Ellis Peters - George Felse 08 - The House Of Green Turf (3 page)

If he had only known it, he had gone about this oblique approach all too gently; they were on different wavelengths, and communication as he understood it had ceased, though to her mind he had just begun to make sharp and practical sense. She sat up alertly. The word professional had a reassuring sound in her ears. Why not? He was right, what she needed was someone who knew how to set about unearthing lost incidents, someone who put his talents on the market at a fair price, and could be hired to do a specific job on a business footing. In a relationship like that, mutually agreed, there would be no violation of privacy.

‘Would you like me to put your case in the hands of somebody like that, and leave it to him to do your searching for you? And if the expert fails to turn up anything discreditable, then will you be satisfied?’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, ‘oh,
yes
! That’s what I need, somebody completely objective. But I shouldn’t know where to look for the right person, and I don’t want to ask anyone else to… to be an intermediary for me. Find me a good private detective, and I’ll turn the whole nightmare over to him, and abide by whatever he finds.’

His name was Francis Killian, and he was forty-one years old. Strictly speaking, he was not what is usually thought of as a private detective at all, and he never called himself one. The small plate on his office door above the book-shop in Market Street, Comerbourne, said only: ‘Confidential Enquiries,’ and that was precisely what he dealt in. He didn’t touch divorce business or commercial spying; sometimes he wondered why, since he had no very inflated opinion of his own holiness, and there was more money in these lines than in the cold, retired researches he did undertake. An eventful life, which had begun its adulthood with national service in Korea, could hardly leave him many illusions; and even after that unspeakably horrible trap had opened and released him, scarred for life, he had half-chosen and half-drifted into situations and callings which were not for the squeamish. Trying, perhaps, to rediscover disgust as the clean feel it, a luxury out of reach of those already soiled.

So he couldn’t congratulate himself that it was any particular moral purity that had won him a recommendation from one of Comerbourne’s most respectable solicitors to one of Comerbourne’s most eminent surgeons, improbably in quest of a private enquiry agent ‘for a friend,’ of course! All that had kept Francis acceptable to such clients was a fastidious sense of cleanliness, a cold dislike of the feel of dirt. If he still had moral scruples it was from old habit, and they were by no means clearly defined.

He was unmarried and alone. He hadn’t always been alone. He remembered women he had known, too many of them and too intimately, but all past. He expected now to continue alone. You can stand only so much self-exposure and so much self-division; in his case very little, the god head in him was a jealous god. It had been clear to him now for five years that there must be no more women gnawing away at the edges of his integrity. Such as it was! Not the world’s treasure, that was certain; but all the treasure he had and he valued it.

So Francis Killian was a lonely man, in the large sense that precludes any feeling of grievance in being alone. And he worked hard, as men alone do, in dry, precise, painstaking ways that commended him chiefly to the legal profession. Most of his work was done for solicitors, tracing witnesses to accidents, combing ancient church registers, making abstracts of tedious documents; and for scholars and writers, running to earth elusive authorities, compiling précis of acts and regulations, searching records for lost details. Sometimes he traced lost persons, too, and even lost ancestries, some of them better lost for good. Occasionally he consented to undertake a shadowing job, where a witness was liable to abscond, or worried parents wished to keep a wary eye on a young son’s questionable associates.

Dealing with documents was clean, sterile, congenial business that neither moved nor disturbed him, and that was what counted. It brought him in a modest living, and in money for its own sake he had no great interest. Indeed he had reached a midway breathing-space in his life when he had only a detached interest in anything, and what mattered most to him was to have the ground about him cleared of all encumbering passions and all human entanglements, like a man who finds it necessary to throw away all his possessions in order to feel free.

There were still things in the world, however, that gave him positive, profound, irresistible pleasure, burdening him with a kind of obligation to look again at a human race which could occasionally produce perfection. The first and greatest of these unwilling relationships he had was with music. Against the grain he conceded that there must still be hope for a species which had produced Mozart.

So against his instincts he agreed to consider stepping out of character to oblige Maggie Tressider. He thought of her as a voice rather than a woman, but the voice needed a human vehicle, and according to the old man the vehicle, the superb mechanism that produced that inimitable sound, was seriously threatened. Her recovery, he said, was being impeded by an obsession.

Any other name, and Francis Killian would have astonished and affronted his visitor by saying no. Obsessions were not in his line.

The old man wasn’t enjoying his errand. He would much rather have handed her over to the head-shrinkers, of course, and kept it, as it were, in the family. He had entered the office stepping with the delicacy of a duchess slumming, and been curiously disarmed, even reassured, by the pale, austere, orderly room, as clinical in its way as his own consulting-room. He too could appreciate professionalism. But the man behind the desk had cancelled out the soothing effect of his own environment. There would always be something ambivalent about Francis, however gravely he comported himself, a faint aura of self-caricature, as if in despising mankind he could never completely conceal his despite against himself.

If Gilbert Rice could have retreated then, he would have done it; but Rattray, Rattray, Bell and Rattray—all four of them—had testified that this man was secret, reliable and conscientious, and to open the case to yet another operative was unthinkable. And Francis redeemed himself. At the mention of Maggie’s name he froze, abandoning whatever he had been about to say, and sat thinking for a long minute, honestly eye to eye with his visitor. Then he said: ‘Tell me about it. If I can help Miss Tressider, I will.’

‘You understand, it is she who insists on employing a private detective. I… it was a misunderstanding. I would have preferred to recommend a psychiatrist. But Miss Tressider is a strong-willed woman, and very clear about her own state of mind. Whether it is a psychiatrist or a detective she needs, the fact remains that she can only be helped with her own co-operation, and she absolutely refuses a psychiatrist.’

Francis readjusted his image of her at once; she might, indeed, be rejecting what she most needed, but a woman who knew her own mind so firmly might well be a reliable witness. His own instinct, had anyone proposed to meddle with his mind, would have been to defend his flawed privacy to the death. The unknown woman who was Orpheus, who was Eboli, who was disembodied beauty shut in a body by some cosmic paradox, moved a step nearer to him.

‘And you think,’ said Francis shrewdly,‘ that the first step in curing her is to act as if you’re taking her preoccupation seriously. In short, I shall be fulfilling my only useful function by going through the motions of trying to trace the thing that’s worrying her. In that case, the answer is no. If I enter her employ I shall do my best for her, and it’s from her I shall take my orders. If she wants me to look for a skeleton in her cupboard, I shall look for it. I may even find it. But I can’t be hired to jolly her along towards recovery by
pretending
to look for it.
You
don’t believe,’ he said curiously, ‘that there’s really anything to be found, do you?’

After a struggle with his distaste and distrust, Gilbert Rice surprised him. ‘Yes,’ he said flatly,‘ there is something. Almost certainly something. I’ll be quite open with you, Mr. Killian. In my judgment Miss Tressider is a person of quite exceptional generosity and integrity, who has fared rather badly in her personal relationships. She comes from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family—you understand, I am using current terms simply because they are useful in establishing a picture—whose other members have sponged on her from the beginning of her celebrity without shame and without gratitude, and privately resent her pre-eminence as much as they publicly rejoice in it. I believe she has behaved towards all her relatives and associates with great loyalty, which in her heart she knows very well is cast on stony ground. I think it is entirely possible that once, just once, she rebelled and recoiled, that just once she turned and tore somebody, in a protest which was overdue. I suppose it’s even possible that there was a disastrous result, for someone who surely deserves little sympathy. She is incapable of real malice or meanness. But her standards are high. I think from her point of view there may well be something to regret. I believe it would be better if she knew what it was, and could be forced to accept it. You need not be afraid of the result, if you do run the thing to earth. She has a sense of responsibility to the rest of us too. Whatever you find, you won’t destroy her, you can only liberate her. She knows of what a marvel she is the custodian.’

Fantastic, Francis thought, shaken clean out of his objectivity. This antique pillar of society, thirty years established, father and grandfather, suddenly wrenching his heart open over a neurotic young woman he never saw before, because some accident of nature gave her the voice of an archangel. And how if he’s right? How if she really needs to be rid of an incubus that might kill her? No more immortal Orpheus, only that lament on a gramophone record, slowly paling for want of new, living breath. Stiff little, grey little stuffed shirt as he might be, Maggie Tressider’s surgeon had the courage of his convictions.

‘I take it,’ said Francis carefully, drawing the classic profile of Orpheus on the half-filled page of notes before him, ‘that the best thing I can do is come and talk to Miss Tressider during ordinary visiting hours… This evening?’

He went home and played the Gluck records. She was better even than he remembered her. It was not a dark, weighty, velvet contralto, but agile, thrilling and true, a quality in it that sheared through the heart like pure pain, like love itself, excising everything of lesser urgency. It was the voice the old man was in love with, of course. No face could live up to it, much less the heart and the being that went with the face.

She had a crooked mouth in photographs, and a wide, defensive glance, like a child’s, and a more than usually asymmetrical face, larger on the right side.

Well, there was the voice to be saved.

She was sitting up in bed when he came, looking exactly like all those other women in the long ward next door, polished and brushed and neatly tucked in for visiting-time. She had even the same half-apprehensive, half-expectant look as they had, and her eyes like theirs enlarged in a face blanched and honed to transparency by the experience of suffering, turned towards the doorway of her room as soon as his hand touched the handle, and transfixed him as he entered with their blue intensity. She looked glad, and eager, and afraid; exactly as if he had really been a personal visitor, and one to whom she had long looked forward.

‘Miss Tressider? My name is Killian.’

‘It’s very good of you,’ she said, ‘to come so promptly.’ Her speaking voice was low-pitched, warm and vibrant. ‘Please sit down. I believe Mr. Rice has explained to you what’s worrying me?… what I want you to find out for me?’

It seemed that everything was to be conducted with despatch, practically, as between business associates, without any suggestion of anguish. Unless, he thought a moment later, you looked too closely at the fine-drawn lines of her face, which had still something of the chill of shock about them, the faint, reflected image of death as it missed its hold on her, or deeply enough into the wide, wild stare of the eyes to discover the fixed, silvery gleam of panic behind their honest, well-mannered blueness. She shopped for the commodity she needed with the directness of a child, but there was nothing childish about her need.

It was illuminating, too, that the paperbacks he had brought with him came as a shock to her, and an embarrassment. When he laid them on the bed convenient to her hand she touched them blankly, and didn’t know what to do or say. The thanks came mechanically, and what was really on her mind couldn’t find words. How right he had been to pass up roses! Unless, of course, he wanted her to withdraw the offer of this job? He still wasn’t clear about that, but if he had wanted it, roses would have been as good a way as any of making sure. He wasn’t here to have any personal relationship with her, she mustn’t be touched. All that he must inevitably discover about her she would countenance and assist as case-notes necessary to the job, but never as the impalpable web of a man’s understanding. This would have to be strictly clinical. So much the better; that suited Francis.

‘It seemed advisable to be as convincing a visitor as possible,’ he said dryly, ‘and you’ll have observed that they never come empty-handed. The women in the ward might not notice. The staff certainly would. I take it I’m right in thinking that
only
Mr. Rice is in your confidence?’

‘Oh,’ she said, flushing, ‘I see! Yes of course, that was thoughtful of you. I thought… I was rather afraid that you might be too well known to pass unnoticed, in any case.’

‘I’m hardly the celebrity type of detective,’ he assured her, amused and disarmed. ‘Few of us are, if the truth be told. Nobody here is likely to know who I am or what I do, and your privacy needn’t be compromised.’

‘That’s what I should prefer, if it’s possible. But of course you must include the books and everything in your expenses.’

The tone was perhaps a little arrogant, but so, in all probability, had his been.

‘We can come to an agreement about all that later,’ he said. ‘Since our time’s limited, what I think you should be doing now is lying back and relaxing, while you tell me yourself about this experience that made you send for me. By this time I take it you’ve found a way of surrendering yourself into the hands of doctors when you have to? Consider me one more in the same category. Close your eyes and shut me out if it makes it any easier. Most of us do that with doctors, when the handling begins.’

‘And dentists,’ said Maggie unexpectedly, and smiled.

‘And dentists.’ It might, he conceded ruefully, be a better analogy. ‘I shall have to take notes. You won’t mind that? They’ll all be destroyed, afterwards.’

‘Yes, I understand.’ She let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘I want to do everything that may help you to find out… what it is that’s haunting me. You understand, I must know. There’ll be no peace for me, no possibility of living normally, unless I know.
He
wanted me to put it out of my mind, but I can’t do that. If I’ve done somebody a terrible wrong, and now for the first time I
feel
what I’ve done, how can I just push it away and pretend I know nothing about it? Then he wanted me to put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist. Why should I do that? I don’t want it rationalised out of existence, if it really does exist,
I want it put right
! I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly fixing those disturbing eyes upon his attentive face, ‘if you find all this a little unbalanced. All that got through to me was the fact of my guilt. It’s because I can’t give a rational account of the thing that I need you. Do
you
think I’m out of my wits?’