If I Should Die
Authors: Hilary Norman
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This title is part of The Murder Room, our series dedicated to
making available out-of-print or hard-to-find titles by classic crime writers.
Crime fiction has always held up a mirror to society. The Victorians were fascinated by sensational murder and the emerging science of detection; now we
are obsessed with the forensic detail of violent death. And no other genre has so captivated and enthralled readers.
Vast troves of classic crime writing have for a long time been unavailable to all but the most dedicated frequenters of second-hand bookshops. The advent
of digital publishing means that we are now able to bring you the backlists of a huge range of titles by classic and contemporary crime writers, some of which have been out of print for
decades.
From the genteel amateur private eyes of the Golden Age and the femmes fatales of pulp fiction, to the morally ambiguous hard-boiled detectives of mid
twentieth-century America and their descendants who walk our twenty-first century streets, The Murder Room has it all.
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Where Criminal Minds Meet
Hilary Norman
Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Anonymous. First printed in a late edition of the
New England Primer
, 1781
Monsters are chaos beasts, lurking at the interstices of order . . . The dragon, for example – perhaps the most widespread monster in myth and folklore – is born
through a mixture of species . . . by the joint generation of a man or worm and a metal.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
May you not hurt your enemy, when he struck first?
Aeschylus,
The Libation Bearers
Sunday, January 3rd
It was one of those special January mornings in Boston when winter felt like a real childhood treat. Fresh snow had fallen the previous day, but the main streets were pretty
much clear and the busiest sidewalks safely gritted, and the Public Garden looked like an old-fashioned Christmas card. Not a Swan Boat in sight, but the sky was perfect azure, the sun shone
brightly, every branch of every tree was blanketed, every twig of every shrub ethereally frosted, and large expanses of sparkling icing sugar landscape were satisfyingly untrodden.
To Jack Long, this morning was just another bonus to add to his new-found sense of well-being. In his early forties, sandy-haired, lean and more than passably attractive, Jack was aware that he
hadn’t felt this good in years, and that every moment of this unplanned, enforced time-out was making him feel even better, fitter, stronger and more optimistic.
He had cleared the snow off a bench with his gloved hands, and now he sat facing the water, watching an old lady with a cane feeding small scraps of bread to the ducks. The sun felt so warm that
he had taken off his anorak, and he was snug in his thick white turtle-necked sweater. So long as his hands and feet were warm, Jack had never minded the cold. He was comfortable now, his breathing
calm and even, forming feathery ribbons of steam.
He looked around, took it all in, then closed his eyes, and gave himself up to the sunshine and the clean air and the sounds of birds and muted traffic.
He was almost asleep when it happened. He felt nothing, for it happened too fast for sensation. One minute, Jack Long was alive, a still-youngish man with everything to live for. The next, he
was gone.
Rose O’Connell, seventy-eight years old and mad as hell with the arthritis that had, in recent months, slowed her former briskness, saw it happen, just as she was turning
away from the water’s edge, her bag of bread scraps empty now. A sudden jolt, thrusting the young man’s upper body forward convulsively for an instant, the way electroshock therapy had
jerked the patients around in the hospital Rose had worked in in the bad old days.
She stood for a moment, resting on her cane, watching the man, her eyes intent and puzzled. He was perfectly still again now, slumped back against the bench, and she supposed he might be
sleeping, but his hands were so limp in his lap and his sandy head lolled in such a way that Rose, with a chill passing through her that had nothing to do with the weather, knew better.
She began to limp closer, moving slowly, cautiously, until she was just a few feet away. She looked down, and the fingers of her right hand clenched the handle of her cane. She had been a nurse,
had seen plenty of spilled blood in her time, much of it created by violence, and she knew she would not faint.
The man’s blood spread slowly and steadily, oozing over his white sweater like a blooming, ever-expanding red rose, and dripping down through the slats in the wooden bench onto the white
snow.
It was not the blood that made Rose cry out. It was something else entirely, something she had never seen in all her years of nursing, either in the operating theatres or in the emergency
rooms.
It was rising from the hole in his chest, in a swirl of black.
Smoke.
Monday, January 4th
He was a cop, and she was a ballet teacher. Joseph Duval was thirty-eight years old, living in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife Jess and her nine-year-old daughter Sal from a
previous marriage. Hélène Duval, his sister, known to everyone as Lally, was twenty-three, living in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with Hugo Barzinsky – her lodger, best
friend and business partner in Hugo’s, their café – and her cat. Joe had known from the age of ten that he would, in time, move away from home. Lally had never doubted that she
would live in New England until they buried her. Those were the most significant differences between Joe and Lally Duval. In most other ways, especially in the ways that counted most – in
their hearts and minds – they were about as similar and as close-knit as any brother and sister could be.
When Joe telephoned Lally at a little before quarter to five that Monday afternoon, he was at his desk in the station in the Logan Square district of Chicago, and Lally was in her bedroom some
nine hundred miles away, brushing her dark brown, almost waist-length hair up into the sleek ponytail that would, with a little deft pinning, become the neat bun that was obligatory in the ballet
world.
“Whatcha doing, sis?”
Lally smiled at the welcome sound of her brother’s deep, warm voice. “The usual – I just delivered a fresh batch of croissants to the café, and now I’m getting
ready for class.” Nijinsky, her three-year-old Siamese, near the door, watched her swinging hair through friendly slit eyes. “Are you at the office?”
“It’s a paperwork afternoon.” Joe paused. “How are you, kid?”
“I’m wonderful,” Lally said. “We got a fresh load of snow last night, but today’s been gorgeous. How about you guys?”
On average, Joe and Lally made a point of speaking to each other at least once a month. So far as Lally was concerned, she’d have been happy to talk to her brother once a day, but being a
lieutenant in the Chicago Police Department’s Violent Crime Unit meant that Joe’s life was wild and full, and Lally knew that his occasional long silences didn’t mean he thought
about her any less.
“We’re all pretty good this end,” Joe said, “knock on wood.” He rapped smartly on his desk.
“How’s Jess feeling?” Her sister-in-law was recently pregnant, and Lally knew that she and Joe and sweet Sal were all on tenterhooks because Jess’s last two pregnancies
had both ended in miscarriage.
“So far so good.” Joe was a man of deep emotion but few words.
“Is she taking it easier this time?” Lally felt his anxiety over the line.
“A little. You know how independent Jess is, but I think she’ll do just about anything to keep this baby, even if it does mean letting Sal and me carry the shopping and take care of
the gardening.”
“It must be hard for her.”
“You bet it is.”
Lally checked her alarm clock and finished pinning her hair. Her brother’s beloved features, his long, sharp nose and soft grey eyes, so like her own, were as clear in her mind as if he
were seated opposite her.
“How’s work?” she asked, grabbing her black leotard and pulling it snugly up her body. She knew it was a pointless question, that in spite of the honesty between them in most
things, the confidences of the Chicago Police Department couldn’t be safer if they were locked in a high-security vault.
“Like always,” Joe said, easily. “You know.”
She didn’t know, but she thought she was probably glad of that. She worried about Joe all the time as it was, and maybe her imagination was worse than the real thing, but somehow she
doubted that. She had seen reality – brutal, bloody reality – the day their parents had been killed in a car crash over four years ago, a few days after her nineteenth birthday. With
Joe so far away, it had been left to Lally to make the identification at the morgue in Pittsfield. She had been aware, even in those most terrible moments of her life, that there was a kind of
mercy in their going together, for they had been the closest married couple she had ever known, more like twins than husband and wife, and it was almost impossible to conceive of either one being
left behind to mourn the other. But that hadn’t helped Lally, not that day, nor in those that followed, to come to terms with the violence of their end. She’d worried about Joe ever
since he’d joined the police force – she guessed she always would.