Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  “No. You can go ahead with that. But I hope the inquiry turns you down.”

  Thanassi cackled again.

  “Attaboy!” he said. “Don’t you worry for me, Jim—I’ve got that all fixed. This Viv feller couldn’t shake it a scrap. What I need him for is to make guys like you think it’s a good thing. I want it accepted. Who’s gonna stay in a hotel which the natives think is an outrage? Cultural roughnecks, that’s who. I don’t want that kinda custom. Jim, mate, I’ll think about this deal of yours. You do right by me, and I’ll name one of the honeymoon suites after you. So long.”

  Pibble sighed as he replaced the purring receiver. All that roaring confidence and gusto. He didn’t envy the money so much. For a moment he wondered whether to ask Thanassi to make Mary secretary. She had the drive, now thirty years frustrated. No, it was a pipe dream.

  He had to lie quite freely to persuade the receptionist to tell him which ward the cathypnics were in. As he walked down the wide and bustling corridors he found that he was moving more and more slowly. Wards P and Q were at the very end of the maze, opening left and right off a stem of corridor, and separated by four or five small rooms in which he saw furniture shrouded in dust sheets. He chose the wrong ward and found the smaller cathypnics being coaxed into bed by Ivan and the fat woman he’d noticed at the McNair and two little coloured nurses in the natty uniform of Saint Ursula’s. He backed out and crossed to the other ward, where he found the two nurses he’d seen before, and Rue Kelly. All three looked very tired, but Kelly glanced up from where he was taking the pulse of one of the sleeping children and grinned. When he’d made the necessary note on the chart at the foot of the bed he strolled over.

  “Hello, my old pal,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  “I wanted to see how you were getting on. You were lucky to find a place where they could fit you all in together.”

  “Lucky, nothing. The Deputy House Governor’s the only person here I’m still on speaking terms with. I knew they’d had to close a couple of wards because of staff shortage, so as I had my own staff I got her to open them up for me. We’re all right, mate. Some of the kids chilled off a bit in the ambulance, but they’re picking up nicely now. You nip home and sleep easy. I’ll see you in the Black Boot.”

  “No,” said Pibble.

  Kelly’s whole stance seemed to change, though the only muscles that moved were the little ones by the side of his nose as he sniffed the hot stale air of the ward as if it had been Wolf Wood. Then his hand came up to stroke his long chin.

  “Something biting you?” he said compassionately. “I’m not surprised. But it wasn’t your fault, Jimmy. I mean you may have triggered the old bag off by bringing a crowd of your mates down to prowl among the evergreens—and boy, is your name mud with that lot! I heard them saying a few words about you before they tootled off—but Posey was going to blow her top any moment. If she hadn’t done it today she’d have done it tomorrow, about something quite as trivial.”

  “She couldn’t make that lighter work,” said Pibble.

  “What lighter?”

  “A silver one which she kept on her desk to tap with her pen when she was angry. You must have seen it. It wasn’t on her desk when I went in there after the fire had started. I think they’ll find it somewhere near where they found the body.”

  “She musta took it along because of the symbolism. Me ould friend Father O’Freud would have the words for a woman that was forivver banging a sphere with a rod.”

  “You think they’ll find it there, too?” said Pibble.

  “Jesus, I don’t know. I’m just trying to follow you into your fantasy world. What else have you got on your conscience?”

  “Ram Silver told me what a biopsy was.”

  “Ram!” said Kelly scornfully, “He—”

  “At one moment he was thinking of killing me—the first time I asked him. In the end he told me. He didn’t tell me why it mattered. I had to work that out.”

  Kelly felt for the bed behind him and sat slowly down, looking at Pibble all the time. He settled himself carefully against the hidden form of the patient and slapped the fat buttocks affectionately, like a farmer with a favourite pig.

  “You’re in a tangle, mate,” he said. “You bring down a horde of cops because you have a fantasy about an escaped homicidal maniac. You’ve evidently got another fantasy about somebody doing for old Posey. And now you’ve got another about Ram Silver trying to do for you. I’m not going to sympathize with you—I don’t hold with mollycoddling nut cases … Yes, nurse?”

  “Mortimer’s breathing a bit funny,” whispered plump, pinchable Molly.

  “What rate?”

  “Same as before, but wheezy like.”

  “Temperature?”

  “Same as before. And the pulse.”

  “OK, I’ll come and see. You hang on here, Jimmy. I’ll be back.”

  Pibble waited dismally at the foot of the bed and watched his friend bend over a motionless shape at the further end of the ward. He looked wholly confident and competent as he listened briefly with a stethoscope, took the pulse, raised the child’s eyelid, and then stood considering. Age him thirty years, gray the hair and recede it over the scalp, wither the skin a little, and you could see him, the great Sir Reuben Kelly going round the wards, harbingered by frowning nurses, attended by tiptoeing students, ushered out by the awed whispers of patients well enough to gossip. By then those fingers would have prodded royal torsos. Into his hank balance would flow the dollars of oil-rich sheikhs, come to London to be healed of their twitches. He would have saved innumerable lives, prolonged innumerable dotages … A useful man, yes. The whole human race would be better for his existence. It would turn out to have been a privilege to have known him, let alone to have drunk beer with him day after day

  Suddenly Kelly laughed, said something sufficiently indecorous to make Molly flush, and came striding back. He walked straight past Pibble with a follow-me jerk of the head and led the way into one of the little rooms between the wards. Briskly he flicked the dust sheets into a corner and revealed a Spartan office.

  “You sit there,” he said, settling into the chair behind the desk and lolling back. “Begin at the beginning. Have it all out. Christ, Jimmy, if I didn’t like you so much I’d kick you out. I think I can see what you’re getting at.”

  “I expect so,” said Pibble. “I was talking to Silver this morning about the problem of getting even scientists to acknowledge the force of statistical probability if they don’t like the conclusions. And here you can’t even quantify the odds.”

  “What odds?”

  “Well, for instance, when did you last rearrange the work schedule in your ward?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And before that?”

  “Oh, not for a couple of months. It’s not really rearranging; the girls like rubbing the children’s backs—it’s for bedsores, but it’s also the only way of loving them—so every few months you find that they’re spending more time on the massage than anything else, and you have to crack down. They hate it.”

  “Say every two months—roughly ten to one against your having done it in the last week. How many departments are there at Saint Ursula’s? Twenty? How many people on the staff of the McNair? A dozen?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And how many of those would have a key to the greenhouses?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “How many wards have scaffolding and hoists outside the window? Not one in a hundred. How many small labs contain carpenter’s tools strong enough to take a window out? Say one in ten. Ten times twenty times fourteen times a hundred times ten makes odds of nearly three million to one that somebody knew it was going to be necessary to evacuate your ward in a hurry, without using the main stairs; then to keep them warm on the spot; and finally to get them into a hospital. The fire
would not have been started unless somebody had known that all that was possible.”

  Kelly had been listening with a kind of joking attention, like somebody playing a radio panel game, anxious to show the audience that he knows it is only a game, but equally anxious to score every conceivable half-point.

  “Where do you get your twenty from?” he said.

  “The only department in Saint Ursula’s you hadn’t quarrelled with.”

  “You couldn’t quarrel with Monica. Her life’s work is to atone for all those eleven thousand virgins.”

  “Yes. Some of the odds are coincidence, if you look at it that way. Look at it the other way, and they are opportunities which can be taken advantage of if you arrange a few further coincidences.”

  “I told you about my cousin from County Clare?”

  “You did. You also told me that Mrs. Dixon-Jones only signed her initials when she was angry, but I’d seen her do it when she had every reason to be pleased.”

  “You’re clutching at straws.”

  “The straws are in the wind. You can also see the wind by the straws in it.”

  “Old Mongolian proverb. Do you wish to show the good doctor any more symptoms of this mild but not very pleasing mania?”

  “You sent a message for me to come and see you. You wanted to tell me about the hairpin and the telephone, and to make sure I thought Mrs. Dixon-Jones was unbalanced, and to find out whether you could do business with Mr. Thanatos, and whether I knew that Silver was a professional con man. But you didn’t want to plunge straight in with all that, so you broke the rule about not talking to laymen about your work, just to keep the party going. Once you’d started you found it difficult to stop, until I said something about there being no more McNair. That pulled you up because you thought I knew what you had in mind. I’d already told you about Mr. Thanatos, but unfortunately I also told you that Mrs. Dixon-Jones was in a near-hysterical state about me and Gorton, and that all the children were in one place. You realized you mightn’t get a better chance. You could say that I pushed you over the edge.”

  “Aha!” said Kelly.

  “Wait. One other thing. You always put on a show of being lackadaisical, but you’re fanatically tidy and conscientious about your work. You went on correcting Membership papers when you could afford not to, for instance. But this afternoon you knocked a pile of them over and let them lie. You knew the flames would get them. That was just as I left. You’d already decided, and were thinking out the details.”

  “Spur-of-the-moment stuff, is it?”

  “You’d thought out the main outlines before. At least I’m convinced that somebody was thinking about fire, and about killing Mrs. Dixon-Jones, some time before that.”

  “Balls. My serve, I think. I won’t even answer your telepathic maunderings, but tell me if I leave anything else out. I’ll go backward. I was worrying about you when you left, because I could see you were going round the bend. I picked the papers up as soon as you were gone. Anybody would be curious about Mr. T. Anybody would warn a pal about Posey. Anybody with a grain of sense would have spotted that Ram was a fraud—I was inquisitive to know how quickly an ex-copper would get on to him.”

  “You hadn’t been all that quick. I’m told you were bloody to him at first—that must have been until you realized he wasn’t a qualified doctor.”

  “Correct. I don’t like doctors. Criminal, is it? But you, Jimmy—did you tell your pals about him?”

  “No.”

  “Oho! We’ll come back to that. Let’s get on. I told you about the telephone because it was a striking example of Posey’s mania. The fact that she used a hairpin to fix the phones today shows how struck she was by it. Now I’ll cut down your odds for you. You can’t have more than evens on the nurses’ work schedule—I only crack down when it gets out of hand. That means that most of the time it’s in hand.”

  “This was a new arrangement. They hadn’t done it like that before.”

  “I’d got tired of the old system always slipping out of gear, so I fixed something they couldn’t muck around with. The tools—I’ve always kept some, rather than hang round waiting for idiot carpenters when I want to change some little thing. I could have broken into the greenhouse with them if I hadn’t known where the key was, and so could anyone else on the staff. I could have kept the children there all night if necessary—they’d have been OK, though the air’s on the steamy side—and we’d have found a ward for them by morning. The scaffolding was luck, but listen, mister: the rule is you’re allowed one piece of luck before you start counting coincidences. Anyway, I could have slung the bedding out of the window and carried the kids down the tower stairs at the back.”

  “They’d have been in the cold much longer—and if one of them chilled off in the ambulance just now …”

  “Like I said, it was luck. I’m not going to do your idiot sums about what that adds up to, but I’ll offer you six to one the lot. Nothing like the odds against you and Costain and the cops all coming the same day to stir old Posey into blowing a gasket.”

  “No, Those aren’t odds. You were waiting for a day when she’d been seen by somebody on what looked like the edge of sanity. You were in a hurry. It had to be soon. But you knew that any interference with her domain could produce a dramatic scene, and if we hadn’t come you’d have arranged for something. You’d been thinking about it for some time, but during our talk you realized that you might not get a better chance.”

  “I was in no hurry, mate. Research takes years and years. I didn’t want some demon in the States to pip me, but I knew I was way ahead of the field.”

  “It wasn’t that. It wasn’t even the convenience of having a fire bomb on the pantry stairs. It was Silver. You thought he was setting up a fraud, and when he’d brought it off he’d just vanish. You needed him to stay because he brought in the money for your equipment, and also because you needed him. He was the perfect assistant for you, medically competent but medically unqualified, and so unable to claim any of the credit for your discoveries. You would have had to fall back on sharing your research with a real doctor somewhere, or perhaps a team of doctors. Earlier on, before you quarrelled with the endocrinology department down here, you had been prepared to put up with that. But by now you weren’t. I think it’s something to do with the cathypnics themselves—they bring out people’s obsessions. I was talking to Silver about it just now. Anyway, you yourself—”

  “Balls,” said Kelly in a harsh voice. “I am what I am.”

  “Yes, of course, at any given moment. So’m I. So’s everyone. But we’re also what we have become. But forget about that side of the children—I shouldn’t have dragged it in. One of them said several things which made me believe that somebody was planning to kill Mrs. Dixon-Jones—I thought it was Gorton, in fact—but you can’t argue from that kind of premise …”

  “I should bloody well think not,” said Kelly, pouncing into geniality. “But I can. Talk about obsessions. You fell in love with those kids, Jimmy—I could see it in your watery old eyes. One of them says about three syllables which imply that there are dirty deeds afoot and off you rush like a retired bloodhound which is suddenly allowed to snuffle around again.”

  “That’s what Mrs. Dixon-Jones said.”

  “Oho! Posey had a lucid interval, but you take no notice because in your heart you know she’s loopy. Come on, let’s have it all out. You haven’t told me why I bumped the poor girl off. She was a nut case, but she was a damned good administrator. We were lucky to have her.”

  “She was the children’s guardian. You needed her consent before you could take the children to a proper hospital and have a major operation, a brain biopsy, performed. She wouldn’t give it. But if she were dead, the odds were that Doll would be made secretary, and you thought she’d do anything you wanted. You’d already done as much as you could on your own. I think that when the Pharmacoi
d money was withdrawn and you quarrelled with the professor here, you had nothing to do but sit down and think. You made up a blue version of Deirdre of the Sorrows, but you also came up with Kelly’s Theory. Doll has a funny little scar on her knee, which looks as though you might have done a peripheral nerve biopsy there, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find similar marks on some of the children in your ward. But apart from that you were stuck. Then Silver turned up, with money to buy the instruments you needed, and sufficient ability to act, for instance, as an anaesthetist with simple equipment. So you tried another step and did a trans something … dammi …”

  He paused. Kelly had turned his head and was staring not at the ceiling but at Pibble. The word suddenly came.

  “. . . transsphenoidal operation. I think it probably produced the evidence you wanted, but the child died of meningitis. I don’t think you would have minded about that, though it’s heavily on Silver’s conscience. Anyway, you have now got to the stage where everything you do must be above board. Or else you think you will soon get there. The operations must be performed by a proper surgeon, so that no questions are asked about how you got your evidence when you finally publish your results. The surgeon wouldn’t steal any of your glory—he’d simply be a technician, as far as you were concerned. I suspect you’d have liked to do a bit more checking up, so as to be sure you would get the exact results you wanted from the final operations, but that Silver dug his heels in. I don’t know—”

  “You don’t know anything, mister.”

  “I know a few things, but not enough to prove you killed Mrs. Dixon-Jones. On the other hand—”

  “You know why I’m in such a hurry and still mucked around burning down the McNair? Six months that’ll put me back.”

  “Not so much, I suspect. I’d be surprised if all your relevant papers, or duplicates of them, weren’t safe somewhere for some perfectly good reason. But you hated the McNair, and you probably knew that a body brought out of a fire is the pathologist’s nightmare. What can show up, provided you lay your victim out without killing him, and then see that the flames really get at him? And then there’s a good chance that after a thorough shake-up you could go to Thanatos direct tell him how close you were to results on the physical side, point out that this was an essential element in approaching the telepathic side, and get yourself set up with everything you want.”