The Investigation (16 page)

“You think they’ll come back … all of them?” he said at last. Sciss raised his eyes to Gregory and quickly straightened up. His face was flushed, his breathing even louder than before.

“I don’t know. It’s possible, it’s even probable. If they do, the whole series will be concluded … and everything else with it! Maybe I figured it out too late. Suitable camera equipment with infrared film would have provided photographs explicit enough to protect me from this … this fooling around.”

“Does Beverly Court fit into your pattern? What I mean is, does its location go along with your theory?” Gregory asked somewhat perfunctorily.

“The question is poorly phrased,” Sciss replied. “I have no way of determining where the bodies will be found; that is, where they will ultimately stop moving. The only thing I can calculate is the amount of time that elapses between a disappearance and the cessation of the phenomenon, and this I can do only approximately. In my estimate, the bodies which disappeared first will be found last. You should be able to understand why. At the beginning, for some reason, the factor conveyed the greatest amount of motor energy to the corpses; by the time it reached the boundary of the region it was only able to transmit a minimal charge, barely sufficient for a series of uncoordinated body movements. You probably think I’m raving. Or lying, perhaps. It’s all the same thing in the end. Now leave me alone, will you? I still have a lot to do.” Sciss pointed to one of the boxes of moldy books. Gregory nodded his head.

“I’m going. Just one question first. Did you go to the doctor by car?”

“No. I went by subway and I came home the same way. I have a question too: what do you intend to do with me? I only ask because I want to be able to work as long as possible without interference. Is that understood?”

Gregory buttoned his coat, which was beginning to hang on his shoulders like a lead weight. Taking a deep breath, and again inhaling the faint musty odor, he answered:

“What do I intend to do? Nothing, for the time being. Let me remind you that I haven’t expressed any suspicions or made any charges—not even one word!”

With his head bent, Gregory walked into the foyer. In the dimness he caught a glimpse of a woman’s face, a pale blot which disappeared almost instantly; he heard the sound of a door slamming. He found his way out of the apartment, checked the time again on the luminous face of his watch, and went downstairs. In the lobby, instead of heading for the street, he turned in the opposite direction and went into the courtyard toward a long, gray automobile. He circled it slowly but couldn’t see very much in the faint light from the windows of the surrounding buildings. The car was locked, completely dark, except where reflections of the apartment house lights danced rhythmically on its shiny fender in time with Gregory’s movements. He touched the hood: it was cool. That didn’t mean anything, though. It was a little harder to reach the radiator. He had to bend down and stretch his hand through a wide chrome-enclosed gap that looked like the thicklipped mouth of a sea monster. Hearing a slight noise, Gregory winced and straightened up. He saw Sciss at the second-floor window. Now he wouldn’t have to continue his examination of the car, Gregory thought; Sciss’s behavior confirmed his suspicions. At the same time, though, he felt a bit uncomfortable, as if he had been caught doing something underhanded, and this feeling became stronger when, observing Sciss more closely, he realized that the scientist wasn’t watching him at all. After standing next to the open window for a few moments, Sciss sat down awkwardly on the window sill, drawing his knees up and wearily resting his head in his hands. This gesture was so incompatible with Gregory’s image of Sciss that he stepped back to get a better look, and as he did so he stumbled over a piece of metal, crushing it underfoot with a piercing noise, Sciss looked down into the courtyard. Gregory stood absolutely still, flushed with embarrassment and anger, uncertain what to do next. He didn’t know for sure if he’d been seen, but Sciss continued looking downward, and although Gregory couldn’t make out his eyes or face, he could feel his disdainful gaze.

Completely crestfallen and not daring to continue with his examination of the car, Gregory walked away, his head lowered and his back hunched.

Before he reached the subway he had regained his composure, at least to the extent that he was able to go over the ridiculous incident in the courtyard—ridiculous, he thought, to have allowed it to upset him. Gregory was almost certain he had seen Sciss’s car in downtown London that afternoon. He hadn’t noticed the driver, but it was the same car all right—there was a distinctive dent in the rear bumper. At the time Gregory hadn’t paid much attention to the car. The chance incident did not begin to take on significance until later, when Sciss claimed to have gone to the doctor by subway rather than by car. The discovery that Sciss was lying wasn’t too important in itself, but, Gregory felt, if he had known earlier in the evening he would have been somewhat less scrupulous and cautious in his behavior toward the scientist; furthermore, it would have counteracted the feeling of compassion which had overcome him during the unfortunate visit. Gregory still didn’t know anything definite, however, and whatever certainty he could derive from his afternoon observation of the car was based on a wretched “maybe” and thus didn’t count for much. His only satisfaction came from knowing he had discovered an inconsistency in what Sciss had told him. Sciss had gotten rid of him by claiming he had work to do, but instead of working he had done nothing but lounge around the window. Gregory remembered Sciss’s state during the visit: his listless body, the inclination of his head, his exhausted leaning against the window frame. But if Sciss’s fatigue was the ultimate cause of their disagreement, Gregory had not taken advantage of it, ultimately, because of a stupid gallantry which prevented him from exploiting his opponent’s moment of weakness and made him leave the apartment perhaps no more than a minute before the decisive words were uttered.

Drawn into a labyrinth of possibilities by these thoughts, Gregory, impotently angry, wanted only to return home and study the facts in his thick notebook.

It was almost eleven o’clock when he got off the subway. Just before turning the corner to the Fenshawe house, he passed a blind beggar stitting in a niche in the wall of a building, a bald, ugly mongrel at his feet. The beggar had a harmonica, but blew into it only when someone was approaching, using it as a signal without any pretence of making music. It was impossible to determine his age, his clothing providing more clues than his face, which was hidden by a nondescript beard. Returning home late at night or leaving before daybreak, Gregory always met the same beggar in the same place, like an inescapable pang of conscience. The beggar was as much a part of the neighborhood landscape as the big bay windows of the house in front of which he sat, and although Gregory was a policeman and the police regulations prohibited begging, it never occurred to him that he was tacitly consenting to his presence and thus was a party to a misdemeanor.

Gregory never gave much thought to the beggar—in fact, the old man’s clothing was so filthy that the very sight of him aroused disgust—but the beggar, nonetheless, must have stirred something in his memory; indeed, awakened feelings deep in his subconscious, for Gregory always quickened his pace almost involuntarily when passing him. Gregory never gave anything to beggars: it had nothing to do with his profession, nor was he an unkind person; perhaps the cause was some indefinable shame. This evening, though, having already passed the old man’s post, spotting the dog crouching at his side (sometimes he felt sorry for the dog), Gregory surprised himself by turning and walking over to the dark wall, taking some money out of his pocket as he did so. There followed one of those insignificant little incidents that one never mentions to others and remembers ever afterward with an indescribable feeling of distress. Assuming the beggar would reach out to accept it, Gregory extended the hand with the money into the vague darkness of the niche. When he did, however, his fingers brushed against those disgusting, filthy rags. The same thing happened again and again; the beggar grotesquely lifted his harmonica to his lips and began blowing. Overcome by a feeling of revulsion, and unable to find a pocket in the torn material covering the huddled body, Gregory blindly threw the money down and backed away. Something clattered at his feet—in the weak light of the street lamp he saw that it was his own coin rolling after him. Gregory picked it up and impulsively pressed it into the darkened indentation in the wall. He was answered by a hoarse, stifled groan. Desperate now, Gregory rushed home, taking such long strides that he seemed to be running. He didn’t recover from his agitation until he had reached the front of his house. Then, seeing a light in the window of his room, he ran upstairs without any of his usual caution, reaching the door slightly out of breath. He stood in front of the door for a moment, listening carefully. Not a sound. Glancing at his watch again—it was 11:15—he opened the door. Sitting and reading at Gregory’s desk, just in front of the glass doors opening on the terrace, was Sheppard. He raised his head from the book:

“Good evening, Lieutenant,” said the Chief Inspector. “It’s about time you got here.”

Gregory was so taken aback that he couldn’t answer for a moment. He stood in the doorway without removing his hat, a foolish expression on his face. Sheppard smiled faintly.

“Why don’t you close the door?” he said at last, when the tongue-tied scene had dragged on a little too long. Pulling himself together, Gregory hung up his coat and shook hands with the Chief Inspector, watching him expectantly.

“I came over to find out what you accomplished at Sciss’s place,” said Sheppard, sitting down at the desk again and resting his elbow on the book he had been reading. The Chief Inspector spoke calmly, as usual; detecting a note of irony in the word
accomplished,
however, Gregory adopted a tone of naive sincerity in his reply.

“But Chief Inspector,” he babbled, “all you had to do was tell me you were interested, and I would have phoned you. That doesn’t mean I’m not glad to see you, of course, but why did you bother to go out of your way—” Sheppard, however, made no effort to carry his end; it was clear that he saw through Gregory’s act and, with a slight gesture, he cut off the flow of words.

“Let’s not play cat and mouse, Lieutenant,” he said. “It was very clever of you to figure out that I’m not here to listen to one of your stories. You made a blunder tonight, a very big blunder, when you set up that telephone call. Yes, the phone call to Sciss while you were at his house. You had Gregson phone him about an allegedly recovered body so you could observe his reaction. And before you start explaining, let me venture a guess that you didn’t accomplish anything with your little trick. I’m right, aren’t I?”

The Chief Inspector’s last words were angry. Rubbing his cold hands gloomily, Gregory straddled a chair and muttered:

“Yes.”

All his garrulousness seemed to have disappeared. Sheppard pushed a box of Player’s toward him and, taking a cigarette himself, continued:

“It was a cheap trick par excellence, Gregory, a classic. You didn’t learn a thing, or almost nothing. Sciss, on the other hand, knows that you suspect him or will know it by tomorrow, which comes to the same thing; furthermore, he’ll also know that you set up the call to trap him. All the same, assuming you’re right—that he is either the perpetrator or an accomplice—then you did him a favor by warning him. And so far as that goes, didn’t it occur to you that someone as cautious as the perpetrator seems to be, now that he’s gotten such a clear-cut warning, will become ten times more cautious?”

Gregory was silent, chewing almost furiously on his fingernails. Sheppard, the calmness in his voice contradicted only by a deep furrow between his eyebrows, went on:

“Whether or not you tell me the details of your plan of operations is your business, because I always try, as much as possible, to respect the autonomy of the officers conducting investigations for me. But it was downright stupidity not to tell me you suspected Sciss! I could have told you quite a few things about him, not as his boss but as someone who has known him for a long time. I suppose you’ve already eliminated any doubts you have about my innocence in this case?”

Gregory’s cheeks turned red.

“You’re right, sir,” he said, raising his eyes to the Chief Inspector. “I acted like an idiot. And I have no excuse at all, except that I absolutely refuse to believe in miracles, and nothing is going to make me, even if I go crazy.”

“We all have to be doubting Thomases in this case—it’s one of the unfortunate requirements of our profession,” said Sheppard, cheerful now that Gregory’s embarrassment had provided him with a degree of honorable satisfaction. “In any event, I didn’t come over to reprimand you but to offer you some help. Let’s get back on the subject. How did it go at Sciss’s?”

Emotionally uplifted by this unexpected reprieve, Gregory described his visit to Sciss with great gusto, not omitting even those points which put him in a bad light. Around the middle of the story, when he came to the part about how he and Sciss burst into laughter after a tense silence, Gregory heard a muffled sound from behind the wall. He bristled internally.

Mr. Fenshawe was beginning the nightly acoustical mystery.

Gregory began to speak faster and with more glibness. He became flushed with excitement. Sooner or later the Chief Inspector was going to notice the noises, whatever they were, and then he’d be mixed up in this weird business too. Barely able to think coherently or to imagine what might happen next, Gregory listened as the sounds increased in volume, reacting to Mr. Fenshawe’s wall with the same obstinacy he would have exhibited in response to the pain caused by the extraction of a tooth. A series of rattling noises was followed by several soft, moist slaps. Raising his voice, Gregory talked faster and still faster with a kind of strained eloquence, hoping the Chief Inspector would be too distracted to notice the noises. And for this same reason, undoubtedly, he didn’t stop talking when he reached the end of the story. Instead, overwhelmed by the desire to drown out Mr. Fenshawe, he undertook something which in other circumstances he would have kept to himself: an elaborate analysis of Sciss’s “statistical hypothesis.”