"It was something that only a mother would do," I said. "She couldn't resist. Grace Ingleby wanted her son to be presentable when he was found, hanging by the neck, dead in Gibbet Wood."
"Good Lord!" Inspector Hewitt said.
* TWENTY-NINE *
"GOOD LORD," FATHER EXCLAIMED. "There's Broadcasting House. They've set up cameras in Portland Place."
He got up from his chair for the umpteenth time and hurried across the drawing room to twiddle with the knobs on the television receiving set.
"Please be quiet, Haviland," Aunt Felicity said. "If they were interested in your commentary, the BBC would have sent for you."
Aunt Felicity, who had barely got home to Hampstead, had hurried back again to Buckshaw as soon as the idea came into her head. She had hired the television for the occasion ("at ruinous expense," she hastened to point out), and because of it, was now enjoying vastly increased dictatorial powers.
Early in the morning of the previous day, the workmen had begun erecting a receiving aerial on the ramparts of Buckshaw.
"It needs to be high enough to pick up the signal from the new transmitting tower at Sutton Coldfield," Aunt Felicity had said, in a voice that suggested television was her own invention. "I had wanted all of us to go up to London to attend the Porson obsequies," she went on, "but when Lady Burwash let slip that the Sitwells were having in the telly ...
"No, no, don't protest, Haviland. It's educational. I'm only doing it for the good of the girls."
Several muscular workers, dressed in overalls, had lugged the set from the back of a pantechnicon and into the drawing room. There it now crouched, its single gray eye staring, like a flickering Cyclops, at those of us gathered in its baleful glow.
Daffy and Feely were huddled together on a chesterfield, feigning boredom. Father had invited the vicar and told them to watch their language.
Mrs. Mullet was enthroned in a comfortable wing-backed chair, and Dogger, who preferred not to sit in Father's presence, stood silently behind her.
"I wonder if they have televisions in Portland Place," Feely said, idly, "or whether they might, rather, be looking out their windows?"
I recognized this at once as an attempt to twit Father, whose contempt for television was legendary.
"Television is a bauble," he would reply, whenever we pleaded with him to have a receiver installed. "If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air, He'd have never given us the cinema.
"Or the National Gallery," he'd add sourly.
But in this case, he had been overruled.
"But it's History, Haviland," Aunt Felicity had said in a loud voice. "Would you have denied your daughters the opportunity to watch Henry the Fifth address his men on Crispin's Day?"
She had taken up a stance in the middle of the drawing room.
— Nonsense! — Father said, but Aunt Felicity, like Henry the Fifth, pushed on, undaunted:
— That's all very well and good, but they didn't have television in 1415, — Father had said rather sullenly, missing her point entirely.
But then, yesterday, something remarkable had happened. One of the mechanics, who had been in the drawing room with his eye intently upon the receiver, had begun calling instructions out the window to a companion on the lawn, who relayed them, in a drill-sergeant voice, to the man on the roof.
— Hold it, Harry! Back ... back ... back. No ... you've lost it. Back t'other way ...
At that very moment, Father had walked into the room, planning, I think, to heap scorn upon the entire operation, when his eye was taken by something on the snow-blown screen.
— Stop! — he shouted, and his word was passed along in ever-diminishing echoes by the mechanics, out the window and up onto the ramparts.
— By George, — he said. — It's the 1856 British Guiana. Back a little! — he shouted, waving his hands to illustrate.
Again his instructions were carried aloft in a verbal bucket brigade, and the picture cleared a little.
— Just as I thought, — he said. — I'd know it anywhere. It's coming to auction. Turn up the sound.
As Fate would have it, the BBC was at that moment transmitting a program on the topic of stamp collecting, and a moment later, Father had pulled up a chair, fastened his wire-framed spectacles on the end of his nose, and refused to be budged.
— Quiet, Felicity! — he barked, when she tried to intervene. — This is of the utmost importance.
And so it was that Father had allowed the One-Eyed Beast to sit in his drawing room.
At least for the time being.
And now, as the hour drew near for Rupert's inhumation (a word I had heard Daffy trot out for Mrs. Mullet's benefit), Dogger drifted off to the foyer to admit the vicar who, even though he was not conducting the funeral, nevertheless felt the professional necessity of wringing the hands of each of us as he came into the room.
— Dear, dear, — he said. — And to think that the poor chap expired right here in Bishop's Lacey.
No sooner had he taken a seat on the sofa than the doorbell sounded again, and a few moments later Dogger returned with an unexpected guest.
— Mr. Dieter Schrantz, — he announced at the door, slipping effortlessly back into his role as butler.
Feely sprang to her feet, and came floating across the drawing room to greet Dieter, hands outstretched, palms down, as if she were walking in her sleep.
She was radiant, the vixen!
I was praying she'd trip on the rug.
— Draw the drapes, please, Dogger, — Father said, and as Dogger complied, the light vanished from the room and left all of us sitting together in the gloom.
Into view on the little tube, as I have said, floated the wet pavement of Portland Place in front of Broadcasting House, as the hushed and solemn voice of the BBC announcer took up the tale (it may have been Richard Dimbleby, or perhaps it was just someone who sounded like him):
— And now, from every corner of the realm, come the children. They are brought here today by their mothers and fathers, their nurses, their governesses, and some few, I daresay, by their grandparents.
They have been standing here in Portland Place for hours in the rain, young and old, each patiently waiting his or her turn to bid a last, sad farewell to the man who captivated their hearts; to pay their respects to Rupert Porson, the genius who kidnapped them every afternoon at four from their everyday lives and, like the Pied Piper, led them away into his Magic Kingdom....
Genius? Well, that was stretching things a bit. Rupert was a brilliant showman; there was no doubt about it. But genius? The man was a scoundrel, a womanizer, a bully, a brute.
But did that disqualify him from being a genius? I don't suppose it did. Brains and morals have nothing to do with one another. Take myself, for instance: I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.