Free Death by Sheer Torture by Robert Barnard Page A

murderous stealth) had crept over to the Gothic wing and snipped through the cord. This would argue, I thought, a certain mechanical aptitude, or that the Squealy in question had watched my father ‘at it’ before. Not impossible. The eldest Squealy was—what?—about ten. Still, I didn’t find it altogether probable. There was also the possibility that the murderer (or the Trethowans in general, closing ranks under attack, as was their wont) would put it about that that was what had happened. Even persuade one of the Squealies to confess. Though that might prove a highly dangerous course.
    But so would be the other possibility: persuading a Squealy to do it and instructing it how. Hideously dangerous. But perhaps not quite so dangerous if the persuader were one of its parents.
    It was just at this point in my perambulations about the great guest bedroom that I thought I heard something. I crossed to the window and stuck out my head: undoubtedly I had heard something, and what it was was sounds of fury, of altercation. And it wasn’t difficult to guess where they came from. I stuck my feet into slippers and quick as a flash I was out of the room, down the great staircase, and out of one of the back doors. I pulled the door to: McWatters had given me all the necessary keys, so I could get back in. I made off through the garden,finding to my pleasure that I knew every tree, every flower-bed. The air was warm and still, the garden a mass of looming, menacing shapes, the moon through the trees highlighting the nearly bare branches. The leaves on the ground were like a pillow under my slippered feet. I skulked towards the Elizabethan wing.
    The two wings on the back of the house were the Florentine wing (occupied by Sybilla and Mordred) and the Elizabethan (occupied by Peter and his brood). It required no great deductive genius to guess that if anyone was bawling their lungs out at twelve o’clock at night, it was likely to come from the Elizabethan wing. I darted from tree to tree, hugging the shade, shunning the moonlight. In no more than a couple of minutes I had landed up safe under an oak, hardly twenty feet from the lighted living-room window.
    And boy! they were really going at it. There was Pete, standing in a filthy old sweater and baggy trousers, his foot resting on a chair, his whisky glass in his hand. And there was Maria-Luisa, hands on her hips, if there were still hips under that great bulging front, tossing her head, bending forward to give point to her hisses of hatred and contempt—looking, in fact, for all the world like Anna Magnani in one of those post-war neo-realistic films. And they were really handing it out, both of them. She, louder and shriller, but he really with considerable expertise and relish. I had to hand it to him: he was holding his own, all right.
    As far as I could make out, of course. Because ninety per cent of all this was going on in Italian, which is really the only language to quarrel in. They made such good use of it that I don’t think I missed all that much, artistically, by not understanding: this wasn’t an exercise in logic. Still, as a policeman I would dearly like to have known what it was all about. Now and then Pete would let fly with a phrase or two in English: ‘You stupid bitch, you’vegot it wrong as usual’ was one; ‘Why don’t you fucking learn English, then you might understand what’s going on?’ was another. These were phrases principally for his own satisfaction: it was like shouting insults at a Lambretta. On and on she went, higher and higher, working herself up to a final orgasm of fury.
    I noticed, while this process was at a point of screw-turning tension, that her eye was suddenly caught by her own whisky glass standing on the table, and if Pete hadn’t been shouting so hard he might have noticed too. Advancing a step, she seized it in her capable kitchen hands and launched it with its contents straight at his head.
    ‘Bruto! Barbaro!