Night at the Vulcan (22 page)

“In what way?”

“In every way, by Janus. A drunkard. A wife-terrorist. An exhibitionist. And what’s more,” he went on with rising intensity, “a damned wrecker of plays. A yea-forsooth knavish pander, by Heaven! I tell you this, and I tell you plainly, if I, sitting in my O.P. box, could have persuaded the Lord to stoop out of the firmament and drop a tidy thunderbolt on Ben, I would have done it with bells on. Joyously!”

“A thunderbolt,” Alleyn said, “is one of the few means of dispatch that we have not seriously considered. Would you mind telling me where you were between the time when he made his last exit and the time when you appeared before the audience?”

“Brief let me be. In my box. On the stairs. Off-stage. On the stage.”

“Can you tell me exactly when you left your box?”

“While they were making their initial mops and mows at the audience.”

“Did you meet anyone or notice anything at all remarkable during this period?”

“Nothing, and nobody whatever.”

“From which side did you enter for your own call?”

“The O.P., which is actors’ right.”

“So you merely emerged from the stairs that lead from the box to the stage and found yourself hard by the entrance?”

“Precisely.”

“Have you any witness to all this, sir?”

“To my knowledge,” said the Doctor, “none whatever. There may have been a rude mechanical or so.”

“As far as your presence in the box is concerned, there was the audience. Nine hundred of them.”

“In spite of its mangling at the hands of two of the actors, I believe the attention of the audience to have been upon My Play. In any case,” the Doctor added, helping himself to a particularly large pinch of snuff and holding it poised before his face, “I had shrunk in modest confusion behind the curtain.”

“Perhaps someone visited you?”

“Not after the first act. I locked myself in,” he added, taking his snuff with uncouth noises, “as a precautionary measure. I loathe company.”

“Did you come back-stage at any other time during the performance?”

“I did. I came back in both intervals. Primarily to see the little wench.”

“Miss Tarne?” Alleyn ventured.

“She. A tidy little wench it is and will make a good player. If she doesn’t allow herself to be debauched by the sissies that rule the roost in our lamentable theatre.”

“Did you, during either of these intervals, visit the dressing-rooms?”

“I went to the Usual Office at the end of the passage, if you call that a dressing-room.”

“And returned to your box — when?”

“As soon as the curtain went up.”

“I see.” Alleyn thought for a moment and then said: “Dr. Rutherford, do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”

The Doctor gave a formidable gasp. His eyes bulged, his nostrils wrinkled and his jaw dropped. This grimace turned out to be the preliminary spasm to a Gargantuan sneeze. A handkerchief not being at his disposal, he snatched up the tail of his shirt, clapped it to his face and revealed a state of astonishing disorder below the waist

“Otto Brod?” he repeated, looking at Alleyn over his shirt-tail as if it were an improvised yashmak. “Never heard of him.”

“His correspondence seems to be of some value,” Alleyn said vaguely but the Doctor merely gaped at him. “I don’t,” he said flatly, “know what you’re talking about”

Alleyn gave up Otto Brod. “You’ll have guessed,” he said, “that I’ve already heard a good deal about the events of the last few days: I mean as they concerned the final rehearsals and the change in casting.”

“Indeed? Then you will have heard that Ben and I had one flaming row after another. If you’re looking for motive,” said Dr. Rutherford with an expansive gesture, “I’m lousy with it. We hated each other’s guts, Ben and I. Of the two I should say, however, that he was the more murderously inclined.”

“Was this feeling chiefly on account of the part his niece was to have played?”

“Fundamentally it was the fine flower of a natural antipathy. The contributive elements were his behaviour as an actor in My Play and the obvious and immediate necessity to return his niece to her squalid little
métier
and replace her by the wench. We had at each other on that issue,” said Dr. Rutherford with relish, “after both auditions and on every other occasion that presented itself.”

“And in the end, it seems, you won?”

“Pah!” said the Doctor with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Cat’s meat!”

Alleyn looked a little dubiously at the chaotic disarray of his garments. “Have you any objection,” he asked, “to being searched?”

“Not I,” cried the Doctor and hauled himself up from his chair. Fox approached him.

“By the way,” Alleyn said, “as a medical man, would you say that a punch on the jaw such as Bennington was given could have been the cause of his fainting some time afterwards? Remembering his general condition?”

“Who says he had a punch on the jaw? It’s probably a hypostatic discolouration. What do you want?” Dr. Rutherford demanded of Fox.

“If you wouldn’t mind taking your hands out of your pockets, sir,” Fox suggested.

The Doctor said: “Let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty,” and obligingly withdrew his hands from his trousers pockets. Unfortunately he pulled the linings out of them.

A number of objects fell about his feet — pencils, his snuff-box, scraps of paper, a pill-box, a programme, a note-book and a half-eaten cake of chocolate. A small cloud of snuff floated above this collection. Fox bent down and made a clucking sound of disapproval. He began to collect the scattered objects, inhaled snuff and was seized with a paroxysm of sneezing. The Doctor broke into a fit of uncouth laughter and floundered damagingly among the exhibits.

“Dr. Rutherford,” Alleyn said with an air of the liveliest exasperation, “I would be immensely obliged to you if you’d have the goodness to stop behaving like a Pantaloon. Get off those things, if you please.”

The Doctor backed away into his chair and examined an unlovely mess of chocolate and cardboard on the sole of his boot. “But, blast your lights, my good ass.” he said, “there goes my spare ration. An ounce of the best rappee, by Heaven!” Fox began to pick the fragments of the pill-box from his boot. Having collected and laid aside the dropped possessions, he scraped up a heap of snuff. “It’s no good now, Dogberry,” said the Doctor with an air of intense disapproval. Fox tipped the scrapings into an envelope.

Alleyn stood over the Doctor. “I think,” he said, “you had better give this up, you know.”

The Doctor favoured him with an antic grimace but said nothing. “You’re putting on an act, Dr. Rutherford, and I do assure you it’s not at all convincing. As a red herring it stinks to high Heaven. Let me tell you this. We now know that Bennington was hit over the jaw. We know when it happened. We know that the bruise was afterwards camouflaged with makeup. I want you to come with me while I remove this make-up. Where’s your jacket?”

“Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me…”

Fox went out and returned with a tail-coat that was in great disorder. “Nothing in the pockets, Mr. Alleyn,” he said briefly. Alleyn nodded and he handed it to Dr. Rutherford, who slung it over his shoulder.

Alleyn led the way down the passage, where Gibson was still on guard, and round the back of the stage to the dock. P. C. Lamprey came off the set and rolled the doors back.

Bennington had stiffened a little since they last looked at him. His face bore the expression of knowledgeable acquiescence that is so often seen in the dead. Using the back of a knife-blade, Alleyn scraped away the greasepaint from the right jaw. Fox held a piece of card for him and he laid smears of greasepaint on it in the manner of a painter setting his palette. The discoloured mark on the jaw showed clearly.

“There it is,” Alleyn said, and stood aside for Dr. Rutherford.

“A tidy buffet, if buffet it was. Who gave it him?” Alleyn didn’t answer. He moved round to the other side and went on cleaning the face.

“The notion that it could have contributed to his death,” the Doctor said, “is preposterous. If, as you say, there was an interval between the blow and the supposed collapse. Preposterous!”

Fox had brought cream and a towel, with which Alleyn now completed his task. The Doctor watched him with an air of impatience and unease. “Damned if I know why you keep me hanging about,” he grumbled at last.

“I wanted your opinion on the bruise. That’s all, Fox. Is the mortuary van here?”

“On its way, sir,” said Fox, who was wrapping his piece of card in paper.

Alleyn looked at the Doctor. “Do you think,” he said, “that his wife will want to see him?”

“She won’t want to. She may think she ought to. Humbug, in my opinion. Distress herself for nothing. What good does it do anybody?”

“I think, however, I should at least ask her.”

“Why the blazes you can’t let her go home passes my comprehension. And where do I go, now? I’m getting damn bored with Ben’s company.”

“You may wait either on the stage or, if you’d rather, in the unoccupied dressing-room. Or the office, I think, is open.”

“Can I have my snuff back?” Dr. Rutherford asked with something of the shamefaced air of a small boy wanting a favour.

“I think we might let you do that,” Alleyn said. “Fox, will you give Dr. Rutherford his snuff-box?”

Dr. Rutherford lumbered uncertainly to the door. He stood there, with his chin on his chest and his hands in his pockets.

“See here, Alleyn,” he said, looking from under his eyebrows at him. “Suppose I told you it was I who gave Ben that wallop on his mug. What then?”

“Why,” Alleyn said, “I shouldn’t believe you, you know.”

Alleyn saw Helena Hamilton in her dressing-room. It was an oddly exotic setting. The scent of banked flowers, of tobacco smoke and of cosmetics was exceedingly heavy, the air hot and exhausted. She had changed into her street-clothes and sat in an armchair that had been turned with its back to the door, so that when he entered he saw nothing of her but her right hand trailing near the floor with a cigarette between her fingers. She called: “Come in, Mr. Alleyn,” in a warm voice as if he were an especially welcome visitor. He would not have guessed from this greeting that when he faced her he would find her looking so desperately tired.

As if she read his thoughts she put her hands to her eyes and said: “My goodness, this is a long night, isn’t it?”

“I hope that for you, at least, it is nearing its end,” he said. ‘I’ve come to tell you that we are ready to take him away.”

“Does that mean I ought to — to look at him?”

“Only if you feel you want to. I can see no absolute need at all, if I may say so.”

“I don’t want to,” she whispered and added in a stronger voice: “It would be a pretence. I have no real sorrow and I have never seen the dead. I should only be frightened and confused.”

Alleyn went to the door and looked into the passage, where Fox waited with Gibson. He shook his head and Fox went away. When Alleyn came back to her she looked up at him and said: “What else?”

“A question or two. Have you ever known or heard of a man called Otto Brod?”

Her eyes widened. “But what a strange question!” she said. “Otto Brod? Yes. He’s a Czech or an Austrian, I don’t remember which. An intellectual. We met him three years ago when we did a tour of the continent. He had written a play and asked my husband to read it. It was in German and Ben’s German wasn’t up to it. The idea was that he should get someone over here to look at it, but he was dreadfully bad at keeping those sorts of promises and I don’t think he ever did anything about it.”

“Have they kept in touch, do you know?”

“Oddly enough, Ben said a few days ago that he’d heard from Otto. I think he’d written from time to time for news of his play but I don’t suppose Ben answered.” She pressed her thumb and fingers on her eyes. “If you want to see the letter,” she said, “it’s in his coat.”

Alleyn said carefully: “You mean the jacket he wore to the theatre? Or his overcoat?”

“The jacket. He was always taking my cigarette case in mistake for his own. He took it out of his breastpocket when he was leaving for the theatre and the letter was with it.” She waited for a moment and then said: “He was rather odd about it.”

“In what way?” Alleyn asked. She had used Martyn’s very phrase, and now when she spoke again it was with the uncanny precision of a delayed echo: “He was rather strange in his manner. He held the letter out with the cigarette case and drew my attention to it. He said, I think: ‘That’s my trump card.’ He seemed to be pleased in a not very attractive way. I took my case. He put the letter back in his pocket and went straight out.”

“Did you get the impression he meant it was a trump card he could use against somebody?”

“Yes. I think I did.”

“And did you form any idea who that person could be?”

She leant forward and cupped her face in her hands. “Oh yes,” she said. “It seemed to me that it was I myself he meant. Or Adam. Or both of us. It sounded like a threat.” She looked up at Alleyn. “We’ve both got alibis, haven’t we? If it was murder.”

“You have, undoubtedly,” Alleyn said, and she looked frightened.

He asked her why she thought her husband had meant that the letter was a threat to herself or to Poole but she evaded this question, saying vaguely that she had felt it to be so.

“You didn’t come down to the theatre with your husband?” Alleyn said.

“No. He was ready before I was. And in any case—” She made a slight expressive gesture and didn’t complete her sentence. Alleyn said: “I think I must tell you that I know something of what happened during the afternoon.”

The colour that flooded her face ebbed painfully and left it very white. She said: “How do you know that? You can’t know.” She stopped and seemed to listen. They could just hear Poole in the next room. He sounded as if he was moving about irresolutely. She caught her breath and after a moment she said loudly: “Was it Jacko? No, no, it was never Jacko.”

“Your husband himself—” Alleyn began and she caught him up quickly. “Ben? Ah, I can believe that. I can believe he would boast of it. To one of the men. To J.G.? Was it J.G.? Or perhaps even to Gay?”

Alleyn said gently: “You must know I can’t answer questions like these.”

“It was never Jacko,” she repeated positively and he said: “I haven’t interviewed Mr. Doré yet.”

“Haven’t you? Good.”

“Did you like Otto Brod?”

She smiled slightly and lifted herself in her chair. Her face became secret and brilliant. “For a little while,” she said, “he was a fortunate man.”

“Fortunate?”

“For a little while I loved him.”

“Fortunate indeed,” said Alleyn.

“You put that very civilly, Mr. Alleyn.”

“Do you think there was some connection here? I mean between your relationship with Brod and the apparent threat when your husband showed you the letter?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think Ben realized. It was as brief as summer lightning, our affair.”

“On both parts?”

“Oh no,” she said, as if he had asked a foolish question. “Otto was very young, rather violent and dreadfully faithful, poor sweet. You are looking at me in an equivocal manner, Mr. Alleyn. Do you disapprove?”

Alleyn said formally: “Let us say that I am quite out of my depth with—”

“Why do you hesitate? With what?”

“I was going to say with a
femme fatale
,” said Alleyn.

“Have I been complimented again?”

He didn’t answer and after a moment she turned away as if she suddenly lost heart in some unguessed-at object she had had in mind.

“I suppose,” she said, “I may not ask you why you believe Ben was murdered?”

“I think you may. For one reason: his last act in the dressing-room was not consistent with suicide. He refurbished his make-up.”

“That’s penetrating of you,” she said. “It was an unsympathetic make-up. But I still believe he killed himself. He had much to regret and nothing in the wide world to look forward to. Except discomfiture.”

“The performance to-night, among other things, to regret?”

“Among all the other things. The change in casting, for one. It must have upset him very much. Because yesterday he thought he’d stopped what he called John’s nonsense about Gay. And there was his own behaviour, his hopeless,
hopeless
degradation. He had given up, Mr. Alleyn. Believe me, he had quite given up. You will find I’m right, I promise you.”

“I wish I may,” Alleyn said. “And I think that’s all at the moment. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get on with my job.”

“Get on with it, then,” she said and looked amused. She watched him go and he wondered after he’d shut the door if her expression had changed.

Adam Poole greeted Alleyn with a sort of controlled impatience. He had changed and was on his feet. Apparently Alleyn had interrupted an aimless promenade about the room.

“Well?” he said. “Are you any further on? Or am I not supposed to ask?”

“A good deal further, I think,” Alleyn said. “I want a word with you, if I may have it, and then with Mr. Doré. I shall then have something to say to all of you. After that I think we shall know where we are.”

“And you’re convinced, are you, that Bennington was murdered?”

“Yes, I’m quite convinced of that.”

“I wish to God I knew why.”

“I’ll tell you,” Alleyn said, “before the night is out.”

Poole faced him. “I can’t believe it,” he said, “of any of us. It’s quite incredible.” He looked at the wall between his own room and Helena’s. “I could hear your voices in there,” he said. “Is she all right?”

“She’s perfectly composed.”

“I don’t know why you wanted to talk to her at all.”

“I had three things to say to Miss Hamilton. I asked her if she wanted to see her husband before he was taken away. She didn’t want to do so. Then I told her that I knew about an event of yesterday afternoon.”

“What event?” Poole demanded sharply.

“I mean an encounter between her husband and herself.”

“How the hell did you hear about that?”

“You know of it yourself, evidently.”

Poole said: “Yes, all right. I knew,” and then, as if the notion had just come to him and filled him with astonishment, he exclaimed: “Good God, I believe you think it’s a motive for
me
!” He thrust his hand through his hair. “That’s about as ironical an idea as one could possibly imagine.” He stared at Alleyn. An onlooker coming into the room at that moment would have thought that the two men had something in common and a liking for each other. “You can’t imagine,” Poole said, “how inappropriate
that
idea is.”

“I haven’t yet said I entertain it, you know.”

“It’s not surprising if you do. After all, I suppose I could, fantastically, have galloped from the stage to Ben’s room, laid him out, turned the gas on and doubled back in time to re-enter! Do you know what my line of re-entry is in the play?”

“No.”

“I come in, shut the door, go up to Helena, and say, ‘You’ve guessed, haven’t you? He’s taken the only way out. I suppose we must be said to be free.’ It all seems to fit so very neatly, doesn’t it? Except that for us it’s a year or more out of date.” He looked at Alleyn. “I really don’t know,” he added, “why I’m talking like this. It’s probably most injudicious. But I’ve had a good deal to think about the last two days and Ben’s death has more or less put the crown on it. What am I to do about this theatre? What are we to do about the show? What’s going to happen about—” He broke off and looked at the wall that separated his room from Martyn’s. “Look here, Alleyn,” he said. “You’ve no doubt heard all there is to hear, and more, about my private life. And Helena’s. It’s the curse of this job that one is perpetually in the spotlight.”

He seemed to expect some comment on this. Alleyn said lightly: “The curse of greatness?”

“Nothing like it. I’m afraid. See here, Alleyn. There are some women who just can’t be fitted into any kind of ethical or sociological pigeon-hole. Ellen Terry was one of them. It’s not that they are above reproach in the sense most people mean by the phrase, but that they are outside it. They behave naturally in an artificial set-up. When an attachment comes to an end, it does so without any regrets or recrimination. Often, with an abiding affection on both sides. Do you agree?”

“That there are such women? Yes.”

“Helena is one. I’m not doing this very well but I do want you to believe that she’s right outside this beastly thing. I won’t get you any further and it may hurt her profoundly if you try to establish some link between her relationship with her husband or anyone else and the circumstances of his death. I don’t know what you said to each other, but I do know it would never occur to her to be on guard for her own sake.”

“I asked her to tell me about Otto Brod.”

Poole’s reaction to this was surprising. He looked exasperated. “There you are!” he said. “That’s exactly what I mean. Otto Brod! A fantastic irresponsible affair that floated out of some midsummer notion of Vienna and Strauss waltzes. How the devil you heard of it I don’t know, though I’ve no doubt that at the time she fluttered him like a plume in her bonnet for all to see. I never met him but I understand he was some young intellectual with a pale face, no money and an overdeveloped faculty for symbolic tragedy. Why bring him in?”

Alleyn told him that Bennington, when he came down to the theatre, had had a letter from Brod in his pocket and Poole said angrily: “Why the hell shouldn’t he? What of it?”

“The letter is not to be found.”

“My dear chap, I suppose he chucked it out or burnt it or something.”

“I hardly think so,” said Alleyn. “He told Miss Hamilton it was his trump card.”

Poole was completely still for some moments. Then he turned away to the dressing-shelf and looked for his cigarettes.

“Now what in the wide world,” he said with his back to Alleyn, “could he have meant by a trump card?”

“That,” said Alleyn, “is what, above everything else, I should very much like to know.”

“I don’t suppose it means a damn thing, after all. It certainly doesn’t to me.”

He turned to offer his cigarettes but found that Alleyn had his own case open in his hands. “I’d ask you to have a drink,” Poole said, “but I don’t keep it in the dressing-room during the show. If you’d come to the office—”

“Nothing I’d like more but we don’t have it in the working hours either.”

“Of course not. Stupid of me.” Poole glanced at his dress for the ball and then at his watch. “I hope,” he said, “that my business manager is enjoying himself with my guests at my party.”

“He rang up some time ago to enquire. There was no message for you.”

“Thank you.” Poole leant against the dressing-shelf and lit his cigarette.

“It seems to me,” Alleyn said, “that there is something you want to say to me. I’ve not brought a witness in here. If what you say is likely to be wanted as evidence I’ll ask you to repeat it formally. If not, it will have no official significance.”

“You’re very perceptive. I’m damned if I know why I should want to tell you this, but I do. Just out of earshot behind these two walls are two women. Of my relation with the one, you seem to have heard. I imagine it’s pretty generally known. I’ve tried to suggest that it has come to its end as simply, if that’s not too fancy a way of putting it, as a flower relinquishes its petals. For a time I’ve pretended their colour had not faded and I’ve watched them fall with regret. But from the beginning we both knew it was that sort of affair. She didn’t pretend at all. She’s quite above any of the usual subterfuges and it’s some weeks ago that she let me know it was almost over for her. I think we both kept it up out of politeness more than anything else. When she told me of Ben’s unspeakable behaviour yesterday, I felt as one must feel about an outrage to a woman whom one knows very well and likes very much, I was appalled to discover in myself no stronger emotion than this. It was precisely this discovery that told me that the last petal had indeed fallen and now—” He lifted his hands. “Now Ben gets himself murdered, you say, and I’ve run out of the appropriate emotions.”