25

Langton could not sleep. He was, he supposed, exhausted, but that did not matter. He did not even undress. His wife heated some milk, and the warm milk was quite delicious, but did nothing to encourage him toward bed. There was simply too much happening.

He had always had an overly advanced sense of responsibility. He was responsible for at least some of what had happened. Or, at least, he felt responsible. He should not, for example, have let Higg stay overnight with that ancient leathered mummy. He wished the ancient bag of trouble had never been found. Langton didn’t care for dead things anyway, and while he knew such old bog men enthralled the scientists, and won over the hearts and pocketbooks of the public, he had to admit that Irene had, perhaps, the more civilized attitude. He had cringed when he had heard it. Irene was a charming girl, but had this terrible propensity for untimely straightforwardness. But she was right, in her way.

There was something obscene about this love of dead bodies, mummies, and such. He wondered what the Church of England felt about cremation. A good idea, that. A bad few minutes, and then you are so much dust. God will love you just as much if you are a handful of dust. What does He care?

Metaphysics. He was sitting in his favorite chair, mulling metaphysics, and it was—he craned his neck to see the clock—two in the morning. He had rung the nurse—Higg was still alive. Still alive, but still the same, which was to say nearly dead.

He asked Harry, the border collie, if he wanted to go for a walk, and of course the dog indicated that he would.

His wife was half asleep, and murmured something like surprise. “A walk. At this hour?”

“Can’t sleep, can I, and who could blame me?”

No one. The last twenty-four hours had been hellish.

The dog was not surprised. Langton was given to fits of sleeplessness. Hardly insomnia, nothing deserving a serious name. Simply a sense of responsibility. A monthly report might keep Langton awake for three consecutive nights. He was, by profession, a worrier.

Langton was not a scientist. He was, at heart, a man who kept things organized. He admired the men and women he worked with, but sometimes felt that he had a point of view somewhat more objective. The romance of ancient things did not wear long with him.

The dog wet this and wet that, trees, gateposts. The two of them strolled to Clifton Green. Cold, naturally. But not so cold. The dog sniffed and snuffled in the grass.

As his wife had heated the milk, Sainsbury’s Virtually Fat-Free, she had mentioned something, and it was this small bit of news, in passing, that had killed Langton’s sleep more than anything else.

“Someone’s done it again,” she had said, tilting the milk pan into the cup.

This was an annoying rhetorical device. She knew that Langton lived in perfect ignorance of most of the things that happened in her life, including the vicissitudes of “Neighbours,” and all the other fictional crises on television.

“Someone’s done it again, and the police haven’t a clue.”

“The police,” he had said, interested in more news of police bungling. “I wonder if they ever do anything right.”

“Someone got the big gray tom over on West Parade. Belongs to Mrs. Phillips, who did the Christian Aid last year. Whose house was hit by a thunderbolt that storm we had last year, that bad one?”

“That killed the pigeons in the Museum Gardens?”

“That storm; it was different lightning.”

The milk was too hot. Langton told her that he knew who Mrs. Phillips was, and yet knew nothing about her cat.

“Of course, you not liking cats.”

“I don’t, really. Of course I have nothing against them. Take care of themselves quite well, as a rule.”

“But you’re a man for dogs.”

Langton admitted that she was right, and then pursued the subject of the gray tomcat belonging, when it had belonged to anyone, to Mrs. Phillips. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Langton had the same trouble in France. Translating a newspaper into actual information took time. “Is the cat dead?”

“How did you guess that?”

“You told me, I believe.”

“I didn’t.”

“How did it die?”

“The police don’t know. They found him floating in the Ouse.” The river was pronounced ooze. Langton thought of ooze at the bottom of the river, and frogmen.

Jane’s white skin.

“But there have been several cats gone missing in the last few weeks,” she continued. “And more than one or two found in the river.”

Langton admitted that this was a fascinating mystery, and then he could not speak. He had washed his hands, although they had not needed washing, and asked her to repeat all she knew about the missing cats.

“Well, I don’t know how they died. Someone killed them, I suppose.”

“Poison?”

“I couldn’t say, could I?”

Now he watched Harry nuzzle tussocks of grass. If it were poison, then that would be a relief. Because Peter had never used poison. He had used his hands, as Langton recalled. So perhaps someone was poisoning cats, and hurling the bodies into the river.

But would one do that, actually? A poisoner never really knows when the victim has eaten the tainted bit of liver. A poisoner would not throw victims into a river.

How many had she said? He couldn’t remember. Enough to cause an interest in the press. There would have been others, then, that no one knew about. He would have to ask Mrs. Webster to look up the articles. He would have to reserve judgment until he knew more.

He would wait. Too many people had done too much in recent weeks. It was almost always better to do nothing.

Peter had not looked well recently. He had looked as though he had not been sleeping. There had been something cadaverish about him, and he had never been exactly plump to begin with.

And hadn’t there, now that he thought about it, been a scratch on one of his arms? Peter had fingered it during a meeting. A cut, not at all well healed, much like the claw mark a cat might make.

But Langton knew nothing of Peter’s sexual habits. Didn’t like to give it a thought. There were torrid affairs in which a man might be scratched a bit. Langton remembered a night or two himself in which pleasure and pain had been confused. That was the way with passion. He was not a scientist, but he kept a broad view of things.

On his wrist. A claw mark.

Harry worked his nose into the grass around a white post.

If only Higg were back from near-death. Langton needed help. He was not made for this sort of crisis. What would Higg suggest? Something active. “We ought to go on down to his flat this very night and see what sort of mischief he’s up to.” Or, at the very least, “Talk to that man the first thing tomorrow morning. You know there’s something wrong.” But Higg would be so much better at confronting possible madmen than Langton would ever be.

Now Langton had indigestion. He would chew three or four Setter’s and try to find something to read. Nothing with a crime in it, or a mystery.

He tugged Harry along the pavement. The entire chain of mishaps might have been Peter’s doing. He certainly knew enough about machinery to cause a generator to blow up. It was not impossible that he had stolen the Skeldergate Man and sold him to the international market. One or two items of the Sutton Hoo exhibit had vanished a few years ago, he had heard, and only luck turned them up in a drug raid in Paris. There was always a potential for crime in archaeology. A dig could be salted with treasures in order to inflate its importance to the press, or to the foundation funding the dig. Finds could disappear. Langton had a good deal of experience, and everyone he knew had been honest and diligent.

Peter had seemed hardworking, and, ignoring his past, entirely respectable. But there was something wrong with Peter now, and Langton had, suddenly, too many questions to wait until morning.

But he had to wait. He couldn’t go knocking people up at three or four in the morning to make wild accusations.

He couldn’t, but Davis could. Davis would be pleased to do something—anything—to recover the missing bog man. He was the sort of man who loved action. Langton would ask for Davis’s help before he confronted Peter. That was the way to handle it—no need to run a risk by taking on too much by himself.

Langton returned to his home, and sat trying to read a historical novel he had enjoyed years before. Unfortunately, the novel took place in Anglo-Saxon times, and this reminded him of the Skeldergate dig.

His wife tottered forth and asked him if he were coming to bed at all that night, or sitting up like a silly owl.

“Like an owl,” he said.

“How many more years of this will we go through, Charles?” she asked.

The question of retirement. She had aired this before, and he still did not know. He did not have to speak. She read his face, his posture.

She amazed him. Dishes and pots had flown across the kitchen, shattering like crockery in a hurricane, and yet now she was more than calm—sleepy. Sometimes women seemed wiser and stronger than men. She was a deep and lovely mystery.

“You’ll wear yourself out,” she said.

He did not have to respond. She left him sitting alone.

Langton read, and watched the clock, praying that night would pass quickly.