One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

couldn’t make his voice produce more than a flutter of opposition. Boredom was floating down on him in the familiar gray softness, burying him helpless in its drift. He drew it to him, snuggled into it, making it his shelter against the hard-edged world. He was so ill, so old. They oughtn’t to. …
    â€œTried to sit up,” he sighed. “Only a little. Blacked out.”
    Follick nodded. This collapse of will was as common a symptom as any among his patients.
    â€œI can tell them you still aren’t up to it,” he said. “Put it off till I can be there.”
    â€œNo.”
    Not that either. Nothing. What was the use? All along, all through his struggle, the Liberator had been already dead.
    â€¢ • •
    He lay still, wavering in and out of doze. Jenny must have come in while he was below the surface of sleep because he woke and knew she was there by the quiet flip of a page. She had taken to spending her rest hour in his chair, reading; sword-and-sorcery, SF, a few thrillers. Tolkien apart, she despised most of what she read but refused to try anything else because what she called “proper books” only made her miserable. He had become used to her presence, a silent element like a pool or tree beside which he drowsed, but this afternoon he slowly perceived that the nature of that presence had altered. It was as though the tree was full of flies, or the pool smelt strange.
    â€œWhat’s the time?” he whispered.
    â€œTen past three. Go back to sleep. You’ve got nearly an hour still.”
    â€œYou don’t have to stay.”
    â€œI’m staying.”
    â€œBut …”
    â€œFollicle hoofed me out so that he could talk to you alone. I’m not having you doing it too.”
    â€œI’ll be all right.”
    â€œOf course you will. I’ve seen them. They’re better than I’d expected—one of them knows you.”
    But he was already burrowing back into the gray drift and could produce only the vaguest gargle of dissent. If Jenny stayed. … Will flailed, trying to grapple Mind to its duty, but Mind was away, ducking through the maze of corridors that riddled the ruined palace of memory. Sometimes, like flashes from the outer day, imagined snatches of the coming interview might obtrude, but Mind shied from them, back into the shadows. . . . A bedside, a bleak single ward, the body on the bed bandaged like a mummy, one eye and the lower face still visible. That eye bright and fierce with will, and the mouth clamped shut, so tight that it seemed to be munching its own lips. Not one word out of her till she died, though it had been an open-and-shut case anyway. Her own son, twenty-nine stab wounds, squabble over a van-load of stolen knitwear. . . .Heard a shot? In that wind? Come off it. … Addressing myself now to the prisoner Foyle. I single you out, Foyle, from these evil men because, strange though it may seem, your wickedness is greater than theirs. True, they have done many things that were individually vile. Murder, robbery, extortion, prostitution, drug peddling — these are crimes against society as well as against the individual victims of those crimes. But you, Foyle, as a senior and re s pected police officer, the supposed guardian of society, have committed a greater crime. You have poisoned the wells of justice. Justice is the mortar of our society. Without it the fabric will not stand. It is for this reason that, in a very real sense, the smallest lie by a police officer must be considered a more serious offense than the greatest crime by a private citizen. . . .OK, let’s say there was a lull, and you heard it and decided to go and look. It was dark. It’s a big garden. High up? I see these windows are double-glazed. … And here, gentlemen, punctual as the Flying Scot, you can observe rigor beginning to set in. The jaw is already almost too stiff for me to, ngff, come on, my beauty,