The Old English Peep Show (18 page)

“Of course they were, darling,” said Mrs. Singleton. “If you think about it you'll see it makes it
much
better. Come and sit here and we'll talk about something else; I've just been telling Mr. Waugh about the terrible old rustic who taught me to ride.”

“Thank you, Judith,” said Mr. Singleton, taking a sheet of paper and a great bangle of keys out of her wavering hand. “Perhaps it would be best if you were to sit down and Waugh fetched you a drink. Now, Pibble, in my opinion the optimum way for a stranger is to walk down the railway line—here—where you will discover a pair of gates, to which this is the key. Immediately beyond the gates, you must strike left along a small path through the yew grove, which will lead you down to the Bowling Green. This is the icehouse, which I will mark with an ‘X,' and this key must be turned twice in the lock. Do you wish me to repeat that?”

“No, thanks,” said Pibble. “That's fine. I think I've got it.”

“Harvey,” said Mrs. Singleton, “you've forgotten to tell him how to prime the pistol.”

“You interrupted me, darling,” said Mr. Singleton, an irritable grate in his voice which seemed out of keeping with so small an annoyance. “When you have inserted the ball and rammed it home, you rotate the pistol in the vise until the barrel is horizontal. On the right-hand side you will observe the steel against which the flint strikes when firing. You push this forward, and the action opens the priming pan, which you fill with a pinch of black powder from the flask. Close the pan. To fire the pistol, you cock the flint and pull the trigger. I think you will find it very simple.”

“Dinner is served, Madam!” screamed a furious voice in the passage. All conversation died, and in the silence they could hear Elsa's booted feet stumping back to her kitchen. A fresh agony of hysteria started to well up inside Pibble, like seasickness; the extra load of guilt—the bucket and the string, on top of the hero's dreadful dying—was more than he could bear. His mouth was open to make a noise, any noise, a high mad laughter, when he felt the flesh above his elbow gripped in that curious hold that salesmen use when they wish to demonstrate that you can trust them. The laughter stifled into a gawp and Harvey Singleton led him out after the ladies. Mr. Waugh came last of all.

Mrs. Singleton was smiling inside the small dining room.

“It's all right,” she said, “she's done us proud. She's like Beethoven, sort of—all temper and beastliness, and then producing this marvelous thing. Help yourself, Judith; it's pâté, and then roast mutton. Harvey, she seems to have decanted some claret.”

Elsa and Mrs. Singleton rescued that meal, Elsa by her miraculous ability to persuade you that anything she cooked, even a boiled potato, had been treated in such a way that the very essence of its nature was made manifest. Pibble remembered a journalist, a music critic who doubled in crime, telling him about an interview with an aging diva who was making a comeback in her home town, Vienna: the journalist had found the lady sitting on her bed in her hotel beside an old 78-rpm gramophone, which was tilted off the level by the folds of the eiderdown; she was playing records of her own arias, shoving the pickup arm across to where she knew the good bits were; every time the music came to a high note she would grin, lift a minatory finger as the true young voice winged out, and shout
“Geschlossen!”
Elsa's cooking was like that, bang on the note, so that you had to enjoy it however miserable you felt.

Mrs. Singleton's performance was different, full of false notes but carrying everybody along by the almost rumbustious quality of her animal attractiveness and high spirits. In that mood she could have wished gaiety on a convocation of decimal coinists. Mr. Waugh was caught up and began bandying Creeveyish anecdotes about theatrical knights. Miss Scoplow, though she relapsed occasionally into crumpled despair, laughed a little and talked a little and did her eye-opening trick several times. Pibble, too, felt the clamminess of shock seeping away from him. Only Mr. Singleton­ seemed detached, holding his wine up to the light, tilting his glass to look at the color of the meniscus, sloshing the liquid around inside the glass so that it would release its secreted odors, and then taking a great gulp and, rattling it to and fro between his molars like a man rinsing his teeth at the dentist's. It was a hulking, muscular wine, tasting of old cavalry boots, but Mr. Singleton seemed determined to show it who was master.

“Is it all right, Harvey?” said Mrs. Singleton suddenly.

“Too young still, a trifle too young.”

Pibble shivered, clammy again. He realized all at once what echo Mrs. Singleton's behavior had been rousing: Lady Macbeth. What's done is done. First at the discovery of the murder, and now at the banquet. While Harvey had been lost in his trance, she had kept the chatter moving, and now she was cajoling him to do his duty by his guests, for all the world as if the blood-boltered General—no, it would have to be the blood-boltered Admiral, unless it was just the blood-boltered Bonzo—haunting him around the inside of his glass. Like Macbeth, his response to the cajoling was fitful. Mrs. Singleton rapidly rethawed the frozen conversation and forced it to tinkle on down the long slope of the evening.

9:00 P.M.

M
r. Waugh, swathed to the great white gills in borrowed mufflers, waited in the shadow of the Private Wing. Pibble plodded away from him across the moon-blanched lawn, lowered himself clumsily into the ha-ha, and began the tedious walk along sleepers which were spaced exactly wrong for any comfortable stride. Three shots, Miss Scoplow had said. Couldn't hear it because of the echoes, the General had said. Two old soaks, drunk enough to fall twice on their way down, drunk enough to make a hash of loading the pistols, but not too drunk For A to hit B and feel B's ball fanning past his cheek. Good shooting for drunks—and Pibble had heard no echoes in the morning, just the two shots of the Americans burning powder. Nothing in it, probably; sounds are always different at night; best wait and see what Waugh heard.

Well, then, what about the worst actress in
Who's Who in the Theatre
(worst supporting actors, Sergeant Maxwell and loyal Dr. Kirtle)? A rum trio to pick, except in the hope of betrayal. What about the double shooting of the lion? And what about that gray blob, gray and spreading, like a cell under a microscope, off key, wrong? What the hell had it been? How big? Pibble could see it on his inner retina, as large as a baby's head and pulsing slightly, changing color now—ah, Crippen, it hadn't been like that. No use trying to force it up: that never works, the summoning of apparitions from the Endor inside the skull. They come when it suits them.

Anyway suppose, if only for the sake of the Macbeth fantasy, that Harvey Singleton had hidden behind the General and shot the Admiral. That would account for both the death and the General's feeling a bullet pass, but what other machinery would be needed? He'd been a brilliant shot, Dr. Kirtle had said. He went to bed late, he'd said himself, and had very good hearing, so he might have listened to the quarrel. Could he have relied on the General tipping the body over for Bonzo? Probably—the Admiral had often asked to go that way—or he could have appeared as if wakened by the shots and suggested it. That would be one old hero out of the way, and a fair chance of having the other one locked up for murder.

But why? They don't believe ordinary common folk have motives, Miss Finnick had said. Policemen do, though. Why would business-efficiency Singleton knock off a couple of dotty old heroes? The old boys still think they're as rich as Croesus, she'd said. The General had talked about Harvey's sideshows. They wouldn't let him show the dirty frieze. He gave up a very promising job with a merchant bank to put the Claverings back on their feet, and here he was, after all those striving years, running sideshows. Forty-nine, say—last possible age to decide between blazing success and gray mediocrity. And all that fizzing action bottled up inside him. Not surprising if the cork popped.

The cork popped, then. Four days of intrigue, and somebody had argued somebody else into sending for a chap from London. Never mind who now, but it was an oddity. No, we're over­running; Deakin had died in those four days. Could he have killed him, or was it just a lucky chance to set the General careering down his crazy slalom of deception, so sure to fail taking a curve too fast, relying on the lost reflexes of youth? Then all he'd had to do was nudge the plot nearer to discovery. Then Scoplow had told them about the telephone call, and he'd hung around at the top of the Tiger Pit while the General waited for him to come and ambush this intrusive Londoner—what would he have said if the hero had emerged triumphant, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi out of the king cobras' hole, covered with dirt, licking his whiskers? Perhaps the General would have been so cock-a-hoop at managing it alone that any excuse would have done.

But they'd both waited for each other, the General and his son-in-law, and Singleton had waited longer. Pibble had seen it happen again—or heard it, rather—when Singleton, motionless in the blackness of the stair well, had outwaited the lion. What had he felt like during that first waiting, when the General might have babbled anything to the detective? Or perhaps he'd spent the whole history lesson leaning on the parapet above them, listening with his very good hearing. Then the fracas, then the last fearsome bark of the hero as the huge claws caught him. Then down the path to the cottage while Pibble was fastening the door; the victor, Pibble or General, would be sure to go there. He'd known the door was shut, too.

Action next, killing the lion. Twice. Yes, of course. If the Admiral had really been killed by a pistol ball, it might still be in the lion's two-fathom of guts, and the police might slice the beast up to look for it, and they'd find a modern bullet. Hide it; spray the long body with modern bullets, same size and caliber; a rimless .45 wasn't it?

Ah, hell, the whole thing was pure supposition; Pibble decided he believed some of it some of the time, like the Nicene Creed.

But Singleton had “forgotten” to explain how to prime the pistols.

He had been walking toward a belt of trees and was almost into their black shadows when he saw amid their upper branches two spike-topped helmets with flat brims, such as Sidney's men might have worn at Zutphen. No, two towers with helmet-shaped roofs on the far side of the trees, enormous—why couldn't you see them from the house? He shone his torch at them and found that they were on the near side of the trees, a small pastiche of the Tower of London, into which the railway gate was set.

The key turned easily. Beyond the gates Pibble could see the glint of moonlight striking off the rails where they curved out from under the trees. There were mossy steps in the low embankment to his left, and then the path plunged steeply down. This must be another section of the ravine by which the bone-meal chapel stood. The path twisted between shrouding yews; logs were set across it to form crude steps at the steepest places. He came around a hairpin corner, shone his torch in front of him, and felt his heart bounce with panic as the beam fell on a very old man, on his knees, rapt, in front of a rough-hewn crucifix. The panic lasted only half a second before he realized that the figure, however priestly its attitude, was lay. Nicely done, though, with real sackcloth on the plaster limbs, and the cell behind clean with a bed of fresh bracken in the corner. There was even a charming hollow in the rock where a spring oozed out between small ferns to fill a natural basin—or perhaps an unnatural one, scooped here at the whim of some long-dead Clavering to provide drink for a living, breathing, wage-earning hermit. Odd world they'd lived in, those great Whig gentry—odd uses which they'd thought it proper to put their fellow men to. Still did. A jink in his train of thought made Pibble wonder who the next heir was, after Mrs. Singleton, and whether he'd inherited the same arrogance.

Another mini-folly stood untenanted beside the path a few yards farther down; then the slope eased and the path widened to a mossy walk, and there was the Bowling Green. It wasn't at all as he'd imagined it, not a lawn below formal terraces, fringed with heraldic topiary. This was a deep romantic chasm, with the Abbey roofs invisible and only the claustrophobic crags, shaggy with trees, surrounding the level turf. The space was a little larger than a tennis court, and when Pibble crossed it to look at the stream, which licked quietly along below the further cliff, he found that the crevice opened to his right so that he could now see what looked like the pitch of an outbuilding roof, and beyond it a star-obliterating line of blackness, the far crest of the valley.

The icehouse was Gothick, flint-built, crenelated. Pibble opened the door and laid his torch on a shelf. The pistols were in a polished mahogany box lined with blue satin; they were larger than he'd expected, but nice to hold. Once you knew about it, it was easy to spot how crookedly the barrels were set, though Deakin had taken full advantage of the asymmetry of the flintlock on one side and sweated a tapering sleeve of steel down the other, covering its surface with fine chasing.

Loading should have been straightforward enough but Pibble was trapped by his instinctive distrust of all contrivances, however primitive, and couldn't believe that the measuring device at the neck of the flask would work; so he unclamped his pistol from the vise and tipped the barrel out onto the shelf. A nasty little pile of black granules mocked him—it
had
worked. But how do you extract a ball and wad from a pistol which has no powder in it to shove them out? There must be a method; it must have happened often enough in genuine flintlock days; but it's not the sort of question a chance-come detective cares to ask at a great house after bungling an attempt to incriminate his host.

He tried again, resolutely trusting all the antique gadgets, bonking the ramrod down onto the ball with manful precision. Nothing rattled when he turned the weapon horizontal, but he couldn't bring himself to point it downward for fear of seeing the whole tiresome cargo cascade out on the floor. He shoved the steel forward and poured some of his spillage into the pan. Snapping the lid shut, he inspected the whole contrivance with wonder: the little flint was held in a miniature vise at the end of an arm on a spring; you pulled it back with your thumb to cock it, and then when you pulled the trigger it shot forward, bashing into the vertical steel to produce its minute meteor shower; the impact also shoved the steel forward, opening the lid of the pan because they were all one piece, thus letting the meteors sprinkle down into the saltspoonful of gunpowder, which then flared—flared enough to send a gout of flame down the pin-sized hole in the barrel, igniting the main charge.

He stared at the gadget, humming, struck by the rum collection of ingenuities which man will assemble to achieve his peculiar ends. There is a town in remote Guatemala called El Progreso, whose sole industry is the cultivation of a single crop; a mountain railway has been built over fantastic canyons in order that this crop may be exported to another part of Guatemala; the crop is the staple diet of the cochineal beetle, which is in turn harvested and pulped so that its juices may be re-exported to enhance the color of European blancmanges without affecting their taste. Never was a town better named: it is by fitting together processes such as these that man heaved himself up from simian innocence to the point where he could assemble iron and carbon into a steel tube, add a flint, a mixture of niter and saltpeter and charcoal, and a lump of lead, and use the resulting contrivance to kill his brother.

Pibble stalked out into the moonlight, pointed the results of Progress at the further cliff, and pulled the trigger.

There was a fractional instant after the click, in which he could begin to think he had loaded wrongly, begin to loosen his grip on the butt. Then the thing went off with a noise louder and lower than a modern pistol, a true bark, not a yap. The butt bucked in his hand, up and to the left. The echoes lasted for several seconds, distinct but fading booms. Pibble counted five of them volleying between the two cliffs. Then he put the gun back in the icehouse, picked up his torch, locked up, and began to climb the path past the plaster hermit, brooding as he went.

What was the best thing to do if he was wrong about Singleton—pragmatically best? They couldn't have been all that drunk if they'd managed the complex process of loading (though the General had said it took a bit of time, and they'd had a lot of practice) and then shot accurately enough to produce one hit and one near miss. But need anyone know about the duel? Wouldn't all England be happier if the evidence was faked so that they both appeared to have been killed by the lion? There could be a grand state funeral of the unconsumed portions, and the world could enjoy its big, soft weep. Say the lion had caught the Admiral, and the General was trying to rescue his brother and got nobbled, too? A good death—both original and heroic. Deakin would have to be fitted in somewhere: say he'd usually helped the Admiral feed Bonzo and his death induced the Admiral to try and do it alone. Rastus could be shipped home; five years in jug would keep him quiet. Everyone else would play. Yes. Better than two soured old soaks squabbling over a woman two generations younger than themselves.

He went through the gate and locked it.

Except that that would leave Singleton in honorable command of Herryngs, ready to shift the last of the Claverings out of the Private Wing, ready to expose the non-pederastic Rector to the view of salivating Yanks, ready to extinguish the last spark of genuine life in the House amid the neon glare of a dollar-earning fun fair. Well, good luck to him, provided he hadn't murdered one old hero and possibly one whiskery coxswain for the sake of transforming his nonprofit concern into a tourist blue-chip.

And how could you prove that, one way or t'other? Check with Mr. Waugh on how many shots/echoes he'd heard; take him to witness a statement from Miss Scoplow about how many she'd heard; have Bonzo sliced up and the bullets counted and inspected; search the Tiger Pit for the odd slug out; search the undergrowth round the Bowling Green for a place of ambush where Singleton had waited. That bullet, it would have to look roughly the same as one from the tommy gun (he wouldn't have had time to get across to the stall and fetch that). A .45, then, and …

He missed the next sleeper, stumbled sideways, banged his shin on the railway line and sprawled onto the bank of the cutting. As he climbed angrily back to his feet, his brain did one of those extraordinary linkages which the mind can sometimes achieve if you don't force it—the gray blob which had been fretting him swam into his mind's eye, fluttered for a second, and diminished with a rush of perspective to a dirty mark about a quarter of an inch across marring the white smoothness of the label under Dotty Prosser's Colt—a long-barreled .45.

And the grenade beside it had been dusty.

Mr. Waugh was fast asleep on the dank lawn in the shadow of the Private Wing. His breath came loudly, but in the nasty gulps of the dead drunk. Fine witness to the number of bangs audible he'd be. Pibble shone his torch around and spotted a small tumbler which he picked up with his handkerchief and smelled. Neat whiskey. So some friendly spirit had brought out a warming toddy to comfort the poor old actor on his chilly vigil—someone who knew that in his shocked and dismal loneliness he would risk a sip and then a swig and then keel ponderously over.