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The Sinful Stones
A James Pibble Mystery
Peter Dickinson
To Nils Gustaf Dalén—who in 1912 was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of
automatic regulators for lighting coastal beacons
and other light buoys during darkness and other periods
of reduced visibility.
Author’s Note
All the religion in this book is entirely imaginary, and has no reference to any living God.
1
You can see him now,” said the voice.
Pibble jerked up, the taste of his dream still pungent in his mind, though he could remember not one image that he’d dreamed, neither leaf nor syllable. His middle-aged heart was bonking its protest at the shock of this unnatural waking and levering up, but when he relaxed his head to where the quilted headboard should have been, chill stone prickled through thin hair. He willed his eyelids open; they fluttered up against the gravity of sleep, then clamped shut to seal out the desert glare. Through blinks he peered at his watch. It was just on three o’clock.
And the desert glare was only the fruity glow from the oil-lamp the woman was carrying. She held it high, as if she were modelling for the Statue of Liberty, so that her hand almost touched the rough vault of the cell.
Sister, um, Dorothy. Squat, stolid and unspeaking when Pibble had been introduced to her in the Refectory, but memorable for deep runnels that curved down her face from nose-corner to mouth-corner and gave her a look of implacable bitterness. She was the great man’s keeper—Pibble could see him now, she’d said.
He twitched the harsh blankets aside.
“I’d’ve loaned you a pair of his pyjamas if you’d asked,” she said, managing at the same time to rebuke Pibble for not making a civilised request, and to imply that he was the class of person who always slept in his vest and pants anyway. Defensively he reached for his travel-weary shirt and the blue pin-stripe trousers whose knees were still splodged with white from the box of school chalks which he’d had thrust upon him in the helicopter.
“Don’t you bother dressing,” she said. “There’s no time to waste. He gets tired after half an hour. I’ve brought you a habit. I’ll wait outside.”
She put the lantern on the floor. As she went out her bare feet flapped against the paving like plaice on to a fishmonger’s slab. Pibble sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the habit; it was as coarse as sacking, but dyed a fierce orange; he’d expected it to open down the front like a dressing-gown, but found that it was a simple tube cut, sleeves and all, from one piece of cloth—a garment only a degree less primitive than a shawl.
He wriggled into the tube like a woman wriggling into a nightie, then stood up to let the folds of sacking fall clear to his ankles; he was stooping for the lantern when he saw that the cowl was now dangling inanely under his chin, like a feed-bag, so there was nothing for it but to wriggle tediously out, reverse the tube and wriggle in again. And the great man “got tired” after half an hour. No time for shoes and socks, then. Pibble picked up the lantern and left. His own feet failed to reproduce the flapping noise that Sister Dorothy had made—she must put hers down with a peculiar vehemence, he decided.
She was waiting for him, stiff as a sentry in the salty dark. “Sorry I was so long,” he said. “I got it on the wrong way round.”
“They always do, first time,” she answered.
“Does the colour mean anything? The ones I saw on the Refectory were all green or brown.”
“Some bloody nonsense of Father Bountiful’s.”
She flapped off up the short corridor and turned right into the cloisters. The pavement was numbing cold, and so uneven that he stubbed his toe twice before he reached the corner; he changed his pace to that of a man wading through shallow water, picking his feet up in a high arc so that he could put them vertically down instead of sliding them forward to collide with the inch-high cliffs which the amateur stone-masons had left. After his stumbles she was several feet ahead of him and striding into the blackness under the arches, knowing the way so well that her legs adjusted without thought to every unevenness. Pibble held the lantern forward so that he could watch for further stumbling-blocks and waded after the blue-green habit which he could just see in the periphery of his vision. There was no chance to look out into the cloister courtyard and find what sort of a night it was, but he could hear the brisk westerly hissing along the slates and beyond that the deeper muttering of the sea. It was strange to hear none of the gulls which had obsessed the evening air when the helicopter had set him down; presumably even gulls must sleep. But not the wind, whose saltness smelt stronger in the dark; it was aseptic and romantic all at once, crying to his townee veins “Love me!”
He felt that he could have walked twelve miles along starlit beaches, except that that would have meant walking three times round the island.
A man’s voice spoke from nowhere.
“A fine night, Sister and guest,” it said. It had a Canadian accent as strong as Cheddar cheese.
Pibble jerked his lantern towards the voice. The man sat cross-legged in a nook in the wall, wearing nothing but a loin-cloth in the sea-chill night. Twenty years younger, Pibble might have achieved that posture for a few seconds before cramp gripped him; but it was clear that this man had already sat there several hours and expected to sit several more.
Brother Hope, his name was—one of the officers of the Community, brown-habited like the helicopter pilot. He’d played host to Pibble in the Refectory, apologising for the absence of the other … they had some cant word for their senior members … other … Anyway, there he had looked fat and stolid, laughing loud and often over their meagre meal. Now, stripped, his torso turned out to be meat and not fat, with muscles scooped and modelled like a bodybuilder’s; and the brown eyes seemed sad in the lantern-light, and not foolish any more.
“Come on,” said Sister Dorothy from the dimness at the edge of the lantern’s reach. “I’m taking him to see him.”
The explanation was for Brother Hope; despite the drabness of intonation Pibble could hear the gamut of emphasis that lay between the two pronouns—the first him being Pibble, a creature as negligible as a house-fly in an empty bedroom, and the second carrying the weight of a universe-filling deity.
“A OK,” said Brother Hope. His head fell forward until the bald spot in the centre of his scalp gleamed in the lamplight like a small moon. His lungs filled with tidal slowness. His stomach-muscles flicked into definition, moulded like wood-carving; no wonder he was in such good trim, if these were his normal exercises of contemplation.
“Come on,” said Sister Dorothy with the snarl of a mother whose child has loitered long enough at a pet-shop window. She strode round the corner of the cloisters. Pibble remembered how much of the precious half hour had already gone to waste; he scurried, forgot to wade, stubbed his toe viciously, stumbled among the hems of his habit, reeled helplessly forward and stopped himself from falling by hurtling against the far wall. The lantern went out with a crash and tinkle.
But when he recovered he saw that the world was not wholly dark. Sister Dorothy was standing in the faint light that came down the stairs below the great tower.
“I’m all right,” he gasped. “I’m coming.”
She disappeared up the stairs. Limping and wading together, Pibble wallowed after her. The light came through a half-open door at the top of the first fligh
t of steps; it seemed blindingly strong and steady compared with the faint flame that the lantern had produced. Sister Dorothy stood by the door in an attitude which showed that she expected him to go in, but would not do so herself. “I’ll sweep your mess up,” she said.
She shut the door behind him.
Sir Francis Francis still looked, at ninety-two, very like the photograph which Armstrong-Jones had taken of him nine years before, when he’d just come back from Oslo with his second Nobel Prize. Perhaps he seemed even hairier now, especially about the ears, but that was all. He wore a black jacket and pin-stripe trousers, and his Old Etonian tie was knotted round a starched white collar from which the neck, scrawny as a turkey’s, poked forth. Amid the round, prim, pink, myriad-seamed visage, the blue eyes blazed. He sat in a wing-chair by a crackling wood fire, hands crossed on an ebony walking-stick, and stared at Pibble as though he were the last creature on earth he wished to see.
“And who are you, sir?” he croaked.
“Pibble. James Pibble.”
“Then what are you doing in that tom-fool garment?”
“I was in bed. It seemed quicker than dressing.”
“Right. So you came. You cut it damned fine, hey?”
“I only got your letter yesterday—the day before yesterday, I mean. I caught the next train. You addressed it to Clapham, and we left that house before the war.”
“Always somebody living in one of those damned miserable little streets who knows where everybody’s gone.”
“They forwarded it to the hospital where my mother died, and the hospital told them to try the rooms where I was living then, and those people sent it to my office.”
“Stop grizzling, man. I had to be certain of getting the right Pibble, hadn’t I?”
“There aren’t any others. I found some fish-merchants in the London Telephone Directory, but they spell their names differently.”
“Right. Willoughby Pibble, mechanic at the Cavendish Laboratory before the First War—what relation was he?”
“My father.”
“Thought so. Some malicious fellow sent me a newspaper cutting about you making a mess of your job, poking your nose in where it didn’t concern you and causing a beastly rumpus. Just Will Pibble’s style, I said to myself. Know what I’m talking about, hey?”
“Yes. My father worked for you at the Cavendish.”
“My personal mechanic. I didn’t pay him, of course—couldn’t afford to. We didn’t call ’em mechanics, either. Dirty word then. We got ’em cheaper if we called ’em Research Assistants. Tchah! J.J. paid Everett out of his own pocket, but the rest of us had to squabble for the damned mechanics as if we’d been cockneys at a whelk-stall. Then your fool of a father attached himself to me, like a mongrel you pick up on a walk—scratch its damned ears for an instant and it follows you home. Bit of luck for him, choosing me, hey, considering who he might have latched on to—one of the Babus, f’rinstance or that American gel. Daresay he told you all about them.”
“He never talked about his time at the Cavendish. My mother sometimes did.”
“Your dad didn’t see fit to tell me about her.”
“They weren’t married until the war broke out; but they did their courting at Cambridge.”
“Damned good place for it.”
The old man seemed to have relaxed his aggressiveness for the last couple of sentences, and now he sat brooding. In the silence Pibble looked round the room. It was like a photographer’s studio set up for an advertisement of some appurtenance of gracious living—Cyprus port, perhaps or Algerian cigars. All the props were there, the ranked books, the old oak tallboy and bureau, the smoky oil-paintings, rich rugs, glints of silver. But they were alien. The real room was the chill, clumsy, echoing stone, behind and above.
“Hey!” said the old man suddenly. “Your foot’s bleeding!” Pibble stretched his stubbed toe clear of the habit. A blue-red ooze was trickling down its side.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Yes it does, by George!” said the old man in a shrill shout. “That’s a damned good rug you’re bleeding on—I won it off Rutherford in a bet in ’23. Wrap it up in something.”
“I’m afraid I left my handkerchief in my room.”
The old man snatched the blue silk triangle from his breast pocket and fluttered it in front of him as though he were saying good-bye to a steamer. Pibble hobbled across, took it and tied it round the bruised extremity.
“Carpet suffered quite enough from my damned bladder,” muttered the old man, “without adding the effusions of your damned toe. Floorcloth in the coal-scuttle, water in that carafe on the spinet. Give the bloody bits a good soaking.”
Pibble took the cloth and the carafe, put them in front of the fender, knelt and began to swab. No amount of rehearsed conversations during that endless train-journey had prepared him for this. He dribbled more water onto the precious fabric. It was not, as a matter of fact, a very good rug—just an honest green-and-crimson Victorian affair, with a gothicised pattern. He glanced towards the fire to check how the pattern repeated and his eye was caught by a gleam under the brass fender—a large marble, except that the gleam came from a curved criss-cross of shiny wire—a shape he’d seen often before, though usually larger. A microphone.
“You whipped up here pretty damned smart, then,” said Sir Francis. “What was the rush, hey?”
“You told me not to answer, but you said that if I hadn’t come by the last Tuesday in March you’d assume I wasn’t coming. That’s today. I didn’t even have time to go home and pack.”
“That’s the spirit, young fellow. Yours not to reason why. Drop everything and come when I whistle. Leave the students to burn London, hey? You must have thought it damned important?”
Pibble stopped swabbing and stared at the unwinking gadget under the fender. It was bad enough answering the sneering old voice above his head; why should he pour these privacies out for a tape-recorder, or for the ear of some holy eavesdropper?
“My father died when I was eleven,” he said slowly. “My mother lost her memory during the Second World War. She often spoke of him before that, but she was a very religious woman and her religion tended to colour her account of him. I have never been able to find anyone else who knew him well, but I want to know everything I can about him—I can’t explain why. Anyway, his dealings with you seem to have affected his whole life and …”
“And I might be dead any moment, hey?”
Pibble said nothing. The creaking voice paused; when it went on it was in a lower tone, oddly secretive, as though the old man had his privacies too.
“Wondering why I sent for you, I daresay,” it said. Pibble picked up the carafe and tilted it sideways under the fender.
“Hey, what are you up to, you damned fool?” said Sir Francis. “You don’t need that much water.”
Pibble carefully eased the fender upwards until he could pour the remains of the water directly into the microphone, which crackled and spat. He had occasionally been involved in eavesdropping operations at the Yard, without ever feeling quite happy that this was a policeman’s proper work. Ruining this nasty toy salved that faint guilt. When he looked up the old scientist was grinning like a gargoyle.
“Any more of those, hey?” whispered Sir Francis.
Pibble stood up and nosed round the leather-smelling room. He hadn’t much hope of spotting a professionally installed mike, but the one he’d spoiled had been so clumsily hidden that he thought he ought to be able to find another flex, at least. He was looking behind the pictures when he remembered how crazily thick the masonry of the tower was: the wires would have to come in through an existing opening—yes, the flex for the first one ran from the fireplace under the carpet and then sneaked out round the jamb of the door, as inoffensive as a sleeping snake. There was nothing at the window.
When Pibble
turned back the sage was coming out of the small door in the further corner of the room, carrying a toothmug full of water. He made quavering signs to Pibble, who lifted the fender up and propped it on a square of peat so that there was room to slide the toothmug under it and immerse the whole microphone.
“Damned stuff, electricity,” said the old man, as though he were cursing an eccentric stable boy. He sank carefully back into the wing chair.
“Know how it works,” he said, “but never know whether it will work, hey? That damned gadget might dry out and he functioning right as rain in thirty seconds, or it might be spitchered for ever. I’ve spent weeks—months—of my life trying to make some damned apparatus work. Design first class—done it myself. Workmanship first class—sacked the men if it wasn’t. Micromagnetometer once, early days, near drove me loony till I spotted one brass screw in a steel frame generating its own charge. Where were we?”
“You were asking if I had any idea why you sent for me. I imagine it had something to do with your book—you wanted to put in a footnote about my father, perhaps?”
Sir Francis’s voice dropped from a creak to a croak.
“What book are you blathering about?” he said.
“I saw some extracts from your memoirs in one of the Sunday papers. The introduction said that you hadn’t quite finished, and that you were working backwards.”
“You’re thinking of someone else, you damned fool.” The voice was back to its normal level of unsuppressed arrogance, making it clear that only a buffoon like Pibble would confuse the memoirs of Sir Francis Francis with those of some come-lately hedge-scientist. Pibble gazed at his blue-swathed toe and collected his thoughts: it showed you how cut-off from the world Clumsey Island was, the old man thinking it possible that anyone, let alone Pibble, should make that mistake. The book—or rather the Sunday paper extracts—was unconfusable with anything. “The publishing event of the decade,” Pooter had called it in The Times. “All the dirt and all the knowledge. Lytton Strachey cross-bred with Bertrand Russell.” The first instalment had borne that out.
The Sinful Stones Page 1
