Ngaio Marsh - Night at the Vulcan

“And in the end, it seems, you won?”

“Pah!” said the Doctor with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Cat’s meat!”

Alleyn looked a little dubiously at the chaotic disarray of his garments. “Have you any objection,” he asked, “to being searched?”

“Not I,” cried the Doctor and hauled himself up from his chair. Fox approached him.

“By the way,” Alleyn said, “as a medical man, would you say that a punch on the jaw such as Bennington was given could have been the cause of his fainting some time afterwards? Remembering his general condition?”

“Who says he had a punch on the jaw? It’s probably a hypostatic discolouration. What do you want?” Dr. Rutherford demanded of Fox.

“If you wouldn’t mind taking your hands out of your pockets, sir,” Fox suggested.

The Doctor said: “Let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty,” and obligingly withdrew his hands from his trousers pockets. Unfortunately he pulled the linings out of them.

A number of objects fell about his feet — pencils, his snuff-box, scraps of paper, a pill-box, a programme, a note-book and a half-eaten cake of chocolate. A small cloud of snuff floated above this collection. Fox bent down and made a clucking sound of disapproval. He began to collect the scattered objects, inhaled snuff and was seized with a paroxysm of sneezing. The Doctor broke into a fit of uncouth laughter and floundered damagingly among the exhibits.

“Dr. Rutherford,” Alleyn said with an air of the liveliest exasperation, “I would be immensely obliged to you if you’d have the goodness to stop behaving like a Pantaloon. Get off those things, if you please.”

The Doctor backed away into his chair and examined an unlovely mess of chocolate and cardboard on the sole of his boot. “But, blast your lights, my good ass.” he said, “there goes my spare ration. An ounce of the best rappee, by Heaven!” Fox began to pick the fragments of the pill-box from his boot. Having collected and laid aside the dropped possessions, he scraped up a heap of snuff. “It’s no good now, Dogberry,” said the Doctor with an air of intense disapproval. Fox tipped the scrapings into an envelope.

Alleyn stood over the Doctor. “I think,” he said, “you had better give this up, you know.”

The Doctor favoured him with an antic grimace but said nothing. “You’re putting on an act, Dr. Rutherford, and I do assure you it’s not at all convincing. As a red herring it stinks to high Heaven. Let me tell you this. We now know that Bennington was hit over the jaw. We know when it happened. We know that the bruise was afterwards camouflaged with makeup. I want you to come with me while I remove this make-up. Where’s your jacket?”

“Give me my robe; put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me…”

Fox went out and returned with a tail-coat that was in great disorder. “Nothing in the pockets, Mr. Alleyn,” he said briefly. Alleyn nodded and he handed it to Dr. Rutherford, who slung it over his shoulder.

Alleyn led the way down the passage, where Gibson was still on guard, and round the back of the stage to the dock. P. C. Lamprey came off the set and rolled the doors back.

Bennington had stiffened a little since they last looked at him. His face bore the expression of knowledgeable acquiescence that is so often seen in the dead. Using the back of a knife-blade, Alleyn scraped away the greasepaint from the right jaw. Fox held a piece of card for him and he laid smears of greasepaint on it in the manner of a painter setting his palette. The discoloured mark on the jaw showed clearly.

“There it is,” Alleyn said, and stood aside for Dr. Rutherford.

“A tidy buffet, if buffet it was. Who gave it him?” Alleyn didn’t answer. He moved round to the other side and went on cleaning the face.

“The notion that it could have contributed to his death,” the Doctor said, “is preposterous. If, as you say, there was an interval between the blow and the supposed collapse. Preposterous!”

Fox had brought cream and a towel, with which Alleyn now completed his task. The Doctor watched him with an air of impatience and unease. “Damned if I know why you keep me hanging about,” he grumbled at last.

“I wanted your opinion on the bruise. That’s all, Fox. Is the mortuary van here?”

“On its way, sir,” said Fox, who was wrapping his piece of card in paper.

Alleyn looked at the Doctor. “Do you think,” he said, “that his wife will want to see him?”

“She won’t want to. She may think she ought to. Humbug, in my opinion. Distress herself for nothing. What good does it do anybody?”

“I think, however, I should at least ask her.”

“Why the blazes you can’t let her go home passes my comprehension. And where do I go, now? I’m getting damn bored with Ben’s company.”

“You may wait either on the stage or, if you’d rather, in the unoccupied dressing-room. Or the office, I think, is open.”

“Can I have my snuff back?” Dr. Rutherford asked with something of the shamefaced air of a small boy wanting a favour.

“I think we might let you do that,” Alleyn said. “Fox, will you give Dr. Rutherford his snuff-box?”

Dr. Rutherford lumbered uncertainly to the door. He stood there, with his chin on his chest and his hands in his pockets.

“See here, Alleyn,” he said, looking from under his eyebrows at him. “Suppose I told you it was I who gave Ben that wallop on his mug. What then?”

“Why,” Alleyn said, “I shouldn’t believe you, you know.”

Alleyn saw Helena Hamilton in her dressing-room. It was an oddly exotic setting. The scent of banked flowers, of tobacco smoke and of cosmetics was exceedingly heavy, the air hot and exhausted. She had changed into her street-clothes and sat in an armchair that had been turned with its back to the door, so that when he entered he saw nothing of her but her right hand trailing near the floor with a cigarette between her fingers. She called: “Come in, Mr. Alleyn,” in a warm voice as if he were an especially welcome visitor. He would not have guessed from this greeting that when he faced her he would find her looking so desperately tired.

As if she read his thoughts she put her hands to her eyes and said: “My goodness, this is a long night, isn’t it?”

“I hope that for you, at least, it is nearing its end,” he said. ‘I’ve come to tell you that we are ready to take him away.”

“Does that mean I ought to — to look at him?”

“Only if you feel you want to. I can see no absolute need at all, if I may say so.”

“I don’t want to,” she whispered and added in a stronger voice: “It would be a pretence. I have no real sorrow and I have never seen the dead. I should only be frightened and confused.”

Alleyn went to the door and looked into the passage, where Fox waited with Gibson. He shook his head and Fox went away. When Alleyn came back to her she looked up at him and said: “What else?”

“A question or two. Have you ever known or heard of a man called Otto Brod?”

Her eyes widened. “But what a strange question!” she said. “Otto Brod? Yes. He’s a Czech or an Austrian, I don’t remember which. An intellectual. We met him three years ago when we did a tour of the continent. He had written a play and asked my husband to read it. It was in German and Ben’s German wasn’t up to it. The idea was that he should get someone over here to look at it, but he was dreadfully bad at keeping those sorts of promises and I don’t think he ever did anything about it.”

“Have they kept in touch, do you know?”

“Oddly enough, Ben said a few days ago that he’d heard from Otto. I think he’d written from time to time for news of his play but I don’t suppose Ben answered.” She pressed her thumb and fingers on her eyes. “If you want to see the letter,” she said, “it’s in his coat.”