One Foot in the Grave (6 page)

“All right. Perhaps you'd better not talk at all.”

“I'm all right. Had a good sleep. Wasn't quite so done up as I made out.”

“I thought you were bright as a button till right at the end. You liked having them here, didn't you?”

“I suppose so.”

“I was glad the Follicle had to go and see his sultan. It was very interesting—though I don't suppose a real interrogation's like that.”

“Haven't they interrogated all the staff?”

“Oh, yes. Just asking where we were—that sort of thing. Whether we knew George Tosca and so on.”

“Did you?”

“A bit—you couldn't really help it. He was … oh, suppose you were new here, he'd manage to be hanging around when you arrived, take your case up for you, all gallant, make sure you spotted he had a passkey. …”

She was talking flippantly, but her voice had an uncharacteristic dryness.

“Did he have much luck?” said Pibble.

“I shouldn't wonder. … It can't have left him a lot of time for bodyguarding, anyway. I wish I knew why Mr. X needed a bodyguard.”

“What makes you think …”

“Well, it's obvious, isn't it?”

“Did they arrive together? Tosca was somebody's chauffeur, Mike said. Did he take Wilson out for drives?”

“That's not his real name. Why won't you call him Mr. X?”

“Because I'm old and stupid and if I met him I might call him the wrong thing.”

“You aren't stupid and you aren't old. Anyway, no, not much. Mr. X never goes out of his room, and I don't think George came up and saw him much—but listen, now I remember, about three months ago the shareholders ordered a blitz on security. They had all the locks changed, and made new rules about keys, and—this is the point—they hired an extra security man, and it was George. And just after that Mr. X came.”

“So they didn't come together.”

“No, but if Mr. X wanted special extra security, he might want it to be a secret too, mightn't he? He might have got them to do it that way so that nobody'd realize it was being done for him.”

“It's possible, but …”

“Don't you see, that would explain why George was shot. So that whoever it is Mr. X is hiding from could get at him.”

It was a game, a new toy that really amused her. The horror of killing seemed scarcely to touch her.

“A professional hit man would have brought his own gun,” he said.

“Oh! But … look, he could have held George up with his own gun, taken George's from him and shot him with that, couldn't he?”

“Why was Tosca wearing that rig?”

“Because he was the vainest man I ever met, that's why.”

“Was there a mirror in the room?”

“No … at least I don't imagine there was. Why?”

“Because vain men like to be seen, if only by themselves, when they are all dressed up. I think it's much more likely he dressed up
for
somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he was the sort of man you say he was—rabbiting after the nurses all the time—much the most likely explanation is that he'd dressed up for one of them.”

“But that's the whole point. We were all locked in from six o'clock, for a start, and by the time you heard the shot we were all up to our necks in work, putting patients to bed.”

“I didn't mean … it doesn't have to be …”

“Who else is there? Mrs. Foyle goes home, and so do the cleaners, except for Mrs. Finsky and Mrs. O'Hara. They'd knocked off early to watch Kevin O'Hara on telly in the Cup replay. Anybody from outside would have to get Mr. Finsky to open the main gate, or else climb the fence and come up through the woods. I can just about see some dopey girl doing that for George, but it's much more likely to be some thug who actually came to kill him.”

“You said he had passkeys. He could have given …”

“Oh, honestly! I wish you'd use all this cleverness on Mr. X! If only you'd met him you'd see it had to be something to do with him!”

“It isn't a game, my dear.”

“It is. And you're an old spoilsport,” she said, bouncing out of her chair to glare down at him. She was acting out her irritation, hamming it up, but he was aware of the core of genuine anger. The idea of somebody she knew and worked with being Tosca's lover and then Tosca's murderer was too close to the grimy world for her; an actual passion binding tangible people in the charmless linkage of cause and effect. She wanted to shift the story into her imagined world of latter-day ores and dragons, where Mr. X belonged. No doubt this was one of the things that fed their affection for each other—despite his own helplessness, he was still able to feel protective toward her, and she to rely on him. He smiled, and she accepted the peace offering.

“Well, you're not going to blame it on me,” she said. “I was washing my hair at half past eight, and Maisie was helping me, so there!”

“Good,” he said. “It's a help to be able to cross a few suspects off.”

She laughed, bent, and kissed him. She was still laughing as she left the room. He lay still, concentrating as usual on the residual feel of her kiss, willing the imprint to last—dryish, snow soft and tingling as snow might, but warm with energy. Too fast it faded, dwindling like an image held in the retina under closed eyelids, gone. With it seemed to vanish the moral energy with which he had woken. The specters of gibberish came flickering out of the marshes, no longer kept at bay by intellectual fires—tedious, inane, repetitive, the Frenchman, the boiler house, Teal's slate. …

Irritably he blew on the embers. All that happened was a small flare, the memory of her kiss. But changed. Icy, quick, almost rubbery, cold fire.
Ice cream for supper? Once a detective, always a detective. A mess, glistening on his spread hand, a taste in his mouth, raspberry jam and suet duff, licked from his thumb in the dark niche of the scullery.
The muscles of his heart clenched like a fist. Somebody groaned. The fist unclenched with a clumsy double bump as he forced his head and shoulders up from the pillows, and then the darkness came roaring down.

3

A
bad time followed, repeating a pattern from earlier in his illness. The self would gather toward the daylight, like a crew on shore leave stumbling out of stews and taverns to assemble, hung over and feverish, on the grimy quays of the conscious world; only then, when almost fully gathered into the waking self, would they observe that the harbor was weirdly different from the one in which they had anchored the evening before, and know that their ship, lying dark on the dawn water, still carried night in its hold. The world to which he seemed to have woken was no more real than the one he had left.

This could happen many times in sequence. Each time he had to take the ensuing dream for reality until the illusion withered with the next fake waking. By the time reality truly dawned, half the crew would be mutinous and refuse to accept the sunrise as anything except another false dawn. Such days would end in a mess of memories, any of which seemed as true, or false, as any of the others. Walking along a seashore, looking for a surgeon, because a large flat limpet had clamped itself to the side of his mouth, irremovable. Waking from that horror to remember that the doctors had stuck a dressing there and when it was peeled away the skin beneath would be a patch of young flesh, a beginning of renewal. Drowsing up into another layer to understand that he had as usual been dribbling in his sleep and the saliva had dried. In the layer beyond that, trying to shave, seeing himself in the mirror, a leper, the lion face. …

Sometimes Jenny was there, feeding him small mouthfuls or coaxing drink between his lips or taking his pulse or helping him piss—or simply there, sitting in her usual chair. With one element of his mind he knew that if she was there, then he was awake, because he never dreamed about her; but with another element he was aware that her presence was the forerunner of a nightmare, to which even the horrors of the limpet and the lion face were preferable. This was something permanent, and in a vague way he understood that he was going to have to face it, that the process of escape by surrender to the world of dream could not go on forever, because in fact his body was steadily recovering from the exhaustion of Thursday night, and that sooner or later it would force him to have a “good” day, and then the nightmare would become real.

The good day began much like the bad, with waking, being cleaned by somebody not Jenny, swallowing food, slithering back into the shifting smother of self-induced delirium. There was a presence in the room, a total stranger in a dressing gown, who became Dickie Foyle, who became a shadowy and nameless schoolmaster, who became a stranger in the dressing gown again. …

“Didn't wake you, did I?”

“Urrugh?”

“Just thought I'd take a look at you, see?”

The sense of reality was very solid. He began, to accept it. Even the most disaffected of the crew shrugged and readied for a voyage.

“Course, I know a bit about you long before,” said the slow, leaden voice. The stranger was squat and elderly. His yellowish face seemed to be partly molded of not very convincing flesh-toned Plasticine. His dressing gown was quilted green and he wore it over mauve silk pajamas. He shuffled nearer the bed and gazed down. His eyes were small and pale, set wide apart under barely visible brows. The yellow of his scalp was mottled and veined; close-cropped gray hair covered the sides of his head. The Plasticine look was of course real flesh, flesh which had once been all jowl and pink pudge, now wasted. His lips were mauve, the lower one twisted at one side into a heavy pad. Waking or sleeping, Pibble knew what he was. He had the dragon look, bleak and subtle.

“You're Wilson,” said Pibble. So Jenny had been right in her romancing.

“'Sright—while I'm in this hole, I'm Wilson. And you're Pibble.”

“How do you do?”

“Not so good, but berrer'n you, cock. If it wasn't for the heart … question is, if I sit in that chair, will I get out without my sending for someone to give me a heave? Not supposed to be in here, am I?”

“The other chair's easier. I usually … they slide.”

“Well, if
you're
up to it, cock. …”

Fully awake now, interested, almost excited—but still aware of the need to keep open the escape route into mumbling doze—Pibble elbowed himself a little up the pillows, watching his visitor all the time. Wilson slid the chairs about, seeming to take care to select an exact site for each of them. He nodded, bent and dusted the seat of the nearer chair with a large handkerchief, which matched his pajamas, a quirk proper to a man used to wearing expensive clothes in seedy places. Pibble was aware of his own mind registering the perception, but the awareness made him oddly nervous—as the ship's captain might be, glancing up at his wind-swelled sails, back at his level wake, all round at his poxed and dream-sodden crew now suddenly obedient and sailorly, and wondering how long it could last.

At last Wilson lowered himself into the chair. With the same heavy precision he took a roll of mints from his pocket, unwrapped one and put it on the pad on his lip. He spoke without removing it.

“Like I say, just thought I'd take a look at you.”

“For old time's sake,” murmured Pibble.

The dragon glance flickered, not surprised but acknowledging a level of mutual understanding.

“I don't remember as we ever run into each other.”

“I don't think so, no.”

Now, like a trapdoor spider taking prey, the tongue flickered between the mauve lips and the peppermint was gone.

“Nearly, I dessay, once or twice. The Furlough bust-up, f'rinstance—wasn't you in on that?”

“On the fringe. A case that had some connections. Were you?”

“Was I? That'd be telling. Spent a year or two in Spain round about then—for my health, see?”

“Ah.”

They contemplated each other for a while, openly, without side glances. For Pibble, Wilson's presence was, as it were, totemic. It had power, power to exorcise the nightmare. He was too interested in this reality to indulge in senile and self-pitying imaginings. Now he became aware of something off-key about his visitor, something not wholly proper to the dragon look. The look was there, certainly, but something, an element of emotionless malice, was not really functioning. The people of this type whom Pibble had known—not all of them criminals, but mostly—had been capable of doing things to other people which were literally incomprehensible. There was no way of imagining the springs of such malevolence; it was inhuman, but not bestial, either. Wilson had clearly had that capacity, most of his life, but now the gland had withered, the springs had dried up. It was as if the dragon had grown not kindly but at least sentimental in old age. Wilson's next remark, spoken as if already well into a train of thought, seemed to confirm this.

“You and me, f'rinstance, sitting here like this. One of us a rozzer all his life, and one of us summing else. It could so easy of been the other way round.”

“I wouldn't have made a very effective …”

“I dunno about that. Plenty of nervy little fellers. … Ever run into Sunny Macavoy?”

It was extraordinary how Wilson's company—the half-shared life, the common concerns—could revive shriveled wits. An hour before, Macavoy's would have been at best a dream name, its waking connotation irrecoverable.

“Con man? I never met him. Wasn't his line phony arms deals? Make anyone nervy, I'd have thought.”

“Sure. He chose it. Did a bit of hotel thieving when things were quiet. Got nicked for that once. No, I'm a liar, twice. Last I heard there was some Palestinians looking for him what he'd got to put down the deposit on a load of plutonium, only it was just lead what he'd got some bent boffin to dope up so it would make a geiger counter click. Might of been your cousin, some ways.”

Wilson unwrapped another peppermint, his manicured but brutal fingers peeling the foil off whole, but then rolling it into a pellet and flicking it onto the floor. All his actions seemed completely considered, even to the deliberate discarding of a bit of waste. They were part of his style, of a life that had been an exercise of will, with the most trivial action performed in a way that emphasized the power to do it.

“Whatchew really in for?” he said suddenly.

“Why am I here? To live for a bit, I suppose. Then die.”

“Nah. Come off it. You was never in Vice. You was never in the Porn Squad, uh? Nor Serious Crime, neither. Even if you
was
bent, which I don't remember hearing, it wasn't the sort of setup that'd let you stack away enough to bring in six hundred nicker a week, pay for a bed in this place.”

“Urr?”

“Besides, I hear as you come in from a grotty little lodging up in Hackney somewhere.”

“Who told you that?”

“Little Miss Innocence what's always asking questins—she answers 'em too. Gives her a chance to talk about her pet detective.”

“Jenny!”

“'Sright. I got interested when she mentions as you been a copper. Name like yours, it rings a bell, dunnit? First, acourse, I get it into my head as you're here to keep an eye on me—arter all, you must be ten years younger than what I am, so what are you doing in a place like this? Then she persuades me as you been reelly ill, and I start to get curious. Don't tell me you hadn't cottoned how much it was costing.”

“As a matter of fact, no.”

Pibble was unable to resent Wilson's questions. Fees were not a subject much discussed among the patients at Flycatchers, though other kinds of gossip were rife. There was, as it were, a tacit recognition that some people might actually find it hard to scrape the money together, might indeed be forced to leave for lack of funds, and thus effectively to die. Poverty to the inhabitants of Flycatchers was a terminal illness, and though minor ailments might be exchanged, like chat about weather, elsewhere there was a solid taboo. Wilson seemed unaware of this. There was a direct and dispassionate quality about him, an acceptance of the world as it is without whining or rancor—a fairly common trait among serious villains.

“So someone's finding the money,” he said, “and it ain't the Police Benevolent Fund. Don't come you dunno who.”

“I've got one rich friend. I hadn't realized how much it was costing him.”

(Had refused to let my mind worry that bone, more like.)

“Ah, him. Saved his life once, dinchew?”

“So he chose to believe.”

“Then why wasn't he giving you a bit of a hand before? Don't tell me—cause you hadn't let him know as you needed it. Stupid, that is. Cost him more in the end, dinnit?”

“I'm afraid so.”

(Only I've still never asked for money. That matters. To him too.)

“All right,” said Wilson. “I'll buy that. It's silly, but it adds up, like most other things. But there's summing as doesn't add up. Here you are, no use to anyone no more, just waiting to die without causing no more fuss. Not my fancy, but I'll buy that too. What I won't buy is you getting up and getting dressed and going out and climbing the tower and finding George in the middle of the night. And don't give me that about hearing no shots, neither. Remember as I'm just a couple of rooms along and I know how the wind was that night. If a bloody howitzer had loosed off under your window you wouldn't of heard it.”

Yes, Wilson would have made a good policeman. His voice had weight, emphasis which came from his refusal to emphasize any particular word. He gave no sign that the question interested him more than the others. If he'd been a policeman he'd probably have been bent, but he'd still have been more effective than a lot of the straight ones.

“Why do you want to know?” said Pibble.

“I'm curious.”

“That doesn't … unless you think that whoever shot Tosca might, er, have been looking for you.”

This time the pale eyes didn't flicker, but still somehow acknowledged the guess. It was as though their impassivity, till now habitual and unconscious, had become deliberate.

“Shouldn't of made his rounds that regular,” said Wilson.

“He didn't that—” said Pibble, and cut himself off too late.

“Couldn't of, not that night, could he? Dead by then. But before that you could of set your watch by the time he went in and out under here. Stupid. Don't tell me as you hadn't noticed.”

“I suppose I had. They run this place on a pretty tight routine, though …”

“Course they do, but George didn't have to pay no attention to that, did he? Trouble with him, he thought he knew it all. Look, when he was training, they must of told him not to do things all regular. That's right, innit?”

The question was not rhetorical, but spoken as though Pibble should know the answer. Wilson, leaning across to interfere with one corner of Pibble's jigsaw, had nudged a loose piece with his cuff, and now, with the slightly altered angle, what had so far been abstract smudges and blurs became plainly representational—a bit of blue uniform with a belt across it. Of course. Tosca had been a policeman. Yes, the licenses for the guns, for one thing, and Mike's attitude to that. Mike being here at all. A Chief Super.

“So what was you up to that night?” said Wilson. “You still haven't told me.”

“I don't know myself,” snapped Pibble, irritated by the interruption to his thoughts. Tomorrow, in an hour's time, even these sharp-edged and potentially interlocking perceptions might have reverted to the usual slithering fuzz.

“You don't know,” said Wilson impassively.

“I probably didn't know at the time, and I certainly don't now. All I can tell you is that a bit after Jenny left me I started to get up and dress, and while I was doing that I began to tell myself that I was doing it because of something I'd heard, in spite of the wind. I thought it was a shot. Even then I didn't know if it was true, and I certainly don't now.”