Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

Dorothy plied her needles energetically.

‘In short,’ she said, ‘they all had a motive to poison her.’

‘All except George Channing, the corned beef millionaire,’ agreed Rosemary. ‘Unfortunately they all had an alibi, too.’

‘Even Rosenstein?’

Dorothy pointed to the Jew, who was still muttering urgent phrases into the phone.

‘He seemed the most likely suspect for some time,’ Rosemary admitted. ‘Samuel Rosenstein had every reason to wish Hilary Bryant dead, since she was blackmailing him over the matter of his shady share-dealings. Moreover it was he who passed her the poisoned glass of wine at dinner that evening…’

‘…and then knocked over his own glass, staining Grace Lebon’s dress red in an eerie presage of the horrors to come…’

‘.. except that it wasn’t his own but the poisoned drink,’ Rosemary continued, ‘which he was forced to spill deliberately in order to avoid having to drink it himself when Hilary, suspecting his murderous intent, cunningly switched their glasses. Yes, Samuel Rosenstein certainly planned Hilary’s death, but he did not in fact kill her.’

Dorothy gazed eagerly at her friend.

‘Then who did?’ she breathed.

The door swung violently open and a thickset woman wearing stained blue overalls came rushing into the lounge.

‘Where the fuck’s Channing?’ she bellowed.

No one moved, no one spoke. The woman stood panting in the centre of the room. Her skin was blotchy and uneven, her hair grizzled. Her eyes took in each of the residents in turn: the colonel with his paper, the elderly hypochondriac swathed in blankets, the gay couple by the window, the financier holding the telephone, the languid aristocrat at the piano, the mild-mannered clergyman reading in the corner.

Weatherby waved his folded newspaper.

‘I say,’ he called, ‘is our tea at all imminent, do you happen to know?’

The woman strode over and struck him resoundingly across the face. She wheeled round on the others, her slim red tongue licking the tips of the fingers which had delivered the blow.

‘The first thing I’ll do to our George is make him tell me how he got out,’ she said meditatively. ‘If it turns out that any of you had a part in it, the only tea you’ll get’ll be Channing’s piss – hot from the kidney.’

She jerked her arm up, making Weatherby flinch, and scuttled rapidly out.

The door wheezed shut on its pneumatic spring. After a moment the click of Dorothy’s needles resumed.

‘Then who did?’

Rosemary gave her a startled glance.

‘Who did what?’

Her voice was low and tremulous. Dorothy gave her a searching look.

‘For heaven’s sake, Rose, I thought I was getting bad! Have you already forgotten what we were talking about? If Samuel Rosenstein didn’t kill Hilary Bryant, who did?’

Rosemary breathed deeply in and then out. She flashed a smile at Dorothy.

‘George Channing.’

Her friend was clearly taken aback.

‘The corned beef millionaire? But we’ve agreed that he was the only person who had no possible motive.’

Rosemary nodded.

‘Not as George Channing, no. But George Channing never existed.’

Dorothy gasped. Rosemary leaned forward confidentially.

“The man we know as Channing is none other than Randolph Fitzpayne, who went to Argentina to bury his sorrows after Hilary Bryant broke their engagement and his heart!’

Dorothy completed a row of stitches while she thought it over. There was now only a short length of yarn left dangling.

‘But Randolph was killed by a drunken groucho,’ she objected.

‘Gaucho,’ murmured Rosemary. ‘Yes, so we all assumed. But we have only Lady Belinda’s word for that, don’t forget. The truth is that Fitzpayne survived the attack and went on to make his fortune in the corned beef trade before returning to wreak his vengeance on the woman who had spurned him three decades earlier.’

Dorothy smiled blissfully.

‘And now he’s fled to evade capture,’ she said, as the free end of the wool inched its way over her knuckles. ‘It all fits together!’

She contemplated the panel of knitting for a moment before sliding it off the needle and starting to unravel it.

‘Why hasn’t Lady Belinda gone with him, though?’ she remarked. ‘After all, they must have been in it together.’

‘She’ll join him later, once the hunt for George Channing has been called off. Then they can settle down in the villa he’s purchased in Antibes and savour the happiness denied them for so long.’

Dorothy rapidly unpicked the knitting she had been working on. Small knots in several places showed where the yarn had previously been broken.

‘Until the police come to arrest them, of course,’ she said. ‘After all, they can’t be allowed to get away with it, can they?’

Rosemary shook her head gravely.

‘That would never do, Dot.’

Another spasm passed across Dorothy’s face.

‘I’ll just pop upstairs and fetch my medicine,’ she said.

Rosemary looked at her with an expression of concern.

‘Is it bad?’

Dorothy shook her head.

‘It’s just there. It’s always there.’

‘Let me go,’ Rosemary offered.

Dorothy waved her away.

‘I need to go to the lav anyway, and you can’t very well do that for me!’

Rosemary watched her frail, diminutive figure recede across the lounge, passing each of the other residents in turn. By the empty fireplace, Weatherby sat slumped over the newspaper whose pages were yellow and brittle with age. Mrs Hargreaves lay on the sofa turning over a pack of battered postcards showing views of Bognor, Hove and Bournemouth, the written messages so blurred that they were no longer decipherable. The elderly couple were still poring over the jigsaw cannibalised from the surviving pieces of what had originally been several separate puzzles.

‘Operator, get me the police!’ urged the gaunt figure in an intense whisper, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the lead dangling down from the phone ended in a frayed mass of severed wires. Studiously ignoring everyone else, Belinda Scott sat draped over the piano whose strings and mechanism had long been removed. As Dorothy reached the door, Purvey looked up from the pages of his engagement diary for 1951 and smiled at her. ‘Thank you once again so very much for letting me impose on your hospitality like this,’ he said. ‘I do hope I’m not being too much of a nuisance.’

Rosemary glanced at the clock, which still read ten past four. She turned towards the window, attracted by a sound outside. Owing to the plastic sheeting which had been taped over the glass to improve the insulation and reduce draughts, it was impossible to see anything outside and the lounge was never aired. On hot days, and in winter when the storage heaters were turned on, the residual stench of flesh and food and urine, always pervasive, became quite overpowering. She could still hear the noise which had drawn her attention in the first place. Then she had thought it might be a fly trapped between the glass and the plastic film, but now it sounded more like a distant growling interspersed with cries which might almost have been human.

Rosemary got up and raised the lower right-hand corner of the plastic, where the tape had come loose from the frame. Through the triangle of grimy glass she could see part of the overgrown lawn at the front of the house and the double row of copper beeches which marked the line of the driveway, but there was no clue as to the cause of the strange sounds, which had now ceased.

A hand grabbed her wrist, forcing her to release the plastic sheet.

‘I’m telling!’

Belinda Scott stood glaring indignantly at Rosemary. Pinned to the bosom of her dress she wore a tattered red paper poppy which she had retrieved from the rubbish bin where it had been discarded by Miss Davis. She pointed to the loose flap of plastic.