Dr. Phibes

by William Goldstein

  Benson glided the Bentley to a stop some twenty feet behind the saloon car. He turned to his master to confirm his wishes. “Shall I get out, sir?”

  Hedgepeth was by now quite absorbed by the car up ahead. The fog lay low on the ground and they seemed to be out in the middle of a deserted field. He could not determine the make of the car, certainly not its difficulty. He cared little about that anyway, preferring to look much more closely at the narrow waist and fine ankles of the young woman who still bent over the motor. He barely acknowledged his chauffeur, only wishing he would get out there and possibly manage an introduction. When the man seemed to hesitate, he hurried him on his way. “Yes, yes, of course, Benson, see what the lady needs.”

  Benson slid out, closing the door with a soft “chug” and walked forward to the car, his steps muffled by the fog. Hedgepeth resumed his scrutiny of the girl. She seemed to be wearing a heavy, black, fur-trimmed greatcoat which was cut rather high on her legs over tall black leather boots; these were laced up to her calf. She balanced on one foot, extending her other leg out behind as she delved into the mystery of the car’s motor. Her soft white knees and lower thighs were softened further by the fog and seemed to glow against the polished black surface of the saloon car. Periodically, her bell-shaped rump bobbed as she dug further into the cowl. He sighed at this vision and waited impatiently for Benson to reach the car.

  Now she moved a bit, her rump sliding enticingly along the chrome plate with the motion of her legs. Even more thigh became visible. Hedgepeth craned his neck and leaned forward. “Aha! Benson is introducing himself!”

  At that, the rear door opposite to the one at which he peered clicked open. The draft disturbed Hedgepeth long enough for him to do two things. First, he glanced over at the door in time to stare directly into the blazing eyes of a man he’d never seen before. And, concomitantly, he shifted his glance in sheer self-defense to the closest object moving within his field of vision.

  That object was a metronome, now ticking. It would continue to tick through and past the final minutes of his life.

  Chapter 9

  IN contrast to the stillness of that fog-bound fen, it was an unquiet Monday in the house on Maldine Square. On the lower floors the dusk of the long night slowly gave over to the filtering daylight, the house creaking and groaning as if trying to reconstitute itself for the new week.

  The ballroom had apparently been the scene for a gala the previous evening. A large canvas backdrop, depicting the Casino Royale in its most lavish transports, had been pulled down over one wall. In front of the massed revelers and milling waiters, who looked slightly out of place in the morning light in the ballroom, the solitary café table, its glassed rose beginning to wilt, seemed forlorn indeed. The ballroom had the unescapable look of all nightclubs in the first morning hours: it was unhappy. Even the musicians’ too-white teeth framed in their smiles, pencil-thin mustaches and slick hair worn by the gigolos of the day, seemed weary.

  The day had come more quickly to the top floor, where much hissing and shuffling about indicated that the Master of the Letter “P” found much to busy himself with this Monday.

  The entire fifth floor, which was the uppermost one in the building, had been given over completely to a combination observatory/laboratory, a very large room, some 125’ by 30’, which looked more like a loft than an apartment. It abounded with windows, these being interspersed with slanted, paneled walls The fifth floor itself, which towered 15’ above the adjacent buildings, actually formed the base of the roof. Its exterior walls were not flat but sloped sharply upward a dozen feet where they joined the roof proper. Viewed from the front, the whole superstructure had the appearance of a raised hexagon, its top peaked by a lightning rod. The roof, angled sides as well as flatter top, was clad with copper, its blue oxidized surface contrasting with the somber cut slate exterior finish of the floors below. Like its neighbors, the building was a stately, formal residence in full command of a decorum befitting the occupants of Maldine Square.

  The fifth floor observatory had a 360 degree view of London. A large land telescope had been mounted at one window. In another, which had been fitted with a retractable skylight, a refractory telescope was installed for celestial viewing. This instrument, polished brass driven by a stainless steel gear mechanism, appeared to be custom-designed for maximum precision. A stellar map of the heavens and charts of the stars’ proper motions hung on the wall near the refractor.

  A long bench directly to the rear contained a full-scale analytical chemical laboratory. A distillation apparatus, precision balance, drying oven and centrifuge crowded its surface amongst Bunsen burners, flasks and beakers of all sizes and racks of test tubes. Suspended the length of the bench on uprights were double rows of three-tiered shelving, crowded with blown-glass jars and bottles of purified reagents. At the very center of the room a Foucault pendulum suspended by a steel wire rope inexorably tolled the motion of the earth. To the left of this stood a life-size figure of a man. The figure was constructed of intricately interwoven skin layers, organs and bones, each of a naturally colored hardened rubber composition, cut in cross-section to illustrate the anatomic details. More remarkably, the figure could be cleaved at other layers and angles to show different structures.

  The room seemed to spread in all directions, offering an infinite variety of complex devices, precision measuring instruments, physical charts, and blackboards crammed with equations of great summary. In its total prospect the observatory could be likened to the study of a Renaissance scholar who, at the infancy of scientific knowledge, had an interest in all of its parts.

  But the scholar of this elaborate room had somewhat more specific interests this Monday morning as he lumbered about a black-cloth shielded portion of his laboratory. He wore a long white laboratory smock and a white gauze hat on his head and looked every bit the occult medicine man as he hovered over a circle of waxen life masks arranged on a rough bench. Hissing sounds came from the orifice in his neck as he fondled and genuflected over the masks. He seemed to be seeking out one in particular. Then he found it, his eyes flashing, his laughter boiling over into scalding peals, he grabbed it from the table, holding the prize up in the sanguinary triumph of an executioner. The face was no other than that of Dr. Arthur Hedgepeth, suspended now with great finitude in the rubber-gloved hands of this wizard. He hissed again, scalding the air once more in compressed fury. Then, slamming the effigy back down on the table, he grabbed a squat, mean-looking blowtorch, and igniting it with a spark, proceeded to melt away Hedgepeth’s features which slid, and finally sank, in waxen agony. Soon, the blowtorch had reduced Hedgepeth’s face to a featureless shell, its core now a lumped residue at the base of the head. Glistening out from the center of the still bubbling wax was another brass amulet; a “charad,” the Hebrew symbol for hail.

  Big Ben was tolling 9 A.M. and the streets were crowded with the last-dash latecomers racing to beat the morning starting bell. Monday was a day definitely to be early but it seemed that on this day there were more late travelers than usual.

  Harry Trout, who’d grown resigned to the exigencies of traffic, was amongst these unfortunates. And, out of their sheer mathematical overbearing, rather than from any specific commission on his part, he reached his office ten minutes later than usual. He debated briefly at the elevator bank whether to have his usual handball match, and was surprisingly relieved when the “up” car arrived first. It was to be the office.

  Tom Schenley was waiting for him. His bland expresion told Trout that nothing untoward had occurred so far that day, for which he was thankful. Tom had also readied two cups of coffee which now rested, steaming and inviting, on his desk. For these he was doubly thankful. He threw his hat on a corner hatrack, grabbed a cup, and sat back in his tilt-back chair waiting for Schenley to speak.

  The sergeant began with his usual forthrightness. “Harry—” he only called him Harry when he was reaching for something “profound”—”You and I have been in thi
s business long enough to know that the initiative must pass to us sooner or later.”

  “That’s a rather gloomy beginning for you this morning, Tom. Had a bad weekend, did you?”

  “No sir. It’s this bloody case. I hate to say it but it’s had me thinking all week. I even got in a fight with my wife; said I took my office home with me, she did.”

  Trout chided him, “Nan wouldn’t say something like that unless she had good reason. You should have kissed her on the cheek and taken her out to a good show.”

  “We started to, but it was raining too hard. Played cribbage instead and drank toddies. Those damned animals stayed with me the whole time.”

  His partner’s constraint sobered Trout. “Of course you’re right, Tom, police officers are always playing ball with the other side. The law tells us that we have to build a case. Our honorable opponents are not, of course, bound by such prosaic considerations. And so they are forced to act in their own best self-interest, which is, by definition, outside the law.” He sipped his coffee. “Good detection is simply efficient second-guessing.”

  “Well, I’d like to start guessing right. It’s a helluva note to sit back and let someone knock these blokes off.”

  Trout brightened up. “Maybe we can change the odds a bit. Our old friend Dr. Vesalius called me over to his place yesterday. Said he’d done some careful thinking and wanted to see me about it. When I got there, he’d pulled out a stack of records, going back ten years. We discussed a number of the men, some of whom were already familiar. One of them I want you to get a line on, a Dr. Anton Phibes.”

  Schenley cut him off by highlighting the known history of this man to Trout’s growing astonishment. “British foreign servant and career diplomat . . . married a blue-blooded beauty, Victoria Regina Devereux, some fifteen years younger than him . . . known as a devoted couple . . . moved in literary and artistic circles. She died following surgery for advanced carcinoma of the uterus. Ironically he died the same day in a motor accident in Switzerland. Car left the road as he raced home to be at her side.”

  Trout leaned back in his swivel chair, his face broadening into a wide grin as his associate displayed his efforts. When Tom finished, the Inspector banged the desk with his palm. “Where the hell did you come up with that?”

  Schenley was modest. “Vesalius called first thing this morning. Said something about not going north after all. Asked if we’d done anything with Phibes. I figured the name was important. Incidentally, his insurance and bank accounts were all closed by the Swiss concern that handled his estate.”

  “And his residence?”

  “The same bank had the whole place—possessions, clothing, furniture, everything was auctioned off. Not a trace left. Nothing.” The phone rang. Schenley looked at Trout, a flicker of hesitation on his face as if he were almost afraid to answer. “That’s probably Vesalius again.” He picked up the receiver.

  Both men kept a thick silence on their way out to Dunton Green. News of a murder affects even the most seasoned police officers. News of Hedgepeth’s death, coming in such close sequence after the others, was a particularly hard blow for both Trout and Schenley. Needless to say, as the men most closely associated with the case, they would have been expected to take some preventive steps. But the manpower shortage within the department, and the murderer’s own accelerating timetable had stymied any workable plan of defense. Trout knew that that would have to change. And, like Schenley had expressed earlier, he now found himself acutely wishing for a shift of the initiative.

  The road had been reasonably clear with the high overcast yielding to good visibility as they traveled through the North London areas of Lewisham and Bromley. But as their car left Orpington and started through the open fields and wooded hillsides of the greenbelt further north, a low ground fog developed which forced them to slow down to less than twenty miles per hour in some spots.

  Trout was anxious to reach the murder site, and kept wiping the windshield with his handkerchief to better see the road ahead. Schenley kept the windshield wipers going against the fog droplets, their “squish-squash” adding to the motor’s drone. They edged through the hamlet of Dunton Green, scarcely detecting it because of the fog, and began navigating the road to the south. This was a particularly desolate section surrounded by well-grazed fields out of which rose an occasional tree, its damp black branches and trunk ghostly in the fog.

  “Up ahead, Tom, they’re over to the side of the road.” It was the first Trout had spoken the entire trip.

  Schenley pulled their limousine directly behind the local police cars that were parked along the dirt shoulder of the road. A local sergeant waved to them as they got out. “Over here, Inspector. They found him sitting off to the side of the road.”

  The sergeant joined Trout as he crossed to the stopped police car. “I’m afraid he’s quite out of it,” the man continued in a low voice.

  It was Benson, Hedgepeth’s chauffeur. The locals had found him lying by the roadside. He was in such a bad way that they’d wrapped him in a blanket and propped him up in the back of one car until help could come. When Trout looked inside the car, the man was still sitting there like a mute vegetable, his eyes and mouth wide-open in a frozen expressionless gaze. Occasionally he would whine the low, hurt moan of an animal badly handled.

  “What happened to him?” Trout queried the sergeant.

  “We don’t know. He’s in a dangerous state of shock that had him damn near fibrillating. Whatever he’s been through or seen has about frightened him to death,” the sergeant replied sadly.

  Trout shook his head, controlling his anger. “Where’s Hedgepeth?”

  The sergeant nodded to the Bentley which was somewhat apart from the other cars. Its low shape was partly obscured by the fog, out of which it rose like some black memorial. The car’s cowl had been raised and its windows and doors, which were all closed tight, were frosted over.

  “He’s in the back.” The sergeant pointed to the rear door as he and Trout walked along the dirt toward the car. Trout stepped directly to it, grabbed the door handle and pulled his hand away instantly. “Wow, that’s cold!”

  He put on his gloves and tried again, this time yanking the door open to emit a dense vaporous billow from inside the car. When it cleared he bent low and peered inside. There, seated like a king in mufti, was Arthur Hedgepeth, his gray bulk covered by hundreds of thousands of hailstones which filled the Bentley’s rear compartment up to his armpits.

  “That looks like number four,” said Tom Schenley, who’d slipped up on the sergeant and Trout.

  “I have little doubt about it.” Trout gritted his teeth and reached into the rear of the car to pick out a handful of the hailstones. “The curse of hail in the bloody middle of nowhere.”

  He threw the hailstones away in anger. The sergeant opened the front door and pointed to a galvanized metal ice machine which rested on the front seat. A dull, sullen nozzle pointed through the open glass divider directly at Hedgepeth. Cables led through the crack on top of the doorway to the motor. The sergeant reached in and gingerly positioned the nozzle so that it pointed outside. “He worked it off the motor; brought the car’s internal temperature down below zero when it was going full blast.”

  He started the machine, its nozzle emitting a blast of hail. “Mercifully he didn’t feel much.”

  Trout was grim. “Like hell he didn’t!” He walked back toward his limousine. Schenley noticed that his shoulders sagged slightly. It was near dusk and the fog was thicker. It would be a long, slow ride home in the darkness.

  Later that night the weather turned cold, cold enough for Henri Vesalius to put an extra log on the fire. He’d been deep in a chess game with his son Lem, and hadn’t noticed that the room had grown frigid. The log was a very dry liveoak round that burst into a sheet of crackling flames and sparks as soon as he dropped it into the embers of the two previous logs. He fixed himself a Scotch and soda while he was up and returned to the low table at which Lem, dres
sed in pajamas and robe, was in the act of moving his knight.

  “Check,” the boy said, cornering his king.

  Vesalius, with two rooks and a bishop remaining on the board, still had a position strong enough to ward off this attack. But he had fallen deep into thought and was obviously not interested in the game.

  “Check,” Lem urged again.

  Vesalius now looked at the board, sighed and sipped his drink. “I guess that’s it, Lem. Now off to bed with you.”

  The boy didn’t like to see his father this way. “It’s not mate, Father, you can still move.”

  Vesalius had drifted back into thought again. “What? Oh . . . well, we can finish tomorrow. You played very well, son. Now, up you go.”

  Lem, sensing that his father was heavily absorbed, reluctantly got up to leave. As he passed the side table he picked up a piece of sheet music and nodded toward the piano. “Would you like to hear that Chopin sonata I just got?”

  Vesalius declined. “No, not tonight. I’m rather bad company, I’m afraid. Go on up and read for a little. I’ll be up in a bit.”

  “That’s all right, Father, I understand. But you must let me play this piece for you tomorrow. Old Darrow put me onto it. It’s super.”

  Vesalius looked puzzled. “Darrow?”

  “You know, the old chap at the music shop where I go for my pieces. I used to think him such a bore, but he’s got a great memory. Do you know that he can recall the dates when Beethoven first published his symphonies, the names of each of Bach’s children, and thousands of other bits of information that you’d never think possible?”

  “Sounds like a good man to know. Here, it’s after eleven, and tomorrow’s a school day. Good night, Lem.”