One Foot in the Grave Page 4

  “The cops are after you, James.”

  “Ur.”

  “We’ve been fending them off.”

  “I’d better see them.”

  “It’s not as easy as that. You’ve had a near thing, you know. If Sankey hadn’t been out looking for Tosca …”

  “Ur?”

  “One of the night security men, bloke called Tosca, was missing. What’s more, he hadn’t turned off the floodlights or closed the security shutters; he was supposed to do that from a couple of switches in the kitchen—first the shutters, then nip round and check they’d all closed, then the floodlighting. …”

  Of course. The footsteps. The two big switches. The lights.

  “. . . But he hadn’t. You know what this place is like for strict routine. Sankey went out to look for him at his watch post, which was a room in the water tower. Halfway to the tower Sankey found you crawling toward the house, apparently delirious and gabbling about a body on the roof.”

  “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “No?”

  “It was there, though?”

  “The body? Yes. Sankey got you in and handed you over to Jenny. You were unconscious by then. That’s what I mean—you wouldn’t actually have made it back to the front door. Now …”

  “Bullet wound?”

  “So I gather. They’re being extremely close about it. That’s not the point. What I’m trying to get into your head is that you’ve had a close call. You’ve been gaga for a couple of days, and now you’ve surfaced, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you went gaga again tomorrow. You’re in shock, and with your rotten blood pressure. … Listen, I’ve got a responsibility to the cops, of course, but in my book I’ve got a bigger one to you. I’ve got to tell them whether you’re up to answering questions. From their point of view that means whether you’ll pass out before they’ve finished with you, but from mine it means whether being questioned is going to set you back, and if so, how much. Understand?”

  “Ur.”

  “Well, I can’t see how I’m expected to make an estimate on something like that until I know what form the interview’s likely to take. How much stress it will involve. Uh? They aren’t telling me a thing, so the only person I can ask is you. Uh?”

  “Ur.”

  “So I suppose the first question is how much can you remember?”

  “I’m not sure. I get muddled.”

  (A half-truth. The events of the storm night, though dreamlike in their patches of clarity—the ghost in the mirror, the swirling away of hat and body, the strange warmth of the tower room—still pieced together with very little of the blurred transitions of dream. But Pibble felt prickly with the almost superstitious fear of admitting anything, a feeling that old lags share with the ordinary old, because anything you say may be used against you.)

  “Don’t we all?” said Follick, acknowledging a cliché of life at Flycatchers. “But I’d have said you’re more on the spot than most, and getting better all the time. You didn’t just get up and potter out on a dopey way—I mean you got dressed. You made a dummy. You can remember doing that?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then I’d have thought you ought to be able to remember why you did it.”

  His tone was only puzzled and friendly, but suddenly Pibble felt hunted. The mysterious shareholders, the ultimate source of authority at Flycatchers … their passion for routine and smoothness … the vision of Greasy Jack, weeping in his geriatric hell. …

  “I heard a shot,” he said.

  “What!”

  “Learn to know the sound.”

  “Yes, of course, but. …”

  Follick looked utterly baffled, but not at all disbelieving. He was an expert himself, and so more easily convinced by other realms of expertise. Can’t tell him, thought Pibble. He’d have to pass it on. Tell the police and ask them not to. …

  “But the storm!”

  “Came and went. Heard it in a lull. Unmistakable.”

  “But …”

  “Just after Jenny finished. Didn’t want her to worry. Didn’t want anyone to worry. Got up and dressed. Left the bathroom door open while I was doing that—make it look as if I was in the bathroom. Couldn’t ask anyone else to go and look, you see—stupid­ old fool, you know … made the dummy because Jenny would be coming back and she’d know I’d just been to the bathroom … had to go and see. Wouldn’t have slept at all.”

  Follick nodded, frowning. A better explanation might have impressed him less—he was used to the old. He stood for a while rocking from toe to heel and back like one of those barroom toys that endlessly teeters to its point of balance and returns.

  “See them soon as they like,” said Pibble. “If I’m going to have a low tomorrow …”

  “I only said you might.”

  “This afternoon. Have a rest now. Four o’clock?”

  “I’ve got to go to town. Can’t get out of it. It’s a sultan’s mother-in-law.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll see that Jenny’s here, though.”

  “No,” murmured Pibble. “No.”

  It was the last thing he wanted, but he couldn’t make his voice produce more than a flutter of opposition. Boredom was floating down on him in the familiar gray softness, burying him helpless in its drift. He drew it to him, snuggled into it, making it his shelter against the hard-edged world. He was so ill, so old. They oughtn’t to. …

  “Tried to sit up,” he sighed. “Only a little. Blacked out.”

  Follick nodded. This collapse of will was as common a symptom as any among his patients.

  “I can tell them you still aren’t up to it,” he said. “Put it off till I can be there.”

  “No.”

  Not that either. Nothing. What was the use? All along, all through his struggle, the Liberator had been already dead.

  • • •

  He lay still, wavering in and out of doze. Jenny must have come in while he was below the surface of sleep because he woke and knew she was there by the quiet flip of a page. She had taken to spending her rest hour in his chair, reading; sword-and-sorcery, SF, a few thrillers. Tolkien apart, she despised most of what she read but refused to try anything else because what she called “proper books” only made her miserable. He had become used to her presence, a silent element like a pool or tree beside which he drowsed, but this afternoon he slowly perceived that the nature of that presence had altered. It was as though the tree was full of flies, or the pool smelt strange.

  “What’s the time?” he whispered.

  “Ten past three. Go back to sleep. You’ve got nearly an hour still.”

  “You don’t have to stay.”

  “I’m staying.”

  “But …”

  “Follicle hoofed me out so that he could talk to you alone. I’m not having you doing it too.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Of course you will. I’ve seen them. They’re better than I’d expected—one of them knows you.”

  But he was already burrowing back into the gray drift and could produce only the vaguest gargle of dissent. If Jenny stayed. … Will flailed, trying to grapple Mind to its duty, but Mind was away, ducking through the maze of corridors that riddled the ruined palace of memory. Sometimes, like flashes from the outer day, imagined snatches of the coming interview might obtrude, but Mind shied from them, back into the shadows. . . . A bedside, a bleak single ward, the body on the bed bandaged like a mummy, one eye and the lower face still visible. That eye bright and fierce with will, and the mouth clamped shut, so tight that it seemed to be munching its own lips. Not one word out of her till she died, though it had been an open-and-shut case anyway. Her own son, twenty-nine stab wounds, squabble over a van-load of stolen knitwear. . . . Heard a shot? In that wind? Come off it. … Addressing myse
lf now to the prisoner Foyle. I single you out, Foyle, from these evil men because, strange though it may seem, your wickedness is greater than theirs. True, they have done many things that were individually vile. Murder, robbery, extortion, prostitution, drug peddling—these are crimes against society as well as against the individual victims of those crimes. But you, Foyle, as a senior and respected police officer, the supposed guardian of society, have committed a greater crime. You have poisoned the wells of justice. Justice is the mortar of our society. Without it the fabric will not stand. It is for this reason that, in a very real sense, the smallest lie by a police officer must be considered a more serious offense than the greatest crime by a private citizen. . . . OK, let’s say there was a lull, and you heard it and decided to go and look. It was dark. It’s a big garden. High up? I see these windows are double-glazed. … And here, gentlemen, punctual as the Flying Scot, you can observe rigor beginning to set in. The jaw is already almost too stiff for me to, ngff, come on, my beauty, don’t be coy, there, force open and the neck muscles are showing the same symptoms of protein precipitation. . . .

  “Jenny?”

  “I’m staying, and that’s flat. I want to know what’s going on.”

  . . . Helpless. You start helpless. Slowly you conquer a kingdom, impose your will, first on your own body, then on your surroundings, then on other people. But the kingdom shrinks. The frontier moves in. No other people in it, only objects your subjects. Then not even those, not your own body. … Large room, crammed with furniture, dust on the glistening veneers. Persian rugs on walls. Blue line painted on floor, dividing room. Thick oil paint, three inches wide, slap across good carpet. At one end, little old woman lying on Madame Récamier daybed, mouth open, flies, dead five days. Brother (smoking jacket, pince-nez) reading Telegraph other end of room. “Nothing to do with me—that’s her side.” Gestures at blue frontier, goes back to paper. … Not my body. Rupert of Hentzau.

  He must have genuinely slept. A figure in glossy black boots, frilled shirt open to the navel, came and went, not always the same face but always handsome as the devil, laughing like the devil before turning away to display a mess of hair and bone and brain at the back of the head.

  Jenny woke him with a touch on his cheek and he opened his eyes to see her wearing her starched uniform cap, nurse at her nursest.

  “The gentlemen have come to talk to you,” she said. “Do you feel up to it?”

  “Urrgh.”

  “Want a pee before they come?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I think you’d better. You don’t want …”

  He gave in. She needed to demonstrate her power, not to him, but to them. Keep them waiting. When he’d done she took the bottle to the bathroom, returned, wiped the crust of sleep spittle from the corner of his mouth, straightened his sheets and at last went to the door and muttered. Two men came quietly into the room—one big and one small but both as surely policemen to Pibble as a dog is a dog to another dog, however human breeders may have reshaped them. The small man wore his black hair almost to his shoulders, which made his thin face seem even thinner and paler than it really was. He looked a little over thirty. The large man must have been twenty years older—heavy, balding but not bothered about it, pale eyes set wide in the many-seamed face.

  “’Lo, Jimmy,” said the large man. “Good to see you again.”

  Pibble felt his brow pucker even while he was forcing his lips into a smile of fake recognition. The past was too much with him. Readable emotions crossed the large man’s face, the welcome suffused with mild hurt at not being known, and discomfort at the sight of the creature lying on the bed. Behind these, less readable, lay a sense of doubt. Pibble spoke on a note of query that sounded more like complaint.

  “Mike Crewe?”

  “Got it,” said the large man, almost in the same breath.

  “But I thought—weren’t you Chief Super, last I heard?”

  “For my sins,” said Mike, smug in his mock sadness.

  “Det Super Cass,” he added, nodding at the other man. “Ted to his friends. Ted’s running the case—I’m just taking the excuse to come and say hello. Ted, this is my old boss, Jimmy Pibble.”

  “Hi,” said Cass with a wary smile. Iago to Crewe’s extrovert Moor. Awkward relationship for him, big gun on his manor, one witness big gun’s old crony. “The doctor says we mustn’t stay more than ten mins.”

  “See how it goes,” said Pibble. “Jenny will blow the whistle.”

  Neither man glanced at her, but a signal seemed to pass. Crewe settled into the visitor’s chair. Cass pulled the other one up to the bed and perched on its arm, in a pose of curious tension which made him look as though he were poised an inch above it, like a frame from a film of a man in the act of springing up. He leaned forward.

  “We’ll cut the corners and save time,” he said. “This is just prelim. And you know the form, of course. Now, deceased was George Tosca, employed here as security guard with some other duties. Body found on top of water tower, two shots in back of head, close range. Death instant, around eight forty-five, give or take half an hour. Soon after death, but long enough for blood to begin drying, body turned over to lie on its back. Body discovered at ten fifty-two by Sankey, the night porter, following up remarks made by you. Right?”

  “I don’t remember talking to Sankey.”

  “But finding the body?”

  “I suppose so. Dressed like an actor?”

  “That’s right. Did you touch it?”

  “I moved his arm. Before I knew what it was.”

  “You didn’t turn him over?”

  Pibble could only shake his head, letting the gesture indicate how far from possible such an effort would have been.

  “Lying on his back?” insisted Cass.

  “Ur.”

  “You didn’t see the weapon?”

  “No. Where …”

  “On the far side of the body—tucked under him, almost. Somebody wearing knitted gloves had wiped it and put it there. Size of hand unknown—we were lucky to get the knitting. See anything else?”

  “Don’t know. Fairly beat up by then—climbing, you know. My legs aren’t … wasn’t there a room? Up. Second floor? A long garden chair. Something on the floor—I thought it was a snake, but I suppose …”

  “His holster. Black leather, with crossbelt. He’d put a lot of polishing into it, but it only had his own prints.”

  “. . . And a paraffin stove, was it? I didn’t see the stove, but I think I smelt it.”

  Mike Crewe answered, carefully toneless.

  “He’d made himself comfortable, Jimmy. He was supposed to be guarding that side of the main building. He’d been issued with a loud hailer and a high-powered rifle, as well as his handgun. But he’d made himself comfortable. Chair to lie down in, radio, paraffin heaters. The window was shut and misted up on the inside, too.”

  “All those guns?”

  “Licenses quite in order. Special permission.”

  “He must have been something special himself, then,” said Pibble.

  “Not really,” said Mike, still noncommittal. “He came here with one of the residents—job-description chauffeur, but more like a bodyguard. Flycatchers is used to that sort of setup, so they took him onto the security staff. Only he doesn’t seem to have taken his duties very seriously.”

  “He did his rounds very regularly,” said Pibble. “You could set your watch by him.”

  “How do you know?” said Cass, just managing not to pounce.

  “I’m right above the kitchen door. I used to hear him coming and going.”

  “But not on Thursday night,” said Cass.

  “I mightn’t have heard. There was a storm.”

  “There was too,” said Cass, softly.

  A brief pause, as though that section of the interview had en
ded and they were about to move on to fresh ground. But Pibble recognized the moment well—he had used it himself, often. You let the chappie relax, think he’s clear, and then you punch him. It was surprising how well his own wits seemed to be working, as though the policemen’s presence—Mike’s in particular—was restorative, forcing him to square moral shoulders, pull up moral socks, not be seen in a state of total dissolution, though he might well have to take refuge in that state, because this surge of energies had brought him to another decision. With Jenny in the room he was going to stick to his lie. It shouldn’t do much damage. He’d be bound to be able to see Mike alone before long and tell him the truth. It wasn’t the sort of thing anyway which pushes a case along the wrong tracks—an old buffer who thought he heard a shot. …

  “Yes,” said Cass quietly. “It was quite a storm. But Dr. Follick tells me you heard a shot. He says you were quite definite about it.”

  “Well … yes, I suppose I was sure at the time. It was just after Jenny left me. Between nine twenty-five and nine-thirty, then. There was a lull in the storm, and I heard it—knew what it was at once. Thought I knew, I mean. If you asked me now … anyway, I lay there for a minute or two, and then I started to get in a fret. … When you get old, you know …”

  “You’re sixty-four, Jimmy,” said Mike rather sharply. “I looked you up.”

  “I know, I know. It’s blood pressure … has the same effect … Jenny will tell you …”

  “He’s perfectly all right,” said Jenny in a dry voice. “He’s good for years and years. But he’s been very ill, and that’s like being old. Go on. You haven’t got much longer.”

  “I’m all right,” said Pibble. “Listen, I told you about the man who came to the kitchen door to do the shutters and the lights. I didn’t know his name was Tosca, but I guessed he must be one of the security men. I thought I’d just go down and tell him about the shot. I got up and dressed—”