Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Well, among the stuff on Trevor’s desk was this pathetic letter from the old boy, eight pages long. He’d had to dictate it, of course, but it was totally coherent, as if he’d worked it up from notes on a PC. I mean he’d been brooding, of course, but it wasn’t at all crazy. When he got to the docket he didn’t just list what was in it, he tried to show how clear his memory was, so he told Trevor about the day he’d brought the papers in and gone through them with him, what the weather was like, and what kind of biscuits Millie had brought with the coffee and so on. And a telephone call Trevor had had to make about a butcher’s business someone was buying, and the name of the client and what Trevor had said to him. There was a whole page of that.

“Trevor had written a draft answer, fobbing him off, of course, saying what a shame it was and how he understood the old boy’s disappointment but there wasn’t anything more to be done. Just generalities. The only actual point he answered was to insist that a thorough search had been made for the docket and he was quite certain that we hadn’t got it, and what’s more that we’d never had it. He had rephrased that bit a couple of times.

“Now, I’d actually met Mr. McNair, and I knew Trevor, so if Mr. McNair said one thing and Trevor said another I was pretty sure who was right. And why just that one point? There were plenty of others he could have said something about. I don’t believe he’d read the whole letter. I think he just skimmed it, and stuck on that one because it was bothering him. I couldn’t possibly have done a full file search—it would take weeks and in any case Millie’s far too possessive of Trevor’s stuff—but I waited till she was at lunch and went and got out the file about the butcher’s business. The docket was in it. Please register amazement.”

“Registered. That’s bloody awkward for you. What’s Jerry going to say?”

“I took it to him yesterday afternoon. He cancelled all his appointments and sent for the files. So he’s taking it seriously, but my bet is that in the end he’s going to ask me to keep quiet about it.”

“I thought Jerry was all right.”

“Oh, I like him. And he’s certainly everyday all right, if you see what I mean. Decent, but…look, if we come clean about this, we’re dead. It’s a partnership, not a limited company, so ultimately the partners are liable.”

“You must be insured.”

“Yes, of course, we have to be. There’s a limit, though I don’t know how much in our case. A few million, I should think.”

“That would pay for a fun fair, wouldn’t it?”

“I should think so, but it isn’t just Mr. McNair’s losses we’d be in for. His insurance company had to pay out for the deaths and injuries—I told you there were whacking damages—and they could come after us because if we’d won it would have been the manufacturer who’d have been liable. That’d take us well beyond our insurance limit.”

“So how’s Jerry going to put it to you?”

“I expect he’ll—”

The telephone rang. Jeff answered.

“No. I’m back,” he said. “Our affairs came to a crashing halt. You can certainly say that…I’ll hand you over.”

“Jerry,” he mouthed as he passed the handset across. Jenny felt her heart contract but spoke unflurriedly, her outer persona closing automatically around her inward self.

“Hello.”

“I gather you’ve got him back early. You’ll have been missing him.”

“To put it mildly.”

“So you won’t be too keen on having a bit of lunch with me tomorrow.”

“Well…”

“I need a word with you. Away from the office, for preference. Thing is, it’s about that stuff you dug up yesterday afternoon. We’re going to have to sort something out, but the fewer people who are involved at this stage the better all round. You follow?”

“Yes, of course. Hold on a moment.”

She put a hand over the mouthpiece.

“He wants me to have lunch with him tomorrow. Can you bear it?”

“Better get it over.”

“How did it go?”

“Take me somewhere where nobody can hear me if I scream. I mean that. Literally. Please.”

He thought for a moment.

“Do you mind getting wet?”

“No.”

They drove in silence. The rain sluiced down. He pulled in at the entrance to a forestry plantation.

“All right if I came along?”

“If you want to.”

She didn’t wait for him. The skirt of her Sunday-lunch-with-the-boss suit constrained her to a stupid mincing run along the squelching track. A shoe was sucked off, but she didn’t stop. The track curved out of sight from the road. Another track crossed it. She slowed to a walk. Leafless branches dripped onto dead and sodden bracken. This was the place.

Where the four ways met she stopped, raised her arms like a priestess at a shrine, summoned Norma into being and let her rip, waiting for each scream to fade into the drenched, indifferent trees before she screamed again. Her throat was really painful before Sister Jenny told her that that was enough.

Jeff was waiting a few paces back, with the big umbrella up and her shoe in his other hand. She took his arm and they walked down to the car and drove home, still in silence, with the heater full up. He made her a linctus with honey, scotch and lemon, and then joined her in the shower. They went to bed again and forgot about everything but each other. After awhile she fell asleep, waking several hours later to find him still beside her, reading a Tom Clancy with the same rapid but exact attention that he would have given to an oil policy analysis.

“How’s the throat?”

“Better. Thanks, Jeff.”

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Nor did I. It was a sort of experiment. I mean I hadn’t tried using her like that before, not since I was a kid.”

“Who?”

“Norma. You don’t know about Norma.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I want to. I didn’t before, because I thought I’d given her up, but yesterday, after you telephoned…”

She told him slowly, whispering to spare her throat, and absent-mindedly fondling his forearm as she talked.

“…of course a lot of little girls have screaming fits,” she said at one point. “But I started again after Dad walked out, and Mummy started drinking, and that meant I had to do stuff for Grandad because she was snorting on the sofa. I would have been about nine.”

“Didn’t Sue help?”

“She did it for a bit but then something happened. No one told me what, but she was very upset and I heard Mum screeching at him later. After that Sue wouldn’t go near him and Mum told me I’d got to do it. She gave me a wooden ruler and told me if he tried anything I must hit him across the knuckles with it. I hadn’t any idea what she was talking about, but she must have said something—I don’t remember what—something about him being as good as dead, or he should’ve been dead by now—something like that—but I got it into my head that the horrible old man actually was dead, only…I’m all right, darling, I want to tell you…just…He had a sort of chuckle…oh, God, this dead thing…only he wasn’t…Listen, before that, when he was in hospital and Mummy took us to visit him, there was this nurse, Sister Somebody, in her blue uniform and her starched pinny and cap, and a wide belt with a big silver buckle, all clean and strong and alive among the dirty, smelly, falling-to-bits old horrors in the beds, and they couldn’t touch her, they couldn’t infect her with their mess and nastiness because her uniform was sort of magic…Anyway, that’s how I invented Sister Jenny, and I gave her an imaginary uniform and while I was wearing it in my head he couldn’t do anything to me, he couldn’t touch me, he couldn’t come and get me and make me dead like him…Do you understand, darling?”