Night at the Vulcan ra-16

by Ngaio Marsh

  “Very possibly, Mr. Alleyn. He’s sweet on the young lady. That’s plain to see. And she on him.”

  “Good Lord!” Mike Lamprey ejaculated. “He must be forty! I’m sorry, sir.”

  Mr. Fox began a stately reproof but Alleyn said: “Go away, Mike. Go back to the stage. Wake Dr. Rutherford and ask him to come here. I want a change from actors.”

  Dr. Rutherford, on his entry into the Greenroom, was a figure of high fantasy. For his greater ease in sleeping he had pulled his boiled shirt from its confinement and it dangled fore and aft like a crumpled tabard. Restrained only by his slackened braces, it formed a mask, Alleyn conjectured, for a free adjustment of the Doctor’s trouser buttoning. He had removed his jacket and assumed an overcoat. His collar was released and his tie dangled on his bosom. His head was tousled and his face blotched.

  He paused in the doorway while Lamprey announced him and then, with a dismissive gesture, addressed himself to Alleyn and Fox.

  “Calling my officers about me in my branched velvet gown,” he shouted, “having come from a day-bed where I left Miss Gainsford sleeping, I present myself as a brand for the constabular burning. What’s cooking, my hearties?”

  He stood there, puffing and blowings and eyed them with an expression of extreme impertinence. If he had been an actor, Alleyn thought, he would have been cast, and cast ideally, for Falstaff. He fished under his shirt-tail, produced his snuff-box, and helped himself, with a parody of Regency deportment, to a generous pinch. “Speak!” he said “Pronounce! Propound! I am all ears.”

  “I have nothing, I’m afraid, to propound,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “and am therefore unable to pronounce. As for speaking, I hope you’ll do most of that yourself, Dr. Rutherford. Will you sit down?”

  Dr. Rutherford, with his usual precipitancy, hurled himself into the nearest armchair. As an afterthought he spread his shirt-tail with ridiculous finicking movements across his lap. “I am a thought down-gyved,” he observed. “My points are untrussed. Forgive me.”

  “Tell me,” Alleyn said. “Do you think Bennington was murdered?”

  The Doctor opened his eyes very wide, folded his hands on his stomach, revolved his thumbs and said “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “We do.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll come to that when I’m quite sure you may be put into the impossible class.”

  “Am I a suspect, by all that’s pettifogging?”

  “Not if you can prove yourself otherwise.”

  “By God,” said Dr. Rutherford deeply, “if I’d thought I could get away with it, be damned if I wouldn’t have had a shot. He was an unconscionable rogue, was Ben.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way, by Janus. A drunkard. A wife-terrorist. An exhibitionist. And what’s more,” he went on with rising intensity, “a damned wrecker of plays. A yea-forsooth knavish pander, by Heaven! I tell you this, and I tell you plainly, if I, sitting in my O.P. box, could have persuaded the Lord to stoop out of the firmament and drop a tidy thunderbolt on Ben, I would have done it with bells on. Joyously!”

  “A thunderbolt,” Alleyn said, “is one of the few means of dispatch that we have not seriously considered. Would you mind telling me where you were between the time when he made his last exit and the time when you appeared before the audience?”

  “Brief let me be. In my box. On the stairs. Off-stage. On the stage.”

  “Can you tell me exactly when you left your box?”

  “While they were making their initial mops and mows at the audience.”

  “Did you meet anyone or notice anything at all remarkable during this period?”

  “Nothing, and nobody whatever.”

  “From which side did you enter for your own call?”

  “The O.P., which is actors’ right.”

  “So you merely emerged from the stairs that lead from the box to the stage and found yourself hard by the entrance?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Have you any witness to all this, sir?”

  “To my knowledge,” said the Doctor, “none whatever. There may have been a rude mechanical or so.”

  “As far as your presence in the box is concerned, there was the audience. Nine hundred of them.”

  “In spite of its mangling at the hands of two of the actors, I believe the attention of the audience to have been upon My Play. In any case,” the Doctor added, helping himself to a particularly large pinch of snuff and holding it poised before his face, “I had shrunk in modest confusion behind the curtain.”

  “Perhaps someone visited you?”

  “Not after the first act. I locked myself in,” he added, taking his snuff with uncouth noises, “as a precautionary measure. I loathe company.”

  “Did you come back-stage at any other time during the performance?”

  “I did. I came back in both intervals. Primarily to see the little wench.”

  “Miss Tarne?” Alleyn ventured.

  “She. A tidy little wench it is and will make a good player. If she doesn’t allow herself to be debauched by the sissies that rule the roost in our lamentable theatre.”

  “Did you, during either of these intervals, visit the dressing-rooms?”

  “I went to the Usual Office at the end of the passage, if you call that a dressing-room.”

  “And returned to your box — when?”

  “As soon as the curtain went up.”

  “I see.” Alleyn thought for a moment and then said: “Dr. Rutherford, do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”

  The Doctor gave a formidable gasp. His eyes bulged, his nostrils wrinkled and his jaw dropped. This grimace turned out to be the preliminary spasm to a Gargantuan sneeze. A handkerchief not being at his disposal, he snatched up the tail of his shirt, clapped it to his face and revealed a state of astonishing disorder below the waist

  “Otto Brod?” he repeated, looking at Alleyn over his shirt-tail as if it were an improvised yashmak. “Never heard of him.”

  “His correspondence seems to be of some value,” Alleyn said vaguely but the Doctor merely gaped at him. “I don’t,” he said flatly, “know what you’re talking about”

  Alleyn gave up Otto Brod. “You’ll have guessed,” he said, “that I’ve already heard a good deal about the events of the last few days: I mean as they concerned the final rehearsals and the change in casting.”

  “Indeed? Then you will have heard that Ben and I had one flaming row after another. If you’re looking for motive,” said Dr. Rutherford with an expansive gesture, “I’m lousy with it. We hated each other’s guts, Ben and I. Of the two I should say, however, that he was the more murderously inclined.”

  “Was this feeling chiefly on account of the part his niece was to have played?”

  “Fundamentally it was the fine flower of a natural antipathy. The contributive elements were his behaviour as an actor in My Play and the obvious and immediate necessity to return his niece to her squalid little métier and replace her by the wench. We had at each other on that issue,” said Dr. Rutherford with relish, “after both auditions and on every other occasion that presented itself.”

  “And in the end, it seems, you won?”

  “Pah!” said the Doctor with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Cat’s meat!”

  Alleyn looked a little dubiously at the chaotic disarray of his garments. “Have you any objection,” he asked, “to being searched?”

  “Not I,” cried the Doctor and hauled himself up from his chair. Fox approached him.

  “By the way,” Alleyn said, “as a medical man, would you say that a punch on the jaw such as Bennington was given could have been the cause of his fainting some time afterwards? Remembering his general condition?”

  “Who says he had a punch on the jaw? It’s probably a hypostatic discolouration. What do you want?” Dr. Rutherford demanded of Fox.

  “If you wouldn’t mind taking your hands out of your pock
ets, sir,” Fox suggested.

  The Doctor said: “Let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty,” and obligingly withdrew his hands from his trousers pockets. Unfortunately he pulled the linings out of them.

  A number of objects fell about his feet — pencils, his snuff-box, scraps of paper, a pill-box, a programme, a note-book and a half-eaten cake of chocolate. A small cloud of snuff floated above this collection. Fox bent down and made a clucking sound of disapproval. He began to collect the scattered objects, inhaled snuff and was seized with a paroxysm of sneezing. The Doctor broke into a fit of uncouth laughter and floundered damagingly among the exhibits.

  “Dr. Rutherford,” Alleyn said with an air of the liveliest exasperation, “I would be immensely obliged to you if you’d have the goodness to stop behaving like a Pantaloon. Get off those things, if you please.”

  The Doctor backed away into his chair and examined an unlovely mess of chocolate and cardboard on the sole of his boot. “But, blast your lights, my good ass.” he said, “there goes my spare ration. An ounce of the best rappee, by Heaven!” Fox began to pick the fragments of the pill-box from his boot. Having collected and laid aside the dropped possessions, he scraped up a heap of snuff. “It’s no good now, Dogberry,” said the Doctor with an air of intense disapproval. Fox tipped the scrapings into an envelope.

  Alleyn stood over the Doctor. “I think,” he said, “you had better give this up, you know.”

  The Doctor favoured him with an antic grimace but said nothing. “You’re putting on an act, Dr. Rutherford, and I do assure you it’s not at all convincing. As a red herring it stinks to high Heaven. Let me tell you this. We now know that Bennington was hit over the jaw. We know when it happened. We know that the bruise was afterwards camouflaged with makeup. I want you to come with me while I remove this make-up. Where’s your jacket?”

  “Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me…”

  Fox went out and returned with a tail-coat that was in great disorder. “Nothing in the pockets, Mr. Alleyn,” he said briefly. Alleyn nodded and he handed it to Dr. Rutherford, who slung it over his shoulder.

  Alleyn led the way down the passage, where Gibson was still on guard, and round the back of the stage to the dock. P. C. Lamprey came off the set and rolled the doors back.

  Bennington had stiffened a little since they last looked at him. His face bore the expression of knowledgeable acquiescence that is so often seen in the dead. Using the back of a knife-blade, Alleyn scraped away the greasepaint from the right jaw. Fox held a piece of card for him and he laid smears of greasepaint on it in the manner of a painter setting his palette. The discoloured mark on the jaw showed clearly.

  “There it is,” Alleyn said, and stood aside for Dr. Rutherford.

  “A tidy buffet, if buffet it was. Who gave it him?” Alleyn didn’t answer. He moved round to the other side and went on cleaning the face.

  “The notion that it could have contributed to his death,” the Doctor said, “is preposterous. If, as you say, there was an interval between the blow and the supposed collapse. Preposterous!”

  Fox had brought cream and a towel, with which Alleyn now completed his task. The Doctor watched him with an air of impatience and unease. “Damned if I know why you keep me hanging about,” he grumbled at last.

  “I wanted your opinion on the bruise. That’s all, Fox. Is the mortuary van here?”

  “On its way, sir,” said Fox, who was wrapping his piece of card in paper.

  Alleyn looked at the Doctor. “Do you think,” he said, “that his wife will want to see him?”

  “She won’t want to. She may think she ought to. Humbug, in my opinion. Distress herself for nothing. What good does it do anybody?”

  “I think, however, I should at least ask her.”

  “Why the blazes you can’t let her go home passes my comprehension. And where do I go, now? I’m getting damn bored with Ben’s company.”

  “You may wait either on the stage or, if you’d rather, in the unoccupied dressing-room. Or the office, I think, is open.”

  “Can I have my snuff back?” Dr. Rutherford asked with something of the shamefaced air of a small boy wanting a favour.

  “I think we might let you do that,” Alleyn said. “Fox, will you give Dr. Rutherford his snuff-box?”

  Dr. Rutherford lumbered uncertainly to the door. He stood there, with his chin on his chest and his hands in his pockets.

  “See here, Alleyn,” he said, looking from under his eyebrows at him. “Suppose I told you it was I who gave Ben that wallop on his mug. What then?”

  “Why,” Alleyn said, “I shouldn’t believe you, you know.”

  Chapter X

  SUMMING UP

  Alleyn saw Helena Hamilton in her dressing-room. It was an oddly exotic setting. The scent of banked flowers, of tobacco smoke and of cosmetics was exceedingly heavy, the air hot and exhausted. She had changed into her street-clothes and sat in an armchair that had been turned with its back to the door, so that when he entered he saw nothing of her but her right hand trailing near the floor with a cigarette between her fingers. She called: “Come in, Mr. Alleyn,” in a warm voice as if he were an especially welcome visitor. He would not have guessed from this greeting that when he faced her he would find her looking so desperately tired.

  As if she read his thoughts she put her hands to her eyes and said: “My goodness, this is a long night, isn’t it?”

  “I hope that for you, at least, it is nearing its end,” he said. ‘I’ve come to tell you that we are ready to take him away.”

  “Does that mean I ought to — to look at him?”

  “Only if you feel you want to. I can see no absolute need at all, if I may say so.”

  “I don’t want to,” she whispered and added in a stronger voice: “It would be a pretence. I have no real sorrow and I have never seen the dead. I should only be frightened and confused.”

  Alleyn went to the door and looked into the passage, where Fox waited with Gibson. He shook his head and Fox went away. When Alleyn came back to her she looked up at him and said: “What else?”

  “A question or two. Have you ever known or heard of a man called Otto Brod?”

  Her eyes widened. “But what a strange question!” she said. “Otto Brod? Yes. He’s a Czech or an Austrian, I don’t remember which. An intellectual. We met him three years ago when we did a tour of the continent. He had written a play and asked my husband to read it. It was in German and Ben’s German wasn’t up to it. The idea was that he should get someone over here to look at it, but he was dreadfully bad at keeping those sorts of promises and I don’t think he ever did anything about it.”

  “Have they kept in touch, do you know?”

  “Oddly enough, Ben said a few days ago that he’d heard from Otto. I think he’d written from time to time for news of his play but I don’t suppose Ben answered.” She pressed her thumb and fingers on her eyes. “If you want to see the letter,” she said, “it’s in his coat.”

  Alleyn said carefully: “You mean the jacket he wore to the theatre? Or his overcoat?”

  “The jacket. He was always taking my cigarette case in mistake for his own. He took it out of his breastpocket when he was leaving for the theatre and the letter was with it.” She waited for a moment and then said: “He was rather odd about it.”

  “In what way?” Alleyn asked. She had used Martyn’s very phrase, and now when she spoke again it was with the uncanny precision of a delayed echo: “He was rather strange in his manner. He held the letter out with the cigarette case and drew my attention to it. He said, I think: ‘That’s my trump card.’ He seemed to be pleased in a not very attractive way. I took my case. He put the letter back in his pocket and went straight out.”

  “Did you get the impression he meant it was a trump card he could use against somebody?”

  “Yes. I think I did.”

  “And did you form any idea who that
person could be?”

  She leant forward and cupped her face in her hands. “Oh yes,” she said. “It seemed to me that it was I myself he meant. Or Adam. Or both of us. It sounded like a threat.” She looked up at Alleyn. “We’ve both got alibis, haven’t we? If it was murder.”

  “You have, undoubtedly,” Alleyn said, and she looked frightened.

  He asked her why she thought her husband had meant that the letter was a threat to herself or to Poole but she evaded this question, saying vaguely that she had felt it to be so.

  “You didn’t come down to the theatre with your husband?” Alleyn said.

  “No. He was ready before I was. And in any case—” She made a slight expressive gesture and didn’t complete her sentence. Alleyn said: “I think I must tell you that I know something of what happened during the afternoon.”

  The colour that flooded her face ebbed painfully and left it very white. She said: “How do you know that? You can’t know.” She stopped and seemed to listen. They could just hear Poole in the next room. He sounded as if he was moving about irresolutely. She caught her breath and after a moment she said loudly: “Was it Jacko? No, no, it was never Jacko.”

  “Your husband himself—” Alleyn began and she caught him up quickly. “Ben? Ah, I can believe that. I can believe he would boast of it. To one of the men. To J.G.? Was it J.G.? Or perhaps even to Gay?”

  Alleyn said gently: “You must know I can’t answer questions like these.”

  “It was never Jacko,” she repeated positively and he said: “I haven’t interviewed Mr. Doré yet.”

  “Haven’t you? Good.”

  “Did you like Otto Brod?”

  She smiled slightly and lifted herself in her chair. Her face became secret and brilliant. “For a little while,” she said, “he was a fortunate man.”

  “Fortunate?”

  “For a little while I loved him.”

  “Fortunate indeed,” said Alleyn.

  “You put that very civilly, Mr. Alleyn.”

  “Do you think there was some connection here? I mean between your relationship with Brod and the apparent threat when your husband showed you the letter?”