“Just a minute,” Pardey said impatiently. “Is this some kind of a sick joke?”
“Joke?” Redpath gave a shaky laugh. “That’s a good one. Joke!”
Pardey’s eyes narrowed in speculation. “This thing about
Leila—when did it happen?”
“Yesterday lunchtime, in her flat. About one.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“It’s not the sort of thing I’d be hazy about.”
“Well, I talked to Leila yesterday around six o’clock and there was nothing the matter with her,” Pardey said in a matter-of-fact voice, his eyes intent on Redpath’s. “What do you say to that?”
Redpath’s mouth went dry and he felt a painful, chilly prickling on his forehead and cheeks. “But I…”
“I’ll tell you what you did yesterday lunchtime—you went round to Leila’s flat when she wasn’t there and you cut up one of her cushions with a kitchen knife. The only person you hurt was yourself.”
Redpath gave the detective a numb smile before turning away to grasp the metal bars of the nearby gate. He stood that way for a moment, bracing himself against the convulsions in his stomach, then brought up the coffee he had drunk a few minutes earlier. The silt-coloured fluid spattered noisily on the concrete.
“Get into the car,” he heard Pardey saying in the distance. There was a sensation of being manhandled, the smell of orange peel and cigarette ash from the car’s interior, rotating street images as the vehicle was backed up a short distance and was driven away from the police station. A bus momentarily filled the view ahead—a meaningless assembly of saffron-coloured sheet metal and posters—and slid away to one side as Pardey overtook it.
“I’m lost,” Redpath mumbled. “Everything…melts.”
Pardey glanced sideways at him. “What is it, Redpath? Drugs?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
Redpath brought all his attention to bear on the task of arranging words in a logical sequence. “I work at the Jeavons Institute. They’ve been trying some stuff out on me—doing tests. I think something has gone wrong. Look, I’ve got to see Leila for myself.”
“She works at the Jeavons too, doesn’t she?”
“I believe so, but then what I believe isn’t necessarily…”
“Would she be there by this time? It’s almost half nine.”
“She should be there,” Redpath said, trying to rid himself of a vision of a slim, tapering back hideously disfigured by stab wounds. “I’d like to see her.”
Pardey nodded ungraciously. “Just remember—no funny stuff. If Leila wasn’t a friend of mine you’d be facing charges right now. In fact, if you don’t get some pretty solid backing for what you’ve just told me…” He glanced at Redpath again, compressed his lips and returned to the business of driving with the air of a man whose natural instincts were being sorely thwarted.
Recognising the advisability of remaining silent, Redpath closed his eyes and rode with the motions of the car, swallowing repeatedly in an attempt to cleanse the sour taste of bile from his mouth and throat.
For months after the death of his father Redpath had been tormented by dreams in which his father was still alive. He had always awakened from them saddened and disturbed, with his grief renewed, but while the illusions still held good for him he had known moments of utter happiness in which he had looked on his living father with joy, appreciation and contentment, understanding that to do otherwise where a loved one was concerned was to squander life itself.
The same kind of emotion gripped him now as he watched Leila Mostyn across the small conference table in Nevison’s office. She was miraculously and beautifully alive, unharmed, untouched, dressed exactly as he would have pictured her in a white lab coat, filmy blouse and tweed skirt. He no longer quite trusted the evidence of his senses, but it seemed to him as he told his story that she was genuinely troubled on his behalf, that without realising what was happening she had come close to entering that special, binding, exclusive relationship for which he yearned and for which he would be prepared to face the events of the previous twenty-four hours all over again.
In his account of those events Redpath, as requested by Nevison, paid as much attention to the imaginary as to the real, filling in every scrap of detail he could remember of hallucination, dream and nightmare. He spoke for almost an hour, during which time both Pardey and Nevison took occasional notes to supplement the tape recording which was being made. At the passages which concerned her, particularly the death scene, Leila’s colouring deepened and she stared fixedly at her hands, looking both thoughtful and embarrassed. Redpath took the opportunity to apologise to her during a lull in which Nevison was changing tapes.
“Dreams ought to be private,” he said. “I’ll bet this sort of thing isn’t in your contract.”
She gave him a wan smile. “I didn’t realise what you were going through.”
“Didn’t realise it myself.” He tried to return the smile. “And do you know the worst of it? It’s just struck me this minute—somebody has half-inched my bicycle!”
“How can you joke about it?”
“It’s no joke,” he assured her with mock-seriousness, the privilege of being able to talk to Leila again producing a sudden lift in his spirits. “There was a brand-new pump on that machine. It’s probably been given a new paint job by this time and shipped over to the Continent. I hear there’s a big racket in …”
“Tape number two,” Nevison cut in. “Just carry on from where you left off, John.”
Redpath nodded and continued his narrative, pausing only to clarify points raised by Nevison, and going on to an account of his mild epileptic seizure and the early-morning departure from the house in Raby Street. In retrospect, in the book-lined, wax-scented comfort of Nevison’s office, he was tempted to omit details of how he had tried to investigate the cellar and had allowed himself to be panicked into headlong flight by nothing more than an unexplained noise. The presence of the tape recorder reminded him that he had set out to provide an exhaustive description of an abnormal state of mind. He gave a fair report of the incident, glancing sheepishly from one face to the other as he did so, and concluded with his abortive visit to the Calbridge police station and the meeting with Pardey. When he had finished speaking the quietness in the room was so intense that the tape machine suddenly seemed defective, whirring and scraping as it tried to record nothing. Nevison switched it off, causing some internal component to reverberate like a tuning fork.
“I’ll kick off by saying I think I owe John an apology,” Frank Pardey said, looking up from his notes. “I’d no idea of the sort of thing that goes on here, and I didn’t know there had been any experimenting with drugs. I’m here mainly as a friend of Leila’s, of course, but it seems to me that if you’re going to use drugs that gives a man hallucinations you should keep a close eye on him till the stuff wears off.”
Nevison shook his head. “The compounds we use aren’t hallucinogens.”
“They just make you see things that aren’t there,” Redpath said sarcastically, surprised and angered to find that Nevison was still disclaiming responsibility for what had happened to him.
“That’s what telepathy is,” Nevison replied. “Seeing things that aren’t in front of your eyes.”
“And that’s another thing—telepathy!” Pardey shifted in his chair and gave the others a perplexed smile. “I thought I knew everything that went on around this town—but telepathy experiments ! And at the Jeavons, of all places!”