“I’m sure your attitude is absolutely correct. What happened next?”
“I went into the kitchen to make us some coffee, and I was in there maybe ten minutes while it was perking.” Maeve gave a rueful smile. “Any time Dad had to make the coffee himself he used instant, but when I was doing it for him it had to be percolated.”
“I see.” Jerome, in spite of his instinctive desire to stay aloof from personalities, was beginning to see the dead man as an individual in his own right. It would have been better if Art Starzynski could have remained Subject X, but the room where he had met his ghastly and inexplicable death insisted on his being accorded a human identity. Everywhere Jerome looked there were mute testimonials to Starzynski having been a man, not an insurance company statistic. There were several unremarkable fossils which derived significance solely from the fact that he had chosen to retain them; a seed catalogue; framed certificates for proficiency in first aid; a little heart-shaped cachou box; antique military field-glasses; tobacco cans; foreign coins. A real person had spent a good part of his life in this room and the evidence seemed to suggest that something very strange had brought that life to a close.
“…making the coffee I began to notice a sweet burning smell,” Maeve was saying. “Heavy and sickly it was, the way you imagine incense would be. When I came into the hall I noticed some light blue smoke and when I opened the door the room was full of it. I couldn’t see anything at first, then I saw this hole in the floor by the television set. There were no flames. Just this hole in the floor and…and…”
Jerome returned to the paperweight and stared into its vivid closed universe, shamed by his eagerness to hear what was coming next.
Maeve took a deep breath and when she spoke again her voice was light and unconcerned, the voice of a stranger. “All that was left of my father was a heap of fine ash. I wouldn’t even have known it was him. I would have thought he had gotten clean out of the room if it hadn’t been for his left hand. That was the only part of him that didn’t burn. It was lying on the floor, right beside the hole.”
Jerome felt a cool prickling on his spine. In part it was due to the overt content of what he had just heard, but in the main it was a reaction to the changes which had taken place inside him. At some indefinable point in Maeve Starzynski’s story he had begun to accept every word she said as true—and that meant there was something wrong with his own private picture of the universe. As a small child first learning arithmetic Jerome had been amazed at how perfectly the whole system of numbers fitted. No matter how many times he added or multiplied or carried out other manipulations there was never a stray quantity left over, and to his infant mind that had seemed too convenient to be true. He had spent hours of his free time performing tortuous calculations he had designed to trick the numerical system into revealing its secret flaw, the place where adult mathematicians had papered over a crack, and he had given up the quest with great reluctance. Now, unexpectedly, after all these years, he felt as though he had discovered the flaw, the hidden place where numbers refused to do what they were told. He looked closely at Maeve and saw that her face was pale and strained.
“I haven’t finished my tea,” he said. “The kitchen?”
Maeve nodded and they left the sitting room. In the kitchen she closed both hands around her mug of tea and took sip after sip from it, her eyes staring past Jerome into the yellow-turfed back garden. An electric clock on the wall made faint scraping sounds.
Jerome finished his own drink and set the mug down. “I have one more question, but if you’d prefer not to…”
“It’s all right. I’m all right.”
“Where is the television set?”
“Oh, that! The police took it away for tests. One detective—I can’t remember his name—must have asked me a dozen times if it was switched on when I went into the room.” Maeve looked wanly amused. “He seemed quite upset when I insisted it wasn’t.”
“Electricity used to be the answer to everything.”
“But not any more,” Maeve said. “Not to this.”
“No.” Jerome had been striving without success for an explanation of what had happened to Art Starzynski, and now he could feel the bizarre mystery of it invading his mind like a stealthy army. It was a curious sensation, pleasurable and oddly familiar, then he realized that for a brief period, and for the first time since her death, Carla had been entirely displaced from his consciousness. And what had done it had been the intellectual challenge, the stimulation he had always felt when tackling some beguiling problem in applied or pure logic. For a moment he saw himself as the emotional equivalent of a vampire, feeding on the suffering of others, and had to repress a twinge of guilt. He gave Maeve Starzynski what he hoped was a reassuring smile.
“There is bound to be an explanation for what happened to your father,” he said. “I’ll do my best to find it.”
CHAPTER 2
The morgue was a low redbrick building discreetly positioned in the grounds at the rear of Whiteford Holy Cross Hospital. There were no windows in the outside walls and the sole entrance was an unmarked steel door. It was the kind of building one tended not to see, which could go unnoticed and unremembered in any urban setting, but its appearance produced a cold queasiness in Jerome’s stomach.
His first impulse on leaving the Starzynski house had been to return to the office and familiarize himself with the stored data on spontaneous human combustion, then he had rejected the idea for philosophical reasons. He would have been working with nothing more than words, other people’s words, at a remove from the phenomenon he proposed to investigate—which was hardly in accord with the scientific method. Also, if he wanted to prove himself to Anne Kruger it would help if he displayed drive and initiative. His call to the hospital had won him an immediate appointment with a Doctor McGrath, and while driving across town in the crystalline New Hampshire sunlight he had been buoyantly satisfied with himself.
Now, however, as he approached the morgue on foot, it was borne home to him that he was generally disinclined to enter a place where corpses were stored. In particular, he did not wish to look closely at a charred human hand, and his reasons for ever wanting to do so seemed to have evaporated. Reflected brightness from the metal door was warm on his face as he paused and looked for a bellpush. A few seconds later, although no scanner was visible, the door was opened by a tall greying man with the harrowed look of someone who had once been very fat and now was thin. His shirt and trousers bunched at the waist, reinforcing the impression that he had lost weight. He had a long, deeply-lined face, and he regarded Jerome with a kind of gloomy candour.
“Come inside,” he said. “It’s cooler in here.”
Jerome cleared his throat. “Doctor McGrath? I’m Rayner Jerome.”
“I guessed that.” A gleam of Karloffian humour appeared in McGrath’s eyes. “We don’t get many casual callers here.”
“I dare say.” Reassured by the doctor’s expert use of the common touch, Jerome followed him into a short corridor and waited while he closed the outer door. The air in the building smelled fresh, untainted by chemicals.
“So you’re a science correspondent,” McGrath said as they walked to a small, harshly-lit office. “I didn’t know the Examiner employed such an animal.”
“Well, they don’t really know it either. I’m trying to steer things in that direction.”
“I see. Are you qualified.”
Not scientifically,” Jerome said, wishing the question would not keep recurring. “But I used to be in engineering and the disciplines haven’t gone to waste.”