by Ellis Peters
‘Good!’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for the chance to talk to you. You worry me.’
‘Do I? I’m sorry!’ she said, startled, and her memory fitted one detail, at least, into its true place. ‘I know you now,’ she said obscurely, ‘you’re the one who said I had a chance to begin again.’
‘Did I? I don’t remember that. But you have, that’s true enough. What are you going to do with it?’
‘Use it, I hope.’
‘I hope so, too, but I’m not so sure of it as I was three days ago. You’re my investment, I want to see you thriving. After a tricky start you got over your physical troubles marvellously, and believe me, you can think yourself lucky to have a constitution like yours. Your pulse is steady, your blood pressure’s satisfactory, and your body’s functioning like a first-class machine. But Sister tells me you’ve lost some weight and are losing your appetite. Why? Why have you less energy than you had two or three days ago? Why do you have nothing to say to anyone unless you’re obliged by politeness? And never use that telephone we gave you?’
Her eyes, which were the darkest, deepest blue he had ever seen, and in any but this lofty light might have seemed black, widened in alarm, astonishment and compunction. ‘I didn’t realise that,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry!’
‘And for all this, let me tell you, there isn’t the slightest physiological reason. Your body’s doing its job. Doing everything it can to get well. So since there has to be a reason why you’ve come to a halt, and even begun to lose ground, the reason must be in your mind. Now probably you’ll tell me that what’s in your mind is no concern of mine,’ he said dryly, ‘but at least don’t tell me there’s nothing damaging there, because I shan’t believe you.’
‘No,’ said Maggie, and raised herself strenuously on her pillow to be eye to eye with him. ‘No, I do realise… It was you who put me together again.’ He understood what she meant; it gave him rights in her. Every artist, every craftsman, has the right to demand that his work shall not be wasted by somebody else’s wanton irresponsibility. ‘I do want to get well,’ she said. ‘I want to go on singing—what’s the good of me, otherwise? And I want to do you credit, too. It’s a priority bill that I must pay before I can get any peace. But, my God, don’t you think I’ve been trying?’
‘I know you have. Even successfully, until something else distracted your attention. Something with a higher priority?’
She let her head fall back on the pillow. Her eyes closed for a moment, but opened unwaveringly to hold him off. There were defences there only an old man with privileges could hope to breach, and even he only when the wind and the hour and the mood were favourable. She was a strong, fit woman, thirty-one years old and one of the treasures of the world, even if she herself didn’t know it, and he was disposed to believe that she did; and unless somebody managed to goad her back into living, she would draw in upon herself and die of absent-mindedness. Literally absent-mindedness, for all her energy and will-power and passion were engaged elsewhere, and her body, however robust and heroic, could not survive unaided.
‘No, don’t say anything yet. Listen to me. I know you love what you do. I know you realise what you possess, a voice in a million. You couldn’t use it as you do, if you didn’t know its value. I’m your surgeon, it’s in my own interests to ensure that what I do isn’t erased by some other force, whether outside or inside my own province. But I’m a man, too, dependent upon music to a degree you maybe don’t suspect. Would you be surprised to hear that I have every recording Maggie Tressider has ever made? You live by my grace, I live by yours. And I need you, I need you whole and effective, I need you because you excel, and your excellence belongs to me, as it does to everyone who feels and understands it. If you can use me, use me. I’m here to be used. It may not be surgery, but it comes somewhere within the bounds of healing, and that’s my business. And this is a kind of confessional, too. I’m here to forget and be forgotten, afterwards.’
She lay silent and motionless for a long time, her blue, unblinking stare wide and wary upon his face.
‘You’d have to have faith in me, too,’ she said warningly, ‘or you’ll take the easy way out and think I’m a mental case.’ Her voice, used now like a weapon, had recovered much of its resplendent viola tone; he had never heard anyone sound saner.
‘I’m being haunted,’ she said, ‘by somebody I’ve killed. A higher priority… that’s what you said, isn’t it? That’s exactly my case. I’m possessed. I owe you and everyone here a return on your investment, I owe the world whatever it is I contribute. But I owe this ghost of mine a life. You can’t get ahead of that, can you? I’m very much afraid my debts to you are going to be difficult to pay. By the time he’s paid I shall be bankrupt.’
The dark-blue gaze speared him suddenly, and found him appalled and pitying, exactly as she had suspected.
‘I told you you’d think I was mad. It’s all right, I quite understand. Sometimes I think so, too. That’s when I lose ground. But if you really want me,’ she said, ‘you’d better believe me sane and go on listening. You did say this was a confessional, remember?’
‘I remember. What you say now remains unsaid. Absolutely and eternally. And I believe it.’
‘I’ve done something terrible,’ said Maggie. ‘I don’t even know what it is, or when it happened, but I drove somebody to his death. I knew it when I came round in the night, after the accident. He was there breathing down my neck, whispering to me that I’d killed him. Not at all vague or distant, absolutely real and present, but when I turn round to look for the details there’s nothing to be found. Just this sense of guilt. What I feel is that somewhere, at some time, I failed somebody, or betrayed somebody… something unforgivable… Criminal? I don’t know, I think it may have been, if only in keeping silent about something I knew. Somebody relied on me, and I turned my back and let him fall. What matters,’ she said, her eyes straining upwards into the quivering blue and white radiance of reflected light on the ceiling over her head, ‘is that he’s dead, and I killed him.’
She waited, almost disdainfully prepared for the soft, humouring tones that medical men keep for the mentally unstable.
‘And have you managed,’ he asked, very soberly and thoughtfully,‘ to find anything in your memory that lends colour to this belief?’
‘No. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t trace any such incident. But it’s still there. He never stops treading on my heels.’
‘But there’s no known ground for this obsession. Don’t forget, you’ve been through fairly drastic surgery, and a considerable degree of shock. It isn’t at all unusual for the kind of experience you’ve lived through to leave a nightmare residue, that may surface at the least expected moment. Details submerge, and a sense of horror remains, something you can’t pin down. Something that passes gradually, if you concentrate on the live world and let it pass.’
‘No,’ she said instantly and chillingly. ‘You forget, it’s almost a week now, and I’ve waited and held my breath, and it doesn’t pass. Because it’s real, not a dream at all, not a floating residue left to surface by chance. It’s there! In the corner of my eye always, and when I turn to look at it, it’s everywhere but where I’m looking. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but it’s something I did, and I can’t get away from it.’
‘You do realise, don’t you, that even if there is some factual basis for it, it may turn out to be in some incident grotesquely out of proportion to the feeling you have about it?’
‘It may,’ she agreed; but he knew by the set of her face that she did not believe in that possibility.
‘But even so, if it does exist in your past, however inadequately, then it must be possible to run it to earth.’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to do for days. I’ve been forwards and backwards through my life poking under all the stones I can find. At first I took it for granted it was Tom, you see… that I’d killed him when I crashed the car. But they told me at once that he was
safe. Then I thought that there might have been somebody else involved in the accident, but there wasn’t. It isn’t as simple as that, and it isn’t as recent. The knowledge seemed to come from very deep, as if an earthquake had split the ground and thrown up something from miles down. There are no levels any more, everything’s torn up and thrown about, and everything has to settle all over again afterwards, and make a new surface to walk on. The first steps are liable to be pretty shaky. And buried things may break out and meet you in the way.’
He saw the quickened breathing heaving her breast, and the hectic flush of exertion flicking her cheekbones. ‘I’m tiring you,’ he said.
‘No, don’t go! No, you’re helping me. After I’d dredged up every recollection I could, right back to school, I did try, you see, to put it out of my mind. I told myself it was one of those freaks, the shock and the fright and the pain choosing to hit me after the event in this way. Nothing behind it. But I couldn’t satisfy myself, and I’m afraid you won’t be able to satisfy me, either. I’m not running a temperature, I’m not in shock, I haven’t any worries, my career will wait for me the short time it has to wait, and all I have to do is lie around and enjoy myself while I get well. There simply is no reason at all—is there?—why this terrible conviction of guilt should stay with me still. Only one possible reason. That it’s true, that it’s justified.’
‘But if there existed any real source for it, you would have found it.’ It did not convince him, and he knew as soon as it was out that it would not convince her.
‘No, because I’m the wrong person to do the searching. Oh, I believe I want to find it, but how can I be sure? Isn’t it possible that there’s at least as much of me trying to stamp it back into the ground, quickly, before I ever get a good look at it? Isn’t that the most likely reason why I always see it out of the corner of my eye?’
‘But did you never stop to consider that you have relatives, associates, friends, people who have been intimately involved in your life for years, and none of them accuses you of anything? Do you really believe you’ve committed some mortal fault against another person, without a single one of your acquaintances knowing anything about it? Is there an empty place anywhere in your life where you even could have done this hypothetical thing, in absolute isolation from any witness? That would rule out anything but the cruder possibilities, like flat, planned murder, that has to be kept secret. And that would involve more complications, like skills I very much doubt if you possess.’ He span out his theme to its ultimate absurdity. ‘And a body. And there never was a body featuring in your affairs, I take it?’
‘No… no body.’ She shivered, and passed the heel of her hand over her eyelids. ‘It wouldn’t be like that. There are more oblique ways of killing. Even without meaning to. But you see, it’s just because I’ve been dead in a way myself that I must know. After coming back to life again as I have, I’ve got to make this a new beginning, otherwise it will be unbearable. If I have something shameful buried somewhere in my past, then I want to know what it is. I want to settle the account, if it can be settled. I want to be out of debt.’
‘And you’ve said nothing of all this to anyone else? To your agent, or your family?’
The look she gave him, beginning with blank incomprehension and burning up into horrified recoil, more than answered that question. Clearly it would have been unthinkable to confide in any one of those circling satellites. She had dealt openly with him only because of his reassuring distance from her, and because he was a professional with a legitimate and impersonal interest in her recovery. And only a moment ago he had come very close to touching her hand, by way of establishing a closer contact! If he had done it he would have lost her irrecoverably.
‘Well, supposing now,’ he said carefully, ‘that someone else, someone completely detached, took over this search for you?’
He grudged her to the psychiatrists, but they might well be the obvious answer, if she could be persuaded to co-operate. And Harlingford was a good man, and old enough to see her with a disenchanted eye. If, he hedged wryly, any man still living is old enough for that. To love her would be to be powerless to help her, that was clear, for at the first touch, no more than the meeting of eyes, she would draw back out of reach, retreat into the castle and bar the doors. Now I wonder, he thought, I really wonder why?
‘Supposing someone else, someone who makes a job of that kind of thing, took over the stone-turning for you? If he found some lost detail—most probably perfectly innocent—to account for the setting up of this cancer in your mind, would that satisfy you? You would have to have faith in your man, of course. But there are people, you know, who are trained in these techniques, highly skilled professionals who take this sort of thing as their special field.’
If he had only known it, he had gone about this oblique approach all too gently; they were on different wavelengths, and communication as he understood it had ceased, though to her mind he had just begun to make sharp and practical sense. She sat up alertly. The word professional had a reassuring sound in her ears. Why not? He was right, what she needed was someone who knew how to set about unearthing lost incidents, someone who put his talents on the market at a fair price, and could be hired to do a specific job on a business footing. In a relationship like that, mutually agreed, there would be no violation of privacy.
‘Would you like me to put your case in the hands of somebody like that, and leave it to him to do your searching for you? And if the expert fails to turn up anything discreditable, then will you be satisfied?’
‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘oh, yes! That’s what I need, somebody completely objective. But I shouldn’t know where to look for the right person, and I don’t want to ask anyone else to… to be an intermediary for me. Find me a good private detective, and I’ll turn the whole nightmare over to him, and abide by whatever he finds.’
CHAPTER TWO
« ^ »
His name was Francis Killian, and he was forty-one years old. Strictly speaking, he was not what is usually thought of as a private detective at all, and he never called himself one. The small plate on his office door above the book-shop in Market Street, Comerbourne, said only: ‘Confidential Enquiries,’ and that was precisely what he dealt in. He didn’t touch divorce business or commercial spying; sometimes he wondered why, since he had no very inflated opinion of his own holiness, and there was more money in these lines than in the cold, retired researches he did undertake. An eventful life, which had begun its adulthood with national service in Korea, could hardly leave him many illusions; and even after that unspeakably horrible trap had opened and released him, scarred for life, he had half-chosen and half-drifted into situations and callings which were not for the squeamish. Trying, perhaps, to rediscover disgust as the clean feel it, a luxury out of reach of those already soiled.
So he couldn’t congratulate himself that it was any particular moral purity that had won him a recommendation from one of Comerbourne’s most respectable solicitors to one of Comerbourne’s most eminent surgeons, improbably in quest of a private enquiry agent ‘for a friend,’ of course! All that had kept Francis acceptable to such clients was a fastidious sense of cleanliness, a cold dislike of the feel of dirt. If he still had moral scruples it was from old habit, and they were by no means clearly defined.
He was unmarried and alone. He hadn’t always been alone. He remembered women he had known, too many of them and too intimately, but all past. He expected now to continue alone. You can stand only so much self-exposure and so much self-division; in his case very little, the god head in him was a jealous god. It had been clear to him now for five years that there must be no more women gnawing away at the edges of his integrity. Such as it was! Not the world’s treasure, that was certain; but all the treasure he had and he valued it.
So Francis Killian was a lonely man, in the large sense that precludes any feeling of grievance in being alone. And he worked hard, as men alone do, in dry, precise, painstaking ways that comme
nded him chiefly to the legal profession. Most of his work was done for solicitors, tracing witnesses to accidents, combing ancient church registers, making abstracts of tedious documents; and for scholars and writers, running to earth elusive authorities, compiling précis of acts and regulations, searching records for lost details. Sometimes he traced lost persons, too, and even lost ancestries, some of them better lost for good. Occasionally he consented to undertake a shadowing job, where a witness was liable to abscond, or worried parents wished to keep a wary eye on a young son’s questionable associates.
Dealing with documents was clean, sterile, congenial business that neither moved nor disturbed him, and that was what counted. It brought him in a modest living, and in money for its own sake he had no great interest. Indeed he had reached a midway breathing-space in his life when he had only a detached interest in anything, and what mattered most to him was to have the ground about him cleared of all encumbering passions and all human entanglements, like a man who finds it necessary to throw away all his possessions in order to feel free.
There were still things in the world, however, that gave him positive, profound, irresistible pleasure, burdening him with a kind of obligation to look again at a human race which could occasionally produce perfection. The first and greatest of these unwilling relationships he had was with music. Against the grain he conceded that there must still be hope for a species which had produced Mozart.
So against his instincts he agreed to consider stepping out of character to oblige Maggie Tressider. He thought of her as a voice rather than a woman, but the voice needed a human vehicle, and according to the old man the vehicle, the superb mechanism that produced that inimitable sound, was seriously threatened. Her recovery, he said, was being impeded by an obsession.
