Michael Dibdin - The Dying of the Light

‘I’ve caught you red-handed vandalising official property!’

‘Calm down, Belinda,’ said Rosemary.

‘Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, you old bag! I’m telling Miss Davis! They’ll stop your meals! They’ll give you jabs!’

‘No, please, I didn’t mean it!’ cried Weatherby suddenly, as though in the midst of a dream.

Grace Lebon stood up, knocking her chair over.

‘I don’t like it here,’ she announced. ‘I want to go home.’

‘Well tough titty, ‘cos you can’t!’ retorted Belinda, turning her wrath on this new target. ‘They don’t want you at home. Not that we want you here either, but we’re bleeding stuck with you, aren’t we? So if this place isn’t good enough for your royal highness, why don’t you do us all a favour and just die?’

‘MY BUM!’ shrieked Charles Symes. ‘JESUS GOD ALMIGHTY, MY BUM!’

‘No, no, please!’ moaned Weatherby, swaying to and fro. ‘Please don’t!’

Belinda Scott strode purposefully about the room, singing at the top of her voice.

‘But it really doesn’t matter if I’m always slightly pissed, ‘cos you’d none of you be missed! Y-o-u’d n-o-n-e o-f y-o-u b-e m-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ssed!’

Purvey wrung his hands and looked on imploringly.

‘I wonder if I could possibly impose on your hospitality for just one more night?’ he pleaded to no one in particular. ‘Don’t turn me out, I beg of you. I’d gladly leave at once, only I have nowhere else to go, you see.’

‘I demand to speak to the police immediately!’ hissed Samuel Rosenstein frantically into the disconnected telephone. ‘Our lives are all in danger!’

‘GOOD JESUS CHRIST, MY BUM!’

‘I don’t like this hotel! I want to go home!’

‘N-o-n-e o-f y-o-u b-e m-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i…’

Rosemary was about to put her hands over her ears to shut out the deafening tumult when the door opened and all the residents immediately fell silent. When they saw it was only Dorothy Davenport, one or two started up again half-heartedly, but they broke off when they saw the expression on Dorothy’s face.

‘What is it?’ cried Rosemary, hurrying over to her friend. ‘What’s happened, Dot?’

Dorothy stopped just inside the door, pale and trembling.

‘I… I saw…’

Rosemary took her arm.

‘What? What is it?’

Dorothy burst into tears.

‘Oh Rose,’ she sobbed, ‘there was blood everywhere! His clothes ripped to shreds and great gashes all over his face and hands!’

She shivered.

‘God knows what they can have done to him, poor man.’

To whom?’ asked Rosemary.

Dorothy looked at her friend dully.

‘George Channing,’ she said. The corned beef millionaire.’

‘And what do you make of this interesting development?’

The two friends were sitting side by side in their usual places. Dorothy’s hands and lips were still quivering and her eyes sightlessly scanned the opaque screen of the window. The other residents, exhausted by their recent outbursts, had resumed their stupor.

‘I suppose it was something we should really have foreseen,’ Rosemary went on. ‘Nothing is more usual, after all, than for the principal suspect to become the next victim. Indeed, my reluctance to consider such an eventuality was perhaps at least partly due to a feeling that the device had become rather hackneyed.’

Dorothy gave a convulsive sob. She reached out and took her friend’s hand.

‘He’s dead, Rose.’

They’re all dead,’ Rosemary returned briskly. ‘We shouldn’t have any victims otherwise.’

Dorothy shook her head violently.

‘This is different, Rose. This is serious. They really killed him!’

Rosemary raised her eyebrows.

‘”They”, Dot? Do you think there’s more than one person involved, then?’

‘You know who I mean! They were carrying him in when I crossed the hallway. There was blood everywhere, his face was scarcely recognisable. It looked as though he’d been ripped apart by some…’

Rosemary withdrew her hand with a genteel shudder.

‘There’s no need to descend to vulgar melodrama, Dorothy, even if…’

She broke off abruptly.

‘Oh Dot!’ she laughed. ‘You are clever!’

Dorothy stared at her blankly.

‘You completely took me in!’ Rosemary went on admiringly. ‘It’s the classic technique, disguising the essential clue in a passage of gory sensationalism, and I almost fell for it. “His face was scarcely recognisable.” Of course! That’s the solution!’

Picking up the shapeless mass of frayed yarn which Dorothy had unravelled, she started to wind it rapidly into a neat ball.

‘We’ve established that Randolph Fitzpayne assumed the identity of George Channing in order to do away with Hilary Bryant. Now that has been achieved, he needs to cover his tracks so that he and Lady Belinda Scott can elope to their villa in Amalfi…’

‘Antibes.’

Rosemary nodded and smiled.

‘Beg pardon. Dot, you’re quite right. In Antibes. And how better to ensure that his crime is not brought home to him than by killing off George Channing? The police can’t arrest a dead man-especially one who never existed in the first place!’

She handed the completed ball of wool to her friend.

‘But if it wasn’t Channing I saw, then who was it?’ Dorothy protested feebly. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’

‘There isn’t anyone else to be the murderer either,’ Rosemary pointed out.

‘What about Mr Anderson and Miss Davis? I saw them carrying the body upstairs between them, like a sack of coal!’

Rosemary gave her a withering look.

‘Well, of course! That’s what staff are for, isn’t it? Fetching and carrying and suchlike tasks may safely be entrusted to them, but never murder. That’s an absolutely fundamental principle. Otherwise what possible interest could the solution have, for heaven’s sake? Being killed by a servant is a fate of no more interest than being run over by a tram. No, no, the murderer must be someone like us, someone who matters.’

Dorothy threaded the wool on to her needles again and began to form the first stitches.

‘Yes, but there isn’t anyone else,’ she repeated. ‘Don’t you remember? We were all gathered here in the lounge.’

‘All except you,’ murmured Rosemary.

Dorothy’s hands became still.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I am merely pointing out that you are the only one who doesn’t have an alibi,’ Rosemary replied. ‘You left the lounge under the pretext of going to powder your nose shortly before the attack occurred, and returned immediately afterwards to stage an extremely convincing display of hysteria.’

Dorothy laughed and resumed her knitting.

‘Oh rubbish! What possible motive could I have?’

‘One can always invent a motive,’ Rosemary sniffed.

‘You might be the sultry Latin temptress with whose affections Channing, alias Randolph Fitzpayne, trifled in the course of his sojourn in Patagonia and who subsequently followed him to England intent on exacting revenge.’

Dorothy glared at her.

‘Honestly, Rose! Do I look like a dago?’

The door was opened by a lanky man in his mid-forties wearing a blue blazer and white flannel trousers. His long florid face rose to a mat of slicked hair which had receded to the centre of his skull. Holding the door ajar, he wheeled in a metal trolley supporting a large teapot and a pile of cups and saucers.

‘Good afternoon, campers!’ he called jovially.

There was a scattered muttering of ‘Good afternoon, Mr Anderson.’

The man picked up a cut-glass tumbler from the trolley and took a leisurely gulp of the amber liquid it contained.