Peter Dickinson - Some Deaths Before Dying

“No, it’s quite all right, really. I’ll be glad to do it.”

This was the literal truth. It felt necessary that she should make the effort. It was as if her original visit to Forde Place had started vibrations which would whimper uncomfortably on, like the dwindling notes of a rapped wine glass, unless deliberately stilled. Repeating the journey would perhaps do that.

“Well, if you say so,” said Flora.

By now Billy Cochrane was merely an exorcised demon, gone with his golden handshake. Jeff, on a recommendation from Sir Vidal, was deep into his first heavy consultancy contract, but insisted on coming to the funeral. To share the driving, he said, but Jenny guessed that it was at least as much that he wanted to be with her, in case she found the event unsettling. He worked at his laptop whenever she was at the wheel. They dropped Nell Cowan and Uncle Albert at the church gate, drove the hundred yards back to Forde Place and parked with the other cars halfway down the drive.

“I’m going for a walk,” she said.

“Want me to come with you?”

“It’s up to you. But I’ll be all right. I’m fine, darling. Really. This is all—I don’t know—all the way it’s supposed to be. Sorting itself out. OK. You carry on with your stuff, and then you won’t be up half the night getting it finished.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. Funerals don’t last that long. I’ll be back in forty minutes and then we’ll go and find a pub while they’re all at the reception.”

She left him juggling equations and walked down the mown grass beside the drive. A caterer’s van was parked in front of the house, with last supplies being carried in. She followed a path round to the south side and on, still downwards, past a couple of terraced lawns, and then along the outside of a walled garden to a small meadow with a river beyond it. A mown grass path led to a footbridge.

Still without any particular purpose, beyond a sense of peace and well-being and vague, unformulated expectation, Jenny climbed the four steps and onto the worn grey timbers of the bridge. It turned out to span only an arm of the river, which at this point ran in two channels separated by a narrow island. Trees partly obscured the further channel, but Jenny could see no sign of a second bridge by which to reach the far bank.

She stopped halfway across and looked around. Upstream the river, shallow at this time of year but still fast-flowing over a rocky bed, was visible for two or three hundred yards. Several more gardens, some with boat houses, lined its bank. But downstream the view was blocked only thirty yards away by a curious industrial structure, with small buildings both on the island and the shore, and between them a sort of dam, brick, pierced with two low arches to let the water through. It looked Victorian, but not contemporary with the main house—some kind of primitive hydroelectric device, perhaps.

Jenny stared at it, puzzled. Though she had never before stood on this bridge, there was a resonance, an echo in her mind of something else she’d seen, something that had spoken strongly to her…In a dream, perhaps…No…The sunlit brickwork, the impenetrable shadows beneath the arches, the water steadily flowing out of light into darkness…a photograph, on the wall of Mrs. Matson’s sickroom…She had turned away from the bed, engulfed in her own private horrors, and been rescued first by the photograph of the monster fungus, and then by other images of life and death, including this view, cropped down to include nothing but the dam and the river.

She stood for several minutes, simply gazing at the moving water, then turned and walked back to the meadow. A clump of wild ox-eye daisies was growing close to the path. Using thumbnail and fingernail she nipped off two of the flower heads, carried them up onto the bridge, leaned on the rail and held them out over the water, side by side. She waited a ritual moment, then whispered their names.

“Norma. Sister Jenny. Thanks.”

She dropped them, saw them settle onto the current and race off towards the dam. They vanished in ripple-glitter before they reached the darkness.

“It isn’t over,” she told Jeff later. “I don’t think it ever will be. But from now on I’ll manage on my own. Just me.”

Jeff took the first stint of the journey home. He regarded ninetyfive as a sensible cruising speed on the motorway, so they were booming south through the shimmery, fumy harvest sunlight when Uncle Albert spoke suddenly from the back seat.

“Had to do it, didn’t I?”

“Do what, Bert?” said Nell, sitting beside him.

“None of your business, miss.”

“Are you sure? It sounds a bit like something you’d like to get off your chest—that’s part of my job, you know. Think about it, Bert.”

He was silent for several minutes. Jenny had the sun visor down to mitigate the glare and could see him in the vanity mirror. His eyes were open but he was nodding drowsily, as if he was about to drop off any moment.

“You’re wrong about that,” he said suddenly. “It’s never bothered me that much. Something’s got to be done, then it’s got to be done, that’s all. Terry didn’t like it, mind you—not from the first. Kept trying to talk us out of it…All right, I suppose I might as well tell you, now I’ve started…”

“One moment,” said Nell. “Do you mind turning the radio on, Jenny? I’m sure you’ll understand. Music, if you can find it.”

Dutifully Jenny tuned to Radio Three and adjusted the volume to give them the privacy of the confessional.

“Can’t have that,” said Uncle Albert. “Let me hear myself think, will you, miss.”

“You don’t mind them hearing too?” said Nell.

“What’s the odds any longer? They’re all dead and done with. Dead and done with. That’s how it goes.”

He fell silent again and settled back into the corner. His eyes closed but his lips moved from time to time, and when he spoke it was in a matter-of-fact tone, quiet but confident, suggesting that he had now ordered his thoughts. Jenny strained to hear, but could catch only snatches through the noises from the motorway.

“…didn’t like I was saying. ‘Suppose the bugger gets you, stead of you getting him.’…got it all worked out…boat business at Brightlingsea, and Ben kept a couple of yachts…lost overboard…note to give to Mrs. Matson…not like it was with crooks. Crooks don’t go running to the police soon as someone goes missing…got an answer for everything, so we talked Terry round in the end. It wasn’t only that, of course, it was knowing we couldn’t’ve done it without him. He’s got the contacts. There was this big fellow—forgotten his name—began with a B, didn’t it?…he’d pay whatever it took, but the B fellow…take the rap for the fellow’s brother as long as he could hang on to the money…”

The road surface changed to corrugated concrete, setting up a resonant drumming that vibrated through the bodywork of the car, drowning speech. In the mirror Jenny could see Nell leaning right across to catch Uncle Albert’s words. There was a brief switch to tarmac as they crossed an interchange, and a few more words came through.

“…drove his own cab—he’d been on the Road too, of course— so I told him time and place he was wanted…”

Then they were on the concrete again. Jenny saw Nell put her mouth to Uncle Albert’s ear. He nodded understanding and stopped speaking. Nell settled back in her place, out of Jenny’s line of sight. Uncle Albert closed his eyes and slept until they stopped at a service station for Jenny to take over the wheel.

At first as they drove on he seemed to have forgotten what he’d been doing. Jenny could glimpse him now in the driving mirror, and thought he’d fallen asleep again, but then he began to speak, picking up the story almost where he’d left off, but in a very different voice, a kind of dreamy monotone, like that of a subject under hypnosis, not addressed to Nell or to anyone in particular, but slow and clear enough for Jenny to catch almost every word at her quieter pace of driving.