Death by Sheer Torture Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1: Obituary

  Chapter 2: Homecoming

  Chapter 3: The Painful Details

  Chapter 4: Trethowans at Meat

  Chapter 5: Cristobel

  Chapter 6: Night Piece

  Chapter 7: The Younger Generation

  Chapter 8: Lunch with Uncle Lawrence

  Chapter 9: Papa’s Papers

  Chapter 10: Family at War

  Chapter 11: Brother and Sister

  Chapter 12: Low Cuisine

  Chapter 13: In Which I Have An Idea

  Chapter 14: In Which I Have Another Idea

  Chapter 15: A Concentration of Nightmares

  Chapter 16: Epilogue

  CHAPTER 1

  OBITUARY

  I first heard of the death of my father when I saw his obituary in The Times. I skimmed through it, cast my eye over the Court Circular, and was about to turn to the leader page when I was struck by something odd in the obituary and went back to it.

  ‘As reported on page 3, the death has occurred . . .’ was how it began. That was odd. Famous actresses, disgraced politicians, exploded royalty might get their deaths reported on the news pages, but why should my father? Even the obituary had admitted that his achievements were few—had implied, indeed, that had he not been a member of a family whose fame verged on notoriety they would hardly have paid him the compliment of an obituary at all. ‘Though now rarely heard, his song-cycle Dolores . . .’—that kind of thing. My father’s death would shatter the world no more than it had shattered me. And in that case there must be something unusual about the death—a spectacular accident, suicide (no, not that), or . . .

  Going against all my principles (for like all right-thinking people I read my paper backwards) I turned to page three. And there it was, tucked away down at the bottom: ‘Police were called to Harpenden House late last night after the death was reported of Leo Trethowan, youngest member of the famous Trethowan family . . .’ Well, well: so the old boy had gone out with a bang.

  I turned back to the centre pages, but I found it hard to concentrate on the first leader (which was about changes in the Anglican liturgy, never a subject of urgent personal interest to me). In spite of myself, in spite of the affectation of total indifference which I assumed even when alone, it had to be admitted that I was interested. My mind was already toying with various enticing speculations: a spectacular accident was of course a possibility, but it seemed to me that, knowing my father, it was odds on he had met his unexpected death at the hands of someone or other. Certainly he would not have committed suicide: he was never one to do anybody a favour. No, on the whole murder seemed . . .

  It was then that the telephone rang.

  ‘Perry Trethowan,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Perry,’ said my superior at the other end. ‘Have you read the paper yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. ‘The Common Market summit seems to be sticky going.’

  There was a second’s pause. I have a nasty vein of dry facetiousness that a lot of people find trying, and my boss was one of them. He was trying to decide whether it was operational now. ‘I was referring to the death of your father,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Oh yes, I saw that.’

  ‘But of course, they must have telegrammed you last night anyway.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll be going down for the funeral, I take it?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought to,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be expected.’

  ‘Isn’t this a time to let bygones be bygones?’

  ‘That’s what I try to do. I finished with my family years ago.’

  ‘Perry, you’re being difficult. You know we’ve been called in?’

  I pricked up my ears. ‘Ah. So it was murder?’

  ‘Yes, it was. Almost definitely. Of course there’s no question of sending you down —’

  ‘No, thank God,’ I said. ‘Who are you sending?’

  ‘Hamnet. What’s your opinion of him?’

  ‘Perfectly decent chap. Excellent choice.’

  ‘It just seemed to me that perhaps he’s a bit lacking in . . . well, imagination. And with your family imagination might be exactly what is wanted.’

  ‘Personally I’d have said a thoroughly nasty mind was the first requisite for anyone investigating the murder of a Trethowan,’ I said incautiously, giving him an opening.

  ‘Well, you should know. That’s really why we’d like to have you down there —’

  ‘I do not have a nasty mind.’

  ‘But you do know all the inside secrets. You are on their wavelength. Of course, I’d heard you weren’t close . . .’

  I laughed. ‘A nice way of putting it.’

  ‘Do you have any financial interest in the death, may I ask?’

  ‘Certainly not. I was cut off without a penny. If there is anything much to inherit (which I wouldn’t bank on) it will go to my sister, which is quite as it should be: she is precisely the sort of person odd legacies do go to.’

  ‘He could have changed his mind, of course.’

  ‘My father never, but never, changed his mind.’

  ‘Well, that’s all to the good as far as we’re concerned.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I mean if you have as little as possible personal interest in the matter.’

  ‘Joe,’ I said, addressing the Deputy Assistant Commissioner in a way I would usually not do except over an off-duty pint, ‘we are both agreed, aren’t we, that I cannot have any part in the investigation of this murder? I can brief Hamnet, I can even put in an appearance for a couple of hours at the funeral. But surely nothing more can be asked of me than that?’

  ‘I thought,’ said Joe Grierly, ‘that since you could be down there for perfectly natural reasons over the next few days, you could be given something in the nature of a watching brief. There are features in this case . . .’

  I groaned audibly. ‘There would be features,’ I said.

  ‘The personalities involved, for example, present problems: I don’t know whether you knew, but one of your father’s sisters—Catherine, I think the name is—went off her head last year.’

  ‘How did they know?’ I asked.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘My Aunt Kate has been teetering on the edge of insanity for fifty years. One would hardly notice when she actually toppled over.’

  ‘Wasn’t there something about the war?’ Joe asked, cunningly vague.

  ‘My aunt had various mad crushes in her teens, on people like Isadora Duncan and D. H. Lawrence, and she capped them by becoming a besotted admirer of Adolf Hitler. She used to spend her summers attending Nuremberg rallies and consorting with Hitler’s Mädchen in Bavarian work camps—some sort of Butlins plus ideology, I gather. They interned her in Holloway during the war.’

  ‘Oh I say—that seems rather hard.’

  ‘Not a bit: I’ve every sympathy with the authorities. If the silly . . . buzzard had kept quiet everything would have been forgotten. Instead of which she went careering round the village on her bike distributing pamphlets calling for a German victory. They really had no option. She had a highly privileged life in Holloway with others of like mind. As far as I can gather they all sat around complaining about the quality of the port.’

  ‘Poor old thing.’

  ‘She was thirty or so at the time,’ I pointed out.
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br />   ‘I can see I’m not going to rouse any sympathy in you for the difficult position your family’s in at the moment.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How did you and your father come to disagree?’

  ‘We never agreed. How did we come to fight? Well, you know how in the past families like ours expected their sons to go into the army, the church, manage the estate and so on, and there was a great stink if one of them wanted to go on the stage or something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, our family’s cussed in this as in everything else. If I’d said I wanted to go to ballet school, or train to be a drop-out, or go to the States and graduate in dope-peddling, they’d probably have patted me on the head and given me the family blessing and a couple of thou. When I said I wanted to join the army, all hell broke loose. My father said it was a pathetically conformist way of life, Aunt Sybilla said it showed a dreadfully coarse nature, and Aunt Kate said I’d be on the wrong side.’

  ‘It was no better when you switched to the police?’

  ‘I didn’t enquire. But I assure you, no—no, they would not have looked more favourably on the police.’

  ‘Your Aunt Sybilla, she’s some sort of artist, isn’t she?’

  ‘My Aunt Sybilla is or was a stage designer; my Uncle Lawrence is a poet and writer of belles lettres sort of stuff; my father was a composer and my Aunt Kate is—well, I suppose you could call her a politician.’

  ‘Well, you see the problems Hamnet is going to face when he gets down there.’

  ‘My sympathy goes out to him,’ I said.

  ‘Look, Perry, it’ll be much the best thing for all of us if you go into this voluntarily. After all, they are your family. Blood is thicker than water.’

  ‘So my professional experience tells me,’ I said. ‘Personally, taking it metaphorically, I’ve never been able to extract much meaning from that saw. Blood is certainly stickier than water—that I do know.’

  ‘Christ, I don’t want to have to draft you —’

  ‘Oh, hell’s bells, all right. I’ll go down for the funeral.’

  ‘You’ll go down today. And you’ll stay down there as long as Hamnet needs you.’

  ‘No wonder men are resigning from the Force in droves,’ I said. ‘This is nothing but jackboot tyranny.’

  ‘Have fun,’ said Joe, registering my surrender.

  I was just banging down the phone when I remembered something I’d forgotten to ask. ‘Here, Joe,’ I shouted, ‘you haven’t told me how he died.’

  Joe obviously resumed the conversation with reluctance. ‘I was afraid you’d ask that,’ he said.

  ‘Not nice?’ I asked, now really curious.

  ‘He died,’ said Joe cautiously, ‘while subjecting himself to a form of torture which I believe is called strappado.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ I howled.

  ‘He had it arranged, I gather, so that he could stop it at will. As far as we can see, someone fiddled with the ropes.’

  ‘Joe, listen,’ I gabbled, ‘you can’t send me to that snake pit. That is just how one of my family would die, and just how one of my family would murder. This is appalling. The press will have a field day. I’ll be the laughing-stock of the CID for the rest of my life. You can’t send me there, Joe —’

  ‘There’s a train at ten fifty,’ said the Deputy Assistant Commissioner. ‘Oh, and there’s one more tiny detail —’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was wearing gauzy spangled tights at the time.’

  CHAPTER 2

  HOMECOMING

  The inconvenient, and slightly ludicrous, house which my great-grandfather finished building in the last years of the Old Queen’s reign must, over the years, have brought a small fortune to British Rail and its predecessor companies from successive generations of my family, and in its heyday, their numerous guests. Perhaps this was why the Beeching axe quivered with compunction in the early ’sixties and spared the nearest station of Thornwick, and why subsequent carve-ups of the public transport system designed to force more and more cars on to the roads have left it standing and (with reduced services) functioning. It’s not every day you meet a large family of lunatics ready to travel from Northumberland to London at the drop of a hat.

  Not, I suppose, that the state of the family finances, or the state of the family limbs come to that, encourages that sort of genteel hoboism nowadays.

  Anyway, I caught the ten fifty Edinburgh train (because, when all is said and done, you may wrangle and grumble, wriggle and chafe with your superiors in the Force, but you don’t disobey their orders) and after changing trains at Newcastle I chugged into Thornwick some time around four. I was oddly touched when the stationmaster, after all these years, said ‘Sad business, Mr Peregrine’ as he took my ticket, though no one had used the appalling full form of my Christian name with my permission for years.

  When, twenty minutes later, my taxi swung through the gates of Harpenden House and up the curved approach, I was cured of any lump-in-the-throat nostalgia by the sight of the house itself. (You are getting all this stuff about trains and stationmasters and ancestral piles because I don’t think you’re strong enough yet to meet the Trethowan family en masse. Did you think you’d heard all there was to hear about them in the first chapter? Oh no, dear reader: you haven’t heard the half of it yet.)

  The house, Harpenden, has just nothing to recommend it—except its size, and even that is more than a trifle ridiculous. My great-grandfather had few qualities to plead his case at the Judgment Seat except a very great deal of money, but even a filthy rich Victorian was expected to build with a modicum of discretion. Pevsner, who is searingly honest about the building, names the architects as ‘Hubert Selby-Grossmith, succeeded at a late stage in the enterprise by Auberon Biggsworth,’ and he might have added that my great-grandfather aided, abetted and tyrannized over the enterprise from beginning to end, having the infernal good fortune to die between completion and moving-in day. The architects, chivvied, bullied and finally swapped midstream, were told to impose the Trethowans on Northumberland: they did so in the form (roughly) of an enormous lowish central block with four turretty wings at each corner. Does that sound regular and sane to you? Well, I should add that each wing is a fantasy based on a different style and period of architecture, that the massive central block acquired certain accretions, that . . .

  In fact, even John Betjeman, faced with it on arrival for a house party in the early ‘thirties, could only stutter ‘It’s jolly . . . jolly arresting.’ And when he tried to write an impromptu verse about it during his visit, the future Laureate’s feet moved in classical metres, and the result was so lugubrious it has appeared in none of his collections. The house has affected most of its visitors in pretty much the same way. It depressed me no end, even now, and as we drove up the sudden swerve in the drive which led to the front door (the result of a last-minute geriatric whim of my great-grandfather’s) and I was disgorged on to the main steps, I fancied that the taxi-driver shook his head in sympathy. Or perhaps he had heard about the death. Or had driven some of the inhabitants.

  It seemed funny to ring, but ring I did. The taxi sat there, the driver separating his tip from his fare, unnecessarily slowly, I thought, and I wondered whether he knew who I was and was interested to see my reception. Was this the beginning of the hideous general public interest that I had foreseen? Eventually the door opened on a smallish, sandy-haired manservant with a manner that (perhaps assumed temporarily) seemed set to repel invaders.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, feeling slightly ridiculous. ‘I’m Perry Trethowan . . . Mr Leo Trethowan’s son.’

  His face changed, but only to cautious welcome. ‘Oh, Mr Peregrine.’ (His voice was gentle, Lowland Scots, and made a meal of the r’s in Peregrine.) ‘Won’t you come in, sir?’ Once in the hall he turned on the soft sympathy. ‘A terrible business, sir. You have my wife’s and my sympathy, indeed you do. Would you . . . would you wait while I inform Miss Sybilla . . . and Sir Lawrence?�
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  And without waiting for an answer he left me in the hall, while he made off in the direction of the main drawing-room. I reflected on the order of the names: would it not have been natural to mention my Uncle Lawrence first? I stood there, looking around the entrance hall, four times the size of a family council flat, its ceiling five times a man’s height, looming in some brown cobwebby heaven up there. It was exactly as I remembered it—its gloom, its stuffed heads of animals slaughtered for the size of their antlers, its monstrously large picture of my great-grandfather, executed (the picture, I mean) by Sir Harold Hardacre, RA, in 1887. Many painters of the period have long ago recovered from the rock-bottom prices they fetched in the ’twenties, but my great-grandfather selected, to commit him to posterity, artists whom no amount of recovered piety could render desirable. One had the impression that he paid them by the square yard.

  Nevertheless, since the little Scotsman did not return, I went to the far wall to gaze irreverently on my great-grandsire. He had been, like me, a large man, and the size therefore had a certain appropriateness. Mill- and mine-owner, captain of industry, were written on his face. He had been as well in his time a ‘useful public figure,’ and that was there too. Believing in the untrammelled freedom of Capital, in the absolute right of men such as himself to pay their men as little as possible and to take no thought whatsoever to their safety at work, he had naturally entered Parliament as a Radical. In the course of time he had become an orthodox Liberal; then he had split with his leader over Home Rule and become a Liberal Unionist. It was very easy, then, to move to the Right without giving anyone the opportunity to label you turncoat. He had held minor office in weak governments that needed the broadest possible basis of support, and had been a great trial. Lord Rosebery had called him, under provocation, a pig-headed nincompoop, and in spite of the best efforts of Sir Harold Hardacre, RA, that had got into the picture too.

  Still the little Scot did not return. An impossible hope rose in me. Could it be that they were refusing to see me? Was I being barred from the ancestral door? Could I not then return quite justifiably to Scotland Yard and report to Joe the satisfactory failure of my mission? I was just weakly nourishing such hopes when a door softly opened.