Night at the Vulcan

Chapter X SUMMING UP

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.”

Alleyn said: “We are creatures of convention and like our tragedies to take a recognizable form.”

“I’m afraid this is not even a tragedy. Unless—” He turned his. head and looked at the other wall. “I haven’t seen Martyn,” he said, “since you spoke to her. She’s all right, isn’t she?” Before Alleyn could answer he went on: “I suppose she’s told you about herself — her arrival out of a clear sky and all the rest of it?”

“Everything, I think.”

“I hope to God— I want to see her, Alleyn. She’s alone in there. She may be frightened. I don’t suppose you understand.”

“She’s told me of the relationship between you.”

“The relationship!” he said quickly. “You mean—”

“She’s told me you are related. It’s natural that you should be concerned about her.”

Poole stared at him. “My good ass,” he said, “I’m nineteen years her senior and I love her like a boy of her own age.”

“In that case,” Alleyn remarked, “you can not be said to have run out of the appropriate emotions.”

He grinned at Poole in a friendly manner and, accompanied by Fox, went to his final interview — with Jacques Doré.

It took place on the stage. Dr. Rutherford had elected to retire into the office to effect, he had told Fox, a few paltry adjustments of his costume. The players, too, were all in their several rooms and Clem Smith had been wakened, re-examined by Fox, and allowed to go home.

So Jacko was alone in the tortured scene he had himself designed.

He looked a frightful scarecrow in his working clothes, with grey stubble on his chin, grey bags under his eyes and grey fuzz standing up on his head. His long crepe-y neck stuck out of the open collar of his tartan shirt. His eyes were bloodshot and his delicate hands were filthy.

“I have slept,” he announced, rising from the heap of old curtains which Clem had transformed into a bed, “like the Holy Innocents, though it is possible that I do not resemble any of them. However deceptive the outward man may be, gentlemen, the inner is entirely at your service.” He smiled ingratiatingly at them. His lips curled back and exposed teeth like a row of yellow pegs in a dice box. “What do we talk about?” he asked, and began to roll himself a cigarette.

“First of all,” Alleyn said, “I must tell you that I am asking for a general search through the clothes that have been worn in the theatre. We have no warrant at this stage but so far no one has objected.”

“Then who am I to do so?”

Fox went through his pockets and found a number of curious objects. — chalk, pencils, a rubber, a surgeon’s scalpel which Jacko said he used for wood carving, and which was protected by a sheath, a pocket-book with money, a photograph of Helena Hamilton, various scraps of paper with drawings on them, pieces of cotton-wool and an empty bottle smelling strongly of ether. This, he told Alleyn, had contained a fluid used for cleaning purposes. “Always they are messing themselves and always I am removing the mess. My overcoat is in the junk room. It contains merely a filthy handkerchief, I believe.”

Alleyn thanked him and returned the scalpel, the pocket-book and drawing materials. Fox laid the other things aside, sat down and opened his note-book.

“Next,” Alleyn said, “I think I’d better ask you what your official job is in this theatre. I see by the programme—”

“The programme,” Jacko said, “is euphemistic. ‘Assistant to Adam Poole,’ is it not? Let us rather say: Dogsbody in Ordinary to the Vulcan Theatre. Henchman Extraordinary to Mr. Adam Poole. At the moment, dresser to Miss Helena Hamilton. Confidant to all and sundry. Johannes Factotum and not without bells on. Le Vulcan, c’est moi, in a shabby manner of speaking. Also: j’y suis, j’y reste. I hope.”

“Judging by this scenery,” Alleyn rejoined, “and by an enchanting necklace which I think is your work, there shouldn’t be much doubt about that. But your association with the management goes farther back than the Vulcan, doesn’t it?”

“Twenty years,” Jacko said, licking his cigarette paper. “For twenty years I improvise my role of Pantaloon for them. Foolishness, but such is my deplorable type. The eternal doormat. What can I do for you?”

Alleyn said: “You can tell me if you still think Bennington committed suicide.”

Jacko lit his cigarette. “Certainly,” he said. “You are wasting your time.”

“Was he a vain man?”

“Immensely. And he knew he was artistically sunk.”

“Vain in his looks?”

“But yes, yes!” Jacko said with great emphasis, and then looked very sharply at Alleyn. “Why, of his looks?”

“Did he object to his make-up in this play? It seemed to me a particularly repulsive one.”

“He disliked it, yes. He exhibited the vanity of the failing actor in this. Always, always he must be sympathetic. Fortunately Adam insisted on the make-up.”

“I think you told me that you noticed his face was shining with sweat before he went for the last time to his room?”

“I did.”

“And you advised him to remedy this? You even looked into his room to make sure?”

“Yes,” Jacko agreed after a pause, “I did.”

“So when you had gone he sat at his dressing-table and carefully furbished up his repellent make-up as if for the curtain-call. And then gassed himself?”

“The impulse perhaps came very suddenly.” Jacko half-closed, his eyes and looked through their sandy lashes at his cigarette smoke. “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “Listen. He repairs his face. He has a last look at himself. He is about to get up when his attention sharpens. He continues to stare. He sees the ruin of his face. He was once a coarsely handsome fellow, was Ben, with a bold rakehelly air. The coarseness has increased, but where, he asks himself, are the looks? Pouches, grooves, veins, yellow eyeballs — and all emphasized most hideously by the make-up. This is what he has become, he thinks, he has become the man he has been playing. And his heart descends into his belly. He knows despair and he makes up his mind. There is hardly time to do it. In a minute or two he will be called. So quickly, quickly he lies on the floor, with trembling hands he pulls his coat over his head and puts the end of the gas tube in his mouth.”

“You knew how he was found, then?”

“Clem told me. I envisage everything. He enters a world of whirling dreams. And in a little while he is dead. I see it very clearly.”

“Almost as if you’d been there,” Alleyn said lightly. “Is this, do you argue, his sole motive? What about the quarrels that had been going on? The change of cast at the last moment? The handing over of Miss Gainsford’s part to Miss Tarne? He was very much upset by that, wasn’t he?”

Jacko doubled himself up like an ungainly animal and squatted on a stool. “Too much has been made of the change of casting,” he said. “He accepted it in the end. He made a friendly gesture. On thinking it over I have decided we were all wrong to lay so much emphasis on this controversy.” He peered sideways at Alleyn. “It was the disintegration of his artistic integrity that did it,” he said. “I now consider the change of casting to be of no significance.”

Alleyn looked him very hard in the eye. “And that,” he said, “is where we disagree. I consider it to be of the most complete significance: the key, in fact, to the whole puzzle of his death.”

“I cannot agree,” said Jacko. “I am sorry.”

Alleyn waited for a moment and then — and for the last time — asked the now familiar question.

“Do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”

There was a long silence. Jacko’s back was bent and his head almost between his knees.

“I have heard of him,” he said at last.

“Did you know him?”

“I have never met him. Never.”

“Perhaps you have seen some of his work?”

Jacko was silent.

“Können Sie Deutsch lesen?”

Fox looked up from his notes with an expression of blank surprise. They heard a car turn in from Carpet Street and come up the side lane with a chime of bells. It stopped and a door slammed.

“Jawohl,” Jacko whispered.

The outside doors of the dock were rolled back. The sound resembled stage-thunder. Then the inner and nearer doors opened heavily and someone walked round the back of the set. Young Lamprey came through the Prompt entrance. “The mortuary van, sir,” he said,

“All right. They can go ahead.”

He went out again. There was a sound of voices and of boots on concrete. A cold draught of night air blew in from the dock and set the borders creaking. A rope tapped against canvas and a sighing breath wandered about the grid. The doors were rolled together. The engine started up and, to another chime of bells, Bennington made his final exit from the Vulcan. The theatre settled back into its night-watch.

Jacko’s cigarette had burnt his lip. He spat it out and got slowly to his feet.

“You have been very clever,” he said. He spoke as if his lips were stiff with cold.

“Did Bennington tell you how he would, if necessary, play his trump card?”

“Not until after he had decided to play it.”

“But you had recognized the possibility?”

“Yes.”

Alleyn nodded to Fox, who shut his note-book, removed his spectacles and went out.

“What now?” Jacko asked,

“All on,” Alleyn said. “A company call. This is the curtain speech, Mr. Doré.”

Lamprey had called them and then retired. They found an empty stage awaiting them. It was from force of habit, Martyn supposed, that they took up, for the last time, their after-rehearsal positions on the stage. Helena lay back in her deep chair with Jacko on the floor at her feet. When he settled himself there, she touched his cheek and he turned his lips to her hand.

Martyn wondered if he was ill. He saw that she looked at him and made his clown’s grimace. She supposed that, like everybody else, he was merely exhausted. Darcey and Gay Gainsford sat together on the small settee and Parry Percival on his upright chair behind them. At the back, Dr. Rutherford lay on the sofa with a newspaper spread over his face. Martyn had returned to her old seat near the Prompt corner and Poole to his central chair facing the group. “We have come out of our rooms,” Martyn thought, “like rabbits from their burrows.” Through the Prompt entrance she could see Fred Badger, lurking anxiously in the shadows.

Alleyn and his subordinates stood in a group near the dock doors. On the wall close by them was the baize rack with criss-crossed tapes in which two receipts and a number of commercial cards were exhibited. Fox had read them all. He now replaced the last and looked through the Prompt corner to the stage.

“Are they all on?” Alleyn asked.

“All present and correct, sir.”

“Do you think I’m taking a very risky line, Br’er Fox?”

“Well, sir,” said Fox uneasily, “it’s a very unusual sort of procedure, isn’t it?”

“It’s a very unusual case,” Alleyn rejoined, and after a moment’s reflection he took Fox by the arm. “Come on, old trooper,” he said. “Let’s get it over.”

He walked onto the stage almost as if, like Poole, he were going to sum up a rehearsal. Fox went to his old chair near the back entrance. Martyn heard the other men move round behind the set. They took up positions, she thought, outside the entrances and it was unpleasant to think of them waiting there, unseen.

Alleyn stood with his back to the curtain and Poole at once slewed his chair round to face him. With the exception of Jacko, who was rolling a cigarette, they all watched Alleyn. Even the Doctor removed his newspaper, sat up, stared, groaned and returned ostentatiously to his former position.

For a moment Alleyn looked round the group, and to Martyn he seemed to have an air of compassion. When he began to speak his manner was informal but extremely deliberate.

“In asking you to come here together,” he said, “I’ve taken an unorthodox line. I don’t myself know whether I am justified in taking it, and I shan’t know until those of you who are free to do so have gone home. That will be in a few minutes, I think.

“I have to tell you that your fellow-player has been murdered. All of you must know that we’ve formed this opinion, and I think most of you know that I was first inclined to it by the circumstance of his behaviour on returning to his dressing-room. His last conscious act was to repair his stage make-up. While that seemed to me to be inconsistent with suicide, it was, on the other hand, much too slender a thread to tie up a case for homicide. But there is more conclusive evidence and I’m going to put it before you. He powdered his face. His dresser had already removed the pieces of cottonwool that had been used earlier in the evening and put out a fresh pad. Yet after his death there was no used pad of cotton-wool anywhere in the room. There is, on the other hand, a fresh stain near the gas fire which may, on analysis, turn out to have been caused by such a pad having been burnt on the hearth. The box of powder has been overturned on the shelf and there is a deposit of powder all over that corner of the room. As you know, his head and shoulders were covered, tent-wise, with his overcoat. There was powder on this coat and over his finger-prints on the top of the gas fire. The coat had hung near the door and would, while it was there, have been out of range of any powder flying about. The powder, it is clear, had been scattered after and not before he was gassed. If he was, in fact, gassed.”

Poole and Darcey made, simultaneous ejaculations. Helena and Gay looked bewildered, and Percival incredulous. Jacko stared at the floor and the Doctor groaned under his newspaper.

“The post mortem,” Alleyn said, “will of course settle this one way or the other. It will be exhaustive. No, it’s quite certain that the dresser didn’t go into the room after Mr. Bennington entered it this last time, and it is equally certain that the dresser left it in good order — the powder-pad prepared, the clothes hung up, the fire burning and the door unlocked. It is also certain that the powder was not overturned by the men who carried Mr. Bennington out. It was spilt by someone who was in the room after he was on the floor with the coat over his head. This person, the police will maintain, was his murderer. Now the question arises, doesn’t it, how it came about that he was in such a condition — comatose or unconscious — that it was possible to get him down on the floor, put out the gas fire, and then disengage the connecting tube, put the rubber end in his mouth and turn the gas on again, get his finger-prints on the wing-tap and cover him with his own overcoat There is still about one-sixth of brandy left in his flask. He was not too drunk to make up his own face and he was more or less his own man, though not completely so, when he spoke to Miss Tarne just before he went into his room. During the second interval Mr. Darcey hit him on the jaw and raised a bruise. I suppose it is possible that his murderer hit him again on the same spot — there is no other bruise — and knocked him out. A closer examination of the bruise may show if this was so. In that case the murderer would need to pay only one visit to the room: he would simply walk in a few minutes before the final curtain, knock his victim out and set the stage for apparent suicide.

“On the other hand, it’s possible that he was drugged.”

He waited for a moment. Helena Hamilton said: “I don’t believe in all this. I don’t mean, Mr. Alleyn, that I think you’re wrong: I mean it just sounds unreal and rather commonplace like a case reported in a newspaper. One knows that probably it’s all happened but one doesn’t actively believe it. I’m sorry. I interrupted.”

“I hope,” Alleyn said, “you will all feel perfectly free to interrupt at any point. About this possibility of drugging. If the brandy was drugged, then of course we shall find out. Moreover, it must have been tinkered with after he went on for his final scene. Indeed, any use of a drug, and one cannot disregard the possibility of even the most fantastic methods, must surely have been prepared while he was on the stage during the last act. We shall, of course, have a chemical analysis made of everything he used — the brandy, his tumbler, his cigarettes, his make-ups and even the greasepaint on his face. I tell you, quite frankly, that I’ve no idea at all whether this will get us any further.”

Fox cleared his throat. This modest sound drew the attention of the company upon him but he merely looked gravely preoccupied and they turned back to Alleyn.

“Following out this line of thought, it seems clear,” he said, “that two visits would have to be made to the dressing-room. The first, during his scene in the last act, and the second, after he had come off and before the smell of gas was first noticed — by Mr. Parry Percival.”

Percival said in a high voice: “I knew this was coming.” Gay Gainsford turned and looked at him with an expression of the liveliest horror. He caught her eye and said: “Oh, don’t be fantastic, Gay darling. Honestly!

“Mr. Percival,” Alleyn said, “whose room is next to Mr. Bennington’s and whose fire backs on his, noticed a smell of gas when he was about to go out for the curtain-call. He tells us he is particularly sensitive to the smell because of its associations in this theatre and that he turned his own fire off and went out. Thus his fingerprints were found on the tap.”

“Well, naturally they were,” Parry said angrily. “Really, Gay!”

“This, of course,” Alleyn went on, “was reminiscent of the Jupiter case, but in that case the tube was not disconnected because the murderer never entered the room. He blew down the next-door tube and the fire went out. In that instance the victim was comatose from alcohol. Now, it seems quite clear to us that while this thing was planned with one eye on the Jupiter case, there was no intention to throw the blame upon anyone else and that Mr. Percival’s reaction to the smell was not foreseen by the planner. What the planner hoped to emphasize was Mr, Bennington’s absorption in the former case. We were to suppose that when he decided to take his own life he used the method by which he was obsessed. Suppose this to have been so. Wouldn’t we, remembering the former case, suspect that it was not suicide at all and look for what my colleague likes to call funny business? On the other hand…” Alleyn paused. Percival, who was obviously lost in his sense of release, and Gay Gainsford, who equally obviously was in a high state of confusion, both seemed to pull themselves together.

“On the other hand,” Alleyn repeated, “suppose this hypothetical planner was none other than Bennington himself?”

Their response to this statement had a delayed action. They behaved as actors do when they make what is technically known as a “double take.” There were a few seconds of blank witlessness followed by a sudden and violent reaction, Darcey and Percival shouted together that it would be exactly like Ben, Helena cried out inarticulately and Poole gave a violent ejaculation. The Doctor crackled his newspaper and Martyn’s thoughts tumbled about in her head like dice. Jacko alone stared incredulously at Alleyn.

“Do you mean,” Jacko asked, “that we are to understand that Ben killed himself in such a way as to throw suspicion of murder upon one of us? Is that your meaning?”

“No. For a time we wondered if this might be so, but the state of the dressing-room, as I’d hoped I’d made clear, flatly contradicts any such theory. No. I believe the planner based the method on Bennington’s preoccupation with the other case and hoped we would be led to some such conclusion. If powder had not been spilt on the overcoat we might well have done so.”

“So we are still — in the dark,” Helena said, and gave the commonplace phrase a most sombre colour.

“Not altogether. I needn’t go over the collection of near-motives that have cropped up in the course of our interviews. Some of them sound far-fetched, others at least possible. It’s not generally recognized that, given a certain temperament, the motive for homicide can be astonishingly unconvincing. Men have been killed from petty covetousness, out of fright, vanity, jealousy, boredom or sheer hatred. One or other of these motives lies at the back of this case. You all, I think, had cause to dislike this man. In one of you the cause was wedded to that particular kink which distinguishes murderers from the rest of mankind. With such beings there is usually some, shall I say, explosive agency — a sort of fuse — which, if it is touched off, sets them going as murder-machines. In this case I believe the fuse to have been a letter written by Otto Brod to Clark Bennington. This letter has disappeared and was probably burnt in his dressing-room. As the powder-pad may have been burnt By his murderer.”

Poole said: “I can’t begin to see the sense of all this,” and Helena said drearily: “Dark. In the dark.”

Alleyn seemed to be lost in thought. Martyn, alone of all the company, looked at him. She thought she had never seen a face as withdrawn and — incongruously the word flashed up again — compassionate. She wondered if he had come to some crucial point and she watched anxiously for the sign of a decision. But at this moment she felt Poole’s eyes upon her, and when she looked at him they exchanged the delighted smiles of lovers. “How can we,” she thought, and tried to feel guilty. But she hadn’t heard Alleyn speak and he was half-way through his first sentence before she gave him her attention.

“—so far about opportunity,” he was saying. “If there were two visits to the dressing-room during the last act I think probably all of you except Miss Hamilton could have made the earlier one. But for the second visit there is a more restricted field. Shall I take you in the order in which you are sitting? Miss Tarne, in that case, comes first.”

Martyn thought: “I ought to feel frightened again.”

“Miss Tarne has told us that after she left the stage, and she was the first to leave it, she stood at the entry to the dressing-room passage. She was in a rather bemused state of mind and doesn’t remember much about it until Mr. Percival, Mr. Darcey and Mr. Bennington himself came past. All three spoke to her in turn and went on down the passage. It is now that the crucial period begins. Mr. Doré was near by, and after directing the gun-shot took her to her dressing-room. On the way he looked in for a few seconds on Mr. Bennington, who had just gone to his own room. After Miss Tarne and Mr. Doré had both heard Mr. Darcey and Mr. Perdval return to the stage, they followed them out. They give each other near-alibis up to this point and the stagehands extend Miss Tarne’s alibi to beyond the crucial time. She is, I think, out of the picture.”

Gay Gainsford stared at Martyn. “That,” she said, “must be quite a change for you.”

“Miss Gainsford comes next,” Alleyn said as if he had not heard her. “She was in the Greenroom throughout the crucial period and tells us she was asleep. There is no witness to this.”

“George!” said Gay Gainsford wildly and turned to Darcey, thus revealing for the first time his Christian name. “It’s all right, dear,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. It’s all right.”

“Mr. Darcey and Mr. Percival are also in the list of persons without alibis. They left the stage and returned to it, together, or nearly so. But they went of course to separate rooms. Mr. Percival is the only one who noticed the smell of gas. Dr. Rutherford,” Alleyn went on, moving slightly in order to see the Doctor, “could certainly have visited the room during this period, as at any other stage of the performance. He could have come down from his box, passed unobserved round the back of the scenery, taken cover and gone in after these four persons were in their own rooms.”

He waited politely, but the Doctor’s newspaper rose and fell rhythmically. Alleyn raised his voice slightly. “He could have returned to his O.P. stairs when the rest of you were collected on the Prompt side and he could have made an official entry in the character of Author.” He waited for a moment. The others looked in a scandalized manner at the recumbent Doctor but said nothing.

“Mr. Poole has himself pointed out that he could have darted to the room during his brief period offstage. He could not, in my opinion, have effected all that had to be done, and if he had missed his re-entry he would have drawn immediate attention to himself.

“Mr. Doré is in a somewhat different category from the rest,” Alleyn continued. “We know he came away from her dressing-room with Miss Tarne, but although he was seen with the others on the Prompt side, he was at the back of the group and in the shadows. Everyone’s attention at this period was riveted on the stage. The call-boy checked over the players for the curtain-call and noticed Mr. Bennington had not yet appeared. Neither he nor anyone else had reason to check Mr. Doré‘s movements.”

Jacko said: “I remind you that Parry said he smelt gas while I was still with Miss Tarne in her room.”

“I have remembered,” Alleyn answered, “what Mr. Percival said.” He looked at Helena Hamilton. “And while all this was happening,” he concluded, “Miss Hamilton was on the stage holding the attention of a great cloud of witnesses in what I think must have been a most remarkable play.” There was a long silence.

“That’s all I have to say.” Alleyn’s voice changed its colour a little. “I’m going to ask you to return to your rooms. You’ll want to do so in any case to collect your coats and so on. If you would like to talk things over among yourselves you are quite free to do so. We shall be in the Greenroom. If each of you will come in and leave us an address and telephone number I’ll be grateful.” He looked round them for a moment. Perhaps deliberately he repeated the stage-manager’s customary dismissal: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That will be all.”