Free Death by Sheer Torture by Robert Barnard Page B

Seduttore! Assassino!’
    It didn’t need even as much as holiday Italian to understand that last one, and to wonder whether it was part of Maria-Luisa’s normal repertoire of abuse, or a statement of fact or opinion.

CHAPTER 7
    THE YOUNGER GENERATION
    I awoke on Friday morning to the sound of policemen in the house. The sound is quite unmistakable, at least to a policeman: heavy men trying to move discreetly. I poked my head round the bedroom door: hordes of them—down in the hall, up the staircase, on the landing. Hamnet was really intending to take the place apart.
    McWatters brought me breakfast on a tray, a substantial and traditional bacon-and-egg affair. He was too sensible to apologize to me for the infestation of policemen. I ate well, then I shaved and dressed and went to see what was going on. If the police were everywhere, the familywas not: only Aunt Sybilla seemed to be around in the main part of the house. I expected her to be creating merry hell, but in fact she was sitting, robed and turbaned, in a small study off the hall, in pensive attitude, as if going through her Blue Period. I slipped in to have a word with Hamnet, and said I thought she was unusually quiet, given the circumstances.
    ‘Used it all up last night,’ said Tim in his phlegmatic way.
    ‘Bad?’
    ‘Incredible. Stood me out it was suicide, or accident, or possibly both. Said she was going to get on the phone to the Home Secretary who was a personal friend, but it turned out she was thinking of the last one but seven. But phew! I think she must be what they call a grande dame.’
    ‘She’d like to think so,’ I said. ‘Did you get anything out of her in the end?’
    ‘Not a thing. As far as movements were concerned, she was in bed. No doubt they all were. As far as motive is concerned, she knew of nothing whatsoever. Everything was hunky-dory.’
    ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine this lot living together and everything being hunky-dory?’
    I told him about the hypothetically missing picture, suggested his searchers should keep their eyes open, pending more details, and then I drifted off into the grounds.
    My idea was that, since it was a fine day, the Squealies might be playing outside, and that I might detach one of the older ones and talk to it in an uncle-like fashion, and perhaps get things out of it that a policeman could not. A pretty fatuous idea, actually, because they did not know me as an uncle and I do look awfully like a policeman. And anyway, as Tim Hamnet found out later, they are only to be detached from one another by the strength of three men. In any case, they weren’t in the grounds—I would have heard them—but I wandered around for a bit, partlyfor old time’s sake, partly to see if anyone would spot me from the window and come out for a chat. I was just standing on the edge of a spinney down by the lake, now thick with weeds, when along came Mordred. I don’t know if he had seen me from the window, but he came purposefully, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, neat and dapper in a tailor-made suit, and looking as if he’d just washed behind both his ears, and felt all the better for it.
    ‘That’s the tree you fell out of when you were five,’ he said, pointing, ‘and that’s the lake you pushed me into when you were ten.’
    He was full of beans, and doing none of the House of the Dead stuff. Still, none of them were.
    ‘What a memory you have,’ I replied in kind. ‘I can see you’re the family historian.’
    ‘For my sins,’ he said with a wry grimace. ‘And until some academic job comes up in somewhere other than Qatar or Abu Dhabi. The damnable thing is, what with the general family publicity mania and now this, if I did ever get the thing finished it would probably be a bestseller. It would sell better than Pete’s magnum opus, anyway.’
    ‘Pete writes, does he?’
    ‘What else?’
    ‘What on?’
    ‘Let him bore you with it. He’ll be delighted. I hear your wife’s coming