Death by Sheer Torture (20 page)

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 mind, 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.

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.’