Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  Jenny hesitated. Presumably once again Mr. Matson was telling her something very like the truth. She couldn’t imagine how else he might have made the connection, or known what he appeared to about Uncle Albert, but in the end both professional habit and her own continuing distrust won out.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t even tell you that, until I’ve talked to my husband. He told me his possession of the pistol was confidential and I’m not in a position to decide for myself what’s relevant to that and what isn’t.”

  “Lawyers, I love ’em,” said Mr. Matson, shaking his head. “You’re not in court now, Mrs. Pilcher. You’ve told me, and you know you have. But you talk to your man and tell him this. What was it the fellow on the telly said the pistol was worth, as it stood? Three or four thou, wasn’t it? Let’s split the difference, call it three-five. We’ll make a date and I’ll show up with the other gun in its box, with all the trimmings and a copy of Dad’s will—you couldn’t ask for clearer proof it’s mine than that—and I’ll hand over three thousand five hundred in cash for the one he’s got, no questions asked about how he came by it. Now that’s a very fair offer, he couldn’t ask for a better, and Sergeant Fred could do with the money, I dare say—it’s no joke what it costs looking after an old buffer like that—I don’t like to think about what my old ma’s costing us in nursing. When is your man back? Thursday, you said. We’ll give him another week to think about it, so if I haven’t heard from him by the end of the month, I’ll be coming after him. Right?”

  Jenny finished her glass and put it down. It hadn’t given her anything like the satisfaction of the first one.

  “I’ll tell my husband what you’ve said,” she said, rising. “After that it’s up to him. It won’t be any use getting in touch with me, so please don’t come again without first checking that he’s in and is willing to see you. You understand?”

  “Only too well, my dear. It’s none of your business, and you want no part of it, and nor would I if I were in your shoes, so I don’t blame you. Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, and thank you for sparing the time. Good night, Mrs. Pilcher, and give my regards to Sergeant Fred next time you see him.”

  3

  When she was alone in the house, especially at night, Jenny kept the CD player turned up as far as she thought the neighbours could stand. She wasn’t musical—wouldn’t even have described herself as a music-lover—but the sound provided a sort of magical companionship, a force field that kept at bay the little insinuating monsters of silence and darkness. Human voices were more potent than instruments, and foreign languages better to work to because the words were mere noise, without intrusive meanings. She had no strong feelings about styles or composers. Handel was as good as Wagner, but it happened to be Verdi that evening, with the Anvil Chorus going full blast, so she never heard the key in the lock or the movement of the door, and the first she knew was when the clamour suddenly muted and Jeff’s voice said “Hi.”

  Her whole body jerked with the bounce of shock. She shoved the laptop aside, staggered to her feet, and round the sofa and into his arms. Behind her eyelids, as they kissed, pulsed a dark red rectangle, the counterimage of the screen she had been staring at.

  “Why aren’t you holding me properly?” she mumbled.

  He pushed her away, brought his other arm out from behind his back and gave her gift-wrapped box.

  “Paris nightie,” he said. “I don’t know how terrific it is. I just had time to grab it out of a shop on my way to the station. You’re cold.”

  “I’ve been working. What’s the time?”

  “Half past one.”

  “What’s happened? You said…”

  “I’ve lost my job.”

  “Great! So’ve I—or I’m just going to. Let’s go and celebrate. Have you had anything to eat?”

  “Later.”

  They got up and made scrambled eggs at five in the morning, then went back to bed till noon.

  “I’m not sure Billy didn’t push me into it on purpose,” he said. “It was yesterday morning, and we were having the usual sort-out over breakfast, and Simon asked about the deadline—he’s got a family holiday booked—and Billy shrugged and said, ‘If I’ve got to stretch it again. I’ll stretch it. I trust you’ve all got that.’ And then—this is what makes me think he saw the chance to set one of us up—not necessarily me—it was the way he did it, looking slowly round the table, forcing us to answer in turn. Anyway, people started mumbling things like ‘I suppose so,’ except for creeps like Neil who tried to sound all eager to carry on for another month—that’s what pushed me into it—Neil—because I was next and I came out with what we’d just been talking about, you and me—you coming over to Paris and so on. I gave Billy plenty of slack to treat it as a joke, but he didn’t. He gave me that stare of his and said, ‘If that’s your line. I don’t want you on my team.’ And I said. ‘That’s my line, Billy.’ and picked up my stuff and walked out.

  “I don’t know whether he’d expected me to back down, but I don’t think he cared. It’s not that I’m irreplaceable, but I really know the stuff, and without me they’d be stuck for—oh, call it a fortnight—and there’s no way the Kazakhs are going to wait that long.

  “That suits Billy fine. The deal was on the rocks already, and it was Billy who put it there, and he knew it. Sir Vidal set it up in the first place, remember—it’s his baby—so walking out the way I did gives Billy the chance to put someone else’s head on the block.

  “I worked that out on the train. All I thought at the time was that he was trying to show me, publicly, that I belonged to him, body and soul, and I wasn’t having it. I’m sorry darling.”

  “They can’t just fire you for walking out under stress. It would be constructive dismissal, at the very least. If you were my client…”

  “That’s not how it will look in Billy’s report, and he carries a lot of clout. Our industrial relations setup is palaeolithic.”

  “I’m rubbing my hands. Just the sort of defense client I like. Seriously, darling, they can’t fire you, not without whopping compensation. How long have you been with them? It can’t be worth it. They know you’re good—OK, it’ll be a black mark on your CV…”

  “Billy will still be there.”

  “You won’t be working for him.”

  “He’ll be out to get me, all the same. I don’t mean just casually. He’ll make a point of it. Your turn.”

  “My… Oh, well…I haven’t actually walked out yet, but…Did I tell you about Trevor having to be rushed into hospital and Jerry asking me to clear up anything on his desk I could deal with, and pass on anything I couldn’t to him? It was a pretty good mess—surprise, surprise—though Millie usually keeps him on the rails. It makes me sick. He takes home four times what she does because he’s a partner and she’s just a secretary. But even so there was quite a bit of stuff—contracts he should have sent on to clients weeks ago and he obviously hadn’t even read yet, that sort of thing—and then yesterday morning I found a letter from a client about a case we’d lost last year. I think I told you—the one about the fun fair ride. I did a bit of work on it but then I went and married someone and by the time I was back from the honeymoon the case had come up and we’d lost it. I was a bit surprised, but I gathered our QC had made a hash of it and that was that.”

  “The one about the ride that collapsed and a couple of kids got killed?”

  “That’s right, and eleven others injured. It was big stuff, in the papers, whacking damages. We were acting for the fairground owner. He was insured, but there was a clause in the contract which effectively meant that if the fairground owner was at fault then he was liable for the first five hundred thousand. It all turned on a maintenance docket. Our client’s case was that the fault was caused by an unsatisfactory repair by the original manufacturers, which our client couldn’t have known about. The manufacturers said that the ride hadn’t been properly maintained. The crucial docket was missing. The fairground
owner was a blind old man called Colin McNair. He had this amazing memory. He could, literally, reel off the dates and details of the maintenance of every machine in his fair for the last three years. He swore the maintenance had been done, and the checks made, and the docket had been among the papers he’d provided, but it wasn’t, and the inference was that the reason it was missing was that the maintenance had never been done. So we lost, and Mr. McNair went bankrupt.

  “Well, among the stuff on Trevor’s desk was this pathetic letter from the old boy, eight pages long. He’d had to dictate it, of course, but it was totally coherent, as if he’d worked it up from notes on a PC. I mean he’d been brooding, of course, but it wasn’t at all crazy. When he got to the docket he didn’t just list what was in it, he tried to show how clear his memory was, so he told Trevor about the day he’d brought the papers in and gone through them with him, what the weather was like, and what kind of biscuits Millie had brought with the coffee and so on. And a telephone call Trevor had had to make about a butcher’s business someone was buying, and the name of the client and what Trevor had said to him. There was a whole page of that.

  “Trevor had written a draft answer, fobbing him off, of course, saying what a shame it was and how he understood the old boy’s disappointment but there wasn’t anything more to be done. Just generalities. The only actual point he answered was to insist that a thorough search had been made for the docket and he was quite certain that we hadn’t got it, and what’s more that we’d never had it. He had rephrased that bit a couple of times.

  “Now, I’d actually met Mr. McNair, and I knew Trevor, so if Mr. McNair said one thing and Trevor said another I was pretty sure who was right. And why just that one point? There were plenty of others he could have said something about. I don’t believe he’d read the whole letter. I think he just skimmed it, and stuck on that one because it was bothering him. I couldn’t possibly have done a full file search—it would take weeks and in any case Millie’s far too possessive of Trevor’s stuff—but I waited till she was at lunch and went and got out the file about the butcher’s business. The docket was in it. Please register amazement.”

  “Registered. That’s bloody awkward for you. What’s Jerry going to say?”

  “I took it to him yesterday afternoon. He cancelled all his appointments and sent for the files. So he’s taking it seriously, but my bet is that in the end he’s going to ask me to keep quiet about it.”

  “I thought Jerry was all right.”

  “Oh, I like him. And he’s certainly everyday all right, if you see what I mean. Decent, but…look, if we come clean about this, we’re dead. It’s a partnership, not a limited company, so ultimately the partners are liable.”

  “You must be insured.”

  “Yes, of course, we have to be. There’s a limit, though I don’t know how much in our case. A few million, I should think.”

  “That would pay for a fun fair, wouldn’t it?”

  “I should think so, but it isn’t just Mr. McNair’s losses we’d be in for. His insurance company had to pay out for the deaths and injuries—I told you there were whacking damages—and they could come after us because if we’d won it would have been the manufacturer who’d have been liable. That’d take us well beyond our insurance limit.”

  “So how’s Jerry going to put it to you?”

  “I expect he’ll—”

  The telephone rang. Jeff answered.

  “No. I’m back,” he said. “Our affairs came to a crashing halt. You can certainly say that…I’ll hand you over.”

  “Jerry,” he mouthed as he passed the handset across. Jenny felt her heart contract but spoke unflurriedly, her outer persona closing automatically around her inward self.

  “Hello.”

  “I gather you’ve got him back early. You’ll have been missing him.”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “So you won’t be too keen on having a bit of lunch with me tomorrow.”

  “Well…”

  “I need a word with you. Away from the office, for preference. Thing is, it’s about that stuff you dug up yesterday afternoon. We’re going to have to sort something out, but the fewer people who are involved at this stage the better all round. You follow?”

  “Yes, of course. Hold on a moment.”

  She put a hand over the mouthpiece.

  “He wants me to have lunch with him tomorrow. Can you bear it?”

  “Better get it over.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Take me somewhere where nobody can hear me if I scream. I mean that. Literally. Please.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Do you mind getting wet?”

  “No.”

  They drove in silence. The rain sluiced down. He pulled in at the entrance to a forestry plantation.

  “All right if I came along?”

  “If you want to.”

  She didn’t wait for him. The skirt of her Sunday-lunch-with-the-boss suit constrained her to a stupid mincing run along the squelching track. A shoe was sucked off, but she didn’t stop. The track curved out of sight from the road. Another track crossed it. She slowed to a walk. Leafless branches dripped onto dead and sodden bracken. This was the place.

  Where the four ways met she stopped, raised her arms like a priestess at a shrine, summoned Norma into being and let her rip, waiting for each scream to fade into the drenched, indifferent trees before she screamed again. Her throat was really painful before Sister Jenny told her that that was enough.

  Jeff was waiting a few paces back, with the big umbrella up and her shoe in his other hand. She took his arm and they walked down to the car and drove home, still in silence, with the heater full up. He made her a linctus with honey, scotch and lemon, and then joined her in the shower. They went to bed again and forgot about everything but each other. After awhile she fell asleep, waking several hours later to find him still beside her, reading a Tom Clancy with the same rapid but exact attention that he would have given to an oil policy analysis.

  “How’s the throat?”

  “Better. Thanks, Jeff.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Nor did I. It was a sort of experiment. I mean I hadn’t tried using her like that before, not since I was a kid.”

  “Who?”

  “Norma. You don’t know about Norma.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I want to. I didn’t before, because I thought I’d given her up, but yesterday, after you telephoned…”

  She told him slowly, whispering to spare her throat, and absent-mindedly fondling his forearm as she talked.

  “…of course a lot of little girls have screaming fits,” she said at one point. “But I started again after Dad walked out, and Mummy started drinking, and that meant I had to do stuff for Grandad because she was snorting on the sofa. I would have been about nine.”

  “Didn’t Sue help?”

  “She did it for a bit but then something happened. No one told me what, but she was very upset and I heard Mum screeching at him later. After that Sue wouldn’t go near him and Mum told me I’d got to do it. She gave me a wooden ruler and told me if he tried anything I must hit him across the knuckles with it. I hadn’t any idea what she was talking about, but she must have said something—I don’t remember what—something about him being as good as dead, or he should’ve been dead by now—something like that—but I got it into my head that the horrible old man actually was dead, only…I’m all right, darling, I want to tell you…just…He had a sort of chuckle…oh, God, this dead thing…only he wasn’t…Listen, before that, when he was in hospital and Mummy took us to visit him, there was this nurse, Sister Somebody, in her blue uniform and her starched pinny and cap, and a wide belt with a big silver buckle, all clean and strong and alive among the dirty, smelly, falling-to-bits old horrors in the beds, and they couldn’t touch her, they couldn’t infect her with their mess and nastiness because her uniform was sort of ma
gic…Anyway, that’s how I invented Sister Jenny, and I gave her an imaginary uniform and while I was wearing it in my head he couldn’t do anything to me, he couldn’t touch me, he couldn’t come and get me and make me dead like him…Do you understand, darling?”

  “There was something going on, wasn’t there, when I took you to meet Uncle Albert first time?”

  “It wasn’t that bad. You were there. It wasn’t my responsibility. I don’t know if I could’ve done it alone. Anyway, being Sister Jenny got me through dealing with Grandad, but really it was a way of bottling up the other stuff till I was out of his room, then when it was over I’d go out into the barn where there was no one to hear but the pigs and get rid of it by screaming and chucking things around. That’s Norma.

  “I’ve never told anyone else about Norma. Sister Jenny’s the one people get to meet. They don’t like her much. Mummy invented Norma, not me, to try and get me out of my tantrums. She was supposed to be a joke, only she wasn’t. Not for me. Kids get things into their heads, you know. Like Grandad being dead. So I was two people. I don’t mean I’m clinically schizophrenic, or anything. It was just a way of coping, but it got a bit stuck, that’s all. Well, now you’ve met Norma.”

  “Hi.”

  “You aren’t worried?”

  “Why should I be? Tell her to come in and make herself at home, if you feel like it. Unless you’re bothered about being married to a bigamist. Though I must say I don’t quite see what Jerry’s got in common with your grandfather.”