He looked round at us again, with an expression of enormous self-approbation.
‘Now, I don’t know about you gents, but I regard that as a success story. Just the sort of enterprise and initiative that Old Mother Thatcher is always recommending: the small, independent bloke finding where the trade is, and going out and getting it. As she said in Parliament the other day, the work is there, if people are only willing to seek it out. I should get a Queen’s Award to Industry, by rights.’
‘So Mr Trethowan got in touch with you as a consequence of the advertisement, did he?’ asked Tim.
‘That’s it. Talked it over on the phone, I dropped over and had a peep at the room, and Bob’s your uncle. When he died, I was working on a rack for him—nice little job, it’s over there, you see. He had it on appro, to see how it worked. I was expecting a nice little succession of jobs from Mr Trethowan. Still, the great thing about this trade is, the market never dries up. You’re not going to get people’s kinks suddenly ironed out, are you? Soon as you lose one, there’s another anxious and waiting to take his place. I’d go into exporting if I had the time. I believe Japan’s got a marvellous market for things of this kind.’
‘You got a fair whack out of Mr Trethowan for this, I see,’ said Tim.
‘Naturally I did. I always do. They’re paying me for my inventive skills, remember. And it’s not the kind of thing you can patent and protect yourself on. I must say, in all fairness, the gentlemen with this sort of interest, they’re very generous gentlemen. They’re a good class, that’s what it is: public school, often as not. Very seldom a quibble, which is nice when you’re in trade. Keeps it on a genteel sort of basis. The fact is, they appreciate craftsmanship, and they’re willing to pay for it.’
‘You’re not worried by any moral scruples about what you’re doing?’
‘Good Lord, no. Why would I be? The market’s there, and all I do is move in and supply it.’
‘Pretty much like a pornographer, eh?’
‘That’s it. You’ve hit the nail on the head. In principle it is very much the same sort of thing, and pornography, as you gentlemen know, is perfectly legal these days, especially when published and marketed with the full knowledge and co-operation of the police.’
‘Trethowan was pushing seventy,’ said Tim. ‘You realize you could easily kill yourself with one of these devices?’
‘’Course you could,’ said Mr Percival. ‘Same as you can on top of a Mayfair tart. If that’s the way you choose to go, what business is it of anybody else’s? That’s what freedom is all about—we’re trying to stop the State prying into every aspect of people’s lives, aren’t we? And the fact is, as you very well know, Mr Leo—God rest his soul in peace, if that’s what he wants—would be here today if someone hadn’t slipped in and snipped that cord. He was a gentleman who knew how to enjoy his pleasures and take care of himself at the same time. He knew exactly when he’d gone far enough. Enjoyed life, Mr Leo did, without endangering himself.’
‘You talk, I said, ‘as if we ought to thank you for making the last years of my father’s life full and happy ones.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mr Percival. ‘Very nicely put, and I appreciate the thought.’
Nothing, clearly, was going to discompose Ramsay Percival.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ I said, looking up at the deployment of ropes and pulleys stretching up to the ceiling, ‘where this machine would be best heard from upstairs, when it was going.’ Tim looked at me sharply, so he had obviously had the same thought. ‘Do you think we could set it going?’
‘Nothing easier!’ said Mr Percival, with professional pride.
‘What we really need,’ I said, ‘is someone strapped into it. Otherwise the machine won’t strain as it ought to do, and we won’t hear anything. You wouldn’t like to oblige yourself, Mr Percival?’
‘Here! Come off it! I’m normal! I’m old-fashioned—I go for girls. I never try out my own inventions. It’d be like a bespoke tailor trying his suits on himself.’
‘What a pity. I was looking forward to that. Do you think you could try your circus act again, Tim?’
‘Oh—been trying it out for yourselves, have you, gentlemen?’ said the irrepressible Mr Percival. ‘Now, if ever you wanted anything special made for the Yard, I’d be happy to oblige.’
‘No chance, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘We use the electrodes plugged into the genitals at headquarters. The march of progress, you know. Tim, give me two minutes, will you, and then start it up. Twice will be enough.’
‘It will bloody well have to be,’ said Tim.
I ran up the stairs again, and went first to the little kitchen where Chris had said she had gone to get the aspirin. It was on the wrong side of the wing, and, as I had suspected, nothing could be heard of the working of the machine from there. So she’d lied about that. Neither could it from the little sitting-room, which had once been my mother’s room. When I moved to the library, a dull sound as of distant jets could be heard if one was exceptionally attentive. It was only when I moved into the study that the noise could be heard at all well. So far so good. I moved around the room, trying to find the point of maximum audibility. It was, in fact, a yard or so from the fireplace. This, presumably, was the point just over the upper pulley, up to which my father (or currently Tim) was being hauled. It was a fair bet that it was around here somewhere that Chris first noticed the noise.
I stood there, looking around me. Had Chris been standing here on Thursday night, looking for a place of concealment? Was she then suddenly struck by the gruesome noise below, forced into the realization that her father was not in bed, but was still being hauled up and down on his appalling machine? But whatever happened, she must have hidden it. Must have made a sudden decision what to do with it, then hurried down to see what was up in the Torture Chamber. Because she certainly didn’t take the letter with her on her raving hysterics over the house, wearing only her nightdress. Where, then?
And as I stood there, looking at the fireplace and the Dali over it, I remembered telling Chris about Lawrence sending the outdoors men to take it away. She had said ‘The Dali!’, with a catch in her voice. Then it came back to me that the night before, when Lawrence had gone on and on about retrieving ‘his’ property, Chris had immediately chimed in with the claim that Father had assured her that the Dali was his, that he had bought it himself. Now the claim was patently absurd. The Dali had been bought in the late ’twenties, was a product of his Paris period. At that time my father was a student at the Guildhall School, had inherited nothing from his father, and was certainly in no position to purchase young but fashionable painters. I had assumed that the lying claim was Leo’s, which Chris had not seen through. But what if it was Chris’s—and prompted not by a desire to assert her claims on portable property, but because she had hidden the letter there?
I went over and took it down from the wall. At least it was the sort of picture you could lift from the wall, unlike the John Martin in my bedroom. I laid it on the floor and inspected the back. Yes—a narrow slit had been made there, and inside . . . I eased my fingers into the slit, and caught a glimpse of blue paper. I enlarged the slit, and drew out a long envelope. It was ladies’ notepaper, ’fifties style—a blue, padded envelope such as I remembered my mother using. I turned it over. It was addressed: ‘To my dear son Peregrine Trethowan.’
I got out of that hated study, my father’s own room, and went through to the library, where I had spent so many childhood hours to be within call of my mother. I sat down on the sofa, and took out of the envelope four small sheets covered with my mother’s thin, angular handwriting—the writing I remembered so well from her letters to me when she travelled abroad for her health. For a moment I could hardly bear to unfold the sheets: they seemed addressed to another person—a quiet, lonely child, haunting a gloomy house.
Finally I took my courage into my hands and opened it. It was dated March 21st, 1958—about two months before my mother’s death. I rea
d:
My darling Perry,
When you read this, I shall be dead—and so long dead, I suppose, that you will have forgotten me, have only dim memories of what I looked like, what I sounded like.
No Mother. I remember. I remember very well. I can hear you now.
I know that I was a poor mother to you, Perry, and to Cristobel. And especially that I could do so little for a strong, healthy boy like you. But something in me hopes that you will have some remembrances of me, and retain a little from our talks together. Above all, I know that you will always have done your duty as a brother, and looked after little Cristobel, as you faithfully promised.
That really got me, and I broke down, bawling unashamedly, feeling more feeble and inadequate than I had felt, perhaps, since the day my mother died. A fine one I had been, to have been entrusted with the care of Cristobel. A fine job I had made of it.
I don’t think [my mother wrote] that there is any last message I can give you that will help you in any way in life. It is not for the dying and the failed to try to do this. I feel confident, Perry, that you, who are a determined little boy, will make your way in life creditably and successfully.
It is because I know that you will grow up steel-straight and with a heart full of honour —
And I cried again, at the G. A. Henty sentiments and the Freudian imagery, and the absurdity of imagining anyone of my generation growing up with a heart full of honour.
— that I entrust to you the following facts, to act on as you see fit. You see, I believe I know you, and I believe that when you are a man you will know the right, and the upright, thing to do. I wish I did myself—wish I did not have to rely on you to make a decision I am unable to make myself, but I feel totally incapable of action. You see, I am depending entirely on your judgment of what a gentleman’s duty is.
Last year I went, you will remember, on a cruise in search of the health that has eluded me for many years. Alas, it was of no avail, but that is not the point now. I went, you may remember, around the world, on the Stratheden. When the ship docked at Sydney and began the return voyage via the Panama Canal, there came to the next table from my own a Mrs Trethowan. She was very vulgar, and jolly, and familiar, and tried to scrape up an acquaintance on the basis of our names. No, on re-reading this I think I am being unfair. I have no reason to think she was not what people call a ‘good-sort’, but you know how tongue-tied I am, and how difficult it is for me to talk easily to those who are not of our own sort. She was Irish by birth, an East Londoner by upbringing, and had lived in Sydney for more than twenty years. She kept a hat shop there. I confess, I tried to avoid her, to freeze her off. However, one day, when the boat was in the South Seas, she sat herself down beside me on deck, and insisted on confiding her life-story to me. And to my horror it became clear that she was Florence Trethowan—‘Flo’ as he always called her, when he spoke of her at all—the first wife of your Uncle Lawrence, who according to him had died long ago, before the Second War. I couldn’t believe my ears at first, but there could be no doubt about it: she had been to Harpenden, briefly; had lived with Lawrence in London for a few years in the early ’twenties; had brought up his son Wallace who died at Arnhem. The frightful thing was, that when she talked of Lawrence—in a sadly bold and indiscreet way—she always referred to him as ‘my husband’, and announced more than once: ‘I’m a Catholic. I don’t believe in divorce. He wanted one, but I refused point-blank. He’ll have to wait till I’m pushing up the daisies before he gets spliced again, and I’m not going to pop off in a hurry.’ She talked like that. It was quite frightful. So frightful that when she asked me about my family, I told a lie—the first one that came into my head: that we came from Cornwall. After a time, thank Heaven, she gave me up, and found friends more to her own taste and of her own class.
Perry, my darling, I have worried and worried over this, and have come to no conclusion about what is right. Of course you will see at once how this affects you. It affects your father too, as you must realize, but for various reasons, and because it could probably only be of consequence to him very late in his life, I prefer to confide the matter to you, leaving it to your judgment as a man, and as a Christian, as well as a member of a family which, to be fair, one must say has made its mark in the world. It is you who must decide whether this matter should be brought out into the light, with all the consequences that must flow from this. I am happy to die in the serene knowledge that you will take the honourable as well as the gentlemanly course.
And now, Perry, it is time to say goodbye.
Your very loving
Mother.
And I sat there in the library, and cried and cried. And laughed too, now and then, through my tears. Did my mother think she was presenting me with a delicate test of my honour, a nicely balanced ethical problem? Did she think of Harpenden House and the headship of the Trethowan family as an inducement? A prize to be won? A shimmering gold light at the end of the tunnel? How little she foresaw! I should have no qualm about renouncing the throne of the Trethowans. The problem was, how was it to be done.
CHAPTER 15
A CONCENTRATION OF NIGHTMARES
I calmed down after a bit. I took out a handkerchief, blew my nose and wiped my eyes, and sat on in the library, wondering what the hell I was going to do.
Not about Harpenden and the heirship of the Trethowans, of course. That was a poisoned chalice I had no difficulty in repulsing. Even my mother, underneath, had wanted me to reject it. That much, on looking the letter over again, it was possible to read between the lines. I wished my motives were as pure and upright as my mother would have desired. Still, I had the feeling that she too did not think the Trethowans much of a family to be head of.
But the question remained: how was I to do it? How was the information in my mother’s letter to be kept secret? Because the news that I was the ‘rightful heir’ (Oh God! How that brought back Jan’s and my laughing over whether I or Peter was the Young Master!) was a vital piece, the last vital piece, in the case against the murderer of my father. And as soon as I revealed it to the police—to the other police, that is: I must never forget that I was part of them—the information was open, public, never more to be concealed. To tell the family was one thing. I could see that that would probably have to be done. But to tell the police was to licence them to bring it out in court. And if that happened, I was lost. Loaded on my back would be the burden of Harpenden and the assorted dreadfuls that made up the Trethowan family. Amateur weightlifter I may be, but not even Rakhmanov could bear such a load as that.
One solution, it occurred to me, would be to conceal the letter and let the murderer go unpunished. It was not as though I felt a Hamletish compulsion to avenge the death of my father. The Prince of Denmark could perhaps not take the line that his old man was well out of the way—an awfully long-winded old chap he must have been, though, to judge by his post-mortem incursions—but I suffered from no such inhibitions. Nevertheless, there is in a policeman (the old-fashioned policeman, a dying species, like the sperm whale) an instinct that tells him that crime, and of all crimes murder, must not go unpunished. That it, above all, is something that threatens the social fabric, and must be seen to incur society’s wrath. Awfully dated stuff, that, but somewhere at the back of my mind it clung. And, quite apart from anything else, who could tell where it might not end? If my father could be killed for the knowledge he acquired from my mother’s letter, might not Chris in the course of time likewise fall victim, having the same knowledge? I was not going to compound my ineffectiveness as Chris’s protector by virtually conniving at her murder.
It came to me gradually, as I sat there in the mounting gloom, that the only way I might conceivably be safe, safe from the burden of Harpenden, was by staging a confrontation. Even then, a lot would depend on the murderer’s reaction. But I was a Trethowan—with disgust and self-loathing I admitted it; at any rate I was Trethowan enough to be fairly confident that I could get inside this murderer’s mi
nd, that I could know what his reaction would be. And if I was right, then I would be safe: Tim could do the carting away, and I could in total secrecy tell the family the whole background, make it clear to them that the information was entirely confidential, that I had no intention of acting on it. Then I could bow out of Harpenden. Hey presto, Perry Trethowan, the fabulous escape artist, leaps out of his chains and is a free man again. Curtain and general applause. As long as the information was shared, Chris would be safe, and the atmosphere in the house would not be poisoned by uncertainty and mutual suspicion. Not more than usual, anyway.
I wondered how I would put the matter to Tim. For a start I did not want him in on the confrontation: that would be a lot more effective if it at least began as a family powwow, however much the screw might have to be turned later on. Tim could be out there in the hall, but no closer. A bobby in the room always turns any occasion into something as natural and informal as the Sun King’s levée. And how much should I tell Tim? That answered itself: as much as need be, and no more. On the real motive I would hold back till the bitter end. Not unless the poor chap actually had to prepare a case would I come clean. Tim would surely go along with that if I put a bit of pressure on him. After all, there was other evidence, circumstantial though that might be, to justify a trial confrontation.
I decided to give it a try. But in spite of that it was slowly, and with dragging feet, that I made my way down again to Tim. This was going to be very painful and tricky. It could also prove the decisive few hours of my life.
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