The Investigation (7 page)

After a while his train arrived. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Gregory took a corner seat. The car jerked and pulled out, the station lights flicking by more and more quickly, then disappearing; the train was soon moving so fast that the lights in the tunnel couldn’t be distinguished from each other as they shot past.

Staring blankly at the row of accidental faces sitting opposite him, Gregory again reviewed the meeting with Sheppard. There was more to it than he yet understood, he felt, but he’d only be able to figure out its real meaning if he concentrated.

Gradually he became aware of an uneasy feeling circulating in his consciousness, and finally it formed itself into words: “There’s trouble. Something terrible and irreversible happened this evening … or was it today?” As if cut off by some outside force, this line of thought suddenly came to a dead end.

Gregory closed his eyes for a moment. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had recognized a man sitting at the opposite end of the car, near the door. He took another look. Yes, the face was familiar all right. It seemed eager to tell him something. Gregory tried to concentrate. It was an old man’s face: flabby, with vague, spongy features.

The man was fast asleep, his head propped up against a partition, his hat slowly slipping downward and casting a deep shadow across his face. His body rocked back and forth with the movements of the speeding train, the rhythm intensifying on the curves. After one particularly sharp jolt, the man’s big, pale, swollen hand slipped out of his lap, as if it were a bundle, and dangled lifelessly at his side.

Gregory was sure he knew the sleeping man, but as much as he tried he couldn’t place him. The train moved faster and faster, the jolting increased, and finally the man’s lower jaw dropped open. The lips fell apart…

“He’s sleeping as soundly as a corpse,” flashed through Gregory’s mind. At the same moment he was overcome by a cold, terrifying sensation. For an instant he couldn’t catch his breath. He knew. The sleeping man was the subject of one of the posthumous photographs in his coat pocket.

The train came to a stop. Cross Row. A few people got on. The platform lights started to flicker, seemed to move, then whisked away backward. The train sped on.

Brilliantly lit signs and advertising posters were soon flashing by again. Although it was nearly time for him to get off, Gregory didn’t even bother to glance at the station sign. He sat absolutely still, as if concentrating deeply, his eyes focused on the sleeping man. The doors closed with a hiss; outside the windows a horizontal row of shining fluorescent lights flowed smoothly backward, suddenly disappearing as if slashed away. Steadily picking up speed, the train raced into the dark tunnel.

Gregory’s head began to throb. Oblivious to the noisy clatter of the wheels, he began to feel as if he was looking at the sleeping man’s head through a long, gray funnel filled with flashing sparks. The dark, gaping mouth hypnotized him; he stared so steadily, so unmovingly, so fixedly, that the swollen gray face seemed to transform itself into a circle of iridescent light. Keeping his eyes, fixed on the old man, Gregory reached into his coat, unbuttoning it to pull out the photograph. The train hissed to a stop. Where were they? Camberwell already?

Several people rose to get off. A soldier, making his way to the door of the car, tripped over the extended leg of the sleeping man, who suddenly woke up and, without a word, adjusted his hat, arose from his seat, and joined the exiting crowd.

Gregory jumped up, attracting attention by his haste. Several faces turned in his direction. The doors began to close. Forcibly holding them open, Gregory leaped onto the platform from the moving train. Running along the platform, he caught a glimpse of an angry face against the background of the moving cars. “Hey you!” the train dispatcher shouted after him.

A cool breeze met Gregory’s nostrils. He stopped abruptly, his heart beating with excitement. Along with the rest of the crowd, the man was making his way toward a tall iron exit gate. Gregory drew back and waited. Behind him was a newsstand lit by the strong light of a single naked bulb.

The old man had a game leg. He was limping along slightly behind the crowd of passengers. With the brim of his hat soaking wet and flopping about soggily, his creased coat frayed around the pockets, he looked like the last of the old-time panhandlers. Gregory glanced at the photograph hidden in his palm. There was no resemblance.

He lost his head completely. Was this just an accidental case of mistaken identity, or was it due to his confused state of mind? The dead man was much too young; he couldn’t possibly be the person he’d followed off the train.

Confused and feeling somewhat nearsighted, his cheeks twitching, Gregory looked alternately at the photo and at the old man, whose unshaven gray face sagged over his collar. Finally sensing that he was being watched, the old man turned toward the detective. Having no idea why the latter was so interested in him, his face took on an empty-headed, listless expression, his slack jaw dropped slightly, his slobbering lips parted, and as a result he suddenly seemed to resemble the man in the photograph again.

Gregory extended his hand as if to touch the old man’s shoulder. The old man, terrified, cried out—or, more accurately, uttered a hoarse, frightened sound—and hurried onto the escalator.

Just as Gregory set off in pursuit, a family with two children stepped between him and the old man, blocking his way. Seeing this, the old man slipped through the other passengers and was carried farther and farther upward.

Gregory shoved his way through the crowd of people blocking his path, paying no attention when an indignant woman said something nasty and a few other angry remarks were directed his way. On the street-exit level the crowd was so thick that he couldn’t get through and finally had to give up, letting himself be carried along at the slow pace imposed by the others. There wasn’t a sign of the old man when he finally reached the street. Looking helplessly in all directions, Gregory berated himself for that split second of hesitation—due either to surprise or to fear—in which the old man had made his escape.

The traffic was heavy on both sides of the safety island where he had emerged from the subway. Blinded by the headlights every time he tried to cross, Gregory stood helplessly at the curb. Before long a taxi pulled up, the driver assuming that he was waiting for a cab. The door opened. Gregory got in and mechanically uttered his address. When the taxi began moving he noticed that he was still clutching the photograph in his hand.

About ten minutes later the taxi came to a stop at the comer of a small street just off Odd Square. Gregory got out, already half-convinced that he had experienced a hallucination of some kind. Sighing, he stuck a hand in his pocket and fumbled for his keys.

The house in which he lived was owned by the Fenshawes. It was an old, two-story building, with an entrance portal almost monumental enough for a cathedral; a steep, gabled roof; thick, dark walls; long hallways abounding in sudden turns and hidden alcoves; and rooms so high they seemed to have been designed for some kind of flying creature. This suggestion was reinforced by the extraordinary wealth of ornamentation on the ceilings. With its high gilded vaults in a constant state of semidarkness due to an effort to save electricity, its broad marble staircases, wide-columned terrace, mirrored drawing room with chandeliers copied from those of Versailles, and its huge bathroom (which was probably once a parlor)—the house had a strange splendor, and it was this that had fired Gregory’s imagination when, accompanied by his new colleague, Kinsey, he had first seen it.

And since the Fenshawes had made a good impression on him, he decided to take his colleague’s advice and rent the room, which Kinsey was giving up, or so he said, for personal reasons.

Unfortunately, the Victorian architects who designed the house hadn’t known anything about modern home appliances, and as a result the place presented a number of inconveniences. To get to the bathroom Gregory had to walk the length of a long hallway and through a glassed-in gallery; to get to his room from the stairs he had to pass through a six-doored drawing room which was almost unfurnished, not counting a few blackening bas-reliefs on the peeling walls, a crystal chandelier, and the mirrors in each of its six corners. After a while, though, the house’s defects didn’t seem too serious.

Since he led a very busy life, returning home late at night and spending the whole day at work, it was a long time before Gregory noticed how peculiar his new residence was; nor did he realize, at first, how much he was being drawn into its orbit.

The Fenshawes were well on in years, but growing old gracefully. Pale and thin, with colorless, slightly graying hair, Mr. Fenshawe was a melancholy man who, because his nose looked as if it had been borrowed from a different, considerably more fleshy face, gave the impression of being in disguise. He favored old-fashioned clothing, usually wore brilliantly polished shoes and a gray frock coat, and, even at home, always carried a long cane. His wife was a dumpy woman with small, dark, shining eyes. She walked around in dark dresses that bulged strangely (after a while Gregory began to suspect that she was puffing herself out on purpose), and she was so taciturn that it was difficult to remember the sound of her voice. When Gregory asked Kinsey about the owners, the answer had been, “Don’t worry, you’ll get along with them,” followed, a moment later, by, “They’re such riffraff.” At the time Gregory had only wanted some support for his decision to move into the big, old house, so he didn’t pay much attention to this mysterious remark, the more so because he was accustomed to Kinsey’s penchant for bizarre expressions.

The morning after he moved in Gregory encountered Mrs. Fenshawe for the first time. It was quite early. Striding along on his way to the bathroom, he came upon her in the drawing room. She was sitting on a low stool that looked as if it had been made for a child, a rag clutched in one hand, some kind of sharpened metal implement in the other. Using her feet to hold back a section of carpet, she was buffing the parquet flooring, working her way along the length of the room, but making such slow progress that she had moved less than two feet by the time Gregory came back from the bathroom, finding her as busy and preoccupied as before. In the middle of the huge drawing room, she looked like the black head of a slowly contracting caterpillar whose body was formed by the patterned rug. When Gregory asked if he could help with anything, Mrs. Fenshawe turned her leathery face in his direction for a moment but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, on his way out of the house, Gregory tripped over her as she was moving from step to step on her little stool (the lights were off), nearly knocking her down the stairs. From time to time thereafter he ran into her in the most unlikely and unexpected places, and when he was working in his room he sometimes heard the slow, measured creaking of her stool as she made her way along the hall. Once, when the creaking stopped just opposite his door, he assumed, with some distaste, that his landlady was spying on him through the keyhole. He quickly stepped into the hall, but Mrs. Fenshawe, who was fastidiously polishing the parquet under the window, ignored him completely.

Gregory concluded from all this that Mrs. Fenshawe was trying to save money by cutting down on domestic help; she used the stool because it was uncomfortable for her to bend over. This explanation, though presumably correct, did not eliminate the problem, however, because the constant sight of Mrs. Fenshawe creeping along on her stool, and the perpetual creaking from dawn to dusk, soon took on a demonic character in Gregory’s mind. He began to yearn for the moment when the creaking would stop; sometimes he had to wait an hour or two to get some peace. Moreover, Mrs. Fenshawe was usually accompanied by two black cats, which to all appearances she took care of, and Gregory, for no apparent reason, couldn’t stand either of them. At least a dozen times he told himself that none of this was any of his business, and in fact if it hadn’t been for Mr. Fenshawe he would have been able to ignore everything that went on outside his room.

Although the old man’s room was right next door to his and shared the same beautiful terrace, Gregory never heard a sound from Mr. Fenshawe in the daytime. The nights were a different story. Well after ten o’clock, sometimes not until after eleven, Gregory would hear a rhythmic knocking from behind the wall separating the two rooms. Sometimes it was a rich, sonorous sound; sometimes hollow and dull, like someone tapping on a wooden wall with a hammer. This was usually followed by several other acoustical phenomena. At first it seemed to Gregory as if these came in an infinite number of variations, but he was wrong, and within a month he was able to recognize the eight most frequent sounds.

The initial knocking behind the wall was usually followed by a dull, empty noise, rather like the sound of a small barrel or a piece of wooden pipe being rolled along a bare floor. Sometimes there were some quick vigorous thumps on the floor, as if someone were walking barefoot with his full weight on his heels. Other times there was clapping—heavy, mean-sounding slaps like those an empty hand might make against a moist balloon-like surface filled with air. There was an intermittent hissing sound also and, finally, some faint noises that were difficult to describe. A persistent scraping, interrupted by a metallic rapping, then by a sharp flat whack like the sound of a fly swatter, or like the tightly wound string of a musical instrument being snapped.

These sounds followed each other in no particular order, and, with the exception of the soft thumps, which Gregory characterized to himself as barefoot stomping, some of them might even be missing for several evenings in a row. Always performed with a certain amount of technical finesse, the sounds increased steadily in tempo, and once they began one could always look forward to a serenade of the most unusual richness and pitch. The sounds and murmurs were usually not very powerful, but to Gregory, lying under his cover in a dark room and staring at a high, invisible ceiling, it sometimes seemed as if they were loud enough to shatter his brain, and in time his interest in the sounds changed from simple curiosity to an almost pathological obsession, although, since he didn’t go in for self-analysis, he would have been hard put to say just when this change took place. It may be that Mrs. Fenshawe’s peculiar behavior during the daytime made him oversensitive to the miseries he had to endure every night. At the beginning, though, he was so busy with a case that he couldn’t worry very much about all this, and in any event, because he was so busy he slept well and hardly heard anything. After several nights of the noises, however, his dark room began to feel like an echo chamber. Gregory tried to convince himself that Mr. Fenshawe’s nocturnal activities were none of his business, but by then it was too late.