The Dying of the Light: A Mystery

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘You haven’t spoken to Mrs Hargreaves yet,’ said a voice behind them.

  ‘Go back to the lounge, Miss Travis,’ Anderson called sternly without glancing round.

  Rosemary grasped the sleeve of Jarvis’s overcoat.

  ‘You must speak to Mavis Hargreaves!’

  ‘She won’t be able to tell him anything he hasn’t already heard fifty times from the others,’ Anderson retorted dismissively.

  Rosemary looked straight into Jarvis’s eyes.

  ‘If you leave now, I will be the next to die,’ she told him. ‘I hope you will at least investigate that properly.’

  Jarvis stared back, shaken by the utter conviction of her tone. He had enough experience of people lying to him to know that Rosemary Travis was speaking the truth – or what she believed to be the truth.

  ‘Mrs Hargreaves is in no condition to speak to anyone,’ Anderson remarked.

  ‘What have you done to her?’ Rosemary cried. ‘Let me see her! Let me see her!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jarvis told her. ‘I’ll make sure she’s all right, and I’ll listen to anything she has to tell me.’

  He turned to Anderson.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Anderson shook his head.

  ‘Letty is just applying some soothing embrocation to the contusions which Mrs Hargreaves sustained in the course of her escapade,’ he said. ‘If you care to wait in my office, I’ll bring her to you.’

  Deliberately avoiding Rosemary Travis’s eye, Jarvis crossed the hall to the book-lined room he had entered what seemed like an age ago. He was prepared to back her up to the extent of defying Anderson over this particular issue, but that was as far as he could go on the basis of the information he had. Voices heard through a partition wall, a scrap of plastic, a figure half-glimpsed by someone who might have been dreaming – these were all nice bits of circumstantial decoration, but they were no use to him without some crucial piece of evidence to tie the whole thing together. He couldn’t even imagine what that might be, still less believe that this Mrs Hargreaves was magically going to come up with it. That was as soft as his adolescent fantasies about Accrington winning the FA Cup.

  The furthest they’d ever got was the third round, but each year young Stanley told himself that this time it might be a different story. The fascination of the Cup was that past reputations and current form counted for nothing. It was all down to what happened on the day. In practice, of course, that was largely determined by the skill and experience of the players, which in turn reflected the financial standing of the clubs concerned, which was dependent on their ability to attract the rewards that success brings with it. The competition was thus a faithful model of British society: supposedly accessible to all comers of talent and ability, in fact dominated by a few established clans who could now unashamedly flaunt a natural superiority which had been demonstrated in fair and open competition.

  This had given Stan’s daydreams an extra edge. When he visualized the Accrington team striding out into the terrifying expanses of Wembley, the odds they faced were comparable to those which had governed his father’s life, and that of everyone they knew. Their opponents, as befitted their symbolic status, wore varying strips and assumed a variety of aliases, until the day Stan heard his dad sounding off about someone – it turned out to be the woman he later took up with – acting ‘like a bloody Chelsea débutante’. From that moment on the names of Manchester United and Liverpool were heard no more. It was always the snooty Blues with whom the Owd Reds marched out to do battle in Stanley’s imagination. Mighty Chelsea, flying high in Division One versus lowly Accrington, struggling to survive in the lower reaches of the Third. All in all, the lads might have been forgiven for conceding defeat in advance and putting the train fare towards a decent striker for the next season.

  Nor did anything in the first half suggest that the result would be anything but wholly predictable. By the time the whistle blew Accrington were trailing by two goals to nil, and it could easily have been twice that if Chelsea had taken a few of the chances which had been handed them on a plate. But in the second half the whole tenor of the game abruptly changed.

  It all began when Chelsea’s central defender scored an own goal with an ill-judged back pass. The London side recovered quickly, coming back with another goal which was disallowed on a blatantly incorrect off-side decision which so upset the Chelsea players that two of them were booked. When one subsequently expressed his frustration by bringing down his opposite number, he was promptly sent off, and Stanley’s centre-forward scored from the spot to level the scores. But although the Blues were down to ten men, this seemed to concentrate their formidable abilities, and by the end of the first period of extra time Accrington had not only failed to score the winning goal but had themselves been saved by the woodwork on no less than three occasions. There were now only five minutes left before the final whistle blew, five minutes for Accrington to achieve the glory which had always eluded them and write their name in the history books for ever …

  ‘Right, Inspector!’

  For a moment Jarvis thought that Rosemary Travis had come to hound him with some new and ingenious theory, but when he looked around he found that the speaker had been Mr Anderson. Beside him stood a plump woman in a loud print dress who wound a strand of pale blonde hair around her finger as she gazed distractedly at Jarvis.

  ‘There’s lots of rape about,’ she said dreamily, waddling towards him.

  Jarvis gaped at her. This was one complaint he hadn’t heard from the other residents. As the woman approached, Jarvis noticed that her right cheek was puffy and discoloured.

  ‘Fields of it, everywhere,’ she went on. ‘And such beautiful tits, too.’

  ‘Too?’ Jarvis echoed feebly.

  Mavis Hargreaves nodded.

  ‘A pair, yes. Mating, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  She touched Jarvis’s arm.

  ‘It was worth it just to be outside again.’

  Another loony, thought Jarvis, the last embers of hope dying in his heart. They were into injury time now, the referee consulting his watch, only seconds left for Accrington to produce the impossible winner from nowhere.

  ‘I’ve been asking everyone here about the evening Mrs Davenport died,’ he recited dully. ‘I don’t suppose you recall anything unusual happening?’

  Mavis Hargreaves gawked at him with a witless grin.

  ‘Anything at all,’ Jarvis stressed, trying to let her off easily, ‘however insignificant it may seem.’

  ‘Only the cocoa.’

  Jarvis jerked his head up.

  ‘Cocoa?’

  The woman tittered.

  ‘I was going to take the wrong mug,’ she said. ‘Would you credit it? I always use the pink one, but that night I went to take the dark blue, which was Dorothy’s, of course. It was thinking about her going, I suppose, that got me muddled. Luckily Miss Davis put me right. “Not that one,” she says, “that’s a special treat for our Dorothy. We’ve put in an extra dose of sugar to speed the parting guest.” ’

  ‘She must be concussed,’ Anderson whispered urgently to Jarvis. ‘Even by her standards, this is complete idiocy. I’d better call the doctor.’

  Mavis Hargreaves fluttered her eyelashes.

  ‘I must admit I was tempted! I have the most terrible sweet tooth. Always have had. When I was a kid, I was never without something in my mouth. I just crave it, night and day. So when I went to Dorothy’s room with the others, later that evening, I was naughty. I blush to say so, but, well, to make a clean bosom of the thing, I stole a sip of Dorothy’s cocoa. More like a gulp, actually.’

  She smiled at Jarvis, who gazed expressionlessly back. Time had stopped. The crowd had fallen silent and the referee’s breath, drawn to blow the final whistle, remained blockaded in his lungs. Only the ball was still moving, smooth and dreamlike, through the heavy air …

  ‘Well, it’s quite true that crime doesn’t pay!’ she went on jocularly. ‘As soon
as I tasted the cocoa, I realized that Miss Davis must have been teasing me. There was a lot of sugar in it, but it still tasted bitter. Really sharp, it was, with a sort of chemical edge to it. Funny, that.’

  … hopelessly low and wide, but about to take that freakish deflection which would place it at the feet of the Accrington centre-forward …

  ‘And it’s no use you asking me about anything after that,’ Mavis Hargreaves concluded with an embarrassed shrug, ‘because I was fast asleep. I usually suffer from the most terrible insomnia, but that night I slept like the dead. The next thing I knew it was broad daylight, and everyone else had been up for hours!’

  She put her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Except for poor Dorothy, of course.’

  … and the huge stadium exploded as the final whistle blew, ending the most extraordinary match which the hallowed turf of Wembley had ever seen. Fans of both teams wept openly and embraced each other, their rivalry forgotten in mutual wonderment at this demonstration that miracles could still happen and anything was possible …

  ‘Thank you,’ Jarvis told Mrs Hargreaves.

  He turned to Anderson with a glazedly formal expression.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment, sir, I’ll just have a word with HQ from the car,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll need to speak to you and your sister.’

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 11

  Rosemary dibbed the forefinger of her left hand into the soft soil several times and drew it out again, the fingernail clogged with dirt. She ripped the top off the small brightly coloured envelope she was holding in her other hand, and poured a stream of tiny black grains into her palm.

  ‘You see?’ she muttered fiercely. ‘They come from Suttons at 75p a packet, you old fool!’

  A car came down the tree-lined drive leading to the road which ran along the top of the ridge. It crunched across the weed-strewn gravel sweep in front of the house and drew up by the front door. Two men got out, looking about them.

  Rosemary wiped the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve. Bending over the flowerbed, she busied herself with the seeds, letting each fall into its shallow grave and smoothing the earth over it.

  ‘Afternoon.’

  Detective Inspector Stanley Jarvis stood looking at Rosemary from the other side of the flowerbed. His companion, who wore dark glasses and appeared to be chewing gum, remained by the car.

  ‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ Rosemary replied.

  Jarvis nodded sagely.

  ‘Planting something?’ he observed.

  ‘Just a few seeds.’

  ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’

  Rosemary did not reply. Jarvis walked round the flowerbed and plucked the packet from her fingers.

  ‘Poppies?’ he exclaimed. ‘I never knew they needed sowing. Thought they just happened.’

  ‘They do grow wild, of course, but sometimes nature can do with a helping hand.’

  Retrieving the packet, she filled the rest of the hollows with seeds.

  ‘It’s much the same as planting clues in a whodunnit, if you like,’ she mused. ‘It may seem a bit contrived, but the results are so much more interesting than the dreary crimes you read about in the papers.’

  Jarvis made a face.

  ‘I don’t like,’ he said. ‘Now then, do you know where Mrs Hargreaves is? My colleague and I are here to take her statement.’

  ‘I believe, in the house. Go through the French windows, I should. No one will mind, and it’s quicker.’

  Jarvis nodded briskly.

  ‘Right you are. Tomkins!’

  The two men converged on the house. Rosemary upended the packet of seeds, scattering the remainder across the flowerbed.

  ‘There, now,’ she murmured. ‘You’ll just have to fend for yourselves. I’ve interfered quite enough as it is.’

  She raised one arm in response to a wave from Jack Weatherby, who had appeared from the grove of rhododendrons beyond the croquet lawn. He called out something that Rosemary couldn’t quite catch.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she returned heartily.

  With a broad smile, Weatherby continued along the path. In his straw hat and linen suit, recovered from a trunk of his belongings discovered in the attic, he looked and moved like a younger brother of the man who used to sit slumped in his chair by the fireplace until the time came to shuffle back to bed. A change no less dramatic was to be seen in the other residents of Eventide Lodge. It was only now that Rosemary realized the extent to which she had come to accept that their condition was an inevitable consequence of the ageing process, only to be expected in people who were virtually at death’s door. She had been astounded by the effect of a healthy diet, exercise, fresh air and renewed contact with their families and the outside world.

  Not that the transition had been entirely smooth. Purvey was still under medical supervision after suffering a nervous collapse due to his belief that the ‘new owners’ were going to turn him out. Charles Symes, too, was in hospital, the media interest in the affair having pushed him to the front of the queue for his operation. Even Rosemary had suffered mild attacks of anxiety following the abrupt collapse of the system which had ruled their lives for so long. The day the plastic sheeting covering the windows had been torn down had been particularly fraught, with both Grace Lebon and Samuel Rossiter requiring sedation. But by far the worst affected had been Belinda Scott, who tried to get the others to join her in a campaign of passive resistance to the changes. When that failed, she had gone on hunger strike, accusing everyone else of betraying the rightful authority of Mr Anderson and Miss Davis and threatening to exact a terrible retribution when they returned.

  However, the chances of that happening were remote indeed. The charges of wilful cruelty and gross neglect on which the siblings had been arrested the previous week had been substantiated beyond a vestige of doubt both by the residents’ statements and by the evidence of the medical examinations they had all undergone. The discovery that a resident of the Lodge named Hilary Bryant, who had since died, had been persuaded to alter her will in the Andersons’ favour, and that pressure had been put on others to do the same, had sealed their fate. Even if by some miracle they escaped a prison sentence, their careers in residential care for the aged were quite clearly over.

  Pending further developments, Eventide Lodge had been placed in the care of the Local Health Authority, who had staffed it with personnel recently been made redundant owing to the closure of the geriatric wing of a hospital in another part of the county. Their cheerful attentions had done wonders to awaken the residents from the catatonic stupor and paranoid delusions into which most of them had retreated, but an equally important factor had been the letters, phone calls and visits from friends and relatives horrified to learn what had been going on behind the genteel façade which the Andersons had maintained – and ashamed that they had not made it their business to find out earlier.

  In the attic of the Lodge, the new staff had found over twenty dustbin liners crammed with post which the Andersons had deliberately withheld to increase the residents’ sense of isolation and dependence. All outgoing letters were read by Anderson or Miss Davis, and any reference to conditions at the Lodge censored. The resulting anodyne communications served to persuade the recipients – not that they usually needed much persuasion – that their nominally beloved but in practice rather tiresome old relatives were as well as could be expected, and that phone calls and visits were pointlessly upsetting for everyone concerned. On the rare occasions when family members did insist on paying their respects in person, the residents were reduced to incoherent passivity by dosing their food with drugs prescribed by the compliant Dr Morel.

  Rosemary made her way across the lawn to the garden seat which stood on the path at the foot of the rockery. She sat down and felt in her pocket for the letter she had received that morning. But it was another piece of paper that emerged, crumpled and soiled, with her name written on one side in shaky capitals. Hastily repl
acing it, Rosemary located the air-mail envelope with its large, colourful stamps in an unfamiliar currency.

  She read the enclosure from beginning to end several times, then lay back on the slats of teak weathered to a silvery sheen, basking in the weak autumnal sunshine. A council employee was at work mowing the lawn at the other side of the house. Rosemary gazed up at the sky of hazy blue seamed with strata of diffuse cloud. The throaty purring of the motor-mower reminded her of the flimsy biplanes of her youth, when flying was still an adventure. She closed her eyes …

  A shadow fell between her and the sun. Rosemary looked up to find Stanley Jarvis standing in front of her. His expression was unsympathetic.

  ‘Have you been winding me up?’ he said.

  Rosemary peered at him, pondering the meaning of these words. She thought of the tin soldiers her brother had used to play with before a real war killed him, and was on the point of making a joke about clockwork toys when Jarvis went on.

  ‘Mrs Hargreaves now refuses to confirm her earlier testimony about the cocoa.’

  Rosemary brushed some grass clippings off her dress.

  ‘How very tiresome of her,’ she murmured.

  ‘Don’t give me that!’ Jarvis snarled.

  He fixed her with a stare.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t appreciate what’s at stake here, Miss Travis. When I came here last week, Mrs Hargreaves told me that Miss Davis had specifically warned her against taking the blue mug of cocoa, claiming that it had extra sugar in it as a special treat for Mrs Davenport. Mrs Hargreaves went on to say that when she tasted the cocoa in Mrs Davenport’s room later she found that it had a bitter taste with a, quote, sort of chemical edge to it, unquote, and that she slept exceptionally long and soundly that night.’

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive my saying so, Inspector, but …’