One Foot in the Grave (12 page)

“Five out of twelve is a fair score,” said Mike.

“Did he take them to the tower?” asked Pibble.

“No,” said Cass. “Two of them he took off for weekends. He had the use of the Jag, remember. But mostly he used his own room. He'd come and fetch them with his passkey after he'd done his final rounds. You're right about his general attitude. The easygoing ones—the first three—said he was a pretty aggressive lover, and he tired of them (they didn't put it like that) after the first two or three days. The other two, I got the impression the affair lasted quite a bit longer, and he was quite considerate to begin with. It was only when he'd got them trained, so to speak—come when he whistled, beg, lie down, all that—that he got bored.”

“But he didn't give any of them keys,” Mike insisted.

“Not that we know. But suppose he'd really set his heart on laying the whole lot. He'd start with the easy ones and treat them like dirt. With the not-so-easy he'd have to give 'em a bit more, act the gentleman some of the time. But when he got round to the real resisters, he would have to play things their way, give what he didn't want to give and so on.”

“You might be right,” said Mike. “I must say I can't see a man of Tosca's type letting anybody into his room when he wasn't there. I'm not laying that down as a certainty—I'm long past believing you can predict how anybody else will actually behave, however well you know them—but he strikes me as the kind who wants his own secret nest where he can sit and gloat.”

Pibble was barely listening by now. His vision was blurry with weariness, but the shoes glowed in the mist like the metallic carapaces of beetles assembled, pair and pair, to mate … Jenny … Tosca. … He was perfectly aware that Jenny—
his
Jenny—was a construct. He knew her only from the angle which their relationship permitted, and therefore his idea of her contained elements for which he had no proof and had molded from an amalgam of guess and wish. One of these guess-wishes was that she, too, valued the relationship, and consciously or unconsciously chose to conform to the construct while she was with him. By doing so, of course, she lessened the certainty even of his proofs, leaving yet larger spaces in which other Jennies—other people's constructs—could coexist with his. But all these Jennies were not different people, they must all relate more or less to a “real” Jenny, and that meant that there were certain constructs which were incompatible with each other, which could not both be true. For instance, though her sexual experience was not in Pibble's knowledge—she had never said anything about it and spoke of other people's amours reluctantly, and with an almost comic dryness—it was inconceivable that in anyone else's construct she was a girl who “slept around.” It was not inconceivable that she had had a lover, or lovers, but it was inconceivable that she should accept a man like Tosca in that role.

And yet she must have been on Tosca's list, because he'd told Wilson it included all the nurses. He would have regarded her as a challenge. What ways could he have found of putting pressure on her? Something. She had been out that night, almost certainly to the tower. How had he persuaded her to go? Some hold, some leverage. And then, if he had that leverage, why should he not use it further? Pibble's mind refused to make the image. Instead there came to him another part of his Jenny construct, a guess, but as sharp as proof. If Tosca had the leverage, he would use it, and if he used it, Jenny would try to kill him.

Voices beyond the door. Her laugh.

“Wake up, Jimmy. Keeper's come.”

He wanted to tell Mike that he was awake, fully aware, eager to help, able to put the whole investigation onto its right lines, but the room seemed to float round him, and his mouth would only mumble meaninglessnesses. Jenny was there, not floating, quite close, arms akimbo, in mockery of her own real indignation.

“You wicked old man,” she said. “Sneaking about again without telling me.”

“He's been a great help,” said Mike placatingly. “I'm afraid we've tired him out rather.”

“Which of you is Dr. Watson, then?” she said. “Can you stand, Jimmy, or shall I get a wheelie?”

Mumble mumble. Statutory effort to rise. Sense of the blackness hovering close above. Her arm round his shoulders, hand against right ribs. Now. He rose, both sets of muscles working in easy tune, as if he and Jenny were dancing partners, into the darkness. He felt his lips beginning to smile as it closed down, happy in the confidence that she would hold him steady till it cleared.

The shoes, two pairs, gleaming still like beetles, came into focus. They seemed at last to reveal their message. He turned to Mike.

“He took them off to paddle,” he said urgently.

“Who?”

“Colonel McQueen.”

7

D
rifting as if on air, the wheeled stretcher slid along the corridors. A lift absorbed it with a sigh like bliss and released it with another. Though the stretcher was in fact being pushed by an impassive young giant called Kerry, behind whom Jenny followed, Pibble's sense of them was merely a whiteness at the fringe of vision. Silence and smoothness made the journey seem involuntary, as though Pibble were a particle of food being passed, with two attendant digestive amoebae, along the shining guts of Flycatchers. The building itself became a chambered cell inhabited by a life system whose metabolism sucked into it decaying fragments of humanity, absorbed their monetary juices and excreted the remains into cemeteries and crematoria. The creature lived by death, but death of another kind had got into its system, and now the creature itself was sick. Elsewhere in its vague vitals Cass and his men moved like other corpuscles, summoned to isolate and destroy the invader. But the creature itself continued to suck in, digest, excrete, and as a part of the digestion process, Pibble was now on his way to a nerve ganglion, Dr. Follick's so-called surgery.

There was a wait in the anteroom. Jenny came round and touched his cheek.

“Not too tired after this morning?” she whispered.

He mumbled, hardly noticing, lost in a mind-wandering vision of another great sick creature, the thing that had inhabited Norman Shaw's grimed and ponderous building by the Thames. Scotland Yard, where Pibble had spent half his working life, had been a creature of the same order as Flycatchers, but enormously more complex. It lived not on death but on the sickness of society, and its complexity made it capable of a dim sort of self-awareness which manifested itself mainly as hypochondria—endless inspection of its own body for traces of the diseases by which it lived. Perhaps all creatures which have to present to the world a face of glorious health tend to brood in private on the latest throb of a neck muscle or the new-found patch of numbness below the hip; but Pibble had been a corpuscle himself in that body when the genuine disease had taken hold, and then in slime and pain the creature had begun to digest itself. To passers-by along the Embankment, the solemn old building had appeared unchanged, had remained both reassuring and menacing; but internally there had been chaos, sudden scurryings, messages from the nerve ends misrouted and distorted, clottings of cells in curious places, whole organs suddenly functionless. There had taken place a near collapse of the life system, much like that which Pibble's own body had undergone in the last few months.

Perhaps it was the memory of the Foyle inquiry that made Pibble, even in his semi-trance, conscious as soon as he was at last drifted into the surgery that this visit, though a routine part of the Flycatcher creature's metabolism, was at the same time an incident in its sickness. The awareness faded as he roused himself to cope with his role as patient, but never quite vanished.

When Pibble had first visited the surgery, he had been past noticing­ much more than it seemed to have a remarkable amount of equipment in it. Later, as his mind improved, he assumed that the display was mainly there to impress the patient, to imply that his fees were being spent on all that was latest and most fashionable by way of geriatric miracle; even to hint that when the old heart finally faltered, or the old spleen ceased to do whatever it was spleens did, Toby Follick would fetch out from a cabinet some chrome and plastic knickknack which would take over the functions of exhausted flesh and begin another whole lifetime. There was still some truth in that picture—no doubt it was why Follick's employers had sanctioned the expenditure—but it was also now apparent that Follick needed the gadgets as much for his own sake as his patients'. They gave him the same kind of thrill of possession that a roomful of netsuke or Tang grave ornaments might give a collector of such stuff. They fed his self-image as the super-competent healer, but they also fed Pibble's image of him as the comic conjurer, on stage now, surrounded by glittering­ cabinets into which bowls of goldfish would disappear and be transformed­ into monstrous bouquets of plastic tulips.

Follick preferred to see his patients on stretchers, even when they were well enough to walk. There was no comfortable chair in the large, light room, and Maisie perched on a stool to take down any notes or instructions. The thin whine of dust extractors filled the room, and a tall gray cabinet against the inner wall blinked a few lights on and off, apparently at random. The sense of a life being lived at Flycatchers, of which the patients and staff were only cellular parts, was especially strong in the surgery.

“Well, what have you been up to since I last saw you?” said Follick. “Exploring the Orinoco?”

“Ur.”

“He got himself up this morning,” said Jenny, speaking through the filter of discipline. “His room was empty. I found him down in the offices, talking to his friends.”

“Did you now? Did you now?” said Follick, apparently delighted by the surprise.

“He was a bit tired after that, but he's had a rest since. He had a couple of low days, like you said he would, but he started picking up yesterday.”

“Fine, fine. Let's have a look at the documents.”

Follick moved out of Pibble's line of vision, so he lay quiet, not thinking of anything much, until his eye was caught by Maisie. There was an oddity about her pose as she too waited, a tension which she was trying to disguise by lolling, as far as the stool allowed her. He thought she was deliberately avoiding his eye until he realized that the target of her nonattention must be Jenny.

She straightened but at the same time relaxed as Follick muttered a snatch of jargon for her to take down. Jenny came into Pibble's line of sight to peel off his blanket. Ritual apparently demanded that this task should be done by the acolyte, but that the priest himself must remove the final veil, the examination shift, which was the only garment patients wore for these encounters. Follicle performed the rite and began to press Pibble's flesh with an abstracted air, like a man in a supermarket pressing a Camembert to see if it is ripe, while most of his mind is on the young mum in the tight yellow jersey who is leaning over the cooler cabinet to compare butter prices.

“These abrasions and contusions are healing, Jenny?”

“Yes, slowly. They still hurt him a bit.”

“Quite a bit, I should think, if he got himself up this morning and went on the gad.”

“He walked back to his room without a wheelchair. I didn't help him much.”

“Um. Tell me, Jimmy—this is a medical question and not bloody inquisitiveness—why did you do that? Just for a gossip?”

“No. Something I wanted to …”

“And did it hurt?”

“A bit. Sore, not proper pain.”

“Right … you see, what I'm getting at is this. In a sense I oughtn't to be treating you, because I'm a geriatrician and you're not old enough for me. Apart from the atherosclerosis in your legs, you aren't beyond late middle age. Your eyesight and hearing are better than most people's, your muscular coordination is fine, you're continent, your heart's in reasonable nick and so on. As I've told you before, it's all a question of getting the blood to the brain. Now, we've been talking as though your problem was that you had low blood pressure, and in a sense that's true. On the other hand I could show you plenty of medical textbooks which say there's really no such condition as low blood pressure.”

“Uh?”

“It occurs, of course. It's quite common—in cases of shock, for instance. But it doesn't go on and on, an illness in its own right. One way of describing your case is that you are in a permanent state of mild shock. Right? Of course this wasn't apparent when you first came in, because you'd run yourself down so far, but now we've had a chance to sort you out. … Let me make a guess. Sometime about eighteen months ago, or perhaps a bit more, something happened which stopped you in your tracks. …”

Mary's face, the color of dirty snow on the glistening pillow. The coffin on the crematorium chute, the twiddling organ music, the chute empty. He hadn't even seen her go.

“All right, you don't have to tell me what it was. But listen, if you've followed what I've been saying, you'll see that there's a limit to what we can do for you, and we've about reached it. Pills and comfort can take you this far, but from now on it's going to be up to you—it's going to be up to your moral energy, your willpower. I haven't talked to you about this before because, to be frank, I didn't think you had it in you. But since last Thursday I've changed my mind. You can do it if you want to, and in that case I think I can help you a bit more. With your cooperation I want to try a little experiment.”

“Ur?”

“A little experiment,” repeated Follick, brown eyes glistening, as if the phrase were a magical formula with which he proposed to conjure up the spirit of healing. “Crank him up to semi-recumbent, will you, Jenny. Maisie, will you hook up the encephalograph and the cardiograph, and then if both of you wouldn't mind waiting out in the anteroom … Maisie, I'm not taking any calls for half an hour … that's high enough, Jenny … now I'm going to tape a few terminals on … there … and there … cover him up, Jenny … and you hold this in your right hand … grip it firmly and don't let go … and finally there's the hat … um … not too tight? Great. Thanks, Maisie. Thanks, Jenny.”

Pibble felt oddly detached, a mere spectator of Follick's bustling and eager performance. The rubbery terminal he had been given to grip, the absurd little padded skullcap with its moon-man cables snaking out of it, which Follick had shown him before adjusting it to nestle on his scalp, the glossy gadgetry, Follick's own almost factitious joy in the employment of his toys—all these seemed such obvious precursors of a trick which wasn't going to work—or was going to work in the way the performer least expected. Pibble watched him cross to the wall and press a switch in one of the cabinets. A small but very intense white light blazed into being. Follick came back and vanished behind the stretcher. There was a thump and a rustle. Pibble bent his neck, rolled his eyes up to their limit, and found himself staring straight up two dark nostrils. He deduced that Follick had perched himself on Maisie's stool at the stretcher head.

“Don't look at me, James. I want you to concentrate on that light over there. Try not to look at anything else. Grip that terminal a little tighter. Concentrate on the light.”

Follick's voice changed, becoming deeper and quieter, without any emphasis at all, but despite the flatness suffused with a steady energy as he repeated and repeated his instructions. The light swam and floated in greeny blackness, an obsessing glare. There was nothing else in the world except the light and the dull, insinuating drone.

“Good. And now your heart is going to beat a little faster. A little faster. Don't think about it. Just look at the light. Good. Your heart is beating a little faster. Good. Tell me about your mother now.”

Mamma, thin and straight, stalking away along the pavement in a black ankle-length dress and the curious little hat which marked her out as a Saint of the Revised Chapter. Jimmy, not quite eighteen, leaning against the low brick wall of the front garden and watching her in a muddle of pity and guilt and irritation, aware that during the course of their short and almost wordless quarrel about whether he should go with her to chapel, he had finally decided to apply to join the police cadets.

“Good. Good. Keep the heart steady. Steady. Now you are going to raise your blood pressure just a little. Raise your blood pressure. You can do it. Raise your blood pressure. Keep your heart steady. Steady. Watch the light. The light. Now tell me about this shot you heard.”

Shooting gallery at Hendon. Instructor stripping automatics in front of a small, bored class, Pibble somewhere in the middle of them. Glare of lamps on concrete. Faint smell of fine oil and fainter still of burnt powder. Concrete dust and boredom the main atmosphere. From the gallery proper the unsystematic crack of shots fired at moving targets. One shot, and all was changed. Light and smells the same, but now the boredom was something else. The instructor paused in mid-sentence, laid down his weapon, turned to the padded door, opened it, stared, shut it. Why had they all known? How had the communal shudder
begun even before the instructor had turned from the bench? Had the sound differed physically when the cadet who had been practicing (blond, acne-speckled, enormous) had put his pistol against the roof of his mouth and fired that last shot? The questions continued to ache long after the equal mystery of why the young giant had suddenly felt compelled to die had ceased to seem to matter.

“Good. Good. Keep your heart steady. Watch the light. Steady. Steady. Keep your blood pressure up. Good. Good. Now tell me about the shot you heard five nights ago, when you were in your room at Flycatchers.”

The voice, even as it asserted the need for steadiness, had faltered slightly. Something—frustration, or fear, or merely inattention—had caused a crack in the dull surface. Till that moment Pibble's world had been filled with the light and the voice, but through the fissure a tiny wisp of consciousness escaped. He was aware that he had been using his throat muscles, aware that he was under some kind of pressure from which there was no escape, physical or mental, in the present. Refuge lay in the past, in childhood, in the years of health. This wisp of free consciousness moved his lips.

“Don't know.”

“You found a body, you remember?”

Tall blind house, up by the railways. The neighbors silent in doorways, ominous presences, like trees. The man at the door, bare torso, pajama trousers; muscular, unsurprised. “Bit of a dust-up with the missus, Sarge. Nothing special.” His whitish eyes flickering to the street and back. Silence of June dusk. More watchers now, and nearer. Whose side. …