“Use Doll’s. The black one, not the gray one. Through that door. You’ll have to ask Posey to give you a line.”
“Thanks.”
Not a sign of personality marked the room, no pictures, postcards from Zermatt, potted plants, scuffed shoes, or significant litter. It was just a cubic space where a girl worked on new furniture between fresh-painted white walls.
Typically, Ned Callow kept Pibble waiting until the hardness of the receiver seemed to have altered the shape of his ear; he heard voices, door bangs, other phones ringing, scufflings of paper, and wondered what point there could be in impressing an ex-colleague with these melodramatic background noises. Perhaps there really was some kind of a flap on.
“Callow!” snapped the machine.
“Jimmy Pibble here. I got a message to ring you.”
“Yeah. You were talking to Brad about Gorton this morning.”
“About who?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Samuel Gorton. Paperham.”
“Oh, yes, I was.”
“You shot Brad some line about a lecture, but he said it sounded as if you had something up your sleeve.”
“Not really. I asked Brad whether the man had some kind of living mascot.”
“Yeah, he did. Does. The writer johnnies decided it was a cat, but I never cottoned to that.”
“I think it might have been his stepdaughter, the one who was about five when you got him.”
“Why, Jimmy?”
“Something she said to me.”
“For Christ’s sake! Where is she?”
“At the McNair Foundation in South London—it’s a small hospital for cathypnic children, and she’s one. Is he out, Ned?”
“He is. He was cleaning the bogs when the driver of a team of busybodies who were visiting the prison came in for a pee. Gorton croaked him and locked him in the cleaning cupboard; took the uniform and drove the busybodies back to London; stopped the car at the Hyde Park traffic lights and nipped into the underground. The busybodies hadn’t even noticed they had a different man, so they drove themselves back to their offices and reported it there. He had half an hour’s start, and probably a quid or two out of the driver’s wallet. He’s got a knife.”
“The woman he was living with—had she visited him?”
“Not for a couple of years. She’s in Australia.”
“But he’d know the child was here?”
“I’ll check. What’s your evidence, Jimmy?”
“It wasn’t evidence, it was a guess, but enough to make me ring Brad up, and find there was something in it. Grit your teeth, Ned. The children at the Foundation are mentally deficient, but most of the staff are sure that they are also telepathic …”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“No, listen. If the staff believe that, Gorton might have, too. It doesn’t have to be true for him to believe it, and it would fit in with his obsessions, wouldn’t it? It’d take too long to explain what she said, but I guessed he used her as a sort of oracle, so I rang Brad up out of curiosity.”
“I’ll have someone go through the notes and see if it fits in. If it does …”
“He might come here.”
“Bloody long odds. I’ll get some bods out from your local station. What’s the address?”
“Ned?” said Pibble when he’d spelled it out.
“Yeah? Make it snappy.”
“See if you can manage to keep the telepathy business quiet. Once this gets on the Fleet Street files they’ll send reporters down here every silly season to pester the staff to make the kids perform.”
“Make a change from the Loch Ness monster. I’ll do what I can for you, Jimmy, but if he does come I can’t keep anything quiet. Got any of his type there?”
“One.”
“Keep an eye on the bitch. Don’t tell her why. See you.”
The brisk quarterdeck voice snapped off. It had always irritated Pibble, coming from a man so devious—when war series were showing on the telly it had been intolerable. Now he had sounded like a hardened veteran of desert campaigns giving orders, impatiently disguised as advice, to a puffy major in the Home Guard. Well, the major was going to disobey. Pibble sat in the insipid room, slowly becoming aware that the tinge of his dread had changed. Before, it had been an abstract emotion, momentary but intense twinges of horror at the knowledge that a species of monster had once existed, which was also a man. Now the thing had returned out of the realm of fiction, which is what the past becomes; any rustle in the rhododendron bushes might be it. Now he had definite duties to attend to.
He leaped a foot from his chair as the window sash banged up, then he whirled, muscles tense. A painter poked his head in.
“Just checking your sashes, sir.”
Despite the carefully desuaved accent Pibble recognized Alfred.
“Carry on,” he said. “What’s it doing outside?”
“As ’orrible as it can manage, without your actual rain.”
Pibble walked to the window, as if to see. Alfred slammed the sashes noisily up and down.
“The Paperham murderer has escaped.”
“Saw the headline in the town,” muttered Alfred. “I’ve been talking to the Yard. He might come here.”
“Uh-huh.”
The news was evidently unimportant beside the affairs of Mr. Thanatos.
“He’s, er, interested in one of the children. He might have the same idea as you.”
“I’ll keep an eye open.”
“Have you finished?” said Doll, smiling round the door. “Hello! Trouble?”
“Just checking the sashes, miss,” said Alfred.
“But somebody did that yesterday.”
“Got to be done more’n once, miss. It’s your wood swelling and shrinking under your new paint. Nowhere for the moisture to go, see?”
“But it’s all red cedar,” said Doll. “My great-grandfather wouldn’t have anything else. I told the man yesterday.”
“Well, he didn’t tell me,” said Alfred with admirable painterly truculence, and ran back down the ladder.
“Rue wants to see you,” said-Doll.
“I’ll go and look for him as soon as I’ve seen Mrs. Dixon-Jones. I’ve forgotten to tell her something. I’d very much like to meet your grandmother sometime, if it’s possible.”
“Why on earth?”
“If it’s a bore, forget it, but I’d like to meet someone who knew this area when it was all countryside.”
“Oh, she’d love that. She thinks the world has never been the same since Lloyd George’s 1910 budget. But she’ll make you pay your way by telling her about a lot of gruesome murders.”
Pibble chilled.
“Most of mine were merely quaint,” he said.
“I’m sure they’ll do. I’ll take you home for tea today.”
“I don’t know about today. I’m half expecting somebody to come here, and—”
“I say, you have made yourself at home! I’ll look for you it four-thirty and you can come if you’re free.”
“That’s fine.”
Mrs. Dixon-Jones was on the telephone again. Pibble wondered whether the plastic was worn thin, like the toe of Saint Peter, with the ceaseless brushing of her ear. A small cathypnic child was asleep on her lap.
“Really, Mrs. Abrahams,” she was saying, “you can be quite sure that Sandra will be very happy with us. They like to be together. No. I’ve got her with me at the moment. Well, we’d rather you came in visiting hours, but if that’s awkward … But I gave you the list. I saw you put it in your handbag. Never mind, I’ll tell you now if you’ll get a pencil and paper. No, I’ll hang on … This is going to take ages, Mr. Pibble.The woman can hardly read and write … Yes, I’m still here, Mrs. Abrahams. Ready?”
Pibble picked an envelope out of her wast
epaper basket, tore it open, and began to write his news on it. It would be a mercy not to have to talk it over, but simply land the responsibility in her lap. He sensed a stir in the room and saw that Sandra had woken and was drifting toward the door; as she went she watched him out of the edge of her eyes. Mrs. Dixon-Jones said, “Wait a moment, Mrs. Abrahams,” and ran to the door.
“Ivan!” she called. “Ivan!”
The echo fluted along the corridors.
“Look, Sandra,” she said, “there’s Melody. Melody, come here, darling. Good girl. This is Sandra—she’s new. Will you take her and find her somewhere warm to curl up?”
“Lovely,” whined the two cold voices together, and the children vanished hand in hand. Mrs. Dixon-Jones scurried back to the telephone and Pibble carried on with his message, but she dealt with the mother much more brusquely now that Sandra was out of the room, and had finished before he had. He looked up to see her wrenching the cords out of the switchboard as if she had been hoicking groundsel out of a neglected bed.
“It’s about that horrible man again, isn’t it?” she said.
“How did you know?”
“Sandra. Well, what about him?”
Pibble told her. Her pen tapped steadily at the silver globe—no wonder its lighting was erratic; when he finished it continued its impatient pinging.
“I’m going to be rude,” she said at last. “But I’ve been here a long time and I’ve seen people behaving like you before. It wasn’t really their fault, but I did expect you to be more sensible than serving maids and nurses. Anyway, you’re making most of this up. I don’t mean lying, but deceiving yourself. It doesn’t usually matter, and the people who come to work here grow out of it, but you’re doing it in a way that upsets the children. Look at Sandra just now. Of course it’s very exciting to come into contact with a group of children who can talk to each other’s minds, and it’s only natural to persuade yourself that you can do it too, but it isn’t true. Very occasionally something slips through to them, like that silly business about your hat in the hall, and your game with Marilyn if you’re not making that up. But you can’t control it. Ram’s got his own reasons for taking you seriously, and I daresay that’s helped to mislead you, but as for this man coming here, you’ve got absolutely no evidence except three words of Marilyn’s that might mean absolutely anything. All the rest’s your own imagination.”
“Marilyn’s been very frightened today,” said Pibble.
“She has on other days, too.”
“She told us just now that she wasn’t frightened of me, but of another man.”
“Would she call her stepfather that?”
“I don’t know. You may be right. You heard me tell Doctor Silver that I distrust hunches and intuitions, and I still do. After I left you this morning I rang up a friend who looks after the records at Scotland Yard, and he told me that Gorton did talk about some living creature as though it were a sort of familiar, which confirms a little bit of my guess. And the officer who’s in charge of the hunt for him, who isn’t a friend of mine, thinks it a serious possibility that he’ll come here. You’ve got to remember that I was in the police force for a long time, and—”
“You were asked to resign,” interrupted Mrs. Dixon-Jones, putting an emphasis on the verb that showed she knew how peremptory the asking had been. Mary must have let that out, in the course of a loyal defence.
“Yes,” he said, “but for a different sort of reason. Another, thing: if, simply by writing a note to you in your room, I can unintentionally produce an effect like that on Sandra, you can’t say that I’m not ‘getting through’ to them, at least some of the time. I’m not making that up. You saw it happen.”
“I expect we could all do something of the sort if we were prepared to think about horrors the whole time. Sandra had never met Marilyn.”
“Oh, well. Put it this way. Gorton has escaped; he had no friends, and the rest of his family are in Australia. If she showed any signs of telepathic powers when they lived together he would certainly have been interested. After his arrest he talked about somebody or something which had supernatural knowledge. I’m not making any of that up, am I?”
“I suppose not.”
“So there is at least an outside chance that he’ll come here and look for Marilyn. Even if it’s a hundred to one, it’s worth taking a few precautions. Perhaps Ivan could keep an eye on Marilyn the whole time—you could tell him it was to see that she wasn’t pestered by hopeful journalists, as she’s the only relative.”
“They’d have to come through me,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones stiffly.
“Of course they ought to, but I’ve known inexperienced local chaps have a go at cutting corners, thinking the scoop will bring them fame and fortune—but it doesn’t matter, it’s only an excuse. I think in fact that you’d be wise to keep all the children together and accounted for; if he can’t get Marilyn, he might decide one of the others would do. The painters should lock up all their ladders. You can’t do much about the scaffolding, but the local police are supposed to be sending some men out, and they can look after that. If he does come, he’ll be coming for Marilyn, not you. He doesn’t know about you.”
“I should think not.”
“I mean when I talked to Marilyn this morning, I thought that she had recognized a situation in which somebody was planning to hurt you, and had tied this up with her own memories of Gorton. Now I think that what she said meant that she knew Gorton had escaped and was thinking about her, and that she mentioned your name simply because you fitted in with the previous pattern of his victims.”
“If it meant anything.”
“Exactly.”
“All right,” snapped Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “I think you’re mad and I know you’re a nuisance, but I’ll do it. Oh, my God, I’m sick of the whole place and everybody in it!”
“Can I do anything to help? For instance—”
“No! Go away! Go away!”
She turned to the switchboard and stabbed cords murderously into sockets.
As Pibble walked along the gaudy corridor the image of her furious face hung in his mind like the head in the poem, on a canvas sky depending from nothing. Love had not missed her, but it had come to her strangely, in the deathlike fondlings of the cathypnics and perhaps the occasional stately embrace of the mock-Arab upstairs. Ram Silver must once, among the tavernas and the junkshops, have conned some of her tourist pittance off her, and she did not have the look of a forgiving woman. He’d have paid her back her “loan,” of course, the moment he’d arrived at the McNair, and at once begun, almost casually, to defraud her of her power and control over the children. Every instant seemed to diminish her hold, every newcomer—Silver himself, Mr. Costain, and now old Pibble. So she sat there, poor good woman, raging, tapping the litter on her desk, flinging up ephemeral ramparts round herself, the children, and her outrageous autumn lover. It was another point in the con man’s favour that he was able to inspire and feed such an improbable passion.
Several cathypnics were waiting in the hail, listless and solemn, but Pibble didn’t feel armoured enough to endure another of their whining rebuffs, so he walked straight to the stairs, still thinking about the perils of Posey.
“Poor Posey,” said the nearest child.
“She’ll be all right,” said Pibble. “We’ll all look after her.”
“Poor Posey,” said another child. Their tone made the words quite emotionless, not an expression of pity but a statement of fact. The whole group drifted away from him with the casual wariness of deer in a public park. He met two more coming down the stairs—it looked as if there was going to be a mysterious gathering of the children, like the seasonal congregations of some animals which still puzzle zoologists.
Prickly with the distress of his interview, and then the curious foreboding omen which the children provided—though their actual language was scarcely
more interpretable than the rustlings can have been among Dodona’s magic oaks—he stopped on the gallery to look down at the slowly assembling cathypnics. Yes, the whole building was prickly, like the air over London before summer thunder. His shirt felt sticky, and not just with the greenhouse heat of the rooms. He longed for ease, contentment, relaxation, and there was only one place to go for that. As he pushed the door open into Kelly’s Kingdom he wondered how much of his unease was hangover from Thanassi’s champagne, suppressed by Thanassi’s pink fizz but still grumbling subliminally away. These children would not be attending the meeting in the hall. They lay exactly as he had seen them before, except that the two nurses had stripped one set of blankets back, turned the child over, and were now rubbing the fat back under a sunlamp.
“Doctor Kelly wants to see me,” whispered Pibble.
“I’ll take you,” said the plump one. “I won’t be a minute, Angie.”
She wiped the pungent oil off her hands and led Pibble through the far door of the ward into a little laboratory—microscope, test tubes, something that looked like an X-ray apparatus, shelves of jars all ranked and dustless. Everything looked fanatically tidy, except where one bit of bench was half dismantled and a clutter of splinters and a few tools lay on the floor. If that was to accommodate the hoped-for scintillation counter, it meant that Rue was not yet ordering expensive toys as partner in a fraud with Ram Silver. The relief and relaxation he longed for were already settling on him as the nurse opened the door into a tiny office where Rue lolled, feet or his desk, reading the Evening Standard.
“Stop following the nurses around,” he said. “At your age, Jimmy, your mind should be on less ephemeral delights.”
“The gentleman asked to see you, Doctor,” said the nurse in a parody of primness.
“Do you realize she’s mine?” said Rue, rubbing his hands together. “All mine! But you can have her if you want her all that much, me old mate. Molly, you’re to go home with this lecherous dotard and provide him with every comfort.”
The nurse flounced virtuously away, but the effect was spoiled by Rue reaching out a long arm to nip the neat buttock.
Sleep and His Brother Page 12
