by Ellis Peters
Any other name, and Francis Killian would have astonished and affronted his visitor by saying no. Obsessions were not in his line.
The old man wasn’t enjoying his errand. He would much rather have handed her over to the head-shrinkers, of course, and kept it, as it were, in the family. He had entered the office stepping with the delicacy of a duchess slumming, and been curiously disarmed, even reassured, by the pale, austere, orderly room, as clinical in its way as his own consulting-room. He too could appreciate professionalism. But the man behind the desk had cancelled out the soothing effect of his own environment. There would always be something ambivalent about Francis, however gravely he comported himself, a faint aura of self-caricature, as if in despising mankind he could never completely conceal his despite against himself.
If Gilbert Rice could have retreated then, he would have done it; but Rattray, Rattray, Bell and Rattray—all four of them—had testified that this man was secret, reliable and conscientious, and to open the case to yet another operative was unthinkable. And Francis redeemed himself. At the mention of Maggie’s name he froze, abandoning whatever he had been about to say, and sat thinking for a long minute, honestly eye to eye with his visitor. Then he said: ‘Tell me about it. If I can help Miss Tressider, I will.’
‘You understand, it is she who insists on employing a private detective. I… it was a misunderstanding. I would have preferred to recommend a psychiatrist. But Miss Tressider is a strong-willed woman, and very clear about her own state of mind. Whether it is a psychiatrist or a detective she needs, the fact remains that she can only be helped with her own co-operation, and she absolutely refuses a psychiatrist.’
Francis readjusted his image of her at once; she might, indeed, be rejecting what she most needed, but a woman who knew her own mind so firmly might well be a reliable witness. His own instinct, had anyone proposed to meddle with his mind, would have been to defend his flawed privacy to the death. The unknown woman who was Orpheus, who was Eboli, who was disembodied beauty shut in a body by some cosmic paradox, moved a step nearer to him.
‘And you think,’ said Francis shrewdly,‘ that the first step in curing her is to act as if you’re taking her preoccupation seriously. In short, I shall be fulfilling my only useful function by going through the motions of trying to trace the thing that’s worrying her. In that case, the answer is no. If I enter her employ I shall do my best for her, and it’s from her I shall take my orders. If she wants me to look for a skeleton in her cupboard, I shall look for it. I may even find it. But I can’t be hired to jolly her along towards recovery by pretending to look for it. You don’t believe,’ he said curiously, ‘that there’s really anything to be found, do you?’
After a struggle with his distaste and distrust, Gilbert Rice surprised him. ‘Yes,’ he said flatly,‘ there is something. Almost certainly something. I’ll be quite open with you, Mr. Killian. In my judgment Miss Tressider is a person of quite exceptional generosity and integrity, who has fared rather badly in her personal relationships. She comes from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family—you understand, I am using current terms simply because they are useful in establishing a picture—whose other members have sponged on her from the beginning of her celebrity without shame and without gratitude, and privately resent her pre-eminence as much as they publicly rejoice in it. I believe she has behaved towards all her relatives and associates with great loyalty, which in her heart she knows very well is cast on stony ground. I think it is entirely possible that once, just once, she rebelled and recoiled, that just once she turned and tore somebody, in a protest which was overdue. I suppose it’s even possible that there was a disastrous result, for someone who surely deserves little sympathy. She is incapable of real malice or meanness. But her standards are high. I think from her point of view there may well be something to regret. I believe it would be better if she knew what it was, and could be forced to accept it. You need not be afraid of the result, if you do run the thing to earth. She has a sense of responsibility to the rest of us too. Whatever you find, you won’t destroy her, you can only liberate her. She knows of what a marvel she is the custodian.’
Fantastic, Francis thought, shaken clean out of his objectivity. This antique pillar of society, thirty years established, father and grandfather, suddenly wrenching his heart open over a neurotic young woman he never saw before, because some accident of nature gave her the voice of an archangel. And how if he’s right? How if she really needs to be rid of an incubus that might kill her? No more immortal Orpheus, only that lament on a gramophone record, slowly paling for want of new, living breath. Stiff little, grey little stuffed shirt as he might be, Maggie Tressider’s surgeon had the courage of his convictions.
‘I take it,’ said Francis carefully, drawing the classic profile of Orpheus on the half-filled page of notes before him, ‘that the best thing I can do is come and talk to Miss Tressider during ordinary visiting hours… This evening?’
He went home and played the Gluck records. She was better even than he remembered her. It was not a dark, weighty, velvet contralto, but agile, thrilling and true, a quality in it that sheared through the heart like pure pain, like love itself, excising everything of lesser urgency. It was the voice the old man was in love with, of course. No face could live up to it, much less the heart and the being that went with the face.
She had a crooked mouth in photographs, and a wide, defensive glance, like a child’s, and a more than usually asymmetrical face, larger on the right side.
Well, there was the voice to be saved.
She was sitting up in bed when he came, looking exactly like all those other women in the long ward next door, polished and brushed and neatly tucked in for visiting-time. She had even the same half-apprehensive, half-expectant look as they had, and her eyes like theirs enlarged in a face blanched and honed to transparency by the experience of suffering, turned towards the doorway of her room as soon as his hand touched the handle, and transfixed him as he entered with their blue intensity. She looked glad, and eager, and afraid; exactly as if he had really been a personal visitor, and one to whom she had long looked forward.
‘Miss Tressider? My name is Killian.’
‘It’s very good of you,’ she said, ‘to come so promptly.’ Her speaking voice was low-pitched, warm and vibrant. ‘Please sit down. I believe Mr. Rice has explained to you what’s worrying me?… what I want you to find out for me?’
It seemed that everything was to be conducted with despatch, practically, as between business associates, without any suggestion of anguish. Unless, he thought a moment later, you looked too closely at the fine-drawn lines of her face, which had still something of the chill of shock about them, the faint, reflected image of death as it missed its hold on her, or deeply enough into the wide, wild stare of the eyes to discover the fixed, silvery gleam of panic behind their honest, well-mannered blueness. She shopped for the commodity she needed with the directness of a child, but there was nothing childish about her need.
It was illuminating, too, that the paperbacks he had brought with him came as a shock to her, and an embarrassment. When he laid them on the bed convenient to her hand she touched them blankly, and didn’t know what to do or say. The thanks came mechanically, and what was really on her mind couldn’t find words. How right he had been to pass up roses! Unless, of course, he wanted her to withdraw the offer of this job? He still wasn’t clear about that, but if he had wanted it, roses would have been as good a way as any of making sure. He wasn’t here to have any personal relationship with her, she mustn’t be touched. All that he must inevitably discover about her she would countenance and assist as case-notes necessary to the job, but never as the impalpable web of a man’s understanding. This would have to be strictly clinical. So much the better; that suited Francis.
‘It seemed advisable to be as convincing a visitor as possible,’ he said dryly, ‘and you’ll have observed that they never come empty-handed. The women in the ward might not notice.
The staff certainly would. I take it I’m right in thinking that only Mr. Rice is in your confidence?’
‘Oh,’ she said, flushing, ‘I see! Yes of course, that was thoughtful of you. I thought… I was rather afraid that you might be too well known to pass unnoticed, in any case.’
‘I’m hardly the celebrity type of detective,’ he assured her, amused and disarmed. ‘Few of us are, if the truth be told. Nobody here is likely to know who I am or what I do, and your privacy needn’t be compromised.’
‘That’s what I should prefer, if it’s possible. But of course you must include the books and everything in your expenses.’
The tone was perhaps a little arrogant, but so, in all probability, had his been.
‘We can come to an agreement about all that later,’ he said. ‘Since our time’s limited, what I think you should be doing now is lying back and relaxing, while you tell me yourself about this experience that made you send for me. By this time I take it you’ve found a way of surrendering yourself into the hands of doctors when you have to? Consider me one more in the same category. Close your eyes and shut me out if it makes it any easier. Most of us do that with doctors, when the handling begins.’
‘And dentists,’ said Maggie unexpectedly, and smiled.
‘And dentists.’ It might, he conceded ruefully, be a better analogy. ‘I shall have to take notes. You won’t mind that? They’ll all be destroyed, afterwards.’
‘Yes, I understand.’ She let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘I want to do everything that may help you to find out… what it is that’s haunting me. You understand, I must know. There’ll be no peace for me, no possibility of living normally, unless I know. He wanted me to put it out of my mind, but I can’t do that. If I’ve done somebody a terrible wrong, and now for the first time I feel what I’ve done, how can I just push it away and pretend I know nothing about it? Then he wanted me to put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist. Why should I do that? I don’t want it rationalised out of existence, if it really does exist, I want it put right! I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly fixing those disturbing eyes upon his attentive face, ‘if you find all this a little unbalanced. All that got through to me was the fact of my guilt. It’s because I can’t give a rational account of the thing that I need you. Do you think I’m out of my wits?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I think you are very much in command of them. Tell me!’
She told him, slowly, carefully, picking her words with concentration and precision, like a party to a case in court who must make the right impression now or never. And after a few moments she closed her eyes and put him out of her recognition except as a disembodied confessor, the better to feel her way towards objectivity. It seemed that her passion for truth and justice was large enough to compel absolute candour, as if she felt herself to be addressing God. In his experience women could be devious even in their prayers, but he would have staked his reputation that this one was not.
Maggie talked and Francis listened, made notes, and watched her face, a pure oval, its irregularities hardly discoverable here in the flesh. Photographs always exaggerate any disproportion in the features; but her photographs were almost caricatures, so far were they from doing her justice. It was largely a matter of colouring. Those dark, dark eyes of hers you would have expected to be softly purple-black like a pansy, but instead they were the startling, piercing blue of high-altitude gentians, as vivid as noon in their midnight darkness. And now he came to think of it, that was exactly the colouring of her dark, dark voice, too. And her hair, refined English mouse-brown in pictures, who could have guessed it would be this unbelievable tint between dark gold and orange-russet, even subtly greenish in the shadows, the colour of the budding foliage of an oak tree in spring? She was much thinner than in any photograph he had ever seen of her; but then, she was probably much thinner now than she’d been a few weeks ago, after extensive surgery, and with this obsession eating her alive.
He made the same discovery as the anaesthetist had made, paying his midnight visit to her in the ward to make sure she had really decided to take up the business of breathing again. She was beautiful. Very beautiful. It seems some people can have everything. Except, of course, peace of mind and a quiet conscience.
It was at about this point that he observed the first interesting peculiarity about her narrative. He didn’t make a note of it, it wasn’t necessary.
‘Thank you,’ he said when she fell silent. ‘That was very comprehensive, and I doubt if I have many questions to ask. If you’d had any clue to time and place you would have included it. But I gather we can’t limit the possibilities at all, apart from ruling out the last few years. Forgetting is mortally easy, easier than remembering, but it does take a little time. Assuming this haunting has a foundation in fact, if it had been recent it would have surfaced more completely, with more detail.’
‘But is it genuinely possible,’ she asked opening her eyes wide, ‘to forget something so important? Even after years?’
‘It’s possible, all right. What we retain over a lifetime is only an infinitesimally small proportion of the whole. Think how many impressions are run through in an hour, and how many brief acquaintances in a year. The most phenomenal memory can’t contain a tenth of the total.’
‘But something like that… a matter of life and death… that would surely be retained, whatever was thrown out.’
‘We don’t know that it was a matter of life and death, or that it seemed so important then. Maybe this is hindsight. I don’t suggest your condition conjured up a totally illusory bogy, but I do think it possible that it magnified and distorted a comparatively innocuous incident. Wait,’ he said reasonably, ‘until you know.’
‘You forget,’ said Maggie mildly, ‘that I’d just slipped through death’s fingers. When you find yourself staring at close range into judgment day, you get your values right.’
‘Not necessarily. Not unless you believe fear to be the best introduction to truth. Even the just aren’t going to feel too sure of themselves on judgment day.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Maggie oddly, ‘I wasn’t afraid. You go clean through that, you know. It doesn’t apply any more. Even now it isn’t like being afraid, it’s just that it’s impossible to live without knowing. Like Oedipus. There isn’t any possibility of turning back and letting well alone. There wouldn’t be any solid ground to stand on. And you can’t sing without truth!’
No, she couldn’t, he quite saw that. It took a bit of believing, in such a bogus world, but this woman had never severed her infant relationship with reality, and while she felt truth to be impaired everything would be devalued for her, even her art. He knew then that he was committed, not simply to accepting her commission, but to bringing it to a successful conclusion.
‘We still have half an hour. If you’re not too tired, I should like you to begin talking to me about yourself. Right from the beginning, your family, your childhood, things you remember. Names you remember. Don’t worry about looking for the seeds of this present trouble. Forget about it now. It may come to light of itself, it won’t if you try to trace it. Tell me who played with you, who were your friends, your fellow-students…’ Though the name that mattered she might not even recognise; she was almost sure by now that she had excised it from her memory for good reason, and eternally, unless some act of God or of Francis Killian raised it again to confront her. Between the conflicting needs and wants of the divided halves of her, what was a man in her employ supposed to do?
But she couldn’t sing without truth; she had said it, not he. And she couldn’t live without singing.
‘Just talk to yourself,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be quiet.’
And she talked, and he was very quiet. Her lips moved slowly and thoughtfully, unrolling before him a cartoon of that ordinary family of hers, odd little vignettes of her schooldays, without sentimentality, without nostalgia, almost without interest. She had had to leave her kin to find her kind, like many another. Not a matter of class at a
ll, but of quality, which is a different and a mysterious thing. She mentioned names faithfully. Most he did not bother to note down, but some were still quick in her memory. He was sensitive to the intonations now. And then her first singing days, the little local successes, the audition that took her into Doctor Paul Fredericks’ classes, the serious study beginning. No doubt of the urgency now, his pen was busy writing down names that mattered to her almost as gravely as her own.
She was still twelve years back in time when the bell rang for the end of visiting-hour. She opened dazed eyes. Her forehead was moist, but the lines of her face were relaxed and tranquil.
‘I’ll come the day after to-morrow,’ he said, putting away his notebook, ‘in the evening, if you can manage to deflect all your other visitors. I’ve tired you out too much…I’m sorry!’
‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly. ‘I’m glad! Just to be doing something about it is worth anything. I feel happier now. I trust you.’
Now that, he thought bitterly, winding his way across the car park to his third-hand Riley, is about the most unfair and terrifying thing one human being can say to another. She trusts me! To come up with miracles, to get her out of her little private hell. What sort of spot does that put me in? But of course, she’ll be paying my daily rate and all expenses… even the paperbacks! That puts it on quite a different footing for her, all she’s asking is fair work for fair pay. But what does it do for me? It may take more than a little patient research, more than leg work, more than you can buy for any daily retainer, to turn up X for her and get the thorn out of her flesh.
Still, he reflected, driving home to his flat in Market Street, bare as a hermitage, he had got one positive thing out of this first session. All the female names he had written down were recorded only as possible sources of information; apart from that he might as well cross them off at once. Maggie Tressider was quite certainly honest in claiming that she could not recapture a single limiting fact about the identity of X. But every time she spoke of her victim and persecutor she said ‘he.’
