The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

by Peter Dickinson

  He smiled, confident in his own charm, pleased with his tiny joke. Pibble flicked through the pile of school children’s cards. Martha, Luke, Robin, Mark, James, Ruth—surely there wasn’t a Robin in the Bible.

  “You haven’t told me where you fit in,” said Pibble.

  The boy studied the formal arrangement of people in the room.

  “That’s my mum.” He pointed to the half-formed herb strewer. “But tribe-wise I belong over here.” He passed close in front of the card table and settled cross-legged at the feet of the elders, giving them suddenly the look of people posed for a group photograph.

  “Right,” said Pibble. “Where were we? Um, yes—I was asking whether any of you slept in the same rooms, so that you could know of each other’s movements in the night. Melchizedek?”

  “The men sleep all in one hut. It is the custom of the Kus.”

  “And the women, Leah?”

  “The women have that custom also.”

  “I see. That should simplify matters.” Should it hell. “But I imagine you are all very silent movers—you could get about so that I could not hear you pass. Would it be possible for one of you to go out of the room where you sleep without any of the others hearing? Melchizedek?”

  “Elijah is the keeper of our door.”

  Elijah’s beard was a Hemingway fringe. He was the one in the brown polo-necked jersey and brown corduroys, an arty getup. His voice had the same low register as the other male Kus.

  “I sleep at the door, lest some stranger should come in, but I think none could go out, either.”

  “And the women, Leah?”

  “I keep our door. None passed in the night.”

  “Are none of you married, Melchizedek?”

  “We do not go to sleep to beget our children.”

  He answered deadpan, but the room thundered with deep laughter, delighted female giggles riding the storm of noise. Eve was laughing as happily as anyone. Only Paul worked on in a daze of concentration. The riot ended in a decrescendo of coughs and squeaks. Pibble plugged on.

  “Elijah, wouldn’t Aaron have disturbed you when he came in?”

  “The chief sleeps in his own hut.”

  “So none of you could have left your rooms last night, except Elijah or Leah themselves?”

  “What about Paul and Eve, Mister?” Robin was trying to sound detached and bored, but his voice had not broken long enough ago to keep the squeak of excitement out of the penultimate syllable. He was one who was never going to achieve the midnight timbre of the pure male Ku.

  “Thank you for reminding me,” said Pibble, and made the mistake of hesitating between sarcasm and avuncularity, like a tennis player trying to convert a drive into a pat in mid-swing. The result was so inane that it was an effort to look at Eve. She rescued him impassively.

  “I do not think, Superintendent, that we can prove that we did not commit the murder in concert, but we share a bed so creaky that it would be impossible for either of us to embark on a midnight excursion unknown to the other.”

  Pibble sorted through the pile of men’s cards while the Kus enjoyed their laugh. Really it was like trying to solve a crime in the Stock Exchange, the way the mildest mention of sex interrupted business.

  “I see that Jacob and Daniel have jobs with London Transport,” he said. “Should they not be working now?”

  One of the younger men answered, solemn as a priest at a graveside.

  “We cannot leave the Kus until a new chief is found.”

  “Um,” said Pibble, interested to know that the young ones took their tabus as seriously as the old ones, and wondering whether Robin’s cockiness extended to questioning his elders’ lore. “That looks as far as we are likely to get for the moment. I think I must tell you that it still seems to me probable that the murder was done by someone who lives in this house, and I must impress on you that it is your duty as citizens to tell me if you know anything which might help me solve the crime. I will question you individually later, but first I must search the locked rooms upstairs. Who has the keys?”

  “Elijah has the key to the men’s hut,” said Melchizedek.

  “I have the key to the women’s hut,” said Leah.

  “Constable Fernham told me that several rooms were locked.”

  “Only two,” said Melchizedek. “The walls have been taken away.”

  “I see,” said Pibble. Eve must have spent a packet setting her tribe up in the style to which they were accustomed. “I will search the men’s room myself. Leah, I should also like to search the women’s room, but if that would offend you I can send for a policewoman to do it.”

  “Search, Mister. The Reverend Mackenzie taught us that the law is above our customs. I will come with you. There will be matters you do not understand.”

  “Fine. Well, we’d better get on with it … Oh, just before you go” (casual, now, casual), “have any of you seen a two-headed penny in the house?”

  Not a sausage. Pibble had been listening like a hunter. Perhaps there’d been a whisper of indrawn breath in the group of men, but too slight and quick to be sure of, let alone traced. Try again.

  “I’d better explain. When Aaron’s body was examined, he was found to be clutching a penny in his hand. Not just an ordinary penny”—Pibble scratched some change from his trouser pocket and held a coin up—“with the Queen’s head on one side and the seated woman on the other, but a penny with a king’s head on both sides. Does anyone know who it belonged to?”

  Blank. Blankety-blank, in fact. Where in screaming hell was he going to make even a clip in the featureless façade of this case? Pibble spun the coin fiercely in the air, caught it, and slammed it on the table.

  There! Done it, by God! Tension tangible in the room, as if a demon had slid through the door behind his chair. The hair on his nape stirred, but he managed not to look around. One of the elders had opened his mouth like a zany, but no words came before Melchizedek’s black claw dug into his shoulder. Paul stopped drawing for the first time, stared at Pibble, and then glanced carefully at Eve, who was watching, with a small frown, the byplay among the men. The women were whispering.

  “Well, Melchizedek, what does it mean?”

  Silence.

  “Why the excitement, man?”

  “Policeman, I cannot tell you what a penny with two heads may mean.”

  “Then what was all the fuss about when I tossed my penny just now?”

  Silence.

  “Eve?”

  “I do not know, Superintendent.”

  “Paul?”

  “Superintendent, I cannot tell you.”

  A nice distinction, and Melchizedek had used the same ambiguous phrase. Pibble felt that Paul meant him to catch it, and the dark glance that flicked sideways to where the women sat.

  “Leah?”

  “Rebecca will speak.”

  The shapeless creature at the farthest end of the sofa began to struggle with language; she was the first inarticulate Ku Pibble had come across, but at once he sensed—or, rather, wanted to sense, wanted to feel—that that peat-water gaze was not a symptom of less than human intelligence, that the impediment was only physical.

  “White man come … talk with Reverend Mackenzie and …­ Moses and Aaron throw penny … We hide … Yellow men …­ come­ … burn

  . . . kill.”

  “This white man, was he Group Captain Caine?”

  Nod.

  “Moses was the chief?”

  Nod.

  “You saw Group Captain Caine talk with the Reverend Mackenzie and Moses and Aaron, and then toss a coin. Who else saw this happen?”

  “Many.”

  “Of the people in this room, who saw this happen?”

  “Paul … Nahum … I do not know … More.”

  “Paul, why …”

&nbs
p; Oh, let it pass for the moment. Let’s assume that Caine had tossed a penny twenty-five years ago to decide something with Eve’s dad (presumably), and that shortly after this unfamiliar gesture the whole tribe had been near-as-dammit obliterated. Wouldn’t the act of tossing a penny have the same effect of sick shock on the survivors as the echo of a traumatic moment does on any neurotic? Though why had they left it to Rebecca to explain? Presumably Paul hadn’t wanted to drag it all out in front of Eve, but the others …

  And did it matter? Well, it might conceivably have been a (even the) two-headed penny which had spun and sung in the tropic clearing. Better slog on.

  “Nahum, did you see this?”

  “I saw this.”

  Another graybeard, in a bulging boiler suit this time, and another colossal bass.

  “And did you hear what they spoke about?”

  “When I was a hunter, I talked no English.”

  “Did you hear anything, Paul?”

  The black mask panned up from the desk, taut with patience.

  “I heard nothing, Superintendent.”

  Pibble caught him, just, before he plunged back into the world he was creating.

  “Can you guess?”

  “No.”

  “How soon after Group Captain Caine’s arrival in the village did this happen?”

  “Two hours, no more. Dr. and Mrs. Mackenzie had fed him in the mission house. I was houseboy. Then Dr. Mackenzie sent me to summon Moses. Aaron came also. They spoke out by the altar. We had no church in the village, but an altar stood in the open before the mission house. Then I saw Caine laugh, and he took a coin from his pocket, tossed it in the air, caught it, and slammed it on the altar, as you did on the table. Then he laughed again, and Dr. Mackenzie led him back to the mission house, still laughing. Hysteria, I now perceive.”

  “Um. Was it dangerous for you that the Group Captain should stay in your village?”

  “Everything was dangerous when the Japanese were in the mountains, but I had heard Dr. Mackenzie and Mrs. Mackenzie talking the day before of a village which had been burnt because they sheltered Australian airmen.”

  “Thank you, Paul. Melchizedek, do you all know the purpose of tossing a coin?”

  “We have seen it on the television set.”

  “Have you ever seen a two-headed penny used?”

  “Two years ago, the bad man tossed a coin to decide whether the white-haired woman must come with him to Berlin to search for her lover, although the bad man well knew that this lover was tied with a rope in a barge near Wapping. But the white-haired woman turned the coin over and saw that it had two heads, and from that she knew the badness of the man, whom she tricked, so that he went to Berlin while she untied the rope that bound her lover.”

  The Kus sighed and clucked with nostalgic appreciation.

  “Did Aaron see this?” said Pibble.

  “Aaron saw this.”

  Pause for thought—excited reverie, rather. Suppose the conversation with Dr. Mackenzie had been about whether it was fair to the Kus for Caine to stay in the village, and suppose Caine had tossed a crook penny to decide, and suppose, all this time after, Aaron had seen this drivel on the telly and (being distrustful of Caine—that we know) had found a chance to nip next door and look for the coin. . . Steady, steady. How could Caine have known Aaron knew? How could he have got in? Could Mrs. Caine be lying about his being away? Why (an academic point) had the Kus insisted on Rebecca’s telling the story first when they all knew? Just because we want Caine to be our man it doesn’t let us off the rest of the rigmarole. Stop daydreaming; search house. (Anyway, even for Caine, you couldn’t call it more than a fractional-motive.)

  “Oh well,” he said, “thank you very much. I shall have to ask you all to stay here for quite a time yet, while I and my men look through the rest of the house. Perhaps it would be best if we started with Eve and Paul’s quarters, and then Leah took us over the women’s hut. Then Melchizedek can take us through the men’s hut, and then you can all go to your own quarters while we do the rest of the house.”

  The Kus said nothing, but Eve gave him a minute encouraging nod. Pibble turned and found that Fernham was still in the room, which saved an undignified bellowing for minions down the stairs.

  “O.K., Fernham, will you hang on here and keep an eye on things? I think Dr. Ku has a bedroom down here, and I’ll try to clear that first.”

  “Yessir.”

  Eve’s bedroom. A place for sleeping in, a world of taste away from Mrs. Pibble’s dainty, pink-frilled, feminine retreat. White walls, no pictures, mannish dressing table, long built-in cupboard, bookcase of Penguins mostly with blue covers, ruddy great brass bedstead with white candlewick cover. Pibble lay gently on the bed, which responded with a thousand twanging instruments. He moved himself a careful half inch, and achieved a rich rococo chord. He rolled right across the snowy expanse and found that the whole bed was mined with noise. Well, it was an alibi of a sort, though he’d hate to have to bring the witness into court. Look through cupboard. Not a skirt in sight, but some brave summer blouses in the drawers and every shade of trousering. Separate section held two blue pin-stripe suits, above drawers with a few white shirts, socks, and underwear—Paul’s wardrobe. Tiny bathroom next door, but nothing there; linen basket empty; medicine cupboard Spartan—but ha! folder of contraceptive pills, solving the unaskable question. Rum, Pibble thought, that he should feel distinctly relieved. Nothing hidden in lavatory cistern or any of the other places amateurs always think of. Back to living room.

  There were three rooms on the floor above—the one where the body had lain, another small one with a big bed in it (one of the places, presumably, where the Kus didn’t go to sleep to beget children), and the women’s hut, which Leah unlocked for him.

  Walls had been knocked down to make a very big room. The windows in the far corner were barred, so that section might once have been a nursery. The place was light and clean, not jungly or un-English, not even strange, except for the number of beds in it; rows of modern divans were punctuated by chests of drawers, and three blue cots with transfers of bunnies on the woodwork. With two huge old Victorian wardrobes at either end, the furniture left precious little floor space. The effect was more like a dorm in Fifth-Form Ballet or Martian at St. Monica’s than anything else.

  Pibble prowled around. The farthest wall was a partition behind which was a double bathroom and three lavatory cubicles. There were dirty clothes in a container, but no bloodstains. Nothing hidden, either. He came back into the main room.

  “Which is your bed, Leah?”

  “This by the door. Before I sleep, I move it across, so that none can open the door.”

  “Why?”

  “It is the custom. The men’s hut must be tabu to the women, and the women’s to the men, lest either defile the other.”

  “But would anyone want to?”

  “By accident, perhaps. We have thought it best to keep what customs we can, so that the Kus remain one together. Without our customs we are lost, we are nothing.”

  “I thought I saw two of you learning to read.”

  “You saw that. It is not good if our children have skills that we lack. Moreover, if we are to stay in this land, it is foolish not to read. Moreover, the Reverend Mackenzie would have wished it.”

  “Are the men learning as well?”

  “They are unwilling—they hold more strongly to the customs than the women. We will keep a custom if it agrees with our comfort of living, but the men try to make their lives agree with the customs. They dream of the village, and the days when they were wild Kus in the jungle.”

  “There are more beds than women, I think.”

  “The children sleep with us—the girls always, the boys until their balls drop and they are ripe to go to the men.”

  “Did Aaron want to go back to the village?”r />
  “Half of him wished to go. Half of him wished to stay, because Eve wished it.”

  “Are you sure of that, if the women and men keep apart so much?”

  “Aaron was my husband.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is nothing. He is with God. Will you search now?”

  It did not take long. All the drawers and cupboards contained clothes. Somebody had an unusual liking for a shade of electric violet. The ritual objects were all together in one drawer—intricately patterned gourds, ultra-chunky necklaces of polished wood and shells, flute-like pipes, and pots of brilliant pigment (make-up for feast days, Leah said). No one seemed to have any possessions of his own except the children, by each of whose beds was a box with two or three toys in it. There was a shelf of battered children’s books, too, and a Bible by every bed. The effect on Pibble was of small lives lived bleakly.

  “Do you spend all your time here?”

  “We sleep and pray here, and those who are unclean stay here for the days of their uncleanness. Most of our life we live in the women’s kitchen, or in the senior common room.”

  Pibble did the double take Graham had hankered for. This black beldame spoke an English as precise as any High Table could desire, but if. . .

  “I think it is a joke of Eve’s,” said Leah. “What you would call the nursery we call the junior common room. It is difficult to know with Eve. He is not like the rest of us.”

  “No, no, of course not. Do the men use the senior common room as much as the women?”

  “When there is television, they come, but at other times they stay in the men’s hut. And they come for feast days, naturally.”

  “Ah. Um. Thank you, Leah. I’d better ask Melchizedek to let me see the men’s hut now, I suppose.”

  Something had happened in Eve’s room. The impassive school-photo groups had lost their poise and become a mob, a silent race riot, clustered around Paul’s desk. Not quite silent—little grunts and breathings came from them as they jostled for a view. They looked excited but not happy; disturbed, stricken, less than they had been. Paul still sat on his stool, gazing at what he had done, his mouth open but drawn sideways and down as he scratched rakingly at his jawbone. It took him ten seconds to notice Pibble; then he rolled the gray paper up into a cylinder and lunged with it across the desk. Pibble stepped forward and took the scroll as if he’d been receiving the freedom of some city. He returned to his table, sat down, and unrolled his trophy, a blaze of color, done with bright-inked felt pens. It was the wrong way up, so he turned the picture around.