Parlour Four

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Thanks for the warning.’ Kidder was nettled. ‘I think I’d rather you went and made a further recce yourself.’

  ‘In fact, you’re rather impressed, but don’t want to go out on a limb about it?’

  ‘You can put it that way. It might just be important. Anything touching on the worldwide and aeons-old tradition of vaticination merits scrutiny by more than one investigator.’

  ‘I rather agree with you there.’

  ‘And either those two women are lying about what Albert Thimble said just then, or we’ve come upon a fairly positive piece of testimony. Isn’t that undeniable?’

  ‘No, it is not. In fact, Kidder, I must tell you that you haven’t quite thought the thing through. Sleep on it further, my dear boy.’ Cudbird, who knew perfectly well that he was being insulting, managed to give this advice with an appearance of the utmost benevolence and good feeling. ‘And I’ll certainly do as you ask, and go out to Plumstead. The road to Endor, eh?’ And the Reader in Parapsychology laughed easily. He seemed actually to believe – Kidder told himself – that he had achieved a witticism.

  At Number 14 Harold Thimble was coming to feel not quite easy in his mind. He believed that he had handled the reporters and ‘feature writers’ pretty well. Almost without exception, they had been easy game. For one thing, they hadn’t armed themselves, as he had done, with a day or two’s crash-course in psychical research. And for another, they weren’t very distinguishably interested in the truth. Investigative journalists (which is what they called themselves) probably came to feel – almost without being conscious of the fact – that too much of the truth is apt to be awkwardly boring. Or so Harold, now so heavily committed to the proposition that fiction has the edge on truth every time, firmly believed.

  It had been different with Kidder, the young man from college, who was apparently some sort of professor’s mate or hodman. Kidder seemed to believe that truth was what was left in the sieve after you’d done a great deal of vigorous riddling, and that it was the part of the package you ought to be interested in. He’d been quite unprepared to buy the notion that Number 14 was a house at which all sorts of unaccountable happenings were lavishly on offer. And yet there were such houses. The books said so. There were the ones, for instance, in which harmless objects kept on tumbling off shelves or even hurtling across the room. Nor had Kidder been interested in Chummy, who could make a mutton bone behave in this satisfactory fashion simply by fixing her eye on it and mewing thrice. Actually, Harold rather regretted the play of his own inventive mind on Chummy, even although ‘Do Cats Have Nine Senses?’ had made a distinctly arresting headline. The business about Chummy seeing things you didn’t see, and being unspeakably terrified as a result, had even brought a man from the Cruelty to Animals, who was quite cross when he found nothing but an obviously contented and well-nourished pet.

  And Samantha was a bother. Samantha was perfectly willing to go along with her brother’s racket so long as there was something in it for her. But by this she didn’t only mean cash. She wanted a role as well. And it had to be a romantic role. Having come across the expression heaven knew where, she had settled for a Demon Lover. Her nightly struggles to maintain her maiden condition against the advances of this monster (robotlike, and lit up from inside as by electricity) would no doubt have made good salacious reading. But Harold had to veto them. They mustn’t, he said, report anything too extravagant.

  But there was a further worry. The Gas Board had, of course, announced the instituting of an immediate inquiry into the disaster at Number 36. But rather a long time had now gone by without any announcement or finding in the matter. This ought not to have affected the Thimbles at all. No Thimble had been an eye-witness, let alone an agent, in the affair, and Albert Thimble’s strange experience, even when vigorously hyped by the joint efforts of his son and the metropolitan press, was none of the Gas Board’s business. Yet the Board had twice sent a nosey fellow along to Number 14, and on the second occasion he was accompanied by a little man who would have been totally undistinguished had he not possessed an intent gaze through a pair of unnaturally pale-blue and glittering eyes. Harold hadn’t a doubt that he belonged to the fuzz. And although Harold’s conscience was clear (or the next thing to it) he found this distinctly disturbing.

  Finally, there was Dad. Albert, although a good deal in awe of the bright speed of his son’s mind, wasn’t at all easy about his own sudden fame. He doubted, he said, whether it was at all good for plumbing. His clientele lay in the main within an unassuming stratum of society, and got the world’s news either from the box or from the kind of newspaper that Harold had so successfully cultivated. People mightn’t greatly fancy having around the house a plumber who perhaps had advance information of what was going to happen to them next week. The Leather Bottle was difficult, too. It chanced to enjoy considerable custom from the local betting fraternity. These people, whether in chaff or because of an honest persuasion of having an oracle in their midst, were inclined to badger Albert about the winner of the next day’s 2.30 at Cheltenham.

  Reviewing these domestic circumstances and the situation in general, Harold felt that the time had come to draw in, as it were, his ectoplasmic horns; to wind up the brief but remunerative history of Number 14 as a kind of fun-fair palace of extrasensory perception. Most of the money from the papers he had managed to keep under his own hand, and it seemed to be enough to start a modest business on. Uncle Ned had probably made do with less. There were risks, of course, but there were chances as well. Youth Redeployment was risk-free – or risk-free if you discounted the possibility of being run over by a bus on the way to it. But on the scale of chances it seemed to Harold to register an absolute zero, whereas a discreet little video ‘library’ or ‘club’ might do very nicely. He had been out one evening in pursuit of this artistic venture when, on getting home, he found his family with a visitor he didn’t much like the look of. Another rozzer, he said to himself at once, like the nasty little man with the pale-blue eyes. Then he saw this wasn’t quite right. Here was just one more journalist, although not quite like those with whom he had recently (and profitably) become familiar. What they called the ‘quality’ press had probably sent this rather senior person. But such persons – supercilious, they’d be – were (to put it mildly) out of place in Pipkin Grove. So Harold decided to begin on the winding-up phase of things pretty vigorously here and now.

  ‘My parents doing the polite, are they?’ he asked the visitor. ‘Well, I’ll tell you something. Enough’s enough, see? We’ve had the bloody media, and you’ll oblige us by fucking off.’

  ‘Really now, Harold!’ Mrs Thimble said.

  ‘Dad here has this strange experience, with Mum and Samantha witnesses to it, don’t forget. And we done our best to satisfy legitimate public curiosity like. But since then our house has had a load of bloody nonsense tipped over it by you and your mob from the papers.’ Harold paused for a moment, perhaps to admire this small exculpatory exercise. Then he rose to more elevated considerations. ‘The claims of science, now: a responsible citizen has to meet them. But he needn’t lend himself to cheap sensation. So just sod off, chum, and do us a favour. Get where you can nose around a bit for a spot of bondage and rape.’

  ‘But Harold, dear, the gentleman is science!’ This came from Mrs Thimble in a kind of wail, and certainly without any consciousness of achieving a trope of rhetoric.

  ‘Are you?’ Harold demanded.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Dr Cudbird (for of course the visitor was he) spoke testily and perhaps without quite considering what he was assenting to. And in one regard, indeed, he was not at the moment personifying science at all well. Instinctively and without having any cool thought to the matter, he was disliking this intolerable young man very much – and he didn’t much care for the young man’s father, either. Moreover, he was rather at a loss how, if at all, to proceed. ‘And my name,’ he managed to add, ‘is Cudbird’.

  There was no reaction to this – nor would
there have been, in all probability, had he said, ‘My name is Ozymandias’ or ‘My name is Might-have-been’ or something similar out of poetry. The young man simply scowled, and took a species of token kick at the Thimble family cat – which had been dozing on the hearthrug without evincing any disposition to see things mere humans didn’t see. But then the elder Mr Thimble spoke.

  ‘Take it easy, son,’ he said. ‘It’s right enough the gent isn’t from the papers. He’s the same as that Kipper was here a matter of days ago. Sent by Kipper, like as not.’

  ‘Kidder,’ Dr Cudbird said with dignity. ‘And Mr Kidder is my Research Assistant.’

  ‘There!’ Albert Thimble said. ‘So you see, son. No word on cash down yet. But it’s not like the papers, with a rush job and a deadline right ahead of them. That’ll come – see?’ The elder Thimble lowered his voice a shade – apparently under the grotesque persuasion that this would render him inaudible to the visitor. ‘And just be civil, Harold. Don’t get putting the gent’s back up. Not prudent, it wouldn’t be. Not after the way we’ve worked it.’

  The elder Mr Thimble’s was clearly not a very lucid mind. There might be much behind this last remark, or there might be almost nothing at all. But it evidently hinted at that element of fraud or absurdity in spite of which – as Cudbird had insisted to his young colleague – psychic research must press on unregarding. Cudbird, however, quite failed to press on now. Prior to Harold Thimble’s arriving home, he had got very little out of Harold’s parents – and out of Samantha Thimble (who appeared to be much attracted to light periodical literature), he had got precisely as much as out of Chummy the unaccountable cat. So that if he left Number 14 forthwith, it would be with a nil score so far as parapsychology was concerned. Nevertheless, he got to his feet without hesitation.

  ‘I must go away at once,’ he said. ‘I have no warrant whatsoever to impose myself on you. I must therefore—’

  ‘Warrant!’ Albert Thimble interrupted – plainly as much in alarm as bewilderment.

  ‘. . . say good-afternoon,’ Cudbird concluded – and he even managed to make the elder Thimbles a kind of formal bow. Harold Thimble, whose language had been so outrageous, he decided to ignore; and as for Samantha, Samantha ignored him. But the order of his going was unimportant. In this wretched little plebeian dwelling he wasn’t merely in the presence of fraud; he was in the presence of fraud and nothing else whatever. Professionally, there was no scrap of evidence upon which to pause. Socially, the occasion had been decidedly not a success. He was glad to leave the dust of Pipkin Grove behind him.

  But – metaphorically, at least – the dust was not so easily shaken off. It turned up in Cudbird’s Department a couple of days later in the form of a plain-clothes policeman – and with so little ceremony that it actually interrupted the Department’s two members endeavouring to make sense of a discouraging mass of statistics unloaded on them by a much larger kindred concern in North Carolina. The policeman (who had piercing light-blue eyes) was, however, properly polite.

  ‘My name’s Gibson,’ he said. ‘I’m troubling you, gentlemen, because I understand you’ve both had some concern with this haunted house.’

  ‘This haunted house?’ Cudbird repeated sternly. (Cudbird detested haunted houses.)

  ‘In Plumstead, sir.’

  ‘Ah, our friends the Thimbles,’ Kidder said. Kidder had what Cudbird considered to be a somewhat insubordinate habit of chipping in. ‘But I’m not clear about the haunting, Mr Gibson. Do you regard Chummy Thimble as a reliable witness?’

  ‘Chummy Thimble, sir?’

  ‘The cat. Chummy Thimble is the Thimble cat. And only Chummy suggests herself as seeing ghosts. Or such is my impression. But undeniably the family Thimble has been going in for miscellaneous supernatural high-jinks for quite some time now.’

  ‘Exactly, sir – and harmless-enough nonsense most of it seems to have been. But there’s been money in it, and the question arises as to whether it has been gained by false pretences.’ With an air of some consequence, Gibson produced a notebook. ‘Hence these enquiries.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Cudbird said.

  ‘Quite wrong,’ Kidder said, promptly and cheerfully. ‘You wouldn’t get any support from the papers that paid for the stuff, since their own journalists must have had a hand in most of it. But I suspect, Inspector, that you’re really after something else. The big bang it all started from, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, Mr Kidder. We’re not happy about that explosion.’

  ‘By which you mean,’ Cudbird asked sharply, ‘the fact, or the assertion, that the elder Thimble knew when it was about to happen?’

  ‘Fair enough, Professor.’ (Gibson clearly felt this to be a judicious form of address.) ‘If something criminal was suspected as being involved, and the whole affair came to court, handling that stuff about precognition – I gather it’s called that – might be uncommonly tricky. I’d like to feel, myself, that we had one or two expert witnesses to call upon.’

  ‘I see.’ It was clear that what Dr Cudbird saw was far from pleasing him. ‘I doubt whether on further thought, Mr Gibson, you will view the matter quite in that light. It is a matter, incidentally, on which I can recall recommending further thought to Mr Kidder here.’

  ‘Or further sleep,’ Kidder said. ‘I was instructed to sleep on it. Quite rightly.’

  ‘In fact,’ Cudbird said, ‘there was nothing precognitive, or parapsychic, or super-what-have-you involved at all. Fraud from start to finish.’

  ‘So Mrs Thimble and her daughter were both lying about the man’s having said, “Now there’s going to be an explosion”, or whatever it was?’

  ‘That’s where I went wrong,’ Kidder said – again cheerfully. ‘Asking that one. The women may have been lying – in which case they are part of a criminal conspiracy – or they may not. At the moment, we can take our choice. Right, Cudbird?’

  ‘Essentially, yes.’ Cudbird appeared to feel that his junior colleague was conducting his part in this discussion with an inappropriate lightness of air. ‘The way I see the matter, Inspector, is this. Harold Thimble – to my mind, a most objectionable young man – is idle and unemployed. He is also clever, and with a smattering of knowledge in one field or another. I seem to recall some poet as remarking that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’

  ‘Alexander Pope,’ Kidder explained to Gibson – and added, ‘Dr Cudbird, you notice, has a smattering of literature.’

  ‘Harold Thimble’—Cudbird ignored this cheap gibe—’evolves a scheme for making a little money out of the popular papers. Something striking must be made to occur in the neighbourhood, and his father is to be represented as the possessor of an abnormal power which gives him prior notice of whatever it may be. That was the general idea.’ Dr Cudbird paused on this. ‘It must be understood, Inspector,’ he added impressively, ‘that at this point I am merely forming a hypothesis.’

  ‘Which can be tested by experiment?’ Kidder asked swiftly.

  ‘My dear young man, we are not in that kind of situation. What we may perhaps hope for is confession.’

  ‘With the Inspector, here, getting out the thumb-screws and giving the rack a thorough dust down? Cudbird, go on.’

  ‘Very well. Let us suppose that Mrs Thimble and her daughter have been telling the truth. It’s my own impression, for what it’s worth, that they have, in fact, been doing so.’

  ‘If we’re to have impressions on the table,’ Kidder said, ‘mine’s the same. The wenches just haven’t got successful lying in them – or not in the face of reasonable interrogation. Inspector, you must have something to say about that. They’re too thick, aren’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it was quite that.’ Gibson shook a misdoubting head. ‘I’ve known very low intelligence go along with successful deception often enough – and under skilled professional questioning, mark you. But I’m bound to say my own impression is the same as yours and Dr Cudbird’s, sir. At least about that first stage of t
he affair, the women are telling the truth. Thimble made that remark, and the explosion followed.’

  ‘Very well,’ Cudbird said. ‘We have a plot incubated by Harold, and with only his father in the know. Just what is required before, so to speak, he can hatch it? Just two things, it seems to me. The first is the ability to cause an explosion in the neighbourhood. A moderate sort of explosion is no doubt what he aimed at: not the horrific affair he eventually achieved. No great difficulty in contriving that. The second thing he required was accurate timing. And what was needed there? I think I can tell you, Inspector.’ Dr Cudbird, although a distinguished scientist, was not above a little dramatic effect, so here he made a short pause. ‘A couple of watches, reasonably synchronised.’

  ‘And that’s it!’ Springing to his feet and glancing at his own watch, Detective-Inspector Gibson might have been calculating just how quickly he could find a magistrate and secure a warrant. ‘Simple fraud from start to finish!’

  ‘Nothing but that,’ Dr Cudbird said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  So Albert Thimble and his son were arrested (or it looked like that) with ignominious publicity – being hustled into a police car while the neighbours gaped, and Mrs Thimble and her daughter wept, and plucky little Chummy Thimble hissed in impotent fury. It was, of course, a serious affair – for had not half of an unoffending citizen ended on a chimney-stack? But although a charge of manslaughter lay with some certainty ahead, Albert and Harold found upon arrival at a police station that they were merely helping the constabulary with their enquiries into the late affair at Number 36 Pipkin Grove. In the following morning’s papers they had become simply ‘two men’. ‘Two men’ etc., were helping the police etc. It was like that, and could so continue to be for some days without legal complications. Few countries are more obviously than England a home of the free.

  But then, on the third day, Dr Cudbird was called to the telephone.