Chapter Fifty-Seven
In Enid’s room, Pluck sat in a chair whilst she tended to his wound. His left shirt sleeve had been ripped open up the shoulder, and she did her best to bathe the gash in cold water.
“We’ll have to wait until the snow abates,” she thought aloud, “and a doctor can be brought in, for that bullet to come out. You stupid boys, you. You and Mifkin and all the rest of you. Do you see what’s happened? Do you see what might have been?”
Pluck wasn’t in the mood to be lectured by a schoolmistress. His head back over the top of the chair, he stared at the small paintings that adorned the walls. One was blocky and gauzy and appeared to represent two maidens and a gentleman on a boating excursion. The ladies had bonnets, one had a parasol, and the man had a straw hat. But they were so far away from the painter, or at least from the viewer, that their faces could be seen as nothing more than peach ovals, which might have been thumbs, or nothing at all.
He had never been on a boat trip. Not for pleasure, anyway; he’d had to take vessels to conduct investigations in far-flung territories around the world, but he’d never witnessed a scene like that one, outside the occasional hotel room decoration.
“Ow!”
“Did that hurt?”
“Excellent deductive reasoning, Miss Trojczakowski.”
“You don’t have to call me by my surname. There’s nobody here but us, you know.”
She said some more, but he wasn’t listening. He was considering that his arm was hurt, but it would heal, and the snow would go, and he would go on with his life, and career, and that would be that. Or would she insist on going with him? Good God! Every road led to a different hell.
“I don’t know what I would have done. If you’d died, I mean. . .”
He half-heard that. Death. . .it was not an unbroached topic in his line of work. As an inspector, he’d come face-to-face with Monsieur Mort many times, but rarely had the death in question been his own.
“Just leave it. Leave it!” He stood up, yanked the rag from her hands and tried to tie it round his arm himself.
“I should wash it.”
“Never mind. If I died of infection it would be just as well.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just answer me one thing, Miss Trojczakowski, if you’re able—because I cannot.”
“Yes?” She looked at him with a dawning sense of dread behind her eyes.
“Why did the murderer, whoever he might be, kill Blip?”
“Snede.”
“Whomever. Why him? Why not any of us—say, me?”
“I’m glad that he didn’t.”
“But don’t you see? It means that it’s all random! It might have been me, or the next man, or a dog, or you!”
“Well, presumably, the killer chose Snede for some particular reason.”
“Yes, but if it hadn’t been that killer choosing Snid for that reason, it would have been another killing another for another!”
“You’re not making any sense. Anything you’re ascribing to chance could just as easily be ascribed to Providence.”
“Yes, yes, that’s what I used to think, once, too. But you’d be surprised to discover, Miss Trojczakowski, just how much your view changes with a bullet in your arm.”
She came close. “I thank God it’s only in your arm.”
And with that, Pluck experienced the altogether curious sensation of not caring whether the bullet was in his arm, his chest, his eye or his pinky toe.
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” he muttered feebly.
“What do you mean?” Everything stood still for Enid; she could hear each of them breathe, but nothing more.
He gave up trying to tie the rag round his bad arm with his good one; without saying a word, she did it for him.
“Nobody likes me,” he finally said, softly.
“That’s not true!”
“Only you, and that’s only because of some strange inflammation in the brain mankind dubs ‘love’. No, they all hate me. They hate me for doing my job, they hate me out of envy, and they hate me because they know I can see straight through them.”
“I do think. . .sometimes. . .people might get frustrated when you mishear them, or misinterpret what they say, or mean. . .or jump to conclusions which might not be altogether justified by the facts.”
“I can hardly help that!”
“Well, have you considered trying to concentrate a little harder?”
“Concentrate on what?”
“On what others are saying, on what you’re saying. . .maybe, before speaking, you could try to internally judge the veracity of what you’re about to say, and the probability of it being true versus being not quite so true.”
“I prefer to bring my conclusions up out of my bowels.” He slapped his belly hardily.
“I know, I know, you go about things differently to everybody else. And that’s one of the things I love about you.” She tried to put her arms around him, but Pluck shook her off, like a bull a cowboy.
“Please, Miss Trojczakowski!”
“Call me ‘Enid’!” Enid pleaded.
He tightened his bow tie with his right hand; it was hard to do so, with just the one hand, and when she moved, instinctively, to help, he ran across the room into a corner.
“If you must be told plainly, Miss Trojczakowski—you disgust me. You are too old, and fawning, and suffocating, and, and, and, and, and slim, for me. No, Miss Trojczakowski, I do not love you, and I never could.”
Enid, it need hardly be described, fell back against the opposite wall, as if she’d been struck; and in a sense, she had been, by the force and ferocity of her beloved’s words; hence the simile.
“Now that I’ve seen Death, close-up, for what it is,” he went on, mercilessly, “I realise how he stalks us all, crouching behind each bureau, slinking through every shadow, and no matter what we eat, how much exercise we take, or how much cotton wool we wrap ourselves in, he might jump out at any moment and render it all—pointless. And so, I intend to start living my life, at once, while I’ve still got it. Goodbye, Miss Trojczakowski. I wish you every happiness—so long as it’s with someone else.”
She’d sunk to her knees, overcome with wretchedness, weeping over the loss of her love and the debilitating humiliation of knowing how idiotic was the whole scene.
She grasped at a straw: “But what about the investigation?”
Pluck shrugged—a shrug of cosmically vast insouciance. “Guilty, or innocent—let them all go hang. It’s all one to me, from now on.”
And out he walked.