Ngaio Marsh - Light Thickens

Alleyn took his head in his hands and did his best to listen to the past. “… get thee back, my soul is too much charged with blood of thine already .” Sir Dougal had the slight but unmistakable burr of Scots in his voice. He had given it a little more room for the Thane: “ too much changed .” A grievous sound. It drifted through his memory but his recollection held no personality behind it. Just the broken despair of any breathless, beaten fighter.

He must look for a new place in the play where the murder could have been committed. It was Sir Dougal who fought and killed Young Siward. He wore his vizor pushed up, displaying his full face. His speech ended with his desperate recollection of the last of the witches’ equivocal pronouncements:

“… weapons laugh to scorn

Brandish’d by man that’s of a woman born ”

and there, suddenly, in his imagination, stood the actor. Up went the gauntleted hand and down came the vizor. He went off into the O.P. corner — and was murdered? Macduff came on. He had a soliloquy, broken by skirmishes and determined searches. Outbursts of fighting occurred, now here, now there. The Macbeth faction was dressed alike: black, gauntleted, some masked, others not. The effect was nightmarish. What if Macduff encountered a man uniformed like Macbeth — but not Macbeth? Pipes. Malcolm, with a group of soldiers, marched on. Old Siward greeted him and welcomed him to the castle. He made a ceremonial entry with pipes and drums. Cheering within. The masked “Macbeth” entered. Macduff came on. Saw him. Challenged him. They fought.

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “It’s possible. It’s perfectly possible but does it throw a spanner in all our calculations and alibis? None of the ‘corpses’ are in position for the curtain call then. The Macduff, Simon Morten, could just , I suppose, have done it, but he’d have got a nasty shock when the dead man turned up to fight him. On the other hand, as Macbeth’s understudy he would know the fight. But he was already engaged in the fight himself. Damn. Barrabell? Gaston? Props? Rangi? All possible. But, wait a bit; all but one impossible. Unless we entertain the idea of a collaborator who understood the fight. Hold on. Let’s take any one of them regardless and see how it works out. Rangi.”

“Rangi,” said Fox without enthusiasm.

“He would do the murder at the earlier time. He’d wait till the last minute, then rush around to Gaston and say Sir Dougal’s fainted and he, Gaston, will have to go on for the fight with Macduff. All right so far?”

“It’s all right,” said Fox, “as far as you’ve got. Motive, though?”

“Ah. Motive. His great-grandfather knew how to deal with this sort of nonsense. He told me in the nicest way imaginable. He cut off the other chap’s head and ate him.”

“ Really !” said Fox primly. “How very unpleasant. But I suppose he could have done a return to his greatgrandfather’s state of mind and killed Macbeth. You know, reverted to the Stone Age, sort of.”

“Any of the others could have done the same thing.”

“You don’t mean —”

“I don’t mean the chopper and cooking-pot bit, and I’ll thank you not to be silly. I mean, could have gone to Gaston at the last moment and asked him to fight. The catch in that is, it’d be a damnable bit of evidence against him, later on.”

“Yerse,” said Mr. Fox. “And whoever he was, he didn’t do it.”

“I know he didn’t do it. I’m simply trying to find a way out, Fox. I’m trying to eliminate and I have eliminated.”

“Yes, Mr. Alleyn. You have. When do we book the gentleman?”

“I doubt if we’ve got a tight enough case, you know.”

“Do you?”

“Blast the whole boiling of them,” said Alleyn. He got up and walked about the room. “Do you know what they’re doing now? At this precise moment? Holding auditions for the replacement. A good play by Jay built around the death of Shakespeare’s young son and the arrival of the Dark Lady. So far they haven’t cast the murderer but there’s no guarantee they won’t. What’s more it’s the play they were doing with great success when this theatre reopened. There was a mess then. Remember?”

“I remember,” said Fox. “Proper turn-up for the books, that one was.”

“And a right proper young monster the boy was. This is altogether a different story. D’you know who this kid is?”

“No. Ought I to? Not anything in our line of business, I suppose.”

“No — well, that’s not quite true. He’s a nice, well-brought-up little chap and he’s the son of the Hampstead Chopper. He doesn’t know that and I’m extremely anxious that he won’t find out, Fox.”

“Harcourt-Smith, wasn’t it?”

“It was. His mother dropped the Harcourt. He knows his father’s in a loony-bin but not why.”

“Broadmoor?”

“Yes. A lifer.”

“Fancy that, now,” Fox said shaking his head.

“One of his father’s earlier victims was a Mrs. Barrabell.”

“You’re not telling me —”

“Yes, I am. Wife. Barrabell put those practical jokes together. He hoped the management would think the boy was responsible and give him the sack.”

“Has he told you? Barrabell?”

“Not in so many words but as-good-as.”

“He’s a member of some potty little way-out group, isn’t he?”

“The Red Fellowship. Yes.”

“What do we know about them?”

“The usual. Meeting once a week on Sunday mornings. Genuine enough. No real understanding of the extraordinary and extremely complicated in-fighting that goes on at sub-diplomatic levels. A bit dotty. He and his mates iron everything out to a few axioms and turn a blind eye to all that doesn’t fit. The terrible reality of Bruce Barrabell rests in the fact that his wife was beheaded by a maniac. I think he believes, or has brooded himself into believing, that the child has inherited the father’s madness and that sooner or later it’ll emerge and then it’ll be too late.”

“I still don’t know where Sir Dougal fits in. If he does.”

“Nor do I. Except that he was a far from subtle funster and Bruce came in for his share of the ragging. He was forever making snide references to leftish groups and so on.”

“Hardly enough to make Bruce cut his head off.”

“Not if we were dealing with anything like normal people. I’m beginning to believe there’s a stepped-up abnormality about the whole thing, Fox. As if the actors had become motivated by the play. That leads one to the proposition that no play should be as compulsive as Macbeth . Which is ridiculous.”

“All right. So what, to get down to our weekly pay packet, do we do to earn it?”

“Find a conclusive reason that will give us the time, as being immediately after Brandish’d by man that’s of a woman born . Find alibis for all but one of the company at that time and then face him with it. That’s the ideal, of course. Let’s tackle the alibis and see if we can do it with both feet on the ground. Now, the troops and all the extras and doubles are already engaged in battle. All the thanes; the doctor, disguised as one of Macbeth’s soldiers; Malcolm; Siward. Macduff’s out. That leaves Rangi, Gaston, and Banquo. The King. Props.”

“He was in and out of the O.P. corner fixing the claidheamh-mor. And that’s all,” said Fox.

“And we can cut out the King, I imagine.”

“Why?”

“Too silly,” said Alleyn. “And too elderly.”

“All right. No King. How about Props? Any motive at all?”

“Not unless something turns up. In a way he’s tempting, though. Nobody would pay any attention to him slipping into or out of the O.P. corner. He’d be there with the naked claidheamh-mor when Macbeth came off and could kill him and put his head on it.”