Some Deaths Before Dying

RACHEL

1

“The most peculiar letter for you, I’m afraid I opened it—it looked like a begging letter—you know they’ll try anything just not to look like begging letters—and that’s probably still what it is. I mean it’s from a vicar somewhere in Kent—at least he’s writing from a vicarage, St. Martin’s Vicarage—he was the one with the cloak, wasn’t he?—and he’s a reverend, or he says he is—the Rev. E. J. Cowan, though he might pronounce it the other way—you can’t tell. Have you ever heard of him? I haven’t. Jack hasn’t. What makes it so peculiar is there’s another letter inside, addressed to you too, I haven’t read that of course. That’s why I’m not sure it isn’t a begging letter after all. But listen …”

She started to read, interjecting her own comments, with no variation in the gabbling monotone.

“To whoever opens this letter dear friend—a bit pushy, but I suppose it’s better than Sir or Madam—dear friend the enclosed concerns a matter which Mrs. Matson may wish to keep private I am aware of her condition—it gets more and more peculiar. I mean the man’s a total stranger. Do you think he’s mad?—her condition I have therefore written it in large type so that it can be held by another person for her to read—he must have done that on a computer. Everyone has them nowadays, even vicars—her to read if that can be arranged if however having read the first few lines she indicates that she is content to have it read to her I for my part have no objection yours truly E. J. Cowan. At least he doesn’t say it isn’t a begging letter. If he did, we’d know it was. What on earth is this about, Ma?”

“Don’t know. Show me, please.”

“You want me to open it? Let’s get your specs on first, shall we? Now I’m going to shut my eyes so you know I’m not cheating. I say, isn’t this rather fun! Here goes. Help, it’s pages and pages. I don’t think I’ve got time now. There, is that the right way up?”

“Yes. Higher. Stop.”

The print was as large as a child’s first reader. How Jocelyn would have enjoyed a computer, Rachel thought—not just as a toy to be played around with, but as a tool he could use, an extension of his competence to deal with the world.

Dear Mrs. Matson,

Mrs. Pilcher has recently asked me on your behalf about my uncle, Terry Voss. I have no direct knowledge of the episode in which you are interested, but on the other hand I recall an incident that I now believe may be connected. I will describe it in some detail.

Despite the large print the lines filled less than half the page. Presumably the writer had stopped there so that Rachel could decide whether she wanted to keep what followed to herself.

“Too long,” she whispered. “Thank you. Dilys.”

Dutifully Flora folded the letter and slid it into the envelope before opening her eyes.

“Well,” she said. “Is it a secret, or isn’t it? Oh, Ma, don’t be so provoking! You might at least give me a hint.”

“About Terry Voss.”

“Terry Voss …? Oh, that funny London spiv Da was so keen on? What on earth has a vicar in Kent got to do with him? He can’t still be alive. Can he?”

“Nephew.”

“How extraordinary, but I suppose it takes all sorts, even in the Church of England, these days, anyway. I really do try to be broadminded, but I absolutely wouldn’t feel comfortable about having my grandchildren confirmed by a gay bishop, so I suppose I can’t blame Mr. Cowan for wanting to keep quiet about Voss. It is good of you, Ma, to keep up with these people after all these years, in spite of everything, just because they were on the Cambi Road with Da … oh, of course! That one! Da saved his life when the Japs beat them both up and left them by the road. And the first time anyone ever told me about it was Archdeacon Donnelly at Da’s funeral, and you said how Da would have hated that, which of course he would, but really it’s something people ought to know about. But Voss wasn’t there—at the funeral, I mean.”

“In prison.”

“Oh yes, and you tried to get him let out on compassionate grounds and they wouldn’t wear it—doesn’t it all seem ages ago?”

“Not to me.”

“No, I suppose not. Now I’ve got to run. I only came up, really, to bring you the letter. Di Grindle’s starting another of her Good Works, not as loony as last time, thank heavens—it’s getting pets into old people’s homes because it’s good for them having an animal around, and she wants me on the committee, except she doesn’t—she wants Jack, because he’s so organised, but he refused to play and who can blame him so she’s got me. Shall I ask Dilys to come and help you read the letter?”

“No hurry.”

“Right. Then I’m off and you can tell me later if there’s anything amusing in it. I do think you’re a wonderful old thing, Ma!”

Rachel closed her eyes and listened to the receding monologue. Yes. Jocelyn would have loathed Archdeacon Donnelly. It had to be him because his brother had died on the Road, but the way he had milked the story for heroism … Hateful! And made more so by the fact that the trick had worked, even on her, so that she had wept, along with most of the others. Not that it had been the first time she’d heard the story. Jocelyn, of course, had never mentioned it, but she’d picked up hints and suggestions at Cambi Road reunions, often in a tone that suggested that Jocelyn had asked people not to talk about it, so that in the end she’d asked Fish Stadding directly and unrefusably, and he’d told her without fuss, in his own manner, of course—oh how much more tolerable he would have been than the archdeacon to give the address!—so that she was aware of the strong streak of farce that seemed to have been inseparable from the fearsome cruelty of their captivity.

Later, choosing her moment one evening, she said, “I made Fish tell me what you did for Terry Voss.”

“Blast him.”

“I said I made him. I didn’t give him a choice. It’s all right, darling, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m just telling you so you know I know.”

He’d grunted and refolded his newspaper to start the next page, but then had looked up and said, “If Voss had come round before me he’d have tried to do the same thing. He wouldn’t have made it, because I weigh twice what he does, and he was in bad shape after his first beating, but he’d have tried. I’m not saying any of ’em would—we’d the same share of mullocks as you’d get in any other grab-bag of humanity—but by and large it was the ones who stuck by each other who made it through. I’d have picked Voss over quite a few of the others, officers among ’em, as a chap to trust in a pinch. I still would.”

“I like him too. I wish he wasn’t always on his best behaviour with me. He must have some fascinating stories to tell.”

Rachel had been thinking, incessantly, uselessly, about Voss since Sergeant Fred’s visit and Mrs. Pilcher’s brief but desperately unsettling return to her bedside. There was one particular moment, one remark, on which, she now felt, everything inexplicably hinged.

She hadn’t known Voss at all well-nothing like as well as she’d known Sergeant Fred, for instance. There’d been no reason why she should. He’d been a conscript, and after the war had returned to his own, hidden, alien, way of life, only occasionally attending Cambi Road reunions. Her few conversations with him had been brief and banal. But after Jocelyn’s funeral she’d decided to try and visit him in prison, not for anybody else’s sake but her own, because it had been something Jocelyn would have liked her to do, and that was what she needed more than anything.

The visit had been surprisingly difficult to arrange. In the end she’d had to tap into Jocelyn’s network of influential contacts to be allowed to make it at all. Furthermore, as she’d been dismayed to discover, Voss was now in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, serving a longer sentence than usual for taking part in a break-in during which an elderly nightwatchman had been seriously injured. She’d hesitated, but in the end drove down, stayed with cousins near Winchester, and took the ferry over to the island and a taxi to the prison.

Once there she waited for almost two hours among prisoners’ families, groups and faces that cried out for the lens, images of despair stoically endured by women who were always tired. Eventually she was taken into a big, bleak room with a kind of counter running its full length. Each prisoner sat on one side of the counter, and his visitors on the other, with a grille between them so that they couldn’t pass anything across. Shallow screens gave them a little privacy from their neighbours but a warder stood behind each prisoner to see that the rules were kept.

Once Rachel was seated there was some kind of hitch, unexplained. She waited numbly. She felt in herself the same sort of hopelessness she had seen on the faces in the waiting room. Her man too had been “put away.” She too had been betrayed by happenings beyond her sphere, and now she was expected to live and behave like a normal citizen, despite that.

But when Voss was brought in her mood immediately lightened. He must not have been told who his visitor was, but when he saw her his puzzled frown cleared into obvious delight. He looked little different, the same too-large head on a scrawny, hunch-shouldered torso. He’d always been a sharp dresser, and even now had somehow managed to iron and adjust the amorphous prison uniform into something resembling tailoring.

“Why, it’s Mrs. Matson!” he said. “Couldn’t think who …”

His grin faded.

“Ah, he’s dead, then?” he said.

She had no idea how he had made the leap. Jocelyn had once said, after a visit from a recent widow formidably in mourning, “You won’t wear black for me, Ray, will you? I suppose you’ll have to at the funeral, but that’s all.”

She’d accepted it as one of those odd, strongly held quirks that dotted his apparently conventional outlook. (Detestation of cream stationery was another.) She’d found it no hardship to do as he wished.

Perhaps Voss had seen her loss, visible in her face, or perhaps it was hard for him to imagine any other reason for the visit. Surely he knew that Jocelyn had been ill …

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d have written, but well, there’s been a lot to think of and there was a special issue of the Newsletter, or don’t you get that here?”

“No one to send that sort of stuff on,” he said. “Niece writes to me Sundays, and that’s it.”

“I hope someone visits you sometimes.”

“You’re the first … lessee … six and a half months. Nell—that’s my niece—can’t come on her own that easy, and there’s no one else wants to. Can’t blame them. It’s a hell of a distance.”

“Oh, dear. I’m very sorry. I gather you’re here for rather a long time. That’s bad luck.”

“No such thing, Mrs. Matson. Brought it on myself, didn’t I, getting in with a crowd like that. But I tell you I’m not trying anything like that again.”

“That sounds sensible. I came because I thought you might like me to tell you about the funeral. I tried to persuade the authorities to let you come to it, but it wasn’t any good. Several of your friends were there. Half the Association wanted to come, but there wasn’t room in the church, so it was just a delegation and there’ll be a memorial service in London next month. But RSM Fredricks was there, and Doug Rawlings …”

“Got that new cab he was after?”

“Yes, I think so. He drove some of them up in it.”

“So Duggie’s got a new cab, and I’m in here. Funny how it goes.” He laughed and shrugged, but his eyes were watching her with another kind of look, ironic, almost mocking, as if this was a private reference he didn’t expect her to understand.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” she said. “Look, I’ve brought some photographs …”

She showed them to him through the grille and told him scraps of news about the subjects, most of it gathered in a long telephone call to the new Association secretary. Voss commented, jokingly disparaging, as if teasing his old mates through her, secondhand as it were. Time passed much more lightly than she’d expected until the warder looked at his watch, took a pace forward and said, “Sorry, folks, three minutes more and that’s it.”

“Oh, dear, they don’t give you very long,” she said as she put the photographs away. “There’s just one other thing I wanted to tell you, Mr. Voss. A few years ago I made somebody tell me what really happened that time the Japanese guards beat you and Jocelyn up and left you lying by the road. I know Jocelyn asked everyone not to talk about it, but I’d heard one or two hints and I couldn’t help wanting to know the rest. No, wait. This isn’t about that. It’s about what Jocelyn said to me when I told him I knew.”

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.”

“I thanked him for telling me. Of course I believed what he said, and still do. He liked, as I have said, to talk about criminal activities, and if he himself had been involved he made no attempt to conceal or palliate his own guilt. The fact that he had never before, and never again mentioned what sounded like a startlingly dramatic episode, and that he was so determined to insist on its ultimate propriety as far as he could, is for me sufficient warranty that whatever had happened out on the marshes must have been very different in nature from anything else he had told me about.

“I think that is all that I can usefully tell you. I would like to add that we have once met, though I do not expect you to remember the occasion. My uncle brought me to a summer reunion of the Association in the garden of your house, and you spoke to me very kindly of him.

Yours very sincerely,

Nell Cowan.

“Only like I say she’s written it Eileen underneath.”

Dilys sighed deeply as she folded the letter away.

“Well, what a story,” she said. “But frustrating, really. Like missing an episode on the telly. And that’s what’s been fretting you so, isn’t it, just the not knowing? And it’s something to do with those pistols of yours—got to be, seeing that’s what started you off…I’m sorry, dearie. I know it’s no business of mine. I shouldn’t’ve let myself be carried away like that. Only…We’re tired, aren’t we? Been a bit much for us, has it?”

“I’m all right.”

Rachel was in fact exhausted, though not in her usual manner, with the ridiculously small reserve tank on which she now depended for all her energies having run almost dry—though that was indeed the case too. But she was experiencing a kind of spiritual depletion, a feeling that all the extrinsic parts of her self were being stripped away in order that whatever powers were left to her could be concentrated into the central essence, for it to confront and finish with the thing it was here for. In order to reach that moment, other things needed to be done, some practical, some, so to speak, ritual.

She calculated. Voss had been in prison by the time of the funeral. His sentence would have been a year or so earlier. He had “taken the rap” so that Nell could continue her schooling after the age of fourteen. When he had brought her to Forde Place she had been at university…

“Albums,” she whispered. “CRA. About ’64.”

“Right you are, dearie. Coming.”

Dilys bustled eagerly out.

A ritual, a politeness, that one. The next one, something practical. Rachel continued to consider the problem while Dilys returned, cranked the bed up, adjusted the reading table and light, and settled the spectacles into place.

“There we are, dearie, all ready. I’ve brought the one from ’61 to ’66, so that should cover it, easy. Start at the beginning, just in case, shall I?”

“Please.”

The pictures ambled past. She had taken as many but kept fewer of these later years. Groups and individual studies of men, and a few women, mostly in early middle age, all wearing Sunday best, styles conservative even in their day, regimental ties, short haircuts, hats and caps—faces and poses caught, embalmed in their instant, by the flick of the shutter. Time at a standstill. Illusion, manifested as such each time the same face recurred at a later meeting, sometimes perceptibly older after the lapse of only a year…

“Stop.”

The girl was standing with Voss in front of one of the cedars. He was smiling confidently and holding himself with his usual swagger—or attempting to, as he didn’t now look well, worse than he had in Parkhurst. Perhaps he was not many weeks out of there, for his long-jacketed, narrow-legged suit looked very new. But for the fact that his arm was round her waist one wouldn’t have thought the girl could have had any connection with him. Rachel could see no family likeness. She was barely shorter than him, the narrowness and primness of her face accentuated by a tight bun. She wore a coarse-knitted jersey and patchwork skirt, both so shapeless as to deny any guess at the body within, and she held herself not with the regulation student droop but with stiff unease. There was no sign of the strong affection for her uncle as expressed in the letter. The image of her was in fact uninteresting, but it was good of Voss, and Rachel had few of him elsewhere. Presumably that was why she had kept it.

She closed her eyes and tried to summon energies.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Take it out.”

“Out of the book? You’re sure? How…Oh, it comes quite easily. You want me to send it to her?”

“Yes. Say thank you. Letter very useful. Next. Call Simon Stadding. Number…from Ellen. Can he come and see me? Not been well. But try. Let me…hear.”

“Righty oh. Just put the bed down a bit first shall I, so we can have a bit of a rest. Now don’t be naughty. I can tell. We’re near done for and we mustn’t pretend we aren’t.”

Rachel tried to protest. Her lips moved, but no sound came. Vaguely she sensed the lowering of the bed as a shift and easing of the pressures on her spine and neck. Her awareness of the change seemed in itself changed—less than she was used to, another loss of the defended ground. A sign that Dilys was right. She was almost done for.