THIRTY-TWO

They had put Arthur Silsby in a side room not because of his social status, but because they knew he was going to die; it afforded him some privacy, and it also saved everyone else from the agony of being reminded a hundred times a day of his doom. I had a spare hour before my first afternoon visit and I popped into Mayday Hospital to see him, partly because he was a long-standing patient of the practice, partly because I was very intrigued as to why he had done something so out of character. I could not bring myself to believe Masson’s theory that he knew something about the recent killings, but I could not conceive of what his motive had been.

It wasn’t yet visiting hours, but that was not a problem both because of his fate and because of who I was. Having checked in with the sister in charge for the sake of politeness, I made my way to his room. I knocked gently but received no answer; looking through the square window in the door, I could see that he was asleep, so I quietly went in and stood at the end of the bed. He had a dextrose-saline drip feeding a Venflon in his left elbow and he was attached to a heart monitor that did its annoying beeping thing in the background. He didn’t look well; not well at all; was there already a hint of jaundice, I wondered? As usual with me, having got there, I didn’t know what to do; I thought about waking him, then thought perhaps it would be best just to let him sleep a while, so sank quietly into one of those over-padded, high-backed chairs that are only found in NHS institutions.

My excuse is that it was warm and I wasn’t used to sitting down in the middle of the day; had I kept on the go I know that I wouldn’t have fallen asleep, but this was not to be. Even in one of the most diabolical items of furniture that mankind has ever devised, my eyes closed and my hold on consciousness relaxed. Doubtless the intrusive yet curiously mesmeric beep of the monitor contributed; doubtless, too, the airlessness of the room played its part.

After a period of uncertain length, I came back from my light, dreamless sleep without obvious or abrupt transition; I opened my eyes and looked directly at Mr Silsby’s. He seemed to be perfectly vigilant as his head lay on the pillow; in his eyes I saw what seemed to be awareness. We stared at each other for a moment that stretched into several bleeps of the medical machine to which he was attached; for myself, I was somewhat groggy, yet he seemed to be at once alert, even as he was inert.

He said then, and this quite succinctly, ‘It is so good of you to come.’

At something of a loss, both because I was still slightly befuddled with sleep and because he spoke in an oddly affectionate tone, I said with some uncertainty, ‘It’s the least I could do.’

He nodded slightly, his head not rising from the pillow. ‘I am so sorry, son.’

Which caught me slightly by surprise; he had been a regular although not frequent visitor to my work premises, and through all those years we had hardly got to know one another, except in a purely professional, detached kind of way, so that we had never until that moment got beyond the polite formalities. Certainly we had never reached the point of using forenames, let alone vernacular terms like that one.

‘Are you?’ I enquired pusillanimously.

‘I taught you differently from this.’

I twigged. Arthur Silsby had had a son, an only child, who had been killed in the Korean War. I can only imagine how horrible that must have been for the Silsbys to experience, but neither of them had ever done any more than mention it in a purely informative, matter-of-fact way. They were, indeed, a stoical couple. ‘Mr Silsby?’ I said tentatively, hoping to disabuse him of his delusion.

It still seemed that he was looking directly at me, and doing so with perfect lucidity, although clearly he was seeing something else. ‘I should have stamped it out . . .’

‘Mr Silsby,’ I repeated.

‘I couldn’t believe it, you see . . .’ I began again to shake him from his delusion, then stopped, suddenly aware of what he had been saying. He shook his head and frowned before repeating the judgement. ‘Absolutely disgusting . . .’

‘What is?’

Unfortunately he was in transmission-only mode, with no incoming messages being processed. ‘I’ve let you down, and I’ve let your mother down.’

‘How?’

‘They denied it, you see, and I was so shocked that it could be going on in my school, I chose to believe them. I was a fool.’

I leaned forward in the chair to be close to him, fairly sure that he would not suddenly see me for who I really was. ‘Are you talking about Yvette Mangon and Marlene Jeffries?’

‘Disgusting behaviour . . .’

‘Lesbianism? Is that what you’re talking about?’

‘And then that snake came to see me. How did he find out? He wouldn’t tell me. He just told me that unless I made him my deputy, he was going to go to the press and tell them that I had condoned it. He wouldn’t listen. What could I do, son?’

‘Who was the snake, Mr Silsby? Was it Gillman?’

‘There was nothing else I could do. I had no other way out.’

A thought occurred to me. ‘Did you kill Gillman?’ I asked this urgently, my mind running through possibilities. Why was he muttering about how shocking the behaviour of two lesbians had been, if he had killed Gillman? Was it because he thought murder was OK? In any case, I didn’t get a direct answer. In fact, I got no more from him; he closed his eyes and after a minute or two, I realized that he was silently crying.