They would have taken him at his word. Voss, after all, owed him a life.
So between them they had collared Fish. How? It didn’t matter. But Doug Rawlings might have had something to do with it. There’d been that odd look from Voss when his name had come up on her prison visit. Ah, had Jocelyn helped him buy his own cab, by way of reward? Possibly. And then Essex, and a place Voss knew of where bodies could be lost, for a price. Two prices. First, Voss’s own four-year imprisonment, paid to the man called Brent for the use of the facility. Second, what Jocelyn had given Voss to allow him to rescue his niece from the Elect of God, and provide a home for her and her family.
And there they had killed Fish Stadding.
When it was all over, after Jocelyn had come back to Rachel with the plaster on his cheek and dealt with what else needed to be dealt with, he had gone to see Simon Stadding and told him that he had killed his father (oh the willed attempt at honour, rather than the integral thing!).
What else had he said? He must have given more reasons than he had to Voss and Fredricks, but not that Rachel had killed the young man.
Had he simply said that Fish had been trying to blackmail him, through Rachel, and for her sake one of them had to go? And then, “Well, I am in your hands. You may go to the police if you want. I won’t deny the charges.”
That would have been nonsense, of course. Jocelyn must have been almost wholly confident that Simon would keep his silence, if only for Leila’s sake, and Anne’s. But the honourable thing would have been to keep his secret to himself, and when the day came to take his daughter down the aisle at his proudest pace—except that it wouldn’t have worked out like that, with Leila’s intransigence after the disappearance of Fish.
But in any case that was not enough. It would, perhaps, have been a reason for not telling the world what had happened, but for not telling Anne…? No. Impossible.
And now Simon kept complaining that he had bad blood, as if he’d always had it—had been born with it, inherited it. What did that mean? It meant that Jocelyn must have told him how far his father’s baseness had extended beyond mere abuse of funds. Told him in such a way that he had then decided that his own blood was tainted…Oh, heavens! Jocelyn had adored Anne almost to the point of obsession. Was it conceivable—he wouldn’t have done it consciously, surely—but was it conceivable that at some hidden level he had taken the chance to satisfy his own unacknowledged jealousy by breaking the engagement, done so by explaining the leverage that Fish had attempted to use on him, something that Simon would feel he could never tell Anne? Oh, God! Let it not have been so!
Poor Simon, poor Anne. They were like chance passers-by—a couple on their honeymoon, perhaps—caught in the blast when a car bomb explodes, detonated in a cause that has nothing to do with them. For a while Rachel lay and grieved for them, a loss unmitigated by time. It might have happened yesterday.
Then, thinking about what had now become of Simon—how the Simon she had known, witty, charming, thoughtful, sensitive, seemed to have gone completely, to be replaced in the same body (altered by illness, but still the same body) by a dreary and exploitative old whiner—it struck her that there are many ways of dying before the nurse comes to close your eyelids and lay your body straight, and that her own way was by no means the worst, nor Sergeant Fred’s, though most people would have thought of those as deaths-in-life: she trapped in her only just not yet purulent carcase; he…oh, it was strange, Rachel thought. What made her herself, Rachel and no one else? What but the shelf upon shelf of ordered memories of all that had composed and shaped her life? To take those away from her, that would be the true death. But Sergeant Fred still moved, talked and held himself in a manner that asserted the living essence of who he was and had been and would remain, like some saga-hero, living flesh still, but riding his skeleton horse among the wraiths of the underworld.
Whereas Simon, though his mind was still his own, did not. Yes. That was worse.
And Jocelyn? Honour dead, but willing himself into the modes and speech of honour, and to such disastrous ends? No. Rachel loved him too much, loved him both before that death and after, loved him even now. She would not bring herself to judge him.
Instead she returned to the conclusion of her earlier thoughts and began deliberately to compose the event into visual images, as definite and solid as she could make them. It felt necessary to do this, in order to be able to put the whole thing aside and have done with it. She knew her imaginings to be invention, but they were all that she could now have, so it was up to her to give them the kind of inward truth that was there in the photographs in her albums. Those two-dimensional black and white and grey shapes on paper were none of them the thing they showed, but its essence was in them.
So, now, the marshes. Early morning, a salty wind off the North Sea. Gulls. A flat landscape crossed by dikes. Smoke from some town on the level horizon. A car crawls down a rutted track on the top of a dike and stops. Four men get out, two of them holding a third by the elbows. They climb down the dike to a squelchy patch of turf. One man, tall and athletic, stands aside. A second, taller but bonier, paces out a distance, marking each end by digging his heel several times into the turf. He has a rectangular box under his arm. The third man guards the prisoner, an elegant, well-fed figure who watches these proceedings with curiosity, like a passing stranger who has stopped to see what’s up.
The tall man goes to the burly one and opens the box. The burly man takes out a pistol, loads it methodically, puts it back and repeats the process with the second pistol. The tall man takes the box to the prisoner, who chooses a pistol and allows himself to be led to one of the marks. The burly man goes to the other and takes the second pistol when it is brought to him. The two duellists face each other. The tall man moves to one side, halfway between them, and the guard stands opposite him, so that the four of them mark out the four corners of a square. The tall man raises his right arm. The duellists level their guns. The arm falls. In the silence of her imagination Rachel hears no shots, but sees the smoke fluff suddenly from the muzzles, and the prisoner stagger back and fall.
Nobody moves for a while. Then the tall man goes to the fallen body and inspects it. He picks up the pistol, puts it in the box and takes it to the other duellist. Blood covers the lower half of the duel-list’s left cheek. He stares at the box, takes it and closes it, then hands the pistol he has used to the tall man, speaks briefly and turns away. Rachel hears no words, but knows what he has said. He never wants to see it again.
Why? Because it is the weapon he has used to kill a man to whom his life has been bound for almost thirty years, whom he had thought his closest friend but found to be his secret enemy?
In that case, why the absurdity of the duel? (Forget the apparent frivolity of using the Laduries. Fish was a reasonable shot, and had often played with them on visits to Forde Place. What other pair of fairly matched weapons was available?)
Honour gone finally mad?
Not in that way, no. But it was a final, despairing attempt at the recovery of lost honour, an acknowledgement that Jocelyn’s own shame was in some ways equal to Fish’s, or greater, and that he couldn’t therefore kill the man as an executioner. Each must be given an equal chance. (And no doubt he had plans laid out for what was to happen if he was the one who died.)
And only when it was done had he discovered that honour was still unsatisfied, could never now be satisfied, because it was dead. Long dead on Cambi Road.
Poor darling.
Rachel fell asleep to the imagined yelping of the gulls.
3
She slept peacefully, a huge stint, and woke in the middle of the afternoon. Dilys cleaned her up, made her a delectable cup of Oolong, fed her, and put on the new talking book, about traumatised soldiers during the First World War. Worth listening to, but Rachel barely did so.
All that, fact or fiction, was over and done with, past. There was only a scrap of future left for her. She thought about that. First, today, whil
e her voice still worked…
Flora came, cheerfully fussed about one of her dozen godchildren.
“Hello, Ma. Do you remember Zelda Warkley? The one with the pointy ears, and her kids have got them too—it must be one of these gene things. Of course you remember, they came here when they were small and we had to fish Donald out of the river—he’d actually got through the netting—and he’s still like that. Zelda was just the same, but it doesn’t stop her worrying about Donald. I got a letter from her this morning. Apparently he’s in Brisbane—is that Australia or New Zealand?—not that it matters, provided he’s on the other side of the world. He went out there to sell this new sheep dip, and I do think somebody might have asked first, but they’d already made it illegal—it’s terrific for the wool, but the shearers started getting Gulf War syndrome—so Zelda’s writing round all her friends asking if they know anyone who could give Donald a job—anything to get him out of England, really. I don’t suppose you can think of anyone who might have a job for a totally charming layabout with pointy ears? What’s up, Ma? You’ve got one of your teases brewing—I can always tell, you know.”
“Bureau. Bottom drawer. Brown envelope. Big.”
“Told you so! Like wrapping our Christmas presents up to look like they weren’t, remember?”
She disappeared out of Rachel’s line of sight. The drawer scraped. Papers rustled.
“This what you mean?…Oh, good heavens! You remembered where you’d put them? No, you didn’t. You’d known all along, you wicked old thing! That’s wonderful. I’d better take them straight along to the bank tomorrow, don’t you think?”
“Wait. You don’t…need…money?”
“Lord, no. I don’t know how Jack does it, but we seem to get more disgustingly well off every year. I’m really ashamed to think about it.”
“Anne?”
“She’s all right. It’s those quarter horses she breeds, tough as old boots but such sweeties, and they keep winning championships so everybody wants one now. And anyway, I’m not at all sure she’d accept…Oh, Ma! You’re not going to give them to Dick after all! I couldn’t stand that! I’d make a really shameful fuss! Please, Ma…Oh you are an old tease! It isn’t fair at your age!”
“Send Dick…something…My…trust.”
“Well, I suppose, if you must. I’ll ask Jack. How much? It was five thousand last time, and a darned sight too generous, to my mind, though he didn’t seem to think so.”
“Same?”
“Oh, all right. What about the pistols?”
“Grisholm…Ebury Street…Ask him…sell…Money…to Sergeant…Fred…Trust…You and…Mrs….Pil…cher…”
“Don’t try and talk anymore, Ma. You’re wearing yourself out. I think it’s a terrific idea. I’d been wondering if we oughtn’t to do something about Sergeant Fred. And you want me and Mrs. Pilcher to be trustees, is that right? No, don’t try and talk. She’s a funny little thing but I rather took to her, she was so sweet about the house—I mean it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. And apparently both their jobs are a bit iffy at the moment, and they’ve been subsidising Sergeant Fred at this home he’s at, and they don’t know how long they can go on doing that—you remember you asked me to find out if he was all right that way? Oh, good heavens, wasn’t Grisholm that funny little man on the antiques programme? You think he’d be interested? Oh, Ma, don’t tease! You’ve been up to something, going behind my back again. And I bet Dilys is in it too. What a pair you are! Thick as thieves.”
JENNY
Mrs. Matson died in August. Flora Thomas telephoned next day with the news. Though she seemed to have elected Jenny as a kind of honorary chum during the process of arranging the trust for Uncle Albert, it still for a moment seemed surprising that she should have found the time to do so.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Jenny.
“Best thing that could have happened, really. She was absolutely longing to go.”
“That doesn’t stop it being hard on you.”
“No, it doesn’t. Still…I try not to think about it. Look, I was talking to Ma about the funeral—she couldn’t talk any more, poor thing, just blink her eyes for yes or no while you asked questions, like one of those nursery games—she actually managed to make it rather fun, dear old thing—she was a great tease…oh yes—Sergeant Fred. She wanted him to come to the funeral. Do you think that’s on? We could send a car this time—at least I hope we can. I think you know Eileen Cowan, don’t you? She’s a parson not far from you, and she’s the niece of an old friend of my father’s—Ma wanted her too, but she’s got a wedding—did I say it was Saturday week, the funeral?—but she’s going to see if she can get somebody else to take it—I must say I thought that was a bit much to ask—I mean she didn’t even know Ma but she said Ma was the only person who visited her uncle when he was in prison, except herself—so if she can come, Sergeant Fred knows her apparently so he’ll be all right if we send a car for the two of them, and you don’t have to worry about it.”
“No, I’ll bring him,” said Jenny. “Then it won’t matter whether Nell Cowan can come or not.”
“Oh. Are you sure?”
“I’d like to, if that’s all right. I won’t come to the service, if you don’t mind—I don’t suppose there’ll be much room, anyway.”
“Just as you like, but there won’t be a lot of us there, if you change your mind—just us family, and the servants, and a few locals. All Ma’s proper friends are dead—goodness I hope I don’t live that long—I can’t think of anything drearier—being the last leaf on the bough, you know…well, that’s splendid, if you really want to, but don’t forget, if Miss Cowan can come…Is that right? It doesn’t feel right—but Mrs. doesn’t feel right either—not that it matters with everyone using Christian names straight off—who was it tried to call me Flo the other day? Oh, yes, the Deputy Mayor, but you never know where you are with Liberal Democrats—they’re such a rag-bag, don’t you think?…And don’t forget, we could easily send a car, and if you want to come you could just hop in and save all that driving…”
“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 wel
l-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.
Some Deaths Before Dying Page 27
