The Sinful Stones (14 page)

“Only God can count the hairs on His own head,” intoned Pibble solemnly.

“Good, good,” said the monk without surprise.

“And he has none,” added Pibble. “Or at least I shouldn't think so. I remember reading a piece by the editor of the New Statesman arguing that God must have a sense of humour because it is a desirable human characteristic and He must be endowed to a supreme degree with any desirable human characteristic. But so's a head, I'd have thought, and if you have a head it's desirable to have hairs on it, but I wouldn't imagine that anyone believed any more …”

“You will find that a sense of humour is a very undesirable human characteristic,” said Providence, rising heavily from his boulder. When he was half way up Pibble jumped him.

It was like an exhibition bout in the police gymnasium, with the right hand, moving apparently of its own free will, swinging horizontally in a perfectly timed curve to catch the big man between the jowl and shoulder. Pibble had always doubted his ability to deliver a chop like that without some fatal last-minute compunction which would abort the blow and leave his enemy angry but unhurt, like a wasp one has failed to swat. But now dislike and humiliation drove the arm and hardened the hand, and Providence, still unsurprised, flopped soundlessly sideways and lay still.

Pibble eased the door open and peeked out. He couldn't imagine Hope being caught and immobilised by a fluke like that; but the corridor was empty. Pibble shut the door and quietly lowered the beam into slots cut in the stone; then he nearly went back for the lantern—Providence deserved to come to in blank dark.

Supposing he did come to? But no bone had snapped, surely?

Patience's room was glazed with fixed panes, Pibble remembered, so he tried the door opposite him and found a store-room between whose mullions the big wind boomed unhindered. The sill was too high to climb to, but he dragged across a bale of the same coarse, green, garlic-smelling cloth as he was wearing and clambered up. He was crouched on the sill, balanced for the leap down into the grey grasses, when a hawk's grip seized him by the ankles, tweaked him back so that he didn't topple outwards, and dumped him on the bale.

This time he fought, for five useless seconds. Then Hope had him pinned in the old police hold, with his arm twisted fully upwards till the pain of it bit to the marrow of every bone. He managed not to scream, but by the time he was tossed against the far wall of his cell sweat had chilled all his surfaces until they were kin to the dank flagstones.

Providence was sitting up in the yellow light, rubbing the side of his neck.

“The mike's still dis,” said Hope. “God told me not to try to mend it. You OK?”

Providence got to his feet, swayed with shut eyes, and then gazed at Pibble through three long breaths.

“Behold the man of blood,” he said. His speech was slurred now. “How near damnation is he who will assault the servant of the Lord. How proud is that spirit; but it shall be led to humility. How vain is that mind; but it shall be shown its emptiness. And the leading and the showing are mine, for this burden God has laid on me. The blow is forgiven already, but the spirit shall be humbled, the mind brought to nothing. This man, Brother Hope, has undone many souls in Babylon. Many poor sinners has he humbled before the vain laws of Babylon. But now God has placed him as a counter on the board, and it shall be my hand that casts his dice, my finger that moves him from square to square, from ladder to ladder, from snake to snake, until he discovers the humility of stone and the patience of stone. As he has done to others, so shall he be done by. Now let us leave him to the mercies of the dark.”

Hope picked up the lantern and left. Providence picked up his plate and spoon, walked to the door, turned under the lintel and nodded. In that moment Pibble knew at last who he was.

“I didn't recognise you with the beard, Doctor Braybrook,” he said.

The door shut. Outside came a heavy thud—not, alas, the sound of a big torso falling dead from a heart-attack, but the beam dropping home into its slots.

Pibble swayed in the dark. Now he was really terrified.

6

W
ith precisely that turn, with precisely that nod, had Doctor Braybrook, M.A., D.D., said his farewell to the world when the policeman led him, grosser then, out of the dock at the Old Bailey. A nod as calm and dismissive as if he had been turning away on the expensive new stage of St Estephe's Preparatory School after telling the assembled boys exactly how far they fell short of the ideal of the English Gentleman which it was the mission of St Estephe's to produce.

Pibble crouched in the dark and started to work his way across the cell, waving his arms like feelers before him. Even in that position it was difficult to resist the instinctive ducking of his head, as though the cell were suddenly full of solid obstacles.

It had been a Fraud Squad case, but because of the number and influence of the parents involved an officer of known tact had been seconded to help with the blackmail side; that had been Pibble. He had given evidence for four hours, watched all the time by those unforgettable gold eyes. And yet he had forgotten them.

His left hand found the boulder. He clutched it with his right. It felt strangely slimy. No, that was the sweat on his palms. He rested against the rock, knowing now that he would have to find a lot of strength somewhere in the crannies of his own system. He had, so far, endured or drifted on the island with a curious fatalism. All he was really interested in up here had happened so long ago, was already fixed in time, that it seemed as if each minute of the current day was equally decreed and fated. A dangerous attitude, that, for a man about to be forcibly converted to a fanatical faith. So far as he'd thought about it, he'd done what he could with logical argument; now the insane tide of the Faith of the Sealed had obliterated all the landmarks of reason, and the only sensible course, it had seemed, was to wait till it ebbed and try again. Sir Francis had thirty-six hours-worth of cortisone. Pibble had been sure that in that time his captors must see that they couldn't get away with it. But now … if Providence was Braybrook, the tide would never ebb.

He stood up, unhunching his head by an effort of will. In about two hours Sir Francis would be at the Macdonalds' cottage.
They
might be persuaded to hide Pibble, and then in the night he could try to sneak back to the radio telephone. Or … But not unless he could get out; and the walls were two feet thick, or the building would never have stood. Digging took weeks. That left …

On the way back from the Common with his draggled and muddied kite under one arm, young Jamie had stopped to gawp at the viaduct as a tank engine trundled a line of clacking trucks across it. Father's mouth was already open to explain, but Jamie was bored with the phenomenon of steam-power and forestalled him.

“But how do the arches stay up when they're made of such small bricks?”

So it had been the principles of the arch for ten minutes, while Jamie had teased at the rags of the kite-tail and half listened. Pibble could remember the smeary green of the tank-engine still, and the pink-and-white stripes of the tattered pyjamas which Mother had found to make the tail from, and the actual softness of the rotten cloth, and the smoky air and the smell from the paint-factory. But of all that earnest teaching only two sentences had endured:

“So you see, Jamie, an arch is like an egg-shell, and if you push it inwards you only make it stronger. Of course if you push it out, like a chick tapping at its shell, it's got no strength at all.”

From on top the stones of the barrel vault had looked smallish. Pray God that there weren't two layers. And that no sentry had been set, in the absence of the microphone, to listen for his screamings and blasphemings. And that St Bruno's hadn't been the first batch of dud cement. And …

Curious, that. You could understand the inadequate tools as part of the dreary discipline needed to provide God with His broken spirits, but damp cement?

As he gruntingly tilted the boulder towards the side wall, waited for the thud of its toppling and stooped and felt to tilt it again, illumination struck him. The Community was broke.

Father Bountiful was being bountiful no longer, except in teasing postcards. The half-caste actress half way up Everest was now getting the benefit of the Hackenstadt millions. He had set the Community up with a beautiful boat unsuited to these seas, an elderly helicopter, brand-new office furniture, and the girder-work of an inane theology. But no steady income—that had depended on his continuing favour, which he had now withdrawn.

Fourth time, the boulder fell with a different thud as it settled against the side wall. Pibble levered it about until it stood stable, then crawled back on hands and knees, groping for the tools.

No need to ask, either, why Bountiful had lost interest; what else could happen to a playboy Messiah when a spirit as stern as Braybrook's comes to the Eternal City?

He missed the tools and turned to begin a new sweep for them. At once he knelt painfully on a chisel; groping he found the little log and the other chisel. He crawled to the wall, stood and felt his way round to the door; there he knelt and prodded the fish-tail chisel into the crack between the wood and the threshold. Missing once or twice he banged it home with the log. Then he felt his way round the wall again to the boulder. At least the involuntary head-ducking seemed to be getting less. He climbed on to the rock, steadied his shoulders against the wall and with his right hand felt for the vault. As slow as a slug nosing through grass he moved his fingertips across the stone. It seemed to be all undifferentiated roughness to his touch, but in his mind's eye he kept the image of the fillet of masonry which had been inserted into the lopsided arch over the outer gateway; if they'd needed to fudge an important and visible place like that, surely in this hidden vault there must be half a hundred botchings. What he needed was a stone plug he could hammer out.

So Bountiful had dammed the freshet of Canadian dollars which once irrigated this spiritual desert. And that was the second time such a disaster had befallen Providence. The first time he had been Doctor Cecil Braybrook, all-powerful master of a machine which was going to restore the gentry of England to their former glories, make England itself a great moral force in the world again, and thus reform the whole round wicked world. Cruelly, the costs of running St Estephe's had gone up just as the supply of boys (suitable boys, of course) was mysteriously going down. Pibble moved his hand to another section of vault and marvelled at the instinctive way the moneyed classes preserve themselves; none of the rumours about St Estephe's can have started by then, surely.

His fingers were progressing in their new trade. They recognised a crack, a join, and traced it all round four corners. Too large a stone, but at one point they found a dried globule of cement slurry, which crumbled beautifully when he probed it with his nail. The neighbour stone was also hefty—ah, Crippen, this couldn't be the only section of the whole building fashioned from proper blocks! He let the network of joins lead him further down the vault, and came to a crack that widened until he could probe with his whole finger, as Tolerance had probed his own ear-hole, into the rubbishy bonding; and then the crack split, running down either side of a thin triangle, a stone wedge. Gingerly he lifted his left hand until the fingers of his right could feel the point of the chisel into the centre of the triangle; he nearly lost his place, and the tools, while he was juggling the log from his left to his right hand, but then he was steady again and able to tap the chisel-top with the log. He inched his feet round and found a position where he could really hit from, tapped at the chisel-top again to locate it in the dark, then swung at it, short-armed. Ouch!

Yes, that was Braybrook's style—vicarious sadism from lofty motives. At St Estephe's the children were encouraged to “rub the corners off each other”. Here, by a further refinement, the victim bashed at his own limbs in the dark.

He practised until he could hit with firm blows. The angle was deadly tiring; the log was too light for such a purpose; his bruised hip nagged, and the moment he allowed himself to notice it his buttocks also clamoured for sympathy; the fillet did not budge. For a rest, and the comfort of feeling that he was making any progress at all, he edged the chisel down to the place where the crack widened and began to prod at the filling. Dust and fragments sputtered, and when he tried to shut his eyes he found that they were already screwed tight from the instinct of groping in the dark. The steel waggled gratifyingly into the cranny.

St Estephe's, founded to reform the world, a machine for making children miserable, smartish (which of the Royals had been tipped to go there?), presided over by earnest, jovial, scholarly, rotund Doctor Braybrook—St Estephe's had run into shoal water. The new stage, the new swimming-pool, the new labs, all had cost more than Braybrook had budgeted for. He had resorted to fraud. With a true scholar's contempt for the world he had devised a wangle which was simple even by the simple standards of the City, and a merchant banker who was making the leap from Rumanian slum to heart-of-oak English squirearchy in one generation instead of the usual three had spotted him at once. So had other parents, but Doctor Braybrook had proved considerably more adept at blackmail than fraud—he had their sons' whole future at stake, and the parents didn't know of each others' existence. What, risk young Marcus being turned out of St Estephe's amid whispers of congenital depravity, and just when a Royal might be going there too! So young Marcus had stayed; and two parents had lent the school enough money for Braybrook to disentangle his fraud and devise, on the basis of his first experience, a considerably more plausible one.

The chisel jammed as the cranny narrowed. Pibble felt it along to the centre of the wedge, whanged with no result, felt it back to the tip and tried there. A heartening flake rapped the bridge of his nose. Carefully, exploring with a finger for results every few strokes, he began to knock the tip off the wedge. At each pause the skin of his forearm seemed to have swollen tauter with effort.

So Braybrook had bought calm for St Estephe's; but into that limpid interval had fallen a thunderbolt. The banker's wife had bolted, taking the executive jet, the pilot and the boy. The pilot, in a dither of lust and fear, had forgotten to check the fuel and the plane had ditched in mid-Atlantic, gliding down to the refuge of a chance sail—a lone yachtsman, trying to prove something, but now alone no longer. While the airman had sullenly steered and the boy had happily fished, the wife had kept the sailor away from his wireless, except for brief reports of his position—his navigational position—to his sponsoring newspaper. Then landfall, and a squealing press swallowed its tragic headlines in dizzy interviews during which many of the banker's private oddities had crawled into public view. The wife was a U.S. citizen, with a passport green as a dollar bill, and though lawyers on both sides of the ocean took their usual pickings she kept the boy. The banker looked round for tender parts of society on which to revenge himself. He told the Public Prosecutor about St Estephe's.

Pibble eased aching shoulders against the cool stone and opened his eyes to see whether the dark was any less. It was not, but there was a noise in it—a faint hissing above his head, a tiny rattling at his feet. He moved his left hand in horizontal sweeps and held it still where the blackness tickled. Fine granules were pattering down, as if poured from a sugar-sifter; he traced the stream up and found, just as the last grains fell, that all the cement at the thicker end of the wedge had simply fallen out, though he'd never even probed there. The wonder was that the vault stood at all. He thrust his chisel into his new gap and levered. The whole wedge moved. The long cranny at the other end gave him less leverage, but he managed to nudge the wedge the other way. And then back. And then forward. He bashed at its middle, convinced that he was nearly through. No go; levering was simply shifting it a quarter of an inch on some hidden axis. Encouraged out of his aches he returned chipping.

The rumour about the Royal had helped, but it was only when the case was under way that Fleet Street realised it was the Case. His Honour Judge Masham had always preferred a good ramble through the evidence, the more irrelevant the better; gradually and casually the extraordinary details came out. Pibble remembered the Senior Maths Master's evidence—he had helped with the sums, and didn't deny it. A youngish man, mumbling and shivering, a very bad witness. Judge Masham had lost his patience and asked how he managed to keep order in his class. You didn't have to keep order at St Estephe's, said the witness and his eyes flicked to the dock, where the accused nodded calmly. One of the things that had made the Maths Master so dithery was his evident belief that whatever Braybrook had done must, ipso facto, be right; and so the police and the court must be wrong—not mistakenly wrong but wickedly wrong. The boys had called Braybrook “God”, and though in every other way he had insisted on a fastidious piety, he hadn't minded about this perversion of the First Commandment.

Aha. A whole triangle of wedge, two inches deep to judge by the jolt of the chisel as it clove through, smacked down to the paving. Now his middle finger couldn't reach the bottom of the crack at the thin end of the fillet and could probe into the hole at the wider end as far as the second knuckle; the stone moved to and fro between these holes; he decided to try bashing at the newly exposed face in the hope of breaking up the axis point of the wedge where the larger stones pinched it. A twisted stance, but a change for some muscles, at least. He licked the salt sweat from his upper lip and bashed back-handed. All his torso was aching now, even while he worked, and his calves were as taut as a wet hawser from the unconscious effort to clutch his toes into their rough pedestal.

Not a scholarship school, St Estephe's. Braybrook, in the course of accounting for the elaborate lies in the prospectus, had claimed that he created character, not bookworms. Nor did he sculpt his characters with the cane—much. That was kept for an occasional favourite, some key figure in the termly initiation ceremonies which the staff “knew nothing about”. A swishing from “God” endowed the victim with quasi-priestly stigmata: those who had suffered at his hands were surely entitled to inflict on other boys such trivial sufferings, as boys can rise to. But there were no suicides, few runnings-away.
Somebody
was keeping an eye on the children, judging their breaking-points with passionate detachment. So Braybrook, even while he juggled with loans, had toiled at his great task. He had got six years. It would have been four, the pundits had said, if Judge Masham had had a cheerier childhood himself. But there was no appeal.