One Foot in the Grave Read online

  There was a long pause.

  “Marianne woke up,” he prompted.

  “Cold. Alone,” she whispered.

  “She was cold. There was no one else in the room. She got dressed. Where was the gun?”

  “Pocket.”

  “The gun was in the pocket of her cloak. She held it. She left the room. Did she go up onto the roof?”

  “Down.”

  “She went down the stairs and let herself out of the castle. She left the door open, swinging in the wind.”

  “Maisie.”

  “She wasn’t Marianne anymore, she was Maisie. She let herself back into the staff wing and went up to her room. Jenny was there, drying her hair with Maisie’s dryer.”

  “Finished.”

  “Jenny saw the gun. Maisie told her about the duel in the castle. How did she know that?”

  “Dream.”

  “Marianne had dreamed it while she slept? Somebody came while she was asleep in the castle?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Maisie told me Marianne had killed Lord Hawkside.”

  Again her face rumpled. He felt the gossamer tackle with which he was trying to play her begin to break, so he let it go slack.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Jenny told her to say she’d been helping her wash her hair. She took the gun from her, and her cloak, and the key to the staff door. Was there only one key?”

  “Only one.”

  “Who gave Maisie the key?”

  “He did.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know! Don’t know!”

  Something was happening behind the mask of sleep. Suddenly the face contorted, as in a fever dream. The small mouth opened to an O. Any instant the hoot would begin. Instinct reacted before caution could restrain him. He lurched himself up onto his left elbow and at the same time flailed his right arm, palm spread, toward her face. Before he made contact the darkness roared round him.

  When he came to, she was bending over him, smiling, normal, the doppelgänger gone. He could see a patch of bright red on her left cheek.

  “Jenny’s got a headache,” she said.

  “Oh. Ur. Kind of you to come.”

  “You must have been asleep. I’ll get your medicine, shall I?”

  She turned toward the drug locker. With fumbling speed he reached across to the bedside table and picked up the six pills, relaxing as he withdrew his hand beneath the bedclothes. She halted, gazing at the open shelf.

  “Jenny can’t have latched it properly,” he said. “It fell open.”

  “Oh. Where’s the tray?”

  “Over here. She did me some sleeping draft, but I decided I didn’t want it.”

  “All right. I’ll bring your pills.”

  This time she took the three bottles off the shelf and brought them across to the tray, counting out the pills in front of him. He swallowed them one by one.

  “Lord Hawkside’s gone to France,” she said. “That’s terribly dangerous with a war on. He hasn’t told anybody why.”

  “Wants to find something out, I expect. Wasn’t that sister of his half French?”

  “Oh, yes. But you mustn’t guess what’s going to happen next. It spoils the surprise. Do you want to go to the loo while I make your bed?”

  “All right. If you’ll help me stand.”

  He felt strangely tottery and realized that the day had been physically exhausting. Only the equally strange sharpness of perception deceived him into believing, until he tried it, that he should be able to strive and stride as he had ten years ago. Still, he managed to wrap the filched pills in a piece of lavatory paper without dropping any of them. He put the little packet into his pajama pocket. Something was on his mind, a detail, buried now under the amazing leaf fall of Maisie’s dream memories. He scuttered fretfully at it, found nothing. Only when he was lying back on his pillow, watching Maisie turn toward the door, did something—her movement perhaps—trip the right switch.

  “Maisie?”

  She stopped, half-turned.

  “The metal detector,” he said.

  Now she turned fully and he saw she was the sleepwalker again.

  “It’s been through the metal detector,” she said dreamily, holding the nonexistent parcel toward him.

  “Did you put it through?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know, then?”

  “Because it was in the tray?”

  “Was it really in the tray?”

  “It was in the tray. It’s been through the metal detector.”

  “All right, I believe you. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  As the door closed he realized that she had forgotten to dim the lighting. He lay for a little, summoning up the will to rise again, and when he achieved it, took advantage of being up to empty his sleeping draft down the basin and to tuck the twist of pills into the drawer where his socks were kept. Lying again in the dimness, he regretted the sleeping draft. He was far from sure that there was anything wrong with the pills, and thought it even more unlikely that a liquid would have been substituted, but perhaps he should have kept it. Or drunk it.

  Clearly, he wasn’t going to sleep. His brain was too busy, had built up a momentum which would become a churning reiteration unless he channeled it into useful work. He tried to remember a long-ago textbook on hypnotism, borrowed from a library in order to settle an academic argument with poor Ned Rickard. Fragments still adhered, like wisps of fleece in a hedgerow. Soldiers can be hypnotized en masse with great ease because they are already drilled into obedience of the meaningless. A particular private, subject of a demonstration before senior officers, is told under hypnosis that when he leaves the room he will turn the light off. He is put through various tricks, then woken and told he can go. Hesitates at the door. “You were wanting the lights off, sir?” “No.” With an awkward bob of shame he flicks the switch off, despite his waking orders, and scurries away. Not very relevant? What about the woman, subject at a demonstration before students? Lecturer called away, leaving her under hypnosis. Students find that they can carry on, persuade her she’s a hen or a bishop, but when they try to get her to take her clothes off, she has hysterics. Um. Cases only. Must be as much variability as there is in the human mind. Maisie was almost indefinitely suggestible, and by almost anybody … Jenny, after all, had managed to impress on her the notion that she had been helping with the hair-washing, and thus actually remove the imprint of the earlier belief that she herself had shot Tosca. … A slippery tool, liable to twist in the hand … but one would be aware of this. Like a computer programmer, one would try to build in security sequences so that a stranger attempting to tap sensitive material would cause the whole mechanism to reject its orders. … Pibble had tripped such a mechanism when he had asked too insistently about the key … yes.

  But would she have killed? Would she have done a murder? All the books said no, pointing to the woman who had refused to undress for the students. On the other hand there was the private who had disobeyed the direct order and turned the light off. How could the books be sure? There were enough experiments, Pibble remembered, to show that subjects refused to do things which their waking intelligence would have told them were harmful to themselves. They might be prepared to lock their bodies into a rigidity they could never have achieved under their own willpower, but they still wouldn’t put their hands into boiling water.

  What about moral repugnance? Take somebody who is a potential murderer in any case: Presumably he could be hypnotized into a killing. Or take the woman who had had hysterics when the students tried to get her to strip: If that woman had lived in a less taboo-ridden era or had been a different woman—had been Maisie? Perhaps even Maisie wouldn’t have done it for the students; but for Lord Hawkside? The only people she’s ever been properly in love with are the hero
es in her toshy books. But in that case, couldn’t she have shot him? Suppose Tosca had been cast in a different role—the villainous Sir Napier Fence—wouldn’t Marianne have killed him for her lover’s sake? An idea like that seemed to have been planted at some time in the mess of her mind and then not quite erased. Murder by proxy. Extraordinarily tempting, if you had the power. Tempting to see whether you had it, to play with the curious toy. …

  Despite apparent wakefulness, he slept.

  11

  The quality of sleep had changed. He experienced a strange sense of return, the honeyed dream-return, not to the gardens of childhood, but simply to the sort of sleep he had enjoyed for most of his life until his illness took him. Light, but not restless, aware of noises and movements, aware that dreams were only dreams. When he woke, it was because somebody had come into the room, and before he opened his eyes he knew who it must be, and why.

  “I’m not dead,” he whispered.

  “No?” said Toby Follick, interested as ever, as though the lack of deadness were an unusual and fascinating symptom. He opened the bathroom door and pulled the light string, shooting a beam of yellow across the bluish darkness. He checked that the door screened the inspection panel, just as Pibble had checked on the night of the storm, then came with eager little steps to the bedside.

  “You ought to be asleep,” he said. “It’s a quarter to two. You didn’t take your medicine?”

  “I didn’t take the pills, either.”

  “Oh? What did you do with them?”

  “Flushed them down the loo. Maisie got me some new ones and I took those.”

  “Good, good. You’re very on the spot these days, James.”

  “I suppose I am. …”

  Follick nodded, as though this had been just what he expected, a trick that for once had gone according to instructions. He turned, picked up the folder of graphs that charted Pibble’s dotage, carried it to the bathroom door and studied it, holding it aslant to catch the yellow light. Pibble watched him. Nobody could have looked less sinister—a neat, brisk little man, pleasing and self-pleased. His feet were in shadow, but it was inconceivable from the rest of his proportions that they were not neat and small also.

  “Remarkable. Lovely,” said Follick. “If we carry on like this, we’ll get you into the reference books.”

  He closed the folder and brandished it as though it were a peace treaty brought back to a rejoicing people.

  “Ur?” said Pibble, feeling that the performance had strayed into an unrehearsed routine.

  “How are you feeling after the day’s excitements, James?”

  “Not too bad. Tired, quite tired …”

  “Only to be expected.”

  “But not stupid.”

  “Splendid. Ready to face the world?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

  Pibble could hear a note of surprised recognition in his own voice.

  “We’ll soon have you out of here,” said Follick, with no hint of ambiguity in his tone. “Tell me, what’s this about not taking your pills?”

  “Maisie came round. She was in a sort of trance. I was afraid they might be, um, doctored.”

  “Why on earth should you think that?”

  “A lot of reasons.”

  Follick nodded and came back toward the bed. Automatically, he made as if to flip the folder back onto the table, but stopped in mid-movement and replaced it with precise care in the place it had come from, then stood tapping it with his forefinger.

  “I did it,” he said suddenly.

  “I know.”

  “You can’t know, James. You were under hypnosis—only just under, but enough.”

  “Uh? I thought you were talking about …”

  “The improvement in your condition, James. It’s early days, of course, but if we carry on as we’ve begun you’ll be leading a pretty well normal life by midsummer. The point is, you can’t do it without my help.”

  “Ur?”

  “That’s right. I can give you a life worth living, for at least another five years—quite a bit more, with luck.”

  Now watch carefully, ladies and gentlemen. My assistant here what has had the misfortune to get hisself sawn in half, I will put the pieces of into this here chest—quite empty, no deception—and close it up—so!—and make a few magic passes what I learnt from the mystic sages of the East—the East, sir, not the East End—and open the chest up again—so!—and what do we have? One walking, talking, all-in-one-piece young feller-me-lad! Legs on the right way round, sonny? Good-oh! Well, go and sit back down among the audience and we’ll get on with bringing back that lady what vanished ten minutes ago. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen!

  “I believe you have plans, James?”

  “Uh?”

  “Or if you don’t, Jenny does.”

  “Oh! Did Maisie …”

  “My spies are everywhere. Let’s not go into that. Now, you’re a good egg, James, not a wheedler or a whiner. I can’t see you setting up house with Jenny or whoever if you think you’re going to be a thorough nuisance to her. You’re never going to be young, of course; you’ll always have a bit of trouble with your legs, but you can control that with the right drugs. … Put it this way—you won’t want Jenny coming home from a long day among the stretcher cases to find another one waiting for her? No, of course not. But that’s what it’ll be if you don’t let me help you. How much do you know about hypnosis?”

  “A bit.”

  “Then you may know that it works much better with the young than with the old. That’s why I don’t make much use of it here at Flycatchers. I only stumbled on the fact that I could do it at all by accident a couple of years back. Naturally, I got pretty excited, and read it up, and talked to doctors who use hypnosis for therapy and so on. I found out that I’m a natural—I mean that even knowing nothing about it, I could put people under when more experienced chaps had failed with them—so I thought I’d try on one or two appropriate cases down here. But it wasn’t much cop. Too old, too bloody obstinate. And I’m good—I really am, James. I don’t think you’re likely to find anyone else who can help you the way I can. You follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the alternative’s not very nice, is it? I’ve seen people like you fairly often—not honestly much wrong with them physically—just given up. They go to pieces in a way which doesn’t seem to happen to the ones with honest-to-God physical illnesses—you’ve been there once, haven’t you, James?”

  “You came to tell me this in the middle of the night?”

  “Explain about that in a minute. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, James, trying to work out what makes you tick and how I can help you. I want to clear something up first. When you went out to the tower that night, it wasn’t because you’d heard any shots, was it?”

  “You know the answer.”

  “What? … Oh … well, let’s take it you didn’t hear any shots. You’d decided to put an end to yourself, and you’d decided to do it that way, partly because it’s not all that easy killing oneself in a place like Flycatchers, and partly because you wanted us all to realize that you knew what you were doing. As I said just now, you’d been down into the depths, and we’d hauled you back, and that was your way of making sure while you still had the willpower that you didn’t go down there again. I must say, I think it was a pretty good performance. I hope I’ll have the guts when my time comes. But as a matter of fact it was that which made me realize that I might be able to help you. You were ready to be helped.”

  “You knew I hadn’t heard a shot?”

  “I worked it out.”

  “You knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You fired the gun. Earlier.”

  Follick shook his head, but rapped the folder a couple of times as if to reassure himself that it was there.<
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  “Not me,” he said. “Maisie.”

  “No,” said Pibble.

  He was full of a curious floating elation, an almost loony cheerfulness, as if he had taken a perception-enhancing drug. Everything was going to work out with lovely tidiness. Follick would kill him, thus solving his own dilemma. Jenny would find the pills among his socks, take them to Mike. … Cass was already constructing his case from the other end, among the old death certificates. … He and Mike would meet in the middle like teams of tunnelers. …

  “I can’t argue with you until you tell me what you’re getting at,” said Follick.

  “All right. Tosca. Policeman. Wilson’s bodyguard. I don’t know if he’d gone wrong before he came here …”

  “We may have pushed him over the edge. There’s a lot of money about, and it sometimes has that effect. I don’t think we’d have taken him on the staff if he hadn’t been landed on us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He may have been snooping around for pickings or he may have stumbled on it by accident. … About six weeks ago he was trying to get off with Maisie. He’d made a list of all the nurses and he was seeing how many he could lay. He was that type. Maisie’s a very good hypnotic subject—that’s how you discovered your abilities—and Tosca triggered her somehow into a trance, in which she told him something about the death of a patient here, Sir Archibald Gunter …”

  “Maisie did that. I was in the States.”

  “Yes. Maisie did it because you told her to, and you arranged to be in the States because you were getting worried about the deaths at Flycatchers. It was becoming known that this was a good place for the disposal of the elderly rich, and you needed to set a scapegoat up. My guess is that the first deliberate death was that of a man called Foster-Banks. I think it was suggested to you by the other shareholders that he had to be disposed of, and you arranged it. The trouble was that there were then a few very influential people who saw no reason why they too shouldn’t take advantage of this new service provided by Flycatchers, so you began to feel trapped. When you discovered how obedient you could make Maisie …”