Death by Sheer Torture by Robert Barnard Page B

it were?’
    ‘Pretty much at leisure,’ I said.
    ‘Could I have a word with you, old man? Nothing frightfully important, but —’
    I strolled over to him. ‘But—?’
    ‘But . . . I’d just like a word,’ he concluded feebly. He was in that denim suit again, which made him look ten years older than his real age. Have you noticed it’s only aging phoneys who wear denim suits? Well, it is, exclusively. This phoney had a bad bruise over his left eye, and I asked with concern: ‘Been in an accident?’
    ‘My marriage is one long accident,’ said Pete gloomily. The sound of the Squealies, playfully scalping each other several floors up, lent point to his remark. ‘I say, I’ll come round to the side door and let you in.’
    ‘Don’t bother,’ I said, easing myself up on to the window ledge and swivelling my legs round into the room.
    ‘Maria-Luisa’s all het up about security. Every door locked, and bolts on the one through to the main house. Crazy bitch. That’s what comes of being born and bred among the Mafia.’
    Peter and Maria-Luisa’s sitting-room was a fairly comfortable affair, with a lot of ’thirties furniture retrieved from the main house, or perhaps left in this wing by Aunt Eliza. There was no great impress of personality on the room, however, unless it was the untidy scattering of books and papers around the place, which could have been strewn for my benefit.
    ‘Excuse the mess,’ said Peter perfunctorily. ‘This is the overflow from my study.’
    ‘I hear you write,’ I said. (I would never have dreamt, by the way, of giving him an opening like that if it wasn’tthat I knew I had to find out something about him and his life.)
    ‘Mmmm,’ said Peter. ‘At the moment I’m reviewing. A load of sex books, for the New Spectator.’ He gestured towards the sofa, where lay a disorder of books, among them such surefire American best-sellers as Sex and the Stock-Market by Theodore S. Rosenheim and Is There Sex After Death? by Dr Philip Krumm-Kumfitt.
    ‘I’m pretty much the New Spectator’s sex man these days,’ said Peter contentedly.
    ‘Really?’ (Well, you think of a reply to that.)
    ‘What with that and the novel, I’ve got my hands full,’ he went on, with killing casualness.
    ‘Novel?’ I said, playing my part like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
    ‘Ye-e-es,’ said Peter, as if reluctant to speak of it, but since I’d brought the topic up . . . ‘A really big one, something on the scale of the old three-volume affairs.’
    ‘Have you got far with it?’
    ‘Oh, so-so.’ He gestured with his hands, as if to indicate a thick pile. ‘I write reams and discard a lot. Discard the whole time. I’m a perfectionist.’
    ‘What . . . sort of thing is it?’
    ‘Well, you know, novels today are all niminy-piminy little affairs, written by housewives between the nappy-changes, or academics in their summer hols. God! British novels these days are so unambitious! They’re positively anaemic.’
    ‘Yours will have blood, will it?’
    ‘I see it as a sort of sexual odyssey, if you see what I mean, combined . . . com bined with an enormous social conspectus, a sort of diagnosis of current social ills, get what I mean? Bleak House was the model I had in mind.’
    ‘I should have thought Nightmare Abbey might be a more appropriate model for someone living at Harpenden,’ I said.
    He looked at me closely. ‘You don’t like us very much, do you, Perry?’
    I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I only meant this house can’t be the most peaceful place for a writer to work in.’
    Peter wagged a fat finger at me. ‘It’s having the leisure that counts, it’s not being a part-time writer. It’s only the old upper classes—the rem nants of the upper classes—that have the time to conceive anything really big these days. Look at your father —’
    ‘He never conceived anything bigger than a musical fart in his whole life,’ I protested.
    ‘Well, he was a bit different,’