by Roy Vickers
‘The best thing I’ve done!’ The words echoed down the years. ‘And it tells an unbearable truth. It’s cruel!’
But its cruelty was not as unbearable as the cruelty of that laughter which was as a flaming sword holding him from his human heritage – a mirror into which he must gaze and see himself ‘not like other men’.
He turned again to the self-portrait, remembered his despair.
‘Last time, I cashed in on my own misery. Can I do it a second time? Work. Thank heavens she didn’t want to go for that holiday! I can work instead of thinking.’
With nervous eagerness he grabbed a pencil and a folder. He flopped into his arm-chair and began to work up some notes he had made for a new scene – a change-ring on the classic carpet act, employing a girl stooge.
He drove up to London next day, put in a couple of hours’ desk work at the theatre, which he was re-opening in the second week in September. There was a letter from the mother of June’s successor saying the girl had had measles, but expected to be well enough to rehearse in a fortnight.
A week later, June, passing by the open garden doors of the gymnasium, saw him leaning ill-temperedly against the wall.
‘Do you want anything, Lucien?’
‘Mabel is sick. I wanted to rehearse myself rather than her. Hangs me up.’
‘Well, what’s wrong with me?’ She came in from the garden. ‘What’s the job?’
‘Nothing you’d fancy, my dear. The girl gets rolled in the carpet instead of the clown.’
‘All right. Only, it’ll ruin this dress.’ She slipped it off.
‘The carpet will scratch your shoulders. Here!’ He helped her into a dressing-gown – it happened to be the black silk dressing-gown.
‘I shall split the seams,’ she warned. ‘I’m bigger than you.’
The words made him feel as if he were a dwarf, which added a spur to rehearsal.
‘When I unroll you, sit up and stare at me; hold the stare while I do my business. You’ll want two coils of the carpet, or else you’ll show. Better do it yourself, or I may hurt you. Lie down, your middle as near dead centre as you can. You can pull one coil over you. Then use all your weight to complete another coil.’
For two hours she helped him uncomplainingly, while the idea came to her that it would be rather a lark if he would consent to doing the act at her party, with herself as the stooge. She was a little anxious lest that lecture on the theory of the clown, which appealed to the dons of Oxford, might be above the heads of her friends. She, at any rate, would give them a good laugh when she popped out of the carpet. She knew that the carpet was used in the lecture.
When she asked him, he showed no enthusiasm. But she pointed out how easily she could steal away while he was holding their attention.
‘What about your frock, though. You’ll be varnished up for the party, won’t you?’
‘I was thinking – I could nip up to my room and slip on the frock I used in our old act. No one has worn it since I dropped out. It’s still in the property wardrobe – if you’ll bring it down for me to-morrow. It’s velvet corduroy, and the carpet won’t do it any harm – being red, it’ll make a fine splash of colour.’
‘I might keep you there two or three minutes. You could breathe all right, couldn’t you?’
‘Yes – it’s a bit stuffy. And when I called out to you when you kept me waiting just now, you couldn’t hear me. Anyway, I shan’t mind.’
‘Hm! I must be careful not to suffocate Mabel. She’ll have to lie in it for upwards of ten minutes.’
When he was at the theatre the following morning, there was no dresser present. He himself collected the key from the caretaker, found the number on the list and took the velvet corduroy frock from one of the fireproof cupboards and put it in June’s suitcase.
‘She has the mind of a child,’ he reflected as he drove home. Her child mind labelled him a very clever man, strong, kind, good, rich, influential. But her adult woman’s instinct thought him funny.
Chapter Five
With the impetus given by the stage hands, the corpse of June Spengrave rolled clear of the carpet. When they had recovered from the momentary shock, the men correctly shut the gymnasium and mounted guard, while one rang the police.
The Inspector was shortly followed by the Chief Constable. He caused a telephone message, sympathetically worded, to be sent to the airfield at Edinburgh. By the time Spengrave arrived, after stopping at the mortuary in Reading to identify the body, the Chief had possessed himself of the main facts. It was assumed that June had died of asphyxia, though the later medical report established that the immediate cause of death was shock.
Spengrave’s account of the incidents of the party did not differ in any essential detail from that already obtained from some of the guests.
‘When you asked the men of the party to roll up the carpet and take it back to the gym, Mr Spengrave, I gather that they all went at the job, and some of the women joined in. D’you think it possible that poor Mrs Spengrave may have joined in the scramble, that she may have fallen down and been rolled up without anybody noticing – in fact, just as the thing happens in the circus?’
‘You ask if I think it possible. Theoretically, anything is possible. I think it very grossly improbable. There were at least six men rolling. If she fell flat on the carpet, the faces of at least three of them would have been within a few feet of her. They must have seen her.’
‘Then she must have been inside the first coil or two of the carpet when the men started to roll it?’
‘Obviously!’ agreed Spengrave.
‘The doctor is already able to say that there are no signs of violence on the body. No one knocked her out and partly rolled her in the carpet. Therefore – a hostess suddenly slips away from her guests, rolls herself in the carpet – so that her guests may unconsciously assist her to commit suicide?’
Spengrave looked tired and indifferent, as if all this were none of his business.
‘She was not happy with me, as I hinted to you yesterday. But she was not melancholic. The last person to think of suicide.’
Spengrave, thought the Chief, was no humbug. He was not pretending to be grief-stricken. But he was being very wooden, showed no desire to help.
‘Against the theory of her having rolled herself up,’ continued the Chief, ‘is the fact that she had had some stage experience under yourself. She was familiar with that carpet, knew how heavy it was, must have known she was doing a very dangerous thing.’
Spengrave snapped his fingers excitedly.
‘That’s a glimmer in the dark!’ he exclaimed. ‘She was familiar with that carpet, you said. Hold that thought, while I add something. That carpet was rolled up the wrong way – namely from right to left, standing with your back to the river. I noticed it, but did not want-to ask the guests to unroll it and start again. Now are you guessing what I’ve guessed?’
This was what the Chief had been waiting for.
‘She assumed it would be rolled up from the other end,’ said the Chief, ‘and that therefore she would be unrolled.’ As Spengrave nodded encouragingly: ‘But why – when there was no need to be there at all?’
‘To give her guests a laugh – and to guy my lecture. She had,’ he added, ‘the mind of a child.’
Thus Spengrave, for all his subtlety, had suggested a cause of death other than murder – always an unwise course when there is any chance of murder being suspected.
At the inquest Spengrave gave substantially the same answers as he had given to the Chief. The Chief Constable did not waste time studying him while he was giving evidence. Actors never betray themselves with involuntary movements of body, hands, or face. The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure. The Chief, without any publicity, consulted Scotland Yard.
Chief Inspector Karslake was very dubious.
‘If it’s murder at all, where is the overt act?’ he asked. ‘The guests did the actual killing. And Spengrave didn’t even incite them t
o it.’
‘If you were to induce a drunkard to lie down on a railway track and then watched him being killed I could hang you, Mr Karslake, without proving that you had incited the engine driver,’ said the Chief Constable.
‘But the lady wasn’t drunk,’ objected Karslake. ‘And Spengrave didn’t–’
‘Yes, he did. Look here!’ The Chief spread out a chart of the garden, with all distances noted in feet and inches. ‘The woman was last seen at six-thirty-five, when Spengrave finished his demonstration with the carpet. Between six-forty and about six-forty-seven, the guests were all – here – their eyes glued to Spengrave, who was lecturing about the double-headed dog.’ He carried his pencil upwards and to the right. ‘Spengrave alone can see the carpet – he has a clear view. He would have seen his wife – must have seen her – go to that carpet.’
‘You’ve certainly got something there,’ admitted Karslake.
‘Spengrave told them he doubted whether he had enough room on the lower lawn for the tray-and-goblet business. One of the men – Periss – asked him if they should roll up the carpet at once and take it back to the gym. Spengrave said “Yes, please”. That’s incitement.’ The Chief went on:
‘As Spengrave is standing pat, it won’t matter if he knows we’re on his track. He thinks that, whatever we suspect, we can’t get any evidence.’
‘So do I!’ said Karslake gloomily. ‘But we’ll try.’
Karslake tried so hard that he came within an ace of committing homicide himself. He had his junior rolled in Spengrave’s carpet, observed that at the fourth coiling the weight of the carpet bore down the fringes so that air was excluded. The unfortunate junior had observed the same phenomenon some minutes before Karslake.
‘That Chief Constable was simply passing the buck!’ said Karslake after a month of fruitless investigation. ‘How can we prove that Spengrave induced her to get into the carpet, and that he wasn’t looking at his notes or something when she did it? I’m sick of the sight of those dossiers. Shove ’em along to Dead Ends and forget ’em!’
Spengrave sold his house by the river, warehoused his expensive furniture, and resumed residence in the suite at the top of the theatre. The act of the girl in the carpet was never put on.
Chapter Six
The Department of Dead Ends, by its nature, could not function until a new light was thrown on a case by some tangential occurrence, some chance echo, even if it were only a chance remark. When this happened and a prosecution followed, Chief Inspector Karslake always called it Detective Inspector Rason’s ‘luck’.
‘I’ve got a niece too,’ protested Karslake. ‘And I hope I’m at least as good an uncle as you are. But my niece has never yet happened to babble out the dope on a case that’s been dead meat for over a year. So I still say it’s luck.’
This, in a police car shortly before midday in October, 1937 – some fourteen months after the death of June Spengrave. They laboured the matter of Rason’s niece because they were both secretly ill at ease – for they were on their way to Spengrave’s theatre, to ask him some questions they were confident he could not answer – which is a strange state of mind for a detective. But Spengrave was a distinguished man, whom nearly everybody could not help liking.
‘She didn’t give me any dope – she gave me backchat,’ retorted Rason. ‘I told her she didn’t need a new frock, because she had a lovely one already. And she said if she went to a garden party in August in her corduroy velvet, people would be laughing over it when she was an old woman. I happened to remember the words “corduroy velvet” in the dossier – and a garden party too! I’ve put in more than two months’ work on that bit o’ corduroy velvet, and you call it luck – sir!’
‘You don’t have to “sir” me till we get back,’ chuckled Karslake. ‘This is your case, my boy, and welcome!’
The car stopped at the theatre. Rason thrust his card through the window of the box office. In due course an attendant presented himself.
‘Mr Spengrave is sorry he will have to keep you waiting for a few minutes. Will you follow me, please.’
They were led through unsuspected corridors to the back of the stage and thence, up a single flight of stairs, to Spengrave’s dressing-room. It was a very large room with more than the usual number of mirrors. Above the mirrors was a frieze, depicting the Clown throughout the ages. In one wide corner was a writing table. There were two divans. The detectives took one each.
‘Haven’t had much to do with the stage!’ remarked Karslake. ‘What’s the good of putting all those telephones over the wash basin? – to say nothing of there being a bathroom behind this curtain.’
‘They use the dressing-room as an office and a parlour as well.’ Rason’s eye travelled along the frieze, to the court jester, to the hunchback pelted by the medieval audience, to the buffoon-god of Greek comedy, to the Sacea of ancient Babylon where the King of the Revels, still wearing his mock crown, is sacrificed to the goddess Ishtar.
‘Good Lord, they’ve all got Spengrave’s face!’ ejaculated Rason. He caught Karslake’s eye and added defiantly: ‘I’m going to put the cards on the table with this bloke.’
For some minutes they sat in silence. Then the door opened. Both men gasped. Both were momentarily as confused as schoolboys.
‘I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting, gentlemen.’
Spengrave was in make-up. They stared at the grey-white, idiot face of the Clown, the splash of carmine, harsh and hideous at close quarters, the bald wig, the conical cap.
‘Perhaps we – perhaps you would rather we waited while you change, Mr Spengrave?’ faltered Rason.
‘Quite unnecessary! You don’t imagine that I’m going to make jokes and fall over carpets.’ The voice coming out of that preposterous face was both irritable and authoritative. ‘I’ve just been having stills taken of a new act. Sit down, please. What can I do for you?’
‘We’ve come on a very serious matter, Mr Spengrave. We have to put to you certain questions arising out of your wife’s death. If you refuse to answer, or if your answers are unsatisfactory, we shall have to ask you to come along with us.’
As Spengrave swung a swivel chair from his dressing-table the mirrors caught him in cross-reflection, so that Rason was compelled to contemplate the Clown face multiplied to infinity, staring into his.
‘Go ahead, Inspector!’
‘Can you describe the dress your wife was wearing at that party?’
‘No. I’ve no eye for women’s dress and no memory.’
‘That’s unusual in one of your profession, especially as you yourself were once a pictorial artist.’ Rason was opening an attaché case. He took out a mill board, on which was a painting of a woman’s dress of green crêpe.
‘Is this the dress she was wearing?’
Spengrave looked at the painting. No expression was perceptible through the clown make-up.
‘It may have been,’ he said. ‘I think it is.’
‘Quite right! It is! Five of the women who were your guests that day have identified it.’ Rason added: ‘I obtained a judge’s order to examine your furniture at the repository. That dress was in the wardrobe of the deceased. By the way, both the men and women guests remarked that they had not been allowed to see the poor lady after death.’
‘That was nothing to do with me – the local police were in charge,’ rasped Spengrave. ‘In any case it was unnecessary. I identified the body myself.’
‘Yes, of course. After you had flown down from Edinburgh. The major examination had not then taken place. The body was almost exactly as it had been found in the gymnasium.’ Rason leant forward and tapped the picture of the green crêpe dress. ‘Did you see that dress on the dead body of your wife, Mr Spengrave?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘You can’t remember!’ echoed Rason. ‘Do you mean that you may or may not have seen that dress on the body?’ As Spengrave assented, Rason produced a police photograph of the corpse taken in the gymnasium.
Rason thrust at him a second mill board, a little crumpled and faded, on which was a painting of a red dress in velvet corduroy.
‘Do you recognize that red velvet corduroy dress, Mr Spengrave?’
‘No,’ snapped Spengrave. ‘I’ve told you I’ve no memory for women’s dress.’
‘But you’ve a memory for your own work, haven’t you? You designed that dress yourself. You painted the picture you have in your hand. It’s the dress she wore in her act with you – The Lady Who Wouldn’t Laugh.’
‘By Jove, you’re right!’ exclaimed Spengrave, as if surprised.
‘On August 18th last year,’ continued Rason, ‘you signed the book, in the keeping of your caretaker, for the key of the robe-room, or whatever you call it. You entered the robe-room with a suitcase. On August 21st, your chief dresser sent you a chit reporting that that dress was missing. You wrote on the chit “O.K.”, and initialled it. Why did your wife want that property dress, Mr Spengrave?’
‘I now remember the incidents you describe.’ Spengrave spoke in the same authoritative, irritable voice. ‘But I don’t remember why my wife wanted that dress.’
‘Let me suggest why you wanted her to have it, and you tell me if I’m wrong,’ pressed Rason. ‘You created an act in which a girl is rolled in that carpet of yours. You asked your wife to play the girl and said you’d put on the act for the party. You fixed it so that she could slip into that carpet without anyone seeing her but you. And you fixed it so that someone should suggest rolling that carpet up. When Mr Periss offered to do it you said, “Yes, please”, thereby procuring the death of your wife. And that means murder.’
‘You asked me to tell you if you were wrong,’ chuckled Spengrave. ‘You are.’