Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

A few pages later the tissue came up sticking to the left hand page. Opposite it was a picture of Colonel Matson out on the lawn with the big cedar beyond him. He had his right arm up and was taking aim with a pistol—no, he was actually firing, because you could see the puff of smoke against the dark of the cedar…

“Stop,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Other page.”

The tissue was sticking to something, four spots of old gum which had once held a photograph in place. At the bottom of the page it said “The Laduries. October 1949.”

“Dick,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Let you in. Stayed out there. He took it. And the list.”

JENNY

“For heaven’s sake! Not that tie with that shirt! Here, this one.”

(Left to himself, even when not in a hurry, Jeff would have dressed in whatever was out—yesterday’s clothes or something, perhaps still slightly damp off the bathroom clothesline—rather than go to the trouble of opening a drawer and choosing. His ensembles tended therefore towards the random.)

“And stop worrying. I’ll be all right. He won’t have a clue who I am, anyway.”

“I was thinking if you took the bloody thing with you, it might jog his memory. Look. Take it, see how it goes, and if it looks—”

“Jeff! Stop it! Your lace-up shoes, not those horrible brown things. And your good coat. You’ve got three minutes. I’m doing your thermos.”

He came down the stairs like a falling boulder. She had the door open, locked it behind him and ran for the car. All the way to the station he rabbitted on about Uncle Albert, but she was too busy making time through traffic to pay attention. They reached the station with forty-five seconds to spare. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see Sister Morris first. I’ll take the gun and show him if I think it’ll help. I’ll cope , right? And this evening you’ll come home and tell me that Sir Vidal has ordered Billy’s public disembowelment. Kiss me.”

He did, and loped away. She watched him out of sight, and drove home to make herself breakfast feeling weirdly unresentful that a tycoon’s whim should have cost them one of these free days together.

* * *

Marlings Retirement Home had originally been built, apparently, by a successful tea planter when he had returned to England with his family just before the First World War. Jenny was unsystematically interested in that kind of thing. She had never been to India, but she felt she might have guessed about the house—wide-eaved, with a deep verandah of dark brown wood, occupying the crest of a low ridge, with dense rhododendrons all along the drive, and behind them droop-branched conifers that might as well have been deodars but presumably weren’t. Anyway, it didn’t feel as if it really belonged in England. Perhaps it wouldn’t have felt right in India either, because it didn’t actually belong anywhere. This made it a bit depressing for the kind of place it now was, full of people sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting, the way one does in airports when one’s flight’s delayed. There’s nothing to do here and nowhere else to go.

Sister Morris was a heavy, dark-skinned woman with a faintly scowling look which Jeff said didn’t mean anything.

“I was hoping to see Mr. Pilcher,” she said. “Thing is, we’ve had a bit of bother about Albert. There was a gentleman came a couple of days back—no, I’m a liar, Friday it would’ve been—said he thought he’d look in seeing he was passing so close. Matson, he said his name was, and his dad had been in the war with Albert. Be that as may be, he sounded all right, but when I told Albert he pulled me up sharp. It was Colonel Matson, he told me, and anyway he was dead and Albert knew that ’cause he’d been to the funeral. I told him, no, that must’ve been this Mr. Matson’s father, and Albert went all stubborn the way he does, and said he didn’t want to see him, but I persuaded him. They get things into their heads, you know, but seeing the gentleman had come all this way, from Devon, he told me…

“Turned out Albert was right and I was wrong, ’cause I’d not left them alone five minutes when Albert was shouting from the top of the stair to me to come and show the gentleman out. He can shout too when he puts his mind to it. So up I run and there’s the gentleman trying to calm him down but I could see it wasn’t any good so I had to tell him he’d better go.”

“Did you tell him anything about Jeff looking after Uncle Albert’s affairs?”

“No, I didn’t. I was just set on getting shot of him quick as I could, and he’d lost his rag and was trying to put it over me in that hoity-toity voice of his and I wasn’t standing for that. Good as a play it must’ve been for the other old dears by then. Should I have told him about Mr. Pilcher?”

“No, I’m sure Jeff would say you did right. It was just that he came and saw me, later that evening, and pretended he didn’t know anything about Uncle Albert living here…I wonder how he found me…Never mind. Anyway, I know what this is about. Mr. Matson is trying to get hold of something belonging to Uncle Albert. I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m not letting him come bothering Albert again, and that’s for sure. The poor old boy’s been that fussed since it happened, not wanting to come down for meals in case the gentleman showed up.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure he’ll listen to me. He doesn’t usually remember who I am, especially with Jeff not here. Is he up in his room? I’ll go straight up, shall I?”

From her first visit Jenny had been impressed by how they did things at Marlings. The stair carpet was thick, the elaborate dark woodwork dusted and polished. There were cyclamen and heavy-scented narcissi in pots on sills and landings. The staff had time for you. Jenny had merely appreciated these things on earlier visits, but this time she saw them not under the pleasant glow of civilised behaviour towards the elderly, but in the more acid light of cost. Uncle Albert’s pension, with the annuity from his savings, didn’t make up half the Marlings fees. Jeff supplied the rest. This hadn’t been difficult out of one excellent salary and one reasonable one, but it would be impossible with both jobs gone.

She went down a corridor, passing two fire doors, and knocked at a room labelled “Mr. Fredricks.”

“Who’s that?” snapped a voice. Even without what Sister Morris had told her Jenny might have detected the note of anxiety. She opened the door and put her head round.

“It’s me, Jenny, Jeff’s wife,” she said.

He was sitting in an upright armchair with a newspaper across his knees, a gaunt old man with a large, high-bridged nose and a thin mouth. He was wearing a suit and tie, and brown laced shoes, polished to a high sheen.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, “but I don’t need anything just now.”

“Hello, Uncle Albert,” she said, paying no attention. “I’m afraid Jeff couldn’t come at the last moment. He sent his love. I’ve brought some fruit. Shall I put it in the bowl?”

“That’s right.”

She did so, then adjusted the other chair so that she was almost facing him, and sat down. He was only a little deaf, but on earlier visits he had seemed to find the lighter timbre of her voice harder to hear than Jeff’s. After the fraught, irrational apprehension of her first visit, when, in spite of Jeff’s assurances that Uncle Albert was a nice old boy in excellent health, she had really needed to force herself to go through with it, for Jeff’s sake, Uncle Albert’s room now held no horror for her. His grasp of present reality might waver, but the habits of order and cleanliness persisted. All his possessions had their exact places. There was none of the reek which pervades the air around some of the old. The visitor’s only difficulty was keeping a conversation going.