Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“Well done,” Rachel whispered. “Box inside. Undo catches. Tilt it so I can see. Then open it. Please don’t look. Sorry.”

“That’s all right, dearie. A secret’s a secret only till you’ve told it, I always say. I promise you I’m not bothered.”

Dilys followed her instructions to the letter. While she studied the catches Rachel looked at the box. It was just as she remembered, about nine inches by eighteen, polished rosewood with a silver coat of arms let into the top.

“Ready,” said Dilys, sliding brass hooks free. “You don’t think anything’s going to fall out?

“All in its own little beds.”

“Right, here we go then.”

Dilys tilted the box into position, crooking it on one forearm, ostentatiously closed her eyes, and opened the lid with her other hand.

Rachel had not seen the contents for almost forty years, since the night when the young man came, but she remembered exactly how it had looked. The purple baize lining, indented with shaped slots and pockets. All but one still held the specific item for which it had been made. The two cleaning rods, brush and plunger, spanner, screwdriver, keys, oil phial, cap-flask, mold, cartridges, slugs and a single pistol, its dark metal lightly chased, its ebony butt inlaid with the two silver initials—expensive, beautiful in its precision and its dormant power, a tool to use. The other pistol was missing. The wrong one.

Perhaps her eyes were failing her.

“Closer.”

Dilys obeyed.

No, there was no mistake. To the casual eye the pistols had seemed identical, but trying them in his hand Jocelyn had decided that one was lighter than the other, and weighing them on his postal scales had found this to be the case, though the difference was barely half an ounce. The discrepancy was evidently deliberate. Concealed in the chasing below the firing hammer, unnoticeable unless you were searching for it, was a single letter, a D for the heavier weapon and an S for the lighter one. Ladurie had been a Swiss, working in Paris. Droit. Sinistre . The lighter gun was intended for the left hand. It had been natural for Rachel to use it when she and Jocelyn had been doing target practice together.

She had been expecting one gun to be missing, since the mysterious woman had apparently shown up with one on The Antiques Roadshow . But it was the wrong gun.

Not hers. His.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You can put it back.”

Dutifully Dilys kept her eyes closed until she had the box shut and fastened. She slid it back into the envelope and carried it out of sight. Rachel listened to the rasp of it being wedged back into its hiding place, the rattle and click of the panel being fitted in, then the deeper rattle and slither of the drawer. Before Dilys had finished replacing the contents there was a knock at the door.

She hurried across, unlocked it and opened it.

“Not a good moment?” came Flora’s voice.

“We’re just making ourselves comfortable, Mrs. Thomas. We’ll be three or four minutes yet.”

(To Rachel’s ears Dilys sounded wholly unconspiratorial.)

“I’ll be back in ten minutes then, if you think she’s up to it.”

“I don’t know. She was a wee bit tired after Mr. Matson.”

“All right. Give me a buzz. I’ll be in the morning room.”

Dilys closed and locked the door and returned to the bureau. When she’d finished she came back to the bed.

“All done,” she said. “Now, up to seeing Mrs. Thomas, are we?”

“Yes. Want to talk to her. Tell her half an hour.”

“And we’ll have a bit of a rest so we’re ready for her? That’s the ticket. Off with our specs, then, and a little drinkie before I settle you down? There’s a good girl.”

Rachel smiled assent and sipped at the barley water. Slop, of course, nothing like Mrs. Moffet used to make, but welcome still. Then she lay with closed eyes and tried to think about the missing pistol. It must have been missing when she had first hidden the box. She would have been too distressed to notice the difference in weight. If it had been hers that was gone, that might have made sense. But Jocelyn’s, and badly cleaned after its last firing…

Her mind refused to grapple to the task. From the corridor came the sound of Dilys’s voice, speaking to Flora on the in-house system. Half an hour…The pistols…

October 1949, a fortnight before Jocelyn’s birthday. She already had his presents, a pullover knitted by Jennie Walters, a book about British India, a slashing tool for nettles, a card of trout flies. Though they were wealthy enough by most people’s standards, they didn’t go in for expensive gifts and she wasn’t looking for anything else. Petrol was still rationed, so she had come by bus to Nottingham for her dental appointment and now had over an hour to spend before she could return. There was a street near the bus station that contained not one but three junk shops, and on such occasions she used to go along there and poke around. Two years earlier she had found a Victorian half-plate camera, bartered but complete. It was now restored, and she used it with great satisfaction.

Two of the shops made little claim to sell anything but junk, but the third had pretensions to the antiques trade. Indeed, its proprietor, a Mr. O’Fierley, dapper, elderly, chirpy, appeared to know a good deal about porcelain, in particular the simpering figurines that many people liked to keep in display cabinets. His main trade was in these, and his shop—dark, cluttered, smelling of dust and leather—was a sort of by-product, stocked with odd items which he had happened to pick up, mainly, Rachel guessed, to conceal his real interest from other, more ignorant dealers. The box had been under a pile of books beside his desk. Rachel had asked to see it.

“Well now…” he had begun, doubtfully, and then with a twitter of amusement in his voice. “Care to guess what’s in it?”

“I was hoping it might be lenses.”

“Oh no. Oh no.”

“Not just fish knives, anyway, or you wouldn’t…I give up.”

He had opened the box with a flourish. The moment Rachel had seen the pistols she had known that she had to have them.

“Why! Those are my husband’s initials!”

“You don’t say. They’re duelling pistols, but it’s not my field. An unpleasant custom, really.”

“Are they for sale? How much do you want for them?”

“Well now. As I say, it’s not my field. In fact I’d put them aside to show to someone, but…My guess is that they’re rather good. What would you say to four hundred pounds?”

“Oh dear. I’ll have to think.”

“Would three hundred and seventy-five assist in your cogitation?”

“That’s very kind. Oh, I don’t know…”

“Shall I put them aside for you, then?”

“Oh, yes, please! Look, I’ll be in Nottingham next week, and…Oh, I’ll give you my telephone number, just in case somebody else comes in.”

“There’s no need. The gods send signals to us, you know. They don’t bother to tell us what they mean, but it’s unwise to ignore them. These are meant for you, my dear.”

He was teasing, of course, and Rachel laughed as she thanked him and left. But already on the bus home, with her face still tingling with the after-effects of the anaesthetic, she had known that she would have bought the pistols if he had asked her double what he’d suggested. It wasn’t simply that she knew Jocelyn would enjoy them. He had various shotguns and sporting rifles, which on winter evenings he would sometimes fetch out and clean, not because they needed it, but for the pleasure of handling them, of deriving—though he would never have thought of it in such a way—aesthetic delight from the caress of their functional craftsmanship. But for Rachel there was more to it than that. Mr. O’Fierley had been right—the gift was meant. Suppose Jocelyn had been the woman and she the man, and suppose the woman had been forced to spend several years away, enduring hideous privations and sufferings and had then come home to him with her health and strength gone forever, but by her own willpower (and with a little help from the man) had made herself sound and whole, as Jocelyn had, then the time would now be ripe for him to give her some special token in celebration, a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, to be a seal of their love and a sign that all was well with them. Almost unconsciously she had been hoping to find or think of some such object—a new fishing rod, perhaps—but no amount of deliberate searching would have produced anything as exactly right as the pistols.