Ancestral Vices (35 page)

‘Extraordinary,’ said the Chief Constable unsympathetically. ‘Anyway, to get back to the case, has the Coppett woman confessed yet?’

‘No,’ said the Inspector, deciding to avoid a complicated explanation which would also involve the use of a great many sibilants.

‘In that case you’ll have to move quickly. I’ve already had an extremely irate Miss Petrefact on the line. She’s instructing her solicitor to apply for an immediate writ of
habeas corpus
and if you can’t break the wretched woman there’s going to be the most appalling uproar in the media.’

‘Thit!’ said the Inspector. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

For the next quarter of an hour he was extremely active. On the one hand he purloined some Blu-Tack from the police typing pool and managed to get his teeth back into his mouth in a makeshift and uncomfortable fashion while on the other he wrestled with the question of whether or not Rosie could drive.

‘There’s only one way to tell,’ he mumbled to himself finally with an intelligence born of desperation. He picked up the phone and called the Chief Constable again.

‘I’d like you to be present when we do a test,’ he explained. ‘It would be helpful and possibly conclusive. We’ll be over in twenty minutes.’ And before the Chief Constable could ask any awkward questions he rang off.

Twenty minutes later the Chief Constable could see exactly what the Inspector had meant about the test being conclusive.

‘If you seriously imagine I’m going to get into that car and allow myself to be driven by a demented murderess down Cliffhanger Hill you must be demented yourself.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the Inspector. ‘On the other hand it’s the only way I can think of which will tell us whether she can drive or not. If she is the dwarfist she must be able to drive and if she can’t drive she can’t possibly be the dwarfist and we’ve got hard evidence that Miss Petrefact’s car was used in the attacks. Now I may be a dumb copper but I’m not a bent one—’

‘If she can’t drive and you let her loose down Cliffhanger Hill you soon will be,’ said the Chief Constable. The Inspector ignored the remark.

‘I am not going to arrest a witless woman and charge her with a crime she can’t have committed.’

‘But isn’t there some other way of finding out? You’ve checked she hasn’t got a driving licence?’

The Inspector nodded.

‘Then you’ve no right to let her drive on a public road,’ said the Chief Constable.

The Inspector adjusted his teeth more firmly against the Blu-Tack. ‘If you won’t allow me to conduct this test, I’ll have to take Miss Petrefact in for questioning,’ he said. ‘That’s the alternative.’

‘Miss Petrefact? Good God, man, do you know what you’re saying? You can’t possibly suspect—’

‘I can and I do,’ interrupted the Inspector. ‘As I’ve said, we know for certain that the dwarfist’s car belongs to her. The cats’ fur on the blanket used on Miss Ottram has been identified as corresponding to her menagerie, and the gnawed dildo was made at the Petrefact Mill in Buscott. Finally, Miss Consuelo Smith said that her attacker had a la-di-da voice. Add that little lot up and it doesn’t come out anywhere near to Rosie Coppett.’

‘What about the housekeeper?’

Inspector Garnet smiled nastily. ‘She’s the one who may have given the game away. She told us that Rosie went out on the nights the attacks took place.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing at all, sir . . . if Rosie can drive. If she can’t . . .’

‘But the housekeeper might have been the dwarfist herself.’

‘Too small. She doesn’t stand five foot two in her shoes and as for weighing 140 pounds . . .’

‘Christ,’ said the Chief Constable and moved unhappily towards the car. They drove out to the top of Cliffhanger Hill.

‘Now then, Rosie,’ said the Inspector getting out of the driving seat, ‘you see that nice hill in front of you. I want you to show us how well you can drive. Now if you’ll just move over and take the wheel I’ll sit here beside you and . . .’

‘But I can’t drive,’ said Rosie tearfully, ‘I never said I could.’

‘In that case you’ve got to the bottom of the hill to learn.’

‘Shit,’ said the Chief Constable uncharacteristically as Rosie was pushed across the seat behind the steering wheel. The Inspector climbed in beside her and fastened his safety belt.

‘Now you go right ahead,’ he said, ignoring the bewildered look on Rosie’s face. ‘The gears are the normal H and the handbrake is beside you.’

‘But how do I start it?’ asked Rosie.

‘You turn that key.’

‘Dear God,’ said the Chief Constable and tried to open the back door but Rosie had turned the key. To her surprise the engine did start.

‘Now the handbrake,’ said the Inspector, determined to bring home to the Chief Constable the sheer lunacy of supposing that Rosie Coppett was the dwarfist and encouraged by the scrabbling noises in the back. But before he could enjoy the situation to the full the car had begun to move and was gathering momentum down the hill.

‘Put the fucking thing in gear,’ he yelled but Rosie was deaf to instruction. Gripping the wheel catatonically and bracing her feet against the clutch and the accelerator simultaneously, she was staring fixedly ahead. For the first time in her life she was unable to do what a policeman said, even if she could have heard him above the scream of the engine at full throttle. Behind her the Chief Constable had stopped scrabbling. As they hurtled
past a sign which predicted a gradient of 1 in 6 and recommended all vehicles to engage low gear, he needed no further persuasion that Rosie couldn’t possibly drive. At what he estimated to be ninety miles an hour, the car was on a fixed course for the front of a petrol tanker lumbering up the hill.

‘Rock of Ages cleft for me,’ he began in place of a prayer and shut his eyes. When he opened them again it was to see the Inspector, hampered by what in other circumstances might have been properly called a safety belt, trying frantically to drag the wheel from Rosie’s grasp while at the same time doing his damnedest to get his right foot across onto the brake pedal, a process impeded by the gear lever in neutral. As they swerved round the wrong side of a second lorry and headed for a corner, the Inspector took his courage in both hands. More precisely, he took the gear lever, dementedly rammed it into reverse and promptly kicked Rosie’s foot off the clutch. For a fraction of a second the car seemed to hesitate – but only for a fraction. The next moment the gearbox, torn between its illogical instruction, the engine speed of eight thousand revs and the wheels doing ninety miles an hour, exploded. As particles of exquisitely engineered machinery sheared through the floor like shrapnel the Chief Constable had the briefest of illusions that they had hit a land-mine. Certainly the effect seemed to be the same. There was the explosion first, the shrapnel second and, now that the drive shaft had dug itself into the tarmac, the sensation of being blown
skyhigh. For a long second the car floated towards the corner before slamming down on the road with a force that wrenched off the front wheels and splayed the rear ones inwards. As silence fell or, at least, the reverberations of battered metal slowly ceased, Rosie could be heard weeping.

‘I told you I couldn’t drive,’ she wailed. The Chief Constable took his bloodshot eyes off the shock-absorber which had nudged its way through the seat beside him and watched with awed fascination one of the front wheels tour over an oncoming Volkswagen and vault the stone wall on the corner. He nodded. What Rosie Coppett had just said was undoubtedly true. She couldn’t drive. No sane driving instructor would have been found dead in the same car with her. Or wouldn’t have. In his present state the Chief Constable preferred the double negative. In which case she couldn’t be the dwarfist.

He was distracted from this dread line of thought by the Inspector who had gone a naturally horrid colour and was making strange noises. For one splendid moment the Chief Constable considered the possibility that he was dying of a coronary.

‘Are you all right, Inspector?’ he enquired eagerly. The remark saved Inspector Garnet’s life.

‘No, I’m fucking not!’ he exploded, spitting a piece of Blu-Tack which had been making its presence known in his windpipe through the shattered windscreen. ‘Now do you believe me about her not being able to drive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I have your permithion to take Mith Petrefact in for quethioning?’

‘I suppose so, if you think you must, but I would advise you to get some fresh dentures first.’

For the next two days, while Inspector Garnet’s new dentures were being rushed through, the Petrefacts took counsel among themselves at Fawcett. Emmelia was driven over by Osbert and even Lord Petrefact was forced, by the threat to his own reputation, to attend. Besides, the notion that his sister was the dwarfist redeemed Yapp in his eyes.

‘I told you the sod could do it,’ he said to Croxley as they drove down. ‘He evidently sent the bitch clean round the bend.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Croxley, ‘this must be a proud moment for you. And they do say there’s no such thing as bad publicity.’

‘Shut up,’ said the peer, for whom the maxim had become anathema.

It was almost exactly the same advice Purbeck was giving Emmelia.

‘If, and I very much doubt that the police will be allowed to take you into custody, but
if
they do you will say nothing. There is no obligation on your part to provide the police with verbal evidence that can be used
in court against you. The Inspector, if and when he calls, will read that warning out to you. If he fails to do so he will be in breach of the law himself.’

‘In short you are telling me to thorpe,’ said Emmelia.

The Judge was scandalized. ‘I would remind you that Mr Thorpe was an innocent man,’ he said sternly.

‘Whereas I am not an innocent woman. I am a foolish and—’

‘That is not for you to say,’ interrupted the Judge hurriedly. ‘It is for the prosecution to prove to the satisfaction of the jury.’

‘Unless I plead guilty,’ said Emmelia.

The family focused their horror on her. Even Lord Petrefact was seen to change colour.

‘But you can’t do that,’ spluttered the Brigadier-General finally, ‘I mean to say, think of the family . . .’

‘Think of Rampton. Think of hospitals for the criminally insane,’ said the Judge more sinisterly.

‘Think of the publicity,’ whimpered Lord Petrefact.

Emmelia rounded on him. ‘You should have thought of that before you hired Professor Yapp to write the family history,’ she snapped. ‘If you hadn’t sent the poor man to Buscott he wouldn’t be where he is today.’

‘I find that a wholly illogical statement,’ said the Judge. ‘He might well have murdered someone else.’

Emmelia raised her eyes to a portrait of her mother for support and found only the impeccable boredom of a woman who had done her duty through countless interminable dinners and weekend house parties. There
was no support in her dull gaze. Only the reminder that family loyalty came before personal preference. Nothing had changed; nothing would ever change. All over England people were behaving as insanely as she had done, but she had influence and could escape the consequences because of it. Innocence had no place in so divided a world.

‘I am prepared to do as you say on one condition,’ she said finally, ‘and that is that you will use your influence . . .’

‘Unless you do what I have advised we will have no influence,’ interrupted the Judge. ‘Without our reputation for probity we have nothing. That is the very crux of the matter.’

For a moment Emmelia verged on the edge of submission – but only for a moment. As she looked up she saw the smile of triumph on Lord Petrefact’s face. It was a grotesque reminder of their days of rivalry in the nursery, a childish skull that grinned. A goad.

‘I wish to discuss the matter with Ronald,’ she said quietly. ‘Alone.’

‘As you wish,’ said the Judge, rising, but Lord Petrefact was of a very different opinion.

‘Don’t leave me alone with her,’ he yelled. ‘She’s mad. She’s insane. For God’s sake . . . Croxley!’

But his two cousins had already left the room and were conferring in the corridor.

‘You don’t think . . .’ began the Brigadier-General. The Judge shook his head.

‘It is something I have often felt inclined to do myself, and besides, a murder in the family is not without its merits. Far better that she should be found unfit to plead and committed to Broadmoor than that we should be embarrassed by her trial as the dwarfist.’

But Emmelia was to be cheated yet again. As she rose from her seat Lord Petrefact slumped forward from the wheelchair and lay still upon the floor. For a full five minutes she stood looking down at him before sending for Croxley and the resuscitation team. By then Lord Petrefact had joined his ancestors.

It was a hesitant Inspector Garnet who arrived at the New House the following day to question Emmelia and a distinctly disturbed one who was ushered into the drawing-room. The coffin in the hall and the empty hearse outside hardly augured well for his enquiries. Nor did the presence of Judge Petrefact in the drawing-room.

‘My cousin is in mourning, Inspector,’ he said austerely. ‘You will be good enough to state your business to me.’

The Inspector put his notebook away. ‘I merely wanted to enquire if Miss Petrefact was aware that her car had been used in the commission of a series of crimes.’

The Judge looked at him malevolently. ‘The answer to that question must be obvious even to you, Inspector. Had my cousin had any inkling of that supposition she
would have been the first to inform you. Since she didn’t, the question is irrelevant.’

As the Inspector left he was feeling distinctly irrelevant himself. ‘You’ve got to be poor or black to get any justice in this fucking country,’ he said sourly to the Sergeant.

It was a fine spring morning when Yapp was summoned from the library at Ragnell Regis prison to the Governor’s office. He had been busy working on a lecture he was due to give to the Open University prisoners. It was entitled ‘Causative Environmental Factors in Criminal Psychology’ and had the paradoxical merit, in Yapp’s opinion, of being wholly at odds with the facts. All his fellow inmates came from excellent social environments and their crimes had been motivated almost without exception by financial greed. But Yapp had long since abandoned his adoration of the facts and with them their correlate, the truth. His obstinate adherence to the latter had landed him in prison, while his survival there had depended on ludicrous invention.