Gilks hauled him back to his feet again and propped him against the wall. Briefly he left the room, then came back with a small jug of water and a glass on a tray. He poured some water into the glass, took it to Dirk and threw it at him.
“Better?”
“No,” spluttered Dirk. “Can’t you at least turn the record off?”
“That’s Forensic’s job. Can’t touch anything till the clever dicks have been. Maybe that’s them now. Go out on to the patio and get some air. Chain yourself to the railing and beat yourself up a little. I’m pushed for time myself. And try to look less green, will you? It’s not your color.”
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—”
Gilks turned around, looked tired and cross, and was about to go out and up the stairs to meet the newcomers, whose voices could be heard up on the ground floor, when he paused and watched the head revolving patiently on its heavy platter for a few seconds.
“You know,” he said at last, “these smart-alec show-off suicides really make me tired. They only do it to annoy.”
“Suicide?” said Dirk.
Gilks glanced round at him.
“Windows secured with iron bars half an inch thick,” he said. “Door locked from the inside with the key still in the lock. Furniture piled against the inside of the door. French windows to the patio locked with mortise door bolts. No signs of a tunnel. If it was murder, then the murderer must have stopped to do a damn fine job of glazing on the way out. Except that all the putty’s old and painted over.
“No. Nobody’s left this room, and nobody’s broken into it except for us, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t do it.
“I haven’t time to fiddle around on this one. Obviously suicide, and just done to be difficult. I’ve half a mind to do the deceased for wasting police time. Tell you what,” he said, glancing at his watch, “you’ve got ten minutes. If you come up with a plausible explanation of how he did it that I can put in my report, I’ll let you keep the evidence in the envelope minus twenty percent compensation to me for the emotional wear and tear involved in not punching you in the mouth.”
Dirk wondered for a moment whether or not to mention the visits his client claimed to have received from a strange and violent green-eyed, fur-clad giant who regularly emerged out of nowhere bellowing about contracts and obligations and waving a three-foot glittering-edged scythe, but decided, on balance, no.
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—”
He was seething at himself at last. He had not been able to seethe at himself properly over the death of his client because it was too huge and horrific a burden to bear. But now he had been humiliated by Gilks, and he found himself in too wobbly and disturbed a state to fight back, so he was able to seethe at himself about that.
He turned sharply away from his tormentor and let himself out into the patio garden to be alone with his seethings.
The patio was a small, paved, west-facing area at the rear, which was largely deprived of light, cut off as it was by the high back wall of the house and by the high wall of some industrial building that backed onto the rear. In the middle of it stood, for who knew what possible reason, a stone sundial. If any light at all fell on the sundial you would know that it was pretty close to noon, GMT. Other than that, birds perched on it. A few plants sulked in pots.
Dirk jabbed a cigarette in his mouth and burned a lot of the end of it fiercely.
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—”
still nagged from inside the house.
Neat garden walls separated the patio on either side from the gardens of neighboring houses. The one to the left was the same size as this one, the one to the right extended a little farther, benefiting from the fact that the industrial building finished flush with the intervening garden wall. There was an air of well-kemptness. Nothing grand, nothing flashy, just a sense that all was well and that upkeep on the houses was no problem. The house to the right, in particular, looked as if it had had its brickwork repointed quite recently, and its windows reglassed.
Dirk took a large gulp of air and stood for a second staring up into what could be seen of the sky, which was gray and hazy. A single dark speck was wheeling against the underside of the clouds. Dirk watched this for a while, glad of any focus for his thoughts other than the horrors of the room he had just left. He was vaguely aware of comings and goings within the room, of a certain amount of tape-measuring happening, of a feeling that photographs were being taken, and that severed-head-removal activities were taking place.
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i—
“Don’t pi—”
Somebody at last picked it up, the nagging repetition was at last hushed, and now the gentle sound of a distant television floated peacefully on the noontime air.
Dirk, however, was having a great deal of difficulty in taking it all in. He was much more aware of taking a succession of huge swimmy whacks to the head, which were the assaults of guilt. It was not the normal background-noise type of guilt that comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century, and which Dirk was usually fairly adept at dealing with. It was an actual stunning sense of “this specific terrible thing is specifically and terribly my fault.” All the normal mental moves wouldn’t let him get out of the path of the huge pendulum. Wham, it came again, whizz, wham, again and again, wham, wham, wham.
He tried to remember any of the details of what his late client (wham, wham) had said (wham) to him (wham), but it was (wham) virtually impossible (wham) with all this whamming taking place (wham). The man had said (wham) that—Dirk took a deep breath—(wham) he was being pursued (wham) by (wham) a large, hairy, green-eyed monster armed with a scythe.
Wham!
Dirk had secretly smiled to himself about this.
Whim, wham, whim, wham, whim, wham!
And had thought, “What a silly man.”
Whim, whim, whim, whim, wham!
A scythe (wham), and a contract (wham).
He hadn’t known, or even had the faintest idea, what the contract was for.
“Of course,” Dirk had thought (wham).
But he had a vague feeling that it might have something to do with a potato. There was a bit of a complicated story attached to that (whim, whim, whim).
Dirk had nodded seriously at this point (wham), and made a reassuring tick (wham) on a pad which he kept on his desk (wham) for the express purpose of making reassuring ticks on (wham, wham, wham). He had prided himself at that moment on having managed to convey the impression that he had made a tick in a small box marked “Potatoes.”
Wham, wham, wham, wham!
Mr. Anstey had said he would explain further about the potatoes when Dirk arrived to carry out his task.
And Dirk had promised (wham), easily (wham), casually (wham), with an airy wave of his hand (wham, wham, wham), to be there at six-thirty in the morning (wham), because the contract (wham) fell due at seven o’clock.
Dirk remembered having made another tick in a notional “Potato contract falls due at 7:00 a.m.” box (Wh . . .).
He couldn’t handle all this whamming any more. He couldn’t blame himself for what had happened. Well, he could. Of course he could. He did. It was, in fact, his fault (wham). The point was that he couldn’t continue to blame himself for what had happened and think clearly about it, which he was going to have to do. He would have to dig this horrible thing (wham) up by the roots, and if he was going to be fit to do that he had somehow to divest himself (wham) of this whamming.
A huge wave of anger surged over him as he contemplated his predicament and the tangled distress of his life. He hated this neat patio. He hated all this sundial stuff, and all these neatly painted windows, all these hideously trim roofs. He wanted to blame
it all on the paintwork rather than on himself, on the revoltingly tidy patio paving stones, on the sheer disgusting abomination of the neatly repointed brickwork.
“Excuse me . . .”
“What?” He whirled round, caught unawares by this intrusion into his private raging of a quiet polite voice.
“Are you connected with . . . ?” The woman indicated all the unpleasantness and the lower-ground-floorness and the horrible sort of policeness of things next door to her with a little floating movement of her wrist. Her wrist wore a red bracelet which matched the frames of her glasses. She was looking over the garden wall from the house on the right, with an air of slightly anxious distaste.
Dirk glared at her speechlessly. She looked about forty somethingish and neat, with an instant and unmistakable quality of advertising about her.
She gave a troubled sigh.
“I know it’s probably all very terrible and everything,” she said, “but do you think it will take long? We only called in the police because the noise of that ghastly record was driving us up the wall. It’s all a bit . . .”
She gave him a look of silent appeal, and Dirk decided that it could all be her fault. She could, as far as he was concerned, take the blame for everything while he sorted it out. She deserved it, if only for wearing a bracelet like that.
Without a word, he turned his back on her, and took his fury back inside the house where it began rapidly to freeze into something hard and efficient.
“Gilks!” he said, “Your smart-alec suicide theory. I like it. It works for me. And I think I see how the clever bastard pulled it off. Bring me pen. Bring me paper.”
He sat down with a flourish at the cherrywood farmhouse table that occupied the center of the rear portion of the room and deftly sketched out a scheme of events which involved a number of household or kitchen implements, a swinging, weighted light fitting, some very precise timing, and hinged on the vital fact that the record turntable was Japanese.
“That should keep your forensic chaps happy,” said Dirk briskly to Gilks. The forensic chaps glanced at it, took in its salient points and liked them. They were simple, implausible, and of exactly that nature which a coroner who liked the same sort of holidays in Marbella that they did would be sure to relish.
“Unless,” said Dirk casually, “you are interested in the notion that the deceased had entered into some kind of diabolical contract with a supernatural agency for which payment was now being exacted?”
The forensic chaps glanced at each other and shook their heads. There was a strong sense from them that the morning was wearing on and that this kind of talk was only introducing unnecessary complications into a case which otherwise could be well behind them before lunch.
Dirk gave a satisfied shrug, peeled off his share of the evidence, and, with a final nod to the constabulary, made his way back upstairs.
As he reached the hallway, it suddenly became apparent to him that the gentle sounds of daytime television which he had heard from out in the garden had previously been masked from inside by the insistent sound of the record stuck in its groove.
He was surprised now to realize that they were in fact coming from somewhere upstairs in this house. With a quick look around to see that he was not observed, he stood on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the upstairs floors of the house and glanced up them in surprise.
6
THE STAIRS WERE carpeted with a tastefully austere matting type of substance. Dirk quietly made his way up them, past some tastefully dried large things in a pot that stood on the first landing, and looked into the rooms on the first floor. They, too, were tasteful and dried.
The larger of the two bedrooms was the only one that showed any signs of current use. It had clearly been designed to allow the morning light to play on delicately arranged flowers and duvets stuffed with something like hay, but there was a feeling that socks and used shaving heads were instead beginning to gather the room into their grip. There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room—the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall. There was an air of tension and of sadness and of things needing to be cleaned out from under the bed.
The bathroom, which opened out from it, had a gold disc hung on the wall in front of the lavatory, for sales of five hundred thousand copies of a record called “Hot Potato” by a band called “Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo.” Dirk had a vague recollection of having read part of an interview with the leader of the band (there were only two of them, and one of them was the leader) in a Sunday paper. He had been asked about their name, and he had said that there was an interesting story about it, though it turned out not to be. “It can mean whatever people want it to mean,” he had added with a shrug from the sofa of his manager’s office somewhere off Oxford Street.
Dirk remembered visualizing the journalist nodding politely and writing this down. A vile knot had formed in Dirk’s stomach which he had eventually softened with gin.
“Hot Potato . . .” thought Dirk. It suddenly occurred to him, looking at the gold disc hanging in its red frame, that the record on which the late Mr. Anstey’s head had been perched was obviously this one. Hot Potato. Don’t pick it up.
What could that mean?
Whatever people wanted it to mean. Dirk thought with bad grace.
The other thing that he remembered now about the interview was that Pain (the leader of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo was called Pain) claimed to have written the lyrics down more or less verbatim from a conversation which he or somebody had overheard in a café or a sauna or an airplane or something like that. Dirk wondered how the originators of the conversation would feel to hear their words being repeated in the circumstances in which he had just heard them.
He peered more closely at the label in the center of the gold record. At the top of the label it said simply, “ARRGH!,” while underneath the actual title were the writers’ credits—“Paignton, Mulville, Anstey.”
Mulville was presumably the member of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo who wasn’t the leader. And Geoff Anstey’s inclusion on the writing credits of a major-selling single was probably what had paid for this house. When Anstey had talked about the contract having something to do with “Potato” he had assumed that Dirk knew what he meant. And he, Dirk, had as easily assumed that Anstey was blithering. It was very easy to assume that someone who was talking about green-eyed monsters with scythes was also blithering when he talked about potatoes.
Dirk sighed to himself with deep uneasiness. He took a dislike to the neat way the trophy was hanging on the wall and adjusted it a little so that it hung at a more humane and untidy angle. Doing this caused an envelope to fall out from behind the frame and flutter toward the floor. Dirk tried unsuccessfully to catch it. With an unfit grunt he bent over and picked the thing up.
It was a largish cream envelope of rich, heavy paper, roughly slit open at one end, and resealed with Sellotape. In fact it looked as if it had been opened and resealed with fresh layers of tape many times, an impression which was borne out by the number of names to which the envelope had in its time been addressed—each successively crossed out and replaced by another.
The last name on it was that of Geoff Anstey. At least Dirk assumed it was the last name because it was the only one that had not been crossed out, and crossed out heavily. Dirk peered at some of the other names, trying to make them out.
Some memory was stirred by a couple of the names which he could just about discern, but he needed to examine the envelope much more closely. He had been meaning to buy himself a magnifying glass ever since he had become a detective, but had never got around to it. He also did not possess a penknife, so reluctantly he decided that the most prudent course was to tuck the envelope away for the moment in one of the deeper recesses of his coat and examine it later in privacy.
He glanced quickly behind the frame of the gold disc to see if any other goodies might emerge but was disappointed, and so
he quit the bathroom and resumed his exploration of the house.
The other bedroom was neat and soulless. Unused. A pine bed, a duvet and an old battered chest of drawers that had been revived by being plunged into a vat of acid were its main features. Dirk pulled the door closed behind him, and started to ascend the small, wobbly, white-painted stairway that led up to an attic from which the sounds of Bugs Bunny could be heard.
At the top of the stairs was a minute landing which opened on one side into a bathroom so small that it would best be used by standing outside and sticking into it whichever limb you wanted to wash. The door to it was kept ajar by a length of green hosepipe which trailed from the cold tap of the washbasin, out of the bathroom, across the landing and into the only other room here at the top of the house.
It was an attic room with a severely pitched roof which offered only a few spots where a person of anything approaching average height could stand up.
Dirk stood hunched in the doorway and surveyed its contents, nervous of what he might find among them. There was a general grunginess about the place. The curtains were closed, and little light made it past them into the room, which was otherwise illuminated only by the flickering glow of an animated rabbit. An unmade bed with dank, screwed-up sheets was pushed under a particularly low angle of the ceiling. Part of the walls and the more nearly vertical surfaces of the ceiling were covered with pictures crudely cut out of magazines.
There didn’t seem to be any common theme or purpose behind the cuttings. As well as a couple of pictures of flashy German cars and the odd bra advertisement, there were also a badly torn picture of a fruit flan, part of an advertisement for life insurance, and other random fragments which suggested they had been selected and arranged with a dull, bovine indifference to any meaning that any of them might have or effect they might achieve.
The hosepipe curled across the floor and led around the side of an elderly armchair pulled up in front of the television set.
The rabbit rampaged. The glow of his rampagings played on the frayed edges of the armchair. Bugs was wrestling with the controls of an airplane which was plunging to the ground. Suddenly he saw a button marked “Autopilot” and pressed it. A cupboard opened and a robot pilot clambered out, took one look at the situation and bailed out. The plane hurtled on toward the ground but, luckily, ran out of fuel just before reaching it and so the rabbit was saved.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 29
