The Dying of the Light

by Robert Richardson

  “Let’s not get over sympathetic,” Emsley said. “If that rock could have fallen over as easily as you say, then he could have given it a shove as well as anybody. Do we know how strong he is? Dwarfs can be stronger than you think.”

  “What there is of him is thickset enough,” Doughty acknowledged. “Not that it would have needed much strength. The thing was balanced on a knife edge. But why should it have been him?”

  “He isn’t going to tell us, so what can we come up with?”

  “Sod all,” Doughty said bluntly. “Nicholls has kept an unofficial eye on him for years — all right, he looks like a villain — but has never even got a drunk and disorderly on him: He’s lived in Porthennis for more than ten years and is almost part of the scenery.”

  “Popular?”

  Doughty shrugged. “Not what you’d call unpopular. Most people feel sorry for him. Admire him for hacking out a life without having to expose himself as a freak. He’s a damned good gardener as well.”

  “Nice law-abiding occupation,” Emsley remarked. “How did he and Martha Shaw get on?”

  “According to Ruth Harvey, fine. Martha was a bit of a gardener as well, but welcomed him taking the heavy work off her. A couple of days before she died they’d been discussing some changes he’d suggested.”

  “Discussing?” Emsley spoke sharply. “Not arguing?”

  “Discussing,” Doughty repeated firmly. “And she apparently agreed with them. He didn’t kill her because she didn’t like what he wanted to do with the herbaceous borders. I’m sorry, sir, but you’re grasping at straws on this one. There’s nothing to get hold of.”

  The inspector turned a page and read again for a moment. “Scene of Crime say they’ve identified more than thirty different sets of shoe prints on the floor of that studio. Did she hold parties?”

  “It was open house,” Doughty explained. “Friends, neighbours, tourists, anyone who showed an interest in her work. It hadn’t been swept for months. God alone knows how old some of those prints are or how we’d trace who made them. And is there any point in trying when we can’t see a motive and everything says it was an accident?”

  Emsley looked at the file again, statements, medical and forensic reports, objective facts encapsulating what the police had pieced together regarding the sudden and savage death of Martha Shaw. It was his job to be suspicious, probing the most apparently innocent situation to see if there was a hidden and unexpected patch of corruption in it, to accept nothing at face value. But as more inquiries drew blanks, the original suppositions came back into focus, increasingly persuasive after surviving the pressure of examination. Untainted by contrary evidence, innocent and straightforward explanations were strengthened. It was happening with the death of Martha Shaw.

  Nobody appeared to have a motive for killing her, nobody gained by her death, nobody had been threatened by her. The only notable recent thing in her life was that she had embraced Roman Catholicism, but she had done so quietly. She had not taken on the mantle of the bigoted convert, crying damnation on those who did not share her new beliefs. A statement from her parish priest said she had shown a marked sincerity, an anxiety to reshape her attitudes even in her final years, but it had been a private and personal anxiety. Religious conversion had led to a quarrel with her old friends, but apparently just the once. And there was nothing else, no suspicious strangers, no letters or papers indicating something wrong or inexplicable, no unusual patterns of behaviour. The facts suggested that Martha Shaw’s death had been the result of a self-inflicted accident and the police had virtually run out of avenues that might lead elsewhere. Emsley handed the file back to Doughty.

  “Pass it on to the coroner’s officer,” he said. “Unless something unexpected turns up, I can’t see that the verdict’s going to surprise anybody.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Nick! Hello! I’m back. Where are you?”

  Charlton twitched as Ruth Harvey called from the kitchen at the rear of the cottage; he had thought her visit to see Martha Shaw’s solicitor in Penzance would have taken longer, leaving him more time to search. He instantly realised it was no use scuttling through the front door to pretend he had been working out there; Ruth would have seen him as she walked from the gate.

  “In the front room,” he called, his mind racing for a reason as he heard her approach.

  “Nick?” She looked puzzled as she saw him. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I heard the telephone.” He gestured towards the instrument on a table near the window. “I came in to answer it.”

  “Who was it?”

  “It was …” Deliberately he dropped one of his gardening gloves, thinking rapidly as he bent down to pick it up. “It was a wrong number. Somebody asking for … for Steve or someone.”

  “Oh.” Ruth appeared satisfied. “Were there any other calls?”

  “If there were, I didn’t hear it ring. I only heard this one because I was working out the front.” He moved towards her, away from the roll-top desk he had only just closed. “How did you get on with the lawyer?”

  “All right.” Ruth sighed. “There are just so many things to worry about. Have you made yourself a cup of tea?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well I need one. I’ll bring yours out to you.”

  Charlton followed her back into the kitchen then went outside, remembering to go round to the front of the cottage where he began to tug weeds from dry, crumbling earth. He had been inside for more than an hour, starting in the bedroom and working his way through the rest of the cottage, looking everywhere for something that would give him if not an explanation, at least some clue. There had to be a paper, perhaps a diary, something, anything, that would reveal the truth he had glimpsed in the Steamer that winter’s night. He had been cautiously sifting through the compartments of the desk and was just starting on the drawers as Ruth had returned. He had found personal letters to Ruth, receipts, the usual accumulation of leaflets from financial advice companies and magazine publishers mixed with flimsy glossy gift brochures, kept with the vague intention of looking at them sometime. But there had been nothing connected with Martha Shaw that gave him any information.

  Upstairs, he had rifled a cardboard concertina file of papers that all seemed to relate to Martha Shaw. He had found correspondence about her work, more personal letters, invoices for a regular supply of herbal medicines. He had even flicked through a Bible on the bedside table, assuming it must have been hers and thinking something might be hidden inside, but there was nothing. Somewhere, he was convinced, there had to be an explanation of what lay behind the argument that had at first angered and then frightened the rest of the Porthennis School, possibly in the mind of the woman she had lived with, from whom she would have had no secrets?

  “Here you are.”

  Absorbed in his thoughts, Charlton had not heard Ruth walk up behind him, carrying a mug with a sketch of St Michael’s Mount stamped on it.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Just about finished here.”

  “The front wasn’t that bad. Will you have time to tie up those beans before you go?”

  “No problem.”

  Ruth smiled and turned away, her mind clearly on other things than the garden. Watching her disappear round the corner of the cottage, Charlton wondered what she knew, and how far he would have to go to get it out of her. There was too much at stake not to try anything.

  In the kitchen, Ruth sat with her own mug clasped between thin hands. It had been a draining, emotional afternoon, the solicitor sympathetic, but inevitably reducing the greatest personal loss she had ever felt to questions of procedure and cold legal necessities. She had signed papers and agreed to actions in a growing daze, impatient with the ponderous stupidity of it all. Next there would be the horror of the inquest at which she would have to give evidence, the woman she had loved subjected to repulsive clinical examination and cold, official inquiries. Then Martha would have to be cremated and …

  Ruth Ha
rvey bowed her head and started to cry as the nightmare stretched endlessly ahead of her. But she would go through it for Martha’s sake, carrying the unshakeable conviction that death had not found her by chance but had been deliberately precipitated. The determination to discover the truth of that put steely strength into the fragile little woman, enabling her to bear her grief, driving with an irresistible intensity.

  *

  Maltravers kicked aside a fallen fuchsia stem, peeled crimson bells of flowers limp and dying, as he accompanied Scott, mellow rather than paralytic, up the channel of stone steps that led to his cottage.

  “Did that happen when you went down the other night?” he asked.

  “Must have.” Scott gasped the words out. “I went arse over tit just here.” He rapped his stick on a stretch of flat dry earth between uneven stone rises up the side of the hill. “Grabbed at everything I could, but still ended up at the bottom.”

  Maltravers glanced back to where the steps fell thirty feet to the roadway below. Half-way down, a branch of a bullace tree, half snapped off, hung like a broken arm, splayed spikes of creamy interior wood ragged and darkening with exposure.

  “Lucky you didn’t break your neck,” he remarked as they walked on.

  “Only the good die young,” Scott wheezed, then laughed sourly. “That’s why we’re all still going strong.”

  Marooned in a heaving green sea of overgrown garden, the cottage was as old, tired and crumbling as its owner. Pebble-dash facing on the outside walls must have been white years before, but was now cracked and discoloured. Grubby dried-out paint was flaked and blistered on wooden window frames splitting with rot and the slate roof was fringed with drips of clinging moss. In the musty interior, patches of weave showed through faded worn carpets, wallpaper twenty years out of date was stained and peeling and the furniture would have disgraced a fire sale. But on the walls hung pictures that stopped Maltravers in his tracks.

  The Palace of Westminster glowed beneath a Turneresque sky reflected in Thames water that almost visibly flowed; six women in a drawing-room captured mannered T S Eliot characters talking of Michelangelo; an afternoon in Hyde Park rivalled Seurat in its encapsulation of light; a portrait of a woman reading trembled with life. They were works of shining talent, produced by a man whose hands had been as skilful as his eye had been penetrating. Maltravers turned to where Scott was watching him, waiting for his reaction.

  “So what happened?”

  Even half drunk — perhaps because he was half drunk — Scott instantly absorbed everything behind the question. He scowled, looking at the paintings as though finding it difficult to associate himself with their creation.

  “Success happened,” he replied. “Sycophantic critics happened. Stupid women who wouldn’t know the difference between a Bonnard and bloody brick wall happened. Men who bought art with as much feeling as they bought shares happened. I fucked most of the women, ripped off all of the men and pissed off out of it.”

  There was a residual sting of bile in the reply, a permanent licking flame of long-ago anger that had despised and rejected fashionable adulation and ingratiating flattery. Maltravers felt the surge of rekindled emotion and understood exactly why Scott had fled the role of society’s idolised darling to live obscurely among illiterate French peasants who treated him as a man and an artist, not that year’s cult figure. Did that capacity for rage still smoulder, ready to be reawakened by other catalysts, like an ageing tiger, teeth and claws retaining unsuspected strength to rip and destroy? And had Martha Shaw somehow ignited that dangerous fury? Helen had told him that Belvedere Scott did not even like himself. Coupled with such a fierce undercurrent of feelings transformed Scott from a scratchy eccentric into a rusty bomb, liable to explode if not handled delicately.

  Obviously agitated by revealing an ancient, unsatiated resentment, Scott had opened a bottle of rum on the sideboard and poured another drink. He held the bottle towards Maltravers in silent invitation.

  “No, thanks. Not after the beer.”

  Scott swallowed half the contents of his glass. “There’s more in the other room.”

  Altogether, Maltravers counted thirty-three paintings, including two unexpected miniatures of wildflowers captured with fragile delicacy.

  There was also a portrait of Dorothy Lowe, young, blonde, vivid and leaping out of its frame.

  “Did you do any more of her?” he asked.

  “A couple. The old bat’s got them somewhere.” Scott’s eyes became puzzled and far away as he peered at the shining face.

  “For you have forgotten that I loved you and I can’t remember your name,” Maltravers remarked quietly.

  “What?” Scott asked absently.

  “Just a line from a poem I never got around to finishing.” Maltravers looked back at the portrait. “Is there any way you could get back there and do that sort of thing again?”

  “No,” Scott replied bluntly. “Edie’s been going on at me about that for years, but that artist’s dead. I killed him.”

  Maltravers felt an enormous surge of sympathy. The passing of love or the shattering of dreams hurt, but did not bite as deep as the permanent knowledge that a unique personal talent had been thrown away. Nothing healed that sense of loss. Whatever he had done — whatever he might even be guilty of — Belvedere Scott was finally a man to be pitied. Suddenly uncomfortable with what he had stirred up, he glanced at his watch.

  “I’ve got to be going. Thank you for letting me see your real paintings. They really should be exhibited.”

  “Not while I’ve got breath in my body.” Scott dismissed powerful, confusing memories from his mind and Maltravers followed him into the hall. On a table by the front door stood a vase, its quality still shining through a filter of thick dust.

  “Is that one of Edward Cunningham’s?” he asked.

  Scott glanced at it indifferently, as if reminding himself of its existence. “Yes. Ted gave me a pair as a birthday present when I was seventy-five. The other one’s in my study. I keep brushes in it.”

  It was not quite the same as negligently using a Ming bowl as a chamber pot, but indicated Scott’s cavalier treatment of a fellow artist’s work. The lionised young painter of sixty years ago probably still retained a conceit of his own squandered abilities and looked down on the works of his friends.

  As Maltravers stepped out into the sunshine again, he raised the real reason he had wanted to talk to Scott. The man was not going to suddenly slough off layers of abrasive hostility and expose his real self, but at least Maltravers had made some sort of contact.

  “I’ve been thinking about Martha Shaw’s death,” he said casually. “It does seem to have been incredibly careless of her not to put some sort of support round that rock. Almost suicidal.”

  The mesh of lines running through Scott’s face folded into different patterns as his eyes narrowed. However much he had drunk, there was still some compartment of his brain that could instantly register.

  “What do you mean?”

  Maltravers shrugged as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t know, but if it was as precariously balanced as all that, it could have been pushed over very easily.”

  He had touched a nerve. For the briefest moment Belvedere Scott looked startled then a mask dropped into place.

  “Balls,” he said contemptuously. “Why would anybody want to do that?”

  “No reason at all that I can see,” Maltravers replied. “The thought just occurred to me.”

  “You bloody writers are all the same.” Scott started to shut the door. “Too much imagination. Mattie died through her own stupid fault. Regards to Helen.”

  Just too quick, Belvedere, Maltravers reflected as the door closed. You should have either shown more interest or been appalled at the suggestion. The hasty brush-off was not the required response. Which means … God alone knows. He walked through the garden to the steps and made his way down, pausing to break off the untidy hanging branch and throw its remains into undergrowth vivid
with the fire-orange of wild montbretia. In the roadway at the bottom was a dried, dark stain the size of a saucer. Maltravers stood by it, looking back up the steps to the spot from where Scott said he had fallen. Once again, the Almighty had looked after one of his drunks. And allowed a murderer to survive?

  Maltravers started to walk away, when something that had not quite made sense clicked into focus. He turned and looked back up the steps. If Scott had fallen there, then surely he should have just collapsed in a drunken heap. But apparently he hadn’t. Maltravers stood thinking for a few moments, trying to work out the ramifications of the suggestion.

  “So did Humpty Dumpty fall or was he pushed?” he murmured to himself. “Pick the bones out of that.”

  *

  Edith Hallam-West’s lips pursed judgementally as she leafed through the sheaf of drawings, stopping occasionally to make the softest sound of approval, occasionally flicking over impatiently. Sitting by the long bay window of her studio, Helen watched her reactions carefully.

  “Much better,” Edith pronounced finally, picking up a handful she had placed to one side. “They’re beginning to live, but the eyes are still giving you trouble aren’t they?”

  “Don’t mention the eyes,” Helen replied. “Cats have thoughts in them I can’t understand let alone draw.”

  “All animals are the same,” Edith said. “Now watch this.” For a few minutes, rubber and pencil erased and recreated. It would have taken a microscope to detect the eventual difference in the placing of lines, but suddenly life was captured in them.

  “Edith, you make me want to give up,” Helen said helplessly as she finished. “I just wasn’t born with your talent.”

  “What we’re born with doesn’t matter. It’s what we make of it.” Edith tapped one of the drawings. “This is better than I could have done at your age. You’ll make it.”