The Sinful Stones

by Peter Dickinson

  “How much are you part of the Community, Sir Francis? You don’t wear the regulation dress, I see.”

  “Tried it for a bit, got the itch, put myself back into gentleman’s kit pretty damned quick.”

  “But you subscribe to some of their doctrines?”

  “Nothing to do with you, you damned peeler. But I’ll tell you it’s symbiosis, because you won’t know what that means. Damned smoke gone, hey?”

  Pibble rose and peered. The brisk wind had come bustling in through the open door and brushed the murk up the chimney. A faint tang of bonfires still hung among the bookshelves.

  “It’s quite clear,” he said over his shoulder, “but I’m afraid I left the door open and it’s pretty chilly.”

  “Well, shut the door and poke the fire,” creaked the voice from the bedroom—a little louder, perhaps, than it need have spoken. Pibble obeyed, then carefully placed the poker across the bared inches of microphone wire and trod on it to make sure of a good contact. Sir Francis came in, hobbling under his blankets, peered at the poker, grunted and sat down in his chair.

  “Silly thing to say, that,” he grumbled. “Willoughby Pibble’s son is certain to know what symbiosis means.”

  “I think most people would,” said Pibble. “There’s a lot of popular science about it these days.”

  “Ought to be a law against it.”

  “I take it that the Community has the kudos of having an immensely distinguished man among them, and you have some compensating advantage.”

  “Great self-educators, these Pibbles.”

  “But I’d have thought their actual creed was a little, um …”

  “Your dad wouldn’t have liked to hear his precious boy sneering at someone else’s beliefs. Very steady chapel-goer, Pibble was. Very pi. Wouldn’t even go down to the lab on Sundays to pump up my vacuums over the week-end—I had to do it. Me!”

  “But he was an atheist,” said Pibble. “Of course he had a very bad war and perhaps that …”

  There was a brusque knock at the door, and Sister Dorothy stalked in carrying a large black enamel tray.

  “I’ve brought two breakfasts,” she said with a sharp smile, “so you didn’t have to interrupt your chatter. Mrs Macdonald has smoked some more kippers.”

  The smile stayed on her face, tense and secretive, as she set the tray on a small gate-legged table, slammed cutlery and crockery into position and slapped out, sniffing.

  Pibble was unfamiliar with kippers. Poor as they had been between the rare patches of comfort, his mother would never have allowed such symbols of a working-class diet into the house. And now Mary, though she was sometimes tempted by the eulogies of a colour-supplement chef out slumming, never bought the fish because it was “tiresome”. He started to detach the backbone.

  “No, no!” yapped Sir Francis from the other side of the table. “Let me do it for you, you damned idiot! Slide your plate across.”

  Pibble did so. The great scientist flipped the fish over, skimmed the skin off with three quick movements, then rapidly and gently teased the flesh away from the underlying bones.

  “Sure sign of a nincompoop,” he said, “trying to eat a kipper that way up. Only met six people in me whole who life knew the right way—all the rest of ’em nincompoops.”

  “I’d never tried before.”

  “Poor man’s food, hey?” snapped Sir Francis. “You don’t know what poverty means. You’d eat anything then, and damn your pride. Do the other one yourself, or mine will be cold.”

  Pibble ate the smoky, tender, juicy flesh and studied the knack as Sir Francis did the same trick with his own fish.

  “They’re very good,” he said.

  “Damned well ought to be. Caught in this sea and smoked on this island.”

  “By the Community?”

  “Course not, you fool. By the Macdonalds. Our lads wouldn’t catch anything but dogfish, or if they did they’d cure ’em wrong, keep ’em wrong and cook ’em wrong.”

  “I thought you had to smoke kippers with oak chippings.”

  “Damned snobbery. Isn’t a tree on the island. Our brown brethren fly in a few logs to coddle my old bones, but all the other fires are peat. Can’t you taste it?”

  The old man made a pyramid of the de-boned fish on his plate, reached for the salt-cellar and poured until the pyramid was as white as the Cuillins. Then he picked up a white pill from the tray, put it on his tongue, frowned, and washed it down with tea.

  “Damned waste of good food,” he said sourly as he began to demolish and eat his snow scene. Suddenly, for the first time in forty years, Pibble remembered the lodger who had come to stay with the Barton sisters, to the thrilled scandal of the street, though they were well past fifty—a tall lethargic man with a strangely darkened skin, who used to fall asleep sometimes in the middle of conversations. He’d done just that trick, piling already salty food with mountains more salt, then eating the mess without relish. Four months he’d stayed, a mooching centre of melancholy, before he was taken off to hospital. He’d been a gentleman, the Bartons had explained, but there was something wrong with his glands. The word “Atticus” dodged into Pibble’s consciousness, probably by word-association with attic salt.

  “Rum thing,” said Sir Francis as he finished gobbling. “Your dad would have swooned with joy at the idea of breakfasting with me, and now you sit there as suspicious as a peasant at a law-case.”

  “Was he any good at his job?” asked Pibble.

  “It’s a contract,” said the old man after a pause. “It’s a bore, but it’s a contract. You find out who’s been cribbing my papers, and in return I’ll tell you every damned thing I can remember about your miserable father. Though I’ve a good mind to report you to your superiors, blackmailing me this way.”

  “It’s up to you,” said Pibble. “If you want me to do the job on my own I must have an excuse for staying here. Even then I can’t guarantee results. It would be much quicker and more efficient to go through the regular channels, bring in detectives with an official status, who could ask straightforward questions, take finger­prints and so on.”

  “Can’t have that,” said the old man.

  “Why?”

  “Mind your own damned business. You’re a fool, Pibble. No wonder the crime rate’s rising. All you’ve got to do is show an interest in their idiot beliefs, drop a hint or two that you feel like enlisting. The moment they see a chance of getting you out of that orange nonsense into a green one, they’ll beg you to stay.”

  “What do the colours mean?”

  “Ha! Brown’s for earth, rock and stone. Green’s for growth and hope and that kind of nonsense. That orange number you’re sporting signifies the everlasting bonfire which will gobble up the good citizens of Babylon. I got to know the jargon damned well, one time. But you ask them that sort of question to start with, and they won’t care what you ask after.”

  “Questions about you and your papers?”

  “Any questions at all, provided you put ’em right. Course you’re nosey about me—that’s why half the idiots come here in the first place—I’m the prize catch. You don’t think they’d expect you to be interested in anyone else in the island, hey?”

  “They know I’m a policeman already.”

  “I’d have thought that’s a thing you’d keep under your hat.”

  “All I said was that I was a civil servant. But one of the brothers called me Superintendent last night, after I saw you.”

  “No odds. Everyone expects peelers to be half way to Colney Hatch. They’ll think you came to spy, remained to pray, hey? That won’t surprise them; why, their top thinker was a Gunner. You start with him—he’s a damned garrulous ninny with a footling moustache—in here at all hours prattling away—I like him. Start him off and he’ll tell you everything. Larky do if he converted you, hey?”

 
“I’ll try to keep my end up.”

  “Having no beliefs gives you no defence, young Pibble. What sort of pap did your irreligious dad feed into you?”

  “He was an atheist, but not aggressive about it, and my mother was very serious about her religion. So he left it to her to send me to Sunday School and so on.”

  “And landed you with half a God and a few crumbs of creed, hey? Much good they’ll do you once our brown brothers start work. My dad did better by me, at least—he spoilt everything. I believe in me.”

  “You never told me how good at his job my father was,” said Pibble.

  “Persistent little terrier, a’n’t you? Your father was a fair run-of-the-mill mechanic, and a damned good glassblower. Trouble was, he never learnt his place. First, he wasn’t contented with working for the Lab in general—he wanted to be somebody’s personal mechanic—mine—like Everett was J.J.’s. Next, he wanted to think about what I was doing, make suggestions, join in. Always borrowing my Journals to read, then coming back and asking damn-fool questions which showed he’d worried some theory out and got it all wrong. I couldn’t choke him off, because I needed him. Didn’t mind how late he worked for me, provided it wasn’t Sunday. J.J. never liked keeping the Lab open late, mark you—said we couldn’t afford the electricity. Your damned dad, Pibble, was the only man in that Laboratory who could blow me vessels big enough to play with my gas plasmas, if I wasn’t going to go crawling to Everett, or to Fred Lincoln with his waxed moustache and his big bum—and then I’d have to wait a fortnight. So I had to put up with his impertinent fool suggestions—and all the time, remember, knowing that he was earning more as a mechanic than I was. Me, the best mind of my generation, drudging along on a Readership worth forty quid a term, a hundred and twenty damned pounds a year.”

  “Could you live on that?”

  “I couldn’t, but I did. You saved out of your scholarship when you were an undergraduate. Not so hard for the others—clerks’ sons from places like Sheffield—see the class of company my dad had condemned me to—but I’d been at Eton, and had to stand on Magdalene Bridge and watch a ninny I’d been at school with hacking off to Cottenham Races leading a hunter which’d cost him more than my whole year’s savings. Ninety quid a year I got when my scholarship ended, Demonstrator at the Cavendish Laboratory, and supposed to be proud of it. There we were, nosing out the knots the stuff of the universe is tied together with, on ninety quid a year. If one of us was offered a job elsewhere J.J.’d glare at us and neigh—damned strange voice he had, and loose false teeth—‘What are they paying you? Thousand a year?’ as though we’d have to be bought to leave the Cavendish. And he was right, too. So we lived on our savings and our pittances—and mark you, if I’d been shifty enough to mug up a bit of Latin and take orders my college could have found me a living out Ely way worth fifteen hundred—and when our savings ran out we left, or we starved. I starved.”

  “I’m glad my father was some use to you.”

  “Your dad was a damned inconvenience, glass-blowing apart. Did he ever blow glass for you?”

  “For me?”

  “Lab mechanics are simple souls, Pibble. If they’ve got kids, they blow glass for them, make little knick-knacks, which the kids bust in ten minutes and cut their damned fingers on the bits. All my dad ever blew for me was bubbles of stinking black mud, out of the tops of his boots as he squelched across the hail.”

  “I doubt if my father would have had the lungs for glass­blowing after the war. He was very badly gassed.”

  “One talent, and he wasted it, hey? Now I’ve told you whether your dad was any good at his job—you can show me whether you’re any good at yours.”

  “All right,” said Pibble. “How long ago did you write the passage I read in the paper?”

  “Last March. I’ve been scribbling for three years now—I don’t do much at a shift, you know. Dammit, I’m old!”

  “And not counting the time it was taken and copied it’s been in that drawer all the time, as far as you know?”

  “Of course.”

  “You haven’t left the island—for your operation, for instance?”

  “Who told you about my operation?”

  “You mentioned anaesthetics.”

  “Jumping to conclusions, just like your fool of a father. I came here long after they cut me up, when I started on the book. Want to tell the world what I think of it before I die, hey?”

  “If you don’t sleep and you don’t leave these rooms …”

  “What do you take me for—a damned invalid? I stroll over to the Macdonalds’ when the weather’s half decent. They teach me Gaelic.”

  “Did you go yesterday?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I wanted to know whether the microphone could have been introduced after I arrived. You took precautions that nobody should know I was coming, so if you didn’t go out yesterday that means the microphone was put there before, and it wasn’t only me whose talk with you they wanted to listen to.”

  “Dorrie took me up to the shieling in the evening, sevenish. The gels were out fishing before that.”

  “I got here just after five. They showed me my cell and asked me to wait, which I did until supper, and then they took me back to my cell and said that Sister Dorothy would come and fetch me when you were ready to see me. Did you know I was here when you, er, came to at … it would have been eleven, wouldn’t it?”

  “Course I did, but I didn’t feel up to coping with a mess of idiot questions then. I wanted to write.”

  “I thought you were going to question me.”

  “Ha! I know Pibbles. Get on with it, man.”

  “Well, let’s assume that they put the microphone in when you were out last night. They know I’m a policeman. Brother Hope is one of the senior members, and he was listening at the other end. You know the set-up better than I do. Could he be in this on his own, or would he be more be likely to be acting for the whole Community? And if so, why? Are they short of money?”

  “If I knew all that, you damned idiot, would I be asking you to find out?”

  “May I have a look at the lock in the desk, please?”

  “It’s a good ’un. All college servants are thieves. Here’s the key.”

  The key fitted all the drawers. Each lock was a solid brass affair, both intricate and tough, more than a match for the amateur picker; but down the inside rim of the second keyhole there was an extra brightness on one side, ending with a thin curl of swarf still attached to the main brass. No other scratches showed on the well-polished metal, and Pibble was unable to jiggle the key in such a way that it could conceivably have planed off that precise shaving. The lock-picking had been professional then, but far from artistic.

  “Do many ex-criminals join the Community, Sir Francis?”

  “How should I know, you nincompoop? You don’t expect me to go hobnobbing with rapists, do you?”

  “Well, I thought …”

  “I’m tired, damn you. Can’t you stop badgering me?”

  Once again, with unpredictable suddenness, the note of senility had crept into the old voice. He seemed to have lasted longer this time—the result, maybe, of that monstrous helping of salt, and the pill; cortisone, presumably. Pibble stood up.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” he said. “Shall I come back in three and a half hours?”

  “Damned fool,” said the old man lethargically, “you won’t find out anything. Do what you like, only go away. Dorrie’ll be waiting outside. Send her in.”

  But the landing was empty. The sentry had deserted her post.

  “‘Who would not laugh if such a man there be?’” Pibble asked himself as he went down the stone stairs.

  “Beg your pardon,” said Brother Hope, now in his brown habit, coming round the corner at the bottom.

  “‘Who would no
t weep if Atticus were he?’” said Pibble “It’s just a bit of verse I can’t get out of my head. Sir Francis asked me up here to talk about my father, and it seems have stimulated my memory in odd ways.”

  “Sure,” said Brother Hope. “Brother Simplicity, we call him.”

  And why hadn’t this jovial yogi come bouncing in when the microphone failed? Well, a trance of communion with the infinite may be good cover for an eavesdropper, but the cover’s blown if he snaps out of it too readily.

  “He told me to send Sister Dorothy to him,” said Pibble. “But she wasn’t there.”

  “OK, I’ll find a guy to look for her.”

  “You must be proud to have him here.”

  “He’s a good lad, right enough.”

  Brother Hope wrapped his little cynicism in his gaudy laugh, just like any monk in any monastery who wishes to suggest how quaint it is that he should occasionally talk in the wicked accents of the world.

  “You ready for breakfast, Superintendent?” he added.

  “Yes, please,” said Pibble. It sounded a good chance to start asking questions, a time when it would be unnatural if he didn’t appear inquisitive. But perhaps Brother Hope knew about the kippers.

  “Breakfast’s my main meal of the day,” he said.

  “Sure,” said the monk. “Follow me. The others are waiting.”

  He strode off along the cloisters, light on his feet as a wing three-quarter. Pibble, scurrying beside him, at once banged his good big toe into a flagstone which rose a full inch above its neighbour.

  “It’s a remarkable building,” he said bravely. “It’ll be enormous when it’s finished.”

  “Twelve thousand furlongs each way, Revelation 21:16.”

  “But isn’t it supposed to be twelve thousand furlongs high, too?”

  Mother’s sect had studied Revelation with great seriousness.

  “Yeah. But maybe they’re not Terran Furlongs. Brother Servitude is working on Father Bountiful’s notes. Hi! Bruce, man!”