The Parasite Person (13 page)

Martin felt his mouth dry, his heart pounding: the Eureka feeling, that he had never thought to feel again. That these
projected studies might give negative, or merely non-significant, results scarcely brushed the outer rim of his consciousness, so immersed was he now in designing the set-up for these tests. Obviously, it was going to involve some pretty drastic changes in the existing questionnaire, including substantial additions; and it would involve, too, the interviewing of not one person but two, in respect of each of the 64 subjects. In every case, not only the depressive himself, but the likely Parasite Person would have to be questioned in depth; and on top of this there would have to be call-backs on each of the fourteen subjects already interviewed. Instead of the original 64, a total of 128 interviews would have to be undertaken: exactly doubling the original work-load.

For one moment, he panicked. Already, he was way behind schedule with the interviews, and now the prospect of actually
doubling
them …!

The panic passed, almost before it had properly made itself felt.

For was there not Ruth Ledbetter now, beavering away at the interviews with a speed and efficiency that almost took his breath away? Five she’d brought in yesterday, and four the day before, nearly all of them long and very thorough, full of the sort of intimate revelations which only a top-class interviewer knows how to elicit.

Nine in two days—nearly thirty a week! Long before that deadline in May, the whole lot would be in the bag!

He’d never known such a marvellous interviewer—never! And any moment now, she’d be along with today’s supply!

“S
O POOR OLD
Parsons is gone at last!” said Miss Crane,
indicating
with a well-shaped but unvarnished finger-nail the relevant spot in the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of the local paper. “Look. Albert Vincent Parsons, of 24 Lymington House—it must be him! Ninety-four—my goodness! I never realised he was
that
old. Why, he must have been gone seventy already when I first came …!”

Somewhat blank looks were all she got in the way of response from the other occupants of the staff-room, and she had to explain:

“You wouldn’t remember him, of course, you young ones, but he was the caretaker here for—oh—something like fifty years it must have been. He retired soon after I got here, I remember the Presentation, and half the school in tears, though by all accounts he must have been a holy terror. He used to hook the children off the Governors’ Lawn by their coat belts with a window-pole, and then chase them with it all the way to the playground steps, yelling frightful threats at them. The Governors’ Lawn,” she explained patiently, for the sake of those who still looked blank, “was at the far end of the playground; you know, that muddy bit, where it says ‘
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
’. Well, there used to be grass there once. And the children had to keep off it.” She sighed. “I suppose Parsons was the last person left alive who actually knew how to stop kids doing things; and now he’s dead, too! Ah well …!

She sighed, laid down the paper, and began putting her books together for her next lesson. When she had gone, Helen, who had a free period ahead, idly picked up the paper to glance through while she finished her coffee.

Ninety-four! Quite a character, too, by the sound of it. Vaguely intrigued by what Gillian Crane had told them, Helen cast her eyes over the remaining few lines of the insertion, and was pleased to note that the cantankerous and colourful old man had at least had a good send-off. Not for him the lonely end usually experienced by those who outlive by so many years the allotted span; on the contrary he was “Deeply mourned by his son, his four surviving daughters, his nineteen grandchildren, his eleven
great-grandchildren
.”

A good life. A full life. Helen found her eyes wandering idly down the rest of the column to see what sort of deaths the others had died, and at what sort of age.

Yes, most of them seemed to be truly mourned by somebody or other. Most of them seemed to have had good long lives—and then, suddenly, Helen stiffened. If anyone else had been in the staff-room to notice it, they would have seen the paper shaking in her hand as she picked it up to look closer … to see if she hadn’t, somehow, misread the small print….

No, there it was, just as it had first caught her eye:

There could be no mistake. Only yesterday—only last night—she had been typing this very name, this very address, at the head of one of Martin’s new interviews. One of Ruth’s, rather, this Ruth Ledbetter, who had taken over (Martin had explained) from the incompetent Walter as his chief assistant. It had been a long interview, Helen remembered, and quite extraordinarily
interesting
: after typing it, together with two or three others equally good,
she had agreed with Martin wholeheartedly that this Ruth girl, despite her off-putting manner, was proving herself an absolutely top-class interviewer, with a real gift for putting her subjects at their ease and extracting from them the most surprisingly detailed and intimate information. This Clive Willis, she recalled, had been particularly revealing about his relationship with his wife, who had been “wonderful” to him ever since the depression had first struck:

And now he was dead! Helen felt the shock almost as if she had actually known him, after having typed out so many of his inmost thoughts.

How sad! How very sad! And only fifty-nine, too.

“Suddenly”, it said: was this a euphemism for suicide? With depression this was a small but ever-present risk. If only one was able to
do
something for these people, instead of just interviewing them; but of course that wasn’t what Martin’s research was all about. It was a shame.

By now, the shock was subsiding slightly, but it left her, somehow, with a compulsive need to read to the end of the column, as if the list of unfamiliar names would be in some way reassuring.

But that first shock was as nothing to the second.

This, too, she had typed, word for word, this very morning!

It couldn’t be true! It
couldn’t
!
She must be dreaming! She must be hallucinating!

Yes, that was it. The shock of that first item must be causing her to hallucinate a second, similar one. Shock could do that sort of
thing to you, she knew, though it was a bit disconcerting to discover that she, Helen, so sane and well-balanced, could be susceptible to such aberrations, even if only for a second or two.

She closed her eyes for a few moments, confident that when she opened them again, the item would be gone.

But it wasn’t gone.

It was impossible. It couldn’t be happening.

But it was happening.

She must think, think. Putting her head in her hands, Helen tried to conceive of some credible explanation, because, of course, there must
be
one. The only answer she could come up with was, once again, the rather unsatisfying one that it was something inside her head that was running amok, and not the world outside. Since she wasn’t hallucinating the newspaper item—she had looked at it too many times to doubt its reality any more—then maybe it was her memory that had gone haywire? Maybe the shock had affected her in such a way that she
thought
she’d typed that name and address this morning when in fact she hadn’t … a sort of
déjà-vu
phenomenon …?

*

Luckily, the phone was free—well, it would be, with everyone else at lessons—and luckily, too, there was no one passing along the passage outside the booth and overhearing, possibly, the bizarre conversation that was about to take place.

“Martin Lockwood speaking. Who is it?”

His voice, so cold, so peremptory, almost left her speechless; but then, quickly, she reminded herself how preoccupied he was with his work these days; and how marvellous it was that he should be so. She should be glad, not affronted, that he was so absorbed in what he was doing that interruptions were intolerable to him.

“Darling—it’s me. I’m terribly sorry to interrupt you, but it won’t take a moment. That interview I typed this morning—the one right on top of the pile? What exactly was the woman’s name …? And her address …?

“Well—for God’s sake!” Martin’s voice was, if anything, more irritable than ever. “Do you have to bother me about it
now
?
Can’t it wait till you get home?”

There was a pause; and during the brief silence Helen became aware of sudden tension coming at her down the line, a mounting wariness.

“What
is
all this, anyway?” he barked. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because she’s dead: that’s why,” Helen snapped back,
suddenly
angry in her turn. “Her name’s in the paper—in the Obituary column! ‘Mrs Claire Huntingdon, of 11 Tewkesbury Avenue It’s right here, in front of me. I just want to check that it
is
the same name as on that interview….
Please,
darling…. I mean, it’s a bit scarey…. It seems so awful….”

She was talking into empty air. He had moved away from the telephone, she could tell, and was now, presumably, looking for the interview in question. Not that it needed looking for—it was right on top of the pile, beside the typewriter.

She waited. She went on waiting. It was a mercy, at least, that everyone else was still in class; as soon as the lunch bell went it would be bedlam, with queues of people waiting outside the telephone booth, and further conversation would be
impossible
.

She looked at her watch. It was all right; a full ten minutes still to go; ten minutes of privacy to thrash the thing out quietly.

Nine minutes … eight minutes … What was he
doing
all this time? Had he mislaid the interview somehow, heedlessly piling his new exciting pages of typescript here, there and everywhere, obliterating everything else under the unstoppable products of his inspiration? Beyond the telephone booth, the faint, muted hum of a well-ordered school at lesson-time just reached her, while down the telephone wire, from her far-off flat, the silence was absolute.

Five minutes had passed; six. Her ear, pressed to the receiver, throbbed with listening; her cheek ached with the pressure of the instrument against it.

“Bugger off!” suddenly snarled a loud and instantly
recognisable
voice, right into her ear. “Just bugger off, will you?” and
forthwith the receiver was slammed down with a noise like crashing furniture.

So Ruth was there. Ruth-Bloody-Leadswinger, as Beatrice had so aptly named her. Helen stood for a moment, her ears singing, and her anxiety swiftly being replaced by sheer fury.

That bloody girl! She had a devil in her, she really had! She was nothing but trouble! Trouble, trouble, trouble, wherever she went, and the insolence of her was beyond endurance! Why in Heaven’s name must Martin choose
her,
of all people, to be his research assistant, his replacement for Walter …?

Because she was so bloody good; that’s why. This was the answer, and it was irrefutable. Helen made a big effort to calm herself, to see the thing in proportion.

Here was Martin, the man she loved, the man who was to all intents and purposes her husband, desperately behind with his work, desperately worried about it; and now, out of the blue, as if dropped by Heaven itself, comes this superbly competent and marvellously enthusiastic assistant, who was not only taking off Martin’s shoulders a huge and gruelling load of work, but also seemed in some way to have inspired in him a quite extraordinary burst of creativity such as he had been awaiting in vain for months and years. For there was no getting away from it—Helen forced herself to be absolutely honest about this—there was no getting away from the fact that Martin’s sudden burst of creative euphoria had coincided just about exactly with Ruth’s appearance on the scene; and for this incomparable service, by whatever means it had been achieved, the ill-mannered, coarse-spoken young woman must be forgiven
anything.

Yes,
anything.
Helen felt pretty certain, in her own heart, that it was not sex that was the driving force in this sudden, headlong partnership between her lover and this peculiar girl; but even if it had been, Helen told herself stoutly, it would have been worth it. To see her beloved Martin happy at last, inspired at last,
succeeding
at last in his long-frustrated ambitions—for this, there was no price too high to pay. No price at all.

“C
OINCIDENCE, DARLING
,” Martin assured her off-handedly when she finally succeeded in making him look for himself at the announcements in the paper, and to compare them with the names and addresses on the interviews. “These things are bound to happen sometimes, you know. After all, depressives
do
commit suicide quite often. It’s one of the hazards of our job.”

Not “quite often”. From her intensive apprenticeship to the subject on Martin’s behalf, and her consequent wide reading, Helen knew very well that depressives, although somewhat more prone to suicide than the general population, were not all that likely to meet their deaths in this way. That two out of nine of Ruth’s subjects to date should have died within a week seemed to Helen to be quite beyond the bounds of coincidence. Besides …

“Martin—
please
!
There’s nothing in the notices to say that they
were
suicides, either of them. ‘Suddenly’ doesn’t
have
to be a euphemism. Besides—two out of nine in a single week! It
can’t
be coincidence! The chances against it …”

“Look, darling, you’re ever such a clever girl, we all know that. You’ve got an I.Q. way up in the stratosphere, I don’t doubt it. But do you, actually, sweetie, know anything
about
the laws of Chance and Probability? It’s a highly specialised field, you know; you have to be something of a mathematician before you can even begin to grasp it. I don’t claim to be an expert myself, but I
did
do a bit of Probability Theory as part of my degree course—which you, my sweetheart, didn’t—let’s face it! And I can tell you this much: coincidences
have
to happen sometimes. They mathematically have to. It would be if there
weren’t
any coincidences any more that
we’d have to start wondering what had gone wrong with the universe!

“Look at it this way. Suppose, instead of nine interviews, Ruth had done a million.
Then
would you think it such a frantic coincidence if out of these million, two should appear in the death column this week? Would you?”

“Of course not, Not out of a
million.
But …”

“But nothing, lovey! Don’t you see? These two coincidences have got to come
somewhere
among the million, if they are to be there at all, and every single place they could come is just as unlikely as any other place! Being in the first nine is no more unlikely than being in any other particular place! If you think of these nine interviews as being the first nine out of a million—and if Ruth
was
going to do a million then they
would
be—then the ‘coincidence’ problem just doesn’t arise.
Wherever
they were in the million, it would be just as much a ‘coincidence’ that they should be just exactly there. Don’t you see?”

That there was a huge, jumbo-sized fallacy somewhere in this argument, Helen was absolutely certain. But exactly where the fallacy lay, and how it could be countered, she did not know. He was blinding her with mathematics; that much was clear to her. But the question still remained, was he blinding himself as well?

Full of unease, she glanced warily up at him, and found herself looking into his shining, triumphant face, all lit up with success and with fulfilment.

How could she destroy such radiance, for the sake of a mere logical fallacy? Why not bask in it? Enjoy it? Revel in the fact that the hopes and struggles of the last months had borne fruit at last?

And yet … and yet. Two people had died. Not old people, either; one of them was only forty-four. It
wasn’t
coincidence, it
couldn’t
be, not all the mathematicians in the world were going to convince her to the contrary.

Something weird, something sinister was afoot, it must be, and if she, Helen, took no action now, it would be on her conscience for the rest of her days.

“Look, darling,” she began, with infinite caution, and
attempting
to approach the question from another, totally non-mathematical
direction: “This girl—this Ruth Ledbetter. I know she’s a marvellous interviewer and all that, but do you actually know anything
about
her? I mean …”

“I know what you mean!” Martin’s handsome face was flushed, his eyes blazing, and yet, despite these overt signs of anger, Helen had the momentary impression that he was relieved; relieved that he had an excuse, now, to quarrel with her, thus bringing rational argument to an end.

“I know what you mean. You mean you’re jealous of her,” he accused. “You’re jealous of her helping me so efficiently—of being so damn good at the job! Of—well—of
inspiring
me, as nobody has ever inspired me before …!”

Was
she jealous? Was there something in these accusations? If Martin has stopped there, Helen might have been prepared to admit to a grain of truth in what he was saying. But he did not stop there.

“You’ve had it in for her right from the start!” he blustered. “You’ve been absolutely beastly to her, from the very beginning!”

This was too much! After all Helen’s tolerance and
forebearance
, her unfailing civility in the face of the girl’s insolence, her outrageous manners, her cool assumption that she could walk into Helen’s flat just whenever she chose, and monopolise the attention of Helen’s lover for just as long as she liked! After all this, to be told …!

“Well, I like that!” Helen flared back. “
I’m
beastly to
her
!
I really do like that! What about the way
she
treats
me
?
What about her telling me this morning to ‘Bugger off!’ when I telephone my own flat …? ‘Just bugger off, will you?’ she said …!”

Now that he had got her angry, Martin seemed to be in some way satisfied. His own anger evaporated.

“Oh, now, come off it, darling,” he said placatingly. “That isn’t what she said at all. You must have misheard her. She must have said ‘Must be running off now’—something like that. You know how it is on the telephone. And your school telephone
particularly
—all that row outside in the corridor all the time …!”

He paused; and when Helen said nothing, he allowed a
self-pitying
note to creep into his voice:

“I do wish, darling, that you’d try to see it a bit from my point of view. Okay, so Ruth hasn’t got the most polished manners in the world, but after all, she’s only young, and you know what the young are like these days—you’ve often remarked on it yourself, you know you have, when you’ve had a rotten day at school! But those are just superficialities—let’s try, if we can, to keep to essentials. And the essential thing here is that I need her—I absolutely
need
her—for my work. Do try to understand, Helen, that this is something
important
to me. It’s the chance of a lifetime! I’ve never had such a fantastically brilliant and hard-working interviewer, never! It’s like magic, the way she gets the buggers talking—really revealing themselves—their real, deep feelings, that they’ve never revealed to anyone before! It’s incredible, what she gets out of them! I’ve never known anything like it!”

Neither had Helen. She had typed quite a few of Ruth’s
interviews
by now, and even before the shock of this morning’s
discoveries,
she had begun to feel uneasy about them, though it was difficult to know just what to put her finger on. There was the right and to-be-expected proportion of dull, inarticulate sort of people that you get in any survey, with nothing much to say for themselves, and with no new light to throw on anything.

But the ones who were articulate—they were
so
articulate! So full of startling revelations, of bizarre and striking turns of phrase: “Good quotes” as Martin exultantly termed them, he was
absolutely
delighted; and it was this delight, so heartfelt, so unclouded, that had caused Helen so far to keep her doubts to herself.

Two people have died. The words would not leave her alone, hammering away inside her skull in and out of season. Two of Martin’s research subjects, for the interviewing of whom he, Martin, was strictly responsible, even though he might choose to delegate the job—two of them were dead. He, and no one else, would be held responsible—and rightly—for any malpractice that might be going on.

Reluctant though she was to re-open the recent quarrel—already Martin seemed to have got over his burst of ill-temper and was humming contentedly as he moved around the room
assembling
glasses, bottles, ice, for their usual evening drinks—Helen
knew she must speak. It could not be left like this. It just could not.

“Darling,” she began—and already her voice was so full of nervousness, reluctance and downright fear that the innocent little word stopped him in his tracks. He stood, tray of glassware in hand, as if in front of a camera. “Darling, I don’t want to upset anything, I’m as thrilled as you are that it’s all going so well—that Ruth’s getting you such marvellous interviews. But had you thought at all—I mean, it’s quite usual in these surveys, isn’t it?—had you thought of doing the odd call-back on the people she’s interviewed? Just as a matter of routine, I mean, the way they do it in Market Research—the supervisor calls back on, say, one in ten of the addresses just to …”

“Just to what?”

Martin’s voice was so cold, so menacing, that Helen found herself shrinking back into her corner of the settee, unable to look at him.

“And since when have I needed a little O-level schoolmarm to explain to me the proper way to run a survey? I might remind you, Helen my dear, that I was working on public opinion surveys—including Market Research projects—when you were hardly out of primary school! When I need you to instruct me on the elementary principles of this branch of Social Science I shall ask you, thank you very much!”

Helen physically shrivelled under the snub. Her blonde hair, golden in the lamplight, fell like a curtain across her white face as she stared down into her lap, fingers lacing and interlacing, her knuckles whitening.

But she would not give in.

“I think, Martin,” she said quietly, “that you ought to do a call-back at those two addresses where the people died. I don’t care how much I’m interfering, I don’t care how furious you are. But I think you ought. There. I’ve said it. And you’ve heard me say it. I won’t say it again.”

For one moment, she thought he was going to hit her; but when, cautiously, she raised her head just enough to see through the pale mist of her hair, she saw that he had not moved. He was still standing exactly as before, and though the glasses were not even
rattling on the tray, and though his voice, when he spoke, was as icily sarcastic as ever, she knew, without knowing how she knew, that somehow she had frightened him.

“A call-back at the addresses of the two people who died,”—he repeated her own words back to her, exactly as in a depth-interview. “And what, precisely, are you expecting that that will reveal? In plain words, what are you accusing Ruth of? Murder? Manslaughter? You see her as some sort of female Ripper? Or what?”