The Sinful Stones Read online

  He settled the bottle into a coil of rope on the foredeck, then tugged at the kite-string while he poised the coil of wire in his other hand and tried to guess what the kite would lift, a job as hopelessly chancy as estimating the raisins in a cake at one of Mary’s charity fetes. About half the wire, maybe. He knelt on the deck to measure out the springy and self-tangling stuff, looped it, scuttered down to the well for the wind-handle, held the loop over the iron anchor-guide in the bows, and hammered at the wire with the handle. The loop wouldn’t stay vertical, and the doubled wire pinched at his left palm. He caught it a lucky wallop which bent it to a proper kink that he could really hit. As he hammered, a croaking yell came through the deck beneath him—serve the old scorpion right. He bent the kink back on itself and hammered with fresh strength. Wristily he waggled the wire on either side of the battered kink to and fro. His thumbs scorched with the abrasion of rough strands. At the kink, all at once, two strands changed colour to a whitish grey, and fractured. Then another. He hammered again at the remaining strands, waggled again, reduced the kink to two obstinate strands which broke after the next hammering. He looked over his shoulder.

  The helicopter was a spiky blob now—four minutes away, maybe. As he was lashing the kite-string to the wire he had a better idea. He looped the wire round a cleat and ran to the cabin. Sir Francis called him a damned fellow. He tried the fishing reels. One large one ran smoothly and held a fat line which he couldn’t break with all his strength; flicking its brass catch to and fro he darted back—one position to wind, one to lock, one to let free. He tied the fishing line to the kite-string so that the wire would dangle loose and paid out wire and line together. The kite rose, seeming to get no smaller, taking the extra weight without wavering; down the taut line he could feel the muscles of the wind. The end of the wire came in a desperately short time, and he let it fall clear. Above the wind and waves he heard the sullen thud of the rotors. He still had to get aft, to bring the wire as near as he could to the boat’s centre.

  But no, the machine was flying parallel to their course, about a hundred yards away, its tail tilted cockily up behind the gawky cabin where the two holy murderers crouched black against the evening sky. They must be puzzling out the meaning of his toy—perhaps, through the blurring perspex, they wouldn’t see the wire.

  Not thinking what he was doing, hypnotised by the bumbling menace, Pibble wound out more line.

  The helicopter swung round across their path, three hundred yards ahead, swung further, lined itself up, and came towards them. The monks had discovered the error of attacking downwind. Pibble shouted to Dorothy and pointed down the line of the kite. She shouted back, put the tiller over, loosed the sail a few degrees, and they were plunging straight downwind towards the pitiful protection of the stay wire—and even that twenty-foot thread of steel was shortened by the curves left in it from the coil. If it had weighed less it would have dangled almost over the bows; but as it was, Hope could dodge round it and come in behind.

  The helicopter had paused in mid-air and edged sideways, into their new path. A hundred yards. It rocked as its load was trundled towards the door. Get aft, you fool, and the wire will be twenty foot nearer the boat.

  No, wait. They were coming in very low this time. They had seen the wire, and for fear of being dodged were coming not round, but under. Desperately he began to wind the fishing line in. There wasn’t time.

  He pressed the brass catch that let the reel fly.

  The kite swooped out and down, tumbling dead from the sky, like any kite he’d ever owned. The wire rushed out and down, too. The helicopter, its reactions as slow as an old bruiser’s, tilted late to the left. The kite was still tumbling, then it steadied and jerked up as though something had dragged for an instant at its line, and then it was tumbling again.

  And so was the helicopter. A biggish morsel of rotor curled away. The machine staggered and rocked, rocked so wildly that the poised boulder spilt and hurtled to the waves—bigger than the last two, a real megastone. Freed of the weight of it the helicopter tumbled more slowly down, its unbalanced rotor threshing.

  “Steer as close to them as you can!” shouted Pibble as he stumbled aft and started to heave at the ungraspable edges of the dinghy. He got one side of it over the bulwark by hauling, wriggled round and shoved from the other side until he had it poised.

  The helicopter’s cabin was still above the water as the boat surged up; the rotor had stopped, but the tail was sinking and the weight of the rotor-shaft was tilting the structure sideways when Pibble shoved at the dinghy. He was too weak now to do more than slop it over the side, but a wave cradled it and then slid it across the ten-foot gap so that it bobbed close alongside the tilting cabin.

  Providence was on his feet, shouting, his hand at the door-rim, his cheeks and forehead purple. From beyond him a brown sleeve snaked up, caught him by the neck, dragged him back to his seat and held him there. He went on shouting, but Hope, sitting brotherly beside him with a face as impassive as a seraph’s, locked him to the seat as the next wave rolled the machine slowly over and the downward drag of the tail tilted its nose towards the sky.

  Another wave smashed across it in spume, as if hitting a sunken rock, and when the pother cleared the helicopter was gone. If a bubble rose, it did so out of sight.

  The rubber dinghy lolloped into view and out again, a slow pulse on the skin of the sea. Dorothy stopped singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”

  “Want to go and look for the bastards?” she said.

  “No.”

  9

  You can see him now,” said the voice.

  “What have you done with that bloody bottle?” it added.

  Pibble groaned out of his dreams. He was lying face down on the foredeck, because any other position was agony. He had not watched Dubh Artach lighthouse saunter by, banded with black and white, the waves frilling its deadly rock with twenty-foot high fluffs of foam. He had not seen in what splendours of marmalade and amethyst the Hebridean sun had sunk. His waking mind had been full of guilt for two dead men, and his sleeping mind had brimmed with pictures. Father, in his plus-twos, bringing Sir Francis, white-whiskered and querulous, saucers of brown goo; snakes of flame flaring in vacuum flasks, such as one might take to a picnic; a radio valve, and Tolerance plucking it out of its socket and saying “Damned ironic hey?”; Mr Toger at the porch, sniffing the air and saying, “I had not imagined that you made use of money.”; Mother laughing in her print dress and new hat while she tore up the rotten pyjamas because they couldn’t afford the kite in the post office window; Father putting on his specs to peer by the erratic gas-light at an enormous photograph of Sir Francis Francis standing on the steps of the Stock Exchange, the rent collector passing the stained-glass in the porch, knocking at either side but never at Number 8; Sir Francis, tottering, teasing a bemedalled general by drawing from his ear, as if by magic, a sailor suit and a pair of Sunday shoes and a special shirt with lace at the cuffs; the Head pacing the dais before the school and talking, while he touched his cane lightly with the tips of his fingers, about fees; Father lying in his medicine-smelling room, listless, not explaining that the fistful of glossy conkers which Jamie had brought from the Common would be dull and wrinkled by the time it came to place them one by one into the back of the fire with the tongs on the night after the funeral, and Sir Francis snarling that that was forty-three years ago; a wallet full of clean pound notes, and Mother taking it out of Father’s plus-two jacket and going off to buy the “medicine” that made her so hazy in the evenings and snappish in the mornings. Mr Toger sniffing the air of the porch again.

  Yes, thought Pibble as he came painfully to a crawling position, no chance of Mr Toger being so attentive, even to a smooth-skinned widow, if there weren’t money in the house. It was almost dark.

  “Want a hand?” said Dorothy.

  Pibble’s hurts of the morning were leagued with a thousan
d aches and stiffnesses that had stolen over his body during his drowsing. He tried to haul himself up by the mast, but dropped back after fitful scrabbling.

  “It’s OK,” he said, “I’ll crawl to him.”

  “No you won’t,” she said. “That’s my job.”

  He heard a strange noise above his head and craned up. She was leaning her arm against the mast, swaying and chortling. He crawled to the edge of the foredeck, let his legs down over the edge and was standing in the well. Dazedly he manoeuvred himself aft, gripping the gunwale with both hands, towards the hunched shape which sat by the tiller, outlined every thirty seconds by the far flash of the lighthouse behind them. Sir Francis was wearing a sou’wester as if it had been a sunbonnet.

  “That the peeler?” croaked the hateful voice.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sit down.”

  Sitting hurt, but so did anything else. Pibble sat.

  “Killed two of our brown brethren, Dorrie says.”

  “They were trying to sink us by dropping rocks, but I managed to bring the helicopter down with a kite.”

  “Damned idiots—couldn’t even outwit you. Won’t look too good in court, will it, Pibble?”

  “There’ll have to be an inquest, but I don’t know how much of what happened need come out in court unless somebody was watching from the lighthouse with binoculars, Dorothy’s the only witness, and. . .”

  “You call her Miss Machin, you damned upstart.”

  “I don’t imagine Miss Machin will go talking to reporters.”

  “You’re relying on me to keep her off the bottle, hey?”

  Pibble was silent.

  “Got me off the island, did you, Pibble?”

  “As far as this, anyway.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without me, could you?”

  “I couldn’t have done it without Rita and Miss Machin either.”

  “You’re an insolent damned jack-in-office, Pibble. And now you expect me to babble away about your father, just to show how grateful I am. I won’t do it, I tell you.”

  “In that case I’ll tell you what I think happened, and if you want to you can tell me whether I’m right or wrong.”

  Sir Francis snorted beside him in the dark.

  “In about 1910,” said Pibble, “you were trying bigger and better vacuum chambers to continue your work on gas plasmas. My father did the glass-blowing. I imagine you’d already done all the work for which you got your Nobel Prize, but that was only a half-way house and you wanted to go on from there.”

  Sir Francis started to say something, then stopped.

  “My father was intensely devoted to you and your work and took an almost obsessive interest in it. He made theoretic suggestions which you thought impertinent, but he also tried to come up with a technical solution to the problem of finding a metal-to-glass seal which would stand the very high temperatures you were trying to work at. None of his solutions was any good, but one of them—I think it was perhaps one which involved a glue and a solidifier, like these modern resin glues—turned out later to be valuable for some other process. I imagine it was something to do with radio, and my guess is that it provided a short-cut in the mass-production of radio valves. This must have been a problem in the later stages of the war, and perhaps your work with gas plasmas meant that you did war-research on radio valves which also involve vacuums. You took out a patent on my father’s double seal. Radio boomed after the war, and you made a lot of money out of it. You never did much deep theoretical research in radio—I know your atom bomb work was involved in the behaviour of the gases around the bomb in the split second after the original explosion, which looks as if professionally you had stuck to your main field. But meanwhile, more or less as a hobby, you did technical work on other radio patents which eventually made you a very rich man indeed. Some time after the First War my father might have seen your name in the paper not in connection with your theoretical work but in connection with being rich from the profits on a radio valve seal. He came to see you. I think he wanted a job like his old one, but you’d got past having to depend on one man to make your apparatus, and you thought he’d be a nuisance, so you bought him off. I think you probably bought our house in Clapham for us, and perhaps that you provided us later with some sort of pension, because we seem to have been erratically comfortable and poor. …”

  “I’ve been poor too,” said Sir Francis irritably. “Damned poor. And it was worse for me because I knew what it was like not to be poor, knew what it was like to have two ponies, and my own groom to keep them, and our own stream to fish—I could see the willows over it from my nursery window—and a floorful of parcels to open on my birthday. And then my idiot dad went bust for his otter-hounds, and I had to go to a second-rate school and a second-rate college and work with the sons of clerks and colonials, yes, squabble with forty of them for the use of the only damned foot pump in the laboratory. I’ve had to scrape and save to pay Everett ten shillings for a glass-blowing lesson. I’ve had to crawl to mechanics to get them to turn me a couple of inches of brass tubing a fortnight later. I’ve had to trudge down to the Cavendish on a Sunday and let myself in to the stink of gas and battery acid, because I couldn’t pay some mechanic to keep my vacuums up till Monday. Why d’you think I know these waters? Because it was the cheapest holiday a man could take. I can remember three whole years when I felt sick to be in the same room as Jeans, with his rich American wife and his estate at Dorking. Jeans floated off in his damned motor while I slogged back to my digs on a rusty bicycle through the dust and stink he left behind him.”

  “And then you were rich again,” said.

  “And then I was rich again. I ought never have had to be poor.”

  “But you gave it all away.”

  “What do you want me to do? It was my damned money, and yet I was supposed to die smiling and let a chicken-hearted government dribble it away mollycoddling the mob, or on some useless dead-end of aeronautics. It began with stopping a leak, hey, so why should it end by becoming one? Soon as I’m dead it’s all a waste anyway, but I’m damned well going to see it wasted my way.”

  “How much was the Nobel Prize worth in 1912?”

  “None of your business. Enough to let me off coming up here for my holidays, not enough to make me free. Plenty of offers of jobs, mind you, but not an extra penny at the Cavendish, and that was where I had to stay, mucking in at J.J.’s deadly dull tea-parties in the Preparation Room—‘You are to talk shop,’ he used to boom at us—me!”

  “Why did you have to stay?”

  “If you weren’t a total illiterate you’d know that the work I got my Prize for was never finished. We couldn’t build the damned apparatus. They’ve done it since, with millions to spend, twenty years after I tried. Those days the only place I had a hope of building the gadgets I needed was the Cavendish, unless you’re asking me to go and live among the apes in America. I stayed, and went to tea-parties, and talked shop, and waited for your damned dad to come up with an answer.”

  “And he never did.”

  Sir Francis snorted in the whistling dark.

  “I take it the contract’s off,” said Pibble.

  “T’wasn’t a contract. “T’wasn’t even a scrap of paper.”

  Pibble could hear him grinning.

  “Perhaps not,” he said. “I’ve noticed that, however much you’ve concealed, all you’ve told me has been the truth, with two exceptions. …”

  “Hey?”

  “You laughed when I told you my father had been a ticket-clerk, which you must have known. And you said you never met my mother.”

  “You’re a fool, Pibble. I always laugh at the notion of your dad helping puffing cockneys to catch their trains, and I said that he never told me about your mum. He didn’t either. She did.”

  “Oh. Well, then, you also said that you’d tell me everything
you could remember about my father provided I got you off the island.”

  “You didn’t get me off, you impertinent numbskull. I got you off. Where’d you have been without me?”

  “I could ask the same, sir.”

  “If you hadn’t come busybodying north, Pibble, d’you think those boobies in brown would have monkeyed about with my cortisone, hey? But for you, I’d have been sitting in my own room now, happy as a flea in your armpit, instead of dying of cold in this damned dull bit of ocean.”

  “They’d bought the chalk to fake your pills with before they knew about me. Besides, you asked me to come.”

  “Can’t an old man indulge his fancy without every snivelling peeler trying to hold him to it?”

  “I shan’t try to hold you to anything, sir.”

  “I’d think not! Only got to tell your masters what you did to that damned helicopter, haven’t I, hey?”

  “I’ll have to put in a report on that myself.”

  The old man snorted and sat silent. He loosed a painful few inches of sail. At last he snorted again.

  “Ninety-two years!” he yelled. “Time enough to get used to idiots, you’d think. And so I have, so I have. But high-minded idiots give me the itch still. You want me to tell you that this rigmarole of yours is historical truth, hey?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Pibble. “You told me that the man who sent you the cutting with my name in it was malicious, so I’m fairly sure that something happened between you and my father, and that other people in the scientific world know about it. One day it will come out, but that doesn’t interest me. Even supposing I did have some claim on you I wouldn’t make it. All I want to be told is what my father was like and why he finished as he did. I can’t force you to tell me what happened, and I wouldn’t try. You said I was a blackmailer, like my family—that’s another point—but if you don’t want to tell me you needn’t.”