The Strangling on the Stage

THIRTY-ONE

When Jude came to, she looked up to find herself surrounded by a circle of curious holidaymakers. Amongst the concerned faces looking down at her was Carole’s. A confusion of voices commented on what had happened.

‘I think we should phone for an ambulance.’

‘There’s a doctor’s surgery just along the road.’

‘Should be the police we call for. That car was going way over the speed limit.’

But it was Carole’s voice saying, ‘How do you feel?’ that cut through the others.

‘Not too bad, I think,’ said Jude, trying to assess the extent of her injuries. ‘Give me a hand and I think I could try standing up.’

Ignoring opinions from the growing crowd that ‘she shouldn’t be moved until the ambulance is here’, Carole’s thin arms hooked themselves under Jude’s chubby ones and got her, first to a sitting position, then upright on her two rather tottery legs.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Think so, Carole. Just a quick check for damage.’

There was quite a bit. The wing of the car had turned her escaping body and flung her face down on to the edge of the road. Her arms had taken the brunt of the impact. Though that had protected her face, the encounter with the tarmac had shredded the palms of her hands. Blood was just starting to well from rows of little scrapes there. Her knees were in a similar state. They were the kinds of wounds that were too recent to have started hurting, but would be agony when they began to heal.

‘Let go of me, Carole. See if I can stand on my own.’

She could. Just about. Not confident, stable standing. More the wobbly, determined kind.

Another voice from the crowd expressed the opinion that an ambulance should be called.

‘No,’ said Carole firmly. ‘Be quicker if I drive her to the hospital.’

Her Renault had stopped in the middle of the road, with the driver’s door open. Carole must have stopped when she saw the crowd around the injured Jude.

Ignoring protests from people who all clearly saw themselves as ‘good in a crisis’, Carole collected up the ‘Bag for Life’ (the eggs inside it all sadly smashed). Then she manhandled Jude into the passenger seat of the car, ignoring her insistence that ‘I’ll bleed all over your upholstery.’

The fact that she said, ‘That doesn’t matter’ was a measure of how seriously Carole viewed her neighbour’s predicament. Normally nothing would be allowed to sully the pristine cleanliness of the Renault’s interior.

They drove a little way in silence, till they had turned off the seafront road. Then the car drew to a sedate halt in a vacant parking space.

‘We’re not going to the hospital, are we, Carole?’

‘No, of course we’re not. We’re just going to get you patched up a bit first.’

It was entirely in character the Carole Seddon would have a well-stocked first aid box in her car. And the efficiency with which she mopped up and dressed the grazes on Jude’s hands and knees suggested that her Home Office training might at some point have included a course in first aid.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘You’ll do. Sure you didn’t suffer any blows to the head?’

‘No, I was lucky in that respect. Just the hands and knees … and the general feeling of a rag doll who’s just been thrown against the wall by a particularly belligerent toddler.’

‘You’ll survive,’ was the unsentimental response from Carole.

‘Yes, I’ve no doubt I’ll survive. Now, who are we going to get the address from?’

‘Elizaveta’d know it.’

‘Undoubtedly, but I’m not sure how good our credit is there. What about Davina?’

‘Do you have her number?’

‘It’s in the “Contacts” in my mobile. But you’d better ring her. I don’t think I can manage the keyboard with my hands like this.’

Carole got through to Davina and the required information was readily supplied.

‘It’s in Fethering,’ she told Jude.

The house was one of the oldest in the village, in a row of small cottages whose original owners had worked in what was then the only industry, fishing. Once regarded as little more than hovels, they were now highly sought-after second homes for wealthy Londoners. Many of them had been refurbished to within an inch of their lives, but there were still a few that had been passed on within families for generations. On these there were fewer window boxes, hanging baskets and quaint cast-iron nameplates.

The house that matched the address Davina had supplied was one of the untarted-up variety. Carole drew up her white Renault behind the already parked white Renault and looked across at Jude. ‘Ready for it?’

Her neighbour nodded and the two women got out of the car with, in Jude’s case, some discomfort. Even in the short journey from Smalting, as the shock of the impact wore off her individual injuries were starting to give her a lot of pain.

Carole knocked on the door, which was promptly opened. Mimi Lassiter looked unsurprised to see her visitors, though perhaps a bit disappointed that one of them was Jude.

‘I think you know why we’ve come to see you,’ said Carole, very Home Office.

‘I think I probably do. Come in.’

The sitting room into which she led them reminded both women of Gordon Blaine’s. It was not just the small dimensions – in this case due to the original builder rather than the owner’s DIY conversion – but the furniture, the ornaments and the pictures on the walls were all from an earlier era. The house had been decorated in the time of Mimi’s parents and she had either not wanted to – or not dared to – change a thing.

It wasn’t an occasion for pleasantries or offers of coffee. Mimi Lassiter sat in a cracked leather armchair, set facing the television, and her guests in straight-backed chairs either side of the box.

‘Rather rash of you this morning, wasn’t it?’ said Carole. ‘Making a public attack on Jude by driving straight at her? There’d have been lots of witnesses on the seafront at Smalting. I’m sure someone would have taken note of your registration number.’

‘I wasn’t thinking very straight this morning,’ said Mimi, sounding as ever like a rather pernickety maiden aunt. ‘I was upset.’

‘Do you often get upset?’ asked Jude.

‘Not very often, but I do. My mother used to look after me when I got upset, but since she’s passed, I’ve had to manage it on my own.’

‘And,’ said Carole, ‘do you regard trying to run someone down in cold blood as “managing it on your own”?’

‘It made sense. I couldn’t see any other way out. And when I heard from Elizaveta that you two were actually investigating Ritchie Good’s death … as I say, I wasn’t thinking very straight. It probably wasn’t the most sensible thing to do.’

To Carole and Jude this seemed like something of an understatement.

‘No,’ said Mimi. ‘I’ve been very foolish. My mother always used to say, “At times, Mimi, you can be very foolish.” And she had ways of stopping me being foolish, but now she’s gone …’

‘How long ago did your mother die?’ asked Jude.

‘Nine years ago. It was just round the time when I was retiring from work.’

‘What did you do when you were working?’

‘I trained in Worthing as a shorthand typist. I was very good. I got a diploma. I could have got a job anywhere, even in London. But I didn’t want to leave Fethering. Mummy needed help with Daddy. He was virtually bedridden for a long time. So I got a secretarial job at Hadleigh’s. Do you know them?’

‘No.’

‘Big nursery, just between here and Worthing. Lots of glasshouses. Well, they were made of glass when I started there. Now they’re mostly that polythene stuff. Still a very big company, though. I did very well at Hadleigh’s. They very nearly made me office manager. But I wasn’t as good on the computers as I had been on the typewriter, so they appointed someone else. I never really took to computers in the same way I took to the typewriter. So they kept me on at Hadleigh’s, but there was never any more chance of promotion. Then they opened up a Farm Shop and they suggested I might work in there. But I didn’t like it. Some members of the public can be very rude, you know.’

‘So,’ Jude recapitulated, ‘your mother died around the time you retired. That must have been a very big double blow for you.’

‘Oh, it was. Two days before I left Hadleigh’s. And it wasn’t real retirement. I mean, I hadn’t served all the time that … They gave me my full pension, but it was really …’

‘Early retirement,’ suggested Carole, whose experience of the same thing still rankled.

Mimi nodded. She looked shaken by the memory. ‘I was in a very bad state round then, I remember. I know it’s wrong, but at times I did think about ending it all. I just felt so isolated.’

‘Are you saying you attempted suicide?’

‘No, not quite. But I thought about it. I even started stockpiling paracetamol, but then things got better.’

‘In what way?’ asked Jude. ‘Was it because you’d joined SADOS?’

Mimi nodded enthusiastically. ‘Fortunately that happened fairly soon after Mummy passed. That’s what really got me out of the terrible state I was in. Elizaveta Dalrymple used to come to the Farm Shop while I was still working there. And she said how the society was always looking for new members and she persuaded me to come along to a social meeting. She can be very persuasive, Elizaveta.’

‘Yes,’ Carole agreed drily.

‘So that’s how I started with SADOS. As a very humble new member … little knowing that I would one day end up at the dizzy heights of Membership Secretary.’ Clearly the appointment was one that meant a great deal to Mimi Lassiter.

‘I’d never wanted to act,’ she went on. ‘I couldn’t act to save my life, but they found things for me to do backstage. And occasionally I’m in crowd scenes … like I am for The Devil’s Disciple. Elizaveta always makes me feel part of the company, though, and she even started inviting me to parties at her home.’

‘Her “drinkies things”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. Where we saw you on Saturday.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what about Freddie? Did you have much to do with him?’

‘Oh, Freddie.’ An expression of sheer hero-worship took over her face. ‘He was wonderful. Did you ever meet him?’

‘Didn’t have that pleasure,’ said Jude.

‘Though we’ve heard so much about him,’ said Carole, ‘that we feel as though we’ve met him.’

‘He was just a wonderful man. So talented. And so kind to everyone, particularly to new members of SADOS.’

A look was exchanged between Carole and Jude. Each knew the other was thinking, ‘particularly to new, young, pretty members of the SADOS’. Who could benefit so much from Freddie’s assistance when working on their parts in his flat in Worthing. Another look between the two also made a silent agreement that they weren’t about to ask whether Mimi Lassiter had ever been the recipient of a star-shaped pendant. It just didn’t seem likely.

‘I gather,’ said Carole, ‘it was a great upheaval for the society when Freddie Dalrymple died.’

‘Oh, it was terrible. For a long time nobody knew what would happen to SADOS. It seemed impossible that the society could continue without Freddie. But that’s when Elizaveta really came into her own. She’s such a strong woman, you know.’

Neither Carole nor Jude was about to argue with that.

‘Could we come back to this morning?’ Carole’s question was not one that would have brooked the answer no.

‘All right,’ said Mimi, instantly subdued.

‘And your attempt to kill Jude.’ Mimi did not argue with the phrasing. ‘You’ve told us you were in a bad state this morning, that you weren’t thinking straight, but you haven’t told us why you wanted Jude dead.’

‘I wanted both of you dead,’ said Mimi with refreshing honesty. ‘I still do.’

An anxious look passed between the two women. Was their unwilling hostess about to produce a gun?

‘But Elizaveta told me that’s not the right way to proceed.’

‘I’d go along with that,’ Carole agreed. ‘But when did Elizaveta say this?’

‘Just now. The phone was ringing when I got back from Smalting.’

‘And had she rung you earlier in the morning as well?’

‘Yes. She told me you were both coming round. And she said you were coming because you thought Ritchie Good’s death might not be an accident.’

‘Which is why you were waiting for us in your Renault? To run us down?’

‘Yes,’ Mimi replied quietly.

Jude took over. ‘Elizaveta said just now on the phone that what you’d done wasn’t the right way to proceed. Did she tell you what would have been the right way?’

‘Elizaveta had seen what had happened in the street outside her house. She knew that I had tried to kill you, and she said that I shouldn’t try to do things like that ever again.’ She made it sound like a child being chastised by a parent for not making her bed. And Jude was struck by the fact that Mimi Lassiter was childlike. There was something emotionally undeveloped about her, the little girl who could not make her own decisions, who had to be directed by a stronger woman. Like her mother … or Elizaveta Dalrymple.

‘Tell us about Ritchie Good’s death,’ said Jude gently.

‘What about it?’

‘You switched the real noose for the doctored one, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Once again there was pride in her voice.

‘And had you planned to do that,’ asked Carole, ‘after you’d heard Gordon Blaine describe the mechanism the previous day?’

‘That planted the idea in my head, yes.’

‘So what actually happened after the rehearsal that Sunday afternoon?’

‘Well, it was very lucky, actually.’ Mimi was now talking with enthusiasm, and clearly not a vestige of guilt. ‘Most people had left St Mary’s Hall, but I was gathering my bits together, my bag and what-have-you. I’d left them in the Green Room, so I was near the stage, and I heard some people come in, and I recognized Ritchie Good’s voice, and Hester Winstone’s. And he was saying how she’d missed a really good show when he used the gallows and she must have what he called “a command performance”. Well, Hester didn’t sound very interested, and Ritchie was trying to persuade her, and I thought, “I’m never going to get a better opportunity than this.” So I went onstage, and the curtains were drawn and it was easy to get on to the cart and switch the two nooses around. And then I slipped out of the hall without them seeing me, and I went to the Cricketers.’ She smiled beatifically. ‘It all worked remarkably well, didn’t it?’

There was a silence. Then Carole asked, ‘And did you do it because the night before you heard Elizaveta say that she wanted Ritchie dead?’

Mimi looked at her curiously. ‘No, it was nothing to do with Elizaveta.’

‘Then why did you do it?’ asked Jude.

‘Well, obviously … because Ritchie Good was in a SADOS production while not being a member of SADOS. He hadn’t paid his subscription.’