Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

“Tough.” Nick still felt shaky at his own daring.

The ambulance arrived at the same time as the patrol car, and it became clear that Nick’s diagnosis of unnatural death might be correct.

“How do you know so much about it, anyway?” Les averted his eyes from his cousin’s corpse, lying by the piano by itself, awaiting the arrival of higher police authority. It looked lonely, and Nick felt protective of the late Greta Hobbs.

“She smelt like your Turkish Salsa gone wrong, that’s why. And she’d blue lips and thrown up.” It didn’t seem right talking about it.

“Maybe that was the chicken,” Les said uneasily. He’d sent some food to the group before the show began.

Sherlock Holmes used to be treated with more respect, Nick reflected bitterly, as he retired to a corner with Les. He was an aficionado of crime fiction from Poe through Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Christie, right up to Peter and Phil Lovesey, Chaz Brenchley and anything he could lay his hands on. He was addicted, whether it be hard-boiled realism or soft-boiled cosy, and irrespective of whether great-grandad used to dabble with a magnifying glass in deepest Muckshire. Tonight Nick’s nose had twitched just as it had in protest at Les putting dried parsley in the prawns. Something hadn’t been right.

When higher police authority arrived, Nick had visions of Jack Frost clapping him on the back, or Inspector Morse reluctantly congratulating him. Unfortunately Detective Superintendent Bishop wasn’t like either of them. His amiable smile gave him the look of everybody’s ideal family doctor. While the police doctor was examining the corpse and most of the audience were filing out under the guidance of a sergeant, he was ambling around the taped-off areas of stage and auditorium like a lazy trout, but Nick couldn’t help noticing his eyes darted everywhere like a particularly hungry piranha fish. They fell on Nick and Les.

“Who might you be? Two more strippers?”

“Catering staff,” Les growled. “We done the supper.”

Nick nudged him, seeing pitfalls ahead, but the piranha spotted him.

“I don’t wonder you’re worried, sir,” he said soothingly to Nick. “We won’t know for sure this is poison till the PM’s done, but you’ll have a few questions to answer if it is. You won’t mind that, I’m sure.”

“I was the one who said you should be called in,” Nick yelped.

Bishop shook his head sadly. “The last fellow who tried that double bluff on me is doing life.”

“If it was cyanide,” Nick said desperately, “it must have been on a poisoned dart unless-” An eyebrow was raised, and he continued hastily, “Our dinner was over by nine o’clock and she didn’t die till ten-twenty.” Too late, he realized poisoned darts were out, for he wouldn’t have smelled almonds then.

“Fancy you knowing what poison it might have been, sir. Washed everything up, have you?”

“Yes,” Les answered bleakly.

“Don’t worry about a thing, sir. We’ll find something,” Bishop assured him cheerily. “If there’s anything to find,” he added as a throwaway.

“Did any of the glasses on the piano smell of almonds?” Nick asked hopefully.

Bishop’s smile became even more genial. “Why? Didn’t drop anything in, did you?”

“No.” It came out as a bleat.

“Just joking, lad. You’ll get used to my merry sense of humour. Why do you think the poison was in a glass?”

“I don’t, because although she had just drunk from one-”

“Who filled it?”

“I don’t know, but she couldn’t have died that way.” Nick could wait no longer to produce his ace. “She’d drunk from it earlier without ill-effect, and the Berties had all drunk from the other three glasses on the piano. Suicide is out because she couldn’t have added anything to the glass between the two toasts. So unless the poison was added intentionally by someone on stage, murder would be impossible.”

A silence, then Bishop said: “Impossible isn’t a word I like.” He beckoned to the three Berties, still sitting miserably on stage in their thongs, resentful of the scene of crime’s photographers’ ill-concealed smirks.

Bishop saw Nick’s struggles to control an insane desire to laugh. “Shock, lad. Seen many corpses, have you?”

“No.”

“I have, and thank God I never get over it. When you do, that’s the time to quit.”

Tony Hobbs was sitting in the first row of seats outside the tape, declaring at intervals that he was used to shock, making it sound as if his wife got murdered every day. He was ashen-faced, though, and in Nick’s opinion looked about to pass out as the Berties joined him.

“Our street clothes are over there,” Hamish told Bishop hopefully, pointing to the “wings” – an all-purpose room at the side of the stage where the lighting and curtain controls were.

“Now bagged up and the temporary property of Her Majesty’s Police Force, sir.”

A stunned silence. “You expect us to bloody well go home like this?” Justin screeched.

“No, we’ll need those thongs too.”

Hamish began to weep, and Bishop relented. “The sergeant will organize something. Can’t have you frightening the horses. Now, gentlemen, I want you to repeat exactly what you did this evening. And you,” he jabbed a finger at Nick, “keep out of it.”

Tony Hobbs elected to fill Bishop in on the background. “These three gentlemen worked to my wife’s choreography. At the beginning six glasses were put on the bar, two each for the men, and a seventh on the piano for my wife, and just before the show Greta filled them all herself. Any poison would have had to be added after that, I suppose,” he added forlornly, “since everyone drank from the same bottle.”

“Who,” Bishop enquired, “put the glasses in position before the show?”

“Hamish,” said his two colleagues gleefully.

“But we all drank from them earlier,” Hamish reminded Bishop anxiously as they began the routine, miming the striptease, and using seven glasses from the kitchen. “Murder’s impossible, just like the kid said.”

“Where did you get the glasses from?” Bishop asked.

“We bring them with us,” Hamish replied miserably. “I got them out of their case.”

Hamish couldn’t have doctored one beforehand, Nick realized happily; he was right. The poison could only have been added on stage.

As Hamish took his glass to the piano to begin the final stages of the striptease, Bishop interrupted. “Is that exactly where you placed your glass tonight?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Try,” Bishop suggested in his best family doctor manner.

Hamish slowly inched it somewhat nearer to the one representing Greta’s, which was on far stage left of the piano top, to be accessible for her right hand. When his turn came, Paul placed his just to the right of Hamish’s, leaving the three glasses in a row.

“It wasn’t there, mate,” Justin pointed out. “Yours was dead behind Greta’s, as it usually is. I saw you put it down, both times, and I put mine behind Hamish’s.”

“Maybe. I’ve other things on my mind,” Paul said sullenly.

“She told me Paul was going to be her blue-eyed boy tonight,” Les whispered to Nick.

“What did her husband think of that?”

“Doubt if he thought much of it, but he was used to it. Anyway, he thought she was the greatest thing since whisky.”

It seemed strange to Nick, but then what made one marriage work and another not was a mystery anyway. What he did know was that husbands were the natural suspect in the case of a murdered wife.

As if on cue, Tony returned to the attack. “I repeat, which one of you bastards did it?” he asked quietly. “It had to be one of you three and you all hated her. None of you appreciated her.”