The Strangling on the Stage

TWENTY-NINE

Jude rang Storm that evening, but got no reply from either her landline or the mobile. She left a message on each, calming herself so as not to sound alarmist and asking Storm to ring her back.

The reply came the next morning, the Tuesday, just as Jude was washing up her breakfast things. ‘Hello?’

‘Oh, it’s Storm, returning your call. What is it? Have you got transport problems for rehearsal tonight, because I’ll happily give you a lift.’

‘No, it’s not that.’ Storm sounded so cheerful, so full of life, that Jude found it really difficult to bring up the subject she wanted to discuss. ‘Actually, it’s in relation to you and Ritchie Good.’

‘Oh?’ The caller’s tone changed instantly, from open and enthusiastic to crabby and suspicious.

‘And it also concerns Elizaveta Dalrymple.’

The call was instantly ended. Jude tried ringing back straight away, but the mobile had been switched off. And calls to the landline switched straight through to the answering machine.

Jude didn’t finish tidying up breakfast. She went straight round to High Tor.

The two neighbours quickly agreed that it was time to confront Elizaveta Dalrymple. ‘There was no way she could have done it herself,’ said Carole, ‘but if she set up Storm …’

‘I’m still finding it difficult to cast Storm in that role.’

‘Maybe, but that’s just because she’s a friend.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And from all the encounters with murderers you’ve had, you should know by now that appearances are very rarely other than deceptive.’

‘I know all that too.’

‘Come on,’ said Carole brusquely, ‘I think you should ring Elizaveta and find out when we can see her.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you know her better than I do.’

It was only when she had dialled the number that Jude realized that the two of them had spent almost exactly the same amount of time in Elizaveta Dalrymple’s company. Still, there were times when arguing with Carole just wasn’t worth the effort.

The late April weather, particularly benign that morning and with a promise of summer, had brought a surprising influx of tourists to Smalting. All the parking on the road facing the sea was taken and Carole was annoyed to have to pay at the small car park at the end of Elizaveta’s road.

‘Will we be out within the hour?’ she asked as she took her change purse out of her neat and nearly empty handbag.

‘I’d pay for two,’ said Jude. ‘Never know how long something like this’ll take.’

Huffily Carole paid for the requisite ticket, placed it prominently on the dashboard and locked the car. The two women were both rather tense as they walked along.

‘I wonder if she’ll be on her own …’ Jude mused.

‘Why shouldn’t she be? Did she say there was anyone with her when you rang?’

‘No, she didn’t. But I’ll bet from the moment I put the phone down she’s been ringing round all her cronies to tell them about our visit.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I’m sure so. Maybe some of them will have rushed round to give her support.’

‘You don’t think any of them will be armed, do you?’ asked Carole.

Jude giggled. ‘No, I don’t think any of them will be armed.’

The doorbell was answered promptly. Dressed in another ample kaftan, Elizaveta once again led them to the upstairs sitting room. Once again they took in the memorabilia of past SADOS triumphs on the walls. Jude looked particularly at the ‘canvas effect’ print of the Macbeths.

The beauty of the day meant that the view over Smalting Beach was better than ever. One of the high windows was raised a little to let in a soft, salty breeze. On the sand they could see parents and grandparents playing with pre-school-age children. Both Carole and Jude found themselves instinctively looking over towards the rows of beach huts and remembering a previous investigation that had focused on one of them.

Elizaveta sat them down. They refused her offer of coffee and so she sat facing them. Her chair had pretensions to being a throne. There was another identical one in the room. Presumably ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ when Freddie had been alive. Elizaveta looked as if she expected some major confrontation, and it was a prospect that excited rather than frightened her.

‘So,’ she said rather grandly, ‘to what do I owe the honour of your visit?’

They hadn’t planned any particular approach, so Carole decided to open the proceedings. ‘We’re here to talk about Ritchie Good’s death.’

‘Are you really?’ Elizaveta let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘If you were listening when you were here on Saturday, you should have realized I do not particularly wish to talk about Ritchie Good.’

‘But I think we have to talk about him.’

‘Do you? I must say I think it’s a bit rich that I should be being told what to talk about by a mere prompter.’

‘The fact is,’ said Jude, ‘that we are not convinced the Ritchie Good’s death was an accident.’

‘I imagine that is a subject on which there has been a great deal of fevered conjecture amongst the SADOS members. Now I’m no longer with the society, I cannot obviously—’

‘Oh, come on, Elizaveta, you get reports from your personal grapevine about everything that goes on there.’

‘Perhaps I do. But I still can’t see how the accidental or non-accidental death of Ritchie Good has anything to do with me.’

‘You can’t deny,’ said Carole, ‘that his death suited you very well.’

She shrugged. ‘Sometimes the fates are generous. No, I can’t pretend I shed many tears when I heard of his demise. Apart from being appallingly rude to me, he showed no respect for anything that Freddie and I had achieved in SADOS.’

‘And the death was easily engineered,’ Carole continued. ‘All that was required was for somebody to change the doctored noose on the gallows to the real one.’

‘I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you are. Because Gordon Blaine explained the workings of his gallows in exhaustive detail at your “drinkies thing” the night before Ritchie’s death.’

‘Goodness me. You have been doing your research, haven’t you?’

‘Do you deny it?’

‘No, of course I don’t. One thing I would like to know, though. If either of you think I was responsible for Ritchie’s death, I’d love to know how I did it. The hanging – or strangulation – happened, I gather, in St Mary’s Hall. Now I have not been in St Mary’s Hall since I was forced to leave the production of The Devil’s Disciple, neither to sabotage a gallows nor for any other reason. I’d be intrigued to know how I am supposed to have engineered this fatal accident.’

‘You planned it,’ said Jude. ‘You got someone else to switch the nooses for you.’

‘How remarkably clever of me. What, so I had a private meeting with someone, did I? I took them on one side and said, “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to bump off Ritchie Good for me?” And they said, “Terrific idea, Elizaveta. Regard it as done.” Is that how it happened … roughly?’

‘No, it wasn’t as overt as that,’ said Carole. ‘At that same party –’ (she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘drinkies thing’) – ‘when Gordon Blaine described the mechanism, you said to everyone how pleased you’d be if Ritchie Good was accidentally hanged.’

‘Well, I may have said that, but only as a joke.’

‘But did everyone present realize it was a joke?’

‘I assumed so, but …’ She seemed rather attracted to the idea as she articulated it. ‘Do you think there really was someone who took what I said seriously enough … who cared enough about me to take the hint and do what I’d asked for?’

‘I think that was what you were hoping,’ said Carole.

‘Really?’ Elizaveta was still intrigued. ‘But who might have done it? A few years ago I would have thought it was Olly Pinto. When he first joined SADOS, he was, I have to say, totally besotted with little moi. Then he would have done anything for me. Now … I don’t know what’s happened to him, but whatever he once felt for me has been … well, to put it mildly, diluted. Now I think he only comes to see me because he’s lonely.’

Jude was surprised to see a tear gleaming in Elizaveta Dalrymple’s eye.

‘I think that’s why most of them stay around me …’ the old woman went on. ‘Because they’re lonely. I think with most of them, it was Freddie they were really loyal to, not me. When Freddie was around, our “drinkies things” were legendary. Just had to mention we were having one and people’d be falling over themselves to get here. Now I have to ring round those who are left and virtually beg them to come along.’

The tears were really falling now, streaking mascara down on to Elizaveta’s heavily made-up cheeks. ‘My life really stopped,’ she went on, ‘when Freddie died. Oh, I’ve tried to maintain a front. I’ve acted hearty, bitchy, thick-skinned. It’s been the toughest performance of my life … and I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. The effort of preparing to see people, of being a hostess, it just gets harder and harder. And after everyone’s gone, I just sink back into total black despair. I just can’t go on like this.’

Carole and Jude exchanged looks. Though Elizaveta was, as ever, self-dramatizing, they could both recognize the core of genuine suffering. And both wondered how big a blow it had been to her when she had discovered that Davina Vere Smith had also been given a star-shaped pendant. It must have brought home – probably not for the first time – the knowledge that the much-vaunted marriage to Freddie had not been as perfect as its mythology might suggest.

But Elizaveta’s personality was not one to stay down for too long. She perked up with her next thought. ‘So you do really think that someone took what I said seriously enough to act on it? To switch the nooses? Somebody actually cared for me enough to do that?’

Without commenting on the woman’s strangely skewed sense of values, Carole replied, ‘We think it’s possible. But nobody said anything to you about having done it?’

‘No. Why should they?’

Jude shrugged. ‘To report back: Mission Accomplished?’

‘No. Nobody has. And I think in a way that’s rather splendid. Whoever it is did something purely out of love for me, and then didn’t want to crow about it.’

They could see Elizaveta Dalrymple transforming before their eyes. A moment ago she had been the sad, neglected, wronged widow. Now she was moving into the role of charismatic inspirer of others. She was eternally recasting herself, but the scenarios in which she appeared all had one thing in common: Elizaveta Dalrymple was playing the lead in all of them.

‘So,’ she said, now rather magnificent after her grief, ‘who do I have to thank for my revenge on Ritchie Good? What is the name of my guardian angel?’

‘We think it was probably Storm Lavelle,’ said Jude.

‘Oh,’ said Elizaveta, basking in glee. ‘I always thought that young woman had something about her. She’s very talented, too. You know, I can see in little Storm something of myself at the same age.’