Ngaio Marsh - Night at the Vulcan

“That was all too obvious,” said Alleyn. “Sweetness apart, did you find her truthful?”

“I’d have said so, sir, yes.”

“What about you, Br’er Fox? Come out of cover and declare yourself.”

Fox rose, removed his spectacles and advanced upon them. “There was something,” he observed, “about that business of when deceased went for her.”

“There was indeed. Not exactly lying, wouldn’t you think, so much as leaving something out?”

“Particularly in respect of whether there was a witness.”

“She had her back to you but she looked at this portrait of Adam Poole. I’d make a long bet Poole found Bennington slanging that child and ordered him off.”

“Very possibly, Mr. Alleyn. He’s sweet on the young lady. That’s plain to see. And she on him.”

“Good Lord!” Mike Lamprey ejaculated. “He must be forty! I’m sorry, sir.”

Mr. Fox began a stately reproof but Alleyn said: “Go away, Mike. Go back to the stage. Wake Dr. Rutherford and ask him to come here. I want a change from actors.”

Dr. Rutherford, on his entry into the Greenroom, was a figure of high fantasy. For his greater ease in sleeping he had pulled his boiled shirt from its confinement and it dangled fore and aft like a crumpled tabard. Restrained only by his slackened braces, it formed a mask, Alleyn conjectured, for a free adjustment of the Doctor’s trouser buttoning. He had removed his jacket and assumed an overcoat. His collar was released and his tie dangled on his bosom. His head was tousled and his face blotched.

He paused in the doorway while Lamprey announced him and then, with a dismissive gesture, addressed himself to Alleyn and Fox.

“Calling my officers about me in my branched velvet gown,” he shouted, “having come from a day-bed where I left Miss Gainsford sleeping, I present myself as a brand for the constabular burning. What’s cooking, my hearties?”

He stood there, puffing and blowings and eyed them with an expression of extreme impertinence. If he had been an actor, Alleyn thought, he would have been cast, and cast ideally, for Falstaff. He fished under his shirt-tail, produced his snuff-box, and helped himself, with a parody of Regency deportment, to a generous pinch. “Speak!” he said “Pronounce! Propound! I am all ears.”

“I have nothing, I’m afraid, to propound,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “and am therefore unable to pronounce. As for speaking, I hope you’ll do most of that yourself, Dr. Rutherford. Will you sit down?”

Dr. Rutherford, with his usual precipitancy, hurled himself into the nearest armchair. As an afterthought he spread his shirt-tail with ridiculous finicking movements across his lap. “I am a thought down-gyved,” he observed. “My points are untrussed. Forgive me.”

“Tell me,” Alleyn said. “Do you think Bennington was murdered?”

The Doctor opened his eyes very wide, folded his hands on his stomach, revolved his thumbs and said “No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“We do.”

“Why?”

“I’ll come to that when I’m quite sure you may be put into the impossible class.”

“Am I a suspect, by all that’s pettifogging?”

“Not if you can prove yourself otherwise.”

“By God,” said Dr. Rutherford deeply, “if I’d thought I could get away with it, be damned if I wouldn’t have had a shot. He was an unconscionable rogue, was Ben.”

“In what way?”

“In every way, by Janus. A drunkard. A wife-terrorist. An exhibitionist. And what’s more,” he went on with rising intensity, “a damned wrecker of plays. A yea-forsooth knavish pander, by Heaven! I tell you this, and I tell you plainly, if I, sitting in my O.P. box, could have persuaded the Lord to stoop out of the firmament and drop a tidy thunderbolt on Ben, I would have done it with bells on. Joyously!”

“A thunderbolt,” Alleyn said, “is one of the few means of dispatch that we have not seriously considered. Would you mind telling me where you were between the time when he made his last exit and the time when you appeared before the audience?”

“Brief let me be. In my box. On the stairs. Off-stage. On the stage.”

“Can you tell me exactly when you left your box?”

“While they were making their initial mops and mows at the audience.”

“Did you meet anyone or notice anything at all remarkable during this period?”

“Nothing, and nobody whatever.”

“From which side did you enter for your own call?”

“The O.P., which is actors’ right.”

“So you merely emerged from the stairs that lead from the box to the stage and found yourself hard by the entrance?”

“Precisely.”

“Have you any witness to all this, sir?”

“To my knowledge,” said the Doctor, “none whatever. There may have been a rude mechanical or so.”

“As far as your presence in the box is concerned, there was the audience. Nine hundred of them.”

“In spite of its mangling at the hands of two of the actors, I believe the attention of the audience to have been upon My Play. In any case,” the Doctor added, helping himself to a particularly large pinch of snuff and holding it poised before his face, “I had shrunk in modest confusion behind the curtain.”

“Perhaps someone visited you?”

“Not after the first act. I locked myself in,” he added, taking his snuff with uncouth noises, “as a precautionary measure. I loathe company.”

“Did you come back-stage at any other time during the performance?”

“I did. I came back in both intervals. Primarily to see the little wench.”

“Miss Tarne?” Alleyn ventured.

“She. A tidy little wench it is and will make a good player. If she doesn’t allow herself to be debauched by the sissies that rule the roost in our lamentable theatre.”

“Did you, during either of these intervals, visit the dressing-rooms?”

“I went to the Usual Office at the end of the passage, if you call that a dressing-room.”

“And returned to your box — when?”

“As soon as the curtain went up.”

“I see.” Alleyn thought for a moment and then said: “Dr. Rutherford, do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”

The Doctor gave a formidable gasp. His eyes bulged, his nostrils wrinkled and his jaw dropped. This grimace turned out to be the preliminary spasm to a Gargantuan sneeze. A handkerchief not being at his disposal, he snatched up the tail of his shirt, clapped it to his face and revealed a state of astonishing disorder below the waist

“Otto Brod?” he repeated, looking at Alleyn over his shirt-tail as if it were an improvised yashmak. “Never heard of him.”

“His correspondence seems to be of some value,” Alleyn said vaguely but the Doctor merely gaped at him. “I don’t,” he said flatly, “know what you’re talking about”

Alleyn gave up Otto Brod. “You’ll have guessed,” he said, “that I’ve already heard a good deal about the events of the last few days: I mean as they concerned the final rehearsals and the change in casting.”

“Indeed? Then you will have heard that Ben and I had one flaming row after another. If you’re looking for motive,” said Dr. Rutherford with an expansive gesture, “I’m lousy with it. We hated each other’s guts, Ben and I. Of the two I should say, however, that he was the more murderously inclined.”

“Was this feeling chiefly on account of the part his niece was to have played?”

“Fundamentally it was the fine flower of a natural antipathy. The contributive elements were his behaviour as an actor in My Play and the obvious and immediate necessity to return his niece to her squalid little métier and replace her by the wench. We had at each other on that issue,” said Dr. Rutherford with relish, “after both auditions and on every other occasion that presented itself.”