Hare Sitting Up by Michael Innes

suppose we’re the only people left in London.’
    ‘The only people left in London?’ He took up the words oddly. ‘We might be, I suppose. Any two people might be, if one or another thing happened.’
    ‘Oh – that!’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve always been impatient – haven’t I? – with people scared about our all going up together. I’ve felt it to be only a kind of phobia. But perhaps that’s irresponsible.’
    ‘Perhaps it is.’
    ‘Do you think there are people who would welcome it – nobody left in London? Is there that sort of pathologically destructive mind?’
    ‘It’s a question one sometimes hears asked.’ Appleby shook his head. ‘I suppose there may be.’
    ‘There was Richard Jefferies. You remember After London ? He thought the city had killed him, and was killing all England as well. So he wrote a fantasy in which he killed London. It was a sort of revenge.’
    ‘And, of course, there’s Macaulay’s New Zealander.’ Appleby, restless still, did his best to keep up this desultory talk. ‘In the midst of a vast solitude, taking his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s. Something like that.’
    ‘Yes.’
    The clock ticked. ‘As I say,’ Appleby said, ‘there’s a hope that the whole thing’s a baseless scare.’
    ‘And just what is the position, if it isn’t? I mean, is Professor Juniper potentially so lethal just because of what he keeps under his hat, or has he–’
    ‘Possibly both.’ Appleby didn’t wait for Judith to finish. ‘There’s certainly what he knows , just as there’s what the top flight nuclear people know . And there may be what he has – more or less literally in his pocket. A culture – or whatever they call it – of almost inconceivable virulence. Clandon says he can’t be sure. He hopes and thinks not. But he can’t be sure.’
    ‘And there’s been no trace of him – not even a trail picked up for a bit and then lost?’
    ‘Absolutely not. He walked out – without a word, it seems, and without so much as a briefcase. The earth might have swallowed him.’
    ‘Or the waters.’
    ‘Quite so. And the waters wouldn’t be too bad. Sooner or later, they’d render up something, and we’d know where we were.’
    Judith was silent for a moment. She had the resource of darning socks. ‘There must be lots of ways,’ she said presently, ‘in which a clever man can commit suicide without leaving a trace of himself.’
    ‘Lord, yes. But why should Juniper do that? In his circumstances, it would be a most devilish trick. What motive would he have?’
    ‘That’s easy, surely. Suppose it has all got him down far more than anybody suspected. Suppose he has suffered indescribably in his conscience simply because of working in that field. He can’t face it, and he takes his own life. But he does it in a way that gets him a little of his own back on authority and government and so on. He’s not prompted to go so far as scattering his microbes or whatever they are. But he does fix things so that a good many of you don’t sleep too well.’
    Appleby shook his head. ‘Yes – but he doesn’t seem to have been quite that sort of person. Nervous and erratic, perhaps – but not even incipiently malignant. I’ve had all this out with medical chaps thoroughly reliable in their field. They incline to the view – naturally they won’t be dogmatic – that a theory like yours posits a personality change that doesn’t come on a man suddenly and without his associates being aware that something’s going wrong. And there’s not the slightest record that Howard Juniper has had what could reasonably be called a psychiatric history.’
    ‘But isn’t it something that a man can have on the quiet? Not everybody revels in broadcasting their experiences on a psycho-analyst’s couch. Although certainly some do.’
    ‘Yes – it has to be admitted as a possibility. But it’s not a substantial one during recent years.