Death by Sheer Torture (21 page)

‘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’, and 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.

‘Oh, Lawrence,’ giggled Kate. ‘You didn’t, did you? You are
naughty!’

Lawrence—all eyes on him, thirsty for sensation—suddenly seemed to lose his passivity. He forced himself out of his rug and forward in his chair; he fixed me with a malevolent eye and began to raise his right arm. His quivering finger pointed at me, and he bellowed:

‘You—you damned—’ but his arm refused to go higher, and he looked at it in horror—‘liar! A
AAAAHHHH.
’

The shriek was hideous, like a stuck pig, and the arm, which had seemed paralysed, clutched his heart as he let out breathless, agonized yelps, choking, spluttering, going hideously purple, like
The Death of Chatterton.

‘Oh, Perry,’ howled Kate, genuinely concerned. ‘Look what you’ve done. He’s had a stroke.’

But before she could get to him, Tim was through the oak door, his men following, and he had Lawrence down on the floor, applying artificial respiration. Providentially—or rather, at my suggestion—they had a stretcher ready, and an ambulance outside. Within minutes, and still hard at the first aid, they were trundling him out of the room and pushing him head first into the ambulance at the door. I had stood aside while all this was going on, as if in unconcern. In fact, I (at least) was breathing normally, for the first time for half an hour. The plan had worked. I was going to be safe.

I was conscious, as the sound of the ambulance faded down the drive and along the road to Thornwick, that everybody was looking at me, and hardly in a spirit of friendship.

‘That,’ said Pete, ‘was too bloody thick for words.’

‘Was it?’ I said. ‘When we had come to that conclusion, he would have had to be faced with it. If it had been done tête-à-tête, him and Hamnet, I imagine the result would have been the same.’

‘You mean that he would have had a stroke?’ asked Sybilla.

‘I mean there would have been an appearance of that,’ I said.

There was a long, long silence, as everybody tried to take in the significance of that. As for Lawrence as murderer, they all accepted it without difficulty: I
suspected, with no evidence for my suspicion, that for many of them it was not too great a surprise. Who could tell what these odd people knew about each other, but preferred to conceal? Perhaps some of them were glad it was not someone nearer and dearer. Lawrence was hardly adept at making himself loved. But then, which of them was? Sybilla seemed to take the first word by some order of precedence.

‘Poor, poor dear Lawrence,’ she breathed, in a spirit of benediction. ‘So it was Lawrence after all.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘Lawrence couldn’t switch off the light, because, as you all know, he could barely raise his hands as far as his mouth. He could manœuvre his chair around the ground floor of the house, and around Kate’s wing, which had the lift, but he couldn’t go upstairs to the rest of the house, or into the garden. Scissors were much easier for a half-paralysed man to manage than a knife—he would have had to hold the cord in one hand and cut with the other: I doubt if he had the coordination, and it would have taken too much time. I said earlier there were perhaps other children in the house, besides the Squealies. Let’s be charitable and assume that Lawrence did this when he was not in full control of his faculties. As far as the outside world is concerned, he did it in a fit of senile malice.’

‘He wasn’t so jolly senile,’ said Aunt Kate.

‘Don’t be foolish, Kate,’ said Sybilla sharply.

‘As I say, we have to take the line that he was, whatever our suspicions, and whatever we feel about the supposed stroke we have just witnessed. Uncle Lawrence will by now be in hospital. After that he will no doubt be put into some kind of institution, and the police doctors and psychiatrists will get on to him. I suspect that nobody will actually
want
to put him on trial. Who knows? Perhaps he
will
retreat into that other, shadow world of his.’

‘Poor old man,’ said Jan.

‘Is that the end of the story, Daddy?’ piped up an unregarded Daniel.

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘Not quite.’

‘The
motive,’
said Mordred. ‘If it wasn’t a senile fit—and of course I don’t believe that for a moment—then
why
did he do it?’

‘Look here, Perry,’ said Peter, stirring his flabby bulk uneasily. ‘I get your point. My old dad did it, and I’m not denying it. Had half a suspicion that might be the case. Can’t we leave it at that?’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘You’re trying to avoid
why
he did it. I think I know why you’re trying to avoid it—I think it’s because, by means we need not go into, you actually know. But if we leave it at that, you’re all going to be asking questions for the rest of your lives. Was it some senile grudge of no importance, or was there something behind it? And if there was something behind it, are the rest of us safe? So I think you ought to know that there
was
something behind it: whether or not the killing was done when he was in his right mind, he had a motive. And at this point I’m going to have to ask you,
all
of you, to swear to keep what I’m about to tell you to yourselves. It’s to be regarded as absolutely and permanently secret. Do you all swear to that?’

They all nodded their heads enthusiastically, greedily. Peter, I thought, nodded more enthusiastically and greedily than the rest. He realized I had no desire to rob him of his little kingdom.

‘Then, if you all agree that what is coming goes no further than this room, I’ll tell you. My mother, in the last years of her life, was on a cruise —’

‘Oh, Perry,’ howled Chris. ‘You’ve found out. Do you have to tell everyone?’

‘My sister,’ I said, in my most elder-brotherly kind of way, ‘who has not been as frank and open with me during this case as I should have liked, already knows what I’m
about to tell you. Yes, Chris, I do have to tell them. This is murder, and if I don’t, suspicion and distrust will go on festering for the rest of your lives. And apart from that, telling them is a form of protection for
you.
Right, then. My mother, on the round-the-world cruise she took in nineteen fifty seven, met a woman who claimed to be, and undoubtedly was, the first Mrs Lawrence Trethowan.’

‘Peregrine!’ shrilled Sybilla. ‘You don’t mean it! Not the appalling Florrie! The Gibson girl!’

She looked around her in theatrical amazement. Pete looked furious; the rest were still taking it in.

‘Jolly pretty little thing, wasn’t she?’ said Kate.

‘I think she had worked in the theatre,’ I said diplomatically. ‘When my mother met her she owned or ran a hat shop in Sydney. The vital point, as you must all see, is that she was still alive in the ’fifties, not dead in the ’thirties as Lawrence had given out. And he had given it out, of course, because he was unable to divorce her. As perhaps you know, she was a Catholic. If she gave him no cause, and if she refused to divorce
him,
the marriage was virtually indissoluble. He was still legally married to her, as my mother realized, and for all I know he still may be. His second marriage was bigamous.’

‘Oh, I say,’ said Morrie, ‘but that means —’

‘You don’t have to spell it out, for Christ’s sake,’ said Peter.

‘No, let’s not spell it out. But that’s the reason why we all must keep it secret. Anyway, the rest can be told fairly quickly. My mother communicated this to me in a letter, to be sent to me on my twenty-first birthday. It was no doubt sent here by her lawyers, and appropriated by my father. I have no doubt it put him in a terrible quandary. On the one hand it made him Lawrence’s legal heir, under the terms of Great-Grandfather’s entail. On the other hand, he could not reasonably expect to enjoy the exalted position of head of the Trethowan family for
long. Then it would inevitably descend to me. That he could not bear the thought of. He hated, absolutely hated me. I realize that now. So he compromised by screwing money out of Lawrence. He had been doing this, I imagine, since nineteen sixty-nine, the year I became twenty-one.’