The Sinful Stones (12 page)

There was no escape, and it wasn't going to be easy, either. Brother Providence would be a hard man to blackmail, bully, cajole, or even argue with on the rational level. And the first problem would be to save his face, and the Community's. Or seem to.

There were various threats he could wheel up, but fewer promises. So the threats would have to be carefully graded.

No mention of the book, at first. Certainly none of the murder. Assuming he won, were there any practical steps to take? Ambulance at Oban, in case Sir Francis stood the trip badly? Um. Supposing he didn't win, then it'd be a matter of stealing the boat, somehow, and in that case an ambulance might be a life-saver. If he won, they could lay it on by radio. If he didn't, they wouldn't let him. No chance of asking for it before negotiating—that'd queer his sales-pitch all right. But suppose. . .it'd be natural to telephone Mary, get her to pass on a piece of easy code to Tim: then, when the whole dicey charade was over, she could learn how essential she had been for the rescue of the finest brain in Europe … why, she might stay content with her lot for two whole weeks together!

Temptation comes in improbable shapes, but they have a family characteristic: the risks always seem smaller than they are.

Pibble stopped pacing, mind made up. Time to change into official-looking serge for the interview? No, he had paced too long, and if he didn't go to the office at once it'd be time for dinner. With mild surprise he realised that he hadn't been shown the office during the morning's tour. Why? Because it contained the photocopier, the one that had been mentioned after the reading of Father Bountiful's idiot postcard, the other gadget they needed a generator for. And why keep it secret? Because it had been used to copy Sir Francis's manuscript. Odd the way illumination comes, thought Pibble; not in steady drips, but in sudden spoutings after long drought. He wondered whether the process of scientific discovery was similar—toiling and toiling and getting no further, and then, almost in a dread, seeing a whole sequence of ideas like angels ascending and descending the ladder of logic.

He asked his way from the leader of a gang who now passed him, their pace subtly different, as though their limbs knew that the morning's hauling and lifting was over and that a meal, however dreary, awaited them.

A spiral staircase led up inside the wall of the Refectory to a large, light room, less plain than the ones he'd been shown, but only because of the amount of brutalist office furniture in it: filing cabinet, steel desk, safe, steel and plastic chairs, radio equipment winking on a steel table against one wall, steel book-case against another, typewriter (a glossy electric toy and not the expected Imperial), and in the corner behind the door a shrouded object—the photocopier?

Three of the Virtues were in the room, and their attitudes showed that he had not interrupted anything, neither prayer nor gossip. Providence and Hope and the helicopter pilot had been waiting for him.

“Come in, come in,” said Brother Providence, rubbing his loose-skinned hands together with a noise like leaves swirling in the corner of a paved courtyard. “I trust all went well at your interview.”

“Not too well,” said Pibble. “I can't remember enough about the kind of things he wants to know. May I use your radio to send a telegram to my wife? She doesn't know when to expect me back.”

“You can ring her up if you wish. Father Bountiful saw fit to equip us with a radio telephone. Give Hope the number.”

Well, that'd make it easier still. And Mary would be home from her morning's bridge-school now, and setting out her ritual lunch of prunes and Fruti-Fort.

“You must let me pay, of course,” said Pibble.

Brother Providence looked at him coldly.

“Our style of life may have persuaded you that we are beggars,” he said. “We are not.”

“I didn't mean that,” said Pibble, and wrote the number on the pad by the radio. Odd reaction from a man who had no feelings to hurt. Brother Hope settled down before the switches and indicator-lights and began to speak patiently with the mainland operator, his accent more Canadian than ever.

“Shall I have to explain to her about saying ‘over' and ‘out'?” said Pibble.

“Oh no, my dear lad,” said the pilot. “This is a very fancy doofer indeed, just like Clore has in his Rollses. It transmits along one wavelength and receives along another, and the other way round at Glasgow, where it connects with mere vulgar telephone wires. You chat away like you do in your own lounge.”

“I understand,” lied Pibble.

Brother Hope seemed to have met an operator who spoke pure Gorbals; the combination of accents was making for misapprehensions. Pibble was nervy. To distract himself he watched the movements of gulls through a cracked pane; they were like blips on a radar screen, tiny in themselves but telling the eye significant things about the track of the enormous air.

“Is the wind always like this?” he said.

“It usually blows for a week when we get a good westerly,” said Brother Providence. “But we do not talk or think about the weather as much as men do in Babylon. Did you listen to the forecast this morning, Tolerance?”

“No change, Prov,” said the pilot. “And am I glad I'm not boating?
Truth
's a sod in this kind of sea.”

“Ringing for you now,” said Brother Hope.

Pibble sat into the still-warm chair, and instantly crouched forwards to take his weight off his scraped buttocks. The purr of the ringing tone seemed strangely loud. It stopped with a click and the stolid voice answered. Pibble prattled gamely away.

“Hello, pigeon, it's me—I hoped I'd catch you. No, I'm still up here for at least a day more. It's a wireless joined to a telephone, but it's got two wavelengths so that you can speak and listen at the same time. Nor do I. Fascinating of course, but damned difficult too, that's what's holding me up. Of course I know he's old, ten years older than Father would have been—he doesn't pay attention for very long at a time, but he's astonishing while he does. It might be on the AA map, but it'll only be a dot, south of an island called Tiree. Cold wind, but very bracing. Of course I'm wearing them. Look, pigeon, this is very expensive—there are two important things. First, I won't be home till Friday evening. I'll ring again if I'm going to be later than that. OK, I'll write him out a cheque first thing on Saturday. Second, there's something I forgot to tell Tim Rackham at the office. Could you give him a ring? Got a pencil and paper? Fine. Just tell him there's no ban on ambulances at the harbour. Got that? Yes, that's right. Today, if possible. OK. I love you too. Bye.”

As he put the receiver down his chair was flipped round as if it had been caught in a whirlpool. He tried to yank himself into the room, towards the pilot who was sitting at the desk studying a scribbling pad, but his arms were twisted down behind the chair-back in an unbudgeable grip. His buttocks screamed with pain as he threshed. Straps bit into his wrists. Now he could see their heads and shoulders as his ankles were tamed. When they stood up Hope was perfectly unflurried, but Providence's beard rose and fell on his heaving chest.

“Was that enough for you, Tolerance?” he said.

“It'll have to be, won't it?” grumbled the pilot. “If only Pa Bountiful had buzzed us a tape-recorder. Keep quiet, duckies, and listen to great art.”

He studied the pad and contorted his lips. An extraordinary, mincing, genteel series of syllables came from between them.

“Hello, pigeon, it's me—I hoped I'd catch you. No, I'm still up here for at least a day more. It's a wireless joined to a telephone, but it's got …”

“That sounds moderately convincing,” said Providence.

“It's only on the phone, mind,” said the pilot.

Providence twirled his bulk round to the chair, the drapery of his habit floating behind in coarse swatches.

“In Babylon,” said Brother Providence mildly, “I used to give up Ximenes if I hadn't finished it in half an hour. An ambulance in Oban Harbour, Brother James?”

5

L
et me go,” said Pibble furiously.

The pilot immediately made another note on his pad.

Pibble tried to stand, achieved a quarter of an inch, and then had to endure the renewed agony as he sank back on to his ravaged buttocks.

“An ambulance in Oban Harbour?” prompted Providence.

Pibble said nothing. He knew now, and cursed himself for not knowing before—it should have been obvious—who the pilot was. Fish Benson, three-year escapee from the Scrubs, famed among the tall-tale-tellers of the Yard as the world's worst con-man. Providence had only told half the story: Fish had won his talent contest with imitations of TV personalities; and the ill company which he had been willed into was Farson's mob. Why, if he'd served his time he'd have been out last year, and very likely convicted and in again for some fresh outburst of naive ingenuity. So here was another threat, maybe, in Pibble's strapped hands. And he'd never get anywhere if he didn't talk—no matter what raw material the pilot could mine from his arguments.

“I need an ambulance in Oban Harbour,” he said, “in case Sir Francis doesn't stand the crossing very well.”

“It seems we have much to talk about, Brother James,” said Providence quietly. Hope nodded. Pibble felt a prickle of terror at the form of address, and squirmed.

“I'm sorry that in the circumstances we cannot make you more comfortable,” said Providence.

“I don't see why not,” said Pibble. “You must know that my arse is bloody sore.”

“Dear me, I had forgotten. Is there a cushion anywhere, Hope?”

“Not since Father Bountiful left.”

“I got some dinky ones on
Truth
,” said the pilot, “but 'tisn't worth the journey, really.”

“I still haven't grasped why you've seen fit to tie me up at all,” said Pibble more calmly.

“Ah,” said Providence with a tone of surprise that anyone could be so dense. “Since you arrived in the island, Brother James, we have been vouchsafed three distinct signs: Sister Rita has had a serious relapse after months of steady progress across the board; Sister Dorothy has been miraculously drunk; and a well-cut stone has crushed the leg of one of our best masons. What can these be but warnings, warnings that Satan has entered Eden? Naturally our first duty is to capture and restrain him.”

“You forgot our mike conking three times,” said the pilot. (Three? All that code wasted?)

“I can't argue about the signs,” said Pibble, “because that sort of thing seems to me quite irrational. Explain about the microphone.”

He was getting pins and needles in his left calf.

“You did it in three times running,” said the pilot viciously.

“I mean,” said Pibble, “why was it necessary to have a microphone in Sir Francis's room at all? He showed it to me last time I was there, but I couldn't have reached it if I'd wanted to.”

“Don't tell me the wetting done it in after all,” said the pilot. The underlying accent of his garage-hand days was beginning to show through the elbows of his stage vowels.

“A sign on the other side, I'd have thought,” said Pibble.

“Certainly not,” said Providence. “But I will accept your ground, Brother James, and argue our case according to the logic of Babylon. Simplicity is old and tiresome, but he is a great soul, and there is hope for him yet. Furthermore he is valuable to us, not because he is rich, for he gave most of his worldly wealth to a worldly charity before he came here, but because he is famous.”

“Like I said, he's a good ad,” said Hope. No laugh this time.

“So we have a duty to protect him,” said Providence, “both for his sake and ours, even when on one of the silly whims of the old he contrives to send a message to a man he has never met, asking him to come here without any explanation of why he wants to see him. A normal man, with honest motives, would, on receiving such a summons, have got in touch with us for further information. He would certainly not have dropped his work and rushed north at once; nor would he have pretended when he got here that he was not a policeman. But the Lord looks after his own, and we were permitted to know that the man, from the moment he arrived, was attempting to deceive us about his job. And we were also permitted to know that he had a claim, though a very fanciful one, on poor Simplicity. A claim on what is left of his estate, which now, suddenly, with the publication of his book, is vastly enlarged. He is going to be a rich man again, and already the first of the hyenas has arrived.”

“No!” cried Pibble, but his protest was not to the bearded monk. This wild illusion could only have come from one source—the sealed envelope. The old demon had betrayed him before he'd even come! Why? Why? Why?

“Yes, Brother James, we are not ignorant of the mean motives of Babylon. Now, we cannot protect Simplicity unless we know what has passed between these two men, so we install a listening device. The men meet, the device is working, and then suddenly it goes dead. The same at their second meeting. The third there is some doubt about. So we do not know what to think. Despite the signs that the Lord has sent we fear that we may have misjudged this man; in his direct dealings with us, he appears kindly disposed and intelligent for the most part; but we remember that he attempted to deceive us the moment he arrived, that his announced reason for coming here at all is unbelievably weak, and that at times he becomes both interfering and inquisitive.”

“Punished, weren't you,” pointed out the pilot, “when you come nosey-parkering into our Reet's affairs?”

“Then, Brother James, after his third interview with Simplicity this policeman walks for some time in the cloisters, as if making a plan. Next he comes and asks to use our radio to send a message to his wife. In the course of that message he inserts a cryptic instruction to a third person which, if he had been acting with honest purpose, he could have sent quite openly to the appropriate authorities. Until that moment, as I say, we did not know what to think. Hope and Tolerance were against you, but I was inclined to be for you despite both your behaviour and the signs the Lord sent us. But now we all know what you are.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Pibble. “All you've got to do is ask Sir Francis what he wants.”

“Of course we shall do that, but as you know there are several hours to wait before he can give us a sane answer. And the old are very easily influenced, and subject to whims which they afterwards regret. So we can occupy the interval by finding out more about you.”

“Tim Rackham is a colleague of mine at Scotland Yard,” said Pibble.

“One corrupt policeman will know others, Brother James. There are some of us in the Community with direct experience of this sad fact.”

“Not half,” said the pilot.

“I don't know how you expect me to think straight with my arse hurting like this and my legs going numb.”

“But surely there should be no need to
think
, Brother James. All you have to do is to tell us the truth.”

“Oh, rubbish. Of course I'll tell you the truth, but I've also got to try and think of evidence and arguments to persuade you that I'm not a crook and that you must let me take Sir Francis back to the mainland.”

“Alas for the weakness of sinful flesh. Perhaps we could slack his legs off, Hope.”

As the straps eased, Pibble squirmed carefully and found a tolerable position. Curious reaction from the three Virtues, or from two of them anyway. Hope seemed genuinely sad in his ruthlessness—sad, perhaps, for corrupt mankind, ruthless with corrupted Pibble. Providence also appeared to take his role at two levels: on the surface he was enjoying himself, purring his cool ironies, the voice of the Head pacing the dais before full school, touching his cane lightly with the tips of his fingers while he talks about “civilised values” before calling out the boys he is going to beat; but that was just
manner
—underneath the elegant sadism Pibble could sense a sterner drive.

The pilot, by contrast, was straightforwardly happy with excited malice. Mustn't mention his real name, nor the stolen manuscript, nor the forged cortisone; push them too far and their mad self-righteousness would switch to madder self-preservation. Pibble felt he was dealing with spiritual psychopaths, unhampered by any legal or moral norm.

“Well, Brother James,” said Providence. “We are waiting for your version of events.”

“The message about the ambulance,” said Pibble. “That seems to be the main thing. I know Sir Francis doesn't like reporters—he calls them the scum of the earth. And I imagine you'd also prefer not to have a great fuss made about his return to the mainland. If I were in my office I could probably arrange to get an ambulance to the harbour without anyone asking why, but I couldn't possibly do so from here. The simplest thing is to get Tim Rackham to do it, and in such a way that the message doesn't go in clear through the Yard switch-board, which is by no means leak-proof. And of course it would give my wife a spot of excitement when she learnt what it was all about, which would cheer her up.”

Silence.

“If anything, I was cheating her, not you.”

Silence again. Pibble determined to leave the next move to them. His last sentence served as a warning against the delirium of confession, that curious condition in which tired, hungry and browbeaten prisoners talk and talk. Courts find it hard to believe afterwards that a man should have spoken so much to his own damage, and signed the statement as well. Men do, and now Pibble knew why.

“Why did you come here?” said Providence at last.

“I told you on the tower. I don't see how I can convince you that it is very important to me to know as much as I can about my father. He was a man of. . .well, of enormous moral stature, I believe, and now he's gone and almost forgotten, and I feel a duty to try and rescue what I can. His dealings with Sir Francis ended in a disagreement, or quarrel, or something—anyway it changed his whole life, and I want to know what it was.”

“You didn't tell me that before, Brother James.”

“It was none of your business, honestly.”

“It is now.”

Silence. Let him come to you, boy.

“So, Brother James, there is no question of your having come to take what you thought was your share of Simplicity's sudden wealth?”

“No. I've never imagined I had any claim on him at all. The first I'd heard of it was when you accused me of that five minutes ago.”

“Oh, come. It is a far more credible motive. To deny it discredits the rest of what you tell us.”

“Nonsense,” said Pibble. “You keep telling me how much you know of Babylon, but if you didn't live so much out of the world—if you'd done thirty-five years of police work, as I have, you'd know that any motive is credible. Shall I go on?”

“Who's stopping you?” said the pilot.

“Right. I didn't say I was a policeman, because it's always simpler not to when one isn't actually on duty. I should think four out of five of my colleagues, when they're on holiday, simply say they work for the Home Office. I was asked up here by Sir Francis, and I came for perfectly good reasons. When we first met we talked for a little about my father—he wanted to make sure I was the right Pibble—and then he told me he wanted to leave the island, but that he thought you wouldn't let him go. Before he could explain any further he got too tired to pay attention. Next time we met there was a bit of fuss because a log had fallen out of the fire and the room was full of smoke, but when we'd settled down we talked again and I decided that he was fully compos mentis when he wasn't tired, and that he really did want to go. But I still didn't know whether there was any substance in his belief that you wouldn't let him, so I decided I would try to find out more about the Community before I saw him again. I didn't tell him that—I said I needed time to make up my mind. So I nosed around for a while—this is what you call being inquisitive and interfering. Of course I had to seem sympathetic. In fact I am sympathetic to certain aspects of your work. But inevitably I came to the conclusion that you would be likely to take an, er, rigid line about his leaving you.”

Long pause: no reaction. The pilot was picking his ear.

“In the interval I decided on a compromise course of action,” said Pibble. “I wouldn't take him out with me, but I would take a letter to anybody he liked to name, telling them his troubles. He thinks his letters are being censored, and something you said suggested that there may be truth in this.”

“Something I said?” said Brother Providence.

“You said he contrived to invite me, but never mind. It seemed a fair course of action, and I was sure he was in no physical danger, even if he imagined he was. But the microphone changed my mind. It persuaded me that I ought to come and tackle you at once, and make certain propositions to you. The trouble was that I couldn't explain any of this to Sir Francis, because we both imagined that the microphone was working; so we spent most of the time talking about what I remembered of my father from my childhood in Clapham. This rather upset me, as I feel, er, a strong antipathy to Sir Francis and didn't like him intruding onto areas which I regard as private; so I had to walk round the cloisters after our talk, simply to calm down and put my thoughts in order. Evidently I didn't calm down enough, because that's when I thought of the unnecessary complications about the ambulance. That's all, I think.”

The room became so still that Pibble fancied he could hear the squelch of the pilot's fingernail digging into a reluctant pocket of ear wax. Nonsense, of course, with this wind hissing through the gappy windows and dragging at the stonework.

“An ingenious construction,” said Brother Providence. “Very ingenious on the spur of the moment. But it has a fatal hole in it. It is impossible to believe that you never spoke about Simplicity's book.”