12:25 P.M.

The 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 scarlet uniform was shown as a series of half-opened drawers full of corpses tumbled together like odd socks.

“Many of our visitors, especially the Germans, admire it considerably, sir,” said a voice at Pibble’s elbow. Mr. Waugh had glided in, silent on the moss-thick carpet, and now stood in a beautifully calculated pose of haughty subservience.

“Can I get you anything, sir?” he added, and the disguise became marginally less complete: there was that in the actor-butler’s­ intonation which made it clear that the apparently limitless possibilities of “anything” began and ended with a stiff drink.

“No, thanks,” said Pibble. “Do you know if the Doctor and Sergeant Maxwell have come?”

“I believe so, sir. Mr. Singleton is talking to them in the Zoffany Room.”

This time the faltering of tone was more marked. Pibble decided to risk a timid probe.

“Mr. Singleton must pay the most fantastic attention to detail,” he said.

“Too sodding right he does,” said Mr. Waugh rancorously. “Rings up Dick Looby at the Spotted Lion and asks him how much I had last night. Dick’s a decent fellow, but he can’t afford not to tell him. I tell you, that’s the way to drive a man to secret drinking—I’ve seen it happen in long runs again and again—and Mr. Singleton thinks he can do it to me. Got me by the short hairs, he has; knows I’d never find another billet like this, any more than he’d find someone else to do the Beach bit—you read Wodehouse?”

“Yes,” said Pibble. “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.”

“Right,” said Mr. Waugh. “I can do that, too: worth a guinea a visitor to Mr. Bleeding Singleton, I am. But he thinks he could scrabble along without me and he knows I couldn’t do without him. He’s got me by the knackers.”

“I suppose nerves are always a big frayed by the end of the season,” said Pibble cautiously.

“First time I’ve noticed it,” said Mr. Waugh. “July, August, that’s the time for tantrums, but by now everything ought to be slack and easy. Why, you heard how sharp Miss Anty spoke up to me this morning. ’Tisn’t like her, Officer. Something’s up.”

Mr. Waugh’s voice was now an urgent whisper. During the last short speech, layers of saloon-bar knowingness had peeled off his voice until he spoke with the direct appeal of the peasant, petitioning Authority (baffled, inadequate Pibble) to simplify the unfair mysteries of the universe. A faint bloom of sweat, a condensation of tiny globules, dewed the melon-structured tissues of his brow and jowls.

“Is it something to do with Deakin’s death?” said Pibble. “I hear he was a bit of a womanizer, for instance.”

“Him?” said Mr. Waugh, astonished back into the saloon bar. “Only woman old Deak would’ve taken an interest in was one made of knot-free deal, so he could’ve gone over her with his spokeshave. Anyway it started before that—everyone a bit nervy for about a fortnight, and then, whammo, something happens and we’re all biting each other’s head off, even Miss Anty, as I’ve always gotten on with particularly well. Three, four days of that and Deak hanged himself. Hanged himself because of it, if you ask me, and this, sir, is a document which many of our American visitors find most intriguing, being the then Sir Spenser Clavering’s original letter to William Penn regretting as how a previous engagement made it impossible for Sir Spenser to come and help found Pennsylvania.”

“Goodness me,” said Pibble. How would a London detective behave after a history lesson from such a portentous domestic? He would tip him, with hesitation. Pibble found half a crown and said, “This has been the most interesting, dash it—” (Damn. A bit too much of the Woosters there.) “Thank you very much.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” said Mr. Waugh. “I endeavor to give satisfaction.”

He wafted himself silently toward the door, yielding the floor to the watching Mr. Singleton.

“You’ve got an extraordinary collection here,” said Pibble warmly.

“It’s a disgraceful muddle, in my opinion,” said Mr. Singleton. “Our German visitors, and I say this in confidence, are frequently disappointed by the inadequate exhibits on the Raid.”

“Do you get many Germans?”

“An average of seven point two per cent increase in each of the last four years. The future of European tourism is in their hands.”

“Ironic,” said Pibble. “That landing craft Deakin was working on—was that his own idea, or part of some planned expansion?”

“Both, to be candid. Poor Deakin had got it into his head that I was going to build him a special display building for a panorama of the Raid, with himself in charge of it to talk a lot of unsubstantiated gossip about the Claverings at St. Quentin.”

“Strip his sleeve and show his scars,” said Pibble.

“It may seem to you statistically impossible, but only one man was wounded on Uncle Dick’s ship, and he was hit while we were waiting to board. We were packed so tightly on deck that it took me a full minute to get a bar of chocolate out of my map pocket, and the sky was stiff with Stukas, but Uncle Dick brought us out. I don’t need to tell you that it is not the kind of episode on which it is possible to calculate the odds, but they must be very high indeed.”

“Fantastic,” said Pibble, surprised as much by the sudden liveliness of tone as by the actual story.

“Yes. But we mustn’t keep Kirtle waiting—he’s a busy man. I expect you would prefer to interview them in private, so I will leave you.”

With the demurest of footfalls they paced the vast hall. Mr. Singleton opened the door of the Zoffany Room but did not go in himself. It was lucky that Sergeant Maxwell was in uniform; otherwise Pibble would have been certain to commit the blunder of acknowledging them in the wrong social order, for it was Dr. Kirtle who had the slabby raw-beef face of the typical village bobby, whereas Maxwell was graying, harassed, wrinkled, humorous, tired—a good but overworked country G.P. to the life. Pibble shook hands with the Doctor and nodded to the Sergeant.

“I’m sorry to bring you out here like this,” he said.

“Not at all, not at all,” said the Doctor, in a strange half-whisper whose obsequiousness seemed to imply that the privilege of breathing the same air as the Claverings excused any inconvenience. Pibble felt stifled with all this insistent grandeur.

“Let’s go outside,” he said.

They both flashed him a sharp glance of surprise—in this sort of household one stayed where one was put until one was given permission to move. For a second Maxwell weighed the imponderables of two unlike disciplines, and then (no doubt in the comfortable knowledge that there was a senior officer to take the responsibility) made a vague half shuffle toward the door. The Doctor sensed himself outvoted, whispered “Oh, well,” and moved in the same direction. Pibble led them out to the lawn where he had first seen Mr. Waugh sitting.

“Any bothers, Doctor?” he said. “Hanged himself all right, in your opinion?”

“Dear me, yes,” said the Doctor, in his peculiar breathy whisper. Pibble now saw, in the full light of a sweet October noon, that his neck was puckered with the aftermath of a hideous wound. The flicker of shock in Pibble’s eyes must have been very marked, or the Doctor peculiarly sensitive.

“I was on the Raid, too, you know,” he breathed. “I bought it on the quay, just as we were getting ready for the final embarkation. Harvey Singleton carried me onto the boat and the General nursed me home, pumped me full of morphine, knew just what to do—astonishing man. But, yes, old Deak hanged himself, and I can’t think why. I hear he was a bit too keen on the ladies, and it might have been something to do with that. He managed it very efficiently, too—clean break, dead in a second.”

“No peculiar bruises, marks of that kind?”

The Doctor ceased pacing the bungey lawn and turned a chill eye on him.

“Great Scott, no!” he said. “You’ll be asking me about stomach contents next.”

“If you don’t mind,” said Pibble.

“I mind very much indeed,” said the Doctor slowly. “What sort of people do you think you’re dealing with? The Claverings aren’t here to provide you with your tuppeny-ha’penny sensation which you can peddle to your pals in Fleet Street. They’re, they’re … Old England!”

“Yes” said Pibble, “that’s just why. Suppose the question came up at the inquest. Unlikely, but just suppose. Isn’t it better for us to be able to say we looked, and there was nothing suspicious, than to say we wouldn’t dream of doing so? I’d prefer to go the whole hog and see that the question was asked. I’d make it clear that the investigation had throughout been thorough, normally thorough. Anyway, I’m afraid I must insist on a proper analysis. Let me tell you, Dr. Kirtle, that there’s far more nasty publicity in doubts and mysteries than there is in certainties.”

“All right, all right,” whispered the Doctor curtly. “You know more about this sort of thing than I do, I suppose. We’re damned suspicious down here, you’ll find. They’ll have to do the job in Southampton, of course, but I’ll lay it on. Anything else?”

“Well, it’s a tiny point, but I’m bothered about Mr. Singleton trying to give him the kiss of life. He looked so very dead, and I’d have thought Mr. Singleton could have seen at a glance it was hopeless. You know him better than I do, but he doesn’t seem to me the kind of man to make a mistake like that.”

Winter glazed the Doctor’s eye again.

“Harvey Singleton,” he said, “had a good war. A very good war indeed. After the Raid he was parachuted into France three times. He was brave, clever, and a brilliant shot. No doubt he saw a lot of dead men, knifed, shot, blown up, garroted. But I doubt if he ever saw a man who’d had his neck broken by dropping three feet with a noose round his throat.”

“No doubt you’re right,” said Pibble, stiff with the knowledge that his name was now chiseled deep into the Doctor’s opinion as that of a complete tick. The Doctor’s boneheaded reverence for great names comforted him not at all. “It’s only that I’m paid to think of all the questions which anybody might ask.”

“Well, let me tell you another thing. When Lady Clavering died, Herryngs near as a toucher went to pieces. I won’t go into the details. But it was Harvey Singleton who held it together, put the Claverings back on their feet. He gave up a very promising job with a merchant bank in the City to come and do it, and he owed them nothing, nothing. He wasn’t even married to Anty then. This place is his monument, almost as much as it is any of the Claverings’. Remember that.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I will.”

Pibble turned to Sergeant Maxwell, who had dropped a tactful few paces behind as they’d walked along the broad belt of sward between the wall of the house and the drive; they’d come now, in fact, right around the Private Wing to its south face. The Adam-the-Gardener figure, whom he’d last seen spraying the plants in the far colonnade, was now sweeping the edge of the turf with slow, thoughtful strokes where the General’s E-Type had sprayed gravel onto the grass.

Sergeant Maxwell dithered unhappily forward to where Pibble waited. A nasty dilemma for a cap-touching local bobby, whether to side with the high-powered officer, who’d be gone back to London tomorrow, or with the Doctor, who had moved off asthmatic with contempt and anger and who would still be about, week after week, year after year, a witness of how Maxwell had borne himself in the hour of trial. Pibble tried to make things as easy as he could for the poor man.

“There’s not much I want to ask you, really,” he said. “But I’d better check that you’ve done all the proper things, just in case …”

Distant but unmistakable, the sound of two shots rang across the park, neither the crack of pistols nor the bark of rifles but a deeper, thudding boom. Pibble raised his eyebrows.

“It’s the duel, sir,” said the Sergeant. “Two of the tourists fight a duel with proper dueling pistols on the old Bowling Green. They use blanks, o’course, but they dress ’em up in old-fashioned clobber and proper lifelike it looks.’

“Sounds terrifying,” said Pibble. “Don’t they have a lot of wadding flying about, getting into people’s eyes?”

“Old Deak fixed the guns so they’d fire very crooked indeed, he did tell me, sir.”

“Oh,” said Pibble, “did you know him well?”

“Well, sir, we played darts most Thursday and Monday evenings at the Clavering Arms.”

“The point is,” said Pibble, “that none of us have any real doubt that poor Deakin hanged himself, but he didn’t leave a note and we can’t say the thing’s satisfactorily cleared up until we have some idea about a motive. When did you see him last?”

“Three nights gone, sir. Night afore he hanged himself.”

“Did he seem any different from usual?”

Maxwell rubbed a toecap against his calf, like an embarrassed schoolboy. Ten yards away the Doctor coughed, a harsh, painful rasp.

“He seemed a bit sulky, like,” said Maxwell. Then the hesitant voice changed gear into a quick, decisive monotone, as though he had nerved himself to get a painful experience over. “It’s not right to speak against the dead, but he were a terrible one for the girls, always chasing and pestering after them and they wouldn’t have him, and he went on and on about the Maureen Finnick as how she was leading him on, till I were proper fretted for him, sir.”

“Did anyone else hear this conversation?”

“No, sir. We had the little bar all to ourselves, and he was mostly muttering, like.”

“O.K.,” said Pibble. “Well, see that you get the details as clear in your mind as you can remember. Now, about what happened after the body was found—Mr. Singleton rang up the police station, I take it.”

“Yes, sir. Asked for me special.”

Maxwell ran steadily through what he had done, which had been everything necessary. When he had finished, Pibble paced out into the drive, and looked up at the house. Goodness, it was pretty, the precisely calculated frilliness of balustrade and finial, the endearingly domestic pediment, the generous swags of stone carving above the main windows—all subservient to the honest proportions of the basic rectangle, and all blotchy with gold lichen.

Work, work, work. The first-floor windows mirrored one bobbly cloudlet and a surround of sky; at this angle the glass might just as well have been silvered—some monster or vampire, the Curse of the Claverings, could have been staring hungrily down from behind it and a watcher on the gravel would have seen neither tusk nor trunk. Pibble shifted about on the drive, trying to find a point from which the looped brocade curtains became visible, and his ghostly unease was suddenly given solid flesh when the sash he was peering at shot upward and Mrs. Singleton leaned out.

“Luncheon in ten minutes, if that suits you, Superintendent,” she said (no need to shout, with her voice). “Just time for you to come and have a glass of hock, Fred. There’s beer for you, in the little kitchen if you want it, Maxwell. Don’t go into the big one—it’ll be full of Yanks in a couple of minutes and they’ll think you’re part of the act.”

The sash slapped down, leaving none of the three a chance to answer; the Clavering blood, however charmingly embodied, was used to being obeyed. Dr. Kirtle, in fact, was already mincing gloomily off toward his glass of hock, and that gave Pibble the chance to satisfy a private inquisitiveness.

“Were you on the Raid, too, Maxwell?” he said.

“No, sir.” The Sergeant’s wilting melancholy deepened.

“What was Mr. Singleton talking about before he came to fetch me?”

“Ah … er … sir … ah … something quite different, sir.”

“Never mind. Anyway, the main point is that you’ve carried though the correct procedure, as far as you were allowed to, and that Deakin talked to you in a very depressed fashion about his sex life.”

“Well … er … yes, sir.”

“Never mind. Off you go for your beer. I should get some notes down about that conversation. If you think of anything else, you can just let me know direct at Scotland Yard. You don’t have to tell them everything here, you know.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Pibble stood still to give the Sergeant a decent start. More steaming intangibles, he thought: first Mr. Waugh’s outburst and then a policeman who’d been hurriedly coached to lie. He walked off toward the Main Block, hoping that if he went the wrong way round the whole edifice he’d be too late for the hock. He didn’t feel like standing there with a glass in his hand in the same room as the idiotic Doctor, who so openly despised him—at any rate not if Mrs. Singleton was in the room, too.

Roughly opposite the Main Block he came up with Adam the Gardener, still sweeping with the stolid stroke of a man rowing the Atlantic.

“Ah-hem!” said Pibble purposefully.

The man straightened up and touched the brim of his hat. Beneath its shade his visage—such of it as could be seen through the prodigious growth of beard—seemed preternaturally dark, as though he were on the verge of apoplexy.

“Did you know Mr. Deakin?” said Pibble.

Something in the man’s attitude changed; he relaxed and ran a finger beneath the elastic of his beard, a gesture which revealed the true reason for the color of his face.

“No, suh,” he said, in a booming Deep South voice. “I’s a stranger in dese parts.”

“Staying long?” said Pibble.

“You recknin’ to run me out of town, Sheriff?” said the Negro, in a different voice, a John Wayne drawl.

“This burg ain’t big enough for you and me, Black Jake,” said Pibble.

The Negro laughed.

“Fuzz?” he said.

“Fraid so,” said Pibble.

“Me, I’m a criminal back home,” said the Negro, in what at last seemed to be his own voice.

“Burnt your draft card?” said Pibble.

“What makes you think that?”

“Sounds as if you’d rather talk with an English policeman than an American civilian.”

“Maybe so.”

“What do you make of this place?” asked Pibble, moving to a less tender subject.

“You know something, Sheriff?” said the Negro. “This setup is just about like all the stories ’bout Virginia ’fore the war—the kind of stories her gramma told my gramma.”

“They’ve done that on purpose, of course,” said Pibble.

“Yeah, but they done it too damn well, like they believed it.”

“At least they’ve got something to believe.”

“Yeah … but … but they believe it all,” said the Negro, waving­ a hand to include the dream landscape, the exquisite house, and a noise of cheering, like far surf, which wafted from the concealed valley whence the shots had come. “Pardon me,” he added, and resumed his monotonous sweeping.

Pibble walked on around the far wing, from which floated a cooking smell so appetizing that he decided it must be canned in aerosol sprays and vented to welcome the “visitors” back from their journey into the past. If so, something had gone amiss with Mr. Singleton’s passionately precise timing, for the Rocket and its dollar-happy load were still invisible; so, he realized, was its track, but looking at the generous sweep of turf he saw a minute fold which might conceal a ha-ha. He strolled over and found himself on a tiny platform with Lilliputian-scale rails curving away to his right. Three rails; so the system was electrified, and those generous puffs of smoke and galvanically working cylinders had been as phony as … as Adam’s beard.

His ten minutes about up, he walked back past the main frontage, and the now-stilled fountain. Dr. Kirtle was getting into his car by the colonnade entrance, but got out again and came toward Pibble.

“Must apologize,” he whispered. “Daresay you thought me no end of an ass—quite unfit to do my job.”

“Not at all,” lied Pibble.

“Kind of you,” said the Doctor. “Truth is I was talking to the Admiral about a month gone by—no, more like six weeks—and the subject of post-mortems came up. He told me—surprised me a bit—that the whole idea revolted him; he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone he’d known being cut open. So when they called me in for Deakin I thought I’d try to spare him—England owes him a lot, you know. But I’ve just been talking to him and he seemed quite happy about the whole thing. Complete volte-face. He didn’t seem very interested—didn’t even look up from his paper, but I got the message all right. Course it’s far better if we do the job properly. I’ll put it in hand at once.”

“Fine,” said Pibble, embarrassed—he liked the Doctor, dammit. “Thank you very much,” he added dimly. It seemed to be enough, for the Doctor minced back to his car and drove away.

Mrs. Singleton was waiting in the winy air of the colonnade, like an embodiment of all autumnal sweetness.

“You mustn’t mind about Fred,” she said. “His world begins and ends with us.”

“All policemen expect to be resented,” said Pibble. “It’s part of the training. I hadn’t realized how many of you were involved in the Raid. I bet if they make a film of it they’ll find a place for you in a landing craft.”

Mrs. Singleton laughed her ambrosial laugh.

“Actually they made two films,” she said. “They turned Harvey into an American for one of them, and the actress who played me—Phyllis Calvert it was—was parachuted in to St. Quentin to join the Resistance and guide the ships in. It was awful nonsense, but the other one was very good and accurate—I’m surprised you didn’t see it. Harvey arranged for us to have some sort of royalty, and it did terribly well, especially in the Commonwealth, and that’s what gave him the capital to develop Herryngs the way he has. It pays for itself now, of course, but only just. Luncheon is ready and the Admiral’s been ringing up your office to try and find out what you like to drink—your sergeant said beer, I hope that’s all right.”

“Lovely,” said Pibble thankfully, but wondering what oubliettes lay beneath this lush expanse of red carpet.

As they went into the dimness of the hall, a small erect figure came forward, holding out his hand. The Admiral had none of his brother’s exaggerated strut; he wore a quiet tweed suit; his voice was quiet, too, almost a murmur.

“Come along, Superintendent,” he said, “you’re just in time. Want a pee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Come in, then; we all help ourselves and are very informal.”

He led the way into a room on the right-hand side of the passage. Really it was no more than a paneled nook left over from the construction of two shapelier rooms; a circular rosewood table nearly filled it. Mr. Singleton and a girl were talking over on the far side, by a crowded hot plate.

“That smells good,” said the Admiral. “Pheasant stew. Waste of good meat to roast them, don’t you agree, Superintendent?” He rubbed his pale hands together. His face was pale, too, with no tan to hide the lichenlike marks of old age; but apart from that and the absence of a mustache and the trimmer eyebrows, he really was astonishingly like his brother. Carried his head at a different angle, perhaps …

“I think you’ve met my nephew,” he said. “Judith, this is Superintendent Pibble, who has come to sort us out; Superintendent, this is our secretary, Judith Scoplow.”

Nothing special about her, really: a tall girl with a flat, pale face and hair that would probably have been mouse without the help of a copper rinse. She wore it lightly backcombed into a sort of half helmet, kept in place by a broad brown Alice band.

“How do you do,” she said, and at once Pibble looked at her again. There was something special about her, once you had heard the voice; something happy, easy, confident, innocent; something dizzily out of keeping with this mansion of rich decay. Despite a couple of pimples below the corner of her wide mouth, she was beautiful, too. Pibble revised an earlier guess: the General’s staglike strut down the steps had not meant he was on his way to visit a woman—it meant he had just been talking with one, had just seized an opportune half minute to sniff the deliriant bouquet of youth.

Queuing for his pheasant stew, Pibble struggled with the sense of having met someone like her in the past. (He struggled, too, with the knowledge that she was the kind of woman who would have that effect on men, a barely sophisticated variant of the urge to say “Haven’t I met you before?”) He was disconcerted out of both struggles by his encounter with the stewpot, which turned out to contain chunks of bird in a sauce heavy with cream and brandy; there was a little dish of fried diced apple by the side. Left to itself, his subconscious did the trick—that girl in the Salinski case! He was so pleased with himself that he took a double helping of creamed potatoes.

Anne something. And Salinski (fortyish, shiny-bald, dapper) had faked a brake failure and let his new Rover run over a cliff with his smart little wife in it, all on the strength of a barely more than nodding acquaintance with this Anne. Again, it had been only when she’d answered Pibble’s first question—there’d been a smell of collusion because Salinski had tried to use her as an element in his timetable alibi—that Pibble had realized that Salinski was perfectly sane. And in the end both counsels, for defense and prosecution, had outdone each other in courtesies, the judge had been a shade more than paternal, and several hard-nosed reporters had attempted to play down her role in their copy. Poor little pigeon, by the time she stepped down from the witness box she was the only person in the whole court who still didn’t understand how Salinski could have done such a thing. And here was another of them. Well, well; no wonder the General had gone down toward his phallic car with the swagger of a hart at leaf fall.

“Come and sit here, my dear fellow, and tell me tall stories about life as a famous policeman.” The Admiral was pulling out a chair on his right. Mrs. Singleton was already prodding a minute piece of bird on the other side of the gap.

“Your sergeant tells me that you know more about beer than anyone else in London,” said the Admiral. “I’d value your opinion on this—we brew it ourselves. I believe it’s a shade on the sweet side for the real purist, but we are trying to gratify the perverse palate of our American cousins.”

Mr. Singleton butted in from the other side of the table.

“I commissioned a little firm in Chicago to market-research the American idea of what English beer ought to taste like.”

“Courages at Alton were very nice to us,” added the Admiral. “They sent a chap over to advise us how to get as near to Harvey’s ideal as we could. I know a couple of chaps on the board, ’smatter of fact.”

“I think it’s horrible,” said Mrs. Singleton, and sipped exaggeratedly from her glass of Burgundy.

Bodingly, Pibble lifted his tankard, and was surprised: true the beer was too sweet and a bit on the dark side; it was like one of those special brews which a few colleges in ancient universities specialize in, but it wasn’t flat, as they tend to be; it had a creamy sparkle which suggested that the barrel must be in tiptop condition. He said so.

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Mr. Singleton. “To be frank, I never let them keep anything left over. We throw away yesterday’s barrel and start on a new one. Brewing’s an extraordinarily cheap process, given the equipment.”

“But are you sure that’s what you want, Mr. Pibble?” said the Admiral solicitously. “There’s some of Harvey’s plonk if you prefer, or there ought to be another of these”—he pointed to his own half bottle of Pommery—“in the fridge, or you could have some of our excellent water, as dear Judith does.”

“It’s the nicest water I ever tasted,” said Miss Scoplow. “A marvelous old man brings it up from the spring in two wooden buckets which he carries with a sort of yoke.”

“I’m happy with this, thank you,” said Pibble, wondering which level of the treasure house of police fantasy he should tap to please the Admiral’s lust for gruesome tales. (Scotland Yard has an oral tradition rich enough to keep a college of Opies busy.) He needn’t have bothered, for the old hero seemed set on talking about his lions, which he did with a mild but insistent volubility, often keeping hold of the conversation by simply repeating some tidbit which he had already rolled out. It was during one of these da capos that Pibble revised his opinion of Mrs. Adamson’s lion books, which, when he’d read them, he’d thought had a too-good-to-be-true quality. She must have covered the ground pretty thoroughly, he now saw, since there was nothing in the Admiral’s mellifluous monologue which he didn’t already know. He seized a moment when the hero’s mouth was full to ask him whether he’d enjoyed the books.

“What books?” said the Admiral, emphasizing his famous deafness by cupping a curiously lobeless ear.

“Elsa!” shouted Mrs. Singleton. It wasn’t exactly a shout, though: she just notched her hound voice up another intensity and produced a word which was still clearly spoken but could have halted a marching regiment. Two more intensities and the windowpanes would have fallen out.

“What’s the matter with her?” said the Admiral. “You are never satisfied with your food, Anty, not even in the nursery, I remember. Would you believe it, Superintendent—”

The door opposite him opened and a little old woman with a crossly crimson face stood there.

“Did I hear you call, Miss Anty?” she said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Elsa,” said Mrs. Singleton. “I didn’t mean you. We were talking about lions.”

“Nasty heathenish things,” snarled the cook. “It’s all very well for you to say they only eat black men, but who’s to know they won’t acquire the taste and we’ll all be gnawed to pieces in our beds?”

The Admiral didn’t even look in her direction, but turned exaggeratedly toward Pibble.

“No, that’s a very interesting aspect of lion psychology,” he said. “Some of them do literally acquire a taste for man-flesh, and can’t be satisfied with anything else. There’s not been any research done on man-eating, though, for obvious …”

His soft voice was almost a whisper, but the cook looked at him, put her hands over her ears, and rushed out.

“Now you’ve upset her,” said Mr. Singleton to the room in general. “Go and soothe her down, Anty.”

Mrs. Singleton rose and left. Pibble sat in a daze. How in holy hell had they thought they could get away with it? Who had persuaded whom? And what in God’s name were they up to, to make it necessary? He pulled himself together to listen to his host, who was murmuring again about lions, but during the monologue he kept thinking of other little bits of confirmation: the Epstein and the cook had started him off; then there were the Adamson books; the General’s stagy departure; the locked door upstairs; Singleton’s whispering—to emphasize the Admiral’s presence behind it; the mere necessity of having a policeman down from London for a case that didn’t warrant it; the too-painstaking collusion in social hypnotism which he’d felt so strongly in the meat store; the volte-face over post-mortem … Oh, Crippen! And presumably Deakin had looked after the Admiral’s shoes, hung up his clothes, taken his trays up, made his bed, even.

When Mrs. Singleton came back, she simply nodded to her husband and sat down. Pibble felt edgy now, but couldn’t decide whether the others did, too, or whether he was attributing his own unease to them. Only Miss Scoplow seemed uninfected with this social itch; she talked little but listened to Mr. Singleton’s jerky explanation of the economics of the wine trade with great animation; she had a pleasant trick of showing interest by opening her eyes absurdly wide, so that the white showed all around the iris. She gave the impression that she could have listened with intense delight to an account of a golf match between two moderate players on a featureless plain.

But Mr. Singleton’s lecture seemed not to stimulate even himself; he had the tense air of an actor ad-libbing while he waits for a colleague to make a delayed entrance. Mrs. Singleton turned one fragment of meat over and over, as if it were the last piece of a jigsaw which was somehow the wrong shape for the last hole. And the old hero was now retailing complete myth as certified lion lore, even the false claw in the tail with which the beast is supposed to lash itself into a frenzy of rage, like some hack satirist.

“No pudding,” said Mrs. Singleton suddenly, “and we’ve eaten the last of the nectarines. There’s blue Cheshire and grapes and apples.”

The shuffling to remove plates and queue (in charadelike parody of housewives at a greengrocer’s) for muscats and pippins (not Cox or Ribston—something Pibble had never met before) broke the tension. As they settled again, Clavering turned to Miss Scoplow­ and told her all the legends he had just told Pibble, while she listened to each nonsensical detail with astonished eyes. This left Pibble free for the first time to enjoy Mrs. Singleton’s presence; the contrast with Miss Scoplow served to emphasize her musky, autumnal quality. You soon got used to the voice; it wasn’t, after all, loud, just penetrating. She must know what was up, Pibble decided, but Miss Scoplow mightn’t. If she thought of Adam the Gardener as “a marvelous old man,” she must be either shortsighted or unobservant.

“You seem to take an enormous amount of trouble over detail,” he said. “Bringing your water up in buckets on a yoke, I mean. There can’t be much chance for tourists to photograph that, however picturesque.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said Mrs. Singleton, with her liqueur-like chuckle. “Harvey sees to it that it’s done while there’s a party going down the colonnade; Rastus walks up just below those windows. Besides, we’d have the water brought up from the spring anyway. As Judith says, it’s much nicer than the mains; there being a picturesque man to do it is just luck.”

“Is that the man I saw spraying ferns on the way to the big Kitchen, dressed up like the gardener in those old Express strip cartoons?”

“That’s right—we call him Rastus. Do you follow the strips? I always read them first.”

They fell into a half-bantering discussion of the protagonists of the thought balloon, discovered a joint admiration for the earliest Four-D Jones strips, and were discussing middle-period Garth plots when the grate of tires on the gravel outside brought Mrs. Singleton to her feet (her hearing seemed to be as keen as her voice).

“That’s Carl Spruheim, Harvey,” she said. “You go and let him in while I fetch the coffee. We’ll have it in my sitting room.”

Both Singletons left. Pibble allowed them twenty seconds before he rose, too.

“There’s just something I ought to check on before I talk to the Coroner,” he said casually, moving as he spoke toward the door so that he was already through it before Clavering had a chance to answer. He ran across the hall and up the stairs; he was panting, more with nerves than exertion, before he reached the first landing. He plugged on.

The barrel of the big key still protruded through the lock of the Admiral’s door, but the door didn’t open—so there must be another entrance. He nipped into Deakin’s pantry and took a pair of crocodile pliers from the pegboard, but he found that though he could grip the barrel with the pliers held sideways, the mahogany beading of the door panels prevented him from turning the key far enough, so he had to run back for a blunt-ended pair. Sweating now, he tried again; the serrations of the jaws slipped on the metal, making bright parallel gouges, then held. Contorting his body so that he did not have to take a fresh grip, he moved the key around until he heard the big wards click over. He dropped the pliers and turned the handle. The door opened.

But before he had moved it an inch, a weight thudded into it from the far side and slammed it shut. Pibble gripped the handle and twisted, throwing all his weight against the mahogany. A child? he wondered—there ought to be some Singleton kids about. Anyway, the door gave, and he jammed his foot into the opening and forced the gap wider, easily enough, with the leverage of knee and shoulder. Then the resistance ceased suddenly and only the inertia of the heavy mahogany saved him; if it had been a flimsy door, he would have fallen sprawling into the secret room. As it was, he entered with an ungainly stagger, to find Clavering, a little flushed and ruffled, facing him with chilly dignity. Who’d have thought the old man had so much agility in him, to race up here so fast and wrestle with the far side of the door?

“What the devil do you think you’re up to?” said the old man with icy fierceness but in the wrong voice.

Pibble didn’t answer but looked around the room. The hairy jacket, yellow waistcoat, and twill trousers were flung across the bed; not good enough—they might both have duds like that. Two Elsa books lay on the desk; nothing like good enough. One of a set of fitted cupboards in the right-hand wall was open, with the corner of a washbasin showing. Pibble walked across and found what he wanted, an uncleaned safety razor with a number of half-inch white bristles stuck in it, a tube of Helena Rubinstein “Tan in a Minute,” a lot of tan-smeared tissues in the wastepaper basket, a pair of nail scissors, even a scattering of shorter, curving bristles on the carpet. As he was wrapping the razor and specimens of his other prizes in clean tissues from the box, Mrs. Singleton’s voice came from the room.

“All right, General?”

The old hero answered with his wild giggle, more exaggerated than before—tension, or the strain of suppressing it for a couple of hours?

“Far from it, m’dear, far from it. You were right about Treacle—he even looks like him now. Down a rabbit hole, you remember?”

Pibble could imagine so, for he was on his knees collecting clippings of the famous eyebrows; he was aware that the seat of his trousers was shiny. From the room it must have looked as if he’d have been wagging his tail, if he’d had one. In fact he was both dismayed and miserable. How the hell could they have thought they’d get away with it?

“Oh, my aunt!” said Mrs. Singleton. “What on earth shall we do now? I thought he was such an agreeable little man.”