Perfect Gallows (31 page)

“I don't know whether May saw the cutting, but if she did I think she would have spotted that January is an improbable season for a flower show. She was extremely sharp. At any rate, I am fairly certain that she knew from an early stage that Charles was an impostor, and may even have worked out or wheedled out of him that he was in collusion with Stephens. She was determined that she was going to stay at The Mimms and oust Elspeth after her father's death, and had recognized Charles as a suitable tool to achieve this. Once the will was read it seemed to be in everyone's interest that Charles would inherit.”

“Except yours.”

“I had no legal title. Mind you, I doubt if the stuff about the demolition of the house in the absence of a male heir would have stood up if it had been contested in the courts, but that would have involved huge costs, long delays and great uncertainty. In any case, Charles bought me off with a promise of support once the will was proved in his favour. At the same time he got me to use what influence I had with Samuel to persuade him to give up his opposition. I did so. We agreed that if no new evidence had come to light by the time I was called up, then Samuel would accept Charles as Sir Arnold's heir. I, casually since I didn't believe it would happen but still quite definitely, promised that if he found such proof I would support him. He told me he still had a chance. I thought he was speaking just of a general faint possibility, but I now think he meant there was one particular thing he wanted to try. He waited for his moment while they were dressing for our first performance of
The Tempest
.

“You remember May had got out an album of early photographs to remind Charles of things he was supposed to know, and this then disappeared? Charles changed the subject abruptly when May started talking about its loss, but by that time she had already asked one of the maids about it. So Samuel would have known. There was one particular photograph which showed Charles, as a child, naked. When the supposed Charles came out of the dressing-room he had not finished pulling up his hose, and he was in a state of outrage and fear. It is clear to me that Samuel had worked out why the album was missing, had concealed Charles's hose so as to delay him and thus be left alone with him, and had then pretended to find the missing garment. While Charles was putting it on he had seized his underpants and exposed his genitals.”

“No! A birthmark? But …”

“The essential element in the ritual by which a Zulu boy was accepted as an adult warrior was circumcision. I did not know this at the time, of course; in fact I looked it up only last week. I simply assumed that Samuel had seen something which both he and Charles knew proved that he was not the child in the photograph.”

“I don't see. Couldn't it have been done after?”

“Yes, but not the reverse. The child in the photograph had been circumcised. I don't remember this as fact, but it is clear to me that it must have been so. It was a common practice among the English classes to which the Wragges presumed to belong by the time Charles was born. No doubt their doctor advised it. Some thought it hygienic, especially for children in the colonies, but the original motive, believe it or not, had been to discourage masturbation.”

“Did it?”

“To judge by Philip Roth, no. So what Samuel must have seen was that Charles had not been circumcised. With the album gone that was still not proof. May had told me that they were not normally let run around naked, and in any case she and Elspeth would have contradicted each other's evidence. So Samuel's first thought was that we must send for the real Charles's wife.

“In fact the verification of Samuel's proof is irrelevant. The important point is that Charles knew. We performed the play without an interval and I was on stage throughout, but Charles was off for long periods. May of course fussed to and fro. He would have plenty of chance to take her aside. Stephens was in the audience—she could have talked to him. After the play Charles stuck to me like a leech—I thought it was because he was interested in Oakley and Price. At one point I found May making a fuss about her butter, which she said had been stolen. Stephens must have told her that she must somehow arrange for Samuel to go out and meet him that evening, which she did by hiding the butter out on the windowsill of the pantry—I trod in it as I climbed down. They may well have calculated that Samuel would seize the chance in any case—since he had been prevented from talking to me, Stephens was his other best hope of help. Anyway he went, and Stephens met him, heard what he had to say, asked if he had told anyone else and, learning that he had not, laid him out. Stephens was immensely strong. I remember him lifting Jean into the back of a truck as if she had weighed nothing.

“I think it possible that he had worked out his scheme in advance, not for this particular moment, but provisionally; he had been bothered by Samuel's persistence for some time. The stake, remember, was enormous. I do not mean that when he first mentioned lynching to me, or when he came on the tours of the house, that he was already thinking of murdering Samuel, only that the potential was there and continued to grow. What he needed was something from which to hang his victim, ground soft enough to take the imprint of boots—he had a supply of them in his stores—and a means of reaching both the gallows and the ground below it without leaving the impression of his own unusually large feet. The dovecote provided all this. He could hang the body from the beam and then rotate the ladder, standing on the lowest rung and pressing the individual boots into the droppings on the floor. No doubt the result would not have stood up to close forensic inspection, though he had very bad luck in my finding the body so soon—a day or two more and the rungs would have been covered with bird-droppings again.”

“But after all that they said it was suicide.”

“My own guess is that it wasn't an out-and-out cover-up, rather a case of tactful under-investigation once the verdict of suicide became plausible.”

“What happened after? Do you know? The sergeant and Mr Trinder and everyone, I mean.”

“By the time I came out of the army Elspeth was living at Charles Street. I used to stay with her when I was in London, and she was very useful to me in other ways, getting me introductions, giving me money and so on. In the end she became somewhat over-possessive, or so I told myself, and I stopped seeing her. Until then she kept me in touch with events at The Mimms. Charles and May succeeded in appointing fresh lawyers and having the will proved. I imagine that at that point Stephens and Trinder expected to be able to cash in on their investment—I can't be sure about that since Elspeth of course didn't know of their involvement, but I know what May's defence was. It was characteristic. She let Charles go back on the bottle. The cellars at The Mimms were still extremely well stocked, and she saw to it that she controlled access to them. Charles became totally dependent on her. According to Elspeth she treated him like a trained dog, rewarding or punishing him according to performance. When Stephens and Trinder made their attempt to cash in she called their bluff. If they exposed Charles they would get nothing. She must have known that Stephens had killed Samuel, and wouldn't have hesitated to accuse him of doing so, and accuse Trinder of fraud—Charles would have told her of his existence, and everything else. The point was that she had less to lose than they had. All three men could at least have gone to prison for conspiracy to defraud, and Stephens might have faced the death penalty. Knowing her I have no doubt that she saw the blackmail attempt off. Next she had the entail of her father's will broken by Act of Parliament, and then got Charles to make his own will entirely in her favour and organized his affairs to reduce death duties, but interestingly she seems to have done her best to keep him alive well beyond the seven year period. She enjoyed her power over him, I think. It was a sort of revenge on her own father. She lived to be ninety-one. The sale we went to was consequent upon her death. Incidentally, she had never let Charles pay me the allowance he had promised me. Elspeth, on the other hand, when she died in the late Sixties, left me almost everything she possessed. About the others I know nothing, except that Mrs Mkele suffered a stroke while I was still in the army and became completely paralysed and helpless. I don't know when she died. That's all.”

He yawned, looked at the water-clock and rose. The girl made no effort to follow him, though the timer had switched off the central heating hours before and the fire had burnt down almost to ash. He stood looking down at her.

“Do you have anything to say?” he said.

“I don't know. Has it helped, telling me?”

“I shall find out this evening, perhaps. Let's go to bed.”

“I'm too cold to move.”

He bent and without apparent effort, though she cannot have been much lighter than he was, lifted her from the sofa and straightened, holding her to his chest as if posing for a cartoon of a bridal couple entering their first home. After a moment, instead of carrying her through into the bedroom, he lowered her deftly to her feet. The water-clock whispered in the silence.

“I shall have to stop doing that sort of thing one day,” he said.

“Don't.”

“Wheel-chair parts. Fogeys on benches.”

“Please don't.”

“We seem to be a reasonably long-lived family. Eighty or ninety years of total self-dedication in the case of old Sir Arnold and my Cousin May.”

“You're different.”

“Miser leans against the wall and becomes generous.”

“What's that about?”

He let go of her and created by his stance an invisible vertical surface against which he seemed to lean while a look of senile benignity suffused his face.

“It is said to be a Restoration stage-direction,” he said. “Some playwright hacking his way out of his fifth act. I have never found it in print.”

“I don't believe it.”

“The transformation? No more do I—but I could make an audience believe it if I chose.”

“I don't want you to. If I've got a say, I mean. Are you going to send me away?”

“No. Not yet. Not for some while.”

“And I can go on calling you A.?”

“Um. You realize that we have now invested the letter with a meaning? Three weeks ago it was almost anonymous. Now each time you used it you would be making an assertion about who and what I am.”

“It's just a way of saying I love you.”

“Love whom?”

“You.”

He shrugged, hunched, spread his palms and became for an instant his classic Shylock, rejecting mercy as unreasonable. With a twitch he shook the role off him and straightened.

“All right, in private,” he said. “Let's go to bed. Wake me at half past eleven. I'm meeting Robin at half past two to decide how much we can screw Benny for, and then I'll have an hour in the gym and then there's some bloody Dutchwoman coming for an interview … Do you feel up to coming to watch this evening?”

“If you want me to.”

“I don't suppose it's ever crossed your mind to wonder what sort of job Prospero made of ruling Milan when he got home. It might be a help, knowing you're there.”

“All right.”

About the Author

P
eter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of 
Punch
, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.

The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children's literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers' Association for two books running:
Skin Deep
 (1968) and 
A Pride of Heroes
 (1969).

A collection of Dickinson's poetry, 
The Weir
, was published in 2007. His latest book, 
In the Palace of the Khans
, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1988 by Peter Dickinson

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-5040-0490-9

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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