Howard Shannon shifted uneasily. He had not the same degree of control over himself; the strain of waiting was becoming more than he could endure without making some effort to reduce the tension. He licked his lips furtively. He seemed to be on the point of saying something when there was a sound at the back of the stage and in a moment or two Jean and Paul Russell came into view, having evidently entered the hall by the back way.
Paul Russell gave a quick, uncertain glance around him.
‘Sorry we’re late, everybody,’ he said, a little jerkily. ‘A last minute call held us up.’
‘That’s all right, Paul,’ said Sandra Borne. She indicated the two vacant chairs. ‘Will you and Jean sit here?’
The gathering was complete now. Mordecai Tremaine wondered what the watchers sitting silently and almost invisibly at the back of the hall were thinking of it. There must be a strange air of phantasy about the scene, so many of them crowded around a table in the centre of the lighted stage and the hall stretching gloomily empty behind them except for those few unofficial observers.
Paul Russell fumbled with his chair as he sat down. It was not usual for him to be so uncertain in his movements. He avoided looking at Mordecai Tremaine.
‘You’re still driving yourself to death for us all, I see, Sandy,’ he remarked, but although the words were normal enough his tone was a betrayal.
Tremaine glanced in his direction—and caught Jean’s eyes upon him, apprehensive and unhappy. Dr. Russell and his wife were in an undoubted state of agitation. Jean flushed and turned hurriedly towards Sandra.
‘I hear a rumour that you’re leaving us, Sandy. Is it true?’
‘Yes, it’s true, Jean,’ she returned. ‘I’ve tried hard, but I can’t stay here any longer. There are too many—too many memories.’
Martin Vaughan coughed. She looked down the table at him.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Martin. You don’t want to hear about me. Now that Jean and Paul are here we can go ahead.’ Her glance swept around the table, including them all in its scope. ‘We all know each other, so that there isn’t any need for me to attempt to be formal.’ She hesitated, choosing her words. ‘I hope no one minds my taking the chair. I don’t want any of you to feel that I’m attempting to—to run things. But I’ve—well, I’ve had a good deal to do with the various arrangements we’ve made and it seemed to be the best thing to do.’
Vaughan leaned forward. Momentarily the bitterness was back in his voice.
‘It’s all right, Sandy. One of us had to do it and you’re more qualified than most of us. We all know that it’s the winding-up meeting.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose that is the best way to describe it. After Lydia’s death we all decided that we’d carry on with the play, but I don’t think there’s anyone who is in favour of it now. There’s been too much real tragedy around us for any of us to want to go on play-acting.’ Sandra Borne looked questioningly at them. ‘Is there anyone who thinks we ought to go on? I’ve been in touch with the people at Kingshampton,’ she added. ‘There’s no question of our being under any obligation to go on with the production. They understand our position.’
There was a silence. She looked at them all in turn. She said:
‘Paul? Geoffrey? Pauline?’
She lingered over the last name. Pauline Conroy shivered.
‘No,’ she said, in a strangled voice bereft of her usual dramatic tones. ‘No, I couldn’t play in it now.’
Martin Vaughan’s clenched fist came down hard upon the table with a force that startled them.
‘The damned play’s a hoodoo! We’ve seen the last of it. We all know that.’ He glared truculently around at them. ‘And we all know that we didn’t need a meeting to decide that there wasn’t going to be any production. We didn’t come here to discuss whether we’re going to continue with Murder Has a Motive. We came because we had to come. All of us were told that we’d be here or else!’
‘Martin—’
Sandra Borne’s hurried protest was doomed to be unheeded before it was made. The big man had exploded the dynamite. And because they had all known it was there they sat breathlessly expectant, waiting for the next development.
Vaughan’s head was thrust forward challengingly.
‘It’s true, isn’t it? It was all very polite, but that was what it meant. We’re here because the police wanted us to come.’
Mordecai Tremaine’s voice cut into the strained silence which followed Vaughan’s outburst.
‘Almost correct,’ he said quietly, ‘but not quite. You are all here because I wanted you to come.’
His calm shouldering of the responsibility disconcerted the big man, and before he could return to the attack Tremaine had forestalled him and was on his feet.
‘I owe you an apology, ladies and gentlemen,’ he told them. ‘That is, all except one of you—the person who killed Lydia Dare and who also killed Philip Hammond and Edith Lorrington.’
There would be no interruption now. He had known what the effect would be before he had spoken. Even Martin Vaughan’s aggressive attitude had vanished; the big man had ceased to loom across the table and had retreated to his chair, his truculence no longer there. Tremaine squared his shoulders. He had his audience. Before him was a lake of silence into which his words would drop effectively and unopposed.
‘I wanted you all to come here tonight,’ he said, ‘because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to talk to you about Murder Has a Motive. I have a copy of it here.’ He indicated the square, brown-paper parcel which lay on the table in front of him. ‘You know, of course, that I attended two of your rehearsals, and during the past few days I’ve also studied the script very carefully. And I would like you all to consider it very carefully yourselves—perhaps from a different angle to that to which you have been accustomed.’
He paused to allow them to appreciate the significance of what he had said. And then:
‘Some of the remarks I am going to make,’ he said, ‘may seem to you to be unwarrantably personal. I am a stranger here among you and I have no official status. But I would ask you to remember that three people have been murdered in this village, and that the murderer is still walking freely in our midst—perhaps preparing to add a fourth murder to the list.’
‘Do you think,’ said Vaughan sharply, ‘that there will be a fourth?’
‘I said that perhaps the killer is planning a fourth,’ said Tremaine. ‘Let that serve as justification for anything I may say.’
‘I don’t understand what all this is about,’ broke in Serge Galeski suddenly, ‘but if you know something, go ahead and say what it is.’
‘I’m aware that it hasn’t been an easy time for any of you, Mr. Galeski,’ said Tremaine, asperity in his voice. ‘I know that suspense isn’t pleasant. But I’m dealing with this in my own way.’
He went on:
‘In the play a woman is murdered by a man who loves her, because she is going to marry someone else. In your production, Miss Galway played the woman and Mr. Vaughan played the murderer. There was a real-life parallel, as I believe you all realized at a rehearsal which followed shortly after the death of Miss Dare and at which I was present. Mr. Vaughan was in love with Lydia Dare. She was to have married another man—Mr. Farrant, to state his name. And she died. She died in circumstances which placed Mr. Vaughan in a very dangerous position and brought him to the notice of the police.’
As though he had expected that it was here that he might begin to face interruptions, he continued quickly:
‘Later in the course of the play, a man—played by Mr. Shannon—is murdered by his wife because he has been unfaithful to her. In real life Mr. Philip Hammond was murdered. It was suspected by at least one of you—and probably more—that he had—to express it without mincing words—a mistress whom he had been seeing in London. Again, you will observe, there was a remarkable parallel between the murder in the play and the murder which actually happened. And just as Mr. Vaughan had been comp
romised by the first murder, so Mrs. Karen Hammond was seriously compromised by the second. To point out their guilt beyond all doubt their motives had already been clearly revealed on the stage in the crimes in which you were acting.’
Tremaine stole a quick glance at Karen Hammond. Her blonde head was lowered and he could not see her face, but he knew from her stillness that she was listening to him in fear.
He drew a deep breath. He had skated over the thin ice of her relationship with Philip Hammond and so far there had been no challenging note. For the moment at least the murders were holding the full interest of all his listeners.
‘One coincidence,’ he went on, ‘could have been overlooked. Two were impossible to accept. There was, in my opinion, only one answer, and that was that the murders in the play and the real murders were connected. In other words that the person who wrote the play wrote it with Lydia Dare and Philip Hammond in mind, knowing that they were going to die.’
Serge Galeski had completely lost his air of superior detachment. There was no trace of careless unconcern in his manner now.
‘You mean,’ he said hoarsely, ‘that the play was written by the murderer?’
‘Yes,’ said Mordecai Tremaine, ‘that’s what I mean.’
Martin Vaughan said:
‘In that case, where does the murder of Edith Lorrington come in? Where is your parallel in the play for that?’
‘There isn’t one,’ said Tremaine. ‘Because it wasn’t intended that Edith Lorrington should die.’
‘Then why was she killed?’
‘To save the murderer’s neck. She knew too much.’
‘If she knew enough to make the killer run the risk of getting rid of her why didn’t she go to someone with her knowledge? It wasn’t like Edith to keep silence. Why didn’t she tell your friend Inspector Boyce?’
‘I think,’ said Tremaine, ‘that the answer is that she didn’t know she knew.’
There had been tension before; now fear and suspicion had broken loose and were running wild among them. The people seated around the table were no longer friendly members of the same community. They were hostile strangers, eying each other with furtive glances, afraid of their neighbours who had suddenly acquired the dark, terrifying quality of the unknown.
Howard Shannon’s plump fingers plucked at his tie in a nervous gesture. He swallowed hard, as if to compel his vocal cords to do his bidding.
‘How do we know,’ he said, with an attempt at bluster, ‘that you’re not inventing all this?’
Mordecai Tremaine looked at him and through him.
‘I’m not inventing it, Mr. Shannon,’ he said. ‘Any more than I’m inventing the fact that on the night that Lydia Dare was killed you weren’t in London as you stated, but in Colminster. You might, indeed, quite easily have spent part of the time in Dalmering. You could have walked back to Colminster in less than an hour and a half and no one would have seen you.’
Shannon’s face was ashen. His hands shook. He placed them beneath the table in an attempt to hide his agitation, but he could not bring the colour back to his flabbily grey cheeks.
‘You’re trying to trap me,’ he said. ‘You can’t prove anything . . .’
‘I have no doubt,’ said Tremaine, ‘that by now Inspector Boyce is able to prove it beyond question.’ His eyes held Shannon’s. ‘I want you to understand,’ he said, ‘that I am not speaking in the dark. I know how all the murders were committed and by whom.’
Someone gave a little gasp, stifled frantically as it came. All their eyes were fixed upon Mordecai Tremaine, and no one but the person responsible knew from whence it emanated.
‘For God’s sake,’ burst out Geoffrey Manning, ‘if you really know, don’t keep this up!’
‘The more I studied the play,’ went on Tremaine, as if he had not heard, ‘the more convinced I became that it could only have been written by someone who knew Dalmering intimately and that “Alexis Kent” was a pen-name hiding the identity of one of you. I’m a little surprised that the same thought didn’t occur to anyone else. I wonder if it did occur to Philip Hammond? I’m told that he was offered a part, but that he refused it. The reason must be obvious to you now—he didn’t wish to play the unfaithful husband because that is precisely what he knew himself to be. It may have been because he realized that someone knew his secret that he came back here after the rehearsal that night without telling even his—wife—where he was going.’
His hesitation over the word ‘wife’ was unintentional. The term had come to him instinctively before he was aware of it. Karen Hammond was looking full at him now, and he saw her wince.
‘Probably a note was given to him,’ he went on. ‘A note which he felt he dare not ignore. That, admittedly, is guess-work, but I think the deduction is justified. We know that Philip Hammond came to the hall, and the murderer must have been waiting for him. He was struck down without warning by a blow from the hammer the murderer knew was kept there. His body was dragged into the gas-stove and the killer watched him die.
‘Can you imagine how gruesome that scene must have been? A man’s life slowly ebbing away with the moments, and the murderer standing by with a fearful, thumping heart, listening to every sound, in mortal dread that someone might come in, but knowing no repentance. It must have needed cold-blooded devilry to do that, a callous, vicious purpose.
‘But the murderer was—is—cold-blooded. The death of Edith Lorrington also tells us that. No doubt she smiled a welcome as she turned to greet her visitor, in whom she saw a friend, but in the next moment she had been beaten down, brutally and with premeditated force.
‘From the very first moment of discovery the implacable intent of the murderer has been made evident. There was no mercy in the hand that struck Lydia Dare to her death, no pity in the heart and mind behind the knife buried so murderously in her breast on that dark and lonely path. Poor Lydia! She’d been so happy. She’d been looking forward to marriage and life with the man she loved. Whoever was responsible for the destruction of all those dear dreams of hers must pay the penalty for that black crime. It was a dreadful, villainous thing which was done in the darkness there.’
He stopped. His glance went to Sandra Borne, sitting stonily at the head of the table. He said:
‘Not one life was wantonly broken, but two. Which one of us but would have done our utmost to stay that tragedy could we have been at hand? Most of you, I know, would be prepared to swear that Sandra, for instance, would have risked anything to prevent that brutal crime.’
She lowered her eyes.
‘Of course,’ she said shakily. ‘Lydia was my friend. I—I loved her.’
‘Oh no,’ said Mordecai Tremaine quietly, ‘you hated her.’
And then, suddenly, his figure was stiff and terrible, and his voice held an icy anger that lashed her soul.
‘You hated her! Didn’t you! ’
18
SANDRA BORNE WAS crouching back in her chair, one hand to her mouth and her eyes dilated with terror. It was as though fear had paralysed her.
Mordecai Tremaine said:
‘You hated her. You hated her because you were jealous of her. And you were jealous of her because she had all the things you yourself wanted. She was able to make friends easily; she occupied the limelight; people sought her out; she was admired by men. Whilst you told yourself that you were always in the position of having to do all the drudgery and that you were perpetually left out of things where men were concerned.
‘Everyone regarded you as the loyal, willing, uncomplaining Sandy who was always ready to take on the jobs other people were too lazy to bother about; always prepared to do all the unpleasant tasks for the good of everyone else; always treating difficulties with a smile. You were regarded as a stand-by for everything in the village; you were always being required to organize or to help. People thought that you enjoyed doing it; that you liked being always busy, always engaged in running some local charity or arranging flower shows, doing the routine dut
ies attached to any village function and not coming forward for any bequests or publicity.
‘But, although no one suspected it, all the time envy was gnawing inside you, and was slowly poisoning your heart. You smiled at people with your eyes and uttered words of friendship with your lips, but all the while you were jealously hating them, wishing you could destroy them for leading lives which seemed to be so much fuller and richer than your own. You envied the fact that they apparently had all they wished for without having to exert themselves to obtain it. I say “apparently” because only the owner of a warped and twisted mind could have argued like that; could have believed that no one else knew strain and sorrow and anxiety.
‘Gradually you came to hate everyone belonging to the circle of your acquaintances whom you believed to be more fortunate, more favoured by life than yourself. You hated Karen Hammond. You hated her because she was happy and had a husband who seemed to idolize her. You hated Lydia. You hated—others.
‘And you nursed your hate. You nursed it and allowed it to grow until it became a festering, evil thing, obsessing your soul, and until it finally drove you to kill. To kill—not suddenly, in the passion of a moment, but cunningly, secretly, your purpose working itself remorselessly out through the weeks and months.
‘I think that it was when you learned that Lydia was going to marry Gerald Farrant that your jealousy reached its climax. You knew that Martin Vaughan was in love with her. And when you heard that two men wanted her enough to want to marry her, and yet not even one had ever suggested marriage to you, it was the last indignity to your unhappy, perverted mind. You began to plan your revenge.
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