The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Read online

  “Ullo, ullo! The other fellah caught in the nest, eh?”

  Pibble turned and saw his destined Adversary. He knew him at once, and his innards cringed, the creature of his waking nightmares, poised to demolish whatever he began or undertook—always the same, with the same lounging arrogance, the same Olympian sneer. The nightmare became real only once in a couple of years, and this, now, here, was one of the times.

  The Adversary’s smile was genial, denying the hint of cruelty in the words. Even teeth flashed; brown eyes crinkled at the corners. The clothes were sharp and modern, a chocolate-brown suit with its waistcoat buttoned high, and on the notch of pink shirt a patently club tie. Everything about him suited him, even the bruise-colored sacs below his eyes and the alcohol hoarseness of his voice.

  “Darling,” said Mrs. Caine, “I’ve got the most awful news. Somebody murdered Aaron Ku last night, hit him on the head on the stairs, and this is the Detective Superintendent who is trying to find out what happened.”

  “Christ! Who’d want to bash old Aaron? Poor old black bastard.”

  “Darling, why don’t you take the Superintendent into your study and tell him all he wants to know about the Kus. You understand them much better than anyone. And I’ll get on with luncheon.”

  “Right. Come along, copper.”

  “Is your thumb all right, Mrs. Caine? Shall I finish off the tin for you?”

  “Good God! Cut yourself, Sue? PERFECT WOMAN SLIPS SENSATION! I must make a note in my diary.”

  “Off you go, Bob, or you won’t get any lunch.”

  “Aye aye, Cap’n. Come along, copper. You married, old man?”

  They moved out into the passage, Pibble sweating lightly. Caine’s aggressive, self-assured charm reminded him of Walewski, the big docker with a knack of knocking his women about in a way that hardly marked them at all, though they might have to go to hospital for months. Walewski had enjoyed his art, certain that none of the women would ever give evidence against him. He’d been right—their terrified fascination with him, all five or six of the ones Pibble had met, had been wholly police-proof. It had been a couple of kids, that blond Mavis Something’s little brothers, who’d sent Walewski down—them and the prosecution lawyer who’d talked to one of the doctors and become sufficiently angry. Pibble had given evidence, and Walewski had smiled from the dock all the time, a smile that said clear as shouting, “You haven’t a hope, you poor little runt.” Eighteen months Walewski had got, trapped in the net of the law, too stupid to see that this was something different from the jungle in which he lived his strong, cruel tiger life.

  Caine’s study was on the other side of the passage, a tiny room, intensely and intentionally masculine. The only decoration was an enormously blown-up photograph of Caine, taped to a wall; it showed him spread-eagled on a face of rock, apparently leading a climb, as a slack of rope dangled downward from his waist and no rope led up. His face was turned sideways so that the craggy profile showed to full advantage. He was laughing like a businessman at a floor show. ’Twas very theatric.

  A pair of climbing boots hung from a nail on another wall and a coil of nylon rope lay in a corner. Caine picked up a shiny piton from the desk and plonked it in the middle of a loose pile of papers.

  “Funny how cleaning women can’t put things back,” he said, “however much they love you.”

  Without apology, he laid himself full length in the only chair, a vanquished object with a torn cover. The seat’s edge supported the small of his back, his crossed legs stuck out four feet across the room, his head was on a level with the arms of the chair, and his neck was bent almost to a right angle by the back of it. He looked as though he and a few friends owned the world. Pibble decided that he would feel less abject perching on the edge of the desk than standing subservient before this arrogant layabout.

  “Sorry, copper, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I am Detective Superintendent Pibble, C.I.D.” The only refuge was police-college formality. “As a preliminary, may I ask where you yourself spent last night?”

  “You may, cock. I was in Southampton, at Turner’s Hotel in Crerdon Road, the meanest bleeding doss house this side of Timbuktu.”

  “Did you go down by car?”

  “Can’t afford to run one, old boy—not anything I’d be prepared to be seen dead in. I’ve got a cobber in the trade who lends me a decent piece of iron from time to time, but I don’t care to ask too often. I took out a beaut of a two-point-three Alfa last weekend, got her up to twenty over the ton on the M4—not bad for 1930, eh?”

  “How long have you known the Kus?”

  “Twenty-five years ago this June, I staggered into their village, copper, pretty sick, and with a duff ankle, too. Been in that bleeding jungle four days, scuttling under cover when a leaf rattled. They were good to me, those Kus, though I sometimes think they’d rather have eaten me than nursed me—probably would have if the Rev. hadn’t been there in his crazy old hat. Eve’s dad, that was, and as near a saint as I’m ever likely to meet on this bleeding piece of earth. Then they all had to go and get themselves wiped out by the stinking Nips. If there was a God in heaven …”

  His voice ran into the sand. For the last few sentences, he had been talking like a maudlin drunk, whose pity for the world is only his pity for himself. He looked as if he’d had a thickish night—perhaps there was enough alcohol still in his system for shock to bring it to the surface.

  “Have you been with them ever since?” asked Pibble.

  “Pretty near. I went back to Australia for a year or two after the show was over, but I kept worrying about little Eve being all alone in the world, so I did a bit of sleuthing, found she’d come back here, and set up camp next door. She may look a pretty tough egg, but she needs a man handy. She’s not practical. D’you know how she spent the first eight years after she got back? Slaving at her schoolbooks, matriculating, getting her degree, getting her goddam doctorate. Eve set a great store by that—owed it to her dad, I think she thinks. By the same token, she takes all her tribe off in a crazy crocodile to church every Sunday.”

  “They are Christians, then?” Did the façade of formality hide his astonishment? With luck it did, Pibble decided; Caine was too self-absorbed to take much note of enemy reactions. Pibble recalled the whining, boring chant in the blue-green light of the wake room. Jissu. Hodigu. Mirri. Godifadi! The blessed Trinity and the Mother of God, all translated.

  “I understand from Dr. Ku that she does not exercise any real authority over the Kus,” he said.

  “Not bleeding likely! It’s her house, isn’t it? Her money that keeps ’em in yams and beer? There’s one or two working for the Transport now, but they don’t take home enough to fill twenty bellies, even at the crazy great wage they’re getting nowadays. No, copper, Eve is like a kid with an ant’s nest—one of those glass-sided jobs. She knows that if she goes poking round, ordering ’em about, she won’t learn much, so she just sits and watches. It’s her toy, and she won’t let any of the other kids touch it. I met a guy in a pub once, a journalist who was nuts on anthropology, so I told him about the Kus. He wanted to come and set up house here and do a color-supplement piece about them—they’re dead photogenic—but Eve warned him off, scared him stiff with libel lawyers and dug up a mossy old friend of her mother’s who was his editor’s godfather. She was bleeding mean about it; in fact, I could have done with the money and then some. Still, she’s had a cruel life, poor old Eve, and it’s not fair to hold her responsible for all her actions. Sometimes, copper, I thank God I’m here to look after her. I don’t know what would have happened to her without me.”

  The maudlin note was back, less strong but no less repellent.

  “Do you think,” said Pibble, “from your knowledge of them, that one of the Kus was likely to have murdered Aaron?”

  “Shouldn’t be surprised. He could be a bloody-minded old bastard.
Y’see it was in his interest to keep the tribe stagnant, preserved, like one of those mummified Vikings they find in marshes. Then he was somebody—hail to the chief, you know. The moment they seriously tried to fit into the pattern here, get jobs, move about a bit, meet people, he’d be a leftover. I tried to take some of the younger ones out a bit, show ’em life, knock the corners off, but Aaron pretty soon whistled ’em back, with Eve’s help. I don’t mind telling you, copper, that though I owe the Kus a lot that doesn’t mean I’ve got to like every bleeding one of them. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the younger ones got frustrated enough to knock the old bastard on the head.”

  Aha! How did he know that Aaron had been knocked on the head? Had Mrs. Caine said anything about it? Yes, she had. Damn!

  “Can you think of any other motive for one of the Kus to kill him? Or anybody else?”

  “Not on the spur of the moment, old boy.”

  “The deceased was clutching a two-headed penny. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing, copper.”

  Had there been a pause, a tiny crackle in the self-confident glaze? Pibble knew he wanted to think so and tried to allow for his own prejudice. No, he decided, there had not.

  “Are you left- or right-handed, Mr. Caine?”

  “Group Captain Caine, if you don’t mind, old boy. And I’m as right-handed as they come. Look, my fists are different sizes, even.”

  He spread his palms out, flat, over his fork. Like a hypnotized hen, Pibble leaned forward and craned down at them. They were big hands with square palms, white and callus-free. The little fingers seemed only half as long as the others. The right hand was visibly larger, and its heart and head lines were joined together in the single horizontal which palmists call the simian line and believe to be a sure sign of criminal degeneracy. Still staring, Pibble wondered whether Walewski had borne the same stigma.

  “Seen enough, copper?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Pibble straightened up, back onto his ignominious perch, then decided he’d had enough and stood upright. Caine did not stir.

  “D’you mean,” he said, “that the old bastard was killed with a left-hander? That makes it look pretty like a Ku, if you ask me. They always …”

  “Dr. Ku has already explained the point, and I am bearing it in mind.”

  “Well, don’t strain yourself, copper. So long. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Thank you, Group Captain, for your help. I’ll let myself out.”

  At the top of the steps Pibble turned right, away from No. 9; right again along the spick-and-span street; right at the lights. Yes (the lost details of the district were coming clear in his mind), there was still a telephone kiosk on the corner of the little square, momentarily unvandalized, too. He rang the Yard and asked for Sergeant Crewe.

  “Mike? Jimmy Pibble here. Got a pencil and paper? There are half a dozen things I want checked on. Ready? One: a Professor Fleisch at Melbourne—in the anthropology department, I should think. Anything he can tell me about a New Guinea tribe called the Kus, Dr. Ku who belongs to it, and the sort of circumstances in which one of them might murder their chief. Second: this Dr. Ku got her doctorate in anthropology in roughly 1954, odds are at London University. Find out how serious a figure she is, and anything useful. Third: Turner’s Hotel, Crerdon Road, Southampton—did one Group Captain Caine spend last night there? Get on to that one quickly, Mike, and make sure the people at the hotel realize this is serious; there’s something a bit fishy there—he got back from Southampton without even a toothbrush. Fourth: ask Tim Speer whether there’s a 1930 two-point-three Alfa Romeo in London which someone in the trade might have lent to a pal last week, and whether it’d do a hundred and twenty. Fifth: ginger Australian Air Force Records into letting you know all they have about this Caine, missing in New Guinea during the war, returned to Australia 1946—might have a police record then—now in England. Sixth: if Superintendent Rickard is driving home this way this afternoon, ask him if he could spare me five minutes; I’d like his advice, but it’s not very important. Seventh: nor is this, but see if you can get someone to find out how a place called Flagg Terrace came to be called that and built like that. That’s the lot—will you read them back? … Fine. No, it’s a lucky dip at the moment, about twenty possibles, one a real swine. I’ll ring again before lunch—you might have something from Southampton by then.”

  Though it must have been near noon by now, with the sweet May sun bouncing off the stilted sycamores outside, all the lights were still on in Dr. Ku’s living room. Even so, it did not seem as staring as it had earlier. Sixteen jet-black faces, like a platoon in some Zoroastrian skirmish, fought against the light. They had been waiting for him for some time, evidently, but with the patience of peasants awaiting the oppression of the taxgatherer. The furniture had been moved. A card table and one of the little gilt chairs were set for him at one end of the room; the sofas had been pushed against the wall opposite the windows, and seven inscrutable women sat on them in a silent row, all ugly and one horribly misshapen. Eight men stood in a group between the windows—or, rather, two groups, six graybeards and two blackbeards. Paul still sat at his desk, painting with the absorption of a craftsman in the grip of his daemon. Dr. Ku, slim in her Hamlet garb, leaned against the wall behind him.

  On the card table were little piles of filing cards, one pile for the women, one for the men, one for Dr. Ku and her Paul, one with a slip of paper on top saying, “Children at school.” There was an envelope labeled “Finance,” and a note on another piece of paper saying, “None of us would think it an impertinence if you were to refer to us by our given names, including Paul and Eve. There are too many Mr. Kus and Mrs. Kus in the house for formality to result in anything but confusion.” The handwriting was very small and square, the letters unconnected.

  Pibble sat down, dithery with irrational panic after his meeting with Caine. How in holy hell (unless Fernham and Strong turned up some blood spots in someone’s linen basket) was he to cope with picking a winner out of those sixteen undifferentiated and inscrutable faces? Even after twenty-five years, Caine couldn’t tell some of them apart, so how was he to tell when they were lying, or flanneling, or pulling his leg? And as for motives! He realized that everyone in the room, except Paul, was looking straight at him, one black stare mitigated by Eve’s brown-colored eyes. Odd that she was so resolutely not looking at what Paul was doing. Oh well, here goes.

  “You all know,” he said, “that Aaron Ku, your chief, was killed on the stairs last night. I am here to find his killer. Perhaps that killer came from outside. Perhaps he is one of you. I must make sure. The killing was done an hour before midnight. Did any of you hear anything at that time?”

  Silence.

  “Do you all understand what I am saying?”

  Silence.

  Pibble glanced at the top card in the left-hand pile.

  “Melchizedek Ku, do you hear what I say?”

  “Your tongue is lucid and apt, policeman.”

  The voice was as deep as Paul’s, but grittier. The speaker was second from the right in the group of graybeards, a very fat man but with most of his weight low on his torso, which was thus shaped like an American space capsule. He had a thin tassel of beard, which wobbled as he spoke.

  “Then why did you not answer me first time?” said Pibble.

  “There is none to speak for us. Our chief is dead.”

  “I see. Well, then, I am the Queen’s servant, and I appoint you, Melchizedek, to speak for the Kus until you choose yourself a new chief. . .” He’d made a mess of it. The tension and shock in the air were tangible. Plunge in deeper. “And Leah Ku will speak for the women.” Tension and shock gone. He wondered if Eve had purposely put the most suitable leaders at the top of the pile; he wouldn’t put it beyond her.

  “Now, Leah and Melchizedek, are there any of your people who
do not understand what I say?”

  “The men understand.”

  “The women understand.”

  Damn. He must remember to put the men before the women. Leah, he thought, was the beldame who had knelt at Aaron’s feet, though it might have been any of the four older ones. Two were obviously younger, and an unfortunately ugly one had strewn the herbs. She clearly had some disease; even in this strong light she seemed hardly to possess a distinct outline, as if she were some figurine which the sculptor had scarcely begun to model before he was called on by a celestial gentleman from Porlock. Funny, Pibble would have expected her eyes to be small and piggy amid those hummocks of flesh, like a whale’s. He turned his head away, as an animal abashed, from her soft jet gaze.

  “So I may take it that none of you heard anything?” he said.

  A deep, formless muttering, like double basses tuning up.

  “The men heard nothing.”

  “The women heard nothing.”

  “Right. Now the next thing to sort out is whether we can be sure if there are any of you who could not have done the killing. Some of you must sleep in the same rooms, for instance, and could not leave without—”

  A knock on the door, and Fernham entered, gripping a boy by the shoulder.

  “I found this one, sir, upstairs under a bed, reading with his thumbs in his ears. I think he’s just playing truant, sir. And there are several locked doors on both the top two floors, sir. Do you want us to force them?”

  “No, thank you, Fernham. That’s all for the moment. You’ve done very well.”

  Pibble looked at the boy. He might have been any English urban school child in his scrambled-into blazer and flannels, except that his face was as black as a boot. Otherwise it was an English face, beaky and bony, not the squashed, half-melted look of the Kus. He was about fourteen.

  “Hello,” said Pibble, “where do you fit in?”

  “I’m Robin Ku,” said the boy. “I’m supposed to be at school, but Jacob and Daniel didn’t go to the buses, so I thought I’d lay off, too—it’s bloody geography, and I haven’t done my homework, and I thought no one would notice. They were all so busy with bodies. And bobbies.”