by John Brunner
Too bad.
Shrugging, he slipped the gift back in his pocket. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I took it for granted that Sammy would open the door.” He scanned the room behind her as he spoke, noting how much was out of keeping: on the floor an old suitcase tied with rope, on a table two magazines which didn’t look like anything Sammy would buy. And dust on all the polished furniture. The music he had heard came from a radio playing a morning programme of requests.
Most things, however, were as they had been. The beloved Braque was still in its place of honour, and so was the Brancusi, that curious shining form like a fish seen through deep water.
“Mr Logan isn’t here,” the girl said tartly. “Nor will he again. So take that—that thing somewhere else, and yourself with it!” The words had a strong Lowland Scots inflection, and Laird was reminded of Sammy’s own accent, though living in Southern England had filed the edges off his original burr.
She made to close the door. He placed a foot in the way.
“Now just a second!” he snapped. “That’s Sammy’s car down below—I know because he sent me an article about it, with pictures. This is still his home! I recognise that Braque, and I’m damned sure he was too fond of it just to leave it hanging on the wall and move away. I want to know what’s going on. And in particular, who the hell are you?”
She didn’t flinch. Her deep brown eyes fixed on his foot, as though with her gaze she could spear the flesh and make him withdraw it. “What business is it of yours?” she countered.
Laird took a deep breath. “My name’s Laird Walker. I’m a good friend of Sammy’s. I met him when I was last in London, two years ago. I flew in yesterday from the States and he’s the first person I decided to look up. Okay?”
The girl hesitated. Her frozen attitude thawed a trifle. She said, “You’ve been in America all the time since you saw him last?”
“No, mostly I’ve been in Mexico and Venezuela. Why?”
“Ah. That’ll be why you didn’t hear about his death.”
All the heat went out of the August day. Laird said in a voice he barely recognised for his own, “Sammy dead? How?”
It’s not possible! High-pressure laughing Sammy Logan, colourful and crazy and everybody’s darling—how in the world could he die so young?
“You’d better come in,” the girl said without enthusiasm. She moved aside to let him pass, and he complied in a daze. Closing the door, she continued, “I can’t tell you much about it except what the papers said. I have all the cuttings in my case. But he was just found dead one day, lying in the middle of the room.” She pointed to where Laird was standing. “At the inquest they said it was heart failure.”
Laird moved a pace to the side, irrationally dismayed at having placed himself on the exact spot where his friend died. He said, “You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“I’m Polly Logan. I’m his sister.”
“I never knew he had a sister!”
Her upper lip curled a little. “Sammy was—don’t they say ‘estranged’ from his family? From me rather less than from our parents, but even so I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you about me. Apparently he didn’t even tell his wife.”
“His wife?” That was a worse shock than the former. “When did he get married, then?”
“It turns out,” Polly said, “he’d been married for seven years. I’ll find the newspaper cuttings and you can read all about it for yourself.”
Uninvited, Laird took a chair and stared into nowhere, wondering why the idea of London without this one single man should be so impossible to grasp.
THREE
Seeming glad to have been distracted from the task she’d been engaged on when he knocked, Polly delved in her case—turning it around so the lid concealed items not for masculine eyes, slips and nighties and stockings—and handed him a collection of neatly cut strips of newspaper. She sat down nervously on the edge of another chair and watched him as he read.
There were little groups associated by date. Group one: the bare news of Sammy being found dead by a window-cleaner who was used to not being let in if he came in the morning and had instructions to attend to the outside of the glass. He’d spotted Sammy’s body on the floor and called the police. There were also several gossip-column paragraphs about his hectic life, which told Laird a few things he hadn’t known before such as the name of the scrap-metal company Sammy had built up from scratch and sold for an alleged half-million pounds.
Clipped together to form a second group: reports of the inquest. It was obvious that the police pathologist had been completely mystified. He compared the condition of Sammy’s body to that of a man he had once seen who had suffered from claustrophobia. Trapped by the collapse of a wall on a building-site, he was brought out without a mark on him but stone-dead from sheer terror.
The coroner had been thorough, and asked all the questions Laird could have thought of and many others as well. But so had the pathologist, and he was adamant. He had even analysed the spinal fluid.
Group three: a series of articles from a sensational Sunday paper, ghosted over the names of girls with whom Sammy’s name and probably his body had been coupled. And group four concerned this unexpected wife, an expensively attractive woman with raven hair and Loren-like facial bones, who had come back from Spain intent on claiming her share of Sammy’s leavings. But there were no details of the marriage itself, no hint of the reason why Sammy had concealed it, no reference to a divorce.
Her name was Medea. It seemed ironically apt.
Laird folded the last of the cuttings and raised his head. Opposite, Polly tugged down her skirt another millimetre over her pretty knees.
“Heart failure,” he said.
“That was the verdict.”
“And it’s been two months.” There was still no warmth in the day, though the sun blazed at the open windows.
There was a dead pause.
At last Polly reached to take back the clippings. She said awkwardly, “I’m sorry I was going to shut the door in your face. But…”
“Oh, I should apologise, not you,” Laird cut in. “I planned to surprise Sammy, of course. But I should have had the sense to call up last night, when I got here.”
“You’d not have learned any the sooner. I came down on the overnight train. I’ve only been here an hour. That’s why the windows are open, and the door below. It was all sealed up after—after the police had finished, I suppose. When I came in it smelt so stale and stuffy…”
She hesitated. In a rush, she added, “What was he like, Mr Walker? You said you were a good friend of his.”
“Do you have to ask me about your own brother?”
She licked her lips. “I hadn’t seen him for eight years. Nearly nine. You see… Well, our parents are very strict, and he did some things when he was starting in business which father disapproved of. And then he got mixed up with—with a girl. It was a scandal. I didn’t know much about it because he was twelve years older than me, but I’ve pieced it together from gossip. One weekend, I recall, he came back from the place where he was working—he’d left home already—and there was a terrible argument. I was sent up to my bedroom, but I listened at the door. I was so scared… He went away. Walked out into the night, in pouring rain and lightning.
“I only saw him twice after that. The last time was when he told me he was going to pay for me to go to university. That was something I wanted desperately, and so did mother, but father forbad me to accept. Said Sammy’s money was tainted silver…”
“But you went to college anyway?” Laird prompted.
“Oh yes. Though I was afraid for a while maybe I should have to break with father too. But we still keep company, even if— No, that’s scarcely the sort of talk for a stranger to hear.”
Laird gave a thoughtful nod. The shock of learning about Sammy’s death had brought back many little hints about his background which his friend had let drop, and what Polly was telling him made the random scraps into a pattern
.
“So what brings you to London? You live in—isn’t it Glasgow?”
“Greenock. Not far away. Well, Sammy left a will, you see. He made it not long after I last saw him and never changed it. It says that his money and investments are to go to his wife, but this house and what is in it are left to me. Though I scarcely know what to make of all these things.”
“Is it the first time you’ve seen your brother’s home?”
“Father refused to let me come before. To his mind, his son had become a child of the devil. But he was still my brother, and I can’t think so hardly of him. He was kind to me!”
Her lower lip was starting to tremble.
“I—I must sound like a fool,” she forced out. “But you’re the first person I’ve met down here in London who knew him. I can’t believe he was the sort of person father thinks. Tell me, Mr Walker—what’s the truth?”
Uncertain, Laird cast about in his mind for ways to describe Sammy Logan. He shrugged.
“If you want me to tell you he was a plaster saint, you’re in for a disappointment, I’m afraid. He lived just as lively a life as it said in those articles you showed me. Above all he liked women, and they liked him.
“But if you object to that, which I don’t, you have to balance it by remembering that it wasn’t only women who liked him. He had more friends than I could hope to count, and not just his rich society chums either. My impression was that he’d never forgotten his origins, and felt that but for a lucky break he’d have been driving a crane in one of those scrapyards he used to run, instead of sitting in the chairman’s office smoking cigars.”
Polly was hanging on every word with a naked hunger Laird found pitiful.
“That’s not to say everybody loved him. I met a few people who were jealous because he made a fortune on his own, which is such a rare thing nowadays that people who were born into fortunes look on the world’s Sammy Logans as a threat. And of course there’s this sickening British notion that if you didn’t go to the right school you’re damned for the rest of your life. I remember Sammy once said he was lucky to have a Scottish accent because that was allowed, but if he’d come from Merseyside he’d never have got away with it… Oh, the hell! What I’m trying to say is that your brother was just about the nicest guy I’ve met in twenty countries, and hearing he’s dead breaks me up.”
There was a silence which rapidly became unbearable. Randomly Laird said, “Don’t you have anyone down here to—well, help out with the arrangements? Are you completely on your own?”
“I’ve never been in London before.” Her answer was almost inaudible. “And I don’t expect I’d get on with—with Sammy’s friends. So I’m just going to see what there is here, and I’m making some lists so it can all be sold.”
Dismayed, Laird leaned forward. “Isn’t there even a firm of lawyers that can help you?”
“Well…” The last shred but one of her doubts about this strange tall American who had brought so curious a visiting card faded, and she spoke confidingly. “There’s the lawyers he left his will with, but they’re at home in Scotland, and all they have down here is what they call a correspondent, to deal with London business for them. It’s supposed to be very good—a firm called Praidle and Hines—but apparently Mr Hines didn’t approve of Sammy, and his being dead doesn’t make any difference. I wrote and said I was coming to London and all they did was send me a key so I could get in.”
“They ought at least to have sent a clerk around to go over the place with you!”
“But they didn’t,” she sighed, and rose to her feet. “So if you’ll excuse me I’ll be getting on with it.”
“Not so fast,” Laird countered. “If the lawyers are that uninterested, they probably won’t make a decent job of disposing of the estate. For instance—well, did you look at the car downstairs?”
“I looked in the garage when I arrived. But I don’t drive, and I don’t know much about cars, so…”
“That’s a Jensen. Your lawyers are apt to list it on an inventory as one year-old Jensen car and let it go at that. They’re all hand-built anyway, so they’re always expensive. But you’ve noticed the finish on it—the paintwork?”
“It’s—well, grey, isn’t it?”
“That’s three hundred pounds’ worth of silver,” Laird told her grimly. “Sammy had it done specially—it’s an experimental technique. And it should fetch more than the average second-hand price anyway, because the interior is done in glove-quality peccary instead of regular coach-hide… Are you with me?”
Clearly she was. Traditional Scots canniness was fighting her reluctance to seem to be haggling over her brother’s belongings.
“You’re going to need advice,” Laird insisted. “And if there’s no one else around to give it, you might as well have it from me.”
Still she hesitated, perhaps wondering: a friend of Sammy’s, but is this the kind of man I ought to get involved with?
“It’s kind of you, Mr Walker. But I shouldn’t really impose—”
“Look! Your brother was the man I more or less came from the States to see. He was a terrific guy, Miss Logan, regardless of what his family thought about him, and whatever I can do I want to just because Sammy was Sammy. You can’t possibly call it ‘imposing’ on me.”
“Well, if you put it like that,” she sighed, “I don’t see how I can refuse.”
FOUR
It was the last way Laird had expected to spend his first day back in London, but the strangeness of what he was doing only struck him when he had been at it for an hour or more. The idea of Sammy being dead was strange enough in itself to use up his capacity for being surprised. To him, London had meant Sammy Logan, alive and swinging.
Once or twice he caught himself swearing under his breath because it was such a waste of a good man.
The architect Sammy had hired to make over his home had hit on an ingenious solution to the problem of the limited space inside. The floor directly over the garage was devoted to the important rooms: the living-room and bedroom, with a shower-cabinet and toilet adjacent. The original attics had been turned into the bathroom proper, where the tub was, and a kitchen fitted with an electric hoist time-switched so that food could be loaded on a tray upstairs and sent down in exactly the time it took the host to walk leisurely around and rejoin his guests.
Someone—the police, presumably—had disturbed but not removed everything. The effect was that of the aftermath of an earth-tremor. But it had clearly been none of the police’s business to clean up the place. In the shower, a cake of soap had absorbed a pool of water from its dish and turned to a jellied mass, then dried out again in a loathsome fungus-like heap; in the kitchen were opened cans of food, a loaf of bread grey-green with mould, garbage piled for the grinder over which summer flies swarmed until Laird found an aerosol of insecticide and laid them low in droves.
Despite all these evidences of time having passed, the impression he got of Sammy having this minute stepped out for a drink was eerie. He would have felt relief rather than alarm if the door had clicked open and that familiar mocking voice had greeted him.
Before his arrival Polly had set to work on a preconceived pattern, listing substantial items first in a spiral-bound notepad, her handwriting small and precise: furniture, carpet—measured on hands and knees with a dressmaker’s tape—and kitchen fitments. Laird took a few sheets of paper from her and sorted the more personal items. He counted the records, and while doing so contrived to shuffle out of sight the deep-dirt calypsoes and the bootleg cuttings of nightclub acts. One white printless label bore the name of Bitchy Legree, and he wondered whether that cross-sexed wonder still sat at the same pansy piano in the same expensive club.
He moved on to the books, making an inconspicuous pile of the Olympia and Grove Press editions and anything else he thought might dismay Polly. Doubtless she was prepared for shocks concerning her brother, but it would be kind to let her elevate him eventually into a misunderstood darling.
In the bedroom, clothes, shoes—beautiful leather so deeply coloured it seemed to have no surface, only depth. A tiny gilt code-number inside each identified Sammy’s personal last. The suits were from a dozen different tailors including a couple in Rome. They had all been searched and there wasn’t even a scrap of paper in the pockets. He turned to the socks, underclothing and ties and listed them industriously.
All the time he was vaguely hoping he might stumble on a clue to this pointless death: perhaps a container of capsules in the back of a drawer, some drug prescribed for a lethal sickness; perhaps the wrong contents in some innocently-labelled bottle… He went so far as to unscrew the caps of the after-shave and shampoo he found in the bathroom. He knew it was absurd; the police had been thorough. But he had to do it anyway.
He was sorting a heap of soiled shirts for laundering when there was a nervous step behind him and he turned to see Polly in the bedroom doorway.
“It’s past one o’clock, Mr Walker,” she said. “You must be hungry. I was going to cook a meal from what there was in the refrigerator, because I thought the gas would still be on if the electricity was. But I’m afraid it isn’t.”
His hands were stiff from writing his lists; he flexed all his fingers in big grasping movements. “That was very kind of you, but I was going to suggest anyway that we go out for a snack. Sammy took me to a pub near here with good plain food like pies and cold beef—how about that?”
“I’m a teetotaller,” she answered self-consciously.
“Well, it’s not compulsory to drink alcohol!” Laird grinned. “And Sammy said it was the only place near here not crowded out by office-workers.”
Her murmur of acceptance was almost inaudible; he could read the stranger-in-a-strange-land thoughts passing through her mind.
Before leaving the house, she faded upstairs to the bathroom, apparently embarrassed to be seen by him entering the toilet adjacent to the shower. Pulling on his jacket, the Peruvian statuette still swinging heavy in the pocket, he wandered down to the garage to look over the celebrated car. He had long ago thrown away the glossy tearsheets from Sporting Motorist which some impulse had caused Sammy to send in care of his Caracas hotel last fall, but he recalled distinctly the sensation it was said to have caused at the London Motor Show.