Some Deaths Before Dying Read online

  “No. There’s nothing in the world I’d sooner have done, and I want you to assure your friend that I fully understand that the gun—or guns—we’ll come to that in a moment—anyway, they’re not for sale, though of course if they were to come onto the market I’d be delighted to make an offer for them. Next—”

  “Excuse me interrupting, Mr. Grisholm, but it isn’t really that I’m her friend. Well, not exactly. She’s paralysed and bedridden, and I’m the nurse she has to look after her. She’s got her wits about her, mind you, much more than some you’ll meet out on the street.”

  “I see. And I take it she saw the Roadshow programme in which a young woman showed up with what seems to be the other gun of this pair? I assume she had been aware that it was missing?”

  “She didn’t exactly say. Far as I can make out she’d put the box away and not looked at it for years. That’s why she’s so upset.”

  “And she wants the other gun back, no doubt. This is all very awkward. I have to tell you that I’ve reason to believe that the ownership of these guns is in dispute. Last week—Thursday afternoon, it would have been—I had a visit from a gentleman who wanted a valuation on the basis of a photograph he showed me. I have no doubt that the photograph was of these guns, both of them, in this box, with these tools and accoutrements. He said that the guns were his, but he hadn’t brought them because it would have been inconvenient to get them out of the bank.

  “Naturally I asked him if he’d seen the TV programme, and he said that that was what had aroused his interest, and he assumed that Ladurie must have made two identical pairs. He told me that the guns in the photograph had been found by his mother in a junk shop in Nottingham just after the war, and she’d bought them and given them to his father on account of the coincidence of initials, J.M.

  “Now, I happen to be able to corroborate this point. My own father, who is now retired, also watched the programme, and he called me that evening in a state of some excitement and told me that his father, my grandfather, had been shown an exactly similar pair of pistols, in their box, in 1949 by a gentleman who had brought them in and said in passing that his wife had given them to him because they carried his initials; and later the same gentleman had come in again and told my grandfather that he had traced the coat of arms on the box and found it to be that of Joachim Murat, who was one of Napleon’s marshals, subsequently King of Naples. The gentleman had had no interest in selling the pistols, of course, but my father remembers my grandfather talking about them as the finest pair he had ever seen, and wondering what had become of them.

  “Despite this, I didn’t fully believe all my visitor told me. It is inconceivable that Ladurie had made two sets of pistols for the same man, and the photograph he showed me had clearly been taken many years ago. Either he must know that one of the pistols was missing or he wasn’t in a position to find out if that was the case. Furthermore, he wanted me to help him get in touch with the woman who’d brought the gun to the Roadshow. I told him to write to the programme in Bristol and they would forward any letter to her, as all names and addresses are strictly confidential. If I’d wanted to talk to her myself, I’d have had to do exactly that. Despite that, he spent some time trying to get me to tell him more about her than had appeared on the programme, which I of course refused to do. And I’m afraid if your patient is hoping that I’ll be able to help in that way, I shall have to take exactly the same line. I’m sorry about that. I’d like to help. I’ve very little doubt you’re telling the truth, and besides that it’s essential, in my view, that this important set should be reunited as soon as possible.”

  “That’s how it goes,” said Dilys. “It was Mr. Dick Matson, I suppose the one who came along with the photo. I’ve only met him just the once, and I must say I didn’t fancy what I saw.”

  “Well…No. I’d better not say it straight out. This is a messy sort of business, so I’ll be a bit careful. Now, is there anything else you want to know?”

  “About it being fired and then not cleaned right,” she said. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Quite sure. This one has also been fired and left for a while—a few hours perhaps—and then very carefully cleaned. But the other one was left for two or three days and, well, it looks as if the chap did his best—I’d guess he knew how to clean a modern gun, but there are vulnerable spots on an antique pistol which he seems to have missed. This is all guesswork, you understand…”

  “I see. Well, I’ll tell her all that. Oh, dear…”

  “You were hoping for more?”

  “She’s a really lovely old thing, brave as brave in spite of everything, but she’s worrying herself sick over all this. It isn’t just wanting the gun back, that’s not even the most of it, I reckon. It’s how it come to missing, and why. That’s why she perked up after the programme. I didn’t tell you, we didn’t see it when it was shown—Mrs. Thomas had to get hold of a tape for us—we’d only heard about it before that, and from Mr. Dick too, which didn’t help, and now what you’ve just told me, I don’t know much about it, but it sounds like just a load of worries for poor Mrs. Matson…”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could do more to help. I wonder if they’ve had cases of disputed ownership before now—at the Roadshow, I mean. I’d have thought that if the enquiring party could make out a sufficiently clear claim, they might be legally forced to put them in touch with the current possessor of the disputed object…Look, I’ll try and find out. Here’s my card—I’ll put my home number on the back. Call me in three or four days’ time and I may have some news for you.”

  He had been nestling the pistol back into its place as he spoke. He placed the card on top of it, closed the box, slid it into the envelope and handed it to Dilys. They rose and thanked each other yet again, delicately balancing formality against effusiveness, the sort of precise social interchange you sometimes achieve by the end of a first meeting, which then allows you to part feeling altogether better about the world you live in. Out on the pavement he hailed a taxi for her and helped her in. As it did its U-turn to take her back to King’s Cross he was locking the shop. I hope he’s going home to a nice wife and kids, Dilys thought. He deserves them.

  She bought a pad at the station bookstall, and on the train north thought and remembered, sucking her pen, scribbled a bit and thought and remembered again, so that she wouldn’t leave anything out. She had it all down and in order by the time she reached Matlock station.

  3

  Mrs. Matson listened with closed eyes, looking as peaceful as the dead, and after a whispered “Thank you, Dilys,” stayed like that for some while.

  At length, still with closed eyes, she whispered again.

  “Albums, please. Second shelf, far end. Letter J. Nineteen forty-eight.”

  “I know, dearie. Shan’t be a mo.”

  Dilys hurried out, both pleased and intrigued—pleased because Mrs. Matson was so obviously much less fretful now that she’d found a loose end to tease at in her tangle, and intrigued because this was an album she’d never been asked to bring before. J. was Colonel Matson, of course. Jocelyn. Pity him having a girl’s name like that, when he was such a big, strong man—and he’d called Mrs. Matson “Ray” too. It was short for Rachel, but still it was a boy’s name, really. Dilys knew that because once or twice in the albums there’d been photographs where Mrs. Matson had set the camera up so that she’d got time to get into the picture herself, and “Ray” was what she’d written underneath. She’d several times asked for the J. albums from before the war, but not this one. Interesting that it didn’t start till ’48 too. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to take pictures of him until he’d got over what they’d done to him in that Jap camp.

  Back in the room, Dilys cranked the bed up, slid the reading table into place, adjusted the lamp, got the reading specs comfortable, opened the album and started to turn slowly through the pages.

  A shooting party, eight men in plus fours, with guns, and a row of dead birds and three hares laid ou
t on pale stubble. She picked the Colonel out at once, him being the tallest. Anybody, any nurse, at least, would have spotted he’d been ill and was getting better. He had that newly fleshed appearance. Dilys really liked the way he looked, the way he stood. With pride. Not thinking about it, not working at it, not stuck-up about it—she remembered miners and farmhands who’d held themselves that way—no wonder Mrs. Matson had been so keen on him. She turned more pages. She guessed Mrs. Matson wanted to look at one special picture, but she was very kind about letting Dilys go slowly so she had a chance to see the other ones. Each pair of pages had a sheet of tissue between them, so the photos didn’t lie against each other. Sometimes there were two or three on one page, sometimes just a single larger one, like the shooting party. That had been posed, obviously, but most of them hadn’t. Still, they weren’t exactly snapshots—not like other people’s snapshots, anyway. There was something about them. They weren’t careless—no, they were somehow meant, even when you couldn’t guess what the meaning might be. There was a copy of the one on the bureau, with the Colonel standing by his car. Underneath in silvery ink it said “Jocelyn. The Rover. November 1948.”

  A few pages later the tissue came up sticking to the left hand page. Opposite it was a picture of Colonel Matson out on the lawn with the big cedar beyond him. He had his right arm up and was taking aim with a pistol—no, he was actually firing, because you could see the puff of smoke against the dark of the cedar…

  “Stop,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Other page.”

  The tissue was sticking to something, four spots of old gum which had once held a photograph in place. At the bottom of the page it said “The Laduries. October 1949.”

  “Dick,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Let you in. Stayed out there. He took it. And the list.”

  JENNY

  “For heaven’s sake! Not that tie with that shirt! Here, this one.”

  (Left to himself, even when not in a hurry, Jeff would have dressed in whatever was out—yesterday’s clothes or something, perhaps still slightly damp off the bathroom clothesline—rather than go to the trouble of opening a drawer and choosing. His ensembles tended therefore towards the random.)

  “And stop worrying. I’ll be all right. He won’t have a clue who I am, anyway.”

  “I was thinking if you took the bloody thing with you, it might jog his memory. Look. Take it, see how it goes, and if it looks—”

  “Jeff! Stop it! Your lace-up shoes, not those horrible brown things. And your good coat. You’ve got three minutes. I’m doing your thermos.”

  He came down the stairs like a falling boulder. She had the door open, locked it behind him and ran for the car. All the way to the station he rabbitted on about Uncle Albert, but she was too busy making time through traffic to pay attention. They reached the station with forty-five seconds to spare. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see Sister Morris first. I’ll take the gun and show him if I think it’ll help. I’ll cope, right? And this evening you’ll come home and tell me that Sir Vidal has ordered Billy’s public disembowelment. Kiss me.”

  He did, and loped away. She watched him out of sight, and drove home to make herself breakfast feeling weirdly unresentful that a tycoon’s whim should have cost them one of these free days together.

  * * *

  Marlings Retirement Home had originally been built, apparently, by a successful tea planter when he had returned to England with his family just before the First World War. Jenny was unsystematically interested in that kind of thing. She had never been to India, but she felt she might have guessed about the house—wide-eaved, with a deep verandah of dark brown wood, occupying the crest of a low ridge, with dense rhododendrons all along the drive, and behind them droop-branched conifers that might as well have been deodars but presumably weren’t. Anyway, it didn’t feel as if it really belonged in England. Perhaps it wouldn’t have felt right in India either, because it didn’t actually belong anywhere. This made it a bit depressing for the kind of place it now was, full of people sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting, the way one does in airports when one’s flight’s delayed. There’s nothing to do here and nowhere else to go.

  Sister Morris was a heavy, dark-skinned woman with a faintly scowling look which Jeff said didn’t mean anything.

  “I was hoping to see Mr. Pilcher,” she said. “Thing is, we’ve had a bit of bother about Albert. There was a gentleman came a couple of days back—no, I’m a liar, Friday it would’ve been—said he thought he’d look in seeing he was passing so close. Matson, he said his name was, and his dad had been in the war with Albert. Be that as may be, he sounded all right, but when I told Albert he pulled me up sharp. It was Colonel Matson, he told me, and anyway he was dead and Albert knew that ’cause he’d been to the funeral. I told him, no, that must’ve been this Mr. Matson’s father, and Albert went all stubborn the way he does, and said he didn’t want to see him, but I persuaded him. They get things into their heads, you know, but seeing the gentleman had come all this way, from Devon, he told me…

  “Turned out Albert was right and I was wrong, ’cause I’d not left them alone five minutes when Albert was shouting from the top of the stair to me to come and show the gentleman out. He can shout too when he puts his mind to it. So up I run and there’s the gentleman trying to calm him down but I could see it wasn’t any good so I had to tell him he’d better go.”

  “Did you tell him anything about Jeff looking after Uncle Albert’s affairs?”

  “No, I didn’t. I was just set on getting shot of him quick as I could, and he’d lost his rag and was trying to put it over me in that hoity-toity voice of his and I wasn’t standing for that. Good as a play it must’ve been for the other old dears by then. Should I have told him about Mr. Pilcher?”

  “No, I’m sure Jeff would say you did right. It was just that he came and saw me, later that evening, and pretended he didn’t know anything about Uncle Albert living here…I wonder how he found me…Never mind. Anyway, I know what this is about. Mr. Matson is trying to get hold of something belonging to Uncle Albert. I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m not letting him come bothering Albert again, and that’s for sure. The poor old boy’s been that fussed since it happened, not wanting to come down for meals in case the gentleman showed up.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure he’ll listen to me. He doesn’t usually remember who I am, especially with Jeff not here. Is he up in his room? I’ll go straight up, shall I?”

  From her first visit Jenny had been impressed by how they did things at Marlings. The stair carpet was thick, the elaborate dark woodwork dusted and polished. There were cyclamen and heavy-scented narcissi in pots on sills and landings. The staff had time for you. Jenny had merely appreciated these things on earlier visits, but this time she saw them not under the pleasant glow of civilised behaviour towards the elderly, but in the more acid light of cost. Uncle Albert’s pension, with the annuity from his savings, didn’t make up half the Marlings fees. Jeff supplied the rest. This hadn’t been difficult out of one excellent salary and one reasonable one, but it would be impossible with both jobs gone.

  She went down a corridor, passing two fire doors, and knocked at a room labelled “Mr. Fredricks.”

  “Who’s that?” snapped a voice. Even without what Sister Morris had told her Jenny might have detected the note of anxiety. She opened the door and put her head round.

  “It’s me, Jenny, Jeff’s wife,” she said.

  He was sitting in an upright armchair with a newspaper across his knees, a gaunt old man with a large, high-bridged nose and a thin mouth. He was wearing a suit and tie, and brown laced shoes, polished to a high sheen.

  “Thank you, my dear,” he said, “but I don’t need anything just now.”

  “Hello, Uncle Albert,” she said, paying no attention. “I’m afraid Jeff couldn’t come at the last moment. He sent his love. I’ve brought some fruit. Shall I put it in the bowl?”
/>
  “That’s right.”

  She did so, then adjusted the other chair so that she was almost facing him, and sat down. He was only a little deaf, but on earlier visits he had seemed to find the lighter timbre of her voice harder to hear than Jeff’s. After the fraught, irrational apprehension of her first visit, when, in spite of Jeff’s assurances that Uncle Albert was a nice old boy in excellent health, she had really needed to force herself to go through with it, for Jeff’s sake, Uncle Albert’s room now held no horror for her. His grasp of present reality might waver, but the habits of order and cleanliness persisted. All his possessions had their exact places. There was none of the reek which pervades the air around some of the old. The visitor’s only difficulty was keeping a conversation going.

  Jeff’s technique was to talk much as he would have to anyone else, a little more slowly but no louder, and if the old boy got hold of the wrong end of the stick, not to correct him, but either to carry on or, if it looked more promising, to go off in the new direction. He said you never knew how much Uncle Albert would pick up, but he would spot it at once if you were trying to make things easy for him.

  “I’m sorry Jeff couldn’t come,” she said. “So’s he. It happened only this morning. In fact we were still asleep when the phone rang. The thing is, Jeff had a row with his immediate boss and walked out. Or he was sacked—it depends how you look at it. Anyway, the call was from someone who works for the top guy in the whole company, saying the big man wanted to see Jeff today, in Birmingham, about the row. It looks like being his one chance to put his case…”

  He was peering at her, frowning.

  “Dyed your hair, then?” he said.

  “No, it’s always been this colour.”

  “Not since I’ve known you, it hasn’t, and then you were just about so high. You took after your dad, that way. Comes of living in America. They’re always messing around with how they look, Americans. Your lad’s not coming today, then? What’s his name? I’ll get it in a minute.”