by E.
“Well, what happened then?” he asked. “On the stage, I mean,” he added.
“We walked off on the prompt side and went into the Green Room as usual. But she started up another argument so I just told her to get to hell, and walked out on her.”
“What was the trouble?”
“Oh, the usual story that I was masking her.”
“Masking her?” The inspector looked puzzled.
“Getting in between her and the audience,” the Cat explained. “Generally does happen to a blooming Cat in the shop scene.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went off to my dressing-room to get a drink.”
Inspector Bradley passed a puzzled hand across his forehead. They seemed, he thought, to be talking at cross-purposes. They were not in the same scene. He tried another tack.
“What was going on on the stage then?” he asked.
“The Dame was doing his chorus act.”
“You mean the Captain and Mate.”
“I don’t mean anything of the kind. That’s after the Highgate Hill scene.”
The inspector roused himself. “Now,” he thought, “we are coming to it.” Aloud he said:
“Now, that’s what I want to get at. You come off after the shop scene, you have a row with Miss de Grey, you dash off to your dressing-room for a drink, and then there’s the Highgate Hill scene. Now, what happened in that scene? That’s what I want particularly to know.”
“How the devil do I know what happened in the Hill scene?” The Cat was getting a bit peeved, and showed it. “That is when I was ill.”
The inspector nodded. “Yes, I know that, Enora,” he agreed. “But what made you ill? And what made Miss de Grey ill at the same time? We’ve been waiting for you to recover in order that we could find out.”
The Cat stared at his questioner in exasperation.
“How the devil do I know what made Miss de Grey ill?” he demanded. “Dammit, I didn’t know that she was ill. How should I know? I wasn’t with her and she wasn’t with me.”
“Not with you? Miss de Grey not with you?” The inspector echoed the words.
“For the love of Mike, Inspector, of course she wasn’t with me.”
“Now take it easy, Enora.” The inspector spoke quietly, and soothingly. He realized that the Cat was still a sick man, and must not be unduly aroused, lest he slipped back into sickness again. “Think carefully before you reply. You say that Miss de Grey was not with you at the time you were taken ill. I was told that she was with you. If she wasn’t, then who was with you in the Highgate Hill scene?”
“The Highgate Hill scene?” The Cat scratched his head. “I don’t know who the devil was in the Highgate Hill scene. I didn’t play in it.”
There was a silence. The mouth of the inspector was open, the bottom jaw dropped in a surprise that invested it with an appearance of comicality.
“You didn’t play in the Highgate Hill scene? Then who was the Cat that was playing?”
“I suppose my understudy was. That’s what he was there for. If I’m not on the stage he takes my place.”
“Well, when did you last see Miss de Grey?”
“I’ve already told you. When we came off the stage after the shop scene, and we had the row. I walked out on her and went to my dressing-room.”
“That’s the time that you say you had your drink, is it?”
“That’s right, Inspector.”
“What happened after you had the drink?”
“Blimey, Inspector, that’s what I want to know. I’m waiting to hear that from you.”
The inspector considered the point. Enora, he felt bound to admit, seemed perfectly open in his answers. And he was not at fault in giving them. He proceeded with his questioning.
“What drink was it?” he asked.
“A pint of bitter, same as I usually had.”
“You were all right when you went up to the room, and you drank the bitter. Then what happened?”
“I just went all queer. Felt as if the top of my head had gone. All light-headed, I was. And the next thing I knew was waking up here.”
“And, of course, you don’t know anything of what happened on the Highgate Hill scene?”
“Not a darned thing. You said that Miss de Grey was taken ill at the same time as me?”
The inspector nodded. “Don’t you worry about that now,” he adjured. “I’ll come and see you again soon. You’ve talked enough for one day.”
The inspector left. He wandered, a very puzzled man, back to the police-station. “He sure talked enough for one day,” he said to himself. “What do I do now?”
He sat himself down in his chair and wrestled with the problem. It looked as though he had jumped too quickly to a conclusion. Not that he could really be blamed, he argued to himself, in his own defence. The doctor had said that the woman must have been doped on the stage itself, and he had convinced himself that only the Cat was near enough to her to have done it unnoticed. Enora had played the cat from the start of the show up to that very scene. Nobody had suggested that he was not the Cat in the Hill scene. They surely would have done if the understudy had been on. Was there any way in which the understudy could have taken the part unknown to the stage-manager and the company?
The inspector proceeded to work it out. Supposing that there had been an arrangement between Enora and the other Cat for the deputy to take that scene. Supposing there had been a monetary arrangement, in order that the deputy could poison Miss de Grey. Only one other person would know who the Cat was, and that was Enora. If Enora could be put out of the way at the same time with poisoned drink, then it would be assumed, as in fact it had been assumed, that Enora was the assailant. Was this the explanation of the strange story of Enora? If it was, the inspector realized that he had made a bad blunder, for the deputy Cat was with the company still, and would have had time enough to dispose both of the poison and of the syringe for which search had been made without result.
He decided that no time must be lost in inquiring closely into these possibilities. In the meantime the doctors must be urged to keep Enora in hospital as long as possible.
With this end in view he called upon the police surgeon and put his request.
“You need not worry, Inspector,” was the reply. “He won’t be able to leave for at least another week. He’ll find that out when he tries to stand up.”
“There’s just one other thing, Doctor,” said the inspector. “You stated that Miss de Grey must have had the poison administered to her while she was lying on the bank in the Highgate Hill scene?”
The doctor nodded.
“Now is that absolutely certain? I don’t doubt that you believe it to be a certain, but a curious situation has developed in my inquiries, and I want to be sure that I do not go wrong. Is it absolutely impossible, in any conceivable circumstances, for the poison to have been taken by her before the particular part of that scene, though, perhaps, in the scene itself?”
“What are you getting at, Inspector? Suppose you put it a little more detailed.”
“Well, Doctor. Miss de Grey stood in the wings before she made her entrance. There she stood surrounded by people—by stage-hands and members of the company, particularly the chorus. Can you say that there were no circumstances in which any one of such people in passing could not have pricked her with the needle as she was on the point of going on? I reckon, roughly, that there was no more than a minute or so, before Dick Whittington lies on the bank.”
“I see your point,” the police surgeon said. “There is one circumstance which would allow the lapse of about a minute before the poison took effect. Hydrocyanic acid, Inspector, as you know, is about the quickest-acting poison we have. But if the dose was very considerably diluted—very considerably diluted—then collapse might not occur at once. The patient would feel decidedly groggy, but under such will-power as would be necessary to an actress actually on the stage, she might stave off collapse for a minute. But no
longer.”
“Then . . .” began the inspector.
The doctor waved a hand to silence him.
“But there is no such possibility in this case, Inspector,” he said. “The amount of prussic acid in the body of Miss de Grey does not admit the possibility of even the slightest degree of dilution. She would have been dead within seconds of the needle penetrating the skin. Of that there is not the slightest shadow of a doubt.”
The inspector left. “Then it was the damned deputy Cat,” he said.
He hurried to the railway station and took a first-class ticket for Waterloo. His next talk must be with the manager of the Dick Whittington company, who had now reached the Metropolis in their travels.
CHAPTER VII
STALKING A CAT
At the time that Inspector Bradley was interrogating the Cat in the hospital at Burlington, the company of Dick Whittington were gathered at the Old Sussex Theatre, in the area of the Elephant and Castle, in London. If the neighbourhood of the Elephant was not exactly salubrious, that of the old theatre was even less so. The Fairy Queen stood in the gloom of the pilot lights which were swinging high above the flies and trying, vainly, to illuminate the cramped stage. The stage staff having erected what part of the scenery they could get on the apology for a stage, had blacked out and ‘gone for one’ before band call started.
“Dreadful! Horrible!” cried the Fairy Queen. “How could they send us to such a place after Burlington”; and with a sound like a sob, she turned back into the passage and made for the dressing-rooms.
“Heavens, what will they be like?” she asked of herself, as she began the climb up the filthy stone stairs. The walls had once been distempered a bright pink. But that was probably in the days when the theatre had begun its career. The distemper had long ago crumbled into a dirty, depressing state of dilapidation. Up three flights of stairs toiled the Fairy Queen, the foetid smell of the dirt of years becoming more and more pronounced. She halted at a door marked in white chalk:
Miss Low.
Miss Peg Roff.
Miss Harlington (understudy).
She paused inside a room measuring ten feet by ten feet. Stage baskets line up one side; on the other was a small waist-high bench on which stood a cracked mirror. Let into the bench was a cracked and stained bowl, which leaked its filthy contents on the dressing-room floor. Two rickety chairs comprised the furniture. The once white-washed walls were now embroidered with greasepaint drawings, and a large notice proclaiming to all and sundry that to deface the decorations would bring down retribution on the inhabitants.
For a couple of minutes the Fairy Queen gazed at the room. Then, near to tears, she ran down the stairs, down the dirty passage filled now with prop baskets, and out of the stage door into the dirty side street heaped with the discarded cabbage leaves of green-grocery stalls. She turned in at the doors of a cafe, there to drink tea and to adjust her ideas of theatrical fortune.
Yes, the Old Sussex was ancient, and horrible, all right, she reflected, as a tear dropped into her cup. But then, one had to have experience, and the Academy had sort of hinted that her voice wasn’t strong enough for Opera. But she had not thought that it would bring her to places quite so awful as the Sussex. Still, it was only for two weeks, and she would then be out of work altogether, so one should not grumble. Besides, it was near the West End where one could go for auditions. Thus consoled, she made her way back to the theatre.
The company were beginning to assemble for the band call of the new date. The new ones took the appearance of the place in various degrees of indignation; the old stagers regarded it complacently as being all in the day’s work; they were only too glad that any kind of a stage door was open to them.
In the absence of the stage-doorkeeper, who also stoked the boilers, artistes helped themselves to letters from the rack. Miss Prue took her correspondence and moved towards Dressing-room No. 1, which she now shared with the new Dick Whittington. After one revolted glance she took off her coat and, opening her trunk, took out soap, cloths and disinfectant and was in the midst of a little spring-cleaning when Dick Whittington arrived.
“Oh, Peg, what a hole,” was the Boy’s greeting. “Chuck me a cloth and I’ll have a go, too. Perhaps it won’t be too bad when we’ve got our bits out. But have you seen the stage and the augmented orchestra, my dear? Fred Karno’s own. Heaven help us on a night like this.”
“Freddie keeps telling me that Lottie Collins made her big success here. Gee, what stamina those old pros had. I’m sending out for some aspirins. We’ll need ’em to pull the show through this.”
Later came the performance.
“Overture and beginners, please. All down on stage.”
The squeaking of the violins, the banging of drums, the shouting of stage-hands, as the company took their places and faced the stunted auditorium of faded gilt and red plush, the worn carpet showing between the broken seats, the dilapidated electric light shades dangling forlornly from the boxes on each side of the stage. The reek of years of stale smoke from cheap tobacco, of oranges and humbugs, mingled together in one foul broth came over the footlights.
“Oh God, I’ll fail,” said Dick. “Who could help it here. A fairy is funny in this rig-out. Who could believe in fairies here? . . . All right. Damn ’em. It’s ten pounds a week, and a chance next year. . . .” And there’s your cue, and you walk into the limes centre-stage and look forlornly into a sea of faces; hungry, tired, dirty little faces, and a gasp of awe comes up to you as you realize they are seeing their childish hero, Dick Whittington, perhaps for the first time, and you smile at them. Then the applause breaks over you, and you know that you haven’t cheated them; they believe in you. If you had shattered their illusion, you would have murdered hundreds of little souls. That is your reward.
And as the warm glow of their happiness swirls round you, you bend and scratch the head of pussy—that’s not in the script, but you’ve got to do something; you can’t let the world see that Dick Whittington is crying. . . .
It was into this atmosphere of pride and prejudice that Inspector Bradley intruded, two nights later, after he had fortified himself first with a substantial meal in a neighbouring hotel. His appearance was greeted by the company with a demand for news of the Cat.
“He’s getting better,” was the reply. But to inquiries as to how he was proceeding with the case of the dead Whittington, he made no reply. Instead, he approached the stage-manager with a request for a short talk.
“Sorry, Inspector, can’t arrange it now. The show is on, you know, and I can’t be away from the stage—not this ruddy stage, at any rate. Now, if you like to hang round a bit until the interval, well, I’ll be able to have a breather then, and we can talk. Sit in my cubby-hole. You’ll be able to see the show from the wings.”
So for the first time Inspector Bradley saw a performance from the back of the stage, instead, as was his wont, of from the audience. What is more, he found with no little interest that he was watching the very scene in which Miss de Grey had died at Burlington. It might well be that the scene could cast a new light on the mystery; some commonplace might have the effect of causing a change of attitude on his part towards certain members of the company. He watched closely all the movements of the artistes as they assembled in the wings, and as they took their appointed places on the stage. He noted, too, all those who came into contact with Dick Whittington. But at the end, when the tabs dropped, he found nothing which seemed to assist him in his investigations.
It was then that the stage-manager, wiping perspiration from his brow, for it was hot under the lights, came across to him.
“Now, Inspector, I can spare about ten minutes,” he said. “Come along to my room.”
The two men, behind the closed door, lighted up their pipes, and puffed the smoke ceilingwards.
“Well, Inspector?” asked the stage-manager.
“Mr. Trimble, I want you to cast your mind back to the moment when you realized at Burlington that M
iss de Grey was ill. There are one or two points upon which I want to assure myself. Now Dick was lying on the bank, and had not spoken her lines. The cat was, of course, with her. You rang down the curtain and rushed to Miss de Grey. She was carried into the Green Room. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CAT?”
“I think you asked me that question at Burlington, Inspector. I really don’t know what happened to him. I was too busy seeing what was wrong with Miss de Grey. As the Cat usually went up to his room for a rub-down and a drink at that time, I assume he did so on this occasion.”
“In spite of the fact that Miss de Grey was unconscious? Is that the normal thing for anyone to do?”
The stage-manager shrugged his shoulders. “The Cat, Inspector, is an old trouper. With an old trouper ‘the show must go on’ is a golden rule. Enora would have gone on in the show even if Miss de Grey had been his wife and was still lying ill. He would go to his room because he was due in the front of the house for his act after he had rubbed down and changed his undervest, which was, you understand, generally saturated at this time. Acting Cat in a skin is damned hot work.”
The inspector nodded. “I see,” he said. “When you found out from the front of the house that the Cat was not out there, and then found him ill in his room, you got hold of his understudy. Where was this man?”
“Where he had no right to be—in the pub round the corner,” was the reply. We sent for him, rushed him into his skin and put him on only a minute or so late for his next entrance.”
“I’d like to have a word with him, if I may?” the inspector asked.
The stage-manager put his head round the door and called for the boy. ‘Tell Mr. Lancy I’d like to see him for a minute when he comes in from the front,” he ordered.
A couple of minutes elapsed before Mr. Lancy, still in his skin, and puffing from his exertions, entered the room.