Some Deaths Before Dying (6 page)

Jocelyn had stopped the car at the top of the drive.

“Oh dear,” she had said.

“I told you it was an eyesore,” he’d answered, and driven her on down to meet his parents.

Anne’s researchers had tended to confirm the family legend that old Eli Matson hadn’t employed an architect, but had told
his mill foreman to build him a house. The man, after all, was responsible for a couple of perfectly adequate mills. Certainly
the house had that look. There was a vernacular style, still to be seen along these valleys: severe facades of brickwork,
undecorated apart from a change of colour for the surrounds of the ranked, flat-arched windows; sweeps of narrow-eaved slate
roof, soaring stacks; proportions, achieved by eye and instinct rather than theory, that were often strongly satisfying. When
Rachel had realised how many demolitions were likely to come she had spent eighteen months systematically recording what still
stood, and years later had given her collection to the local record office.

These virtues didn’t tame easily to domesticity. Forde Place hadn’t the look of a mill in miniature, but of one somehow compacted—drop
it in water and it would then expand into a mill. Even the chimneys appeared to be lacking their upper sixty feet. The stables
too—they should have housed bale-hoppers, not traps and horses. In the early years of her marriage Rachel couldn’t have imagined
that she could bear to live here. Now she could hardly remember having wanted to live anywhere else.

Dilys turned the page. Ah. Rachel had forgotten how beautiful. Almost pure abstract. The near-dead lighting of a cloudy noon.
Course after course of dark unweatherable bricks, and the lower corner of a window. She and Jocelyn had once come round the
corner of the house and found an old builder, there to repair one of the greenhouses, actually caressing a stretch of wall.
At their footsteps he had looked up, unashamed. “Lovely work that,” he’d said. “You wouldn’t find a brickie to touch it, these
days. Stand a thousand years, that will, and a thousand after.”

Another page. The fire escape. Anne had told the story opposite, how Eli as a young man had worked in a factory that had been
gutted by fire, and workers, some of them as young as eight, had died, trapped on the upper floors. All his mills had fire
escapes, and so of course did his house, good solid cast iron, painted dark industrial green, zigzagging brazenly up the west
facade to the nursery floor. Jocelyn’s parents had buried it in Virginia creeper, whose autumn blaze clashed hideously with
the purple bricks of the house, but this had got honey fungus and died during the war. On taking over the house Jocelyn had
had the ironwork scraped down and repainted, and Rachel had realised that she actually liked the fire escape for the same
reason that she had learnt to like the whole building, that it was, emphatically and uniquely, itself.

More pages. Views and details. The stable clock; the bell in its little turret; the boiler shed for the greenhouses. Not many
interiors. The main staircase, of course, but few of the actual rooms, as they fitted in less well with Anne’s thesis, being
surprisingly light and lively, though often oddly proportioned. Jocelyn’s parents, on moving in in the nineteen twenties,
had redecorated in a nondescript but not unpleasing way; too late for arts and crafts, too early for art deco. Jocelyn, often
radical in practical matters, was deeply conservative in his tastes. If a room needed to be done up, he didn’t see that it
needed to be done differently.

Tucked in at the end of the folder was a large plain envelope.

“More photos,” said Dilys, peeking in. “Want to look, dearie? Here you are, then.”

Spares. Other interiors. The greenhouses. The laundry. The fire escape again, looking dizzingly down from above. The old nursery—this
very room. Last of all, Jocelyn at his desk in the study.

“You’re supposed to be taking pictures of the house, aren’t you? You don’t want people in them.”

“I need a focal point.”

(Liar. She wanted a picture of him at his desk. It would be her fee for taking all this trouble for his Anne.)

“Oh, if you must.”

“You’re going to have to sit still when I tell you. It’ll be a long exposure because I don’t want to bring a lot of lights
in. That’s why the sitters in some of those old photographs look as if they’d been stuffed.”

“I can look stuffed as well as any man I know.”

And, of course, he’d stayed as still as a tree stump while she counted the thirty seconds. You could see every wisp of his
sparse, sandy hair. His hand, poised above the letter he was writing, had not quivered. His head was bent into the soft glow
of the lamp, the rest of his body in shadow. Glow and shadow patterned the room. She had waited till the evening, because
this was the hour she had wished to celebrate. Though there were more obviously comfortable rooms in the house, this was where
they always sat when alone, a habit begun in the feebleness and chill of his homecoming, because coal had still been rationed
and the study was simpler to make snug than anywhere else. She had moved two easy chairs in, and a worktable large enough
for her to spread her photographs on. The result was a clutter, but he hadn’t once grumbled, even in jest, about her invasion
of so male a sanctum. Though by his second winter Jocelyn had regained his robust indifference to temperature, and then fuel
had become available and a modern oil-fired boiler had been installed, they had without any discussion stayed on here. As
with so many things, they had grown to the shape of their discomforts, and would for a while have felt awkward anywhere else.

Still, it was a strange room to have chosen, a kind of left-over space, all its proportions dictated by whatever lay on the
other side of its walls. The chunk out of the corner opposite the door was the back stairs, whose existence also meant that
there was only one window, looking out onto the kitchen yard. The fireplace was off centre in the left-hand wall, because
the position of the flue was dictated by the dining room fireplace beyond. The fireplace wasn’t visible in the photograph,
but part of the window was, and the intrusion of the back stairs.

Rachel gazed at the picture. It was exactly as she had remembered, unsurprisingly, as it had stood on her worktable from the
day she developed it until the morning after Jocelyn’s death, when she had taken it from its frame and put it back here. She
had not then expected ever to want to look at it again. It was, in its way just as expressive of Jocelyn’s nature as the one
of him with the Rover, just as full of the instant, but at the same time seeming to throb faintly with the movement of the
web of time around it, invisible threads linking instant to instant, the whole life, the whole memory of that life, right
up to this instant now in which she was looking at the photograph after an interval of almost forty years.

It told her nothing that she did not already know. Half the box was clearly visible by the light of the desk lamp on the small
table at Jocelyn’s right elbow. The further half was in shadow.

“Thank you. Dilys,” she whispered. “Copy it for your niece. Copier in office.”

“Lovely,” said Dilys. “I’m not that much of a writer, you see, and I feel stupid sending her just a page or two back, so it’ll
be just what I want. Now, I’ll change our specs, shall I, and see what’s on the telly? Oh, Thursday—it’ll be that cooking
programme you liked that last time.”

“All right.”

Dilys swung the bed to face the television, a large screen, mounted well up on the further wall, so that Rachel could watch
it more easily. The cooking programme would do, anything would do that would distract her from thought and memory. She would
have to face it sometime, sometime soon but not now, she was too tired, too disturbed…

It wasn’t enough. As Dilys said, she usually enjoyed cooking programmes, despite the tendency of the presenters to thrust
their personalities, always so much less pleasing than they seemed to imagine, at the viewer. Rachel herself had never been
much of a cook—she had had no need—but she enjoyed watching the process, and the imagined taste seemed to help her to salivate,
moistening her mouth for a while. But not today.

Deliberately she had buried patches of memory, though not in the manner she had read about, where the person in question is
no longer superficially aware that some hideous event took place. She had always known, just as she had known where she had
hidden the pistol box and put the picture of Jocelyn at his desk. At any time in the past forty years she could, if she had
chosen, have related in outline most of what had happened on the night that the young man came, but she had never chosen,
never intentionally recalled any part of it. Sometimes, unwilled, a fragment would insinuate itself, but as soon as she was
aware of it she would push it away, muttering angrily to herself about something irrelevant, until she could force herself
to concentrate on the here and now.

But today she lacked the willpower to do that. She would watch the programme for a little, lapse into a snatch of unwanted
recall, drag herself clear, watch, and lapse again. Senility must be like this, she thought. Please God may my stupid body
go first.

“We’re still tired aren’t we?” said Dilys as the programme ended. “We must really have overdone things today.”

Rachel attempted a “yes” smile, but her lips seemed not to respond and her mouth was too dry for speech. Dilys leaned over
the bed, all blur, but her voice revealed her anxiety.

“Worse than that, is it, dearie? Something’s really bothering us. Tsk, tsk. But you’d tell Dilys, wouldn’t you, if there’s
anything I can do.”

Rachel felt something happen, an actual physical event taking place in the citadel of her mind, a mine sprung, a crack opening
in a rampart. To her shame and anger she was weeping again, those strange dry tears, the squeezings from an almost juiceless
citrus.

“Jocelyn’s pistol,” she heard her lips whisper. “She’s got Jocelyn’s pistol.”

JENNY

J
enny carried the portable phone round the house as she bustled to be ready to leave. The moment it beeped she pressed the
button and said “Hi,”

“Mrs. Pilcher?” said a man’s voice—the wrong man.

“Sorry. I can’t talk now. I’ve got a call coming. And if you’re selling something, no thanks. Bye.”

In a few seconds the handset beeped again. This time she answered more cautiously.

“Hello.”

“Mrs. Pilcher. This is important—it’s about your pistol—“

“It’s not mine, and it’s not for sale. Goodbye.”

Brusquely she prodded the buttons. How the hell…? They’d promised the thing was absolutely confidential, no addresses passed
on, no telephone numbers, not even names. And he was bound to try again. Yes.

“Hello.”

“That doesn’t sound very welcoming.”

“Oh, hi, darling, thank God it’s you. I’m being persecuted by some dimwit. How’s it going?”

“Dire. We thought we’d got the breakthrough last session, I told you? Now they’ve got back to Alma-Ata overnight and been
told to try and squeeze us some more.”

“I want them dead. How long is this going on?”

“You aren’t going to like this. The Kazakhs came in all smiles this morning and announced that they’re postponing the auction,
so we’ve got a new deadline. Thursday.”

“I can’t stand it. I won’t stand it. I’m coming over for the weekend. I’ll get on the Chunnel tonight somehow…”

“Oh, God! I wish you could.”

“Champs-Elysces, here I come.”

“No use, darling. We’ve been here four days and I’ve barely set foot out of the hotel. I haven’t been in a real restaurant,
even. Billy loathes Paris…”

“He probably thinks the French don’t take him seriously. He wouldn’t like that.”

“Right. We’re only here because the Kazakhs wanted a go at the fleshpots, but if any of us isn’t under his eye Billy decides
we’re hatching something up, so we all eat together in the hotel and then sit around in his suite all night pretending to
go over the figures again…”

“You must get to bed sometimes.”

“Three o’clock, this morning.”

“I’ll be waiting for you. In a terrific Paris nightie.”

“Mmmmmh…I could chuck the job up, I suppose…I’m tempted…”

She could hear that he meant it, and it wasn’t fair on him. Working for Billy Cochrane was already frustrating enough.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll let you off the hook. Next time you’re taking a doctor’s certificate with you and you can show
it to bloody Billy and tell him that sexual frustration is bad for your mathematical abilities and it’ll cost the company
billions if you get your sums wrong.”

“I’ll try it if I get the chance. Look, what about next weekend? I could book us into a real hotel, not this plastic—“

“It’s Barbara’s wedding. Besides, it’s you I want, not Paris. Got that? You.”

“Mutual. Bloody hell…”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“All right. What kind of a dimwit? Double glazing?”

“No, I’m afraid it was about Uncle Albert’s pistol.”

“I thought we’d got away with that. Some kind of dealer, I suppose. Didn’t they tell you they kept everything confidential?
How did he get hold of you?”

“I’ve no idea. He didn’t sound like a dealer, somehow. If he calls again, I’ll tell him to piss off. Don’t worry. Provided
Uncle Albert himself didn’t see the programme. Anyway, don’t let’s waste time on that now. Are you all right? You don’t sound—“

“I’m dog tired but still functioning. The breakouts are the worst. Billy keeps us at it trying to guess what the Kazakhs are
up to, so we explore all the blind alleys only he can’t see they’re blind alleys until he’s taken us down them…”

“Your problem is you’re too damn quick.”

“Maybe, but it’s no use telling him in advance, because it makes it look as if I thought the lot of them were dead thick,
but I’ve got to keep listening in case Billy swings on me suddenly and says ‘How does that work out, Jeff?’ and I’ve got thirty
seconds flat to come up with the answer. How’s things with you though?”