THE GAUDY SHADOWS

by John Brunner

  A few chords, a trilling run in the middle of the keyboard, halted on a tantalising dominant, and Bitchy leaned to the mike to giggle camply: “It’s no good looking, darlings. I have the best-kept secret in London. I even make my own clothes…”

  And a few bars of Buttons and Bows.

  “Yes, the best-kept secret in London… although I had the second-best until yesterday, when my dears I came into possession of the most fab bit of gossip. Naturally I swore I wouldn’t tell a soul…”

  Body and Soul, the first sixteen bars of the chorus in full, stopping dead like a car when the brakes are tramped on, and the snide, meant-to-be-taken-seriously gibe which was Bitchy’s trademark.

  “I can tell you, though. All of you sold your souls long ago.”

  And the contempt seared across the room like a flame thrower, forestalling the wince, the laugh, the brief applause for the first truly Bitchy joke of the evening. Laird didn’t smile. His eyes were on the figure at the piano and he was remembering the words of a quarter-hour ago: “Press their buttons and they’ll jerk all night.”

  He was suddenly certain he’d come to the proper starting point in his unpremeditated quest for the truth about Sammy’s death.

  The “fab bit of gossip” was nothing—a pun on the name of the Prime Minister with three distinct perverted implications, one of them in German. Laird got all three. He’d heard the German word used on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg during his first trip to Europe.

  It continued: the inevitable mixture of deep dirt, savage slander aimed at public figures, monstrously exaggerated in-the-know accounts of recent news items, cleverly contrived so that one could never tell what was meant to be fact and what fiction just over the borderline of the ludicrous—unless Bitchy chose to snap the truth on as a postscript.

  “Absent friends,” came the eventual murmur, and with it a phrase of God Be With You Till We Meet Again that carried Laird all the way back to Sunday mornings when he was a kid, uncomfortably smart between his parents in the narrow pew of their neighbourhood church. “I’ve just thought of a new explanation for the death of Sammy Logan. Do you remember Sammy? No, I see you don’t. There are one or two faint frowns—‘Now where did I hear that name?’—but nothing more.”

  Down Memory Lane. The next part was spoken over a full ornate statement of the time.

  “Sammy? Well, he was the guy who paid your bill, sir, the night you went to the cleaners in the back room. Poker, I believe… or poke-him, it’s hard to tell just by looking, isn’t it? And Sammy was the man who picked you out of the gutter, madam, hired the doctor and… put you back… Generous. Yes. But a very hard-headed person. Sort of… practical. Knew which side his bed was guttered.”

  An instant shift into Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.

  “There have been countries… they tell me… where when a man died his family and friends gathered to eat him at a ceremonial feast… Should revive the custom here, I think… Idea was some of the dead man’s virtues passed on with his flesh… I know a lot of people… who could do with some virtues. None of their own. None at all…”

  And very softly and blasphemously to the mike, in the precisely-caught tone of a bored minister who has done this more thousands of times than he cares to count and got to bed very late on Saturday night: “Take and eat Him in remembrance and feed on Him in your heart—”

  Cut short, at exactly the psychological moment when the first listener realised what was being said and bridled into offence, by a snatch of song: “Gin a body—eat a body—kind enough to die…” The piano under it, mocking.

  It would be very easy, Laird reflected, to hate Bitchy Legree.

  “Oh, my new theory… about his death? They found him lying face down, don’t you remember? I think he picked up a succubus, and when she’d finished with him she just faded away from beneath him and… there he was.”

  I’m Into Something Good, punned the piano.

  “Wrote a song about Sammy… Some of you may have heard it, but I know one person who hasn’t.” The immensely lashed eyes turned on Laird. “So I’ll sing it anyway…”

  During it, Laird stared without any attempt to conceal his interest at the party Bitchy had drawn his attention to: Reggie and Miriam Flanceau, he forty-five and paunchy, she younger with a scrawny stale beauty; Sammy’s last girl, who had the grace to look uncomfortable at the song; and Alec Harmadale—mainly at the latter, because as soon as Bitchy’s act was over he intended to go and renew their former slight acquaintance. At first the man was puzzled; then his mouth rounded into an O and he took up the game of “where have we met before?”

  By the time the song ended, Laird knew exactly what Bitchy had meant. It wasn’t so much that these people were dishonouring the memory of a man allegedly their friend; it was more that, no matter how much they claimed to have liked him, they preferred not to think of him again now he was dead.

  “If I should die before I wake,” Bitchy said, pushing back from the piano, “I pray the Lord my soul to take. I’d rather be good—tough though that may be—than spend the next life as well as this with a shower like you.”

  And gone, not waiting for applause. A few of the audience did clap until someone quoted, quite loudly, an old Bitchy comment about the high incidence of clap among the customers of the Lizzie Borden. Then people began to drift towards the gaming-rooms, and Laird rose to walk over to the Flanceaus’ table.

  “Aren’t you Alec Harmadale?” he said pleasantly.

  “I thought I’d seen you before!” Harmadale said, getting up. “But I’m afraid—”

  “About two years ago, in company with Sammy Logan. My name’s Laird Walker.”

  “Oh yes!” The name didn’t mean a thing to Harmadale, but his manners were glossy as new paint. “Ah—let me introduce you.”

  “Won’t you join us?” Miriam Flanceau invited insincerely. That was Laird’s idea, and he accepted warmly. Courcy’s eyes had fixed on him the moment he appeared, but when he had thanked Reggie Flanceau for the offer of some brandy, it was Miriam who spoke up.

  “Don’t you think it’s disgusting, dragging Sammy’s name up again tonight? Apparently when Bitchy sang that song before—just after he died—there were a lot of complaints to the management, and I thought they’d banned it.”

  “If they started to censor Bitchy,” Laird said, “most of the people here would stop coming. They’re here to be outraged—it passes for sophistication. But I must admit I was horrified to learn about Sammy’s death. I only heard the news this morning.”

  “Really?” Miriam leaned forward. Laird diagnosed that she had ridden to death the story of Sammy’s last party, and was overjoyed to find someone who might not have heard about it yet. “Wasn’t it shocking? Why, only an hour or so before he died he was at our place, and nobody had the least idea—”

  “I was with him that night,” Courcy said in a clear voice. “I thought he wasn’t himself.”

  Harmadale gave a barely suppressed sigh, as much as to say, “Here we go again!” Laird recalled Bitchy’s definition of him as “Sammy’s sweeper”, and had trouble preventing a grin.

  “Is it true that they couldn’t decide on the cause of death?” he asked.

  From Reggie: “Yes, apparently—” And at once he was overridden by both women.

  “No, it was a heart-attack. I don’t see what else it could have been!” Miriam declared.

  “I’ve been told,” Courcy stated firmly and simultaneously, “he was put out of the way, and the police had orders to fake the evidence and make sure the inquest verdict went the right way.”

  “I’ve told you before, darling,” Harmadale said with forced patience. “If that were so they’d have done a much more thorough job of covering up, not left it all hanging in the air. Don’t you agree?” he added, appealing to Laird.

  “I guess so. But the idea of him simply dropping dead… Well, I find that equally unconvincing.”

  Flanceau and Harmadale exchanged glances. It was
plain both of them would have liked to change the subject. With gentle persistence, and Courcy as a willing ally, Laird kept steering them back on the same tack. It was hardly surprising, he thought, to find women more willing to talk about Sammy than men after his death. So long as he was around, his charm and generosity enabled men to repress their jealousy of his success with women; now he was in his grave, underlying resentment showed through.

  But it was a weird sensation to hear Courcy repeating the sort of rumours Bitchy would have turned into a snap aside, or glossed with a saving mask of irony. She seemed to take them perfectly seriously. It was a pity, he found himself thinking, that she couldn’t be as level-headed as she was pretty.

  Abruptly he found himself wondering how Polly Logan would have reacted to Bitchy’s performance.

  Finally, this superficial and gossipy conversation began to get on his nerves, and he excused himself on the grounds that he was tired after his flight yesterday. The others made only a token attempt to delay him, although Courcy asked point-blank not only where he was staying but what his room-number was. He told her. Sammy’s companion on the last night of his life was someone he might well want to contact again.

  As he walked out into the warm noisy night, an idea crossed his mind. Maybe Polly would rent him Sammy’s old place for a while, because it was bound to be weeks or months before it could be sold. That, though, was for tomorrow. Tonight was for sleep.

  Only it wasn’t, not immediately.

  Lying back in the broad bed of his hotel room, he found himself staring at images projected on the darkness: Polly appalled at the present he had brought her brother; the mechanic tending the Jensen, delicate as a groom with a valuable horse; crazy green and purple wigs in a store window, as though all the customers were twins of Bitchy Legree; Medea taking up her calculated pose on the long soft lounge.

  And, shadowy because imagined instead of remembered, yet somehow as vivid as any of the others, the picture of Sammy’s body on the carpet of his home.

  It was the first time that he had been able to confront the news about his friend without distractions—and the first time it had had a chance to solidify, like a block of ice.

  “It’s crazy!” he said aloud. “Sammy having a heart-attack before he was forty!”

  Not a thrombosis; the autopsy hadn’t revealed a blood clot. But the kind of heart-attack that could result from shock. The pathologist had said: if a man were to be scared to death.

  Nothing could have scared the Sammy I knew. A man who could crash a plane in a thunderstorm and walk away lighting a cigarette? Ridiculous!

  He reminded himself that the British police were efficient and thorough, that so much publicity had centred on Sammy the official verdict must be the proper one.

  And yet…

  He shut his eyes with determination and rolled on his side, ordering himself to sleep. He failed. Another hour passed, and eventually he realised the truth.

  He wasn’t going to be able to relax and enjoy his stay until he had pestered everyone who might know anything about the way Sammy Logan had died.

  So he’d do that.

  The decision, once reached, released him into slumber. But he dreamed of Medea Logan aping her classical namesake and slipping Sammy a poisoned cup.

  NINE

  The excuse he had used to disengage himself from the Flanceaus was more than half true: the flight from New York had made him tired, and the next morning he overslept. When he called Sammy’s number, hoping to speak to Polly, he got no reply, and decided she must have gone to the lawyers as she’d intended.

  Not that it mattered; after talking to Bitchy he probably knew more than she did.

  Besides, there were a hundred and one other things to check on before he let Sammy rest in his grave. Over breakfast he made a list of lines of approach. He had always had a good memory for what he read, and details from the news-cuttings Polly had shown him had stuck in his mind like barbs. There had been, along with everything else, a brief announcement of Sammy’s will, and that had told him how to spell the name of the firm of lawyers Polly had mentioned, Praidle and Hines; also it had identified the Brankside Hospital as a beneficiary. He jotted all those down, and added the name of the police officer who had conducted the investigation into Sammy’s death, a superintendent from Scotland Yard called William Green who had given evidence at the inquest.

  Was it worth trying to get the police to talk to him? Laird debated that question for as long as it took him to drink his second cup of coffee, and concluded that he had nothing to lose by trying.

  He dialled Whitehall 1212 and asked for Green.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” a metallic voice told him. “The super is in Birmingham today. Would you like to speak to someone else?”

  Damn. “Yes, anyone who worked on the Sammy Logan case, please.”

  “May I know what it’s about, sir?”

  Laird produced the half-truth like a jewel. “I’m an old friend of his from the States. I may be able to give you some new information.”

  “Thank you, sir. Hold on…” A pause long enough to light a cigarette. Then a baritone voice with a trace of Oxford drawl.

  “Hello! My name’s Lewis—Inspector Lewis. I gather you want to talk to someone who worked on the Logan case. I could spare you a few minutes if you can get here before lunch—will that do?”

  “Anything will do,” Laird said grimly.

  Lewis was younger than Laird had imagined from his voice—only a year or two his senior—with cropped dark hair and a dark moustache. He waved Laird to a chair and leaned back.

  “So you have something new for us in the Logan case, do you?” he said.

  “Well, to be frank, I doubt it,” Laird admitted.

  “So do I,” Lewis agreed, not in the least put out. “But I said I’d see you because if there’s the slightest chance of anything new coming to light we want to hear about it—fast. Officially, of course, the case is closed. Privately, I don’t mind telling you, everyone I knew who worked on it is still worried.”

  “I kind of got that impression from the stories I read in the papers,” Laird nodded. “That was why I took the chance of calling up and asking to see you.”

  “You guessed right. Ordinarily it would be out of the question. But this was a very exceptional case. It wasn’t one where—oh, where one was morally certain someone had done something and yet we couldn’t proceed for lack of evidence. That does happen occasionally. More, this was a matter of suspecting the facts, if you follow me.”

  “I’d be satisfied to get hold of a few facts,” Laird sighed. “I only just got here from the States, and already I’m half-drowning in fantasies. Like some cabinet minister ordered Sammy put away.”

  “You heard that kind of talk already?” Lewis scowled. “Yes, I wish the bloody gossip would die down! It’s—well, never mind.” He reached for a notepad and poised a pencil over it. “When did you last see Logan, Mr Walker?”

  “On my first trip to Europe, two years ago.”

  Lewis looked at him blankly for a long moment. Then he tossed his pencil aside.

  “Well! You’re a cool customer, I must say! There aren’t many people who can con me into indulging their curiosity for them!”

  Laird gave an apologetic grin. After a moment, Lewis’s mouth also twisted upwards at the corners.

  “Okay, you win,” he said and glanced at the electric clock on the wall of his office. “I have to go catch a train and join my super in Birmingham, but I have about ten minutes before I need to leave. What the hell do you want?”

  “I didn’t know Sammy for long,” Laird said. “But I got to know him pretty well. Just about everything I’ve heard or read about his death strikes me as horseshit. And going by what you said already, I think you agree. So I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  He waited. At length Lewis gave a shrug.

  “All right. I certainly won’t promise to answer you. But you can try.”

  Laird drew a d
eep breath, forcibly ordering his thoughts. He said, “The verdict on Sammy was natural death. Does a natural death always rate the attention of a superintendent and an inspector from Scotland Yard?”

  “No.”

  “So how come Sammy—?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! He was rich and he enjoyed seeing his name in the papers! And our path man said he was scared to death. What we wanted to know was what a man worth half a million was so frightened of, in case it involved other people.”

  “Going broke?”

  “Naturally. We alerted the Fraud Squad. But his finances proved to be perfectly sound.”

  Laird bit his lip. “So what in hell could have frightened him? Did he suffer from some kind of phobia?”

  “Obviously we thought of that the moment we found out he’d been a voluntary patient in a mental hospital. But—”

  “A mental hospital?” Laird broke in, astonished.

  “Yes! The one he left a legacy to, the Brankside in South London. That’s public knowledge, isn’t it?”

  “I heard about the legacy,” Laird muttered. “I just didn’t realise it was a mental hospital. Please go on.”

  “For someone who promised to tell me something, you’re doing an awful lot of listening,” Lewis said sourly. “But Logan didn’t make a secret of his treatment—in fact he took something of an interest in the hospital afterwards, bought books for its library, that kind of thing.” He hesitated. “One point did come up in that connection, though. It’s definite that he wasn’t there to have any sort of phobia treated, but—well, you may have seen in the inquest reports that our path man analysed his spinal fluid?”