The Dying of the Light

by Robert Richardson

  “And her body was never found?” Maltravers confirmed as he began to spread pate on his toast.

  “No.” Helen raised an eyebrow. “And neither was the doctor who’d told her she had cancer. Her regular one said she hadn’t been to see him for months and it wasn’t anyone else local. There weren’t many around in those days and they were all checked.”

  “Perhaps she’d gone to one in London?” Maltravers suggested.

  “Possibly,” Helen acknowledged. “But why? You don’t suddenly decide you think you’ve got cancer and dash off to a doctor three hundred miles away to confirm it. You go to your local one.”

  “I see the mystery,” Maltravers agreed. “How do you know so much about it?”

  “It’s all in the guidebooks and Belvedere and the others still go to the beach on the anniversary for a minute’s silence. No prayers or anything, they all gave up any religious beliefs years ago.”

  Maltravers found the image of ageing artists standing by the evening sea in memory of a woman who died nearly forty years earlier bizarre. Encounters with Scott and Dorothy Lowe had indicated little sentiment among their emotions; they both appeared to relish their roles as outrageous elderly Bohemians and the rest were presumably the same. A solemn annual ceremony of mourning appeared totally out of character.

  “Except for Martha. Her obit says she’d become a Catholic.”

  “Yes, and that went down like a fart in church,” Helen said. “She went to Rome to look at art and said God spoke to her in St Peter’s.”

  Maltravers grinned. “That must have made her popular.”

  “Belvedere told her she must have been drunk, but it’s not funny. They’ve grown old together and stopped having new ideas years ago. There was a row in here one night you wouldn’t believe. Jack Bocastle stepped in just in time to stop Dorothy hitting Martha with a bottle and the others were all taking Dorothy’s side.” Helen shuddered off the memory. “It was grotesque. A bunch of pensioners fighting like lager louts.”

  “Just because Martha had got religion?” Maltravers shook his head. “And yet each year they stand on the beach and remember Agnes Thorpe? That’s … disproportionate. Correction. That’s insane.”

  “I sometimes think they are insane.” Helen glanced round the Steamer. “In winter this place is like the old days. There are incredible wild seas crashing over the harbour wall and we sit in here at night listening to the wind. There are no tourists, and it’s just a Cornish fishing village again. That’s when you see them as they really are.”

  Maltravers frowned as he caught the note in her voice. “Which is?”

  Helen looked into her glass for a moment. “Old. Bitter. Resentful. Slightly pitiful. Missing their summer audience of tourists.” She looked up at him. “And secretive. They cling on to certain things. It’s as though they’re all members of a select society and the rest of us are outside a charmed circle. Even those who’ve lived here all their lives.”

  “Memories of how it began may be all they’ve got left,” Maltravers remarked. “Their dreams didn’t come true, but they were the only people who shared them. I can believe they’d guard them jealously.”

  “Come back in winter and see what you think then.” Helen shook her head. “I know what you mean, but if that’s all it was to it, they’d just be rather sad. It’s more as if they are …” She paused, seeking an elusive word.

  “Obsessed, Helen?”

  Maltravers looked up at the figure who had silently appeared beside their table. “Hello, Mortimer. Where the hell have you been?”

  Chapter Four

  “What’s this muck?” Scott’s fork suspiciously probed a small mound of cottage cheese set on lettuce leaves between two tomatoes; it bore a marked resemblance to a banal serving suggestion illustration on the side of the tin. “It’s bloody vegetarian, isn’t it?”

  “Vegetarian, yes. Bloody, no,” Dorothy Lowe told him crossly. “It’ll do you more good than your usual diet of alcohol and instant curries. Do you know how many packets there are in your pantry?”

  He thrust the tray away across his bed. He was dressed in a grubby, creased nightshirt, lines across his battered face deepened by pain and weariness.

  “At least they’ve got some meat in them. Chuck one in a pan. It only takes ten minutes.”

  “Cook it yourself,” Dorothy snapped. “I’ve already spent nearly two hours running around after you. You’re not going to take any notice of what the doctor said about staying in bed, are you?”

  “You die if you stay in bed. And I don’t want to die.” He glared at Dorothy challengingly. “Do you want to? Die?”

  “We’re all going to die one day. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Mattie thought it did. Said we’d all roast in eternal flames or some crap like that.”

  Dorothy looked out of the bedroom window across the wilderness that was Scott’s garden. “We told her what we thought of that. She’d become more Catholic than the Pope.”

  Scott winced as he turned his head towards her. “Let’s face it Dottie, none of us is weeping over her.” He laughed sourly. “Blessing in disguise.”

  “After all these years,” Dorothy suddenly sounded very sad. “It’s not ending the way we planned is it?”

  “I’ve forgotten what we planned now.”

  “I haven’t.”

  She remained with her back to him; his mockery at her tears would have been unbearable. Memories swelled inside her, fired by betrayed hopes, acid with remembered pain, vivid with lost passion. The young could never comprehend that the very old could once have been like them, with eager bodies and driven by the importance of fierce ideals, however irrational. And not all the old become resigned and philosophical. She wanted to get away from Belvedere and nurse her feelings alone.

  “How did you manage to fall over anyway?” she asked as she crossed to the bedroom door. “I’ve known you get up those steps with enough inside you to fell an ox.”

  “Must have slipped,” he mumbled. “Could have happened to anyone.”

  “You’re getting senile.”

  “We’re all getting senile.” He leered at her. “Admit it, Dottie. How long since you’ve had a good rogering?”

  “Not as long as you!”

  For a moment they glared at each other; their combined ages were a hundred and fifty-nine. They had first met when she was eighteen and he was thirty-one and their relationship had been as fiery as the French Pyrenean sun under which they had made love. After more than half a century, love had crumbled through fading affection and indifference to casual contempt. Images of strong naked bodies, twined excitedly together and panting with ecstasy were faded and dead as sepia photographs. Simultaneously, each lost the courage to meet the other’s eyes.

  “If you’re well enough to think about fornicating, you’re well enough to look after yourself, you bloody old goat!” The door slammed.

  Scott shouted an obscenity, then yelped as bruised flesh and strained muscles shot pain through him. Sparse, stringy hair at the base of his skull had been shaved off and a wide strip of sticking plaster covered the stitches holding split skin together. The tray slid to the floor, contents spilling over the carpet. He swore again, then cautiously moved his legs off the brass bed. Clutching furniture, he hobbled to where his clothes lay on a chair and awkwardly began to dress.

  “Bloody doctors. Bloody nurses. Bloody Dottie.”

  The litany continued as he pulled on a shirt and struggled with his trousers. He had been a difficult casualty patient, sobered by his fall, aggressively threatening physical violence to anyone who approached with a hypodermic. A muscular sister had been hurled across the room when she tried a brisk “Come along, Mr Scott, let’s stop being silly and do as we’re told, shall we?” tactic. Having established that there appeared to be nothing broken, a house surgeon had finally allowed him to leave only after he had made it quite clear in front of witnesses that the hospital could accept no responsibility if he insisted on dischargi
ng himself. When Social Services had been advised, they had been amused. Home visits by community nurses a few years earlier, after Scott’s doctor had reported he was suffering from flu, recorded that one girl had said if he was that randy when he was ill, she would not go near him when he was better without an armed guard.

  Downstairs, Scott drank half a tumbler of rum and felt better. He could eat in the Steamer later; his injuries should ensure ample sympathetic drinks. He went into his front room, where a wide window faced down the hill across falling rooftops of lower houses to the sea. The point where he had fallen was just visible before the steps curved out of sight. For a long time he looked at the spot.

  “Who the hell were you?” he muttered.

  *

  Ruth Harvey pulled the door open the instant Dorothy inserted her key. Eyes full of panic, she resembled a startled bird. She was wearing one of her endless collection of printed floral frocks, garish colours exaggerating chalky face beneath white hair tied back in a bun and held in a rubber band. She had gone grey almost overnight when she was twenty-six.

  “It’s the police!” she gasped. “They want to go into Martha’s studio again.”

  “Then why didn’t you take them?” Dorothy snapped.

  “They’ve only just arrived.” Thin hands fluttered helplessly. “I wanted you to be here. I knew I’d get confused when they started asking more questions and —”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Dorothy slammed her basket down on the hall table. “Where are they?”

  “In the front room. I told them you wouldn’t be long.”

  The two men stood up as Dorothy entered the room; they appeared relieved to see her.

  “Hello, Miss Lowe. Detective Sergeant Doughty. It’s in connection with Miss Shaw’s death.”

  “I didn’t imagine it was a social call.” Dorothy glared impatiently at Ruth, silently ordering her to hide her nervousness. “Your people wouldn’t let me in yesterday.”

  “It wasn’t possible at the time,” Doughty replied evenly. “However, we want to take Miss Harvey into the studio again and she asked if you could be there as well. We have no objections.”

  He smiled reassuringly at Ruth. “There’s nothing to worry about. We just want to check a few details.”

  “Will it take long?” Dorothy demanded.

  “I don’t imagine so. You don’t have to be there.”

  Dorothy looked at Ruth’s pleading face and sighed. “Yes I do.”

  As they approached the studio, Ruth became increasingly agitated and only a warning look from Dorothy kept her under control. The door was secured by a padlock the police had fitted. Doughty unfastened it and turned on the lights. Nearly six feet long, the uncompleted statue lay across the floor; it had taken levers and the combined strength of five men to lift it off Martha Shaw’s body. Once the police photographer and forensic team had finished, someone had considerately washed off blood and crushed flesh embedded with splinters of bone. One end tapered into the outline of bare feet beneath the hem of a robe emerging out of the rock. Doughty squinted up at the skylight, broken glass of four of its six frames replaced with hardboard.

  “It was lowered in through there by crane,” he confirmed.

  “Martha had her studio built next to the road for that very reason.” Dorothy sounded impatient.

  Doughty walked round the piece of granite, assessing its shape and probable weight. “I assume this is the bottom?” He indicated the half-sculpted feet.

  “Naturally,” said Dorothy. “That’s where the feet usually go.”

  “But that would mean it was top heavy when it was standing up,” Doughty remarked.

  “Statues always are,” Dorothy told him. “The human body is. Those damned angels you see in churchyards only stay upright because they’re fixed at the base.”

  “But why did she start work at the bottom?” Doughty persisted. “Surely it would have been safer —”

  “Sergeant,” Dorothy interrupted impatiently, “if artists always did things the safe way, Michelangelo would have painted panels on the ground and had them nailed on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by workmen. Logic has nothing to do with where an artist starts work.”

  “But why wasn’t it propped up?”

  “Don’t think we didn’t suggest it to her. She kept saying she would, but never got around to it.”

  Turning his attention from the statue, Doughty crossed to where the stepladder had been propped against a wall. The metal was chipped and flecked with rust and three of the wooden steps had retaining screws missing. He lifted one up and let it fall again.

  “If this was in a factory, a Public Health Inspector would have taken out a prosecution,” he commented.

  “This isn’t the shop floor at Fords,” Dorothy replied sharply. “It’s an artist’s studio. Health and safety regulations have nothing to do with it.”

  “Miss Shaw might still be alive if they did.”

  Ruth Harvey suddenly sobbed and ran out of the studio. “Oh, well done,” Dorothy said sarcastically. “Very diplomatic. Have you quite finished now?”

  “For the time being,” Doughty agreed cautiously. “Although we may have to come back if my inspector thinks it’s necessary.”

  “Well next time, ask for me. Miss Harvey’s in a bad enough state as it is.”

  “I’m sorry to have distressed her.” Doughty looked at Dorothy. “You know more about this sort of thing than I do, Miss Lowe. What do you think happened?”

  “I would have thought it was obvious. Martha was standing on the ladder starting work on the top. You can see the first chisel marks. The ladder must have gone off balance and she grabbed at the statue and pulled it down on her. Of course, I’m not a policeman. Heaven knows what you people think.”

  There was a silence as she waited for a reply that did not come.

  “Is that all, then?” she demanded and when Doughty nodded, she marched out, the CID in her wake. She watched them walk down Fern Hill towards their car. As they vanished, she crossed the garden into the cottage where Ruth was sitting in the front room staring at a photograph on the sideboard of Martha and herself, laughing on the rocks of Land’s End thirty years earlier, arms around each other.

  “It’s all right, they’ve gone.” Dorothy was gruffly sympathetic. “Sorry it upset you.”

  Ruth did not move or look at her as she began to weep silently again.

  *

  “So what have we got?” Detective Inspector Brian Emsley tossed the initial report into Martha Shaw’s death onto his desk. “Miss Lowe could be quite right. It has all the signs of an accident.”

  “Looks that way,” Doughty agreed. “But somebody could have gone in there and pushed it.”

  “Who?” demanded Emsley sharply. “And why?”

  “Don’t know,” Doughty admitted. “But there are places to hide in that studio. Someone could have done it, then waited until Ruth Harvey and Charlton went to call us before making off. But there’s no smell of a motive. Miss Shaw’s solicitor says she left everything to the Little Sisters of Mercy, apart from the house which is Miss Harvey’s, but only for her lifetime. She’ll have to manage on her old age pension and any savings she’s got.”

  “I can’t see the Little Sisters of Mercy bumping her off,” Emsley commented. “And Miss Harvey hardly counts as a major beneficiary. Anyway, I thought they were in love with each other.”

  “There’s no way Ruth Harvey did it.” Doughty sounded positive. “She’s genuinely grief-stricken.”

  “And Miss Shaw’s closest friends are those geriatric Porthennis artists.” Emsley thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Mad as hatters of course, but I can’t really see any of them as a murderer. What reason would any of them have?”

  “There’d apparently been a big row between them and Martha Shaw,” Doughty pointed out. “They objected to her becoming a Catholic.”

  “They used to burn people at the stake for things like that,” Emsley admitted. “Perhaps the
y still do in Tehran, but not in Cornwall.”

  He looked up at Doughty. “Could there be anyone else?”

  “Not that we can see,” Doughty replied. “I’ve talked to Mike Nicholls, the neighbourhood PC, who knows just about everyone and everything in Porthennis. All the villagers knew Martha Shaw of course — it’s that sort of place — but apart from her artistic friends there was nobody special.”

  “What about a visitor? The place is full of them.”

  “And we’d have a hell of a job tracing them all,” Doughty pointed out. “Most of them rent cottages for a fortnight then disappear or just make day trips from somewhere else. Anyway, why should one of them suddenly decide to kill a harmless old woman? There’s no sign of theft.”

  “Nutty rapist covering his tracks?” Emsley suggested.

  “The lower part of her body wasn’t crushed and the medical report says there are no indications of sexual attack,” Doughty replied. “It looks a total non-starter.”

  “Just covering all the options.” Emsley pushed the report across the desk. “Keep at it and let me know if anything turns up, but at the moment my money’s on accidental death. We’ve got more urgent things with that armed bank raid. Now the security guard’s dead, that’s certainly a murder hunt. We haven’t got time to waste looking for killers who probably don’t exist.”

  *

  Suspended from barley sugar twisted poles, painted wooden horses with teeth carved in rigid mock smiles rose and fell in an endless circular chase. Children waved to their parents each time they reached them, shouts of greeting mingling with deafening amplified pop music. In the control box at the carousel’s centre, Charlton sat on a wooden chair, a pile of newspapers raising him sufficiently to see outside. He waited for the two teenage girls to pass his kaleidoscope view again, young flesh firm and sun-pink in shorts and sleeveless cotton shirts. They would casually give their bodies to any man who took their fancy; any normal man. Charlton had to pay for such pleasures, and it was a long time since he had been able to afford them.

  The girls flashed by and Charlton absently reached for the switch to stop the roundabout. Ruth Harvey was the answer now. In her distress she would talk with increasing carelessness as he coaxed and tricked her. Charlton had never experienced the taste of power over others and the prospect excited him with its promise and its possibilities.