One Foot in the Grave Read online

“Got you. The Smith Machine. There was a bent copper working for ’em, and a big ’un. Now, what was his name?”

  “Richard Foyle.”

  “Right. A knight in shining armor with dirty underpants, that’s him. And you was the young copper who opened it all up. And Mary Lou … now, I heard summing about her in that case. What was it? I hadn’t nothing to do with the Smith Machine myself, but somebody told me long after, when we was talking about Mary Lou … got it. She wanted the Smith brothers sent down, spite of being a witness on their side, and she did her best to see that’s what happened. Right?”

  Pibble closed his eyes and tried to dredge the image out of the quicksands. A pale child, dark, petite, nervous, biting her knuckles before she answered; starting well, then a faint hesitation and a recovery. A rather ordinary sort of girl—older than she looked, one came to realize—but a good choice by the defense for an alibi witness, ordinary and credible. Pouncer Malahide rising to cross-examine. The witness suddenly more nervous. The first self-contradiction. Pouncer doing his stuff. Witness going to bits, defiant and pathetic. Stir in court, a shared shiver of triumph along police spines—the alibi wouldn’t wash after all. The Smiths were going down.

  “I wonder if you’re right,” said Pibble. “It certainly didn’t strike me at the time.”

  “It wouldn’t, not with Mary Lou. Remember what happened to the Smiths?”

  “They got into a fight in Parkhurst. One of them died.”

  “And the other just didn’t—got his skull bashed in, though, and his brain went sort of soggy. Spent the rest of his life in a home, and not so cushy as this place, neither. I sometimes wonder if Mary Lou didn’t lay that fight on, somehow. She wouldn’t fancy the Smiths coming out, trying to pick up where they left off, would she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was, of course, possible. On the other hand even apparently dispassionate historians like Wilson could become ensnared by the glamour of power, the common belief among criminals that everything that happens has been arranged for the advantage of one of the moguls of violence.

  “How long ago was all that?” said Wilson. “Twenny-five years?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Much as that? Water under the bridge, uh?”

  If it was, then there must be some kind of eddy in time, set up by the bridge itself, for whenever Pibble stared over the coping he saw Foyle’s face trapped there, turning and turning. He watched another peppermint flicker and vanish from the pad on Wilson’s lip, and seized on it as the chance to turn the talk away from Foyle and the Smiths.

  “Did you find it difficult to give up?” he asked.

  “I’ve not bloody given up. Just laying off—part of the contract, see? But soon as this job’s done with, I’m taking my cash and flying out to Bermuda or someplace where I can sit on the beach all day with a fresh box of Havanas beside my chair and watch the bathing girls do-dahing along the sand. P’raps the cigars will kill me, p’raps they won’t, but one thing—I’m not going to die of sucking bloody Polos.”

  Pibble made a sympathetic mumble, and Wilson leaned forward, apparently roused for the first time.

  “What else is there, my age?” he asked. “Girls? No thanks, except to look at. Never been much of a drinker, neither. But a good cigar, now … I shall miss George for that.”

  “Uh?”

  “My chauffeur, see? Took me out for a bit of a drive, fine days, where I could have a smoke in the back of the Jag without Miss Innocence or someone coming along and sniffing what I been up to.”

  “I see. … What did you make of Tosca?”

  Wilson leaned back in his chair and considered.

  “Kind of life I’ve lived,” he said, “you see a lot of rubbish. You don’t run into a lot of fellers what you respect, if you follow me. You get used to rubbing shoulders with all kinds of scum, and it doesn’t bother you. You take what you want of them and you leave the rest. So you won’t tell me I’m contradicting myself when I say I quite liked young George, but I knew he was rubbish. He needn’t of been but he was, and I’ll tell you for why. Because he fancied George Tosca so much. F’rinstance, he’d read a lot of books—always on about his reading—but he’d hardly thought about anything, ’cepting as it affected George Tosca. Vanity made him stupid, spite of him having his share of brains and more. Listen, you remember we was talking about how it might of turned out you being a villain and me being a rozzer?”

  “Uh.”

  “I give you a caper with a bit of class, didn’t I? Sunny Macavoy—he’s got class, all right. But if George had been a villain, he’d have been a ponce and nothing more. Yes, and not one of the gentle ones, neither. He had it in for women—you know the sort. Told me once he’d made a list of all the girls here and was crossing them off as he laid them. I dessay that’s what he was up to in that room of his in the tower.”

  The wing of the nightmare brushed at Pibble’s consciousness. He pushed it away.

  “Was Tosca bent?” he asked.

  “Depends what you mean. Bent enough to slip a box of Havanas into the glove pocket before we went out driving and take a tenner off me for the service—that what you mean?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “He’d have bent more, and you wouldn’t have had to wait long for it, neither. You must of met ’em, the fellers what gets a satisfaction out of doing wrong and telling themselves it’s all right because it’s them that’s doing it.”

  Wilson knew his world, Pibble thought. There had been a touch of that sort of megalomania in Richard Foyle.

  “You want to make anything of it?” said Wilson. “Wasn’t a lot of opportunity for his going bent down here, was there?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been wondering. If he wasn’t stupid … if he knew the threat to you was serious … I mean, bodyguards get killed as often as the people they’re supposed to be guarding … so you’d expect him to take his job seriously, if only because of the danger to himself. But he didn’t. Made himself snug in the tower, never varied his rounds. … Suppose he had been in touch with someone—they’d pay for news of your whereabouts, wouldn’t they—then he might believe that he wasn’t in any danger …”

  “It’s a thought,” said Wilson, calm as ever. “Yes, it’s a thought. You mention this to Mr. Crewe?”

  “No.”

  “I think you better.”

  “But …”

  “Come better from you, see? I don’t want him thinking. … Not that there’s all that to be scared of, now. If it was Mary Lou had George knocked off, she done a dumb thing. Before that, the rozzers had to keep their heads down, pretend they wasn’t no such thing. Now with a murder to investigate, Mr. Crewe can put as many as he wants in here and no one’s going to pass remarks. Still and all, I’d be glad if you told him what you just said.”

  “All right. Including your cigars?”

  “Leave that out, cock, will you?”

  “All right. … These drives Tosca took you on, I suppose they were appointments to meet Chief Superintendent Crewe?”

  “’Sright. Better’n taking the risk of his getting followed down here, see. You got your wits about you, anchew?”

  “It comes and goes.”

  “Don’t give me that. Miss Innocence, she says it’s only your legs letting you down.”

  “Ur.”

  “And that’s why I’m still not buying that crap about you hearing a shot. You knew what you was doing all right, dinchew?”

  “Ur.”

  Pibble was already sliding down the pillow, as if by shrinking under the bedclothes he could withdraw his whole self into the safe shell of illness. But Wilson’s presence, which had brought him out of that shell with the bait of interest and amusement, now compelled him with sheer power.

  The chilly eyes watched him, unblinking.

  “What I been thinking i
s this,” said Wilson. “They found me somehow. Mind you, we been pretty careful, but now you given me an idea how it might of been. They sent a feller out either to look the place over or to see if he can’t get a shot at me. I don’t know what happened next. Could of been anything. Some of these young fellers these days, they get themselves so hopped up before a job they don’t know what they’re doing half the time, so George could of got knocked off almost by accident. Or the bloke might of thought he’d get a sight of me from the tower, and George caught him there. … Even if I dunno exactly what happened, it makes a kind of sense. George in his seduction-scene kit, waiting for that night’s bit of skirt to come tiptoeing in, all shy. … And what does he get? A hit man from Mary Lou. Yes, I can see it. What I still can’t see is where you come in. You follow me? If I know what’s going on, even when it’s bad for me, then I can deal with it. But where there’s summing as doesn’t fit into the picture, then p’raps that means I got the picture all wrong. I don’t like it.”

  At last Pibble managed to withdraw his gaze from the pale eyes. He closed them with a sigh and lay still. Blurrily a scene began to form in his mind but refused to coalesce. A collage of heroines with Lillian Gish faces crowded the tower stairs, swooned at what they saw on the leads, bent to remove some clue which would in fact have proved their innocence and flickered wide-eyed into the storm. …

  “Lessee if I can get out of this chair,” said Wilson.

  Pibble opened his eyes and watched him rise. The body seemed to make no hideous effort, but a shadow of doubt—possibly even pain—twitched across the clay-colored features. Wilson stood for a few seconds, withdrawn and silent, then nodded and shuffled toward the bed. Pibble stared up at him.

  “Now see here, cock,” said Wilson. “It ain’t no use you lying there playing gaga. I’m not leaving you alone till you tell me what reelly happened. You never heard no shot, for a start. That’s right, innit?”

  “Ur.”

  “So what was you doing, climbing the tower?”

  “Nothing to do with you.”

  “Reelly? Nothing to do with me? Or George Tosca? Or Mary Lou Isaacs?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t tell me no more?”

  “No.”

  Wilson stood for a while, his hand teasing thoughtfully at his distorted lip. Pibble could feel the moral energy fading and the weariness of old age becoming a different kind of bond between them. Suddenly Wilson gave a joyless little smile.

  “You was always a straight copper, they tell me,” he said. “Well, now I’m going to bend you. We’re going to do a deal. Your end is you forget to tell Mr. Crewe about me having a few cigars on the side. My end is I don’t mention as you been lying about them shots. Right?”

  “Ur.”

  “So long. Stay bent then, cock.”

  4

  Incoherence would not quite come. The world was a desert, lit by an exhausted sun, but no monsters stalked there. The rocks were eroded into no particular shape, and the uninteresting scrub put forth a few drab leaves. Any liveliness of thought flickered like a lizard and was gone. Still, it was a daylight world, and the things in it stayed the same shape they always had been. Wilson was a villain helping the police. The body on the tower had belonged to a half-bent copper with a stamp collector’s attitude to women. And Jenny’s lips had been icy—she had come straight to Pibble from outside, and had bedded down old Turnbull out of roster, because he wouldn’t notice.

  Unable to perform the mind swap into the preferable horrors of delirium, Pibble refused to contemplate these dreary truths. Instead, like the doomed prospector trudging across that desert, he kept his head bent and watched the movement of his own feet. Repetition. Habit. Habit. Repetition. Comfort. Tedium. In a poky little room a man could impose his own repetitions on his context. By putting his shoes in a precise place by the broken chair, by learning to wedge the self-opening door of the wardrobe until he does it without knowing he has done it, he proves his control of his kingdom. He can control time, too, by never eating the snack that passes for supper until he has read at least two pages of yesterday’s Guardian (filched from the dustbin where the neighbor with the artificial leg puts it—also by habit—each morning). But in sickrooms, as in prison cells, these kingdoms are invaded. Unwilled repetitions are imposed by the machinery of the place, and by diminishing the man’s control, they whittle his life away.

  There had been a prison cell once—at Pentonville, was it?—police seldom see men in their cells, but there’d been a strangling in the cell next door. A short, white tunnel, gray square of window, two beds, one hard chair, soil bucket, locker, one picture—ship in full sail—taped to wall. No blankets on second bed. Prisoner—small, soft-spoken, earnest, unalarmed—had noticed nothing. Curious sense, emanating somehow from sailing picture, but filling whole room, of pure order, imposed by the prisoner himself. As if the picture had been placed there after a long process of measurement and decision, and could now never fit anywhere else. Conversation with warder outside cell door: “That’s not much help. Pity there’s only one of him. I thought you were overcrowded.” “Can’t put anyone in with him, sir. He drives them all mad. He’s so bloody happy.”

  A discomfort which habit has learnt to cope with can be more comfortable than a habit imposed from outside. Threadbare blankets folded double seem somehow to give a more living warmth to an old body that has taught itself to huddle into half a bed than fluffy bedclothes smoothed and tucked in, with hospital corners, at the exact minute when the hospital schedule demands that the bed should be remade. To know this, to be self-aware as Pibble usually was, does not prevent one from snarling at the innocent who makes the bed. And where love intervenes, or tries to, a tetchy jealousy crawls out to greet it.

  Mrs. Finsky came round with the lunch trays. Pibble managed to divert his lust to hurt her into a smile, sweet and feeble, and a claim not to be hungry. She stared at him for a moment with her glittering black eyes, then with an if-that’s-how-you-want-it shrug took the tray away. Hungry at once, he lay and stared at the ceiling. Saliva spurted, and he had to swallow energetically to avoid dribbling. The sense of having been cheated, cheated by no one but himself, filled his universe. Nothing else mattered. There was nothing he could do about it. Now, like an ambush, the longed-for incoherence gripped him. He was starving, had been left to starve in the horrible room in Hackney, left to die. … He was aware of tears streaming down his cheeks, and furious with himself for weeping so, he was on parade at Hendon with his legs quite bare and his face streaming with tears. …

  “Are you all right, Mr. Pibble?”

  “Ur?”

  “Look, I’ve brought your lunch. Jenny said …”

  He managed to shake the dream away and open his eyes. Maisie was standing by the bed, her soft cow eyes looking amazed with trouble.

  “Just a bad dream,” he managed to mumble.

  “Mrs. Finsky said … but Jenny said …”

  “All right.”

  “Do you want me to … she said … she didn’t want to go … her mother …”

  Clearer now, back in the real desert, Pibble blinked at these shreds of meaning. Maisie was Dr. Follick’s personal nurse, but stood in for some of the other nurses on their days off. She and Jenny had adjoining rooms in the staff quarters, slightly cut off from the other nurses by being on the other side of the stairs. Jenny was fond of her, and grew angrily protective if you suggested that there was anything odd about her mental makeup. “Look, she passed her exams, and you can’t do that if you’re thick. And she’s good at her job, too—the Follicle wouldn’t put up with her if she wasn’t. She’s all right, I tell you!” But even Jenny couldn’t have denied the oddness of Maisie’s physical appearance. Though not the most beautiful of the Flycatchers bevy, she was almost ludicrously the most striking; tallish, thin to emaciation, stretched neck bearing a tiny, pale, small-featured face framed in a dahl
ia-like flurry of bright orange hair.

  “I can manage, thanks,” he said.

  That seemed to be the right answer, confirming the rest of the interpretation: Tuesday, Jenny’s day off, which she spent with her mother. She had told Maisie to see that Pibble ate, and spoon-feed him if necessary, but then Mrs. Finsky had said he didn’t want his lunch. …

  “We’ve all got to do what Jenny tells us,” he added.

  “Yes! Oh, yes!”

  She put the tray down and bent to help him up the pillows. Her mantis-like arms were extraordinarily strong.

  “Jenny says I’ve got to …”

  “. . . stop and see that I eat it. If you like. And I’ll probably need a wipe-up afterwards—the messy slops they give invalids. How’s Lord Hawkside?”

  “He’s all right. I think. He’s always gentle and kind with Marianne, but there’s that woman he says is his sister, the Comtesse de la Folie. She can’t be—I mean she’s French and he’s English—so I can’t help feeling he’s lying about her. But if he’s a liar …”

  Maisie had spoken with a sudden rush of energy, as though the adventures of these shadowy puppets were all she really wanted to talk about, all in a sense that was real to her. Presumably the scheming Comtesse would turn out to be only Lord Hawkside’s step-sister, the result of a foreign entanglement on the part of his father, who had later enjoined him to help and protect the unworthy creature. There had been a lot of coaching lore in the book so far, so possibly the Comtesse was going to die in a coaching accident; her one virtue seemed to be her vigor with the whip; no hint, of course, that she might use it on anything but horses. Ah, yes, the cliff road—she’d go over there, in a wild midnight dash to escape the consequences of her plots. … Pibble had once made the mistake of telling Maisie what was going to happen in her current book, and had thus ruined the reality of it for her. Jenny had been quite angry. So now he kept his guesses to himself, and only discussed the current state of play in the surprisingly intricate stories.

  “If you can lie about one thing, you can lie about anything, can’t you?” said Maisie.