One Foot in the Grave Page 6

  Sometimes Jenny was there, feeding him small mouthfuls or coaxing drink between his lips or taking his pulse or helping him piss—or simply there, sitting in her usual chair. With one element of his mind he knew that if she was there, then he was awake, because he never dreamed about her; but with another element he was aware that her presence was the forerunner of a nightmare, to which even the horrors of the limpet and the lion face were preferable. This was something permanent, and in a vague way he understood that he was going to have to face it, that the process of escape by surrender to the world of dream could not go on forever, because in fact his body was steadily recovering from the exhaustion of Thursday night, and that sooner or later it would force him to have a “good” day, and then the nightmare would become real.

  The good day began much like the bad, with waking, being cleaned by somebody not Jenny, swallowing food, slithering back into the shifting smother of self-induced delirium. There was a presence in the room, a total stranger in a dressing gown, who became Dickie Foyle, who became a shadowy and nameless schoolmaster, who became a stranger in the dressing gown again. …

  “Didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “Urrugh?”

  “Just thought I’d take a look at you, see?”

  The sense of reality was very solid. He began, to accept it. Even the most disaffected of the crew shrugged and readied for a voyage.

  “Course, I know a bit about you long before,” said the slow, leaden voice. The stranger was squat and elderly. His yellowish face seemed to be partly molded of not very convincing flesh-toned Plasticine. His dressing gown was quilted green and he wore it over mauve silk pajamas. He shuffled nearer the bed and gazed down. His eyes were small and pale, set wide apart under barely visible brows. The yellow of his scalp was mottled and veined; close-cropped gray hair covered the sides of his head. The Plasticine look was of course real flesh, flesh which had once been all jowl and pink pudge, now wasted. His lips were mauve, the lower one twisted at one side into a heavy pad. Waking or sleeping, Pibble knew what he was. He had the dragon look, bleak and subtle.

  “You’re Wilson,” said Pibble. So Jenny had been right in her romancing.

  “’Sright—while I’m in this hole, I’m Wilson. And you’re Pibble.”

  “How do you do?”

  “Not so good, but berrer’n you, cock. If it wasn’t for the heart … question is, if I sit in that chair, will I get out without my sending for someone to give me a heave? Not supposed to be in here, am I?”

  “The other chair’s easier. I usually … they slide.”

  “Well, if you’re up to it, cock. …”

  Fully awake now, interested, almost excited—but still aware of the need to keep open the escape route into mumbling doze—Pibble elbowed himself a little up the pillows, watching his visitor all the time. Wilson slid the chairs about, seeming to take care to select an exact site for each of them. He nodded, bent and dusted the seat of the nearer chair with a large handkerchief, which matched his pajamas, a quirk proper to a man used to wearing expensive clothes in seedy places. Pibble was aware of his own mind registering the perception, but the awareness made him oddly nervous—as the ship’s captain might be, glancing up at his wind-swelled sails, back at his level wake, all round at his poxed and dream-sodden crew now suddenly obedient and sailorly, and wondering how long it could last.

  At last Wilson lowered himself into the chair. With the same heavy precision he took a roll of mints from his pocket, unwrapped one and put it on the pad on his lip. He spoke without removing it.

  “Like I say, just thought I’d take a look at you.”

  “For old time’s sake,” murmured Pibble.

  The dragon glance flickered, not surprised but acknowledging a level of mutual understanding.

  “I don’t remember as we ever run into each other.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  Now, like a trapdoor spider taking prey, the tongue flickered between the mauve lips and the peppermint was gone.

  “Nearly, I dessay, once or twice. The Furlough bust-up, f’rinstance—wasn’t you in on that?”

  “On the fringe. A case that had some connections. Were you?”

  “Was I? That’d be telling. Spent a year or two in Spain round about then—for my health, see?”

  “Ah.”

  They contemplated each other for a while, openly, without side glances. For Pibble, Wilson’s presence was, as it were, totemic. It had power, power to exorcise the nightmare. He was too interested in this reality to indulge in senile and self-pitying imaginings. Now he became aware of something off-key about his visitor, something not wholly proper to the dragon look. The look was there, certainly, but something, an element of emotionless malice, was not really functioning. The people of this type whom Pibble had known—not all of them criminals, but mostly—had been capable of doing things to other people which were literally incomprehensible. There was no way of imagining the springs of such malevolence; it was inhuman, but not bestial, either. Wilson had clearly had that capacity, most of his life, but now the gland had withered, the springs had dried up. It was as if the dragon had grown not kindly but at least sentimental in old age. Wilson’s next remark, spoken as if already well into a train of thought, seemed to confirm this.

  “You and me, f’rinstance, sitting here like this. One of us a rozzer all his life, and one of us summing else. It could so easy of been the other way round.”

  “I wouldn’t have made a very effective …”

  “I dunno about that. Plenty of nervy little fellers. … Ever run into Sunny Macavoy?”

  It was extraordinary how Wilson’s company—the half-shared life, the common concerns—could revive shriveled wits. An hour before, Macavoy’s would have been at best a dream name, its waking connotation irrecoverable.

  “Con man? I never met him. Wasn’t his line phony arms deals? Make anyone nervy, I’d have thought.”

  “Sure. He chose it. Did a bit of hotel thieving when things were quiet. Got nicked for that once. No, I’m a liar, twice. Last I heard there was some Palestinians looking for him what he’d got to put down the deposit on a load of plutonium, only it was just lead what he’d got some bent boffin to dope up so it would make a geiger counter click. Might of been your cousin, some ways.”

  Wilson unwrapped another peppermint, his manicured but brutal fingers peeling the foil off whole, but then rolling it into a pellet and flicking it onto the floor. All his actions seemed completely considered, even to the deliberate discarding of a bit of waste. They were part of his style, of a life that had been an exercise of will, with the most trivial action performed in a way that emphasized the power to do it.

  “Whatchew really in for?” he said suddenly.

  “Why am I here? To live for a bit, I suppose. Then die.”

  “Nah. Come off it. You was never in Vice. You was never in the Porn Squad, uh? Nor Serious Crime, neither. Even if you was bent, which I don’t remember hearing, it wasn’t the sort of setup that’d let you stack away enough to bring in six hundred nicker a week, pay for a bed in this place.”

  “Urr?”

  “Besides, I hear as you come in from a grotty little lodging up in Hackney somewhere.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Little Miss Innocence what’s always asking questins—she answers ’em too. Gives her a chance to talk about her pet detective.”

  “Jenny!”

  “’Sright. I got interested when she mentions as you been a copper. Name like yours, it rings a bell, dunnit? First, acourse, I get it into my head as you’re here to keep an eye on me—arter all, you must be ten years younger than what I am, so what are you doing in a place like this? Then she persuades me as you been reelly ill, and I start to get curious. Don’t tell me you hadn’t cottoned how much it was costing.”

  “As a matter of fact, no.”
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  Pibble was unable to resent Wilson’s questions. Fees were not a subject much discussed among the patients at Flycatchers, though other kinds of gossip were rife. There was, as it were, a tacit recognition that some people might actually find it hard to scrape the money together, might indeed be forced to leave for lack of funds, and thus effectively to die. Poverty to the inhabitants of Flycatchers was a terminal illness, and though minor ailments might be exchanged, like chat about weather, elsewhere there was a solid taboo. Wilson seemed unaware of this. There was a direct and dispassionate quality about him, an acceptance of the world as it is without whining or rancor—a fairly common trait among serious villains.

  “So someone’s finding the money,” he said, “and it ain’t the Police Benevolent Fund. Don’t come you dunno who.”

  “I’ve got one rich friend. I hadn’t realized how much it was costing him.”

  (Had refused to let my mind worry that bone, more like.)

  “Ah, him. Saved his life once, dinchew?”

  “So he chose to believe.”

  “Then why wasn’t he giving you a bit of a hand before? Don’t tell me—cause you hadn’t let him know as you needed it. Stupid, that is. Cost him more in the end, dinnit?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  (Only I’ve still never asked for money. That matters. To him too.)

  “All right,” said Wilson. “I’ll buy that. It’s silly, but it adds up, like most other things. But there’s summing as doesn’t add up. Here you are, no use to anyone no more, just waiting to die without causing no more fuss. Not my fancy, but I’ll buy that too. What I won’t buy is you getting up and getting dressed and going out and climbing the tower and finding George in the middle of the night. And don’t give me that about hearing no shots, neither. Remember as I’m just a couple of rooms along and I know how the wind was that night. If a bloody howitzer had loosed off under your window you wouldn’t of heard it.”

  Yes, Wilson would have made a good policeman. His voice had weight, emphasis which came from his refusal to emphasize any particular word. He gave no sign that the question interested him more than the others. If he’d been a policeman he’d probably have been bent, but he’d still have been more effective than a lot of the straight ones.

  “Why do you want to know?” said Pibble.

  “I’m curious.”

  “That doesn’t … unless you think that whoever shot Tosca might, er, have been looking for you.”

  This time the pale eyes didn’t flicker, but still somehow acknowledged the guess. It was as though their impassivity, till now habitual and unconscious, had become deliberate.

  “Shouldn’t of made his rounds that regular,” said Wilson.

  “He didn’t that—” said Pibble, and cut himself off too late.

  “Couldn’t of, not that night, could he? Dead by then. But before that you could of set your watch by the time he went in and out under here. Stupid. Don’t tell me as you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I suppose I had. They run this place on a pretty tight routine, though …”

  “Course they do, but George didn’t have to pay no attention to that, did he? Trouble with him, he thought he knew it all. Look, when he was training, they must of told him not to do things all regular. That’s right, innit?”

  The question was not rhetorical, but spoken as though Pibble should know the answer. Wilson, leaning across to interfere with one corner of Pibble’s jigsaw, had nudged a loose piece with his cuff, and now, with the slightly altered angle, what had so far been abstract smudges and blurs became plainly representational—a bit of blue uniform with a belt across it. Of course. Tosca had been a policeman. Yes, the licenses for the guns, for one thing, and Mike’s attitude to that. Mike being here at all. A Chief Super.

  “So what was you up to that night?” said Wilson. “You still haven’t told me.”

  “I don’t know myself,” snapped Pibble, irritated by the interruption to his thoughts. Tomorrow, in an hour’s time, even these sharp-edged and potentially interlocking perceptions might have reverted to the usual slithering fuzz.

  “You don’t know,” said Wilson impassively.

  “I probably didn’t know at the time, and I certainly don’t now. All I can tell you is that a bit after Jenny left me I started to get up and dress, and while I was doing that I began to tell myself that I was doing it because of something I’d heard, in spite of the wind. I thought it was a shot. Even then I didn’t know if it was true, and I certainly don’t now.”

  “Hunch!”

  “I don’t believe in hunches. I never did. They always let you down.”

  “Right. Remember Ferdy Greer?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “After your time, perhaps. Hit man for the Blue Bear crowd. Drugged a bit. Mary Lou Isaacs told me this—she and me was quite good pals, once. Forget it. Ferdy. It was after some job, the payout. Everything gone like clockwork. Some very hard boys in the Blue Bear lot, so Mary Lou liked to have Ferdy around case one of ’em tried something. But that night there hadn’t been no arguments and they was all sitting around having a drink and relaxing when Ferdy jumps up and says, ‘I’m getting out of this.’ Summing in the way he says it, so Mary Lou looks at him, and he’s dead white, and all he’ll say is summing bad’s coming, summing really bad. Born in a gypsy van, Ferdy, so Mary Lou shrugs and gives him a stack of tenners, and that’s the last she sees of him. Couple of hours later he’s out at the airport with his passport and a ticket, getting on to a plane for Jamaica. Now, there’s a rozzer in plain clothes on the gangway, looking for someone else, not Ferdy at all. Ferdy sees him and knows him but he walks past and is going up the gangway when the rozzer does a double take and calls out to him to come back. It’d only have been a couple of minutes’ chat, see—he couldn’t of stopped him, and he wasn’t wanted, nothing like that. But Ferdy’s that nervous he’s got his gun out—this was before the big hijacks had started, see—and the copper’s dead almost before Ferdy’s finished turning round.”

  “Yes, I remember. He tried to take the plane, didn’t he, but made a mess of it?”

  “’Sright. Funny thing about Ferdy—he was shyer with women than anyone I ever heard of. Kept a deaf and dumb girl, not much younger than what he was, but he treated her more like she was his daughter and he was shy even with her. That’s how Mary Lou managed him, see, but even there it had its disadvantages. Mean as a ferret with men, Ferdy; didn’t mind what he did to them—knock ’em off quick or watch ’em linger, it’s all one. But suppose Mary Lou needed a woman roughed up or scared, she had to hire a different bloke. Well, there was this air hostess top of the gangway, and spite of what she seen Ferdy do she gets out a smile for him—it’s the training, I suppose. Automatic, doesn’t mean nothing, but it hits Ferdy like it was a bit of lead pipe and he stands there, all goofy. Can’t of lasted more’n a second, but the girl spots what’s up—you know how quick some of these tarts are, that sort of thing—and spite of he’s got his gun on her she somehow knows he’s not going to use it and she gives him a shove and gets the door shut and the plane taxis away with Ferdy still on the steps, no hostages, no plane, nothing. And he’s shot a copper for no reason at all, ’cept that he had this hunch that summing bad was coming. He puts his gun in his mouth and knocks hisself off.”

  The interruption to Pibble’s tenuously maintained reasoning processes turned out to have been no such thing. He half-listened as Wilson told the story—dull voice almost a whisper, small eyes studying glistening fingernails—but at the same time he was becoming aware of how hard it is for a certain type of man to take his secrets to the grave. Some do, almost gleefully, the miser’s dead hands still clutching his bag of ducats; but others who have amassed their dangerous knowledge with the same ferocity discover in old age that their lust is for their secrets to live on, where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. Like a millionaire
pouring out his money on some charity that will perpetuate his name, they spill the beans. The Wilson Foundation. No wonder a Chief Super had come down; he’d been on the case long before Tosca died, because Wilson was also a Super. A super-grass. Because of his heart they’d put him into a top-class nursing home, and because of his importance they’d chosen one that was already a fortress, and on top of that they’d given him a bodyguard. With Wilson around, there couldn’t be room for much else in their minds than the idea that Tosca had been killed in order to clear the way toward him. If that was true, the killers had made a mess of it, but at least it meant that the opposition was not squeamish.

  “Is Mary Lou looking for you?” asked Pibble.

  The cold eyes flicked toward him, then back to the fingernails.

  “Fellers with rotten hearts,” said Wilson. “You hadn’t ought to go saying that sort of thing to them. Besides, she’s in Switzerland, last I heard, having her innards taken out. … Meet her ever?”

  “Not to talk to. I saw her years ago. She was a defense witness in two of the cases when we broke the Smith Machine. I don’t remember that she struck me as anything extraordinary.”

  “You wouldn’t say that now, not if you saw her. ’Sides, there must have been summing, you remembering her all that long.”

  “Not really. It was my first big case, though …”