by John Burke
In the interview room my solicitor sat stony-faced beside me. For all the moral or legal support he gave, he might as well have been sitting alongside the policemen on the other side.
The accusation was that I had been pestering Mrs. Brooke, and on one occasion had raped her when she was visiting me to discuss her husband’s work. She had made no complaint at the time because negotiations with her husband’s publisher had been at a tricky stage and she did not dare to antagonise me. But then Crispin Brooke began to suspect, and had called me round that evening for a showdown.
“And you lost your temper, and there was a fight.”
“A fight? Me and Crispin? He was ex-SAS, you know. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“Neighbours confirm there was a shouting match. It could be heard halfway down the street.”
Of course. Gemma opening the window and then not saying another word that might give away her presence.
“As you say, Mr. Milburn, picking a direct fight with a highly trained soldier with the deceased’s courageous record was risky. So in the end it had to be something subtler. If you can call cyanide subtle.”
“Cyanide’s agonizing.” I knew that much, again, from my clients’ fictional outpourings. “He’d have screamed his head off.”
“Exactly. That, too, was heard halfway down the street.”
“But what time was this?”
Detective Inspector Emerson glanced at his sidekick, who studied his notes and said: “About twenty-three fifteen, according to the neighbour two doors down.”
“But I was home by then. Gemma had dropped me off, and I was in the flat well before eleven.” I turned triumphantly to my solicitor, who stared dispassionately at the table.
“You have a witness to this, Mr. Milburn?”
“I’ve shown you, I live alone. But check on her car. Someone must have seen it parked round the corner from their house. Or dropping me off. She did drop me off.”
Then I went wild. I had been hoping that the nightmare could be driven away, that commonsense would prevail, that Gemma would come to the rescue and somehow it could all be sorted out.. But I knew starkly what had been going on; and I let fly.
Couldn’t they see it? It was a put-up job. The two women—two lovers. damn them—had planned it from way back, maybe from that very first innocuous meeting.
Drawing two bloody stupid men into the trap. Despising, us, wanting to get rid of both of us.
The taste in my mouth was as bitter as any poison. “As a literary agent,” I said, “I suppose I ought to have learnt to be cynical about such things.”
Part of the package: wasn’t that what Gemma had looked so smug about? She had gone to bed with me, suffered the indignity of something for which she had no appetite, gone through the motions…all the time saving her real self for her woman, her real lover.
“Crispin wouldn’t have been likely to go along with a straightforward divorce.” I was trying to reason with those implacable faces. “Least of all when it was something he’d regard as intolerably kinky. So it had to be a matter of getting rid of the obnoxious husband, and saddling another man with the blame. That way, Gemma inherits the royalties which have survived from those past successes, and she and the Whiteley woman can live happily ever after.”
“Very ingenious, sir.”
“You can’t be that stupid!” I raged. “You can’t let them get away with it.”
“As a literary agent, sir”—the detective inspector took up my own words with a condescending smile—“you must undoubtedly get a lot of tips from your clients on how to put a good story together. Right?”
“It’s better than your other crazy notion,” I protested. “That one simply doesn’t hold water.”
“I think we can promise you, Mr. Milburn, that by the time we’ve finished, we’ll guarantee to make it waterproof.”
* * * *
Women. How did I ever let myself get pushed around by bloody women?
I wonder if Gemma or Nina will amuse themselves by taking it in turns to visit me in prison? Or simply cross me off their list altogether?
PLEASE PUT ME IN A BOOK
There used to be a time when no one from London ever thought of coming to live on our coast. Too cold for them. But now they’re all at it—buying up weekend cottages and places to retire to. If you can stick the first six months, you live for ever.
That’s what this Jeremy Craven fellow was told when he moved in. And put it straight away into one of his books. Hardly in the place, and already he was writing clever-clever things about folk who’d lived a lifetime here. And lecturing the Ladies’ Flower Arranging Society and Rotary and the Young Wives and all that lot.
I went up to him after one of those talks. And I told him. “You ought to put me in a book” I told him. “If I had the time, I could write it myself.” And then a couple of women came twittering round him, and he put on the charm and he’d got no time for me.
But I soon saw him again. In one of the local pubs. Got his own tankard by now, and calling the landlord “Eric, old son.”
I asked him if he was interested in murder. He’d heard about the Senwich Common murder, hadn’t he? It had been in all the papers. And of course most people still thought that half-baked young postman did it.
But I knew better.
I could tell him.
Then Eric leans over the bar and ruins it all. “If Fred’s telling you all about the murders he’s committed, don’t you pay him no heed. He’s always having us on.”
So Craven props his elbow on the bar, and there’s Eric grinning and telling him, “Every time there’s a death anywhere in Britain, off goes Fred to the station to confess.”
“Oh,” says Craven. “One of those? Fascinating.”
And you know, he really did look interested now, and I could see he was going to come over and patronise me—like the police do whenever I go and try to help them; or that doctor I was made to go and see. Well, I wasn’t here to be laughed at. I downed my pint and went.
Next thing, he was off for a few months and I didn’t slap eyes on him again till the end of the summer. I was walking past that little group of beach huts we’ve got at the north end, and suddenly he’s standing in the doorway of one of them. Seems the Johnsons, who always go off to the Canaries for the winter, had given him the key.
He called me over, and he’d got a sort of greedy look in his eye; and he started nosing into why I felt this compulsion, as he put it, to go and confess every time there was a murder. He was so patronising, so damn sneering. I took it for as long as I could, trying to hint just that there were things I really could tell him if I wanted to, which I didn’t. Then I found I couldn’t stand the sound of his voice any longer.
There was a folded deckchair propped against one wall of the hut...and when I simply had to put a stop to that voice I did the only thing possible: I picked it up and bashed him over the head and went on bashing until he couldn’t take any more and couldn’t make any more of those silly wailing, grunting sounds.
Then I was very calm. Like some master criminal in a book—a good book, not one of his.
I had a look outside. Nobody about. So I tossed the chair into the sea and watched it being carried away. And I locked the door of the hut behind me and threw the key into the water as well. No one would find him till the Johnsons came back in the spring. No one would ask questions. He was a writer, he was always going off somewhere.
But after a week or so I couldn’t bear the thought of him being in there, and nobody knowing I’d really done it this time.
In the end I had to go to the police station. The moment I walked in, the desk sergeant said: “Here’s Fred. Come to confess to killing Mr. Craven? Who tipped you off?”
I started in to tell him exactly how I’d done it, but he just snickered, that way he always has. And then I heard what the whole town knew by the evening: that Craven had been using the beach hut for...well, meeting a girl. A girl he shouldn’t have gone near
, a real bit of trouble. Anyone in the town could have told him that. And yesterday she’d gone down to let herself in, and found him—“That’s her story,” they all said—and someone heard her scream. But she’d done a fair bit of screaming ten days ago, in the pub with him, saying she had a good mind to beat his brains in. And the hut was plastered with her fingerprints. And she said she hadn’t done it, and there were lots of things the police weren’t happy about, but some of Craven’s things were found in her bungalow, and anyway she’s coming up for trial.
And they won’t listen to me.
You know what it’ll be like. Some newspaper’ll pay for her defence, just for the exclusive story, and then someone’ll come along and write a book about her.
It’s not right. What about me?
I’m the one who ought to be in a book.
DESIRABLE RESIDENCE
It was perfect. It had been planned to be so, and perfect it undoubtedly was.
You came back from the office or the laboratory or the works in the afternoon, and the place was waiting for you. It drew you in and welcomed you home. The main doors opened automatically as you approached, and the spacious entrance hall beyond was warm in winter, deliciously cool in summer. The lift was waiting. Before you went up to that beautiful flat on the twentieth floor, you punched a chosen sequence at the cuisine panel. There would just be time to get home, have a shower, accept a drink from the dispenser, and the tireless analytical brain in the depths of the building would have employed its electronic circuits to provide your meal in the delivery hatch.
If you were one of the lucky ones, maybe you didn’t even have to leave the building to get to your work. Perhaps you went into one of the office suites, or the shops on the ground floor. In that case this gleaming erection was a world in itself for you.
The only part you didn’t know much about yet was the community hall. It was a magnificently designed room, and no doubt some impressive functions would be arranged there soon. But during the first few weeks, most of the inhabitants spent the time in their own flats, still delighted just by the idea of being here; sitting and thinking about it, or looking out of the window, or just sitting.
Yes, perfect. Standing away from the sprawling city yet within easy reach by mono-rail or helicar, it was the most magnificent specimen of its kind. You were proud to live in it. On one side fields and woods fell away into the green distance; on another, the outer suburbs of the city were hidden by a barrier of trees, broken only by the gleaming line of the railway. To the north was the helicar park, sleek and new.
There would be other palaces like this before long. Two more were already being rushed up a few miles away, their muscles being built in, the pounding heart and nerve centre delicately installed, the arteries woven into the framework. But this one here would always be the first, the great predecessor of the ultimate development. There had never been such a flawless machine a habiter before. Almost you felt that it lived and had a vitality of it sown.
The people who were privileged to make their homes here were conscious of their good fortune. They felt that they ind their neighbours added up to something special.
And they were right. For some time they did not know just how right they were.
* * * *
Rafe Darby did not order a meal when he got home. Not tonight. He checked the information screen in the hall and checked on the shows that were on in town. Then he went up in the lift, helping himself to a cigarette from the ejector on the way up. His wife heard the door opening as he approached it, and was waiting for him when he entered.
“Hello, honey.”
He kissed her. “I haven’t fixed us a meal,” he said.
She stared. “Why not? I’m hungry. If I’ve had one candy bar from the hatch while I’ve been waiting for you, I must have had a dozen.”
“You’ll get fat and repulsive.” He kissed her again to prove that he was not convinced of this at all. “What I thought was maybe we could hustle off up town and catch a show. There’s a live one—a real old play, done live on the stage—at the ancient theatre in the Haymarket.”
It had seemed a good idea while he was on his way home. Now, suddenly, it wasn’t such a good idea. He didn’t really want to go out at all. Not any more. Funny, that. Now he felt tired, and it wasn’t as though he had been overworked today. But there it was, he was tired, and he wished he hadn’t suggested this theatre idea.
Fiona said: “Look, honey, that’s sweet of you, but really....”
She was fumbling for words. She didn’t need to. He was grinning.
“You mean you’d sooner stay at home?”
“Well, yes. But if you want to go—”
“Not on your life,” he said, thankfully. “Not me.”
They ordered a meal on the personal service relay, and sat back to wait for it. Rafe yawned happily. Nothing like being home. It was queer that he should feel so listless when he got here, but it wasn’t what you’d call an unpleasant sensation. He just sprawled back, and felt that somehow his energy was draining away, but there wasn’t anything he wanted to do about it.
When the meal came they ate it and smiled across the table at one another.
“I’d much sooner stay home,” murmured Fiona.
“Me, too.”
Afterwards, they sat together and did not move. Once, Rafe made an effort to switch on the wall TV, but somehow he could not summon up the strength to do it. What the hell, anyway? Who wanted to see the same old faces, listen to the same old jokes, play the same corny guessing games night after night? He was sitting here nice and peaceful beside his wife, and that was good enough. Contentment, that’s what this was.
Silence enshrouded them. Not a sound came up from the floors below; not a scrape, a thump, nor the sound of a voice filtered down from above. Of course the walls were soundproof. But this silence was due to something more than that. You felt instinctively that nobody was moving anywhere else in the building. If you opened the door of any flat and walked in, you would find the folk in there sitting just like this.
Rafe yawned again, and Fiona yawned with him. They exchanged smiles. They felt agreeably lazy, and at the same time virtuous—as though their tiredness were a result of working hard, of giving their minds to something useful and accomplishing something inexplicably beneficial.
* * * *
Christopher Cardew sat at his desk and tried to make his pen move across the virgin sheet of white paper before him.
A lot of his friends considered that Christopher was a crank. The last romantic, they called him—or the last individualist, or the last eccentric, whatever epithet they felt in the mood for using to express their tolerant amusement and affection for him. A man who wanted to be a writer was an oddity in this century, when books were produced in such small quantities and then only for freaks and reactionaries; but to make it worse, he would not even use a cybernetic resolver, but insisted on writing his stuff out laboriously by hand.
And what stuff....
Right at this moment he was trying to express the thoughts he had had earlier in the day, when walking through the dark, cool-smelling aisles of the woods down there by the river. He had seen a small disused cottage and wanted to write an idyll about it. But the words would not come.
He sat back and looked round the room. His wife, Lisa, smiled at him. She was exquisite, and he adored her. If he had not adored her, he would not have been here. It was Lisa who had insisted that they should snap up the opportunity of coming here to live.
“It will kill my work,” he had protested. “The ultimate in artificiality….”
“Why you always condemn labour-saving devices as artificial, I can’t imagine,” Lisa had said. “And as for killing your work—why not regard it as a challenge? Why not show that your sense of traditional values”—she had got the jargon off pretty well by now—“is in no way impaired by the oppression of modern technology. Let’s live in a wonderful new flat and prove that we can still preserve our individual
ity.”
He had been quite unable to resist that, and so here they were.
And here was a blank sheet of paper.
For a moment he was conscious of a terrible fear. There was a sense of constriction that made him want to panic. He wanted to get up and rush out of this flat and right out of the building, clear away, out where a man could breathe.
But he did not do this. He let out a long sigh, and then it became a yawn. His strength, his creative power, his stub-born individualism…all ebbed away, were sucked away by something he could not comprehend.
His pen moved slightly between his fingers. He stared at it, puzzled. Now he knew that he was going to write, yet absurdly he did not know just what it was that he was going to write. It was as though the pen would guide his fingers. And that was wrong. Quite the wrong way round. But he continued to stare, offering no resistance, and slowly the pen began to scrape across the paper.
This, he wrote, is the Manifesto of the Suprahomo. The time has come for the renunciation of petty selfhood and for the merging of individual human cells into a new and greater being. Only by a blending of talents and temperaments can true progress be assured. The future of the human race can be significant only if the selfishness of independent existence is abandoned and a new corporate awareness developed. We, the Suprahomo, hereby declare our intention….
* * * *
Mark Jordan, licensed telepath and detective inspector of the Central Investigation Bureau, was about to pay a call. An unofficial call. This evening he had done his five minutes of mental relaxation exercises, so that his telepathic faculties were smoothed down and brought under strict control; and now he was going to visit friends in this new building everyone was talking about.
Actually, he had expected to visit it a lot sooner than this. He and plenty of others in his Department had prophesied some fancy crimes breaking out right away in a place like that. They had been surprised by the quietness. Nobody was robbed, nobody took a poke at anybody, and—well, nothing at all happened. His first visit was going to be a social call.
