The Lively Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “I’ll miss him. Why’s he going?”

  In fact nobody ever saw Dr Ng. He wasn’t a real doctor, but had been sitting various medical examinations without success for the last twelve years, so they gave him a courtesy title. Richard had a strong fellow feeling for him, as another late-come student.

  “He’s come into money. He wants more room, so that he can bring his family over.”

  “That makes two.”

  “What?”

  “Two lots of tenants who’ve come into money. Mrs Pumice …”

  “She doesn’t count. Don sent it.”

  “Umm. How did Dr Ng get into the conversation?”

  “If I let the Government have his room they could move their door to the top of the stairs and include that and Paul’s room in their territory.”

  “What makes you think they’d want to?”

  “Something Mr Obb said yesterday. I met him on the stairs. At least doing banisters means I see a bit of the tenants. It’s a bloody job.”

  “You’re marvellous. I’ll do some at the week-end, if you can find a place where bad workmanship won’t show. What did Obb say?”

  “Well … he started talking about what Livonia’s like at this time of year, very strange and a bit weepy. Then all of a sudden he said that when the new lease was agreed they could do with a bit more room. It’s only a year since they were talking about looking for somewhere smaller.”

  “Umm. So they’ve come into money too. I don’t like it.”

  (Another twist.)

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Has it struck you that Mrs N’s fingerprints would have been on those bottles anyway, if she brought them home? But if they were empties the Government had used, then Linden’s would be on top of hers?”

  “I know. What’s that got to do with Dr Ng’s room?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just the way Tommy was nosing about. You don’t think … this is quite mad. Suppose they wanted to expand, and wanted to bury Aakisen … that’s two motives for bumping off Mrs Newbury.”

  “Oh, rubbish!”

  “Your friend Diarghi told you that Linden had all sorts of little ways of making people die from apparently natural causes. And didn’t Lal say she thought there was something going on, to do with Paul?”

  “Honestly, darling, they’re such incompetents. I was thinking only the other day how I’d have tackled it, if it had been me, and I decided I couldn’t.”

  “Paul’s pretty handy. I’ve decided I don’t care for him, you know.”

  “Darling, this is nonsense. I mean, Lal was talking about currency fiddling, though she couldn’t see how it would work … Are they all in it? Do you need extra rooms to fiddle roubles? It’s all much too fancy. The world isn’t like that. You’ll tell me next it’s an FCP.”

  “Umm. Somebody killed her.”

  “Well, I think Procne must have told her something in one of those telephone calls, and she must have tried to use it for blackmail purposes, and that was that.”

  “Have you told Austen?”

  “I can’t. And in any case I won’t. I’m not sane about that man.”

  “Perhaps I’d better.”

  “No!”

  “What’s up, Liz?”

  By will-power she resisted the tightening screw, disciplining her limbs muscle by muscle into slackness.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Cramp.”

  “You must eat more salt.”

  “That’s just the sort of pseudo-science you learnt from your nanny.”

  Richard loved reminiscing about his nursery, and did so now, apparently without a thought that they had only a few moments back been talking about a murder done under their own roof and still not solved. Or perhaps he was using his old technique to put the notion out of his mind. At any rate, Lydia was glad to lie half-listening to him and half-trying, in fits and starts, to make more coherent sense of her growing certainty that Mr Ambrose had come to “frighten” Mrs Newbury and had finished by killing her. She was sure that coherent, practical thought would fit in the missing elements, the empties, the alcohol in the blood-stream, and so on. But her thoughts wouldn’t cohere. She kept dipping in and out of dreams, all irrelevant. It wasn’t until she was truly asleep that she dreamed anything that she could remember next morning: she was hacking plaster off a wall when, between stroke and stroke, the untouched plaster bulged and fell away, and the brickwork behind crumbled outwards leaving a smoking orifice out of which Mr Ambrose stalked, on tip-toe like a dancer, all covered with strands of grey mycelium which twitched like tentacles and reach towards her own flesh. The dream woke her, and she heard by his breathing that Richard was also awake.

  “Nightmare,” she said, reaching for his hand.

  “Yes,” he said, mysteriously, pulling her close, whether for his comfort or hers she couldn’t tell.

  Chapter 25

  He came not as a monster from behind the wall, nor as a voice in the telephone saying that Dickie would never come home unless … but standing on the front doorstep in a green turban, pressing the bell, looking solemn and respectable like a charity collector for an already prosperous Maharishi. It was mid afternoon. Dickie was home from school. Superintendent Austen hadn’t visited the house for a couple of days. Lydia’s impulse to slam the door was very strong.

  “Oh, hello,” she said. “Where’s Mr Roberts? We’ve missed him. I hope he’s coming back.”

  “I have tried to repersuade him,” said Mr Ambrose gravely, “but when he learnt that you had refused to talk to me he was most hurt. I’ve been a very good friend to him, you know.”

  “I’m sorry—I really didn’t have time that day.”

  “You have time now.”

  “Well, I suppose so,” she answered, though it hadn’t been a question. “Shall we go downstairs?”

  She had hardly time to stand aside as he pranced over the threshold. He was already at the top of the stairs by the time she had shut the door.

  “Mind your head,” she sang out. Mr Ambrose was tall enough to give the warning some point, but really it was only part of Dickie’s spy-game, a code-word meaning “Take cover”. With most visitors Dickie would have scuttled into hiding at the first footfall on the stairs, but Mr Ambrose seemed to float down with no noise at all. At the bottom he turned the wrong way and strode into the chaos of what was now Lydia’s workshop and timber-store. She took that as a good omen; it was the kind of unsettling trick that he deliberately worked on other people. Only he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Sorry,” she said, holding open the right door. “We’ve switched it all round since you were last here.

  “You have sold your bed?” he asked, standing in the doorway and peering round.

  “No. We’ve got a separate bedroom now.”

  “You are luckier than most of my friends, Lydia.”

  “Yes, I know. Milk?”

  “Hot. A large cup.”

  “I’ll put it on. The big chair’s more comfortable than it looks.”

  “You have it then. I’ll sit here.”

  While Lydia lit the gas and put the saucepan on he picked up an upright chair and flicked it over to the shelf by the telephone. Slowly, hitching up his trousers with great delicacy so as not to spoil the creases, he settled onto it. It was a performance, a demonstration. He was master and could choose his own ground and take his time about it, picking in the end a place that commanded both the door and the telephone, cutting her off from the world. Lydia perched herself on the arm of Richard’s chair. Mr Ambrose said nothing, but looked round the room as though he were memorising its contents for a game of Pelmanism.

  “I think you were trying to warn me about something,” said Lydia at last.

  “No.”

  “Oh. You said I had trouble. I’m sure you did.”

 
“That is your own affair, Lydia. You told me so, and I believed you. How can I do my work if I do not believe people?”

  “What exactly is your work?”

  (It was a nuisance to have reached this stage without having had a chance to trip the rat-trap, but the opportunity to ask so bluntly might not come again.)

  “Ah,” said Mr Ambrose in episcopal tones, “I could tell you that that is my own affair, but it is not, because my work is helping other people, advising other people.”

  “You mean like the Probation Service?”

  “Sometimes I work with the Probation Service.”

  “Who actually employs you? Are you part of the Borough Council?”

  “I work for a private charity, the Citizen’s Council Trust. We call it the Council. We prefer to work without publicity, so you will not have heard of us. We specialise in housing problems.”

  “Are you a registered charity?”

  “Why do you ask, Lydia? I am not begging for a subscription.”

  Tense though she was, some body-clock clicked. Lydia dashed for the cooker and caught the milk just as it rose. She blew on it to break the uprush, poured it out and carried it across to him. As she did so she felt him watching her, felt the pressure of his personality focussed tightly upon her, building up moral dominance. His many-ringed fingers gripped the hot mug without flinching. The rings had sharp outlines on the fat, dark flesh; a sideways flap of the hand would rip a face open in half a dozen places, but Lydia was sure he didn’t often need to do that. The feel of the man was enough; there was this switch or stop marked THREAT, which he could pull and at once the threat boomed out of him, without his needing to do or say anything.

  “Hang on a moment,” she said. “I have got to make a phone call. My sister will be going out later, and I can’t put it off.”

  “Yes you can, Lydia. Your sister must wait.”

  “She can’t. I told you she’s going out.”

  “Then she will wait longer.”

  “Really, Mr Ambrose …”

  “Do not use that voice to me. I have taken the trouble to come here to tell you something of importance. I find it intolerable that you should prefer to chatter to your sister.”

  Lydia hesitated an instant too long. If she had moved at once for the door she could have got there, but the knowledge that Dickie was still hidden in the room, and the determination to trip the rat-trap made her dither, although she knew that the encounter was now out of her control. She had a half-notion that if she made for the door Mr Ambrose, impeded by his mug, would move into her path and thus give her a chance to grab at the phone. So she walked deliberately in that direction. But he was far faster than she’d bargained for. Before she’d taken a couple of steps he had put his mug on the shelf by the telephone, risen, lunged and caught her by the elbow. A flick of his wrist spun her against him with her shoulder in his chest. His stance seemed as solid as a cast-iron pillar, though he was resting all his weight on one leg while the other locked round hers. One hand gripped both her forearms behind her back. The hold was gentle but completely firm, like that of a vet examining a wounded bird. Close to, she discovered he used scent. He smelt of wild honey, not strongly but piercingly. The whiff of it seemed to reach into her, all along her veins.

  “Let me go,” she said. She didn’t expect him to, of course, but she instinctively felt that he wanted her to struggle, to scream. So the best thing was to enter, so to speak, a formal protest. The wild-honey scent frightened her more than his touch and his strength. It suggested an element of irrational savagery; but the rest was just an act, a demonstration. She could cope with that.

  With a slow movement like a caress he slid his free hand across her breasts, down her ribs, till it reached her own hand. Carefully he began to bend her third finger backwards until all the tendons were fully stretched.

  “Stop it,” she said quietly.

  He smiled, gave the finger a well-judged extra tweak which made pain twang up to her elbow, then without waiting for her reaction tossed her into the armchair. She’d put good casters on it, so it slid smoothly back under the impetus of her body until it fetched up against Dickie’s hide-out. She fancied she could hear his breathing.

  “You don’t work for a charity at all,” she said, scooting the chair back towards the middle of the room. “You’re just some sort of hired bully.”

  “In my work I sometimes need to restrain hysterics. It is a melancholy business.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’re a fool, Lydia. You think you can buck the system. You’ve got a very nice set-up here, nice hubby, nice kid, nice tenants. Why should you want to spoil all that?”

  Lydia said nothing. Mr Ambrose moved back to his chair, sat, leaned forward, and put his ringed fingers together, like a prissy clergyman explaining some point of doctrine.

  “It is my experience,” he said, “that citizens who misbehave do not get away with it. They are not directly punished, but the good Lord strikes them down in their pride and obstinacy when they least expect it. I remember a young man who started to tell lies about some of my friends, and shortly afterwards he became involved in a fight in a bar and was very severely hurt. I can remember many such cases. A busybody interferes in the life of an unfortunate young woman, and shortly afterwards her own son is knocked down by a car in the street. I have seen it happen many times.”

  “If you want to make threats you’d much better make them openly.”

  “To the trained mind that is a hysterical remark. You are too intelligent to become the victim of a persecution complex, Lydia.”

  “Balls. Your job is to scare people. You put Mr Roberts in to see whether it was worth trying to scare the owners out of some of these houses. You probably decided it wasn’t because we’d be able to fight you and that might bring into the open some of the other schemes which your bosses are involved in. Did you have anything to do with Mrs Newbury’s death?”

  “That old bag?”

  He mismanaged the note of surprise, pausing too long before he answered.

  “Mrs Newbury didn’t die by accident,” said Lydia. “And Mr Roberts was a different man from the bloke I first asked about gardening. I believe that Mrs Newbury’s daughter worked for your lot, and she used to phone Mrs Newbury once a week for a long chat. She probably told Mrs Newbury a lot of things which you’d rather didn’t get out, and if she did Mrs Newbury might easily have tried to use them. I think that first bloke was doing a clumsy sort of recce. Whether you killed Mrs Newbury or not, you’d need to know what was going on.”

  Mr Ambrose modulated his surprise into a dismissive laugh, not bothering to make his amusement sound genuine. He shook his head, then leaned forward, suddenly earnest.

  “We have good friends in the police force, Lydia,” he said. “I hear the old bag left a number of papers which you purloined.”

  “You hear wrong.”

  “Lydia, Lydia, some of the things you have said about me suggest that you have been listening to lies, or reading lies. But it is true that poor little Procne used to phone the old bag, and Procne is a great liar. I need to know what she told the old bag, and what the old bag wrote down. There was some money, too, wasn’t there? That belongs to my friends. Where is it?”

  Despite her vulnerability and her failure to reach the telephone Lydia felt that she still had some control over the situation—rather more, in fact than when Mr Ambrose had worn his facetious mask of charity. She’d actually gained ground. The memory of the wild-honey scent began to recede. And if Mr Ambrose felt as earnest as this about the imaginary blackmail material, it became increasingly plausible that he, or someone else in his organisation, had earlier eliminated the blackmailer.

  “Your friends in the police haven’t kept you up to date,” she said. “I believe that the witness who told them about Mrs Newbury leaving something has now decided
she made a mistake.”

  “The power of landlords over tenants is very great.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lydia, stung to be equated with the type of landlord Mr Ambrose worked for. “In any case, suppose there had been some money, I would have thought it belonged to Mrs Newbury’s daughter.”

  “Ah, our mutual friend, little Procne,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about her. That is the purpose of my visit. When I spoke to you, and you were too busy to sit with me in my car, I did not then know that you had stolen this money of ours. I was merely concerned to point out what damage you might do—would certainly do—both to her and your own family by … Ah, Lydia, Lydia, you took this money so that you could give it to little Procne when she is released. A sentimental theft. I see.”

  He sat for a few seconds moving the tips of his fingers against each other and clicking his tongue quietly.

  “I hate butch women,” he said. “I think I must teach you a lesson.” He reached for his untouched mug of milk and looked at it. “Skin,” he sneered. He poured the milk out on the carpet. “And a cracked mug. Unhygienic.”

  He put his thumbs into the mug—Dickie’s old mug with a steam threshing machine as the design—and pulled it apart. He dropped the pieces in the mess of milk.

  “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” said Lydia, rising.

  He leaped up, grabbing his own chair so that for an instant Lydia thought he was going to hit her with it. But he simply thrust her back into the armchair and stood over her, legs wide. She opened her mouth to yell.

  “You scream for help,” he said, “and I break your neck. You need some new furniture, Lydia. This old stuff is no good.”

  He plucked a leg out of the chair and tossed it away, disgustedly. Then with no visible effort he broke the back of the chair across his knee.

  ... --- ... sang the metal bird ... --- ...

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” yelled Lydia, crazily hoping to drown the sound.

  Mr Ambrose stepped back, nostrils flaring, then dashed at the pile of boxes, tearing them violently from each other and leaving Dickie naked to the world with his hand poised over the key. Even in her fear for him Lydia shared the shock of his finding himself in a world where the brutal enemy did discover the hero’s hide-out. She jumped up, tense to bite and claw. Mr Ambrose snatched Dickie up by the scruff of his T-shirt and said “Catch”. The chunky little body caught her square in the chest but she managed to clutch it as she fell and convert her fall into a sprawl back across the armchair. By the time she had struggled into a sitting position Mr Ambrose was back between her and the door, looking at the transmitter. He dropped it and put his foot on it as if it had been a beetle. The key scrunched sideways. Dickie gasped. The wild-honey smell was very strong.