A Suspension of Mercy

  Tilbury did not struggle now. His eyes were beginning to look glassy. Sydney let four minutes pass, by his watch, as he held Tilbury back against the sofa. Sydney shook out some more pills, and Tilbury took them as if he were too sleepy to know what he was doing. He hiccupped once, but the pills stayed down.

  “That’s a good fellow,” Sydney said softly.

  In the next six or seven minutes, Tilbury took all but one of the pills that were left. He took them very slowly into his mouth from Sydney’s fingers, like a sleepy child or a bird, and at last slumped sideways on the sofa, his lids open only a slit, his mouth ajar, as if he tried to say something and hadn’t the energy. When Tilbury seemed very quiet and his eyes were closed, Sydney looked around on the floor for the three pills that had fallen. The third one was under the sofa. Sydney retrieved it and dropped the three pills into what remained of Tilbury’s scotch and soda.

  Tilbury was so far gone, Sydney could get only an inch or so of the liquid down him before it started spilling on Tilbury’s chin. Sydney then lifted his feet onto the sofa, pulled Tilbury’s neatly folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his fingerprints from Tilbury’s glass and, holding the glass by its rim with the handkerchief, wrapped Edward’s limp hand around the glass, and pressed his thumb and fingers on it in a few other spots. Sydney performed the same operation with the soda dispenser. He made a trip to the bathroom to erase prints on the medicine cabinet door, and finally he went to the telephone and called Scotland Yard.

  He asked to speak to Inspector Hill.

  “Inspector Hill, I’m sorry, but I got delayed,” Sydney said in a harassed voice. “There were telephone calls and people at my house today. I’m sure you can understand. But I’ve just got to London and I’ll see you very shortly.”

  Inspector Hill did not sound at all annoyed.

  Sydney wiped the telephone, then carried it toward Tilbury, but it didn’t reach. He had to lift Edward off the sofa to the floor, and press Edward’s hand around the telephone there. Then Sydney replaced the telephone with the aid of Edward’s handkerchief, removed it from the cradle and left it lying on the desk. At last he left the handkerchief wadded on the coffee table beside the drink. He’d have to let himself out by touching the doorknobs, but doorknobs were notoriously fuzzy when it came to fingerprints, Sydney knew, and it would look worse to wipe them.

  He left the apartment. He would drop the Dormor bottle into a rubbish bin or down a drain in the street, and not in this neighborhood.

  29

  In the taxi to Scotland Yard, which Sydney providently caught at Hyde Park Corner instead of Sloane Street or Knightsbridge, it dawned on him that he hadn’t remembered to think what it felt like to commit a murder while he was committing it. He had not thought at all about himself. Of course, the murder was not committed yet. It was still being committed. Tilbury was still alive, and might live if he were found in the next hour or so and had his stomach pumped. A suspension of mercy, Sydney thought. An absence of something. And yet he had not even been aware of that at the time. No, his action had been merely a brutal, unthinking retaliation for Tilbury’s deceit and heinousness in fleeing from Alicia after she was dead or dying.

  The taxi stopped, and Sydney paid him off.

  He was passed by a sentinel constable, who escorted him to another policeman inside the building, who accompanied him to Inspector Hill’s office on the second floor.

  Inspector Hill was with two men in plain clothes, both of whom remained in the office, though Inspector Hill gave his attention to Sydney as soon as he entered. “Ah, Mr. Bartleby, good evening. Sit down, if you please.” His telephone rang. “Hill speaking . . . Oh . . . Excellent. Well, find him and bring him here.” He hung up, passed a hand over his hair and said to Sydney, “We’re making progress finally. I’m sorry indeed about your wife, Mr. Bartleby. The identification was established this afternoon beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

  “I know. I knew,” Sydney said.

  “You knew?”

  “I knew when I saw the photograph in the paper. The photograph of the cliff.”

  “And for the record, Mr. Bartleby, where were you Wednesday night?” Inspector Hill asked briskly.

  “I was home that evening and that night.”

  “Can you prove that, if you have to?”

  Sydney thought a moment. “No.”

  “Well, you may not have to. We’re just now on the trail of the man your wife was with, the Eric Leamans. We have an excellent description of him. Does the name Edward Tilbury mean anything to you?”

  “Yes,” Sydney said.

  “What?”

  Sydney glanced at the two interested listeners on his left, one a middle-aged man, the other younger. “I knew since last Friday that my wife was with him, but I wanted to give her a chance to come back herself. On her own. That’s why I didn’t mention it to the police.”

  “And—how did you find out?”

  “I saw them in Brighton. I didn’t know the man’s name, but I found it out later.”

  “How, may I ask?” asked Inspector Hill.

  Sydney knew the police must have gotten Tilbury’s name from Inez and Carpie. “I asked a couple of London friends. Inez Haggard and Carpie Dunne.”

  “Um-m. We’ve just spoken to them. Have they known all along?” the Inspector asked with a frown.

  “No. Only as long as I have. You see—I described to them the man I saw in Brighton. And if anyone’s to blame for their not telling the police, it’s me, because I asked them not to. I didn’t tell them I’d seen my wife or Tilbury, either, but I remembered Tilbury paying attention to my wife at a party they gave. I didn’t know his name, but I remembered what he looked like.”

  “I see. Well, they’re bringing Tilbury here tonight.”

  Sydney was wondering if he should tell the Inspector he had written the letter and telegram to Alicia? Alicia might have destroyed them. Tilbury hadn’t mentioned the letter or the telegram. The telegram might come out, since the post office kept a record of them for a while. Or if by some wild fluke, the police decided to think Tilbury had not been on the scene the night of Alicia’s death, the telegram could be seen as a ruse: he had sent the telegram Wednesday morning, jumped on a train and gone to Brighton and Lancing Wednesday night, pushed Alicia over the cliff in a fit of jealousy, cleared Tilbury’s things out of the villa to make it look as if Tilbury had killed her and fled, and returned home. Sydney blinked. It really couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t be able to make it happen even in a piece of fiction. “You spoke with my wife’s parents, I suppose?” Sydney asked, breaking into several seconds of silence in the room.

  “Yes, around noon today. We corroborated the identity, in fact, by asking her mother if she had a birthmark on the inside of her forearm.”

  Sydney knew the birthmark, a strawberry mark like a tiny map of France, Alicia had always said. He thought again that her face must have been damaged beyond recognition. “Where is she now?”

  “Her body is being taken to Kent after the post-mortem,” Hill replied, then answered his telephone on the first ring. “Oh? Well, break in then, of course. And call me back.” He hung up. “Telephone’s off the hook in Tilbury’s flat, the light’s on, and he doesn’t answer the door. Interesting.”

  Sydney said nothing.

  “Where did you see your wife in Brighton?” Inspector Hill asked.

  “I’d been waiting in the railway station to see if I could see Tilbury,” Sydney said, “or rather someone who looked like him.” He told about following Tilbury in a taxi to where he met Alicia, who then had red hair, and how he had visited towns to the west of Brighton and traced her to Angmering by means of the post office. “I thought it would be a matter of time until she came back herself. Or communicated. I didn’t want to embarrass her by exposing all this.”

  “We trac
ed them to Angmering, too,” said one of the officers on Sydney’s left.

  “But just today,” said Inspector Hill with a tight smile, and answered his telephone again. “Sorry, I can’t talk about that now, Michael, I’m expecting a call and I want the line free.” He had hardly hung up, when the telephone buzzed again. “Oh? . . . Yes, I agree. Right. See you.” He pressed the cradle, then dialed a single number. “Inspector Hill speaking. I’d like a car right away.” He hung up and said, “Tilbury’s taken an overdose in his flat. They’re getting a doctor. I think we should go over.”

  They all moved, took hats and macintoshes, and went downstairs to a black car that was already waiting.

  There were a couple of people in Tilbury’s foyer, and a few more on the landing outside his flat door, which was closed. Sydney recognized the woman who had seen him, but she did not seem to pay any particular attention to him. Hill knocked, and was admitted to the flat. Sydney followed with the other two men.

  Tilbury was still on the sofa, and a long rubber tube hung from his mouth and led to a gray enamel cooking pot on the floor. His eyes were closed, his face pale and flaccid.

  “Not getting much,” said the doctor to Hill.

  “Is it a fatal dose, you think?” asked Inspector Hill.

  “Depends on how many of these he took,” said the doctor, picking up the plastic pill container, in which one pill remained. “It’s whole grain seconal.” He put the container back on the coffee table.

  Inspector Hill took it and read the label, which gave a doctor’s name, the chemist’s shop, and said “one or two as needed.” Hill opened the bottle and sniffed. Then he set it on the coffee table.

  “Can’t get any more out,” said the doctor, and removed the tube from Tilbury’s throat. “Next step is the hospital.” He went to the telephone.

  Hill looked at his watch and made a wry face. “It’ll be hours before Tilbury’s fit to talk. Mr. Bartleby, can you spend the night in London? We’ll want to talk to you if and when Mr. Tilbury comes to. Unless you prefer to go home and come back tomorrow.”

  “No, I’ll stay,” Sydney said.

  “Would you give us a ring tomorrow between nine and ten?”

  “Yes.” Sydney said good night to the Scotland Yard men, and left.

  The woman who had seen him was not on the landing, but the two men were still there.

  “How is he?” one of the men asked. “Is he alive?”

  They’d heard about the overdose, no doubt. “Yes, he’s alive,” Sydney said, and the message was passed down to the men standing in the foyer.

  Sydney rang Inez and Carpie from the first call box he came to. He emphatically didn’t want to be alone, and they were just the people he wanted to see.

  “Sydney, darling!” Inez sang out. “Are you in London?”

  Inez said they would love to see him, and that they were alone, though their telephone had been ringing all evening.

  They had not been quite alone, Sydney saw as his taxi turned into their mews street. Alex Polk-Faraday was walking away from their house, his head down, though Sydney knew he was aware of the taxi and of him, because taxis didn’t go often into a dead-end street. Alex was avoiding him.

  “Sydney! Come in, darling,” Inez said at the door.

  He was welcomed by restrained embraces from both the girls, and words of sympathy about Alicia. They gave him a scotch, which Inez said Carpie had just run out to buy especially for him, and then they questioned him. Had he seen Tilbury? What were the police doing to him?

  “I just saw him,” Sydney said. “He’s taken an overdose and they’re getting him to the hospital.”

  “What?” from Carpie.

  “I’ll bet he pushed her, that son of a bitch,” Inez said. “Don’t you think he pushed her?”

  “I don’t know,” Sydney said.

  “Did he take a fatal dose?” asked Carpie.

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Just that he cleared all his gear out of that villa down there,” Inez said. “Even got rid of Alicia’s pocketbook, didn’t he? Nobody found it. He’s guilty, and no wonder he tried to kill himself.”

  Sydney found himself wordless and slightly shaky, even with the scotch. Carpie replenished his glass generously from the bottle. “Can I stay the night?” he asked. “On your couch? I’ve got to talk to the police again first thing in the morning.”

  “But of course, Syd. Say, have you et?” Carpie got up. “We haven’t, because we had a visitor till now.”

  “Your old pal Alex,” Inez said. “I knew he’d shoo when he heard you were coming. We didn’t have to ask him to.”

  Sydney nodded and smiled faintly, no longer interested in what Alex had to say about him. Their series, he supposed, would run its length of six installments and stop. Then Sydney realized he could carry it on himself, or at least try to.

  “He had to change his tune a little,” Inez said. “Now he says you’re not a wife-killer, just a nut.”

  “As if he isn’t,” Carpie put in from the kitchen, which was partitioned from the living room.

  “Gosh, Syd, we shouldn’t be joking,” Inez said. “It looks like poor Alicia was the one who was out of her mind. Staying away for so long—”

  “We didn’t tell Alex you knew about Tilbury for a whole week,” Carpie yelled over the sound of running water. “That’d have made him even more furious.” Her voice was cheery.

  “I just told the police I did,” Sydney said.

  “Well, so did we, today,” Inez said. “I hope you didn’t mind, Syd. With Alicia—”

  “I don’t mind,” Sydney said. “Let’s talk about something else. I sold The Planners to Potter and Desch this week.” He announced it rather lugubriously.

  There were proper congratulations, and a refill of drinks.

  The dinner was good, though Sydney could not eat much. The girls put him to bed very soon afterward on the couch, and Sydney fell asleep listening to their chatter that came faintly from the upstairs regions.

  He awakened to the morning feeding of the two kids. It was a quarter to eight. Sydney realized with a jolt that Tilbury could be alive and talking at this minute. The police, of course, didn’t know where to reach him. Sydney had only coffee and orange juice for breakfast.

  “What do the police want you for now?” Carpie asked.

  “They want me to talk with Tilbury, probably.”

  Inez nearly dropped a plate as she turned to face Sydney. “Gosh, he might be dead, mightn’t he? Do you know what hospital they took him to?”

  “No.” And he wouldn’t call up to ask, if he did know, Sydney thought. Had Tilbury blabbed everything? What kind of sentence would they give a man who’d tried to make someone take an overdose? The same as for murder, of course. Or would Tilbury live and be remarkably, unbelievably noble, and not say anything to the police about his visit from Sydney Bartleby? Would Tilbury possibly try to redeem himself that way? If he were writing it in a story, Sydney thought, could he dare to make Tilbury that noble? Not without a little indication of nobility beforehand, and Sydney had yet to see any in Tilbury. Sydney spent an anxious and sickening hour until nine o’clock, relieved by a couple of nips of scotch which Carpie pressed on him. Inez had taken the kids out for an airing. Sydney could not bring himself to turn on the radio for the news, and it didn’t seem to occur to either of the girls to do it.

  Sydney rang Scotland Yard. Inspector Hill had not come in yet, but a man he was passed on to said in answer to Sydney’s question that Edward Tilbury had died at 4 A.M.

  “His heart gave out,” the voice said. “It always depends on the heart whether they pull through.” The man possibly thought he was speaking to a relative. “Inspector Hill ought to be in any minute.”

  “What’s the news?” Carpie asked from the ki
tchen.

  “Tilbury died last night,” Sydney said.

  Carpie turned with a dishcloth in her hands. “Goodness. Oh, Christ. A real fatal dose. That sounds like he did push her. Doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sydney said. “I don’t suppose it matters much. I imagine Tilbury was worried about his job—wasn’t he?”

  “Oh, sure. I know that. I talked with Vassily around six. My God, I wonder if Vassily knows he’s dead?”

  Sydney barely heard her. He was thinking that he ought to call the Sneezums. “May I make a call to Kent, Carpie? I’ll get the charges.”

  “Oh, of course, Syd. Alicia’s parents, you mean?”

  Sydney nodded, and started putting the call through. He had to get the number from information, as he could not recall it exactly. Carpie went upstairs so he could be alone. A servant answered, and Sydney asked to speak to Mrs. Sneezum.

  “Just a minute, please. I’ll see if she’s free.”

  Sydney waited more than a minute. Then Mrs. Sneezum said:

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Sneezum. This is Sydney. I wanted to say how sorry I am about Alicia. I’m—”

  “Oh, Sydney—” Mrs. Sneezum’s voice seemed to give way. But she regained it quickly, and said, “We’re all sorry. I had no idea what was going on. None of us did. Not even you—did you?”

  “No,” Sydney said. “I’m sorry it had to end like this.” He was really sorry, and Mrs. Sneezum, for all her stiffness—and her stiff side was the only side Sydney had ever seen—seemed more human and real now than anything he had encountered in the last many days. “Edward Tilbury is dead. I just heard a few minutes ago. He took an overdose of sleeping pills.”

  “Oh, heavens! Oh, good Lord! It’s like some horrible tragedy—on a stage. I keep thinking all this has nothing to do with Alicia. It can’t be real. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” Yes. As if his murder of Tilbury wasn’t real, either, because Tilbury might have done it himself, if he had lost his job, and there wasn’t much doubt that he would have lost it.