Some Deaths Before Dying (11 page)

Dilys didn’t have any doubts about finding the address list. Mrs. Matson knew where every file was, as well as every album.
And yes, the Cambi Road file was exactly where she’d said. The list wasn’t in it.

Dilys checked the files on either side in case Mrs. Thomas had put it into the wrong one, but it wasn’t there either. She
went back and reported her failure.

“Oh…but Flora…”

“Now don’t you go getting upset, dearie. They’ll be having breakfast too, won’t they? I’ll look in and ask Mrs. Thomas, shall
I? Perhaps she’s borrowed it for something.”

“Please.”

Dilys left smiling confidently, but shook her head as soon as she was clear of the room. This sort of thing wouldn’t do. She’d
long ago learnt that the most important part of keeping her patients perky wasn’t any of the obvious things like making them
as comfortable as poss, or seeing their food was what they liked, or jollying them along; it was allowing them to feel that
they still had some control over their lives and their surroundings. Control is life, because it’s freedom. From the prison
of her inert body Mrs. Matson could still reach out and have her say over what mattered to her. The files and photographs
were specially important because she was the only one who knew her way around them and what they meant. Even when the list
was found she would be upset, still, that it had not been in its place. We can’t have that, Dilys thought.

She was still tutting to herself when she reached the stairwell. She paused, and looked at it with new eyes. It was so odd,
and at the same time somehow familiar, though she had never quite been able to lay her finger on what the “somehow” consisted
in. The well itself was a square space, the area of a large room, running the full height of the house, with a glass roof
overhead. At each floor there was a sort of balustraded balcony the whole way round, with rooms and corridors opening off
it. The oddness consisted in the staircase itself. Dilys had worked in large houses, and some of them had a central hallway
and stairs something like this, but in those cases the stairs had been long, handsome flights, there to be looked at as much
as walked on. These were a kind of shaft made of wooden pillars and rails, like the balustrades of the balconies, with short
flights running down through a series of right angles to the floor below. They looked as if they should have had a lift going
up the middle of them, or had been made to fit into a square turret, only here they were standing right out in the open, like
a scaffold tower or something. And yet the really funny thing about them was that they didn’t look wrong, they looked right.

And now, this morning, Dilys knew why, because there’d been a photograph of them in the album Miss Anne had done for her schoolwork,
and opposite a sketch she’d made of some iron stairs at a mill somewhere, and they were just the same. Dilys even understood
why they had seemed familiar, because she’d worked in old Victorian hospitals where there’d been courtyards like the stairwell,
with iron balconies round them, and a fire escape running down, the way these stairs did.

It was surprising, she thought, as she started down them, how pleased it made you feel when things suddenly made sense when
they hadn’t a little before, even when they didn’t matter to you a bit, like the whys and wherefores of this staircase didn’t.
And when they did matter, my! That was why Mrs. Matson was so upset about the business about whatever it was in the box—a
pistol, she’d let out at the end, one of Colonel Matson’s, and it had something to do with him being a Jap POW, and it hadn’t
been there, by the sound of it, and that dratted list was missing too…It wasn’t just that they weren’t where they should have
been, it was that it didn’t make sense… Let’s hope Mrs. Thomas knew about the list, at least…

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas breakfasted in the morning room, which faced east and so was full of thin, spring sunshine. There was
shiny silver and mahogany, and white table napkins, and smells of coffee and bacon, as well as last year’s lavender and this
year’s hyacinths, not shop-bought but raised in batches in one of the greenhouses by Mr. Worple, a dozen at a time so there’d
be a succession of them for the house. The wealth of Dilys’s different employers made no difference to her. If anything she
respected those who needed to skimp to afford her more than those who could do so and barely notice, but what really mattered
to her was their attitude to her patient, as merely a problem to which she was the solution, or as a real person with a right
to the best that could be done. Anyway, she liked the Thomases.

Now Mr. Thomas looked up as she entered, rose a polite inch from his chair, saying, “Good morning, Dilys,” as he did so, sat
back and returned to the letter he’d been reading. Mrs. Thomas laid hers aside.

“Trouble?” she asked.

Dilys explained.

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Thomas, “about the end of January it must have been, in that cold snap, because I was coming up
to tell her about Annie Pinkerton, that’s an old friend of hers, we always used to call her Aunt Pincushion, catching the
burglar. He was trying to steal the lead cupid from the goldfish pond under her window. There were two of them, burglars,
not cupids, but she only caught one, and they’d put a ladder across the pool to get at the cupid and Pincushion was tottering
off to the loo in the middle of the night and she saw them, it had snowed, you see, and there was a moon so it was bright
as day so she saw them quite plainly, and she flung up the window and threw—Tommy Baring says it was a bust of Shelley, but
it wasn’t, it was just the dictionary she keeps by the loo for the crossword—it was quite brave of her, really, seeing she’s
alone in the house—or stupid, I suppose, depending how you look at it—but they’d got the cupid and were almost off the ladder
when she yelled and they tried to hurry and one of them slipped on the ice and the other one dropped the cupid on his leg
and broke it and he was still there when the police came, and of course Pincushion had gone out and covered him with a rug
so he didn’t die of hypothermia.”

“So it was January,” said Mr. Thomas, not looking up from his letter.

“That’s right, because of the snow,” said Mrs. Thomas. “I wonder what’s happened to it. I know I put it in the file and threw
the old one out.”

“I thought perhaps you or Mr. Thomas …”

“Not me. You haven’t been at Ma’s files for anything, have you, Jack? I can’t think who else. Anyway, I’ve got to take Jack
to the station because his car’s in for a service, but I’ll come and have a good hunt for the thing as soon as I’m back. I’ll
be about forty minutes and here’s something to take her mind off it while you’re waiting. You know how to work the video,
don’t you? I don’t know where the bit about Da’s pistols comes, so you’ll have to play it right through …”

“It’s a videotape, dearie. Mrs. Thomas said there was something in it you wanted to see, but we’re going to have to play it
right through.”

Carefully Dilys didn’t mention the pistols, though Mrs. Thomas had spoken as if she didn’t think there was anything secret
about them. No point in worrying Mrs. Matson about things like that. The tense look on the old face eased a little.

“Breakfast first, shall we?” Dilys coaxed.

“Please.”

It was kedgeree, one of Mrs. Matson’s favourites, and usually she was an excellent eater, concentrating on her food to get
all the enjoyment from it that she could, and on her difficult days really working to swallow it. This morning she was at
first distracted and after a few spoonfuls closed her lips and waited for Dilys to withdraw the spoon.

“The tape,” she whispered. “Set it up, then wait for Flora. Don’t go away. You watch too.”

“Just as you like, dearie, but we’ll finish our breakfast first, shall we? Forty minutes, Mrs. Thomas says, and she’s always
longer.”

Obediently Mrs. Matson opened her mouth and did as she was told, but Dilys could sense the inner impatience, so unlike her
usual steadfast acceptance of all that she could no longer command, and it didn’t seem to ease until the tape was in place
and running, just to check, and the title and credits of
The Antiques Roadshow
appeared on the screen. Oh, that, Dilys thought. A lot more interesting than some, anyway. She busied herself with her morning
chores until Mrs. Thomas knocked and came bustling in, already voluble.

“…queue from here to eternity at the Post Office. Well, Ma, what do you make of it? Wasn’t that quick? Only three days since
I rang Biddy to ask. Is it really one of Da’s pistols?”

“We’ve only just finished our breakfast,” said Dilys. “We were waiting for you.”

“Well, here I am, all eager. Can you see, Ma? Sure those are her right specs, Dilys? Isn’t this perfectly fascinating?”

Dilys finished adjusting Mrs. Matson’s pillows, put her middle distance spectacles in place, switched on TV and video, started
the tape, and settled into the chair that she had put ready so that she could both watch the programme and keep an eye on
Mrs. Matson. She knew
The Antiques Roadshow
well. Some of her patients had liked to watch it and then reminisce about knickknacks they had once owned, which would have
been just as valuable as the ones on the show if they hadn’t had to be mended after some parlourmaid had knocked them off
the whatnot. The presenter was barely into his usual smooth piece about the privilege of doing the show in this particular
town and building when Mrs. Thomas said, “Maidstone? Stop the tape, Dilys. Dick told me Salisbury, not Maidstone. What did
he tell you, Ma?”

“Vaguer. Somewhere like Salisbury.”

“But Salisbury’s nothing like Maidstone.”

“No.”

“What’s he up to? Something, as usual. Carry on Dilys.”

The programme got into its customary stride, a painting of a lot of sick-looking cows, a big brass cobra made into a lamp,
a horrid-looking blunderbuss—”Keep an eye open for that chap,” said Mrs. Thomas. “He’ll be the guns expert.”—some very ordinary-looking
teacups which the expert said were wonderful and worth thousands of pounds and the lady who’d brought them in kissed the gentleman
who was with her and everyone laughed, and some chairs and another picture and a toy train and then a pair of hands in close-up
holding an old pistol, the sort that highwaymen used in films to make the people in the coach stand and deliver…

“That’s it, Ma. Look, that’s one of Da’s Laduries. It’s got to be. There’s the initials. How on earth did she get hold of
it? Has anyone ever seen her before? Stop the tape, Dilys. Rewind. Here, I’ll do it.”

Mrs. Thomas was too excited to notice that Dilys was perfectly capable of managing for herself, but she handed the remote
across without resentment. The rapid images blurred and bounced with the rewind, stilled onto the toy train, blurred again,
and settled.

“…a very interesting gun, really beautiful. It’s one of a presentation pair, of course—you don’t have the other one?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, it would have come in a box with…”

More flickers, and then the picture froze to show a young woman. The camera had been on her only for the instant of her answer.
She had, Dilys, thought, a sort of in-between look, dark hair, small nose and mouth, good skin, but she wasn’t exactly pretty.
Not plain either, mind you. Neat, a bit stiff…her voice hadn’t been bored or excited. It had just answered the question, not
letting you know anything else about her.

“Never seen her in my life,” said Mrs. Thomas. “Doesn’t remind me of anyone either. What about you, Ma? No? All right, on
we go.”

“Well, it would have come in a box as one of a pair, with its own tools and ammunition—I’ll be coming to that in a moment.
Now there are several reasons why this is a very interesting gun. First, it is made by René Ladurie—See here, in the chasing
under the butt, his initials. Laduries are extremely rare. This is the first I have ever had in my hands, and I have to say
it’s a thrilling moment for me. What’s more, I can tell you here and now that this is a genuine Ladurie, made with his own
hands, because of the sheer quality of the workmanship. There were three great gunsmiths working in Paris at the beginning
of the last century, Pauly and Pottet and Ladurie, and it’s generally agreed that Ladurie was the best of them. They were
all after the same thing, which was a gun you could load and fire quickly and accurately, and be sure it would go off. Just
imagine, before that you were in a battle and your life depended on this contraption…”

The expert was a small, eager, quick-talking man, not old but almost bald, the sort who tells you everything you could possibly
want to know about a subject and a lot more that you don’t. He explained, acting it all out, about using an old-fashioned
gun, and then about what an improvement this pistol was. The young woman listened attentively but without any of his excitement,
as if he’d been a salesman telling her about his wonderful dishwasher.

“…you needed to do was lift this catch here, open the breech, so, and … oh dear, black powder is terribly corrosive. At some
point somebody has fired this and then left it, maybe two or three days, before cleaning it, but…well, we must get on. Now
the third point about this gun is these initials, here. This gun was evidently made for somebody and judging by the care Ladurie
put into it, it could well have been someone important. If you could find out who that was, and if it were a person of some
historical interest, well … so I expect you’d like to know what it’s worth. I’ll start at the top end. Suppose you had the
other gun and the box and the fittings and suppose—I’ll be fanciful for a moment—you could prove that it was made for one
of Napoleon’s Marshals—there was Massena, wasn’t there, and Murat, and who was that other chap? … then we’re talking about
something over forty thousand pounds. Now you mustn’t get too excited …”

(The young woman seemed in no danger of this.)

“… we aren’t anywhere near that. With only the one gun, and the pitting in the firing mechanism, and no box and fittings,
well, it’s still a Ladurie, and an important one. I’d say between three and four thousand.”