The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Page 3

  “But how does that affect—”

  “It is my relationship with Paul that has diminished my authority, Superintendent. This, naturally, the Kus regard as a homosexual relationship. The attitude of different societies to homosexuality is extremely varied; some regard it as normal, others as despicable. There are still a few places where it is punished by death. Among the Kus and related tribes, random homosexuality is rare and severely punished, but for two men to become steadfast lovers is regarded as only mildly despicable—indeed a trifle comic. Paul and I come in for a lot of banter on feast days, but it is good-natured enough. Still, we have forfeited our full membership of the men’s hut; we cannot join in discussions and parliaments. At the time, it seemed to resolve a number of difficulties, both personal and tribal, so Paul and I decided on what is, in the tribe’s eyes, a homosexual marriage. Of course there are prescribed rituals for this, which we carefully observed.”

  II

  Eve squatted under the fig tree, worrying. It was dusk for a few minutes before the huge-starred night; the hummingbirds were gone, and a fruit bat was out and flopping among the upper leaves. Eve was sentry. Nobody had seen a Japanese for a fortnight, but she was glad to be alone. The facile joke of being a man was wearing thin, with the hiding lasting so long. There were too few women in the caves, and the others knew she wasn’t really a man, despite her hurried initiation, because she bore no ritual scars. She was a sort of nobody, of no sex. When the hunters’ awe for her father had melted a bit further—a few days would do it—she would be in a real jam.

  Odds were the full-moon feast would be the night when she stopped being a person and became some hunter’s animated chattel. The feast would be a hole-and-corner do, compared with the old junketings in the village, but even Aaron would be roaring drunk. Five days. If nothing changed, she’d run away on the fourth. If Bob weren’t so sick, he’d help—or would he? He might think it a great big joke. What about trying to rig some ghostlike manifestation of Daddy, to renew the old respect? Possible, but it would mean props—the hat, the jacket. It would mean going to the village. Before she could draw down the blinds in her skull, she pictured the garroted bodies dangling in the charred doorways. No props, then, and no ghosts.

  She was damned if she was going to try and make herself look more like a man. The bandage around her breasts hurt all day, and anyway it wouldn’t be any use. She was already so hideous by Ku standards, so unlike the huge-haunched, long-breasted, slab-shaped women of their dreams, that even if she was to grow a mustache and sing bass she couldn’t make herself less sexually attractive. But all a drunk Ku needed on a feast night was the minimum equipment.

  Surely Aaron was worried, too. He might think up some tabu valid enough to be potent after gourdfuls of vile, sweet kava. No rigging of the spirit world for him, though: it was all too real for cheating. But he might pull something out of the bag still. Or what about Bob again? Was his sickness real? There weren’t any symptoms you could see, but it might be shock. Anyway, chattel or no chattel, could she really run off and leave him after all that had happened? Or what about Paul …

  A hand touched her arm, in the crook of the bare flesh inside the elbow. Jiminy, how quietly they could all move! She looked sideways and up, through the dark. It was Paul, naked, carrying his short bow. He leaned it against the tree and squatted beside her. Silence.

  From behind his ear Paul drew what looked like a fat twig and handed it to Eve. It was softer than branch wood—a root. Eve turned it in her hands.

  “What does this mean, Paul?”

  “Miss, Aaron say—if we are man and man—loving—we may not go to moon feast.”

  Silence. Good Paul. Quiet, attentive, reserved, the perfect houseboy. Only there was now no house. The star pupil. And no school either. It was a way out. There had been a homosexual couple in the village, middle-aged, very good hunters. They had been set apart. Yes. Paul’s English had been better down in the village—was he rusty, or just embarrassed? No telling. Presumably he’d not spoken Ku because he wanted to make sure she understood what he was suggesting.

  “Like David and Jonathan, Paul?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We break root. We bite. I bite, you bite. We put our bitings into other one’s mouth. They make our mouth blue, so all Kus can know we are man and man, loving.”

  Oh, the white wedding in St. Andrew’s, with the bridesmaids all in satin and the black coats and the flowered hats and the organ playing “Love Divine.”

  The root was like alum, drying the mouth. It took a lot of chewing.

  “Is finished, Miss.”

  “Call me Eve, Paul. Now we’re man and man, loving. Let’s go and set up house.”

  III

  Pibble looked at the poised head; the soft, secretive brown eyes; the Edinburgh-straight back; the unmitigated black attire. Very embraceable, the whole effect—a challenge to male domination; his sort of woman, except that she wouldn’t have him. Doesn’t look as if she needed anything, he thought. Rum do, all around. Wonder who does what and with what and to whom. Probably tell you, if you asked—no, probably not. It’d be beyond the line of scholarly interest. Still, no wonder she takes a wog-bashing so calmly. Would anything dismay her? No goblin or foul fiend, anyway.

  “I see. Can you tell me, Dr. Ku, whether the owl had any ritual significance?”

  She turned slowly toward her black man. Their eyes met. He shrugged his shoulders and she turned back, slow as a priest at Mass, to Pibble.

  “If it has,” she said, “neither Paul nor I know of it, though we are not especially adept in the women’s lore. It was the only loose animal on the stairs, too.”

  “Um. And the two-headed penny the deceased was clutching?”

  “A two-headed penny!”

  “Yes. He was—”

  Knock on the door. Enter Fernham, excited.

  “Sorry to butt in, sir, but deceased spent an hour with Mrs. Caine last night. She just got back, sir, and she didn’t know what had happened. She’s a bit upset, sir.”

  “Say anything useful?”

  “She thinks he left about eleven-twenty, sir. She says he often used to come and talk—mostly about his home. I didn’t like to badger her, sir; she was crying and I thought I’d better give her a chance to pull herself together. Then I thought you’d like to see her yourself, sir.”

  “Right. Thank you, Constable. If she’s back, some of the others may be. Would you and Strong do the rounds again and check the people who were missing first go? In fact, you’d better do the whole lot, now you know about the time. Make a note of any kids of courting age—they hang about in porches all hours—not that they’d be any use as witnesses about time. Or anything else, really.”

  “Righty-ho, sir.”

  Fernham was gone, leaving in the air the inaudible echoes of a phrase that always set Pibble’s teeth on edge. He turned to Dr. Ku, and was surprised not to find in her eyes the hint of a similar distaste. Perhaps she hadn’t heard, in her trance of stillness.

  “Dr. Ku,” he said, “I can’t really believe that your influence on the household is as small as you make out, and in any case you could always say you were simply passing my orders on. It would be true. So would you arrange for everybody to be in one room—one with a bit of light in it, like this—in half an hour? If you’ve time, I’d be most grateful for a list of their names, with any relevant notes.”

  “I could get out the cards from my index.”

  “That’d do fine. And—it probably hasn’t got anything to do with the killing, but you can’t be sure—a résumé of the financial setup here.”

  Again came the slow turn toward Paul, the shrug, the slow turn back.

  “I don’t see why not, Superintendent.”

  “Fine. I’ll be back in half an hour, if you can get everyone on parade by then. Or will the c
eremony upstairs not be finished?”

  “Oh,” said Dr. Ku, “that will end as soon as the body is taken away. I had imagined that the police would have done that by now.”

  “Um. I have a feeling that Superintendent Graham will have told his chaps not to barge in until the ladies had finished whatever they’re up to.”

  Mr. Ku laughed sourly and suddenly. “Superintendent, it would be a kindness to intrude. We are like children, easily bored, even by prolonged excitement.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The landing and stairs seemed black after that glaring room; the daylight striking through the anatomy of “Love Locked Out” gave, for the moment, no more illumination than the moon throws on the floor of a thick-leaved wood. Pibble stared at the picture while his eyes became used to the dusk. A fixed window, he noticed, not a sash—no chance here of a desire for daylight throwing those pale limbs into obscene confusion. There was a figure on the lower stairs now—a still white face, black body, black additional head under the right arm. Ah, yes, a uniformed man carrying his helmet.

  “Strong, isn’t it?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “I’m going next door, to the basement of Number eight, for about half an hour. There are three things I’d like you to do. First, get hold of the mortuary van and tell them they can take the body away. They needn’t mind the goings on in the room, provided they act a bit reverent. Second, sort out where I’m going to have lunch—a Whitbread pub for preference, though a Courage or a Charrington would do. I don’t want to have to go hunting round. Make up my mind for me. Third, get hold of Fernham—he’s out in the Terrace somewhere—and arrange to search the whole building five minutes after I come back. I’ll be holding a parade of the inmates in Dr. Ku’s room, and I want to be sure no one’s missing. Got that?”

  “Got it, sir. Remove cadaver, recommend pub, search premises.” The blond beard wagged, as if ticking the points off. “You going to see Mrs. Caine, sir?”

  “You know her?”

  “I do, sir. Nice bit of crackling, she is—underneath it all. Came up to the station February asking after a lost set of keys, and dropped in a question or two, all casual, about her husband. Been missing a few days, apparently, but she wasn’t worrying. She said.”

  “Thank you, Strong. Don’t forget about the pub. Good bitter, fresh bread, mousetrap, bangers.”

  May, out in the street, seemed as solid as stone compared to the imported and crazily preserved tropics inside No. 9. The murder, in that hard sunlight, became hallucinatory and trivial, except that for the moment it was Pibble’s job. Next week, like as not, he’d be off at the other end of London puzzling out what sort of twist in the mind could make a chap take to strangling whores with college scarves. Two pigeons strutted through their clockwork courtship on the crown of the asphalt, their shot-silk necks arched with appreciation of each other’s efforts, he to pursue, she to stay six inches out of reach. Silently Pibble cheered his own sex on. A pram had appeared on the far pavement. Things hadn’t changed so much—it was a streamlined, two-toned job in white and lavender, chromed unsparingly, the bodywork bulging just below the handles into a pair of simulated jet exhausts. Its occupant, by a happy fluke, was crying at a pitch that was just right for a tiny aero engine screaming for take-off.

  Conscientiously Pibble stubbed out his moment of Wordsworthian insight. He turned right and down the steps to the basement of No. 8. No milk empties down here, or wet rubbish in corners. The wall that retained the road was pale pink; a wooden name plate, “8a Cora Lynn,” hung on two tiny chains from the peak of the ogee arch that supported the steps up to the porch of No. 8 proper; the door of the basement flat was lime green and open.

  Pibble went in and found a hall decorated with a brilliant Paisley wallpaper, the one Sanderson’s had just begun to use in their glossiest ads. A turquoise door on the left of the passage opened, and a girl said, “Come in.”

  It was the kitchen. Red lino, yellow walls and cupboards, two big orange Goods and Chattels posters filling gaps. All the equipment cheap and old, but very clean and tidy.

  The girl—woman—no, girl—was a surprise for being a girl at all. Somehow Pibble expected everybody involved in the case to be at least in their late thirties. That obliterated village in the jungle valley already loomed so large that he felt it off-key that even such a chance and peripheral witness as Mrs. Caine should clearly not have been born when the thatch went up in flames. Her eyes had the large, soft look that very strong spectacles give—ultrasevere National Health specs in this case. Her head was tiny and very round, with a tiny, pretty nose and mouth below the enormous eyes; the hair an off-mouse bob; the body plump and cuddly in its knitted beige dress.

  “You’re the Superintendent,” she said. Her voice had the sharp reasonableness of a career businesswoman in a B film. “I know I’ll have to tell at least six different people the same things before I’m done, so I shan’t mind if you ask exactly the same questions as the other bod. Couldn’t they do this part of detecting by computer, and save all the overlapping which we ratepayers cough up for?”

  “I suppose it might work,” said Pibble, “if you could program it for the rumness of people. Difficult to prepare in advance for a setup like next door, don’t you think? And that lot’s only unique in a rather exotic way on the surface—half the households in London turn out to be just as off-center once you do a bit of digging. Do you know them well?”

  “Eve and her Kus? As well as anybody, I suppose, except Bob, though I’ve only known them for ten months. But it depends what you mean by know. I saw a lot of poor old Aaron, for instance, but I couldn’t’ve told whether he was happy or unhappy at any given moment. Do you think one of the Kus killed him?”

  “What do you think? Dr. Ku seems to regard it as anthropologically impossible.”

  “I simply can’t keep up with Eve on that sort of thing, but I thought they were mostly pretty fond of the old boy, and respectful as all getout. It was funny. My dad’s a fairly high-powered figure in the Navy, and the way the other Kus treated Aaron reminded me of the way the middies used to behave with Dad when he was a captain. But I’ve no idea what they felt individually—I still can’t tell one or two of them apart, and nor can Bob, though he’s known them twenty years.”

  “Well, what about Dr. Ku? D’you think she’d tell me if she knew who’d done it? Or if she knew of a motive?”

  “She’s not much more scrutable, is she, Superintendent? I don’t think she would. I don’t want to be bitchy, and anyway Eve’s a sort of saint in some ways, but she’s funny about the Kus. Bob says she thinks they’re her own private stamp collection, unique, worth untold millions in auction rooms, not to be touched by ignorant hands. Besides, I’m sure she thinks their laws are as valid as ours. You’ll have to ask Bob. He ought to be back soon.”

  “Where’s he been?”

  “Off on a business trip somewhere. He doesn’t always tell me where he’s going. He’s got some agencies for Swedish firms in the south of England, and has to go and persuade factory owners in Swindon that they’d be better off with his sort of industrial filter, or whatever it is. It makes for an unsettled life, rather, but it suits him.”

  “Anyway, he wasn’t in London last night?”

  “Good Lord, no, or he’d have been here. And Aaron wouldn’t have come round. They didn’t get on, though Bob will never tell me why. It wasn’t anything serious, Superintendent, not a mote . . .” The sharp voice became fainter and more urgent. “You’d better ask him; he’d tell you. Look, Superintendent, I must start getting him some luncheon ready, just in case he turns up. He never has any breakfast, you see, so he gets pretty famished by now. But carry on—I can answer questions while I cope.”

  Cope was the word. Pibble sat on a tall stool by the sink and watched Mrs. Caine tip her string bag of groceries onto the yellow Formica of the table in a sharp, practice
d movement, like a coal heaver tipping his sackful down a manhole: a few tins, a green pepper, a hundred Senior Service, butter, soup packets, streaky bacon, macaroni. Without moving her feet, she took a knife from a drawer and a chopping board off the shelf behind her. She sliced the pepper into coarse strips, slowly, as though it were vital that every strip should be the same precise width.

  “I don’t know that I’ve got a lot else to ask you, Mrs. Caine. I hear that Aaron didn’t talk about anything that he mightn’t have talked about on any other evening, and that he left at about eleven-twenty.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he talk about, in fact?”

  “New Guinea. He always did. What it was like, and whether they would ever go back there. They’d seen some sort of exploring film on the telly a few weeks back, and they were desperately stirred up—the old ones, anyway. There’d been a village just like theirs. I don’t think there was a serious possibility of their going, but it gave them something to talk about.”

  The strips of pepper went into melted butter in a frying pan; a saucepan was filled with water, presumably for macaroni. Mrs. Caine managed to cook as if she knew precisely what she was at, and with very few movements. Now she started to open a tin of stewed steak with an old-fashioned, pre-butterfly can opener, the sort you have to wrestle with. She wrestled clumsily, and Pibble was just about to do the honorable thing and take the job on himself when she jabbed her left thumb with the spike of the instrument.

  “I’m an idiot,” she said, and ran cold water on it. “There’s some Elastoplast in the top left cupboard behind you, on the second shelf.”

  There was, too. None of Mary’s in-the-thing-behind-the-thing-over-there-I-think. Dear God, an unself-conscious jewel. He stripped the plastic protection from the sticky surface and smoothed the plaster around the strong, small thumb. It curved very sharply back and its nail was bitten flat down to the skin.

  A voice came from the door.