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

coaches to pick me up, and prattling away as if I were an old friend. Then Sir Ralph bowls me a dolly, watches me cart it for six, and records his admiration for posterity. Even Harvey Singleton, the rapid reader, for whom all time is composed of instants in which the profit motive can operate, tells me more than he need and stages a moment of soul-baring at the study window. “Stages” is the word. Memo: go and stand on the gravel and look whether a man driving away could actually see watchers behind glass a story higher.
    What else? (He was now so cold that Deakin’s whiskers took on the appearance of hoarfrost.) “I can’t think how we’d have coped if all this had happened a couple of months ago.” And then that leaky explanation about it being terribly upsetting, and making it difficult to keep a proper eye on things. What else had she been doing with Mrs. Chuck and Claire and Mr. Waugh, for heaven’s sake? And then Mr. Singleton had claimed that Deakin’s death was not trivial to them, even at this stage of the season: rum epitaph for a faithful servant. And the Singletons had told different tales about who’d insisted on calling in Scotland Yard, though Singleton himself might have said “we” for the sake of family solidarity. Memo: ask why Deakin was making a model landing craft. And why was Singleton whispering?
    It wasn’t much. (He sighed, and his breath hung mistily in the icy air.) Apart from the Claverings’ assumption that the rules didn’t apply to them—getting a wallah down from London, shoving the corpse in here, not allowing anyone to bother about an autopsy, freezing out the local police—there was only one genuinely odd thing: Singleton had heard a noise of drumming, but Deakin’s neck had been broken clean, and his shoes and the cupboard door had been unmarked, though both were so polished that they looked as if a fly’s footsteps would have scarred them. When a man hangs, he drums his heels—in literature; in fact he can only achieve that last tattoo if he’s bungled the job and is strangling. But if you’re inventing a story you put the drumming in because it feels right.
    Not enough to bother a prosecutor with, or anyone else. Still, there was another rum thing about the wallah from London: that Tom Scott-Ellis and Harry Brazzil, the two most eager blue-blood suckers in Scotland Yard should have been joint favorites in the Herryngs Stakes—several other chaps had been far less busy. And then, with as much fuss as a big bank robbery would have warranted, it had been Pibble who’d been sent, quiet, easy­going Jimmy Pibble, whose main achievement in life had been to lever himself out of the upper-lower-middle class into the lower-middle-middle­, despite the handicap of an overrefined wife—just the man to buy a social gold brick for its shiny outside, they’d thought. (No, not fair to the Ass. Com., who couldn’t have known about the gold brick. It would just have been put to him, in grunts and half sentences, that an officer with some respect for his betters would be more welcome to the Claverings. They had chosen their own vulture, and specified one who didn’t like the taste of lion.)
    Crippen, I’m cold, he thought, but did nothing about it; stared at the blind face of the corpse and wondered why the Chichester Theatre had felt like a social gaffe. They ought to be used to gaffes, ride them as easily as a liner taking a ten-foot wave. Answer, he’d asked a question they hadn’t prepared an answer for.
    O.K., so he was being conned, and there was nothing to do about it. Make a fuss, ask tiresome questions, insist on formalities, and they’d all (including the Ass. Com. and Brazzil and Scott-Ellis) assume he was trying to spin the Herryngs paragraph in his book out into a Herryngs chapter. There was nothing to go on, except the drumming noise and the smell of being