By the time Anderson reappeared in the lounge some twenty minutes later, Jarvis had spoken to all the residents except the errant Mrs Hargreaves. With the exception of Alfred Purvey, who was definitely a few stamps short of the first-class rate, they proved to be considerably less gaga than Jarvis had feared. Unfortunately it was Purvey who had come up with the only substantive piece of new information, which virtually destroyed its value as evidence.
Surrounded as he was by formless, menacing uncertainties, Purvey left nothing to chance in those aspects of his life which he could control. His ‘jabs’ were the most significant of these. The regular regime of insulin injections had come to provide a certainty on which not only his life but also his sanity to some extent depended, and he was fanatically precise about everything relating to it. On the other hand, he was convinced that his tenure at Eventide Lodge was entirely dependent on the goodwill of his ‘hosts’, and he was therefore very reluctant to make any fuss about what was in any case a very minor matter: the disappearance of his syringes at some point in the course of the previous week.
If true, this removed the basic stumbling block to Rosemary Travis’s theory of murder, which she herself, for all her much-vaunted prowess in the matter of detective stories, had completely overlooked. If Dorothy Davenport had not intended to kill herself, she would have taken no more than the prescribed dose of her medicine, and even in combination with alcohol and sleeping tablets this was not sufficient to cause death. What it would do was ensure that the victim fell into a deep sleep, thus enabling a potential murderer to inject a quantity of morphine consistent with that revealed by the post-mortem. And if some eagle-eyed pathologist happened to notice the puncture mark, Mrs Davenport’s medical record would reveal that she had received a number of injections over the past few weeks in the course of the tests she had undergone.
In theory then, Purvey’s testimony, together with the fragment from the plastic wrapping of the syringe which Jarvis had discovered under the victim’s bed, cleared the way for him to open a full-scale murder investigation. But in theory only. The simple fact was that no evidence Alfred Purvey might give was likely to carry any weight with Jarvis’s superiors, still less a jury. Jarvis shuddered to think what a sarcastic QC would do to Purvey if he got a chance to cross-examine him. Clearly the testimony of a mind so pathetically at variance with reality could not be credited for a single instant. On the contrary, the implication had to be that the surer Alfred Purvey was about anything, the less likely it was to be true.
This was particularly galling in view of the fact that Purvey had not only noticed the loss of the syringe, but had seen the person who had taken it from his room.
‘I thought at first that I was dreaming,’ he said with an apologetic smile. ‘The door was wide open-not that I ever shut it completely. One doesn’t want to appear discourteous…’
‘Go on,’ said Jarvis, cutting quickly through what he had by now identified as a recurrent closed loop.
‘The curtains were still drawn, and as the room in which I am staying is on the western side of the house, it is rather dark in the mornings-not that I wish to complain, of course! Heaven knows, if s only too good of them to put me up at all…’
‘Go on.’
‘I noticed a woman moving about. What with the poor light and my own drowsiness I was unable to identify the intruder-although that is of course a wholly inappropriate word in the circumstances, implying as it does…’
‘Go on” ‘Then I must have dosed off again. When I woke, the room was empty and the door ajar. I got out of bed and found that one of the syringes which I keep on top of the chest of drawers was missing.’
To cap the unfavourable impression which would be made by Purvey’s repeated references to falling asleep and dreaming, it transpired that he had no idea which day these events had occurred. It was thus without any great hopes that Jarvis had asked his next question.
‘So you have no idea who took your syringe?’
‘Oh yes,’ Purvey replied simply. ‘It was Miss Davis.’
It took Jarvis a moment to master his emotion.
‘How do you know?’ he asked casually.
‘Well, by… by the smell.’
‘Smell?’ echoed Jarvis.
‘Of drink,’ Purvey explained.
Jarvis stared at him. Purvey blinked mildly.
‘Spirituous liquor,’ he said. ‘If one has been strictly TT all one’s life, as I have, there’s no mistaking the nauseous odour. As I say, the intruder was a woman, and of course none of my fellow guests have any access to alcoholic beverages. Not of course that I wish to give the impression of making judgements on those who have been so good as to take me in…’
‘Ah, here you are, Inspector!’ cried Anderson, appearing in the doorway. ‘I hope my little flock haven’t been trying your patience too much.’
He fixed Rosemary with a keen gaze.
‘I take it this was your idea, Miss Travis?’
Jarvis got to his feet.
‘It was mine,’ he snapped. ‘Even we clods in the police get ideas of our own from time to time.’
He had expected Anderson to react to hearing his sneering words quoted back at him, but he merely shrugged.
‘I’m sure you do, Inspector, but I was in fact referring to the episode involving Mrs Hargreaves.’
‘Where is she?’ Rosemary asked.
‘I’m so sorry you’ve been subjected to this unnecessary delay,’ Anderson murmured to Jarvis. ‘Please don’t let us detain you any longer. You must be anxious to go-‘
Rosemary pushed her way between the two men.
‘Where’s Mavis?’ she demanded. ‘Is she all right?’
Anderson regarded her coldly.
‘Mrs Hargreaves is in the capable hands of my sister, Miss Travis. She is as well as can be expected.’
Turning his back on her, he led Jarvis to the door.
“The whole thing was my fault for neglecting to lock up properly after letting you in,’ he explained in an undertone. ‘Normally we keep all the hatches firmly battened down lest the fauna get loose and do themselves an injury. Old Weatherby fell down the ha-ha last year and was in plaster for six weeks. You wouldn’t believe the pain and inconvenience we were put to. Time was you could get some great gormless strapping country lass in to do for them, but these days they all want minimum wages and National Insurance stamps and a week’s paid holiday in Tenerife.’
‘Where did you find her?’
‘Hargreaves?’ Anderson replied breezily. ‘Letitia treed her in the copper beech on the east lawn.’
‘You didn’t have to use the dog this time, then?’
Anderson gave him a sharp look.
‘Have they been telling you about Channing?’
He sighed and shook his head.
‘A typical example of the way they personalise everything. The results can be quite alarming until you learn to decode them. Symes, for instance, suffers from incontinence caused by an anal tumour which causes him a certain amount of discomfort. Since there is a long waiting-list for the operation, we have to put up with the mess and stench as best we can. Mr Symes’s response has been to accuse my sister of cauterising his rectum with a red-hot poker. Like Miss Travis, he prefers to ascribe his suffering to individual villainy rather than to the shortcomings of the health service and the workings of a fate which is simply indifferent to human misery.’
He led Jarvis into the hallway.
‘As for Channing, he has no one but himself to blame for what happened. The man’s an obsessive escapologist. He managed to get away from some POW camp during the war and has been bragging about it ever since. Last week he decided to show us all that he’d lost none of the old skills. Unfortunately he happened to choose a moment when my pet was stretching his legs in the grounds. The worst of it is that his adventure seems to have started a trend. Now they all want to have a go.’
He unlocked the front door and held it open.
‘I would ask you to stay for lunch, Inspector, but Letitia’s catering, although perfectly nourishing, is not the sort of thing you’d invite someone to. Give my respects to the Chief Constable, should you happen to bump into him. We met at a charity dinner it must be, let’s see, three years ago now?’
‘You haven’t spoken to Mrs Hargreaves yet,’ said a voice behind them.
‘Go back to the lounge, Miss Travis,’ Anderson called sternly without glancing round.
Rosemary grasped the sleeve of Jarvis’s overcoat.
‘You must speak to Mavis Hargreaves!’
‘She won’t be able to tell him anything he hasn’t already heard fifty times from the others,’ Anderson retorted dismissively.
Rosemary looked straight into Jarvis’s eyes.
‘If you leave now, I will be the next to die,’ she told him. ‘I hope you will at least investigate that properly.’
Jarvis stared back, shaken by the utter conviction of her tone. He had enough experience of people lying to him to know that Rosemary Travis was speaking the truth-or what she believed to be the truth.
‘Mrs Hargreaves is in no condition to speak to anyone,’ Anderson remarked.
‘What have you done to her?’ Rosemary cried. ‘Let me see her! Let me see her!’
‘It’s all right,’ Jarvis told her. ‘I’ll make sure she’s all right, and I’ll listen to anything she has to tell me.’
He turned to Anderson.
‘Where is she?’
Anderson shook his head.
‘Letty is just applying some soothing embrocation to the contusions which Mrs Hargreaves sustained in the course of her escapade,’ he said. ‘If you care to wait in my office, I’ll bring her to you.’
Deliberately avoiding Rosemary Travis’s eye, Jarvis crossed the hall to the book-lined room he had entered what seemed like an age ago. He was prepared to back her up to the extent of defying Anderson over this particular issue, but that was as far as he could go on the basis of the information he had. Voices heard through a partition wall, a scrap of plastic, a figure half-glimpsed by someone who might have been dreaming-these were all nice bits of circumstantial decoration, but they were no use to him without some crucial piece of evidence to tie the whole thing together. He couldn’t even imagine what that might be, still less believe that this Mrs Hargreaves was magically going to come up with it. That was as soft as his adolescent fantasies about Accrington winning the FA Cup.
The furthest they’d ever got was the third round, but each year young Stanley told himself that this time it might be a different story. The fascination of the Cup was that past reputations and current form counted for nothing. It was all down to what happened on the day. In practice, of course, that was largely determined by the skill and experience of the players, which in turn reflected the financial standing of the clubs concerned, which was dependent on their ability to attract the rewards that success brings with it. The competition was thus a faithful model of British society: supposedly accessible to all comers of talent and ability, in fact dominated by a few established clans who could now unashamedly flaunt a natural superiority which had been demonstrated in fair and open competition.
This had given Stan’s daydreams an extra edge. When he visualised the Accrington team striding out into the terrifying expanses of Wembley, the odds they faced were comparable to those which had governed his father’s life, and that of everyone they knew. Their opponents, as befitted their symbolic status, wore varying strips and assumed a variety of aliases, until the day Stan heard his dad sounding off about someone-it turned out to be the woman he later took up with-acting ‘like a bloody Chelsea debutante’. From that moment on the names of Manchester United and Liverpool were heard no more. It was always the snooty Blues with whom the Owd Reds marched out to do battle in Stanley’s imagination. Mighty Chelsea, flying high in Division One versus lowly Accrington, struggling to survive in the lower reaches of the Third. All in all, the lads might have been forgiven for conceding defeat in advance and putting the train fare towards a decent striker for the next season.
Nor did anything in the first half suggest that the result would be anything but wholly predictable. By the time the whistle blew Accrington were trailing by two goals to nil, and it could easily have been twice that if Chelsea had taken a few of the chances which had been handed them on a plate. But in the second half the whole tenor of the game abruptly changed.
It all began when Chelsea’s central defender scored an own goal with an ill-judged back pass. The London side recovered quickly, coming back with another goal which was disallowed on a blatantly incorrect off-side decision which so upset the Chelsea players that two of them were booked. When one subsequently expressed his frustration by bringing down his opposite number, he was promptly sent off, and Stanley’s centre-forward scored from the spot to level the scores. But although the Blues were down to ten men, this seemed to concentrate their formidable abilities, and by the end of the first period of extra time Accrington had not only failed to score the winning goal but had themselves been saved by the woodwork on no less than three occasions. There were now only five minutes left before the final whistle blew, five minutes for Accrington to achieve the glory which had always eluded them and write their name in the history books for ever…
‘Right, Inspector!’
For a moment Jarvis thought that Rosemary Travis had come to hound him with some new and ingenious theory, but when he looked around he found that the speaker had been Mr Anderson. Beside him stood a plump woman in a loud print dress who wound a strand of pale blonde hair around her finger as she gazed distractedly at Jarvis.
‘There’s lots of rape about,’ she said dreamily, waddling towards him.
Jarvis gaped at her. This was one complaint he hadn’t heard from the other residents. As the woman approached, Jarvis noticed that her right cheek was puffy and discoloured.
‘Fields of it, everywhere,’ she went on. ‘And such beautiful tits, too.’
‘Too?’ Jarvis echoed feebly.
Mavis Hargreaves nodded.
‘A pair, yes. Mating, I shouldn’t wonder.’
She touched Jarvis’s arm.
‘It was worth it just to be outside again.’
Another loony, thought Jarvis, the last embers of hope dying in his heart. They were into injury time now, the referee consulting his watch, only seconds left for Accrington to produce the impossible winner from nowhere.
‘I’ve been asking everyone here about the evening Mrs Davenport died,’ he recited dully. ‘I don’t suppose you recall anything unusual happening?’
Mavis Hargreaves gawked at him with a witless grin.
‘Anything at all,’ Jarvis stressed, trying to let her off easily, ‘however insignificant it may seem.’
‘Only the cocoa.’
Jarvis jerked his head up.
‘Cocoa?’
The woman tittered.
‘I was going to take the wrong mug,’ she said. ‘Would you credit it? I always use the pink one, but that night I went to take the dark blue, which was Dorothy’s, of course. It was thinking about her going, I suppose, that got me muddled. Luckily Miss Davis put me right. “Not that one,” she says, “that’s a special treat for our Dorothy. We’ve put in an extra dose of sugar to speed the parting guest.” ‘
‘She must be concussed,’ Anderson whispered urgently to Jarvis. ‘Even by her standards, this is complete idiocy. I’d better call the doctor.’
Mavis Hargreaves fluttered her eyelashes.
‘I must admit I was tempted! I have the most terrible sweet tooth. Always have had. When I was a kid, I was never without something in my mouth. I just crave it, night and day. So when I went to Dorothy’s room with the others, later that evening, I was naughty. I blush to say so, but, well, to make a clean bosom of the thing, I stole a sip of Dorothy’s cocoa. More like a gulp, actually.’
She smiled at Jarvis, who gazed expressionlessly back. Time had stopped. The crowd had fallen silent and the referee’s breath, drawn to blow the final whistle, remained blockaded in his lungs. Only the ball was still moving, smooth and dreamlike, through the heavy air…
‘Well, it’s quite true that crime doesn’t pay!’ she went on jocularly. ‘As soon as I tasted the cocoa, I realised that Miss Davis must have been teasing me. There was a lot of sugar in it, but it still tasted bitter. Really sharp, it was, with a sort of chemical edge to it. Funny, that.’ …hopelessly low and wide, but about to take that freakish deflection which would place it at the feet of the Accrington centre-forward…
‘And it’s no use you asking me about anything after that,’ Mavis Hargreaves concluded with an embarrassed shrug, ‘because I was fast asleep. I usually suffer from the most terrible insomnia, but that night I slept like the dead. The next thing I knew it was broad daylight, and everyone else had been up for hours!’
She put her hand to her mouth.
‘Except for poor Dorothy, of course.’ …and the huge stadium exploded as the final whistle blew, ending the most extraordinary match which the hallowed turf of Wembley had ever seen. Fans of both teams wept openly and embraced each other, their rivalry forgotten in mutual wonderment at this demonstration that miracles could still happen and anything was possible…
‘Thank you,’ Jarvis told Mrs Hargreaves.
He turned to Anderson with a glazedly formal expression.
‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment, sir, I’ll just have a word with HQ from the car,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll need to speak to you and your sister.’