One Foot in the Grave Read online

  “You really don’t understand about her!”

  “She can’t always have been like she is now. She’d never have passed her examinations, let alone got taken on the staff of a crack place like this. Don’t you think that although she was always, uh, susceptible, you’ve changed her? There must have been some controlling mechanism to get her through life this far. But I think you’ve broken that down. She’s pretty well a schizophrenic now, isn’t she?”

  “Not me,” said Follick, puzzled but unperturbed. “I’ve been trying to help.”

  Pibble drew a long, restful breath. He had been speaking in the quietest possible tones above a whisper. It was as though his physical being was a fine electric filament, capable of carrying only a particular current. Any surge of energy might burn it out. But the current was there, flowing steadily, in a way that it had not done for months, so that the filament could glow with a clean, unwavering light.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “When you discovered your hypnotic gift, I think you were probably teasing her about her romantic novels, pretending that she was one of their heroines—something like that—and you found you’d put her into a state in which she thought it was true. By now, you and Tosca between you have done it so often that her fantasies have become as real for her as her everyday existence. When Tosca started to put pressure on her, she retreated into that world as a sort of defense mechanism—that’s how he found out about it—and naturally he took it into his head to explore a bit further and discovered what had happened to Sir Archibald. Being Tosca, he didn’t hesitate to try and blackmail you. He got somebody—an old woman, apparently—to write a letter to the local police so that they should come and see you and make you jumpy. Your first reaction was to make sure it didn’t happen again. You planted in Maisie the order that if anyone started to ask her questions about certain things, she was to refuse to answer and come and tell you. It happened again this evening, which was why you told her to bring me the doctored drugs.

  “But you still had the problem of Tosca. You had to get rid of him—kill him. It wasn’t going to be as easy as doing away with one of your patients. Tosca was armed, strong, on guard. Then he played into your hands. He was genuinely concerned to seduce Maisie—that would be important to his own image of himself—and he took it into his head that he could force you to help him. He’d enjoy that, too. You explained that even in hypnosis Maisie wouldn’t make love to him, because there are limits and inhibitions the hypnotist can’t overcome. You hit on the idea that Tosca would have to become part of her dream world in order to make it work, and to do that the full romantic trappings would be necessary—the fancy dress, the tower, the storm. It probably was necessary, but it had other advantages: It would pin the murder on Maisie; the noise of the storm would drown any shots; it would be enough time before the body was found to cover any minor clues and so on. As the doctor who does the liaison with the security side, you’ve got a set of keys, haven’t you?”

  “Er … as a matter of fact, yes. Maisie knows where they are.”

  “You would make sure of that. You’ve thought it out in detail. If Maisie was going to seem to have used the keys, she would have to know where to find them, but in fact you gave her the key to the staff door and you set about persuading her to go to the tower. I think you experienced a little difficulty here. You weren’t at all sure whether she would allow Tosca to go as far as you needed, so your first idea was to cast him in the role of the villain, who would be attempting to ravish the heroine when the hero turned up and challenged him to a duel and killed him. But she must have rejected that, so you recast the plot and Tosca became the hero, and she went out in the storm to meet her lover. She’s still got both ideas mixed up in her mind, though.

  “I expect you’d taken advantage of Tosca’s watch periods in the tower to search his room—you’d have the key for that, too. You wanted to check whether he’d left any message, just in case; but you’d noticed that he had unusually small feet for a man of his size, and shoes that you could wear. That seemed to make the whole thing possible. You could go to the tower too, and leave no footprints of your own.

  “That day there were plenty of gale warnings on the wireless—I heard them, because I was … never mind. You made contact with Tosca and told him to expect Maisie that evening. You put Maisie into a trance and told her what to do …”

  “It can’t be done, James. You don’t have to take my word for it. I could show you half a dozen books.”

  “I know, but you solved that problem by programming Maisie to fall asleep as soon as she lay down. That could be done, and it’s, uh, right, if you see what I mean. From what she tells me, the sort of book she reads isn’t exactly straitlaced, the way they used to be, but it still draws a veil over the actual bedroom scenes. There was another advantage—two, in fact. Part of the idea was to distract Tosca’s attention so that you could get at his gun, and I can’t think of anything much more distracting than … uh … well. … On top of that was the problem of Maisie’s memory. I got her to talk a little about it; with part of her mind she does remember what happened, and you couldn’t risk that.”

  “When schizophrenics want to deny responsibility for things they’ve done, they usually persuade themselves they were asleep.”

  “Exactly. That would make it look as if Maisie had in fact shot Tosca, but it doesn’t explain why she took him up to the roof to do so.”

  “She got the gun and he ran away and she followed him.”

  “Up? And through a bolted door? And then two shots from close range in the back of the head? No, he was held up and marched up there so that the shot shouldn’t wake Maisie. I think you’d rather have killed him in the room so that she could wake up and find the body and the gun and think she’d killed him herself. Part of the whole idea was that it would dispose of Maisie, too, not by killing her but by having her put away and her ‘dreams’ regarded as part of her psychiatric problem, but you couldn’t take the risk of her seeing you. As a matter of fact, the way Tosca was killed was much more characteristic of a gangland shooting.”

  “This is all nonsense, James. It’s impossible to say that a schizophrenic will or will not behave in a certain way. Now I’m going to tell you what really happened. …”

  Pibble’s lips mumbled his willingness to listen, but already the current was fading, fading, and his mind was full of shadows. Vaguely he followed the thread of Follick’s talk … Maisie suddenly saying under hypnosis that she had killed Sir Archibald Gunter, she didn’t know why … Follick believing that she was fantasizing, that his treatment was helping her, only gradually discovering that with a schizophrenic’s unconscious cunning she was deliberately dragging him into the web … then dragging Tosca in as well so that the two of them could buzz and grapple while she watched … no knowledge of why she shot him … Tosca too violent for the fantasy, perhaps … but Follick’s own career, and the cover-up over Gunter … only when Wilson died … if she could be persuaded to tell Pibble, then perhaps Follick might not be caught in the final destruction of the web. …

  It was conjurer’s patter, and had that manic energy about it, rising steadily to a climax which at last forced Pibble into full awareness.

  “. . . couldn’t sleep,” Follick was saying. “It was all rattling round inside my head until I got up and checked the drug safe, just for something to do. She must have had another key, James. She’d used mine before but had given it back quite willingly when she told me about Gunter. I should have guessed. She’d got it copied. … Believe me, James, I came to check on you, yes, but not to see if you were dead—to see if you were alive!”

  Follick’s tones were full of energy and excitement, but they breathed no sympathetic life into Pibble. No, he thought, it won’t wash. Maisie told me, tonight. She hasn’t cut that side of her off. And the pills—she didn’t know what she was doing—she took new ones from my cupboard; and the shoes, glowing like be
etles but fitting into no conceivable romantic fantasy; and the shots in the back of the head; and Wilson, yes, Follick had actually asked how long the police would hang around, and Pibble had told him that if Wilson left … and more than all that there was the actual conversation, now in this room. Suffused through Follick’s apparent worry and fear was that throb of excitement, almost of delight. It was the quickness and ingenuity of the argument that thrilled him, the sheer sleight-of-mind whereby the object which the audience sees—the goldfish bowl or the bunch of paper flowers—seems to remain in full view all the time, but between a blink and a blink it has become a white dove, fluttering round the room, free.

  “I need your help, James,” said Follick, tapping the folder as if for emphasis. “I need Jenny’s too, and you’ve got to help me persuade her. Between you you’ve got to undo the damage you’ve done by providing Maisie with a false alibi. I’m not talking about damage to me, or even damage to Flycatchers, but damage to Maisie herself. You see, she’s got to have treatment, and she’s got to have it in a place where they can make sure she does no further harm. She won’t be punished—she’s eminently certifiable—but really the best thing that could happen to her now is for the authorities to know that she killed Tosca and caused Wilson’s death. Then they’ll take her seriously. She can be shut up and looked after and perhaps even cured. But that’s as far as we need go. I can see no point in raising the question of Sir Archibald’s death. Once Maisie is being looked after, we can be confident that sort of thing won’t happen again. … But listen, James, this matters to you as much as it does to me. You see, if it comes out that I was covering up for Maisie, I shan’t be able to practice anymore, and that means I shan’t be able to help you. Don’t you see? With my help you can start to live a normal. …”

  Pibble had ceased to listen. Follick had dropped his voice to the tone of deadness, deadness somehow suffused with power, which he had adopted for hypnosis, but for Pibble only the past was present. All this had happened before.

  “These are very serious allegations, Inspector.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The large office, strange-seeming for the Yard, with no more than two or three loose files in one tray and some signed letters in another on the wide desk. Beyond the windows a clatter of trams on the Embankment, and then the Thames sliding greasily through the dusklike noon of winter. The man at the window looking out at the view, as if turning his back on the problem Pibble had brought him. A weak man, rumor said, a stopgap. Certainly the office had a hotel-like feeling of being unimpressed by its occupant, but of course that made him more formidable in that he stood not for himself but for the Yard, in its complexity and secretiveness and vacillation. Pibble was aware that he himself was of the same kind and that in the impossible event of promotion to this room, he himself would react with the same fret and indecision to such a heaving-up of stones.

  The man turned from the window.

  “I take it you have thought of your own position,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If we do not institute this inquiry you suggest …”

  “I should have to resign, sir.”

  “And then?”

  “Try to do something from outside, sir.”

  “We can’t afford … even though . . . no … this couldn’t have come at a worse time. …”

  A longer pause.

  “Let me put my cards on the table, Inspector. You have so far named no names, and quite right, but of course I am aware that the main target of your allegations is a very intelligent and popular officer. Popular with the public, too. To put it bluntly, we can’t afford to lose him, and to put it even more bluntly, we can afford to lose you. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir. I will send in my resignation tomorrow.”

  “It needn’t come to that. There is a middle way—there usually is, you know. A number of senior posts are due for reallotment, and though the officer you refer to was not on the list of names for consideration, there is no reason why he should not be included. He could, in effect, be promoted in such a way that if your allegations are well founded, he would do no further harm, and if they are not, he would have received a reward he well deserved.”

  “But—”

  “One moment, Inspector. I asked you just now about your own position. I know you to be an intelligent and hard-working officer, and those are valuable qualities. But there is another quality which here at the Yard we value even more, and that is loyalty. All of us, at one time or another, have to accept decisions that go against our interests, or our judgment, or our private conscience. In asking you to accept the course I suggest, I am asking you to demonstrate your loyalty. Because of your war service you have fallen a little behind some of your contemporaries in the promotion race, but it is not too late to catch up and even overtake them. You follow me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “No.”

  “No.”

  The syllable was like an echo, whispering back from the cliffs of the past. It hung in the sickroom, answer to a question that Pibble was not even aware of having heard. In the silence heels clicked twice on the parquet outside the door. Neither Pibble nor Follick stirred until with a slight scrape they moved away across the soft carpeting. The fire door sighed. The room relaxed, breathed.

  “No, James?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Too many reasons. I’m tired now. You killed them all: Tosca, Wilson, only trying to frighten him off, Foster-Banks, two or three others. Got an account somewhere—Switzerland. They’ll find it.”

  “You are tired, James. My fault—I shouldn’t have kept you talking so long. You’d much better sleep on it, give the old brain a chance to recover. The blood’s got to get to the brain, remember?”

  “I remember,” said Pibble, unamazed.

  Follick gave the folder a final tap and came toward the bed.

  “I’ve brought one of my eight-hour knockouts,” he said.

  His hand made a pass in front of his breast pocket and a hypodermic syringe gleamed between his fingers. Pibble lay still and watched him perform the ritual of raising it to the dim light and squeezing out the first drop. He made no resistance as Follick peeled back the bedclothes and folded the pajama sleeve up the scrawny arm. Now, now it would end. And Jenny was only a couple of rooms away, putting Lady Treadgold to sleep.

  As if the image of her had been a primeval stimulus jerking the body into unwilled action, his other arm threshed across the bed. Before he knew what he had done, his hand was gripping Follick by the wrist, pushing the needle away. After the first judder of surprise, Follick reacted without apparent emotion, one hand holding the target arm to the bed and the other simply forcing the needle toward it against Pibble’s resistance. He seemed immensely strong. Though Pibble’s arm muscles were the least wasted in his body, they were like paper fluttering against concrete. When the needle was an inch above the flesh, he jerked it across and, as Follick resisted, back. The frail point plunged nearly to the sheets, but impassively Follick heaved it up and over the target again. Pibble’s heart was thundering and bubbling. He could sense the darkness closing, closing. Any moment it would roar round him, drown him, and the last thing he would know of life would be this senseless struggle. Too concentrated on the effort to cry out, he raised his eyes to Follicle’s face, and as he did so, Follicle seemed to grow an extra arm, monstrous, from behind his shoulder. The arm closed round Follicle’s neck. For an instant Pibble saw the small round hand clench with effort, and then Follick’s wrist was wrenched from his grasp. The face disappeared. The weight vanished from his arm. There was a heavy double thud and a gasp.

  He rolled onto his side. Follick and Jenny were sprawling in a muddle of limbs across the floor, both threshing to rise. Follock managed it first, turned, stared for a
moment at Jenny and, as she too was rising, launched himself at her. His clenched fists beat down at her. She began to crumple.

  Pibble rolled himself from his bed and, still gasping with the fall, crawled across the soft carpet. As he reached the fight, Follick drew back a foot to kick at Jenny, who was now crouched on the carpet with her forearms covering her face. She was yelling. Pibble clutched at the swinging ankle, held, fell deliberately sideways. Unbalanced with effort, Follick tumbled across him. His lips gasped “Run!” but there was no breath in his lungs to make the sound. Air croaked inward through his throat as Follick scrambled up. For a moment the creased, monkeylike face loomed over him, the mask still untouched by anything more than a kind of eager surprise that life’s whole performance should have gone so chaotically awry, but Jenny was still shouting incoherently, and as Follick turned to silence her, Pibble was aware, in the motion, of long-accumulated furies bursting into the open.

  The motion was never completed. Over Follick’s crouched back a metal structure gleamed, inexplicable, falling in a curve with the slowed intensity of action. He saw a crosspiece on the structure strike Follick, precise as a machine, on the nape of the neck. Still with the same treacle slowness, Follick collapsed out of Pibble’s vision.

  Time resumed its proper beat. Lady Treadgold was standing above him in the gloom, an idol of triumph. She was wearing an orange bed jacket, frothy with lace. Her head was almost bald. She panted, more with excitement than effort, as she lifted her walking frame by its legs and held it high, ready to strike again.

  “Stop shouting, Nurse, and go and get help,” she said. “There must be a policeman somewhere. Don’t try to get up, Doctor, or I’ll hit you again … oh, I wonder if I’ve broken his neck! Henry Cotton said I had a perfect swing, you know. I don’t expect you had time to play much golf, Mr. Pibble.”

  She pronounced the word goff.

  12

  Jenny’s left eye was closed by a bruise which spread as far as her jawbone. She had a plaster across the bridge of her nose and another down her left cheek. She was moving very carefully still, as though not sure what was going to hurt. Pibble knew the feeling well.