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  The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest

  A James Pibble Mystery

  Peter Dickinson

  I

  Slower, please.”

  Impassively the driver slipped into third and the car began to dawdle down the wide street.

  Too impassively? James Pibble stared at the cropped and disciplined neck, wondering how the gossip ran about him in the lower reaches of the Yard. Lives ago, he’d been a sprat in those waters himself, and then he and all the other sprats had evolved a shared mythology about the big fish—this one a lecher, this one a miracle-worker, this one a near villain—and mostly they’d been right. What did the current generation of sprats make of Super­intendent Pibble, aging, unglamorous, graying toward retirement? Did they know how much luck had gone into his reputation for having a knack with kooky cases? Probably. And did they know about the Adversary?

  Wandering unwary through the jungle of self, Pibble fell into the pit. Normally he’d have had Sergeant Crewe with him, but Asian flu was sifting the Yard, and two men couldn’t be spared where one would do, so now he wallowed in the dread which haunted all new beginnings. To what did it go back? Some party for tots at which a bigger tot had smiled him to scorn? Had he come from the womb haunted? Not every new case, not every supper party in a strange house, produced its Adversary, the lounging, contemptuous male who shriveled his soul. Pibble had, in his time, sent Adversaries to prison—Walewski, for instance—but that didn’t exorcise them. This time, perhaps …

  Defensively, as if to study the ambience of murder, he leaned forward and peered at the tidy terraces: a red door, a turquoise door, a brown door picked out in white, a tangerine door picked out in black—the district had swallowed a lot of money and paint since he was last down this way. Crippen, wasn’t that an antique shop? What used to be there, a tobacconist? And the fish-and-chip shop was gone—and the vet, too. The doors had brass dolphins for knockers and upper-middle-class prams stood on the pavement, each with its tiny Dominic or Miranda or Camilla or Adam resting in the dusty May sunshine. Prams are a dead giveaway; if the same tribes had still been living here as did when Pibble used to come down, fifteen years back, to rouse small-time burglars out of bed (three families to a house then, gas cookers on each landing, one cold tap, outside lav, the odor of damp dirt), there’d have been prams all right, but different. Shiny, streamlined, jazzy with chrome—not these staid barouches.

  Well, well, all London was changing, changing, dreadfully changing. Estate agents must be doing nicely down this way, with a constant flow of moneyed youngsters moving in with one kid and moving out with three. Pretty it all looked, with the easy, plain proportions shown off by the fresh paint. Rum sort of area for a black man to get his head bashed in. The car swung north.

  Wrong again. Just the sort of area for a black man to get his head bashed in. Flagg Terrace hadn’t changed by so much as a dirty dishcloth drying at a window. The tide of money had washed around it. The hordes of conquering young executives, sweeping down like Visigoths from the east and driving the cowering and sullen aboriginals into the remoter slums of Acton, had left it alone. Neither taste nor wealth could assail its inherent dreadfulness. Pibble suddenly realized that he had never kept a promise to himself, made full fifteen years back, that he would look up Flagg and find out something about the man who had designed and built this thing.

  It was like a late, phony Tudor castle turned inside out, a crenelated cul-de-sac. The bricks were an implacable and unweathered bull’s-blood, picked out in ruglike patterns with other blue-black bricks. To counterpoint these aimless crisscrosses, the plumbers had imposed their own pattern of vigorous verticals and horizontals—drainpipes and vent pipes and rising mains and rain-water pipes—with profuse virtuosity down every façade. Stone steps ran up to the front doors; under each flight of steps was a dark arch, full of ungarnered milk empties; above each a lowering porch, crenelated but without the expected portcullis. There were twelve such houses in the cul-de-sac. A uniformed policeman—a rather little one with a blond beard—stood at the door of No. 9, halfway down the western side, and a few bored loungers watched him. No photographers, Pibble observed; except when Fleet Street has one of its fits of liberalism, black men don’t rate much press coverage, even with their heads bashed in. He wondered why Sandy Graham had sent so smartly for the Yard. Something a little unusual there.

  “Unusual? No, Jimmy. We’ve got a lovely little setup here, really airy-fairy. Just the thing for Pibble, I said, the moment I’d seen the Kus.”

  “Coos?”

  “Every single member of the household, me dear, is called Ku. They’re a tribe from New Guinea somewhere. Deceased’s a Ku, suspects all Kus, witnesses all Kus, only there aren’t any witnesses.” Superintendent Graham vented his strange contralto giggle.

  “Any of them speak English?”

  “Oh Lord, yes, according to their lights. Then there’s Dr. Ku. She’s as white as I am. Or you,” Graham added grudgingly. “She’s English.”

  “British,” corrected the silent figure in the gloom behind Graham’s left elbow.

  Graham swung his hulk around toward the voice with the ponderous dignity of a swing bridge. “Sergeant Pauncefort, may I beg you in future to leave the susceptibilities of Celtic minorities to my care?”

  Jesus, thought Pibble, I’m not going to get much help from Sandy if he’s starting his cross-talk bit with Pauncy this soon. He’s got something to hide—this must be a real sticky one. Why’s he got it in for me now? He used to be an honest copper under that gloating hulk. Ah, who can one trust?

  “Jimmy boy,” said Graham, turning back to him, “this is going to be a sticky one. You’ll find out why. And I’m up to my virginal eyebrows and can’t be much use to you. But I do think it’s your cup of tea, honest. Come and have a squint at the deader and you’ll see what I mean. Never seen anything like it. I blew my top at first, but then I thought there wasn’t much point in having him moved back and provoking a race riot or something. There’s plenty of blood on the stairs to show where the poor bastard bought it—all that’s clear enough. Then I’ll introduce you to Dr. Ku and leave you to get on with it.”

  The stairwell was not as brightly lit as the Borough Council would have wished. There was a 25-watt bulb in the big hallway and another on the first landing, but the chocolate-and-beige lincrusta walls seemed to suck in their yellow fight, leaving a jungly gloom which smelled much less dirty than Pibble had expected. Luckily there was a window at the half landing, a stained-glass rendering of “Love Locked Out.” The heavy leading employed by the craftsmen lent a peculiar emphasis to the anatomy of the naked figure leaning on the doorpost, but this unfortunate accent was compensated for by the amount of light let through by the pallid limbs. In this welcome shaft, Pibble saw that the two newel posts of the banisters ended in realistically carved animals, an ape and a squirrel.

  The light on the second half landing was like a sunburst. Some came from the window, the lower sash of which had been flung up. As the stained glass here depicted “Dante Meeting Beatrice,” this meant that the pale, timeless passion-hungry faces were intruded upon by hams and thighs in mauve and emerald tights. But a fiercer, more unnatural light glared from the police photographer’s flood lamps, poised above darker patches on the dark red carpet, each patch ringed carefully around with tailor’s chalk. An oak cat squatted on one newel, but the other animal was missing.

  “We’ll come back to this,�
� said Graham. “Scuse me, Jack.”

  With a patient mumble, the photographer shifted the legs of his tripod to let the two officers pass, and then began to rearrange them. The second landing was a copy of the first, a rectangle with one door at the end and two on either side. All the paintwork was off-chocolate. From somewhere came a tiny, ceaseless muttering, like a mains hum on an old wireless. Graham paused at the second door on the left.

  “It’s like going into church,” he said, “only Dr. Ku says they don’t mind. Hope you think we’ve done right to let them get on with it, Jimmy.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  Graham opened the door.

  The caged smells weltered out and mingled in Pibble’s nostrils—rugby changing rooms, burnt tires, Italian restaurants, meths, cheap talcum. He went in behind Graham, whose hay-wain figure bulked black for a second against the crazy light. The curtains were drawn. There were seven women in the room, all as dark as anyone Pibble had ever seen. The green flame from a sputtering dish made their skins look midnight blue. They wore jerseys and woolen skirts, but they didn’t sit English—they squatted on the floorboards in attitudes which spoke of bare breasts and coarse cotton prints knotted at the waist.

  “Tikaru mindi kmava iraki jissu,” shrilled the grayhaired one cross-legged at the feet of the corpse.

  “Tikaru mindi kmava iraki hodigu,” answered a strange lump, featureless with disease, from the far wall.

  “Tikaru mindi kmava iraku mirri,” cried the next without looking up from the pink sock she was knitting.

  “Tikaru mindi kmava iraku godifadi.”

  “Tikaru mindi . . .”

  Mindless as the endlessly repeated calls of wild birds, the incantation went on around the circle, and around again. The lump by the far wall rose and threw fresh herbs and a piece of electric cable into the flame. The stench of burnt rubber and strange cooking thickened. Two beldames against the near wall turned a page of the book they held—a Dr. Seuss reading primer—and, finger pointing, started to labor through a fresh sentence; when their turns came, they sang out their responses without looking up. There was no furniture in the room at all. The corpse lay, strictly to attention, in the middle of the floor.

  At first, Pibble thought it was a trick of the light that made the victim look so foreshortened, but then he realized the man really was that shape, only just over four feet tall and almost square. His hair was white, in close Negroid curls. The angle from which the light came threw the ritual scarrings on his cheeks into abrupt relief, so that they looked like the lips of small subsidiary mouths, all smiling. The real mouth amid the white beard turned down fiercely at the corners, in the manner of the mask of tragedy on a proscenium arch. The nose was almost flat. The body wore striped pajamas, their colors impossible to be sure of in the grisly light.

  Pibble picked his way between the ugly, dusky choristers and knelt by the body. He turned the dead man’s head away from him; rigor made the left shoulder try to follow the neck with a comedian’s baffled shrug. The hair at the back of the skull was stiffened with crusted blood, and a lacy delta marked another flow from the left ear. The skin was barely warmer than the room. Pibble rose and picked his way back; Graham had the door open for him.

  They leaned on the landing banisters and peered down into the gloom of the stairwell. To their right, the photographer clicked and fluttered.

  “Worth seeing, Jimmy?”

  “And smelling. Thank you, Sandy, for the experience. There’s a snag about the left-handed blow, I imagine.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing. Dr. Ku will tell you.”

  “Know what he was hit with? “

  “An owl.”

  “Off the newel post there?”

  “Jimmy, you’re a bastard, a gleeking bastard. You might have lifted an eyebrow, for God’s sake. How many chances d’you think the average copper gets in his career to tell a colleague that the murderer did the job with an owl?”

  “Didn’t you tell Pauncefort?” Pibble asked.

  “Sergeants don’t count.”

  “Sorry, Sandy. I owe you one double take. No fingerprints or anything, then?”

  “Nah. They’ve seen too much TV. They don’t go out much in the evenings, so after seventeen years they know all the tricks. Long before Perry Mason they were watching. Rum do when you think of it—men from Mars, almost—learning all about the great big world outside by staring at the idiot box. Patchy sort of education, but very hot on some things: how to heist a car, or blow a peter, or—”

  “Do they side with the Indians against the cowboys?”

  “Didn’t ask. Anyway, they know all about prints. Finished with that blasted bird, Jack?”

  The photographer didn’t raise his head from his view finder. “Clean as a whistle,” he said, “always excepting the blood. Held with a cloth, my guess.”

  “Suppose you might as well see it,” said Graham to Pibble. “In here.”

  The owl lay on a marble-topped washstand in the other left-hand room—a small bedroom with an enormous bed. The bird was about fifteen inches high, carved in oak with simple clean strokes which allowed the lines of the grain to suggest the mottling of feathers. There was a little dried blood and a few white hairs behind its right ear, almost as though some enemy had waited for it in the dark and coshed it savagely with a human. Beside it on the marble lay an Edward VII penny.

  “That’s the clue,” said Graham disdainfully. He flipped the coin over. On the obverse was the familiar likeness of his late majesty King George V.

  Pibble turned it back. There lay the Peacemaker. “Toss you whether it means anything,” he said.

  “Heads it does. The deceased was holding it so tight that it’s left a mark on his palm. I’ll show you, if you feel up to facing the Luton Girls’ Choir again.”

  “What did they make of the doctor?”

  “Didn’t turn a hair. I think they’d have been perfectly happy if he’d got out his little knives and started looking for goodies inside the cadaver, but he didn’t. It was Dr. Morton—sound bloke. Says he’d lay heavy odds that there was nothing more to it than a lucky clonk with our feathered friend, or else someone knew exactly where to clonk. About midnight, Morton thinks, on the half landing there. There’s a trail of blood, and they found him almost at the top, so he must have crawled on before he died.”

  Graham pointed to a chalked outline at the edge of the landing where they stood. Pibble walked to the top of the stairs and saw that the marks continued on to the top three steps, making the discernible shape of a human figure, very short and broad. The biggest of the dark patches came where the head would have been.

  Graham pointed again, to the half landing below. “There’s only one street lamp, so that corner’s black as pitch, Dr. Ku says, even with the window open. It was last night. Our chap could have stood in the corner waiting for the old boy to come up the stairs. He always went pretty slowly, hauling on the banisters—bad heart. Easy to clock him as he passed.”

  “They’ve learned about footmarks from the telly, too?” Pibble asked.

  “Course. The whole corner’s wiped clean. He used the lace doo-day from the window, and then just left it lying on the sill. Wiped the sill, too, for some reason.”

  “Came from outside, perhaps.”

  “Leaned on the sill for a bit, more like, watching for the old boy to come home.”

  “He went out in those pajamas?” Pibble asked.

  “That’s right. Never wore anything else, the Kus say. Just put more layers of pajamas on when the weather turned colder. You’ve got to realize, Jimmy, that until he was forty-odd he didn’t wear anything most days.”

  “Yes, of course. Did he go out much?”

  “That’s about as far as I got when I decided to ask for you. Dr. Ku will tell you the rest. I’ll introduce you and be off. We’ve got a nasty bit of kid-molest
ing up by St. Stephen’s—run-o’-the-mill, really, but it’s got me bothered.”

  “I know what you mean, Sandy. It’s quaint, like an exercise in a forgotten art form. You go and harry your pervert with a clear conscience. Where’s Dr. Ku?”

  “Floor below.”

  They had to wait. The photographer had achieved a delicate and contorted balance of himself and his tripod, both cantilevered across the stairwell, to photograph the owl’s abandoned pedestal from a rewarding angle. Pibble might have edged past, but for Graham to have tried would have risked both man and machine. Sandy looks edgy, thought Pibble. Hope he’s all right. Enough prima donnas in the force already. Odd how little you can hear from the wake room—or smell, either. He left the banisters to look at the door. It wasn’t what he’d expected, a flimsy old deal affair with fillets of fresh wood tacked to the top to fill successive gaps caused by a subsiding doorpost; no, it was solid mahogany, foursquare, fitting its frame as closely as the air lock on a spaceship. Pibble leaped a few inches into the air and came down on his heels; the floor scarcely gave, though the photographer glanced around, frowning, and then (seeing that the tremor had been caused by a senior officer) erased all emotion from his face.

  “Sorry,” said Pibble.

  “That’s all right, sir. I’d finished. It was just the principle of the thing.”

  “Sturdy bit of building this, Sandy. Last for a thousand years if they don’t pull it down. Funny the way they used to put top-class craftsmanship into such hideous buildings sometimes. Stairs don’t creak, doors almost soundproof. Ideal setup for an ambush.”

  “Yes. Come on.” From Graham’s tone, Pibble half expected him to add, “Let’s get it over.”

  On the floor below, Graham knocked at the single door at the far end of the landing, waited respectfully for an answer, and went in. In its way, the room was almost as improbable, in that particular house, as the wake room on the floor above. It was large, and brimming with light. Two tall windows opened onto back gardens where Pibble could see the top of a savagely over-pollarded sycamore. Both the big neon lights in the ceiling were on, and auxiliary illumination came from a Swedish-looking standard lamp, which must have had at least two 150-watt bulbs in it, and a couple of angle-poises. There couldn’t have been a shadow anywhere. The furniture was too low, curveless modern sofas, a large architect’s desk, and several silly gilt chairs, upright, such as one used to see in the tearooms of would-be smart cinemas. The fabrics were soft grays and yellows, which made the pictures all the more staring.