The Strangling on the Stage (15 page)

They clinked their glasses, Janie's a vodka and coke, Jude's predictably enough a Chilean Chardonnay. ‘Olly seems to be stepping fairly effortlessly into Ritchie's shoes, doesn't he?'

Janie agreed. ‘Mind you, he'll never be as good as Ritchie. He hasn't got the same amount of talent. Not nearly.'

‘No, but I think he'll be all right.'

‘He may be, if he learns his bloody lines.' Janie giggled. ‘Mind you, Carole the Dominatrix is keeping him up to his work, isn't she?'

Jude giggled in turn, wondering how Carole would react to the nickname.

‘She's quite a hard taskmaster, isn't she?' Janie went on.

‘Something of a perfectionist, yes.'

‘Where on earth did she come from? I've never seen her round any other SADOS shows.'

‘I brought her in.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes, she's a friend of mine. My next-door neighbour, actually. Why're you looking so surprised?'

‘I'm sorry, it's just … I wouldn't have put you two down as friends. You seem so different. You're so laid back and, well, Carole …'

‘Opposites attract,' suggested Jude.

‘Maybe.' But Janie didn't sound convinced.

‘Hm. Anyway, the surface of the water seems to have closed over Ritchie Good, doesn't it? Like he never existed.'

‘I think in some ways that's quite appropriate.'

‘How do you mean?' asked Jude.

‘Well, there always was something slightly unreal about him.'

Jude found that a very interesting observation; it chimed in with the feeling she had got about Ritchie when they'd met in the Crown and Anchor, that he was going through the motions of life rather than actually living it. She asked Janie to expand on what she had meant.

‘The way he used to come on to every woman he met, it never felt spontaneous. It was more like … I don't know what you'd call it. Learned behaviour, perhaps? Certainly not innate.'

Jude grinned. ‘You know the jargon.'

‘I've got a degree in psychology,' said Janie.

‘And do you use that in your work?'

‘Sadly not at the moment. I haven't had a proper job since I left uni. And that was nearly three years ago.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘There's nothing I could get round here that'd actually use my qualifications. Unless you reckon that stacking shelves in Lidl gives a unique opportunity to study the patterns of human behaviour.'

‘Couldn't you look for something further afield?'

Janie Trotman shook her head ruefully. ‘Can't really at the moment. My mother's got Alzheimer's. And my father's desperate that she shouldn't have to go into a home or a hospital. But looking after her is too much for him on his own. So …' She spread her hands wide in a gesture that seemed to encompass the limited possibilities of her life.

‘Obviously it won't always be like this. My mother will presumably die at some point. I just hope to God she goes before my father. Otherwise I'll be lumbered full time.' There was no bitterness in her words, just a resignation. What she had described was her current lot in life, and that was all there was to it.

‘It's why I keep doing the amateur dramatics,' she explained. ‘I enjoy it and it gets me out of the house at least three times a week.'

Jude said again that she was sorry.

‘It's all right,' said Janie. ‘I'm not after sympathy. My parents looked after me when I couldn't help myself …' She shrugged. ‘Some kind of payback seems logical.'

‘Are you an only child?'

The girl nodded. ‘And I love both my parents … or perhaps in my mother's case I should say I love what she used to be.' Determined not to succumb to a moment of emotion, she went on briskly, ‘Anyway, I've told you about my life. What about you, Jude? What do you do?'

She explained that she was a healer.

‘Ah. And it'd be too much to hope for, I suppose, that you might have found a way to heal Alzheimer's?'

‘I wish. I can sometimes alleviate distress or panic in a sufferer, but cure … no.'

Janie grinned wryly. ‘I was afraid you'd say that. But at the same time I'm rather relieved you did.'

‘Why?'

‘Because you don't come across to me like a charlatan.'

‘Thank you.'

‘I mean, I've looked online endlessly for anything that offers the hope of a cure. And there are plenty of people out there who do just that. If you only buy their patent medication, their dietary supplement … then hooray, goodbye to Alzheimer's.'

‘Did you buy any of them?'

‘I'm afraid I did. When my mother started to decline, I was desperate, I'd try anything. Well, I did try one or two things, and they all had one thing in common. They were entirely useless. So, as I say, there are a lot of charlatans out there.'

‘I don't doubt it.' Then Jude redirected the conversation. ‘Incidentally, did Ritchie Good come on to you?'

‘Of course.'

‘When he first met you?'

‘Yes. Didn't he come on to everyone when he first met them?'

‘Certainly did with me. And Carole too, actually.'

‘Really?'

‘Don't sound so surprised. Carole is a very attractive woman.'

‘Yes, I'm sure she is. But there's something a bit … I don't know, a bit forbidding about her. Like, say a word out of line and she'd cut you down pretty quick. If I were a man, I'd think twice before coming on to Carole.'

‘But, as we've established, Ritchie Good came on to
every
woman.'

‘Hm.'

‘How did you react, Janie?'

‘When Ritchie first came on to me? Well, I was flattered, I guess. At that stage I hadn't witnessed him coming on to anyone else, so I thought maybe he was genuinely attracted to me. And then of course he was the star of the show, and he was so much older than me, and … yes, I was flattered. Also, at the time I was in a rather low state about men.'

‘Oh?' Jude smiled sympathetically. ‘Relationship just finished?'

Janie nodded. ‘Actually, it finished quite a while ago, but I was still feeling raw. I had quite a lot of boyfriends while I was at uni, but there was this one boy I got together with in my third year, and we kind of stayed together after we'd done our degrees. We had a flat together in Crouch End, but then … Mummy got ill, and I was having to spend more and more time down here. And, you know, I'd rush up to London for the odd night, but that made me feel guilty and … Oh, I don't blame him. I don't think I was much fun to be with at the time. Well, we tottered on like that for … over a year, it was … and then the inevitable happened.'

‘He met someone else?'

‘Yup,' replied Janie, trying to make it sound casual, as if the separation was something she had come to terms with. But Jude could tell that she hadn't. ‘So, anyway, having an older man, an attractive man coming on to me, telling me I was beautiful, even if he was married, even if he was Ritchie Good … well, it gave me quite a boost. And yes, I did fall for him a bit.'

‘Did anything come of it?'

‘Like what? Are you asking whether we went to bed together?'

‘Well, yes, I suppose I am.'

‘Then the answer's no. But it was odd …'

‘Odd in what way?'

‘Well, he kind of implied that we would go to bed together. He kept telling me how much he fancied me and trying to persuade me to say yes. And he said he'd book a hotel room for us and … well, he persuaded me, I guess. I don't know how much I really wanted to, but, you know, it was the prospect of something different happening in my life, something apart from looking after my mother and attending rehearsals for
The Devil's Disciple
.

‘So I said yes. And we fixed the date, and Ritchie said he'd booked the hotel room and … Then the afternoon of that day I had a text from him saying he'd decided he couldn't go through with it.'

‘Did he give any reason?'

‘He said he'd realized that he was just being selfish and, however much he fancied me, it wouldn't be fair to his wife.'

‘And how did he treat you after that, Janie? When you met him at rehearsals? Was he embarrassed?'

‘Not a bit of it. He behaved as if nothing had happened between us. I mean, he stopped coming on to me, but he didn't try to avoid me or anything like that. And certainly his confidence wasn't affected. In fact, I would have said he was cockier than ever after that.'

‘Pleased that he had avoided the pitfalls of sin?' suggested Jude with some irony.

‘I don't think that was it. It was almost as if for him the process was complete. He'd got what he wanted out of his relationship with me. He'd persuaded me to agree to go to bed with him and, having achieved that, he had lost interest.'

What Janie Trotman had said confirmed the impression Jude had got when she and Ritchie met in the Crown and Anchor. She didn't know if there was a word to describe a man who behaved like that, but had it been a woman she would have been called a ‘cock-teaser'.

‘I
s that Jude Nichol?'

She was surprised. So few people ever referred to her by anything other than her first name. It was only on official documentation that she used the surname she had gained from her second marriage.

‘Yes,' she replied cautiously.

‘It's Detective Inspector Tull,' said the voice from the other end of the phone. ‘You remember you gave a statement to me and one of my colleagues after the death of Mr Ritchie Good.'

‘Yes, of course I remember.'

‘And I said then that I might be in touch with you again in connection with our enquiries.'

‘Yes.'

‘So here I am, being in touch,' he said with some levity in his voice.

‘Right, Inspector. What can I do for you?'

‘I just wanted to check a couple of details that you put in your statement.'

‘Fine. Fire away.' But Jude felt a small pang of panic. She had withheld from the police what Hester Winstone had said to her in the Green Room that Sunday night. Maybe, when interviewed, Hester herself had mentioned it and Inspector Tull was about to expose Jude's lie.

‘We've now spoken to all of the people who attended the rehearsal that afternoon,' the Inspector began smoothly, ‘and they all seem to tell more or less the same story.'

‘That's not surprising, is it?'

‘Not necessarily, no. And the sequence of events that everyone agrees on is that before the demonstration of his gallows, Gordon Blaine was holding a real noose as opposed to the fake one. Would you go along with that, Mrs Nichol?'

‘Please just call me Jude.'

‘Very well, Jude.'

‘Yes, I would go along with that.'

‘Thank you. And then when the stage curtains were drawn back to reveal Mr Good, he had the fake noose around his neck …?'

‘Yes.'

‘And he was standing on the wooden cart, which Gordon Blaine moved away so that it no longer supported him …?'

‘Exactly. And Ritchie then grabbed the noose so that the Velcro didn't give way immediately, and he did a bit of play-acting, as if he was actually being hanged.'

‘“Play-acting”?'

‘Yes, playing to the gallery, showing off.'

‘And to do that would have been in character for Mr Good?'

‘Completely.'

‘So, after the demonstration, everyone went off to the Cricketers pub opposite St Mary's Hall …?'

‘Yes, I'm honestly not certain whether
everyone
went, but most people certainly.'

‘And within half an hour you went back to the hall and found Mr Good dead, hanging from the gallows with the real noose round his neck …?'

‘As I said in my statement, yes.'

‘Yes. So within that half-hour – or however long it was exactly – someone substituted the real noose for the fake one …?'

‘They must have done.'

‘Mm.' The Inspector was silent for a moment. ‘When you went to the Cricketers pub that evening, did you notice any members of the group missing? Or did you see anyone leaving the pub to go back to the hall?'

‘I wasn't aware of anyone missing or anyone leaving, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. You know, I was just having a drink with a bunch of people. I wasn't expecting ever to be cross-examined on the precise events of the evening.'

‘No, of course you weren't.' Another silence. ‘Well, Jude, you'll be pleased to know that your account tallies more or less exactly with what all the other witnesses have said.'

‘Good.'

‘Did you know Mr Good well?'

‘No, I'd only met him since I became involved in the production.' No need to muddy the waters by mentioning drinks à deux in the Crown and Anchor.

‘So you probably didn't know him well enough to have a view on whether or not he might have suicidal tendencies?'

‘No. But from what I had seen of him, I would have thought it very unlikely.'

‘A lot of suicides are very unlikely.'

Jude agreed. She'd seen plenty of evidence of that in her work as a healer. ‘I know. It's often impossible to know what's going on inside another person's mind.'

‘Hm.'

‘Does that mean, Inspector, that you are thinking Ritchie changed the nooses round himself?'

‘It's something we're considering … along with a lot of other possibilities.' She might have known she would just get the standard evasive answer to a question like that. ‘One of the people in your group seemed to think it was the most likely explanation.'

‘Oh, who was that?'

‘Come on, Jude. You know I won't tell you that.'

‘Was it Hester Winstone?'

‘Or that.'

‘And I suppose you won't tell me if you're about to make an arrest either?'