Some Deaths Before Dying Page 3

  Dilys bustled off. Rachel listened to the slither of the drawer, and the movement of packages. While she waited she thought about the trusts, one for the as yet unborn children of each child. Jocelyn had begun to set them up a fortnight after his first stroke, when he could still barely make himself understood, and then only to her—just as she had at first been the only person who believed that Jocelyn himself was still there, locked inside the mumbling wreck in the wheelchair, all his intelligence, all his pride, all his immense willpower. Mr. Bickner had come and sat with them in the study, stiff and uncertain. Jocelyn had mumbled, she had interpreted, Bickner had answered pityingly, patronisingly, speaking to her, not Jocelyn, until she had been forced to interrupt him in mid-sentence.

  “Stop. This won’t do. You must talk to my husband, not me. Look him in the eye—it’s what he expects you to do. He understands every word you’re saying, better than I do, in fact. And listen to him. You can hear what he’s saying, if you really try. Think of it like a very bad line on a telephone, but you’ve got this important message coming and you’ve just got to catch it, somehow. Please. You’ve been a very good friend to us over the years, so do please try. Now, darling, just a few words at a time, so I can help Mr. Bickner understand what you’re telling him.”

  And stuffy, unimaginative old Bickner had genuinely tried, and by his third visit was making something of it and answering Jocelyn direct, without waiting for Rachel to interpret. That had been wonderful for Jocelyn, just knowing that there was someone other than his wife and one daughter who was prepared to make the effort to reach him… Dick couldn’t be bothered, and Anne, alas, had stayed away, furious and frightened … only Flora … Did she ever think how unfair it had all been? Anne always Jocelyn’s darling. Dick Rachel’s, but Flora, decent, impulsive, conscientious Flora, simply taken for granted, given her due of parental concern and affection, but never that extra element of passionate love?

  There was a rap and creak as the drawer was pulled free. Dilys came back.

  “That’s all done, dearie, but there’s nothing I can see in behind.”

  “Put a lamp on the floor. Knothole at back on left. Put your finger in. Push left, till it clicks. Pull panel out. Package behind. Bring it.”

  “Oh, a secret compartment, like in a Victoria Holt! I knew it had to be.”

  Almost exhausted now, Rachel lay and waited, willing fresh energies to secrete themselves. She watched the rooks without attention, just letting them come and go… The panel clicked. Dilys gave a tweet of excitement. There was a scrabble as she eased the package free. It had barely fitted when Rachel had wedged it in against the back panel of the bureau… and then Dilys was by the bed again, her eyes bright, her mouth slightly open. She showed Rachel a large buff envelope with a flat rectangular shape inside it.

  “Well done,” Rachel whispered. “Box inside. Undo catches. Tilt it so I can see. Then open it. Please don’t look. Sorry.”

  “That’s all right, dearie. A secret’s a secret only till you’ve told it, I always say. I promise you I’m not bothered.”

  Dilys followed her instructions to the letter. While she studied the catches Rachel looked at the box. It was just as she remembered, about nine inches by eighteen, polished rosewood with a silver coat of arms let into the top.

  “Ready,” said Dilys, sliding brass hooks free. “You don’t think anything’s going to fall out?

  “All in its own little beds.”

  “Right, here we go then.”

  Dilys tilted the box into position, crooking it on one forearm, ostentatiously closed her eyes, and opened the lid with her other hand.

  Rachel had not seen the contents for almost forty years, since the night when the young man came, but she remembered exactly how it had looked. The purple baize lining, indented with shaped slots and pockets. All but one still held the specific item for which it had been made. The two cleaning rods, brush and plunger, spanner, screwdriver, keys, oil phial, cap-flask, mold, cartridges, slugs and a single pistol, its dark metal lightly chased, its ebony butt inlaid with the two silver initials—expensive, beautiful in its precision and its dormant power, a tool to use. The other pistol was missing. The wrong one.

  Perhaps her eyes were failing her.

  “Closer.”

  Dilys obeyed.

  No, there was no mistake. To the casual eye the pistols had seemed identical, but trying them in his hand Jocelyn had decided that one was lighter than the other, and weighing them on his postal scales had found this to be the case, though the difference was barely half an ounce. The discrepancy was evidently deliberate. Concealed in the chasing below the firing hammer, unnoticeable unless you were searching for it, was a single letter, a D for the heavier weapon and an S for the lighter one. Ladurie had been a Swiss, working in Paris. Droit. Sinistre. The lighter gun was intended for the left hand. It had been natural for Rachel to use it when she and Jocelyn had been doing target practice together.

  She had been expecting one gun to be missing, since the mysterious woman had apparently shown up with one on The Antiques Roadshow. But it was the wrong gun.

  Not hers. His.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “You can put it back.”

  Dutifully Dilys kept her eyes closed until she had the box shut and fastened. She slid it back into the envelope and carried it out of sight. Rachel listened to the rasp of it being wedged back into its hiding place, the rattle and click of the panel being fitted in, then the deeper rattle and slither of the drawer. Before Dilys had finished replacing the contents there was a knock at the door.

  She hurried across, unlocked it and opened it.

  “Not a good moment?” came Flora’s voice.

  “We’re just making ourselves comfortable, Mrs. Thomas. We’ll be three or four minutes yet.”

  (To Rachel’s ears Dilys sounded wholly unconspiratorial.)

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes then, if you think she’s up to it.”

  “I don’t know. She was a wee bit tired after Mr. Matson.”

  “All right. Give me a buzz. I’ll be in the morning room.”

  Dilys closed and locked the door and returned to the bureau. When she’d finished she came back to the bed.

  “All done,” she said. “Now, up to seeing Mrs. Thomas, are we?”

  “Yes. Want to talk to her. Tell her half an hour.”

  “And we’ll have a bit of a rest so we’re ready for her? That’s the ticket. Off with our specs, then, and a little drinkie before I settle you down? There’s a good girl.”

  Rachel smiled assent and sipped at the barley water. Slop, of course, nothing like Mrs. Moffet used to make, but welcome still. Then she lay with closed eyes and tried to think about the missing pistol. It must have been missing when she had first hidden the box. She would have been too distressed to notice the difference in weight. If it had been hers that was gone, that might have made sense. But Jocelyn’s, and badly cleaned after its last firing…

  Her mind refused to grapple to the task. From the corridor came the sound of Dilys’s voice, speaking to Flora on the in-house system. Half an hour…The pistols…

  October 1949, a fortnight before Jocelyn’s birthday. She already had his presents, a pullover knitted by Jennie Walters, a book about British India, a slashing tool for nettles, a card of trout flies. Though they were wealthy enough by most people’s standards, they didn’t go in for expensive gifts and she wasn’t looking for anything else. Petrol was still rationed, so she had come by bus to Nottingham for her dental appointment and now had over an hour to spend before she could return. There was a street near the bus station that contained not one but three junk shops, and on such occasions she used to go along there and poke around. Two years earlier she had found a Victorian half-plate camera, bartered but complete. It was now restored, and she used it with great satisfaction.

  Two of the shops made little claim to sell anything but junk, but the third had pretensions to the antiques trade. Indeed, its proprietor, a M
r. O’Fierley, dapper, elderly, chirpy, appeared to know a good deal about porcelain, in particular the simpering figurines that many people liked to keep in display cabinets. His main trade was in these, and his shop—dark, cluttered, smelling of dust and leather—was a sort of by-product, stocked with odd items which he had happened to pick up, mainly, Rachel guessed, to conceal his real interest from other, more ignorant dealers. The box had been under a pile of books beside his desk. Rachel had asked to see it.

  “Well now…” he had begun, doubtfully, and then with a twitter of amusement in his voice. “Care to guess what’s in it?”

  “I was hoping it might be lenses.”

  “Oh no. Oh no.”

  “Not just fish knives, anyway, or you wouldn’t…I give up.”

  He had opened the box with a flourish. The moment Rachel had seen the pistols she had known that she had to have them.

  “Why! Those are my husband’s initials!”

  “You don’t say. They’re duelling pistols, but it’s not my field. An unpleasant custom, really.”

  “Are they for sale? How much do you want for them?”

  “Well now. As I say, it’s not my field. In fact I’d put them aside to show to someone, but…My guess is that they’re rather good. What would you say to four hundred pounds?”

  “Oh dear. I’ll have to think.”

  “Would three hundred and seventy-five assist in your cogitation?”

  “That’s very kind. Oh, I don’t know…”

  “Shall I put them aside for you, then?”

  “Oh, yes, please! Look, I’ll be in Nottingham next week, and…Oh, I’ll give you my telephone number, just in case somebody else comes in.”

  “There’s no need. The gods send signals to us, you know. They don’t bother to tell us what they mean, but it’s unwise to ignore them. These are meant for you, my dear.”

  He was teasing, of course, and Rachel laughed as she thanked him and left. But already on the bus home, with her face still tingling with the after-effects of the anaesthetic, she had known that she would have bought the pistols if he had asked her double what he’d suggested. It wasn’t simply that she knew Jocelyn would enjoy them. He had various shotguns and sporting rifles, which on winter evenings he would sometimes fetch out and clean, not because they needed it, but for the pleasure of handling them, of deriving—though he would never have thought of it in such a way—aesthetic delight from the caress of their functional craftsmanship. But for Rachel there was more to it than that. Mr. O’Fierley had been right—the gift was meant. Suppose Jocelyn had been the woman and she the man, and suppose the woman had been forced to spend several years away, enduring hideous privations and sufferings and had then come home to him with her health and strength gone forever, but by her own willpower (and with a little help from the man) had made herself sound and whole, as Jocelyn had, then the time would now be ripe for him to give her some special token in celebration, a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, to be a seal of their love and a sign that all was well with them. Almost unconsciously she had been hoping to find or think of some such object—a new fishing rod, perhaps—but no amount of deliberate searching would have produced anything as exactly right as the pistols.

  Jocelyn had undone the wrappings and looked at the box with puzzled interest. He had opened it and stared. She had never before seen him speechless with pleasure—could not have imagined that such a thing was possible. Even now, as she lay waiting for Flora’s return, her arid tear ducts attempted to water at the memory. All day, in any vacant few moments, he had the box out and was playing with one of the pistols, loading and unloading it, aiming, feeling the balance in his hand. He carried the box up to bed as if he intended to sleep with it under his pillows, like a child, but he merely put it on his bedside table.

  Next week, going up to London for one of his committees, he left early. That evening at supper he said. “Do you mind telling me what you paid for those guns?”

  “I don’t think I’d better. It was rather a lot.”

  “Four figures?”

  “Goodness me, no!”

  “Then you’ve done well. You remember Gerald Mackie, used to be a beak at Eton? I got to know him because in my day he helped coach the Eleven. He left after the war and got himself a job at Christie’s—He’d always been interested in china and stuff, and they were glad to have him.”

  “Didn’t you introduce me to him on Fourth of June? He had a Hitler moustache.”

  “That’s right. He’s still got it. Had it before anyone took any notice of Adolf, he used to say, and he was going to hang on to it. Anyway, he couldn’t help me himself about the pistols, but he put me onto a chap in Ebury Street who deals in that sort of thing. I looked in this morning, before the committee. Wonderful shop. I could have spent a week there poking around. The fellow who runs it, Grisholm’s his name, is a rum little gnome with a club foot, but he obviously knows his stuff, and he got really excited about your pistols. They were made by a fellow called Ladurie—he was a Swiss, but he worked in Paris and Grisholm said he’d only once had another pair through his hands, nothing like as good as yours—it was just the guns, without the box or the trimmings—and they’d been knocked around a bit, and they were Ladurie’s ordinary stock-in-trade, whereas yours are obviously custom built for somebody pretty swell…Like to guess what Grisholm says he sold his for?”

  “I don’t know. A hundred pounds?”

  “Three fifty.”

  “Oh my goodness.”

  “The thing about Ladurie, Grisholm says, is that he was the first person to make a truly modern pistol. Most of the elements were around already, but he put them together, rifling, cap, powder cartridge, breech loading, firing pin—the only thing still to come was getting the slug and cap and powder all together into a single round. There were a couple of other fellows trying to do much the same thing, Frenchmen too, in the early eighteen hundreds, with the Napoleonic Wars in full swing, and they were all trying to interest the French army in taking their guns up. Ladurie’s were the best, but he didn’t get anywhere with them. His problem was that his craftsmanship was just too damn good. You can see that, can’t you—see it the moment you open the box. You’d need a workshop full of Laduries if you were ever going to turn out more than a handful of guns as good as what he made himself. So that’s why there aren’t that many around, and Grisholm’s never heard of anything this quality. Ladurie would have tested them in the workshop, but Grisholm says it looks as if they’ve never been fired since. Black powder’s desperately corrosive, of course, so you can usually tell unless they’ve been cleaned at once by someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  “Does that mean you can’t use them? I hope not. I thought we might be able to get some fresh ammunition made, somehow. Those won’t still fire, will they, after—what is it?—a hundred and fifty years?”

  “Getting on that. I don’t know. When we were in Bangalore—’38, wasn’t it?—the Quartermaster came up with some ammo which had been around since before the first war, and we tried it out. There were just two duds in a hundred rounds. That was thirty years old, of course, but a craftsman like Ladurie…at a guess I’d say about one in five of the caps might fire, and the cartridges look sound and dry. But if the set’s a museum piece, which Grisholm says it is, they’re all part of it. No, I’ll ask Purdey’s. There’s bound to be someone there who can tell me how to get fresh ammo made, and how to clean the guns right, and all that, and then we’ll have some fun together…What’s the matter, Ray? Don’t you…?”

  “No, I’d love to try, darling. It isn’t that. To tell you the truth I’m worried about Mr. O’Fierley. I feel as if I’ve swindled him out of several hundred pounds.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. You take the rough with the smooth in his line of business. He’ll have made what he regards as a decent profit already.”

  “Yes, I know, but…I mean, they’re so perfectly right, I don’t want anything spoiling it. Did I tell you, Mr. O’Fi
erley said they were meant for us?”

  “That’s poppycock. Look, next time you’re in Nottingham, why don’t you look in and tell him about it, and see what he says? It was a fair sale, so if he tries to be greedy you can just offer him a couple of hundred more and leave it at that, but if he’s decent about it then you can work it out between you.”

  “All right.”

  “And see if you can take a worthwhile picture of the coat of arms, and I’ll send it to be Joe Popplewell at the College of Heralds.”

  “It’ll be French, won’t it?”

  “Yes, of course, but he should be able to look it up.”

  The answer came back before Rachel next had reason to visit Nottingham. The arms were those of Joachim Murat, Marshal of the first Empire, later King of Naples. Ladurie had presumably made them as a presentation gift, in the hope of persuading this influential soldier to take an interest in his weapons. Jocelyn telephoned Mr. Grisholm, who told him that such a provenance perhaps doubled the already considerable value of the pistols, but Jocelyn, typically, was far less impressed by this than their having belonged to a brave and successful soldier.

  Mr. O’Fierley’s eyes had barely widened at the news.

  “I’d been wondering,” he said. “When you’ve been in the trade as long as I have…well, well, well. But you’ve no need to worry, Mrs. Matson. A sale’s a sale, and I’ve been in the other ends of deals like this often enough in my time. If I had to go back now and make it up to all the people who’ve sold me stuff when I knew what it was worth and they didn’t, I’d be bankrupt ten times over. No, I’m delighted for you, and I haven’t made a loss on them—quite the contrary.”

  “I thought you might say that,” said Rachel, “but I know I don’t want to leave it like that, so I’ve brought you these. I’ve no idea what they’re worth, if anything, but they’ve been sitting in the back of a cupboard since an aunt of mine died, and you might as well have them.”

  While she was talking she took the cardboard box out of her bag and unwrapped the little china figures, a man and a woman, idealised peasants, far too elaborately dressed for real work, he with a sickle and she with a hay rake. Mr. O’Fierley looked them over with great care.