One Foot in the Grave

by Peter Dickinson

  “Why?” interrupted Cass. (Not How?—he wouldn’t see that that was the real question. Jenny would, though.)

  “Keep warm. I get cold, you know … besides, this man, finding some old idiot in the kitchen, still in his dressing gown, rabbiting on about hearing a shot. …”

  Mike grunted affirmation. He was a good policeman. He understood about the obstinate vanity of decay—old women spending half an hour putting on their makeup before tottering along to the station to report some urgent horror, old men. …

  “You made a dummy,” said Cass.

  “I didn’t want Jenny to worry.”

  They glanced at her for confirmation.

  “He didn’t want me to find out, more likely,” she said, still remote and clinical. “Then he could tease me about it next morning. It’s a game, you know. They like doing things they’re not supposed to, just to show they still can.”

  “Some Colditz!” said Cass. “Where were you while all this was going on, me old Stalagführer?”

  “Putting my other patients to bed, I imagine.”

  “You were in Turnbull’s room when I went by,” said Pibble.

  “You couldn’t have … oh, yes, that’s right—I went back to him.”

  “OK,” said Cass with a reluctant shrug. “So you went down to the kitchen to wait for Tosca. But he didn’t come. Because he was dead. Then …?”

  “I’m not quite sure. I suppose getting down there had taken it out of me a bit more than I expected. Perhaps I was feeling a bit cocky about having got that far. I got impatient. I went and tried the door—I expected it to be locked, you see, but it wasn’t—”

  “You’re quite sure about that?” interrupted Cass.

  “Oh, yes. How else could I have got out otherwise?”

  “They run this place like a fortress,” said Crewe. “Everything locked. That’s right, isn’t it, Nurse?”

  “Yes,” said Jenny. “I mean, we’ve got our own door in the staff wing, but we aren’t allowed night keys to it. It’s always locked just before dark, and after that we have to come in and out through the main entrance.”

  “OK, I’ll check what the routine was for the kitchen door,” said Cass.

  “Somebody usually saw the kitchen staff out after supper and locked it,” said Pibble. “I could hear them, but the storm …”

  “Right,” said Cass. “But at any rate it was unlocked around ten o’clock. You opened the door, and then …”

  “Well, I went out,” said Pibble. “I don’t know why—it seems perfectly stupid now. I suppose the storm mightn’t have been so bad in the courtyard, and I’d got it into my head I wanted to find the chap, and then … well, the door blew shut, for a start, so I couldn’t get back in that way. Had to get round to the front. Started off and … fell over. Wind, it was like. … Anyway, started crawling, I suppose, and just went on. Stupid. Found myself at the tower—must have gone wrong way, you know. Wind. Door open, went inside for shelter—at least that’s what must have happened. I can’t remember deciding to do any of these things. Expect I crawled across and sat on the bottom step—remember feeling I couldn’t just sit there. I’d better do something. Started to climb up. Habit, you know.”

  “Habit?”

  “You tell them, Jenny.”

  “I think we’d better stop soon,” said Jenny. “Can you hear how tired he’s getting?”

  “I’m all right,” said Pibble, aware that he had been overdoing the note of feebleness in order to force them to accept his story. “Give me a bit of a rest. Tell them about stairs.”

  He closed his eyes and half-listened to Jenny’s explanation. His body seemed detached from his mind, the former whining­ with aches and weariness, the latter eager as a puppy on a walk. Even if he hadn’t had a position to defend, a need for alertness, he might have had something of the same feeling. It was as though the working machinery of investigation—Mike and Cass—carried­ a voltage strong enough to wake inductive currents­ in his discarded circuits.

  “Well, I suppose it’s pleasant to have a couple of mysteries cleared up,” said Mike.

  “If you say so,” said Cass, mock-subservient. “I’ll check with the kitchen staff about the door—now I come to think of it, there was something about that first time through. …”

  (Rustle of notebook leaves.)

  “Yes. I’ve only put a query. I remember now. One of them—the fat one—wanted to say something and the thin one interrupted her. Damn. I should have gone back to that earlier. … What else? This shot, if that’s what it was …”

  “Just one,” whispered Pibble, eyes still closed. “Didn’t hear the other one.”

  “A little after nine twenty-five … that’s ten minutes beyond the pathologist’s outer limit.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, Ted,” said Mike. “A different boffin would have given you a different limit. Bloody cold night, wasn’t it? Snow thawing with the body warmth, adding to the wind chill. … How old is this boffin?”

  “Youngish. Nobody’s made him a knight yet.”

  “There. If he’d been a bit older he’d have allowed himself double the leeway.”

  Pibble, eyes still closed, was aware of a tautness between the two men, an unspoken area of dispute, reaching beyond the timing of the shot. It relieved itself in movement. Cass’s voice came from near the window.

  “That’s a fine old cedar out there,” he said. “I’ve heard a tree like that make some pretty odd noises in a storm.”

  “It groans,” said Jenny. “I’ve never heard it bang.”

  “Dendrophonics and medicine,” said Cass.

  Pibble sensed the conversation floating beyond his reach. Jenny’s sudden, firm intrusion, as if determined that her patient must be a reliable witness … Cass’s instinct to tease her … a nip of jealousy. …

  “It could have been the cedar,” he said, loudly. “I thought of it at the time and decided it wasn’t.”

  “Let’s leave it at that,” said Mike.

  There were sounds of rising. Pibble opened his eyes and saw him standing by the bed, smiling down.

  “We’ll leave you alone now, Jimmy …”

  “A couple of mysteries?”

  “What? Oh yes. The tower stairs. I don’t know whether you noticed when you were doing your circus act, but they didn’t get cleaned very often. Plenty of dust, just right for footprints. Policeman’s dream. Only somebody had worked the whole way up, sweeping them clean all down the middle where the prints would have been. Gun wiped, we thought. Stairs swept clean. Rummy bit of work. … We weren’t to know, were we, that an old friend had been slithering up on his arse, wiping all those prints out?”

  “Crippen! I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “Not your fault, mate. And Tosca had swept his hidey-hole out, so that wasn’t any good either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it, Jimmy. I mean, it would have been handy to have some prints, but at least we’re better off than we were, trying to work out how our chappie had the nerve to spend the time doing that job.”

  “And who’d have thought it necessary,” said Cass. “We don’t have half a million footprints on computer, do we?”

  Pibble lay staring up at Crewe, stunned with guilt. The sense of alertness, of being at least mentally his old self, was sucked away like water down a drain. He had the impulse, as the last swirls vanished, to blurt out his real reasons for climbing the tower, to atone for this huge mess by undoing his minor lie; but before he could grasp at the notion, all will had gurgled away.

  “Don’t worry, Jimmy,” said Mike in a changed voice. “I shouldn’t have told you. Worse things happen every day, remember?”

  “I’m sorry” seemed to be all Pibble’s lips would say.

  “I think you’d better go now,” said Jenny, her voice for the first time tinged with some
thing more than medical dispassion.

  “Right. Come along, Ted. See you, Jimmy.”

  “Come and see me again,” whispered Pibble.

  They were gone.

  Come and see me again. I can tell you then. Come and see me alone. Old days. Like the old days. Never come back. Come back. …

  He felt Jenny’s hand at his pulse.

  “Are you all right, Jimmy?”

  She wouldn’t understand. It was no use. For the moment she represented only the world of sickness and helplessness, which for a while he seemed to have escaped.

  “Just tired,” he whispered. “I’m all right.”

  “Do you think you can go back to sleep for a bit?”

  “Urrh.”

  She stood for a moment, then smoothed his bedclothes and moved away. Through the sigh of the door he heard the mutter of male voices. Before they could wake in him fresh springs of guilt, he pulled sleep down over himself and hid.

  While he slept a decision made itself. It was quite easy. There were writing things in his bedside table. There was a police guard in the corridor. He could write a note to Mike—two short sentences to explain that he had heard no shot, but that the rest of the story was true, and a third to say he didn’t want the staff at Flycatchers to know. Weak though he was, he could surely reach the man in the corridor, sometime when Jenny’s routine took her elsewhere. …

  He woke decisively, almost as though the train of thought had been a coherent one, despite being the product of sleep. He was already moving his arm out from the bedclothes to reach for pen and paper when he saw that she was in the room, sitting quietly in one of the chairs, watching him.

  “I think you’re marvelous,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  He was confused, and thought she must be talking about the note he was preparing to write.

  “Your friend thinks so too.”

  “Uh?”

  “They were still out in the passage when I left you, talking about what you’d said. The thin one must have been saying something about not believing you, because your friend—he wasn’t angry, but he was very serious—was telling him that if you said it, it was true. He saw me coming and asked me to back him up, so of course I did. Then they moved off. I listened as long as I could, but it wasn’t very much. He was starting to tell the other man about some case you’d once been in—someone called Smith, was it?”

  “The Smith Machine. Mike’s too young.”

  “He said it was before his time. I didn’t hear any more. What was it about, Jimmy?”

  “My boss was bent. The Smith brothers had bought him. I was the chief witness.”

  “That must have been awful for you!”

  (Typical. Despite her air of having grown and come to flower in some garden untouched by the rots or aphids of the ordinary world, she knew what mattered.)

  “Yes. Don’t let’s talk about it.”

  “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. …