Fen found a telephone box and rang up Mudge.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get to you,’ he said, ‘but there have been fun and games.’
‘Fun and games?’
‘I’ll explain later . . . I want you to send a couple of men backstage at the opera, because there may be an attempt to kill Langley.’
‘Langley?’
‘Yes. And come there yourself as soon as you can. By the way, you’ll probably be getting some reports about me before long. I threw a brick at a window and threatened to shoot a chemist.’
‘Brick?’ Mudge said confusedly. ‘Chemist?’
‘Do stop repeating everything I say . . . I’ll see you later. We’d better have a conclave after the performance. Bring that skeleton along, will you? – or anyway, a skeleton.’
He rang off and walked to the opera-house, where he watched the first act from the wings. The performance, quite evidently, was going well. Mudge’s men arrived shortly after him, and he communicated certain possibilites to them. The Inspector himself, they said, would not be able to get away until later.
When the act was over, Fen after congratulating a cheerful and light-hearted cast, obtained a piece of information from Adam. Acting on this, he later searched one of the dressing-rooms, and, having found what he expected to find, took a taxi back to his home, where he ‘retired to the attic’ – an improvised laboratory – to make certain experiments. His family, who had learned from experience that Fen’s experiments were often explosive and always malodorous, retired to the kitchen for mutual solace and reassurance.
For about two hours Fen occupied himself with hydrochloric acid, water, a strip of copper-foil, a Bunsen burner, and a small sublimation tube. Finally he inspected the results of his work through a microscope, and was pleased, though scarcely surprised, to find his hypothesis confirmed. He returned to the theatre just in time to witness the event which brought Mr Levi backstage in a condition nearing apoplexy, and cursing vividly in several remote tongues.
The opera had about twenty minutes to run. Adam chanting the splendours of the Prize Song, became obscurely aware, during one of the choral comments which punctuate it, that in some manner all was not well. He risked a glance into the wings, and saw that a revolver was levelled at him.
What followed took the audience very much by surprise. Herr Walther von Stolzing, apparently becoming belatedly aware that marriage to Eva might not be quite the ecstatic thing which fiction so gaily postulates, abandoned the Prize Song in mid-career, gazed wildly about him, and after a moment, descending from his mound, fled incontinently from the stage. Almost immediately there ensued a violent detonation – to which the carefully-planned acoustics of the theatre gave full effect – and a sound of scuffling and shouting from the wings. The cast stood rigid with amazement. There was a moment’s uncertainty and then the curtain was lowered.
Mr Levi was with difficulty dissuaded from addressing the audience, whose mystification his words would most probably have deepened rather than allayed. In about five minutes the curtain rose again, and the opera was played through from the beginning of the Prize Song to the final chord. But there was no longer any spirit in it. Too many people had seen the attempt to kill Adam. Too many people had seen Judith, her features twisted with rage, and hatred, dragged away by the Inspector’s men.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE INTERVAL DURING which the cast changed and removed make-up was occupied by Fen in explaining matters to Sir Richard Freeman and to Mudge, who had arrived opportunely during the rather uncertain applause. At about a quarter past eleven Adam, Joan, Peacock, Karl, Charles Shorthouse, Beatrix Thorn, and Elizabeth, who had after all been present at the performance, assembled in the green-room. The first four were exhausted, and spoke of Judith in low voices. The Master approached Adam.
‘Ah, Langley,’ he said amiably. ‘How very trying all this is. I was virtually ordered to present myself here . . . By the way, I should like you to sing Aegistheus in the New York production of my Oresteia. You or Melchior. Can that be managed, I wonder?’
Adam had endured much that evening; he found himself, for the moment, incapable of replying.
Presently Fen appeared, with Mudge and Sir Richard Freeman. A silence fell. Through it Elizabeth, who remained unacquainted with the Master and Beatrix Thorn, and whom no one had so far enlightened as to their identity, could be heard saying innocently:
‘But I thought Charles Shorthouse lived with some awful woman called Beatrix Thorn?’
Fen coughed noisily. ‘Here is Miss Thorn,’ he anounced; and added, with great severity: ‘In the flesh.’ Elizabeth blushed, and Beatrix Thorn’s face grew murderous. Fen hastened to cover the general embarrassment.
‘There seems to be an impression among you,’ he said ‘that Judith was responsible for the deaths of Edwin Shorthouse and of her husband. You may as well know at once that that is not so.’
He watched their faces as he spoke. Adam was sprawling in a chair. Near him was Peacock, still in full evening dress, but wan and almost incapable of movement. Charles Shorthouse, wearing a black coat and with his black Homburg hat crammed rakishly on to his head, stood incuriously, his hands in his pockets, with Beatrix Thorn small and vehement, at his side. Joan Davis, neat, worldly and self-possessed, was with Elizabeth. Another silence ensued, longer and more intense than the first. Adam broke it by saying:
‘But she tried twice to kill me. Why?’
‘That’s very simple, my dear Adam,’ Fen replied in a curious voice. ‘Very simple indeed. She tried to kill you because she hated you. And she hated you because she knew, even before we did, that it was you who killed her husband.’
Adam Langley went very white. His hair was tousled, and there was sweat on his forehead. He got to his feet. Elizabeth crossed the room, and took his hand in hers.
‘I suppose,’ said Adam thickly, ‘that you also think it was I who killed Edwin Shorthouse?’
‘Oh, yes.’ There was no hint of joking in the way Fen spoke. ‘You killed him too.’
‘You fool,’ said Elizabeth in a low voice. ‘You damned fool.’
‘This afternoon,’ Fen went on, ‘Judith visited the Radcliffe Science Library. She may have had shadowy suspicions before. But what she found, in a text-book of forensic medicine, amply confirmed them. She learned that arsenic could be administered externally, through the skin. She remembered that Boris had been practising make-up, for an hour every day. And she remembered, too, that he had been using a jar of removing-cream which you, my dear Adam, had given him. So this afternoon she got you, by a false message, to her room, and tried to gas you there, choosing a time when no one else would be in the house. If Mudge hadn’t happened to mention to me, quite casually, that she’d visited the Science Library, she would probably have succeeded. But having failed, she made a second attempt – with, I may add, the gun which you so carelessly left in an unlocked drawer in your dressing-room. She was, as they say, “mad with grief”; which is a conventional phrase we use to describe a very horrible reality.’
Fen became suddenly matter-of-fact and cheerful, and in that electric atmosphere his change of manner was a shock. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘I mustn’t alarm you unduly. I mean what I say, of course. You did kill both those men. Two traps were set, and by a curious irony you quite unknowingly sprang both of them. I may add that one of them was set for you.’
Adam gulped. The colour flooded back to Elizabeth’s face, and she began, almost unnoticeably, to cry with relief. Fen, observing this, experienced a twinge of conscience.
‘Now, now,’ he said ineffectually. ‘Now, now.’
‘Two traps . . .’ Adam stammered.
Fen glanced at the others. ‘Yes. There are two murderers in this case.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Peacock suddenly. His hands were trembling uncontrollably.
‘And both of them,’ Fen went on quietly, ‘are dead.’
‘Shorthouse and Stapleton!’ Adam exclaim
ed.
‘Certainly. Stapleton murdered Shorthouse. And Shorthouse, intending to kill you, murdered Stapleton. It’s a curiously ironic situation – isn’t it? That Shorthouse should revenge himself after his death.’
‘But – but what about the attacks on me?’ Elizabeth demanded.
‘They were made, of course, by Stapleton, because of a remark you made in the “Bird and Baby” the other morning. You said, referring to the manner of Short-house’s death: “It’s as though the laws of gravity were suspended”.’
‘I still don’t see . . .’
‘I’ll show you in a minute just how that applies. Let’s first of all clear up the loose ends in the Stapleton murder. I was convinced from the first that Judith hadn’t done it; she was too much in love with him for such an explanation to be conceivable. But apparently she was the only person who had the slightest opportunity of regularly doping his food or drink. Plainly, then, the arsenic must have been administered in some other way, and rather belatedly I remembered that it has effect if applied externally – for example, there are quite well-known instances of poisoning as the result of arsenic in face-cream, depilatories, soap, and so forth. Thinking back, I recollected that Stapleton was practising make-up – Judith herself told me so – and further, that in the “Bird and Baby” I heard that Adam had lent a jar of removing-cream to him. This evening, after inquiring what brand it was, I searched for it in the chorus dressing-room, and having found it, took it home and applied the Reinsch test. Even in the small amount which remained I found a good deal of powdered white arsenic. So evidently Stapleton had, in a sense, killed himself.
‘Naturally, my first suspicion was of you, Adam. But I couldn’t see, in the first place, why, if you were guilty, you had been so frank and open about giving him the removing-cream, and in the second place, why should you have wanted to kill him at all. You’d never met him before this production; you apparently weren’t jealous of him on account of Judith; in fact, there seemed to be no possible advantage which you could get from his death. So unless you were some kind of homicidal maniac, or a disinterested killer like the man in Aiken’s King Coffin, the explanation had to be sought elsewhere.
‘It wasn’t difficult to find. When Shorthouse visited your dressing-room during Don Pasquale, you came upon him meddling with the removing-cream. Actually he was substituting the poisoned cream for your own, since he still hated you as the result of your marriage with Elizabeth. It’s small wonder that you thought his apology unconvincing . . . It wasn’t a bad plot – though intended, I fancy, to hurt rather than kill, since he must have known that as soon as the stuff made you really ill you’d go to a doctor. For him, of course, it was a most unlucky chance that you caught him with the poisoned cream in his hand. If he attempted to restore the original jar you would naturally be suspicious, while if he didn’t you would be even more suspicious when the symptoms began to show. There’s only one thing I don’t understand, and that’s why he didn’t subsequently remove the poisoned jar and put the other back.’
‘That’s easily explained,’ said Adam. ‘After I discovered him playing about in my dressing-room, I decided to keep it locked unless I was actually in it myself.’
‘Ah. Then I think he must have been considerably relieved – though also, I suppose, puzzled – when this unpleasant scheme hadn’t any results.’
‘Thanks to Elizabeth,’ Adam interrupted. ‘If she hadn’t that day bought me a superior brand of cream, and if I hadn’t started at once to use it in place of the other, things would have become unpleasant . . . Though I might have saved Stapleton’s life,’ he added thoughtfully.
‘Only temporarily,’ said Fen. ‘If he hadn’t died of arsenic poisoning, he would have been hanged . . . I should add for the sake of completeness that I did just consider the possibility that Adam had killed Stapleton because Stapleton knew that Adam was guilty of Short-house’s murder. But apparently the poisoning had begun before Shorthouse died – and in any case, it was soon obvious that Stapleton, and Stapleton alone, must have killed Shorthouse.’
Adam spoke hesitantly, ‘You said that I –’
‘You sprang the trap. But it was Stapleton who set it.’ Karl Wolzogen voiced the query that was in all their minds. ‘But how was this thing done?’
‘Come upstairs,’ said Fen, ‘and I’ll show you. Mudge, will you prepare the scene?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TEN MINUTES LATER they had all crowded, somewhat uncomfortably, into Edwin Shorthouse’s dressing-room.
‘As regards Judith,’ Sir Richard said to Adam, ‘we shan’t, if you don’t mind, prefer any charges. She’ll recover more quickly at home with her parents than in any sort of mental institution. And once she knows the truth, there’ll be no further danger to you.’
Charles Shorthouse spoke cautiously. ‘I feel,’ he announced, ‘that this is in all probability a portentous moment, but I must confess that at present the exact meaning of it all eludes me . . .’
‘If you feel tired, Master,’ said his paramour, ‘you must lie down.’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t do to exhaust yourself.’
‘Kindly be silent, Beatrix.’
Mudge was fussing with the skeleton which had been found in the property-room; Adam noticed that the wire which held together the cervical vertebrae had been straightened. On the floor lay three lengths of rope and some cotton waste. Fen assumed a didactic expression and called for silence.
‘Now, we know,’ he said, ‘why Stapleton intended to kill Edwin Shorthouse. It was because of the attempted rape of Judith Haynes. But you must realize that he’d no intention of being connected with the crime if he could possibly help it, and so, having a twisted and ingenious mind, he conceived a twisted and ingenious plan. That plan he tested, in advance, with this skeleton.
‘His first job was to screw that hook in the ceiling – the one from which we found Edwin Shorthouse hanging. There would, of course, be plenty of opportunity for that, and the only danger was that Shorthouse would notice the thing. Even if he did, however, he could hardly suspect its purpose.
‘Stapleton’s next step was to steal the Nembutal which he knew was in Joan’s dressing-room, and to dope the gin which Shorthouse kept in here, and it was over this that he made his one mistake. The Nembutal had, of course, to be put in the bottle, where it would certainly arouse suspicion if found. I think there’s no doubt that he intended to rearrange that part of his setting – by substituting an innocuous bottle for the doped one – while he was in here, and that when it came to the point, he forgot. It’s the dreariest of platitudes to say that every murderer makes at least one mistake, but unlike most platitudes, that one happens to be true.
‘Well, then; as usual, Shorthouse comes up here to drink after he’s finished his round of the pubs. Stapleton waits until it’s safe to assume that the drug has taken effect, and then goes up to the roof above here, with a good length of rope. On the way, he makes sure that the lift is at the second and not at the ground floor. He knows that Furbelow, being in fear of such contraptions, won’t touch it, and he doesn’t expect anyone else to be in the theatre at that late hour. The machinery of the lift, you’ll remember, is not far from that skylight there.’
‘Oh,’ said Adam, suddenly enlightened.
‘Yes, exactly,’ Fen agreed. ‘But of course if you hadn’t taken the lift, Stapleton would have done so, so you needn’t be unduly distressed. He must have been considerably startled when you did that part of his job for him.
‘One end of his rope, then, he attaches to the machinery of the lift, or to the top of the lift itself. Its length has been nicely calculated, for he mustn’t run the risk of pulling the unfortunate man’s head off . . . The other end he takes with him to the little skylight. Through that skylight he drops into the room two further lengths of rope (unattached), some cotton waste, and the end of the rope which is attached to the lift. A stool of exactly the right height has been placed in the room
previously. Immediately beside the skylight, on the roof, he fits up some temporary projection – perhaps a small nail. Have you done that, Mudge?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good . . . Now he’s ready. An appointment to discuss his opera score with Shorthouse has already been made, so as to minimize subsequent suspicions. He comes in here at five to eleven, observed by Furbelow, knowing perfectly well that nothing on earth will make the old man put his nose into the room while Shorthouse is there. And he makes his final arrangements . . . Mudge, go and drop a length of rope through the skylight, will you. You needn’t bother to attach it to the lift, but hang on to your end, and heave away when I give the word.’ Mudge departed on this errand. ‘As you see,’ Fen continued, ‘the other materials are already here.’
In due time the rope appeared through the skylight, accompanied by a sound of muffled panting from Mudge.
‘Now,’ said Fen, ‘observe what Stapleton does. The skeleton represents Shorthouse, now unconscious from the drug.’
He took a piece of chalk from his pocket, and with it very lightly marked two points on the seat of the stool. Then, holding it where the marks were, he carried the stool to the skeleton and pressed the bones of the fingers and thumb against the wood in several carefully selected places.
‘We now have finger-prints,’ he said, ‘appropriate to the theory of suicide.’
Putting the stool aside, he picked up the shorter length of rope from the floor, stood on a chair, and tied one end of it firmly to the hook in the ceiling. The other end he arranged in a running noose, with a knot placed where the angle of the jaw would be. Then he climbed down, took the longer piece of rope, tied it round the wrists of the skeleton, and after a moment untied it again.
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