'Go see for yourselves,' she cried and scuttled into her room. Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode went cautiously up the stairs.
'If as you say the woman is non compos mentis' said Mr Bullstrode, 'that only makes what has just occurred all the more regrettable. Having parted with her mind she has also relinquished any right to the estate under the will thus negating the necessity for that disgusting foreigner's statement.'
'Not to mention the swine's death,' said Dr Magrew. 'I suppose we had better pay our compliments to Edwin.'-
They turned towards old Mr Flawse's bedroom while at the foot of the stairs Mr Dodd tried to dissuade them.
'He's not seeing anyone,' be shouted but the truth of this remark escaped them. By the time Lockhart, coming stealthily up the back stairs to avoid being kicked in the groin by his demented mother-in-law, arrived, the landing was empty and Dr Magrew had taken his stethoscope out and was applying it to Mr Flawse's chest. It was not the wisest of moves and Mr Flawse's subsequent ones were appalling to behold. Either the doctor's bedside manner or Mr Bullstrode's accidental treading on the remote control activated the mechanism for the old man's partial animation. His arms waved wildly, the tiger's eyes rolled in his head, his mouth opened and shut and his legs convulsed. Only the sound was off, the sound and the bedclothes which his legs kicked off the bed so that the full extent of his rewiring was revealed. Mr Taglioni had not chosen the kindest spot for the wires to extrude and they hung like some terrible electronic urethra. As Mr Taglioni had said at the time, it was the last place anyone examining him would think of looking. It was certainly the last place Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode wanted to look but by the very complexity of the wires they couldn't take their eyes off the thing.
'The junction box and earth,' Lockhart explained adding a cricketing term to their confusion, 'and the aerial. The amplifier is under the bed and I've only got to turn the volume up…'
'Don't, for God's sake, don't do anything of the sort,' pleaded Mr Bullstrode, unable to distinguish between spatial volume and output and convinced that he was about to be privy to an erection. Mr Flawse's reactions were awful enough without that dreadful addition.
'I've got him on ten watts per channel,' Lockhart went on but Dr Magrew interrupted. 'As a medical man I have never been in favour of euthanasia,' he gasped, 'but there's such a thing as sustaining life beyond the bounds of human reason and to wire a man's… ' Dear God!'
Ignoring Mr Bullstrode's plea Lockhart had turned the volume up and besides twitching and jerking the old man now gave voice,
'Twas ever thus with us,' he bellowed, a statement Dr Magrew felt certain must be untrue, 'Flawse blood runs in our veins and carries with it the bacteria of our ancestral sins. Aye, sins and sanctity so intertwined there's many a Flawse gone to the block a martyr to his forebears' loves and lusts. Would that it were not so, this determinism of inheritance, but I have known myself too well to doubt the urgency of my inveterate desires…'
There was equally no doubting the urgency of Dr Magrew's and Mr Bullstrode's desires. They wanted to get the hell out of the room and away as fast as their legs would carry them but the magnetism of the old man's voice (the cassette was labelled 'Flawse, Edwin Tyndale, Self-Opinions of) held them – that and Lockhart and Mr Dodd standing implacably between them and the door.
'And I must say, congenitally speaking, that I am as much a moss trooper at heart as I am an Englishman and a man of so-called civilization, albeit that civilization to which I was born and bred has gone and taken with it that pride in being an Englishman which so sustained us in the past. Where is the proud craftsman now, and where the self-reliance of the working man? Where too the managers of men and great machines that were the envy of the world? All gone and in their place the Englishman a beggar has become, the world's beggar, whining cap in hand for alms to help support him though he does no work nor now produces goods the world will buy. All cloth is shoddy and all standards dropped. And this because no politician dared to tell the truth but bowed and cringed and bought their votes to empty power by promises as empty as themselves. Such scum as Wilson, aye and Tories too, would make Keir Hardy and Disraeli both agree, this was not their meaning of democracy, this bread and circuses that makes of men a mass and then despises them. So has old England gone to pot since I was born and laws being broken by the men who passed them from Bills to Acts of Parliament, being broken by the Ministers themselves, what law is left a man should now obey when all are outlawed by bureaucracy. Aye, bureaucrats who pay themselves with money begged and borrowed, or stolen from the pockets of the working man. These civil-service maggots on the
body politic who feed upon the rotting corpse of England that they killed… .'
Lockhart switched the old man off and Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode breathed a sigh of terrible relief. It was short-lived. Lockhart had more in store for them.
'I had him stuffed,' he said proudly, 'and you, doctor, proclaimed him healthy when he was already dead. As Dodd's my witness so you did.'
Mr Dodd nodded. 'I heard the doctor so proclaim,' he said. Lockhart turned to Mr Bullstrode. 'And you were instrumental in the killing of my father,' he said. 'The sin of patricide…,' 'I did nothing of the sort,' said the solicitor. 'I refuse…' 'Did you or did you not draw up my grandfather's will?' he asked. Mr Bullstrode said nothing. 'Aye, you did and thus we three all stand convicted of complicity in murder. I would have you consider the consequences carefully.'
Already it seemed to Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode that in Lockhart's voice they heard the unmistakable tone of the old man sitting stuffed beside them, the same unshakable arrogance and that dread logic that neither port nor learned disputation nor, now it seemed, even death could totally dispel. They followed his instructions to the letter and considered the consequences very well indeed.
'I must confess to finding myself perplexed,' said Mr Bullstrode finally. 'As your grandfather's oldest friend I feel bound to act to his best advantage and in a way he would have liked.'
'I doubt very much he would have liked being stuffed,' said Dr Magrew. 'I know I wouldn't.'
'But on the other hand, as an officer of the law and a Commissioner of Oaths I have my duty to perform. My friendship contradicts my duty. Now if it were possible to say that Mr Taglioni died a natural death…' He looked expectantly at Dr Magrew. 'I can't believe a coroner would find the circumstances propitious to such a verdict. A man chained by his wrists to a wall may die a natural death but be chose an unnatural position to do it in.'
There was a gloomy silence and finally Mr Dodd spoke. 'We could add him to the contents of the cucumber frames,' he said.
'The contents of the cucumber frames?' said Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode simultaneously, but Lockhart ignored their curiosity.
'My grandfather expressed a wish not to be buried,' he said, 'and I intend to see his wishes carried out.'
The two old men looked unwillingly at their dead friend. 'I cannot see him sitting to anyone's advantage in a glass case,' said Dr Magrew, 'and it would be a mistake to suppose we can maintain the fiction of his life perpetually. I gather that his widow knows.'
Mr Dodd agreed with him.
'On the other hand,' said Lockhart, 'we can always bury Mr Taglioni in his place. Grandfather is so jointed it would take a conspicuously right-angled coffin to fit him in and I don't suppose the publicity attached to such a contraption would do us any good.'
Mr Bullstrode and Dr Magrew were of the same opinion.
'Then Mr Dodd will find him a suitable sitting place,' said Lockhart, 'and Mr Taglioni will have the honour of joining the Flawse ancestors at Black Pockrington. Dr Magrew, I trust you have no objections to making out a certificate of death, of natural death, for my grandfather?'