The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “I think you have no previous convictions, Jones.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good. So you will plead guilty. You will explain that you are obsessed by this girl, Procne Newbury. You will say you resented Lady Timms’s friendship with her, and lost your temper. You will get a short sentence, or possibly even a suspended sentence. OK?”

  Grunt.

  “In either case neither you nor your organisation will make the slightest move against Lady Timms or her family. You will move out of this street. You won’t … that’s the police. I’m going to untie you. You’ll go quietly. You’ll say you don’t know what came over you. Right?”

  “OK. I get the message. Thanks.”

  Feet on the stairs. Paul’s voice saying “It’s all right, he’s coming round …”

  “That’s all,” said Lydia. “You don’t want to listen to me cleaning up the mess, do you?”

  She snapped the machine off. The space round her seemed very small and drab. It wasn’t just Tony’s office, it was the space round her own life, and Richard’s, and Dickie’s. She felt very tired of fighting the oppressors, the corrupters, the enemies of freedom and love.

  “G-God!” said Tony. “Who was the other bloke?”

  She shook her head.

  “Leave him alone,” she said. “He’s out of your league. I’m afraid there wasn’t much there for you. I’m sorry. Do you know that restaurant?”

  “Kn-know it! Best nut curry in t-t-ten miles!”

  “I thought you weren’t interested in food.”

  He almost strangled himself with sudden shyness as the question of his own likes and dislikes was thus dragged to the surface. Lydia could only gather that she had been right, but that for semi-ideological reasons he felt a duty to be enthusiastic about certain vegetarian restaurants. They played the tape through again to let him recover himself.

  “What’s Durley Bridge?” she asked.

  “Miscarriage of j-justice. Years ago. Wrong man hanged. They were still hanging ’em then.”

  “Do you want to do anything about it?”

  “I d-don’t know. It’s slightly crank territory. Why?”

  “Well, if there’d still been someone in prison, we’d have had to. But I’m very frightened of Mr Ambrose now. I’d like to think that somebody still had some sort of hold on him.”

  “This other bloke?”

  “Leave him to me. I’ve got to go now, Tony. I’ve got to collect Dickie. Listen, when you do what you’re going to do, whatever it is, you’ll remember it’s got people in it, won’t you? People like me and Mrs Pumice and Procne Newbury. Sorry, I know that sounds rude. It’s just I sometimes think that you get carried away and forget.”

  “N-not much chance of forgetting about you. Or P-P-P-Procne. D-different reasons, of course.”

  “Glad to hear it. Bye.”

  That evening Lydia sat in her chair. Richard was reading a dismal-looking volume on company law, an aspect of his studies that normally infuriated her, because she wasn’t quite able to envisage an industrial society that could be run without it, though its detailed provisions seemed to her almost exclusively immoral. But to-night all her furies were concentrated on her search for the microphone. She had even drawn a careful grid of the room, to search through square by square, because anger had warped all the mental grids she had made.

  Dickie came crawling from his improved hide-out behind the bookcase and in complete silence collected a spoon, a clothes-peg, a wooden skewer and two wooden play bricks. He sat on the floor with them, frowning and moving them about. Lydia went back to her grid. Click. Click-click. Click. Click-click-click. Click.

  “Bother,” said Dickie as his improvised Morse key fell to bits. “I wanted to practise.”

  “What’s the matter, Liz?” said Richard. “You look as though you’d just won an Aston Martin off a cornflake packet.”

  “Try using a big elastic band round the skewer and under the block and over the other end of the skewer,” said Lydia. “Then you won’t need the clothes peg. Can we have a drink, darling? And stop reading that horrible book and tell me I’m a nitwit.”

  “I can’t do that without hearing the evidence.”

  “Let’s have a drink, anyway.”

  “Well,” he said. “What about that evidence?”

  Lydia was lying on the wrong side of the bed, because of her shoulder. It seemed very odd to be holding the wrong hand. Otherwise she felt marvellously relaxed, simply from having decided that there was no microphone in here, either.

  “Darling, you won’t laugh at me?” she said.

  “I don’t know until I see what you say. Sometimes I can’t help it. You make me laugh. It’s one of the reasons I love you.”

  “Pig. Do you think I’m really a lesbian?”

  He didn’t try very hard. She kicked him as he lay snorting.

  “Damn you, I’m serious,” she said.

  “I know you are. It was just the surprise. You didn’t give me a chance. You might have led up to it tactfully. If you’d given me a thousand guesses about what I wasn’t allowed to laugh at, I’d still have … stop kicking me! I’m sure it’s bad for your shoulder.”

  “It is, but it’s worth it.”

  “All right, all right. My face is straight as the equator.”

  “That’s only straight if you look at it sideways. Am I a lesbian?”

  “Explain a bit more.”

  “I’ve had Austen here again, twice.”

  “How’s he taking things?”

  “Not very kindly. I mean, if you’re baffled already, it must be a kind of insult to be confronted with fresh bafflements.”

  “So he accuses you of being a lesbian?”

  “Not yet. But he’s got on to the connection between Mr Ambrose and Procne, and he knows I’ve been to see Procne, and I’ve been wondering what sort of story Mr Ambrose is going to tell. I mean, all the evidence I’ve got is that he pretended that he was some sort of social worker and told me to stop seeing Procne. If he says he did it out of jealousy …”

  “This is all very much up in the air, for you, Liz. It’s the kind of thing I spend my days fretting about.”

  “No. It’s practical. I mean, it’s almost like a piece of machinery.”

  “Umm. What does Austen think?”

  “I don’t know. I think he still really wants to prove that Paul and I got together to kill Mrs N, because I wanted the money and he’s my lover. That’s why I redecorated the room as soon as I could, to cover fingerprints or something.”

  “Umm. How far could Ambrose take his story? Could he say that you attacked him out of sexual jealousy and that’s what caused the mess in the room?”

  “It won’t wash. I made them fingerprint some of the things he’d smashed, and the telephone and so on.”

  “You are the original wonder-woman. Anyone else would have been running about screaming or filling themselves up with sedatives.”

  “I came damn near it.”

  “That’s what’s marvellous … but why are you bothered about this other thing? I mean it’s …”

  “Being crypto-butch?”

  “What do you think, Liz? That’s what matters.”

  “What do I feel, you mean? I don’t think I feel … damn … you see, I suppose I keep my feelings so battened down that anything like that would come out all changed … but it was the first question Procne asked, Richie.”

  “What you’re saying,” said Richard in the finicky, thin voice he used for arguing out intimate teasers, “is that Procne—partly because she’s a natural animal and partly because she’s had a lot of experience—might instantly perceive in you a strand of which you are unaware. Perhaps Ambrose might see the same thing. You feel that this would account for your apparently low sex-drive and your obsession with Procne and yo
ur dislike of your father and your passion for doing what most people think of as masculine jobs at least as well as a man can. You are, of course, mainly worried about whether your desire to help Procne and your liking for her are based on this hidden drive. It is the secrecy and uncontrollability of the drive that frighten you. You wouldn’t think it at all disreputable of someone else to be a lesbian, or of yourself, if you chose it consciously. But you are alarmed about the possibility of something inside you rebelling against your conscious choices.”

  “I hadn’t thought it out as far as that. I expect you’re right. Shall we talk about something else?”

  “Not until I’ve told you I think it’s all balls.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “Look, I do know some things. I’ve been through some experiences most people have missed out on. I’ve watched myself falling to bits and then being pieced together again. I know what’s at the centre of my world. It’s not one great abominable serpent stirring in its dreams that makes the surface heave and erupt. It’s hundreds, thousands, of smaller creatures. They’re all right, most of them, provided you let them bide where they were created to be. In their natural dark they are beautiful. So … Entia non simplificienda praeter naturam.”

  “Gentlemen don’t talk Latin in bed. What does it mean?”

  “Look how much it leaves out, the, er Ambrose hypothesis. Here’s this girl who’s a perfect symbol of all the things you really care about, an archetypal spoilt life. You’ve got a Pavlov reaction to that sort of thing. And, look, you aren’t going to tell me that your fondness for that frightful old harridan Mrs Newbury was crypto-butch? You managed to like her a lot, in spite of everything, and naturally you transferred some of that to Procne … has Austen been to see her?”

  “I think so. He went before, soon after we found the body, but she won’t have told him anything. She’d just clam up, or lie. This time I think he asked her about me. Anyway he asked me about her, quite a bit, and why I wanted to visit her, and so on. He asked me the usual old questions about the will and the money, but he’s getting very half-hearted about that so I don’t think she told him what I’d done.”

  “Pity. I wish she would. That’d take him off your back … Liz?”

  “M?”

  “Come a bit closer, if you can without hurting yourself. If I go threshing about I’ll do your shoulder in, but I want to talk to you.”

  Moving carefully she achieved a position of surprising comfort, curled along his side with her head on his chest. He stroked her hair gently.

  “You don’t have to go on looking after me,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m OK. I can take my share again.”

  “Of course you can. You do.”

  “Liar. Listen. I knew you were up to something, those days before Ambrose came. I knew it was important and you were scared. I decided quite consciously I wouldn’t interfere—of course if I’d realised quite what you were up to, I would have, but … Can you see that not interfering, going along, trusting, all that was much more of a strain than it would have been to ask? A year ago I couldn’t have done it. Do you follow me that far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, don’t you think you ought to tell me what you’re up to now? Lie still. Take it easy. That’s better. Now …”

  She told him, slowly, in a whisper. It took a lot of persuasion to make him let her go ahead with it.

  Chapter 27

  “Sorry,” said Lydia. “The Post Office engineer’s just been to mend the phone and I wanted to try it out. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Indeed I would,” said Paul. “I’ll bring Dickie’s transmitter down. I’ve patched it up.”

  “Oh, you are kind. He’s out with a friend, but he’ll be thrilled when he comes back.”

  No mucking about this time with fancy trip-cords. Lydia pulled the thread with her own fingers and heard the rat-trap snap. Then she put the kettle on. She was spooning Nescafe into mugs when his head poked round the door. The stitches down his cheek looked like two rows of little black ants.

  “There,” he said, putting the transmitter on the table. “It wasn’t too bad, because I made it tough enough for a kid to knock about in the first place.”

  The kettle hummed to the boil.

  “I thought it stood up remarkably well,” said Lydia, pouring out the water and handing him his mug. “The other half was still working, wasn’t it?”

  He took the mug without a tremor and sat down, smiling.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive me. Do you want me to explain?”

  “If you can. Where is it?”

  He took from his pocket a delightful multiple tool which with a twist and a click became a small screwdriver. He undid two screws and swivelled the toy sideways on its base. The object that nestled in the cavity didn’t look like a microphone at all.

  “Is it transmitting now?” said Lydia.

  “I hope so.”

  “Surely when Dickie pressed the key …”

  “Yes, that was a mistake. I devised a beautifully efficient jamming system for my own transmitter.”

  Point one. If he was telling the truth, he hadn’t heard the part of the conversation with Tony about her own bugging system. Curiously this slight gain made Lydia suddenly more tense. He seemed aware of the change.

  “You are angry,” he said. “I’m sorry. You see …”

  “Switch that thing off first.”

  His eyebrows flickered up above his pale eyes. He tapped his teeth a couple of times with the screwdriver, then used it to disconnect the microphone.

  “That’s better,” said Lydia. “Well?”

  “Does Lalage talk to you about me?”

  “Not much. We don’t.”

  “I see … well … I’m sorry, this is rather embarrassing, because it’s going to sound like a declaration of love, but it isn’t.”

  “My heart is already possessed by Another.”

  He laughed and relaxed, or seemed to.

  “I know,” he said, “that’s part of it. I asked about Lalage because she is often cross with me for talking about you so much. I have allowed myself to become somewhat obsessed with you …”

  “Oh, that’s rubbish.”

  “No, really, it’s true. I mean …”

  He gestured with absurd and theatrical penitence towards the little transmitter.

  “Tell me something, since we’re talking about truth,” she said. “You remember you told Dickie a story about ambushing a slave train? Were you really there?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “But that happened in Estonia. It was nothing to do with Aakisen at all.”

  “I changed a few details. If I’d known Dickie then like I do now, I wouldn’t have.”

  “I don’t think you’re a Liv at all.”

  “I am, Lydia.”

  “I think you were one of the guards.”

  “I’m too young. I was a child, on that train.”

  He looked broodingly at the little tool in his hands, clicked and twisted it and produced instead of the screwdriver blade a fine steel spike, with which he started to clean his nails, though it was not well adapted for the job.

  “I am a Liv,” he said quietly. “I was a small child when my father died in a political upheaval. My mother took me to Estonia, but she too had been a political activist, so later, at a time of—I was taught to call it ‘normalisation’—she and I were included among dissident elements who were to be moved from Estonia to another part of Russia, for our own good and the good of Estonia. So that was how I came to watch the attack on the train. I saw it between the slats of a cattle truck. They didn’t attack our truck, because they were only interested in rescuing certain elements of their own organisation. Both sides were equally incompetent
. Several people in my truck were wounded or killed by bullets from the partisans. On the other hand, the train was booby-trapped with explosives so that we could all be blown up if we were ambushed, but this the guards refused to do. I doubt whether many of those who escaped survived their exposure in the marshes. Some of us, it’s true, also died of exposure during the journey, but not nearly so many, and when we reached our destination my mother was given work and I was allowed to live with her. I was also given an education, a very sound one. When my mother died, quite normally, of a brain tumour which would have happened under any political system, I was almost grown up. You see? I could not tell it like that to a child.”

  Lydia sipped her coffee and thought. Paul seemed to want to talk; she had expected to find him much more guarded and wary.

  “About your education,” she said. “You said something when I poured the flour into Mr Ambrose’s mouth. You said ‘That’s something they never taught us.’ Who were ‘they’? What were you?”

  He smiled at her and shook his head.

  “Well then,” she said. “How did your father die? Did Count Linden kill him? Or have him killed?”

  The smile seeped away.

  “With a spike like that? Between the vertebrae?”

  “You are being stupid, Lydia.”

  “I need to know. It’s all right—I’m quite safe, I think. I’ve taken precautions. They’d work. I think.”

  “If you took them, they would. Of course.”

  “Well?”

  “But you are still being stupid.”

  “What did you say to Mr Ambrose while I was out of the room?”

  “Very little.”

  “You didn’t promise him anything or threaten him with anything?”

  “I told him to leave you alone.”

  “And then as soon as you get the chance you suggested to me that we should play down what he’d done, in our statements.”

  “I said I would, provided he agreed to leave you alone.”

  “And you think he’d stick to his side of it.”

  “He’d better.”

  “Paul…”

  “No, it’s my turn. I want to know what’s on your mind. You’ve got some sort of theory, and you want me to confirm it. So you are trying to lead me into saying things which…I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be easier if you told me what you are worrying about and I told you whether you were right or wrong?”