The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (2 page)

Graham pointed to a chalked outline at the edge of the landing where they stood. Pibble walked to the top of the stairs and saw that the marks continued on to the top three steps, making the discernible shape of a human figure, very short and broad. The biggest of the dark patches came where the head would have been.

Graham pointed again, to the half landing below. “There's only one street lamp, so that corner's black as pitch, Dr. Ku says, even with the window open. It was last night. Our chap could have stood in the corner waiting for the old boy to come up the stairs. He always went pretty slowly, hauling on the banisters—bad heart. Easy to clock him as he passed.”

“They've learned about footmarks from the telly, too?” Pibble asked.

“Course. The whole corner's wiped clean. He used the lace doo-day from the window, and then just left it lying on the sill. Wiped the sill, too, for some reason.”

“Came from outside, perhaps.”

“Leaned on the sill for a bit, more like, watching for the old boy to come home.”

“He went out in those pajamas?” Pibble asked.

“That's right. Never wore anything else, the Kus say. Just put more layers of pajamas on when the weather turned colder. You've got to realize, Jimmy, that until he was forty-odd he didn't wear anything most days.”

“Yes, of course. Did he go out much?”

“That's about as far as I got when I decided to ask for you. Dr. Ku will tell you the rest. I'll introduce you and be off. We've got a nasty bit of kid-molesting up by St. Stephen's—run-o'-the-mill, really, but it's got me bothered.”

“I know what you mean, Sandy. It's quaint, like an exercise in a forgotten art form. You go and harry your pervert with a clear conscience. Where's Dr. Ku?”

“Floor below.”

They had to wait. The photographer had achieved a delicate and contorted balance of himself and his tripod, both cantilevered across the stairwell, to photograph the owl's abandoned pedestal from a rewarding angle. Pibble might have edged past, but for Graham to have tried would have risked both man and machine. Sandy looks edgy, thought Pibble. Hope he's all right. Enough prima donnas in the force already. Odd how little you can hear from the wake room—or smell, either. He left the banisters to look at the door. It wasn't what he'd expected, a flimsy old deal affair with fillets of fresh wood tacked to the top to fill successive gaps caused by a subsiding doorpost; no, it was solid mahogany, foursquare, fitting its frame as closely as the air lock on a spaceship. Pibble leaped a few inches into the air and came down on his heels; the floor scarcely gave, though the photographer glanced around, frowning, and then (seeing that the tremor had been caused by a senior officer) erased all emotion from his face.

“Sorry,” said Pibble.

“That's all right, sir. I'd finished. It was just the principle of the thing.”

“Sturdy bit of building this, Sandy. Last for a thousand years if they don't pull it down. Funny the way they used to put top-class craftsmanship into such hideous buildings sometimes. Stairs don't creak, doors almost soundproof. Ideal setup for an ambush.”

“Yes. Come on.” From Graham's tone, Pibble half expected him to add, “Let's get it over.”

On the floor below, Graham knocked at the single door at the far end of the landing, waited respectfully for an answer, and went in. In its way, the room was almost as improbable, in that particular house, as the wake room on the floor above. It was large, and brimming with light. Two tall windows opened onto back gardens where Pibble could see the top of a savagely over-pollarded sycamore. Both the big neon lights in the ceiling were on, and auxiliary illumination came from a Swedish-looking standard lamp, which must have had at least two 150-watt bulbs in it, and a couple of angle-poises. There couldn't have been a shadow anywhere. The furniture was too low, curveless modern sofas, a large architect's desk, and several silly gilt chairs, upright, such as one used to see in the tearooms of would-be smart cinemas. The fabrics were soft grays and yellows, which made the pictures all the more staring.

Eight canvases hung on the walls, and a pile of others was stacked in a corner. They were all the same size, tall and narrow, and all unframed; Pibble liked them quite a lot. The colors were fierce and simple, giving, at first glance, an impression that the pictures were gaudy abstracts. Then, in a blink, he saw that this was caused by the carefully formal patterning of the backgrounds, and that each picture was a portrait of a person or an animal—naïve but not childlike. There was no hesitation anywhere. The insides of the creatures were drawn as if they were on the outside. There was a heron with a fish in its stomach. There was a European businessman with bowler, brolly, and blue pin-stripe; you could see both his wallet and his esophagus. Pibble nearly laughed aloud with pleasure.

Behind the desk, a very black black man sat stabbing at the wood with a scribing knife. A red-haired white woman sat on the sofa in front of Sandy. She had a square, soft face and was dressed wholly in black—high-necked jersey, ski trousers, ballet shoes. She looked fortyish, and sat peculiarly still and upright.

Sandy's attitude was peculiar, too; while Pibble looked at the pictures, he embarked on a series of gaunt banalities, his accent becoming more Scottish with every sentence. The woman assented at intervals with a slow nod of her head.

Sandy said, for instance, that it was fine the noo, but likely there'd be thunder betimes. He looked smaller but more ungainly, and if he'd had a cap he'd have been twiddling it in front of his crotch. Ah well, thought Pibble, every man to his own terrors—
that's
why he sent for me so promptly. Is it just her slinky, sub-masculine style that does it, or has she got something else on him? Anyway, who am I to deride?

Sandy plodded around to the point at last.

“This is Detective Superintendent Pibble from the Yard, Ma'am,” he said. “He will be able to devote his whole time to resolving your difficulties, which I canna. I've known him a long time.”

Like an undergardener giving a good character for one of his mates at the Big House. The woman replied in the same idiom.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Graham. You have already given us more of your time than we deserve, and you have been very tolerant of our eccentricities. We must not detain you any longer from clearing up that unpleasant business at St. Stephen's, which you must consider more important than our irrelevant little tragedy here.”

Pibble tried to place the accent—not that you could call it an accent by the broad standards of B.B.C. regional programs—rather an intonation, a slight clipping, a narrowing of the vowels, a hint that in her cups the lady might begin to lilt. Edinburgh! The great dames of that city—the wives of Writers to the Signet, the sisters of successive Provosts—exchange the gossip of their exclusive society in just such tones over tiny cups of lemon tea—or used to, forty years ago. Surely, thought Pibble, they can't have survived the intervening slumps and wars and Socialist governments untouched. Still, no wonder Sandy was twiddling his invisible cap, as though it were
he
who had slain the old man, by knocking his ball through the irreplaceable windows, and was now come to own up and offer to pay for the damage, week by week, out of his pocket money. Sandy came from a decent Edinburgh family, but not that rarefied. Pibble decided to try and jolt the conversation into the sixties.

“Superintendent Graham says you can give me the dope on the setup here. The sooner I get stuck into it, the more chance I've got of making some sense of it.”

“Quite right, Mr. Pibble,” said the woman. “Goodbye, Mr. Graham. I am sure your colleague will keep you
au fait
with whatever progress he may make.”

“Sure,” said Pibble.

“Goodbye, Ma'am,” said Graham. “Goodbye, Mr. Ku. James, you will be in touch with me?”

“Sure,” said Pibble, who was called James about once in two years, mostly by some senile cousin. Graham left.

“Now see what you've done,” said the black man. His voice was very deep and rich. “You've alienated the new Superintendent by teasing the old one. What you have to explain is already sufficiently complex without your introducing adventitious complexities.”

“I'm sorry,” said Dr. Ku. “I was so scared when I started speaking to him that I suppose I instinctively imitated Mummy, and he reacted so strongly that it would have made things worse if I'd stopped. Can we start all over again, Superintendent Pibble? It will relieve you of the obligation to lard your interrogation with slang.”

“I'm easy either way,” said Pibble. “Why were you frightened of Superintendent Graham?”

There were several odd intangible things about her. The first one Pibble pinned down was that she sat stiller than anyone he'd ever seen before.

“Oh,” she said, “I was not frightened of him—merely frightened. It is not simply that the idea of anyone of our community killing Aaron is horrifying. As an anthropologist, I would have thought it impossible. But it seems equally impossible that anyone should have come from outside and done it. And he was struck with the left hand, and with a piece of wood lying by the path.”

“What does that mean?” said Pibble. “Graham told me there was something funny about the left-hand business.”

“Yes. To start with, Superintendent, you must realize that we are all members of the same tribe. We come from New Guinea. Ku is not really a surname, but what we call ourselves in our own language. We are the sole survivors of our own civilization, the only living Kus—the rest were obliterated by the Japanese. We are, even by the standards of Central New Guinea, a very primitive people, and the whole of our behavior patterns is riddled with ritual and tabu. There is almost no predicament—certainly no predicament with which we might be faced in our own jungle—for which we have not a prescribed mode of action. The predicament of killing a member of our own tribe is one. This we would invariably do with the left hand, and with a chance piece of wood or a stone picked up by our path. It would be the deepest pollution of our real weapons, and hence of our manhood, to use one of them to kill a Ku.”

“The same applies to the women?”

“They would not own weapons, of course. But they would use the left hand.”

Mr. Ku stopped stabbing the desk. “Are you certain of that, Eve?” His bass was theatrical, a voice like drums.

Dr. Ku answered in a foreign language, one full of dentals and labials, with complex vowels strung together into immense polysyllables, singsongy. Mr. Ku boomed back in kind, but in his voice the consonants merely fluttered above a velvet thorough bass of sound. Dr. Ku shook her head and settled the argument in a couple of sentences that were like a flight of improbable birds.

“We must apologize,” said Mr. Ku. “The affairs of our people make better sense in our own speech. Eve was reminding me of an episode in the life of my maternal grandfather. The women would kill a Ku with the left hand also. It is true.”

“You both seem,” said Pibble, “to take the idea of killing a Ku calmly enough, yet you think it impossible that a Ku should have done this particular murder.”

“Both attitudes are valid,” said Mr. Ku.

“To us,” said Dr. Ku. “But it is not to be expected that they should be to you, Mr. Pibble. In general, throughout New Guinea internecine killing is not a rarity. The killing of a chief (and Aaron was our chief) by a member of his own clan is much rarer, and there is no tradition of its having happened among the Kus. Furthermore, there is a statistical relationship, on which I have published a paper myself, between internecine killing and the well-being of a clan. In short, there are two phases in which the vast majority of such killings occur—first, when the clan population is appreciably above its norm and approaches the limits which the tribal area can support in comfort, but when, for one of a number of reasons, it has not proved possible to resort to the usual expedient of warfare; second, when the clan population diminishes to a point where the clan itself begins to lose its sense of identity and becomes, you might say, psychopathic. We, of course, are very much closer to the second state than the first, but now that the children are beginning to grow up we are nothing like as close as we were. Not, I assure you, that that means we have been through a period when murders were the regular thing; but we have endured a climate in which it was theoretically possible for murder to occur, and now I believe the climate to be different. As an anthropologist, I would be astonished if Aaron had been killed by a Ku. But, as a practical person living in this house and knowing Aaron, I cannot believe that he was killed by some intruder. Paul will confirm what I have said.”

The black man smiled. In that squashed and alien face, it was impossible to tell what the smile meant—sympathy, shyness, hypocrisy, the instinctive rictus of a carnivore moving on its prey, anything.

“Yes,” he said. “Eve knows us. In my marrow, I am certain that I could not have killed Aaron, and nor could any of us.”

Hmm, thought Pibble, this is right nasty. What have we here but a very sophisticated version of “Oh, Orficer, it can't 'ave bin one of the fambly as done it, reely it can't. It must 'ave been some 'orrible man what broke in.” What can one do but raise an eyebrow? He raised it.

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Ku, “you had better cable Professor Fleisch at Melbourne. He will confirm the theoretical background. Paul's marrow you will have to take on trust.”

“I'm afraid I can't take anything on trust. Let's start at another point. The deceased was out in his pajamas. He can't have gone far. Have you any idea where he went?”

“The odds are he was visiting the Caines. He liked to chat with Susan, especially when Bob wasn't there.”

“The Caines?”

“Bob and Susan Caine live next door. We know them well, though we have not known Susan very long. They were married only last year, but Susan was a tremendous help when we had an outbreak of scarlet fever in the winter. We have known Bob much longer. He was with us in the valley. It was because of him …”