One Foot in the Grave (16 page)

“I wonder if he's right. I wish I'd known that twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years you've had it?”

“Me? Oh, no. At least … it's a clematis disease.”

“Oh.”

Silence gripped the room like a closed fist. Pibble was about to return to his magazine when she moved, very slightly but enough to break the trance.

“Clemaytis, you mean?” she said. “I never had room for clemaytis, nor the depth of soil, neither. Only had the roof, you see? I used to grow some fancy begonias up there when I was a kid.”

Her voice was still light and slow, but a sudden warmth had come into it, together with a distinct East London twang. The contrast with her formidably haut bourgeois mask was sharp and pleasing.

“Did you?” said Pibble. “So did I, for three or four years, until my wife made me pack them in.”

“Why would she want to do that?”

“Some fool suggested they were vulgar, so we started a gray border instead. Artemisias and things. At least they were less trouble than begonias.”

“Real sods, begonias can be,” she said. “Myself, I prefer a bit of vulgarity.”

She looked directly at him as if for agreement. Her eyes seemed preternaturally dark, contrasted with the nacreous skin of illness.

“I suppose you can do what you like on a roof,” he said. “In the front garden, you've got the neighbors to think of.”

“Oh, we had the customers up on the roof, summer. My dad kept this pub, see?”

“Was that the Blue Bear?”

Without a muscle moving, her face became that of another woman. The dark eyes were wet pebbles, the cheekbones declared the skull, the mouth was a predator's. At once he had no doubt whom he was talking to, though this persona was further than ever from the shaken little witness of thirty years ago. He thought that she was going to deny the connection, but evidently she felt herself too imperious for that level of lying.

“I heard as you'd retired,” she said. “You want to keep your nose clean now, mister. They haven't the same interest in seeing you're looked after.”

“I'm sorry,” he muttered. “I didn't mean …”

She watched him, half fury, half contempt.

“I
have
retired, of course,” he said. “I'm not very interested in anything that happens now. I don't know what's going on. But … do you remember the Smith trial?”

Again her face changed, warier now, but interested.

“Suppose I do?”

“There was a defense witness, a Miss Potter?”

She nodded, that characteristic flick of the head, accepting the safer formality of the third person.

“She broke down under cross-examination, and the defense fell to pieces as a result. I'd like to know if she went to bits on purpose.”

“Why?”

“The Smith case—it made a lot of difference to me. I suppose you could say it changed my life.”

She turned away and leaned back a little, gazing at the blood-colored poppies.

“Mary Lou Potter,” she said, almost dreamily. “What we used to call a good-time girl, that's all she was. Vernon Smith's tart, and he thought he owned her. He thought he owned her, like he owned his hat and his shoes and his motor car. If he wanted her to swan about stark naked, 'part from a load of rubies, in front of his friends, then that's what she did. I suppose … d'you know that hymn, mister? ‘Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide'? I suppose she decided it wasn't going to happen no more. From now on she was going to be somebody else, not a good-time girl, not anybody's tart, ever again. Yes, that's when it happened. You aren't the only one what it made a bit of difference to, mister.”

“No, I expect not. Did you ever meet Richard Foyle?”

She laughed. “Dickie Foyle! Now, he was a case!”

“What do you mean?”

“Thought such a lot of himself.”

“So did the Smiths, I imagine.”

“Course—but that's different. Listen, I known a lot of big men since those days or ones what thought they was big. The Smiths, they was quite a common type—they knew right from wrong, fair enough, but they didn't care. It was just rules, what they'd always got away with breaking, see? Then there's the ones what honestly don't know, they don't grasp as there's rules at all, if you follow me. That sort never get very far, 'cause of not understanding what makes anyone else tick. They can be quite brainy, but they're thick with it. Morally thick, if you follow. And then there's Dickie Foyle's sort—they know right from wrong too; but it doesn't apply to them, because they're God. They're above it. I expect Hitler was that sort.”

“Very likely.”

“I tell you something might interest you. Dickie Foyle, he bowled that Potter girl over first time she met him. When you're running around with a bunch of yobbos, meeting a bloke as can actually talk, one as seems interested in what
you
think, too …”

“Yes, he was very good at that.”

“Well, couple of times when Vernon was busy, she went off with Dickie. They went to Malta once, and once just down to Kent, had a good time. Then there was that business about stripping off in front of all those fellows and wearing them rubies, and after that she had a bit of a row with Vernon and she went and let him know as she and Dickie had been having good times together. Vernon, I said as he thought he owned her. All he did at the time was rough her up a little, but he took it into his head he was going to fix Dickie. Can you guess what he did?”

“He tortured and murdered a man called Duggie Canino?”

She didn't seem at all surprised.

“That's right. He was killing two birds with one stone, see? He was frightening off the Mafia same time, but the idea was he'd get Dickie to have the body found—something to do with a car with blood in it, which Dickie could say he'd worked out—only
then
it would turn out as Dickie couldn't of worked it out that way, length of time they took killing Duggie. Vernon said it was about time somebody noticed about Dickie, so he wasn't going to be much use no longer. He decided to give that somebody something to notice.”

The drizzle, the creaking capes, the scarlet-patterned limb.

“That was me,” said Pibble. “I think he may have been a bit suspicious. He worked it so that I found Canino, and he wouldn't admit it had been his idea to search that bit of waste. He said he wanted me to have the credit.”

“Yes,” she said. “The Potter girl tipped him to watch out. She didn't want him to go down, particular—it was Vernon what she was after. She'd been giving Dickie bits about Vernon; you see, Vernon had got Dickie wrong. Vernon couldn't understand that Dickie wasn't through-and-through bent. Spite of everything, Dickie always saw hisself as a thief-taker, and all along he'd been fixing to get the Smiths when it suited him, piling the evidence away. She was sorry when he went down, but there wasn't anything she could do about it—she had to look after herself, see? She couldn't let Vernon guess as she had anything to do with what Dickie'd got hold of … and Dickie played fair about that, didn't he? Never let on?”

“No. I never realized …”

“Course, I can't say it was all for the Potter girl's sake. He'd be trying to get as much credit as he could for hisself, if he was going to get them to let him turn Queen's evidence … only they wasn't wearing that.”

“King's evidence,” murmured Pibble.

“King's? Long ago as that? I suppose so. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.”

“Yes … did you know Duggie Canino?”

“Never met him. What you thinking? My … the Potter girl's first boyfriend? Too neat that would of been, don't you think? Tell you what, though, Vernon picked him 'cause of the way he'd once seen him smiling.”

“I thought it was because he was working with the Mafia.”

“Oh, yes, there was that,” she said, almost dismissively, as though the irritation of a grimace weighed heavier. Silence fell again, but companionable now, almost like the accepted non­communications of marriage. Pibble began to gather his energies for rising from the chair and leaving. He would have liked to tell her that he would have to pass on to Mike that she was there, but to do so would be to acknowledge that Mike wanted to know, and that in turn would prove that Wilson was at Flycatchers.

“You got any regrets?” she said in wholly conversational tones, as though raising the subject of the weather.

“I suppose so,” said Pibble. “I expect most people have, really, whatever they say.”

“Pillars of salt,” she said. “No, that ain't what I meant. I was only talking about Vernon. And Dickie. Before you come in, even … funny, perhaps it was seeing you here before and knowing who you was. … I was sitting looking at them poppies and thinking as I'd never liked red anyway. I wonder, if it had been sapphires instead of rubies … no, I suppose not. …

“Were those the Ilford rubies?” asked Pibble.

Her eyes widened slightly.

“That's right,” she said. “How did you know? I thought they wasn't never on file, 'cause of supposing to have got lost in a yachting accident.”

“Something somebody told me.”

“It's a funny world, that,” she said. “Nobs, I'm talking about. Few years back I got interested in them. I suppose I thought as I'd like to meet a different class of people from what I'm used to. But in some ways it was just the same—nobody ever saying anything out straight, for instance. And gangs. And there being things, like them rubies, what everyone knew what had really happened, only they wasn't letting on. … You know, when Vernon got hold of something like that he wouldn't use a fence if he could help it. Always tried to sell it direct back to the owner. That's what he did when he got hold of them rubies … had a bent lawyer what did the tricky business. I can tell you Vernon wasn't half put out when this feller reports back with his lordship's compliments, saying his lordship had only laughed and said to tell him as he'd done him a service. … Do you know, I think it was 'cause of that as Vernon laid on that party where the Potter girl wore the rubies. He could never stand being laughed at, Vernon, so all he could think of was to pass the insult on, get the laugh on someone else. He thought he'd rile the cops a bit, letting 'em see he had them rubies and they couldn't touch him 'cause of their not being stolen property, see? So he threw this party and invited the cops along. … You wasn't one of them, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said, with a very faint twitch of the thin lips. “It ain't the sort of introduction … talking of nobs, ain't you a bit of a fish out of water in a place like this?”

“A friend's paying for me—a very rich man. I worked for him after I retired.”

“How long've you been here?”

“Six or seven months.”

“Heard anything?”

“What sort of …”

“Our sort of thing. Something dicey about Flycatchers.”

“Drugs?”

“Might be … only that don't smell right. Tell you, I was having coffee with one of my nobby friends—charity committee we called it, but it wasn't really more than a hen party with mink and pearls—and this place came up in the talk. It was just the way one of them said it and another of them twitched, and I thought,
hello, there's something dicey there.
You get a nose, don't you?”

Pibble shook his head. Was she fishing for news of Wilson? If so, it was a very oblique cast, but the possibility made him nervous. He tried to strike a closing note so that he could leave without seeming to be going anywhere in particular.

“I think we'd have got the Smiths anyway,” he said. “As you say, Dickie was building up to it, and if he hadn't tripped up, too, I think he'd have managed things much more cleanly than we did without him. But as it was … no, I don't regret that it happened, but I regret very much that it was me who caused it to happen.”

She nodded, accepting the banality, and returned to the vision of redness in the poppies. To her it was rubies, but to Pibble it was blood, and he wanted no knowledge of it. The momentum of going rebuilt itself. He laid the magazine down, gripped his stick and the arm of the chair, and carefully drew himself forward and up. The blackness hovered, murmured, but never quite enclosed him. He was already moving toward the door when she spoke again.

“You know,” she said dreamily. “I think if things had turned out a bit different I might of married Dickie Foyle. What become of him, anyway?”

“He got full remission, of course. He went out to Australia. Died about a year ago.”

“I wish I'd known,” she said. “And did he make a go of it out there?”

“I'm told he died a millionaire.”

“You see?” she said.

9

I
t was strange to stand at his own door, peer through the one-way glass and see his own bed empty, made and waiting with the cover turned enticingly back; and Jenny too, sitting in her usual chair, reading. It all gave Pibble a sense of being risen from the tomb to a more spiritual plane of life, except that his body was still agreeably with him, having climbed the stairs without exhaustion and being now far from enticed by the bed. Jenny broke her marble mourning-angel stillness by turning a page. The movement was absurdly reassuring; it seemed much too simple and natural for anybody with a load of worry, let alone guilt, on her mind.

Pibble let himself stand for a good minute, simply watching. When she turned another page he moved quietly on.

Wilson's room lay beyond the fire doors, down a short side passage. As Pibble turned the last corner he found himself face-to-face with a young man in a dark jacket and jeans. He had his hand in his jacket pocket and inspected Pibble with a combination of caution and boredom, a look which Pibble knew well.

“I'm James Pibble. I'm a patient here, but I know Chief Superintendent Crewe. He asked me to bring a message to Mr. Wilson.”

The sentry studied him for a moment in silence, then nodded.

“Nurse was along, asking had I seen you,” he said, speaking in a near mutter and half out of the side of his mouth, as though somehow the medical conspiracy were as great a danger as the criminal one.

“I'll be about five minute,” said Pibble.

The man nodded and stood aside.

Wilson was watching the racing. He slouched in his chair, his whole pose sullenly rejecting the factitious thrill of the commentary. The dull eyes glanced at Pibble and returned to the screen. Three horses rose in apparent slow motion to a fence. One fell over. The other two galloped across muddy turf. Jockeys belabored rumps. The front horse didn't seem to be moving very fast, but the camera followed it, so that the second horse galloped backward, out of the screen. A grandstand floated by, with about twenty spectators sprinkled along it. Most of them had umbrellas up. The winning post slid unemphatically past. The losing horse, now about twenty yards behind, slowed to a walk before it reached it. There seemed to be no more runners. Wilson pressed a gadget in his hand, and though the picture remained the voices died.

“Cat's meat,” he said. “They get it back out of the cans and reconstitute it into horses, and then they call it racing. Ever strike you as everything as seems to make life better makes it worse?”

“Ur?”

“Take racing. Forty years back, standing out there in the sodding rain, what wouldn't I have given to be able to watch it all in the warm, in my own room? Now that's what I'm doing, and you know what? It's not hardly racing. They got to put something on, but where's the horses? Why, they're fetching them back out of the knackers to give the cameras something to look at. Lucky for you you're not a racing man.”

“No. But I remember stand-up comics.”

“Right. Living a whole year on just three routines, you mean? Not that I bothered with them much—it's not something villains go in for, I suppose. Funny, I hadn't thought of that before. Course, there were jokers, but a laugh just for the sake of a laugh … you got something to tell me, then?”

“What? Oh, er, yes … Mike Crewe asked me to have a word with you.”

“Serious, is it?”

“Possibly. Just a question of warning you so that it didn't get sprung on you unawares.”

“Fire away. I won't drop dead, I promise.”

“It's about Mrs. Isaacs.”

“Ah.”

“I've been talking to her.”

“Phone?”

“No, in the coffee room.”

“You don't say.”

Wilson sounded completely unperturbed, more interested in the horse steaming in the winner's enclosure than in what Pibble was saying.

“I think what happened is this,” said Pibble. “She's been in Switzerland having an operation, but things started to get out of hand at the Blue Bear, so she came home before she'd finished convalescing to try and sort things out. My impression is that her friends told her you were here, but that her organization had got a bit chaotic while she was away, and she didn't believe them. She needed to be in a nursing home anyway, so she decided to come down here and see for herself.”

“She say whether they killed George?”

“No. I couldn't ask … it'd have been admitting the connection between this place and the Blue Bear …”

“Suppose you're right. How is the old bag, anyway?”

“Frail. She had that pearly look. She seemed a bit fed up.

“Mary Lou!”

For the first time Wilson sounded surprised, even faintly alarmed.

“She was in a what's-it-all-for-anyway mood,” said Pibble.

“I don't believe it. She didn't scare the pants off you, then?”

“No. She looked pretty formidable, but she talked in a rather cozy way about begonias and things.”

“What things?”

“The Smith case, mostly. She told me Vernon Smith deliberately saw to it that Richard Foyle got spotted. By me, as it happened. Then she arranged things so that Smith himself got entangled in his own net. Apparently it was because Smith had made her walk about in front of his friends wearing nothing except some rubies.”

“You don't say! You don't say! I remember hearing about that—knew a feller what was there. I don't suppose. …”

He was looking at the ceiling now, sounding as wistful as a child.

“I'd give a lot to have a word with her,” he said.

“I doubt if the Chief Superintendent …”

“And why not? Mary Lou'd remember a pile of things what I've forgot. This sort of case, anyway, the more witnesses you get … I'll have trouble making anyone believe me, all by myself, won't I? But if Mary Lou's in that kind of mood, and we could persuade her. … You're missing something, you know, only seeing her like this. When she's her proper self she can strike sparks off of a lump of cream cheese.”

“Well,” said Pibble. “I suppost I could suggest. …”

Wilson interrupted him by a sudden movement of the hand, slight but imperiously effective. Pibble, who had been standing all this while propped on his stick, turned to see the door opening. For a moment he expected to see Mrs. Isaacs stalk into the room, her proper self, lethal with sparks, but in fact it was only Maisie bringing round the afternoon post—another invariable item in the Flycatchers routine. She had a smallish parcel with the letters.

“Hello, beautiful,” said Wilson. “Brought something for your uncle, then?”

Maisie produced her strange vague smile and gave him the parcel.

“It's been through the metal detector,” she said, as though the words had no meaning to her at all. Pibble guessed that her whole attention was far away, galloping with Lord Hawkside along the cliff road while the lightning flashed and the smuggler-swarming sea rolled its waves in thunder to the beaches.

“Has it now? That's good. Spot of class there, Pibble, don't you think? They didn't have to install the doofer special for me, 'cause they'd got one already, case of someone having a go at some of the wogs you get holidaying here. Bring us a knife, miss, so as I can open it. Ta. Now give your uncle a kiss. Ta. And now you can go.”

Still in her dream, Maisie performed her tasks like an automaton. She gave the impression that if Wilson had told her to do a belly dance or to jump out of the window, she would have done so with the same dazed grace. Wilson licked his upper lip as he watched her go.

“What couldn't I have done with a few of that model forty years back,” he said. “Doesn't know if she's in this world or the next, does she?”

As if reminded by the movement of his tongue, he took his roll of peppermints out of his pocket and inspected it, then put it back. His other hand caressed the parcel.

“You still bent, mate?” he said suddenly. “Like we fixed?”

“Ur.”

Pibble's mutter of assent came from only a pocket of his mind.
Doesn't know if she's in this world or the next, does she? … I don't think she ever realized what was happening to her. I hope not.
. . .
So do I.
The image of the Balham poisoner swam into focus. Maisie's replaced it. Lord Hawkside whipped his foundering mare along the cliff road. Tosca lay face up in the snowstorm, dead romantic. Maisie.
I was washing Jenny's hair.
The shock of revelation faded to the wearisomeness of having to rethink all his thoughts.

“You know what this is, don't you?” said Wilson.

There was a throb of ecstasy in his voice. His hand trembled slightly as he sliced the Sellotape exactly down the line where the brown paper joined. The process looked much the same as that with which he unwrapped his peppermints, but its drive was clearly different, not an exercise in power but a heightening of lust by anticipation. He was like a lover stripping his mistress with luxurious ritual to nakedness.

“Ur,” said Pibble, welcoming the summons back into the here and now.

The parcel was square-edged, about nine inches by four by two. A white sticker label addressed it to Wilson at Flycatchers. It had been sealed with a practiced precision that suggested an old-fashioned shop. Pibble was not sure whether he could already smell the tobacco, and the fainter odor of the cedar-wood box, or whether that was autosuggestion.

“Slipped through, I suppose,” said Wilson. “George used to stop the postman and take them off of him, only he missed a couple of times. … Thought it was going to be like that from now on … got a new feller doing them up, by the look of it … ah. …”

He laid the box in its wax-paper inner wrapping to one side, took a gold lighter from his dressing-gown pocket and lit the brown paper at one corner, holding it expertly so that the flame burnt across it in an even march, blue at the leading edge and yellow, almost white, where the picric smoke trailed upward from the rim. Black flakes wavered to the carpet. Wilson ignored them, as if used to spoiling expensive furnishing, relishing the destruction, even. Power again.

“Always burn the evidence, my granny told me,” he purred.

When the final corner was almost scorching his fingers, he let it fall, still flaming, to a point where he could shuffle his slippered heel onto it, then turned to the box again, raising the seal of the wax paper with his knife and folding it back. He slit the seal of the box itself, laid his knife down, cradled the box between his two palms and eased its lid up with his thumbs. For several seconds he stared at the ranked contents.

“That ain't right,” he said.

He picked out one of the cigars and rolled it between thumb and forefinger.

“What the …”

With a violent movement he rammed the cigar back, then peered at the whole box.

“The bitch!” he shouted. “The sodding. …”

He flung the box into the corner of the room. A heave, a spasm, and he was standing, turning to face Pibble. His lips were purple, his cheeks yellow and scarlet. He stood there, his mouth dragging down and sideways in wrenched jerks. His right hand rose, griped like a bird's foot at his chest, twice. He fell. There was the slow thump of his falling and then he was lying face down, still except that his hand continued to gripe at the carpet and his breath gargled painfully in his throat.

Pibble almost fell himself, getting his stick tangled in his legs as he scurried to the door. He heaved it open.

“Heart attack!” he gasped.

The sentry sprang from his half-lounge against the door, drew a pistol from his pocket and rushed past Pibble into the room, holding the gun in the position he had been taught, as though he hoped to tame the rebellious organ by threatening to shoot it. At a flapping shuffle which was almost a run, Pibble went to fetch Jenny.

“Sorry about that,” said Mike. “You can't really blame Shanklin.”

“Course not.”

Pibble lay with his eyes half-closed, feeling that all the bright essences had been drained from him, leaving him a papery shell which needed the bedclothes to hold it from crumbling into mummy dust.

“Makes a change, getting arrested yourself. … What's up? Jimmy!”

“All right. Only … last thing Dickie said to me.”

The rictus smile, the jaunty nod, the almost insane sparkle in the eyeballs.

“Foyle? Rum how he keeps cropping up, isn't it?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize, Jimmy. I know how you feel—at least I half know. There are one or two people in everybody's life, I expect … totems, if you see what I mean. As a matter of fact, you're one of mine.”

“Uh!”

“That's right. I've never really thought about it till now, but I suppose I've always tended to use you as a sort of standard … and suppose when we were working together I'd discovered you weren't the totally straight copper I'd taken you for …”

“Mike!”

“All right. Take it easy. I didn't mean to embarrass you. Let's change the subject. … Where were we … Shanklin …”

“Did the right thing,” Pibble managed to mutter.

“Glad you think so. He says that nurse of yours asked him to handcuff you to the bed.”

“Wilson?”

“Dead. On his way to the surgery. Took eighteen months' hard work with him, not to mention the taxpayers' money this place cost us. Joke cigars! The sort that blow up in your face! Jesus! Who'd have imagined …”

“But the box …”

“Oh, that was pukka—we've talked to the shop. Wilson had left an order with them and they'd been sending him a box once a week. The people here intercepted the first two or three and told him they'd done so on medical grounds, and after that they stopped coming. We assume he'd canceled the order, and the shop assumed he was getting them, and as he'd paid for a year's supply in advance, they went on sending them. Somebody must have been nicking them somewhere in the pipeline and having a regular luxury smoke.”