Death Of A Hollow Man

by Caroline Graham

  “Oh. Right. I might come along and audition anyway … if that’s okay?”

  “Anyone,” replied Harold, magisterially breaking upstage right, “can audition.”

  After he had left, the two young people smiled at each other, celebrating their meeting and mutual admiration.

  “Will you go on Friday?” asked Cully.

  “I think so. He might’ve calmed down by then.”

  “Then I shall, too.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Why not? I’m not due back till the end of January. And I’d give anything to play Yelena. We can always work our own way.”

  “Gosh—that’d be fantastic.”

  Cully parted her lovely lips and smiled again. “Wouldn’t it though?” she said.

  Barnaby and Troy were in the office of Hartshorn, Weatherwax, and Tetzloff. Their Mr. Ounce, who handled Esslyn Carmichael’s affairs, was being affable if slightly condescending. Entertaining the police, his manner implied, was not what he was used to, but he hoped if it was thrust upon him, he could behave as well as the next man.

  But if Barnaby had hoped to discover some sinister undertow to the murdered man’s life in his solicitor’s office, he was unlucky. Mr. Ounce could reveal little more than the arid contents in the desk at White Wings. Barnaby had been unlucky at the bank as well. No suspiciously large sums of money ever leaked in or out of the Carmichael account, all was depressingly well ordered, the balances no more and no less than one would have expected. The only thing remaining was the will, which he was about to hear read. (He had offered to apply in the proper manner and go to a magistrate, but Mr. Ounce had graciously waived the necessity, saying he was sure time was of the essence.)

  The document was brief and to the point. His widow would get the house and a comfortable allowance for herself and the child as long as she carried out her maternal duties in a proper manner. Carmichael Junior would get the full dibs on reaching twenty-one, and in the event of the child’s demise everything, including White Wings, went to the brother in Ottawa. Mr. Ounce replaced the stiff ivory parchment folds in a metal deeds box and snapped the lock.

  “Neatly tied up,” said Barnaby.

  “I must confess my own fine Italian hand was somewhat to the fore there, Chief Inspector.” He rose from his old leather swivel chair. “We can’t let the ladies have it all their own way, can we?”

  “Blimey,” said Troy, when they were back in the station and warming themselves up with some strong coffee. “I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall when Kitty hears that.”

  Barnaby did not respond. He sat behind his desk tapping his nails against each other. A habit to which he was prone when deep in thought. It drove Troy mad. He was just wondering if he could sneak out for a quick drag when his chief gave voice.

  “What I can’t get, Sergeant, is the timing. …” Troy sat up. “There are dozens of ways to kill a man. Why set it up in front of a hundred witnesses … taking risks backstage … tinkering with a razor … when all you have to do is wait and catch him on some dark night?”

  “I feel that’s rather a strike against Kitty, myself, chief. Trying it at home, she’d be the first person we’d suspect.”

  “A good point.”

  “And now we’ve flushed the lover out,” Troy bounded on, encouraged, “and discovered that he was the one who supplied the razor in the first place. I bet he even suggested the tape—”

  “I think not. I’ve asked a lot of people about that. The general consensus seems to be that it was Deidre.”

  “Anyway, there he is with the perfect alibi, leaving Kitty to carry the can. That sort always do.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a bit obvious.”

  “But … excuse me, sir … the times you’ve said the obvious is so often the truth.”

  Barnaby nodded. The observation was a fair one. As was Troy’s implication that the familiar unheavenly twins lust and greed were once again probably the motivating power behind a sudden death. So why did Barnaby feel this case was different? He didn’t welcome this perception, which seemed to him at the moment to lead absolutely nowhere, but it would not be denied. He saw now, too, that his previous knowledge of the suspects, which he had regarded from the first as an advantage, could also work against him. It was proving well nigh impossible to make his mind the objective mirror it should be if he was to appreciate what was really going on. His understanding of Kitty’s character, his liking for Tim and the Smys, his sympathy for Deidre, all were gradually forcing him into a corner. At this rate, he observed sourly to himself, I’ll hardly have a suspect left.

  And then there was Floyd on Fish. He picked it out of his tray and fanned the pages yet again. The thing had been through the works at the lab. It was no more and no less than what it purported to be, and smothered with dozens of assorted prints. Now, why the hell should someone send Harold, who had not the slightest interest in cooking, a recipe book? Why was it given anonymously? Troy, asked for his ideas, had been worse than useless. Just given one of his excruciating winks and said, “Very fishy, chief.” Joyce said Harold had seemed to be genuinely puzzled by its arrival, assumed it to be a gift from an unknown admirer, and promptly given it away. Barnaby couldn’t see a single way in which it might be connected with the case, but it was certainly odd. A loose end. And he didn’t care for loose ends, although, as the case looked at the moment like a bundle of cooked spaghetti, he supposed another one more or less didn’t much signify.

  Troy was clearing his throat, and Barnaby retrieved his wandering thoughts and raised his eyebrows. “If we’re leaving sex and cash out, chief, I suppose the other big one would be that he’d got something on somebody and they wanted to keep him quiet.” Barnaby nodded. “I know we didn’t find any surprises in his account, but it could still have been blackmail. He could’ve been stashing it abroad.”

  “Mmm … it’s an appealing idea. The trouble is, it doesn’t fit the nature of the beast.”

  ‘‘Sorry, sir … I’m not quite with you on that one.” Troy was frowning; a little anxious about being found wanting, but determined to have each step quite clear before proceeding to the next. He never pretended that he understood what Barnaby was getting at when he didn’t, and the chief inspector, knowing how his sergeant longed to give the impression of keeping up or even leaping ahead, respected this veracity.

  “I just don’t think Carmichael was the type. It’s not that he was a nice man—far from it—but he was completely self-absorbed. He had no interest in other people’s affairs, or the sheer energetic nastiness a successful blackmailer needs.”

  ‘‘Jealousy then, chief? Him being the leading light and all that. Maybe somebody else wanted a go?” Even as he voiced this suggestion, Troy thought it was probably a nonstarter. Although he had quite enjoyed Amadeus, he thought the actors a load of pimpish show-offs. Personally he wouldn’t have thought any of them had the guts to skin a rabbit, never mind putting somebody in the way of cutting their own throat. Still, he had been wrong before (Troy saw his willingness to admit to possessing this almost universal human weakness as a sign of real maturity) and might well be so again. ‘‘Perhaps they were all in it together, sir? Like that film on a train … where everybody had a stab at the victim. A conspiracy.”

  Barnaby raised his head at this and looked interested. Interested but glum. Troy remembered a phrase from the early morning news and essayed one of his witticisms.

  “A putsch-up job, sir?”

  ‘‘What?”

  ‘‘Put up—it’s a joke, chief. A sort of play on words. Putsch up—put up …”

  Barnaby was silent for a minute, then spoke slowly. “My God, Troy. You might just be right.”

  Gratified, the sergeant continued, “It was in one of these banana republics—”

  “It’s so near …”

  “That’s what I said. Put and—”

  “No, no. I’m not talking about that. Perhaps … let me think. …”

  Barnaby sat very st
ill. A nebulous possibility, no more than a glimmer, flickered into his mind. Flickered and was gone. Came back, solidified a bit, was gently tested.

  “I wonder,” continued Barnaby, “perhaps Esslyn gave us the reason for the murder. At least”—he groped toward the next words slowly—“he gave it to Kitty. She didn’t have the wit to see the implication behind what he said, but I should have. There’s no excuse for me.”

  Troy, appreciating that he also hadn’t had the wit and that there was no excuse for him, either, regarded his boots sulkily. Barnaby got up and started to pace around, then sent his sergeant for some more coffee. Troy disappeared into the outer office and helped himself from the Cona.

  When he returned to the inner sanctum, the DCI was gazing out the window. Troy put the mugs on the desk and returned to his seat. When Barnaby turned, he was struck by the paleness of the chief inspector’s countenance. Pale but lively. No sooner had one expression, hopeful elation, registered than it was chased away by disbelief, which in turn gave way to a jauntiness that was almost debonair, dissolving into puzzlement.

  “You’ve … got something then, sir?” asked Troy.

  “I don’t know. It’s all out of whack … but it must be. I just can’t see how.”

  Fat lot of good that is then, opined Troy silently. The old sod always did this when he believed a case was shifting toward a conclusion. He would say that all the information so far obtained was as available to Troy as it was to him and that the sergeant should be perfectly capable of coming to his own assessment. The fact that this remark was a perfectly valid one in no way lessened the sergeant’s chagrin every time he heard it. Now, he noticed Barnaby was looking at him rather oddly. Then, to his alarm, the chief walked around the desk, came up to Troy’s chair, bent down, and brought his lips close to the younger man’s ear. Bloody hell, thought Troy, preparing to leap for the door. Who’d have thought it? Barnaby moved his mouth, breathed faintly, and returned to his seat. Troy produced a handkerchief and mopped his face.

  “Well, sergeant,” Barnaby said, in a blessedly masculine and unseductive manner. “What did I say?”

  “Bungled, sir.”

  “Aaahhh …” It was a long, slow hiss of satisfaction. “Nearly, Troy. A good guess. Nearly … but not quite.”

  Bangles? thought the sergeant. Burgled? Boggled? Buggered? (Back to Doris and Daphne.) Or how about bonbons? Hey … how about bonbons? The bloke was eating sweets all through the play. Or there was borrowed. That fitted. The razor was borrowed. All the dead man’s clothes were hired. Wasn’t much like bungled, though. Fumbled. Something had been fumbled. That was more like it. Meant practically the same thing, after all. As no revelation appeared to be forthcoming from the horse’s mouth, Troy decided to settle for “fumbled.” He looked across at Barnaby, who seemed to have gone into a trance. He was staring over Troy’s left shoulder, the light of intelligence quite absent from his eyes.

  But his mind was whirring. Like a chess player, he moved his figures around. On the black squares (the wings, the stage, the dressing rooms) and on the white (the lighting box, the clubroom, the auditorium). He forged likely and unlikely alliances and guessed at possible repercussions. He imagined mirrored reflections of his suspects, hoping that way to surprise a familiar face in secret revelatory relaxation. And gradually, by way of improbable juxtaposition, glancing insights, and hard-won recall of certain conversations, he arrived at an eminently workable hypothesis. It fitted very well. It made perfect sense and was psychologically sound. It explained (almost) everything. There was only one slight snag. The way things stood at the moment, what it hypothesized (who had murdered Esslyn Carmichael and why) could not possibly be anywhere near the truth. He muttered that fact aloud.

  Near what truth? wondered Troy, still smarting over his inability to figure out Barnaby’s earlier insights. Now, the chief was rumbling again. Rumble, rumble. Mutter, mutter.

  “There had to be an audience, Troy. We’ve been looking at things from quite the wrong angle. It wasn’t a hazard—it was an essential. So that everyone could see what he was doing.”

  “What, Carmichael?”

  “No, of course not. Use your nous.” Barnaby picked up a ball-point and started scribbling. “And don’t look so affronted,” he continued, not looking up. “Think, man!”

  While Troy thought, Barnaby reflected minutely on the times and the names and positions he had jotted down. If everyone was where they said they were at the times they said they were, doing what they said they were doing, then he was up a creek. So someone was lying. Fair enough. You expected murderers to lie. But when you had a theater full of people prepared to stand by what was, after all, the evidence of their own eyes and back him up then you were in a real bind. Especially when two of the eyes were your own.

  But he knew he was right. He knew in his blood and in his bones. Over the years he had come to this point in a case too many times to be mistaken. Details might be unclear, practicalities elusive, methodology right up the Swanee, but he knew. The backs of his hands prickled, his neck in the stuffy, overheated office crawled with cold. He knew and could do nothing.

  “Oh, fuck it, Troy!” The sergeant jumped as Barnaby’s fist hit the desk. “I’m bloody hemmed in. Nobody can be in two places at once … can they?”

  “No, sir,” replied Troy, feeling for once on pretty safe ground. He was not displeased to see Barnaby foxed. You could put up with just so much swaggering about. Now, there were two of them without a bloody clue. He watched his chief’s fierce frown and tightly clamped jaw. Any minute now, the little brown bottle would appear. And here it was. The chief inspector shook out two indigestion tablets and chased them down with cold coffee. Then he sat and stared at his piece of paper for so long that the neat black letters became meaningless.

  “This is where,” he said to Troy, “if I were a religious man, I should start praying for a miracle.”

  And—such is the wickedly unfair tilt of things in a world where a monk can spend his life on his knees and never get a nibble—for Tom Barnaby, sometimes profane, moderately decent, frequent faller by the wayside, the miracle occurred. Buzz, buzz. He picked up the phone. It was David Smy. Barnaby listened for a moment, responded “You’re quite sure?” and replaced the receiver.

  “Troy,” he said, presenting an awesome countenance. “When all this is over, remind me to send a hefty check to a worthwhile cause.”

  “Why’s that then, chief?”

  “Strokes of luck like this must be paid for, sergeant. Otherwise whoever’s sending them gets annoyed.”

  “So what did they say? Whoever it was.”

  “If you remember,” said Barnaby with a smile so broad it seemed to touch his ears, “David thought there was something odd about the tray he took on.”

  “But he described it all and there wasn’t.”

  “Quite right. But you’ll recall from his statement that as it was a personal prop he gave the tray a quick look-see about the five. Now, the razor that Young supplied and that the murdered man used to cut his throat had a mother-of-pearl design of flowers and leaves on one side of the handle and a little line of silver rivets on the reverse. The reason David Smy thought there was something odd when he entered the wings with it lying sunny-side down on his tray was because he noticed the rivets.”

  “So?”

  ‘‘When he gave the tray the once-over just before eight, the rivets were not there.”

  “Then”—Troy picked up the inspector’s excitement— “there were two?”

  “There were two.”

  “So all our problems with the time … ?”

  “Gone. The whole thing’s wide open. It could have been tinkered with any time between when Deidre checked it and ten o’clock, when David took it on.”

  “So … whoever it was left the substitute, took the tape off, and slipped the original back in his or her own good time.”

  “Precisely. I’d thought of that option, of course, but assumed no one would dare ri
sk leaving the tray on the props table minus the razor for more than a few minutes, even with the wings dark. But, as we now see, they didn’t have to.”

  “So you’re no longer boxed in, sir?” Troy struggled hard not to sound peevish. He didn’t wish to appear mean-spirited, but really, the way information fell into some people’s laps was beyond a joke. Then he recalled that some of the kudos at the end of a successful case always fell on the bag-carrier and cheered up. “So we’ve got a full house, then? Anybody could have done it?”

  “I think we’ll have to except Avery Phillips. He didn’t come out of the box till after the murder. But apart from him, yes … anybody.” He got up, suddenly full of vim and vigor, and grabbed his coat. “I’m going to sort out a warrant. Get the car round.”

  “We looking for the other razor, sir?”

  “Yes. I expect whoever it is has had the sense to chuck it by now, but you never know. We might strike lucky.” By the time Barnaby returned from Superintendent Penrose’s office, Troy, sub-Burberry tightly belted, had brought the car around.

  “Where to first, chief?”

  “We’ll start at the top and work our way down.”

  Deidre opened the front door of the house and stepped inside. It was eerily quiet. She had always thought of her father’s presence as a silent one; now, she realized it instigated many subtle sounds. The creak of his armchair, the soft rub of his clothes against the furniture, the snatched papery rustle of his breath. She took off her coat and Sunny’s leash and hung them in the dingy hall, then walked to the kitchen, where she stood uncertainly, looking at the dishes that had been sitting in the sink, gravied and custard-streaked, for the past four days. They looked as much a fixture as the spotted chrome taps and grubby roller towel. Best to keep busy, the medical social worker had said, and Deidre knew this was good advice. Even as she stood there, she saw herself sweeping and polishing and dusting. Hanging gay new curtains, placing a bright geranium on the windowsill. But vivid as these pictures were, they paled beside a concomitant weight of ennui so great that after a few more minutes attached to the hearth rug, she began to believe she would never move again.