“I’m sorry,” she said. “You do see? I had to have a hostage. I can’t get at the machine but I can switch off the mike.”
She rose, crossed the room and kneeled by the sink. It was slightly tiresome having only one good hand to ease the mike out of the scourer can.
“Ingenious,” he said, so close above her head that she jerked with surprise. “You even have holes in the lid to admit the sound. Do you mind if I check?”
She held the mike so that he could see her thumb sliding the switch into the “Off” position.
“Ah, the machine is under the floor, of course,” he said.
“That’s right. I…”
His hands closed round her neck. She jerked backwards, uselessly. Fury filled her, not at him but at the system that was making him do this, and all the wasted lives, including now her own. She threshed, consciously trying to make it hard for him to find the pressure point, consciously trying to mark her own body so that the struggle would show. Another Lydia, somewhere, longed to be still to accept, to float into undreaming dark, but she was still writhing against his hard legs and the sink supports and the slithering linoleum when that dark came. In the last instant the hands round her neck, strong and precise, turned into her father’s.
Chapter 28
Procne’s eyes were round as a baby’s with horror and delight. Emotion made her seem yet more fragile and new-created, just as the first flush of growth in one warm March week draws out delicate-looking petals which ought to be completely tender but are, in fact, kitted out by evolution to stand the tortures of the equinox. In this mood she was very obviously the daughter of her mother.
“Je-sus!” she whispered. “You sure you’re OK? I mean, you aren’t used to it.”
All round them the conversations with other prisoners created privacy.
“I was pretty stiff for a couple of days,” admitted Lydia, not a little smug at her sudden entry into the great sisterhood of battered women. “My shoulder’s not quite right yet, but otherwise I’m fine. Better than ever, in fact. I almost feel as if I’d been to a health farm and got toned up.”
“I know what you mean. Sometimes a bashing does that to you, and sometimes it don’t. But d’you think he’d actually have finished you off ?”
“I don’t know. That’s one of the things that’s been making me furious. I’ve been trying to see him but they won’t let me. They say it’s because it’s security, but really it’s that bloody little man Austen, getting his own back for my not telling him about who the man in the coffin was, and your money, and Mr Ambrose…”
“Lucky the police come just then. You ought to count your blessings, Liz.”
“Lucky, my foot! They’d been watching me for weeks, following me about. I’d even spotted them a couple of times. And they’d got two men in Mrs Evans’s spare room—I’d noticed she was looking a bit nervous—I think that’s what made me crossest of all, them frightening one of my own tenants into hiding them so that they could catch me and Paul making love, or discussing how we’d murdered your mother, or something, and tiptoeing down and standing outside my door to eavesdrop…”
“But honest, Liz, you’re lucky they did, or they wouldn’t of been there to rush in and haul him off of you. I don’t see how you can’t see it!”
Lydia laughed.
“That’s what Richard says,” she said. “His chief interest—no, that’s not fair, I mean his chief interest after he’d got over worrying about me—is whether the Russians will try to exchange Paul…”
“They can’t! Not after he’s been done for murder!”
“I don’t know whether the police can make that stick,” said Lydia. “And if they don’t there’s not much else he can be charged with.”
“Bashing you, but—don’t tell me—you’re not going to bring charges. Honest, Liz, you’re just as stupid as the rest of us.”
“I expect so. I mean, what’s the point? If they don’t charge him with murder or something else they’ll deport him. That clears him out of our lives…”
“You’ll be sorry, won’t you? You liked him?”
“I liked his company. I hated the things he did. And I can’t keep them separate. Richard says he has a psychopathic personality. Richard knew quite a lot of spies at one time, and he says four-fifths of them were nut cases. What worries me is that sometimes I’m afraid Dickie’s going to grow up like Paul—he lives such a fantasy life. He’s inconsolable, poor little brat…”
“You didn’t tell him!”
“Richard did, as much as he could understand. I shirked it. I was so frightened he’d feel it was my fault, and never forgive me. You see, he’d only just had this other shock of seeing Mr Ambrose beat me up and Paul coming and rescuing me…”
Procne frowned, suffering Dickie’s lost illusions, his betraying hero. Her sympathy was easy, perhaps even facile, but for the moment it filled her being. Lydia waited for it to seep away, not wanting to mar in any way the news she had been saving up for towards the end of her visit.
“Do you know a vegetarian restaurant called The Organic Traveller?” she said at last.
“I been there,” said Procne, suddenly very cautious.
“Well, rather a curious thing happened. While I was talking to Paul I mentioned the name, so it was on my tape which the police took. Besides, they may have heard it when they were listening outside the door. Mr Ambrose’s organisation kept their records above the restaurant—I don’t know whether you knew?”
Procne shook her head, still wary.
“Well, there must have been a leak from the police station, because the organisation started moving their files out. But earlier I’d told a friend of mine about this restaurant, and he works for a local Marxist group…”
“Honest, Liz, your friends!”
“He’s all right, I think. Listen. He’d been keeping an eye on the place. He didn’t explain quite how it happened. I think he’d been planning to fake up a race riot in the restaurant and then hope somehow to get upstairs, but when the van was almost loaded he took his chance—his lot are very efficient—they had a couple of hundred blacks and whites battling up and down in the street—it was all in the papers next day, including that some of the rioters stole a van belonging to a local businessman. My friend’s lot are infiltrated by the police of course, so they didn’t have very long, but they managed to photocopy a lot of the documents and send them to the Sunday Times and the Minister of the Environment and the Director of Public Prosecutions and people like that.”
Procne looked appalled.
“Nothing about me!” she whispered. “Not all over again!”
“My friend brought me your file. Some of the others wanted to keep it, but he wouldn’t let them even copy it. He’s a better bloke than I thought. I burnt it. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind! Me mind! Liz, that’s the greatest thing that ever happened! Say, you didn’t read it, did you?”
“No. I should have, perhaps, in case there was anything in it that would have been useful to you, but…you know, Richard’s got about ninety-nine theories about friendship, and one of them is that you’ve got to accept the face people show you, and not keep looking for faces they don’t want you to see. So…”
“I only got just the one face,” said Procne. “I don’t know what you mean, really. This is me.”
She looked at Lydia, earnest and puzzled, but also somehow as though she were looking at her own face in a mirror, deciding on the day’s make-up. Lydia looked back, thinking that perhaps it was true, perhaps that was the secret of her extraordinary appeal. They both smiled together.
“You know, I feel extraordinarily peaceful,” said Lydia. “I feel as though I’d spent the past few weeks walking down a narrow passage whose walls kept getting closer and closer together, all those people trying to lean on me and use me. But now I’m out in the open again.”
“Yes, you look like a cat what’s…oh, Liz, does that mean you’ve started your baby? My, you can blush, can’t you?”
“Hell! The answer is I don’t know. I hope so. I’ve missed a period and I’m pretty regular usually, but it might have been the shock of getting myself strangled and all that.”
“Well, where there’s hope there’s life, like Mum used to say. D’you remember how she used to get that sort of thing inside out?”
“She once told me that wild horses on bended knees wouldn’t drag her into some store or other.”
“Selfridge’s, I bet. She had a thing about Selfridge’s, going back to…”
They talked, until it was time for Lydia to leave, about that rather awful, rather ordinary old woman who had had so much life in her that even now the memory of her seemed more solid and immediate than any meeting with some living citizen.
“That’s what I can’t forgive Paul,” said Lydia. “Just using her like that, snuffing her out, not knowing what he was doing.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Procne. “He did her a good turn, I been thinking. I mean, where she is now, if she knows it’ll be a big thrill, won’t it, being a murder victim; even up there there’s not a lot of them can say that. And if she don’t know, it’s no skin off her nose, is it? She’d had a smashing life, her way. I mean there wasn’t much to it, but she made it smashing, didn’t she?”
“Yes. I suppose that’s what matters.”
“Course it is.”
About the Author
Peter Dickinson was born in Africa but raised and educated in England. From 1952 to 1969 he was on the editorial staff of Punch, and since then has earned his living writing fiction of various kinds for children and adults. His books have been published in several languages throughout the world.
The recipient of many awards, Dickinson has been shortlisted nine times for the prestigious Carnegie Medal for children’s literature and was the first author to win it twice. The author of twenty-one crime and mystery novels for adults, Dickinson was also the first to win the Gold Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for two books running: Skin Deep (1968) and A Pride of Heroes (1969).
A collection of Dickinson’s poetry, The Weir, was published in 2007. His latest book, In the Palace of the Khans, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
Dickinson has served as chairman of the Society of Authors and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2009 for services to literature.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1975 by Peter Dickinson
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4976-8440-9
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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