Death by Sheer Torture Read Online Free Page A

year?’
    ‘I heard she had some kind of . . . breakdown,’ I ventured.
    ‘All that wonderful strength of mind—gone! As you can see. Now, you say there is no chance at all of keeping all this absolutely quiet?’
    ‘None at all, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Well, then, we’ll have to make the most of it,’ said Aunt Sybilla, with something like a happy smile on her face.
    ‘I don’t quite know what you mean by that, Aunt Sybilla, but . . .’
    ‘Now never you mind, Peregrine. You leave this to me. I know the press! I’ve been dealing with them for years! Meanwhile you — since you are here, by happy chance—can help me by being my liaison with the gentlemen of the Police! You must know this man they’ve sent. Get in with him! Find out what he’s up to! And I can feed judicious fragments of information to my friends. Oh, by the way, you will stay for the funeral, won’t you?’
    ‘I —’
    ‘Then that’s settled. I’ll go and tell McWatters to get a spare room ready. Your father’s wing—?’
    ‘Well, there are places I’d rather —’
    ‘Splendid, that’s settled. And I’ll tell Mrs McWatters there’ll be one extra for dinner. I’ll try and get all thefamily there for dinner, a real reunion. That will be nice, won’t it?’
    ‘Yes, well, perhaps I’d better go and see Superintendent Hamnet.’
    ‘No hurry, Peregrine dear. Do finish those sandwiches. You do look as if you need an . . . awful lot of food.’
    And she tottered out with the tinkling laugh that had echoed through the smaller London theatres on dress-rehearsal days in the ’thirties. I took another sandwich and was just stuffing it into my mouth (to get a healthy sized bite) when she surprised me by putting her birdlike head round the door again.
    ‘Oh, by the way, are you married, Peregrine?’
    ‘Yes, I am actually. But —’
    ‘Splendid. Thought I ought to know. I didn’t want to make another false step —like about the police. Do gobble up all those, won’t you? Dinner’s not until eight thirty.’
    I cursed her, but I did as I was told. I took up the plate and stood with it in the centre of that enormous room. Chomping away, with Trethowanian irreverence, I gazed at the portrait of my great-grandfather. I winked at it, but it was one of those portraits that could never, by any stretch of the imagination, seem to wink back. I looked at the enormous, wonderfully literal Victorian story-telling canvases: The Love Potion; The Capulets’ Ball; Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath. They had been on the family walls over a period so long that their critical esteem must have done a graph rather like a political party’s between general elections.
    Then I looked at the portraits—by my dead aunt, Elizabeth Trethowan. The witty, affectionate one of her father (my grandfather, the first actual occupant of this elephantine monstrosity of a house). Then the little group of pictures of her brothers and sisters, done just after the war: Lawrence, posing like mad as the Man of Letters; Kate—stern in greens and khakis; my father, lookingevery inch a minor composer. And my eye came to rest on the picture of Sybilla—all bright modern blues, greys and pinks, colours which highlighted the crow’s feet around the eyes, the discontented droop of the mouth, the souring of the bright little talent of ten or fifteen years earlier.
    I have always said that Aunt Eliza was the only one of the family with talent. I’d go further: there was a touch of genius about the work of Aunt Eliza at her peak. And she was dead these twenty years or more, leaving behind the brood of siblings that had swung merrily into the glare of publicity on the skirt-tails of her gifts. ‘That enormously vital and gifted family,’ The Times had generously called them. Us. No, it was wrong. There was really only one Trethowan.

CHAPTER 3
    THE PAINFUL DETAILS
    Eventually it had to be faced up to. I supposed that Hamnet was still at work in my father’s wing of the