One Foot in the Grave (10 page)

“That reminds me,” she said. “I couldn't ask you yesterday. Your hat's vanished.”

“Blew off, I'm afraid, my dear. Sorry. Only thing I can call my own, as the lady said to Dr. Joh—”

She had taken three quick strides across the room and was staring down at him.

“You were going outside all along,” she whispered.

“Ur?”

“You were going outside all along. You put your hat on. That story about waiting for George in the kitchen and him not coming. …”

She gripped his hand with both of hers and pressed it, hard, as though trying to extrude the truth from him. He lay still, gazing up, as the fences of his carefully reconstructed Eden withered and the desert rolled in. In a second she would guess the truth.

“Coat,” he murmured. “Put on coat. Put on hat. Don't think about it. Coat. Hat. See if you can find it, Jenny.”

She shook her head slowly.

“Your friend Mike came yesterday. I told him you weren't up to seeing him. I think he really wanted to talk to you. He said you were one of the best detectives he'd ever met, in a certain sort of case. He said this was it. … Jimmy, you knew all along, or guessed. You went to look.”

“I want my hat. It's mine.”

He had summoned this wish as a defense against her, but not it was all he could think about. Without his own hat, his last worldly possession, he would cease to be Jimmy Pibble, become a zombie, animated only to wear the alien clothes in the cupboard, to be an object for Jenny to nurse, a fraction of the Flycatchers' income.

“Honestly!” she snapped, then laughed. “I'll try to find your stupid hat for you. When did it blow off?”

“Going along the colonnade.”

“I thought you didn't remember any of that.”

He said nothing. She nodded and turned herself, like a car passenger who can only read a map in the direction of travel. Wind over her right shoulder—she knew that—he could almost feel its rush; could she too?

“Out there,” she said, pointing decisively. “Those bushes by the croquet lawn. If it's not there it'll have blown all the way to Godalming.”

“If they haven't found it already,” he said.

She swung back, head cocked on one side, half smiling and half frowning, improvising the charade.

“If they have … I suppose you can still tell them it's yours. That bit about your coat. You can make them believe that, can't you?”

“Ur.”

“I think you're quite extraordinary! This sort of thing
and
Dr. Johnson. What did he say to the lady, anyway?”

“Madam, do you call my heart nothing?”

She bent as if to look at his hand, which she was still clasping in hers. She lifted it slightly, put it down and let it go, then looked at him.

“About his hat?”

“No, about her coffeepot. But it's the wrong way round. You're supposed to be saying it to me.”

“Do I have to call you madam?”

“Ur.”

Waking again. He was the yokel at the fair, tricked every time by the illusion. Under which flowerpot lurks the stuffed mouse? There, surely … no, only the emptiness of dream. But through several layers of nonwaking rambled the same figure. As far as he knew he had never before dreamed about any of the inhabitants of Flycatchers—they belonged to their own nonworld—but now, of all people, Colonel McQueen kept trying to break into the misty adventures, more nonsensical even than usual, and tell Pibble something that mattered. In one of the last layers before true waking the message at last came through. Pibble was sitting on a sunlit beach, on a hard upright chair. He was about forty. The sand and sea were quite empty. Then the dream surface quivered, and he and Mary, still on the beach, were playing bridge. It must be an immense tourney. The tables spread all along the sand. The cards in his hand had no cohesion. He made a plan, but when he started to play to it, the necessary elements were no longer there. Colonel McQueen, playing at a neighboring table, flung down his hand and said, “The rest are mine.” After that Pibble and McQueen were paddling in the thin froth of the wave margins and McQueen was saying, “Of course it looked hopeless, but there was one distribution which could save me, so I played as if it was true. And it was.”

At this point, still some time before dawn, Pibble woke. He lay for a while, registering the message at first and then discovering its total unimportance. He slept again, without apparent dreams, but his mind must have continued on its own erratic course, because when he woke to face the day it had made itself up. He would assume that Jenny had been out on the night of the murder and had gone to the tower, but she had not been the latest on Tosca's target list, and she had not killed him, either. So far, so good—that was the assumption. Now he had to satisfy himself that it was true.

6

P
ain—or rather soreness. Pibble sat in the outer of the two offices, which the police were using as an incident room, and waited. Outside the window, beyond a ridge of roof, a scurry of sharp-edged clouds moved north behind a bat-winged cedar. A uniformed constable had given up his chair to him and was leaning against the wall by the door, and a plainclothes sergeant sat at a desk, busy on the familiar task of reducing a mess of notes to typed coherence.

Dressing had not been easy—harder than on the night of the “adventure,” in fact; the bruised muscles of his left leg had grumbled and almost mutinied; nor had they liked the cautious walk through the corridors. But he had not allowed himself to think about pain until it was over, and then he discovered that it had not really counted as pain at all. True pain, the proper shrilling fire, nowadays lived deeper in. Though the anguished nerves might be on the surface, something told him that its source lay near the marrow, or in the nooks around the diaphragm. Surface injuries no longer hurt with the old urgency. It was as though morale at the frontiers had half collapsed; a few lackadaisical nerve endings might tap out messages of insult by the outer world—Pibble could almost see them, slouched in their patched and windswept guard posts and gazing in a weary stupor at the latest horde of wild bacteria to sweep yelling through the passes—but true pain no longer seemed like an invader. Any day now it would be applying for naturalization papers.

The idea still frightened him. He had never experienced prolonged pain of that order, but he had seen it.
A boy writhing in a doorway off the Portobello Road; Scottie Mason had helped Pibble drag him there while they waited for the ambulance, because his writhings threatened to smash the spindle-legged furniture in the shop. In the streetlights the boy's face was blue-purple; he screamed and contorted into impossible attitudes; foam frothed his lips. Scottie and Pibble could not look at each other, nor at the boy; they were helpless, pierced by the screams and the pain, no notion what to do. Windows were slamming up, heads peering out. … Somebody must have phoned the shopkeeper, who arrived after the ambulance had left, whispering, scholarly, unappalled. He had shown them the snake. His safe, you see, was almost as old as the furniture in the shop, so he had kept the snake in there. The boy, presumably, had put his hand in, in the dark. … Lansdowne Crescent next morning. Smart little front garden,
Magnolia stellata
in full flower with flame-colored tulips beneath it. Boy's father a chancery lawyer, doing well;
mother attractive, down-to-earth; boy their only. Both stricken
—
but they hadn't had to stand like Pibble and Scottie by that doorway and listen to the boy dying. …

“'Lo, Jimmy. Glad to see you up.”

He glanced up and saw that Mike Crewe had come in from the outer door and was standing there, actually looking pleased at the sight of him.

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Mike.

“Scottie Mason.”

“Villain?”

“No. On the beat with me—Notting Hill, before the war. Left to join up. Got killed, I think. Africa.”

“Friend of yours, though?”

“Not really. Just the same station. Saw the same. …”

Pibble let his voice trail off, but Crewe interpreted the horrors from it. He nodded.

“Some things you don't forget,” he said. “Come in. Shall I give you a hand?”

“No. I can manage if I take it slowly … there.”

Mike held the door of the inner office and Pibble followed him in. The two rooms, unlike most incident rooms, were real offices, but already the police flavor hung strong around them, the sense of being worked in at all hours, of boredom laced with strain, of papers not processed and filed as in an ordinary office, but endlessly reread and recombined in the hope that with each sifting a missed nugget might emerge. Cass was sitting at the desk, staring at the ceiling. He looked less pleased than Mike had to see Pibble.

“Got your man, then, Chief?” he said. “The least likely person, I notice. That's what I call artistic.”

“It's part of his world-domination plan,” said Mike. “Which chair'll suit you, Jimmy? No, stay where you are, Ted. Anything new?”

He tweaked an upright chair round and sat on it with its back support jutting up between his thighs and his arms folded across the top. The light from the window fell half sideways across his face, emphasizing how the smooth, almost babyish contours Pibble remembered had been weathered by the gritty wind of the years.

“One bit,” said Cass. “More on my side than on yours. Remember me saying that the kitchen staff had a little more to give? I've got it now. They were supposed to hang on till Tosca turned up to close the mortise lock behind them, but they didn't that night because the Irish lady's nephew was playing in a football match and it was on the telly, so when Tosca was late they just slid away and left the door on the Yale. He was supposed to be there at eight-twenty, and they gave him ten minutes extra.”

“How do you fit it in?” said Mike.

“Two points. From eight-thirty anybody could have got out of the house.”

“They'd have to know.”

“Maybe. The other point is, why didn't Tosca show? Perhaps he was dead already.”

“Not if Jimmy heard the shot.”

“Cedar banging off. Eight-thirty's well inside the pathologist's limits.”

“You can't have them both. If he was dead already, whoever did it couldn't have gone through the kitchen. The staff were still there.”

“Then I'll take point two.”

Mike nodded, outwardly accepting the argument as sound but at the same time somehow boring—an angle he didn't want to think about. Pibble was aware of a tension between the two policemen, not originally of dislike, but of a disagreement that could eventually build into animosity. It wasn't easy for either of them, clearly, with their different ranks and loyalties and interests in the case.

“You got anything, Chief?” said Cass.

“Not me. Jimmy has, though.”

“Ur!”

“I called on our friend on my way in—that's why I'm late. He says you've got an angle, Jimmy.”

“Wilson?”

“That's the boy. I'm glad you've had a word with him. I'll be interested to know what you make of him.”

“Big fish.”

“He tells me you spotted who he was.”

“What he was. I don't know his real name, but he good as told me the rest.”

“He
does
like an audience. Yes, he's big—bigger than he realizes—if we can use him. You remember how it goes: You get a quiet period with the usual bit of random bother in it, and perhaps you relax; then you get a period with the bother still random, but somehow on a bigger scale—that's where we are now, by my reckoning; and then all of a sudden, while you've been sitting on your backside, you find the villains have got themselves organized, a whole new generation have learnt the trade, they've sorted out their pecking order, invented new sorts of villainy and new ways of pulling old jobs, and zap, they're on top. This time, if all goes right, they won't be on top and half of 'em will be inside.”

“If you can use him?”

“Grasses! Batty Perrin, for instance. Came in with a list as long as your arm of the men who'd been working the lorry capers all over the North-West. The judges threw the whole lot out.”

“Yes. I read about that. I remember Batty. I was surprised you …”

“Not me, mate. I put in a memo saying it wasn't worth the risk. Half of what Batty gave us were grudge cases, and he was too thick to see what would hold. … But Wilson's different, don't you think?”

“Yes, but even so. …”

Crewe sat for a moment, chewing the knuckle of his thumb.

“Of course it's all very iffy. … D'you think he'll scare, Jimmy? He can't back out, you see. We've got enough to put him down for fifteen years, and he doesn't want to die in jail. But suppose he scared. He might try Batty's line, mixing enough duff gen in to get the whole lot thrown out. Oh, he'd be in trouble, but he might
think
he'd get away with it, telling us he'd kept his side of the deal and the villains that he had done them a favor. So it matters whether he'd scare.”

“You mean they couldn't get at Wilson, so they killed Tosca to scare him?”

“It's one theory. I can't say I care for it much—for one thing they'd need to know that Tosca was that easy to get at.”

“He doesn't seem to have taken his job very seriously.”

“He was top of his course for pistol shooting,” said Crewe, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Ditto for unarmed combat­. Ditto for emergency driving. Second for swimming. Straight As for the paperwork. IQ a hundred and thirty-something. Tee­totaler. … Just the man for the job, apart from being a rank bad policeman. Wilson says you've got an idea about him.”

“It's hardly even that, but … suppose your theory's right, you've still got to explain how the villains knew Wilson was here. Also why Tosca was taking his job so casually. He wasn't stupid. He must have worked out that the bodyguard is in just as much danger as the target.”

“
He
told them, you mean?” said Mike. “Yes. … What do you think, Ted?”

“I quite like it,” said Cass, stretching like a waking cat and making the movement into a gesture of interest, almost an apology for earlier boredom: “I was on one of those courses myself, when I was a sergeant. They laid quite a bit of stress on variation of routine. One way or another, he seems to have decided he wasn't in any danger, so he could afford to take it easy and go James-Bonding among the staff here. He seems to have laid half the nurses, Mr. Pibble, and had his sights on the other half.”

“But if you accept that,” said Mike, “you've let the Blue Bear lads into the picture …”

“I didn't say I had, Chief. Tosca could easily have decided there wasn't any danger because your friends didn't know Wilson was here.”

There was a brief silence before Mike turned back to Pibble.

“We've agreed to differ,” he said a little stiffly. “Ted's angle—and I don't blame him for it—is that one of Tosca's girls shot him. He may be right, but I've invested a lot in Wilson, and I can't take any risks … and somehow it doesn't feel like a straightforward lovers' bust-up.”

“It doesn't to you. It does to me,” said Cass, irritation getting the better of subservience.

In the suddenly claustrophobic atmosphere of the incident room (so absurdly more comfortable and convenient than most such camping grounds, with its deep carpet and its warmth and privacy), Pibble could feel the case going sour over this dispute. A little more pushing from Mike, and Cass might become obsessed with proving that one of the nurses had fired the shots, however many Blue Bear hit men might have left their footprints in the grounds that night. A moment of panic prickled at the base of Pibble's spine. He exorcised it by summoning up the image of Colonel McQueen paddling in the never-never wavelets. Cass had got to be wrong. That was now an axiom.

“He was shot in the back of the head,” he murmured.

“Yes,” said Mike. “We've thrashed that out. It's almost the only point Ted will concede …”

“Right,” said Cass. “But I've been thinking. With all those A levels in the martial arts he had, it might be the only way she could get him, sneaking up behind him.”

“That's stretching it,” said Mike. “You find somebody shot close range in the back of the head like that, nine times out of ten it's a gang killing.”

“And one time out of ten it isn't.”

Mike shrugged.

“Besides,” said Cass, “whoever it was hung around a bit and then turned him over.”

“Check if he was dead.”

“I thought these were professionals we were talking about. If they aren't sure, they just put another bullet in, don't they? But what I can see is one of the girls here—one of the nurses, for preference—shooting him, then having a few minutes' hysterics, then calming down and nipping back to see if she'd really done it.”

Mike restrained some retort and turned to Pibble.

“Anything else, Jimmy?”

“I don't know … routine … Tosca's sort of vanity … you'd think he'd prefer to disrupt the existing routine, just to show who was boss. Make them do things his way instead of fitting in with theirs.”

“Maybe. Where does that take us?”

“Well, suppose he knew that something was being planned against Wilson …”

“I get you. If the Blue Bear lads, or whoever, knew his routine, then they could jump him and tie him up and it'd look quite natural. But if they didn't know his movements, and still got him, that might look as if George Tosca allowed himself to be got … and wait a minute, they'd have to meet, here on the ground, to set it up efficiently. They might have had somebody here that night. … What do you think, Ted?”

“Pretty airy-fairy. Besides, if Tosca was bent, from their point of view that's an asset. You don't go bumping your assets off.”

“A quarrel,” suggested Pibble.

“Possible,” said Crewe. “Some of the Blue Bear lot are on a permanent high. You certainly couldn't say they were predictable.”

“You've got no evidence Tosca was bent, even,” insisted Cass.

“Oh, I think so. It rang a bell. It's difficult, isn't it, Jimmy? You've got colleagues who give you a feeling. Nothing you can prove, nothing you can even guess at. What do you do? Even if you've got the powers, you can't go firing men on a hunch.”

“I don't know. Hunches. I think Foyle was before your time, Mike.”

“That's right. Did you know he'd died, Jimmy?”

“Died?”

“Last May, I think. In Sydney, anyway. Ran a security firm there. Did very well—must have been getting on for a millionaire. I expect he managed to hang on to a lot of his loot from the Smiths, to set it up with. You didn't know?”