Free One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson

usually … they slide.”
    â€œWell, if you’re up to it, cock. …”
    Fully awake now, interested, almost excited—but still aware of the need to keep open the escape route into mumbling doze—Pibble elbowed himself a little up the pillows, watching his visitor all the time. Wilson slid the chairs about, seeming to take care to select an exact site for each of them. He nodded, bent and dusted the seat of the nearer chair with a large handkerchief, which matched his pajamas, a quirk proper to a man used to wearing expensive clothes in seedy places. Pibble was aware of his own mind registering the perception, but the awareness made him oddly nervous—as the ship’s captain might be, glancing up at his wind-swelled sails, back at his level wake, all round at his poxed and dream-sodden crew now suddenly obedient and sailorly, and wondering how long it could last.
    At last Wilson lowered himself into the chair. With the same heavy precision he took a roll of mints from his pocket, unwrapped one and put it on the pad on his lip. He spoke without removing it.
    â€œLike I say, just thought I’d take a look at you.”
    â€œFor old time’s sake,” murmured Pibble.
    The dragon glance flickered, not surprised but acknowledging a level of mutual understanding.
    â€œI don’t remember as we ever run into each other.”
    â€œI don’t think so, no.”
    Now, like a trapdoor spider taking prey, the tongue flickered between the mauve lips and the peppermint was gone.
    â€œNearly, I dessay, once or twice. The Furlough bust-up, f’rinstance—wasn’t you in on that?”
    â€œOn the fringe. A case that had some connections. Were you?”
    â€œWas I? That’d be telling. Spent a year or two in Spain round about then—for my health, see?”
    â€œAh.”
    They contemplated each other for a while, openly, without side glances. For Pibble, Wilson’s presence was, as it were, totemic. It had power, power to exorcise the nightmare. He was too interested in this reality to indulge in senile and self-pitying imaginings. Now he became aware of something off-key about his visitor, something not wholly proper to the dragon look. The look was there, certainly, but something, an element of emotionless malice, was not really functioning. The people of this type whom Pibble had known—not all of them criminals, but mostly—had been capable of doing things to other people which were literally incomprehensible. There was no way of imagining the springs of such malevolence; it was inhuman, but not bestial, either. Wilson had clearly had that capacity, most of his life, but now the gland had withered, the springs had dried up. It was as if the dragon had grown not kindly but at least sentimental in old age. Wilson’s next remark, spoken as if already well into a train of thought, seemed to confirm this.
    â€œYou and me, f’rinstance, sitting here like this. One of us a rozzer all his life, and one of us summing else. It could so easy of been the other way round.”
    â€œI wouldn’t have made a very effective …”
    â€œI dunno about that. Plenty of nervy little fellers. … Ever run into Sunny Macavoy?”
    It was extraordinary how Wilson’s company—the half-shared life, the common concerns—could revive shriveled wits. An hour before, Macavoy’s would have been at best a dream name, its waking connotation irrecoverable.
    â€œCon man? I never met him. Wasn’t his line phony arms deals? Make anyone nervy, I’d have thought.”
    â€œSure. He chose it. Did a bit of hotel thieving when things were quiet. Got nicked for that once. No, I’m a liar, twice. Last I heard there was some Palestinians looking for him what he’d got to put down the deposit on a load of plutonium, only it was just lead what he’d got some bent boffin to dope up so it would make a geiger counter click.