One Foot in the Grave

by Peter Dickinson

  “God give me strength! It could be true—Mary Lou started trying to get into nobby society a few years back—this Bunty woman might even be on the files …”

  “Jaques. Bunty Jaques, I’m almost certain.”

  “Thanks. I can’t say it’s a help. Quite the opposite, but I suppose it’s better to know than not to know.”

  “There’s one thing might keep her quiet,” said Pibble. “This is the stupid bit. She wants you to investigate the death of a resident here, sometime late last year. Sir Archibald Gunter.”

  “Oh, no!” said Mike. “That’s what she was on about, with her friend the Home Sec, I suppose. She didn’t get round to details.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Pibble.

  “Doesn’t the old bag realize—”

  “Hang on,” said Cass, quietly. “Has she got anything more, Mr. Pibble? The inquest on Gunter was on December fourth.”

  Mike tilted his car onto one leg and swung himself round to look at Cass. As far as Pibble was aware, Cass had produced the date out of the air, without referring to any kind of note.

  “We had a letter,” said Cass. “Anonymous. We’re used to that; there’s eleven of these places in our area—nothing as plushy as this, of course—and we keep getting letters from them, telling us that some old bird didn’t pop off entirely by accident. Just what you’d expect, uh? The boredoms and the jealousies, for a start. Plus a feeling that death—my death—ought to have a meaning. Oughtn’t to be an accident, if you follow. So when it gets right up close and people are dropping off all round, I start trying to make them into nonaccidents. Something somebody’s been doing a-purpose, uh?”

  “I live here,” said Pibble.

  “There was something different about the Gunter letter?” asked Mike.

  “Not that you’d notice. Our routine is to pay a friendly call, and it doesn’t take more than an afternoon to find out who wrote ’em. Depending on circumstances, we give the old dear a gentle lecture and let it go at that. But this one, it wasn’t any of the residents or nurses. The graphologist said it was an elderly woman using her normal handwriting and copying it out. He couldn’t say whether it was just a fair copy of her own rough or someone else’s. A psychoboffin we got in had an interesting line. He said it was an absolutely routine poison pen—too routine, in fact. One or two bits came straight out of textbooks.”

  “Tosca,” said Pibble.

  Mike tilted again and swiveled back. Cass, while he spoke, had gradually recalled his limbs from their off-duty sprawl and was beginning to hunch into his pouncing posture.

  “Lady Treadgold told me that Tosca had hinted that there was something phony about Gunter’s death,” Pibble explained. “Her theory is that someone has been taking lump-sum, tax-free payments to knock off relatives who might linger on until the heirs’ expectations came to nothing. She thinks Tosca found out and was blackmailing the someone.”

  “So the someone shot him?” said Mike, only half mocking.

  “Not necessarily. In her theory he was blackmailing everybody he could get any dirt on. He had the same shape of ears as a blackmailer she knew in Monte Carlo in the twenties. I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go back a bit,” said Mike. “Ted, did you come up with anything smelly about that inquest?”

  “Not a whiff. But remember this is a hospital.”

  “Jesus, yes. Hospitals. I heard something a couple of years back, Jimmy, which sounds like a bit of soap opera. An anesthetist told me, at one of the city dinners I sometimes have to go to. One of the big teaching hospitals—he wouldn’t say which. There was this up-and-coming surgeon, handsome, smooth, all that. World waiting for his scalpel. Vistas of millionaires lining his future. Then things went wrong. His operations didn’t work any more. People died. You get the picture? Career almost in ruins. Hospital hushing things up the usual way. And then, quite by accident, it comes out that it wasn’t his fault at all. Or not directly. He’d been having a real wow of an affair with one of his theater nurses, and then he’d given her the push. But he hadn’t sacked her from her job, because she was good at it. Does she bite the dust, have hysterics, call the Medical Council to witness to her wrongs? Not a bit of it. All she does is, quietly, without telling anyone, set out to ruin his career. See that his ops go wrong. See that his patients die. … Makes your blood run cold, doesn’t it?”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing. The hospital just kept on hushing things up. They posted the nurse up to Birmingham and told the surgeon to confine his attentions to ward nurses in future.”

  “Do you think it was true?”

  “Well, the bloke who told me had been doing his stuff with the claret. He rang me up next morning to make a point of telling me it was a well-known hospital chestnut. I found a theater nurse from St. Nigel’s who’d been posted to Birmingham and committed suicide a few months later. I got a man to look through the death certificates in the months before she went and found a sudden bump in one surgeon’s failure rate. He’s in America now. Point is, even inside the hospital, it only came out by accident. So what chance would there’ve been of our getting on to it? Ted’s right, of course—the letters he gets all come from old biddies with nothing better to do—but there’s the other side, too. When we run into a sort of villainy we’re not geared to cope with, there’s always the temptation to behave as if it didn’t exist. I don’t think I’m going to take this idea very seriously, but … what do you think, Ted?”

  “Um. Just about worth seeing if we can get a lead through Tosca on who wrote that letter.”

  “He was a collector,” said Pibble. “He’ll have keepsakes.”

  “Plenty of those,” said Cass. “But not from dear old ladies.”

  “Lady Treadgold thought he was ready to have a go at her.”

  “Naughty old bag.”

  “No. It’s possible. I think he liked power.”

  “I know the sort,” said Mike. “Rather have a woman who didn’t want him than one who did. Interesting what your psychoboffin said about the letter coming out of textbooks, Ted. Tosca would have seen those.”

  “I think he would tell the actual writer that it was police work,” said Pibble. “Something about trying to force a suspect into action. She would have to keep it secret, of course. Has he got a mother?”

  “Yes,” said Mike. “Very cut up, poor thing. She had his career all planned for him. I don’t think I’ve seen her writing.”

  “Oh, I doubt it would be her, but she might recognize the writing.”

  “Haven’t got it here,” said Cass, “but it’s still on file. I’ll see to it.”

  “Fine. Anything else, Jimmy?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Not unless you’ve found my hat.”

  “Hat!” said Cass and Mike together.

  “Must have blown off,” mumbled Pibble, already preparing his seedy defenses—those hopeless barricades of burnt-out cases and other senile rubbish behind which the last ragged armies of freedom try to repel the storm troopers.

  “Wind,” he added, as if attempting to pile that swirling pother onto his ramparts. Slowly he realized that the storm troopers were failing to attack, distracted by some other interest. In fact, Cass got up and left the room, coming back with three plastic bags.

  “Stupid of us not to think of it,” he said, drawing a shapeless dark lump from one of them. “Somehow, I hadn’t pictured you wearing a hat. This it?”

  Pibble took the object and stared at it, full of vague wonder, like a mother gazing at some tanned veteran and still managing to recognize her child who had marched off for the wars as a downy-chinned stripling all those years ago.

  “Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Thanks.”

  It was all he could do not to put it on his head and see if it still fitted.

  “Thick. Thick. Thick,” said Cass angrily.

 
“Not your fault,” said Mike. “After all, it looked as if it had been in that bush for a year and a half. The shoes are different. Tell us what you think about this, Jimmy. It’s your sort of thing.”

  A little dazed now, from the long effort of concentration and the curious collapse of morale that followed the discovery that his barricade was not going to be attacked after all, Pibble gazed at the shiny, neat shoes, which Cass was taking out of the other bag. Both pairs were black, one stout, with laces, and other flimsier and with elastic sides.

  “They’re small,” he said.

  “Seven and a half,” said Cass. “At least Tosca was no flatfoot. The pair with laces was in the tower room with the rest of his duty clothes—quite stout, bad-weather shoes. Looks as though he’d gone to the tower in them and changed into his fancy gear when he got there—they had damp soles. The other pair’s more interesting. He kept a lot of clothes, including about ten pairs of shoes. Sergeant Astley picked these ones out because they had damp soles too. They’ve got that crackly feel, as if he hadn’t worn them much. A few of his prints on them, but the boffins say there’s a microscopic scum of dust on top of the prints, which makes it look as if they’ve been sitting around some time since he last handled them.”

  “Two ways of looking at it,” said Mike. “Plain or fancy. Plain is my way. Tosca wore them earlier because he didn’t mind getting them wet. Picked them out of his cupboard the way you do; finger and thumb holding inside the two insteps. His socks would wipe those prints off soon as he was wearing them. Because they were wet, he scuffed them off with his feet when he came in and slid them onto the shelf with his toes, save bending. All perfectly natural. Ted?”

  “I go along with all that. There are marks on the heels where they were scuffed off. Only difference is that I don’t think it was Tosca wearing them. A woman could, too, though she might clump a bit, and then she’d leave the right kind of prints in the tower.”

  “That makes it premeditated,” said Mike. “And she’d still have to have a key to Tosca’s room.”

  “OK, it was premeditated. I’ve felt it was all along. It’s got that smell about it. Some bint went out to kill him—someone he’d had a go with and was moving on from. And I can’t see why she shouldn’t have a key to his room—he’d have to have given her one key already to get out of the house with, so why shouldn’t he have given her two?”

  Pibble recognized the tone of the argument as one that had been gone through many times before, now with an extra edge because they were, in a sense, appealing to him. Himself, he was beginning to feel the familiar shriveling and withdrawal into a half-private world. For the moment the shoes obsessed that world. They had an inscrutable look, as though they held messages which they had no intention of delivering.

  “How many?” he murmured.

  “Come again,” said Cass.

  “Had he … moved on from, I mean.”

  “Don’t know for certain. We’ve got five so far. There’s three that don’t mind talking about it. They’re the sleeping-around sort. You can’t see them getting jealous. Two more I’ve found who’ll admit it, reluctantly—got their names out of the first three. That’s all anyone knows about, but he was a fairly secretive operator.”

  “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

  Drifting 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.