The Tiger in the Well

  "The Tzaddik - he's here. In Amsterdam. Come on, my boy, we're going spying. Headache? Serve you right. Stick to beer. Put your coat on - it's damn cold outside."

  Bill wasn't at all sure where they were. An oil-lamp showed him a narrow, cramped little room with an iron stove and round windows. Then it came back to him: they were on a barge. One of the boatmen was going to take them somewhere - to the docks? He'd forgotten. Never mind. Goldberg wanted him, and they'd found the Tzaddik.

  He struggled up and forced his arms into the sleeves of his coat.

  "What are we going to . . . the Tzaddik. . . D'you want to get him? What are we going to do?"

  Goldberg was peering intently out of the window. Bill could see little: it was dark outside, and he had no sensation of movement, but then the lighted window of a house moved past through the mist, and he felt suddenly giddy. He sat down on the bunk.

  "We're going to spy, as I said," said Goldberg. "See if we can find out who he is, what he's doing. Just have a look at him."

  Bill turned up his coat collar and tied the blue and white handkerchief around his neck. Then he became aware of another man in the cabin. He was lying on an upper bunk, hand behind his head, supported on his elbow.

  "His carriage was unloaded earlier today from one of the Rhine barges," said this man quietly. "They think he came up from Cologne. We're going up the Herengracht now to see if he's at the house we think is his."

  "What you going to do then?" said Bill. "D'you want to smash him, or what?"

  Goldberg looked round. "We want to find things out, Bill. That's all."

  "You know what a dybbuk is?" said the other man.

  "A dybbuk? What's that?" said Bill.

  "It's an evil spirit. A demon. Well, this man has got a dybbuk as his personal servant. They usually take possession of people - enter their bodies. This one lives outside. People have seen it. You might see it yourself soon, if you keep your eyes open."

  Bill didn't know whether to scoff. Goldberg turned back to the window, and the man in the bunk was watching him impassively.

  The barge bumped gently against the side of the canal. Bill heard a voice outside making soothing noises to a horse and heard the soft whiffle of breath as it shook its head.

  "Come on," said Goldberg. He reached up to shake hands with the man in the bunk and said something in German, and Bill nodded to him before following Goldberg up the little ladder to the deck.

  The mist struck chill into him at once. It was completely dark. Everything was half-air and half-water; the few points of light that he could see - a few yellow windows, a dim gleam at the bow of the barge - were haloed with suffocating moisture. He stepped across the gap between the tarry deck and the stones of the bank, heard Goldberg say a word or two to the man with the horse, and tugged the coat tighter around him as the cold bit into his lungs.

  The boatman clicked his tongue and the horse took up the strain on the rope again. The barge moved forward heavily. Goldberg tapped his arm and beckoned, and Bill followed him down a dark alley between two big buildings that looked in the misty gloom like something between warehouses and mansions. Lights were gleaming on the second floor of one, but the other was dark.

  On the other side they came out into a narrow street bordering another canal. The waterfront was lined with trees, and more of those tall elegant brick houses stood on the other side of the narrow road, facing it. The whole world was silent, except for the eternal drip of water.

  "What's the time?" whispered Bill.

  "Past midnight. You slept off the schnapps yet? By God, listen. Can that be him, I wonder?"

  Bill strained to hear, and then came the sound of hoofs and iron wheels. Goldberg melted into the darkness behind the nearest tree trunk and Bill slipped back into the alley. He stood pressed against the damp bricks as the hoofs came closer and the carriage rolled to a halt.

  Bill couldn't see Goldberg at all, though he knew he was only a few yards away. He reached into his pocket and brought out his slip of mirror.

  In the glass, spectral in the light that was now streaming out of the house, was the reflection of a large, black carriage with a driver on the box and two servants in livery busying themselves with some apparatus by the carriage door. They had swung out an iron platform from underneath the body of the vehicle and they were adjusting the height of it. Once they'd done that, one of them laid a wooden ramp over the steps leading up to the house, and the other unfastened the carriage door. It was unlike a normal door: it looked as if the whole side of the carriage slid aside.

  The servants entered the carriage, and a few moments later a vast chair on wheels began to emerge. The servants manipulated it with enormous care on to the iron platform, and then while one of them held it steady, the other turned a handle at the side, lowering the chair to the level of the pavement.

  In the chair was seated, immobile, a huge man swathed in darkness. All Bill could see was the silhouetted bulk of him surmounted grotesquely by a top-hat. At one point he saw a large, gloved hand swing down limply, and heard a command in a soft, deep, cracked voice. The nearest servant gently picked up the hand and laid it with the other in the man's lap.

  When the platform was finally lowered, both servants went behind the chair to push it up the ramp; and then Bill saw something that nearly made him faint.

  Something climbed out of the man's head - a dark, lithe shape the size of a cat, that jumped lightly down on to his knees and crouched there, chittering softly.

  The dybbuk, thought Bill, and a cold thrill of fear suffused him, body and soul.

  The shape was half-human, half-devil: it had hands, it had a tail, it radiated malevolence. It was the sort of shape that would spring and prance through hell, mocking the damned. Bill watched it for the few moments it took the servants to push the chair up the ramp and into the house, and then he realized that he hadn't been able to breathe for fear.

  He let his breath out in a silent shuddering sigh.

  Oh, ridiculous. It was the schnapps. It was the mist; he wasn't seeing properly. Certainly the surface of the little mirror kept fogging over with moisture. But the evil in that little dark shape - and the way it had crawled out of his head - or had it been sitting on his shoulder?

  Then the dripping silence was broken. There was a moan from the carriage. A girl's voice, he thought - and in pain -

  His hand trembling, he put up the mirror again. The driver still sat on the box with his back to Bill's alley, the horses were standing motionless at the other end, the steam from their flanks blending with the mist. The door of the carriage lay open.

  And then that little fiend thing shot out of the house and sprang in a single leap off the pavement and into the carriage, and the girl screamed.

  Before Bill could think, Goldberg had covered half the distance between his tree and the carriage. But before he got any further, the girl herself appeared on the iron platform - a dark cloak, a cascade of dark hair, mouth and eyes wide with panic - and then she fell full-length on the pavement.

  She was up in a moment. She was seeing nothing: she was in some realm beyond fear, beyond thought. As if Goldberg wasn't there, she sped around him, her face fixed, and made straight for the bank and plunged into the water. She sank in a moment.

  Bill leapt out of the alley and joined Goldberg on the edge. The water was black, and the mist was so thick over it that they couldn't see halfway across; they couldn't even see where the surface was. There were ripples spreading, but no sign of the girl.

  A voice behind them, and Goldberg turned and replied in the same language. It was the driver. He looked back anxiously at the house, where light from the golden doorway soaked out into the mist. A servant appeared and the driver beckoned.

  "We're just passing by," Goldberg whispered to Bill.

  Then he said something in Dutch to the driver, something about police, Bill thought. The servant heard, and nodded, and ran back to the house. Bill crouched down low over the edge, but he could see no
thing. She'd vanished.

  During the next few minutes three more servants came out of the house with lanterns, and one ran off over the little bridge near by; and then a policeman arrived, with a net and a boathook; and shortly after that, a steam-launch with electric lights came chugging under the bridge and tied up to the bank.

  The policemen looked competent and unruffled. Bill supposed there was a routine procedure for finding and hauling out bodies. In normal circumstances, the presence of policemen was uncomfortable for Bill, but after what he'd seen earlier, he could hardly get close enough to them. They were real, they were human, they weren't made of nightmares.

  After a few more minutes, when they'd launched a dinghy and begun to trail their boathooks through the water, Goldberg nudged Bill and spoke quietly.

  "We're getting some funny looks from the servants. I think it's time we slipped away. They're not going to find her now, and I've seen enough."

  He said something vague and general to the men on the bank, wished them goodnight or good luck, and began to trudge away. Bill followed. He cast a last glance back at the house, but there was no sign of the man in the chair, or of his dybbuk.

  Chapter Eight

  THE KNIFE-MAN

  The day after her encounter with Bill, Sally received a letter with a Norwich postmark. She tore it open at once.

  Dear Miss Lockhart,

  I regret to inform you that the Reverend Mr Beech is no longer resident at this address, and that his present whereabouts are unknown to me.

  I am therefore returning your letter, and I hope that you will excuse my opening it in order to ascertain your address.

  I am,

  Yours very sincerely,

  T. D. Gunston, MB, FRCP,

  director, St Anselm's.

  Her letter was enclosed. At first she didn't know what to think: a wave of disappointment passed over her. She'd thought, naturally, that St Anselm's was a parish; but if it was something that had a director, and if that director was a medical man, the whole thing was confused again. A nursing home? A mission?

  She left the breakfast table, took her cup of tea to the bureau, and wrote to Dr Gunston at once.

  Dear Dr Gunston,

  Thank you for returning my letter to Mr Beech.

  I am most anxious to speak to him on a matter of the most extreme importance. Time is short, and the only clue I had to his whereabouts was the name of St Anselm's, which I took to be a parish of which he was the priest. You say he is no longer resident there; may I ask what St Anselm's is, and how long he stayed with you?

  Anything you can tell me will help me.

  She signed it, stamped it, and put it in the post on her way to the City.

  She had taken to sitting for minutes on end at her desk, saying nothing, toying at first with a pen, but then falling completely still. It was like sleep - like real sleep, unlike the broken state of wakefulness she suffered in bed. It was a time when responsibility receded, and when she existed as little as possible.

  It worried Margaret Haddow, and it worried Cicely Corrigan, their clerk. Cicely would bring her letters to sign or ask irrelevant questions, just in order to wake her out of this unhappy trance, and on the day Sally wrote back to St Anselm's, Margaret decided to take her out to lunch and talk to her.

  They went to a chop-house in Watling Street where they had gone before. Women were so rarely seen in the City, where you could stand at a busy junction at the busiest part of the day and see nothing but men for ten minutes at a time, that Sally and Margaret still felt a little like strangers; and there were some eating-places where, having been once, they never went again. But this little place was friendly, the booths they sat in were comfortable, and the food was good.

  Margaret ordered for them both: grilled lamb chops and vegetables, and when the food came, she made Sally eat it.

  "What's the matter with you?" she said. "I know what you're worried about, but there's nothing the matter with you, is there? You're healthy and clever and you've got a bit of money and an extremely talented partner and, all things considered, you're not badly off at all. Eat that chop. And this cauliflower is excellent. Everyone cooks cauliflower for far too long; they know when to take it out of the water in this place. Gravy?"

  Sally smiled.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I've let it depress me too much. I find it hard to think of anything else. . ."

  "Well, think of this then. We've got that fusspot Mrs Carpenter coming this afternoon. She's going to say that her dear husband would have insisted on gold, gold never fails, put all your money in gold mines, my dear. She's got about six thousand pounds, and she wants some life insurance too. . .What shall we tell her to invest in?"

  Sally sipped some water.

  "I like the look of those Bolivian railway shares," she said. "Hickson's promoting them, and he's done very well."

  "Now I read something about Hickson recently - or did I hear it from Mr Battle. . ." Mr Battle was their downstairs neighbour in the office building, a journalist of sorts. Margaret tapped the table, trying to remember. "Oh yes. Mr Battle showed me an article in some paper, I can't remember what, attacking Hickson violently. It was only just this side of libel, said Mr Battle, and he should know. It implied that Hickson owned a number of sweatshops under different names. I don't know how true it was; it felt like an attempt to discredit him without actually having any evidence. I'll have to ask Mr Battle if he's still got it."

  "Why did he show it to you?"

  "We were talking about socialism. It was a socialist paper."

  "Oh," said Sally. "What do you feel about Hickson then?"

  Margaret made a face. "Difficult," she said. "I know one ought to disregard that sort of thing, but. . ."

  "You think there's something in it? Well, perhaps Hickson's not right for Mrs Carpenter. What about chemicals? The Germans are doing extraordinary things. . ."

  They discussed Mrs Carpenter's investments, and then the state of the market in general, and the effect the government's economic measures were having. It was the sort of talk that Sally usually enjoyed, and little by little her eyes became more animated and the colour returned to her cheeks.

  Margaret's treatment worked so well that Sally had some bread-and-butter pudding to follow the chop, and then they looked at the time and hurried back to Bengal Court for fear of missing Mrs Carpenter.

  That weekend Sally decided to go to Oxford. Rosa had left an open invitation, and Sally felt sure it would do both her and Harriet good. Surely the child must be feeling something of Sally's anxiety? It didn't show, Harriet's nature being sturdy and cheerful and not especially reflective; but she too had begun to wake in the night, and had wet her bed twice in the past week, something they'd thought she'd grown out of.

  So on Saturday morning they packed their bags and went with Sarah-Jane to the station to catch the train to Oxford. It was a brisk autumn day, and Sally thought back to the day nine years before when she and Frederick had come to Oxford to bring news of his brother to the same man she was going to see now. That business had ended in Matthew Bedwell's death at the hands of the man Sally had later shot; something as densely clustered with lawyers as her present situation couldn't involve that kind of violence, surely, and yet here she was, rolling along the beautiful High Street as the autumn sun touched the golden buildings, and she had a revolver in her bag with five bullets in it. . .

  They reached the Rectory in time for lunch, and Harriet's cousins, May and Matthew, six and four respectively, greeted her with glee. Rosa was deep in preparations for a village pageant; it was the closest she could come to the theatre these days, except as a member of the audience.

  The Reverend Nicholas, a powerfully built man whose cheerful face still bore a scar or two around the eyes from his boxing days, greeted her warmly.

  "What a lot of nonsense," he said. "Rosa's told me all about it. The fellow's clearly a scoundrel. Come and have some lunch, and we'll go for a walk in the afternoon. See if we can find s
ome chestnuts. . ."

  The dining-table was crowded and the children were noisy, but they were indulged for once, since their father could see how happy it was making Sally.

  In the woods that afternoon, as the Bedwells' spaniel frisked through the leaves and the children raced here and there hunting for chestnuts, Sally told Rosa and her husband about the injunction and the letter from St Anselm's.

  "I've heard of the place," Nicholas Bedwell said. "I don't know why it didn't come to mind earlier. It's a nursing home of some kind; it's run by one of those charities that look after clergymen in reduced circumstances - you know the kind of thing - usually they specify 'aged and infirm', or something like that. You've written to the director?"

  "Yes, at once. But I don't suppose he'll be able to tell me anything; he was quite clear about not knowing where Mr Beech was now."

  "I looked Beech up in Crockford's Clerical Directory. He's in his fifties, apparently - not aged yet, though he might be infirm, of course. Worked abroad as a missionary; perhaps he caught malaria or something of the sort."

  "Where did he work?"

  "China. But he was much younger. I suppose there are recurring diseases that catch up with you. . . His last address is given as that place in Portsmouth, but my Crockford's is out of date. They running out of chestnuts? I'd better scatter some more."

  Knowing that there wouldn't be many chestnuts, he'd brought along a pocketful of them to drop quietly in places where the children were about to look. Harriet had found three, to her great satisfaction.

  They walked on, talking about autumn, and how the children were all growing, and where May and Matthew would go to school, and about Rosa's pageant; and when the children were beginning to tire, they turned back to the Rectory. Mist was gathering, and someone somewhere was burning leaves.

  They roasted the chestnuts on the nursery fire, and then Nicholas told them all a story. Harriet sat on Sally's lap, leaning in close, her thumb in her mouth; the other two sat beside Rosa on the sofa, each wide-eyed and intent on the story, each becoming the Princess and the poor woodcutter's son, and each learning what it was to be brave, and fearful, and loved, and triumphant, and responsible. Nicholas was as good a storyteller as Jim, though his stories were very different.