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

conned (sense of smell thanks to the exquisitely patient process of moving from upper-lower-middle to lower-middle-middle); so stay conned. Perhaps hint to the Ass. Com. of his unease (given the luck of catching him in the lift or something—no formal request for interview) and let him carry the ghostly load of responsibility. Otherwise let sleeping lions lie. A good policeman never has hunches, his first boss, Dick Foyle, used to say.
    Gloomy with the foreknowledge of self-betrayal, Pibble turned to the door. His heart bounced in irrational panic as he walked toward its safe-like solidity: they’d locked him in to die freezing, while eighty Americans chumped knowledgeably through bleeding steaks not twenty yards away!
    But the latch was on the other edge of the door, hidden in a triangle of shadow, and the door opened smoothly. He turned off the light, shut Deakin back into solitude, and stood shuddering with cold in the flagged passage. Cold and shock. He had believed them capable of it—they were capable of it, dammit.
    O.K., he was going quietly. But let them stretch his conscience one notch further and the lion would feel the talons of this vulture, blunt, bourgeois talons though they were.

12:25 P.M.
    T he Chinese room was empty except for its trophies. Pibble mooned about, gazing halfheartedly at this and that: here a scrap of tarnished fabric from the Field of the Cloth of Gold; there a side drum which had been one of those not heard at the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna; here an invitation to a soirée at the Hell-Fire Club; there fragments of birch twig rescued from the flesh of some previous Clavering after a thrashing at Eton.
    He stopped, astonished and outraged, in front of a case of exhibits from the St. Quentin Raid—mainly weapons, all modern and apparently in good working order: the Sten which Sir Ralph himself had carried; the long-barreled Colt .45 with which “Dotty” Prosser, the Raid’s posthumous V.C., had wiped out two nests of machine gunners guarding the submarine pens; a captured Skoda automatic; the famous but now dusty grenade which had failed to explode when it landed in the middle of the Raid’s command group; Sir Ralph’s sketches for one of his big booby traps; and so on. There must be a dozen gangs in London, not to mention several thousand semi-psychopaths up and down the country, to whom this lot would seem worth more than even the lovely Romney of Miss Hester Clavering which smiled with sweet eighteenth-century blankness immediately above the deadly collection. And deadly they looked, ready to go bang-bang or rat-a-tat this instant and mow down the revolting plebs—there was even a round of grayness where a drop of fresh oil had fallen onto the typewritten label of the Colt, so carefully was everything maintained in its lethal perfection.
    Ah, hell, what was the point in being outraged? It was just typical Clavering, the assumption that pleas to hand over weapons to the police didn’t apply to them. To school himself into the mood of going quietly, Pibble turned away and walked across to inspect the bronze Epstein bust.
    Seen close, it was a delicious piece of work. Pibble had always associated an element of caricature with these portraits—shaggy Shaw rendered as an intellectual goat, saintly Einstein haloed with his own hair. This time the artist seemed to have chosen as Sir Richard’s chief characteristic a deliberate mildness, a balanced sweetness of mind, which he had interpreted into bronze, treating the willing metal with less than his usual fierceness so that the modeling of even the ear lobes seemed to be part of a central douce harmony.
    Curiously, the big-joke Dali above the bust shared some of its qualities, for here, too, smoothness reigned, painstaking and glossy. But beneath the sheer patina of varnish wallowed all the Surrealist furies; Sir Ralph’s face was purple and twisted with Goya-like rage, and his