The Old English Peep Show (7 page)

“Come and sit here, my dear fellow, and tell me tall stories about life as a famous policeman.” The Admiral was pulling out a chair on his right. Mrs. Singleton was already prodding a minute piece of bird on the other side of the gap.

“Your sergeant tells me that you know more about beer than anyone else in London,” said the Admiral. “I'd value your opinion on this—we brew it ourselves. I believe it's a shade on the sweet side for the real purist, but we are trying to gratify the perverse palate of our American cousins.”

Mr. Singleton butted in from the other side of the table.

“I commissioned a little firm in Chicago to market-research the American idea of what English beer ought to taste like.”

“Courages at Alton were very nice to us,” added the Admiral. “They sent a chap over to advise us how to get as near to Harvey's ideal as we could. I know a couple of chaps on the board, 'smatter of fact.”

“I think it's horrible,” said Mrs. Singleton, and sipped exaggeratedly from her glass of Burgundy.

Bodingly, Pibble lifted his tankard, and was surprised: true the beer was too sweet and a bit on the dark side; it was like one of those special brews which a few colleges in ancient universities specialize in, but it wasn't flat, as they tend to be; it had a creamy sparkle which suggested that the barrel must be in tiptop condition. He said so.

“I'm glad to hear you say that,” said Mr. Singleton. “To be frank, I never let them keep anything left over. We throw away yesterday's barrel and start on a new one. Brewing's an extraordinarily cheap process, given the equipment.”

“But are you sure that's what you want, Mr. Pibble?” said the Admiral solicitously. “There's some of Harvey's plonk if you prefer, or there ought to be another of these”—he pointed to his own half bottle of Pommery—“in the fridge, or you could have some of our excellent water, as dear Judith does.”

“It's the nicest water I ever tasted,” said Miss Scoplow. “A marvelous old man brings it up from the spring in two wooden buckets which he carries with a sort of yoke.”

“I'm happy with this, thank you,” said Pibble, wondering which level of the treasure house of police fantasy he should tap to please the Admiral's lust for gruesome tales. (Scotland Yard has an oral tradition rich enough to keep a college of Opies busy.) He needn't have bothered, for the old hero seemed set on talking about his lions, which he did with a mild but insistent volubility, often keeping hold of the conversation by simply repeating some tidbit which he had already rolled out. It was during one of these
da capos
that Pibble revised his opinion of Mrs. Adamson's lion books, which, when he'd read them, he'd thought had a too-good-to-be-true quality. She must have covered the ground pretty thoroughly, he now saw, since there was nothing in the Admiral's mellifluous monologue which he didn't already know. He seized a moment when the hero's mouth was full to ask him whether he'd enjoyed the books.

“What books?” said the Admiral, emphasizing his famous deafness by cupping a curiously lobeless ear.

“Elsa!” shouted Mrs. Singleton. It wasn't exactly a shout, though: she just notched her hound voice up another intensity and produced a word which was still clearly spoken but could have halted a marching regiment. Two more intensities and the windowpanes would have fallen out.

“What's the matter with her?” said the Admiral. “You are never satisfied with your food, Anty, not even in the nursery, I remember. Would you believe it, Superintendent—”

The door opposite him opened and a little old woman with a crossly crimson face stood there.

“Did I hear you call, Miss Anty?” she said.

“Oh, I'm so sorry, Elsa,” said Mrs. Singleton. “I didn't mean you. We were talking about lions.”

“Nasty heathenish things,” snarled the cook. “It's all very well for you to say they only eat black men, but who's to know they won't acquire the taste and we'll all be gnawed to pieces in our beds?”

The Admiral didn't even look in her direction, but turned exaggeratedly toward Pibble.

“No, that's a very interesting aspect of lion psychology,” he said. “Some of them do literally acquire a taste for man-flesh, and can't be satisfied with anything else. There's not been any research done on man-eating, though, for obvious …”

His soft voice was almost a whisper, but the cook looked at him, put her hands over her ears, and rushed out.

“Now you've upset her,” said Mr. Singleton to the room in general. “Go and soothe her down, Anty.”

Mrs. Singleton rose and left. Pibble sat in a daze. How in holy hell had they thought they could get away with it? Who had persuaded whom? And what in God's name were they up to, to make it necessary? He pulled himself together to listen to his host, who was murmuring again about lions, but during the monologue he kept thinking of other little bits of confirmation: the Epstein and the cook had started him off; then there were the Adamson books; the General's stagy departure; the locked door upstairs; Singleton's whispering—to emphasize the Admiral's presence behind it; the mere necessity of having a policeman down from London for a case that didn't warrant it; the too-painstaking collusion in social hypnotism which he'd felt so strongly in the meat store; the
volte-face
over post-mortem … Oh, Crippen! And presumably Deakin had looked after the Admiral's shoes, hung up his clothes, taken his trays up, made his bed, even.

When Mrs. Singleton came back, she simply nodded to her husband and sat down. Pibble felt edgy now, but couldn't decide whether the others did, too, or whether he was attributing his own unease to them. Only Miss Scoplow seemed uninfected with this social itch; she talked little but listened to Mr. Singleton's jerky explanation of the economics of the wine trade with great animation; she had a pleasant trick of showing interest by opening her eyes absurdly wide, so that the white showed all around the iris. She gave the impression that she could have listened with intense delight to an account of a golf match between two moderate players on a featureless plain.

But Mr. Singleton's lecture seemed not to stimulate even himself; he had the tense air of an actor ad-libbing while he waits for a colleague to make a delayed entrance. Mrs. Singleton turned one fragment of meat over and over, as if it were the last piece of a jigsaw which was somehow the wrong shape for the last hole. And the old hero was now retailing complete myth as certified lion lore, even the false claw in the tail with which the beast is supposed to lash itself into a frenzy of rage, like some hack satirist.

“No pudding,” said Mrs. Singleton suddenly, “and we've eaten the last of the nectarines. There's blue Cheshire and grapes and apples.”

The shuffling to remove plates and queue (in charadelike parody of housewives at a greengrocer's) for muscats and pippins (not Cox or Ribston—something Pibble had never met before) broke the tension. As they settled again, Clavering turned to Miss Scoplow­ and told her all the legends he had just told Pibble, while she listened to each nonsensical detail with astonished eyes. This left Pibble free for the first time to enjoy Mrs. Singleton's presence; the contrast with Miss Scoplow served to emphasize her musky, autumnal quality. You soon got used to the voice; it wasn't, after all, loud, just penetrating. She must know what was up, Pibble decided, but Miss Scoplow mightn't. If she thought of Adam the Gardener as “a marvelous old man,” she must be either shortsighted or unobservant.

“You seem to take an enormous amount of trouble over detail,” he said. “Bringing your water up in buckets on a yoke, I mean. There can't be much chance for tourists to photograph that, however picturesque.”

“Don't you believe it,” said Mrs. Singleton, with her liqueur-like chuckle. “Harvey sees to it that it's done while there's a party going down the colonnade; Rastus walks up just below those windows. Besides, we'd have the water brought up from the spring anyway. As Judith says, it's much nicer than the mains; there being a picturesque man to do it is just luck.”

“Is that the man I saw spraying ferns on the way to the big Kitchen, dressed up like the gardener in those old
Express
strip cartoons?”

“That's right—we call him Rastus. Do you follow the strips? I always read them first.”

They fell into a half-bantering discussion of the protagonists of the thought balloon, discovered a joint admiration for the earliest Four-D Jones strips, and were discussing middle-period Garth plots when the grate of tires on the gravel outside brought Mrs. Singleton to her feet (her hearing seemed to be as keen as her voice).

“That's Carl Spruheim, Harvey,” she said. “You go and let him in while I fetch the coffee. We'll have it in my sitting room.”

Both Singletons left. Pibble allowed them twenty seconds before he rose, too.

“There's just something I ought to check on before I talk to the Coroner,” he said casually, moving as he spoke toward the door so that he was already through it before Clavering had a chance to answer. He ran across the hall and up the stairs; he was panting, more with nerves than exertion, before he reached the first landing. He plugged on.

The barrel of the big key still protruded through the lock of the Admiral's door, but the door didn't open—so there must be another entrance. He nipped into Deakin's pantry and took a pair of crocodile pliers from the pegboard, but he found that though he could grip the barrel with the pliers held sideways, the mahogany beading of the door panels prevented him from turning the key far enough, so he had to run back for a blunt-ended pair. Sweating now, he tried again; the serrations of the jaws slipped on the metal, making bright parallel gouges, then held. Contorting his body so that he did not have to take a fresh grip, he moved the key around until he heard the big wards click over. He dropped the pliers and turned the handle. The door opened.

But before he had moved it an inch, a weight thudded into it from the far side and slammed it shut. Pibble gripped the handle and twisted, throwing all his weight against the mahogany. A child? he wondered—there ought to be some Singleton kids about. Anyway, the door gave, and he jammed his foot into the opening and forced the gap wider, easily enough, with the leverage of knee and shoulder. Then the resistance ceased suddenly and only the inertia of the heavy mahogany saved him; if it had been a flimsy door, he would have fallen sprawling into the secret room. As it was, he entered with an ungainly stagger, to find Clavering, a little flushed and ruffled, facing him with chilly dignity. Who'd have thought the old man had so much agility in him, to race up here so fast and wrestle with the far side of the door?

“What the devil do you think you're up to?” said the old man with icy fierceness but in the wrong voice.

Pibble didn't answer but looked around the room. The hairy jacket, yellow waistcoat, and twill trousers were flung across the bed; not good enough—they might both have duds like that. Two Elsa books lay on the desk; nothing like good enough. One of a set of fitted cupboards in the right-hand wall was open, with the corner of a washbasin showing. Pibble walked across and found what he wanted, an uncleaned safety razor with a number of half-inch white bristles stuck in it, a tube of Helena Rubinstein “Tan in a Minute,” a lot of tan-smeared tissues in the wastepaper basket, a pair of nail scissors, even a scattering of shorter, curving bristles on the carpet. As he was wrapping the razor and specimens of his other prizes in clean tissues from the box, Mrs. Singleton's voice came from the room.

“All right, General?”

The old hero answered with his wild giggle, more exaggerated than before—tension, or the strain of suppressing it for a couple of hours?

“Far from it, m'dear, far from it. You were right about Treacle—he even looks like him now. Down a rabbit hole, you remember?”

Pibble could imagine so, for he was on his knees collecting clippings of the famous eyebrows; he was aware that the seat of his trousers was shiny. From the room it must have looked as if he'd have been wagging his tail, if he'd had one. In fact he was both dismayed and miserable. How the hell could they have thought they'd get away with it?

“Oh, my aunt!” said Mrs. Singleton. “What on earth shall we do now? I thought he was such an agreeable little man.”

2:00 A.M.

A
false note, thought Pibble as he straightened up; a degree too Noel Cowardly, not quite right for her—or perhaps she's been acting, family-charade-playing, all morning and this is the real Miss Anty, the formic-acid one. More to avoid facing them than anything he started prying into the neighboring cupboards. The Admiral seemed to own few clothes but a formidable amount of shoes, each pair in its own special Deakin-built niche, and all the niches full. He nerved himself to turn and face the Claverings.

“I have to assume that there is some reason for this impersonation, Sir Ralph,” he said. “Otherwise you would hardly have gone to the lengths of shaving off your mustache.”

“Right,” said the General. “Wish I hadn't now. Bloody fidgety it makes me feel—kept wanting to touch it all through luncheon—only thing stopped me was it would look as if I wanted to pick me nose. Bloody good stew, didn't you think? Wanted to say so at the time; only I couldn't express my appreciation with Dick's prim bloody vocabulary.”

“Oh, General!” said Mrs. Singleton. “This is serious, and Carl Spruheim's waiting.”

“Quite right, m'dear, but you might tell Elsa—wouldn't want her to think I didn't like it, eh? She spotted me right away, Super­intendent. All your fault, Anty—you must learn to keep your voice down—it used to give your poor mother headaches, y'know.”

Mrs. Singleton's face twitched for an instant into the haggard dimension of tragedy; then she recovered her smiling mask.

“How did you guess, Mr. Pibble?” she said.

“Sir Ralph's ears are not the same shape as the ones on the Epstein bust; besides, there were a lot of little things which made it look as if you were putting on a play for my benefit.”

“My dear fellow,” said the General with a sudden ferocity, “we've been putting on a bloody play for the last twenty years.”

“I take it the Admiral is not in the house,” said Pibble.

“Right,” said the General.

“Can you tell me where he is?”

“No. He's gone missing. Disappeared completely. Bloody inconvenient.”

“Since when?”

“Went the morning Deakin was found. Just walked away and hasn't come back. Done it before a couple of times, you know. First time when my wife died, 'smatter of fact.”

“We're not frightfully worried about him,” said Mrs. Singleton. “But you can just imagine what a hullabaloo there'd be if the papers got hold of it. That's why we couldn't have let the local police in; they'd have spotted the trick at once, and if we hadn't tried it they'd have raised a terrible hue and cry after Uncle Dick.”

“Whose actual idea was it to get someone down from London?” said Pibble, inquisitive about the tiny discrepancy that had been worrying him.

“Harvey's,” said the General.

“The General's,” said Mrs. Singleton in the same breath, then glanced sharply at the old man.

“… as much as it was anyone's,” he carried on, as though there had been no full stop after Harvey's name, “but we all more or less hammered it out together. Anty's quite right, it'd be bloody chaos if this got out, but I won't blame you if you don't see it that way. Not that it affects Deakin's death, you realize. All that happened before.”

“Do you mind if I go over it again?” said Pibble. “Everything was smooth and normal, except for Deakin's love life, and then he committed suicide. Sir Richard left next morning—yesterday morning. You decided he might be gone for a longish period, agreed between yourselves to get a policeman down from London, and rang up by lunchtime.”

“I know it sounds terribly quick,” said Mrs. Singleton, “but we do know Uncle Dick very well, and it was only just in case. If he'd come back, then everything would have been straightforward.”

“I see,” said Pibble. He hated it. It all sounded quite reasonable, according to their crazy, highhanded version of reason—very much the General's style of practical joke, in fact—and only sottish Mr. Waugh's sullen grumblings to set against it. And, by God, the caption to the funeral photograph among the press cuttings!

“How long was Sir Richard away the first time he disappeared?” he asked.

“About ten days,” said Mrs. Singleton.

“Near enough,” said the General, but there was a brooding flash of doubt below the shorn eyebrows, as though he sensed a pitfall; for the second time in five minutes Pibble was conscious of the lionlike past, the muscled majesty, moving wary through the ambushed scrub, who now lived moodily eccentric, the prime specimen behind the bars of Harvey Singleton's zoo. He liked the setup less than ever.

“All right,” he said. “I don't see that there's any real need to tell the Coroner about Sir Richard's disappearance. The only snag I can see is that one of you would normally give evidence at the inquest, but now you've shaved I don't think that's possible, unless Sir Richard comes back in time. Either you or your husband could do the identification, Mrs. Singleton—he'll have to be there in any case, as he found the body. How deaf
is
Sir Richard, by the way?”

“Middling,” said the General. “He's worst when he's bored. I found it bloody hard to hit it off right—you may have noticed.”

“In any case,” said Mrs. Singleton, “Uncle Dick took sleeping tablets.”

“Neither of us used to need much sleep,” said the General. “Now we're old we need it but can't get it. Most nights we sit up till about two, grunting at each other about this and that. Then we toddle upstairs and dope ourselves into dreamland.”

“Well,” said Pibble. “shall we go and settle the Coroner's worries? And Mr. Singleton's, too, I suppose.”

The General allowed himself another of his happy cackles.

“You needn't fret about Harvey,” he said. “Always makes his plans three layers deep—learnt it from me. D'you want this room locked up?”

Trap question. Pibble looked around the room slowly, the nape of his neck prickling. The little door through which the Claverings had come seemed to be at the top of a spiral stair in the thickness of the wall. They must have rummaged through the room already, but hadn't had time to clear up the detritus of the General's quick change act.

“No,” he said, “unless you feel it is possible that something has happened to Sir Richard in his absence. In that case it might just be worth while making the room proof against interference. If it didn't mess up household arrangements, cleaning and so on, I'd advise you to lock both doors and keep the keys.”

“You lock up, General,” said Mrs. Singleton, “and I'll take Mr. Pibble to see Carl. You'd better keep out of the way, I suppose.”

The General grunted.

Down the stairs Pibble lagged, worried sick with syntax and shoes. Uncle Dick took sleeping tablets. There should have been an empty niche in the shoe cupboard. Took, took, took. Mrs. Singleton, two steps below him and to his right, moved down the gradient with the creamy suppleness of a skier in a slow-motion film. Took. Could she use the past tense, in that particular sentence, when everyone else was so painstakingly in the present? Yes, she could, but there hadn't been a gap for the shoes the Admiral ought to have been wearing when he walked away. Took. She was beautiful, sugary, irresistible, like a box of homemade fudge. But took was wrong, and the General had switched the tense back to the present very smoothly, and then had spoiled things by asking a question which demonstrated that he wanted to know how suspicious Pibble was. Took. Put it with Mr. Waugh's tirade and the shoes and the funeral photograph, and then there was a decent chance that the old hero was dead, the quiet one who had handled his boats so brilliantly. If he'd just disappeared, and had done so before, what cause was there for Deakin to hang himself? And it must have been that way round—three or four days, Waugh had said. But if he was dead, and they were trying to keep
that
from Fleet Street, then. . .Pibble remembered the photograph in Deakin's room, and Harvey Singleton's impatience with the coxswain's yen to be curator of a museum commemorating the Raid: perhaps the idea of missing the Admiral's funeral was enough to make life not worth living for such a man. Took. In that case, what the hell had they done with the body? Buried it under Capability Brown's smooth-flowing turf? Not their style.

“How do you do?” he found himself saying.

“Spruheim,” said the blond man, holding out a robotic arm and hand for him to shake.

“I'll leave you to it,” said Mrs. Singleton, and shut the door of the chintzy little room on the ground floor.

He was a caricature of a Prussian, with his yellow hair, pale eyes, and angular jaw just shaped for the dueling scar which, mysteriously, did not adorn it.

“Don't tell me you were in the Raid, too?” said Pibble.

The Coroner made a noise which might have been a laugh or a clearing of the throat.

“Prisoner of war?” he said. “No, Superintendent, I left Germany in 1937. I used to practice law in Hamburg, but I am a Jew and by 1936 all my clients had found it wiser to consult an Aryan lawyer, so I came to England and found work as a baggage clerk. Fortunately your government interned me during the period of hostilities, which gave me time to explore the bizarre confusion which passes for law in these islands. So here I am, a respected solicitor in Southampton, trusted in great houses to deal adequately with the demise of servants. There is something fishy about this one, ha! or you would not be here.”

Crippen, thought Pibble, here's another reason why they wanted me; they couldn't afford to have this unbluffable intelligence taking charge.

“I don't know,” he said. “They're not the sort of people who need
reasons
for doing whatever they fancy. There are one or two little things which worry me, but I can't say how far they aren't just a reflection of the oddity of the whole setup. You find yourself hypnotized, you know.”

“Who better? There is no doubt that Deakin hanged himself, Kirtle says.”

“None, I think. I'd just like to clear up some aspects of the motive and leave the whole thing tidy. I've one witness who says he was crossed in love, and I hope to talk to another this afternoon, and that should leave everything shipshape. There will be some straightforward medical evidence, with no holes in it, and that ought to be that, with luck.”

“The Claverings have always enjoyed excellent luck,” said Mr. Spruheim. “Tuesday afternoon?”

“Fine.”

“And there are no elements in the, ha! setup which you might wish to hint to me should be glossed over?”

“Not that I know of. Mrs. Singleton will give evidence of identity and Mr. Singleton will give evidence of finding the body. Sergeant Maxwell will give technical evidence. Dr. Kirtle will give medical evidence. Sergeant Maxwell, and perhaps a Miss Maureen Finnick, whom I haven't yet interviewed, will give evidence about the motive. That should be the lot.”

“And neither Sir Ralph nor Sir Richard will attend,” said Mr. Spruheim. “I suppose they are wise—at least it will mean fewer journalists cluttering up my little court. Good. That seems easy enough. You will let me know if there are any aspects which you feel require, ha! delicate handling, will you not, Superintendent?”

“Of course,” said Pibble.

The Coroner scratched at the corner of his jaw with long, irritable strokes, like a cat clawing at a sofa leg. He was fixed, poor chap. He'd given Pibble every opportunity to voice the merest soupçon of a doubt and Pibble had refused, but still he knew that something was being kept back.

“So be it,” he said, at last. “The last thing that any of us desires is a fuss—see how English I have become! Now I have business to conduct with Mr. Singleton—he does the conducting and I simply follow the baton to the best of my poor abilities—so I will wish you luck with your Miss Finnick. I believe I have had some dealing with her before, in some equally trivial matter. She has achieved a certain, ha! notoriety in this district, I understand.”

He bowed like a doll hinged at the waist, but the expected click of heels did not follow.

“Superintendent, I am truly sorry that I have not been able to help you in your difficulties.”

“Not at all,” said Pibble, wondering whether there was something extra this odd man knew. No way of asking him, though—no natural way. Both men tried to open the door for each other, both to bow each other out first; Spruheim, with his longer reach and stronger formality, won each time. Harvey Singleton was in the hall, managing to look as if he had been on his way from X to Y when interrupted by this polite jostling.

“You've finished, then,” he said heavily. “Carl, I have left a lot of notes which I have made about the planning application in the blue folder on the left-hand side of my desk. You'll find our new secretary, Judith Scoplow, in there.”

“And she will not bite my head off?” said Mr. Spruheim.

“Far from it,” said Mr. Singleton with an unexpected nuance of warmth. “While you look through the notes, I will conduct the Superintendent to wherever he wants to go next.”

Ah, Crippen, thought Pibble, everywhere that Mary went, is it? I'll fix him. He tried to make a noise like an embarrassed cough.

“I really must disappear for a bit,” he said, “if you'll show me where the toilet is—I'm sorry. And please don't wait. I ought to talk to someone called Maureen Finnick, but I'm sure I can find her myself if you'll just tell me which way to go.”

Mr. Singleton studied his large, many-paneled wrist-watch.

“Two-forty-three,” he said. “You've just about got time if you aren't too long in the bog. The first of the afternoon coachloads is due to reach her stall at three-thirty-seven. But I'm afraid I have to insist that you must be accompanied on your way there because you will have to pass through the Lion Ground, and our insurers are—quite properly—very strict. I'll tell Anty to meet you here in ten minutes.”