The Investigation (8 page)

Next Gregory tried rationalizing. Faced with a collection of weird, incomprehensible sounds that no one ever mentioned, he attempted to work out a logical explanation of some kind that would cover everything. This, he soon discovered, was impossible.

Where once he had always slept like a log, dropping off as soon as he hit the sheets, and listening to the complaints of insomniacs with a polite attitude that verged on disbelief, now, in the Fenshawe house, he began to take sleeping pills.

Every week, Gregory had Sunday dinner with his landlords. The invitation was always extended to him on the preceding Saturday. On one of these occasions he managed to sneak a look into Mr. Fenshawe’s bedroom, but he regretted this immediately because what he saw exploded his elaborately constructed theory that his landlord was conducting a complicated scientific experiment. Except for a huge bed, a chest of drawers, a night table, a sink, and two chairs, the bright triangular room was empty. There wasn’t a sign of tools, wooden boards, balloons, metal containers, or kegs. There weren’t even any books.

The Sunday dinners were usually quite dull. The Fenshawes were conventional people who lifted their convictions and opinions from the pages of the
Daily Chronicle
; they rarely had anything original to say, and their conversation generally centered on repairs the old house needed and the difficulty of raising money to pay for these, along with a few anecdotes about some distant relatives in India who apparently comprised the more exciting branch of the family. All this was so trite and commonplace that any mention of the night sounds, or of Mrs. Fenshawe’s processions around the house on her stool, would have been out of place; in any event, whether or not this was actually so, Gregory could never quite manage to say anything about these matters.

Afterward, Gregory would tell himself that it was a waste of time to worry about any of this: if he could only think the matter through, or at least formulate a reasonable theory about what his neighbor was doing behind their mutual wall in the middle of the night, he told himself, he would finally be free from the agonizing hours of tossing sleeplessly in a dark, lonely room.

But the idea of making sense out of a series of weird, disjointed sounds floated around in Gregory’s head as if in a void. Once, somewhat groggy from a sleeping pill which had made him drowsy without bringing rest, he quietly slipped out of bed and went out on the terrace, but the glass doors to Mr. Fenshawe’s room were covered from the inside with a heavy, nontransparent curtain. Gregory returned to his room shivering from the cold and, feeling like a whipped dog, he slipped under the covers, overcome with gloom because he had tried to do something for which he would always be ashamed.

Gregory’s work kept him so busy that he rarely thought about the noises during the daytime. At most, he was reminded of them once or twice when he bumped into Kinsey at Headquarters. On these occasions Kinsey always eyed him expectantly, with an air of cautious curiosity, but Gregory decided not to bother him about it. After all, in the long run the problem was trivial. In time, perhaps without even realizing it, Gregory gradually began to change his routine: he brought official reports home and brooded over them until midnight, sometimes even later. This enabled him to lie to himself about the ultimate disgrace that was already so close, for during his long hours of sleeplessness, the most extraordinary ideas were coming into his head, and several times he had conceived a desperate desire to just give up and take refuge in a hotel or a boardinghouse.

This evening more than ever, returning from Sheppard’s, Gregory needed peace and quiet. The alcohol had worked its way out of his system long before, although he still felt angry and had a pungent taste in his mouth, and his eyes smarted painfully as if there were sand beneath the lids. The staircase, immersed in darkness, was deserted. Gregory passed quickly through the drawing room, where the dark mirrors glistened coldly in the corners, and closed the door of his room with a sigh of relief. Out of habit—it had already become almost a reflex—he stood perfectly still for a moment, listening. At such times he didn’t think; his behavior was instinctive. The house was as still as death. Gregory turned on a lamp, noticed that the air in the room was heavy and stuffy and flung open the door to the terrace, then set about making coffee in his little electric pot. He had a splitting headache. Earlier in the evening other things had distracted him, but now the pain came up to the surface of his consciousness and demanded his full attention. He sat down on a chair next to the bubbling pot, but the feeling that he had just gone through a lousy, unlucky day was so inescapable that he had to stand up. Relax, he told himself, nothing really awful had happened. He’d been given the slip by a man on the subway who vaguely resembled one of the missing corpses. Sheppard had put him in charge of the very investigation he wanted to command. True, the Chief had babbled strangely for a while, but in the end it was all only words, and Sheppard was certainly entitled to carry on if he wanted to. Maybe he was getting religious in his old age. What else had happened? Gregory reminded himself of the incident in the dead-end arcade—the meeting with himself—and laughed involuntarily. “That’s the detective in me… Ultimately, even if I bungle this case, nothing will happen,” he thought. He took a thick notebook out of his drawer, turned to a blank page, and began writing: “MOTIVES: Greed. Religious Fervor. Sex. Politics. Insanity.”

Glancing back at what he had written, Gregory crossed out each item on the list except “Religious Fervor.” What a ridiculous idea! He threw the notebook aside and leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. The pot was bubbling viciously now. Maybe his silly little list of motives wasn’t so stupid after all, he reflected. A frightening idea began to work its way to the surface. Gregory waited passively, gloomily beginning to feel like a struggling, helpless insect trapped in an incomprehensible darkness.

Shivering, he got up, walked over to his desk, and opened a bulky volume entitled
Forensic Medicine
to a place indicated by a bookmark stuck between the pages. The chapter heading read, “The Decomposition and Decay of the Corpse.”

He began reading, but after a while, although his eyes obediently continued to follow the text, his mind began to visualize Sheppard’s room with its gallery of dead faces. He pictured the scene: Sheppard pacing back and forth in an empty house, stopping occasionally to take a look at the pictures on the wall. Shivering again, Gregory made a decision: Sheppard was a prime suspect. Suddenly he heard a shrill whistle and realized that the coffee was ready.

Closing the book, Gregory got up, poured himself a cup, and gulped it down while standing at the open door of the terrace, not even noticing that the hot coffee was burning his throat. A hazy glow hung over the city. He could see far-off cars shooting along the nighttime streets, looking, in the distance, like white flashes disappearing into a black abyss. From inside the house there was a faint rustling. It sounded a little like a mouse eating its way through the wall, but Gregory knew it wasn’t. Feeling as if he had lost even before the game really started, Gregory ran out on the terrace. Supporting himself on the stone balustrade, he raised his eyes upward. The sky was full of stars.

That night Gregory had a dream in which everything became crystal clear and he cracked the case, but in the morning he couldn’t remember a single detail. Part of it came back to him while he was shaving. He was at a shooting gallery in Luna Park firing a big red pistol at a bear. He’d just scored a bull’s-eye when the bear growled and reared up on its hind legs; suddenly it wasn’t a bear at all but Doctor Sciss, very pale and wrapped in a dark cloak. When Gregory took aim, the pistol became as soft as a piece of rubber. He kept pressing his finger against the place where there should have been a trigger even though it didn’t do any good. That was all he could remember. When he finished shaving, he decided to phone Sciss and arrange a meeting. On his way out of the house he saw Mrs. Fenshawe in the hall, rolling up a long carpet runner. One of the cats was curled up under her stool. Gregory could never tell the cats apart, although he could see the differences between them when they were together. After a quick breakfast in a cafeteria on the other side of the square, he telephoned Sciss. A woman’s voice at the other end told him that Sciss had left London for the day. This ruined Gregory’s plan. Uncertain what to do next, he went out into the street, strolled around for a while gazing at the store windows, and then, for no reason at all, spent an hour wandering through Woolworth’s. Around twelve o’clock he left Woolworth’s and finally checked in at Scotland Yard.

It was Tuesday. Making a mental note of the number of days still remaining in the period Sciss had specified, Gregory skimmed through a sheaf of reports from the outlying suburbs, carefully went over the latest weather information and the long-range forecasts for southern England, chatted for a while with the typists, and arranged to see a film that evening with Kinsey.

After the film he was still at a loss for something to do. He most definitely did not want to spend any more time in his room studying
Forensic Medicine
, not from laziness but because the pictures always upset him, although naturally he’d never admit that to anyone. There was a long wait ahead; he knew it would pass more quickly if he could find an interesting diversion, but it wasn’t easy. After killing some time by compiling a long list of books and old issues of
Archives of Criminology
to borrow from the department library someday, he went to his club to watch a soccer game on television, then read for a few hours at home, finally falling asleep with the feeling that the day had been a total waste.

The next morning Gregory made a resolution to learn something about statistics, and on his way to the Yard he picked up a few books on the subject. He hung around the Yard until dinner time. After eating, he found himself in the subway station at Kensington Gardens. Deciding to try amusing himself with a game he’d invented when he was a student, he got on the first train that came along, got off just as randomly when he felt like it, and for a whole hour rode haphazardly around the city.

This little game had always fascinated Gregory when he was nineteen. He used to stand in the middle of a crowd without knowing until the last minute whether or not he’d board an approaching train, waiting for some kind of internal sign or act of the will to tell him what to do. “No matter what I won’t move from this spot,” he would sometimes swear to himself, then would jump on just as the doors were shutting. Other times he would tell himself severely, “I’ll take the next train,” and instead would find himself entering the one standing right before him. The very concept of chance had fascinated Gregory when he was younger, and through self-analysis and research he had tried to study its workings in his own personality, though without any results, to be sure. Apparently such efforts to uncover the mysteries of the personality were somewhat more interesting when one was nineteen years old. Now, however, Gregory was forced to conclude that he had already become a completely different and much less imaginative person: at the end of an hour (having finally forced himself to change to the right train, even though he was quite aware that he had nothing else to do) he was bored again. Around six o’clock he stopped in at the Europa; seeing Farquart at the bar, however, he left at once before his colleague caught sight of him. He went to the movies again that evening and was bored stiff by the film. Later, he studied statistics texts in his room until he fell asleep while trying to work out an equation.

It was still dark when the ringing of the telephone awakened him and forced him out of bed.

Running barefoot along the cold parquet floor, Gregory realized that the ringing had begun as part of a dream. Half-asleep, unable to find the light switch, he groped for the receiver while the phone kept ringing insistently.

“Gregory speaking.”

“It’s about time! I was beginning to think you were spending the night with someone. Well, at least you can get a good night’s sleep—we’re not all that lucky. Listen! A report just came in. There was an attempted body snatching in Pickering.”

Gregory recognized the voice as soon as he heard the first word: it was Allis, the duty officer at the Yard.

“Pickering? Pickering?” he tried to remember. He stood up, still a little unsteady on his feet from sleepiness, while the duty officer’s shouting continued.

“The constable detailed to the mortuary wound up under a car. There’s probably an ambulance there by now, but the story’s all confused. The car that ran over the constable smashed into a tree. You’ll find out the rest for yourself.”

“When did all this happen? What time?”

“Oh, maybe half an hour ago. The report just came in. Do you want anyone special? Tell me now, because I’m sending a car out to pick you up.”

“Is Dudley around?”

“No. He was on duty yesterday. Take Wilson. He’s not any worse. You can pick him up on the way. I’ll call him and get him out of bed.”

“All right, let it be Wilson. And get me someone from the lab also. Thomas would be best of all, do you hear? Oh, what the hell, let’s take the whole crew. And a doctor too. What about a doctor?”

“I already told you that they sent an ambulance. There’s probably a doctor there by now.”

“But I want one from the Yard, man, from the Yard! Not a healing doctor—just the opposite!”

“Right! I’ll take care of it. But you’d better hurry. As soon as I hang up I’m going to send the car.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

Gregory switched on the lamp. In the darkness, when the phone began ringing, he felt a tingling excitement, but the feeling had disappeared without a trace when he heard the duty officer’s first words. He ran to the window. It was still almost pitch-dark, but it had snowed during the night and the streets were covered with a layer of white. “Perfect,” he said to himself. He ran on tiptoe to the bathroom, guessing there’d be enough time for a shower before Thomas managed to pack up all his junk, and he wasn’t mistaken. When he walked out to the gate, wrapped in his raincoat with the collar pulled up around his neck, the car still hadn’t arrived. He glanced at his watch: nearly six o’clock. A moment or so later he heard the sound of a motor. It was a big, black Oldsmobile. Sergeant Calls was sitting behind the wheel, next to him Wilson, the photographer, and in the back seat two other men. The car was still moving when Gregory jumped in, slamming the door behind him, and with a jerk it accelerated to full speed, its headlights glimmering brightly.