The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Read online

  He leaned between two slabs of granite and gazed down; with a clack of wings, three pigeons left their perch on a drainpipe four feet below him; beyond that were more pipes—so many that at this angle there seemed to be more metal than brick in places. If Caine had in fact scrabbled his way across the façade, it ought to be possible to see the marks of his passage on the relevant plumbing. It would take, Pibble decided, a whimsically perfectionist mountaineer and murderer to erase his tracks in such circumstances. He craned a bit farther, so that he could distinguish the individual windows, and tried to work out the route Ned Rickard had specified. That must be the vent pipe, which meant that that was the overflow; the latter, to judge by the guano on it, had clearly not endured the tread of man for many years. Elsewhere all the pipes were mottled and splotched in a way which made judgment impossible. An army might have clambered across, each splotch a footprint, or no one at all—you couldn’t tell at that distance. Close up, it’d be another matter, but that would mean expensive scaffolding simply in order to justify a police officer’s one-sided feud. Pibble withdrew from temptation between the crenelations, like a tortoise retracting his neck.

  “Is there another way back in?” he asked.

  “There’s a trap door over there, in the middle roof, which opens above the stairs, and there’s another like the one we got out by round on the far side, but it only takes you back into the hut, and the screen in front of that door’s nailed tight. I’ll show you when we get back.”

  Pibble explored the roof. It was an E shape, with the upright backing onto the street and the three arms reaching back toward the garden. Both the other trap doors were bolted on the inside. He jerked himself inelegantly over the party wall and tried the traps of No. 8. The two outer ones were bolted, and the moss on them looked undisturbed. As he was kneeling by the stair trap, it rattled and rose. A pale, sulky head peered at him.

  “I wouldn’t like you to marry my daughter, eiver,” said Billy Youbegood.

  The trap banged shut. Pibble opened it again and shouted, “Hey!” Billy’s head reappeared.

  “I only heard noises and fought as I’d better look,” he said.

  “What are you standing on?”

  “Chest o’ drors. Full o’ junk. Nuffing worf nicking. Don’t belong to no one.”

  “Could anyone else come up there and get out?”

  “Not wivout I’d hear vem.”

  “Billy, there’s a lot of lead out here.”

  “Vere is, ain’t vere? Hey! What are you suggesting? Vere ain’t none missing, is vere?”

  “Not that I can see. But I don’t understand how you’d hear a whisper out of their attic in yours, let alone clanging and banging. Not the way these houses are built.”

  “Ar, for Chrissake,” said Billy, “course I been looking round. I got a friend or two in vat line, an’ if I got moved out of here it might come in, but I’m not going to be nicking ver roof off my own head, am I? ’Tween you and I, I did take a look round about a monf ago, and vat’s when I first heard ver racket vey make—like funder, it was. After vat, I always know when vey’re at it. It’s not reely a noise, but everfing in ver house seems to go shiver, shiver, like ver was an unnerground railway under ver Terrace. Whatter vey up to, d’you know?”

  “Playing ritual drums. Thanks, Billy. You’re sure no one could have come out through there last night without your hearing?”

  “Sure. I got good ears. Uncle Isaac wanted me to be a peterman—combination locks an’ such, but I hadn’t ver application. Hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you Pibble?”

  “Yes,” said Pibble. “How did you know?”

  “Kinky little case like vis. Vey wouldn’t send one of ver big boys out on it—too much to lose, nuffing to gain. Good luck, ven.”

  The head popped back, the trap cracked to, bolts ground home. Yes, kinky and little, just Pibble’s line, a typical sidetrack for the excoming man. Ah well, it suited his talents, whatever Mrs. Pibble might say. If he was going to stay and listen to Robin’s drumming, he’d have to ring her up soon and make what peace he could. Ah well. Memo: he’d better get Strong to check the exits from the other houses in the Terrace—not that it was important, but somebody might ask. What mattered was the way into No. 9.

  He found the tunnel a bit easier to negotiate this time, going under the beam on his back, but realized as he squeezed through that none of the blob-shaped old men could have done it at all. Fernham was out on the landing, tiptoe on a chair to peer at the bolts of the central trap.

  “Don’t touch it,” said Pibble.

  “I won’t, sir. I just heard you moving about and thought I’d better have a look. There’s oldish cobwebs up here, sir. I don’t think it’s been open for a month or two at least.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Pibble. “O.K., Robin. That’s all for the moment, thanks.”

  “Can we have the hut back soon, please?” said Robin. “It’ll take ages to get things straight before this evening. Golly, it looks awful like this, doesn’t it?”

  “Have the lab men finished, Fernham?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Then I suppose that’s O.K. by me, Robin. I’d like to come and listen if I may. I suppose it’s only fair to say that I shall have to take some sort of action about some of what’s been going on.”

  Robin stopped playing friendly schoolboys. The soft lines of the black visage jump-cut into wary maturity.

  “Why?” he said. “What business is it of yours? You get the N.S.P.C.C. to come messing around and you don’t get another squeak out of me or any of my old men, I can promise you that.”

  “You can, can you?”

  “Yes.”

  Um. There seemed to be two Robins: the Ringo fancier, prepared to put up with a lot of pain in submission to the tribal whims of his terrible elders, just in order to be allowed to play the drums; and the jungle drumming man, going through the purgatory of initiation in order to be able to dominate his cackling elders. Or a combination, even … Oh, the hell with it. Carry on, policeman.

  “So you and the old men have more information you could give me?”

  “I expect so. You haven’t asked us very much yet.”

  “Did Aaron know you were doing the drumming?”

  “I expect so. He’d have heard the noise, and it had to be me.”

  “Why?”

  “The priest in the village was my mother’s brother. I was the only one who could do it.”

  “And it didn’t matter who your father was?”

  “Not a bit. Haven’t you been told we’re a matrilineal society?”

  Robin produced a long, easy stare, defiant but by no means cocky.

  “What else do you know, then?”

  “It’s not knowing—at least not your way, with fingerprints and so on. But it wasn’t anyone in the hut, that’s certain. I was awake all night with my back hurting and I’d’ve heard them moving.”

  “Would you? They move too quietly for me.”

  “They don’t for me. I’m one of them.”

  “What about the women, then?”

  “Not a chance. They were all over him, like kids round a teacher, fetching his beer, rolling his fags, running to wipe his nose when he had a cold. They didn’t give my old men a look-in. It was dead unfair.”

  “And Eve and Paul, as you suggested earlier?”

  “They’d have to be in it together, wouldn’t they? And Eve wouldn’t muck up his private zoo for anything. He’s got us all in here like rats in a lab, and why should he spoil all that because one old dodderer wants something different?”

  “So, according to you, it can’t have been anyone in the house?”

  “No. There’s only one person it could have been, really.”

  “These aren’t facts you’ve been telling me, you know.”

  “They
’d be facts all right if you’d been living here fourteen years and watching all the little bits and bobs of people’s behavior.”

  And that was true. That was the whole trouble with police work. You come plunging in, a jagged Stone Age knife, to probe the delicate tissues of people’s relationships, and of course you destroy far more than you discover. And even what you discover will never be the same as it was before you came; the nubbly scars of your passage will remain. At the very least, you have asked questions that expose to the destroying air fibers that can only exist and fulfill their function in coddling darkness. Cousin Amy, now, mousing about in back passages or trilling with feverish shyness at sherry parties—was she really made all the way through of dust and fluff and unused ends of cotton and rusty needles and un-matching buttons and all the detritus at the bottom of God’s sewing basket? Or did He put a machine in there to tick away and keep her will stern and her back straight as she picks out of a vase of brown-at-the-edges dahlias the few blooms that have another day’s life in them? Or another machine, one of His chemistry sets, that slowly mixes itself into an apparently uncaused explosion, poof!, and there the survivors are sitting covered with plaster dust among the rubble of their lives. It’s always been the explosion by the time the police come stamping in with ignorant heels on the last unbroken bit of Bristol glass; with luck they can trace the explosion back to harmless little Amy, but as to what set her off—what were the ingredients of the chemistry set and what joggled them together—it was like trying to reconstruct a civilization from three broken pots and a seven-inch lump of baked clay which might, if you looked at its swellings and hollows the right way, have been the Great Earth Mother. What’s more, people who’ve always lived together think that they are still the same—oh, older of course and a bit more snappish, but underneath still the same laughing lad of thirty years gone by. “My Jim couldn’t have done that,” they say. “I know him. Course he’s been a bit depressed lately, funny like, but he sometimes goes that way for a bit and then it passes off. But setting fire to the lingerie department at the Army and Navy, Inspector—such a thought wouldn’t enter into my Jim’s head. I know him.” Tears diminishing into hiccupping snivels as doubt spreads like a coffee stain across the threadbare warp of decades. A different Jim? Different as a Martian, growing inside the ever-shedding skin? A whole lot of different Jims, a new one every seven years? “Course not. I’m the same, aren’t I, same as I always was—that holiday we took hiking in the Peak District in August thirty-eight—the same inside?”

  Pibble sighed and shook himself. You couldn’t build a court case out of delicate tissues. Facts were the one foundation.

  “O.K.,” he said, “I’ll try and persuade myself that what’s been happening to you is none of my business if you’ll try and persuade your old men to tell me what they know. I think I know who your one person is, but it’s no use to me if I can’t prove it. I want to talk to Dr. Ku again, and after that I’d like to talk to the members of the men’s hut, one at a time. They can wait in the S.C.R. until I’m ready for them; then I’ll talk to them in one of the little rooms in the second floor and pass them up to you to help get things ready. When do you do your drumming?”

  “After supper,” said Robin. “Could you turn up about half past eight?”

  “Fine.”

  Paul was alone in the bright room downstairs, painting in a curious way, carefully laying thick bars of orange poster paint vertically down a sheet of white paper with a single slow stroke of the brush. They came out marvelously straight and smooth, the paint flowing evenly off the tilted brush as though there were a reservoir in the handle. He worked across the sheet until all its white innocence was behind bars; then he put his brush down, turned the paper around through a hundred and eighty degrees, and studied each bar in turn. At last he crumpled the sheet up and threw it on the floor; there were about twenty balls of colored paper already there.

  “What are you up to?” said Pibble.

  “Learning. Practicing as a child practices the violin. I began late and I have much to learn. Eve has gone for a walk. He is upset.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The time was coming, even if Aaron had not died.”

  “You mean the tribe would have decided to break away from her—him and gone back to New Guinea anyway.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Which side were you on?”

  “Side?”

  “Do you think they should go?”

  “I do not want them to go. They are necessary to my work. I flower out of their decay, out of our decay. Furthermore, I want what Eve wants; we are a very harmonious couple, Superintendent.”

  Silence, though the afternoon air seemed filled with the impregnation of his soft, prodigious bass, as though the salts of it were suspended in a solution of stillness.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” said Pibble.

  “Your question had no meaning, which was why I answered with an account of my own selfishness. The tribe cannot be considered as a living entity, Superintendent, susceptible to words like ‘should’ and ‘ought.’ It is not dead yet, but it is in a state of coma from which it will never awake. The people here, insofar as they are people, are worth thought and trouble. But to a great extent they do not consider themselves as people but as organs of a larger body, a body which was smashed in an accident twenty-five years ago and breathes still only through the combined miracle of Aaron’s will and Eve’s skill. This house is an iron lung.”

  “They have started some sort of drumming ritual in the men’s hut,” said Pibble.

  “How? Oh, of course, with Robin using the drums. Did Aaron know?”

  “Eve and Robin think so. Didn’t she—he tell you?”

  “Use the feminine, Superintendent. Aaron would not have liked the sound of the drums. It was a sign of the will beginning to lose its hold on the flesh. I told you the time was coming.”

  “What could he have done to stop it?”

  “He could have …”

  Silence again. Paul chose a fresh brush, a tiny one, and dabbled it carefully in a jar of floor stain. Then with a quick swoop he drew one huge “O” on the clean sheet before him. The brush went back into its holder, and he picked up a two-foot rule and measured his circle this way and that.

  “Do you admire Giotto, Superintendent?” he said.

  “I like his paintings very much.”

  “I, too. But, as you imply by your half answer, the story is unworthy of him. It is too easy to draw what looks like a circle, too difficult to draw what is one.”

  “Aaron, Paul.”

  “I was wrong, Superintendent. He could not have held a meeting of the whole tribe and used his weight as chief to forbid the drumming, because that weight was part of the world to which the drumming belongs. His authority as chief grew out of the same roots as the priest’s powers as drummer; if Aaron had a right to forbid the drumming, then Robin had a right to drum. He could have argued, but I cannot see what arguments he could have used. Even the Reverend Mackenzie did not forbid the drumming—he just enticed us away, and when the priest found us coming no more, he laid his drums aside.”

  “Enticed you?”

  “There may be a better word, Superintendent. It is difficult to explain. The Reverend Mackenzie was, to a simple people, a magician. I now realize that much of his magic was hypnotism, but I do not think he knew this himself. We had had a missionary before him, the Reverend Smith, a good man; I was his houseboy; he worked hard and he died. We believed our priest had killed him with the drums, but did not much care. Then the Reverend Mackenzie came. The chief—his name was Akotapolulo—arranged that we should greet him formally, with the whole people there. He walked between us, spoke to the chief in the dialect of a tribe down the valley—quite like our own language—and to the priest. Then he knelt and prayed aloud in his own language, among us all, and then he stood up and
looked along the men’s side. His eyes found me and he called me to show him his hut. I was dressed no differently from the other boys—our tribe wears no clothes—but he picked me out, the houseboy of the old missionary, and I led him to his hut. Within two days, any of our people who were in the village would be watching all the time out of the edge of their eyes in the hope of seeing the Reverend Mackenzie moving between his hut and the school, or the school and the altar he was building under the big tree. He made it all with his own hands and would not let us help. Soon it was as if we had a god living among us. The hunters tried to touch him before they went out onto the mountain, and women before childbirth would beg me to steal some belonging of his for them to hold during their pains. And all of us tried to earn his pleasure by doing what we believed he wished, though he seldom made his wishes directly known to us. In the end the priest, too, put his drums away and worked only with leaves and the fire. He was trying to use the drums again when the Japanese shot him. I found him in the middle of them.”

  “Are the drums wicked?”

  “They are different, Superintendent. As different from Christianity as my skin is from yours.”

  “Why didn’t the whole tribe hide?”

  Paul took a razor blade and scratched out a tiny line where an errant hair from the brush had spoilt the round of his “O.”

  “I do not know for certain,” he said. “Akotapolulo was dead, and it was decided between Moses and the men’s hut and the Reverend Mackenzie. But the place where a tribe lives is a holy place, twice holy, since the Reverend Mackenzie also lived there. One does not readily desert it, any more than monks left their shrines when the Goths came. I think they decided that the danger was not great, that the Japanese would probably not come at all. But Bob had to hide, and enough of our people had to go with him to tend him, so it seemed wise to make the party a fairly large one, but not large enough for it to be obvious that people were missing. Then, provided every trace of Bob’s presence was removed, all should be safe. When I went to the village after the Japanese had gone, I found the Reverend Mackenzie hanging from his own doorpost, with a packet of Bob’s cigarettes stuffed between his teeth. I have never told Eve.”