Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

Rachel closed her eyes and listened to the receding monologue. Yes. Jocelyn would have loathed Archdeacon Donnelly. It had to be him because his brother had died on the Road, but the way he had milked the story for heroism … Hateful! And made more so by the fact that the trick had worked, even on her, so that she had wept, along with most of the others. Not that it had been the first time she’d heard the story. Jocelyn, of course, had never mentioned it, but she’d picked up hints and suggestions at Cambi Road reunions, often in a tone that suggested that Jocelyn had asked people not to talk about it, so that in the end she’d asked Fish Stadding directly and unrefusably, and he’d told her without fuss, in his own manner, of course—oh how much more tolerable he would have been than the archdeacon to give the address!—so that she was aware of the strong streak of farce that seemed to have been inseparable from the fearsome cruelty of their captivity.

Later, choosing her moment one evening, she said, “I made Fish tell me what you did for Terry Voss.”

“Blast him.”

“I said I made him. I didn’t give him a choice. It’s all right, darling, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m just telling you so you know I know.”

He’d grunted and refolded his newspaper to start the next page, but then had looked up and said, “If Voss had come round before me he’d have tried to do the same thing. He wouldn’t have made it, because I weigh twice what he does, and he was in bad shape after his first beating, but he’d have tried. I’m not saying any of ’em would—we’d the same share of mullocks as you’d get in any other grab-bag of humanity—but by and large it was the ones who stuck by each other who made it through. I’d have picked Voss over quite a few of the others, officers among ’em, as a chap to trust in a pinch. I still would.”

“I like him too. I wish he wasn’t always on his best behaviour with me. He must have some fascinating stories to tell.”

Rachel had been thinking, incessantly, uselessly, about Voss since Sergeant Fred’s visit and Mrs. Pilcher’s brief but desperately unsettling return to her bedside. There was one particular moment, one remark, on which, she now felt, everything inexplicably hinged.

She hadn’t known Voss at all well-nothing like as well as she’d known Sergeant Fred, for instance. There’d been no reason why she should. He’d been a conscript, and after the war had returned to his own, hidden, alien, way of life, only occasionally attending Cambi Road reunions. Her few conversations with him had been brief and banal. But after Jocelyn’s funeral she’d decided to try and visit him in prison, not for anybody else’s sake but her own, because it had been something Jocelyn would have liked her to do, and that was what she needed more than anything.

The visit had been surprisingly difficult to arrange. In the end she’d had to tap into Jocelyn’s network of influential contacts to be allowed to make it at all. Furthermore, as she’d been dismayed to discover, Voss was now in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, serving a longer sentence than usual for taking part in a break-in during which an elderly nightwatchman had been seriously injured. She’d hesitated, but in the end drove down, stayed with cousins near Winchester, and took the ferry over to the island and a taxi to the prison.

Once there she waited for almost two hours among prisoners’ families, groups and faces that cried out for the lens, images of despair stoically endured by women who were always tired. Eventually she was taken into a big, bleak room with a kind of counter running its full length. Each prisoner sat on one side of the counter, and his visitors on the other, with a grille between them so that they couldn’t pass anything across. Shallow screens gave them a little privacy from their neighbours but a warder stood behind each prisoner to see that the rules were kept.

Once Rachel was seated there was some kind of hitch, unexplained. She waited numbly. She felt in herself the same sort of hopelessness she had seen on the faces in the waiting room. Her man too had been “put away.” She too had been betrayed by happenings beyond her sphere, and now she was expected to live and behave like a normal citizen, despite that.

But when Voss was brought in her mood immediately lightened. He must not have been told who his visitor was, but when he saw her his puzzled frown cleared into obvious delight. He looked little different, the same too-large head on a scrawny, hunch-shouldered torso. He’d always been a sharp dresser, and even now had somehow managed to iron and adjust the amorphous prison uniform into something resembling tailoring.

“Why, it’s Mrs. Matson!” he said. “Couldn’t think who …”

His grin faded.

“Ah, he’s dead, then?” he said.

She had no idea how he had made the leap. Jocelyn had once said, after a visit from a recent widow formidably in mourning, “You won’t wear black for me, Ray, will you? I suppose you’ll have to at the funeral, but that’s all.”

She’d accepted it as one of those odd, strongly held quirks that dotted his apparently conventional outlook. (Detestation of cream stationery was another.) She’d found it no hardship to do as he wished.

Perhaps Voss had seen her loss, visible in her face, or perhaps it was hard for him to imagine any other reason for the visit. Surely he knew that Jocelyn had been ill …

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d have written, but well, there’s been a lot to think of and there was a special issue of the Newsletter, or don’t you get that here?”

“No one to send that sort of stuff on,” he said. “Niece writes to me Sundays, and that’s it.”

“I hope someone visits you sometimes.”

“You’re the first … lessee … six and a half months. Nell—that’s my niece—can’t come on her own that easy, and there’s no one else wants to. Can’t blame them. It’s a hell of a distance.”

“Oh, dear. I’m very sorry. I gather you’re here for rather a long time. That’s bad luck.”

“No such thing, Mrs. Matson. Brought it on myself, didn’t I, getting in with a crowd like that. But I tell you I’m not trying anything like that again.”

“That sounds sensible. I came because I thought you might like me to tell you about the funeral. I tried to persuade the authorities to let you come to it, but it wasn’t any good. Several of your friends were there. Half the Association wanted to come, but there wasn’t room in the church, so it was just a delegation and there’ll be a memorial service in London next month. But RSM Fredricks was there, and Doug Rawlings …”

“Got that new cab he was after?”

“Yes, I think so. He drove some of them up in it.”

“So Duggie’s got a new cab, and I’m in here. Funny how it goes.” He laughed and shrugged, but his eyes were watching her with another kind of look, ironic, almost mocking, as if this was a private reference he didn’t expect her to understand.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” she said. “Look, I’ve brought some photographs …”

She showed them to him through the grille and told him scraps of news about the subjects, most of it gathered in a long telephone call to the new Association secretary. Voss commented, jokingly disparaging, as if teasing his old mates through her, secondhand as it were. Time passed much more lightly than she’d expected until the warder looked at his watch, took a pace forward and said, “Sorry, folks, three minutes more and that’s it.”

“Oh, dear, they don’t give you very long,” she said as she put the photographs away. “There’s just one other thing I wanted to tell you, Mr. Voss. A few years ago I made somebody tell me what really happened that time the Japanese guards beat you and Jocelyn up and left you lying by the road. I know Jocelyn asked everyone not to talk about it, but I’d heard one or two hints and I couldn’t help wanting to know the rest. No, wait. This isn’t about that. It’s about what Jocelyn said to me when I told him I knew.”