The Dying of the Light: A Mystery

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘My officers reported that Miss Travis appeared quite rational.’

  Anderson shrugged.

  ‘They were expecting maybe the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor?’

  He drained off the last of the whisky and went to replenish his glass.

  ‘They don’t tear their hair or foam at the mouth, my little gerries,’ he called above the chink of bottles. ‘At some of their other orifices, now and then. But by and large most of them give a pretty fair impression of knowing a hawk from a handsaw, if we are to accept that feat as an adequate criterion of sanity.’

  He strolled back to the fireplace and took up his former pose.

  ‘Appearances, however, are deceptive,’ he went on. ‘You and I may be constrained by fictions, Inspector, but this lot are haunted by them. Nothing more natural, of course. For while we are lashed to the mast of actuality, our eyes fixed firmly on the future, their present is hanging by a thread and they’ve no future at all. It is hardly to be wondered at if they occasionally fall prey to siren voices.’

  Jarvis ostentatiously consulted the next page of his notebook. It read:

  Bank

  Chemist: piles

  Cleaners – still stained

  Plonk for piss-up

  RITA????

  ‘According to my officers’ report,’ he said, ‘Miss Travis claimed that Mrs Davenport had been murdered by one of the other patients.’

  ‘Clients,’ snapped Anderson. ‘I have no patients, and no patience with such stuff as this. When dear Mamma passed on to the great rest home in the sky, leaving this sublunary one in my unworthy hands, my first thought was to take the money and run to NW3 or possibly the S of F. Unfortunately she had in her wisdom made it impossible for me to sell up as long as the present occupants keep one foot out of the grave. Thus it is that I am forced to eke out my best years in the company of dribblers and bed-bespatterers.’

  Jarvis tapped his pen against the notebook.

  ‘Just answer the question, please, sir.’

  ‘You didn’t ask a question, Inspector, you raised one. If you give me half a chance, it will become clear that I am in fact addressing it.’

  He swallowed some more whisky before continuing.

  ‘Whatever the drawbacks to the life I lead out here, I have at least had ample opportunity to acquaint myself with the varieties of senile dementia to which my flock are subject. In the case of Miss Travis this takes the form of an inordinate passion for detective stories.’

  ‘I’m not talking about leisure pursuits,’ Jarvis interrupted.

  ‘Nor am I, Inspector. I’m talking about death.’

  Jarvis added an elegant curlicue to his doodle.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but natural or violent? That’s the question.’

  ‘Not to Miss Travis,’ Anderson returned. ‘Such distinctions are bound to appear specious to those facing the prospect of their own imminent extinction. All the residents of this establishment are shortly destined to become the victims of a ruthless and anonymous killer against whom the combined forces of civilization have so far proved powerless. What more natural than that they should seek to contain their terror by recasting themselves as characters in a nice cosy whodunnit, threatened not by impersonal oblivion but a fallible human murderer, acting in a recognizable manner and for comprehensible motives, whose identity will be revealed in the final chapter?’

  Stockport County 0, Accrington Stanley 0, thought Jarvis. Accrington Stanley 3, Tranmere Rovers 1. Under the influence of this homely mantra, the stress gradually seeped out of his system. When he could trust himself to speak in a suitably authoritative tone, he looked back at Anderson.

  ‘I shall need to talk to Miss Travis, sir.’

  Anderson raised his glass and stared through it darkly at Jarvis.

  ‘My overriding concern must at all times be the welfare of the little community entrusted to my care,’ he murmured. ‘Those were my dear Mamma’s dying words to me. Well, actually she made a noise resembling a washing machine on a heavy soil cycle, but that’s what she was trying to say all right. I should know. Christ knows I’d heard it often enough before.’

  ‘Either here or at headquarters,’ Jarvis continued implacably. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  Anderson poured the rest of the whisky into his mouth. Leaning his head back against the wall, he gargled loudly.

  ‘It’s not so much a question of the venue,’ he said at length, ‘as of upsetting the psychological microclimate which Letitia and I strive to maintain here at Eventide Lodge, and which is so essential to our clients’ well-being. In this carefully controlled environment, the fictions I referred to earlier proliferate freely and yet harmlessly. But if an outsider – particularly one girded in the awful panoply of the Law – comes crashing in demanding to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or God help you, the effect on the delicate and frankly non-viable life-forms whose habitat is thus rudely disturbed is fearful to contemplate.’

  ‘I’m not intending to conduct a formal interview,’ Jarvis protested. ‘It’s just a question of asking Miss Travis a few questions, that’s all.’

  Anderson sighed.

  ‘Even so, is there really anything to be gained by harassing a sad old lady who lives in a world of her own, which although it to some extent mimics the one we inhabit has in fact only the most tenuous connection with it?’

  Jarvis stuck his chin up. His ears gleamed dangerously.

  ‘If you prefer, sir, I can always apply for a court order.’

  Anderson butted the wall with his forehead.

  ‘As you wish!’ he cried, making for the door. ‘I’ll get Letitia to round her up. Do with her what you will, Inspector – Miss Travis, I mean. No one in their right mind would want to do anything mentionable with Letty.’

  The door closed behind him. Jarvis expelled a breath which he seemed to have been holding for a very long time. Bradford City 6, Accrington Stanley 4. Accrington Stanley 0, Port Vale 0. Crewe Alexandra 0, Accrington Stanley …

  A cold panic gripped him. Fourteenth of November 1953, the weather dull, crowd of almost seven thousand. Ian Brydon the scorer, Galbraith substituted at half-time and Accrington must have won because of the announcer’s rising intonation, but what was the friggin’ score?

  He slumped down in the armchair and closed his eyes. Such a thing had never happened before. Come hell or high water, he had always been able to quote any Accrington scoreline on demand. Not that there was much demand, once the family moved down south. Jarvis had been six at the time, so it hadn’t meant that much to him, but his dad had never got over not being able to go along to Peel Park and watch the lads lose.

  The team in the town they moved to was non-league, but his dad didn’t reckon that what they played down south deserved to be called football anyway. Even after ten years, Harry Jarvis’s roots remained in Lancashire. As time went by his memories became increasingly vague and unreal, and even his accent gradually lost its native edge. In the end only Accrington Stanley FC remained. Every Saturday afternoon, he and his son would sit themselves down in front of the radio in the parlour and listen to the Division Three results: Barrow 3, Scunthorpe United 1. Grimsby Town 1, Wrexham 1. Mansfield Town 2, Accrington Stanley 3.

  Sitting beside the hissing gas-fire with a mug of hot tea listening to that plummy voice reciting the familiar litany of names was the high point of Stanley’s week. Although the Accrington result was the only one they were interested in, he loved the build-up through the First Division giants, and the poetic coda of the Scottish clubs with names like the title of a romantic novel – Partick Thistle, Queen of the South. Above all, he liked trying to guess the result from the announcer’s intonation: rising for an away win, dropping for a defeat – the more sharply, the greater the goal difference – and stressing both names equally if the match was a draw.

  The second highlight of the week occurred when a brown envelope with an Accrington postmark landed on their doormat. It c
ontained a letter from Stan’s uncle enclosing a cutting from the local newspaper expanding the bare result into a racy and compelling narrative involving their favourite cast of characters being cautioned or sent off, scoring or giving away goals, making heroes or fools of themselves. Stanley devoured these reports like episodes of a thriller, and the facts and figures around which they were built impressed themselves so effortlessly on his memory that he had no idea what a fund of them he possessed until that fateful day in March 1962 when Accrington Stanley made the national news for the first and last time as their sixty-eight-year league existence came to an abrupt and ignominious end.

  After years spent bumping comfortably along the lower reaches of Division Three North, in the mid-Fifties the club suddenly rose to finish within the top three for several years in succession. Harry Jarvis said at the time that no good could come of them getting ideas above their station, and his forebodings were soon realized as Accrington marked the new decade by slipping for the first time into Division Four, where they would have to rub shin-pads with the likes of Peterborough and Aldershot. Stanley fans didn’t give themselves airs, but they weren’t common. They might not aspire to the Second Division, but being relegated to the Fourth represented a stigma they feared like poverty. But hardly had the Jarvis household come to terms with this disgrace than worse occurred as the club, plagued by debts and mismanagement, resigned from the Football League in mid-season without even completing its fixtures.

  The local fishmonger had once demonstrated for Stan’s mum, who was squeamish about such things, the humane method of killing lobsters: you drove a sharp point – he’d used a bradawl – into the creature’s nerve centre. The news of Accrington’s demise had a similar effect on Stan’s dad. ‘The Owd Reds’ had become a repository for everything he had lost – the mist pouring down off the moors, that girl’s thighs going up the top deck of the tram, the blowfly sheen on the bacon in the window of the grocer’s – and now this last and seemingly secure refuge had been swept away. Harry Jarvis declined overnight into an alcoholic stupor.

  His collapse lasted only a month or so, after which he started an affair with their next-door neighbour and perked up no end, but there was no way of knowing that at the time. Young Stan, who was of course scared stiff, soon discovered that the only way to revive his dad was to recite episodes from the club’s glorious past, holding up heroic feats and dastardly deeds from past matches for admiration and contempt. In the course of this therapy Stanley discovered without pride or surprise that he could remember almost every detail of Accrington’s record during its last decade in the league, but it was not for another six years – by which time his dad had moved in with the woman next door and Stan out to Hendon Police College – that he attended his first live football match.

  He found the experience totally bewildering. Instead of the elegant interaction he’d been led to expect, a meaningful drama with a beginning, middle and an end, proliferating complexities building towards a climax where they were satisfyingly resolved, the game was a depressing, pointless chaos of muddled moves, failed attempts, missed passes and cynical brutality, with no perceptible shape or underlying rhythm, no sense or significance. Stan left at half-time, and didn’t even bother to check the final score in the paper next day.

  Jarvis got to his feet and tried to concentrate on the matter in hand. It was just a question of going through the motions with this Travis woman and he’d be out of here. Not like Anderson, poor sod. No wonder he was a bit rum, stuck out here in the middle of bloody nowhere with a bunch of oldies well past their sell-by dates, judging by what Tomkins had said. Seriously whiffy. Kids were bad enough, but at least with them it got better. What it must be like having to deal with this lot, knowing that however bad it was today it was going to be worse tomorrow, just plain buggered the imagination.

  Still, that was no skin off his dick, was it? Reports were what it was all about. Been there, seen this, done that, and here’s a file to prove it. Besides, the case was open and shut. There was no question that she’d poisoned herself. The PM had turned up a cocktail comprising the morphine syrup she had been prescribed for pain control, a massive overdose of sleeping tablets she’d nicked from her friend and a few glasses of spirits thrown in for good measure. The why wasn’t a problem either. She’d just heard that her cancer was terminal and inoperable, and she had never made any secret of the fact that she did not want to die in hospital. Open and shut, wasn’t it?

  Even this Rosemary Travis spannering up the works with allegations of murder most foul wouldn’t have counted for anything if it hadn’t been for the forensic report on the samples taken from the scene. Consistency was the name of the game, as Jarvis liked to tell the new recruits. It didn’t matter what story you came up with as long as it all hung together, but if what you said on page 42 clashed with something you’d said on page 24 then you were in dead lumber.

  In the present case, fortunately, there was no substantive discrepancy. SDs were the bane of every policeman’s life. Unless spotted in the early stages, they could turn the most promising case into an embarrassing write-off. This, though, was just a minor anomaly. All the ingredients which the pathologist had named as causes of death also figured in the samples of cocoa and medicine which Tomkins had found by the bed. The only problem was that the alcohol – some sort of proprietary liqueur – had been mixed into the morphine syrup, and the sleeping tablets crushed up and dissolved in the cocoa.

  There was nothing to say that the deceased hadn’t done this herself, of course, but it was unusual. Normally a suicide wouldn’t bother mixing the stuff together, they’d just scoff it down and let their stomach do the churning. An MA, then, but no more than that. All Jarvis needed to do was tie up the loose ends, take a statement and then piss off – in time for the other half on the way back with any luck.

  ‘Good afternoon, Inspector.’

  The voice was low and pleasant. Jarvis turned round as an elderly woman emerged from the shadows of the hallway. At first he made her about sixty, an estimate which he revised progressively upwards as she moved forward into the light. Well-preserved, though. Good bones, and the worst over for the skin and hair. Look much the same in a thousand years, he thought, like that bloke they dug up from the peat bog.

  ‘Well I never!’

  The woman stopped in the centre of the room, staring at Jarvis with an expression of disbelief.

  ‘This is really quite extraordinary! I do hope you won’t think I’m being familiar, Inspector, but you bear the most astonishing resemblance to one of my nephews. Rather a feckless lad, young Stuart, although he can charm the birds out of the trees when he wants. He lives in Canada and I haven’t seen him for donkey’s years. Well, now! I don’t know, I really don’t!’

  Anderson came in, accompanied by a burly woman in her thirties wearing a pair of shapeless blue overalls. He gave Jarvis an ingratiating smile.

  ‘May I introduce my sister Letitia, Inspector?’

  The woman in overalls nodded at Jarvis, who raised his eyebrows and inclined his head politely. Anderson took the elderly woman by the arm and led her to the chair.

  ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is Miss Rosemary Travis.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Miss Travis, the officers who responded to the 999 call last week reported that you made a number of allegations concerning Mrs Davenport’s tragic death. Now under the circumstances it would be perfectly natural if you had said things which you perhaps didn’t really mean. If that’s the case, just say so and this need go no further.’

  They stood in a ring, Jarvis, Anderson and his sister, looking down at the elderly lady sitting bolt upright on the edge of the armchair. To mitigate the effect of an interrogation, Jarvis seated himself on the wooden stool which stood in front of the writing-desk.

  ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you,’ he suggested in a kindly tone.

  Rosemary Travis looked him in the eye.

  ‘Murder is always unpleasant, Inspecto
r. So much the more so when the victim was one’s best friend.’

  ‘Chuck it, Travis!’ growled the woman in overalls.

  She grinned coquettishly at Jarvis.

  ‘Brains in their bums,’ she said.

  Anderson put his arm around his sister’s shoulders:

  ‘I think perhaps you should go and see how lunch is coming along, Letty,’ he muttered.

  The woman flinched.

  ‘There’s no need for that, William.’

  The arm encircling her tightened a fraction.

  ‘I believe there is.’

  ‘It’s Spam sandwiches with cold baked beans. What can go wrong?’

  Anderson smiled thinly.

  ‘Nevertheless, I feel quite strongly that you should go.’

  ‘But I don’t want to.’

  They stared at each other. After some time the woman’s breathing became loud and laboured, and her left cheek began to twitch uncontrollably. Anderson smiled and withdrew his restraining arm. His sister turned and ran out of the room, slamming the door loudly behind her.

  Anderson sighed and shook his head.

  ‘Poor Letitia!’

  He looked at Jarvis.

  ‘Our father was exceptionally intelligent, our mother strikingly beautiful. In an ideal world, each child would have received a portion of these gifts. As it was, I inherited Papa’s brains and Mamma’s looks, while Letitia got the latter’s muddle-through-somehow mind installed in a superficially feminized version of Pater’s burly bod. It is an unenviable not to say frankly repellent combination, and one which perhaps goes some way towards explaining her often startlingly abrupt manners. My apologies for the interruption, Inspector.’

  He drifted over to the writing-desk and refilled his tumbler. Jarvis turned to the elderly lady perched on the edge of the armchair. Her expression was full of mild determination, but held no clue as to her feelings about the scene which they had just witnessed.

  Jarvis got out his notebook, turned to a blank page and licked the lead of his pencil.