Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

Jarvis flashed a regulation smile.

‘Mr Anderson? I believe you’re expecting me.’

The man eyed him blearily.

‘You may also believe that the earth is flat, for all I know. It doesn’t follow that such is in fact the case.’

Jarvis felt his guts clench as though in the first stirrings of indigestion. Just when everything had seemed to be going so well. He unbuttoned the dark blue overcoat he’d got half-price in the sales, revealing an acrylic-rich suit from which he produced his warrant card.

‘Detective-Inspector Stanley Jarvis, sir. I am calling with regard to Mrs Dorothy Hilda Davenport, nee Cooke, deceased.’

The man squinted at the warrant card.

‘You don’t look anything like the person in this photograph.’

‘I was given to understand that you had been informed of and had agreed to this visit,’ snarled Jarvis, with whom the quantity of weight gained and hair lost over the past few years was a sore point. ‘One of my associates was in telephonic communication with a certain…’

He took out his notebook.

‘…Miss Davis.’

Anderson raised his hands in surrender.

‘Ah, the fair Letitia! That explains everything. Say no more, Inspector! I’ll come quietly, it’s a fair cop, lock me up for my own good, I get these terrible urges, etcetera etcetera.’

He opened the door wide and Jarvis stepped inside. The hall was deep, bare and resonant. A boar’s head projected from a trophy hung high on one wall. Next to the door stood an elephant’s foot hollowed out to take an assortment of sticks and umbrellas. The air was chill and dank, the light dull.

‘This way, Inspector!’

Anderson padded across the flagstones towards a lighted doorway. Hush Puppies squealing underfoot, Jarvis followed. The room they entered was small and windowless and smelt strongly of mould. All four walls were covered in shelving crammed with books of every conceivable size, shape and colour. The furniture consisted of a leather armchair which had seen better days and an antique writing-desk supporting an array of spirit bottles.

Jarvis looked round at the serried spines and titles, most of which were either illegible or incomprehensible. Several were in foreign languages. None seemed to have anything to do with the history or fortunes of Accrington Stanley FC.

‘Like books, do you, sir?’ he remarked archly.

‘How very astute of you, Inspector. One can readily see why you have risen to a position of such eminence.

As you so rightly surmise, bibliomania is indeed one of my principal pleasures, the other being alcoholism.’

He selected one of the bottles from the escritoire and poured a generous quantity into his tumbler.

‘I’d be more than happy to offer you a dram,’ he told Jarvis heartily, ‘but generations of literary coppers saying “Not while I’m on duty, sir” have no doubt made it impossible for you to accept such an offer even if you felt so inclined. Thus are we constrained by fictions.’

Leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece, Anderson fixed his visitor with an expression of polite attention. Jarvis realised it was incumbent on him to say something. He consulted his thoughts. They were empty.

‘This is just a routine visit, sir,’ he declared.

‘That’s what they all say, Inspector.’

Jarvis cleared his throat.

‘Who all?’ he demanded. ‘I mean, all who?’

That didn’t sound right either.

‘Along with refusing a drink because they’re on duty,’ said Anderson, taking a gulp of his whisky.

We’ve got a right one here, thought Jarvis. He inhaled deeply and massaged the bridge of his nose. Accrington Stanley 4, Stockport County 0. Gateshead 1, Accrington Stanley 1.

‘According to the officers called to the scene last Tuesday,’ he said, ‘one of the patients here, a Mrs…’

He glanced at his notebook again.

‘…Miss Rosemary Travis, made certain allegations regarding the circumstances surrounding Mrs Davenport’s death.’

Anderson giggled.

‘Glitches,’ he said.

Jarvis goggled.

‘Witches?’

‘Bats,’ said Anderson, heaving at his whisky. ‘In the belfry. Bugs in the program. If our clients-the preferred term, incidentally-were user-friendly, they wouldn’t be.’

Jarvis got out his pen and executed a doodle in his notebook.

‘Wouldn’t be what?’ he murmured.

‘In loco dientis,’ replied Anderson as though the point were obvious. ‘If they weren’t already loco.’

Catching Jarvis’s expression, he put his glass down and made pantomime gestures indicating insanity.

‘IF ALL THERE, NOT ALL HERE!’

Jarvis assumed an expression intended to impress on Anderson the manner of man with whom he had to do. Catching sight of himself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, he decided he just looked constipated.

‘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 recognisble manner and for comprehensible motives, whose identity will be revealed in the final chapter?’