The Sinful Stones (2 page)

Pibble carefully eased the fender upwards until he could pour the remains of the water directly into the microphone, which crackled and spat. He had occasionally been involved in eavesdropping operations at the Yard, without ever feeling quite happy that this was a policeman's proper work. Ruining this nasty toy salved that faint guilt. When he looked up the old scientist was grinning like a gargoyle.

“Any more of those, hey?” whispered Sir Francis.

Pibble stood up and nosed round the leather-smelling room. He hadn't much hope of spotting a professionally installed mike, but the one he'd spoiled had been so clumsily hidden that he thought he ought to be able to find another flex, at least. He was looking behind the pictures when he remembered how crazily thick the masonry of the tower was: the wires would have to come in through an existing opening—yes, the flex for the first one ran from the fireplace under the carpet and then sneaked out round the jamb of the door, as inoffensive as a sleeping snake. There was nothing at the window.

When Pibble turned back the sage was coming out of the small door in the further corner of the room, carrying a toothmug full of water. He made quavering signs to Pibble, who lifted the fender up and propped it on a square of peat so that there was room to slide the toothmug under it and immerse the whole microphone.

“Damned stuff, electricity,” said the old man, as though he were cursing an eccentric stable boy. He sank carefully back into the wing chair.

“Know how it works,” he said, “but never know whether it will work, hey? That damned gadget might dry out and he functioning right as rain in thirty seconds, or it might be spitchered for ever. I've spent weeks—months—of my life trying to make some damned apparatus work. Design first class—done it myself. Workmanship first class—sacked the men if it wasn't. Micromagnetometer once, early days, near drove me loony till I spotted one brass screw in a steel frame generating its own charge. Where were we?”

“You were asking if I had any idea why you sent for me. I imagine it had something to do with your book—you wanted to put in a footnote about my father, perhaps?”

Sir Francis's voice dropped from a creak to a croak.

“What book are you blathering about?” he said.

“I saw some extracts from your memoirs in one of the Sunday papers. The introduction said that you hadn't quite finished, and that you were working backwards.”

“You're thinking of someone else, you damned fool.” The voice was back to its normal level of unsuppressed arrogance, making it clear that only a buffoon like Pibble would confuse the memoirs of Sir Francis Francis with those of some come-lately hedge-scientist. Pibble gazed at his blue-swathed toe and collected his thoughts: it showed you how cut-off from the world Clumsey Island was, the old man thinking it possible that anyone, let alone Pibble, should make that mistake. The book—or rather the Sunday paper extracts—was unconfusable with anything. “The publishing event of the decade,” Pooter had called it in
The Times
. “All the dirt and all the knowledge. Lytton Strachey cross-bred with Bertrand Russell.” The first instalment had borne that out.

“The piece I read,” said Pibble slowly, “was about your time, helping to build the first atom bomb.”

“My dear man,” said Sir Francis, “there were several hundred garrulous prima donnas down there, and every damned one of them's written his memoirs.”

“There was a long section in the piece I read about the sexual habits of some of your American colleagues. I remember a bit about one physicist—they didn't print his name—who was trying to arrange a divorce with his wife, but they were so determined not to be commonplace that they used to meet and invent plausibly ingenious forms of cruelty which she could allege against him, and then the imaginary details so stimulated them that they invariably ended the session in bed together. I haven't read about them in any of the other books.”

“Rubbish!” shouted Sir Francis. “Everybody knew them. He was a damned priggish Bostonian, but she was one of those fleshy New York Jews who lean their tits against you while they tell you how their marriage is coming apart. Her breath smelt of melons.”

“The paper printed a page of the manuscript,” said Pibble. “You could see it had been photographed, but was quite clear, and just the same handwriting as your letter to me. There was a long word crossed out near the bottom of the page.”

He looked up from his bandaged foot to find the harsh eyes staring at him, so exophthahnic now that they looked as if they might pop out and roll across the carpet. And the cheeks had lost their unnaturally healthy pink and become mottled with purple.

“Are they stealing something you have written or forging something you haven't?” said Pibble.

“I've written the damned stuff,” croaked Sir Francis. “Who're they, hey?”

“Who are who?”

“Damned fellows cribbing my book, you fool. What are you going to do about them?”

“Me?”

“You're a peeler, a'n't you. Arrest them!”

“I imagine that at least some of the people in the Community must be involved, except that none of them seem to be very interested in money. I can't imagine any other motive.”

“Everybody's interested in money. I know. I've been poor, and then rich, and now I'm poor again. My book's worth a packet of money, what's more.”

“They must have known you'd find out.”

“Not a bit. No damned papers on the island, no wireless either, not counting the radio telephone.”

“But people would write to you, surely. People you used to know?”

“Not sure I've been getting all my mail lately.”

“Was that why you told me not to answer your letter?”

“Course it was, you damned ninny. Spring you on them and see. How much of my stuff did they print?”

“Only one extract has appeared so far, but the introduction implied that several more were coming and that the book would be out in the autumn. It seems a long time to keep it secret from you. But I suppose the thieves might be content to take the money from the newspaper extracts and the advance on the book and clear out. Even so, it was a hideous risk, I'd have thought—the sort of thing only a simple-minded thief would try. The
Sunday Times
was badly had a couple of years ago over some forged Mussolini papers; I can't imagine that any of them would print your stuff without some fairly water-tight authorisation from you.”

“Never mind that,” snapped the old man. “Here's another damned fishy thing. Why did you drown that microphone, hey? I might have popped it there for my own good reasons, mightn't I?”

“I thought of that,” said Pibble. “But I was fairly sure that something, well, unusual was up. Your choice of this hour in the morning to see me, for one thing, when everybody else is likely to be asleep; and your not having told the helicopter pilot to expect me; and your writing to Clapham when you could have written to Scotland Yard and simply asked if I was the right chap—it still seems a roundabout way of getting hold of me (in fact you nearly didn't); and the indirect way you talked about my job when I first came in—I thought it meant that you didn't want to parade my connection with the police.”

“Damned claustrophobic little streets,” grumbled Sir Francis, “with their yellow bow windows and stained glass in the porches. Nobody moves out of them for generations. I've already told you someone was bound to know where you'd got to. Do I have to say everything twice? Or don't you trust me, hey?”

Trust the family traitor? Pibble said nothing.

“Your dad did,” said Sir Francis. “And he was always jumping to conclusions, just your style. What're you going to do about my book, Pibble?”

“How many copies are there?”

“No copies. Write it all out in my own fist—damned good hand I've got, too.”

Pibble remembered the spiky copperplate of the letter now in his wallet—back in his cell, where anybody could sneak in and inspect it—not that it told anything, and besides he'd already had to show it to the helicopter pilot.

“And you've still got the whole manuscript here?” he said. “Are there any bits missing?”

The old man grunted out of his chair and hobbled spryly across to a black, squat bureau, where he unlocked a drawer with a key from his watch-chain. He lifted out a swadge of foolscap, ruled with faint blue lines and covered from top to bottom and margin to margin with the same quick and careful script—so like every other gentleman's hand of sixty years ago, so different from most of them in its tough self-certainty. Even at ninety-two he formed each loop without a quiver. Pibble peered over his shoulder.

“Four-fifths finished,” said Sir Francis. “Been doing the bits which amused me first. Scared that some of the ninnies I worked with would die on me before they could read what I said about them.”

He rustled through the pile with the sureness of a rabbit scuttling through its home copse; and the pages seemed as haphazard as the least tended copse in England: the folios were numbered, but not in any order, and there was a galaxy of starred cross-references­.

“Bother is,” said Sir Francis, “writing's so damned one-dimensional­. Begin at the start and follow the thread to the end. But life a'n't like that—not my life. . .here we are. This the bit you saw?”

Pibble scanned it through.

“They cut the part about Linus Pauling,” he said. “I don't think it's actually libellous. . .”

“Tom-fool law,” interrupted Sir Francis.

“. . .but they might have thought it was bad taste, I suppose.”

“Stick to the point,” snarled Sir Francis, “and stop waving your damned bourgeois sentiments under my nose. If your toe's stopped bleeding you can give me back my handkerchief. What are you going to do about my book, hey?”

While Sir Francis nudged the pile of manuscript back into its drawer, Pibble sat down by the fire and removed the blue silk. It wasn't bleeding, and wasn't even very badly bashed—he wouldn't lose it. Forty years ago Miss Fergusson, daughter of a bishop, making a few precious shillings a week by giving dancing lessons to the children of shopkeepers, had called him “The Pibble who has no toes.” Surprised that he hadn't forgotten her, he stared vaguely at the fire. The Community, however impoverished, must value their prize convert highly if they imported logs to this treeless isle for him to burn among the uninspiring peat. And giving him electricity too: that meant there was a generator somewhere. He was all right, and if some villain was nicking his precious manuscript he'd be discovered in the end. The old boy still had plenty of life in him, and Pibble owed him nothing. Nothing.

“You asked me whether I trusted you,” he said. “And before that you asked me what motive I had for dropping everything and rushing up here. I don't get the impression that you trust me either, and if so …”

“I trust you all right, you damned stupid nincompoop,” shouted Sir Francis, “provided you don't try to do any thinking for yourself.”

“You trust me because I'm a policeman?”

“Course not. Peelers are just as crooked as anyone else—more so, with their opportunities. I trust you, Pibble, because I knew your fool of a father. Tell you something: J.J. Thomson's personal mechanic, Everett, was a first rate glass-blower, so he made most of the vacuum flasks we used in the Cavendish, for storing liquid air, mostly. He was chums with a rich little tobacconist, who spotted a nifty chance for making a fortune. Tobacconist offered Everett half-share in a business making vacuum flasks for the public—just the thing for taking your tea out for a picnic, keeping it hot, hey? Cracking good scheme, you'd have thought, but Everett turned it down. Vacuum flasks, he said, were not for the likes of ignoramuses out for Sunday larks on the Cam—they belonged to the Laboratory. Stuffy as all-get-out he was about it, prating about his duty to J.J. when he could have pocketed a million quid. Very intense relationship some mechanics built up with their masters. Why, you came haring up here, young Pibble, to find out about your damned dad, dead these forty-three years—and your dad would have stayed in that shocking little house, just in case I sent for him. That's why I trust you. Help me back to my chair.”

He was swaying on his stick by the locked bureau, looking frailer all of a sudden. Pibble went across, took him by the arm and guided him back, settling him in the pose in which he'd first found him. He got no thanks.

“Main point is,” said Sir Francis, “I've not shown that stuff to a soul, not even Dorrie. But it's been nabbed by some scoundrel and sold to a common Sunday rag.”

“My father …” said Pibble.

“Shut up, man—I'm going soggy any minute—I can feel it coming. Dorrie'll bring you back in three hours forty minutes and you can tell me who you've arrested.”

“It's the middle of the night.”

“Very likely. Now send Dorrie in—she'll be waiting outside.”

“I shan't find anything out at this hour of the night.”

“Oh, go away and leave me alone. Can't you see I'm tired?”

The change had been quite extraordinary in its speed: from the clan chief of the highlands of the intellect to this whining elder. Sir Francis watched dully as Pibble lifted the microphone out of the tumbler, removed the log, settled the fender into position, carried the tumbler back into the bleak little bedroom, returned the carafe and floorcloth to their proper places, and left. Sister Dorothy, in her sentinel stance, was waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

“Is he all right?” she hissed.

“I think so. I left when he said he was tired.”

“You've kept him ten minutes longer than usual.”

It was an accusation. She handed Pibble the lantern and went through the door without another word.

It was hard to walk downstairs with a natural gait while following the flex by the yellow dimness from the wick; luckily the amateur stonemasons had done their work so unevenly that a certain amount of stooping and peering seemed plausible. The flex turned the corner at the bottom of the steps in the direction of Brother Hope in his alcove. Along the flat Pibble was forced to move faster, but a carefully timed stumble allowed him to stoop close enough to see that it still ran along the right-angle where the paving joined the wall. Then it snaked up into the alcove.