Some Deaths Before Dying

DILYS

1

Soundlessly she opened the door and slipped into the room. She liked to find a patient still asleep, so that she could stand by the bed in the dimness and study the altered face. It spoke to her of things the waking mask didn’t, mostly just the peacefulness of being free for a little from the dreary indignities of waiting to die, but sometimes more than that. Sometimes there was a sort of translucency through whose mist she seemed to be able to make out what the face had been twenty, forty, sixty years before—as a child’s even. At other times she saw no more than discontents and rages at the betrayal that had so cynically abrogated the freedom and respect and command that had once seemed written into the contract.

Dilys thought no worse of a patient for that; such feelings were human, and therefore proper; even those whose spirits grovelled and whimpered and pleaded had her respect. But there were others who, though their minds might be almost wholly gone, seemed still to register that there were no ears to hear the whimpers, no eyes to perceive the abasement, no court to consider the pleas. In their faces as they slept she believed she could see that these old things were heroines and heroes, and she felt proud in their pride. Her job, her mission, was to make sure that until the moment they carried it into darkness that flame still burned.

She had never had a lover. As a girl she had let herself be kissed and fumbled with a bit, because that had been the way of things, but she’d found it an uncomfortable pastime, arousing sensations that didn’t seem to belong to the Dilys she knew and understood. She had not been handsome enough to provoke real eagerness and so had had little trouble in persuading the fellow to desist, and before she was thirty had recognised, with some relief, that unless a crazy took it into his head to rape her, she would die a virgin.

She had sometimes been asked, since she had what people thought a motherly look, whether she minded not having had children. Not wishing to appear heartless, she had answered that she supposed so, but in truth, as far as she could see or feel, she had missed nothing she wanted. In her training she had done a routine course in the obstetric wards and—again because it had been expected of her—she had cooed and admired like a good ’un, but inwardly she had never been able to think of babies as anything more than the main symptom of a common female complaint which she had luckily been spared.

These weren’t coherent, verbalised beliefs, but unformulated feelings, and of course she had never talked about them to anyone, being sure that her life would be considered arid and repressed. It wasn’t. She found her work utterly fulfilling. When, in the ripeness of time, a patient died, she didn’t grieve. If anything, she glowed. A life had run its full course. Over the years she had seen a lot of television which she wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with, because patients often liked a companion to whom they could comment about the programmes they chose. It helped keep them perky, which was one of her main objectives. Ladies liked soaps and gentlemen liked sport. That was how she’d come to see a programme about a sprint relay team, and the gentleman in question, Admiral Poskett, had suddenly cackled and said, “That’s what you are, Dilys. You’re my last lap coach.” He’d been right. When the coach had talked about the satisfaction of seeing his team run at their peak he had put into words many of Dilys’s own feelings as she closed the eyes and laid the body straight. She had helped her patient live those last months and die that death as well as they could be lived and died.

Not that she was ever impatient for the death. It was the living that counted. Once she had connived with a doctor to allow a patient to escape from endless pain. Once she had, effectively, permitted a strong-willed old man to starve himself to death. But once she had fought by every means she could against a family and doctor who wanted to make an end, when Dilys herself was sure that the patient, stone blind, four-fifths deaf, and in pain, still raged against the necessity. It was fourteen years since Dilys had lost that fight, and she still minded.

This morning, before she was fully into the room, Dilys knew that for the third morning running Mrs. Matson was already awake after a bad night. Her nose told her. She didn’t find the inevitable reeks of old age offensive—how could she, after all these years?—but she didn’t let habit blank them out. They were useful. To her, there was an obvious difference between the odours produced by someone contentedly wetting and soiling themselves in their sleep, and those that arose in the miseries of wakefulness. There was a particular sourness among the mix of smells—acids or something, but no one would have done the research. It was the sort of thing nurses knew and doctors weren’t around to notice. She was already tutting as she opened the curtains.

“We’ve not been sleeping, have we? You should’ve let me give you that pill—drinkie before I see to you?”

She eased the withered body up and tilted the glass against lips that were dry as paper, giving them time to sip and sip. There was a microphone suspended above the pillow that amplified every whisper into Dilys’s room. Other patients would have called for a drink several times in the night.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Matson whispered. “Pills make me stupid next day.”

“There’s that,” said Dilys. “Now let’s tidy you up. Brooding about Mr. Matson, still, were we?”

“Not brooding. Thinking.”

“Brooding’s just thinking and not getting anywhere, so you may as well stop, only you can’t.”

“Got somewhere. Perhaps. At last. When you’ve finished. Filing cabinet. Top drawer, near back. Cambi Road. C.A.M….”

“I remember, dearie—that address list, came a few weeks back, you were telling me where to put it only Mrs. Thomas came in and she said she knew.”

“Yes. Bring the list.”

“Soon as I’ve done. Amazing they’ve kept it going this long, getting out a proper address list every year, and all. My dad’s lot—I told you he was in Shangar, didn’t I?—they used to have get-togethers for a bit…”

She rattled purposefully on, as she always did when she was cleaning up, to distract her patient’s attention from the shameful need—they all minded, and rightly so—at the same time with another part of her mind attending to her task, not allowing it to become an automatic process. You could miss little signs…yes, tsk, that was a bedsore trying to start—it’d be those acids again—nothing like that for weeks now…and the trip all the way to London, seven hours in the coach, ’54 that would have been, just finishing at Caernarvon General. Of the thirty-odd in the coach there’d been eight who, like Dad, were still on full disability, and more than a dozen others on half—and not one of them over fifty, including one poor fellow barely ten years older than Dilys herself—which was why they’d taken a real nurse along with them to look after the crocks. Sad as sad it might have been, but they’d sung the whole way to London and the whole way back—“Like a moving chapel,” someone had said, what with a reverend from Llanfairfechan in the party, and hymns as well as the camp songs—they’d made Dilys stop her ears for the rude ones…But well before Dad had died, even, there hadn’t been any of that any more, local fund-raisings for a bit, and a Roneoed newsletter, and then only a few gaunt-faced men among the others on the Armistice Day parade.

“There we are, dearie. All done, and we’ll be comfortable. Now I’ll go and see what they’ve done about our breakfast, shall I?”

“List first, please.”

“My, we’re in a hurry. All right, then.”

The corridor was a long space lit by skylights, narrowed from its original generous width by a set of bookshelves that ran along the wall backing onto Mrs. Matson’s room, which had been the old nursery. The door of Dilys’s bedroom was directly opposite Mrs. Matson’s, with her bathroom and sitting room beyond. All the books on the shelves were photograph albums, identically bound in green cloth with green leather backs. Mrs. Matson had learnt book binding in order to make them the way she wanted. At the end of the book-shelves stood a four-drawer filing cabinet, with the card-index to the albums on top of it.

Dilys didn’t have any doubts about finding the address list. Mrs. Matson knew where every file was, as well as every album. And yes, the Cambi Road file was exactly where she’d said. The list wasn’t in it.

Dilys checked the files on either side in case Mrs. Thomas had put it into the wrong one, but it wasn’t there either. She went back and reported her failure.

“Oh…but Flora…”

“Now don’t you go getting upset, dearie. They’ll be having breakfast too, won’t they? I’ll look in and ask Mrs. Thomas, shall I? Perhaps she’s borrowed it for something.”

“Please.”

Dilys left smiling confidently, but shook her head as soon as she was clear of the room. This sort of thing wouldn’t do. She’d long ago learnt that the most important part of keeping her patients perky wasn’t any of the obvious things like making them as comfortable as poss, or seeing their food was what they liked, or jollying them along; it was allowing them to feel that they still had some control over their lives and their surroundings. Control is life, because it’s freedom. From the prison of her inert body Mrs. Matson could still reach out and have her say over what mattered to her. The files and photographs were specially important because she was the only one who knew her way around them and what they meant. Even when the list was found she would be upset, still, that it had not been in its place. We can’t have that, Dilys thought.

She was still tutting to herself when she reached the stairwell. She paused, and looked at it with new eyes. It was so odd, and at the same time somehow familiar, though she had never quite been able to lay her finger on what the “somehow” consisted in. The well itself was a square space, the area of a large room, running the full height of the house, with a glass roof overhead. At each floor there was a sort of balustraded balcony the whole way round, with rooms and corridors opening off it. The oddness consisted in the staircase itself. Dilys had worked in large houses, and some of them had a central hallway and stairs something like this, but in those cases the stairs had been long, handsome flights, there to be looked at as much as walked on. These were a kind of shaft made of wooden pillars and rails, like the balustrades of the balconies, with short flights running down through a series of right angles to the floor below. They looked as if they should have had a lift going up the middle of them, or had been made to fit into a square turret, only here they were standing right out in the open, like a scaffold tower or something. And yet the really funny thing about them was that they didn’t look wrong, they looked right.

And now, this morning, Dilys knew why, because there’d been a photograph of them in the album Miss Anne had done for her schoolwork, and opposite a sketch she’d made of some iron stairs at a mill somewhere, and they were just the same. Dilys even understood why they had seemed familiar, because she’d worked in old Victorian hospitals where there’d been courtyards like the stairwell, with iron balconies round them, and a fire escape running down, the way these stairs did.

It was surprising, she thought, as she started down them, how pleased it made you feel when things suddenly made sense when they hadn’t a little before, even when they didn’t matter to you a bit, like the whys and wherefores of this staircase didn’t. And when they did matter, my! That was why Mrs. Matson was so upset about the business about whatever it was in the box—a pistol, she’d let out at the end, one of Colonel Matson’s, and it had something to do with him being a Jap POW, and it hadn’t been there, by the sound of it, and that dratted list was missing too…It wasn’t just that they weren’t where they should have been, it was that it didn’t make sense… Let’s hope Mrs. Thomas knew about the list, at least…

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas breakfasted in the morning room, which faced east and so was full of thin, spring sunshine. There was shiny silver and mahogany, and white table napkins, and smells of coffee and bacon, as well as last year’s lavender and this year’s hyacinths, not shop-bought but raised in batches in one of the greenhouses by Mr. Worple, a dozen at a time so there’d be a succession of them for the house. The wealth of Dilys’s different employers made no difference to her. If anything she respected those who needed to skimp to afford her more than those who could do so and barely notice, but what really mattered to her was their attitude to her patient, as merely a problem to which she was the solution, or as a real person with a right to the best that could be done. Anyway, she liked the Thomases.

Now Mr. Thomas looked up as she entered, rose a polite inch from his chair, saying, “Good morning, Dilys,” as he did so, sat back and returned to the letter he’d been reading. Mrs. Thomas laid hers aside.

“Trouble?” she asked.

Dilys explained.

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Thomas, “about the end of January it must have been, in that cold snap, because I was coming up to tell her about Annie Pinkerton, that’s an old friend of hers, we always used to call her Aunt Pincushion, catching the burglar. He was trying to steal the lead cupid from the goldfish pond under her window. There were two of them, burglars, not cupids, but she only caught one, and they’d put a ladder across the pool to get at the cupid and Pincushion was tottering off to the loo in the middle of the night and she saw them, it had snowed, you see, and there was a moon so it was bright as day so she saw them quite plainly, and she flung up the window and threw—Tommy Baring says it was a bust of Shelley, but it wasn’t, it was just the dictionary she keeps by the loo for the crossword—it was quite brave of her, really, seeing she’s alone in the house—or stupid, I suppose, depending how you look at it—but they’d got the cupid and were almost off the ladder when she yelled and they tried to hurry and one of them slipped on the ice and the other one dropped the cupid on his leg and broke it and he was still there when the police came, and of course Pincushion had gone out and covered him with a rug so he didn’t die of hypothermia.”

“So it was January,” said Mr. Thomas, not looking up from his letter.

“That’s right, because of the snow,” said Mrs. Thomas. “I wonder what’s happened to it. I know I put it in the file and threw the old one out.”

“I thought perhaps you or Mr. Thomas …”

“Not me. You haven’t been at Ma’s files for anything, have you, Jack? I can’t think who else. Anyway, I’ve got to take Jack to the station because his car’s in for a service, but I’ll come and have a good hunt for the thing as soon as I’m back. I’ll be about forty minutes and here’s something to take her mind off it while you’re waiting. You know how to work the video, don’t you? I don’t know where the bit about Da’s pistols comes, so you’ll have to play it right through …”

“It’s a videotape, dearie. Mrs. Thomas said there was something in it you wanted to see, but we’re going to have to play it right through.”

Carefully Dilys didn’t mention the pistols, though Mrs. Thomas had spoken as if she didn’t think there was anything secret about them. No point in worrying Mrs. Matson about things like that. The tense look on the old face eased a little.

“Breakfast first, shall we?” Dilys coaxed.

“Please.”

It was kedgeree, one of Mrs. Matson’s favourites, and usually she was an excellent eater, concentrating on her food to get all the enjoyment from it that she could, and on her difficult days really working to swallow it. This morning she was at first distracted and after a few spoonfuls closed her lips and waited for Dilys to withdraw the spoon.

“The tape,” she whispered. “Set it up, then wait for Flora. Don’t go away. You watch too.”

“Just as you like, dearie, but we’ll finish our breakfast first, shall we? Forty minutes, Mrs. Thomas says, and she’s always longer.”

Obediently Mrs. Matson opened her mouth and did as she was told, but Dilys could sense the inner impatience, so unlike her usual steadfast acceptance of all that she could no longer command, and it didn’t seem to ease until the tape was in place and running, just to check, and the title and credits of The Antiques Roadshow appeared on the screen. Oh, that, Dilys thought. A lot more interesting than some, anyway. She busied herself with her morning chores until Mrs. Thomas knocked and came bustling in, already voluble.

“…queue from here to eternity at the Post Office. Well, Ma, what do you make of it? Wasn’t that quick? Only three days since I rang Biddy to ask. Is it really one of Da’s pistols?”

“We’ve only just finished our breakfast,” said Dilys. “We were waiting for you.”

“Well, here I am, all eager. Can you see, Ma? Sure those are her right specs, Dilys? Isn’t this perfectly fascinating?”

Dilys finished adjusting Mrs. Matson’s pillows, put her middle distance spectacles in place, switched on TV and video, started the tape, and settled into the chair that she had put ready so that she could both watch the programme and keep an eye on Mrs. Matson. She knew The Antiques Roadshow well. Some of her patients had liked to watch it and then reminisce about knickknacks they had once owned, which would have been just as valuable as the ones on the show if they hadn’t had to be mended after some parlourmaid had knocked them off the whatnot. The presenter was barely into his usual smooth piece about the privilege of doing the show in this particular town and building when Mrs. Thomas said, “Maidstone? Stop the tape, Dilys. Dick told me Salisbury, not Maidstone. What did he tell you, Ma?”

“Vaguer. Somewhere like Salisbury.”

“But Salisbury’s nothing like Maidstone.”

“No.”

“What’s he up to? Something, as usual. Carry on Dilys.”

The programme got into its customary stride, a painting of a lot of sick-looking cows, a big brass cobra made into a lamp, a horrid-looking blunderbuss—”Keep an eye open for that chap,” said Mrs. Thomas. “He’ll be the guns expert.”—some very ordinary-looking teacups which the expert said were wonderful and worth thousands of pounds and the lady who’d brought them in kissed the gentleman who was with her and everyone laughed, and some chairs and another picture and a toy train and then a pair of hands in close-up holding an old pistol, the sort that highwaymen used in films to make the people in the coach stand and deliver…

“That’s it, Ma. Look, that’s one of Da’s Laduries. It’s got to be. There’s the initials. How on earth did she get hold of it? Has anyone ever seen her before? Stop the tape, Dilys. Rewind. Here, I’ll do it.”

Mrs. Thomas was too excited to notice that Dilys was perfectly capable of managing for herself, but she handed the remote across without resentment. The rapid images blurred and bounced with the rewind, stilled onto the toy train, blurred again, and settled.

“…a very interesting gun, really beautiful. It’s one of a presentation pair, of course—you don’t have the other one?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, it would have come in a box with…”

More flickers, and then the picture froze to show a young woman. The camera had been on her only for the instant of her answer. She had, Dilys, thought, a sort of in-between look, dark hair, small nose and mouth, good skin, but she wasn’t exactly pretty. Not plain either, mind you. Neat, a bit stiff…her voice hadn’t been bored or excited. It had just answered the question, not letting you know anything else about her.

“Never seen her in my life,” said Mrs. Thomas. “Doesn’t remind me of anyone either. What about you, Ma? No? All right, on we go.”

“Well, it would have come in a box as one of a pair, with its own tools and ammunition—I’ll be coming to that in a moment. Now there are several reasons why this is a very interesting gun. First, it is made by René Ladurie—See here, in the chasing under the butt, his initials. Laduries are extremely rare. This is the first I have ever had in my hands, and I have to say it’s a thrilling moment for me. What’s more, I can tell you here and now that this is a genuine Ladurie, made with his own hands, because of the sheer quality of the workmanship. There were three great gunsmiths working in Paris at the beginning of the last century, Pauly and Pottet and Ladurie, and it’s generally agreed that Ladurie was the best of them. They were all after the same thing, which was a gun you could load and fire quickly and accurately, and be sure it would go off. Just imagine, before that you were in a battle and your life depended on this contraption…”

The expert was a small, eager, quick-talking man, not old but almost bald, the sort who tells you everything you could possibly want to know about a subject and a lot more that you don’t. He explained, acting it all out, about using an old-fashioned gun, and then about what an improvement this pistol was. The young woman listened attentively but without any of his excitement, as if he’d been a salesman telling her about his wonderful dishwasher.

“…you needed to do was lift this catch here, open the breech, so, and … oh dear, black powder is terribly corrosive. At some point somebody has fired this and then left it, maybe two or three days, before cleaning it, but…well, we must get on. Now the third point about this gun is these initials, here. This gun was evidently made for somebody and judging by the care Ladurie put into it, it could well have been someone important. If you could find out who that was, and if it were a person of some historical interest, well … so I expect you’d like to know what it’s worth. I’ll start at the top end. Suppose you had the other gun and the box and the fittings and suppose—I’ll be fanciful for a moment—you could prove that it was made for one of Napoleon’s Marshals—there was Massena, wasn’t there, and Murat, and who was that other chap? … then we’re talking about something over forty thousand pounds. Now you mustn’t get too excited …”

(The young woman seemed in no danger of this.)

“… we aren’t anywhere near that. With only the one gun, and the pitting in the firing mechanism, and no box and fittings, well, it’s still a Ladurie, and an important one. I’d say between three and four thousand.”

He handed the gun back and the young woman thanked him as if she’d been telling the salesman she’d think about his dishwasher, and the programme moved on to other objects. Mrs. Thomas pressed the mute button.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said, “but that’s Da’s pistol all right. And didn’t the funny little man know his stuff. He actually mentioned old Murat. Anyway, we’ve got to get hold of that girl somehow. I’ll try asking Biddy again. There’s far too many people living round Maidstone—Salisbury would have been much easier, but Maidstone…Oh, Ma, the Cambi Road list! That’s why you wanted it! That’s brilliant! I mean it’s still a long shot, but … I’ll go and have a look in the files, shall I? It can’t have gone far…”

She flurried out.

“Dilys?”

“Yes, dearie?”

“Fast-forward. Quick. The names at the end.”

Dilys took the remote and found the place after a couple of tries.

“Stop,” whispered Mrs. Matson, and after a pause to stare at the list of names, “Thank you. Turn it off. Wait. I’ll tell her I’m tired. I’m not. When she’s gone …”

She closed her eyes as the door handle clicked. Dilys slid the spectacles from her face and bent to crank the bed down to the resting angle.

“… know I put it there,” Mrs. Thomas was saying. “I can’t think…What’s up Dilys? Been a bit much for her?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Thomas. I think it’s time for a wee rest.”

“So sorry, darling,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Stupid.”

“That’s all right, Ma. It’s very upsetting seeing one of Da’s Laduries all of a sudden like that. I’m absolutely outraged about it. Anyway, don’t worry about the stupid list. I’ll ring Simon Stadding—he’s not been too well, poor chap, something wrong with his liver—and get him to send us … no, better yet, I’ll ask him if any of the old boys are living around Maidstone now—he’ll know. And I’ll ring Biddy again. It would mean telling her about the pistols of course, but…”

“No. Please.”

“Of course not, if you don’t want me to, darling, and I’ll be careful what I say to Simon too. I simply can’t believe Da would have given one of them away, not to anybody…You’ll give me a call when she wakes, won’t you, Dilys? I’ll see that Ellen knows where I am. Sleep well, Ma, and don’t worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this somehow.”

As soon as Mrs. Thomas was clear of the room Mrs. Matson opened her eyes and smiled, purse-lipped, like a child certain of forgiveness for some naughtiness. Dilys smiled back. Nice to see her like that, she thought. Always works wonders, bit of conspiracy against the family. Perks them up no end.

“Saturday off?” whispered Mrs. Matson.

“That’s right, dearie, not that there’s anything much I fancy doing. I thought I might try a bit of shopping in Nottingham, maybe.”

“See niece in London?”

“No, dearie, they’re both … oh, I get you. Well if there’s something you want…I’m not that good at London.”

“London directories. Ellen’s office. Grisholm. Ebury Street.”

“Wait a minute, dearie—I’d better write this down.”

She did so, spelling the names aloud to make sure, and then went down to the room where Mr. Thomas’s secretary had her office. Now fully into the swing of deceit, she told Ellen about her niece, who would be staying at a hotel with a name like Gribbins, only when she’d tried to ring it it was an undertaker’s and she was supposed to be meeting her niece there Saturday. To her relief there was no such hotel, so she dithered and flustered until Ellen told her to take the book away and bring it back later. She carried it upstairs chuckling inwardly because of course there had been an undertaker called Gribbins, in Cheltenham, wasn’t it…?

“Here we are, dearie. Grisholm and Son, antique weapons, armour and militaria—do you want me to go and see the gentleman?”

“Call him. Wait till ten. Tell you what to say.”

“Grisholm and Son. What can I do for you?”

Dilys recognised the voice instantly. She was entirely used to this kind of intermediary role on behalf of her patients. It happened time and again, for different reasons. Mrs. Matson listened on the small speaker propped by her pillows.

“Is that Mr. Hugh Grisholm?”

“Speaking.”

“My name’s Dilys Roberts. I’m calling for an old lady who can’t manage the phone. She can hear what you’re saying but then she’s got to tell me what to say. It’s about a pair of Ladurie pistols…”

“One moment. I have to tell you, I’m afraid, that since last week when a Ladurie pistol was shown on a television programme, I have had several similar calls. I don’t like raising false expectations, so I must start by telling you that it is very unlikely that yours are genuine Laduries. Before we go any further, would you give me some indication of what makes you believe they may be?”

“Wait… Yes, dearie?…There’s just one pistol…in a box with all the equipment… the other pistol’s missing…the arms on the box belonged to Marshal—you’d better spell that, dearie…M.U.R.A.T …don’t tire yourself, dearie…and it’s not for sale. She just wants me to come and show it to you. Are you open Saturday?”

“Not normally, but…What time do you suggest?”

“Wait…She says I can get there by twelve.”

“That will suit me very well. I’ll see you then.”

2

It didn’t look like much of a shop. The one next door had beautiful polished furniture in the window, laid out like a room, the sort of stuff anyone would have loved to own if they’d got that kind of money. This one had a clutter of guns and swords and pikes and armour which you couldn’t see properly because of the dirty glass and the grille, and the name board needed a fresh paint. The bell rang as she opened the door. Inside was the same kind of clutter, and the air smelt of leather and oiled metal and dust, like a storeroom. A man came out of the back room, the one who’d been on the programme.

“Miss Roberts, is it? You made it, then. I’ll just put up my ‘Closed’ sign and we won’t be disturbed. In here, then…”

He held the door for her. The back room was also a clutter of stuff for killing your enemies or trying to stop them killing you. There was just room for an old rolltop desk and a couple of filing cabinets and a small easy chair, which Mr. Grisholm moved slightly, not for any reason except to show Dilys where he wanted her to sit. He seemed surprisingly shy, not at all like the self-confident expert who’d talked about the pistol on the TV programme.

“Well, now,” he said, settling and resettling himself behind the desk. “Um. I suppose the first thing is for you to show me what you’ve brought. That will, uh, establish your credentials. If you follow me.”

Dilys took the envelope out of her shoulder bag and put it into his reaching hand. She hadn’t even peeked into it since taking it from its hiding place that morning. Now she watched Mr. Grisholm remove the box and study it for a while. He picked up an open book from his desk and compared it with the coat of arms on the box. Then he undid the catches, raised the lid, and again simply looked for two or three minutes without saying anything, holding the box tilted in his hands. At last he laid it on the desk and delicately picked out a pistol, which, as far as Dilys could see, looked exactly like the one on the TV. He peered at the base of the butt through a magnifying glass and inspected the rest of the pistol inch by inch, before clicking a catch and hingeing it open in the middle. Using the glass again, he studied the mechanism.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes.”

He closed the gun, put it back in its case and looked up. His manner had changed, become much easier. Dilys wondered if he’d been afraid he might have to tell her that the gun was a fake, or something, and he hadn’t been looking forward to it.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “Before anything else I want to thank you for coming, and I want to ask you to say thank you to the person on whose behalf you’ve come. Will you do that for me?”

“Of course I will, Mr. Grisholm. And I’m sure she’d want to say thank you to you for bothering to come in on a Saturday and look at her gun, when you’ve got better things to do with your time off.”

“No. There’s nothing in the world I’d sooner have done, and I want you to assure your friend that I fully understand that the gun—or guns—we’ll come to that in a moment—anyway, they’re not for sale, though of course if they were to come onto the market I’d be delighted to make an offer for them. Next—”

“Excuse me interrupting, Mr. Grisholm, but it isn’t really that I’m her friend. Well, not exactly. She’s paralysed and bedridden, and I’m the nurse she has to look after her. She’s got her wits about her, mind you, much more than some you’ll meet out on the street.”

“I see. And I take it she saw the Roadshow programme in which a young woman showed up with what seems to be the other gun of this pair? I assume she had been aware that it was missing?”

“She didn’t exactly say. Far as I can make out she’d put the box away and not looked at it for years. That’s why she’s so upset.”

“And she wants the other gun back, no doubt. This is all very awkward. I have to tell you that I’ve reason to believe that the ownership of these guns is in dispute. Last week—Thursday afternoon, it would have been—I had a visit from a gentleman who wanted a valuation on the basis of a photograph he showed me. I have no doubt that the photograph was of these guns, both of them, in this box, with these tools and accoutrements. He said that the guns were his, but he hadn’t brought them because it would have been inconvenient to get them out of the bank.

“Naturally I asked him if he’d seen the TV programme, and he said that that was what had aroused his interest, and he assumed that Ladurie must have made two identical pairs. He told me that the guns in the photograph had been found by his mother in a junk shop in Nottingham just after the war, and she’d bought them and given them to his father on account of the coincidence of initials, J.M.

“Now, I happen to be able to corroborate this point. My own father, who is now retired, also watched the programme, and he called me that evening in a state of some excitement and told me that his father, my grandfather, had been shown an exactly similar pair of pistols, in their box, in 1949 by a gentleman who had brought them in and said in passing that his wife had given them to him because they carried his initials; and later the same gentleman had come in again and told my grandfather that he had traced the coat of arms on the box and found it to be that of Joachim Murat, who was one of Napleon’s marshals, subsequently King of Naples. The gentleman had had no interest in selling the pistols, of course, but my father remembers my grandfather talking about them as the finest pair he had ever seen, and wondering what had become of them.

“Despite this, I didn’t fully believe all my visitor told me. It is inconceivable that Ladurie had made two sets of pistols for the same man, and the photograph he showed me had clearly been taken many years ago. Either he must know that one of the pistols was missing or he wasn’t in a position to find out if that was the case. Furthermore, he wanted me to help him get in touch with the woman who’d brought the gun to the Roadshow. I told him to write to the programme in Bristol and they would forward any letter to her, as all names and addresses are strictly confidential. If I’d wanted to talk to her myself, I’d have had to do exactly that. Despite that, he spent some time trying to get me to tell him more about her than had appeared on the programme, which I of course refused to do. And I’m afraid if your patient is hoping that I’ll be able to help in that way, I shall have to take exactly the same line. I’m sorry about that. I’d like to help. I’ve very little doubt you’re telling the truth, and besides that it’s essential, in my view, that this important set should be reunited as soon as possible.”

“That’s how it goes,” said Dilys. “It was Mr. Dick Matson, I suppose the one who came along with the photo. I’ve only met him just the once, and I must say I didn’t fancy what I saw.”

“Well…No. I’d better not say it straight out. This is a messy sort of business, so I’ll be a bit careful. Now, is there anything else you want to know?”

“About it being fired and then not cleaned right,” she said. “You’re sure about that?”

“Quite sure. This one has also been fired and left for a while—a few hours perhaps—and then very carefully cleaned. But the other one was left for two or three days and, well, it looks as if the chap did his best—I’d guess he knew how to clean a modern gun, but there are vulnerable spots on an antique pistol which he seems to have missed. This is all guesswork, you understand…”

“I see. Well, I’ll tell her all that. Oh, dear…”

“You were hoping for more?”

“She’s a really lovely old thing, brave as brave in spite of everything, but she’s worrying herself sick over all this. It isn’t just wanting the gun back, that’s not even the most of it, I reckon. It’s how it come to missing, and why. That’s why she perked up after the programme. I didn’t tell you, we didn’t see it when it was shown—Mrs. Thomas had to get hold of a tape for us—we’d only heard about it before that, and from Mr. Dick too, which didn’t help, and now what you’ve just told me, I don’t know much about it, but it sounds like just a load of worries for poor Mrs. Matson…”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could do more to help. I wonder if they’ve had cases of disputed ownership before now—at the Roadshow, I mean. I’d have thought that if the enquiring party could make out a sufficiently clear claim, they might be legally forced to put them in touch with the current possessor of the disputed object…Look, I’ll try and find out. Here’s my card—I’ll put my home number on the back. Call me in three or four days’ time and I may have some news for you.”

He had been nestling the pistol back into its place as he spoke. He placed the card on top of it, closed the box, slid it into the envelope and handed it to Dilys. They rose and thanked each other yet again, delicately balancing formality against effusiveness, the sort of precise social interchange you sometimes achieve by the end of a first meeting, which then allows you to part feeling altogether better about the world you live in. Out on the pavement he hailed a taxi for her and helped her in. As it did its U-turn to take her back to King’s Cross he was locking the shop. I hope he’s going home to a nice wife and kids, Dilys thought. He deserves them.

She bought a pad at the station bookstall, and on the train north thought and remembered, sucking her pen, scribbled a bit and thought and remembered again, so that she wouldn’t leave anything out. She had it all down and in order by the time she reached Matlock station.

3

Mrs. Matson listened with closed eyes, looking as peaceful as the dead, and after a whispered “Thank you, Dilys,” stayed like that for some while.

At length, still with closed eyes, she whispered again.

“Albums, please. Second shelf, far end. Letter J. Nineteen forty-eight.”

“I know, dearie. Shan’t be a mo.”

Dilys hurried out, both pleased and intrigued—pleased because Mrs. Matson was so obviously much less fretful now that she’d found a loose end to tease at in her tangle, and intrigued because this was an album she’d never been asked to bring before. J. was Colonel Matson, of course. Jocelyn. Pity him having a girl’s name like that, when he was such a big, strong man—and he’d called Mrs. Matson “Ray” too. It was short for Rachel, but still it was a boy’s name, really. Dilys knew that because once or twice in the albums there’d been photographs where Mrs. Matson had set the camera up so that she’d got time to get into the picture herself, and “Ray” was what she’d written underneath. She’d several times asked for the J. albums from before the war, but not this one. Interesting that it didn’t start till ’48 too. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to take pictures of him until he’d got over what they’d done to him in that Jap camp.

Back in the room, Dilys cranked the bed up, slid the reading table into place, adjusted the lamp, got the reading specs comfortable, opened the album and started to turn slowly through the pages.

A shooting party, eight men in plus fours, with guns, and a row of dead birds and three hares laid out on pale stubble. She picked the Colonel out at once, him being the tallest. Anybody, any nurse, at least, would have spotted he’d been ill and was getting better. He had that newly fleshed appearance. Dilys really liked the way he looked, the way he stood. With pride. Not thinking about it, not working at it, not stuck-up about it—she remembered miners and farmhands who’d held themselves that way—no wonder Mrs. Matson had been so keen on him. She turned more pages. She guessed Mrs. Matson wanted to look at one special picture, but she was very kind about letting Dilys go slowly so she had a chance to see the other ones. Each pair of pages had a sheet of tissue between them, so the photos didn’t lie against each other. Sometimes there were two or three on one page, sometimes just a single larger one, like the shooting party. That had been posed, obviously, but most of them hadn’t. Still, they weren’t exactly snapshots—not like other people’s snapshots, anyway. There was something about them. They weren’t careless—no, they were somehow meant, even when you couldn’t guess what the meaning might be. There was a copy of the one on the bureau, with the Colonel standing by his car. Underneath in silvery ink it said “Jocelyn. The Rover. November 1948.”

A few pages later the tissue came up sticking to the left hand page. Opposite it was a picture of Colonel Matson out on the lawn with the big cedar beyond him. He had his right arm up and was taking aim with a pistol—no, he was actually firing, because you could see the puff of smoke against the dark of the cedar…

“Stop,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Other page.”

The tissue was sticking to something, four spots of old gum which had once held a photograph in place. At the bottom of the page it said “The Laduries. October 1949.”

“Dick,” whispered Mrs. Matson. “Let you in. Stayed out there. He took it. And the list.”