Some Deaths Before Dying

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Some Deaths Before Dying Page 17

by Peter Dickinson


  Her own worktable sharp-lit, cleared for her task and then systematically set out: three stacks of blank cards of different sizes; their envelopes; a dozen piles of photographs to be selected and pasted in; her card lists for the past three years; two address books, hers and Jocelyn’s; paste; pen; blotter; stamps. Apart from desk and table the room in deep shadow.

  The night silent. Neither she nor Jocelyn listened to music, and used the wireless solely for the early morning news. When the Ransons were in you might catch the mutter of their television. The house itself stood rock solid. After ninety years not a floorboard creaked, every door clicked quietly home, and it took a full gale to rattle a window. So the gentle flap of a flame over the coals was enough to mask the opening of the door, which she’d left an inch ajar for air. She merely sensed its movement.

  Her heart thumped. Dick? Not the Ransons, home early—she’d have heard the car in the yard. Flora or Anne would certainly have called. Dick was supposedly in Australia, but hadn’t been heard from for three months. This would be typical.

  She put the paste brush back in its pot and turned. Her heart thumped again. The head that was peeking round the door, though hard to make out with lamp-dazzled eyes, wasn’t Dick’s. Before she could speak the man stepped confidently into the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Hello,” she said, now startled but not yet alarmed. “Who are you? This is a private house, I’m afraid.”

  Without answering he switched on the overhead light and strolled towards her. A young man—eighteen?—slight, blond, with high cheekbones and sunken cheeks. Pale blue eyes and a full-lipped mouth. He was wearing a short dark overcoat with heavily padded shoulders. This, and something in his bearing and look, though his face bore no marks of old blows, suggested he might be a boxer, or perhaps wish to pass as one.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Just a pal of old Joss,” he said.

  For a moment she couldn’t think who he was talking about.

  “You mean my husband, Colonel Matson?”

  “You’re on,” he said. “Been a good friend to me, Joss has, a very good friend.”

  He looked at her half sideways and smiled. She said nothing, only stared. She was aware of her chest heaving, dragging air in, forcing it out unused. Not the words but the look had carried the meaning.

  “So when he says to me, ‘Why don’t you just run up to Matlock, tell my good lady I’ll be late home?’ I thought, Why not, seeing it’s old Joss. ‘Here’s a tenner for the ticket and the taxi,’ he says. ‘Tell him Forde Place. And here’s the keys so you don’t bother the servants.’”

  The heaving was replaced by nausea. He was lying, of course. Jocelyn had called. He’d have known the Ransons would be out—he didn’t forget that sort of thing. He’d never have sprung something like this on Rachel, or given anyone else his key—he’d even made a fuss about having one cut for Fish Stadding when he’d had a room of his own here…

  The young man was watching her, still smiling. She saw that he didn’t expect her to believe him. His confidence lay elsewhere. In the “friendship.”

  “Joss didn’t want you worrying, really he didn’t,” he said. “Very thoughtful, Joss is…Fag anywhere? No, you stay put, lady.”

  His right hand, which had so far remained casually in the pocket of his coat, moved as if to withdraw something, and stopped. A flick knife? Rachel had read about flick knives.

  He lounged over to Jocelyn’s desk, took a cigarette out of the ebony box, and lit it one-handed with Jocelyn’s lighter. He inhaled deeply, confident in his own dominance.

  “One for you?” he suggested, teasing.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  Her voice answered flatly, controlled by some corner of her mind detailed to keep the rest of the system going when the rest was in shock. It wasn’t thinking, that rest. It was refusing to think, refusing to imagine, huddling down with its eyes uselessly shut and its hands uselessly over its ears. She had no ideas, no plan. What she had was a vomit-like upsurge of emotions, disgust, jealousy, hate, rage, bottled up in herself for a dozen frustrated years. She had no doubt that her understanding was far more than a good guess. If anything, she should have at least guessed before. Jocelyn was a sensual man. He lived through his body. Younger, she had not believed that of herself, had thought she lived primarily through her eyes and mind. Without Jocelyn she might never have discovered her other self—only, through his captivity and the years that followed, to have to put that self back to sleep, and learn to live again just through the eye and the mind. But it was still there, sleeping, dreaming, dreaming of wakefulness once more. She had shared many of those dreams. But Jocelyn…People don’t change that much. They don’t. Jocelyn was a sensual man still, living through his body. What had changed was the objects of his sensuality. Changed when? On the Cambi Road.

  “Well, aren’t you going to say nothing?”

  The corner of her mind did its duty.

  “Sorry…I was surprised…I wasn’t expecting…Do you want anything to eat…? A drink…?”

  “What you got?”

  “The drinks are in the cabinet there.”

  He opened it and drew the bottles out one by one for inspection, standing sideways on to keep an eye on her. He sniffed a decanter.

  “Scotch,” he said. “Can’t stand it. Rotgut. What’s this one?”

  The question steadied her.

  “It should have a label round its neck. I think it’s Marsala. Sweet. A bit like port.”

  “Port’ll do. What’s this? Lemon. Well, I’m happy.”

  He poured a couple of fingers into a schooner, uncapped a bottle of bitter lemon and half filled the glass. He tasted, grimaced, added Marsala and tried again. His hands were small and short-fingered, his movements deft.

  “That’s something like,” he said. “What’s yours, then?”

  “Scotch,” she said. “Not much. Neat.”

  “I’m surprised at you,” he said mockingly, but poured the drink and set it in front of her.

  “Thank you,” she said, still speaking like an automaton. Jealousy, disgust and fury screamed inside her, but she isolated and contained them. More of both mind and body came under control. She was aware of a change in him, a loss of confidence. He had expected something different.

  “You’re taking this pretty cool,” he said. “I mean me just walking in.”

  “It’s interesting to meet one of my husband’s London friends,” she said. The absence of emotional colouring made the words seem to hang there, waiting for him to decide how to take them.

  He lost patience.

  “’My husband’s London friends,’ ” he jeered. “I suppose you think you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He took a couple of paces forward and stared down at her, leaning his knuckles on the table. She looked up at him, unafraid. There was nothing more he could do to her now.

  “Bugger me!” he said quietly. “I don’t get it. There was a fat old cow across the road when I was a kid. Been a housemaid or something in big houses, back before the first war, she had, full of stories about life among the nobs, Lord this having it off nine ways with Lady that, and her husband not giving a fuck because he was going with a lot of stable lads. ‘Don’t you take no notice of her,’ my ma told me. ‘It’s only stories.’”

  “Do you want anything to eat?” said Rachel.

  He took a look at the tray, sniffed the cheese and made a face.

  “There’s some ham in the kitchen,” said Rachel. “I could make you a ham sandwich.”

  “What about the servants? He said there’d be servants.”

  “It’s their evening out. They won’t be back until ten.”

  “All right. Got any pickles?”

  “I expect so.”

  All that Rachel could recover from the time in the kitchen was an image of the cooking knives in the jar beside the salt-pot and the scales, and the thought drifting thr
ough her strangely will-less mind, Perhaps I could kill him with one of those.

  Then they were back in the study, under the ugly, dull illumination of the overhead light. She was at her table again, and he half perched on the edge of Jocelyn’s desk, munching. On the plate beside him were the discarded crusts of his sandwiches and a yellow smear of pickle sauce. A fresh cigarette lay on the ashtray, smoke curling up from its tip. He must have helped himself to more Marsala, neat—the glass was half full and the liquid unclouded. He was looking at Jocelyn’s lighter, with his initials on it, a thank-you present from Flora and Jack after their wedding.

  “Nice,” he said. “He’d like me to have that, wouldn’t he? Something to remember him by.”

  “If you like,” she said, indifferent.

  His eyes widened. Perhaps he had been expecting at least a token resistance. He smiled and dropped the lighter into his coat pocket. His confidence was returning. No doubt the Marsala helped. Rachel wondered whether he would become drunk enough to attack her, and if that would be enough to rouse her from her apathy. Part of her seemed to stand outside herself and consider the question. Probably not, she concluded. She watched him rise, walk round the desk, and sit in Jocelyn’s chair. The stimulus of pure anger returned, but there was no eruption. He tried the drawers and found the centre and top left ones locked.

  “Where’s the key, then?”

  “On my husband’s key ring.”

  He nodded, apparently assured that she was too tamed to lie to him, and tried the others. The ones he could open contained little to interest him—writing paper, envelopes, stamps, account books—but from the lowest on the right he pulled out a flat hinged box, opened it, and frowned.

  “What’s this, then?”

  “The ammunition for my husband’s antique pistols.”

  “Pistols, now. Where?”

  “On the lower shelf of the table beside you.”

  He reached down, lifted out the rosewood box, laid it on the desk and opened it.

  “Hey! Now that’s something!” he said.

  He picked out one of the pistols and aimed it at her, grinning. She saw that he was younger than she’d thought. He was a boy, playing with a toy gun.

  He switched his aim to other targets, the fire, the portraits of Jocelyn’s parents, the fox’s mask beside the window. When he pulled the trigger there was no answering click, as the gun wasn’t cocked. He put it back in the box and took out the other one, turning it to and fro to study the details. The neat movement of his fingers demonstrated his respect and admiration for the object, something like Rachel herself felt for her favourite cameras.

  “Got his initials on them, too,” he said. “Only they got to be older than that. His dad’s, were they?”

  “No. They belonged to a man called Joachim Murat. He was one of Napoleon’s generals. The pistols are about a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “You don’t say!”

  No mockery now. He seemed genuinely impressed. Rachel could imagine a young man of her own class—one of Dick’s friends, say—reacting less appropriately. He looked up, and his manner reverted.

  “Now that’s something Joss’d really want me to have,” he suggested. “To remember him by, you know? Seeing I’ve been a good friend to him.”

  Anger found leverage at last. Her will woke and controlled it, letting her answer in the same dead tone.

  “I don’t know.”

  He picked up the other pistol and fought an imaginary skirmish, two-handed, gunning down half a dozen outlaws in rapid succession.

  “You’d need to reload between shots,” said Rachel.

  “Yeah,” he said absently, whirling to take a snap shot at the half-caste creeping up behind him.

  “Shall I show you how?” said Rachel.

  “Oh. Right you are. No, you stay where you are, lady.”

  He came round the desk with the box and handed her one of the pistols. She picked one of the slugs out of its nest, then put it back.

  “We’d better not use these,” she said. “They’re the original ones, and the paper on the cartridges is very fragile. Will you bring me the other box? Thank you. If you just watch what I do, and copy me, so you know how. You’ve got the right-hand gun, by the way—it’s a little bit heavier. Now you need a slug, and a cartridge and a cap.”

  She picked out of their compartments two of the elongated lead pellets, about three eighths of an inch in diameter and twice that long, with one end rounded and the other flat; two of the cartridges, tubes of thick waxed paper pinched shut at one end and with a brass base at the other; and from individual slots in the third compartment two caps, squat copper cones with a nipple at the point.

  “First you fit the cap into this pit at the bottom of the cartridge. It goes in pointed end first, like this. That’s right. Put it down carefully. They can go off at the slightest tap. Now, you have your own loading rod and mallet. Here. You move this catch up—it’s on a spring and fairly stiff—and break the gun open. That’s right. Hold the barrel in your left hand, pointing downwards. Now drop the slug in, pointed end first. Look and check that it’s sitting centrally. Put the loading rod into the breech, this end first—you’ll find it just fits—and give it a tap with the mallet. Again—I don’t think that was quite hard enough. That’s to seat the slug into the rifling. Now drop the cartridge in on top of it, this way round, and push it down with your thumb until you can feel it’s flush with the rim of the breech. Let me see. Yes, that’s right. Now close the breech—do it firmly, so that the catch clicks. No, take your finger off the trigger. Lay it along the trigger guard, like this. Now with your left hand—you can do it with your thumb, but it’s safer to use both hands—cock the gun. That’s this lever here. Check that it’s all the way back …”

  While he lowered his glance to make the unnecessary inspection she aimed her own gun at his chest and fired.

  * * *

  Another gap, but of a different nature, because even at the time there had been no memory to fill it. Nothing between the jar of the explosion and her becoming aware of herself sitting in the dark of the hall, shuddering as if with extreme cold. She rose, felt her way to the cupboard and fetched out coats, choosing them by touch, her own camel-hair, which she put on, and Jocelyn’s big raglan, which she heaped over herself when she huddled back into the armchair. The movements had been awkward because all the while she had been clutching a hard object in her left hand—the key to the study. That told her why she was here. She was waiting for the lights of the Triumph to sweep across the windows as it took the bend of the drive when the Ransons came home. She would then go down to the back yard and tell them to leave the car out for her to take to the station to meet the Colonel.

  There was a taste of cheese in her mouth. She could remember everything that had happened up to the moment she had fired the shot. Her supper tray had remained untouched at the end of the desk, apart from the young man picking up the cheese and sniffing it. She seemed to have no horror of what she had done, but the fact that she must then have felt hungry enough to eat the cheese he had handled struck her as very strange. Strange, but satisfying.

  The sequence repeated itself, she didn’t know how many times—the waking, the shuddering cold despite the coats, the key, realisation she was waiting for the Ransons to return, the mouth’s memory of cheese …

  Another gap, and then she found herself driving into the station car park and choosing a place well beyond the buildings so that she could be sure of seeing the train come in. She didn’t remember speaking to the Ransons, but in her mind’s ear was a kind of echo of her own voice, sounding brisk and normal. She must also have driven here. Some part of her mind, disconnected, must have seen to all that.

  Perhaps not wholly disconnected, because the thought came to her that she dare not wait in the car, as she’d planned, in case she was in one of her blanks when the train arrived. She got out, went into the station, buying a platform ticket from the machine by the gate, and paced up a
nd down the platform, frowning at the clock sometimes as she passed it, but unable to calculate how long it still was until twelve past eleven.

  A porter emerged from a door, saw and recognised her.

  “London train’s not for another forty minutes, Mrs. Matson.”

  “Yes, I know. I misread my watch and came an hour early, so I thought I’d wait.”

  “It’s getting parky out here. Be a frost by morning, I shouldn’t wonder. Look, there’s a nice fire in the porters’ room. We’re not supposed to, but it’s only two of us on, and seeing it’s you …”

  “I was afraid of falling asleep if I waited in the car. And my husband doesn’t know I’m meeting him.”

  “You’ll be all right in our room. There’s a bell goes off like the crack of doom when it passes the signal box.”

  “Well, thank you very much.”

  The blank this time less absolute. Something like warmth beginning to invade her body, something like coherence attempting to piece her mind together as the forlorn minutes dawdled away. Actual thoughts about her situation. One certainty—that she loved, wanted, needed Jocelyn, and always would. An absurdity—that at least it wasn’t some other woman. A possible way of thinking and feeling about him: Belinda Daring’s cousin the archdeacon, was married to a woman who couldn’t help swearing, wild streams of obscenity, provoked by nothing, in public. Otherwise a pleasant, kind woman, apparently—Rachel hadn’t met her—but with this debilitating tic. There was a name for it, somebody’s syndrome. Her husband, his colleagues, her own friends, the parish, simply ignored it among themselves, but led her out when it happened among strangers … Perhaps Rachel might school herself to do the same, to treat what was happening to Jocelyn as merely an unpleasant and embarrassing ailment, but not despicable or degrading because not his fault, being beyond his power to control … It would be hard, hard almost to the point of despair, an uncovenanted doubling of the price she had paid for having him home, but still, bitterly, worth it.

 

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