If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  Hilary Norman and The Murder Room

  ››› This title is part of The Murder Room, our series dedicated to making available out-of-print or hard-to-find titles by classic crime writers.

  Crime fiction has always held up a mirror to society. The Victorians were fascinated by sensational murder and the emerging science of detection; now we are obsessed with the forensic detail of violent death. And no other genre has so captivated and enthralled readers.

  Vast troves of classic crime writing have for a long time been unavailable to all but the most dedicated frequenters of second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing means that we are now able to bring you the backlists of a huge range of titles by classic and contemporary crime writers, some of which have been out of print for decades.

  From the genteel amateur private eyes of the Golden Age and the femmes fatales of pulp fiction, to the morally ambiguous hard-boiled detectives of mid twentieth-century America and their descendants who walk our twenty-first century streets, The Murder Room has it all. ›››

  The Murder Room

  Where Criminal Minds Meet

  themurderroom.com

  If I Should Die

  Hilary Norman

  Now I lay me down to sleep;

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I should die before I wake,

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  Anonymous. First printed in a late edition of the New England Primer, 1781

  Monsters are chaos beasts, lurking at the interstices of order . . . The dragon, for example – perhaps the most widespread monster in myth and folklore – is born through a mixture of species . . . by the joint generation of a man or worm and a metal.

  Encyclopaedia Britannica

  May you not hurt your enemy, when he struck first?

  Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

  Contents

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Epilogue

  Outro

  By Hilary Norman

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Copyright page

  Prologue

  Sunday, January 3rd

  It was one of those special January mornings in Boston when winter felt like a real childhood treat. Fresh snow had fallen the previous day, but the main streets were pretty much clear and the busiest sidewalks safely gritted, and the Public Garden looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card. Not a Swan Boat in sight, but the sky was perfect azure, the sun shone brightly, every branch of every tree was blanketed, every twig of every shrub ethereally frosted, and large expanses of sparkling icing sugar landscape were satisfyingly untrodden.

  To Jack Long, this morning was just another bonus to add to his new-found sense of well-being. In his early forties, sandy-haired, lean and more than passably attractive, Jack was aware that he hadn’t felt this good in years, and that every moment of this unplanned, enforced time-out was making him feel even better, fitter, stronger and more optimistic.

  He had cleared the snow off a bench with his gloved hands, and now he sat facing the water, watching an old lady with a cane feeding small scraps of bread to the ducks. The sun felt so warm that he had taken off his anorak, and he was snug in his thick white turtle-necked sweater. So long as his hands and feet were warm, Jack had never minded the cold. He was comfortable now, his breathing calm and even, forming feathery ribbons of steam.

  He looked around, took it all in, then closed his eyes, and gave himself up to the sunshine and the clean air and the sounds of birds and muted traffic.

  He was almost asleep when it happened. He felt nothing, for it happened too fast for sensation. One minute, Jack Long was alive, a still-youngish man with everything to live for. The next, he was gone.

  Rose O’Connell, seventy-eight years old and mad as hell with the arthritis that had, in recent months, slowed her former briskness, saw it happen, just as she was turning away from the water’s edge, her bag of bread scraps empty now. A sudden jolt, thrusting the young man’s upper body forward convulsively for an instant, the way electroshock therapy had jerked the patients around in the hospital Rose had worked in in the bad old days.

  She stood for a moment, resting on her cane, watching the man, her eyes intent and puzzled. He was perfectly still again now, slumped back against the bench, and she supposed he might be sleeping, but his hands were so limp in his lap and his sandy head lolled in such a way that Rose, with a chill passing through her that had nothing to do with the weather, knew better.

  She began to limp closer, moving slowly, cautiously, until she was just a few feet away. She looked down, and the fingers of her right hand clenched the handle of her cane. She had been a nurse, had seen plenty of spilled blood in her time, much of it created by violence, and she knew she would not faint.

  The man’s blood spread slowly and steadily, oozing over his white sweater like a blooming, ever-expanding red rose, and dripping down through the slats in the wooden bench onto the white snow.

  It was not the blood that made Rose cry out. It was something else entirely, something she had never seen in all her years of nursing, either in the operating theatres or in the emergency rooms.

  It was rising from the hole in his chest, in a swirl of black.

  Smoke.

  Chapter One

  Monday, January 4th

  He was a cop, and she was a ballet teacher. Joseph Duval was thirty-eight years old, living in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife Jess and her nine-year-old daughter Sal from a previous marriage. Hélène Duval, his sister, known to everyone as Lally, was twenty-three, living in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with Hugo Barzinsky – her lodger, best friend and business partner in Hugo’s, their café – and her cat. Joe had known from the age of ten that he would, in time, move away from home. Lally had never doubted that she would live in New England until they buried her. Those were the most significant differences between Joe and Lally Duval. In most other ways, especially in the ways that counted most – in their hearts and minds – they were about as similar and as close-knit as any brother and sister could be.

  When Joe telephoned Lally at a little before quarter to five that Monday afternoon, he was at his desk in the station in the Logan Square district of Chicago, and Lally was in her bedroom some nine hundred miles away, brushin
g her dark brown, almost waist-length hair up into the sleek ponytail that would, with a little deft pinning, become the neat bun that was obligatory in the ballet world.

  “Whatcha doing, sis?”

  Lally smiled at the welcome sound of her brother’s deep, warm voice. “The usual – I just delivered a fresh batch of croissants to the café, and now I’m getting ready for class.” Nijinsky, her three-year-old Siamese, near the door, watched her swinging hair through friendly slit eyes. “Are you at the office?”

  “It’s a paperwork afternoon.” Joe paused. “How are you, kid?”

  “I’m wonderful,” Lally said. “We got a fresh load of snow last night, but today’s been gorgeous. How about you guys?”

  On average, Joe and Lally made a point of speaking to each other at least once a month. So far as Lally was concerned, she’d have been happy to talk to her brother once a day, but being a lieutenant in the Chicago Police Department’s Violent Crime Unit meant that Joe’s life was wild and full, and Lally knew that his occasional long silences didn’t mean he thought about her any less.

  “We’re all pretty good this end,” Joe said, “knock on wood.” He rapped smartly on his desk.

  “How’s Jess feeling?” Her sister-in-law was recently pregnant, and Lally knew that she and Joe and sweet Sal were all on tenterhooks because Jess’s last two pregnancies had both ended in miscarriage.

  “So far so good.” Joe was a man of deep emotion but few words.

  “Is she taking it easier this time?” Lally felt his anxiety over the line.

  “A little. You know how independent Jess is, but I think she’ll do just about anything to keep this baby, even if it does mean letting Sal and me carry the shopping and take care of the gardening.”

  “It must be hard for her.”

  “You bet it is.”

  Lally checked her alarm clock and finished pinning her hair. Her brother’s beloved features, his long, sharp nose and soft grey eyes, so like her own, were as clear in her mind as if he were seated opposite her.

  “How’s work?” she asked, grabbing her black leotard and pulling it snugly up her body. She knew it was a pointless question, that in spite of the honesty between them in most things, the confidences of the Chicago Police Department couldn’t be safer if they were locked in a high-security vault.

  “Like always,” Joe said, easily. “You know.”

  She didn’t know, but she thought she was probably glad of that. She worried about Joe all the time as it was, and maybe her imagination was worse than the real thing, but somehow she doubted that. She had seen reality – brutal, bloody reality – the day their parents had been killed in a car crash over four years ago, a few days after her nineteenth birthday. With Joe so far away, it had been left to Lally to make the identification at the morgue in Pittsfield. She had been aware, even in those most terrible moments of her life, that there was a kind of mercy in their going together, for they had been the closest married couple she had ever known, more like twins than husband and wife, and it was almost impossible to conceive of either one being left behind to mourn the other. But that hadn’t helped Lally, not that day, nor in those that followed, to come to terms with the violence of their end. She’d worried about Joe ever since he’d joined the police force – she guessed she always would.

  “Are you okay, sis?” Joe asked. “You sound breathless.”

  “Just getting changed – class is in ten minutes.”

  “You wanna call me back later?”

  “You’re never there – will you be there?” She tucked the receiver under her chin, stepped into her blush pink rehearsal skirt, then tugged on leg warmers.

  “Probably not.”

  Lally smiled again. “Okay, let’s do a round up. I’m well and happy, Hugo had a cold but now he’s okay, the roof needs clearing, the path needs sweeping and gritting again, but otherwise the house is fine – ” The Siamese came and rubbed around her ankles. “Nijinsky sends his love – he’s great.” She picked up her pointe shoes. “One of the children I teach isn’t so great, and I’m worried about her, but everything else is just wonderful, and I love you and I miss you, and I wish you’d all come and live back here.”

  Joe, too, grinned. “I miss you, too, sweetheart, and everyone this end’s great, too – and Sal was talking about you this morning, said that if you don’t get over here soon, you’ll wake up one day and find her on your doorstep.”

  “Tell her any time.”

  “I love you, sis.”

  “Joe?”

  “What?”

  “Be careful.”

  “You, too.”

  Nature, Lally always felt, had struck an almost perfect balance in the Berkshires. No mountain or valley or lake was too massive or too daunting. There was a wonderful blend, an almost perfectly harmonious mix of natural landscape and the human factors of villages, small towns and country roads, of farms, large and small, of handsome churches and old colonial graveyards. There were the seasons, so clearly defined: youthful springs and richly blooming summers, memorable, glowing autumns, splendid, uncompromising winters. Visitors came from far and wide to the region, drawn by its beauty and its cultural appeal, for the Berkshires were famed for their summer festivals of dance, theatre and music. But for Lally Duval, so deeply rooted in western Massachusetts, there was an earthy solidity, a sense of permanence and belonging that had little to do with those things.

  Her mother, Ellen Carpenter Duval, had been born and raised in Lee, just a few miles away, in a family who had lived in the area for five generations, and even Jean-Pierre Duval, of French-Canadian extraction, was a second-generation resident of West Stockbridge. There must have been at least one other Duval over the decades with travel lust, but Joe was the only one who’d ever up and gone anywhere for keeps.

  “Are you sure you want to stay in town?” he’d asked Lally when she’d found her new house a few months after their parents’ death. It was a white clapboard Cape-style home with blue shutters, a porch and a sun room with a bay window and a view of the distant Berkshire hills, and it stood on Lenox Road, not much more than a mile from their old family house on Main Street.

  “Of course I am,” Lally had reassured him. “It’s home and I love it – not just because of the past, but because of the present and future. I can’t really imagine wanting to live anywhere else.”

  She had felt no desire to alter anything much about her life; that wasn’t why she’d agreed to sell their parents’ home. She had always been independent, even as a young child, and both Jean-Pierre and Ellen had respected their daughter’s individuality and need for space. A house, with land – even a small scrap of land – was something Lally felt she could stamp herself on, something she could grow within, in which she could expand and extend herself. Besides, a dancer needed both space and the confidence that the thumping of her entrechats and the echoing of her beloved music would not disturb neighbours, especially if – as happened quite often – the urge to dance woke her up out of sleep in the middle of the night.

  Lally had known since she was fourteen that she would never be a great ballerina. In the first place, she had grown too tall, and in the second, dance was not everything to her. It was what she looked forward to doing every day of her life, and it was something she could not conceive of giving up, but Lally loved life in general a little too much to dedicate herself utterly to ballet. She had never been a slave to ritual, and if the weather was especially gorgeous or the air particularly invigorating, she would always much rather have gone outdoors than go to ballet practice, and if a friend needed a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on, Lally never thought twice about her priorities, for people naturally came before dance. And so early on, she had sought her own compromise, and had found it in teaching.

  Classes at the Lally Duval School of Dance were held in an old converted barn next to Lally’s house. She taught children from the ages of five to twelve, and this afternoon’s class was made up mainly of ten-year-olds, includi
ng Katy Webber, the student she’d referred to on the phone to Joe.

  Katy was one of the most promising children Lally had ever taught, a pretty, slender, fair-haired girl with the look of a fragile fawn and the underlying constitution and determination of a prizefighter. Katy never missed class, had every ounce of passion, ambition and courage necessary for a dancer, and yet Lally had always been glad to note that she combined those gifts with a normal capacity for fun, and it was plain as the nose on her face that the healthy balance in the child was nurtured by her parents, Chris and Andrea Webber, who both encouraged and patently adored their daughter.

  Lally had noticed the stiffness first – a slight loss of flexibility in Katy’s back – during class a couple of months ago. On questioning the child, Lally had sensed an unusual evasiveness in her, and had refrained from pressing the issue, and two days later, Katy had seemed back to normal. When, the following week, Lally saw her wince during an arabesque, she had ordered her to stop and to see her at the end of class, but by the time the rest of the children had made their customary final curtseys and bows, Katy had gone.

  Andrea Webber had telephoned that evening.

  “Katy wanted me to apologize for leaving without speaking to you.”

  “That’s okay,” Lally said easily. “It was just that she seemed to be having a little difficulty today, and I wanted to be sure she was all right.”

  “That’s why Chris and I didn’t let her wait when we picked her up. Chris had an idea Katy might be coming down with something, and so we got her home and tucked her up right away.”

  Katy had missed her next class, and Lally had assumed that the flu, or whatever, must have caught up with her, but three weeks later, when Lally came into the girls’ changing room to check on a leaking radiator, she caught a glimpse, just before Katy had time to cover herself with a towel, of a large black bruise on the child’s right buttock. It was the look in the ten-year-old’s eyes that had stopped Lally in her tracks, freezing the question in her throat. Lally knew suddenly, without being told, that the bruise was not the result of an innocent accident. She knew it from the split second’s fear and embarrassment in Katy’s blue eyes.