Thanassi knew about Silver now. He’d listened to the tape and ordered Alfred to stay in the area and watch over his interests, which would not be easy to do inconspicuously in peacock livery. Alfred for Thanassi, then, and Pibble for the rest. If Brad got to hear about it, there would be no defence; It was Pibble’s bad luck that it seemed the only thing to do.
He was feeling considerably less exhilarated by the time he pushed the door of the McNair open, but cheered at the sight of the two doorkeepers sitting back to back on the carpet.
“Hello, you two,” he said.
“Man,” said one child, unsmiling.
“Shove off,” drawled the other.
“I’m the copper who lost his hat,” explained Pibble. “I want to see Posey again.”
“Poor Posey,” said one child.
“Man,” said the other.
Perhaps they weren’t even reacting to his presence at all—Marilyn had said “Poor Posey.”
“Shove off,” said both children together.
He crossed the hall to the glaring passage.
Mrs. Dixon-Jones did not look in the mood to play Poor Posey. Her face and lips were pale except for a bright red blotch below each cheekbone. She hardly opened her mouth to free the acid syllables.
“Come in, Mr. Pibble,” she said. “I’ve just been talking about you.”
“Oh, who to?”
“An employee of Mr. Thanatos called Catling.”
“Viscount Catling.”
The title was not emollient.
“He says it is Mr. Thanatos’ wish that you should be taken onto the staff in an advisory capacity, to help Doctor Silver with his research, and that I am to settle your salary with you. I can understand that, though I cannot see the point of it. But he also says that you are to make any recommendations about the Foundation which you think fit.”
“Oh, I say, that’s a bit thick!”
“He says that you are to have full facilities to investigate my department, as well as Doctor Silver’s and Doctor Kelly’s, and that you are responsible to no one but Mr. Thanatos himself.”
“But this is nonsense!” said Pibble.
“I’m glad to hear you think so.”
“I had lunch with Mr. Thanatos and Lord Catling and we talked about the telepathic abilities of the children. I agreed to talk to Doctor Silver about helping him with his research, but that was the only practical result. Most of the time we were talking about life and death and things like that.”
Mrs. Dixon-Jones was once more tapping her pen against the little silver globe, punishing the Bering Straits for Pibble’s shortcomings.
“What salary do you suggest?” she said.
“I told him I didn’t want to be paid, at least for the time being.”
“He usually gets what he wants the way he wants it. He finds a lever.”
“That’s one advantage of being retired,” said Pibble. “There isn’t a fulcrum any longer, if you see what I mean.”
(Even if you have a betraying tape, there’s no longer a job for you to lever against.)
“Well, that’s something,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones without relaxing. “I can put off filling in those ghastly forms for you. What do you want to know about my department, Mr. Pibble?”
“Nothing. I just—”
“You’ll have to ask me,” she snapped, “or Mr. Thanatos will decide that I’ve been obstructive and I’ll be sacked. After seventeen years!”
“He can’t do that—there are limits to his power. He’s not God. He doesn’t own the place.”
“As good as,” she said. “I went down on my knees to the trustees, but he had them hypnotized. They called it ‘a very happy solution to the Foundation’s financial difficulties.’ Oh, God, I wish I’d never …”
Been born? Been to Crete, more likely.
“Was this what you were talking to Lady Sospice about?” he asked.
She nodded.
“He must be putting up a very large sum of money,” he said.
“He’s mad, but it’s not as much as you’d think. We were nearly broke, but we got along. Ram’s toys are expensive, and Rue’s even more so, but apart from that it didn’t need a lot to put us on our feet.”
“This place must eat money,” said Pibble. “Couldn’t you have sold it and gone to live somewhere easier to run?”
She shook her head, still stately but less enraged.
“It isn’t worth much, because no one would get building permission here. And we’d have to get a bill through Parliament to vary the Trust, because one of the conditions is that we live here.”
“Who are the trustees?”
“The mayor, the bank, and one of the Sospice family lawyers.”
“Not Lady Sospice?”
“She’s the patron, which means she has no powers except to make life hell for me.”
“We all seem to do that. I really came to explain about my talk with Marilyn Goddard this morning.”
“Yes,” she said. Despite the sharp impatience of the monosyllable, Pibble began at the beginning. She snorted when he described Mr. Costain’s camerawork, but with less fire than she would have that morning—perhaps Thanassi’s tampering with the hierarchy had given her a new foe. Pibble began to describe the guessing game.
“You’re not making this up?” she said.
“No, as a matter of fact, not. But I quite see why I might be.”
“Go on.”
“How much do you remember about the Paperham murders?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“It matters.”
“I got one of the books out of the library, but I couldn’t read it. They should have hanged him.”
“I don’t know,” said Pibble, uneasy because he really didn’t.
“Go on, anyway.”
“When she saw I hadn’t a chestnut she was terrified.”
“You can’t read their faces.”
“You could this time.”
“She’s often frightened. She’s different from the others.”
“I know. I know why.”
He told her about “Good day for Posey,” and what he thought it meant, and Marilyn’s sudden friendliness, and Brad’s half-confirmation of his guess. When he’d finished piecing it together it didn’t sound like a rigid logical structure, but she took a different line of attack.
“They can’t see into the future. They think they can, but I’m sure they can’t.”
“Yes, but—”
“And the man’s locked up, so it’s nonsense.”
“It doesn’t have to be that man. The victims at Paperham were all very respectable women, well-to-do, smart by Paperham standards. They had quite a lot in common with you, and if somebody round here were thinking of harming you—making plans, as it were—Marilyn might have been aware of the impulse and felt it was the same as her stepfather’s.”
“No doubt I have a lot of enemies,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones, and looked it. “You said that little rat Costain was there—be might be thinking about strangling me, but it’s ridiculous to suggest he’d actually do anything.”
Pibble shook his head. If Marilyn had picked up a murderous echo of her past from Mr. Costain, he would need to have been thinking about his human quarry with excitement, pleasure, a sort of lust. So far only great brickwork and the Domestic Grandiose seemed to have moved him to passions of that stature.
“I probably shouldn’t have worried you with this,” he said.
“Never mind. You’d better tell Ram about your game.”
“Yes. What do you want me to say about the second half?”
“I’d rather you left it out.”
“OK. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“Not yet,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. Suddenly she laughed with a str
ange and bitter glee.
“I’d like to see him try,” she said. “You’ll find Ram in his office. Do you want me to do a memo for him and Rue Kelly about your being allowed to snoop into their affairs?”
“I’ll leave it to you,” said Pibble, and left.
The tape recorder in the corridor was listening to silence with a diligence that so irritated him that he shouted “Boo!” into the microphone for the pleasure of watching the machine’s green eye wince with the shock of sound. But the children by the door, though they had moved round face to race and were now playing a slow, strange finger-touching game, ignored him as he crossed the hall, even though he thought with every cranny of his mind about the richness and pinkness of raspberry ice cream.
Depressed and ashamed of himself, he mooched up the monstrous stairs. He had been behaving like a tiresome old hen, the sort that you hear in the bay windows of public libraries rattling away to some unwilling stranger about her premonitions of family debacles. The intensity of the guessing game by the mausoleum was already fading, becoming more like a dream or a daytime fantasy of self-importance; and his own guesses about the meaning of the child’s words—which had seemed so sure, so confirmed by her sudden trust—he could now see would bear a hundred other explanations. And Mrs. Dixon-Jones, in sour contrast, had behaved extremely well. You’d have expected her to be jealous that this tedious newcomer should have been able to make contact like that with one of the children, while she, who had known and adored them—generations of them, living their moth-short lives—had never been allowed to. She could easily have shown she disbelieved him, but her heroic animosities were above bothering with Pibbles.
A boy was asleep in a doorway on the landing. Pibble knelt and with some difficulty found his pulse, slow but quite firm.
“That’s Peter,” said Ivan’s voice above his head. “Don’t worry—he’s OK.”
“They manage to look very, er, inert,” said Pibble.
“You get used to it. We don’t lose many, honest. We’ve had a lot of practice looking after them—keep them warm, you know, and that. We’ve only lost one in my time, apart from cathypny itself—a kid in Doctor Kelly’s ward got meningitis month before last. Can’t do much about that.”
Pibble straightened up and walked with Ivan toward Dr. Silver’s domain.
“Do you like working here?” he said.
“Sure. I sometimes think that it’s going to feel a bit funny when I marry and have kids of my own, normal kids, not dormice. They’ll never be quite the same thing, somehow. See you.”
He went into the room with the purring recorders in it, and Pibble took the next door.
Dr. Silver was also asleep, lying in his black, expensive chair with his mouth slightly open and his arms dangling. He slept with great authority, as if giving a demonstration of the techniques of slumber. Pibble was almost able to persuade himself that he could remember seeing that noble head among the thousands of photographs of trivial villains which year after year had passed across his desk. He tiptoed across the lush carpet to the door from which the secretary had emerged that morning.
“Mr. T. treat you properly?” said the rich voice as his hand started to turn the handle.
“I was trying not to wake you up.”
“Time I woke. That guy Doll quoted was half right. Sleep is beautiful. In short doses. Death goes on a bit long for my tastes. How did you make out?”
“Oh, he gave me champagne and hamburgers, and he said he liked me. He wants me to take the job we were talking about, but I decided I’d rather do it for free and see how it goes. I imagine that paid performers are more suspect than volunteers, in your kind of work.”
“It’s better than it used to be, that way. Did you tell him about losing your hat?”
“Yes. And there was a much more extraordinary thing which happened when I found Marilyn Goddard this morning. I’d have told you then, but there wasn’t time.”
He sat and for the third time he related his adventure. Repetition made the phrases more precise, but the events somehow less real. If he said it often enough, he felt, it would become fiction. But Dr. Silver was virgin soil.
“Hallelujah!” he shouted, springing from his chair. “If we can repeat that under laboratory conditions!”
“I think we should be a bit careful,” said Pibble. “About Marilyn, I mean. I think that her stepfather, the one who did the murders, may have played the same game with her.”
Dr. Silver seemed not to have heard; he was banging drawers open and shut, taking out small objects and putting them on the top of his desk.
“It’s hell working with these kids,” he said. “They can’t tell you anything, almost. D’you reckon she’d know what that is?”
He held up a paper clip as he spoke into the intercom.
“Doll, bring me the little pencil out of your diary. A match, too. Then go and find Marilyn Goddard. Get the nurse to wake her if she’s asleep.”
“Can you do that?” said Pibble.
“After they’ve had an hour they’ll wake up for a bit, but try it often and all you do is hustle them into Rue’s kingdom. We’ll give this thing a trial run here, now, Mr. Pibble, and that’ll clear my mind for setting up a series of demonstrations which I can get witnesses along to and write up into a paper. What we want is household names of known probity. Any chance we could get the Duke of Edinburgh to come? He’s the type who’ll try anything once. Or how about your chief commissioner? Do you know him well?”
“I’m not in a position to ask him favours just now,” said Pibble, smiling at the man’s admirable nerve. No—he meant it. He was lost in his fantasy of honour and respect; the experimenter who was going to shake the medical world to its cracked foundations was the reality for him, the shabby con man only a stupid dream.
Doll came in with a little pencil and a box of matches.
“Thanks, thanks,” said Dr. Silver. “Got anything else little and easy, something the kids would recognize? Lipstick?”
“I’m not wearing it this winter.”
“Borrow your ring, honey?”
She took it off her ring finger and tossed it onto the glossy leather of the desk.
“Ivan’s gone to look for Marilyn,” she said, as the telephone began to ring. She picked it up.
“Yes, he’s here. I’ll tell him. C-a-l-l-o-w. I’ve got it.”
She put the receiver down.
“A message for you, Mr. Pibble, from Posey. Will you ring Superintendent Callow at Scotland Yard as soon as you can?”
Pibble stood up. Ned. Bradshaw had talked to him. Was it conceivable that he kept on his shelves an unclosed file on a con man who preferred metallic aliases? But Ned Callow was not the type to get himself landed with a dingy little task like that. His hunting ground was the rich uplands where the headlines grow, cases like …
The door opened, and there was Marilyn pale and blinking. Ivan nudged her into the room, and behind her back made a grimace and a thumbs-down sign. With a conjuror’s pass Dr. Silver scooped pencil, ring, paper clip, and the other knickknacks into a manila envelope.
“Hi, Marilyn, honey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“Frightened.”
“Nonsense. We’ll take care of you.”
“Man.”
“This is James, honey. He’s a great guy. You met him in the wood.”
“’nother man.”
“You dreamed him, honey. There’s only James and me and Doll and Ivan. We want you to play a game, like you played with James this morning.”
“Game.”
“That’s a girl. We’ll play it again now, so that we can all see how clever you are.”
“Don’ wanna.”
Pibble was fascinated to see that Silver was a little ill at ease with the child; skilled tracker though he might be through all the adult jungles, he w
as not at home with these hints of an earlier and other creation. So Pibble picked the envelope off the desk, felt in it, and took the paper clip, making sure that it was in the fold of his right fist before anybody in the room could see it. He swapped it into his other hand behind his back, then crouched in front of the girl with his fists level with her face.
“Which hand?” he said.
They icy finger rose and touched his left hand. “What is it?”
“Dunno.”
He opened his palm to show her the little racetrack of wire.
“She might mean she didn’t know what you had in your hand,” said Doll. “Or she might mean she couldn’t describe it.”
“Sh,” said Dr. Silver.
Pibble took the ring this time and juggled it into his left hand again, but when he crouched and concentrated on the green stones and the almost bristly feel of their hardness in his palm, the finger rose and touched the wrong hand.
“Pretty,” she said.
He showed her. If those were real emeralds the ring must be worth the better part of a thousand quid. The child looked dully at it, and when Pibble tried again with a small plastic measuring spoon she did not raise her hand.
“Don’ wanna,” she said.
He showed her the spoon but she turned slowly away, in a manner that made him see that under all the layers of fat every muscle and nerve was taut.
“It’s all right,” he said. “He can’t hurt you. He can’t hurt anyone. We’ve shut him away. You’ll never see him again.”
She swung back and looked at him as if he were lying.
“Bad moment,” sighed Dr. Silver. “All kinds of feed-back operating there. When, when, when will I learn not to rush into things? Nil result on the which-hand test, but you seem to have got through to her with the ring. That what-is-it test is going to be a sow to evaluate statistically. Thanks, Ivan; take her away and tuck her in.”
Pibble watched her waver out, not with the free-floating motion of the other cathypnics, but as though something heavy and dragging, some weighted object on a chain, constrained her to follow her erratic course.
“May I use the telephone?” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“This might be confidential, I suppose, though it’s probably only to ask me where I left some file.”
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