Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Good for him. This has got to have something to do with the pistol, hasn’t it?… Oh, all right, you’re not going to tell me. Look, my mother’s the other way round from Sergeant Fred—I mean she’s paralysed and bedridden and can’t talk much, but she’s absolutely all there mentally. I’ll talk to her and see what she says. Then it’ll be a question of getting him up here. You could put him on a train… No, he’d have to have somebody with him, wouldn’t he, or he’d get out at the wrong station. I think we’d better send a car. Would he be up to that? It’s three hours plus from London, make it five from Hastings—he’d have to stay the night—does he need nursing? I could arrange—”

“If you’re serious, I think he’ll have to come with someone he knows,” said Jenny. “I suppose I could drive him up. If Jeff—that’s my husband—if Jeff’s free, he could come and share the driving. I’ve got a few days off, so it’d have to be this week…”

Jenny was uncertain how she had reached a point where she could be thinking about the trip as a possibility. It was something to do with being, for this week only, a completely free agent, free, even, from her own rational needs, with just her whims and desires to satisfy.

“Take a week off to think about it,” Jerry had said, but there was no thinking to do. Millie had worked for Trevor for twenty years. Selina’s partner had left her and the kids just before Christmas, and not been traced for maintenance. Dave was getting married. Trevor himself was dying. And so on. Anyway, what was the point? The only moral certainty that Jenny had been able to grasp was that she would have to leave. That was fixed. When she’d left, she would try to decide whether to tell Mr. McNair that he’d been right about the docket. But for this week she was in limbo. So was Jeff—not officially sacked, not until this morning working. The car too—theirs and not theirs, for this week only. And the house—there were things to be fixed before they could put it on the market, but the decision couldn’t yet be made…

Thus it didn’t, until she had put the telephone down and thought about it, strike Jenny as odd that she should have pretty well agreed with this stranger that she and Jeff might use one, or perhaps two, of their precious days to take Uncle Albert up to Matlock to visit a bedridden old lady, though when she’d first spoken of it it had been little more than the easiest way to persuade him back into his chair.

“And besides,” she told Jeff over supper, “I really want to know about the pistol. I’m inquisitive.”

“I’m not,” he said wearily. “I just want it out of my hair. Do I have to ring this woman tonight?”

“It’s a bit late. Tomorrow…Look, I’ll do it, if you want. And if she says yes, I’ll take Uncle Albert up there and sort out about the pistol with her. I’ll do you a couple of lines for you to sign, giving me authority. I’d better look up the law relating to gifts…”

“My impression is that Uncle Albert doesn’t actually think it belongs to him. None of that matters, anyway, provided he finishes up happy about it. Do you think you can do it in a day?”

“If I can’t I’m not going. It’s unlucky sleeping apart, I’ve decided. Bad things happen. You’ll be all right for a day?”

“I’ll be fine. When you’re here, I keep wanting to break off. In fact, one good solid day, when I can really concentrate, would be a help. I’ve got the stuff on disk, but it’s all over the shop and pretty technical. See if you can fix Matlock for the day after tomorrow, then I’ll spend tomorrow sorting out what I need—that’s just a question of time—and I’ll have two days to get it into a shape Sir Vidal can understand. That’s going to be the tricky bit.”

“I’m worried about him wanting to take you over, sort of absorb you, the way Billy tried. These guys think you’re a gizmo, Jeff. There’s plenty of gizmos out there, but you’re the best, and they want you for themselves.”

“I had a thought on the train. Suppose I went freelance, and you packed it in with Barlow and Ames and ran the business side…”

“…and get to come with you to Paris and Bermuda as part of the package…”

“It’ll just as likely be Flint, Michigan.”

“Not if I’m running the business side, it won’t.”

“There’s that. Right. I’ll take the car back Friday, and clear my desk. But first I’m going to screw Billy.”

RACHEL

1

“The most extraordinary thing. Ma! You’ll never guess. I was just finishing doing the flowers last evening when Simon Stadding rang—he really doesn’t sound at all well, poor man. I wonder if he ever thinks about Anne now. Oh dear, never mind. Anyway all he would tell me was that there was this woman called Pilcher, in Maidstone, wanting to get hold of me. You remember I rang him to ask if anyone in the Association lived in Maidstone and he said no, but apparently he’d forgotten that that was where Sergeant Fred’s great-nephew—you remember Sergeant Fred, of course—that was where this great-nephew lives who looks after Sergeant Fred’s affairs. Light dawned, you could say. So of course I rang the woman straight away. I thought she’d be asking for money, so I was pretty sharp with her to start with and I didn’t say anything about Sergeant Fred. I just tackled her straight off about the pistol and told her we’d got to have it back. She was remarkably cool about it, I must say—she’s some kind of solicitor, she says, but she’s not wearing her solicitor’s hat about this—solicitor’s wig. I suppose I mean—no I don’t—that’s barristers—but she absolutely refused to say anything about the pistol except that it wasn’t hers and she shouldn’t have taken it to the show, and she’d pass a message on to whoever it did belong to, only it didn’t of course because it belongs to you, but you know what I mean. And then she rather took the wind out of my sails by saying that what She was calling about was that Sergeant Fred has suddenly decided he wants to come and see you, and we hummed and hawed about that for a bit but I thought if it means we’re going to get the pistol back, and apparently she’s prepared to drive him up, with her husband because it’s a long way, though we did talk about them staying the night—he’s spry as a flea, she says, but his mind’s a bit off so he’s never quite sure what’s what—the other way round from you, I told her—I hope you don’t mind—so Mrs. Pilcher says he may have forgotten all about it by tomorrow, but she doesn’t think so because he seems to have a thoroughgoing bee in his bonnet about something—she says he was trying to come up here on his own, after she’d gone, and they had to stop him—I must say I rather took to her in spite of her sounding so keep-your-distance about everything. She’d taken Sergeant Fred for a drive this afternoon, she said, and she sounds rather fond of him, so her heart’s in the right place. I’d’ve come up last night and told you only supper was ready and kidneys are Jack’s favourite and you know how easily those cream sauces crack—wasn’t it good though? She’s terrific at the tricky things, only she can’t be bothered to get the easy ones right, and really there’d be something indecent about having two cooks…anyway. I’ve been thinking. I bet what’s bothering Sergeant Fred is that he’s got the pistols, somehow, heaven knows how. I mean if it had been—what was that funny crook’s name Da was so fond of? Terry something. Vass?”

“Voss.”

“That’s right. If it had been him…but Sergeant Fred? Anyway, he’s got the pistols, and someone must have been messing around firing them and not cleaning them properly, which is a shame because you know what a fuss Da always made about that—and then this woman got hold of one of them—I mean if she’d had the other one and the box she’d have taken them all along to the show, wouldn’t she?