The Old English Peep Show by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

heavy smell, near to rottenness, of the muscats was missing, and so were the plants put out to wither; everything here was for display, and it must have needed another large greenhouse to keep this one stocked. An old man with a spade beard, his face hidden beneath a droop-brimmed hat, his trousers tied with string below the knee, was spraying an arrangement of ferns; he touched his hat as they passed, but did not look up. The doors at the far end led directly into the kitchen, a big plain room with deal tables and settles filling two-thirds of it. A big, plain woman was counting slabs of steak onto a butcher’s block beside a bed of glowing charcoal.
    â€œThat looks good,” said Pibble.
    â€œIt has to be,” said Mr. Singleton. “Americans understand about meat.”
    There was a stone passage on the far side of the kitchen, with little round-topped doors opening off on the right every few feet; Mr. Singleton unlocked the fourth and Pibble followed him in. It was like stepping out of mellow October into black frost.
    â€œThere he is,” said Mr. Singleton. “If you have finished before I come to fetch you, perhaps you would be kind enough to wait in the Chinese Room. The light switches are here. I will shut the door to keep the cold in. It opens from the inside.”
    â€œFine,” said Pibble. The door, thick as a strong-room hatch with insulation, swung shut with a breathy plup. He was entombed with the suicidal coxswain.
    The light was garish. The dead man lay on a marble shelf, his eyes shut, the contours of his face (such of them as were visible through a Sealyham-like sprouting of white whiskers) relaxed into the strong lineaments of death. Pibble hated bodies; it wasn’t squeamishness, but a sense of intrusion into a particularly bleak intimacy, and the facial changes always added to this feeling. With the disappearance of the shifting minute-by-minute animation of the moving blood, you saw the real, enduring character emerge in coarse lines like a caricature. The mouths harshened; the bones of the nose declared their nature; the intricate patterning of wrinkles resolved into a bold, interpretable ideogram.
    Deakin’s dogginess had resided not only in his whiskers; all his features were small and sharp, like a terrier’s. The grisly process of hanging had even cocked his head inquiringly to one side, as though his last thought on earth had been a desire that someone should throw a stick for him. The contents of his pockets lay in a neat pile above his head, banal and uninformative. His shoes were old but glossy with ten thousand polishings. His hands were square and calloused, and in a cracked nail was a thread of what might have been hemp from the rope he used to hang himself.
    Pibble stared at the waxy face and tried to imagine Mr. Singleton applying the kiss of life through all that hair. The chill made him feel detached, ruminative, just as the mild warmth through his carriage window had earlier that morning.
    I am being conned, he thought. I am a tiny figure in some larger drama of theirs, simply here to be gulled and sent home, more momentary and peripheral even than loyal old Deakin. I must do my duty by God and the Claverings, certify this suicide, touch my cap, and depart. Anyway, it is a certifiable suicide, not quite unfakable but as near as makes no difference. You’d have to make him unconscious, lift him with the noose round his neck almost to the ceiling, drop him—it’d take at least two. Drugs would show in the autopsy, and so would the bruise of a knockout blow. Memo: see that stomach contents are analyzed.
    Or you could hypnotize him—which is what they’re doing to me, dangling their glittering life in front of me and letting it swing slowly to and fro, until I can only gasp, yes, yes. At the instant of arrival there is honeyish Mrs. Singleton in her dottily beautiful car, sent specially to meet me when they could easily have told the