The Sinful Stones Read Online Free PDF

was the Great Dane, still very friendly, but urging him to desist for its own good reasons. Pibble allowed himself to be policed back to the bollard, where the hound immediately snuggled close against him, settling its heavy jowl into his shoulder almost exactly where Sister Rita’s head had lain. The coarse hide quivered continually with the ecstasy of contact; Pibble, grateful for the animal warmth, put his lantern down again so that he could tease the long spine—four such beasts to adore him and he’d have been as cosy as any nightwatchman over his brazier.
    Think, Pibble! He wanted you up here for something, and he was uncertain how much you knew. Just an old man’s whims, perhaps—senility can take other forms than the ones you once became so drearily familiar with. But (a) there is a probability, at least, that a valuable document has been pirated, and (b) you don’t know quite whose pigeon it would be, but surely the Community is the wrong place for a schizophrenic like Sister Rita.
    He shuddered like a labourer shaken by his road-drill.
    Poor Pibble, trying to tune in to sense and duty, those stodgy inescapable angels, telling him to find out what he could without causing a disturbance, then go home and make a report which would send some colleague round to ask questions at the newspaper office and publishers, and another to come winging up to Clumsey Island to disrupt the monks’ harsh idyll—but through the signal came a mush of other voices, as happens at night, saying but then how’ll you ever find out what did happen at the Cavendish? Only the old man can tell you, the last witness, sick, compos only at the regular four-hour intervals when the fierce mind spouts regular as a geyser—and he’s cheating you over something, as he cheated Father over something, but you’ve a counter to bargain with, being a policeman and trying to trace the supposed memoir-stealers, hey?
    Father, told these motives, would have bent his index finger back, paled, made a false start, and then shown small Jamie in quiet phrases too clear for any misunderstanding that he was lying to himself, cheating himself. “Get the half-crown accent!” the coalmen had jeered when Father went up the street to tell them that they were giving the Miss Bartons short measure, but small Jamie, even now, had no such counter-attack.
    So he should make a report. It should cover both the manuscript and the Community effect on Sister Rita and other fragile minds.
    A single midnight meeting with one near-senile elder, and another with a crazed teenager? Some report! Oh yes, and the microphone.
    Pibble stared at the harbour and found that he could follow the quay out to the blind light-tower at its end. Craning round he saw that the sky above the cliffs was paler, and the stars diminished. Could it be dawn already? The hound sighed as he rose, but did not follow him up the cliff path into the wind’s inimical caress. So at least it would be tolerably honest to rootle around for a day or two more; and he’d need an excuse for staying, which Sir Francis would have to supply by pretending to wish to know more about the Pibbles for his book; and that would mean several more interviews in which the talk would run, inevitably, on Father.
    It wasn’t dawn, it was moonrise. Hard to connect this indifferent crescent with the dreamy, rust-tinged round that shines on Lovers’ Lanes. It was well up in a big patch of clear sky, just to the left of the buildings; so silhouetted the central tower looked crookeder than ever. Even this theatrical light, enhancing the gaunt outline while concealing the muddle and mess of the lower buildings, could not lend the structure a momentary dignity. It was certainly big—a gruesome amount of human effort had gone into building it—and would be vast when it was finished, if ever. Pibble had a momentary vision of the entire island covered with this quasi-Gothic