New Writings in SF 21 - [Anthology]

by Ed By John Carnell

  The play of expression on a face, the lines and contours pulled into it by experience of one kind or another, could tell an awful lot about its owner. But there were occasions, Michaelson knew, when it could tell an awful lot of lies.

  If there was any such thing as a criminal face, this certainly was not it. Oh, the man was worried, of course, and hiding something—the bumps of tension along his jaw, the listening look and the sweaty highlights developing on his forehead and around his mouth were clear indications of guilt of some kind. But the overall impression was one of innocence and he looked far too honest and clean-cut to be true.

  Michaelson had known high court judges with faces like pickpockets and he himself had steadfastly refused to grow his hair longer or wear coloured shirts. But being old-fashioned and neatly trimmed at his age was normal. In the suspect’s age group it was rare, perhaps abnormal.

  ‘...He was seen in the shop and several times in the street since the rumour began going around that Mrs. Timmins had come into money,’ Greer was saying. ‘Three times he visited the shop yesterday, buying newspapers on each visit—the same newspaper on two of the occasions. But the old lady hasn’t served in the shop since------’

  ‘Did she come into money?’ Michaelson preferred facts to rumours, even though a rumour like this was enough to make the vultures gather.

  ‘If she did, it came too late to do much good,’ said Greer, who obviously was feeling so strongly about it that he had forgotten to answer the question. Michaelson understood why.

  Mrs. Timmins had been forced by age and ill-health to sell her shop and live in the flat above sixteen years earlier, and she had been virtually bedridden for the past five years. By rights she should have given up trying to work long before then, but she had never been quite right in the head—a condition which, Michaelson had heard, dated from the time her husband had deserted her during the second year of their marriage. And she was old, she had been old even when Michaelson had been a kid at school.

  He remembered hanging around the bright window of her shop with some of his classmates, all of them flat broke and their pocket money not due for three days. It would have been very easy to create a diversion or for a few of them to keep her talking while the others loaded up with apples or chocolate or her teeth-destroying peppermint rock, but in those days boys did not often think along those lines.

  Instead they had smeared the display window with their dirty faces and even dirtier hands, wearing expressions of distress and projecting hunger for all they were worth. She had been a very soft touch and had nearly always asked them in for a handout, saying that they could pay by doing odd jobs or by tidying up.

  But the shop, like the old lady herself, was always clean and tidy so that they were never overworked. She had talked to them about their lessons or the running of the shop or her long-absent husband as if they were members of her non-existent family. When they came away they had laughed and tapped their heads at some of the things she had said, but with less and less frequency. She had become a very pleasant and important part of their young lives.

  Michaelson had been much older when he overheard his parents discussing the old lady. His mother had wondered why she had not married after the statutory seven years had passed since her husband’s desertion and he could be presumed dead in law—-she had been a beautiful girl—and his father had replied that her husband must have been a good con man to make her remain faithful to his memory like that.

  It had been about that time that Michaelson had decided that the old lady was too good and kind and trusting for people to be allowed to take advantage of her. Later he realised that there were a lot of kindly, vulnerable people needing the same kind of protection, but by then he had already decided what he would do with his life.

  She must be nearly ninety, Michaelson thought. When he had visited her three years ago she had looked frighteningly old and shrunken, and he had been kept too busy to visit her since then. She had mistaken him for one of the other boys, but she had called him ‘son’ the way she always had done and had talked about the importance of education if he wanted to get on, the necessity of cleaning his teeth after eating her candy and, inevitably, about her husband.

  Michaelson sighed and checked his headlong gallop down memory lane. He repeated, ‘Did she come into money?’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Greer, ‘we won’t know until we’ve had time to ask more questions, but she had a big screen colour TV delivered three weeks ago, her doctor and nurse visit her every day instead of every week or so and she has a cleaning lady coming three days a week. The man downstairs —the one who bought the shop from her—says that she did not tell him anything but that all these things began happening at once.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Michaelson, ‘that everyone in the district thinks she has money and some of them may not want her to keep it.’ He opened the big envelope containing the suspect’s personal possessions and tipped them on to his desk.

  There were two soiled handkerchiefs, a bunch of keys and a leather wallet. The usual junk which accumulates in pockets was absent and the wallet was unusually thin. It contained a more than adequate number of banknotes and two small photographs in transparent pockets.

  They were a little more than an-inch square—too small for the windows—and showed the suspect and a girl of about the same age. The focus was soft and they had been cropped to show only the features.

  ‘Girlfriend?’ Michaelson asked.

  ‘Wife,’ said the suspect.

  The girl’s face showed character, all of it good, and she was beautiful. He had no doubt about that because she was wearing little if any make-up and her face had a freshly-scrubbed look that was almost nun-like. Perhaps she, too, had strict parents.

  But he was forgetting that the suspect had no parents. He did have a beautiful young wife, though, so why was he playing Peeping Tom with an old lady if he had not intended committing a crime of some kind ? And why had he removed all identification from his clothing and wallet? In short, was the suspect sick, or bent ?

  For a few seconds Michaelson tried to think like an expert witness for the defence. It was possible that the loss of this man’s parents at an early age had caused serious psychological damage or, despite his prepossessing appearance, outright psychosis. The relatives or friends responsible for bringing him up might have been too strict—his tidy, well-barbered look and conservative dress were symptoms of repression. Perhaps his wife had been chosen by the people who had made him what he now was. Perhaps his condition was aggravated by the fact that his wife was not the angel she appeared to be.

  In his profession Michaelson was continually being reminded that devils were fallen angels and that few of them had had time for plastic surgery on the way down.

  This suspect did not look bent nor, so far as Michaelson could see, was he sick, either—but he had to be one or the other. The absence of spoken or documentary identification indicated careful pre-planning. Perhaps he considered the reward worth the risk of a period under psychiatric care should he be caught.

  ‘What,’ said Michaelson again, ‘is your name?’

  The suspect shook his head.

  Michaelson said, ‘You must realise that we will learn your name sooner or later—much sooner than you expect, believe me—and that your behaviour increases our suspicions and reduces any chance of sympathetic treatment when we do discover------’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ the suspect broke in, beginning to sound desperate. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt the old lady. There is no crime that I’m guilty of and so you won’t be able to prove that I committed one and eventually, even though I won’t give my name, you’ll have to let me go.’

  Michaelson nodded. A tricky one...

  He was thinking of old Mrs. Timmins, bedridden, frail and with a bone structure as fragile as a bird’s and her only hold on life an innocent obsession about the blackguard who had deserted her. He thought of her being beaten into disclosing the hiding place
of her money or being rolled on to the floor while the suspect tore the mattress apart. He thought of the livid, permanent bruising and the broken bones too old ever to knit and of the months or years of pain which resulted from a simple robbery with violence when the victim was senile. Michaelson had worked on too many cases just like that.

  ‘Your property will be returned to you,’ he said finally, ‘if I ever let you out.’

  While the suspect was being returned to his cell Michaelson prodded the bunch of keys with his forefinger. There were no car keys and the five in the bunch, presumably the door, room and garden shed keys, were old in design indicating a dwelling in the older part of the city and the remaining two, which were duplicates, were new and distinctive with a long serial number etched into them. Greer was practically breathing down his neck as he wrote the number on his pad.

  ‘I’ve seen that type of key before, too,’ said the Sergeant. “There are five or six new office blocks using them. We were notified because the locks are supposed to be thief-proof, but obviously the keys aren’t. Or do you think they are his own?’

  When Michaelson did not reply he went on, ‘Those buildings maintain a round-the-clock security guard. I can ring them with the serial number right now, and if their key registers are up to date, find out the office and the occupier’s name. He may know something about the suspect, and I can call at his office first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll call at his office,’ said Michaelson, ‘as soon as you come off the phone.’

  ‘Aren’t you a bit senior to be personally investigating a...’

  Michaelson nodded, and said, ‘This one bothers me.’

  Half an hour later he was reading the tasteful cream lettering on the grained door of office 47 in the Dunbar Building while the patrolman on night duty, an ex-policeman called Nesbitt, stood watchfully behind him. The company occupying the office was SMITH PHILATELIC SUPPLIES and the Smith in question, Michaelson had discovered on the way up, answered fully to the description of the suspect.

  ‘I intend having a look around,’ said Michaelson, ‘and I shall not remove any of Mr. Smith’s property unless a more detailed examination becomes necessary, by which time I shall have a warrant. In the meantime I would appreciate it if you would accompany me while I look around, and, of course, give me as much information as you can about Smith. Last time I saw him he could not even give me his name.’

  He was not actually lying to Nesbitt, but he had managed to give the other a very strong reason for believing that the suspect was an amnesia victim.

  The suspect—Michaelson could not believe that his name was really Smith—occupied a small suite of offices. The outer office contained two desks, a few chairs and even fewer filing cabinets. Dominating the inner office was a large desk covered by a thick asbestos board on which lay an electric toaster, kettle and frying pan. The desk lamp was angled to point at the head of the camp bed which was neatly made up behind the desk. Most of the built-in shelving contained non-perishable groceries, also neatly stacked, while a refrigerator in one corner took care of the perishable kind. The desk’s telephone table had been removed to another corner where it supported a colour TV. A washroom opened off the smaller office where shirts and socks were dripping dry into a bath.

  ‘It isn’t usual,’ said Nesbitt in answer to Michaelson’s unspoken question, ‘but so long as there is no fire hazard, and Smith is very careful that way, there is nothing in the rules which actually forbids it. Besides, at the prices we charge for these offices we can’t afford to be too strict.’

  Michaelson nodded and began taking a closer look around. The towels looked new—not brand new, but not very old, either—and the shaver and other bits and pieces had also been bought recently. A closer examination of the inner office showed that the suspect was very clean and tidy in his habits. There were books here and there, not enough to be called a library but they all looked as though they had been read several times—cheap editions or paperbacks on pretty heavy, non-fiction subjects for the most part. The exception was a small pile of science-fiction paperbacks. He noted Asimov’s The End of Eternity, Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, Shaw’s The Two-Timers and Tucker’s Year of the Quiet Sun...

  The suspect’s taste in S-F was good if somewhat restricted, Michaelson decided as he returned to the outer office.

  ‘Has Mr. Smith spoken to you?’ Michaelson asked as he lifted the dust cover off what he thought was a typewriter, but what turned out to be a small record player.

  ‘Often,’ Nesbitt replied, then explained, ‘he isn’t very organised about his paperwork and when I suggested that he get himself a secretary, he asked me what exactly would be involved. I told him about medical and unemployment insurance payments and income tax deductions and so on, he seemed to lose interest.’

  There were sheets of printed music and blank manuscript pages scattered over the top of the desk, which apparently had not been disturbed for some time. On the manuscript pages the same few bars of a melody had been written over and over again. The desk drawers were filled with more manuscript blanks and dozens of records which, like the sheet music on top of the desk, were mainly ballads. A few were familiar—pleasant enough tunes, but too derivative for Michaelson to really approve of them. There were no musical instruments in the room.

  The other desk, which seemed to be in current use, was scattered with philatelic magazines and reference books. The drawers contained magnifiers and large sheets of unused stamps in plastic folders with a few singles, also in transparent envelopes, which were even older. Michaelson had never been a stamp collector.

  ‘Are these valuable?’

  ‘They aren’t rare,’ replied Nesbitt, in tones which said that he had been and probably still was. ‘But in quantities like that, in mint condition, they are worth a considerable sum of money. If I’d known about them I would have advised him to keep them in a fire-proof safe.’

  ‘He takes your advice?’

  ‘He listens to it.’

  Michaelson smiled. ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘I call in most nights during my rounds,’ said Nesbitt. ‘Being alone he doesn’t have to work normal hours, and if he is awake or working late he leaves the door open so I can come in for a cup of coffee, or to watch the wrestling if it coincides with my break.’

  ‘So his hobbies are drinking coffee and watching the wrestling,’ said Michaelson drily.

  ‘No, sir. He switches channels for me. I usually find him watching current affairs programmes. He is a very serious-minded young man,’

  ‘Worried about something, do you think?’

  ‘He hasn’t looked very happy recently, but from what I’ve heard he doesn’t have any financial worries.’

  ‘Any idea where he stayed before coming here?’

  ‘At a hotel a few blocks away, the Worcester. Some of his mail is still being forwarded from it.’

  ‘Why did he move?’

  ‘I think it was red tape again,’ said Nesbitt. ‘He had been living there for nearly two years—well, not exactly, he used a room to carry on his business and sometimes he lived in it if it was too late to go home in the evening. The hotel did not mind at first—it is a small place with an easygoing manager. But apparently it contravened regulations for a guest to carry on a business on a permanent basis from his room. Rather than try to sort it out he moved here.’

  ‘He confided in you a lot?’

  ‘Not at first. But one night he came in drunk, really sick drunk. I think it must have been the first time he had tried alcohol and he had tried everything in sight. While I was helping him to bed he told me that he had a problem, but not what it was, and that he had to talk to somebody here. After that we talked for a few minutes, sometimes longer, every night—but never about his problem. I got the impression that it was a very personal thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michaelson. ‘Did he go out much at night?’

  ‘Recently, yes,’ said Nesbitt. ‘I expect he got himself a girlfr
iend. A good thing, too—he had been very worried about something for the past three weeks. He had told me that his problem was worse than ever and that now there would never be a solution to it. But earlier this week he started going out every night for three or four hours and sometimes staying away all day, so probably there was a solution to it after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michaelson.

  He was thinking about Mrs. Timmins and the solution which she represented to the suspect’s very personal problem and he could not trust himself to say anything else.

  His quick look around was gradually developing into a full-scale search, but so far the night security man had made no objections. He believed that he was helping the suspect and it was obvious that he was so convinced of ‘Smith’s’ honesty that the thought that he might be harming the other man had never entered his head. The fact that he was an ex-policeman and Michaelson an Inspector would also have something to do with it.