Текст книги "The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul"
Автор книги: Douglas Noel Adams
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Chapter 5
Dirk knew Lupton Road. It was a wide tree-lined affair, with large late-Victorian terraces which stood tall and sturdily and resented police cars. Resented them if they turned up in numbers, that is, and if their lights were flashing. The inhabitants of Lupton Road liked to see a nice, well-turned-out single police car patrolling up and down the street in a cheerful and robust manner – it kept property values cheerful and robust too. But the moment the lights started flashing in that knuckle-whitening blue, they cast their pallor not only on the neatly pointed bricks that they flashed across, but also on the very values those bricks represented.
Anxious faces peered from behind the glass of neighbouring windows, and were irradiated by the blue strobes.
There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal, good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just fuck off.
Dirk hurried up the road, sweat pricking at him beneath his heavy leather coat. A police constable loomed up ahead of him with his arms spread out, playing at being a stop barrier, but Dirk swept him aside in a torrent of words to which the constable was unable to come up with a good response off the top of his head. Dirk sped on to the house.
At the door another policeman stopped him, and Dirk was about to wave an expired Marks and Spencer charge card at him with a deft little flick of the wrist that he had practised for hours in front of a mirror on those long evenings when nothing much else was on, when the officer suddenly said, «Hey, is your name Gently?»
Dirk blinked at him warily. He made a slight grunting noise that could be either «yes» or «no» depending on the circumstances.
«Because the Chief has been looking for you.»
«Has he?» said Dirk.
«I recognised you from his description,» said the officer looking him up and down with a slight smirk.
«In fact,» continued the officer, «he's been using your name in a manner that some might find highly offensive. He even sent Big Bob the Finder off in a car to find you. I can tell that he didn't find you from the fact that you're looking reasonably well. Lot of people get found by Big Bob the Finder, they come in a bit wobbly. Just about able to help us with our enquiries but that's about all. You'd better go in. Rather you than me,» he added quietly.
Dirk glanced at the house. The stripped-pine shutters were closed across all the windows. Though in all other respects the house seemed well cared for, groomed into a state of clean, well-pointed aftluence, the closed shutters seemed to convey an air of sudden devastation.
Oddly, there seemed to be music coming from the basement, or rather, just a single disjointed phrase of thumping music being repeated over and over again. It sounded as if the stylus had got stuck in the groove of a record, and Dirk wondered why no one had turned it off, or at least nudged the stylus along so that the record could continue. The song seemed very vaguely familiar and Dirk guessed that he had probably heard it on the radio recently, though he couldn't place it. The fragment of lyric seemed to be something like:
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» – and so on.
«You'll be wanting to go down to the basement,» said the officer impassively, as if that was the last thing that anyone in their right mind would be wanting to do.
Dirk nodded to him curtly and hurried up the steps to the front door, which was standing slightly ajar. He shook his head and clenched his shoulders to try and stop his brain fluttering.
He went in.
The hallway spoke of prosperity imposed on a taste that had originally been formed by student living. The floors were stripped boards heavily polyurethaned, the walls white with Greek rugs hung on them, but expensive Greek rugs. Dirk would be prepared to bet (though probably not to pay up) that a thorough search of the house would reveal, amongst who knew what other dark secrets, five hundred British Telecom shares and a set of Dylan albums that was complete up to Blood on the Tracks.
Another policeman was standing in the hall. He looked terribly young, and he was leaning very slightly back against the wall, staring at the floor and holding his helmet against his stomach. His face was pale and shiny. He looked at Dirk blankly, and nodded faintly in the direction of the stairs leading down.
Up the stairs came the repeated sound:
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» -
Dirk was trembling with a rage that was barging around inside him looking for something to hit or throttle. He wished that he could hotly deny that any of this was his fault, but until anybody tried to assert that it was, he couldn't.
«How long have you been here?» he said curtly.
The young policeman had to gather himself together to answer.
«We arrived about half-hour ago,» he replied in a thick voice. «Hell of a morning. Rushing around.»
«Don't tell me about rushing around,» said Dirk, completely meaninglessly. He launched himself down the stars.
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» -
At the bottom there was a narrow corridor. The main door off it was heavily cracked and hanging off its hinges. It opened into a large double room. Dirk was about to enter when a figure emerged from it and stood barring his way.
«I hate the fact that this case has got you mixed up in it,» said the figure, «I hate it very much. Tell me what you've got to do with it so I know exactly what it is I'm hating.»
Dirk stared at the neat, thin face in astonishment.
«Gilks?» he said.
«Don't stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what are those things what aren't seals? Much worse than seals. Big blubbery things. Dugongs. Don't stand there looking like a startled dugong. Why has that…» Gilks pointed into the room behind him, «why has that. man in there got your name and teIephone number on an envelope full of money?»
«How m…» started Dirk. «How, may I ask, do you come to be here, Gilks? What are you doing so far from the Fens? Surprised you find it dank enough for you here.»
«Three hundred pounds,» said Gilks. «Why?»
«Perhaps you would allow me to speak to my client,» said Dirk.
«Your client, eh?» said Gilks grimly. «Yes. All right. Why don't you speak to him? I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.» He stood back stiffly, and waved Dirk into the room.
Dirk gathered his thoughts and entered the room in a state of controlled composure which lasted for just over a second.
Most of his client was sitting quietly in a comfortable chair in front of the hi-fi. The chair was placed in the optimal listening position – about twice as far back from the speakers as the distance between them, which is generally considered to be ideal for stereo imaging.
He seemed generally to be casual and relaxed with his legs crossed and a half-finished cup of coffee on the small table beside him. Distressingly, though, his head was sitting neatly on the middle of the record which was revolving on the hi-fi turntable, with the tone arm snuggling up against the neck and constantly being deflected back into the same groove. As the head revolved it seemed once every 1.8 seconds or so to shoot Dirk a reproachful glance, as if to say, «See what happens when you don't turn up on time like I asked you to,» then it would sweep on round to the wall, round, round, and back to the front again with more reproach.
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» -
The room swayed a little around Dirk, and he put his hand out against the wall to steady it.
«Was there any particular service you were engaged to provide for your client?» said Gilks behind him, very quietly.
«Oh, er, just a small matter,» said Dirk weakly. «Nothing connected with all this. No, he, er, didn't mention any of this kind of thing at all. Well, look, I can see you're busy, I think I'd better just collect my fee and leave. You say he left it out for me?»
Having said this, Dirk sat heavily on a small bentwood chair standing behind him, and broke it.
Gilks hauled him back to his feet again, and propped him against the wall. Briefly he left the room, then came back with a small jug of water and a glass on a tray. He poured some water into the glass, took it to Dirk and threw it at him.
«Better?»
«No,» spluttered Dirk, «can't you at least turn the record off?»
«That's forensic's job. Can't touch anything till the clever dicks have been. Maybe that's them now. Go out on to the patio and get some air. Chain yourself to the railing and beat yourself up a little, I'm pushed for time myself. And try to look less green, will you? It's not your colour.»
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» -
Gilks turned round, looking tired and cross, and was about to go out and up the stairs to meet the newcomers whose voices could be heard up on the ground floor, when he paused and watched the head revolving patiently on its heavy platter for a few seconds.
«You know,» he said at last, «these smart-alec show-off suicides really make me tired. They only do it to annoy.»
«Suicide?» said Dirk.
Gilks glanced round at him.
«Windows secured with iron bars half an inch thick,» he said. «Door locked from the inside with the key still in the lock. Furniture piled against the inside of the door. French windows to the patio locked with mortice door bolts. No signs of a tunnel. If it was murder then the murderer must have stopped to do a damn fine job of glazing on the way out. Except that all the putty's old and painted over.
No. Nobody's left this room, and nobody's broken into it except for us, and I'm pretty sure we didn't do it.
I haven't time to fiddle around on this one. Obviously suicide; and just done to be difficult. I've half a mind to do the deceased for wasting police time. Tell you what,» he said, glancing at his watch, «you've got ten minutes. If you come up with a plausible explanation of how he did it that I can put in my report, I'll let you keep the evidence in the envelope minus 20 per cent compensation to me for the emotional wear and tear involved in not punching you in the mouth.»
Dirk wondered for a moment whether or not to mention the visits his client claimed to have received from a strange and violent green-eyed, fur-clad giant who regularly emerged out of nowhere bellowing about contracts and obligations and waving a three foot glittering-edged scythe, but decided, on balance, no.
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» -
He was seething at himself at last. He had not been able to seethe at himself properly over the death of his client because it was too huge and horrific a burden to bear. But now he had been humiliated by Gilks, and found himself in too wobbly and disturbed a state to fight back, so he was able to seethe at himself about that.
He turned sharply away from his tormentor and let himself out into the patio garden to be alone with his seethings.
The patio was a small, paved, west-facing area at the rear which was largely deprived of light, cut off as it was by the high back wall of the house and by the high wall of some industrial building that backed on to the rear. In the middle of it stood, for who knew what possible reason, a stone sundial. If any light at all fell on the sundial you would know that it was pretty close to noon, GMT. Other than that, birds perched on it. A few plants sulked in pots.
Dirk jabbed a cigarette in his mouth and burnt a lot of the end of it fiercely.
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i» – still nagged from inside the house.
Neat garden walls separated the patio on either side from the gardens of neighbouring houses. The one to the left was the same size as this one, the one to the right extended a little further, benefiting from the fact that the industrial building finished flush with the intervening garden wall. There was an air of well-kemptness. Nothing grand, nothing flashy, just a sense that all was well and that upkeep on the houses was no problem. The house to the right, in particular, looked as if it had had its brickwork repointed quite recently, and its windows reglossed.
Dirk took a large gulp of air and stood for a second staring up into what could be seen of the sky, which was grey and hazy. A single dark speck was wheeling against the underside of the clouds. Dirk watched this for a while, glad of any focus for his thoughts other than the horrors of the room he had just left. He was vaguely aware of comings and goings within the room, of a certain amount of tape-measuring happening, of a feeling that photographs were being taken, and that severed-head-removal activities were taking place.
«Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
Don't pi» – Somebody at last picked it up, the nagging repetition was at last hushed, and now the gentle sound of a distant television floated peacefully on the noontime air.
Dirk, however, was having a great deal of difficulty in taking it all in. He was much more aware of taking a succession of huge swimmy whacks to the head, which were the assaults of guilt. It was not the normal background-noise type of guilt that comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century, and which Dirk was usually fairly adept at dealing with. It was an actual stunning sense of, «this specific terrible thing is specifically and terribly my fault». All the normal mental moves wouldn't let him get out of the path of the huge pendulum.
Wham it came again, whizz, wham, again and again,
wham
wham, wham.
He tried to remember any of the details of what his late client (wham, wham) had said (wham) to him (wham), but it was (wham) virtually impossible (wham) with all this whamming taking place (wham). The man had said (wham) that (Dirk took a deep breath) (wham) he was being pursued (wham) by (wham) a large, hairy, green-eyed monster armed with a scythe.
Wham!
Dirk had secretly smiled to himself about this.
Whim, wham, whim, wham, whim, wham!
And had thought, «What a silly man.»
Whim, whim, whim, whim, wham!
A scythe (whom), and a contract (wham).
He hadn't known, or even had the faintest idea as to what the contract was for.
«Of course,» Dirk had thought (wham).
But he had a vague feeling that it might have something to do with a potato. There was a bit of a complicated story attached to that (whim, whim, whim).
Dirk had nodded seriously at this point (wham), and made a reassuring tick (wham) on a pad which he kept on his desk (wham) for the express purpose of making reassuring ticks on (wham, wham, wham). He had prided himself at that moment on having managed to convey the impression that he had made a tick in a small box marked «Potatoes».
Wham, wham, wham, wham
Mr Anstey had said he would explain further about the potatoes when Dirk arrived to carry out his task.
And Dirk had promised (whom), easily (wham), casually (wham), with an airy wave of his hand (wham, wham, wham), to be there at six-thirty in the morning (wham), because the contract (wham) fell due at seven o'clock.
Dirk remembered having made another tick in a notional «Potato contract falls due at 7.00 a.m.» box. (Wh…)
He couldn't handle all this whamming any more. He couldn't blame himself for what had happened. Well, he could. Of course he could. He did. It was, in fact, his fault (wham). The point was that he couldn't continue to blame himself for what had happened and think clearly about it, which he was going to have to do. He would have to dig this horrible thing (wham) up by the roots, and if he was going to be fit to do that he had somehow to divest himself (wham) of this whamming.
A huge wave of anger surged over him as he contemplated his predicament and the tangled distress of his life. He hated this neat patio. He hated all this sundial stuff, and all these neatly painted windows, all these hideously trim roofs. He wanted to blame it all on the paintwork rather than on himself, on the revoltingly tidy patio paving-stones, on the sheer disgusting abomination of the neatly repointed brickwork.
«Excuse me…»
«What?» He whirled round, caught unawares by this intrusion into his private raging of a quiet polite voice.
«Are you connected with…?» The woman indicated all the unpleasantness and the lower-ground-floorness and the horrible sort of policeness of things next door to her with a little floating movement of her wrist. Her wrist wore a red bracelet which matched the frames of her glasses. She was looking over the garden wall from the house on the right, with an air of slightly anxious distaste.
Dirk glared at her speechlessly. She looked about forty-somethingish and neat, with an instant and unmistakable quality of advertising about her.
She gave a troubled sigh.
«I know it's probably all very terrible and everything,» she said, «but do you think it will take long? We only called in the police because the noise of that ghastly record was driving us up the wall. It's all a bit…»
She gave him a look of silent appeal, and Dirk decided that it could all be her fault. She could, as far as he was concerned, take the blame for everything while he sorted it out. She deserved it; if only for wearing a bracelet like that.
Without a word, he turned his back on her, and took his fury back inside the house where it began rapidly to freeze into something hard and efficient.
«Gilks!» he said. «Your smart-alec suicide theory. I like it. It works for me. And I think I see how the clever bastard pulled it off. Bring me pen. Bring me paper.»
He sat down with a flourish at the cherrywood farmhouse table which occupied the centre of the rear portion of the room and deftly sketched out a scheme of events which involved a number of household or kitchen implements, a swinging, weighted light fitting, some very precise timing, and hinged on the vital fact that the record turntable was Japanese.
«That should keep your forensic chaps happy,» said Dirk briskly to Gilks. The forensic chaps glanced at it, took in its salient points and liked them. They were simple, implausible, and of exactly that nature which a coroner who liked the same sort of holidays in Marbella which they did would be sure to relish.
«Unless,» said Dirk casually, «you are interested in the notion that the deceased had entered into some kind of diabolical contract with a supernatural agency for which payment was now being exacted?»
The forensic chaps glanced at each other and shook their heads. There was a strong sense from them that the morning was wearing on and that this kind of talk was only introducing unnecessary complications into a case which otherwise could be well behind them before lunch.
Dirk made a satisfied shrug, peeled off his share of the evidence and, with a final nod to the constabulary, made his way back upstairs.
As he reached the hallway, it suddenly became apparent to him that the gentle sounds of day-time television which he had heard from out in the garden had previously been masked from inside by the insistent sound of the record stuck in its groove.
He was surprised now to realise that they were in fact coming from somewhere upstairs in this house. With a quick look round to see that he was not observed he stood on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the upstairs floors of the house and glanced up them in surprise.
Chapter 6
The stairs were carpeted with a tastefully austere matting type of substance. Dirk quietly made his way up them, past some tastefully dried large things in a pot that stood on the first landing, and looked into the rooms on the first floor. They, too, were tasteful and dried.
The larger of the two bedrooms was the only one that showed any signs of current use. It had clearly been designed to allow the morning light to play on delicately arranged flowers and duvets stuffed with something like hay, but there was a feeling that socks and used shaving heads were instead beginning to gather the room into their grip. There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room – the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall. There was an air of tension and of sadness and of things needing to be cleaned out from under the bed.
The bathroom, which opened out from it, had a gold disc hung on the wall in front of the lavatory, for sales of five hundred thousand copies of a record called Hot Potato by a band called Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo. Dirk had a vague recollection of having read part of an interview with the leader of the band (there were only two of them, and one of them was the leader) in a Sunday paper. He had been asked about their name, and he had said that there was an interesting story about it, though it turned out not to be. «It can mean whatever people want it to mean,» he had added with a shrug from the sofa of his manager's office somewhere off Oxford Street.
Dirk remembered visualising the journalist nodding politely and writing this down. A vile knot had formed in Dirk's stomach which he had eventually softened with gin.
«Hot Potato…» thought Dirk. It suddenly occurred to him looking at the gold disc hanging in its red frame, that the record on which the late Mr Anstey's head had been perched was obviously this one. Hot Potato. Don't pick it up.
What could that mean?
Whatever people wanted it to mean, Dirk thought with bed grace.
The other thing that he remembered now about the interview was that Pain (the leader of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo was called Pain) claimed to have written the lyrics down more or less verbatim from a conversation which he or somebody had overheard in a cafe or a sauna or an aeroplane or something like that. Dirk wondered how the originators of the conversation would feel to hear their words being repeated in the circumstances in which he had just heard them.
He peered more closely at the label in the centre of the gold record. At the top of the label it said simply, «ARRGH!», while underneath the actual title were the writers' credits – «Paignton, Mulville, Anstey».
Mulville was presumably the member of Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo who wasn't the leader. And Geoff Anstey's inclusion on the writing credits of a major-selling single was probably what had paid for this house. When Anstey had talked about the contract having something to do with Potato he had assumed that Dirk knew what he meant. And he, Dirk, had as easily assumed that Anstey was blithering. lt was very easy to assume that someone who was talking about green-eyed monsters with scythes was also blithering when he talked about potatoes.
Dirk sighed to himself with deep uneasiness. He took a dislike to the neat way the trophy was hanging on the wall and adjusted it a little so that it hung at a more humane and untidy angle. Doing this caused an envelope to fall out from behind the frame and flutter towards the floor. Dirk tried unsuccessfully to catch it. With an unfit grunt he bent over and picked the thing up.
It was a largish, cream envelope of rich, heavy paper, roughly slit open at one end, and resealed with Sellotape. In fact it looked as if it had been opened and resealed with fresh layers of tape many times, an impression which was borne out by the number of names to which the envelope had in its time been addressed – each successively crossed out and replaced by another.
The last name on it was that of Geoff Anstey. At least Dirk assumed it was the last name because it was the only one that had not been crossed out, and crossed out heavily. Dirk peered at some of the other names, trying to make them out.
Some memory was stirred by a couple of the names which he could just about discern, but he needed to examine the envelope much more closely. He had been meaning to buy himself a magnifying glass ever since he had become a detective, but had never got around to it. He also did not possess a penknife, so reluctantly he decided that the most prudent course was to tuck the envelope away for the moment in one of the deeper recesses of his coat and examine it later in privacy.
He glanced quickly behind the frame of the gold disc to see if any other goodies might emerge but was disappointed, and so he quit the bathroom and resumed his exploration of the house.
The other bedroom was neat and soulless. Unused. A pine bed, a duvet and an old battered chest of drawers that had been revived by being plunged into a vat of acid were its main features. Dirk pulled the door of it closed behind him, and started to ascend the small, wobbly, white-painted stairway that led up to an attic from which the sounds of Bugs Bunny could be heard.
At the top of the stairs was a minute landing which opened on one side into a bathroom so small that it would best be used by standing outside and sticking into it whichever limb you wanted to wash. The door to it was kept ajar by a length of green hosepipe which trailed from the cold tap of the wash-basin, out of the bathroom, across the landing and into the only other room here at the top of the house.
It was an attic room with a severely pitched roof which offered only a few spots where a person of anything approaching average height could stand up.
Dirk stood hunched in the doorway and surveyed its contents, nervous of what he might find amongst them. There was a general grunginess about the place. The curtains were closed and little light made it past them into the room, which was otherwise illuminated only by the flickering glow of an animated rabbit. An unmade bed with dank, screwed-up sheets was pushed under a particularly low angle of the ceiling. Part of the walls and the more nearly vertical surfaces of the ceiling were covered with pictures crudely cut out of magazines.
There didn't seem to be any common theme or purpose behind the cuttings. As well as a couple of pictures of flashy German cars and the odd bra advertisement, there were also a badly torn picture of a fruit flan, part of an advertisement for life insurance and other random fragments which suggested they had been selected and arranged with a dull, bovine indifference to any meaning that any of them might have or effect they might achieve.
The hosepipe curled across the floor and led around the side of an elderly armchair pulled up in front of the television set.
The rabbit rampaged. The glow of his rampagings played on the frayed edges of the armchair. Bugs was wrestling with the controls of an aeroplane which was plunging to the ground. Suddenly he saw a button marked «Autopilot» and pressed it. A cupboard opened and a robot pilot clambered out, took one look at the situation and baled out. The plane hurtled on towards the ground but, luckily, ran out of fuel just before reaching it and so the rabbit was saved.
Dirk could also see the top of a head.
The hair of this head was dark, matted and greasy. Dirk watched it for a long, uneasy moment before advancing slowly into the room to see what, if anything, it was attached to. His relief at discovering, as he rounded the armchair, that the head was, after all, attached to a living body was a little marred by the sight of the living body to which it was attached.
Slumped in the armchair was a boy.
He was probably about thirteen or fourteen, and although he didn't look ill in any specific physical way, he was definitely not a well person. His hair sagged on his head, his head sagged on his shoulders, and he lay in the armchair in a sort of limp, crumpled way, as if he'd been hurled there from a passing train. He was dressed merely in a cheap leather jacket and sleeping-bag.
Dirk stared at him.
Who was he? What was a boy doing here watching television in a house where someone had just been decapitated? Did he know what had happened? Did Gilks know about him? Had Gilks even bothered to come up here? It was, after all, several flights of stairs for a busy policeman with a tricky suicide on his hands.
After Dirk had been standing there for twenty seconds or so, the boy's eyes climbed up towards him, failed utterly to acknowledge him in any way at all, and then dropped again and locked back on to the rabbit.
Dirk was unused to making quite such a minuscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway.
He felt momentarily deflated and said, «Er…» by way of self introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him. He frowned. There was a kind of steamy tension building in the room it seemed to Dirk, a kind of difficult, hissing quality to the whole air of the place which he did not know how to respond to. It rose in intensity and then suddenly ended with an abrupt click which made Dirk start.
The boy unwound himself like a slow, fat snake, leaned sideways over the far side of the armchair and made some elaborate unseen preparations which clearly involved, as Dirk now realised, an electric kettle. When he resumed his earlier splayed posture it was with the addition of a plastic pot clutched in his right hand, from which he forked rubbery strands of steaming gunk into his mouth.
The rabbit brought his affairs to a conclusion and gave way to a jeering comedian who wished the viewers to buy a certain brand of lager on the basis of nothing better than his own hardly disinterested say-so.
Dirk felt that it was time to make a slightly greater impression on the proceedings than he had so far managed to do. He stepped forward directly into the boy's line of sight.
«Kid,» Dirk said in a tone that he hoped would sound firm but gentle and not in any way at all patronising or affected or gauche, «I need to know who» —
