One Foot in the Grave

by Peter Dickinson

  “You’re not too tired?”

  “No. Feel as if I’d had a rest, lying here.”

  “Good. That’s just how you should feel. Now, there’s something else I’d like to have a word about, if you’re up to it. It’s not medical. … In fact, I need your advice. Mr. Brackley, one of our senior shareholders, gave me a ring this morning—doesn’t normally happen, but they’re getting a little jumpy, and they asked me. … Tell me, do you know anything about a patient we have here called Wilson?”

  “A little. He paid me a visit a few days back.”

  “Did he now? … Well, in that case … look, obviously I can’t expect you to tell me anything confidential. I’ll just assume that you know as much about this Wilson chappie as I do—which, since he’s not my patient, was nothing at all until Mr. Brackley telephoned—and I rather gather from his tone that he hadn’t really been told anything like the whole truth and if he had we wouldn’t have taken Wilson on. … You know we make a special feature of our security arrangements? That’s the reason Mr. Brackley got on to me—I do the liaison on the medical side. …”

  (Of course, thought Pibble. The electrically controlled shutters. A typical Follick gadget.)

  “You see, people who really want that sort of service don’t mind what they pay. But they’ve got to be sure it’s working. A murder on the premises isn’t a very good advertisement, but at least it was a security guard who was shot, and in some ways that’s a plus—shows that the system is functioning, and that it’s needed. We can cope with that. What’s really worrying the owners now is having these troops of policemen all over the place, inside the building, getting nowhere as far as anyone can make out. That is very bad for morale, and in this sort of business, which depends so much on word of mouth, a few weeks’ dissatisfaction can result in two or three years’ loss of profits. You follow?”

  “You want to know how long the investigation will go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t say. If they don’t solve the case, they won’t close the file for a long time. Might still be a couple of officers working on it for a year.”

  “Here? At Flycatchers?”

  “No. It’s not only Tosca, it’s Wilson. If they decide Tosca’s death had no connection with Wilson, they’ll concentrate on his other activities and probably clear it up in a couple of weeks, and you’ll be rid of them after that. But of course that’ll probably mean the arrest of somebody inside Flycatchers—not such a good advertisement. But if they find there was a Wilson connection, then the murderer’s probably from outside and they can investigate that just as well—better—from their own centers. But they’ll want to keep a few chaps on here till they are pretty sure Wilson’s safe.”

  “They won’t take him away?”

  “They might; depends whether they can find anywhere else as good. You’d know about that, more than I would.”

  “There’s a couple of places. … Thanks, James. I get the picture. I’ll tell Mr. Brackley. Now let’s get you unplugged.”

  Pibble lay still. He felt weary and relaxed, but remarkably well and clear-headed. He had positively enjoyed explaining the logical outcome of the police investigation, putting the sequence of events together in coherent sentences instead of letting Follick fish sense out of a jumble of half-senile mutterings. He watched Follick remove the terminals and the moon-man hat, and then stride to the anteroom door and open it with a characteristic flourish, as though it were a cabinet from which he had triumphantly vanished the two nurses.

  And replaced them with what? Just as characteristic as the door-opening was the suddenness with which the gesture stopped, unfinished, while the eyebrows rose in unashamed surprise at what the cabinet now contained. Maisie and Jenny came stiffly into the room, both flushed, and with Jenny’s cap crooked and her hair (normally as neat in its natural curls as the orderly arrangement of scales on a mackerel) half tousled. It looked as though Maisie had been crying. Kerry followed them into the room, his face transformed by a wide, vague grin which gave him a look of daft benevolence, like the bamboozled ogre in a folk tale.

  As the stretcher drifted back through the corridors, Pibble let his tiredness take hold. He slept and only half woke when Kerry lifted him effortlessly across into his own bed. Familiar blankets closed around him. He heard the door whimper, click where the stretcher jarred it, and close. Fingers settled round his wrist and found the pulse.

  “Sound as a bell,” he murmured.

  “Jimmy!”

  He opened his eyes and saw her face above him, cap still awry, hair out of place.

  “You’re a patient,” she said. “You’re not allowed to play tricks on the staff. Only April the first.”

  “A ration of one trick will be issued to each patient. … Wasn’t there a chap called Bertie Foster-something?”

  Awake now, he was aware that something had happened during an earlier period of unconsciousness. Whatever it was left him with a sense of almost hysterical exhilaration, the aftermath of victory. The Old Guard, maimed, leaderless, marching with ancient muskets, had fought off a computerized modern army. Cracking good show, Pibble—pity you can’t remember what the battle was about.

  “Foster-Banks,” she said. “He was frightful. He once put itching powder in all the wheelchairs. His jokes weren’t funny at all. We got up a deputation saying that either he left or we did, but it wasn’t any good. He turned out to be a big shareholder. One of the owners.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died before it got that far.”

  “What they call a merciful release. Something’s happened to your hair.”

  “I was fighting with Maisie.”

  “Uh?”

  “She wouldn’t let me listen at the door. Goodness, she’s strong. Kerry just stood there grinning. I suppose it must have looked like a bit of silent movie, me trying to get to the door and Maisie holding me against the wall and tears lolloping down her cheeks and neither of us saying a word.”

  “Why? …”

  “You’re my patient, aren’t you? I have to know what’s going on, and. … It was almost as if he’d summoned up a devil or something—there was this strange voice going on and on; it took me ages to work out it must be you—and Maisie wouldn’t let me listen! What on earth were you on about?”

  “Don’t know. He put me in a trance and made me talk. Idea is you make the mind distract itself, or something. … When I came to, I was telling him about Dickie … trying to bend me …”

  “Don’t try and tell me now. You’re tired.”

  “. . . Didn’t bring it off …”

  “I could see that.”

  “Uh?”

  “It’s a look men have. When they want something and they don’t get it. I’m not blind!”

  She let go of his wrist and swung away from the bed, snatching his pajamas from the back of the chair and then standing irresolute, as if not sure why she was holding them.

  “Jenny?”

  “Yes!”

  “Tosca. He wanted. …”

  She turned very pale, and then a raw and mottled blush suffused her face and glowed like a rash on her neck. Her mouth worked as though something glutinous were stuck to her teeth.

  “Must know,” he muttered.

  She shut her eyes and deliberately controlled the fit. Paler than ever now, she bent her head as though she was studying the texture of his pajamas.

  “Yes, he did,” she said in a flat voice. “And no, he didn’t. If you ask me anything like that again, ever, however much you need to know, I shall leave and go somewhere else.”

  Pibble dozed the early evening away, physically and emotionally exhausted. Self-pity and boredom—pity for his boredom, boredom with his pity—wound through their endlessly reiterated reel. Jenny had left the radio on, but it remained gibble-gabble in his ears. The time pips for the seven o�
�clock news seemed to break the trance, and though the news itself was nothing but strikes and bad-weather blues, he listened to it. When the loathed Archers followed, the stimulus was enough to make him switch the machine off and simply lie, thinking, till supper came. His thoughts were not about himself, and surprised him by their coherence.

  8

  Almost summer,” said Jenny over his shoulder.

  “Don’t you believe it. Springs are getting later and later.”

  “Look, those are going to be crocuses, aren’t they?”

  She stopped the chair so that he could inspect a few dark-green spikes poking through the winter-withered turf.

  “Yes,” he said, “but they’ll be looking just the same in six weeks’ time.”

  “You’re hopeless. I want it to be summer. You and I are going to win the mixed doubles.”

  “Who is there to beat?”

  “Nobody, yet. They use the old tennis court as a croquet lawn. Colonel McQueen is the expert; he teaches all the new nurses to play. Makes sure we swing the mallet right; you know, lot of standing around with his hands over yours, adjusting your grip.”

  She laughed with mockery but without bitterness. The morning was deceptively soft and bright, but cold enough to make sitting still in the wheelchair uncomfortable, despite gloves and scarf and overcoat.

  “I’d like to walk for a bit,” he said.

  “Sure? I’m not certain you should be up, even, let alone out and tramping around.”

  “I’m all right.”

  She stopped the chair, helped him to his feet, put his stick into his right hand and drew his left over her shoulder.

  “What are you smiling at?” she said.

  The answer was McQueen, cunning old goat. But though the relationship seemed to have reestablished itself uninjured, he wasn’t going to risk stepping even that close to forbidden ground. He felt wide awake—had done, since soon after breakfast—and it was noticeable that when he had stood from the wheelchair the customary darkness barely brushed its wing across his consciousness.

  “Let’s go and look at the scene of the crime,” he said.

  “Oh! You can’t get up the tower—they’ve put a new lock on it.”

  “Never mind.”

  With Jenny pushing the empty chair, they moved slowly, slantwise along the path across the shallow slope of lawn that spread down from the front of the house to the ha-ha. The downs, hummocked and shadowed, looked only half the distance away that they did on other days. Flycatchers rode its own swell of green in placid ugliness.

  “You’re quite right, its being like a ship,” he said. “I thought of that when I was going out in the storm. Deck bucketing about, you know.”

  “You didn’t!” she said. “That’s extraordinary!”

  “Ur?”

  “Oh … just you thinking about it at a time like that, I suppose.”

  He had felt an instant of withdrawal where his arm ran across her back, but she relaxed almost at once. He couldn’t detect any sense of wariness or reluctance as they neared the colonnade.

  “What are you looking for?” she said. “Scraps of thread’s the usual thing, isn’t it, or bits of tobacco ash?”

  “The police will have found all those. They’re the experts. It’s a nuisance, sometimes, the stuff you find. I mean, look at these ramblers—any of you coming along here in one of your cloaks might catch a bit on a thorn. Look there. And there.”

  “Why do you think they’d be wearing a cloak?”

  “You misunderstand me. I wasn’t talking about that night in particular. You’re wearing a cloak now.”

  “They’d look like a bat, wouldn’t they? He’d be watching from above—Countess Dracula, going to her tower.”

  “If that’s what happened.”

  She glanced at him, a little surprised, and looked away. It was as though her dancing partner had put a foot out of step. He was morally certain now that she had come out on the night of the storm, and almost as sure that she had been to the tower. What’s more, she was aware of these certainties, tending only to overestimate­ their strength and detail. He looked down at her small hand on the white rail of the chair.

  “What size shoes do you take?” he said.

  She laughed.

  “I don’t, or at least they don’t make them. If they did they’d be three and a half Cs, so I have to get them made—my feet are almost square, like a boxer pup’s. Sometimes I think that the factory didn’t quite finish making me. Look.”

  She held up her other hand to show him its square, muscular palm and its extraordinarily short fingers.

  “I know,” he said. “This must about be where I fell over. I crawled the rest of the way. I wonder if it was me broke that clematis.”

  “Look, it’s growing,” she said, pointing at the juicy leaf buds in the axils of the wizened foot of stem.

  “They start very early. I wonder how much he could actually see from up there. …”

  He turned at the tower door and faced along the colonnade. It was a continuation of the terrace that ran the whole length of the house, which meant that the tower was set a little forward from the line of the building. A marksman up there would be in a classic enfilade position.

  “Which is Mr. Wilson’s window, do you know?” he said.

  “He’s got the corner room, that one there. One window looks this way and the other one out front. He always likes these curtains drawn before it’s dark; in fact, since George died he’s left them shut all day.”

  Her tone implied that these were facts he needed to know. He stood pondering, conscious of her support and the layer of extra warmth where the hem of her cloak had half wrapped itself round his trouser leg. Countess Dracula. “I wish I knew why Mr. X needed a bodyguard.” That was after the shooting. Had Tosca told her, or had she worked it out? And when? Suppose she’d known before the shooting, surely she’d have mentioned it during her endless speculations on Wilson’s role. The knowledge hadn’t been dangerous then. And if she hadn’t known, that must mean she could not have planned Tosca’s death. She’d need to know about the gun. A previous visit? Several? No. Last evening’s outburst surely meant that Tosca had made an attempt to cross her off his list, and failed. It could even seem to mean that he’d failed because she’d shot him; to judge from her reaction to Pibble’s question, she was capable of that. He considered her last visit on the evening of the murder, with her hair glistening from its wash and her presence humming with life and energy—even that could be accounted for as an exhilaration of triumph over the dragon—but it was a single event, out of context.

  During the last few days before that, when Pibble’s own plan had been complete and he’d only needed to wait for a night of storm, he had become almost painfully sensitive to her fluctuations of mood and had perceived nothing. She’d had a distinct low a month or so before, but had emerged from it and was normal, neither exhilarated nor depressed. If she had killed Tosca, it had been on impulse.

  And that meant she hadn’t killed him. The McQueen principle held firm. Something had definitely been planned to happen in the tower, by somebody other than Tosca. Perhaps the shooting had been only an accident, or byproduct, but the element of calculation hung around, like the aftersmell of cigars. Experience could smell it, and experience did not rely on hunches. The killer had taken thought, done sums … and the sums had gone wrong.

  One of those steep South London streets, familiar from childhood. Stained glass in porch windows; stuccoed walls; raw-red tiles, golden privet hedges round minute front patches. Reek of vomit strong, even on pavement. In the dark hall passage appalling. Almost glowing in that stench and gloom, a freak of beauty, a woman. Dead man in front parlor, face down in vomit. Classic Victorian poisoning, sixty years late. Everything there—husband a brute, lover a herbalist, and the woman, pale and statuesque, with the classic oval face
and the crazed calm of misty-gray eyes. Solicitor arrives with letter from husband, voicing his suspicions. Arrests. Charges. Only mystery apparent smallness of dose to cause all that agony; but then evidence that dead man ultra-sensitive to hyoscine. Trial. Black cap. Sentence. What fluke decreed that a Mr. Bill Dudgeon, junk dealer, should pick out from a crate of unreadable books, unbid-for in the sale, the Sermons of the Rev. W. W. Dudgeon and, looking to see if the holy author was any relation, discover blank pages, filled with the dead man’s secret diary? All planned to punish wife with sentence of attempted murder. Every clue planted. Dose calculated to the microscruple, except that the dead man’s doctor had never told him about his sensitivity. And they’d hanged the lovers the morning Mr. Dudgeon came into the station with his find. All at the height of the first anti-hanging campaign, too. But the desk sergeant, a passionate pro-roper, had found a kindred spirit in Mr. Dudgeon, convinced him of the damage his find would do to the cause, so Mr. Dudgeon had taken it home and put it in his stove.

  “I don’t think she ever realized what was happening to her,” Pibble murmured aloud. “I hope not.”

  “So do I,” said Jenny.

  He turned to stare at her, and she nodded as if to show she’d meant what she said.

  “I’ve got to go in now,” she said. “Or I’ll be late with Lady Treadgold’s massage. Anyway, I’m getting cold, and so are you. Hop into the wheelie, Jimmy, and I’ll run you back.”

  “All right.”

  Snared by the apparent well-being, the phantasmal euphoria he had felt after breakfast, Pibble had booked himself for lunch in the dining room. Rather wishing he hadn’t, he waited in the coffee room, vaguely looking through the property advertisements—each an instant fantasy life—in an old copy of Country Life, and thinking without any real purpose about Wilson, the retired dragon, who moved as though his heart were the frailest of fine glass and was yet determined that his life should be prolonged into the prosecutions of his old acquaintances. Even if he was dead, they would remember him in their cells. Pibble found this longing alien; he himself wanted no sort of immortality. A year and a half ago, when he was starting on the downward slither, he had absentmindedly taken a train from central London to the wrong home, not the room in Hackney but the undulating road in the southeast suburbs where he had lived for over thirty years, until Mary died. He had only recognized what he was doing when he turned the last corner and saw that his rose garden was gone, obliterated, the whole triangle chopped off to make room for a new roundabout. Standing there, blinking at the alteration, he had been mostly amazed that he felt no pang. The roses had been his pleasure, his satisfaction. Mary had admired them and approved of them out of her natural competitiveness—her James grew better blooms than anyone for a mile around—but Pibble never felt any of that. The roses existed for him and he for them, and if he was gone it was better that they should vanish too. He did not want even the ghost of a rose. And so with everything else, no shreds, no aftereffects, no grave or headstone. If as he went he could have sucked away with him the memories a few remaining friends might have of him, he would have done so. That applied to Jenny too.