Suspension of Mercy (23 page)

“No,” Sydney said. “I’m sorry it had to end like this.” He was really sorry, and Mrs. Sneezum, for all her stiffness—and her stiff side was the only side Sydney had ever seen—seemed more human and real now than anything he had encountered in the last many days. “Edward Tilbury is dead. I just heard a few minutes ago. He took an overdose of sleeping pills.”

“Oh, heavens! Oh, good Lord! It’s like some horrible tragedy—on a stage. I keep thinking all this has nothing to do with Alicia. It can’t be real. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes.” Yes. As if his murder of Tilbury wasn’t real, either, because Tilbury might have done it himself, if he had lost his job, and there wasn’t much doubt that he would have lost it.

“Sydney, may I say I think you’ve been extremely patient? Patient also with our wayward daughter. She drove herself to an extreme, to the brink of death—until she just couldn’t take any more. It know it’s difficult to talk, but will you come to see us at some point? Drop us a note, Sydney.”

“That I will. I certainly will,” Sydney said, grateful that Mrs. Sneezum was winding up the impossible conversation. “Give my love to your husband.”

“Oh, my goodness—the funeral. The funeral service will be tomorrow at eleven, Sydney. At the little church here.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Sneezum. I’ll be there.”

“Come to our house tomorrow,” she said in a tremulous voice.

“It was over. Sydney wiped his forehead, and fished two half-crowns out of his pocket to leave for the call.

Carpie started down the stairs.

“I’m off to Scotland Yard now,” Sydney said. “Thanks so much, Carpie. And for the razor, too.” Sydney had shaved with soap and Inez’s or Carpie’s safety razor.

“Will you come by later and see Inez? Ring us anyway.”

“I’ll ring you,” Sydney promised. He wasn’t sure what Inspector Hill had in store for him, and if he were quite free, he wanted to get back home immediately, and think what to do about the house, his life, everything. Sydney came halfway up the stairs to meet Carpie, and pressed a kiss on her cheek. “Thanks for being the best friends in the world.”

“Oh, Syd, we adore you. You’re going to be on our list of celebrities, you know.
The Planners
has got to be a best-seller.”

Inspector Hill met Sydney in the hall outside his office, smiling pleasantly. “Sorry to have delayed you this morning. I went to fetch a lady and she was a bit late. A woman who thinks she saw you going into Tilbury’s house last evening. Around six?” The Inspector looked at Sydney expectantly.

Sydney’s reaction was the blandest possible, he felt. An “Oh?” which admitted and denied nothing, and certainly showed no alarm.

The plump woman of about forty-five, whom Sydney remembered with her dog, was seated in Inspector Hill’s office.

“This is Mr. Bartleby,” said Inspector Hill. “Mrs. Harmon.”

“How do you do?” Sydney said.

“How do you do?” she replied. “Yes. This is the man I saw.”

“Mr. Tilbury admitted you,” said Inspector Hill, still pleasantly. “Mr. Tilbury was in at six. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Sydney said.

“That’s why you were a little late yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“I think that’s all, Mrs. Harmon,” said the Inspector. “I thank you very much for coming in. If you’d like, one of our drivers will take you back to your house.”

Mrs. Harmon stood up. “No, thank you, Inspector. I’ve an errand not far away. I’d just as soon take a bus.” She gave Sydney another look, a nod of good-bye, then left the office, graciously seen into the hall by the Inspector.

“Why did you go to see Tilbury?” asked the Inspector as he came in and closed the door.

“I was interested in getting the true story from him—if I could. What really happened to Alicia.”

“Sit down, Mr. Bartleby.”

Sydney sat down.

So did Inspector Hill, behind his desk. “And what did Mr. Tilbury say?”

And what if Tilbury weren’t dead, Sydney thought. What if the man he had spoken to this morning had been told to say he was dead—the police could later call that information a mistake—to see what Sydney’s story would be? “He told me that Alicia was upset Wednesday evening. She ran out of the house and Tilbury tried to catch her. He said she headed for some cliffs by the sea, or the sea road. And he couldn’t stop her from throwing herself over.”

“Did you believe him?”

Sydney hesitated a moment. “Yes. I did.”

Inspector Hill studied him. “Did you expect Tilbury to confess or admit to you that he’d pushed her, something like that?”

“No. I just wanted to hear the real story. I assumed Tilbury knew, because he’d been there.”

Inspector Hill’s gaze still rested quietly on Sydney. “How long did you stay at Tilbury’s?”

“I suppose about ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.”

“Did you ring me from his house?”

“Yes,” Sydney said, not wanting to admit this, but if he had rung from a call box, the noise of the push-button and falling coins would have been heard by the Scotland Yard operator, and just might have been remembered. Anyway, now he’d said it.

“What kind of mood was Mr. Tilbury in? Surprised to see you, I suppose.”

Maybe Mrs. Harmon had said that, Sydney thought. “Yes. Frightened at first, I think. He’d also had quite a bit to drink. He said—after he told me the story—that he was afraid of losing his job if all this came out, and of course he knew it would come out.” Sydney was aware that he had no feeling, therefore no look, he supposed, of guilt now. Far less than when he had spoken to people in the early days of Alicia’s disappearance. Perhaps that was due to practice.

Inspector Hill pressed his lips together in what looked like a resigned smile. “He didn’t say anything to you then about taking pills? Taking his life?”

“No.”

“Did you make any threatening remarks to him? About telling the story to his law firm, something like that?”

“Oh, no. I knew it’d come out without my doing anything.”

“I see . . . And why didn’t you mention yesterday that you’d been to see Tilbury?”

“Well—I’m sure I would have mentioned it finally, but I thought Tilbury was going to be brought here yesterday. I wanted to compare what he’d say to you with what he said to me—if I’d been allowed to hear it, or if you’d told me.”

“Do you think it would have been different?”

“Probably not. No. Tilbury denied pushing her. He wouldn’t have admitted it ever, if he did push her.” Sydney spoke calmly. He felt calm.

“Hm.” Inspector Hill opened a drawer and pulled out Sydney’s brown notebook. “I suppose you’d like this back.”

“Sydney stood up to take it. “I would, Thank you, Inspector.” As he touched the notebook, Sydney thought that he would write a description of the Tilbury murder in it, while his recollection was still very clear, because the notebook was now, after all, the safest place in which to write it.

“A curious little book. Well, Mr. Bartleby, I think that’s all I have to ask you or say to you this morning.” Inspector Hill stood up and walked around his desk, looking at Sydney all the while with a remote and thoughtful smile.

An accuser who cannot prove, Sydney thought, because the Inspector certainly suspected he might have forced Tilbury to take the pills. Sydney could feel the Inspector’s thought like a radar beam, definite as the hand of the law on his shoulder, only the hand wasn’t physically there. The hand was extended, in fact, and Sydney took it. The Inspector’s attitude was a friendly one—and everything was a matter of attitudes.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her
adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published
The Price of Salt
in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States.

The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Basel.

P
RAISE FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH:

“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

—
The New Yorker

“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”

—
Newsday

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

—Robert Towers,
New York Review of Books

“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

—
Time

“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”

—Julian Symons,
New York Times Book Review

“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

—Graham Greene

“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”

—
Boston Globe

“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

—
The Sunday Times
(London)

“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”

—
Newsday

“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”

—
Boston Phoenix

Copyright © 1965 by Patricia Highsmith

Copyright renewed 1993 by Patricia Highsmith

First published as a Norton paperback 2001

Originally published in 1965 by William Heinemann, Ltd., London, England

First published in the United States in 1965 as
The Story-Teller
for The Crime Club by Doubleday and Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

The text of this book is composed in Bembo

Design and composition by Amanda Morrison

ISBN 978-0-393-32197-5 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-393-34468-4

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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