Ancestral Vices (8 page)

‘Well, someone certainly tried to kill him. His bedroom’s been wrecked. He must have put up a terrific struggle.’

‘If you’re looking for a culprit I’d turn your attention to him,’ said Mrs Billington-Wall, indicating Walden Yapp, who was hesitating with every symptom of guilt written all over him halfway down the stairs. ‘And if you don’t take that mask off the old fellow’s face you’ll be to blame yourselves.’

Walden Yapp waited no longer. The conviction that he had been lured to the house less by a hoaxer than by someone determined to have him pulped and scalded to death in that fearful bath had been made less tenable by the sight of Lord Petrefact lying bleeding and clearly
in
extremis
on the floor. He was trying to deduce why the doctors were wrestling with Croxley when that snob of a woman intervened to point the finger of guilt at him. He could see himself being made the scapegoat for whatever crime had been committed. As the doctors moved towards the stairs and Mrs Billington-Wall uncoupled Lord Petrefact from the life-support system that was slowly killing him, Walden Yapp panicked. He turned and ran back along the landing and down the corridor. Behind him the doctors’ footsteps urged him on but before he could decide where to go, and anywhere was preferable to the King Albert suite, they had turned the corner. Yapp tried a door and found it unlocked. He shot inside, slammed it behind him and looked for the key. There was no key. Or if there was it was on the other side. For a second he considered barricading the door with whatever furniture he could find but the curtains were drawn and the room in semi-darkness. It was also bare and apart from what looked like a rocking-horse he could see nothing useful. Instead he stood silently against the wall and hoped to hell they hadn’t seen him enter.

But the footsteps had stopped and some muttering was going on in the corridor. Those ghastly creatures in white coats were evidently conferring. Then he heard Croxley speak.

‘It’s the old nursery. He won’t be able to get out of there.’ A key turned in the lock, the footsteps retreated, and Walden Yapp was left alone with the rocking-horse and his own tormented thoughts. By the time he had
examined the room more thoroughly and discovered the barred windows he could see what Croxley meant about not being able to get out, though what ferocious children had required such thick bars to contain them he couldn’t imagine. But then Fawcett House was filled with so many extraordinary features that it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that the nursery had once been used to house a baby gorilla. It seemed unlikely, but that fucking bath had seemed unlikely too and he wasn’t going near the rocking-horse for fear it turned into a synchronized one. Instead he sat down in a corner and tried to take his mind off his own misery by studying those of the knife-grinders in Sheffield in 1863.

By the time Croxley and the resuscitation team returned to the hall Mrs Billington-Wall had taken control.

‘You’ll take him upstairs and give him a bed-bath and a fresh pair of pyjamas and put him to bed,’ she told the doctors. ‘And don’t argue with me. There’s nothing the matter with him that a good rest and some disinfectant won’t put right. Scalp wounds always bleed profusely. I wasn’t a FANY for nothing you know.’ Croxley looked at her doubtfully and wondered. Mrs Billington-Wall was not a prepossessing woman but in wartime men were desperate . . . On the other hand he wasn’t looking forward to Lord Petrefact’s reaction when he recovered consciousness and voiced his opinions about guests who wrecked bathrooms and put his life in danger, wheelchairs, medical teams and almost certainly that damned
pig, and it might be an advantage to have him immobilized upstairs on Mrs Billington-Wall’s instructions. Croxley made himself scarce while the resuscitation team, urged on by her insistence that she didn’t want to have visitors seeing a peer of the realm in such a disgusting condition, carried Lord Petrefact up the staircase and into a bedroom.

And so until Lord Petrefact awoke to find himself clean, clothed and bedded down in a room that looked down over the lawns to the lake, Croxley busied himself with breakfast, the Sunday papers and what the hell to do about Yapp. He had no qualms about keeping him locked in the nursery and in any case the swine had his uses. If Mrs Billington-Wall could take the can back for ordering Lord Petrefact to be put to bed on the first floor with no recourse to the communications system implanted in the arm of the wheelchair, then Yapp would be a suitable scapegoat for the rest of the catastrophe. And catastrophe it certainly was. Croxley’s brief inventory of the damage done by the Synchronized Ablution Bath and the wheelchair added up to something in the region of a quarter of a million pounds and possibly more. The jade pieces, and the term applied more accurately now than it had done before the wheelchair had shattered them, had been beyond price. Now they were beyond restoration. So were several extremely valuable Oriental rugs. The bath was responsible for their destruction – the bath and the
steam which had filtered down through the hole left by the chandelier. In fact Petrefact’s makeshift bedroom looked as though a rather hot flashflood had been through it. Yes, Yapp could be held responsible and Croxley thanked God that he hadn’t been the one to suggest lodging the brute in the King Albert suite.

He was just congratulating himself on this piece of luck when one of the doctors came downstairs with a message that Lord Petrefact had regained consciousness and wanted to see him. From the look on the man’s face Croxley gained the impression that Lord Petrefact’s health had improved dramatically and with it had come a marked deterioration in his temper.

‘I should watch your step,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s not what you might call himself yet.’

Croxley went upstairs wondering what this cryptic comment might mean. Much to his astonishment he found Lord Petrefact in a comparatively mild state of fury. Mrs Billington-Wall was laying down the law.

‘You’re to stay here until you’re better,’ she told the nastier side of Lord Petrefact’s face with a courage that suggested she had indeed been a FANY in the war and might well have seen action on a great many fronts. ‘I won’t allow you to be moved until I’m satisfied you’ve fully recovered from this dreadful assault.’

Lord Petrefact glared at her but said nothing. He evidently knew when he had met his match.

‘And I don’t want you to excite him,’ she told Croxley. ‘Ten minutes at the most and then down you go.’

Croxley nodded gratefully. Ten minutes in Lord Petrefact’s company was ample. Under present conditions it was too long but it was better than forty.

‘Who the hell was that?’ asked Lord Petrefact weakly when she had left.

‘Mrs Billington-Wall,’ said Croxley, deciding that obtusely literal answers were the best defence. ‘The widow of the late Brigadier-General Billington-Wall, DSO, M—’

‘I don’t want the bitch’s family tree. I want to know what she’s doing here.’

‘Taking care of you, as far as I can tell. She’s usually showing visitors round the house but she’s taken time off today—’

‘Shut up,’ yelled Lord Petrefact, momentarily forgetting his head. He sank back wincingly on the pillow. Croxley shut up and sat gazing with deferential dislike at the old man.

‘Well, say something,’ moaned Lord Petrefact.

‘If you insist. First you tell me to shut up and then when I do you complain that I’m not saying anything.’

Lord Petrefact eyed his secretary with undivided loathing. ‘Croxley,’ he said finally, ‘there have been moments in our long association when I have seriously considered firing you but I can tell you this, never before have I considered it quite so seriously as I am at this moment. Now then, why am I on the first floor?’

‘Mrs Billington-Wall,’ said Croxley. ‘I tried to dissuade her but you’ve seen for yourself what she is like.’

Lord Petrefact had. He nodded. ‘And what happened before that?’

Croxley decided to avoid a replay of the mouth-to-mouth misunderstanding and to get down to basics. ‘Shall I start at the beginning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well it all began when that fellow Yapp decided to take a bath . . .’

‘A bath?’ goggled Lord Petrefact. ‘A bath?’

‘A bath,’ repeated Croxley. ‘Apparently he turned on the hot tap and waited until the bath was nearly full before getting in and . . .’

But Lord Petrefact was no longer listening. It was clear that he had misjudged Yapp. The man wasn’t the milksop he had supposed. If the brute could begin a train of events that had ended with the total destruction of a downstairs room and its contents, not to mention bringing down an extremely heavy and valuable chandelier, simply by taking a bath, he was a force to be reckoned with. More, he was a human cataclysm, a walking disaster area, a man of such maniacal gifts as beggared the imagination. To let him loose on his Petrefact relatives would be to bring down on their heads something of such malevolent energy that they wouldn’t know what had hit them.

‘Where is he now?’ he demanded, interrupting the flow of Croxley’s account.

‘We’ve locked him in the old nursery.’

Lord Petrefact jerked under the sheets. ‘In the old nursery? What the hell for?’

‘We thought it safest. After all, the insurance company are going to want to know how this . . .’

But Lord Petrefact had no intention of wasting Yapp’s terrible gifts on insurance companies. ‘Let him out at once. I want to see that young man. Fetch him here this instant.’

‘But you heard what Mrs Billington-Wall . . . oh all right.’ He went out and down the corridor to the nursery and was about to unlock the door when he was interrupted by Mrs Billington-Wall.

‘And what do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.

Croxley looked at her with malign pathos. It was perfectly obvious what he was doing. Even the meanest intelligence could comprehend that he was unlocking a door and he was about to put these thoughts into simple words when the look in her eye deterred him. It was even meaner than her intelligence. ‘Lord Petrefact has requested the presence of Professor Walden Yapp,’ he said, hoping to hell that formality would quell her. It did nothing of the sort.

‘Then he’s far sicker than I would have supposed. Probably suffering from concussion. In any case there will be no communication with that creature in there until the police have interviewed him.’

‘Police?’ squawked Croxley. ‘You don’t mean to say . . . What police?’

Mrs Billington-Wall’s eyes took on the qualities of an irritated laser. ‘The local police, of course. I’ve phoned them to come at once.’ And she shepherded the astonished Croxley back down the corridor.

Only outside Lord Petrefact’s room did Croxley make a stand. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s been some mistake. You may not like Professor Yapp, and I certainly don’t, but for some unknown reason Lord Petrefact does and when he hears you’ve called in the cops he isn’t going to take kindly to it. It’s in your own best interest to go downstairs and phone them again . . .’

‘I think I know my own best interests rather better than you do,’ said Mrs Billington-Wall, ‘and I’m not going to be party to an affray.’

‘Affray? Affray? Dear God, you didn’t tell them there’d been an affray here?’

‘And how would you describe the disgraceful occurrences of this morning?’

Croxley sought for a suitable word and, apart from happenstance, which was rather too frivolous to appeal to this foul woman, could think of nothing. ‘I suppose you could say—’

‘An affray,’ interrupted Mrs Billington-Wall. ‘And what you seem to forget is that I am held personally responsible for this house during Lord Petrefact’s absence and as caretaker . . .’

‘But he isn’t absent. The man’s in there,’ said Croxley.

Mrs Billington-Wall gave the door of Lord Petrefact’s bedroom a disparaging look. ‘One must suppose so,’ she
conceded. ‘All the same, my judgement is that he’s not in a fit state to make a lucid assessment of the situation. Legally speaking, he is absent. I am not, and in my opinion—’

‘Yes, but what about the scandal?’ said Croxley, now fighting with a desperation made positively ferocious by the knowledge of what Lord Petrefact would do when he learnt that the police had been invited to take a look at his private affairs. Short of actually asking Her Majesty’s Income Tax Inspectors to send half a dozen of their brightest young men to browse through his third set of ledgers, Croxley could think of nothing more likely to give the old man terminal apoplexy than the intrusion of the police.

‘What scandal?’ asked Mrs Billington-Wall. ‘If there’s been any scandalous behaviour here I would say that the destruction of . . .’

But Croxley had taken her arm and was leading her down the corridor away from the door.

‘Pigs,’ he whispered conspiratorially.

‘Pigs?’

‘Exactly.’

‘What do you mean “exactly”?’

‘What I said,’ continued Croxley, frantically trying to lure the woman into a maze of misunderstanding from which she would emerge determined to stop the police on the doorstep.

‘But you said “Pigs”. Now you say “Exactly”. I’ve not the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘A nod’s as good as a wink,’ said Croxley with what he hoped was a suggestive leer.

Mrs Billington-Wall ignored it. ‘Not to me it isn’t. Are you trying to tell me . . .’

‘Quite,’ said Croxley. ‘Say no more.’

‘That that old man in there has a perverse penchant for pigs?’ Croxley raised his eyes to heaven and prayed. If it ever got to the old man’s ears . . . Still, anything was better than the police. He ploughed on.

‘Sucking pigs,’ he said, trying to imbue the participle with a positively revolting emphasis. He succeeded. Mrs Billington-Wall stiffened.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she snapped.

‘I’m not asking you to,’ said Croxley truthfully. ‘All I’m saying is that if the police come tramping round the house in their dirty great boots the name of Billington-Wall’s going to hit the front page of the
News of The World
next Sunday with banner headlines like “Brigadier General’s Widow in Pork Orgy”. And if you don’t believe me go and ask the contract chef in the kitchen. Lord Petrefact had one disembowelled last night so that it would fit.’