Sleep and His Brother (17 page)

“The war's over now, darling.”

“Nonsense, darling. You know quite well that none of the butchers has started delivering again, so that you have to traipse all over the town to buy my doggies' offal. That's what I mean by war.”

“Isn't she marvellous?” said Doll. “You ought to be in a museum, darling.”

“Yes, I should. There's no such thing as civilized values left in the world today.”

“What happened to the precentor?” said Pibble.

“He shot himself. He had
some
decent instincts.”

The telephone rang. The dogs yelled at it and went on yelling as Doll ran into the hall.

“You lost your job, they tell me,” shouted Lady Sospice.

“Yes, there was a reorganization, and I was almost due for retirement anyway.”

She sniffed and gagged herself with another cake. Pibble, left hanging in his defensive posture, drank the last chill dregs of tea. Doll rushed into the room, stumbling among terriers.

“The house is on fire!” she said.

“Then summon the fire brigade, darling.”

“Not this house.
Our
house. The McNair. The telephone was out of order, but they found a police car in Montagu Norman Close, and sent a message over the radio. That was Mr. Costain from the phone box by the pond. He said you ought to know. He said it's burning like a torch. There was an explosion. He's just seen two fire engines go past.”

“What about the children?” said Pibble.

“He didn't say.”

“Fetch my chair, darling,” said Lady Sospice. “I would prefer to see it go.”

“I'll run ahead and see if there's anything I can do,” said Pibble.

“Fiddle-de-dee!” said Lady Sospice. “They've two fire engines there, and I need you to push my chair. It's far too heavy for a slip of a girl. Help me up.”

She held out two loose-skinned hands; their touch was as cold as the cathypnics'.

“Now pull,” she said. “Not too hard. I'm very light. That's right. Now my sticks. Good. Now I can get myself out into the hall.”

“I'm doing a hottie for you, darling,” called Doll from the kitchen, Lady Sospice grunted. She needed all her energy and concentration for inching herself over the carpet. When a terrier­ tried to fawn on her she stopped and thwacked it with one of the sticks, then inched on again. For the first time Pibble realised that she must live in continual pain, like many of the old. Doll was already in the hail with a wheelchair; neat and quick with practice, she eased her grandmother into a shapeless squirrel overcoat, lowered her into the chair, settled a hot water bottle into her lap, swathed her in shawls and scarves, and finally skewered­ a black straw hat, such as charladies wore in the George Belcher cartoons of the thirties, to her spindly hair. Pibble took the bar at the back of the chair and wheeled her out, over the doorstep, with a bump into the night.

The sky to the west was an unnatural orange. The villa gardens were full of people, watching and pointing. Some were already drifting along the road to where a fire engine brayed up the hill.

“Quick,” said Lady Sospice. “We don't want to miss anything.”

“Move over,” said Doll.

Together they shoved their senile cargo up the slight slope at a good five miles an hour.

“Come on, Uncle,” said Doll. “I don't want to miss anything either. I adore fireworks. We'll go up the road. The paths in the melon ground are a bit bumpy for Gran.”

The pavement in the main road already looked as though a procession of major royalty was expected next morning, with loyal citizens already staking out their cheering points, but there was room to push the chair up the steeper slope behind the rows of gawpers. A small crowd was bothering the uniformed constable at the main gate, but Doll ruthlessly nudged the backs of their knees till they let her through.

“Can't come in, ma'am,” said the constable. “Move along, please.”

“Nonsense, my man,” snapped Lady Sospice. “This is my house.”

“Is Superintendent Callow still here?” asked Pibble.

“Oh, it's Mr. Pibble, isn't it?” said the man. “You don't know me, sir, but I know you—I'm local, I daresay that's all right, sir.”

“Has anything been seen of your chappie?”

“No, sir. P'raps he started this fire as a diversion, though.”

“Where are the children?”

“The little ones were all outside when it started. They're swaying the big ones out through a window—there's hoists and scaffolding there. Lucky break, sir.”

Another fire engine was clanging up the road. Pibble whisked the chair into a nook of rhododendron and let the thing through—it was an old-fashioned one, gleaming like a regiment. They followed it down the gravel to the front of the house.

Doll had been right about fireworks. An oily cloud hung over the roof, its underside lit orange, and into this huge sparks curved and whirled from what seemed a roaring chimney of flame at roughly the back of the hail—yes, those inner stairs, all covered with paint rags and paint and containers of pint.
That
would go up like a bomb, if a cigarette end had been left smouldering there when the workmen knocked off. Pibble remembered an arson case out Acton way in which two brothers had so soaked their cousin's house in gasoline that they were blown clean into the street when they lit it. Two fire engines were ranged at the near corners of the house, and the latest arrival was already jolting up onto the lawn and disappearing round the far wing. A conference of firemen was taking place in the middle of the gravel, their chin straps seeming absurdly thick and heavy compared to those on police helmets, and their holstered hatchets wagging at their buttocks like docked tails. The whole front of the house was lit, as if for
son et lumiere
, by the searchlights iii the engines; the house itself supplied part of the
son
—loud crackles and a steady, windy roaring—but most of it came from the deep, intolerable drumming of the diesels that drove the pumps.

“The fire hasn't got very far, has it?” shouted Doll.

“They'll try to get at the base of it,” shouted Pibble. “From either side. But remember all that wood, and how dry the heating must have made it. And the smoke will heat it more.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I've taken a course.”

He looked round the gravel sweep to where the cathypnics stood all together, their moon faces faintly reflecting the orange glare. Higher up was a group of men, among whom he recognized the parade-ground stance of Ned Callow. He didn't feel like another encounter now, so he walked over to the children. Ivan was in charge.

“Won't they get cold?” said Pibble.

“I'm just waiting till Doctor Kelly's finished wheeling his lot into the greenhouses, and then I'll take them down. It's heated there.”

“Has he got them all out?”

“Like magic. I ran up to give him a hand as soon as I'd counted the dormice, and he'd got a window out of the ward already—he had some tools up there, see. And we slung them out onto the scaffolding and down on a couple of hoists. We'd done half of them before the firemen came. And he even had a key to the greenhouses. Trust him!”

“Where's—” started Pibble.

“Hi! What's that sod up to again?” said Ivan.

Pibble followed his glance. A pinioned figure was struggling in front of Callow, screened from them by the detective's ominous bulk. Excited stirrings tickled the edges of the group. Pibble looked quickly away. It is difficult to judge the force necessary to arrest and restrain a homicidal maniac; it is also foolish to be a witness of the amount Callow and his team might judge necessary. Suddenly the fire seemed to have lost its drama; it was like some tedious
diseuse
trying to recapture her audience after the real star's face has shown itself tactlessly in the wings. The night was cold, the fire hot but not enough to account for the way in which it now felt colder behind him than in front. His neck muscles ached with the strain of not looking round. Ivan had copied him and was also staring purposefully at the orange gouts from the roof and the thickening smoke. Two firemen in breathing apparatus climbed out of the downstairs window at the bottom right-hand corner, and began to report to a superior. He could see from their attitudes that they had been driven out—the fire was still winning.

“Mr. Pibble, sir?”

His taut muscles tried to jump and cringe at the same moment. Callow's sergeant blinked at the convulsion. “You all right, sir?”

“Yes, thanks—I swallowed a sneeze. Courcy, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir. We've collared a character up there—not our villain, but sneaking in the bushes. He says you can vouch for him.”

“All right.”

It was Vivian Costain, undamaged. Some instinct must have restrained Callow from hitting a citizen who had the necessary skill and persistence to make trouble for him afterward. Costain had been refused re-entry at the gate after his telephoning, so had climbed the wall by the wood and come down through the shrubbery. Pibble explained who he was, ,and Callow looked disgusted, as if it were intolerable for a military man to have to meet an aesthete without ordering his hair to be forcibly cut and giving him a good kick in the pants.

“I'd prefer to have him officially OK'd,” he rapped. “No offense, Jimmy. Where's that Jones woman?”

“She goes home in the evening,” said Pibble. “I'll ask Ivan.”

Ivan hadn't seen her.

“But I told the firemen she'd gone home,” he said. “They wanted to know whether to search the building. The dormice say she's gone, and they'd know, because she always says good night to them last thing. She was just going off to do her rounds when I last saw her; that's what she always does, too. Posey's gone, hasn't she, Dickie?”

“Posey gone,” whined a child.

“Poor Posey,” said another.

The fire changed its note, and Pibble looked round. Upward-streaming beards of flame rose now from three windows of the upper floor, to the right of the porch.

“'ot.” said a child.

“They're not themselves, you know,” said Ivan. “They haven't been all afternoon. I suppose it's only natch. One thing—it's the first time anyone's seen them all awake together.”

Pibble went back to Callow. Mr. Costain was running a finger round inside his collar as if trying to preen out the creases made by the arresting fists. Callow snarled at the news.

“There's that Indian gentleman I talked to this morning,” suggested Mr. Costain. “He has status here, I think.”

Pibble searched again. More orange flared from the rooms leading toward Kelly's Kingdom.

“They won't save that wing,” said Callow judiciously. “Not against the wind.”

By the sudden light Pibble saw Silver's white hair shine against the rhododendrons; he had taken off his dustcoat and his dark skin made him otherwise invisible against that background. Pibble crossed to him.

“Could you come with me, Doctor Silver? Just for a moment.”

“A pleasure. This is sad, sad, eh? That beautiful house.”

“You've been very lucky about casualties.”

“Yes indeed. I have seen hospital fires where … Aha! It is Mr. Costard!”

“This is Doctor Silver, Ned,” said Pibble. “Doctor, Superintendent Callow wants to know—”

“One moment,” said Dr. Silver. He turned casually but firmly away, like a monarch who has dispatches to read before returning to gossip with his courtiers; he strolled down across the gravel toward the still unburned east wing, and disappeared behind the thudding fire engine. The group round Callow had watched him, astonished but unstirring. His back was as authoritative as his front. Pibble somehow still felt that the uncompleted introduction was his responsibility and had drifted a few dithering steps toward the building, but when Silver disappeared he began to run. Someone else was moving quickly in the same direction from farther over to his left. He rounded the bellowing pump, whose hoses snaked in to the window of the corridor, and made for the corner of the building. A hand gripped his shoulder.

“He went in there,” shouted a voice. It was Alfred, pointing at the open window of Mrs. Dixon-Jones's room; the top enter pane of the bottom sash was smashed, but no one would have noticed that slight tinkle amid the uproar.

“Shall I go first, sir?” yelled Alfred. It was an order. Pibble followed him clumsily over the sill. The room was tangy with smoke but not intolerable, and ghastlily illuminated by the searchlight outside. Alfred slipped a pencil flashlight from his pocket and without looking round nipped through the door;

Pibble was half across the room when he stopped. Something caught his consciousness as being different—yes, he had seen without noticing as he was climbing in that the door into the tower staircase was now open. Odds were that Silver had taken the key from the board over the mantelpiece and gone up.

After the glare of the searchlights the stairway was like black felt; the air might be breathable, but it looked stifling He nipped back into the room—even Mrs. Dixon-Jones's erratic lighter would be preferable to total dark. But it was gone. Nothing for it. He climbed slowly on hands and knees remembering that it is fatal to work yourself into the frenzy of action when you begin to pant. The bedroom at the top was only permeated by a faint, far smell of burning, though the searchlight glared into it and the pumps and the flames roared together. But the corridor was black, and swirling.

He shut the door, thankful for the dead, misguided craftsmen who had fitted it so well to its jamb that no trickle seeped through; till their work actually burned it was almost an airlock. He counted doors in his mind and decided that the laboratory, Silver's room, and Doll's were the third, fourth and fifth down the long corridor to the back of the building. He took one more good breath and walked firmly out into the smoke, moving easily to the corner, feeling his way round, crossing the corridor and counting doors. It was difficult not to feel that the smoke was chasing him, as the smoke from a bonfire sometimes seems to. His nerve was already failing him as he reached the fourth door, groped for the handle, found it on the other side, opened the door, and stagger through. Involuntarily he took an eager gulp of air and began to choke; it was breathable, but not good.