The Old English Peep Show (6 page)

“There's not much I want to ask you, really,” he said. “But I'd better check that you've done all the proper things, just in case …”

Distant but unmistakable, the sound of two shots rang across the park, neither the crack of pistols nor the bark of rifles but a deeper, thudding boom. Pibble raised his eyebrows.

“It's the duel, sir,” said the Sergeant. “Two of the tourists fight a duel with proper dueling pistols on the old Bowling Green. They use blanks, o'course, but they dress 'em up in old-fashioned clobber and proper lifelike it looks.'

“Sounds terrifying,” said Pibble. “Don't they have a lot of wadding flying about, getting into people's eyes?”

“Old Deak fixed the guns so they'd fire very crooked indeed, he did tell me, sir.”

“Oh,” said Pibble, “did you know him well?”

“Well, sir, we played darts most Thursday and Monday evenings at the Clavering Arms.”

“The point is,” said Pibble, “that none of us have any real doubt that poor Deakin hanged himself, but he didn't leave a note and we can't say the thing's satisfactorily cleared up until we have some idea about a motive. When did you see him last?”

“Three nights gone, sir. Night afore he hanged himself.”

“Did he seem any different from usual?”

Maxwell rubbed a toecap against his calf, like an embarrassed schoolboy. Ten yards away the Doctor coughed, a harsh, painful rasp.

“He seemed a bit sulky, like,” said Maxwell. Then the hesitant voice changed gear into a quick, decisive monotone, as though he had nerved himself to get a painful experience over. “It's not right to speak against the dead, but he were a terrible one for the girls, always chasing and pestering after them and they wouldn't have him, and he went on and on about the Maureen Finnick as how she was leading him on, till I were proper fretted for him, sir.”

“Did anyone else hear this conversation?”

“No, sir. We had the little bar all to ourselves, and he was mostly muttering, like.”

“O.K.,” said Pibble. “Well, see that you get the details as clear in your mind as you can remember. Now, about what happened after the body was found—Mr. Singleton rang up the police station, I take it.”

“Yes, sir. Asked for me special.”

Maxwell ran steadily through what he had done, which had been everything necessary. When he had finished, Pibble paced out into the drive, and looked up at the house. Goodness, it was pretty, the precisely calculated frilliness of balustrade and finial, the endearingly domestic pediment, the generous swags of stone carving above the main windows—all subservient to the honest proportions of the basic rectangle, and all blotchy with gold lichen.

Work, work, work. The first-floor windows mirrored one bobbly cloudlet and a surround of sky; at this angle the glass might just as well have been silvered—some monster or vampire, the Curse of the Claverings, could have been staring hungrily down from behind it and a watcher on the gravel would have seen neither tusk nor trunk. Pibble shifted about on the drive, trying to find a point from which the looped brocade curtains became visible, and his ghostly unease was suddenly given solid flesh when the sash he was peering at shot upward and Mrs. Singleton leaned out.

“Luncheon in ten minutes, if that suits you, Superintendent,” she said (no need to shout, with
her
voice). “Just time for you to come and have a glass of hock, Fred. There's beer for you, in the little kitchen if you want it, Maxwell. Don't go into the big one—it'll be full of Yanks in a couple of minutes and they'll think you're part of the act.”

The sash slapped down, leaving none of the three a chance to answer; the Clavering blood, however charmingly embodied, was used to being obeyed. Dr. Kirtle, in fact, was already mincing gloomily off toward his glass of hock, and that gave Pibble the chance to satisfy a private inquisitiveness.

“Were you on the Raid, too, Maxwell?” he said.

“No, sir.” The Sergeant's wilting melancholy deepened.

“What was Mr. Singleton talking about before he came to fetch me?”

“Ah … er … sir … ah … something quite different, sir.”

“Never mind. Anyway, the main point is that you've carried though the correct procedure, as far as you were allowed to, and that Deakin talked to you in a very depressed fashion about his sex life.”

“Well … er … yes, sir.”

“Never mind. Off you go for your beer. I should get some notes down about that conversation. If you think of anything else, you can just let me know direct at Scotland Yard. You don't
have
to tell them everything here, you know.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Pibble stood still to give the Sergeant a decent start. More steaming intangibles, he thought: first Mr. Waugh's outburst and then a policeman who'd been hurriedly coached to lie. He walked off toward the Main Block, hoping that if he went the wrong way round the whole edifice he'd be too late for the hock. He didn't feel like standing there with a glass in his hand in the same room as the idiotic Doctor, who so openly despised him—at any rate not if Mrs. Singleton was in the room, too.

Roughly opposite the Main Block he came up with Adam the Gardener, still sweeping with the stolid stroke of a man rowing the Atlantic.

“Ah-hem!” said Pibble purposefully.

The man straightened up and touched the brim of his hat. Beneath its shade his visage—such of it as could be seen through the prodigious growth of beard—seemed preternaturally dark, as though he were on the verge of apoplexy.

“Did you know Mr. Deakin?” said Pibble.

Something in the man's attitude changed; he relaxed and ran a finger beneath the elastic of his beard, a gesture which revealed the true reason for the color of his face.

“No, suh,” he said, in a booming Deep South voice. “I's a stranger in dese parts.”

“Staying long?” said Pibble.

“You recknin' to run me out of town, Sheriff?” said the Negro, in a different voice, a John Wayne drawl.

“This burg ain't big enough for you and me, Black Jake,” said Pibble.

The Negro laughed.

“Fuzz?” he said.

“Fraid so,” said Pibble.

“Me, I'm a criminal back home,” said the Negro, in what at last seemed to be his own voice.

“Burnt your draft card?” said Pibble.

“What makes you think that?”

“Sounds as if you'd rather talk with an English policeman than an American civilian.”

“Maybe so.”

“What do you make of this place?” asked Pibble, moving to a less tender subject.

“You know something, Sheriff?” said the Negro. “This setup is just about like all the stories 'bout Virginia 'fore the war—the kind of stories her gramma told my gramma.”

“They've done that on purpose, of course,” said Pibble.

“Yeah, but they done it too damn well, like they believed it.”

“At least they've got something to believe.”

“Yeah … but … but they believe it
all
,”
said the Negro, waving­ a hand to include the dream landscape, the exquisite house, and a noise of cheering, like far surf, which wafted from the concealed valley whence the shots had come. “Pardon me,” he added, and resumed his monotonous sweeping.

Pibble walked on around the far wing, from which floated a cooking smell so appetizing that he decided it must be canned in aerosol sprays and vented to welcome the “visitors” back from their journey into the past. If so, something had gone amiss with Mr. Singleton's passionately precise timing, for the
Rocket
and its dollar-happy load were still invisible; so, he realized, was its track, but looking at the generous sweep of turf he saw a minute fold which might conceal a ha-ha. He strolled over and found himself on a tiny platform with Lilliputian-scale rails curving away to his right.
Three
rails; so the system was electrified, and those generous puffs of smoke and galvanically working cylinders had been as phony as … as Adam's beard.

His ten minutes about up, he walked back past the main frontage, and the now-stilled fountain. Dr. Kirtle was getting into his car by the colonnade entrance, but got out again and came toward Pibble.

“Must apologize,” he whispered. “Daresay you thought me no end of an ass—quite unfit to do my job.”

“Not at all,” lied Pibble.

“Kind of you,” said the Doctor. “Truth is I was talking to the Admiral about a month gone by—no, more like six weeks—and the subject of post-mortems came up. He told me—surprised me a bit—that the whole idea revolted him; he couldn't bear the thought of anyone he'd known being cut open. So when they called me in for Deakin I thought I'd try to spare him—England owes him a lot, you know. But I've just been talking to him and he seemed quite happy about the whole thing. Complete
volte-face.
He didn't seem very interested—didn't even look up from his paper, but I got the message all right. Course it's far better if we do the job properly. I'll put it in hand at once.”

“Fine,” said Pibble, embarrassed—he liked the Doctor, dammit. “Thank you very much,” he added dimly. It seemed to be enough, for the Doctor minced back to his car and drove away.

Mrs. Singleton was waiting in the winy air of the colonnade, like an embodiment of all autumnal sweetness.

“You mustn't mind about Fred,” she said. “His world begins and ends with us.”

“All policemen expect to be resented,” said Pibble. “It's part of the training. I hadn't realized how many of you were involved in the Raid. I bet if they make a film of it they'll find a place for
you
in a landing craft.”

Mrs. Singleton laughed her ambrosial laugh.

“Actually they made two films,” she said. “They turned Harvey into an American for one of them, and the actress who played me—Phyllis Calvert it was—was parachuted in to St. Quentin to join the Resistance and guide the ships in. It was awful nonsense, but the other one was very good and accurate—I'm surprised you didn't see it. Harvey arranged for us to have some sort of royalty, and it did terribly well, especially in the Commonwealth, and that's what gave him the capital to develop Herryngs the way he has. It pays for itself now, of course, but only just. Luncheon is ready and the Admiral's been ringing up your office to try and find out what you like to drink—your sergeant said beer, I hope that's all right.”

“Lovely,” said Pibble thankfully, but wondering what oubliettes lay beneath this lush expanse of red carpet.

As they went into the dimness of the hall, a small erect figure came forward, holding out his hand. The Admiral had none of his brother's exaggerated strut; he wore a quiet tweed suit; his voice was quiet, too, almost a murmur.

“Come along, Superintendent,” he said, “you're just in time. Want a pee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Come in, then; we all help ourselves and are very informal.”

He led the way into a room on the right-hand side of the passage. Really it was no more than a paneled nook left over from the construction of two shapelier rooms; a circular rosewood table nearly filled it. Mr. Singleton and a girl were talking over on the far side, by a crowded hot plate.

“That smells good,” said the Admiral. “Pheasant stew. Waste of good meat to roast them, don't you agree, Superintendent?” He rubbed his pale hands together. His face was pale, too, with no tan to hide the lichenlike marks of old age; but apart from that and the absence of a mustache and the trimmer eyebrows, he really was astonishingly like his brother. Carried his head at a different angle, perhaps …

“I think you've met my nephew,” he said. “Judith, this is Superintendent Pibble, who has come to sort us out; Superintendent, this is our secretary, Judith Scoplow.”

Nothing special about her, really: a tall girl with a flat, pale face and hair that would probably have been mouse without the help of a copper rinse. She wore it lightly backcombed into a sort of half helmet, kept in place by a broad brown Alice band.

“How do you do,” she said, and at once Pibble looked at her again. There
was
something special about her, once you had heard the voice; something happy, easy, confident, innocent; something dizzily out of keeping with this mansion of rich decay. Despite a couple of pimples below the corner of her wide mouth, she was beautiful, too. Pibble revised an earlier guess: the General's staglike strut down the steps had not meant he was on his way to visit a woman—it meant he had just been talking with one, had just seized an opportune half minute to sniff the deliriant bouquet of youth.

Queuing for his pheasant stew, Pibble struggled with the sense of having met someone like her in the past. (He struggled, too, with the knowledge that she was the kind of woman who would have that effect on men, a barely sophisticated variant of the urge to say “Haven't I met you before?”) He was disconcerted out of both struggles by his encounter with the stewpot, which turned out to contain chunks of bird in a sauce heavy with cream and brandy; there was a little dish of fried diced apple by the side. Left to itself, his subconscious did the trick—that girl in the Salinski case! He was so pleased with himself that he took a double helping of creamed potatoes.

Anne something. And Salinski (fortyish, shiny-bald, dapper) had faked a brake failure and let his new Rover run over a cliff with his smart little wife in it, all on the strength of a barely more than nodding acquaintance with this Anne. Again, it had been only when she'd answered Pibble's first question—there'd been a smell of collusion because Salinski had tried to use her as an element in his timetable alibi—that Pibble had realized that Salinski was perfectly sane. And in the end both counsels, for defense and prosecution, had outdone each other in courtesies, the judge had been a shade more than paternal, and several hard-nosed reporters had attempted to play down her role in their copy. Poor little pigeon, by the time she stepped down from the witness box she was the only person in the whole court who still didn't understand how Salinski could have done such a thing. And here was another of them. Well, well; no wonder the General had gone down toward his phallic car with the swagger of a hart at leaf fall.