The Dying of the Light

by Robert Richardson

  The Dying Of The Light

  Robert Richardson

  © Robert Richardson, 1990

  Robert Richardson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1990 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter One

  Blank eyes opaque as emerald marbles, Tess Davy lay on her back across the rock, body limp and still. A sand fly crawled over her cheek, a creeping black blemish on a frozen, fine-boned face of rose quartz pink. The sea breeze stirred long hair falling from her hanging head in a tawny cascade. The silence was filled by the seething hiss of waves endlessly rattling stones like an infinity of dice on the beach two hundred feet below the cliffs, mixed with choking sobs of gliding herring gulls swooping through sun laden sapphire sky. As the shadow of one slid swiftly across her body and was gone, Augustus Maltravers’s features were immobile and unreadable as he looked down at the terrified death mask of the woman he loved. A man stood over her. His name was Neil Levis and it was exactly six months since Tess had met him. He slowly raised his hands, staring at the powerful, trembling, sweat-glistening fingers with which he had mercilessly strangled her, as though unable to believe that it had happened. Then he shrieked like an animal in agony.

  *

  Two miles away, Martha Shaw lay on her studio floor, crushed from neck to waist by nearly two tons of granite, the statue she knew it had contained partly sculpted out of stubborn hardness in bright sparks and flying chips. Knuckles of one hand were tense and white on fingers squeezed in terror around a cold chisel. Her mouth stretched open wide, silent symbol of a scream stopped in her throat when the rock slammed down with a crash that had rattled the huge windows of the skylight so violently that several had shattered. The door of the studio was flung open and a woman burst in.

  “Martha! Are you all right? I heard a bang and …” The sentence ended in a cry of horror at what she saw. “Martha!”

  Crackled and loosened by the thunderous impact, another pane of the skylight gave way. Triangular shards of glass fell silently before shattering on the grey concrete floor in a cacophony of harsh bells, but the woman did not move.

  “Martha?” Softly spoken now, calling the name was a pitiful plea for a miracle, a helpless disbelief that the irrefutable reality of savage death could somehow be undone. Grief flooded the woman’s eyes, but she was too shocked for tears. As she remained as still as the corpse on the floor, a man ran in through the door which she had left open behind her.

  “What’s happened?” he demanded urgently. “I was at the top of the garden and saw you … Christ!”

  For a long moment both of them stood together in silence, then he took the woman’s arm and turned her away.

  “Come on. There’s nothing we can do. We’d better call the police.”

  Stunned and incapable of thought, the woman let him lead her out of the studio and across the garden to the adjacent cottage. The radio she had been listening to when the great slam of sound had reached her was still playing, Bach drifting through open windows and fading among bees and honeysuckle into warm, scented, birdsong air.

  *

  In his sitting-room, Mortimer Lacey shivered as some undefinable impression touched him, a draught chilled with ghostly ice coming from nowhere in the heat of the day. The tortoiseshell cat dozing on his lap growled and leapt down, abruptly agitated.

  “It’s all right, Tobias.” He scooped the animal up, stroking it reassuringly. “It was only death again. You should be used to it by now.”

  He rose from his chair and crossed to the window, the cat still tense in his arms, and looked out towards the harbour. The seeping incoming tide was still low and holidaymakers’ children shouted with delight as they ran among tilted boats marooned on sand smeared with a wide crescent of sea lettuce. A little girl knelt in a shallow half moon of water by the harbour entrance, solemnly filling a red plastic bucket and pouring its contents back, dreamy and fascinated by splash and ripple. A group of boys clung to the face of the harbour wall like monkeys, toes and fingers seeking cracks in joints between huge squared stones. Tourists — emmetts to the resident Cornish — strolled among crawling cars on the short, narrow Porthennis seafront, past souvenir shops, general store and the harbour office topped with a small clock tower. A yacht with sails bent like a tightened bow in an offshore breeze swept by against a distant horizon shimmering in heat haze. Late July, the benison of a sweltering day, slow, pacific and idle.

  “Only death,” Lacey repeated, long, thin fingers massaging the cat’s head. “We’ve felt it before. But that was very close.”

  Calmed by attention and reassurance, Tobias relaxed, slipping back into tranquillity, at one again with the peace of high summer.

  *

  Siren whooping, the police car broke free of the labyrinth of packed streets and raced up Fern Hill, screeching to a halt opposite the gate of Martha Shaw’s cottage. Two constables in shirt-sleeves leapt out and ran to the front door where the man was waiting to lead them to the studio. As they stood inside, the sound of an arriving ambulance reached them.

  “Have you touched anything?” one of the policemen asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “No. Ruth — Miss Harvey — did. She’s in the cottage.”

  “Right.” The officer turned to his colleague. “Call CID and explain to the ambulance crew, then guard the door. I’ll go and talk to Miss Harvey.”

  Another woman was about to enter through the garden gate off the road as the second policeman returned to the patrol car.

  “What’s happened?” she demanded. “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m afraid there’s been an accident,” the policeman told her. “I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you to go in.”

  “What do you mean?” The woman sounded offended. “Miss Shaw and Miss Harvey are friends of mine. I may be able to help.”

  “There’s nothing you can do. Please let us handle this.” He turned to the ambulance men, who were also standing by the gate. “There’s a lady in the cottage. See what you can do for her. It’s a CID job.”

  “CID?” the woman echoed. “What’s going on? I insist you tell me!”

  Short and stocky, she appeared to be well over seventy. Salt and pepper black and white hair was pulled into a bun at the back of her neck and the slackening skin of her face was browned with time and weather. A pair of spectacles hung from a gold chain against an embroidered peasant blouse. Despite her age, she was alert and pugnacious. The policeman classified her as a nosy old neighbour, determined not to be left out of some local drama, who would have to be firmly dealt with.

  “Miss Shaw is dead,” he told her bluntly. “Now please go back home and let us deal with it.”

  “Dead? That’s ridiculous.” The woman reacted as though he was lying just to get rid of her. “I was talking to her only this morning.”

  “Then you may be able to assist us in our inquiries,” he said. “I have to radio headquarters and then I would like your name and address. Just wait one moment.”

  The prospect of becoming
part of an official inquiry either excited the woman or made her think about the wisdom of too much insistence. She waited obediently as the policeman made his call on the car radio and appeared to have calmed down by the time he had finished.

  “My name is Dorothy Lowe and I live in the next cottage down the hill.” She indicated a house half hidden between trees in the adjoining garden. “I am an old friend of both Miss Shaw and Miss Harvey.”

  Sensing that her mood had changed, the officer wrote the information in his notebook and thanked her.

  “I’ll inform CID,” he promised. “It may help them if you could be at home for the next hour or so.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” There was a flash of renewed tetchiness in the statement. “Miss Harvey will want to see me.”

  “We’ll let her know of your concern.”

  They stood facing each other for a moment, then the woman turned and walked back down the hill. The policeman sighed philosophically. In a place like Porthennis, it would have been impossible to keep what had happened quiet for very long; the news would now be spread by Dorothy Lowe with additional speed.

  Inside the cottage, Ruth Harvey sat on a straight chair in the back living-room, staring at the tiled fireplace. The horror of what had happened seemed to have shrivelled her, making her appear even smaller than she actually was. Brittle parchment skin, stretched across the little face that had carried the naivety of infancy into old age, was stained with a waxy pallor, intensifying tiny crimson webs of veins on each cheek. Thin forearms, bare in her flowered cotton summer dress, were streaked with flour. An ambulance man gently took one of her clasped hands from her lap and placed a cup of tea in it.

  “Drink that,” he said coaxingly. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  The cup was accepted, but he had to make her raise it and sip the contents like a child. Since she had last spoken Martha Shaw’s name she had not said a word and her silence remained absolute for twenty minutes before the CID arrived. Recognising her condition, Sergeant Richard Doughty finally coaxed out the name of her doctor and told one of the ambulance men to call him. Then he went into the kitchen where the man who had escorted Ruth Harvey from the studio was waiting.

  Like many dwarfs, Nick Charlton looked as though he had originally grown to full height before being compressed. Stumpy legs and muscular arms protruded clumsily from the barrel body and his face was like one drawn on a rubber ball then squeezed in a vice, features pinched and fighting for space. Short, tight curls of chocolate-coloured hair gave a further impression of restriction. He was wearing dirty bottle-green cord trousers, cut down from their original length, and an orange-check cotton shirt. Sitting at the plastic-topped table, only the upper half of his chest was visible. Doughty took the other chair, noting details of his name and address before asking what to his knowledge had happened.

  “I was in the vegetable garden. Up there.” Charlton gestured through the window. The garden climbed steeply from the back of the cottage and Doughty could see rows of bean sticks at the far end. “I thought I heard a crash, then I saw Miss Harvey running to the studio. I came down and saw what had happened. I brought her back here and called the police.”

  Bald and informative, the statement was unemotional. The accent was not Cornish and Doughty mentally noted distinct London sounds.

  “Are you the regular gardener?” he asked.

  “I am now. Someone else used to do it, but he died. I started coming here regular this year.”

  “It’s a big garden,” Doughty observed. “They must have needed help.”

  “They’re both getting on as well,” Charlton added. “And Miss Shaw was always busy in her studio.”

  Doughty’s local knowledge told him all he needed to know about Martha Shaw’s life, so he concentrated on her death.

  “Could you see the studio from where you were working?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t looking. I was knelt down picking lettuces and facing the other way anyway.”

  “So you didn’t see if anyone went in before you heard the crash?” Doughty added another question without waiting for a reply. “Where did Miss Harvey run from?”

  “The cottage. Where else?”

  Doughty did not reply as he scribbled the answer down and stood up.

  “Thank you, Mr Charlton. We’ll require an official statement from you. One of my colleagues will take it.” He walked towards the door.

  “Is Miss Harvey all right?” Charlton’s enquiry sounded awkward.

  “She’s very shocked of course, but her doctor has been called,” Doughty replied. In the hall he told a detective constable to take Charlton’s statement and stepped out of the front door as another car drew up and the police doctor climbed out. Doughty led him to the studio where he began to examine the body as best he could. As he waited, Doughty looked round the room; he would not touch anything until the Scene of Crime officer had arrived and completed his work. Martha Shaw’s studio was made of wooden planking, a plain, high box with the skylight occupying most of the ceiling. In one corner stood some large packing cases and the furnishings consisted of a decrepit easy chair, tilted at an angle by the loss of one claw-foot wooden leg. Assorted hammers, chisels and other sculpting tools were scattered across a trestle table. There was only the one door. The floor was covered with splinters of stone and rock dust, smothered in random shoe prints clearly visible to the naked eye let alone forensic examination. Doughty forced himself to look at the body again. The eyes were stretched wide, as open and terrified as the mouth, and the right leg was trapped under the bottom rung of an old tubular metal stepladder fallen beside the corpse.

  “Dead,” the doctor announced with protective mortuary humour. “Very. But not for very long.”

  “We know that.” Doughty glanced at his watch. “We got the call just after it happened less than three quarters of an hour ago.” The doctor straightened up. “Well I can’t examine her properly until you get her out from under this lot. How long will you be?”

  “A couple of hours or so at least,” Doughty replied.

  “Let me know when you’re ready.” He snapped his bag shut and nodded at the body. “Martha Shaw, eh? What a bloody ironic way for her to go. She’s going to make a few headlines.” He stepped across the floor and looked at the ladder. “That’s a death trap in itself. She must have been mad standing on it.”

  “They say they’re all mad,” Doughty commented.

  “But it takes a lot to kill ‘em.” Absently whistling the judge’s song from Trial by Jury — he was a leading light in Penzance amateur operatics — the doctor walked out into the sunshine.

  *

  “You know,” Maltravers remarked reflectively, “if she’d only told him in act three that the handkerchief was at the laundry, she’d have avoided an awful lot of domestic unpleasantness.”

  Helen Finch appeared surprised. “I never thought I’d hear you knock Shakespeare. You quote him often enough.”

  “Just a minor criticism of construction. He’ll survive.” Maltravers nodded at the seamless sky above the Botallack Theatre. “He survived that air assault.”

  “One of the hazards of playing this place,” Helen agreed.

  They were sitting on the lowest of the precipitous grass-covered terraces at the foot of a natural semi-circular amphitheatre that made up the auditorium of the Botallack on top of the cliffs. In front of them, an empty open-air stage stood against a curved, flat backdrop of glittering blue and silver sea, sweeping round three quarters of the horizon. Draped curtains and furniture transformed pillars and arches of grey Cornish rock into an imitation of Italy. It was a stunning setting for high drama, although Othello’s eloquent defence of Desdemona’s wooing before the Duke of Venice and his court had been shatteringly interrupted when an Isles of Scilly helicopter had clattered overhead. More than fifty years earlier, when Agnes Thorpe had defied ridicule by building a theatre on the very edge of the ragged cliff tops above a chaotic shoreline of tumbled boulders, suc
h difficulties had not been anticipated. Not that they would have deflected Agnes; a dream born when she had first stood at the spot had grown into an obsession and a personal pilgrimage. Now her statue witnessed its subsequent success and what she would have regarded as the natural consequence of a purblind world’s inevitable acceptance of a vision. Every summer the Botallack played to audiences who suffered personal discomfort and vagaries of weather for the experience of witnessing drama performed in conditions as near to its Greek roots as could be conceived.

  Leading stars were rare at the Botallack, but talented actors and actresses were often attracted to productions which mixed classics and less demanding but quality works. As well as Shakespeare, the current season included Private Lives, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Hobson’s Choice and A Little Night Music. Having seen a new play which she had expected to keep her employed for several months collapse under critical overkill (wearing his playwright’s hat, Maltravers had warned her it would), Tess Davy had jumped at the alternative to enforced resting of playing Desdemona one week, followed by Coward’s Amanda Prynne — an interesting contrast in marital difficulties. Neil Levis, an actor who had become a friend, was sharing the experience, appearing first as jealous Moor and then worldly Elyot Chase.

  As they waited for Tess to join them, Maltravers leaned against the terrace, turning over agreeable memories as he looked at the back of Helen’s head, boiling bubbles of chestnut hair flecked with blonde highlights which he suspected camouflaged creeping drifts of grey. They were cousins, but only in a long-distant sort of way; the relationship had been far enough apart for them to have had a no-commitment affair several years earlier, before they each entered disastrous marriages with other people. Helen was thirty-four, her slightly Oriental face with its scatter of honey freckles Westernised by wide, toffee-brown eyes. After her divorce, her share of the profits from selling a Docklands flat had enabled her to buy a cottage in Porthennis, working as a secretary to supplement an erratic income as a painter. Maltravers and she had not seen each other for more than a year, although they kept vaguely in touch by letter.