The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “Oh, Liz, you’re so practical. Trust you to remember something like that. I bet you could do it, too.”

  “Lal!”

  “Oh, God! Sorry. Of course I don’t …”

  “You’d better stop talking, darling. Think about money. That’ll have a calming effect. Thank you for warning me. Bye.”

  She put the receiver down to find Dickie standing close beside her, frowning.

  “Grandfather told me that, about the spike, too,” he said. “What I want to know is where.”

  “Africa, he used to say. But I don’t think it happens any more.”

  “I meant where on me?”

  “Oh. Didn’t he show you?”

  She remembered the surgeon’s fingers, precise as a machine, feeling along the vertebrae. She remembered her own clenched jaw, her violent stillness, determined not to shiver or wriggle, being even then sure that that was what he’d really wanted.

  “There wasn’t time,” said Dickie. “It was Rorke’s Drift. Show me.”

  He stripped his jersey and T-shirt up in a single movement and waited. Lydia counted along the spine, numbering off the hidden beads down the necklace of bone, wondering whether a run-of-the-mill autopsy—with the cause of death so obvious—could be expected to spot this tiny extra wound, and the severed nerves that would carry no more the traffic.

  “There,” she said, pressing gently. He shivered and wriggled quickly into his clothes. The touch of his body seemed to have restored her balance, so much so that she longed to pick him up and hold him tight on her lap. But he wandered off to the bread-bin, cut himself an erratic slice and spread it thickly with peanut butter. Lydia made coffee, drank it and then slung together a bacon and potato pie for supper. She thought as she worked. OK, I must accept it. Mrs Newbury had been killed. By whom? The case against Lydia Timms. Lydia Timms had been friendly with the deceased, enough to be trusted. She might therefore have known about the hoard of money. She had taken that money and put it into a Post Office account, under her own name. She had destroyed the will of the deceased. She had known and understood the technique of the so-called kaffir trick. She was in severe financial straits, caused by fresh discoveries of dry rot in her house. Furthermore, with the decease of the deceased, the room of the deceased would cease to be leased under a controlled tenancy—a new tenant, a handsome young businessman, lover of the said Lydia Timms’s half-sister, and no doubt of the said Lydia Timms on the side, would pay ten times the amount that the deceased had. Furthermore, the said Lydia Timms had concealed from the police several material facts, and had refused to answer certain material questions, and had added one lie. Furthermore …

  But Lydia’s mind wandered down the by-way of working out whether she could in fact have killed Mrs Newbury, without help, in the way it seemed to have been done. You would have to lay her out—no, first, surely, you would have to trick her into drinking a little vodka, then lay her out, then, while the heart was still working, inject more alcohol into her blood-stream, then fake the fall from the table to cover the bruises of the laying-out, then bash her head hard against the fender, and finally do the kaffir trick. She couldn’t have done it alone. She didn’t know how to lay a person out, for certain, without the use of drugs which would show up in an autopsy; nor was she strong enough to manhandle that sack of a body. As in life so in death, you couldn’t get any leverage on Mrs Newbury.

  Rolling out the pastry—a brisk and cheerful operation, most days—Lydia reluctantly dragged her mind round to Mr Ambrose. If Mrs Newbury had been murdered, presumably he was the murderer, for some motive to do with Procne. There was no evidence yet for this, but it was the only thing that made sense. So, obviously, Superintendent Austen ought to be told about Mr Ambrose. Equally obviously, Lydia wasn’t going to tell him. She numbered off her reasons, knowing as she did so that she was only putting up bulwarks round a decision that had been made at a deeper level than reason. First, she didn’t want the link with Procne brought to light; second, if Austen had to find out, it would be far better for him to do so from somebody other than Lydia—if she went running to him with the news, he might well think that she was simply trying to drag a red herring across her own trail; third, and most important, it wasn’t the murder that mattered, it wasn’t Mr Ambrose who was the enemy. The really vital thing, in the long run, was to try to bring into the open the activities of the people he was working for, right back to Dice and Dottridge, if possible. They were the real creators of misery and injustice; they were the people who had moved the Hoods out of Number Forty-six, and broken up the pigeon loft—and had done the same, often with trickery and violence, to thousands of other harmless people, all in the sacred name of property. They were the enemy. Though Tony’s plan had only a slim chance of success, Lydia was determined that it mustn’t be she who spoilt it. And if it did come off there would be a by-product. Superintendent Austen could hardly refrain from transferring his suspicions to Mr Ambrose, without Lydia having to tell him anything.

  Dickie was spending a quiet morning as a submarine waiting to ambush a passing battleship, so Lydia sat down and wrote a careful account of everything that she had done and decided, and her reasons. Then she put it in an envelope and dated the flap and wrote a note to Mr Muxbury, Richard’s family solicitor, asking him to certify the date and keep the envelope unopened. Poor Mr Muxbury, lover of trusts and entailments and contingent heirs, dreader of anything to do with the criminal law! I If only he knew …

  The feet on the stairs were heavy but shambling. When Lydia opened the door she found Mrs Pumice outside, with Trevor on one arm and the other carrying a battered suitcase. It took her an instant to realise that if Mrs Pumice had decided to quit she would have left her luggage in the hall.

  “Bloke brought this for you,” said Mrs Pumice. “Lord, it’s heavy.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Lydia, taking it. “I expect it’s some books I wanted.”

  “Can I come in?” said Mrs Pumice. “I sort of got to …”

  Her voice trailed into hesitation. She looked very nervous and miserable.

  “Come and have a cup of coffee,” said Lydia. “Shall I take Trevor for a bit?”

  But Mrs Pumice clung to him and came very timidly into the room, as though expecting, somehow, to be punished for being there at all. She jumped violently when Dickie torpedoed her. Lydia took her arm and settled her into Richard’s big arm-chair. Trevor, despite his suety appearance, was sensitive to his mother’s mood and looked on the verge of wailing.

  “What’s the matter, Mrs Pumice? I hope the police haven’t been pestering you. You mustn’t let them. They haven’t any right.”

  That only seemed to make it worse.

  “Oh, oh,” sobbed Mrs Pumice. “You been so kind to me and I went and told ’em.”

  “Told them?”

  “Oh, oh, if it had been anyone except Princess Anne! She’s so lovely. You oughtn’t to have took it. Old Ma Newbury really loved that wedding, she did!”

  “Honestly …” said Lydia.

  “Oh, oh,” said Mrs Pumice.

  “Boom!” said Dickie.

  “Shut up, Dickie,” said Lydia.

  She settled herself on the arm of the chair and put her arm round the throbbing shoulders. Dickie emerged from under the table, flat on his stomach, and using only his toes propelled himself to his cardboard cave. Trevor watched him with suspicious eyes.

  “Listen,” said Lydia. “As far as I know Mrs Newbury didn’t leave anything to Princess Anne. I can’t tell you exactly what she did leave, because it isn’t my secret, but I promise you I haven’t taken anything, and you haven’t done any harm, really you haven’t.”

  But still Mrs Pumice sobbed. Lydia found her impatience at such feebleness tinged with envy. To be able to cry so easily, for so little. To be able to collapse in tears, and refuse to cope, and let the tide of the world drift you wherever it wille
d, instead of having to swim all the time against its hidden and unpredictable currents. It was a gift, of a kind.

  “Oh, oh,” sobbed Mrs Pumice, “then I’m worse than what you are. Oh, oh.”

  Chapter 24

  The suitcase contained an absurdly large tape-recorder, sensitive no doubt, and capable of recording a good couple of hours of incriminating talk, but impossible to hide in the Timms’s sparsely furnished room. In the end Lydia put it under the floor-boards, with the microphone in an empty tin of scourer standing quite plausibly below the sink. She thoroughly enjoyed constructing a trigger mechanism to set the thing going, with a rat-trap lashed to the recorder-box and set so that its arm, when the trap was sprung, came down across the “Start” and “Record” buttons; she padded the buttons up with foam rubber, so that the arm of the trap could get at them and at the same time not make too loud a click. After some thought she decided that the best way for her to spring the trap was by some definite action, rather than trying to do it unobtrusively. So she led a length of black button-thread up from the bait-points of the trap, between two floor-boards, and fastened it to the flex of the telephone so that a jerk on the instrument was enough to release the arm. She reasoned that it was entirely plausible that she, when threatened, should attempt to use the telephone. If Mr Ambrose let her she could jerk it herself. If he prevented her, the struggle would be enough.

  That was about all she did enjoy over the next few days. Superintendent Austen questioned her every day for a week. He took to arriving unannounced, almost sliding into the room as if hoping to catch her in some incriminating posture, actually counting the missing money, or reading the missing will. She didn’t see him outside the house again—perhaps the momentary glimpse in Holland Park had been a coincidence—but she did spot the curly-haired young man with the side-burns a couple of times. He was much better at his job than Tony, so she got no chance to accuse him. In any case, she reasoned, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have him about just in case the frightener, Mr Ambrose, attempted something in the open.

  The interviews with Superintendent Austen became a sort of ritual, with the same questions and responses. Lydia didn’t make the old mistake of elaborating, either on her lie or the truth. Superintendent Austen didn’t think of any new questions, but on the third morning there was a variation in the ritual. Once more he had asked her about the money and the will, once more she had told him she couldn’t answer, once more he had asked whether she had discussed the matter with her husband, once more she had told him to mind his own business. Then he said “Lady Timms, I have no need, I am sure, to tell you how severely the law treats any attempt to interfere with witnesses.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “I mean what I say. I must advise you in the strongest terms not to attempt to interfere with witnesses.”

  “Heavens! You don’t mean Mrs Pumice?”

  It was not in the Superintendent’s nature to admit even that

  “I’ll make a statement about that, if you like,” said Lydia. “Ready, Sergeant? Mrs Pumice came to see me, apparently to apologise for telling you about a will and some money that Mrs Newbury was supposed to have left and I was supposed to have stolen. I told her I hadn’t stolen anything. That’s all. Now, listen to me—Mrs Pumice is very young and she hasn’t had much luck in her life. You’ve got to leave her alone. She simply isn’t up to hours and hours of interrogation. If you try that she’ll get scared and run away, and then she’s bound to get into trouble.”

  “She has nothing to be afraid of,” said Superintendent Austen.

  “People like Mrs Pumice have everything to be afraid of. Oh, you make me mad, the way you can’t see it!”

  “If you would tell me the truth about these other matters there would be no need for me to question Mrs Pumice.”

  “Can I have that in writing?”

  “What?”

  “Your threat to subject Mrs Pumice to endless questioning in the hope of making me change my mind.”

  “I made no such threat.”

  “Well, that was what it sounded like.”

  He hesitated, shrugged and retreated into the old ritual.

  That was almost enjoyable, but the rest of the periods of interrogation were merely dull, dull with the added tension of Lydia having to stay fully aware throughout them in case some variation of phrase might trap her into a casual admission. Too fidgety to begin a major job, she settled to the finicky and boring business of stripping antique layers of paint off the banisters, and finding that the wood underneath was too battered to be worth button-polishing and would all have to be stopped and repainted. That meant hours in gawky postures on the stairs, apologising every time one of the tenants wanted to get past with an armful of shopping or a pram.

  Spring turned chilly, and the draught up the stairs made the job beastlier yet. Usually Lydia disliked having to stop and chat when she was working, but it was pleasant when Mr Obb came slowly up and stood watching.

  “I wonder whether that was once Livonian pine,” he said. “We had quite a good trade in timber, once.”

  “I don’t imagine you can tell,” said Lydia, peering at the straight march of grain over the bobbles and flutings. “Do you know, I read somewhere that at one time in the last century pine—deal, we call it—was so fashionable that it became more expensive than oak.”

  “We have good oak woods also. Just now they will be all yellow with their little flowers. My father used to say that winter was a prison for the earth, locking it in walls of frost. But in spring it broke free and was happy. You do not know what spring is like, because you have never known a real winter. You do not know how the world smells, so fresh, so young, in spring.”

  “Do you know—you can’t smell it now because of this foul stripper I’m using—but I noticed the other day when I was sanding a bit that you could still smell that it was pinewood, after eighty years. It smelt a bit like your varosh, in fact.”

  “Ah, you have not tasted real varosh. The stuff we drink here is ersatz.”

  “I liked it.”

  “One day, again I shall taste true varosh … Lady Timms, I must discuss with you some time our lease. It runs out in October, I believe.”

  “That’s right. I hope you’re staying. But I’m afraid rents have gone up a lot in the last few years. I think perhaps we’d better get some independent person to arbitrate a fair rent.”

  “Oh, the rent we can manage, but would it be possible for us to occupy more rooms? If we could perhaps incorporate Mr Vaklins’ room, and …”

  His sad, pale eyes flashed queryingly to Dr Ng’s never-open door.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Lydia. “I’ve made one attempt to shuffle the tenants round, and they dug their heels in. But if there are any vacancies before October of course I’ll think about it.”

  “You are very good, very good,” said Mr Obb. “I must go. Very good, very good.”

  He smiled with extreme sweetness and went murmuring up the stairs. Lydia felt even more dismal as she returned to her dreary chore.

  But worst of all was not being able to be frank with Richard. She was quite sure that she was right not to tell him about Mr Ambrose. He had his Bar Examinations in five weeks and was already intensely nervous about them. How could he hope to do decent work if he was worrying all the time about what might be happening to her at home? And though he might respect her decision not to explain to the police about Mr Ambrose, it was impossible that he would agree with it. So she couldn’t tell him, but all the time she felt the lie inside her, corrupting her, growing bigger, slowly rotting, strand by strand, the web of love that held them together.

  For instance, when they lay talking in the dark she found herself growing tense and wary as the conversation edged towards the secret. When Richard had found Mrs Newbury’s body the shock had been like a mental wound, tearing open the half-healed
tissues and letting him see again the raw, repulsive innards of his breakdown, three years ago. Now the wound had closed once more, leaving only a sort of itch which he liked to tease as he relaxed.

  “I had lunch with Tommy Norris to-day,” he said one night.

  “Oh? What’s he doing? How did you run into him?”

  “He’s still at the FO, Department 14.”

  “Isn’t that counter-intelligence?”

  “Not exactly. They work with counter-intelligence a lot, because their main job’s keeping an eye on what foreign embassies in London actually do with their time. I met him on the tube, but I think he rather arranged for it to happen.”

  “Oh. What did he want?”

  (The first twist of the tension-screw.)

  “Just checking up, I think. They seem to want minimum fuss. He didn’t tell me anything, much, but … you know …”

  “All right, he didn’t say anything but he allowed you to gather. What?”

  “Umm. Put it like this. I think there’s a bit of a power struggle going on in the FO. Alec Home wasn’t the only one who had a lot of face invested in the Baltic States. I’m pretty certain Tommy knew it was Aakisen in the box—by the way, he let on that Obb pulled a fast one there. Apparently when there’s a wake the undertakers have a duty to satisfy themselves that they’ve got the right body in the box before the funeral, but Obb told them that Mrs Newbury’s room was Diplomatic ground, so it didn’t apply …”

  “It will be soon, if I let it. I don’t mean let it, I mean let it.”

  She could sense his smile in the dark. He had always enjoyed her tendency to stray into all the homophonous quags which bestrew the meadows of our language.

  “Dr Ng’s leaving,” she said. “He came and saw me this morning while I was doing the stairs, dressed in his best white suit and taking those yellow gloves on and off the whole time. He was terribly nervous. He must have thought I wasn’t going to let him go.”