Some Deaths Before Dying

by Peter Dickinson

  And then at last the saving reality of the camera, the light meter, her fingers composedly setting apertures and exposures and changing filters, that composure steadying the whole being.

  The graveside—family and servants, Jocelyn’s sisters and the Austen cousins, three or four old friends, the Cambi Road Association representatives. Not good of Sergeant Fred, unfortunately. That must be the top of his head behind Duggie Rawlings. Duggie had driven the others from London up in his new taxi. Rachel remembered him coming to her before he left and taking her aside to explain that the reason he hadn’t been able to bring Terry Voss was that Terry was in prison again. Of course she’d want to know that, the Colonel having been so thick with Terry all along.

  “Thank you very much, Duggie,” she’d managed to say. “I’m sure Terry would have come if he could.”

  And it was true, just as Jocelyn would have moved heaven and earth to attend Voss’s funeral, Jocelyn, who, for instance, had refused to shoot again with an old acquaintance whom he’d discovered to be behaving dubiously over the division of an inheritance. But Voss, of course, had been on the Cambi Road. That changed everything.

  Finally, completing the sequence, the picture she had been taking when Tom Dawnay had photographed her, the coffin being lowered into its slot of earth, the V of the straining tapes that held it, the surrounding, almost regular patterned frame made by the lower legs and feet of the mourners.

  “How sad,” said Dilys, closing the album. “But it’s wonderful what we can get over, isn’t it! Do you want another one, then, or are we finding it a wee bit tiring? How about a little rest now? A drinkie first, and then a little rest, eh?”

  “Thank you, Dilys.”

  “My pleasure, dearie.”

  2

  Horizontal again, Rachel lay and watched the rooks, but today without studying them, though it seemed a waste of a crystal morning, with every twig clear. Absurdly she felt a sense of dereliction at her failure to carry on with her self-imposed task. It didn’t even help to tell herself that what she was now attempting to do was a continuation of the task, was indeed the true task, for which the study of nest-building had been a kind of preliminary exercise. Apart from the young man’s visit she had not herself witnessed, and would never now have direct evidence of, whatever it was that had happened thirty-nine years ago, any more than she would ever be able to look directly down on a rook’s nest in the process of construction. All she had to go on in either case were the side effects, the comings and goings, the shudderings of the structure, the occasional protrusion of objects of events beyond its edge. In one case the distance was in length, in the other in time…

  Anne banging in through the front, door, wholly unexpected, while Rachel was stitching up the hem of one of the hall curtains. No telephone call, no request to be met at the station. No kind of greeting now.

  “Where’s Da?”

  “Hello, darling. What a surprise!”

  “Where’s Da?”

  “In the study, I think. But please, darling…”

  Anne strode past, blank-faced. When Rachel went to close the door she saw the taxi waiting in the drive. She had guessed it might be bad, but never as bad as this.

  And then, of course…but there is always something worse that could happen. Mercifully you seldom get to the true worst.

  Because there was nothing better to do and it was an excuse for staying nearby, she went back to the dreary job of the curtain. The study was round the corner on the way to the dining room and kitchen, and its door was solid. Jocelyn never raised his voice, spoke more softly when angry, and Anne was no screecher. The first she heard was a single, dull thud. Perhaps she felt rather than heard it, juddering up through the floor. But she sensed it, knew at once what it meant, and ran.

  The door of the study opened as she reached the corner.

  “Quick, Ma, the doctor. Something’s happened to Da.”

  Then she was in the room.

  He must have been standing behind his desk and then have fallen half sideways, heavily, all of a piece. Now he was lying almost prone, with his face in the carpet and his right arm twisted beneath him. Rachel knew nothing about medicine. She took one look, picked up the telephone, dialed 999, was answered almost at once and spoke briefly, keeping her head, to explain the urgency and give directions. Then she flung herself down beside the body and let the dry sobs shudder through her.

  “Oh, Ma, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault, darling…Not your fault.”

  “Is he dead? I suppose we’d better not move him.”

  “I…don’t know…The ambulance…Go and wait for it please…”

  Voices at the door. Yes, of course. Thwaite and Young Jim would be in for their elevenses in the kitchen. They too must have heard the fall. Her right arm was across his back when she felt the slight spasm. His left hand was beneath her breast on the carpet. She shifted and clutched it. His fingers moved in answer.

  Somebody touched her shoulder.

  “Now, Mrs. Matson…”

  Ranson.

  “No, don’t touch him. Wait for the ambulance men. He’s alive. Is Minnie there?”

  “Here, Mum.”

  “Get a bag together for him. Pyjamas. His yellow dressing-gown. His shaving kit, hair brushes…”

  Things he knew. Things that were his own, part of his being. While she was listing them Rachel eased herself up, never letting go of his hand, so that she could sit nestled against his side and with her free hand gently stroke the back of his neck and head, her own touch, all she could give him to let him know she was there, with him in this pit, this darkness…

  “They’re here, Ma. They’ve just turned into the drive.”

  She stayed where she was, waiting. The men were competent and friendly. They let her keep hold of his hand as they eased him onto the stretcher, lifted him and carried him out.

  “Do you want me to stay, Ma? I wasn’t going to, but…”

  “Please. For a bit. Ring Flora. Dick, if you can find him. The aunts. Minnie’s putting a bag together. Bring it to the hospital. And some stuff for me. I don’t know if they’ll let me stay. Take the Triumph. The keys are in the hall drawer. Look in his diary and see if he’s got any appointments and cancel them if you can. Numbers in his book on the desk…”

  The hospital was stupidly rigid about visitors. Outraged and distressed, Rachel came home to find that Anne, after coping well with everything within her competence, had worked herself into a pit of her own, in which she was hurled and battered by misery, rage and self-blame. She allowed herself to be held close on the morning room sofa for a while, but rose abruptly and moved away.

  “I suppose you want me to tell you what happened,” she said.

  “Yes, please. Anything. Everything.”

  “Simon came and told me he couldn’t marry me. It was because of something Da had told him.”

  “Oh, my darling!”

  “Did you know he was going to do that?”

  “Of course not. Only that Da was going to talk to him about his father.”

  “About Uncle Fish? What…? And anyway, what bloody business is it of Dad’s who 1 marry? Of either of yours? I’m twenty-three. I can marry anyone I bloody well choose!”

  “Yes, of course, darling. Simon didn’t tell you what it was about?“

  “No. If you want to know there was something shifty…I mean, he was upset all right, but it wasn’t just about us. He had to get out somehow. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. We’ve always wanted each other. Always. Ever since we were little. Simon’s mine. I’m his. I don’t want anyone else, and I don’t want anyone else to have him. We’ve been going to bed for ages, whenever we got the chance. Why do you think I was so sweet as pie about putting the wedding off? Because it doesn’t make any difference, that’s why. We’re good as married already, and we can go to a Registry Office and get it made official anytime we want. You can’t stop us, Aunt Leila can’t stop us, however crazy
she’s gone. When Simon showed up I thought…Oh, Christ! he just wanted to get it over.”

  “Shall I tell you what Da told him?”

  “If you like.”

  “Fish has run off with the funds of the Cambi Road Association, as well as any of Leila’s money that’s left. He’s abroad somewhere.”

  “Jesus Christ! Is that all?”

  “About forty thousand pounds. Everything Da had raised to help with pensions and so on.”

  “But…All right. Ma, I can see that’s pretty awful for you, but it’s not enough! It’s bloody well not enough! What’s it got to do with Simon and me? Nothing. We knew about Uncle Fish doing a bunk, and we knew it had to be something like that, though Aunt Leila won’t talk to any of us… Look, Simon’s always been a bit iffy about Uncle Fish—he says you can’t tell where you are with him. But he’s always worshipped Da, and if Da came and told him he couldn’t marry me because of something else Uncle Fish had done—something unspeakable—I can just about see Simon—he’s got these stupid ideas about honour…Jesus, I’m furious with him! And Da! There’s something he told Simon and he wouldn’t tell me, though he’s bloody well wrecked my life! I’m sorry, Ma. I’m sorry about what happened to Da, and I wish it hadn’t, but I came to tell him how furious I was, and I still am, and even if I’d known he’d got a weak heart I’d still have come and I’d still have said what I said!”

  A pit had opened into a place which Rachel for the past seventeen days had been schooling herself not to think about. No, that had nothing to do with Fish. She clutched at an irrelevance.

  “I think it’s a stroke, darling, not heart. You couldn’t have known.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “I’m sure I’d feel the same in your shoes. I’m truly sorry for you, darling. I hope you’re wrong about Simon wanting to get out of it. I’ve always loved him. If it’s any use to you, Da and I used to tell each other how stupid we’d been, waiting till we were married.”

  “Not much,” snapped Anne, unrelenting. And then, “Oh, God, I’m never going to feel about anyone the way I do about Simon. I can’t imagine even being interested in anyone else!”

  She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Rachel rose to stand beside her and hold her close again, but she shrugged herself free and moved away, still blindly sobbing.

  “I’m sorry, Ma, Oh, God, I’m being desperately self-centred when…I just can’t think about anything else. I’d better go.”

  “Please, darling. Oh, please…I…I…”

  But Rachel couldn’t bring herself to say “I need you.” Not even now, when it would have been for the first time true. For twenty-eight years all that she had truly needed had been supplied by Jocelyn. Even Dick had been no more than an emotional extra, a luxury, a want and not a need. It was to late for such a demand.

  “I’ll go for a walk and think about it,” said Anne.

  She had stayed on, in fact, for three silently dutiful days and then gone back south. A month later a card had arrived saying that she was moving to Bristol, with the address. She hadn’t returned to Matlock until the funeral.

  Rachel lay and considered the event. The emotions didn’t return, however faintly, to confuse her.

  All there was was the puzzle for her mind to tease at. She had been aware of it at the time, and Anne had, in effect, stated it aloud, but it had been among the mass of stuff at the periphery of Rachel’s concerns, whose centre was wholly occupied with the horror of what had happened to Jocelyn, and then with the obstinate, passionate nurturing of hope when everyone was insisting that there could be none.

  The puzzle was that the emotional logic didn’t cohere. Fish Stadding had embezzled the Cambi Road funds. When discovered he had fled abroad. The committee had decided not to try and hunt him down. The money was apparently gone on some speculation in the City, so what was the point? Besides, Fish had been on the Road.

  The Staddings were old friends, Uncle Fish and Aunt Leila to the children. They had always brought their three boys to Forde Place for a week or so in the school holidays. There had been a lovely inevitability about Anne and Simon deciding to marry. Rachel remembered walking by the river with him—a still, early summer day, a perfect light. She had lagged behind the others, taking pictures, and Simon had stayed with her, unasked, for company. That was Simon, sensitive, considerate, straightforward, very like Leila in that. (In fact it was as if all the good fairies had come to his christening, because he seemed to have inherited his father’s quirky intelligence, not to mention the rather oriental good looks of both parents.)

  “We didn’t fall in love,” he’d told Rachel. “I think we were born in love.”

  The memory simply didn’t chime with any picture of a Simon who, on learning that his father was an embezzler who had shamefully betrayed his future father-in-law, had so readily, and apparently shiftily, broken the engagement. Yes, a young man might well have behaved like that, but it would have been a different young man from the one Rachel had talked to by the river. That Simon would have said, “This is tragic and appalling, and I will do everything in my power to make it up, but the first thing I will do is insist on marrying Anne, if she will still have me.”

  Indeed a Simon something like that surfaced a few years later, when out of the blue he had written to Rachel saying that he had learnt that the Association was looking for a younger secretary, and asking if she would put his name before the committee. He had added in a private note to Rachel that he would like to do something to repair the harm that his father had done to the Association. Rachel had hesitated, but she knew the committee were desperate and Anne was now settled in Canada, so she’d done what he asked.

  Surely that Simon would have waited a little while for decency and then gone to Anne and told her he couldn’t live without her. As far as Rachel knew there hadn’t at the time been another woman. A decade or so later he had married a widow, older than himself, apparently out of a shared delight in bird-watching. He had never brought her to reunions at Forde Place. There had been no children.

  No, Anne was right. Jocelyn must have told him about something else. The young man’s visit? He certainly couldn’t have borne to tell Anne, of all people, about that, and it would have been astonishing if he’d told Simon. Besides, it had nothing to do with Fish.

  Unwilled, her lips moved and the dry whisper came.

  “He didn’t tell me, either.”

  JENNY

  1

  “Wake up, Uncle Albert—I think we’re there.”

  Jenny braked inside the gates to give him time to pull his wits together before they reached the house. He had dozed in snatches for almost half the journey, and each time he woke had checked the cardboard box on his lap, raising the lid and groping inside to make sure that nothing had been substituted for the pistol while he slept. It was already early afternoon, but since Mrs. Thomas had insisted that food would be waiting for them on their arrival, they had stopped only once on the way, for coffee and biscuits at a service station. There they had scarcely sat down before Uncle Albert was fidgeting to be off again.

  Now he woke and checked the box once more.

  “Well, what are we stopping for?” he said. “It’s a long way, you keep telling me.”

  “I think we’re there.”

  Distrustingly he gazed through the windscreen, then relaxed.

  “Ah, that’s more like it,” he said. “That’s Forde Place all right. Well done, girl.”

  It was not at all what Jenny had expected from the picture of well-to-do squirearchy suggested by Mrs. Thomas’s telephone voice and chance remarks from Uncle Albert. The grounds were appropriate—not a flower bed visible, but large old trees, cedars and planes and such, rising from several acres of lawn that sloped down to what was probably a river, with a wooded bluff beyond. But the house itself was odd for such a setting, a solid slab of dark red brick with a wide-eaved slate roof and serried windows. It didn’t look like a building intended for pe
ople to live in. It was utterly different from Jenny and Jeff’s own little house, but it had the same quality of being obstinately itself, and the hell with anyone else’s ideas of taste and style. Jenny rather liked it for that.

  She drove on, stopping a little beyond the front door, climbed stiffly out and went round to help Uncle Albert.

  “Lend me your shoulder, girl,” he said. “That’s right. I’ll do in a minute. Legs aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Shall I take the box? It’ll go in my bag.”

  “Might as well, now we’re here.”

  The bell was answered by a middle-aged woman whom Jenny assumed to be Mrs. Thomas, but Uncle Albert spoke first.

  “You’re new.”

  “Only been here twelve years,” she answered. “Tell Mrs. Thomas you’ve come, shall I? She’s expecting you. If you’ll wait just a minute.”

  She led them into the hall and walked off along a sunlit corridor.

  Jenny gazed around. This was more like it—more in conformity with her expectations, that is, though still with something very odd about its proportions. A large space, three storeys high, roofed with glass. Polished old furniture, hyacinths, still lifes, seascapes, display cabinets, never-sat-in easy chairs. An extraordinary staircase, not, as would be expected in such a room, climbing handsomely up in broad flights, but a sort of free-standing shaft, a lattice of pale narrow timbers—satinwood Jenny thought—with stubby flights rising inside the shaft. It was a life-size version of the sort of staircase a hobbyist might model out of matchsticks. It had the beauty of total economy, with no ornament except itself, fashioned from the lightest materials, its obvious strength inherent in the design, in the almost pure idea. Jenny had walked across to look at it more closely when a voice reached her from the corridor.