Death of an Old Goat (11 page)

‘Look,' he said finally, ‘I don't care a monkey's fart what went on at the party. All I want to know is whether this Pommie Bastard Bascomb was there.'

There was silence for a moment as the group inspected him, apparently wondering whether they could believe him. Surprisingly one of them decided that he could.

‘Came about half past twelve,' he said, a youth who looked about Bascomb's own age.

‘Did you see him come?'

‘Yes. I was under the trees over there with my girl. He came in a taxi, and went straight in. I thought I'd stay out there in case he got shirty about the party, but he was beaut about it.'

‘How long did he stay?'

‘Bloody hours. He was enjoying himself.'

‘What time did he go to bed?'

‘About five. We put him to bed. Typical bloody Pommie. Can't take his booze.'

‘You're sure it was five? And he couldn't have got up after he'd gone to bed?'

‘Not a chance. He was bloody paralytic. He was so pissed he couldn't have scratched his own arse.'

That, at any rate, seemed conclusive.

I
T WAS
the next day before Inspector Royle got to call on any of the other party guests. He chose the Turbervilles first, probably from some obscure inklings of the rights of precedence, and he rang up Kenilworth in advance to tell them he was coming. Kenilworth was the property which Mr Turberville's father had bought from the grandson of a Scottish convict who had stolen sheep from Sir Walter Scott. He thought the Turbervilles would probably be a pleasant relief after a day spent with blood-spattered bodies and bloody academics. In the University world he was never quite sure what pose to adopt. Towards the Turbervilles he knew what his attitude and manner had to be: servile. He had always got on very well with them in the past. There had been the little matter of the youngest Turberville boy — the one at the Drummondale School — who had shot dead a jackaroo in a fit of pique during his summer vacation. It was easy enough to hush up that one as an unfortunate accident. Luckily the jackaroo was just out from England, an ex-Barnardo's boy, whom the Turbervilles had engaged on conditions not very far from slavery, so nobody asked any questions.

Then there'd been the occasion when Turberville Senior had run over that child and put him in hospital for six months. It was near the Abo reserve, so he hadn't been taking care, naturally, but by ill-luck it turned out to be a white child. What he'd liked about both occasions had been the frank way in which Turberville went about getting a handful of notes, large ones at that, from various little nest-eggs he kept concealed about the house in armchairs
and drawers. He had handed it straight over without any embarrassment, and Royle had found the whole thing the very model of how a gentleman should behave. There was nothing he found so convenient as bank-notes. There weren't, he thought regretfully, going to be any bank-notes this time.

• • •

‘No question of cash this time,' said Guy Turberville, as he and his wife waited in the huge lounge with the dull furniture and the stag's head over the door. He was a medium-sized, flabby man in his fifties with a military moustache and a rather weak mouth. He frequently sucked at a pipe, more for something to do than anything else, and he often lost his temper with his inferiors, particularly when things went wrong for which he knew himself to be responsible. That was fairly frequent these days.

‘Of course not,' said Nancy Turberville, looking down her smart little navy dress and wishing that her neck was not beginning to look so scraggy. ‘Why on earth should there be? We haven't done anything, have we? I know I haven't anyway.'

‘No, of course not,' said Guy, looking around the room nervously, as if he didn't quite recognize it. ‘It just seems the thing to do.'

‘Silly habit to get into,' said Nancy. ‘One day you'll do it to one who'll refuse and put you on a charge.'

‘Never happened to me yet,' said Guy.

• • •

Inspector Royle drove past the semi-regal splendours of the houses for the elder Turberville boys, past the Volkswagen used as a chicken-run and up the drive of the sprawling, much-altered-and-built-on-to colonial mansion, vintage 1895, entry to which was so dearly prized by Lucy Wickham and her like. He was immensely flattered by Guy Turberville's ‘Walk right in, Royle,' shouted through the open window, and he came in to them rubbing his hands in a
perfect lather of gratified subservience.

‘Good morning, Mr Turberville, and g'day to you, ma'am,' he said. ‘Sorry to have to break in on you like this.'

‘Not at all, Inspector,' said Nancy. ‘We know you've got your job to do, same as all of us.' The Turbervilles were very hot on the police doing their job when they spoke at political meetings, especially if there had been a hint of student unrest at the University. ‘We're as willing as the next man to help you.'

‘That's very handsome of you, ma'am,' said Royle, sketching a bow. ‘Very handsome indeed.'

‘Not that we can,' said Guy. ‘Never saw the old . . . chap in our lives before last night.' He looked round at his wife, who backed him up by nodding vigorously.

‘Well now, sir, that's what I thought would be the case. I thought: they won't know anything about it, but they will be unprejudiced outsiders. And that could be useful, I thought.'

‘Ye-e-es,' said Nancy. ‘I suppose you might say we were that. But of course, we'd have kept our eyes open more if we'd known. You just don't expect the person you're talking to to be bumped off by next morning.'

‘But as it was, then, you didn't notice anything suspicious, nothing that you might have talked about together after the do, like?'

‘Can't say we did. Don't remember that we talked much after the party, did we, Guy? Dull little affair.'

‘You didn't notice anyone who seemed to know the old boy from before, did you?' pursued Royle, looking at her scraggy neck with well-concealed distaste.

‘No, not that I noticed. Poor old boy seemed a little bit . . . well, dim, to me, if you know what I mean. Not quite on the ball, so to speak. He wasn't up to much when he came, and by the time he'd had a couple — well! To give you an example: I was talking to him about the communists, see, and he certainly didn't seem to be very well up on
the red menace to our free institutions. But that's true of all Englishmen. They're living in a dream world . . .'

Inspector Royle cut in hastily. He had been on the receiving end of Nancy Turberville's obsesssions too often before.

‘Have you been to Oxford, ma'am?'

Nancy Turberville was stopped in her tracks.

‘Oxford . . . Oxford, Guy? Have we?'

‘Blessed if I know, Nance. All those old places look alike to me. You're the one who insists on going. Quite happy at the races, myself,' he added to Royle, with an attempt to work up fellow-feeling. Royle smiled as if to say that he knew what womenfolk were like.

‘That black and white place,' said Mrs Turberville pensively. ‘Sort of patchwork. Lots of little souvenir places with ashtrays, and swans on the river and things.'

‘Isn't that the Shakespeare place?' said Guy.

‘I believe you're right,' said Nancy. ‘Not Oxford, no. So I don't think we have, Inspector. And it can't have been for more than a day if we have.'

Royle gave up that line.

‘Did you notice him talking to any of the academics particularly? Like it might be getting serious, you might say?'

‘Well, most people had a word with him at one time or another. More a duty than a pleasure, I'd say, wouldn't you, Guy?'

‘Didn't know much about the drought,' said Guy.

‘Anyway, he seemed to get dimmer and dimmer as the night wore on, so that you were expecting him to go out any minute — ' Nancy Turberville gave a hard little laugh at her own wit — ‘and then just before the end he got nasty with Wickham. It all blew up quite sudden, and I didn't really twig what was going on. It was as he was going, and he got sharp-like, in that English sort of way. Wickham's not my cup of tea, but I didn't see any call for it myself.'

‘Other than that had he got on well with the Wickhams
during the earlier part of the evening?'

‘So far as I saw. Don't think he saw all that much of Wickham, but Lucy was talking to him a lot early on. Rather overdoes things, that one, if you ask me.'

‘The hospitality?'

‘The lot. She's a pusher, you know. Wants to get in everywhere. She's not really one of us, but she wants to be.'

‘I believe she was at Oxford with her husband some years ago,' said Royle, with heavy casualness.

‘Believe you're right,' said Nancy. ‘Always talks about it. Trying to impress, or something. Her father was a miner, you know. A bit pathetic, really.'

‘What about the others, the local lot, so to speak,' said Royle. ‘How many were there?'

‘Only Peggy Lullham and Joan McKay. McKay himself looked in when he brought Joan, but he was off to a meeting, he said. I wouldn't mind betting it was in Beecher's. All the Athertons were coming — parents, and both the sons and their wives — but there was something about a sick baby, so they didn't. May have heard there'd be academics there, of course. They're South African, and they don't like all this mixing.'

‘Nobody else there?'

‘Oh, Doncaster. Such a nice class of man. I can always find plenty to talk to him about. And that big woman from the Methodist School. Not so sure about her. Looks like a tank. Otherwise just academics. Don't get on with that lot myself. Just reds, most of them.'

‘Couldn't agree with you more, ma'am,' said Royle. ‘If you saw some of the things I see in my job, you'd wish the university had never come to Drummondale.'

‘I do already, Inspector,' said Nancy. ‘Place has never been the same since.'

‘Don't know, though,' said Guy, like a rhinoceros in meditation. ‘Gives the place a bit of tone.'

‘Some tone,' said Nancy, in her most nannyish manner.

‘So I'm right in thinking,' said Royle, getting reluctantly back to business, ‘that you both talked to him at one time or another in the course of the evening — you on politics, ma'am, and you on the drought, sir — but you didn't notice anything suspicious, either of you. And you didn't hear anything odd in his conversation with anyone else.'

‘No, Inspector.'

‘Or anything nasty, like?'

‘No, except for that little sput at the end of the evening. But that was nothing.'

‘And you drove straight back here and went to bed?'

‘Nance drove,' said Guy, rather smugly. ‘She always drives us home after parties.'

‘Never have more than five or six,' said his wife. ‘Better safe than sorry I always say.'

‘What time would this be, do you think, ma'am?'

‘I suppose we'd be in by about half past twelve,' said Nancy, looking thoughtfully at her husband.

‘About then, yes,' said Guy, not looking at her.

‘Anyone awake when you got back, anyone who saw you arrive home?'

‘What's the idea, Inspector?' asked Guy, going a purply pink. ‘What are you trying to infer? I don't like your tone. It's coming to something when people in our position and with our good relations with the police need to have our statements checked up on.'

Royle hastily jumped in to set matters right, realizing that he had reached the limits of the Turbervilles' anxiety to help the police do their job.

‘Just routine, sir. Just to get the old report sheet in order. Well, I think that should be all. Just to recap . . .' He looked down at his notes. ‘You hadn't met the old guy before the party, you briefly talked to him there but didn't notice anything odd in his behaviour to anyone, you got
back here about twelve-thirty and you didn't go out again. Is that all OK?'

There was a short pause.

‘More or less, Inspector,' said Nancy Turberville. ‘But there is one thing.'

If Inspector Royle had been observant he might have noticed Guy Turberville sit up tensely in his chair and cast a quick glance at his wife, but he was not, and did not.

‘What's that, ma'am?'

‘We met the old boy at the University, you know, the morning before the party. Went to a lecture there — on Mrs Austen, or some such person. I was thinking about my little granddaughter's birthday party most of the time, so nothing much got through, except that she was some English lady who wrote books.'

‘OK, then, that gets things straight,' said Royle, making a squiggle in his book that he hoped they would think was shorthand. ‘Anything else?'

There was silence, and Royle lumbered to his feet. The Turbervilles stood by the mantelpiece, and looked as if they expected him to back out of the presence. Royle blundered towards the door like a learner crab, and made his farewells, hoping, he said, that he didn't have to trouble them again, thanking them for their co-operation, wishing that all the witnesses he had to deal with could be as frank and open and generally lovable, and concluding by wishing them health, prosperity and eternal life.

‘Only too pleased to be of help at any time,' said Nancy Turberville with all the sincerity of Queen Victoria welcoming Mr Gladstone back for a further spell as her first minister. Guy wondered if the renewed frostiness was really directed at Inspector Royle or at himself, and he found out when the figure of the inspector was seen easing its great bulk into the police car.

‘By the way,' said his helpmate, turning to him, ‘I just
remembered when the inspector was talking. You went out that night after we got home. You thought I was asleep. Where did you go?'