The Strangling on the Stage

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 scrambling 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.’