The Strangling on the Stage

by Simon Brett

  ‘Very clever,’ said the sardonic voice of Neville Prideaux, ‘but in fact unnecessary. In the text of Shaw’s play the cart never gets moved. Dick Dudgeon may have the noose around his neck, but he’s in no danger of ever getting hanged. Then he’s saved by the arrival of Pastor Anderson.’

  Gordon Blaine looked almost pathetically nonplussed at having his moment of triumph diminished. But Ritchie Good came quickly to his rescue. ‘Well, speaking as the person who actually has the rope around my neck, may I say I’m very pleased about the sensible precautions Gordon has taken. Accidents do happen. I could black out while I’m up there, or the cart could break or somebody could push it away by mistake. No, thank you very much, but I’m happy to stay with my Velcro rope. And I’m equally happy that General Burgoyne is unable to see through his plan of getting me hanged.’

  Though he was talking entirely in terms of The Devil’s Disciple, Ritchie Good still managed to make his last sentence sound like a criticism of Neville Prideaux, and a point scored in the ongoing rivalry between the two men.

  As she watched the action, Jude had been standing next to Mimi Lassiter, who looked seriously shocked by the scene they had just witnessed. ‘Are you all right?’ asked Jude.

  Mimi didn’t answer the question, just announced in an appalled voice, ‘He said “fellow members of SADOS” – and he hasn’t even paid his subscription.’

  Clearly she took her duties as Membership Secretary very seriously.

  Over by the stage, where the curtains had once again been closed, there was much clapping on the back for Gordon Blaine, along with congratulations on another feat of stagecraft and offers to buy him a drink. He said he and Ritchie would join the others after he’d made a couple of adjustments to his precious gallows.

  And the rest of the company, predictably enough, adjourned to the Cricketers.

  As Jude crossed the car park towards the pub, she saw Hester Winstone standing by the side of a flash BMW, in heated conversation with someone through the driver’s side window.

  ‘I just want to stay and have a drink,’ Hester was saying.

  ‘And I just want you to come home.’ The voice was recognizably her husband’s. ‘Look I’ve already had to rush my Sunday lunch to get you here for the beginning of the bloody rehearsal. Then I come into the rehearsal room and see some idiot showing off pretending to be hanged – and I see no sign of you. And now you’re here and I’d have thought the least you can do is come home now the bally rehearsal’s finished.’

  ‘You go home. I’ll get a cab.’

  ‘Well, that’s a waste of money when I’m here to give you a lift. I’m already stuck with paying the insurance excess on the repairs caused by you pranging your bloody car. On top of that …’

  Jude couldn’t hear any more of the conversation without becoming too overt an eavesdropper, so she continued her way into the Cricketers.

  ELEVEN

  The macabre demonstration they had seen had lifted the spirits of the Devil’s Disciple company. This was partly due to the jokey double act which Gordon and Ritchie had just presented for them, but also to the feeling that they were finally making progress on the production. They were around halfway into their rehearsal schedule, some of the cast were actually ‘off the book’, and now they were being shown how bits of the set would work. The Devil’s Disciple was beginning to gather momentum.

  Jude had found that sessions in the Cricketers had become considerably more relaxed since the departure of Elizaveta Dalrymple and her cronies. Elizaveta was one of those women who not only needed always to be the centre of attention but who also carried around with her a permanent air of disapproval. And, given her place in SADOS history, though she didn’t voice it in so many words, there was an implication of disdain for everything the society had done since the demise of its founding father Freddie Dalrymple. And yet, despite this inevitable decline in standards, Elizaveta Dalrymple had appeared magnanimous enough to offer her services and do what she could for SADOS.

  So, without her condescension and prickliness, without everyone kowtowing and worrying about her reaction to things, the atmosphere in the Cricketers after rehearsals had improved considerably. The inevitable glass of Chilean Chardonnay in her hand, Jude found herself looking round quite benignly at her fellow actors. She had come to recognize that most of their flamboyance and ego derived from social awkwardness and, as ever attracted to people by their frailty, she realized that she was getting fond of most of them. To her considerable surprise, she discovered that she was enjoying her involvement in amateur dramatics. She giggled inwardly at the thought of breaking that news to Carole.

  Feeling it was her turn to buy a round for the small circle she stood with, Jude looked for the African straw basket which contained her wallet, and realized to her mild irritation that she must have left it in St Mary’s Hall.

  To joshing cries about ‘the Alzheimer’s kicking in’, Jude left the Cricketers and made her way back to the rehearsal room. The March evening was comfortingly light, finally promising the end of the miserable weather that seemed to have been trickling on forever.

  Security at St Mary’s Hall was not very sophisticated. The keys were kept behind the bar of the Cricketers and one of Davina Vere Smith’s duties as director was to open the place and lock up at the end of rehearsals. Frequently, because cast members were slow to leave the hall, Davina didn’t do the locking up until when she was leaving the pub to go home.

  So it proved that Sunday evening. Jude slipped in without difficulty and went through the foyer area to the main hall. She switched on one row of lights and noticed, without thinking much of it, that the stage curtains were almost closed, with just a thin strip of light showing.

  The straw bag was exactly where she thought she’d left it, propped against the wall by the trestle table on which the kettle, coffee mugs and biscuit tins were kept.

  Jude was about to leave the hall when she thought she should perhaps turn off the stage working lights. Though not obsessive about green issues, she tried whenever possible to save electricity.

  There were pass doors on either side, but the simplest route up on to the stage was by the steps in the middle (much used for audience participation when the SADOS did their pantomimes). Jude stepped up, pushing the curtains aside, in search of the light switches.

  But what she saw on stage stopped her in her tracks. The wooden cart had been pushed to one side. From the noose on the gallows dangled the still body of Ritchie Good. His face was congested, his popping blue eyes red-rimmed.

  This time he wasn’t play-acting.

  TWELVE

  Jude’s mobile was in her basket. She knew she should ring the police straight away. But Ritchie Good was unarguably dead, and a few minutes’ delay was not, so far as she could see, going to make a lot of difference to the official investigation. She moved closer to the hanging corpse and looked up at the rope tight around his neck.

  It was as she suspected. The noose which had strangled Ritchie Good was not the fake one with the Velcro linkage. It was the unbroken one whose strength Gordon Blaine had demonstrated in the run-up to his coup de théâtre.

  Jude moved far enough away to see the top of the gallows. Fixed there was a large backward-facing hook, on to which the ring at the end of the noose had been fixed. From it the rope ran through a channel at the beam’s end, so that it could dangle in its appropriate position over the cart.

  For anyone who knew the structure of the gallows, switching the two nooses would have been a matter of moments. But who on earth could have done it? And how had they persuaded Ritchie Good so helpfully to have stood once again on the cart and placed the noose around his neck?

  Though still in a state of shock, Jude found her mind was buzzing with possibilities. She tried to think back over the last half-hour, to remember who had appeared in the Cricketers and in what order. Also who had left the pub, and who hadn’t even gone in in the first place.

  While these thoughts were scr
ambling through her mind, Jude became aware of a noise in the empty hall. She heard a low whimpering, sounding like an animal, and yet she knew it to be human. It was coming from the small annex to the side of the stage, which during their productions SADOS used as a Green Room.

  She moved softly through and found Hester Winstone collapsed on a chair, incapable of stopping the flow of her tears.

  The woman looked up as she heard Jude approaching and said brokenly, ‘It’s my fault. I’m the reason why he’s dead.’

  THIRTEEN

  Jude would have liked to talk to Hester, to offer comfort, to find out what exactly her words had meant, but they were interrupted by a scream from inside the main hall. Jude rushed through to find an aghast Davina Vere Smith.

  The director must have come into St Mary’s Hall to lock up, then, just like Jude, have gone to turn the lights off on stage. Where she too had been confronted by the grisly sight of Ritchie Good’s dangling body.

  Once she had recovered from her initial shock, Davina had no hesitation about ringing the police straight away. Somehow drawn by bad news, a few other SADOS members had drifted over from the Cricketers. The sight of Ritchie’s corpse prompted all kinds of emotional displays, making it difficult for Jude to talk privately to the still-weeping Hester Winstone.

  And once the police and an ambulance had arrived, such a conversation became impossible. Two uniformed officers came first, but they were quickly calling up plain clothes reinforcements. The paramedics from the ambulance were allowed to confirm that Ritchie Good was dead, but then the police asked them to keep off the stage. Soon after they left St Mary’s Hall. Moving the body would happen later, after photographs and other essential procedures.

  Jude was struck by how little information the police have when they first arrive at the scene of a crime (or indeed an accident). They’d probably never heard of SADOS; they’d need an explanation of the rehearsal process which had brought everyone to St Mary’s Hall. And that was before they started even getting the names of the individuals involved.

  But the two officers, later backed up by detectives, showed great patience in their questioning as they began to build up a background to the events of that afternoon. Their job was not made any easier by the histrionic tendencies of the SADOS members. All of them seemed to have something to contribute, and in many cases it was something that placed them centre stage in the day’s drama.

  Eventually St Mary’s Hall was cleared. The police had by then established the identity of the victim. They had also taken names, addresses and contact numbers from everyone present and said that further follow-up questions might be necessary at a later date. The SADOS members were then left in no doubt that it was time for them to leave. Which – with some reluctance, they were enjoying the theatricality of the situation – they did.

  They were also forbidden to tell anyone about what they had witnessed in the hall that afternoon. But if the police thought that instruction was likely to be followed, then they had never met anyone involved in amateur dramatics.

  Jude was kept till last. As one of the first into the hall after Ritchie Good’s death, she was told that a full statement would be required from her. Not straight away – the police needed time to examine the scene of the incident – but the following day, either at her home or the local police station, according to her preference.

  ‘But I’m free to go now, am I?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. You’ll get a call in the morning.’

  ‘And …’ Jude looked across to where the weeping Hester Winstone was being comforted by a female officer. ‘What about …?’

  ‘No, Mrs Winstone won’t be leaving straight away,’ said the detective.

  During the drive back to Fethering in her Smart car Storm Lavelle went into full drama queen mode. ‘I mean, it’s just such a shattering thing to happen. Ritchie’s such a good actor, it’s such a waste! And God knows what’s going to happen to The Devil’s Disciple now.’

  Jude was relieved to hear that her friend seemed more worried about the production than heartbroken about Ritchie Good’s death. Storm must’ve been too busy with rehearsals to have any time to start throwing herself at Ritchie.

  ‘What, you mean they’re likely to call the whole thing off out of respect for Ritchie?’

  ‘Oh, good Lord, no. The show must go on.’ She spoke the words devoutly; they were, after all, the basic principle of amateur dramatics. No matter what disaster might occur during the rehearsal period, The Devil’s Disciple would still be presented to the paying public in St Mary’s Hall on the promised dates.

  ‘No, Jude, Davina’ll just juggle the cast around. Presumably Olly Pinto will be boosted up to Dick Dudgeon … which will please him no end, because he always thought he should have been playing the part in the first place. And, I don’t know, one of the boys playing the soldiers will get boosted up to take on Olly’s old part of Christy.’

  ‘Will it make a lot of difference to you, playing Judith Anderson to a new Dick Dudgeon?’

  ‘I don’t think it will that much, actually. I mean, Ritchie’s a very good actor, but you never feel he’s really engaging with you onstage. You know, he’s thought through how he’s going to play his part and that’s what he does, regardless of what he’s getting back from the rest of the cast. Ritchie’s a great technician, but he isn’t the kind of actor with whom you can get any kind of emotional roll going. He’s very self-contained. It’s a bit like having a very cleverly programmed robot on stage with you.’

  Jude was interested to hear how closely Storm’s assessment of Ritchie Good’s acting skills matched that of Neville Prideaux. And Storm’s was more objective; she wasn’t motivated by jealousy.

  ‘What do you think killed him?’ asked Jude, in a manner that was meant, but failed, to sound casual.

  ‘Well, obviously, strangulation by the noose round his neck.’

  ‘Yes, but why did it happen?’

  ‘An accident. He and Gordon must’ve been doing some adjustment to the gallows and unfortunately—’

  ‘Gordon wasn’t there. He was in the group that came straight over to the Cricketers at the same time as I did.’

  ‘Oh well, Ritchie may have just been fiddling about with it.’

  Storm seemed so remarkably incurious about the circumstances of the death that Jude didn’t feel inclined to raise suspicions by asking further questions. Instead she said, ‘The police want me to make a statement for them tomorrow. Have you got to do the same?’

  ‘No, they just took my address and mobile number. Said they might be in touch, but didn’t make it sound very likely.’ There was a silence, then Storm said, ‘Hester looked in a pretty bad way, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. So far as I could work out, she’d found Ritchie’s body just before I had. She was in a terrible state of shock.’

  ‘Hm. And she started off pretty neurotic, didn’t she?’

  ‘Is that the impression she gave?’ asked Jude, surprised at her friend’s powers of observation. Then she reminded herself that Storm was also a healer, used to analysing the sufferings of her clients.

  ‘No, on the surface she was fine, but I did get the impression that she was very tense, holding a lot in.’

  ‘Yes, I felt that too.’

  ‘So,’ said Storm, ‘if Hester doesn’t recover, we’ll be short of a prompter. And, judging from this afternoon’s display, just when her services will be most in demand.’

  ‘Oh, surely there are lots of SADOS members around who could do that?’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But a lot of the potential prompters, mature ladies who’re unlikely to be cast in plays any more … well, they’re part of the contingent that walked out with Elizaveta Dalrymple.’

  ‘And might they not be lured back?’

  ‘Oh, Good Lord, no. Not until The Devil’s Disciple boycott is complete. Anyone who breaks through the picket line on that will receive the full blast of Elizaveta’s anger.’

  ‘I’m s
urprised that would worry anyone. I got the impression that she was rather a spent force in the SADOS.’

  ‘A spent force she may be, but there are still a lot of members terrified of getting the wrong side of her. They might be excluded from the guest list for her famous “drinkies things”.’

  ‘Oh dear. Well, maybe Hester will make a full recovery and no replacement prompter will be needed.’ But as she said the words, Jude wasn’t feeling as positive as she sounded. After all, what Hester Winstone had said to her in the Green Room could have been interpreted as a confession to murder. Whose consequences could make her unavailable for Devil’s Disciple rehearsals, as well as many other areas of her life.

  ‘Anyway, if Hester is ruled out,’ said Storm, ‘you wouldn’t by any chance have a friend who might step into the breach as prompter, would you?’

  Jude could hardly prevent herself from giggling at the thought, as she replied, ‘Yes, you know, I think I might.’

  FOURTEEN

  On the Monday, by arrangement, the police had come to Jude’s home to take her statement. She had described to the best of her recollection exactly what she had witnessed the previous day at St Mary’s Hall. She had told the truth, but not quite the whole truth, omitting to report Hester Winstone’s words about the death being her fault. Jude had glossed over that, saying that Hester was too hysterical to say anything coherent.

  Her motives for telling the lie were instinctive and benign. She recognized Hester’s mental fragility and didn’t want to get her into any more trouble than she already was.

  But she decided not to tell her neighbour what she’d done. Perhaps because of her Home Office background, Carole strongly disapproved of lying to the police.