Free Death by Sheer Torture by Robert Barnard

if Cristobel had ever wanted a reconciliation between me and the family. At times like this, you know, nasty thoughts even about the comparatively near and dear do occur to one.
    I put on pyjamas and went over to the desk, where my notebook lay, white and inviting. I opened the window: the night air outside was warm, even heavy. It was early autumn—season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Or of decay and death, if you are in that frame of mind. I sat at the great Victorian desk, big enough to store a couple of bodies in, drew my notebooks towards me and took up my pen.
    ‘Why that way?’ was the first thing I wrote.
    I’d told Joe that that was just the way one of my family would kill somebody, and I held by that. Still, almost any other way would have been quicker, cleaner, safer. Whoever did it must surely have been seen by my father to do it. And there was no guarantee that my father would not be heard, crying for help. I jotted down: ‘Lights on’. It was a spectacular but exceedingly dangerous way of getting rid of anybody, and it almost suggested that the method was part of the point—that the murder was some kind of appropriate revenge, some ghastly tit-for-tat affair.
    Which in its turn suggested some victim of my father’s peculiarly perverted mind.
    I next wrote: ‘Scissors? Knife? Where are they?’
    Whatever it was had been used, it was in effect the murder implement, and would have to be found, even if it brought us no closer to any particular individual. Andthat, to a practical policeman, immediately suggested an army of PCs swarming through the house. If a proper search of the house were to be made, let alone of the grounds, it would take days. Which would not please Aunt Sybilla. But perhaps I could suggest they search for the missing picture at the same time?
    I wrote. ‘Picture. Get description. Painter.’
    Then I wrote: ‘Financial situation. Not just Father’s. Lawrence’s. All the rest too.’
    That, surely, Tim Hamnet would do. I hoped Chrissy would be left fairly well off—a tidy sum would be only her just deserts. My father, though, when I knew him, was not careful with money, even though he had always hated to be swindled. He was the last person in the world to care whether anybody else would be well off or hard up after he died. Lawrence should be very comfortably off. With the house, in the male line, went a hell of a lot of money. But these days, none of the whacking fortunes were quite what they were. There had been inflation, the house itself must be a terrible millstone, there was Peter, who seemed to have no visible means of support. Day-to-day living in the house seemed much more frugal than in my time. Was Lawrence becoming miserly in his old age, as so frequently happened, or were there solid reasons for the frugality? At least the house—that is, Lawrence—had tremendous assets, of every kind.
    I wrote down: ‘Pictures. Worth how much?’
    The Times kept me informed of saleroom prices. Little-known Victorian painters were often fetching quite fantastic sums these days. Not to mention the moderns—and under Aunt Eliza’s supervision quite a lot of first-rate stuff had been bought for Harpenden in the ’twenties and ’thirties. Interesting.
    On the other hand, it was not immediately apparent how the financial state of the head of the family could have any bearing on the death of my father.
    I got up and walked around a bit. There was this to be said about Harpenden: it gave you room to move about. Hour by hour, in fact, I felt myself expanding. Space itself took on a new dimension, and I felt in a relation to things quite different from the one I was in in the little flat in Maida Vale, where the three of us lived. Thinking about us I thought about Daniel, and thinking about Daniel I (most unfairly) thought about the Squealies. There was the possibility that one of them (not all together, surely—I could not imagine all five of them moving through the house with