Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

She recounted the rest of that conversation. When she finished, Voss sat for several seconds sucking at his upper lip and shaking his head.

“Jesus!” he muttered. “I don’t know what to say, honest. All right—I wouldn’t’ve let him down—I didn’t, neither, when it come to it—but Jesus!… Well, thanks, Mrs. Matson. And I’ll say this. It goes for you too—right along the line it goes for you. Anything … Any time …”

“Thank you, Mr. Voss. I’ll remember.”

“You do that, and just one more thing, Mrs. Matson—if ever it come to your ears how the Colonel got hisself into something he oughtn’t of, you can tell ’em straight back it wasn’t like that—it was because he had to. Right?”

The warder had stepped forward again as he was speaking.

“Time’s up, folks, so just say your tatty-byes.”

Rachel, dismayed almost beyond dismay that Voss should bring the subject up, especially after conducting the rest of the interview with such ease and tact, blurted out the first thing that came into her head.

“I think I know what you’re talking about and I agree with you.”

A look of bewilderment came over Voss’s face, but the warder touched his shoulder and he let himself be led away.

Waiting in the drizzle for the ferry Rachel puzzled miserably about it. How could Voss have known? There was, perhaps, a connection: Voss came from the East End, and so, apparently, did the young man she had shot; but Voss’s tone and phrasing had suggested both sympathy for Jocelyn’s predicament and detachment from it. However much he had admired and respected Jocelyn, was it credible that he would speak in that way of his compulsive involvement with a creature like the young man? But suppose Jocelyn had discovered that side of his nature on the Cambi Road, as she had come to believe; and suppose that many others, not normally that way inclined, had also sought such solace, and been tolerated by the rest—men such as Voss—for doing so, then perhaps there would be no need for Voss to have known about the young man to speak as he had. And perhaps his look of bewilderment, almost of shock, as he was taken away was his reaction to the idea of an apparently devoted marriage that persisted after the man had told his wife that he had done what he had. The young man himself had expressed outrage at the self-same thing, and he and Voss were very much products of the same culture…

No, that had not been it. Not at all. She had been wrong for almost forty years. It was something else that Voss had been talking about, a specific occasion, Sergeant Fred also there, and together they’d seen Fish Stadding die, and Jocelyn…Jocelyn had “got hisself into something he oughtn’t of.”

2

“Well, dearie, so we’ve got a lovely letter to read.”

Rachel hadn’t heard Dilys come in. Unnoticed behind her reverie the rooks had been making an unusual racket and perhaps that had drowned the movement of the door. She opened her eyes and made her lips smile. Dilys blurred into the usual vagueness as she reached the bed.

“I’m to hold the pages for you so you can read it yourself, Mrs. Thomas says. Sure you can manage?”

“You read it.”

“Oh. She said…are you sure? All right, then—this’ll be it, I suppose. Are we comfortable, dearie, before I start? Here we go, then…Goodness, what big letters! Now, she said you’d read some of it…”

“Just first…paragraph.”

“Oh, I see. All right. Here goes…”

Dilys, too, read in a near monotone, but very different from Flora’s, slowly and with regular pauses to make sure of the next phrase or sentence.

“First, as I have just said. Terry Voss was my uncle, my mother’s brother. Our relationship was closer than that implies. As you no doubt know, he was a professional criminal, but he was the only member of my family to show me any true affection, and crucially he enabled me to continue my education when I would otherwise have been taken away from school. I loved him. I also thought of him, and still do, as a truly good man. One of my reasons for writing this letter is that the only other people I know of who seem to have valued him as I did were certain members of the Cambi Road Association.

“During the latter part of my school days he was in prison for a longer sentence than usual, for a serious crime that I do not believe he committed. I think in fact that he had been paid to ‘take the rap’ for somebody else, and had accepted the money so that my mother could provide a home for myself and my brothers. Be that as it may, though I wrote to him weekly, I barely saw him for several years—”

“Stop. End of letter. Signature.”

The pages rustled.

“Mrs. Thomas said it was a parson…here we are…Oh, goodness me, it’s a woman! Eileen Cowan—that’s what she’s typed, but she’s signed it Nell Cowan.”

Of course. Not some never-mentioned nephew, but the niece. Voss had brought her once, a rather forbidding young woman, to show off to the Association. A good while after Jocelyn’s death, that must have been.

“Go on.”

“I did not see him for several years, and when I did I found he had changed. Inwardly, and in his relationship with me he remained much the same person, but his experiences as a prisoner of war had at last caught up with him, and though he lived for many more years he was thenceforth an invalid. He managed to stay out of trouble until I had finished at university, and at that point, instead of going on to post-graduate work, I took a job so that I could support us both.

“Some years later, my then employment involved me in driving extensively round East Anglia, often to remote areas. My uncle was recently out of hospital, so in fine weather I took him along with me. It was good for him to get out of the house, and it gave him the chance to express his dislike and distrust of the countryside. Other than in his period of National Service he had seldom set foot outside London. He was company for me too, with a fascinating repertoire of criminal reminiscences and lore. Since I was now a seriously practising Christian, he liked pretending to try to shock me with tales of appalling villainy.

“On one of these occasions we drove out to a lonely farm in that strange area of Essex marshland between the Crouch and Blackwater estuaries. I left my uncle in the car, as usual, while I made my visit, and on my return was surprised to find him gone. I waited, and some while later saw him walking towards me along an unmetalled lane that led towards the sea, still a mile or two away to the east. I went to meet him, and then realised from the state of his shoes and the difficulty of his breathing that he must have walked some distance. I helped him back to the car and then remonstrated with him for his stupidity. I will try to reproduce his exact words. You have spoken with him. So will remember the accent.

“‘I wanted to have another look,’ he said. ‘Been here before, see? But I been and bit off a bit more than I can chew.”

“I drove off, turning the heater full up to warm him. For a while he wheezed alarmingly, but when he had recovered a little I asked him what he had been doing so far from the city.

“‘Losing bodies.’ he said. ‘Mind you, one of them hadn’t been a body, not till we brought him here.”

“For once I was genuinely shocked, so much so that I stopped the car and turned to him. I then saw that he had not, this time, been merely teasing, and realised that the tone of his answer had been uncharacteristically sombre.

“‘That’s not the sort of thing you got involved with,’ I said.

“‘No more it was,’ he said. And I don’t want to talk about it. Didn’t ought to have brought it up in the first place.”

“‘All right.’ I said, and drove on, still considerably troubled. I believe he must have sensed this, for after a while he said. ‘I don’t want you to think bad of me, Nell, so I’ll just tell you this. What happened back along that track wasn’t nothing to do with villains. Amateurs, more like—which is what they wanted me along for. I’m not saying it was aboveboard, and we’d have been dead in trouble if we’d been caught at it, but it wasn’t nothing to be ashamed of. I’d do it again, if the same fellow asked me.”