“You won’t go? All right then!” Sciss stood up, coughing and gasping violently. He stretched himself, touched his shirt collar, which he had unbuttoned just a moment before, smoothed out his suit, and walked into the foyer. A moment later the outside door slammed.
Gregory was alone in the apartment, free to look through the drawers, the whole desk; he walked over to it, but even as he did so he knew he wasn’t going to search it. Lighting a cigarette he paced from wall to wall, trying unsuccessfully to think. He crushed the cigarette, looked around, shook his head, and went into the foyer. His coat was lying on the floor; when he picked it up he saw that it had been torn almost in half by a strong pull along the back; the loop and a small fragment of material were still on the hanger. He was standing with the coat in his hand when the telephone began to ring. He listened intently. The telephone kept ringing. He went back into the room and waited for it to stop, but the ringing continued. “Too few scruples and not enough results,” he thought. “I’m a snake. No, what was it? A worm.” He picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
“You? How is it that…” He recognized Sheppard’s voice.
“Yes, it’s me. How… how did you know I was here?” Gregory asked. He suddenly became aware that his knees felt like rubber.
“Where else would you be in the middle of the night if you weren’t at home,” Sheppard answered. “Will you be there long? Is Sciss around?”
“No, Sciss isn’t here. He’s not in the apartment at all.”
“Well, who is? His sister?” Sheppard’s tone was severe.
“No, no one at all…”
“What did you say? You’re there alone? How did you get in?” Suspicion and distaste were evident in the Chief Inspector’s voice.
“We came here together, but he… walked out. We had… there was an argument,” Gregory said with great difficulty. “I… then, that is, tomorrow, I’ll be able… oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong? Why did you call?”
“Well, it happened. Williams is dead. You know who I mean.”
“I know.”
“He regained consciousness before he died and wanted to make a statement. I tried everything to get hold of you — I even sent out a radio call.”
“I… I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. We taped the statement. I want you to hear it.”
“Today?”
“Why not? Are you waiting for Sciss?”
“No, no… I was just going to leave…”
“Good. If you feel up to it, I want you to come over to my house right now. I’d rather not put this off until tomorrow.”
“I’ll be right over,” said Gregory in a dull voice. Then, remembering his coat, he added quickly:
“I have to stop at my place first. It’ll only take half an hour.”
Sheppard hung up. Gregory returned to the foyer, picked up his coat, threw it over his arm, and ran down the stairs. A quick look into the courtyard showed that the gray Chrysler was gone. He caught a taxi around the corner and went to the Savoy, where he transferred to the Buick. The motor was cold; listening intently to its rumbling while trying to get it started, he could only think about one thing: what would Sheppard say.
There was a no-parking sign on the street outside the Fenshawe house, but he ignored it, running up to the front door along a wet sidewalk that glistened like a mirror in the reflected light of the street lamps. He tried unsuccessfully to unlock the front door with his key, realizing with surprise that it was open. That had never happened before. The big entrance hall, usually completely dark, was faintly lit by a slow-moving, flickering reflection that rhythmically dimmed and intensified on the vaulted ceiling high above the stairs. Walking on tiptoe, Gregory went upstairs, coming to a stop at the door to the mirrored drawing room.
Where there had been a table before, now there was a platform covered with rugs, a row of lit candles along each side of it. In the corner mirrors, the reflected glow of the candles was heightened by the glimmering of the street lights outside. The air was filled with the odor of melted tallow; blue and yellow flames fluttered restlessly. The whole sight was so unexpected that Gregory stood immobilized for a long while, staring at the empty, oblong space between the double row of candles. He looked up slowly, seemingly counting the rainbow-colored sparks flaring up and waning in the low-hanging chandelier, then looked around — the room was deserted. He had to pass through it; sneaking along the wall, he moved on tiptoe like a burglar, his foot brushing against an indistinct, coiled, thin, twisted, whitish-colored wood shaving. Just as he reached the open door he heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Quickening his pace in the hope of reaching his room without a meeting, he saw some yellow sparks flickering in the dimness in front of him; an instant later Mrs. Fenshawe appeared in the room. She was walking slowly, a purple shawl embroidered with shimmering gold sequins flung over her black dress. Gregory didn’t know what to do; he wanted to avoid her but there was no way to get past. She seemed to be in a trance; he backed up to get out of her way and kept walking backward, with Mrs. Fenshawe striding along beside him, apparently unaware of his presence. Stumbling against the edge of a rug, Gregory came to a stop. They were back among the mirrors.
“My life!” Mrs. Fenshawe burst into tears. “My life! Too soon! Too soon! They took him away!” She drew so close to him that he could feel her breath on his face. “He knew he couldn’t hold out much longer; he knew, he knew, and even today he told me so! Today started like every other day, why couldn’t it have gone on that way? Why?!” She repeated this over and over, burning his face with her breath, until finally the words, though they were uttered from deep pain, stopped having any meaning for him.
“Oh… I didn’t know… I’m very sorry,” Gregory mumbled, completely at a loss, feeling that he had gotten stuck in an absurdity of some kind, an incomprehensible misfortune, a theater of unreal events and real despair. Mrs. Fenshawe stretched out her dark, tendinous hand from under the shawl and grabbed him violently by the wrist.
“What happened? Did Mr… Mr…” He didn’t finish — her voiceless sobbing and the spasmodic movements of her head were answer enough. “It was so sudden,” he mumbled. The word brought her around. She stared at him with a strained, insistent, almost hate-filled look.
“No! Not sudden! Not sudden! No! Years, sir, years, and he always managed to avert it, we postponed it together; he had the best care a human being could have. I massaged him every night, and when it was very bad I held his hand until dawn, I sat with him. He wasn’t able to stay by himself except in the daytime; he didn’t need me during the day, but now of course it’s nighttime, it’s night!!!” She began screaming horribly again, her voice prolonged in an unnatural ringing echo. “Night…” The cry was audibly interrupted and distorted somewhere in the depths of the house, somewhere in the darkness of the rooms that opened on the staircase, somewhere above the head of the woman, who was digging into Gregory’s wrist convulsively and pounding his chest with her other hand. Astounded, choked by such frankness, such outspokenness, and such deep despair, Gregory was beginning to understand everything. He stared at the moving flames that lit up the empty, rug-covered place in the middle of the room.
“Help me, oh please help me!” Mrs. Fenshawe called out, whether to God or to him Gregory didn’t know, and suddenly her cries were drowned in sobs. One of her tears, shining in the candlelight, fell on the lapel of his suit. Her weeping brought relief for both of them. In a moment Mrs. Fenshawe calmed down, and in an amazingly peaceful although shaky voice, she said:
“Thank you. I’m very sorry. Please… please go. No one will bother you. No one! Oh… there’s no one…”
With these words her voice came dangerously close to the crazy screaming again. Gregory was terrified, but Mrs. Fenshawe, gathering up the folds of her purple shawl, went toward the opposite door. He reached the hallway and, almost breaking into a run, rushed to his room, closing the door carefully a
nd firmly behind him.
Safe inside, Gregory turned on the small lamp and sat at his desk, staring at it until his eyes were dazzled by the light.
So he was sick and had died. Some kind of prolonged, peculiar, chronic illness. She’d been nursing him. Only at night — in the daytime he wanted to be by himself. What was wrong with him? Maybe asthma or some other kind of breathing disorder. She mentioned massages. Something to do with the nerves? Insomnia too, or maybe he had heart trouble. He looked so healthy though — that is, he didn’t seem to be sick. How old could he have been? Around seventy, at least. It must have happened today — that is, yesterday. Gregory hadn’t been home for almost twenty-four hours; the death must have occurred that morning or afternoon, and the body had been taken away in the evening. Otherwise, why the candles?
Gregory’s legs were beginning to fall asleep. “It’s all clear now,” he thought. “He was sick and she was nursing him, some kind of complicated, all-night treatment, but when did she sleep?”
Suddenly remembering that Sheppard was still waiting, he sprang to his feet. He grabbed an old coat from his closet, threw it on, and walked out on tiptoe. The house was still. The candles in the drawing room were beginning to burn out; he made his way downstairs in the remnants of their light. When he got into the car he was amazed to discover that the whole commotion had lasted less than a half hour. He passed Westminster at one o’clock.
Sheppard himself opened the door, same as last time. They walked upstairs in silence.
“I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” Gregory said while hanging up his coat, “but my landlord died and I had to… uh… pay my respects.”
Sheppard nodded his head coldly and pointed toward an open door. The room hadn’t changed — but with the lights on the collection of photographs looked different, and it occurred to Gregory that there was something pretentious about them. Still not saying anything, Sheppard sat down behind his desk; it was covered with papers and folders. For the moment Gregory remained under the spell of the dark, funereal atmosphere of the Fenshawe house, the unexpectedly silent wall opposite his bed, and the dying candles. He rubbed his wrist involuntarily, as if trying to wipe away the remaining traces of Mrs. Fenshawe’s touch. Sitting down opposite the Chief Inspector, he realized for the first time that night how tired he was. All at once it occurred to him that Sheppard was waiting for an account of his visit with Sciss. He responded to the thought as reluctantly as he would have to a demand that he betray someone very dear to him.
“I spent the evening tailing Sciss,” he began slowly, then stopped abruptly and studied the Chief Inspector’s face. “Should I go on?” he asked.
“I think it would be useful.”
Gregory nodded his head. It was hard for him to describe the evening’s events, so he dispensed with commentary and kept to the details. Sheppard leaned back in his chair and listened; only once, when he heard about the photograph, was there any sign of a reaction.
Gregory paused, but the Chief Inspector remained silent. When he finished, he looked up and saw a smile disappearing from Sheppard’s face.
“Well, did you finally get him to confess?” the Chief Inspector asked. “As far as I can tell, you stopped suspecting Sciss at the very moment that he left you alone in his apartment. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Gregory was stunned. He wrinkled his brow, not certain how to reply. The Chief Inspector was right, but until now he himself hadn’t been aware of the change in his thinking about Sciss.
“Yes,” he muttered. “I guess so. Anyway, even before then I didn’t have much hope of accomplishing anything. I was following the path of least resistance, that’s all. I latched on to poor Sciss because there was no one else and I needed a suspect; who knows? — maybe I deliberately tried to compromise him. It’s possible — I don’t know why, maybe to get the upper hand in my own mind.” Gregory became more and more confused. “I know that none of this makes any sense,” he finished. “In the long run I don’t know a thing about Sciss, not even what he’s capable of doing.”
“Would you like to know?” the Chief Inspector asked in a sarcastic voice. “You might find him visiting his mother’s grave, or trying to pick up a prostitute near Picadilly. That’s more or less his range. I don’t want to sound like your police auntie, but in this line of work you really should be prepared for an occasional moral hangover. Now, what do you want to do next?”
Gregory shrugged his shoulders.
“A few weeks ago I was pushing all of you, warning about trouble from the press and the public,” Sheppard continued, playing with a small metal ruler. “But this time none of what I expected came to pass, in fact nothing came of it at all. There were a couple of articles connecting the case to flying saucers and — paradoxically — that was the end of the publicity. A few letters to the editor — and it was over. I hadn’t realized how indifferent we’ve become to the extraordinary nowadays. If a moon walk is possible, so is everything else. So we’re on our own with this case, Lieutenant, and we might as well just shelve it quietly…”
“Is that what you called to tell me?”
The Chief Inspector didn’t say anything.
After a moment or so Gregory answered his own question.
“You wanted me to hear what Williams said, right? Maybe… I should go now. It’s very late and I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”
Sheppard rose to his feet, opened a flat case containing a tape recorder, and connected the speaker.
“The recording was made at his request,” he said to Gregory. “The technicians were in a rush and the recorder wasn’t working too well, so the sound isn’t the best. You’d better move closer. Now listen to this.”
He threaded the tape into the spool, plugged in the extension cord, and adjusted the modulation knob; the recorder pulsated a few times; a steady hum emanated from the speaker, followed by several knocks and some scratching noises, and at last a far-off voice, distorted as if it was coming through a metal tube.
“May I speak now? Commissioner, Doctor, may I? I had a good flashlight… my wife gave it to me just this year, for the night shift. First time I went around he’s lying there the usual way, with his hands like this; next time around I hear a crash like a bag of potatoes is falling. I shine my light through the second window — he’s on the floor. I figure he must have fell out of the coffin but he’s moving already. I think I must be dreaming all this so I rub my eyes with snow, but he keeps shuffling along, falling all over the place as he goes. Commissioner, I don’t know how long this went on, but it was long enough, believe me. I kept shining my light but I didn’t know if I should go in or not, and there he is, flapping around and turning over and finally he reaches the window and I couldn’t see him too good because he was crawling right under the window, making a hell of a racket all the time. Then the shutters come open.”
An indistinct voice in the background asked something; it was difficult to make out the words.
“That I don’t know,” resounded a voice closer to the microphone. “And I didn’t see if any glass was falling either. Maybe it did, but I can’t say. I was standing over on the side, I can’t… can’t manage to show you. So I was standing this way and he was sitting or whatever he was doing this way — all I could see was his head — I could have touched it, Commissioner, it was closer to me than this here table is. I shined my light inside and lit the place up real good and there was nothing there, only the empty coffin with some shavings in it and nothing else and no one was there. I lean over and take a look in the window and there he is down below me; his legs going a dozen ways at the same time and he’s rocking back and forth like a drunk, Doctor, he’s crawling along on his side and tapping away, like a blind man tapping his cane, except he was doing it with his hands. Or maybe he had something. ‘Halt,’ I says to him, ‘what d’you think you’re doing, what’s going on here?’ — that’s what I said, or something like that.”
A short silence followed, except for a ste
ady, delicate creaking, as if someone was scratching the microphone with a needle.
“He climbs up a bit, then falls over again. Like I told you, I ordered him to stop, but he wasn’t alive; at first I thought maybe he wasn’t dead and had just now woke up in the coffin, but he wasn’t alive, he didn’t have any eyes like, I mean only — you know what I mean, so he couldn’t see anything and he didn’t feel anything. I mean if he could feel he wouldn’t keep banging himself around on those boards, and he was banging away like the devil himself was inside him. I yelled something at him — I don’t even know what — and he kept turning this way and that way and finally he grabs the windowsill with his teeth — What?”
Once again a muffled, indistinct voice asking questions; only the last word was comprehensible: “… teeth?”
“So I shined my light on his face from close up, it was kind of blurred like, well, kind of like a dead fish, and what happened next I don’t know.”
Another voice, closer and lower, asked:
“When did you draw your pistol? Did you try to shoot him?”
“My pistol? I can’t say if I drew it or not because I don’t remember. You say I ran away? How did that happen? I don’t know. What’s this on my eye? Doc… doctor…”
A far-off voice.
“… there’s nothing there, Williams. Close your eyes, that’s good; you’ll feel better in a minute.”
A woman’s voice from the back:
“He’s done for, he’s done for.”
Again Williams’s voice, breathing faster:
“I can’t go on like this. If it… am I done for? Is my wife here? No? Why not? She is? What damned good are the regulations if they don’t say nothing about… this… they don’t cover…”
The sounds of a brief dispute could be heard; someone said out loud:
“That’s enough!” Another voice interrupted:
“Did you see the car, Williams, the headlights?”
The Investigation Page 19
