The Sinful Stones (11 page)

“Not on your damned life,” said Sir Francis. “That's my job, piecing patterns together. Always has been.”

“It's mine, too.”

“Tchah! Call the random buffoonery of prisoners a pattern? You tell me. Sit down.”

“I can't,” said Pibble. “I had a fall and hurt my arse.”

Sir Francis cackled with real pleasure. Pibble jerked his thumb towards the microphone, then held his palms an inch apart to show the minnow of tale he had to tell, then touched his watch.

“Must start some damned place,” said Sir Francis. “What's the most important thing you know about his connection with me? There must be something to bring a man all the way up to this damned rock, hey?”

That there must, and not only one man. Pibble nerved himself for the bullying that was certain to follow the truth.

“Well,” he said, “I know he lost his job at the Cavendish because of a disagreement with you. It changed his whole life, that and the war. He died when I was eleven. He was a ticket clerk at Clapham Junction. But even then, with his whole life spoilt, he was a very remarkable man. I want to know what he was like before the war, and what sort of person he might have become if things had been different.”

Sir Francis was laughing, but without a sound; rocking to and fro in his chair, mouth open, cheeks taut and purple.

“A ticket clerk!” he shrieked at last. “No wonder our damned trains are still so hopeless!”

It was a Grand Guignol exhibition of nastiness—and no less fake than those tomato-ketchup horrors; the hard eyes were still watching Pibble, and he ploughed on.

“I doubt if even now I could understand what the disagreement was about. My father wouldn't talk about it, but my mother would sometimes bring it up. She used to say that he should have won the Nobel Prize, and he sometimes answered that she was wrong, but he didn't say why. She called it the Noble Prize, and I used to think it had something to do with the House of Lords. But since I grew up I've imagined that he felt he had contributed some element towards the research for which you got your 1912 Nobel Prize, and you hadn't given him proper recognition.”

“Tchah! Damned melodramatic ideas all you laymen have. Nothing like that at all. Chap like your dad wasn't concerned with the theory, not one iota. His job was to build the gadgets to prove the theories—build what he'd been told and see that it didn't leak. Lab mechanic can be a genius, mind you—Lincoln and Everett both were, in different ways—but a genius at building gadgets. Brunel, not Darwin.”

It was at this point that Pibble remembered the envelope, clutched under his left armpit to leave his hands free for his earlier bit of dumb-show. He handed it to the old man, who clawed it open and drew out a smaller envelope, turning it over to study the big wax seal on the flap, so that Pibble could see but not read three words on the front in the familiar writing of the stolen MS.

Pibble broke the long silence.

“But you said my father was a great self-improver. I imagine that a man like that might have tried to follow the reasoning behind the gadgets he was building, and so might have stumbled on a usable idea.”

“Stumbled is the word for Will Pibble. Neither of 'em said anything about they should have been damned rich, hey?”

Pibble blinked.

“Come on, you nincompoop,” shouted Sir Francis. “Doesn't mean anything. Everybody believes they should have been damned rich. I'm just trying to get you started.”

“My mother left all the money matters to my father, even when he was too ill to work and she had to go out. My father didn't think in those terms, I think, though he was a careful saver. When I had to move my mother out of the house I went through his desk, which I'd never done before, and I found several envelopes with small sums of money in them saying things like ‘Penny a day. Saved.' ‘Sixpence a week. Saved.' He never seemed to have much money, but I remember a holiday when his wallet seemed full of clean pound notes. He could have got a much better job, better-paid, I mean. He was clever by ordinary standards, and very hard-working when he wasn't ill.”

“Ordinary clever people cause more bother than ordinary nincompoops. And you ought to know, with your education, that it was no use being clever and hard-working in the twenties if you were off sick half the time, like your dad. Now look here, you fool, you've got it all wrong. Your father worked for me right up to the day when I packed him off to fight for King and Country. We went through the Lab—I was a bit more senior by then, seeing I'd got my Prize—telling all the bright young fellows which uniform to go and die in. One chap, I remember, could ride a horse and of course he could do sums, so we detailed him for the Horse Artillery. Some of the mechanics were young enough, and I'd no use for your dad any more. I'd worked out that my line wasn't going to come to anything till there were millions of quid to spend on it, and that kind of tin wasn't going to be going with a war on. Tell you a rum thing—it's in my book—they set up one of the experiments I had my eye on at Harwell getting on for fifty years later. Lot of fuss in the papers—scum of the earth, journalists—saying it meant Free Energy for Everyman. Cost 'em four million, and didn't come to anything. I'd worked
that
out by then, too, on the back of an envelope. Cost me a ha'penny. But of course they wouldn't consult
me
, not any longer. Damned little sensitive schoolgirls, frightened I'd tell 'em what ninnies they were. And that four million came out of taxes
you
paid, young Pibble. I only paid my ha'penny, and then it wasn't wanted. What the devil are you staring at?”

Pibble shut his mouth, shuddered and managed at last to swallow.

“Can you prove it?” he whispered.

“I've still got the damned envelope, with the postmark on it, but what the devil has it to do with you?”

“No,” said Pibble, his throat still so constricted that it would only whisper, “no, I'm sorry, it's very impertinent, but I meant can you prove my father worked for you until the war and left on good terms?”

The old man laid his ears back in the involuntary spasm of his rage. Hair and whiskers seemed to bristle like hackles. His cheeks puffed in and out. Suddenly he barked.

But the bark was laughter, the hackles fell back and he tugged the other end of his watch-chain out of his waistcoat pocket. It ended in an ordinary jeweller's catch which held a large, ornate gold seal whose die-surface was a purple stone cut with a crest. A curlicue of gold wire hung beside it.

“That's all I inherited from my dad,” said Sir Francis, tapping the seal. “Sent it to me from Vichy. No letter, o'course. This is what I got from yours.”

He scrabbled at the catch with shivering claws, released the gold wire and passed it to Pibble. It was a simple semi-circle, with an eye in one end by which it had been threaded to the catch. The eye was tidily shaped, but looked as though it hadn't been there when the semi-circle had first been shaped and polished.

“It looks like half a wedding-ring,” said Pibble, getting his voice back.

“Damned sharp you think yourself,” said Sir Francis. “Eighteen carats— I had it analysed.”

“I knew they had to postpone their wedding,” said Pibble slowly.

“Premature were you, hey?”

“No. It was just a remark I overheard.”

“O'course, o'course. Will Pibble was a damned honourable nincompoop, and it sounds as though your mum was worse. But he never had the grace to tell me he had a girl. Said he'd needed the gold for metal-to-glass seals—ingenious lad your dad was, in some ways—damned early on to that trick. No use to
me
, o'course. Gold melts.”

“Why did you keep it?”

“Because I'm a sentimental old dodderer, that's why. Put it on my chain when he gave it to me, never took it off. Suppose it expressed our relationship in a rum way. That damned chatterer Servitude talks about the noise of one hand clapping: half a ring's a good symbol, hey? First thing your dad looked for when … Tchah! Don't you brood on it, you idiot. If they'd gotten you earlier­ you would have been someone else.”

And that was true.

“Now look here,” said Sir Francis. “I'm an old man, a'n' I? Damned old by any ordinary standards. Old men have fancies, hey? Everybody knows that. I had a fancy to bring you up here and now I've a fancy to know about your fool of a father. You talk, I'll listen. Don't signify what you say—I'll get the bits I need.”

Pibble nodded and put the semi-circle of gold on the table. He touched his watch, held up the fingers of one hand and raised querying eyebrows. Sir Francis brooded a moment, shook his head, opened and closed one claw three times and then at the same time touched his temple and turned down the corners of his mouth in a harsh grimace. Fifteen minutes before he “went soft”. So Pibble had ten minutes to fill with
Reminiscences of a Clapham Childhood
.

Sir Francis had his pad on his knee, but he wrote only once or twice while Pibble talked. Sometimes he snorted in derision, as when Pibble spoke of the non-flying kite. He nodded, unmoved, when Pibble described the Bartons' ailing lodger. Once or twice the eyes shifted up and sideways to where the microphone hung. Pibble himself spoke drably, telling the truth but toning down colours and blurring vivid edges. This was his own and private world, which only he should inhabit; why should this grisly old lizard be allowed to pry round it, just to provide pap for the ears of the holy spies? His voice dragged, reluctant.

Suddenly, while he was describing Father's experiments with dog-repellent in which to steep the trousers of their friend Cyril, the postman, Sir Francis made a sharp horizontal gesture, palm down, like a conductor cutting a fortissimo short. Pibble hurried the postman episode to its close.

“That's as much as I can remember for the moment,” he said. “If you thought of anything which might open up other areas we could try again next time, perhaps.”

Sir Francis glared at him and said nothing. Pibble jerked his thumb towards the lurking mike to indicate that he was now wearing his conspirator's mask again.

“I imagine you'll be having your Gaelic lesson this afternoon,” he said. “About three o'clock it'll be, won't it?”

Difficult to keep all the meaningfulness out of his voice while suggesting this further plunge into melodrama. But it was the best place he could think of, supposing his interview with Brother Providence went badly, where they could settle their next move without this time-wasting code. Sir Francis nodded.

“I get old Dorrie to trot me out before my damned brain's properly clear,” he said. “She gets her kicks out of babying me, and it gives me more time to make sense when I'm there.”

“So I'll come and look for you soon after seven, shall I?” said Pibble, shaking his head.

“Do what you damned well like,” said the old man tiredly. Only his eyes showed that the huge and selfish mind was still toiling in its office.

“I wish I could have been more help to you,” said Pibble. “But I'm sure I will have come up with something by our next meeting.”

“You're a damned useless layabout if you haven't. Get out. Send Dorrie in.”

“Good-bye for now, sir.”

Sister Dorothy was still sitting on the step. No one else was in sight, but Brother Hope was probably at his niche below. Pibble squatted beside her in order to be able to whisper. At once she slumped her head on to his shoulder and moved it about like a dog nuzzling to have its ears scratched.

“Wake up!” he hissed. “This is important.”

Her head came up and she looked at him with quick loathing.

“Get him out to the Macdonalds' as early as you can,” he whispered.

The loathing changed, and the same sly and secretive look that he had seen when she brought the breakfast in slid over her face. She nodded, staggered to her feet and through the door, and began shouting. Pibble heard the words. “Now I'm going to tell you what I think of you, you bloody bastard.” The door shut off the rest of the tirade.

He stood on the stairs, the echo of his own farewell running through his mind. He'd called the bloody bastard “sir”. A change had come over their relationship and had now been formalised by his subconscious. At least at the rational level it made life easier, as he now had written authority, in the unmistakable handwriting, to do what he was going to do. Pity it contained that phrase about the pill—that was dangerous knowledge. He took the unfinished note from the pouch of his habit, folded it and tucked it into the elastic of his pants. As he let the orange cloth fall back into place he remembered that he'd left the half-ring on the table. He'd kept the paper but left the gold.

Ah well, that was a symbol too. First things first. Nothing mattered for the moment beside getting the old man to a fresh supply of cortisone in the next twenty-four hours, or possibly persuading the monks to resume the proper treatment. Pibble paced the cloisters, hoping that the peaceful rhythm would calm his churning mind. (A) There was this bloody old man, worthless apart from his genius, who had sent Father off to be gassed. And who, under the shock of the forged pill and the blatant microphone, had said all sorts of teasing little things, which would have to wait for thinking about. And who had kept for over fifty years half a wedding-ring given him by his victim. Without Sir Francis, young Jamie would have been some other child, growing up in some other town, perhaps with a well father. And that must wait, too.

(B) There was the Community, just as hateful, just as treacherous. At least there was no doubt now that Brother Patience hadn't been improvising placebos out of the school-room chalk. Pibble had never been happy with lawyer's law—the splitting of hairs long fallen from the scalp of justice—but this must be a deliberate attempt at murder, negative in its means but as sure and nasty as a sawn-off shot-gun. It forced Pibble to choose between his enemies, by giving him no choice.