Death by Sheer Torture (23 page)

Authors: Robert Barnard

BOOK: Death by Sheer Torture

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But were their guffaws any worse than the manly guffaws of my colleagues at the Yard, their assertions of healthy normality? At least I wouldn’t have to work every day with the Northumberland squirearchy. I thought of walking the grounds with Jan and Daniel; I thought of Daniel growing up with room to be free in, to wander and to explore at will; I thought of being rid of the slog and
paperwork of life in the CID, of washing my hands of the petty crooks, wheedling for one more chance, of the big, sleek crooks trying to slip me a bribe, I thought of getting shot of all the sleaziness, the stench of evil, the vileness . . .

My agonized meditation was interrupted by McWatters. Entering hurriedly, he walked straight over to me (showing that he had been listening at the door). He looked unaccustomedly confused and worried.

‘Mr Peregrine, sir. There’s someone arrived. A . . . gentleman . . .’

‘Well?’

‘He says he’s Mr Wallace Trethowan.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr Wallace, sir. Elder son of Sir Lawrence.’

And there entered unannounced into the drawing-room a large brown man of around sixty, with a broad-brimmed hat, cavalry-twill trousers and chukka-boots, followed by an encouraging-sized family.

‘Greetings, all,’ he said, in broad Australian. ‘Thought we’d drop in as we were passing. Old place looks smaller than it used to. Jeez, it’s nice to be back, though. Anyone going to offer me a nice cool beer?’

CHAPTER 16

EPILOGUE

You lot were expecting that all along, I suppose. For you this has just been a book, and in books people who are ‘missing, presumed dead’ always turn up by the end. For me, this was all for real, and I’d been used all my life to looking on Cousin Wallace as dead. If Wallace was not dead, indeed, I owed my very existence to a bureaucratic error.

We got the whole story, at boozy length, over the next few days. Wallace had gone with his mother to Australia in 1933. His father had never shown any great interest in him, beyond inviting him a couple of times to Harpenden, where he had been rather grandly neglected (this, remember, was the time when the Trethowans’ artistic pretensions were at their height). When they left these shores, all contact between them and the English Trethowans had ceased. On the outbreak of war, Wallace (or Wally as he insisted we call him) had come back to Europe, enlisted, and found himself in a Guards regiment. It did not take him long to be ‘really pissed off, if you’ll pardon the expression’ with the bull, the snobbery, the grind and the danger. And so in 1944, during the Arnhem action, he just ‘took off’, which was his nice way of saying he deserted. He made his way, somehow, through the chaos of Central Europe at that time, through countries emerging out of one ghastly tyranny, and about to fall victim to another. In the end he made it to Greece, where he got a job on a cargo boat which finally took him back to Australia.

He seems never to have joined up with his mother again (‘she lived her own life, and between you and I she was a bit of an embarrassment’), but eventually he worked his way up to owning an enormous property in outback Queensland: thousands of square miles, thousands of head of cattle, and hardly enough water to bathe a baby in. Only a man with a property like that could conceivably find Harpenden smaller than he remembered it. This was the family’s first trip back to the Old Country.

I don’t for a moment believe that their turning up at Harpenden was entirely coincidental. They said they were on their way to Scotland in the Land-Rover, which was no doubt true enough. But I suspect they had read about our little troubles in one of the sensational rags Sybilla had been feeding information to, had been intrigued, and
had started wondering about poor old Lawrence, and what pickings there might be for them when he died.

They certainly got more than they bargained for. Uncle Lawrence, as I foresaw, totally deceived the examining psychiatrists (there is no one, but no one, more gullible than a psychiatrist), very much as I believe he had been deceiving the family in the year since his stroke: I think most of his ‘off-days’ were assumed, were a preparation for the murder which he finally so ingeniously accomplished. But three months later he died of a second stroke, while declaiming his poetry to the other inmates of the institution he had been confined to. He died as he lived, a grandiose old phoney, and the Wallace Trethowans were now masters of Harpenden.

It didn’t go well. It was an exceptionally cold winter, Harpenden is impossible to heat at the best of times, Aunt Sybilla got on their nerves, and the McWatterses, finding that the tone of the place had gone down, left for more prestigious employ. I met Wally in London for lunch one day, and when I’d listened (with the most genuine sympathy) to his beefing for half an hour, I suggested he made the house over to the county, or to the National Trust, and hotfoot it back to Australia with what remained of the loot. It wasn’t easy to manage, the financial climate of the country being what it is, but finally it went through. Harpenden House became a museum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century arts, subject to the present residents having the right to remain in their living quarters.

It works very nicely. Aunt Syb shows people round, descants on the Friths and the Holman Hunts and the Luke Fildeses, and most people imagine she dates from the same era as the pictures. When she comes to the Elizabeth Trethowan Gallery, which is housed in the Elizabethan wing, she draws attention to what she calls the ‘tiny little faults’ in the work of her sister, which she
says ‘only the eye of a fellow artist’ can detect. There has even been a slight revival of interest in Aunt Kate: little parties of National Front supporters come to see her Collection, and though after the first such visit she remarked wistfully that they were not quite the superb specimens of Aryan youth she had been expecting, by now her romantic mind has managed to create a halo of the heroic even around them.

Pete vacated the Elizabethan wing very shortly after Wally took over. He had developed a close working relationship with the director of the Museum of Women’s Art in Philadelphia, and he decamped to the States to make it still closer. He took three of Eliza’s pictures, to ensure a warm welcome. Maria-Luisa and the Squealies took themselves back to Naples, where Maria-Luisa assumed a position of some power and influence in a branch of the Mafia her family was involved with. The Squealies are considered fine children in the Italian South, but Aunt Sybilla has been heard to remark, almost hopefully, on the high incidence of fatal childish diseases in the Naples area. Cristobel had her baby, and is the better for it, and I hope it is having a happier childhood in the Gothic wing than ever Chris and I had. Jan and I had a postcard, all lakes and scrubland, from Mordred the other day. He is with the British Council in Finland, where no doubt he is learning more enchanting things to do with herrings.

As you can imagine, Jan and I had a few bad days after the spectacular treachery of her joining Sybilla’s eleven to play against me. I roughed her up a bit, verbally, and she pretended it had all been a joke, to see how I took it. After a time I said that I believed her. On the scaffold of such mutual deceptions is the stability of married life built. She has just done well in her second-year exams at Newcastle, and is beginning to wonder what to do with a degree in Arabic.

Well, so now you’ve heard the story of how I shopped my uncle for murdering my dad, caught my bastard cousin pinching the family pictures, discovered my sister was pregnant by the same bastard cousin, and all the rest of the little oddities and secrets of one of the grand old families that make this country what it is today. The whole thing was sheer torture from beginning to end, and if I confess that I enjoyed it now and then, you will say, I suppose, that that, at least, I got from my father. Now it’s all out in the open, though, couldn’t we call it a day? You can put it out of your mind, and I can go on with my life. I do have a job of work to do.

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