Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

‘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 personalise 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 cauterising 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?’

‘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 visualised 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 debutante’. 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.