The Sinful Stones (3 page)

“Excuse me,” said Pibble. “I'd like to go out for a short walk. Is there anywhere I mustn't go?”

Brother Hope emerged like a snail from the shell of his trance, with a slow, blind hesitation.

“Pardon?” he said.

“I'd like to go for a short walk. Is there anywhere I mustn't go?”

“. . . a naughty boy to get so excited,” said a strange, cooing voice out of nowhere. Sir Francis's querulous creak got as far as “I'm all …” before Brother Hope appeared to scratch his buttock and cut him off.

“The island's yours, and God's,” said Brother Hope. “Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks,” said Pibble, and walked on. The flex naturally no longer ran along the wall, Damned stuff, electricity, for the microphone to dry out and function perfectly at the moment he was opposite the alcove—Brother Hope must have a lowish opinion of policemen if he didn't expect Pibble to guess that something was awry. Wrong—they didn't know he was a policeman. Even so, for verisimilitude's sake, he'd have to go for his walk, though his neck was aching for the pillow. As he turned the next corner of the cloisters a soft shape fluttered out from the arches, thin arms coiled round his neck and the corner of his jawbone was kissed so fervently that he could feel the slimy hardness of teeth against his unshaved skin.

The kissing stopped.

“I am more than gratified that Your Highness was able to come,” said an ultra-genteel female voice. Pibble raised the lantern from the folds of his habit so that he could see who was draped so living-warm, and so garlic-smelling, against him. Black hair, a death-pale oval face—seventeen, perhaps—with a strange, small mouth drawn down into an even stranger smile, the upper lip quite straight and the lower lip bowed so deep that all the gums showed. The girl wore a habit the same blue-green colour as Sister Dorothy's. Suddenly she disentwined herself and drew back so shrinkingly that Pibble was at once steeling his nerves against the coming scream.

“Your Highness is displeased with my poor hovel,” she said in a faint voice.

“Not at all,” said Pibble emphatically. Then, feeling that he ought to explain the stolidity of his response to her welcome, he added “It's a cold night.”

“Pardon me,” twanged a deep voice behind him. Brother Hope surged out of the darkness, now wearing the brown habit he had worn in the Refectory.

“One of our servants,” explained the girl rapidly. “They are all desperately loyal to the Cause, I do assure you.”

“Meet Sister Rita, Superintendent,” said Brother Hope at the same time. “Why, Reet, you've certain-sure trodden on a big snake tonight. Let's take you home to Sister Charity.”

The fat hand looped out from the brown folds, took the girl by the elbow and swung her effortlessly round. Brother Hope's nod over her shoulder meant, as plain as speaking, that Pibble was expected to take the other elbow and march her back to quarters. But before he could make up his mind which side he was on, or even recover from the mild shock of finding that Brother Hope did know he was a policeman—knew the exact rank, in fact—the girl slipped her arm through his and leaned her head on his shoulder.

“Come,” she said softly. “This good fellow will show us the way.”

“Which square were you on, Reet?” said Brother Hope impassively.

“Your Highness will find the dialect a trifle quaint,” said the girl. But she spoke with a degree less certainty, like an actress who knows she has forgotten her next cue.

“Can you count the hairs on your own head, Reet?” said Brother Hope.

The girl gave a high, social trill of laughter. Then she shook herself, altered her minuet-like pace to a mousy drifting, drooped her head submissively and said, “Only God can count the hairs of His own head.”

If Pibble had been listening out of sight he wouldn't have known it was the same woman speaking. She had two voices. Brother Hope dropped his hand from her elbow and she walked on unguided.

“Can you count the sins of your heart, Reet?” said Brother Hope in a tone so conversational that he might have been asking her about her holiday in Torquay.

“Only God can count the sins of His own heart,” said Rita. “And He has none.”

“And He has none,” intoned Brother Hope. “What do the stones say to your feet, Reet?”

“The Prince has given me such beautiful gold sandals,” said Rita in her other voice. “I am to wear them to the Cardinal's ball.”

Brother Hope sighed in the dark.

“That was some snake you trod on tonight, Reet,” he said sympathetically. “You'll need plenty ladders to work back to your old square. Good-night, Superintendent. This is as far as we go together. That gate yonder won't be locked. I'll see Reet back to Sister Charity.”

He nodded affably and swung the girl off down a passage. Pibble walked on over the erratic paving, trying to remember something from Police College refreshers about schizophrenia. The schizos he'd met in the course of his job had mostly not been the harmless ones, but had worked out their fantasies of power or vengeance on their fellow-citizens.

The rough timber of the gate was badly hung and scraped open in jerks. He stared into the wind-possessed dark and wondered about his own mind: what complex of oppression and ill-luck would split that cunning bauble into two halves? Would he crack easy? The bauble might be cunning, but he had a curious conviction that it was not strong, that there was a strain of broodiness in his blood. Mother (religion apart) had been as sane as home-baked bread until senility took over. But Father? A schizoid streak might explain the mysterious fracas at the Cavendish, and also the deliberate wasting of his talents in the Clapham booking-office. There had to be a reason for that, and also for Mother's acceptance of it.

The salt and icy air hissed through the coarse cloth of Pibble's habit as though the cloth wasn't there; he blessed Mary for her stolid belief in woollen underwear, but didn't dare mooch along the path. To keep what warmth he had he strode as briskly as he dared over the curious surface—except where an underlying rock projected it had been scraped or rolled quite smooth. Even so he held the lantern forward and walked in a hurried crouch, peering for obstructions that might batter his feet still further.

So who had stolen the manuscript, and why? And had they stolen it at all?

Ach, the hell with that—why had Sir Francis sent for him in the first place? Not for the book, apparently. Nor to find the thief, since the old man hadn't known of the theft until Pibble had told him. But there'd been that curious easing of aggressiveness when Pibble had said that Father never spoke about the Cavendish …

And the hell with that, too. His mind, too rebellious to think in an orderly fashion when it ought by rights to have been hull down in the seas of dream, kept sidling off from its proper problems back to a single obsessive figure, back to the quiet-voiced railway clerk who used to walk hand in hand with small Jamie Pibble along the streets of Clapham on Sunday afternoons, explaining things. Always explaining: the principles of the electric motor as a tram banged past; Lloyd George's betrayal of his soul and his party where a shredded election poster hung from black brick; natural selection when they came to the serried tulips in Councillor Blacker's front garden. . .Pibble, transfixed by the pang of memory, stood still and looked upward; the Atlantic wind was herding streamers of cloud so fast that the stars behind them seemed to be racing to the west—Father would have found that a fine occasion for an explanation of the phenomenon of parallax.

But what had he been like? How could anyone tell, who only knew him out of context—when his illness, and the war, and his row with Francis Francis had combined to cut him off from his proper sphere and leave him with no other concern than to keep his wife and son fed and warm in the cramped house on the steep street?

The only person who could answer that question had been dead forty-three years. (Odd that Sir Francis had bothered to count them.) He'd have known, too, whether he had schizoid tendencies. Pibble remembered the sleepless summer night when he'd crept down and settled on the canvas drugget which protected the precious stair-carpet, and then listened in a chilly half-dream to Father's voice as it explained the neighbours in terms of the cheap copy of
The Plain Man's Guide to Freud
which he'd spent his tobacco money on that week: why Betty Fasting made such a fuss about her dustbins; why Ted Fasting, in consequence, insisted on growing his prize onions in the front garden for all the street to see; why the Barton sisters held those hissing quarrels over the proper treatment of their aspidistra; why Joe Pritchett would cross the street to touch a lamp-post; and (just as mysterious to the shivering listener as any of the other explanations) why Mr Martin the rent collector—the one with the year-round snivel—ought to be watched in case he tried to become friendly with small Jamie. Father's even, earnest sentences hung disembodied in the dusk of the hallway, answered by Mother's interjections, shocked and admiring and commonplace. Small Jamie had fallen asleep against the newel-post and never knew how he was carried up to bed; Mother must have done it, for Father's lungs wouldn't have stood the effort. But he'd woken next morning knowing that Mr Martin with the bull's-eyes was somehow ogrish, though theirs was the only house in the street he didn't call at; small Jamie had worried for a week how to warn Sara Fasting (a whole year older, a whole year more worldly wise) without betraying his own secret knowledge—worried too long and decided too late.

Shrivelled with that childhood guilt Pibble walked on. The path, still smooth and rolled, sloped down and twisted to ease the sharp descent to the harbour. There was spume in the wind now that he was so close to where the big rollers picked irritably at the small granite protrusion of Clumsey Island, the ocean fingering this pimple of land. He'd only seen the island from above, peering through the windows of the helicopter at the tilting seascape as the machine swung and settled. Even to his unseamanlike eye, even through that grimy and half-opaque triplex, the harbour had seemed awkwardly placed, aimed due west into the gap below the Outer Hebrides where the main ocean came lolloping through.

The road yanked back on itself, running directly under the cliffs; despite the scouring wind, Pibble could smell the unalterable smells of any harbour, however large or small, tar and diesel-­oil and dead fish. He was walking along level and spray-slimy paving when two green lights blinked on in the dark before him, moved, and were eyes—eyes at the wrong level, too high for a cat and too low (please God) for a ghoul. He stood still and held the lantern forward.

The eyes were moving, becoming larger, nearer, a pony? But there was no clack of hooves—Crippen, it was a dog.

Stand still and don't be afraid, Father used to say. They can smell fear. So Pibble stood and sweated with terror as the creature stalked, hackles slightly raised, into his globule of lantern-light. He could see a faint brindling on its coat: it was a Great Dane. It stalked forward until its nose poked into his habit just below the nipples. There it stopped and snuffled.

The hackles dropped. Whatever it had smelt was not fear, evidently. It lowered its big skull and licked Pibble's free hand. He scratched it behind the ears, then walked a few yards along the quay until he came to a bollard, on which he sat. The dog plonked its head into his lap, nuzzling his arm for more attention. Pibble settled the lantern on the stones behind the bollard and tried to see into the dark. The total blackness behind him was cliffs, and the squatter blackness to his right was a large shed. Straight in front the gleam of starlight flicked off the crinkled water; where the movement ceased must be where the quay jutted out to give the harbour some protection from the booming ocean. But the quay seemed to bulge and give off a steadier glimmer in two places. Separating dark from dark to the west he discerned a probable horizon; following its line with his eye he saw that it was interrupted just where the lights gleamed by a small building, a building with masts, a boat.

He got up and walked along the quay, the dog pacing beside him, until his lantern showed him a white stern on which gleamed the gold word
Truth
. Bracketing this word two hulking outboard motors hung, swung up horizontally above the glimmering lop of the tamed ocean. A short gangway led to the deck and Pibble already had one foot on it when a wet and bony grip closed round his wrist and hauled him back.

It was the Great Dane, still very friendly, but urging him to desist for its own good reasons. Pibble allowed himself to be policed back to the bollard, where the hound immediately snuggled close against him, settling its heavy jowl into his shoulder almost exactly where Sister Rita's head had lain. The coarse hide quivered continually with the ecstasy of contact; Pibble, grateful for the animal warmth, put his lantern down again so that he could tease the long spine—four such beasts to adore him and he'd have been as cosy as any nightwatchman over his brazier.

Think, Pibble! He wanted you up here for something, and he was uncertain how much you knew. Just an old man's whims, perhaps—senility can take other forms than the ones you once became so drearily familiar with. But (a) there is a probability, at least, that a valuable document has been pirated, and (b) you don't know quite whose pigeon it would be, but surely the Community is the wrong place for a schizophrenic like Sister Rita.

He shuddered like a labourer shaken by his road-drill.

Poor Pibble, trying to tune in to sense and duty, those stodgy inescapable angels, telling him to find out what he could without causing a disturbance, then go home and make a report which would send some colleague round to ask questions at the newspaper office and publishers, and another to come winging up to Clumsey Island to disrupt the monks' harsh idyll—but through the signal came a mush of other voices, as happens at night, saying but then how'll you ever find out what did happen at the Cavendish? Only the old man can tell you, the last witness, sick, compos only at the regular four-hour intervals when the fierce mind spouts regular as a geyser—and he's cheating you over something, as he cheated Father over something, but you've a counter to bargain with, being a policeman and trying to trace the supposed memoir-stealers, hey?