Ngaio Marsh - Vintage Murder

“Oh!” said Valerie Gaynes flatly. “Well, I think—”

“Of course you do,” said Carolyn quickly, “but if you could manage not to talk quite so much, darling, it would be such a good idea.”

“But, Miss Dacres—”

“Yes, darling, but do you know, I think if I were you, I should just go all muted — like you did over your money, do you remember, when Mr. Alleyn offered to look at your note-case.”

Valerie Gaynes suddenly sat down.

“That’s right, darling,” said Carolyn jerkily. “Come and sit down, Mr. Alleyn. It seems we are all to be shut up in here while they find out whether my poor Pooh was — whether it was all an accident or not.”

Her voice was pitched a note too high and her hands moved restlessly in her lap. “That’s the idea, I believe,” said Alleyn.

“What are they doing out there?” asked little Ackroyd peevishly.

“How much longer—”

“Mr. Alleyn, can you tell us—”

They all began again.

“I know no more than you do,” said Alleyn, at large. “I believe they propose to interview us all, singly. I’ve just had my dose. I got ticked off for loitering.”

“What did they ask you?” demanded young Palmer.

“My name and address,” said Alleyn shortly. He dragged forward a small packing-case, sat on it, and surveyed the company.

The wardrobe-room at the Royal was simply a very large dressing-room, occupied by the chorus when musical-comedy companies visited Middleton. The Dacres Company used it to store the wardrobes for their second and third productions. An ironing-table stood at one end, an odd length of stage-cloth carpeted the floor, and a number of chairs, covered with dust-cloths, were ranged round the walls. It served the company as a sort of common-room — an improvised version of the old-fashioned green-room. Carolyn tried to create something of the long-vanished atmosphere of the actor-manager’s touring company. She was old enough to have served her apprenticeship in one of the last of these schools and remembered well the homely, knit-together feeling of back-stage, the feeling that the troupe was a little world of its own, moving compactly about a larger world. With Meyer’s help she had tried, so far as she was able, to keep the same players about her for all her productions. She used to beg Meyer to look for what she called useful actors and actresses, by which she meant adaptable people who could pour themselves into the mould of a part and who did not depend upon individual tricks. “Give me actors, Pooh darling, not types.” Perhaps that was why, with the exception of Valerie Gaynes and Courtney Broadhead, none of her company was very young. Valerie she had suffered only after a struggle, and, she confided in Hambledon, because she was afraid they might all begin to think she was jealous of young and good-looking women. Courtney came of an old acting family and took his work seriously. The rest — Ackroyd, Gascoigne, Liversidge, Vernon, Hambledon and Susan Max, were all over forty. They were, as Hambledon would have said, “old troupers,” used to each other’s ways, and to the sound of each other’s voices. There is a kind of fortuitous intimacy among the members of such companies. It would be difficult to say how well they really know each other, but they often speak of themselves as “a happy family.” As he looked from, one face to another Alleyn was aware of this corporate feeling in the Dacres Company. “How are they taking it?” he wondered. He asked himself the inevitable question: “Which? Which of these?” And one by one he watched them.

Hambledon had moved away from Carolyn and sat opposite her and beside George Mason. They were both very pale and silent. Mason’s undistinguished face was blotched, as if he had been crying. He looked apprehensive and miserable and rather ill. Hambledon’s magnificent head was bent forward. He held one long-fingered hand over his eyes, as though the light bothered him. Old Brandon Vernon sat with his arms folded and his heavy eyebrows drawn down. He had the peculiar raffish look of a certain type of elderly actor. His face was pale, as if it had taken on the texture of grease-paint, his mobile mouth seemed always about to widen into a sardonic grin; his eyes, lack-lustre, had an impertinent look. There were traces of No. 9 in the hair on his temples and his chin was blueish. He played polished old men-of-the-world with great skill. When Alleyn came in Vernon was deep in conversation with little Ackroyd, with whom he seemed to be annoyed. Ackroyd, whose amusing face was so untrustworthy a guide to his character, listened irritably. He grimaced and fidgeted, glancing under his eyelids at Carolyn.

Next to Ackroyd sat Liversidge, with an empty chair beside him. Valerie Gaynes had moved out of it when Carolyn called her. Alleyn was a little surprised to see how shaken Liversidge seemed to be. His too full, too obviously handsome face was very white. He was unable to sit still, and when he lit one cigarette from the butt of another, his hands shook so much that he could scarcely control them.

Young Courtney Broadhead, on the other hand, looked solemn, but much less unhappy than he had appeared to be that night in the train. “They have changed their roles,” thought Alleyn. For in the train Broadhead had stood huddled in his overcoat on the little iron platform, speaking to nobody; while Liversidge had shouted and shown himself off. Alleyn’s thoughts returned persistently to the night in the train.

Ted Gascoigne had joined young Gordon Palmer and his cousin, Geoffrey Weston. The stage-manager was describing the mechanism of the pulley and the bottle. Gordon listened avidly, bit his nails, and asked innumerable questions. Weston said very little.

The stage-hands stood in an awkward and silent group at the far end of the room.

Alleyn had not been long in the room before he realised that the members of the company felt themselves constrained and embarrassed by the presence of Carolyn, and perhaps of Hambledon. Through their conversation ran a chain of sidelong glances, of half-spoken phrases. This, he told himself, was natural enough, since they must assume that they were in the presence of grief, and there is nothing more embarrassing than other people’s sorrow. “But not to these people,” thought Alleyn, “since they have histrionic precedents for dealing with sorrow. They are embarrassed for some other reason.”

Under cover of the general conversation he turned to Carolyn and said quietly: “I am plagued with a horrible feeling that you may think I have brought misfortune to you.”

“You?” She looked at him in bewilderment. “How should I think that?”

“By my gift.”

“You mean — the green figurine — the tiki?”

She glanced swiftly at Hambledon and away again.

“I wish you would return it to me and let me replace it by another gift,” said Alleyn.

Carolyn looked fixedly at him. Her hand went to her breast.

“What do you mean, Mr. Alleyn?” she asked hurriedly.

“Is it in your bag?”

“I — yes. No.” She opened her bag and turned it out on her lap. “No. Of course it’s not. I haven’t had it since — since before supper. Somebody took it from me — they were all looking at it. I remember distinctly that I did not have it.”

“May I ask who has it now?”

“Of course — if you want to.”

Alleyn raised his voice.

“Who’s got Miss Dacres’s tiki, please? She would like to have it.”

Dead silence. He looked from one figure to another. They all looked bewildered and a little scandalised, as though Carolyn, by asking for her little tiki, had stepped outside the correct rendering of her part of tragic wife.

“It must be on the stage,” said Courtney Broadhead.