“The critics were already biased against me. And it was Lebeau’s fault.”
This was so astoundingly irrational that I could not make sense of it, but then nothing I was hearing made the least amount of sense, not to a sane person.
“And where did Milo and I come into this?” I asked.
“I wrote the threatening letters to bring the police into the matter,” he said. “All the better to prove that I wasn’t involved. But Flora was adamantly opposed. Her brother has been in some trouble with the law, and she was very protective of him. She was always trying to shield him, even when he stole money from her. She threatened to leave the play if I called them, and we didn’t want that. Not after all our planning. And then I happened across you and Mr. Ames outside the theatre that night, and it gave me an idea.”
“We became your unknowing adversaries,” I whispered.
He smiled. “I realized it would be even more amusing than the police. After all, you and your husband have something of a reputation. It was nice to have a foil of our own class.”
“And so the night of the gala, you put your plan into operation,” I said.
“It was all arranged ahead of time,” he said. “I had quarreled with Flora earlier in the evening. I knew people are always listening and mentioned Lebeau loudly, for she had done her scene differently than we had rehearsed. Later, I told her I wanted to speak to her alone, to make up, she thought. We arranged to meet in the theatre. Then it was time for the real performance to begin. Georgina took care to wave at you across the ballroom. She knew you would come looking for us, and we let you overhear our argument. I thought that was rather a nice touch. Naturally, it was important everyone believe we were still at odds.”
My head was pounding and was beginning to feel dizzy, as though what they were telling me was too much for me to take in.
“When we knew you had gone, we slipped across the alleyway through the stage entrance. Georgina went up to one of the boxes to watch, and I met Flora onstage. Then I killed her.”
He said this so calmly that I felt a wave of nausea pass over me.
“It was a shame, really, with that sort of talent. But I’m afraid Georgina wouldn’t let me change our plans.”
I glanced at Georgina and found that her eyes were hard. “He romanced Dahlia and then Flora. Two women were quite enough. I didn’t want another one involved.”
He shrugged. “And so Flora it was. When it was finished, I came back through the alleyway entrance to the gala and came out to send you in search of Georgina. She was, of course, waiting in the theatre to watch you discover the body.”
The ill feeling in my stomach increased. I had felt eyes on me. It had been Georgina, watching from the box.
“You took it rather well, all things considered,” Georgina said. “Not even a scream. I was a bit disappointed.”
“When you hurried out, Georgina slipped out of the theatre and back to the gala through the alleyway before the police arrived. From there on, it was just a matter of leading you in the right direction. There was a fine balance between giving you too much direction and not enough. I must say, you took your cues very nicely.”
I thought of how Mr. Holloway had arranged for me and Milo to be a part of everything, of their visits to our flat, of the subtle ways in which both of them had given me information that would lead me to suspect Balthazar Lebeau.
“You sent that telegram to him, the one from a mysterious producer. You wanted him to leave the gala so he would be without an alibi.”
“Yes. And like the fool he is, he fell for it.”
One thing didn’t make sense. “Why did you send me to Flora’s boardinghouse?” I asked.
“That was a gamble, but it paid off. I had discovered recently that Mr. Lebeau had been paying visits to her boardinghouse. I knew if you went, you wouldn’t be able to resist asking questions and that gossip of a landlady would be only too happy to tell you.”
“Why was he going to see her?” I asked.
“That I don’t know. Even sweet little Flora kept her secrets. She never breathed a word to me, though it suited my purposes well enough. I assume he was trying to woo her. Flora was, after all, easily wooed.”
“And, of course, you weren’t really drunk that night you came to our flat,” I said.
“No, though I wasted a good bottle of whiskey spilling it over my clothes. The critics were wrong, you see. I’m an excellent actor.”
“If we’re taking credit for our achievements, I applied makeup to give him an ill appearance,” Georgina put in. “He looked very grim indeed by the time I was done with him.”
I remembered his ashen face and couldn’t help but agree she had done a good job of it.
“But why come to our flat at all?” I asked.
“I wanted to make you worry, if only slightly, that Georgina might be guilty. I knew it would make you try even harder to prove that someone else had done it.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, though he had already given me the answer. He wanted his accolades. He had given a masterful performance and felt he had earned the applause. His next words confirmed it.
“Because it was so very much work,” he said. “One doesn’t paint a great work of art without signing one’s signature.”
“You haven’t thought of everything,” I said. “You may threaten me all you like, but you can’t expect me to stand idly by while an innocent man hangs.”
“That’s precisely what you’re going to do,” he said calmly. “You have no proof, and no one will believe you.”
“They might, if I lay out the evidence.”
“Perhaps.” He stepped closer. “But if you say anything, your husband might just encounter a thief with a knife one night on the way home from one of his gambling clubs. They’re dangerous places, after all. One never knows what might happen.”
I felt sick, and my hands were shaking. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m afraid I am,” he said. “We’ve killed and gotten away with it. Aside from you, no one will ever be the wiser. You may as well accept it. Do you remember what I told you the night you asked me about Victoire’s final choice?”
I did, but I would not give him the satisfaction of repeating it.
He smiled. “Sometimes the villain wins, Mrs. Ames.”
“And sometimes he doesn’t,” a voice called.
The houselights turned on suddenly, throwing the entire theatre into a blaze of light. Gerard Holloway froze and an expression of incredulity passed across Georgina’s normally composed features.
Then I heard the sound of someone clapping from the back of the theatre.
28
“BRAVA, MRS. AMES,” Inspector Jones called in a pleasant tone. “That was an excellent performance, and it served its aim.”
It was only then, I think, that Mr. Holloway realized what had happened.
“Why you…” He stepped toward me again, but this time a burly policeman had made his entrance while a second came and took hold of Georgina. The expressions of absolute astonishment on their faces might have been comical if it wasn’t all so horrible.
Then Milo took the stage, his expression as dark as I had ever seen it. He had been standing hidden in the wings for the duration of our little encore performance, and I imagined it had been very difficult for him not to charge onto the stage earlier than this.
I wanted nothing more than to leave this stage and never set foot here again, but I felt that first I must show Flora Bell’s killers that they were not as smart as they had believed. And so I turned to face the Holloways.
“I had wondered what would have happened if one of you was the killer,” I said. “But it took me a long time to realize that you had done it together.”
They remained silent, both of them watching me in an expressionless way that chilled me more than outright fury would have done.
“When the thought first occurred to me, I was sure it was madness,” I continued. I was glad tha
t my voice sounded calm, though my heart had begun to beat a bit more rapidly. “I could think of no reason why the two of you should have done something like this. After all, you were at odds. Flora Bell meant something different to each of you. Not only that, the amount of time in which either of you could have done it after the argument I overheard was very limited, and it could not have been you that I heard in the theatre, Mr. Holloway, as I had just left you at the gala.”
Georgina watched me, the barest hint of a smile on her face. She looked as though she were watching a performance she enjoyed, not as though she was being confronted with the evidence of a murder she had committed.
“It would probably never have occurred to me,” I said. “After all, one doesn’t normally escalate from safaris and mountain climbing to murder. But when going over the evidence I remembered something Inspector Jones said. It was strangely theatrical to kill Flora Bell in such a way. It might have been a crime of passion as we originally assumed, but why send her threatening notes? Why kill her with the curtain rope when there were other weapons available? Why leave her positioned in that ghastly final bow? It seemed it must have been done to set a scene.”
“It was another thing that pointed to Mr. Lebeau initially,” Inspector Jones said. “After all, he is known for his flair for the dramatic.”
“But then my mother said something last night,” I went on. “Something about people enjoying the theatre because it allows them the opportunity to pretend, to build a reputation for themselves, and, for some reason, it began to turn the wheels in my brain. Then she said something about stage props looking excessively unrealistic. And I thought suddenly of the gun.”
Mr. Holloway said nothing, but I saw the flash of anger in his eyes.
“I believed someone had hit me in the head to prevent my finding your letters, which they believed to be in that drawer. It didn’t cross my mind that it might have been you, for Inspector Jones told me you were the only one who knew the police had already removed the drawer’s contents. But then I thought that, perhaps, it wasn’t that drawer that you wanted to keep me from opening. You see, I remembered that you had put the gun in a drawer the day we came to see about Miss Bell’s letters. I thought it looked strange in your hand, and then I realized why. It was a prop gun, wasn’t it? Meant to impress Flora Bell and us with your sincerity, your concern for her well-being. But you forgot about it. The police had already seen it, but, as a prop, it was not unusual to them. However, you knew if I came across that gun there, if I realized that it wasn’t genuine, that I might also guess your concern had been artificial.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Holloway said. “There was no gun in the drawer.”
“No,” I agreed. “You removed it after you hit me. But when Inspector Jones found the love letters from Flora Bell in Balthazar Lebeau’s dressing room today, it was further proof.”
“Proof against us? I don’t see how,” Holloway retorted.
“After speaking with Mr. Lebeau, we knew they had been planted there. You see, you misjudged in your attempts to make everyone believe that Balthazar Lebeau had been trying to seduce Flora Bell. For one thing, she was in love with Mr. Landon.”
“Flora was in love with everyone,” Mr. Holloway said in a tone that made me want to hit him.
“She truly loved Mr. Landon,” I replied. “And I think she would have returned to him eventually. She was beginning to realize that you were not what you seemed. ‘Actors are too good at pretending,’ she told her brother. When she said that things were just like in the play, I think she recognized that she would have to choose between darkness and light. And she was beginning to understand that you were the darkness, Mr. Holloway.”
“Nonsense,” he said scathingly.
“But that wasn’t the only reason she wouldn’t have been wooed by Mr. Lebeau. You see, he’s her uncle.”
Mr. Holloway had not wanted to show surprise, but this was too big of a revelation for him to conceal it.
“I didn’t put all the pieces together until this morning when we spoke to him about the role he was to play in our little performance. That’s when Mr. Lebeau told us why he had agreed to take a bit part in your play to begin with. He had only just realized that Freddy and Flora Bell were his sister’s children. Their mother split with the family long ago after a falling-out. She even changed her name. From Lebeau to Bell. The French for ‘handsome’ to an anglicized version of the French for ‘beautiful.’ She never wanted Flora to pursue this life, but, as Mr. Lebeau once said, acting is in the blood.
“Flora’s landlady overheard one of their conversations, and she remembered Mr. Lebeau uttering the phrase ‘love doesn’t end with time, and not all bonds can be easily broken.’ Mr. Lebeau had cared for his sister, had spent years searching for her, and he wanted to do right by his niece and nephew. However, Flora was used to being independent and refused to acknowledge the connection. She hadn’t even told her brother about it. She was determined to win fame on her own merits and did not want Mr. Lebeau’s interference either in her life or onstage. I saw for myself how his critique of her performance annoyed her. Mr. Lebeau respected her wishes and told no one, for he appreciated that she wanted to make a name for herself. And she would have. If the two of you hadn’t killed her.”
The frown on Georgina’s perfect brows gave way suddenly and she smiled. It was that perfect hostess smile that I had seen so many times. “It all fits together very nicely,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Gerard was playing a joke on you, Amory. Not a nice one, but there you have it. You’ll never be able to prove anything.”
“No, we wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Which is why we set up this elaborate performance. I knew that, even cleared of the crime, you would not be able to resist the urge to boast about it. You have presented a perfect front all these years, but, as someone once told me, even the best masks slip eventually.”
“There is a bit of further proof,” Inspector Jones said. “Not that we require it after a confession. The knot in the curtain rope tied around Miss Bell’s neck was unusual, and no one could place it. That is, not until we asked the right people. It was a butterfly loop. Used in mountaineering.”
“You have always liked to oversee every detail, Mr. Holloway,” I said. “But I’m afraid this time you overlooked a few things.”
His face turned so red with fury then that it was almost purple. “We should have killed you when we had the chance,” Mr. Holloway said through gritted teeth.
There was a flash of movement so fast I barely had time to register it. And then Holloway was slumping in the policeman’s grasp, Milo having delivered a crushing blow to his jaw. I had never seen Milo so openly lose his temper, and I think I was as startled as Mr. Holloway.
“Gerard!” Georgina moved toward her husband, but the policeman caught her arm.
“He’s all right, madam. Come along.”
Georgina’s gaze came up to mine, her eyes hard and bright. “You can’t understand what Gerard and I have because you don’t know what real love is.”
“That’s the sort of love I can do without, Georgina,” I said.
“Take them away,” Inspector Jones said. And with that they were led offstage.
I turned to Milo and he stepped toward me, catching my hand in his. “Are you all right, darling?”
“I still can’t believe it,” I said. “Even as I took the stage to speak with them, I hoped that I would be proven wrong. It’s just so horrible. To think that they were our friends…”
“The world is full of wicked people; we’re bound to know some of them,” Milo said, with a typical lack of astonishment in the face of evil. When the whole thing had become clear, he had displayed only a modicum of surprise. It made me wonder if perhaps he had suspected something all along.
“You knew there was something amiss with Holloway, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I knew that he was not all he seemed,” he admitted. “There have been indications for severa
l years that he might not be quite the gentleman everyone believes he is. He has always seemed to me to be an actor playing a part. I had just not imagined the extent of the true self he was hiding.”
“But you didn’t suspect something like this?”
“Not at first. After all, a murder for the thrill of it is not something one likes to suspect people of offhand.”
He was right. I couldn’t imagine the scandal that would come of this. I wondered if people would even believe that such a thing was possible. The Holloways had always been the epitome of a perfect society couple. This revelation was going to prove a scandal of enormous proportions.
What I was thinking about, however, was their children. How dreadful it would be to grow up under such a stigma. I prayed they were young enough to recover from this blow, but I did not imagine they would ever completely surmount it. Presented in this light, my mother’s obsession with avoiding familial disgrace seemed a blessing rather than a perpetual nuisance. Perhaps, in her own way, she had been doing her best to protect me.
“However, yesterday I talked to some people who knew the Holloways—the news I was going to relate to you last night—and began to suspect this may not be the first time they have done such a thing,” Milo said. “They hinted that one of their safari guides died rather mysteriously. And the avalanche that killed a large portion of their mountain expedition was started by a gunshot. No one was ever able to identify who had shot it off, but Mr. and Mrs. Holloway were both absent from the camp at the time.”
I shuddered. “So they’ve been killing people for years.”
Inspector Jones gave a curt nod. “I had heard rumblings along the same lines. There’s no proof, of course. But it does seem as though they have been seeking thrills of this nature for quite some time.”
My stomach churned at the thought of the innocent lives that had been lost to their bloodlust. Poor Flora Bell. Her future had held so much promise.
“I must thank you again for your help, Mr. and Mrs. Ames,” Inspector Jones said. “Without you, it would have been terribly difficult to prove.”
An Act of Villainy Page 28