The Investigation (24 page)

“My life!” Mrs. Fenshawe burst into tears. “My life! Too soon! Too soon! They took him away!” She drew so close to him that he could feel her breath on his face. “He knew he couldn’t hold out much longer; he knew, he knew, and even today he told me so! Today started like every other day, why couldn’t it have gone on that way? Why?!” She repeated this over and over, burning his face with her breath, until finally the words, though they were uttered from deep pain, stopped having any meaning for him.

“Oh… I didn’t know… I’m very sorry,” Gregory mumbled, completely at a loss, feeling that he had gotten stuck in an absurdity of some kind, an incomprehensible misfortune, a theater of unreal events and real despair. Mrs. Fenshawe stretched out her dark, tendinous hand from under the shawl and grabbed him violently by the wrist.

“What happened? Did Mr… Mr…” He didn’t finish—her voiceless sobbing and the spasmodic movements of her head were answer enough. “It was so sudden,” he mumbled. The word brought her around. She stared at him with a strained, insistent, almost hate-filled look.

“No! Not sudden! Not sudden! No! Years, sir, years, and he always managed to avert it, we postponed it together; he had the best care a human being could have. I massaged him every night, and when it was very bad I held his hand until dawn, I sat with him. He wasn’t able to stay by himself except in the daytime; he didn’t need me during the day, but now of course it’s nighttime, it’s night!!!” She began screaming horribly again, her voice prolonged in an unnatural ringing echo. “Night…” The cry was audibly interrupted and distorted somewhere in the depths of the house, somewhere in the darkness of the rooms that opened on the staircase, somewhere above the head of the woman, who was digging into Gregory’s wrist convulsively and pounding his chest with her other hand. Astounded, choked by such frankness, such outspokenness, and such deep despair, Gregory was beginning to understand everything. He stared at the moving flames that lit up the empty, rug-covered place in the middle of the room.

“Help me, oh please help me!” Mrs. Fenshawe called out, whether to God or to him Gregory didn’t know, and suddenly her cries were drowned in sobs. One of her tears, shining in the candlelight, fell on the lapel of his suit. Her weeping brought relief for both of them. In a moment Mrs. Fenshawe calmed down, and in an amazingly peaceful although shaky voice, she said:

“Thank you. I’m very sorry. Please … please go. No one will bother you. No one! Oh … there’s no one…”

With these words her voice came dangerously close to the crazy screaming again. Gregory was terrified, but Mrs. Fenshawe, gathering up the folds of her purple shawl, went toward the opposite door. He reached the hallway and, almost breaking into a run, rushed to his room, closing the door carefully and firmly behind him.

Safe inside, Gregory turned on the small lamp and sat at his desk, staring at it until his eyes were dazzled by the light.

So he was sick and had died. Some kind of prolonged, peculiar, chronic illness. She’d been nursing him. Only at night—in the daytime he wanted to be by himself. What was wrong with him? Maybe asthma or some other kind of breathing disorder. She mentioned massages. Something to do with the nerves? Insomnia too, or maybe he had heart trouble. He looked so healthy though—that is, he didn’t seem to be sick. How old could he have been? Around seventy, at least. It must have happened today—that is, yesterday. Gregory hadn’t been home for almost twenty-four hours; the death must have occurred that morning or afternoon, and the body had been taken away in the evening. Otherwise, why the candles?

Gregory’s legs were beginning to fall asleep. “It’s all clear now,” he thought. “He was sick and she was nursing him, some kind of complicated, all-night treatment, but when did she sleep?”

Suddenly remembering that Sheppard was still waiting, he sprang to his feet. He grabbed an old coat from his closet, threw it on, and walked out on tiptoe. The house was still. The candles in the drawing room were beginning to burn out; he made his way downstairs in the remnants of their light. When he got into the car he was amazed to discover that the whole commotion had lasted less than a half hour. He passed Westminster at one o’clock.

Sheppard himself opened the door, same as last time. They walked upstairs in silence.

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” Gregory said while hanging up his coat, “but my landlord died and I had to … uh … pay my respects.”

Sheppard nodded his head coldly and pointed toward an open door. The room hadn’t changed—but with the lights on the collection of photographs looked different, and it occurred to Gregory that there was something pretentious about them. Still not saying anything, Sheppard sat down behind his desk; it was covered with papers and folders. For the moment Gregory remained under the spell of the dark, funereal atmosphere of the Fenshawe house, the unexpectedly silent wall opposite his bed, and the dying candles. He rubbed his wrist involuntarily, as if trying to wipe away the remaining traces of Mrs. Fenshawe’s touch. Sitting down opposite the Chief Inspector, he realized for the first time that night how tired he was. All at once it occurred to him that Sheppard was waiting for an account of his visit with Sciss. He responded to the thought as reluctantly as he would have to a demand that he betray someone very dear to him.

“I spent the evening tailing Sciss,” he began slowly, then stopped abruptly and studied the Chief Inspector’s face. “Should I go on?” he asked.

“I think it would be useful.”

Gregory nodded his head. It was hard for him to describe the evening’s events, so he dispensed with commentary and kept to the details. Sheppard leaned back in his chair and listened; only once, when he heard about the photograph, was there any sign of a reaction.

Gregory paused, but the Chief Inspector remained silent. When he finished, he looked up and saw a smile disappearing from Sheppard’s face.

“Well, did you finally get him to confess?” the Chief Inspector asked. “As far as I can tell, you stopped suspecting Sciss at the very moment that he left you alone in his apartment. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Gregory was stunned. He wrinkled his brow, not certain how to reply. The Chief Inspector was right, but until now he himself hadn’t been aware of the change in his thinking about Sciss.

“Yes,” he muttered. “I guess so. Anyway, even before then I didn’t have much hope of accomplishing anything. I was following the path of least resistance, that’s all. I latched on to poor Sciss because there was no one else and I needed a suspect; who knows?—maybe I deliberately tried to compromise him. It’s possible—I don’t know why, maybe to get the upper hand in my own mind.” Gregory became more and more confused. “I know that none of this makes any sense,” he finished. “In the long run I don’t know a thing about Sciss, not even what he’s capable of doing.”

“Would you like to know?” the Chief Inspector asked in a sarcastic voice. “You might find him visiting his mother’s grave, or trying to pick up a prostitute near Picadilly. That’s more or less his range. I don’t want to sound like your police auntie, but in this line of work you really should be prepared for an occasional moral hangover. Now, what do you want to do next?”

Gregory shrugged his shoulders.

“A few weeks ago I was pushing all of you, warning about trouble from the press and the public,” Sheppard continued, playing with a small metal ruler. “But this time none of what I expected came to pass, in fact nothing came of it at all. There were a couple of articles connecting the case to flying saucers and—paradoxically—that was the end of the publicity. A few letters to the editor—and it was over. I hadn’t realized how indifferent we’ve become to the extraordinary nowadays. If a moon walk is possible, so is everything else. So we’re on our own with this case, Lieutenant, and we might as well just shelve it quietly…”

“Is that what you called to tell me?”

The Chief Inspector didn’t say anything.

After a moment or so Gregory answered his own question.

“You wanted me to hear what Williams said, right? Maybe… I should go now. It’s very late and I don’t want to take up any more of your time.”

Sheppard rose to his feet, opened a flat case containing a tape recorder, and connected the speaker.

“The recording was made at his request,” he said to Gregory. “The technicians were in a rush and the recorder wasn’t working too well, so the sound isn’t the best. You’d better move closer. Now listen to this.”

He threaded the tape into the spool, plugged in the extension cord, and adjusted the modulation knob; the recorder pulsated a few times; a steady hum emanated from the speaker, followed by several knocks and some scratching noises, and at last a far-off voice, distorted as if it was coming through a metal tube.

“May I speak now? Commissioner, Doctor, may I? I had a good flashlight … my wife gave it to me just this year, for the night shift. First time I went around he’s lying there the usual way, with his hands like this; next time around I hear a crash like a bag of potatoes is falling. I shine my light through the second window—he’s on the floor. I figure he must have fell out of the coffin but he’s moving already. I think I must be dreaming all this so I rub my eyes with snow, but he keeps shuffling along, falling all over the place as he goes. Commissioner, I don’t know how long this went on, but it was long enough, believe me. I kept shining my light but I didn’t know if I should go in or not, and there he is, flapping around and turning over and finally he reaches the window and I couldn’t see him too good because he was crawling right under the window, making a hell of a racket all the time. Then the shutters come open.”

An indistinct voice in the background asked something; it was difficult to make out the words.

“That I don’t know,” resounded a voice closer to the microphone. “And I didn’t see if any glass was falling either. Maybe it did, but I can’t say. I was standing over on the side, I can’t … can’t manage to show you. So I was standing this way and he was sitting or whatever he was doing this way—all I could see was his head—I could have touched it, Commissioner, it was closer to me than this here table is. I shined my light inside and lit the place up real good and there was nothing there, only the empty coffin with some shavings in it and nothing else and no one was there. I lean over and take a look in the window and there he is down below me; his legs going a dozen ways at the same time and he’s rocking back and forth like a drank, Doctor, he’s crawling along on his side and tapping away, like a blind man tapping his cane, except he was doing it with his hands. Or maybe he had something. ‘Halt,’ I says to him, ‘what d’you think you’re doing, what’s going on here?’—that’s what I said, or something like that.”

A short silence followed, except for a steady, delicate creaking, as if someone was scratching the microphone with a needle.

“He climbs up a bit, then falls over again. Like I told you, I ordered him to stop, but he wasn’t alive; at first I thought maybe he wasn’t dead and had just now woke up in the coffin, but he wasn’t alive, he didn’t have any eyes like, I mean only—you know what I mean, so he couldn’t see anything and he didn’t feel anything. I mean if he could feel he wouldn’t keep banging himself around on those boards, and he was banging away like the devil himself was inside him. I yelled something at him—I don’t even know what—and he kept turning this way and that way and finally he grabs the windowsill with his teeth—What?”

Once again a muffled, indistinct voice asking questions; only the last word was comprehensible; “…teeth?”

“So I shined my light on his face from close up, it was kind of blurred like, well, kind of like a dead fish, and what happened next I don’t know.”

Another voice, closer and lower, asked:

“When did you draw your pistol? Did you try to shoot him?”

“My pistol? I can’t say if I drew it or not because I don’t remember. You say I ran away? How did that happen? I don’t know. What’s this on my eye? Doc … doctor…”

A far-off voice.

“…there’s nothing there, Williams. Close your eyes, that’s good; you’ll feel better in a minute.”

A woman’s voice from the back:

“He’s done for, he’s done for.”

Again Williams’s voice, breathing faster:

“I can’t go on like this. If it … am I done for? Is my wife here? No? Why not? She is? What damned good are the regulations if they don’t say nothing about … this … they don’t cover…”

The sounds of a brief dispute could be heard; someone said out loud:

“That’s enough!” Another voice interrupted:

“Did you see the car, Williams, the headlights?”

“Car … what car?” Williams repeated in a weak, stuttering voice. “I can’t get it out of my head, how he was rocking back and forth on his side and couldn’t do nothing, and how he was dragging those shavings along with him … if there was a rope I might have understood it, but there wasn’t no rope…”

“What rope?”

“A doormat? No. Rope? I don’t know. Where? God, no one ever saw anything like it. He looked like he didn’t like the light shining on him, but that’s impossible, Commissioner, isn’t it? The shavings—no! Straw … won’t … hold…”

A long silence, interrupted by scratching, blurred noises—it sounded as if several persons were carrying on a furious whispered conversation at some distance from the microphone. A short choking, the sound of hiccups, and suddenly the voice was gruffer:

“I’ll give it all away, I don’t want anything for myself. Where is she? Is this her hand? Is that you?”

Again scratching, tapping as if something heavy was being moved, the sound of cracking glass, the hiss of escaping gas, some sharp static, then a deafening bass voice uttering the words:

“Turn it off, there won’t be any more.”

Sheppard stopped the reels, the tape stood still. He returned to his place behind the desk. Gregory was hunched over, pressing his hand against the arm of the chair and staring at his own whitened knuckles. He seemed to have forgotten about Sheppard.

“If I could only turn everything back,” he thought. “The whole thing, all of it, to about a month ago—no, not enough, maybe a year. Ridiculous. I can’t escape…”