Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson Page A

criminal mind. There’s a couple of things I wanted to check on.”
    â€œFire away.”
    â€œWhat became of Black Irish?”
    â€œDied in Katanga.”
    â€œAre you sure? Sorry, I mean …
    â€œCame through Interpol. Someone saw the body. You think he’s still alive?”
    â€œI just didn’t know he was dead. He was a big fellow, Irish background, wasn’t he? Hawk-faced, very strong personality, specialized in roles with real class, doctors, priests, archaeologists …”
    â€œJimmy?”
    â€œStill here. This is a funny line.”
    â€œWhat are you playing at?”
    â€œEh?”
    â€œNow look here; you’ve come across some villain in the same line of business, haven’t you? If you were giving a lecture, the thing you’d have started from would be the Southward Islands.”
    â€œI was coming to that,” said Pibble, hoping that his gulp sounded like an effect of the erratic line. “I wanted to clear the other stuff up first. I can only remember bits of it. Give me a quick run-through.”
    â€œKorean war helped the Colonial Office to hush it up. We sent out a duke to govern the islands. Local resistance group spotted that he looked something like your fellow—Goldsmith he called himself then, or was it Irons? No, it was Nicholl … Kidnapped the duke during a stopover in Rio, caught him as he went into a brothel, I believe, and Nicholl walked out half an hour later wearing his clothes. Caught the plane, came down the gangway, cock-hatted and spurred, ran the islands better than they’d been run for years. Then skipped. Someone in the liberation­ movement peached on him, I think. Islanders petitioned for his return, anyway.”
    â€œThat’s fine.”
    â€œHe didn’t get away with much loot—never did, I believe. He had nerve. There’s a story he spent several weeks at Saint Eustace’s, mostly in the operating room, even did a few ops himself. When they got on to him he skipped, and about three months later somebody noticed something familiar about the padre who was burying their failures at the cemetery next door. We had him inside twice in England, and I should think he knew what a few foreign cells looked like. That all?”
    â€œNot quite. Can you remember whether the Paperham murderer had a good luck piece?”
    â€œWow, that’s a nasty one for your old ladies. What do you mean?”
    â€œWell, he had a weird homemade religion, didn’t he? Diabolist, vaguely. Did he have any sort of object, or possibly some animal or person, which he consulted, like an oracle, to tell him the right time to start laying for his next victim? Something like that?”
    â€œCan’t help you much. There was something, Ned Callow told me, but Gorton was damned cagey about it and it didn’t affect the case. Ned thought it was a cat. I think I remember a newspaper cutting about Gorton having a cat as his familiar, but the writer probably got it from Ned. There wasn’t a cat in the basement, anyway, or in any of the other flats, as far as I can remember. OK?”
    â€œFine. Thanks. That’s all.”
    â€œJimmy, you’ll take it quiet, won’t you? I’ve been a long time in this hole, long enough to see a lot of good men given the push for bad reasons, some of them worse than yours, mate. I’ve seen them get jobs with private agencies, run into something that was our business, and try to keep it to themselves. Now listen—the people here who know you know you were hard done by. They matter; the other creeps don’t. You won’t prove anything to either lot if you try thief-taking on your own account.”
    â€œI wouldn’t try. I’m thinking of getting a job helping a doctor with research into the intelligence of mental defectives.”
    â€œSounds just like old times. So long.”
    Pibble’s thanks were spoken to the dial tone. The