by Clara Benson
‘I suppose I’ll go and speak to Dorothy again,’ said Gussie, as they went inside and Cora shut the door. ‘I didn’t get the chance to speak to her for long, and I don’t want her to think I’m upset. Where is she, by the way? I haven’t seen her for ages.’
‘I don’t know. She was by the piano,’ said Cora. ‘I’ll go see if I can find her.’
She hurried off, and Gussie went to talk to Patience Neale. Basil and Birdie Kibble had returned to the piano and the music had started again, although more quietly this time. Freddy drifted across to where they were sitting. From a distance they seemed a youthful pair, but close up he now saw that they were both wearing thick stage make-up, and were obviously much older than they appeared.
‘Hallo, hallo,’ said Basil Kibble. ‘A little bird tells me you’re press.’
Freddy saw that the paint had collected in the creases at the corners of his eyes, and that his hair was a suspiciously rich shade of dark brown.
‘That’s true,’ he said.
‘I thought this was meant to be a private party,’ said Basil.
‘So it is. I came with Gussie—Augusta, I mean. Rather a jolly do, what?’
‘Oh, we’re having a fine time!’ said Birdie, and laughed uproariously. ‘We always do, don’t we, Basil?’
‘Splendid,’ said Freddy. ‘I’m pleased to hear it. I understand you’re going to be in this film,’ he went on, addressing Birdie.
‘Oh, yes, oh yes indeed!’ she exclaimed. Her eyes fairly gleamed with excitement at the prospect. ‘It’ll be nice to get back in front of the camera, although nothing beats the stage. You don’t hear the applause in a studio,’ she explained. ‘Music to our ears, that sound is.’
‘It certainly is,’ agreed Basil, and rattled off a few chords. The two of them seemed far more cheerful than anyone else at the party—but then all this business about the rôle of Helen Harper did not affect them in the slightest.
‘Hallo, Birdie,’ said Gussie, joining them just then. ‘Have you seen Dorothy?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ said Birdie. ‘Where’s she disappeared to, then?’
Just then a bell rang, and Freddy saw the door to the suite open and admit a man. From the looks of him he was some high functionary at the hotel. He appeared to be casting his eyes about for a person in authority. At last he spotted Eugene Penk, who had just come out of Dorothy’s room and loudly demanded a drink, and approached him discreetly, a serious expression on his face. From the other side of the room a commotion was happening. There was a bustle of excitement and some shrieking. Something seemed to be going on outside, for there was a little rush towards the terrace. Seymour Cosgrove came across to Penk, his face twisted into an expression of distaste. Penk glanced at the functionary and held up his hand to arrest him before he could begin to speak.
‘What’s all that noise?’ he said to Seymour. ‘Why’s everybody going outside all of a sudden?’
‘They’re saying there’s been an accident in the street,’ said Seymour. ‘Someone’s been run over or something, and they’ve all gone out to have a look. Rather ghoulish, if you ask me.’
The functionary was coughing and doing his best to attract Penk’s attention.
‘Yes, what is it?’ said Penk impatiently.
The functionary said something in a low voice.
‘What?’ exclaimed Penk and Seymour at the same time.
There was more urgent conferring. Freddy was now watching with the greatest interest. Seymour looked aghast, and Penk set his jaw. At that moment there was a scream.
‘It’s Dorothy!’ shouted someone. The cry was quickly taken up, and more people rushed for the terrace. The functionary now spoke again, and this time Freddy could hear his voice clearly.
‘Yes, sir. It appears Miss Dacres fell from the terrace. I’m terribly afraid she’s dead.’
On receiving the news, Eugene Penk stood rooted to the spot, but only for a moment. Then he swiftly took charge.
‘Get all these people off the terrace,’ he said. He strode across the room, followed by Seymour, and started ordering, shooing and cajoling people back inside, with the strength of personality that had seen him rise to the powerful position he held today. Once everybody was inside, he stood in front of the door, with an expression designed to repel all comers.
‘You,’ he said, beckoning to a nearby waiter. ‘Keep everybody back.’
The functionary nodded to the waiter in agreement, and then he and Penk went out onto the terrace. Freddy, who had been watching the scene closely, now melted away from the crowd gathered around the door, and slipped quietly back into the room in which he had found Corky earlier. It was empty. He dimmed the light, then went across to the second set of terrace doors and pulled them open a little way, standing behind the curtain so as not to be seen from the outside. After a moment, Penk and the functionary came around the corner of the terrace from the living-room side, and looked over the edge.
‘They’re down there now, seeing to her, sir,’ said the functionary. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing at all to be done.’
Penk turned away. His face was set in an unfathomable expression.
‘I guess she’ll get all the attention she wanted now,’ he said at last, then looked a little ashamed of himself as he saw his companion’s face. ‘I’m sorry. We’d better go in and lock the door. We don’t want people staring. I’ll get rid of everybody.’
‘Perhaps we ought to take their names, sir. For the police, I mean.’
Penk stared at him.
‘The police?’ he said. ‘Yes, they’ll have to be called. Was it an accident? Did anybody see what happened?’
‘Not as far as I know, sir. This terrace gives onto a back street, and there’s not much traffic at this time of night. She was found by a group of passers-by.’
‘Where did she fall from? This side of the terrace, it must have been. Did they see her fall?’
‘No, sir. She was already lying in the street when they arrived. Nobody knows how long she had been there.’
There was a pause as Eugene Penk digested this.
‘Let’s go inside,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll go downstairs and see to her. And we’d better tell Cora. That’s her sister.’
They disappeared around the corner. Freddy waited a moment, then crept out through the door and looked over the railing. It was dark, but in the street six floors below he could just make out a group of people, who were gathered around something. Concerned voices floated up from below, while at intervals people left the group to fetch things, and others joined it. A blanket had been brought and draped over the figure lying in the street. Freddy grimaced, and began examining the wall and the railing that ran around the terrace. They were quite solid. Something fluttered in the corner of his eye, and he turned to see what it was. A tiny scrap of pink chiffon had caught on the railing. He bent to peer at it, but did not touch it. A table and chairs stood nearby, and he eyed the legs of the chairs, then shook his head. He looked down at his feet. The weather had been dry, so there were no traces of footprints to be had in that regard.
He was staring down into the street again when he felt a presence at his shoulder and saw that Corky Beckwith had come out onto the terrace through the same door, and was standing next to him. His face wore an expression that in anybody else Freddy would have described as akin to religious fervour.
‘Dorothy Dacres dead!’ he said, in a kind of ecstasy. ‘Oh, the exquisite alliteration of it! It quite brings a tear to my eye. This will be a two-pager, at least! “Film star plummets to her death. Night of her greatest triumph.” I only wish I’d been there to see it happen.’
‘You really are a stinker, Corky,’ said Freddy absently, for his attention was still directed towards the railing. From what he had seen, he did not like this at all.
He went back inside and into the living-room, whe
re the guests were huddled in groups, looking about them as though waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. After the initial excitement, the news had finally begun to sink in, and everyone was speaking in solemn, hushed voices. Freddy was immediately accosted by Gussie, whose face wore an appalled expression.
‘Oh, Freddy!’ she cried. ‘What an awful, awful thing! I can’t bear it! And to think I’d just wished her dead. I’d take the words back this very minute if only I could.’
She threw herself into his arms and burst into tears. Freddy patted her gingerly on the back, conscious that Seymour Cosgrove was standing nearby, watching him with a hawk eye and scowling.
‘There, there,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, old girl. It’s just a figure of speech. I knew what you meant. You’d just had a disappointment, and anybody might have said that sort of thing in the heat of the moment.’
‘That’s all very well, but I shall feel terrible about it forever, I know I shall,’ she said, sniffing. ‘But how did it happen? Is the balcony safe? How did she come to fall? This is going to be the most dreadful scandal for the Abingdon. For all of us, in fact.’
‘It’s perfectly safe out there,’ said Freddy. ‘I’ve just been outside and had a look.’
‘But then what happened? Did she jump?’
‘I expect that’s what the police will want to find out,’ said Freddy. ‘And here they are now, if I’m not much mistaken. Hallo, I know this one, don’t I?’
A man in plain clothes but of unmistakably official appearance had just entered the room, in company with a police constable in uniform and another hotel functionary.
‘Don’t tell me they’ve called the Yard in already,’ murmured Freddy to himself.
At a word from his senior, the police constable stationed himself by the door with a notebook, while the plain-clothes man surveyed the room. At last his eye fell on Freddy and he raised his eyebrows. Freddy disengaged himself gently from Gussie.
‘Look, there’s Mrs. Neale gaping at you,’ he said. ‘Go and tell her you’re all right.’
‘Oh, the poor dear,’ said Gussie. ‘She worries about me so, even when there’s no need.’
She dried her tears and went off obediently, and Freddy approached the plain-clothes policeman.
‘Hallo, Sergeant Bird,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you missed the party. It was all going off nicely until a few minutes ago, but then someone decided to spoil the fun.’
‘Hallo, Mr. Pilkington-Soames,’ said Sergeant Bird. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here—although I suppose I might have known the papers would be sniffing around.’
‘As a matter of fact, I’m not press this evening,’ said Freddy. ‘Or at least I wasn’t until this happened. But I might just as well ask what you’re doing here. It’s not a Yard matter already, is it?’
‘Not officially,’ said Bird. ‘The inspector and I were on our way back from somewhere else and just happened to catch the commotion in passing, so to speak. The constable over there was doing his best to keep order in the street, so we stopped to help him.’
‘Entwistle’s here, is he?’
‘He’s downstairs, directing operations, but he’ll be up in a few minutes, once reinforcements have turned up. I’m under instructions to hold the fort here until he arrives. Who was the woman, then? They’re saying downstairs it was Dorothy Dacres.’
‘That’s quite right,’ said Freddy. ‘Rather rude of her to leave in the middle of her own party, don’t you think? Not exactly the done thing.’
Despite his words, his face was serious. The sergeant looked at him sharply.
‘An accident, was it?’
‘I don’t think so. I can’t see what she could possibly have been doing to overbalance and fall over the edge. The wall is three feet high and has a railing about fifteen inches high on top of it. She’d have to have been swinging on the thing to have tipped over it.’
‘Drunk?’ suggested Bird.
‘It’s possible, although she was certainly fairly sober earlier in the evening, as far as I could judge.’
‘Suicide, then?’
‘She’d just announced to a crowd of adoring fans that she was to play the starring rôle of a lifetime. Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that drives one to kill oneself, does it?’
‘Not an accident and not suicide, you think? That only leaves one possibility,’ said Bird.
‘Yes, it does,’ said Freddy. ‘Of course, I’m not a detective, and I might be wrong.’
‘Supposing you’re not,’ said the sergeant. ‘Anyone in mind?’
Freddy thought of Gussie Lippincott, who had wished Dorothy Dacres dead only an hour earlier, and who had been mysteriously absent for several minutes before Dorothy’s body had been discovered.
‘She seems to have rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way,’ he said at last. ‘Half the people I’ve spoken to this evening had some grudge or other against her—even that little girl over there.’
‘Is that so?’ said the sergeant, regarding Adorable Ada, who at that moment was lolling on her mother’s knee, half-asleep, with her thumb in her mouth.
‘Yes. If it is murder, I should say you’ll have your work cut out for you. But perhaps you’ll find out it was an accident. I had a scout about just now and found the spot she fell from. She left a little scrap of her dress on the railing. I haven’t touched it—that’ll be for your chaps to examine.’
‘Show me,’ said Bird.
They went outside, and Freddy indicated the place from which Dorothy Dacres had presumably fallen. Corky Beckwith was still there, snooping about and peering over the railing.
‘Ah, the police!’ he said when he saw them. ‘About time, too. Sergeant Bird, isn’t it? I recognize you from the Heptonstall case.’
‘And who might you be?’ said the sergeant, looking suspiciously at Corky’s waiter’s uniform.
‘Oh, don’t pay any mind to my attire—I happen to be in disguise this evening. Beckwith of the Herald, at your service. Tell me, what would you say if I told you this was all the fault of the demon cocaine, and that Dorothy Dacres threw herself from the balcony in a hallucinatory trance brought on by her fatal addiction to the drug?’
‘I’d be most interested to hear it. Do you have any proof of this, sir?’
Corky waved his hand.
‘Not proof as such, no,’ he said. ‘But the signs are all around you, sergeant. Just look at the rag-tag of people here tonight. I give you Pilkington-Soames as an example. Don’t tell me he doesn’t look distinctly seedy. And he’s not the only one. I’ve had word from your department that someone has been supplying the stuff to these film people, and that’s why I’m here this evening. If Dorothy Dacres wasn’t a dope fiend, I’ll eat my hat.’
‘Do you know anything about this?’ said the sergeant to Freddy.
‘Not at all,’ said Freddy, who had drunk less and behaved better that evening than perhaps on any evening that year. ‘But I shouldn’t listen to him too closely. The Herald has an obsession with this sort of thing.’
‘I tell you—’ began Corky, but the sergeant held up his hand.
‘We shall hear your story in good time, sir,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I’d better get back inside and wait for my inspector.’
As it happened, Inspector Entwistle had just arrived, in company with Eugene Penk. Dorothy’s sister Cora was with them, too. She looked as though she had been crying. Entwistle glanced at Penk, who went to stand in the middle of the room and addressed the crowd in his carrying voice.
‘I guess you’ve all heard there’s been an accident tonight,’ he said, as the guests fell silent. ‘This was supposed to be a celebration, but I don’t see much to celebrate right now. The police say you can all go home, but they’re going to take everybody’s names on the way out.’
He looked as though he wanted to say so
mething more, but then shook his head grimly and walked off. One by one or in little groups the guests started to leave, and the constable at the door was kept busy writing as they filed out. At last only a few people remained. Robert Kenrick and his girl-friend had gone, as had Seymour Cosgrove. Basil and Birdie Kibble had left in a much subdued state, while the Neales had taken Gussie home, leaving Cora, Eugene Penk, and a silently crying maid to sit and stare at the detritus of the party. It would all have to be cleared away, but that would not be until tomorrow, for it was now long after midnight. Inspector Entwistle had inspected the terrace briefly, and had instructed one of the functionaries to lock the door. Cora and the maid would have to leave the suite, at least until the police had finished looking around, he said. The functionary was most sympathetic and accommodating. There was no other suite available, but the two ladies should both be made perfectly comfortable in rooms downstairs. Cora heard this without emotion. She seemed drawn and exhausted. Penk looked perpetually as though he wanted to say something, and opened his mouth frequently to begin, but each time he thought better of it and closed it again with a snap.
Corky and Freddy had remained behind too—Corky because he was determined that only brute force would remove him from the scene of such a story, and Freddy because he would have died rather than let Corky beat him. Inspector Entwistle regarded them impatiently.
‘I said everyone out,’ he said.
‘Oh, but I can help you, inspector,’ said Corky, full of self-importance. ‘Thanks to this clever little disguise of mine, I’ve been the eyes and the ears of the place all evening, and I can tell you exactly what’s been going on.’
‘All in good time,’ said Entwistle. ‘Just leave your name with the man on the door, and you’ll hear from us soon.’
‘But—’ said Corky.
‘Out!’ said Entwistle, and jerked his thumb towards the door.
Freddy saw it was time to leave.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Cora, and went out. After a little more sparring with the police, Corky followed him, and they went down together in the lift.