Ancestral Vices

  ‘No room at the inn,’ he said with mock despondency, ‘unless you’re prepared to stay in a boarding-house.’

  Lord Petrefact made several incomprehensible noises.

  ‘No, well I didn’t think you would but there’s nothing else.’

  ‘But the place is a dead-and-alive dump. Where did you try?’

  Croxley laid the list of hotels on the desk. Lord Petrefact glanced at it. ‘Don’t we own any of them?’ he asked.

  ‘The family does but . . .’

  ‘I didn’t mean them. I meant me.’

  Croxley shook his head. ‘Now if you’d said Bournemouth . . .’

  ‘I didn’t say fucking Bournemouth. I said Buscott. They’re miles apart. Well, where the hell can we stay?’

  ‘The rats’ nest?’ suggested Croxley and brought on another bout of high blood pressure. ‘Of course as a last resort there’s Mr Osbert at the Old Hall.’

  Lord Petrefact felt his pulse. ‘And die of pneumonia,’ he yelled when it was down to 130. ‘That oaf’s so bloody medieval he hasn’t heard of central heating and his idea of a warm bed is one with a fucking whippet in it. If you think I want to share a bed with a fucking whippet you’re insane.’

  Croxley agreed. ‘In that case I can only suggest the New House. It may have its disadvantages but Miss Emmelia would make you comfortable.’

  Lord Petrefact kept his doubts on the matter to himself. ‘I suppose so. In any case we may be able to get the business over in a day.’

  ‘May we enquire the nature of the business?’

  Another paroxysm ended the discussion and Croxley hurried out to order the hearse. There were times when he wished the old swine would put it to its proper use.

  *

  And so that Saturday the illustriously obscure Petrefacts gathered at the New House in Buscott to deal with a family crisis that was already over. They were not to know. Yapp had the weekend to consider the weight of circumstantial evidence against him and Inspector Garnet was in no hurry.

  ‘Take all the time you need,’ he told Mr Rubicond, who had finally discovered where his client was being held. ‘If he tells you the same story he told me you’ll have a hard time with your conscience if he insists on pleading not guilty. His only out is “guilty but insane”.’

  Two hours later Mr Rubicond shared his opinion. Yapp was still adamant in his claim that he had been framed – and by the Petrefacts, of all unlikely people.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Mr Rubicond. ‘No sane judge is going to believe that you were hired by Lord Petrefact to write a family history and were then framed with the murder of a dwarf simply to prevent you from writing it. If they had, and I can’t for one moment believe it, if they had been prepared to take such extreme measures, why on earth murder Mr Coppett when they could as easily have murdered you?’

  ‘They wanted to discredit me,’ said Yapp. ‘The capitalist class is extremely devious.’

  ‘Yes, well it must be, though while we’re on the subject of anyone discrediting you I can only say that you’ve done an exceedingly good job yourself. I told you not to say anything.’

  ‘I have said nothing that is not true. The facts are as I’ve described them.’

  ‘Perhaps, but did you have to describe them? I mean take this business of ejaculating in the car because Mrs Coppett kissed you. Of all the incredible indiscretions I’ve ever come across . . . Words fail me. You’ve handed the prosecution your motive on a plate.’

  ‘But I had to explain why I went into that wood. I mean I had to have some good reason.’

  ‘Changing out of a pair of soiled Y-fronts doesn’t strike me as a good reason at all. It’s a bloody bad one. Why didn’t you change in the car?’

  ‘I told you. Because there was a lot of traffic on the road at the time – and besides I have rather long legs and I couldn’t have got them off in the confined space.’

  ‘So you climbed a gate with barbed wire on it, cut your hands, crossed a field, and spent the next two hours sitting under a fir tree clutching your underpants and waiting for the rain to stop?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Yapp.

  ‘And since, when you arrived back at the Coppetts’ house, you were wearing a shirt stained, according to the Inspector, with Mr Coppett’s blood, we must assume that during the time you say you were in that wood his body was deposited in the boot?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And you don’t remember where this wood is.’

  ‘I daresay I could recognize it if I were allowed out to drive round.’

  Mr Rubicond looked at his client doubtfully and wondered about his sanity. On one thing he was resolved: when it came to the trial he would advise counsel not to allow his client to go into the witness box. The blasted man seemed determined to condemn himself with every word he said.

  ‘I somehow don’t think the police would grant you that degree of freedom in the circumstances,’ he said. ‘However, if you want me to I’ll ask the Inspector.’

  Much to his surprise the Inspector agreed.

  ‘If he’s half as daft as he’s been so far he’ll probably lead us to the exact spot and hand us the murder weapon,’ he told the Sergeant.

  For two hours Yapp sat in the police car between the Inspector and Mr Rubicond while they drove round the lanes above Buscott, every so often stopping at a gate in a hedge.

  ‘It was on a hill,’ said Yapp, ‘the headlights shone in my eyes.’

  ‘They’d do that on the flat,’ said the Inspector. ‘Were you going up hill or down?’

  ‘Down. The gate was on the left.’

  ‘But you can’t say how far you had gone before you stopped?’

  ‘I was far too distraught at the time and my mind was on other things,’ said Yapp, staring hopelessly out of the window at a landscape that seemed wholly unfamiliar, a consequence in part of their driving up the hill he had come down. In any case his illness and days in bed, not to mention the horrors of the past thirty-six hours, made the fateful night seem long ago and had changed his view of the district. Experience had robbed the countryside of its romantically tragic and historic associations. It was now murderous and predatory.

  ‘Well, a fat lot of good that was,’ said the Inspector when they were back at the station and Yapp had been locked in his cell. ‘Still, you can’t accuse us of refusing cooperation.’

  Mr Rubicond couldn’t. It was part of his stock-in-trade to accuse the police of brutality and of denying his clients their rights, but on this occasion they were behaving with a disconcerting rectitude which tended to confirm his own impression that Professor Yapp was indeed a murderer. They were even prepared to let him attend the post-mortem, a privilege he would happily have forgone.

  ‘Hit over the head with the proverbial blunt instrument and then stabbed in the stomach for good measure,’ said the Police Surgeon.

  ‘Anything to suggest what sort of instrument?’

  The Police Surgeon shook his head. Willy’s passage down the river had removed what evidence there might have been that he had been hit by a tractor. Even his little boots had been washed clean.

  ‘Well, there you have it, Mr Rubicond. Now if your client is prepared to make a full confession I daresay he might get off with a lighter sentence.’

  But Mr Rubicond was not to be drawn. He had his own interests to consider. Professors who murdered dwarves were not an everyday phenomenon; the trial would draw an immense amount of publicity; and Walden Yapp was an eminent man and highly regarded in those progressive circles which hadn’t actually met him; he must also be a man of considerable means, and a long trial followed by an appeal would be a very profitable affair.

  ‘I am convinced of his innocence,’ he said more cheerfully and left the station. Inspector Garnet shared his enthusiasm.

  ‘Now I don’t want this fouled up by any mistakes,’ he told his team. ‘Professor Yapp is to be treated with the utmost consideration. He’s not your ordinary villain and I don’t want anyone compl
aining to the Press that the swine’s been ill-treated. It’s kid gloves all the way.’

  *

  In the bar of the Horse and Barge feelings were rather different.

  ‘They should never have done away with hanging,’ said Mr Groce, who felt particularly aggrieved at the loss of Willy. He had no one to help him wash and dry the glasses. Mr Parmiter shared his views but took a broader perspective.

  ‘I never did agree with the way Mr Frederick went on about Willy’s right to use that fucking awful knife on the bloke just because he was shafting Rosie Coppett. I reckon Willy tackled him and the fellow did for Willy.’

  ‘I suppose they’ll be calling you as a witness because of the car and hiring it from you.’

  ‘They’ll be calling you too. You must have been the last person to see Willy alive, excepting the murderer of course.’

  Mr Groce considered the prospect while Mr Parmiter concentrated on the possibility that the police might require his dubious accounts as evidence.

  ‘Buggered if I’m going to mention Willy’s threats,’ said Mr Groce finally. ‘Might give the bastard a chance to plead self-defence.’

  ‘True enough. On the other hand, Willy did say he’d seen Rosie having it off with the bloke. You can’t get away from that.’

  ‘Least said soonest mended. I’m still not saying anything to let that Yapp off the hook. If ever a man deserved to swing, he does.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t want to involve Mr Frederick either,’ said Mr Parmiter. In the end they agreed to say nothing and to let justice take its own uncomplicated course.

  22

  Lord Petrefact was driven down to Buscott in a thoroughly good mood. Before leaving London he had completed an arrangement between one of his many subsidiaries, Petreclog Footwear of Leicester, and Brazilian State Beef whereby he hoped to bring home to the workers in Leicester the disadvantages of demanding a thirty per cent pay rise while at the same time increasing his profits enormously by transferring the plant to Brazil where he would have government backing for paying the local workers a quarter of what their British counterparts had previously earned.

  ‘A splendid move, simply splendid,’ he told Croxley as the converted hearse with its attendant ambulance, in which the resuscitation team were playing Monopoly, hurtled along the motorway.

  ‘If you say so,’ said Croxley, who always found riding so prematurely in a hearse an unnerving experience, ‘though why you want to go to Buscott beats me. You’ve always said you loathed the place.’

  ‘Buscott? What the hell are you talking about? I was talking about the Brazil deal.’

  ‘Yes, well I daresay it will raise your popularity rating in Leicester.’

  ‘Teach the swine not to meddle with basic economics,’ said Lord Petrefact with relish. ‘In any case I’m helping an underdeveloped country to stand on its own two feet.’

  ‘In Petreclog Footwear no doubt.’

  But Lord Petrefact was in too ebullient a mood to argue. ‘And as far as Buscott is concerned, one owes a duty to one’s family. Blood is thicker than water, you know.’

  Croxley considered the cliché and had his doubts. Lord Petrefact’s familial record suggested that in his case water had a decidedly more glutinous quality than blood, while his evident pleasure seemed to lend weight to the theory that he was looking forward to a first-rate row.

  But when they arrived at the New House it was to find the drive cluttered with cars and no one in.

  ‘Miss Emmelia’s taken them on a tour of the Mill,’ Annie explained to Croxley who had rung the front doorbell.

  ‘A tour of the Mill?’ said Lord Petrefact when the message was relayed to him. ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘Possibly to show them her ethnic clothing,’ said Croxley.

  Lord Petrefact snorted. He had come down to discuss the question of Yapp’s researches into the family background, not to be taken on a guided tour of an ethnic clothing factory. ‘I’m damned if I’m budging until they get back,’ he said adamantly, ‘I’ve seen all of that fucking Mill I want to.’

  *

  For once his opinion was shared by the group of Petrefacts gathered in the fetish factory. Emmelia had proved her point that publicity was to be avoided at all costs. The Judge had been particularly hard-hit by the merkins. Coming on top of his long-held opinion that all homosexuals were congenital criminals who ought to be castrated at birth and sentenced to penal servitude as soon as legally possible, he had been so incensed that he had had to be helped to Frederick’s office and several stiff brandies, and had still refused to continue the tour.

  Emmelia had led the others on to dildos. Here the Brigadier-General, who had escaped the full implications of merkins thanks to an inadequate acquaintance with the sexual attributes of anything larger than female gerbils and Siamese cats, was forced to recognize what he was looking at.

  ‘Monstrous, utterly monstrous!’ he snarled, his pique evidently provoked by personal comparison. ‘Even a Bengal tiger doesn’t have a . . . well, a thingamajig . . . a watchermacallit of such fearful proportions. You could do someone a terrible mischief with a . . . Anyway who on God’s earth would want a thing like that hanging about the house?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Fiona, only to be herself surprised and infuriated by the chastity belts. ‘They’re outrageous. To expect anyone to hobble round in a medieval instrument of clitoral torture is an insult to modern womanhood.’

  ‘As I understand it, dear,’ said Emmelia, ‘they’re actually for men.’

  ‘That’s entirely different, of course,’ said Fiona, provoking Osbert into a paroxysm of alarm, ‘men ought to be restrained.’

  ‘Restrained?’ shouted Osbert. ‘You must be insane. Put some poor blighter in a thing like that and have him go hunting and he’d be a damned gelding at the first fence.’

  In the background the Van der Fleet-Petrefacts were being disabused of their hope that the thermal agitators with enema variations were a form of personal fire extinguisher by closer examination of the garments. By the time Emmelia had led the way to the Bondage Department, nearly everyone was appalled.

  Only Fiona maintained an odd combination of Women’s Power and sexual permissiveness. ‘After all, everyone is entitled to find her sexual satisfaction in her own personal way,’ she insisted, adding with unconscious irony in the face of the gags, handcuffs, shackles and plastic straitjackets, that society had no right to impose restraints on the freedom of the individual.

  ‘Don’t keep using that word,’ squealed Osbert, still maniacally obsessed with the terrible consequences certain to result from hunting in a male chastity belt.

  ‘And never mind the freedom of the individual who dons one of those thingamajigs,’ roared the Brigadier-General, picking up a cat-o’nine-tails with dangerous relish, ‘I’m going to find that bloody manager, Cuddlybey, and flay the hide off the swine. He must have gone off his rocker to switch from flannel pyjamas to these . . .’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing, Randle,’ interrupted Emmelia. ‘Besides, you’d have considerable difficulty. Mr Cuddlybey retired fourteen years ago and died last August.’

  ‘Damned lucky for him. If I—’

  ‘If you had taken a little more interest in family affairs and a little less in those of Seal-Pointers and gerbils you’d have known that.’

  ‘Then who is the manager now?’ demanded Osbert. For a moment Emmelia hesitated but only for a moment.

  ‘I am,’ she declared.

  The group gazed at her in horror.

  ‘You don’t mean to say . . .’ began the Brigadier-General.

  ‘I’m saying nothing more until Ronald arrives.’

  ‘Ronald?’

  ‘Oh really, Osbert, don’t keep repeating things. I said Ronald and I meant Ronald. And now let’s see if Purbeck has recovered sufficiently to be at all coherent.’

  They made their way back to the office where the Judge, having taken several small pills in addition to the brandy, was engross
ed in the catalogue. Coherency wasn’t his problem.

  ‘The Do-It-Yourself Sodomy Kit,’ he bellowed at the cowering Frederick. ‘Do you realize that you’ve been putting on the market an accessory before, during and after a crime punishable by death?’

  ‘Death?’ quavered Frederick. ‘But surely it’s legal between consenting adults?’

  ‘Consenting? What the hell do you mean consenting? Not even the most depraved, perverted, sado-masochistic, insane, perverted, perverted . . .’

  ‘You’ve said that three times, Uncle,’ ventured Frederick with remarkable courage.

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Perverted.’

  ‘And I meant it three times, you damned scoundrel. In fact I meant it continuously. Not even the most perverted ad infinitum perverted swine of an arse-bandit would consent to have that diabolical contraption rammed past his sphincter . . .’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Osbert with feeling. The Judge turned on him lividly.

  ‘And I don’t require your comments, Osbert. I’ve always suspected there was something wrong with you ever since you put that pink-eyed weasel in my bed with a tin can tied to its tail and now . . .’

  ‘Never did anything of the sort. In any case it was a ferret.’

  ‘Whatever it was it—’

  ‘I think we should concentrate on the present,’ intervened Emmelia. ‘The question is what are we to do about Ronald?’

  The Judge shifted his own pink eyes to her. ‘Ronald? What’s Ronald got to do with these inventions of the devil?’