The Dying of the Light

by Robert Richardson

  *

  Unlike Helen’s cottage, the two downstairs rooms in Lacey’s remained separate. Sunshine poured through the front window, shining off lemon Regency stripe paper and gleaming on yellow cane furniture. Maltravers examined autographed photographs on the mantelpiece of icons of the sixties — Dusty Springfield, Julie Christie, Jean Shrimpton — who had worn Lacey creations. A group picture at a party showed a younger Lacey, flamboyant in velvet jacket and ruffled silk shirt, surrounded by faces now only half remembered, but which had once dominated popular culture.

  “It was the best of times to be young, but I have to remind myself now that it all happened,” Lacey remarked. “Where did they all go?”

  “Why did you come here?” Maltravers asked. “Porthennis is a long way from Carnaby Street.”

  “I saw the writing on the wall,” he replied. “I cringe when I see some of them today, wrinklies like me trying to pretend it never ended. And old footage on television looks as quaint as the twenties now.”

  Maltravers and Helen sat on a bamboo settee with Beardsley-style patterned cushions and Lacey stood with his back to the window.

  “I refuse to become nostalgic,” he added. “There’s no bore like a sixties bore. And there are more important things to talk about.”

  “Yes there are,” Maltravers replied. “And a lot of questions. I find you … worrying, Mortimer.”

  Lacey laughed. “You’re not the first.”

  “I can believe it. What you said to Tess last night was true, but that’s a closed book and I won’t talk about it. But if you were right about that, I’ve got to accept you could be right about Martha Shaw being murdered.”

  “I had to convince you,” Lacey told him simply.

  “Then why can’t you tell us who did it? You read Tess’s mind at the Botallack, why can’t you lock on to the killer?”

  “Don’t overestimate me,” Lacey replied. “Most of the time people guard their thoughts. When you talk to somebody, you’re at least subconsciously aware of what you’re saying, how they are reacting to it, why you’re saying certain things. Absolute, pure thought without any defences around it is very rare. Tess did it during the play for just one moment of immense concentration. For a few seconds, there was nothing in her mind but the essential images and emotions of a single real incident. I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve known that happen.”

  Maltravers leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, mouth against fingertips of touching palms, and thought for a few moments.

  “All right.” He straightened up again. “But if you can do that — and know the moment Martha Shaw died when you were standing in this room — you can do other things. Like point us in a few directions.”

  “How about to the police?” Helen suggested.

  “The police don’t have a great deal of time for people claiming inexplicable second sense,” Lacey remarked. “I have no wish to change my reputation from Porthennis eccentric into local loony. However, if we find definite evidence, then we certainly go to them.”

  “You also told Tess that she and I — and Helen — would become involved in Martha Shaw’s death,” Maltravers added. “Enlarge.”

  “That’s difficult. I’m certain of it, but can’t explain how.”

  “Very runic. Did the Cornish pixies tell you?”

  “Don’t disappoint me, Gus,” Lacey replied levelly. “You’re too intelligent to mock this. If you weren’t, you’d have told me I was out of my mind at the start and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Maltravers shrugged. “You can’t blame me for trying to give things a touch of normality. Tess and I came down to Cornwall because of her job — extravagant though acting can be, that’s what it is — stay with Helen and give me time to do some writing. We didn’t anticipate running into sudden death and a man who would once have been hanged for witchcraft.”

  “Porthennis may have other things you didn’t expect,” Lacey told him. “I’m afraid I can’t explain that either.”

  “If I insisted on explanations all along the line, we’d get nowhere.” Maltravers stood up. “So where do we start? How about with your trip this morning? You said you had a compulsion to visit a church?”

  “Yes, but not any one. I knew it wasn’t here or even in Penzance.”

  “So how did you find it?”

  “I kept driving until I felt I was getting near.”

  “Sounds like getting warm when you’re playing hunt the slipper.” Maltravers held his hand up in apology. “Sorry, but comments like that help my sense of proportion. Where did you end up?”

  “A Roman Catholic church in Wenlock,” Lacey replied. “Nearly fifty miles away. As soon as I stopped outside I knew it was the right place. Don’t ask how. I went inside and sat there. After a while the priest came and asked if he could help me, but I just said I wanted to pray. The trouble is, I’m not a Catholic and was worried I’d make some mistake of procedure and he’d be calling the police accusing me of planning to steal the altar cross.”

  “The way of the mystic was ever hard,” Maltravers commented. “So what happened?”

  “I felt Martha’s presence, there are no arguments about that. But I didn’t know why.”

  “Did she ever worship there?”

  “She may have done,” Lacey replied. “She could have gone to any Catholic church for all I know. But her regular one was Our Lady Immaculate in Penzance.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Positive. I gave her a lift there one Sunday when her car was out of action and I happened to be going that way.”

  Maltravers thought for a moment. “So if her … spirit, shall we say, was trying to tell you something, that’s where it’s most likely to have been. With the BVM in Penzance.”

  “I’ve never claimed powers of communication with the dead,” Lacey corrected. “That’s a different gift to mine. All I know is Martha had been in that church and something happened there which was important.”

  “Did you speak to the priest again before you left?”

  “Yes. I said a friend from Porthennis had been to his church and asked if he remembered her. He knew nobody from this area.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t see the priest,” said Maltravers. “She could have just gone there for some reason … but why travel fifty miles when her own church is only ten minutes’ drive away?”

  “I’m afraid I’m rather better at unearthing problems than supplying answers,” Lacey apologised. “I only know that something took me to that particular church.”

  “Unfortunately, the only spirit that moves me comes in a bottle and is served with ice and tonic,” Maltravers said. “And it doesn’t tend to help me think clearly. So what do you suggest we do?”

  “Specifically, nothing.”

  Maltravers raised his eyebrows. “Nothing? Just sit around until the answers find us? Hang around in the Steamer for a convenient guilty confession? Stumble across clues by way of serendipity? Wait for something to turn up? Mr Micawber tried that and ended up in Australia.”

  “Things will turn up,” Lacey assured him. “Things will happen. What we have to do is recognise and interpret them.” He suddenly appeared uncomfortable as he turned away and looked through the window. “I can appreciate you joking, Gus, but I don’t think any of us will be laughing when this is finished. There’s evil somewhere out there.”

  “Evil?” Maltravers weighed the word as he repeated it. Even from Lacey it seemed melodramatic. “What are you trying to do now, Mortimer? Scare me?”

  “No. I’m trying to warn you.”

  Maltravers scowled at him, wishing he had not sounded so serious.

  Chapter Five

  Patrick Dawson’s bony, stained fingers juggled shreds of tobacco and a thin strip of paper with the automatic skill of more than sixty years; he had started smoking when he was nine. The paper was twisted into an irregular tube, tongue flashed along its gummed edge with lizard speed. Fragments of shredded
leaf protruding from one end were pinched away and the tube was smoothed out, slipped between his lips and lit from a battered, gunmetal petrol lighter’s bulging flame with the speed of a conjuror. Dark-grey, humourless eyes in a long hollow face blotched with patches of seaweed brown, remained fixed on his canvas. He dropped the lighter into the pocket of a paint-spattered cream linen jacket and picked up his brush again, carefully deepening the colour beneath a falling wave. Drooping from the centre of a wide mouth turned down at pointed ends, the cigarette rose and fell as he spoke.

  “Are the police satisfied it was an accident?” Faint but indelible echoes of Lancashire speech from a Salford childhood were overlaid with cadences picked up in the Merchant Navy and nearly half a lifetime in Porthennis. He did not look away from his work as he asked the question.

  “I think so.”

  “But if it wasn’t …” The voice was only half-attentive as he became absorbed in correcting details. Worn canvas on the back of his chair strained as he leaned back. “You think someone pushed it?”

  “They could have, couldn’t they?”

  The suggestion had no immediate effect; Dawson had other things on his mind. That wave was right, but that shadow …

  “For God’s sake, Patrick, leave it alone! Did you hear what I said?”

  Dawson’s head revolved slowly and he looked straight at Ruth Harvey, standing by the far wall of his studio. Behind her hung a large beach scene, wilderness sand and dark, menacing sea with a small solitary figure — it was impossible to say if it was man or woman — sitting in isolation and gazing into emptiness.

  “I heard.” Having briefly given direct attention, his preoccupation with the shadow of the rocks returned.

  “And?” she demanded.

  “And what?”

  “Who was it?”

  “Who says it was anybody? Apart from you.”

  “Nobody’s saying it. But they could be thinking it.”

  Smoke weaved up between thin nostrils and Dawson squinted as his eyes watered. “I’m not thinking it, Ruth.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Dawson replaced the paintbrush in the handful he was holding and selected another, working it into his palette. “It was an accident.”

  “Then it was a very convenient one, wasn’t it?” Her voice choked with sobs as she lost control.

  Dawson paused as he attended to the shadow, then turned to her again. “These things happen, Ruth. What do the others think?”

  “You’re the first I’ve talked to.”

  “They’ll say the same. You’ll see.”

  Ruth twisted the eternity ring on her finger helplessly. She had needed to get her heart very high for this visit, overcoming crushing grief and a sense of terror with a determination to know, however awful knowing might be. And Dawson, as always, had been unmoved and immovable. She had never known anyone so unsympathetic to other people’s emotions, indifferent because he did not share and could not comprehend them. But there was one thing; she had never known him to lie.

  “Patrick, you’ve got to tell me,” she said timidly. “Was it you?”

  “No.” The simple denial was not amplified and he did not even look up from his work again. Ruth accepted it without a word, then walked to the door, pausing as Dawson called her name. When she looked back at him, he was still considering his painting.

  “Sorry about Martha,” he said. It was the only expression of sympathy he had offered her. She walked out and he heard her footsteps descending the staircase to his gallery and shop. With a delicacy unexpected in a man so obviously strong despite his age, he perfected the shadow. The cigarette had burned down so short that the heat scorched his lips. His eyes screwed up as he pushed his lips forward and carefully removed the stub between pinched fingers before treading it out on the floor and starting to roll another, critically examining what he had done.

  “Let it go, Ruth,” he murmured to himself. “Just let it go.”

  *

  Tess left the Botallack shortly before midnight after a birthday party on the set for one of the cast. As she reached the top of Fern Hill, the street lamps were out, but a white wax gibbous moon glittered in a blade of diamonds across placid, hammered silver sea gently washing the great open mouth of Mounts Bay. There was no other traffic, but she drove slowly, alert for creatures of the dark. Idly humming Desdemona’s melancholy willow lament, she suddenly caught a glimpse of a figure which leapt out of the blaze of her headlights back into the shadow of hedges then there was a clump as though she had struck something. She stopped violently and twisted round in her seat, peering anxiously at the road behind her, flooded crimson by the glare of brake lights. There was no sign of anyone, injured or unharmed.

  As she waited for someone to appear, the flashing images of the moment replayed themselves in her brain and she was half conscious that something had been wrong with them. There had been a furtive urgency about the figure’s hasty movements, not the natural actions of a late-night walker surprised by an unexpected vehicle. If she had hit them, they should be visibly lying there; if not they should have stepped out of the hedge again. Whatever the case, she had to investigate.

  Opening the glove compartment, she found a torch and swore resignedly when it didn’t work; there were times when Maltravers’s incompetence over the most basic practical matters ceased to be an amusing eccentricity. As she got out of the car, a drift of night-scented stock reached her in the stillness and the only sound was the crisp rustle of waves on the beach below. Eyes probing moon-cast gloom, she cautiously walked back up the hill, keeping her distance from the hedges. The figure had looked like a child, but she was apprehensive as she neared the spot where it had vanished. On the roadway lay a broken tree branch, the probable explanation for the impact sound as she had driven over it. Eyes never leaving the hedge, she stooped and picked it up then stood very still, ears straining for sounds, but there was nothing.

  She realised she was outside Martha Shaw’s garden; opposite her the white painted wooden walls of her studio dimly caught the moonlight. To her left the cottage was in darkness and she remembered Dorothy Lowe had said Ruth Harvey was staying with her; was some teenager taking advantage of its emptiness to break in? She jumped at the faint noise of someone or something moving slightly among the bushes.

  “Who’s that?” Her voice sounded disproportionately loud. “What are you doing?”

  There was no reply. Senses heightened, she gripped the branch more tightly as she crossed the narrow road and cautiously opened a wooden gate leading to the studio. While confident of being able to look after herself — at least two previous boyfriends who would not take no for an answer had painfully discovered her skill in self-defence — summer-thick bushes offered too many hiding places from where she could be attacked from behind. The gate remained open as she stepped on to a concrete path, then there was a sudden scuffling and someone leapt out immediately beside and beneath her. A punch in the stomach sent her staggering into a looming hydrangea bush and she half saw a figure dash through the open gate. An instant attempt to stand up was stopped as she grunted in pain, gasping for breath and by the time she managed to reach the gate the road was empty in both directions. Instantly abandoning any ideas of a futile chase in the darkness, she concentrated on analysing impressions. The fleeing figure had not looked right. Small as a child, but with wrong movements, the clumsiness not adolescent but — her mind groped for the right word — distorted. She shivered. The incident had been more than frightening; there had been a sense of malevolence about it. She realised she was still holding the branch and hurled it away before hurrying back to the car.

  Maltravers was still up watching a late-night film on television when she returned to Helen’s cottage.

  “What’s happened to you?” He pointed at a tear in her slacks.

  “It must have been when … Has Helen gone to bed?”

  “No. She’s still working in her studio at the back. Why?”

  “I want to a
sk her if she knows a dwarf.”

  “A dwarf?” Maltravers looked surprised. “Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Doc, Sneezy and … no, it’s gone. However, I can name all the Magnificent Seven, including Brad Dexter who everyone forgets, but he wasn’t a dwarf.”

  “This is serious,” she said impatiently. “I’ve just been attacked.”

  “By a dwarf?”

  “Yes … Well, I think it was a dwarf. I only got a glimpse of him.”

  Maltravers turned off the set with the electronic control.

  “It’s been a difficult enough afternoon with Mortimer,” he warned her. “I may have trouble coping with maniac midgets. However, try me.”

  He poured a drink while she explained then sat opposite her in the club porter’s seat.

  “Are you sure? It wasn’t just a teenager?”

  “No,” she insisted. “I was falling over and couldn’t see properly in the dark, but his movements were all wrong. He was … waddling.”

  “And he just pushed you and ran? Or waddled.”

  “Yes.” Tess sipped her Scotch. “And what was he doing there? He must have been breaking in to Martha Shaw’s cottage.”

  “Did you check?”

  “No. I just wanted to get back here.”

  “Sounds like a nasty opportunist thief,” Maltravers remarked. “It’s sick, but homes were looted in Lockerbie after the Pan-Am air crash.”

  “But how would he know Ruth wasn’t still in the cottage?”

  “We know she’s staying with Dorothy Lowe and we’re strangers,” Maltravers pointed out. “In a place as small as Porthennis word gets around. But is there a resident dwarf?”

  “Helen may know,” said Tess. “Anyway, I gather Mortimer turned up after I left the Steamer. What did he have to say for himself?”