Death by Sheer Torture Read online

  ‘Sir Lawrence is in the drawing-room, Mr Peregrine, with your two aunts,’ said the ingratiating voice, ‘and they’ll be pleased to see you now.’

  My heart sank again. ‘Thank you—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘McWatters, sir. Shall I take your case to one of the guest rooms?’ He gestured towards the tiny case (suitable for a very short stay) which I had set down by the main door.

  ‘No, McWatters, better wait a bit,’ I said, ever the optimist. Squaring my shoulders I marched across the vast expanse of hall and into the drawing-room.

  My eye was met, first of all and inevitably, by my great-grandfather again, in position over the mantelpiece in the version of himself perpetrated, for just that position, by Sir Richard Fairweather, RA, in 1896—very much the same as the one in the hall, except that nine more years of pig-headedness and nincompoopery had lined their way on to the face. Around the other walls were large masterpieces I remembered, by Maclise, Frith, Waterhouse and others, as well as newer ones, portraits, by my Aunt Elizabeth, the real artist of the family, who died when I was still a child. Dwarfed by all this oil and varnish, in two uncomfortable armchairs and a wheelchair, were my Aunt Sybilla, my Aunt Kate, and my Uncle Lawrence. Sybilla rose, somewhat unsteady on her pins, to greet me.

  ‘Good afternoon, Peregrine,’ she said. ‘This is quite a surprise. Oh dear, still so large? . . . Even larger, I think?’ (Six-feet-five, seventeen stone, enthusiastic amateur weightlifter and shot-putter, I could only nod agreement that I was even larger. She shook her head regretfully, as if shrinking would have been the best sign that I repented my odd notions.) ‘Your Aunt Kate, your Uncle Lawrence.’

  I kissed Aunt Kate, who stood to attention to allow it, and then burst into a disconcerting chuckle of laughter. I had to take Uncle Lawrence by the hand to shake it, since he seemed immobile, but as I did so he shouted, ‘Who? Who?’, and then seemed to relapse into a doze. To relieve the awkwardness of the situation Sybilla said ‘Would you like some tea?’ but she seemed displeased when I accepted. She was forced to ring for McWatters and order tea and, after a pause, sandwiches and cake. The prodigal son, I felt, got a much more wholehearted culinary welcome.

  ‘Er . . . you’ve come about your poor father, I suppose?’ said Sybilla, unusually uncertainly for her, I felt, since she was so seldom less than mistress of any situation.

  ‘Of course he’s come about Leo,’ bellowed Aunt Kate. ‘Don’t be a blithering ninny. Give him the details, then! Give him all the details!’

  ‘Kate!’ shrilled Sybilla. But Kate’s parade-ground tones had unfortunately woken Uncle Lawrence, who immediately started up with his ‘Who? Who?’ routine again.

  ‘Peregrine,’ said Aunt Sybilla in her loud, hard tones, like a malignant bell-bird. ‘Your nephew Peregrine. Leo’s son, you remember.’

  ‘Oh, Leo’s son,’ nodded the patriarchal head. ‘Well, what are you wasting time for? Show him up to Leo!’

  At which, mercifully, he nodded off again, and McWatters came in with the tea-things.

  Perhaps I should take advantage of the pause to describe the surviving members of my father’s generation, grandchildren of the imperious, frock-coated numbskull staring down at us in all his eight-feet-high splendour from over the marble fireplace. My Uncle Lawrence’s most remarkable physical feature was his shaggy, venerable man-of-letters head: its mane of white hair might have been (in fact, probably was) combed outwards to emphasize its size and distinction, to provide a striking frame for the classic lines of the face, the shaggy moustache, the keen (though now senseless) eyes. Lawrence Trethowan, his appearance proclaimed, was a Literary Man. He had survived the First World War and had written some agonized sonnets on it, much praised by Eddie Marsh and other literary gents of the era. After that (for want of subject matter, I take it) he had declined into writing rather feeble nature lyrics, stuff about country lanes and whatnot, and this was hardly attuned to the public mood. But he had also written occasional essays—‘delightful’ was the usual way of describing them—for declining periodicals, and in collected form they entranced the Boots library subscribers of the ’thirties and ’forties. He had been inexplicably knighted in 1964, by which time he was unread if not forgotten (my family, alas, has never been forgotten.)

  My Aunt Sybilla had aged less gracefully. In her youth she had been known for her spry, sharp, gamine qualities—qualities which easily grow sour with age. She had designed the sets and costumes for that bright young review Wits! in 1929, and its nearly as successful successor Quits! in 1931 (both revues still affectionately remembered by old ladies in St John’s Wood and their older flames in Highgate). She had designed things for Coward (who had seen through her), for the young Rattigan, and had even done a spry, witty Orfeo for Sadler’s Wells, which nobody who understood the opera had really liked. Her career had collapsed with the war and had never got going after it, though Covent Garden, notoriously prone to pick lame ducks when it comes to designers, did employ her on a couple of misconceived ballets. She was now—and had been as long as I can remember—a vinegary, pretentious bundle of egocentric extravagances, a succession of ghastly, ill-fitting artistic poses. It’s living with people like Aunt Sybilla makes a man take up weightlifting.

  Aunt Kate, as ever, was square, gruff and ludicrous, but now she had—perhaps regained from her childhood, and the result of last year’s breakdown—a dreadfully hockey-stick schoolgirl roguishness peering through the heartiness. I never could actually dislike my Aunt Kate, but she exasperated me thoroughly: plenty of people were silly enough to admire Hitler before 1939, but to persist in that admiration forty years later seemed to call for a superhuman kind of silliness that was all but repellent.

  Anyway, there we sat, over tea and cress sandwiches, one big happy family.

  Lawrence ate little. He woke, looked at me, muttered ‘Oh, yes,’ and was handed a cress sandwich, which he wolfed down. Kate handed him another, but after one bite he fell asleep, and she took the rest of it from his hand with surprising gentleness, then went back to stolidly munching her own.

  ‘I apologize for Lawrence,’ said Sybilla sharply. ‘He is not always like this. In fact, this is what Mrs McWatters calls “one of his off days”—which is a very vulgar phrase, but it does rather sum it up, doesn’t it?’

  I did not respond to this invitation to ridicule my Uncle Lawrence (though only, probably, because it came from my Aunt Sybilla). Aunt Kate, by this time, was positively bouncing with suppressed puppyish enthusiasm.

  ‘Syb!’ she said. ‘You haven’t told him. Oh, go on, Syb! Tell him the details!’

  I found this—even I found this—rather ghoulish. ‘I think I know the main outlines.’

  ‘Really?’ said Sybilla, clearly affronted at being cheated of her story. ‘But no. You can’t possibly. You can’t have talked to Cristobel, and nothing has appeared in the public prints.’

  Deliberate archaisms were one of Aunt Sybilla’s favourite forms of affectation.

  ‘I’m not dependent entirely on the public prints,’ I said. ‘I heard it from my superior in the police force.’

  ‘The Police! Have you joined the Police? I thought you were in the army! Kate, did we know Peregrine was a Peeler?’

  ‘I knew,’ said Kate, chomping vigorously at her sandwich like a young horse. ‘I’ve known for jolly ages!’

  ‘I left the army eight years ago,’ I said. ‘I went into the police. I’m a detective-inspector with the CID. I expect to be a superintendent before long.’

  ‘Spare me the details of the promotional ladder in the Metropolitan Police Force,’ said Aunt Sybilla, flapping an aesthetic claw. But I thought she was interested too, because, nibbling delicately at a piece of seed cake, she said: ‘Well, well, so you’re in the police. Really, you must forgive me, Perry dear—not knowing, or forgetting. But the fact is, your father did not . . . very frequently . . . talk about you, you know!’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ I said. ‘We each went
our own way a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes, indeed—thirteen years, is it? Or fourteen? A long time. And now you’d be—ah, yes, thirty-two. So you heard about our little problem in . . . in the course of duty, as it were?’

  It struck me, momentarily, that the Aunts were taking this with a quite chilling degree of calmness. Then I realized that sensation, public clamour, the scorn of vox populi, these were meat and drink to a Trethowan: the legend had been a pure publicity creation, and if my father at his death had been recognized as an obscure minor composer, he would have been a totally unknown one had it not been for the Trethowan PR machine. And much the same went for Lawrence and Syb.

  ‘I was officially informed of my father’s death,’ I said stiffly, ‘and of some of the details. You can probably tell me more, I imagine.’

  Kate bounced anew. She made an odd, soaring gesture with her hands to signify being hauled up, then, with relish, a great swooping one to signify being dropped down. ‘Bump! Ouch!’ she guffawed.

  ‘Catherine! Any more and you leave the room!’

  ‘Oh Syb, you are a spoilsport.’

  ‘Your father,’ said Sybilla gravely, turning to me (but I thought I detected a certain enjoyment in her, too), ‘met his end while conducting one of his little experiments. Of course, you know all about them . . .’

  ‘To be frank, Aunt Sybilla, I don’t. You forget the last time I saw him I was only eighteen. I had some . . . inkling . . . about his tastes. But the fact is, I really don’t think he was actually . . . experimenting, at that time.’

  She thought, her scratchy little face, all crow’s-feet and old chicken skin, puckered in malicious calculation.

  ‘You know, I think you must be right. The experiments came later, I think. With age. Probably he needed more . . . stimulation. Anyway, the fact is, Peregrine, your father was exceedingly interested in the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition (among others), and he began to experiment to see whether he might not . . . reproduce their effects . . . if you understand me . . . on himself.’

  At this point Aunt Kate could not repress another chortle.

  ‘I see. Now, was this something that was generally known—I mean in this house?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We’re a very unconventional family, as you know, Peregrine. We are not censorious: we can encompass human variety. No, give your father his due: he wasn’t like those poor little men who shop furtively in Soho. He never made a grubby little secret of it!’

  I was seized with a conviction that the best thing to do, if you have inclinations like my father’s, was to make a grubby little secret of the fact.

  ‘When you say you all knew,’ I said, trying not to make this sound like a police enquiry and not succeeding very well, ‘what does that mean? Did he invite you all to exhibition performances?’

  ‘You are being a teeny bit vulgar, Peregrine dear. No, he did not. Though I’m quite sure he would not have minded. I would not have thought twice of breaking in on him, if anything important had come up. He talked about it quite openly, even at meals.’

  ‘I watched him through the keyhole once,’ volunteered Aunt Kate. She was going to do a repetition of her pantomime, but thought better of it.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘So the whole household would have known. And so what happened?’

  ‘Well, of course, it was just a little unwise, at his age. And I suppose he overdid it . . .’ She averted her eyes. ‘They say a thread snapped, or a pulley broke, or something, and he just . . . couldn’t stop it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘That’s really all there is. Your poor sister—’ she looked at me conspiratorially, to see whether we mightn’t have a snigger together over my poor sister, but I maintained my professional policeman’s poker face—‘your poor sister woke towards midnight, wanted some water or something; she heard the machine still going, and she went down and . . . found him, poor thing. She had hysterics all over the house. And it’s a big house to have hysterics all over.’

  ‘Poor Cristobel,’ I said. ‘And at the moment the police are in possession of father’s wing, I take it.’

  ‘Exactly. Though why they should have been called I don’t know. Anyway, they’re infesting the entire house.’ A thought transparently crossed her face, and she leaned towards me. ‘Now, Peregrine, dear boy, let me have your candid opinion. What is the best thing for us to do?’

  In a flash I understood that Aunt Syb was on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand there was the aristocratic (well, upper-middle, with oodles of the necessary) instinct, bred into her, that at times of family crisis one sat tight, closed ranks, said nothing, and waited for things to die down. On the other hand there was the newer Trethowan feeling (fostered by her and her siblings) that everything ought to be capitalized on, everything done to the clashing cymbals of publicity. The Trethowan legend, the creation of publicity, had been kept alive by periodic injections of it (including one hideously embarrassing libel action I remember from my adolescence). Now my father’s death could perhaps be the latest in a long line of front-page spreads. She rather nauseated me, did my Aunt Syb.

  ‘Well,’ I said, cautiously and reluctantly, ‘the first thing to say is that, even if it was an accident, it can’t—the strappado business and so on—be kept quiet. There will have to be a coroner’s inquest —’

  At this point my Aunt Kate clapped her hands with happy anticipation and woke Uncle Lawrence, who began to shout: ‘What am I doing here? Gross negligence on somebody’s part! Why haven’t I been put to bed?’

  ‘Take him up, Kate,’ said Sybilla. ‘No, this minute! You brought it on yourself!’ And Kate, dragging her old feet, began the long wheeling of Lawrence’s chair towards the door. I rose to help her, but Sybilla’s arm restrained me.

  ‘No. It does her good. Gives her something to think about. You know she was Not Well last year?’

  ‘I heard she had some kind of . . . breakdown,’ I ventured.

  ‘All that wonderful strength of mind—gone! As you can see. Now, you say there is no chance at all of keeping all this absolutely quiet?’

  ‘None at all, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, then, we’ll have to make the most of it,’ said Aunt Sybilla, with something like a happy smile on her face.

  ‘I don’t quite know what you mean by that, Aunt Sybilla, but . . .’

  ‘Now never you mind, Peregrine. You leave this to me. I know the press! I’ve been dealing with them for years! Meanwhile you — since you are here, by happy chance—can help me by being my liaison with the gentlemen of the Police! You must know this man they’ve sent. Get in with him! Find out what he’s up to! And I can feed judicious fragments of information to my friends. Oh, by the way, you will stay for the funeral, won’t you?’

  ‘I —’

  ‘Then that’s settled. I’ll go and tell McWatters to get a spare room ready. Your father’s wing—?’

  ‘Well, there are places I’d rather —’

  ‘Splendid, that’s settled. And I’ll tell Mrs McWatters there’ll be one extra for dinner. I’ll try and get all the family there for dinner, a real reunion. That will be nice, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes, well, perhaps I’d better go and see Superintendent Hamnet.’

  ‘No hurry, Peregrine dear. Do finish those sandwiches. You do look as if you need an . . . awful lot of food.’

  And she tottered out with the tinkling laugh that had echoed through the smaller London theatres on dress-rehearsal days in the ’thirties. I took another sandwich and was just stuffing it into my mouth (to get a healthy sized bite) when she surprised me by putting her birdlike head round the door again.

  ‘Oh, by the way, are you married, Peregrine?’

  ‘Yes, I am actually. But —’

  ‘Splendid. Thought I ought to know. I didn’t want to make another false step—like about the police. Do gobble up all those, won’t you? Dinner’s not until eight thirty.’

  I cursed her, but I did as I was told. I took up the plate and stood w
ith it in the centre of that enormous room. Chomping away, with Trethowanian irreverence, I gazed at the portrait of my great-grandfather. I winked at it, but it was one of those portraits that could never, by any stretch of the imagination, seem to wink back. I looked at the enormous, wonderfully literal Victorian story-telling canvases: The Love Potion; The Capulets’ Ball; Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath. They had been on the family walls over a period so long that their critical esteem must have done a graph rather like a political party’s between general elections.

  Then I looked at the portraits—by my dead aunt, Elizabeth Trethowan. The witty, affectionate one of her father (my grandfather, the first actual occupant of this elephantine monstrosity of a house). Then the little group of pictures of her brothers and sisters, done just after the war: Lawrence, posing like mad as the Man of Letters; Kate—stern in greens and khakis; my father, looking every inch a minor composer. And my eye came to rest on the picture of Sybilla—all bright modern blues, greys and pinks, colours which highlighted the crow’s feet around the eyes, the discontented droop of the mouth, the souring of the bright little talent of ten or fifteen years earlier.

  I have always said that Aunt Eliza was the only one of the family with talent. I’d go further: there was a touch of genius about the work of Aunt Eliza at her peak. And she was dead these twenty years or more, leaving behind the brood of siblings that had swung merrily into the glare of publicity on the skirt-tails of her gifts. ‘That enormously vital and gifted family,’ The Times had generously called them. Us. No, it was wrong. There was really only one Trethowan.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE PAINFUL DETAILS

  Eventually it had to be faced up to. I supposed that Hamnet was still at work in my father’s wing of the house, and before dinner I would have to meet him and face the appalling professional embarrassment of my father’s death.