Some Deaths Before Dying (12 page)

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.”

I
t 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.