Suddenly Jerome had had enough. His nervous system had been savaged by shock, by grisly images and nauseous smells, and now it had begun to react. He turned away from the abomination in the summerhouse and was violently sick. The first irresistible heave voided his stomach, yet spasm after spasm followed in seemingly endless succession until he had to clutch a nearby sapling for support. And his mind, as though taking action to distance itself from the bodily turmoil, began to fashion cold, clear thoughts:
Spontaneous human combustion was an extremely rare event. Only a few cases were reported worldwide in any given year, without any discernible pattern. It was, therefore, highly remarkable for two residents of the same small town to be stricken within a week of each other.
And it was even more remarkable that both had been receiving treatment from the same physician…
Jerome pushed himself away from the tree and—still retching, but impelled by a thunderous sense of urgency—ran towards his car. He had been searching for a link between fire deaths, for a common factor, but he had not considered a human agency.
And he was not prepared for an encounter with the enigmatic Doctor Pitman.
CHAPTER 4
As soon as he reached home Jerome washed his face with cold water and brushed his teeth to rid himself of the lingering aftertaste of bile.
It was half an hour before noon and the house and its furnishings had a faint air of unfamiliarity. At first he put it down to something like the insomnia effect, to his being home at an unusual time, then he realized there had been a shift in his perception of the entire universe. Everything seemed slightly alien to him now that he had seen the unthinkable happen. On the previous day he had become convinced that spontaneous human combustion was a reality, but the knowledge had been isolated in his head. Now he knew about the fire death in his heart and guts, as part of his direct experience, and there was the problem of adjusting to a world in which such things could occur.
He was also conscious of significant changes affecting the phenomenon itself. The entire history of SHC had been characterized by lack of pattern, by a sheer randomness which defeated all attempts to find an underlying mechanism. There had been only one previous occasion when it had seemed that a hint of order might be introduced and that had been as far back as 1938. On April 7th of that year three men—one near Nijmegen in Holland, one near Chester in England and one on a ship steaming south of Ireland—had become classic examples of SHC at exactly the same time. But the simultaneity of their deaths had only served to add mystery to mystery. There had been no more visible correlations until the deaths of Art Starzynski and Sammy Birkett and now the pendulum had swung the other way.
Jerome had no hesitation in ruling out coincidence, which meant that Doctor Pitman was starkly revealed as a connecting link. For hundreds of years the fire death had preserved its essential mystery—but now, suddenly, the phenomenon was yielding secrets to an amateur investigator. Jerome frowned, took off his glasses and began to polish the lenses as he considered the implications. The assumption of mediocrity guided researchers in fields as diverse as cosmology and particle physics. All egotism gone, burned away in the flame which had devoured Birkett, he had to accept that he was no more gifted than any of the countless others who had pitted themselves against the riddle of SHC, and yet unless his conclusion about Pitman was totally false—he had made a major breakthrough in little more than a day. Either he was fantastically lucky, or the parameters of the problem were changing.
What the hell am I trying to say? Jerome demanded of himself irritably. Why am I trying to tie extra knots in the string?
He put his glasses on again and his gaze steadied on the modest collection of liquor bottles on the living room sideboard. They had scarcely been touched since Carla’s death, but the clean taste of gin might help to restore a feeling of sanity to his world. It might also quell the tremors which had been coursing through him since he had watched Birkett’s face burn outwards from the mouth.
He mixed a gin and club soda and, not bothering to fetch ice, sat down to marshal his thoughts. An idea to be considered was that in yielding to sheer fright he had proved himself completely inept as a reporter. Any newsman with courage and the right instincts would have seized the opportunity to make a name for himself—and there was still time for Jerome to do the same. The chances were that Birkett’s remains had not yet been discovered in the seclusion of the summerhouse. All Jerome had to do was go back there, telephone the police, start filing sensational and highly profitable stories with major news agencies, stir up a hornets’ nest.
Sipping his drink, he tried to imagine himself facing up to Doctor Pitman, hard-nosing his way through all the consequent furore, and his mood altered for the worse as he realized he was not up to it. The next best thing would be to call Anne Kruger and turn everything over to her, but even that much seemed beyond him. He was gripped by a numb timidity. Given a free choice he would have run for cover, perhaps to the privacy and safety of the chalet at Parson’s Lake.
Wondering if his feelings were a typical aftermath of shock, Jerome made a conscious effort to induce relaxation while he was finishing his drink. His heartbeat was alternating between birdlike flutters and periods of suspenseful pounding. He was reluctant to believe that the tightness he had recently been experiencing in his chest after exertion was anything to worry about, but it seemed advisable to calm down as thoroughly as possible and think clearly about his next move. The problem lay with the problem—because it had changed, almost beyond recognition.
He was reminded of the way in which a decaying smoke ring can still be seen as a torus long after a newcomer to the room would observe only formless ribbons drifting in the air. The great enigma of SHC remained, but its outlines were being distorted by a more urgent question—if latching on to Doctor Pitman or an equivalent elsewhere was so easy why had nobody done it before? And that question led directly to another. Was he, in his heart, attributing sinister motives to Pitman? An obvious interpretation of events was that an innocently prescribed drug, or a rare combination of drugs, had led to freakish tragedies—but Jerome’s subconscious mind seemed to have other…
The buzzing of the telephone made him flinch. He stared at it for a few seconds, knowing that the caller was his editor or a deputy, then got out of his chair and picked up the instrument. Anne Kruger wasted no time on preliminaries.
“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Is this Thursday?”
As always, her brand of heavy sarcasm needled him. “Let’s see. Yesterday was Wednesday, so—unless there’s been a drastic revision in the calendar—it’s safe to assume that this…
“Don’t try to be funny, Ray.”
You started it, he thought. “What can I do for you, Anne?”
“Have you considered writing news stories?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Jerome said. “I can concentrate better at home.”
“Oh? And what red-hot page-one lead are you concentrating on at the moment?”