Free Ancestral Vices by Tom Sharpe

doctors got to their feet rather awkwardly.
    ‘Well, someone certainly tried to kill him. His bedroom’s been wrecked. He must have put up a terrific struggle.’
    ‘If you’re looking for a culprit I’d turn your attention to him,’ said Mrs Billington-Wall, indicating Walden Yapp, who was hesitating with every symptom of guilt written all over him halfway down the stairs. ‘And if you don’t take that mask off the old fellow’s face you’ll be to blame yourselves.’
    Walden Yapp waited no longer. The conviction that he had been lured to the house less by a hoaxer than by someone determined to have him pulped and scalded to death in that fearful bath had been made less tenable by the sight of Lord Petrefact lying bleeding and clearly
in
extremis
on the floor. He was trying to deduce why the doctors were wrestling with Croxley when that snob of a woman intervened to point the finger of guilt at him. He could see himself being made the scapegoat for whatever crime had been committed. As the doctors moved towards the stairs and Mrs Billington-Wall uncoupled Lord Petrefact from the life-support system that was slowly killing him, Walden Yapp panicked. He turned and ran back along the landing and down the corridor. Behind him the doctors’ footsteps urged him on but before he could decide where to go, and anywhere was preferable to the King Albert suite, they had turned the corner. Yapp tried a door and found it unlocked. He shot inside, slammed it behind him and looked for the key. There was no key. Or if there was it was on the other side. For a second he considered barricading the door with whatever furniture he could find but the curtains were drawn and the room in semi-darkness. It was also bare and apart from what looked like a rocking-horse he could see nothing useful. Instead he stood silently against the wall and hoped to hell they hadn’t seen him enter.
    But the footsteps had stopped and some muttering was going on in the corridor. Those ghastly creatures in white coats were evidently conferring. Then he heard Croxley speak.
    ‘It’s the old nursery. He won’t be able to get out of there.’ A key turned in the lock, the footsteps retreated, and Walden Yapp was left alone with the rocking-horse and his own tormented thoughts. By the time he hadexamined the room more thoroughly and discovered the barred windows he could see what Croxley meant about not being able to get out, though what ferocious children had required such thick bars to contain them he couldn’t imagine. But then Fawcett House was filled with so many extraordinary features that it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that the nursery had once been used to house a baby gorilla. It seemed unlikely, but that fucking bath had seemed unlikely too and he wasn’t going near the rocking-horse for fear it turned into a synchronized one. Instead he sat down in a corner and tried to take his mind off his own misery by studying those of the knife-grinders in Sheffield in 1863.
    By the time Croxley and the resuscitation team returned to the hall Mrs Billington-Wall had taken control.
    ‘You’ll take him upstairs and give him a bed-bath and a fresh pair of pyjamas and put him to bed,’ she told the doctors. ‘And don’t argue with me. There’s nothing the matter with him that a good rest and some disinfectant won’t put right. Scalp wounds always bleed profusely. I wasn’t a FANY for nothing you know.’ Croxley looked at her doubtfully and wondered. Mrs Billington-Wall was not a prepossessing woman but in wartime men were desperate . . . On the other hand he wasn’t looking forward to Lord Petrefact’s reaction when he recovered consciousness and voiced his opinions about guests who wrecked bathrooms and put his life in danger, wheelchairs, medical teams and almost certainly that damnedpig, and it might be an advantage to have him immobilized upstairs on Mrs Billington-Wall’s instructions. Croxley made himself scarce while the