Free The Old English Peep Show by Peter Dickinson

none of his brother’s exaggerated strut; he wore a quiet tweed suit; his voice was quiet, too, almost a murmur.
    â€œCome along, Superintendent,” he said, “you’re just in time. Want a pee?”
    â€œNo, thank you.”
    â€œCome in, then; we all help ourselves and are very informal.”
    He led the way into a room on the right-hand side of the passage. Really it was no more than a paneled nook left over from the construction of two shapelier rooms; a circular rosewood table nearly filled it. Mr. Singleton and a girl were talking over on the far side, by a crowded hot plate.
    â€œThat smells good,” said the Admiral. “Pheasant stew. Waste of good meat to roast them, don’t you agree, Superintendent?” He rubbed his pale hands together. His face was pale, too, with no tan to hide the lichenlike marks of old age; but apart from that and the absence of a mustache and the trimmer eyebrows, he really was astonishingly like his brother. Carried his head at a different angle, perhaps …
    â€œI think you’ve met my nephew,” he said. “Judith, this is Superintendent Pibble, who has come to sort us out; Superintendent, this is our secretary, Judith Scoplow.”
    Nothing special about her, really: a tall girl with a flat, pale face and hair that would probably have been mouse without the help of a copper rinse. She wore it lightly backcombed into a sort of half helmet, kept in place by a broad brown Alice band.
    â€œHow do you do,” she said, and at once Pibble looked at her again. There was something special about her, once you had heard the voice; something happy, easy, confident, innocent; something dizzily out of keeping with this mansion of rich decay. Despite a couple of pimples below the corner of her wide mouth, she was beautiful, too. Pibble revised an earlier guess: the General’s staglike strut down the steps had not meant he was on his way to visit a woman—it meant he had just been talking with one, had just seized an opportune half minute to sniff the deliriant bouquet of youth.
    Queuing for his pheasant stew, Pibble struggled with the sense of having met someone like her in the past. (He struggled, too, with the knowledge that she was the kind of woman who would have that effect on men, a barely sophisticated variant of the urge to say “Haven’t I met you before?”) He was disconcerted out of both struggles by his encounter with the stewpot, which turned out to contain chunks of bird in a sauce heavy with cream and brandy; there was a little dish of fried diced apple by the side. Left to itself, his subconscious did the trick—that girl in the Salinski case! He was so pleased with himself that he took a double helping of creamed potatoes.
    Anne something. And Salinski (fortyish, shiny-bald, dapper) had faked a brake failure and let his new Rover run over a cliff with his smart little wife in it, all on the strength of a barely more than nodding acquaintance with this Anne. Again, it had been only when she’d answered Pibble’s first question—there’d been a smell of collusion because Salinski had tried to use her as an element in his timetable alibi—that Pibble had realized that Salinski was perfectly sane. And in the end both counsels, for defense and prosecution, had outdone each other in courtesies, the judge had been a shade more than paternal, and several hard-nosed reporters had attempted to play down her role in their copy. Poor little pigeon, by the time she stepped down from the witness box she was the only person in the whole court who still didn’t understand how Salinski could have done such a thing. And here was another of them. Well, well; no wonder the General had gone down toward his phallic car with the swagger of a hart at leaf fall.
    â€œCome and sit here, my dear fellow, and tell me tall stories about life as a famous policeman.” The Admiral was pulling out a chair on his