I had been up there in the library so long, lost in thought, that when I came down Mr Percival had gone about his business, back to his vocation of bringing pain and pleasure to his select little clientele. It was obvious when I opened the door to the Torture Chamber that Tim was pretty pleased with himself. Nothing of interest had been got from Mr Percival, not surprisingly, but one of Tim’s underlings had finally got on to the member of the Newstead Board of Trustees who had been mainly involved in the buying of the William Allan.
‘Offered for sale by Mr Peter Trethowan,’ said Tim triumphantly. ‘Fat Pete himself. Sorry, old chap: forgot he was a cousin. All negotiations conducted by him. Naturally they knew his father was still alive, and they asked for his authorization to sell. Which Little Lord Fauntleroy brought them, signed and sealed.’
‘Which means—?’
‘Either forged, I take it, or obtained when he was having one of his “off days”.’
I had my own ideas about that, but I held my peace. I just said: ‘Very satisfactory. That’s one little loose end neatly tied up.’
‘Precisely,’ said Tim. ‘And it lets your late father off that particular hook, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t in on that little game.’
I wondered whether we ought to go further into the question of Peter, whether I ought to inform Tim that, in addition to his other delinquencies, he was also the seducer of my sister. But Chris’s pregnancy had not come up, and if she was to be kept out of it, as I fervently hoped would be possible, there was no real need to confide it to Tim at all. So instead I said:
‘Tim, do you think we could go over the case as a whole? I’ve got something to suggest.’
And so we chewed it over, threw it back and forth, and it soon became clear that Tim was on the same road as I was, and pretty much as far along it. Bright boy, Tim. I liked him. So far, so good. I then made my confession that there was one piece of evidence that I was loath to bring forward, for family reasons. I felt a bit of a heel doing it: morally I bamboozled Tim with the old aristocratic family notion (which frankly I don’t give a pin for). And I’m afraid he was impressed by it. The great families of this country did have their secrets, he seemed to feel. He metaphorically touched his forelock to me. I (mentally) shuffled with embarrassment, and hastened to say that if it became clear that nothing could be done without the evidence I was withholding, I would place it at his disposal like a shot.
I went on, becoming quite eloquent, to put to him the various reasons why I did not think it would be necessary. I began to sell him the idea of a confrontation, a private one, between me and my family, in which the evidence we both had was put before the murderer, fairly, squarely and brutally. I frankly admitted I did not know how it would work out: there might be a confession, there might be blank denial, there might be some other catastrophe. But I didn’t see how anything could be lost by it, from our point of view.
Tim was reluctant, at first. He is a cautious chap, as most really good policemen are. There was something flamboyant, a touch of the Dame Agatha, about the whole procedure that he didn’t quite take to. But finally, after a burst of my rhetoric and an appeal to him as a comrade, he fell in with the idea. We arranged that I would go down to sherry as usual, and he and a couple of men would station themselves in the hall, outside the drawing-room door.
‘But it’s such a hell of a big room, Perry,’ said Tim. ‘How am I going to hear?’
‘Strain your ears,’ I said. ‘Just strain your bloody ears.’
He shook his head dubiously, and I could see he did not really like it. As I was going out of the door, he said:
‘Sure you won’t tell me, Perry, what it is you’ve got hold of?’
And I replied, oozing an agonized sincerity: ‘It’s a terribly delicate family matter, Tim.’
You bastard, Perry Trethowan. This case was bringing out the lowest I was capable of. Still, I was glad it was Tim that Joe had sent on the case. Glad, too, as it turned out, that Joe had drafted me as well. Think what could have happened if he hadn’t. Tim might have come breezing back to the Yard and presented me with the heirship of the Trethowans as if it was the season’s biggest win on the Treble Chance.
All this took time. When I got out of the Gothic wing, wiping my forehead with the strain of it, it was already nearly seven. On an impulse I ran upstairs, had a shower, and packed some of my things into my little case. No harm in hoping, after all. With a little bit of luck I could be out of here in a couple of hours. I could spend the night with Jan at the Danby, and drive her back to Newcastle next day. You’ve no idea how attractive a Sunday in Newcastle can sound when you’ve been lodged for a few days in a madhouse like Harpenden.
That made it nearly half past. Sherry-time, and hour of decision. I squared my shoulders, told my heart to stop thumping, and marched out of the bedroom. As I walked down the stairs I realized that—clean and showered though I was—the sweat was starting to run. This was it: the decisive coin was spinning in the air, and somehow or other I was going to have to will it to come down heads.
I saw Tim and other dark shapes lurking down one of the corridors. We had arranged that they would not take up their positions until everyone was assembled in the drawing-room. I made no sign to them, but turned at the bottom of the stairs and pushed open the door to the drawing-room.
And there they all were, or most of them, tucking into the sherry. Aunt Sybilla, in one of her most awful drapes, long and magenta, with a heavy amethyst necklace round her scrawny throat. Aunt Kate, in some female equivalent to battle dress. Chris in something frilly and unsuitable. Uncle Lawrence, tucked round with a rug, feeble but assertive. Mordred looking as if drink never passed his lips, but drinking. And there too was Jan, with a self-satisfied, now-I’m-part-of-the-family look on her face. Not for long, my girl, I said to myself grimly. Daniel was standing by her chair, clutching a soft drink, and looking as if this was a very fair substitute for children’s television.
A policeman is used to situations where he has, willy-nilly, to take command. But I wanted to start this coolly, so when Uncle Lawrence said in his grand way: ‘Sherry, m’boy? Fetch him one, Kate,’ I accepted, but coming down to the fireplace (marble, quarried in Carrara or some such place and brought by donkey and steam-train across Europe, to be carved into something infinitely hideous in the North of England) I put my glass down on its absurdly assertive top and turned to them all.
‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if I might ask something. I thought I ought to have a few words with you all tonight about how the case is going, just to put your minds at rest a bit. If you agree, it might be a good idea if just for this once the Squealies didn’t come along.’
‘Excellent notion,’ said Sybilla.
‘Pity to disappoint the little darlings,’ said Lawrence.
‘Mordred, go along and fetch Peter and Maria-Luisa alone,’ said Sybilla, flapping a drape.
‘Damned woman,’ said Lawrence.
‘What about Daniel?’ asked Mordred, as he made for the door.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he could go in with the Squealies.’
‘No!’ said Daniel, with more firmness than I’ve ever known him muster. So I left him, convincing myself, as adults do, that he would understand very little of what was going on.
I stood there awkwardly, waiting for Peter and Maria-Luisa. I felt Jan’s eyes on me: she knew I was up to something. I would very much have preferred her not to be there. Sybilla was sitting snug, pursing her lips with anticipation, wafting her drapes around as if she were part of some ghastly infants’ school play. Chris, I noted, was looking mulish. At last the door opened.
‘Oh—Pete, Maria-Luisa—’ I began.
‘What’s this? Taken over the family, Perry?’ muttered Pete unpleasantly, as they marched in, two mountainous bulges of hostile flesh. And though I hadn’t intended it, I suppose it did look a bit as if I’d taken charge.
‘I wonder,’ I began, now disconcerted,
‘if we could put our drinks aside for a moment. This won’t take long, but it’ll need a bit of concentration.’
Pete, on his way to the drinks tray, glared at me in outraged, puffy dignity, like some Middle-European kingling who has been told by his Prime Minister to give up his favourite mistress.
‘Who the bloody hell do you think you are?’ he asked, and poured doubles for himself and his wife.
Well, eventually they would have to know the answer to that question. For the moment I was just a policeman. I could not restrain myself from throwing him a glance of distaste, but then I drew myself up, saw that the rest had put their glasses by (even, charmingly, Daniel) and were looking at me slightly agape. No doubt about it, they were interested! Time to take the plunge.
‘I thought you should know—Uncle Lawrence, Aunt Sybilla, er, all of you—a little about how the case is going. These things take time, and it must seem an eternity to you all already. But we have at least come some way. We seem, for example, to have cleared up one or two side issues, such as the missing pictures —’
‘I fail to see,’ said Sybilla, looking like a hen who has had her favourite nest-egg snatched from under her, ‘how the pictures can be described as a side issue.’
‘Nevertheless, they are,’ I said. ‘Let’s ignore them for the moment and concentrate on the main issue: the fact that my father was murdered.’
‘Poor old Leo,’ said Uncle Lawrence. ‘Awful little squirt, but nobody here wished him any harm.’
‘No?’ I said. ‘And yet it’s always been difficult for us—us of the police, I mean—to see this as the work of an outsider. It seemed so much more likely that the murderer was someone who knew my father’s habits, knew how the machine worked, knew him well enough to break in on him while he was, so to speak, at it. In fact, the first thing that struck me,’ I went on, looking around the half-moon of attentive faces, ‘almost as soon as I heard of the murder method, was the boldness of it. The aplomb. The theatricality.’
‘As a family we are famous for our panache,’ said Sybilla, purring.
‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘I think I went a little wrong here, but that was one of the things that seemed to me to bring it home here, to Harpenden House. Of course, another way of looking at it might be to say that it was childish. To snip the cord while my father was playing his little sado-masochistic games might in itself seem, to a child, something of a game.’ Daniel was about to put in some devastating question, but fortunately he was interrupted by a savage imprecation of a spectacularly southern kind from Maria-Luisa. Uncle Lawrence, too, looked very distressed and muttered: ‘Lot of damnable nonsense.’
‘Quite,’ I said. ‘I’m inclined to agree with you. The idea that it was done by the Squealies didn’t originate with me. But I noticed that once it was in the air, it spread like wildfire through the house. With the honourable exception of their mother, everyone seems to have thought it a frightfully good idea. It fitted so well. Nobody seems to have reflected that in a sense the Squealies were not the only children in the house.’
‘He means me!’ said Kate, clapping her hands with glee.
‘It was rather the same with the idea of the McWatterses as the thieves of the pictures,’ I carried on. ‘And I have to admit that the idea occurred to me when I heard he spoke Italian.’
‘Well, it did seem frightfully suspicious, Perry dear,’ said Sybilla, wafting delicately.
‘An attractive idea: the art-connoisseur thief, who takes up butling and purloins the family collection. But if that was the case, why did he reveal he spoke Italian after the murder, when he knew the police were on to the question of the missing pictures? He’d always kept quiet about it, and could have gone on doing so. No . . . it didn’t add up. It looked to me as if you were all—forgive me—trying to shift the blame from one of the family, or from any member of it likely to be arrested and tried. Perhaps because you knew who had done it. Perhaps because you merely suspected.’
‘Being a bit long-winded, aren’t you, Perry?’ said Peter, going back for a refill.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But we’ll be getting down to brass tacks in a moment. Now, I mentioned the theatricality of the thing. It seemed, as I say, childish. Perhaps, also, it could have been revengeful. I wondered whether some victim of my father’s little kink might not be taking a spectacular revenge—a revenge that would certainly be clear enough to his victim in his last minutes. Uncle Lawrence didn’t think there was anybody here that fitted the bill . . .’
‘Not here,’ emphasized Lawrence. ‘Could have been someone from London. God knows what he got up to in London.’ He licked his lips reminiscently, as of one who has got up to many things in London in his time.
‘Once again, an outsider,’ I commented.
‘Well, why shouldn’t it be?’ burst out Cristobel, with that stupid-obstinate look which irritated me no end still on her face. ‘It’s perfectly possible. The insurance people have complained about the security here.’
‘I think I’ve made it clear why that’s unlikely,’ I said. ‘In fact, one of the things that really made me rethink my preconceptions about the murder was that, though you’re all trying to put the thing on to an outsider, almost any other method of murdering my father would have been easier to attribute to an intruder from outside the house. That made me think. Right you are—now we’ll get down to the brass tacks, as Peter demanded. When I first came here and started on the case, three things struck me at once.’ I looked at them hard, and counted the things off on my fingers. ‘One: almost any other method of killing would have been safer. Two: granted that it had to be done this way, why was the cord snipped, and at that height? Three: why were the lights not switched off? And to these questions I later added a fourth: why were the scissors, which brought the murder unquestionably home to Harpenden, hidden where they were?’
God, I was being corny. Colombo didn’t come within an ace of me! But, corny as it was, it got their attention. They goggled at me, in painful thought.
‘Just like the party games we used to play when I was a gel,’ said Sybilla. ‘I used to love brain-teasers.’
‘I give up,’ said Kate. ‘Tell us the answers!’
‘Right. Take the second of the questions first. Now, if I was going to kill my father while he was at his damned strappado, I think I’d try to give at least the appearance that the cord was worn away naturally. That was not done. Again, if I was going to cut the cord, I think I’d have used a sharp kitchen knife. That was not done either. Scissors were used. And consider at what height they were used. Where, if I was standing watching my father playing his silly and dangerous games, where would it be natural to snip the cord?’
I pantomimed a pair of scissors in my hand, and holding them at a natural height I snipped the air with them.
‘How high was that? Over three feet from the ground, definitely. Very well, I’m tall. You, Mordred: you’re about five feet nine. Where does it come natural to you to cut? . . . Well above two and a half feet from the ground, if I’m any judge.’
‘Damned mathematics,’ said Pete.
‘But there’s a point to it. The cord was snipped at little more than two feet from the floor.’
‘For Christ’s sake, he could have bloody bent down,’ said Pete.
‘Why should he? But that’s what most of us here would have to have done.’
Maria-Luisa once again started up one of her train-whistle imprecations, and began going on about bambini. I held up my copper’s hand for silence.
‘You’re getting the wrong end of the stick. Now, remember my third point: the light wasn’t switched off. But surely it would have been natural for the murderer to try to cover up what was happening in some way: here was my father being slowly strappadoed to death, and yet his shadow could surely have been seen, through the curtains, from the grounds. Anyone might have come in and cut him down. And yet the light wasn’t switched off.’
I heard Aunt Sybilla, under her breath, mutter ‘A Squealy’, a
nd Maria-Luisa shot a look like a stiletto in her direction.
‘A Squealy, you say, Aunt Sybilla? But if it was a Squealy, wouldn’t he (or she) either have just dropped the scissors on the floor and run? Or—if he was cunning—taken them back to the bathroom cupboard they came from? Hiding them argues first a knowledge of the enormity of the act, which I don’t think any of the Squealies would have had; and second some knowledge that forensic science could have connected those scissors to the murder—and that they certainly wouldn’t have had. Again, why did the murderer not get rid of the scissors outside the house? Somewhere in those enormous grounds. To slip out and chuck them in the lake would have been a natural impulse, even if we might eventually have found them, by dragging. And yet, they were hidden in the house, on the very floor the murder was committed on.’
Someone shifted uneasily. I thought it was Mordred. I was getting through. I went on quickly.
‘It was when I put all those four things together that I realized that there was an alternative reading of the things that puzzled me. One that could be equally valid. I had concentrated on the theatricality of the whole set-up, the blatant self-advertisement. I had thought it—if you’ll pardon me—typical of the family. But what if it was quite fortuitous? What if the murder was done like that because there was no other way for the murderer to do it?’
The silence was total. I had them in my hand, and as I looked at them I thought I saw dawning, reluctant understanding in one or two faces.
‘Or to put it like this,’ I went on, my voice rising with a touch of melodrama, of the old Trethowan theatricality: ‘who could not have shot, knifed, poisoned, smothered anyone in what we may call the normal way, nor arranged a deceptive-looking accident? Who could not switch off the light, nor get out of the house to hide the scissors? Who would naturally have cut the cord of the machine at about two feet from the ground?’
I let my voice ring into silence. And in that silence Mordred looked at Uncle Lawrence. And Sybilla looked at Mordred, and then at Uncle Lawrence. And then the rest took their eyes off me, and looked at Uncle Lawrence. Lawrence himself seemed to have shrunk down into his rug. Suddenly the silence was broken.
Death by Sheer Torture Page 16