Death Of A Hollow Man (22 page)

Long afterward, when she was able to look back with some degree of equanimity on the first night of
Amadeus
and its shocking aftermath, Deidre marveled at the length of time it had taken her to realize that there was only one place where her father felt safe and cared for when she was absent. Only one place where he could possibly be.

The day center, Laurel Lodge, was nearly a mile from the middle of town. Two custard-yellow minibuses, Phoenix One and Phoenix Two, collected the elderly and infirm at their homes and ferried them to and from the center each weekday. So Mr. Tibbs knew the way. In fact, it was not complicated. You just took the B416 as if you were going to Slough, then tapered off on a side road toward Woodbum Common. The distance could be covered in about an hour. Or less, if you were running your heart out and pacing yourself against dark, unreasoned fears.

Deidre remembered the center when she had been hunched over the electric fire in the kitchen being urged by the policewoman to swallow some hot, sweet tea and try not to worry. Now, she sat once more in the back of the Escort warmed by the drink and above all by the knowledge that the hopeless, misdirected floundering was over and that they were definitely on their way to where her father would be waiting. She struggled to keep calm, knowing that her attitude was bound to affect the situation when they met.

She couldn’t help worrying, of course. For instance, the place was locked up and there was no caretaker on the premises, so Mr. Tibbs would not have been able to get in. This observation, when first made, had considerably threatened Deidre’s equilibrium. For the building, thoughtfully, even lovingly designed so that its inhabitants would get the benefit of all the light and sunshine available, was made almost entirely of glass. And what if her father, frenziedly searching for Mrs. Coolidge (or Nancy Banks, who made such a fuss over him) harmed himself by hammering on those heavy slabs or, worse, seized a stone from the garden and tried to smash the doors? Suppose he then tried to squeeze through gripping the jagged raw edges … ?

At this point Deidre would wrench her mind from such dreadful fancies and once more wrestle her way toward comparative tranquility. But the idea would not easily be vanquished, and when the car drew up outside Laurel Lodge, and the dark glass structure loomed apparently undisturbed, she felt a great rush of relief.

The iron gates were locked, a token restraint merely, as the grounds were surrounded by a brick wall barely a yard high. The rain had stopped, but there was still a high howling wind. As Deidre staggered across the gravel, her coat streamed out behind her and her cries of “Daddy, where are you? It’s Deidre” were blown back into her mouth as soon as uttered. Constable Watson had a flashlight in his hand, and was testing all the doors and windows and bellowing “Mr. Tibbs?” in what seemed to Deidre a very authoritative, even threatening manner. He disappeared around the side of the building shining his light into each of the five transparent boxes; the workroom and kitchen, the rest room and office, the canteen. Then he came back shouting “He’s not here,” and Deidre, uncomprehending, yelled back, “Yes, yes … somewhere.”

She waved at the surrounding garden, and the man followed the movement with his flashlight. The beam swept an arc of brilliant light over the surrounding lawns and shrubbery. A band of green-gold conifers, waving and soughing like the sea, leaped into sight, then vanished as the flashlight moved on. The flower beds were empty brown sockets, and the shrubs that gave the place its name creaked in the bitter whirling wind. (Deidre had always hated the laurels. They were so coarse and melancholic, and their leathery spotted leaves made her think of the plague.)

She seized PC Watson’s arm, gasped, “We must search,” and started pulling him toward the nearest dark mass of shrubbery. He resisted, and Deidre, turning back, was just about to redouble her efforts when the blistering roar of the wind ceased. The strife-tom trees rustled and groaned for a few moments more, then settled into silence.

Surprisingly—for they were half a mile from the nearest habitation—a dog barked. This was followed by another sound, which, although muffled by the hedge of Leylandii conifers, was unmistakably a human voice. It was calling out, not in any panic-stricken way but with a sonorous, tolling necessity, like a town crier. Deidre moaned, “The lake!,” and flew in the general direction from which the recitations had come. Her companion followed, trying to light her with his flashlight, but she was running so fast and zigzagging so wildly back and forth that he kept losing her. Once she tripped, fell into a flower bed, and scrambled up, her hands and clothes plastered with mud.

In fact, the lake was not a lake at all but a reservoir. A vast natural hollow that had been extended and shaped into a rectangle, then edged with masonry and planted all about with reeds and other vegetation. People were allowed to sail on it in the summer, and it was home to a large variety of birds and small mammals. Nearby was a concrete building surrounded by a high wire fence with a sign attached. It showed a yellow triangle with a jagged arrow and a man lying down and read
danger of death, keep out.
Just as Deidre arrived, the moon, so white it appeared almost blue in the icy air, sailed serenely out from behind a bank of dark cloud. It illuminated an astonishing sight.

Mr. Tibbs was standing rigidly upright in an oarless rowing boat in the very center of the reservoir. His arms were flung wide and, as his fingers were almost precisely aligned with the perfect circle of the reflected moon, he seemed to be holding a new, mysterious world in the palm of his hand. His trousers and shirt were torn, his hair stuck out wildly in all directions, and his forearms and chest were scratched and bleeding. But his face as he stared upward was stamped with such ecstatic bliss that it was as if he saw streams of celestial light pouring from the very gates of paradise.

Mr. Tibbs had an audience of one. A rough-haired, rather shabby brown-and-white mongrel with a plumed tail. He sat bolt upright, his head cocked to one side in an attitude of strained attention, his ears pricked. He paid no attention when the others crashed into view, but kept his eyes (brown and shiny as beechnuts) firmly fixed on the figure in the boat.

“I saw a mighty angel come down from heaven!” cried Mr. Tibbs. “Clothed with a cloud. And a rainbow was upon his head! And his face was as it were the sun. And his feet as pillars of fire!”

While the constable used his radio to organize assistance, Audrey Brierley was hanging on to a struggling Deidre. “We’re getting reinforcements, love,” she said urgently. “And an ambulance. They’ll be here in no time.
Please
calm down. There’s nothing you can do. If you get in there, that’ll be two people we’ll have to pull out. Twice the trouble, twice the risk. Now you don’t want that, do you?” Deidre stood still then. “Good girl. Try not to worry. He’ll be cold and wet, but he’s in no real danger.”

“If any man have an ear, let him hear,” clarioned Mr. Tibbs. Then he flung out his arm in a wide sweep encompassing his human audience of three, the concrete hut, and the scrupulously attentive canine, and fell into the water.

Deidre screamed, Policewoman Brierley hung on anew, and Constable Watson peeled off his heavy tunic, got rid of his boots, and dived in. He kicked out with great difficulty (his trousers were immediately saturated), cursing the fate that had put him on late turn. He attempted a strong crawl toward the dark outline of the boat, and each time he turned his head, a little of the water, freezing cold and tasting richly of mud and iron, slopped into his mouth. He grabbed what he thought was his quarry, only to find himself clutching a huge skein of slimy weed. He swam further in. On his limited horizon the water lapped and bobbed against the sky. Mr. Tibbs’s descent had fractured the immaculate circle of the moon, and it now lay in broken bars of silver around the policeman’s head. He could hear wails from Deidre interspersed with barks from the dog, which, now that the declamation had ceased and the action had started, was running excitedly round in circles.

The policeman reached Mr. Tibbs, hooked an arm around the old man’s neck, and turned him around. To the anguished Deidre, wringing her hands on the bank, her father seemed to spin with graceful ease, but to Jim Watson it was like hauling a hundred-pound sack of potatoes. Thank God, he thought, feeling his arms wrenching in their sockets, the old man wasn’t thrashing about. Indeed, Mr. Tibbs seemed quite unaware that there was any danger in his position at all. He drifted beatifically, cruciformly, on his back. With his rigid, unnatural smile and spreading white hair, he looked like the corpse of a holy man floating in the Ganges. PC Watson plodded on. His arm was almost beating the water in his efforts to keep them both afloat.

Then Mr. Tibbs decided he had had enough and announced his approach to the next world. “We are coming, Lord,” he cried, and made the sign of the cross, poking PC Watson savagely in the eye.

“Christ!” exclaimed the unfortunate constable as an agonizing pain exploded behind his forehead. Mr. Tibbs, no doubt encouraged by this sign of solidarity, twisted himself out of the policeman’s grasp, placed his hands on his rescuer’s shoulders, and sank them both. Jim Watson held his breath, kicked his way violently to the surface, took a fresh lungful of air, and dived again, bringing up Mr. Tibbs.

“Ohhh …” wailed Deidre. “We must
do
something.”

“He’ll be all right.” PW Brierley sounded more confident than she felt. The two pale faces were still a long way from the edge.

“Can’t you go in and help?”

“Then there’d be two of us round his neck.”

“I thought everyone in the police had to be able to swim.”

“Well they don’t,” snapped Audrey Brierley, unpleasantly aware that her uniform was wet and filthy, her hat lost somewhere in the bushes, her tights in shreds, and that she was screamingly, ragingly, desperately dying for a pee. She moved slightly forward, extending her fingertips another inch. The inch that might make all the difference. She said, “Hang onto my legs.”

The dog, as if sensing that the situation was now completely out of his control had crouched quietly down and was looking back and forth from the couple on the edge to the couple in the water with increasing degrees of anxiety.

PC Watson had been unable to seize Mr. Tibbs with his former neat precision and, having awkwardly grabbed at his shoulder, was now lugging rather than towing him. The policeman’s muscles ached almost beyond endurance with the double effort of trying to steer them both to the bank and keep Mr. Tibbs’s head above the water. Also, the old man’s benign attitude had become transformed, no doubt due to his being snatched from the jaws of death against his will, to one of extreme truculence. He flailed his arms and legs about, and gave little wheezy hoots of crossness. Kevin Lampeter, the ambulance driver, said afterward it was as if someone were trying to drown a set of bagpipes. He arrived just after the police reinforcements, who had brought a coil of rope and had drawn PC Watson and his burden to safety.

Deidre immediately flung herself on her father, supporting him and calling his name over and over again. But he shrank away as if from an unkind stranger. The ambulance men persuaded him onto a stretcher, and the bedraggled group limped, staggered, or, in the case of the dog, trotted briskly toward the waiting vehicle. The wall was negotiated with far less ease than previously. PC Watson, a blanket around his shoulders, climbed heavily into the back of the ambulance, and Mr. Tibbs, all the light fled from his countenance, went next. The dog, attempting to follow, was sternly rebuffed.

“You’ll have to take him up front.”

“Oh, but he’s not—” said Deidre, bewildered. “I mean … I don’t know …”

“If you could hurry it up, please, dear. The sooner we get the old man to a hospital, the better.”

Deidre climbed into the cab, but the dog had got there first. When she sat down, he bounded onto her lap, unfurled his plume tail, wrapped it neatly around his hindquarters, and stared intently out of the window all the way to Slough.

Kitty settled herself composedly. She inspected her pretty face, flirted her curls a bit, and accepted a cup of tea from Sergeant Troy with a look that was as good as a wink and then some. Barnaby assumed her sangfroid to be genuine. Given her present position as suspect number one, this argued either great cunning, absolute innocence, or absolute stupidity. Of the three, Barnaby was inclined to favor the latter. He started with formal condolences.

“A terrible business this, Kitty. You must be dreadfully upset.”

“Yeah. Terrible. I am.” Kitty’s azure glance slid sideways and fastened, sweet and predatory, on Troy’s carrot-colored crown. He looked up, met the glance, flushed, smirked, and looked down again.

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to harm your husband?”

“Could’ve been any number of people. He was an absolute pig.”

“I see.” He was obviously not going to have the same problem with the second Mrs. Carmichael that he had had with the first. “You would include yourself among that number?”

“Definitely.”

“But it wasn’t you who removed the tape?”

“Only because I didn’t think of it first.” Bold madam, thought Troy. And get a load of those sweet little oranges.

“Did you and Esslyn arrive together?”

“Yes. I went straight to the dressing room. Got dressed and made up. All of a twitch and tremble I was. Ask Joycey.”

“That was a savage bit of business in Act Two,” said Barnaby, circling closer.

“Bastard. Nearly broke my back.”

“I understand he’d just discovered you’d been having an affair.”

“An affair.”
Dismay, indignation, and comprehension jostled for position on Kitty’s foxy face. “So that was what set him off. How the hell did that get out?”

“You were seen.”

“Charming. Nosy buggers.” She scowled. “Where was I seen?”

“In the lighting box.”

“Oh, no.” Kitty laughed then. A blowsy, coarse chuckle. “Poor old Tim. He’ll be furious.”