One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson Page B

wasn’t.”
    â€œLet’s leave it at that,” said Mike.
    There were sounds of rising. Pibble opened his eyes and saw him standing by the bed, smiling down.
    â€œWe’ll leave you alone now, Jimmy …”
    â€œA couple of mysteries?”
    â€œWhat? Oh yes. The tower stairs. I don’t know whether you noticed when you were doing your circus act, but they didn’t get cleaned very often. Plenty of dust, just right for footprints. Policeman’s dream. Only somebody had worked the whole way up, sweeping them clean all down the middle where the prints would have been. Gun wiped, we thought. Stairs swept clean. Rummy bit of work. … We weren’t to know, were we, that an old friend had been slithering up on his arse, wiping all those prints out?”
    â€œCrippen! I’m sorry, Mike.”
    â€œNot your fault, mate. And Tosca had swept his hidey-hole out, so that wasn’t any good either.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œForget it, Jimmy. I mean, it would have been handy to have some prints, but at least we’re better off than we were, trying to work out how our chappie had the nerve to spend the time doing that job.”
    â€œAnd who’d have thought it necessary,” said Cass. “We don’t have half a million footprints on computer, do we?”
    Pibble lay staring up at Crewe, stunned with guilt. The sense of alertness, of being at least mentally his old self, was sucked away like water down a drain. He had the impulse, as the last swirls vanished, to blurt out his real reasons for climbing the tower, to atone for this huge mess by undoing his minor lie; but before he could grasp at the notion, all will had gurgled away.
    â€œDon’t worry, Jimmy,” said Mike in a changed voice. “I shouldn’t have told you. Worse things happen every day, remember?”
    â€œI’m sorry” seemed to be all Pibble’s lips would say.
    â€œI think you’d better go now,” said Jenny, her voice for the first time tinged with something more than medical dispassion.
    â€œRight. Come along, Ted. See you, Jimmy.”
    â€œCome and see me again,” whispered Pibble.
    They were gone.
    Come and see me again. I can tell you then. Come and see me alone. Old days. Like the old days. Never come back. Come back. …
    He felt Jenny’s hand at his pulse.
    â€œAre you all right, Jimmy?”
    She wouldn’t understand. It was no use. For the moment she represented only the world of sickness and helplessness, which for a while he seemed to have escaped.
    â€œJust tired,” he whispered. “I’m all right.”
    â€œDo you think you can go back to sleep for a bit?”
    â€œUrrh.”
    She stood for a moment, then smoothed his bedclothes and moved away. Through the sigh of the door he heard the mutter of male voices. Before they could wake in him fresh springs of guilt, he pulled sleep down over himself and hid.
    While he slept a decision made itself. It was quite easy. There were writing things in his bedside table. There was a police guard in the corridor. He could write a note to Mike—two short sentences to explain that he had heard no shot, but that the rest of the story was true, and a third to say he didn’t want the staff at Flycatchers to know. Weak though he was, he could surely reach the man in the corridor, sometime when Jenny’s routine took her elsewhere. …
    He woke decisively, almost as though the train of thought had been a coherent one, despite being the product of sleep. He was already moving his arm out from the bedclothes to reach for pen and paper when he saw that she was in the room, sitting quietly in one of the chairs, watching him.
    â€œI think you’re marvelous,” she said.
    â€œOh?”
    He was confused, and thought she must be talking about the note he was preparing to write.
    â€œYour friend thinks so too.”
    â€œUh?”
    â€œThey were