Dr. Phibes Read online

  “Albert, you promised us this rubber,” a voice said in his ear.

  It was Skewes-Cox at his side, and his monstrous wife, billowing like an obese dahlia, moved directly in his path. She was his best patient, he having just concluded arrangements for her annual two-week checkup at a private spa. The woman was as healthy as a pair of draught horses but she was an untiring patient.

  “Of course, Henry,” he muttered weakly, “I just want to glance at this marvelous tapestry.” He started to brush past the Skewes-Coxes when a steely hand gripped his elbow. Without looking he resigned himself to the inevitable.

  The doctor motored home in high gloom. The bridge game had been a disaster. Lady Palafox had insisted on rubbing knees throughout, the friction only serving to fire his sense of defeat. To lose at the hands of a rival was a point of honor; to be outplayed by a husband was disgusting. He played fitfully and lost gloriously, consuming half-a-dozen tall scotch-and-sodas in the process. At midnight he escaped only by promising to come again in a month: the thought of having another chance at meeting the lady of his desires being pale consolation for the long grim evening. Of course it was too late to find a companion for the evening, he’d have to return to a desolate bed.

  Fastidious gentleman that he was, he seldom availed himself of the women to be found patrolling the streets of London’s seamier districts. No, Doctor Dunwoody kept a roster of telephone numbers in his notebooks, a veritable bibliography of delectables the vivid descriptive language of which, had it fallen into the hands of a less sensitive person, would have been considered absolutely prurient. But young women of this class aspire to a precise mode of gentility, and to call one at an. “inconvenient” hour would have been absolutely vulgar. It was home to bed—alone!

  Dunwoody lumbered out of the cab and up the wide staircase to his apartments like a man who’d stood long and well at the bar. He fumbled a bit for his keys, then brushed them out of his paisleyed vest and, unlocking and opening the door with one practiced lunge, burst into his fashionable, if somewhat frayed quarters. When he reached the upper landing he probed around his bedroom without turning on the light: it would have been too difficult to find and he knew the floor plan by heart anyway.

  A few steps and he was in his bedroom. Out of long habit he threw his cloak and outer clothes onto the silent butler at the side of the bed. Ross, his manservant, would be up at 9:30 in the morning; he could attend to them then. His shoes were the hardest. One of the knots had come undone and he had to struggle with it, the exertion adding to his weariness.

  At last he was ready for bed. Perhaps in the smooth sheets he would find some solace. He pulled a night shirt and sleeping cap from a hook in the closet and tumbled into the outsize bed—a beaten man.

  A long hour’s sighing and settling followed. It was as if the wheezes, groans and whispering of a thousand troubled muscles had been given voice and vent by the sheets. Dunwoody, drunk and abed was like a spring seeking its proper tension. But, weary as the night had left him, he couldn’t sleep. Try as he did, the pillows were never fitted together properly, the heavy velour bedclothes hung like the skin of some long-dead animal, even the air in the room possessed a stiff texture like one finds on deep winter evenings, although Dunwoody kept the house at an unvarying 71°.

  He turned the light on and groped for the Times’ crossword puzzle that he always kept handy on the sideboard. He’d work off whatever it was that was bothering him and then get to sleep: he had rounds at the hospital tomorrow at eleven. The puzzle was about two-thirds finished, it being Wednesday and he liked to string the work out until Saturday so that he could go right on to a fresh one. Dunwoody never ceased to wonder at the infinite multitude of puzzle designs.

  Ah!, it was no use. The frustration was restoring his weariness. He scanned the page a last time. Triumphantly he slowly began to print number 1 across: a sinner’s reward was D-E-A-T-H. Then he swept his bed clean of newspapers, writing pad, dictionaries and other paraphernalia, flipped off the light switch and threw himself back onto the pillows.

  The Dunwoody townhouse occupied a slightly off-center position in a square of similar two-story buildings in London’s Kensington district. Many professionals lived there because of its proximity to midtown offices. Guy’s Hospital was less than thirty minutes away by public transportation, by cab considerably less. Dunwoody’s square was similar to a hundred other tiny enclaves built during the past two centuries by practical-minded architects who perceived the need for such islands inside the burgeoning metropolis. It was a quiet, pleasant place with cobbled pavements, narrow sidewalks and neat wrought-iron fencing adding to the general conviction of privacy throughout the square. The houses were all faced in white stucco and brick, kept clean and sparkling by contracted attendants. All of the windows bore polished hardwood shutters, further evidencing the regard which the square’s nearly one hundred souls placed upon privacy. It was a quiet place inhabited by people of measured manner and salutary distinction.

  Were one to survey this square on this still dark May morning, one would have seen a quietude unblemished by human or animal intruder. It was a clear spring night, a rarity for that time of year in a London grown used to an abundance of fog. The moon’s luminosity marked the soft incandescence of the square’s gas lamps. Nothing stirred and each of the houses, their shuttered windows quite dark, were left to an unmolested sleep.

  The building at Number 18—Dr. Dunwoody’s—was the one exception. That building was being intruded upon. Above, on the roof, a cloaked figure stood. What surprised most was that he should look so natural in this unnatural circumstance. Perhaps it was the formality of his appearance. He stood in silhouette against the dusky horizon, his outline sharp and correct like the formal cameos of a century earlier.

  Grave and great strength attended his movements as he bent toward a spot on the flat rooftop. He stood angled in tension for a moment, then abruptly lifted up the building’s skylight. Then the figure stepped to the side and slid a large bell-shaped container to the open skylight and lowered it into the unsuspecting house. The entire process required less than ten minutes and was executed in velvet, precise silence.

  Dr. Dunwoody was a victim of the flesh in his sleeping as in his working hours. He snored. In long groaning swipes he snored. This bellowing had more than once driven an unsuspecting lady from the bed; now it provided a loud fanfare to the events taking place above his head.

  The skylight to his apartment led directly into his bedroom. Its opening destroyed the natural appearances of the apartment, giving it a fractured aspect. The moonlight that now streamed in was unfiltered by any glass and angled obliquely over, not onto, the doctor’s bed. It illuminated the room in varying degrees of penumbral light, a light which was abruptly blocked off, then equally quickly restored. Of course Dr. Dunwoody did not notice it, but had he been a normal sleeper he might have stirred awake long enough from the draft of chill air to notice this source of the light perturbation within his bedroom.

  A four-foot-tall sack presently descended through the skylight, being lowered ever so gently on a thick velvet rope by someone who was skulking out of view beyond the light frame. But wait! It wasn’t a sack; it was a cage, cloaked in a heavy cloth in a manner used by bird fanciers to shield their sleeping pets from the light.

  To accompany the cage’s descent, Dr. Dunwoody emitted an arpeggio of rapid-fire snores and then, proud of his performance, turned over on his side and was silent.

  The cage dropped the last few inches to the floor and came noiselessly to rest, sending up a slight waft of dust from the rugs which was reflected and scattered by the moonlight above.

  The rope’s tension relaxed, then increased again until it rose straight and taut to the skylight. A barely audible “click” announced that the cage’s bottom had been slid open. Now the cage glided upward again ever so silently on the velvet rope.

  The rope moved, the cage rose. A low squealing entered the diorama. Rasping, it was the kind of pitc
h one didn’t want to hear on a dark night. Then the squealing ebbed and throbbed, forming in volume a presence that could not be denied. Again, the cage shuttered; then the skylight closed, casting the room into a grayer luminosity.

  But the squealing was continuing. It was iron hard now, like a thousand midget sirens. Firm and rasping it ran up and down the walls, into the draperies, wainscotting and chambered parts of the ceiling. Loud it droned, pulsing with the heave of the doctor’s chest. His chest rose and lowered, his mouth whispering with the sheets. The squealing darkness ebbed and expanded its own rhythm, the two sounds advancing toward each other in a prescribed Doppler effect.

  Then they met. And the room burst in an explosive thematic variation of breathing and squeals.

  Dunwoody started to snore but gasped instead. The squeals were now hard, staccato emissions that periodically ran together in horrific tearing bursts.

  The bed had become a swirling ant hill of activity, its voluminous sheets filled with hundreds of worrying dark shapes. The doctor was wrenched from his sleep into half-dead wakefulness. What he saw sent him screaming: hundreds of starved bats now driven by their already excessive onslaught to more carnage. But his scream stopped abruptly as it drowned in a gargle of blood from his throat.

  He lashed out weakly but the bats were all over him, biting his arms and tearing through his tattered nightshirt in a violent wave of wings and teeth. He lumbered up out of the bed, trying to heave the animals off. A few were dislodged and immediately supplanted by others. He struck out again like a drowned fighter, then fell back into the bedding, bleeding in a dozen places.

  Now he moaned, croaking hoarsely for his manservant who would never hear him. The bats were relentless now, biting his eyes, lips, ears and throat to get at the major blood vessels. His tongue was bitten in the midst of a shriek, his beard framing a muted croak.

  Dunwoody gestured once again, his croaking cry rasped to stillness. The weight of bats compressed his chest, arms, legs into captured inertia. Then he shuddered, his torn throat gurgling, and was still.

  A pillow dropped to the floor. The bats would continue feeding through the night

  Chapter 3

  “EVERY bloody screwball death is called into homicide. You’d think we didn’t have enough to do with a strangler running loose in Bournemouth, widows being picked up by a mail-order creep, and the inspector’s wife running off on him like that” The younger of the business-suited men was talking with great animation as the two approached the stair port of the handsome house.

  “Yeah, I just heard that myself. Where d’you think the lady is off to?” whistled the other through plump cheeks stuck high on an ornate stiff collar.

  “I dunno; Carver told me she went to Egypt, to see the tomb of Tutankhamen. What is it about middle age that makes women so darned restless?”

  “Probably their husbands. The old man doesn’t miss too many tricks. Have you noticed the way he manages to get up to the library every other day?” The older man winked as they reached the stairs and, moving ceremoniously to the side, gestured for his chief to go first.

  “Yeah, she’s a bit of a special redhead. I’ve been looking at her myself.” The younger man smiled.

  “You better keep it at that, sir. You know how the old man feels about playing on the job.”

  “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I’m sure Sir John David Crow wants contented men in his department, men sufficiently secure in their footing so that they can carry out any mission with dispatch and integrity.” He winked and held the door open. “What have we here, Mr. Schenley?”

  “Bats, Mr. Trout.” Schenley punched open the door with his fist and he and Trout disappeared into the house’s taciturn facade.

  The two men were officers of the London Municipal Police Force’s Detective Division. Sergeant Tom Schenley was a career officer, his thirty years of service interrupted only by a four-year stint with the Royal Navy.

  He’d been an Intelligence Officer on Vice Admiral Sir Roger Keyes’ staff and played a big part in the submarine operations in the Sea of Marmora. The story had gotten around that Schenley had been instrumental in the tracking down and sinking of the first dreadnaught class battleship of the war, the Barbarusse Hairedoin, but the lid was still on and Schenley’s modesty kept him from talking too much about the war.

  When he was released in 1919 he assumed his old rank as corporal, declining an offer to advance a grade. He felt much more at home in the ranks than as an administrator. But his talent for detail and great steadiness on cases was always evident. When he organized the detection of a banknote forgery ring in 1922, his promotion was decreed in high circles. This, Tom Schenley accepted with grace and no noticeable change in habit.

  He lived with his wife, the former Nan Exley, in an unpretentious West End flat. The Schenleys never entertained socially, his trout fishing excursions to the lake district absorbing all of his free time. But Tom Schenley was a devoted husband—a leather-bound color-tinted portrait of Nan was one of the few ornaments he permitted on his otherwise spotless desk. Mrs. Schenley taught the sixth grade and, from her portrait, was a still attractive woman of an indeterminate age—somewhere between 35 and 50. Her one noticeable feature was a large pouting mouth.

  That she attended her husband well was continuously demonstrated by the Sergeant’s manner and dress. Robust, large, substantial, solid he was—but not fat. He wore three-button suits of an excellent fabric and tailoring, and he wore them surprisingly clean and pressed for a man of his bulk. For Tom Schenley, at six foot two inches and 190 pounds, was a big man, a formidable man. He was not known to lose his temper, but when the need arose he could handle himself with commendable vigor. During one particularly difficult arrest, he’d broken a suspect’s jaw when the hapless fellow attempted to get a gun out of a shoulder holster. Schenley subsequently referred to the man as a “scurvy bastard,” and expressed a sense of outraged decency at his breach of rules.

  At an age when most men went to seed in a dozen awkward ways, sprouting thick jowls, sagging bellies and splotchy scalps, Tom Schenley had held his own, achieving in his middle years a seasoned good looks that elicited a new kind of stare from the young ladies and an occasional jealous glance from the men.

  The sergeant walked as hard as he looked but an eighth-pound of shrapnel had taken enough zip out of his leg to slow him down. His gait was more like an academician’s than a policeman’s and, in fact, some of the younger officers called him “the professor.”

  Harry Trout was a young man in a hurry. Barely twenty-two when a dazzling series of detections brought him headlines and grudging official recognition, his brilliance earned him an inspector’s badge two months before his twenty-fourth birthday. During the six months since that date, detective-now-Inspector Trout pushed like a man possessed. In that time he’d brought to successful conclusion three major homicide investigations and opened the files on a fifteen-year-old case which resulted in the arrest of a Derby vicar. The prelate’s parishioners brought a lengthy petition attesting to the man’s saintliness but Trout’s meticulousness linked the man with three spinsters whose deaths had puzzled Dulwich residents a decade and a half earlier.

  What Trout had especially liked about this case was that these ladies, the youngest of whom had been 67, all had been sexually assaulted, if such can be said of women of superior years, before they’d been dispatched. Also no evidence of a straggle attached to the crime, and each lady had succumbed in an attitude of bliss, even excitement. In fact, the yellowed photographs portrayed the victims, decked in lace and ruffles, lying abed in truly licentious abandon, not at all in keeping with their station in life. Their deaths would have been attributed to the natural transport that is said to accompany such excesses of the flesh, had not some enterprising patrolman insisted on a forensic check. This demonstrated that, although the ladies enjoyed themselves in a fashion which can be called rare at that time of life, they could not overcome the effects of zinc cyan
ide. This substance was found in liberal and sufficiently deadly quantities in decorative boxes of chocolate-covered marzipan, several pieces of which the poor dears had innocently ingested.

  Trout had theorized that his killer was a genteel, even reserved man whose attenuated sexual appetites were whetted by the peculiar combination of kindness and cruelty, a dual motive that charged many of the religious reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Trout further theorized that his man was of a spirituality sufficient so that, if he was not a man of the cloth, he was possessed of deep aspirations for that life.

  In a shrewd but obvious (to Trout at any rate) next step, he surveyed local parish birth and death records. The Derby congregation which had been under the tutelage of its new vicar for less than two years, experienced a loss of eight of its elderly women parishioners over that span. Trout’s probing determined that three of their number died in the hospital, one had succumbed in a rest home from a long-standing but obscure disease. Of the remainder one had been abroad at a spa for the mineral baths when the end came, the other three lived alone in modest apartments of the kind not-quite-impoverished type refuge in during their declining years.

  Trout had called on these ladies’ neighbors and found that they had received few callers other than delivery boys and the Vicar.

  Examination of two of the deceased demonstrated to all but Trout’s surprise that cyanide had done the ladies in. A local chemist supplied the clincher: the Vicar had purchased the lethal white paste to deal with a “rodent invasion” that descended on his vicarage. The arrest that ensued did not expand Harry Trout’s popularity but it added another bright star to his lustrous trail.

  Still, the publicity attending the Vicar’s case did not help his career. At some point thereafter, high administrative councils within the police department decreed that Trout should be reassigned. In their wisdom they attached to his responsibility a veritable bibliography of more routine matters: burglaries, embezzlements, and an occasional “questionable” death.