The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Read online

  Eight canvases hung on the walls, and a pile of others was stacked in a corner. They were all the same size, tall and narrow, and all unframed; Pibble liked them quite a lot. The colors were fierce and simple, giving, at first glance, an impression that the pictures were gaudy abstracts. Then, in a blink, he saw that this was caused by the carefully formal patterning of the backgrounds, and that each picture was a portrait of a person or an animal—naïve but not childlike. There was no hesitation anywhere. The insides of the creatures were drawn as if they were on the outside. There was a heron with a fish in its stomach. There was a European businessman with bowler, brolly, and blue pin-stripe; you could see both his wallet and his esophagus. Pibble nearly laughed aloud with pleasure.

  Behind the desk, a very black black man sat stabbing at the wood with a scribing knife. A red-haired white woman sat on the sofa in front of Sandy. She had a square, soft face and was dressed wholly in black—high-necked jersey, ski trousers, ballet shoes. She looked fortyish, and sat peculiarly still and upright.

  Sandy’s attitude was peculiar, too; while Pibble looked at the pictures, he embarked on a series of gaunt banalities, his accent becoming more Scottish with every sentence. The woman assented at intervals with a slow nod of her head.

  Sandy said, for instance, that it was fine the noo, but likely there’d be thunder betimes. He looked smaller but more ungainly, and if he’d had a cap he’d have been twiddling it in front of his crotch. Ah well, thought Pibble, every man to his own terrors—that’s why he sent for me so promptly. Is it just her slinky, sub-masculine style that does it, or has she got something else on him? Anyway, who am I to deride?

  Sandy plodded around to the point at last.

  “This is Detective Superintendent Pibble from the Yard, Ma’am,” he said. “He will be able to devote his whole time to resolving your difficulties, which I canna. I’ve known him a long time.”

  Like an undergardener giving a good character for one of his mates at the Big House. The woman replied in the same idiom.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Graham. You have already given us more of your time than we deserve, and you have been very tolerant of our eccentricities. We must not detain you any longer from clearing up that unpleasant business at St. Stephen’s, which you must consider more important than our irrelevant little tragedy here.”

  Pibble tried to place the accent—not that you could call it an accent by the broad standards of B.B.C. regional programs—rather an intonation, a slight clipping, a narrowing of the vowels, a hint that in her cups the lady might begin to lilt. Edinburgh! The great dames of that city—the wives of Writers to the Signet, the sisters of successive Provosts—exchange the gossip of their exclusive society in just such tones over tiny cups of lemon tea—or used to, forty years ago. Surely, thought Pibble, they can’t have survived the intervening slumps and wars and Socialist governments untouched. Still, no wonder Sandy was twiddling his invisible cap, as though it were he who had slain the old man, by knocking his ball through the irreplaceable windows, and was now come to own up and offer to pay for the damage, week by week, out of his pocket money. Sandy came from a decent Edinburgh family, but not that rarefied. Pibble decided to try and jolt the conversation into the sixties.

  “Superintendent Graham says you can give me the dope on the setup here. The sooner I get stuck into it, the more chance I’ve got of making some sense of it.”

  “Quite right, Mr. Pibble,” said the woman. “Goodbye, Mr. Graham. I am sure your colleague will keep you au fait with whatever progress he may make.”

  “Sure,” said Pibble.

  “Goodbye, Ma’am,” said Graham. “Goodbye, Mr. Ku. James, you will be in touch with me?”

  “Sure,” said Pibble, who was called James about once in two years, mostly by some senile cousin. Graham left.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” said the black man. His voice was very deep and rich. “You’ve alienated the new Superintendent by teasing the old one. What you have to explain is already sufficiently complex without your introducing adventitious complexities.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dr. Ku. “I was so scared when I started speaking to him that I suppose I instinctively imitated Mummy, and he reacted so strongly that it would have made things worse if I’d stopped. Can we start all over again, Superintendent Pibble? It will relieve you of the obligation to lard your interrogation with slang.”

  “I’m easy either way,” said Pibble. “Why were you frightened of Superintendent Graham?”

  There were several odd intangible things about her. The first one Pibble pinned down was that she sat stiller than anyone he’d ever seen before.

  “Oh,” she said, “I was not frightened of him—merely frightened. It is not simply that the idea of anyone of our community killing Aaron is horrifying. As an anthropologist, I would have thought it impossible. But it seems equally impossible that anyone should have come from outside and done it. And he was struck with the left hand, and with a piece of wood lying by the path.”

  “What does that mean?” said Pibble. “Graham told me there was something funny about the left-hand business.”

  “Yes. To start with, Superintendent, you must realize that we are all members of the same tribe. We come from New Guinea. Ku is not really a surname, but what we call ourselves in our own language. We are the sole survivors of our own civilization, the only living Kus—the rest were obliterated by the Japanese. We are, even by the standards of Central New Guinea, a very primitive people, and the whole of our behavior patterns is riddled with ritual and tabu. There is almost no predicament—certainly no predicament with which we might be faced in our own jungle—for which we have not a prescribed mode of action. The predicament of killing a member of our own tribe is one. This we would invariably do with the left hand, and with a chance piece of wood or a stone picked up by our path. It would be the deepest pollution of our real weapons, and hence of our manhood, to use one of them to kill a Ku.”

  “The same applies to the women?”

  “They would not own weapons, of course. But they would use the left hand.”

  Mr. Ku stopped stabbing the desk. “Are you certain of that, Eve?” His bass was theatrical, a voice like drums.

  Dr. Ku answered in a foreign language, one full of dentals and labials, with complex vowels strung together into immense polysyllables, singsongy. Mr. Ku boomed back in kind, but in his voice the consonants merely fluttered above a velvet thorough bass of sound. Dr. Ku shook her head and settled the argument in a couple of sentences that were like a flight of improbable birds.

  “We must apologize,” said Mr. Ku. “The affairs of our people make better sense in our own speech. Eve was reminding me of an episode in the life of my maternal grandfather. The women would kill a Ku with the left hand also. It is true.”

  “You both seem,” said Pibble, “to take the idea of killing a Ku calmly enough, yet you think it impossible that a Ku should have done this particular murder.”

  “Both attitudes are valid,” said Mr. Ku.

  “To us,” said Dr. Ku. “But it is not to be expected that they should be to you, Mr. Pibble. In general, throughout New Guinea internecine killing is not a rarity. The killing of a chief (and Aaron was our chief) by a member of his own clan is much rarer, and there is no tradition of its having happened among the Kus. Furthermore, there is a statistical relationship, on which I have published a paper myself, between internecine killing and the well-being of a clan. In short, there are two phases in which the vast majority of such killings occur—first, when the clan population is appreciably above its norm and approaches the limits which the tribal area can support in comfort, but when, for one of a number of reasons, it has not proved possible to resort to the usual expedient of warfare; second, when the clan population diminishes to a point where the clan itself begins to lose its sense of identity and becomes, you might say, psychopathic. We, of course, are
very much closer to the second state than the first, but now that the children are beginning to grow up we are nothing like as close as we were. Not, I assure you, that that means we have been through a period when murders were the regular thing; but we have endured a climate in which it was theoretically possible for murder to occur, and now I believe the climate to be different. As an anthropologist, I would be astonished if Aaron had been killed by a Ku. But, as a practical person living in this house and knowing Aaron, I cannot believe that he was killed by some intruder. Paul will confirm what I have said.”

  The black man smiled. In that squashed and alien face, it was impossible to tell what the smile meant—sympathy, shyness, hypocrisy, the instinctive rictus of a carnivore moving on its prey, anything.

  “Yes,” he said. “Eve knows us. In my marrow, I am certain that I could not have killed Aaron, and nor could any of us.”

  Hmm, thought Pibble, this is right nasty. What have we here but a very sophisticated version of “Oh, Orficer, it can’t ’ave bin one of the fambly as done it, reely it can’t. It must ’ave been some ’orrible man what broke in.” What can one do but raise an eyebrow? He raised it.

  “Perhaps,” said Dr. Ku, “you had better cable Professor Fleisch at Melbourne. He will confirm the theoretical background. Paul’s marrow you will have to take on trust.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t take anything on trust. Let’s start at another point. The deceased was out in his pajamas. He can’t have gone far. Have you any idea where he went?”

  “The odds are he was visiting the Caines. He liked to chat with Susan, especially when Bob wasn’t there.”

  “The Caines?”

  “Bob and Susan Caine live next door. We know them well, though we have not known Susan very long. They were married only last year, but Susan was a tremendous help when we had an outbreak of scarlet fever in the winter. We have known Bob much longer. He was with us in the valley. It was because of him …”

  She sat as still as ever, but the precise voice stumbled. Two lines of strain seamed the pale flesh beside her mouth. Mr. Ku’s deep accents moved gently into the silence.

  “Eve means that our tribe was destroyed because Bob Caine was there. He was the catalyst. It was not his fault, but we are tied to him with a strong rope.”

  Pibble went to the door and called. Graham had left in such a dither that they hadn’t discussed what forces Pibble could dispose of, but there must be someone. Feet thudded up from the jungly gloom of the hall. A minion, by Jove!

  “Did Superintendent Graham leave anyone else behind?”

  “Yessir. Strong, sir. And he said to apologize we weren’t more. My name’s Fernham, sir.”

  “Did either of you do the early round of the Terrace, scouting for witnesses, Constable?”

  “Both of us, sir. That’s why the Superintendent left us. It’s mostly flats, and o’ course we didn’t get an answer from about half of them, and nothing useful from those as did answer.”

  “Were the Caines, next door, in?”

  “Which side, sir?”

  “Number eight, basement,” called Dr. Ku from inside the room. “I think Bob’s away at the moment, and Susan usually does her shopping early. If she was out, she should be back by now.”

  “Right, Constable,” said Pibble. “Nip down there again, will you, and if Mrs. Caine’s in ask her whether the deceased visited her last night. Find out about times, subject of visit, suchlike.”

  “Yessir.”

  “If he did visit the Caines,” said Pibble as he came back into the room, “would he have left the door unlocked?”

  “Certainly not. He had a key.”

  “So for the murder to have been done by an outsider he would either have had to break in, and Superintendent Graham would have told me if there’d been any sign of that; or he’d have had to come in earlier in the day and lurked about; or he’d have had to have a key of his own. Do any of these possibilities seem likely to you?”

  “None,” said Dr. Ku. “The lurking intruder is most implausible. Europeans have a very distinctive smell, for one thing. Nor is the door, as you imply, left on the latch all day. This is not a hotel; it is a private house.”

  Pibble was pleased by the rebuke. He liked Dr. Ku considerably. Her primness of speech was part of her offbeat attractiveness, and she looked very cool, in control, but seriously concerned—a thoroughly proper attitude for somebody in whose house a nasty little murder has been committed.

  Or was the propriety, the donnishness, the almost phony primness, just a barricade against the nastiness—and not a very effective one at that? She had crumpled completely, a moment back, at the first mention of the Caine figure.

  “O.K.,” he said. “I don’t go much on the lurking intruder either. We’ll bear him in mind but look for something more likely. Who has a key to the house, for instance, and how many have been lost in the past six months or so?”

  “All the adults have keys,” said Dr. Ku. “None has ever been lost. The basement door is always bolted and the front door has a good Ingersoll lock.”

  “None lost! But there must be a dozen of you!”

  “Seventeen. I fear I must do my professional act again. Among a people like the Kus, Superintendent, ritual has a meaning as solid as the meaning of a rates demand to you. You must know people who carry a lucky charm about, or swear by some mascot—they’d be distressed if they lost it, but still in their hearts they would know that their penchant for their own little totem was just a whimsical superstition, perhaps with psychological overtones. This would not be a conceivable attitude of mind for us. There are many objects to which we attach a ritual—you would say ‘magical’—significance which to us is solid and real. For instance, some shapes of cooking pot are used only in the preparation of great feasts, not for good luck or custom’s sake, but because the pot is part of the feast, quite as much as the meat that is stewed in it.

  “The keys have this nature, too. I expect you can imagine what a psychological turmoil our removal to England involved—the shouting and jostling; the meaningless, unpatterned behavior of people; the new and repugnant smells; the very horizons changing from day to day, as though the hard hills were wavering like smoke. And then to come here, to be given a little magical gadget with which it was possible to shut out utterly all that imbecile flux, so that we could begin to build up again the known and detailed pattern of daily behavior. If you said the keys symbolized our membership of the Ku clan (what is left of it), you would be wrong—they are our membership. It has not happened yet, so I cannot be certain, but I seriously think that if one of us was to lose his key outside the house he would refuse to come home. He would, in a sense, have lost his identity. Do you agree, Paul?”

  Mr. Ku replied in his own tongue, his velvet bass sounding less truly exotic in those thickets of sound than it did in English.

  “Paul thinks,” said Dr. Ku, “that if one of us lost his key outside he would come home, but would then (voluntarily, though it would be expected of him) undergo a reinitiation ritual which is both protracted and uncomfortable. Paul may be right—I tend to take a melodramatic view of our affairs at times. But either way you will understand why no keys have been lost.”

  “Yes,” said Pibble. “But you must see that that disposes of the third method by which an outsider might have got in, unless he was a skilled professional thief—and skilled thieves have their own tabus. You’ll have to take my word for it, but they would be most unlikely to kill an old man going upstairs. Another thing: you said that the Kus would most likely smell a stranger in the house. Wouldn’t Aaron have smelled whoever was waiting to ambush him, if it had not been one of you?”

  “I had thought of that,” said Mr. Ku. “He had got over his cold, I think.”

  Dr. Ku said nothing. Her silence was not sulky or obstinate, but the contained blankness of someone who has nothing, for the moment, to ad
d. She sat totally still, like a priest in contemplation, a mathematician staring at the grained surface of his desk, an ape in the sun.

  “So you see,” intruded Pibble, “my first step must be to sort out and eliminate, as far as possible, the actual inmates of the house. As there are so many, it would be best if we could have a sort of informal parade—in here, for preference—so that I can see who’s who and ask a few straightforward questions, if you will interpret for me. D’you think you could get them down here?”

  Dr. Ku sighed.

  “I think,” she said, “they all speak sufficient English for your needs, but you misunderstand my position here. I’m afraid I am a very inferior sort of creature in the hierarchy—Paul, too. I had a lot of influence with Aaron, because of my father, but now I do not know. I certainly cannot order the rest of the tribe to come and go.”

  “Because you are a woman?”

  “No—it is more complicated than that, and peculiarly interesting to an anthropologist. Technically I am a man. When my father and Moses decided that some of the Kus should go into hiding, my mother insisted that I should go with them. My father was against it, but agreed on condition that I was accepted into the tribe as a man. I was about seventeen, but it wasn’t only in case I got raped at the next feast; as a man, I would have some say in the councils of the group in hiding, and Aaron would be able to consult with me, which he could not decently have done with a woman. It was a sensible arrangement, though it has led to awkwardnesses.”