Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

Jenny hesitated. Presumably once again Mr. Matson was telling her something very like the truth. She couldn’t imagine how else he might have made the connection, or known what he appeared to about Uncle Albert, but in the end both professional habit and her own continuing distrust won out.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t even tell you that, until I’ve talked to my husband. He told me his possession of the pistol was confidential and I’m not in a position to decide for myself what’s relevant to that and what isn’t.”

“Lawyers, I love ’em,” said Mr. Matson, shaking his head. “You’re not in court now, Mrs. Pilcher. You’ve told me, and you know you have. But you talk to your man and tell him this. What was it the fellow on the telly said the pistol was worth, as it stood? Three or four thou, wasn’t it? Let’s split the difference, call it three-five. We’ll make a date and I’ll show up with the other gun in its box, with all the trimmings and a copy of Dad’s will—you couldn’t ask for clearer proof it’s mine than that—and I’ll hand over three thousand five hundred in cash for the one he’s got, no questions asked about how he came by it. Now that’s a very fair offer, he couldn’t ask for a better, and Sergeant Fred could do with the money, I dare say—it’s no joke what it costs looking after an old buffer like that—I don’t like to think about what my old ma’s costing us in nursing. When is your man back? Thursday, you said. We’ll give him another week to think about it, so if I haven’t heard from him by the end of the month, I’ll be coming after him. Right?”

Jenny finished her glass and put it down. It hadn’t given her anything like the satisfaction of the first one.

“I’ll tell my husband what you’ve said,” she said, rising. “After that it’s up to him. It won’t be any use getting in touch with me, so please don’t come again without first checking that he’s in and is willing to see you. You understand?”

“Only too well, my dear. It’s none of your business, and you want no part of it, and nor would I if I were in your shoes, so I don’t blame you. Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, and thank you for sparing the time. Good night, Mrs. Pilcher, and give my regards to Sergeant Fred next time you see him.”

3

When she was alone in the house, especially at night, Jenny kept the CD player turned up as far as she thought the neighbours could stand. She wasn’t musical—wouldn’t even have described herself as a music-lover—but the sound provided a sort of magical companionship, a force field that kept at bay the little insinuating monsters of silence and darkness. Human voices were more potent than instruments, and foreign languages better to work to because the words were mere noise, without intrusive meanings. She had no strong feelings about styles or composers. Handel was as good as Wagner, but it happened to be Verdi that evening, with the Anvil Chorus going full blast, so she never heard the key in the lock or the movement of the door, and the first she knew was when the clamour suddenly muted and Jeff’s voice said “Hi.”

Her whole body jerked with the bounce of shock. She shoved the laptop aside, staggered to her feet, and round the sofa and into his arms. Behind her eyelids, as they kissed, pulsed a dark red rectangle, the counterimage of the screen she had been staring at.

“Why aren’t you holding me properly?” she mumbled.

He pushed her away, brought his other arm out from behind his back and gave her gift-wrapped box.

“Paris nightie,” he said. “I don’t know how terrific it is. I just had time to grab it out of a shop on my way to the station. You’re cold.”

“I’ve been working. What’s the time?”

“Half past one.”

“What’s happened? You said…”

“I’ve lost my job.”

“Great! So’ve I—or I’m just going to. Let’s go and celebrate. Have you had anything to eat?”

“Later.”

They got up and made scrambled eggs at five in the morning, then went back to bed till noon.

“I’m not sure Billy didn’t push me into it on purpose,” he said. “It was yesterday morning, and we were having the usual sort-out over breakfast, and Simon asked about the deadline—he’s got a family holiday booked—and Billy shrugged and said, ‘If I’ve got to stretch it again. I’ll stretch it. I trust you’ve all got that.’ And then—this is what makes me think he saw the chance to set one of us up—not necessarily me—it was the way he did it, looking slowly round the table, forcing us to answer in turn. Anyway, people started mumbling things like ‘I suppose so,’ except for creeps like Neil who tried to sound all eager to carry on for another month—that’s what pushed me into it—Neil—because I was next and I came out with what we’d just been talking about, you and me—you coming over to Paris and so on. I gave Billy plenty of slack to treat it as a joke, but he didn’t. He gave me that stare of his and said, ‘If that’s your line. I don’t want you on my team.’ And I said. ‘That’s my line, Billy.’ and picked up my stuff and walked out.

“I don’t know whether he’d expected me to back down, but I don’t think he cared. It’s not that I’m irreplaceable, but I really know the stuff, and without me they’d be stuck for—oh, call it a fortnight—and there’s no way the Kazakhs are going to wait that long.

“That suits Billy fine. The deal was on the rocks already, and it was Billy who put it there, and he knew it. Sir Vidal set it up in the first place, remember—it’s his baby—so walking out the way I did gives Billy the chance to put someone else’s head on the block.

“I worked that out on the train. All I thought at the time was that he was trying to show me, publicly, that I belonged to him, body and soul, and I wasn’t having it. I’m sorry darling.”

“They can’t just fire you for walking out under stress. It would be constructive dismissal, at the very least. If you were my client…”

“That’s not how it will look in Billy’s report, and he carries a lot of clout. Our industrial relations setup is palaeolithic.”

“I’m rubbing my hands. Just the sort of defense client I like. Seriously, darling, they can’t fire you, not without whopping compensation. How long have you been with them? It can’t be worth it. They know you’re good—OK, it’ll be a black mark on your CV…”

“Billy will still be there.”

“You won’t be working for him.”

“He’ll be out to get me, all the same. I don’t mean just casually. He’ll make a point of it. Your turn.”

“My… Oh, well…I haven’t actually walked out yet, but…Did I tell you about Trevor having to be rushed into hospital and Jerry asking me to clear up anything on his desk I could deal with, and pass on anything I couldn’t to him? It was a pretty good mess—surprise, surprise—though Millie usually keeps him on the rails. It makes me sick. He takes home four times what she does because he’s a partner and she’s just a secretary. But even so there was quite a bit of stuff—contracts he should have sent on to clients weeks ago and he obviously hadn’t even read yet, that sort of thing—and then yesterday morning I found a letter from a client about a case we’d lost last year. I think I told you—the one about the fun fair ride. I did a bit of work on it but then I went and married someone and by the time I was back from the honeymoon the case had come up and we’d lost it. I was a bit surprised, but I gathered our QC had made a hash of it and that was that.”

“The one about the ride that collapsed and a couple of kids got killed?”

“That’s right, and eleven others injured. It was big stuff, in the papers, whacking damages. We were acting for the fairground owner. He was insured, but there was a clause in the contract which effectively meant that if the fairground owner was at fault then he was liable for the first five hundred thousand. It all turned on a maintenance docket. Our client’s case was that the fault was caused by an unsatisfactory repair by the original manufacturers, which our client couldn’t have known about. The manufacturers said that the ride hadn’t been properly maintained. The crucial docket was missing. The fairground owner was a blind old man called Colin McNair. He had this amazing memory. He could, literally, reel off the dates and details of the maintenance of every machine in his fair for the last three years. He swore the maintenance had been done, and the checks made, and the docket had been among the papers he’d provided, but it wasn’t, and the inference was that the reason it was missing was that the maintenance had never been done. So we lost, and Mr. McNair went bankrupt.