The Gropes by Tom Sharpe Read Free Book Online Page B

statement. He had never found his brother-in-law in the least likeable and hadn’t for a moment understood why Vera had married the fellow, but he shared his sister’s simple sentimentality and belief in the crudest of familyvalues. In his world fathers were supposed to love their sons or at least be proud of them. It was the same with cats and dogs. You liked them because they were yours. To go around saying you detested your own son wasn’t just not nice – it was unnatural.
    ‘That’s not a nice thing to say, Horace,’ he said finally. ‘Not nice at all. Esmond’s your son. It’s only right and proper he looks like you. It would be bloody odd if he didn’t. I mean to say, if I had a son and he looked like someone else, I wouldn’t be too happy, me being away from home so often, know what I mean?’
    Horace thought he did but he kept his thoughts to himself. He had begun to have a most remarkable idea. It required his brother-in-law’s cooperation, though it would have to be unwitting. He would have to act very carefully indeed. Horace Wiley fell back on his experience as a bank manager. For more years than he cared to remember he had lured customers who least required overdrafts into accepting them, while refusing loans to small businesses that desperately did need them.
    ‘Well, I agree it’s not right to feel the way I do. I know that, but I can’t help myself. He’s always hanging around, imitating me. It’s … it’s like having a doppelgänger.’
    ‘A doppelgänger?’ said Albert, who had as much trouble with the word as he’d had with psyche, perhaps understandably given that his mind seldom left theworld of buying and selling cars. And he’d certainly never heard of one called a doppelgänger.
    ‘A double, someone who’s always with you and acts the same way as you do and you can’t get rid of him,’ Horace explained. He paused with a sinister glint in his eyes. ‘Except by killing him.’
    ‘Blimey,’ said Albert, now thoroughly alarmed. Horace was clearly as mad as a hatter. ‘Are you telling me you want to murder him?’
    ‘Not want to. Got to. You don’t know what it’s like never being able to get away from someone who’s just like you but isn’t. If only he’d go away for a bit and leave me alone I’d feel a lot safer. I mean, it’s not nice getting this terrible urge to murder your own son. And I’ve got Vera to think of. I’d leave the bank and go away myself if it would do any good, but I’ve got to support her and earn a living and she’s been such a wonderful wife I wouldn’t want to do anything to upset her.’
    Albert Ponson considered the statement and found it difficult to reconcile with Horace’s dreadful urge to kill Esmond. ‘Upset’ was putting it mildly. Vera’s reaction would be far more deadly. In fact, 143 Selhurst Road would go down in the annals of British crime history along with Rillington Place and other houses where there’d been multiple horrors. It wouldn’t do Ponson’s Pre-Used Motors much good either.
    Seeing Albert weaken, Horace struck again.
    ‘I’ve thought of how to do it too. I’d have to getrid of every trace of him of course,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have bits of him in the garden for instance, or under the cellar floor. So I’d have to dissolve his body in acid. I measured the water butt behind the garage and he’d fit in there easily, lanky limbs and all, and I’ve got a customer at the bank in the acid and chemical business who’d let me have forty gallons of nitric acid cheap.’
    Albert sat down at the foot of the bed with his head in his hands, only half listening to his brother-in-law’s ravings, and all hope of beating a hasty exit back to the relative sanity of the Ponson bungalow disappeared.

Chapter 7
    By the time Albert Ponson went downstairs, he was a shaken man. His feelings for his brother-in-law had turned from contempt to detestation and fear. The bloody man had described his plans for disposing