Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

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.”