“Except hurt the children.”
Rue shook his head.
“She’s mad,” he said. “Mad people don’t think like that. You’d have said the same about fathers who suddenly smash their family up with the coal hammer before they hang themselves. They wouldn’t have done anything to hurt the children either. And then they do.”
“Doctor Silver thinks she’s a very good woman.”
“Are you clever about people, Jimmy? I know you got the sack and all that, but earlier you must have met men who’d done their own horrible thing, and then been collared. You saw them under pressure. You took them apart, as far as you could, and looked at the bits. But supposing you’d known one of them fairly well before he went off the rails—could you have guessed he was going to? Or that he might—that the potentiality was there?”
“Now you are making a layman’s mistake,” said Pibble “The people who do what you call their horrible thing are practically all deprived, mentally subnormal, and oppressed by life. The typical murder is messy, sad, simple: a mother who’s been deserted, gets her maintenance erratically, lives in a rotten basement with three kids, youngest won’t pot train—for obvious psychological reasons which the poor girl too deprived to have heard about. She gets so exasperated and beaten down that one day she starts to hit the kid after it’s just dirtied its last clean pants, and she can’t stop and she kills it. Certainly, if you know the family at all you can spot that that sort of thing might happen, but—”
“I know, I know,” said Kelly impatiently. “But you must have met a few cases where the villain was neither a moron nor a pauper. What about them?”
“I think there’s nearly always an element of obsession, and if you can spot that … But I’ve been married to Mary for twenty-eight years now, and though I can guess how she’ll probably react to something, I can’t be sure. I don’t know what it’s like to be her. People are like weather forecasting. Observation of past patterns can—”
“Ram Silver, for instance,” interrupted Rue. “You’re going to be involved with him. Do you trust him?”
“Completely/largely/partly/a little/not at all. Tick the adverb of your choice. Then, in not more than twelve words …”
Pibble’s attempt to joke the conversation out of this awkward area was a mistake. Rue swore at him in chilly Erse. Pibble couldn’t understand the words but he caught the meaning.
“I seem to spend my day infuriating the staff,” he said.
“Who else?”
“Mrs. Dixon-Jones.”
“You told me about that.”
“This was the second time. There’s an off-chance that this chap, Gorton”—he scuffed the fallen paper with his toe—“might come down here to look for Marilyn. I’ve been talking to the Yard about it, and they want us to take precautions. I told Mrs. Dixon-Jones about it, and she was very angry indeed.”
“D’you mean you’ve invited a horde of your old mates down here?”
“I don’t think they’ll come. It’s a very long shot. Something Marilyn said to me suggested that Gorton regarded her as a sort of mascot, or oracle.”
“Oh, don’t come that with me. The kids are too stupid to know what’s going on, and if they did their vocabulary is too small for them to be able to formulate sentences that you cart, interpret.”
“You’re probably right. But when I came up a lot of them seemed to be drifting down into the hall, without being told. It’ll make it far easier to keep an eye on them.”
“You’ll get used to that, if you stay here. They often gather, together for no known reason.”
“I expect so. One curious thing is that Mrs. Dixon-Jones, is exactly Gorton’s type.”
“Yes,” said Rue in a mildly surprised voice. “Yes, I suppose: she is. You want to keep out of her way, Jimmy—not just for your sake but for all of ours. Some days I breathe a sigh of relief when she goes home to that little flat of hers.”
“I thought she lived on the premises.”
“She’s just sane enough to know she’d be stark staring if she did. I’m sorry I lost my cool with you, Jimmy. It’s just that sometimes you’re too bloody fastidious to be human.”
“Oh, I thought it was because I was quoting. If you can’t take Shelley from Doll then I shouldn’t expect you to take Kellogg from me.”
“Great!” cried Rue. “I have bechewed those flakes!”
Either he hadn’t practiced his mimicry of Silver enough, or his return to good humour was less spontaneous than it seemed.
“Time I went,” said Pibble. “I wouldn’t like to come between a Pakistani and his Membership.”
“Work,” sighed Rue, ostentatiously putting his feet back on the desk in such a way that he toppled the pile of Membership papers across the floor. Pibble bent to pick them up while Rue stared at the ceiling and sighed the syllable again.
“Let ’em lie,” he snarled as he noticed what Pibble was doing. “Screw them all—I’ve done with them. Watch your step, Jimmy, See you.”
Pibble felt worse than ever as he picked his way through the tools and splinters on the laboratory floor. His fear of Gorton’s coming flooded over him. He recognized that this was a superstitious fear—doubly superstitious, because he nearly certainly wouldn’t come, and if he did he was still only a man. An aberrant man, but human.
Still the fear remained, mixed with the deep depression of his talk with Rue, which for all its spurts of jokiness had been tense and strained, so that he wondered whether it would ever be possible to resume the Black Boot relationship again. Having seen him on his own ground, having felt his passion for his work—as narrow and obsessed in its own way as Mrs. Dixon-Jones’s possessiveness with the children—it would no longer seem quite real to loll and chat about nothing much over their beer. He stopped at the door into the ward, wondering whether Rue had valued their meetings as an island of calm from his obsession, whether he’d chosen Pibble as a man remote from the striving world. If so, all that was spoiled. It might recover, but …
The atmosphere in the ward was not much better, because the nurses were quarrelling.
“But we’ve only done two,” said the tall one, Angela, a little hysterically. “At that rate we won’t get round in a week, and they’ll get so sore …”
“It’s what the man said,” snapped the shorter one. “You can cross him if you fancy it.”
“I’ll go and ask him,” sniffed Angela.
She walked off towards the laboratory door as the plump one bent to insinuate a fine tube into one of the children’ nostrils. Her buttocks were her most animated feature—no wonder that Kelly’s fingers had strayed to the very brink of infamous conduct. Her lively flesh, surrounded by the chill swathed shapes of children who would never reach even to her small tally of years, struck Pibble as a nasty incongruity; he wondered whether the effect was deliberate, engineered by Kelly in his choice of nurses. It was like one of those weird orgies in churchyards to which the adherents of austere medieval heresies suddenly became prone. Or supine, as the case might be. All the bourgeois hairs on Pibble’s nape rose at this fanciful tableau of bad taste. He scurried out of the ward.
The hall was worse, though. From the gallery it looked like the aftermath of a massacre—a bomb in the airport lounge. Bodies sprawled patternless; between them figures mooned, as if stunned with shock.
“Satisfied?” said a harsh whisper, and Mrs. Dixon-Jones ghosted out from behind the pillar at the top of the stairs.
“Are they all here?” said Pibble. “Where’s Marilyn?”
A shapely finger pointed, and he recognized the dull green sweater amid a jigsaw of chubby torsos and limbs. A head beside it stirred restlessly, as if the sleeper were in the middle of a nightmare.
“I thought the others kept away from her,” said Pibble.
“You’ll see, if you go down there. Oh, God, I’m not sure how
long I can stand this! If you’ve done it for nothing I shall never forgive you.”
I shall never forgive myself, thought Pibble, and went slowly down the stairs. A delegation of three mooned over to meet him as he reached the last step.
“Mister,” said one.
“Frightened,” said another.
“Please,” said the third.
Their high drawl, a voice with the tone of death in it, seemed to make the fear a material substance, a heavy gas lying in a layer above the jaunty carpet. He felt that if he had stooped he would have breathed fear.
“It’s all right,” he said. “He can’t get in. There are coppers coming to look after you.”
“Come,” said one of the children, and the three of them turned away from him as starving villagers might turn away from a lorry which they thought brought rice but in fact carried a cargo of birth control leaflets. He could ring up the local station, or the Yard, for news. Instead he decided to look outside first. Ivan was in the porch, wearing a First World War trench coat, reading the same edition of the Evening Standard that Kelly had had. Mrs. Dixon-Jones must have posted him there—once committed to a course of action, however much she disapproved of it, she would carry it through as efficiently as she could manage.
“Don’t they give you the creeps, eh?” said Ivan. “They’ve never been like this before, not since I’ve been here. Think it’s something to do with this joker?”
He flicked the dismal photograph with his fingernails; Pibble pretended to read the news for the first time.
“Why should it have?” he said. “The man might go anywhere.”
“We’ve got one of the kids here, and that’s in the Stop Press, so they must think it matters.”
And it was. Pibble wondered whether Callow had held a press conference (“Had to give the bastards something, Jimmy, and there wasn’t another crumb”) or whether it was an old-fashioned leak from a subordinate, worth about a tenner in these inflationary days.
“They’re bound to catch him soon,” said Pibble. “A chauffeur’s uniform is pretty conspicuous.”
“A chauffeur?”
“I thought it said that,” said Pibble lamely.
Ivan’s brown eyes looked at him, and the little beard shook sideways.
“I hope to God he doesn’t come,” he said. “Poor sod! No wonder they’re scared.”
Pibble longed to get away. He was more and more conscious that the whole horror might be the product of his own mind—his subconscious revolt against the watery monotony of retirement bodying itself, through the children, into this melodrama. That’s what Mrs. Dixon-Jones thought, and would never forgive him. Quite right, too. If he took himself off, perhaps he’d remove the central cause of all the fear; but he couldn’t go right away until the local police took over.
“I’m going for a stroll,” he said, “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“You know what you’re doing,” said Ivan, shaking his head again. “I won’t come and look for you if you yell, mind.”
Pibble grunted and strode away up the gravel. It was not yet dusk but it was cold, and the sun must be low behind the banked layers of cloud to the west. He walked fast, partly to keep warm but partly to get away from the house; the shrub-lined path to the terrace bent back on itself and became a short flight of steps, at the top of which he turned and looked down the hill. From here you could see that the roof line was just as crankily exotic as the walls, with spires at the farther corners as well as the two he had seen from outside the porch; and at the centre of the quincunx rose a glass onion, which must be the dome that gave light to both sets of stairs. And height seemed to confirm his fantasy of the children’s fear being like a heavy gas: now he could see what a storm in a teacup the whole preparation was. Gorton, now, would be miles away, skulking in a builder’s yard or (if he was lucky and the rest of us not) exercising his electric dominance over some dim-witted tart, who would conceal him and keep him while he built up a base, honed his knife, and then began to stalk the suburb for the woman (fortyish, blonde, A/B readership, snappish but confident in her fur-trimmed suede coat) who would be his next slow-dying prey. The odds against his coming to the McNair were so great as to be not worth thinking about, let alone acting on.
Beside his elbow the rhododendrons rustled.
6
His heart bounced once, then settled into a quick, loud thud. He could feel his palms slippery, and his cheeks chill with withdrawn blood. But he did not run—the inertia of civilization kept him still while he waited for the thudding to quiet and for his mind to persuade his muscles that the noise was no more than the rootling of some clumsy bird.
“Don’t turn round, Jimmy,” said an officer-type mutter.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“Who the hell did you think it was?”
“I don’t know. You found something in the notes, Ned?”
“He kept saying, ‘She knows. None of you know.’”
“That might mean anything.”
“Yeah. They were turning a Bakerloo tube round at Elephant and Castle when they found an unconscious man in his shirtsleeves. You don’t knife a blighter if you want his coat.”
“How long ago?”
“Couple of hours. They got on to me just after I’d finished with you, so I came myself instead of ringing the local boys. He’ll have tried buses from there, and he won’t know his way. I reckon we’ve got an hour before he comes.”
“You haven’t found the chauffeur’s cap and jacket?”
“We’re looking. I want you to clear off now, Jimmy. Nothing personal.”
“I’ll be glad to go, as a matter of fact. The waking children are all in the main hall, including Marilyn Goddard. Mrs. Dixon-Jones, the secretary, is keeping an eye on them. The sleeping ones are in a ward, with Doctor Kelly in charge—he’s head of the medical research side. There’s also a Doctor Silver who runs other branches of research.”
“What the hell do you mean by sleeping and waking?”
Pibble explained.
“All the waking children are very frightened,” he added. “They get it from each other.”
“Don’t bother me with that kind of rubbish.”
“The Standard has a piece about the girl in the Stop Press.”
“We had to give them something, Jimmy. There wasn’t another bloody crumb.”
“I know. They’ve got the builders here. I told the secretary to see that all the ladders were locked up, but there’s scaffolding all down one side. You’d better go and see the secretary—she thinks I’m making the whole thing up.”
“Heaven help you if you are. So long, Jimmy.”
“Shall I take you down and introduce you?”
“Might as well.”
With a crash Callow burst from the concealing evergreen. Twigs clung to his tweedy suit and his hair, but his military stance made it look as though he were deliberately wearing them as light camouflage.
“I was doing a bit of a recce,” he said. “Last thing we want to do is scare the blighter off—I want him inside the ring, and then I’ve got him. I’ve tucked the cars out of sight already. Next thing is to tuck my bods away all round, and then I’ll give the building a quick once-over. But even if he has got here, he’ll lie doggo till dark, and break in then.”
“I’d have thought a northerner might fail to find his way here at all,” said Pibble. “South London can be very tricky, and he won’t feel like showing his face to ask people.”
“I rang the prison again. His woman came to visit him before she went to Australia, and he asked her a lot about it then. They forgot to tell me. Bastards!”
“It looks as though he’ll at least try to get here, then?”
“That’s my thinking. Jesus, what a pile!”
Pibble was interested to find that Callow’s sensibilities were not so ha
rdened that the building failed to impress him.
“It grows on you,” he said.
“I’d like a place like this, Jimmy. Out in the country, of course—couple of lakes, pheasant shooting, home farm …”
“You should meet my friend Mr. Thanatos. If he liked you, he might stand you one.”
“Your friend?”
“Only since lunchtime.”
“Jesus!”
They came to the porch, where Ivan looked relieved to see a recruit of Callow’s meaty bulk.
“This is Superintendent Callow,” said Pibble. “Is Mrs. Dixon-Jones still on the landing?”
“Hope he’s brought a few of his mates,” said Ivan.
“Now listen to me, my man,” said Callow. “This is a very serious affair. You are to keep your mouth shut or I’ll make mincemeat of you.”
“Mince away,” said Ivan, cocky, with relaxed tension.
Callow took a half pace forward and swung his arm in a practiced curve. Pibble couldn’t see whether his fist was open or shut, but he heard a fleshy crack as Ivan reeled against the wall of the porch and then stood shaking his head. Callow opened the door and walked in as though the place were already his.
“Wonder when he last had his ears boxed,” he said loudly. “Too long ago, anyway. Hello, here’s a cheery lot of little beggars!”
He stood and stared at the stodgy throng. Several of the recumbent ones stirred and sat slowly up, and one child came toward him with a gradualness that again reminded Pibble of the bored explorations of aquarium specimens.
“Copper,” she said.
“Officer,” said Callow. “And keep a civil tongue in your head, my lass.”
“They only know about three hundred words,” said Pibble.
Sleep and His Brother Page 14
