‘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.’
