Completely crestfallen and not daring to continue with his examination of the car, Gregory walked away, his head lowered and his back hunched.
Before he reached the subway he had regained his composure, at least to the extent that he was able to go over the ridiculous incident in the courtyard — ridiculous, he thought, to have allowed it to upset him. Gregory was almost certain he had seen Sciss’s car in downtown London that afternoon. He hadn’t noticed the driver, but it was the same car all right — there was a distinctive dent in the rear bumper. At the time Gregory hadn’t paid much attention to the car. The chance incident did not begin to take on significance until later, when Sciss claimed to have gone to the doctor by subway rather than by car. The discovery that Sciss was lying wasn’t too important in itself, but, Gregory felt, if he had known earlier in the evening he would have been somewhat less scrupulous and cautious in his behavior toward the scientist; furthermore, it would have counteracted the feeling of compassion which had overcome him during the unfortunate visit. Gregory still didn’t know anything definite, however, and whatever certainty he could derive from his afternoon observation of the car was based on a wretched “maybe” and thus didn’t count for much. His only satisfaction came from knowing he had discovered an inconsistency in what Sciss had told him. Sciss had gotten rid of him by claiming he had work to do, but instead of working he had done nothing but lounge around the window. Gregory remembered Sciss’s state during the visit: his listless body, the inclination of his head, his exhausted leaning against the window frame. But if Sciss’s fatigue was the ultimate cause of their disagreement, Gregory had not taken advantage of it, ultimately, because of a stupid gallantry which prevented him from exploiting his opponent’s moment of weakness and made him leave the apartment perhaps no more than a minute before the decisive words were uttered.
Drawn into a labyrinth of possibilities by these thoughts, Gregory, impotently angry, wanted only to return home and study the facts in his thick notebook.
It was almost eleven o’clock when he got off the subway. Just before turning the corner to the Fenshawe house, he passed a blind beggar stilting in a niche in the wall of a building, a bald, ugly mongrel at his feet. The beggar had a harmonica, but blew into it only when someone was approaching, using it as a signal without any pretence of making music. It was impossible to determine his age, his clothing providing more clues than his face, which was hidden by a nondescript beard. Returning home late at night or leaving before daybreak, Gregory always met the same beggar in the same place, like an inescapable pang of conscience. The Beggar was as much a part of the neighborhood landscape as the big bay windows of the house in front of which he sat, and although Gregory was a policeman and the police regulations prohibited begging, it never occurred to him that he was tacitly consenting to his presence and thus was a party to a misdemeanor.
Gregory never gave much thought to the beggar — in fact, the old man’s clothing was so filthy that the very sight of him aroused disgust — but the beggar, nonetheless, must have stirred something in his memory; indeed, awakened feelings deep in his subconscious, for Gregory always quickened his pace almost involuntarily when passing him. Gregory never gave anything to beggars: it had nothing to do with his profession, nor was he an unkind person; perhaps the cause was some indefinable shame. This evening, though, having already passed the old man’s post, spotting the dog crouching at his side (sometimes he felt sorry for the dog), Gregory surprised himself by turning and walking over to the dark wall, taking some money out of his pocket as he did so. There followed one of those insignificant little incidents that one never mentions to others and remembers ever afterward with an indescribable feeling of distress. Assuming the beggar would reach out to accept it, Gregory extended the hand with the money into the vague darkness of the niche. When he did, however, his fingers brushed against those disgusting, filthy rags. The same thing happened again and again; the beggar grotesquely lifted his harmonica to his lips and began blowing. Overcome by a feeling of revulsion, and unable to find a pocket in the torn material covering the huddled body, Gregory blindly threw the money down and backed away. Something clattered at his feet — in the weak light of the street lamp he saw that it was his own coin rolling after him. Gregory picked it up and impulsively pressed it into the darkened indentation in the wall. He was answered by a hoarse, stifled groan. Desperate now, Gregory rushed home, taking such long strides that he seemed to be running. He didn’t recover from his agitation until he had reached the front of his house. Then, seeing a light in the window of his room, he ran upstairs without any of his usual caution, reaching the door slightly out of breath. He stood in front of the door for a moment, listening carefully. Not a sound. Glancing at his watch again — it was 11:15 — he opened the door. Sitting and reading at Gregory’s desk, just in front of the glass doors opening on the terrace, was Sheppard. He raised his head from the book:
“Good evening, Lieutenant,” said the Chief Inspector. “It’s about time you got here.”
5
Gregory was so taken aback that he couldn’t answer for a moment. He stood in the doorway without removing his hat, a foolish expression on his face. Sheppard smiled faintly.
“Why don’t you close the door?” he said at last, when the tongue-tied scene had dragged on a little too long. Pulling himself together, Gregory hung up his coat and shook hands with the Chief Inspector, watching him expectantly.
“I came over to find out what you accomplished at Sciss’s place,” said Sheppard, sitting down at the desk again and resting his elbow on the book he had been reading. The Chief Inspector spoke calmly, as usual; detecting a note of irony in the word accomplished, however, Gregory adopted a tone of naive sincerity in his reply.
“But Chief Inspector,” he babbled, “all you had to do was tell me you were interested, and I would have phoned you. That doesn’t mean I’m not glad to see you, of course, but why did you bother to go out of your way —” Sheppard, however, made no effort to carry his end; it was clear that he saw through Gregory’s act and, with a slight gesture, he cut off the flow of words.
“Let’s not play cat and mouse, Lieutenant,” he said. “It was very clever of you to figure out that I’m not here to listen to one of your stories. You made a blunder tonight, a very big blunder, when you set up that telephone call. Yes, the phone call to Sciss while you were at his house. You had Gregson phone him about an allegedly recovered body so you could observe his reaction. And before you start explaining, let me venture a guess that you didn’t accomplish anything with your little trick. I’m right, aren’t I?”
The Chief Inspector’s last words were angry. Rubbing his cold hands gloomily, Gregory straddled a chair and muttered:
“Yes.”
All his garrulousness seemed to have disappeared. Sheppard pushed a box of Player’s toward him and, taking a cigarette himself, continued:
“It was a cheap trick par excellence, Gregory, a classic. You didn’t learn a thing, or almost nothing. Sciss, on the other hand, knows that you suspect him or will know it by tomorrow, which comes to the same thing; furthermore, he’ll also know that you set up the call to trap him. All the same, assuming you’re right — that he is either the perpetrator or an accomplice — then you did him a favor by warning him. And so far as that goes, didn’t it occur to you that someone as cautious as the perpetrator seems to be, now that he’s gotten such a clear-cut warning, will become ten times more cautious?”
Gregory was silent, chewing almost furiously on his fingernails. Sheppard, the calmness in his voice contradicted only by a deep furrow between his eyebrows, went on:
“Whether or not you tell me the details of your plan of operations is your business, because I always try, as much as possible, to respect the autonomy of the officers conducting investigations for me. But it was downright stupidity not to tell me you suspected Sciss! I could have told you quite a few things about him, not as his boss but as someone who has known him for a long tim
e. I suppose you’ve already eliminated any doubts you have about my innocence in this case?”
Gregory’s cheeks turned red.
“You’re right, sir,” he said, raising his eyes to the Chief Inspector. “I acted like an idiot. And I have no excuse at all, except that I absolutely refuse to believe in miracles, and nothing is going to make me, even if I go crazy.”
“We all have to be doubting Thomases in this case — it’s one of the unfortunate requirements of our profession,” said Sheppard, cheerful now that Gregory’s embarrassment had provided him with a degree of honorable satisfaction. “In any event, I didn’t come over to reprimand you but to offer you some help. Let’s get back on the subject. How did it go at Sciss’s?”
Emotionally uplifted by this unexpected reprieve, Gregory described his visit to Sciss with great gusto, not omitting even those points which put him in a bad light. Around the middle of the story, when he came to the part about how he and Sciss burst into laughter after a tense silence, Gregory heard a muffled sound from behind the wall. He bristled internally.
Mr. Fenshawe was beginning the nightly acoustical mystery.
Gregory began to speak faster and with more glibness. He became flushed with excitement. Sooner or later the Chief Inspector was going to notice the noises, whatever they were, and then he’d be mixed up in this weird business too. Barely able to think coherently or to imagine what might happen next, Gregory listened as the sounds increased in volume, reacting to Mr. Fenshawe’s wall with the same obstinacy he would have exhibited in response to the pain caused by the extraction of a tooth. A series of rattling noises was followed by several soft, moist slaps. Raising his voice, Gregory talked faster and still faster with a kind of strained eloquence, hoping the Chief Inspector would be too distracted to notice the noises. And for this same reason, undoubtedly, he didn’t stop talking when he reached the end of the story. Instead, overwhelmed by the desire to drown out Mr. Fenshawe, he undertook something which in other circumstances he would have kept to himself: an elaborate analysis of Sciss’s “statistical hypothesis.”
“I don’t know where he got the cancer story,” Gregory said, “but I’m sure there really is an enclave with a low death rate. Of course we ought to make a large-scale comparative study of all Europe to find out if there are any other enclaves like the one in Norfolk. If there are, it would knock the bottom out of his theory. I didn’t discuss any of this with him, but he’s right about one thing: if his theory is valid, this really isn’t a job for us. The idea of the police checking out a scientific hypothesis is too funny for words. Still, so far as the theory’s long-range consequences are concerned, Sciss was very clever. Instead of trying to confuse me with fantastic possibilities, he made it into a joke. But there aren’t any alternatives. I’ve been giving this theory a lot of thought. This is what I’ve come up with. I’ll give you the more conservative variant first. The assumption is that we’re facing some kind of peculiar mutation that causes cancer; an unknown virus of some kind, let’s say. The reasoning goes this way: cancer manifests itself in an organism as chaos; the organism itself, representing order as it is found in the life processes of a living body, is the antithesis of chaos. Under certain conditions, this chaos factor — that is, cancer, or, more accurately, the cancer virus — is mutated, but it remains alive, vegetating in whatever medium is its host. When the victim stops being sick, the virus goes on living in his corpse. Ultimately, it undergoes such a complete transformation that it develops entirely new powers; it changes from a factor that causes chaos to one that tries to create a new kind of order — a kind of posthumous order. In other words, for a specific period of time it fights against the chaos represented by death and the decomposition of the body that follows death. To do this, the new factor tries to restore the life process in an organism whose body is already dead. When a dead body begins moving around, it’s a sign that this process is going on. The moving corpses, in other words, are produced by a weird symbiotic relationship between the living — that is, the mutated virus — and the dead — the corpse itself. Since human reason isn’t capable of understanding everything, it’s irrelevant whether or not this explanation makes sense. It is important, however, that the order factor is able to initiate highly sophisticated, well-coordinated movements: an ordinary virus wouldn’t be able to make a corpse get up, find some clothing for it, and then sneak it away so skillfully that we can’t find it again.”
Gregory paused, seemingly awaiting Sheppard’s reaction; in reality the wall had distracted him with a gentle, repetitive pattering — it sounded as if a light rain was falling on Mr. Fenshawe’s side.
“A cancer virus is within the realm of probability,” Gregory continued, “but since the improbable can’t be explained in terms of the probable, we may have to find an improbable explanation for this case. That’s why Sciss mentioned flying saucers, although he tried to be casual about it. He wanted me to know that we may have to look for the answer in outer space. The second variant involves cosmic forces. We’re faced with something along the lines of a ‘first contact’ between Earth and a race of people from the stars. It goes this way: there are beings of some kind out there, intelligent but functioning in a manner completely beyond our comprehension. They want to study human beings at close range, so they send some kind of — information-gathering instruments, let’s call them — to Earth, using a method of transportation that we can’t understand yet. Maybe the saucers deliver them. The information-collectors are microscopic — invisible for all practical purposes. Once on Earth they ignore living organisms and are directed — programmed would be a better word — only to the dead. Why? First, so they won’t hurt anyone — this proves that the star people are humane. Second, ask yourself this. How does a mechanic learn about a machine? He starts it up and watches it in operation. The information-collectors do exactly the same thing. They start up some human corpses, getting everything they want to know in the process. If this variant is correct, there are several good reasons why we can’t understand the phenomenon. First of all, the information-collector seems to act rationally; therefore, it isn’t a device or tool in our sense of the word. It’s probably more comparable to a hunting dog: in other words, some kind of trained bacteria. Second, there’s the problem of the connection between the information-collector and cancer. If I was forced to figure out a theoretical basis for linking the second variant with the cancer phenomenon, I’d do it this way: there are just as many cancer viruses in the low-mortality enclave as anywhere else. So if most people in the enclave don’t get cancer, it’s because they’re immune to it. Therefore, human immunity to cancer is inversely proportional to immunity to the something from outer space. This theory explains everything, and we don’t have to abandon our statistics…”
Gregory paused. His room, like Mr. Fenshawe’s next door, was silent. During this whole presentation Sheppard had listened quietly, occasionally looking as if Gregory’s fervor surprised him more than his ideas.
“Obviously you don’t believe any of this…” the Chief Inspector commented.
“Not a bit,” Gregory answered in a weak voice. He suddenly felt indifferent to everything. He didn’t care whether or not the other side of the wall was quiet. All he wanted, just as when he left Sciss’s place, was to be alone. The Chief Inspector continued:
“You’ve done so much research that you hardly sound like a policeman anymore. Well, I suppose it’s a good idea to master the enemy’s language… Sciss would probably consider you a good pupil. You still suspect him, don’t you? What do you think his motive is?”
“It’s not that I suspect him,” Gregory answered. “If I did I’d make a formal accusation. Actually, I’m more on the defensive, and my position is quite hopeless. I feel like a cornered rat. I only want to defend myself against the allegedly miraculous character of this case. After all, sir, to develop this kind of theory to its full extent, you have to include everything. Let’s say, for example, that there are periodic interventi
ons of factor X separated by long time intervals; that the last drop in cancer mortality took place about two thousand years ago — not in England but in the Near East; that there was a series of alleged resurrections then also — you know, Lazarus, and… the other one… If we take this story seriously even for one moment, the ground opens up beneath our feet, our whole civilization turns into jelly, people can appear and disappear, everything is possible, and the police should just take off their uniforms, disperse, and disappear… and not just the police. We must have a culprit. If this series has really stopped, then it will soon be nothing but past history and we won’t have anything to show for it but a couple of plaster casts, a few contradictory stories told by some not too bright mortuary workers and gravediggers — and what kind of investigation can we conduct with that? Finally, the rest of our investigation will probably concentrate on getting the bodies back. You’re absolutely right: my trick didn’t accomplish anything, the phone call didn’t surprise Sciss at all, and yet, wait a minute—”
The Investigation Page 13
