The Dying of the Light: A Mystery

by Michael Dibdin

  Miss Davis’s eyes grew wider.

  ‘And you think I have?’

  Jarvis winked.

  ‘I feel it. In my bones.’

  Miss Davis blushed.

  ‘Cor,’ she said.

  ‘Now let’s just have a quick look next door,’ Jarvis went on briskly. ‘In case there’s a secret passage.’

  Miss Davis looked flustered.

  ‘Secret passage?’

  ‘I think one might be regarded as permissible in a house such as this,’ he announced airily, heading for the door.

  Miss Davis caught him up.

  ‘You can’t!’

  ‘Whyever not? You haven’t got anything to hide, have you?’

  She stared at him in silence for some time, then shrugged.

  ‘I’d better ask William.’

  Jarvis tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.

  ‘Rule Number One,’ he said. ‘What your superior officer doesn’t find out didn’t happen. Right?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Right?’

  Miss Davis nodded.

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  Jarvis opened the door and stepped inside. At first sight, the room seemed a mirror image of the one next door: the same miscellaneous assortment of third-hand furniture, the same oppressive volume of chilly grey light, the same sense of desolation and decay. The only difference Jarvis noticed at first was that the lower pane of the window had been replaced by a rectangle of plywood. Then he heard a low moan, and realized with a shock that what lay on the bed was not just a mattress but a man, bound to the frame at the wrists and ankles.

  ‘Doctor’s orders,’ Miss Davis explained, hurriedly undoing the webbing which bound the man to the bed-frame. ‘Wouldn’t lie still, would you, George? Kept reopening his wounds, so we had to restrain him.’

  The elderly man moved his arms and legs feebly, groaning through his clenched, toothless gums. A series of long shallow cuts extended from the temple to the chin on one side of his face, while on the other there were two deep gashes which had been stitched. His hands and arms were heavily bandaged. The rest of his body was concealed by the covers.

  ‘What happened?’ Jarvis asked.

  Miss Davis took up a position at the head of the bed.

  ‘Had an accident, didn’t you, George? Tripped and fell out of the window.’

  Ignoring her, Channing turned his head to look at Jarvis.

  ‘They set the dog on me,’ he said.

  ‘We never!’ shouted Miss Davis.

  She bent over the bed, fist raised. Jarvis grasped her arm and led her away.

  ‘If you’re to be any use to us in the police,’ he hissed, ‘you must learn never to interrupt an officer when he’s interviewing a witness!’

  ‘But the old bastard just fibbed himself!’

  Jarvis nodded earnestly.

  ‘You don’t think I believe him, do you?’ he whispered.

  Miss Davis gawked. Jarvis gave her a playful nudge.

  ‘Rule Number Two is let ’em talk. The more he says, the easier it is to spot the inconsistencies and trap him in his own contradictions.’

  A smile spread slowly across Miss Davis’s face. Leaning back slightly, she punched Jarvis on the shoulder.

  ‘Oooooh, you are a one!’ she said.

  Surreptitiously rubbing his aching shoulder, Jarvis sat down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘what was that about a dog?’

  A scornful smile appeared on the man’s ravaged face.

  ‘Jerry couldn’t hold me in ’44. Got as far as Ostend that time, and would have made it back to Blighty if I hadn’t been turned in by some bloody Belgian. Whistling in the street, you see, hands in pockets. Not done sur le continong, it seems.’

  He pointed one bandaged hand at the broken window.

  ‘Worked the pane loose and climbed out. Managed to get down from the ledge in one piece, then the hound got me.’

  ‘And you’ve been kept tied up here ever since?’ Jarvis murmured.

  The man nodded.

  ‘Medic came that afternoon, patched me up.’

  He laughed soundlessly.

  ‘Worried I might die on them. Wouldn’t look good, he said. Got the wind up about old Davvers, too.’

  ‘Mrs Davenport?’

  The bandaged hand beckoned. Jarvis bent down over the pillow and the man’s humid breath billowed in his ear.

  ‘Wall’s like paper. Hear every word.’

  Jarvis nodded.

  ‘The morning they found the body, before the police got here, I heard Anderson talking to someone in there,’ Channing went on in a sibilant whisper. ‘Couldn’t make out the other voice, but it must have been …’

  His eyes swivelled towards the figure in blue overalls standing by the window, ostentatiously not listening.

  ‘Anderson was in a bit of a panic. Man’s a dipso, of course. Always go to pieces at the first sign of trouble. Kept wittering away about how the police would be there any minute. Then something about getting rid of something at all costs. Miss Davis must have asked him where, and Anderson says, “In a bloody haystack.” ’

  ‘A haystack?’ repeated Jarvis.

  ‘Then she said something else, and he said, “Well, we’ll just have to make sure they don’t get a chance to speak to her.” Then he laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll handle them. The police are such clods.” ’

  The man lay back on the pillow, exhausted. Jarvis stood up.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  He pointed to the wrist and ankle restraints.

  ‘I don’t really think those are necessary any more,’ he told Miss Davis.

  ‘Not if he’ll be good,’ she shrugged. ‘Will you be good, George?’

  Jarvis took her arm.

  ‘I’m sure he will,’ he said, guiding her to the door.

  ‘What did he say?’ Miss Davis demanded as soon as they were outside.

  Jarvis shrugged negligently.

  ‘Oh, nothing much. This and that. You know.’

  This could be it, he thought as they started along the corridor. The one he’d always dreamed about, the one that got you on TV telling some prat in a mac how it felt. He imagined opening his morning paper to find a headline reading ‘HELL HOME HORROR – Exclusive Pictures and Interview with Detective Chief Superintendent “Accrington” Stanley Jarvis’. Then he blinked, and the next moment the whole thing looked as insubstantial as the world-shattering insights Tomkins tended to come out with after the fifth bottle of Bud or Schlitz or whatever it was that week.

  No way, Stan, he told himself. The last thing he could afford to do was chance his arm on something that could blow up in his face and leave him without a leg to stand on if it subsequently turned out that he’d put his foot in it. This Miss Davis might come across with a bit of flattery, but her brother was considerably less of a soft touch, and well-connected with it. You couldn’t risk going up against people like that on the basis of a few ambiguous overheard phrases and the melodramatic fantasies of the dead woman’s best friend.

  Jarvis was no longer totally convinced that Rosemary Travis had adulterated the cocoa and morphine syrup herself, but that didn’t mean she was someone you could put in the witness-box if you wanted to reach retirement age with your reputation intact. Reluctantly he let the dreams of fame and fortune fade. In his heart he had always known that he was not destined for such things any more than the football club after which he had been named. Accrington fans regarded titles and cups as slightly swanky, suitable for folk in Blackburn or Burnley, but not their style. Like them, Jarvis knew his place.

  They had almost reached the landing when they heard Anderson yelling ‘Letty! Letty!’

  Miss Davis broke into a run, with Jarvis close behind. As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Anderson appeared from his office. He pointed to the front door, which was wide open.

  ‘Hargreaves is loose!’

  Miss Davis’s ey
es narrowed.

  ‘The bitch. I’ll fucking spay her.’

  Anderson smiled urbanely at Jarvis.

  ‘Sorry about this, Inspector! A minor domestic crisis, such as will happen from time to time in even the best-regulated households.’

  The smile vanished as he turned to his sister.

  ‘You take the north side, I’ll check the paddock. She can’t have gone far.’

  The front door clacked shut and footsteps scurried away over the gravel. Jarvis paused to check his appearance in the mirror at the foot of the stairs. He’d have been perfect on TV, too, he thought with a twinge of regret. He looked the part: solid, sound, dogged but fundamentally uninspired. People would have trusted him. That Jarvis, they’d have said, he’s all right. Shame there aren’t more like him in the force.

  ‘We’re ready for you, Inspector.’

  He spun around to find Rosemary Travis looking at him from a doorway near by.

  ‘This way!’ she said.

  Jarvis walked past her into the lounge. The other residents were all in their places: Weatherby sitting by the fireplace reading The Times, Charles Symes and Grace Lebon bent over a jigsaw puzzle, Samuel Rossiter muttering into the telephone, Belinda Scott lightly touching the keys of the piano, Purvey nodding over his book.

  ‘So, here we are,’ Rosemary remarked brightly, ‘gathered together in the lounge of this isolated country house to face the detective’s probing questions. One of us is guilty, but which? Can the sleuth succeed in unmasking the murderer before he – or she – strikes again?’

  The seven faces gazed expectantly at Jarvis.

  ‘Yes, well …’ he said.

  He licked his lips.

  ‘The thing is …’ he said.

  He consulted the marble clock on the mantelpiece, which read ten past four.

  ‘I’d like to ask you each a few questions,’ he said.

  He pointed at the skinny woman bent over the keyboard of the piano, her shrivelled body hinting at vanished beauty like the chrysalis of a butterfly condemned to live its brief life backwards.

  ‘I’ll start with you,’ said Stanley Jarvis masterfully.

  CHAPTER 10

  By the time Anderson reappeared in the lounge some twenty minutes later, Jarvis had spoken to all the residents except the errant Mrs Hargreaves. With the exception of Alfred Purvey, who was definitely a few stamps short of the first-class rate, they proved to be considerably less gaga than Jarvis had feared. Unfortunately it was Purvey who had come up with the only substantive piece of new information, which virtually destroyed its value as evidence.

  Surrounded as he was by formless, menacing uncertainties, Purvey left nothing to chance in those aspects of his life which he could control. His ‘jabs’ were the most significant of these. The regular regime of insulin injections had come to provide a certainty on which not only his life but also his sanity to some extent depended, and he was fanatically precise about everything relating to it. On the other hand, he was convinced that his tenure at Eventide Lodge was entirely dependent on the goodwill of his ‘hosts’, and he was therefore very reluctant to make any fuss about what was in any case a very minor matter: the disappearance of his syringes at some point in the course of the previous week.

  If true, this removed the basic stumbling block to Rosemary Travis’s theory of murder, which she herself, for all her much-vaunted prowess in the matter of detective stories, had completely overlooked. If Dorothy Davenport had not intended to kill herself, she would have taken no more than the prescribed dose of her medicine, and even in combination with alcohol and sleeping tablets this was not sufficient to cause death. What it would do was ensure that the victim fell into a deep sleep, thus enabling a potential murderer to inject a quantity of morphine consistent with that revealed by the post-mortem. And if some eagle-eyed pathologist happened to notice the puncture mark, Mrs Davenport’s medical record would reveal that she had received a number of injections over the past few weeks in the course of the tests she had undergone.

  In theory then, Purvey’s testimony, together with the fragment from the plastic wrapping of the syringe which Jarvis had discovered under the victim’s bed, cleared the way for him to open a full-scale murder investigation. But in theory only. The simple fact was that no evidence Alfred Purvey might give was likely to carry any weight with Jarvis’s superiors, still less a jury. Jarvis shuddered to think what a sarcastic QC would do to Purvey if he got a chance to cross-examine him. Clearly the testimony of a mind so pathetically at variance with reality could not be credited for a single instant. On the contrary, the implication had to be that the surer Alfred Purvey was about anything, the less likely it was to be true.

  This was particularly galling in view of the fact that Purvey had not only noticed the loss of the syringe, but had seen the person who had taken it from his room.

  ‘I thought at first that I was dreaming,’ he said with an apologetic smile. ‘The door was wide open – not that I ever shut it completely. One doesn’t want to appear discourteous …’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jarvis, cutting quickly through what he had by now identified as a recurrent closed loop.

  ‘The curtains were still drawn, and as the room in which I am staying is on the western side of the house, it is rather dark in the mornings – not that I wish to complain, of course! Heaven knows, it’s only too good of them to put me up at all …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I noticed a woman moving about. What with the poor light and my own drowsiness I was unable to identify the intruder – although that is of course a wholly inappropriate word in the circumstances, implying as it does …’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Then I must have dosed off again. When I woke, the room was empty and the door ajar. I got out of bed and found that one of the syringes which I keep on top of the chest of drawers was missing.’

  To cap the unfavourable impression which would be made by Purvey’s repeated references to falling asleep and dreaming, it transpired that he had no idea which day these events had occurred. It was thus without any great hopes that Jarvis had asked his next question.

  ‘So you have no idea who took your syringe?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Purvey replied simply. ‘It was Miss Davis.’

  It took Jarvis a moment to master his emotion.

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Well, by … by the smell.’

  ‘Smell?’ echoed Jarvis.

  ‘Of drink,’ Purvey explained.

  Jarvis stared at him. Purvey blinked mildly.

  ‘Spirituous liquor,’ he said. ‘If one has been strictly TT all one’s life, as I have, there’s no mistaking the nauseous odour. As I say, the intruder was a woman, and of course none of my fellow guests have any access to alcoholic beverages. Not of course that I wish to give the impression of making judgements on those who have been so good as to take me in …’

  ‘Ah, here you are, Inspector!’ cried Anderson, appearing in the doorway. ‘I hope my little flock haven’t been trying your patience too much.’

  He fixed Rosemary with a keen gaze.

  ‘I take it this was your idea, Miss Travis?’

  Jarvis got to his feet.

  ‘It was mine,’ he snapped. ‘Even we clods in the police get ideas of our own from time to time.’

  He had expected Anderson to react to hearing his sneering words quoted back at him, but he merely shrugged.

  ‘I’m sure you do, Inspector, but I was in fact referring to the episode involving Mrs Hargreaves.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Rosemary asked.

  ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been subjected to this unnecessary delay,’ Anderson murmured to Jarvis. ‘Please don’t let us detain you any longer. You must be anxious to go.’

  Rosemary pushed her way between the two men.

  ‘Where’s Mavis?’ she demanded. ‘Is she all right?’

  Anderson regarded her coldly.

  ‘Mrs Hargreaves is in the capable
hands of my sister, Miss Travis. She is as well as can be expected.’

  Turning his back on her, he led Jarvis to the door.

  ‘The whole thing was my fault for neglecting to lock up properly after letting you in,’ he explained in an undertone. ‘Normally we keep all the hatches firmly battened down lest the fauna get loose and do themselves an injury. Old Weatherby fell down the ha-ha last year and was in plaster for six weeks. You wouldn’t believe the pain and inconvenience we were put to. Time was you could get some great gormless strapping country lass in to do for them, but these days they all want minimum wages and National Insurance stamps and a week’s paid holiday in Tenerife.’

  ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘Hargreaves?’ Anderson replied breezily. ‘Letitia treed her in the copper beech on the east lawn.’

  ‘You didn’t have to use the dog this time, then?’

  Anderson gave him a sharp look.

  ‘Have they been telling you about Channing?’

  He sighed and shook his head.

  ‘A typical example of the way they personalize everything. The results can be quite alarming until you learn to decode them. Symes, for instance, suffers from incontinence caused by an anal tumour which causes him a certain amount of discomfort. Since there is a long waiting-list for the operation, we have to put up with the mess and stench as best we can. Mr Symes’s response has been to accuse my sister of cauterizing his rectum with a red-hot poker. Like Miss Travis, he prefers to ascribe his suffering to individual villainy rather than to the shortcomings of the health service and the workings of a fate which is simply indifferent to human misery.’

  He led Jarvis into the hallway.

  ‘As for Channing, he has no one but himself to blame for what happened. The man’s an obsessive escapologist. He managed to get away from some POW camp during the war and has been bragging about it ever since. Last week he decided to show us all that he’d lost none of the old skills. Unfortunately he happened to choose a moment when my pet was stretching his legs in the grounds. The worst of it is that his adventure seems to have started a trend. Now they all want to have a go.’

  He unlocked the front door and held it open.

  ‘I would ask you to stay for lunch, Inspector, but Letitia’s catering, although perfectly nourishing, is not the sort of thing you’d invite someone to. Give my respects to the Chief Constable, should you happen to bump into him. We met at a charity dinner it must be, let’s see, three years ago now?’