Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

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 eyes 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.

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, if 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…’