Death Of A Hollow Man (36 page)

“I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“It’s a long story. Shall I tell you? Perhaps while we have some tea—’’ She turned toward the door, but David drew her back.

“In a moment. I’ve been waiting a long time to do this. And we have the rest of our lives to have some tea.” And then he kissed her.

She nestled once more against his shoulder, and his arm tightened. It was not a white-feathered arm, and it was certainly not twelve feet tall, yet such was the feeling of exhilarating comfort, for a moment it seemed to Deidre that she might have been enclosed in a tightly furled wing.

Rosa sat in the middle of row D, feeling disappointed. She had been convinced there would be an “atmosphere” at the audition for
Vanya
. Surely the unseemly departure of the company’s previous leading man would mark the proceedings in some way? Slightly lowered tones perhaps; a nice hesitancy in putting oneself forward for the unexpectedly vacant title role. But no, everything was proceeding as usual. Actors striding on and off the stage, Harold pontificating, Deidre at her table. David Smy was in the back row next to his father with a piebald dog on his knee, and Kitty, who had had quite a bit of fun running away from Rosa with mock squeals of fright, was now leaning against the proscenium arch and sulking. She had come down not to read but to have a nice cozy chat with Nicholas, only to find him deep in conversation with Joycey’s showy daughter.

Joyce herself, hoping for the part of Marina, the elderly nurse, was waiting in the wings with Donald Everard. Clive, to everyone’s surprise, had cheekily taken to the stage to try for Telyegin. Boris, having just given Astrov’s “idle life” speech, was drinking Kanga’s piddle, and Riley rested on Avery’s bosom darting many a snappy glance over his shoulder at the dog in the back row, suspecting some planned territorial infringement.

When Clive had finished, Cully Barnaby stepped forward to read for Yelena, and Rosa sat up. No reason why the child shouldn’t make an attempt, of course. There was no denying that she was marginally nearer to the character’s age (twenty-six) than Rosa, or that, as a youngster, she’d had quite a little way with her onstage. Still … Rosa half settled back and waited, uneasy.

“You’re standing by the window,” called Harold. “You open it and talk, half looking out. From ‘my dear—don’t you understand’ … page two one five.”

Then Cully moved, not as Rosa had expected, toward the window at the back of the set, still in place from
Amadeus
, but right down to the footlights, where she pushed against an imaginary casement and leaned out, her lovely face stamped with irritated melancholy. She began to speak in a rich, sharp voice, vivid as an ache and not at all in the musical “Chekhovian” manner the CADS thought proper. Her anger flowed into the auditorium, powerful and bitter. Rosa, chilled to the marrow, felt her heart tumble out of its place and bounce against her ribs.

But Cully was hardly into the speech when two men appeared at the swing doors under the exit sign and walked, with measured tread, down the aisle. So unflurried and even was their stride (neither fast nor slow), so closely did the younger man emulate the bearing of his companion, that there was something almost comic in their sudden appearance. They might have been making an entrance in a musical comedy. Until you looked at the first one’s face.

Cully faltered, read one more line, stopped, and said, “Hello, Dad.”

“Well,
really
, Tom . . Harold got up. “Of all the times. We’re auditioning here. I hope this is important.”

“Extremely. Where are you going?” Tim had climbed out of his seat.

“To open some wine.”

“Sit down please. What I have to say won’t take long.” Tim sat down. “Perhaps everyone onstage and in the wings could come to the stalls. Save me screwing my neck around.”

Nicholas, Deidre, Joyce, and Cully clambered down from the stage. Donald Everard followed and slid into the seat next to his twin. The young detective in the raincoat sat on the steps leading from the stage, and Barnaby walked to the pass door at the end of row A, turned, and surveyed them all. Joyce, sitting next to her daughter, shivered as the cold, impersonal beam of her husband’s attention swept around the stalls. She felt suddenly alienated, and watched his profile tighten and become almost hawkish, with increasing feelings of distress. By the time he began to speak, she felt she was looking at a complete stranger. There was absolute quiet. Even Harold had fallen silent, though not for long, and Nicholas, innocent though he might be, thought, This is it, and experienced a thrill of alarm so strong it made him feel almost sick.

Barnaby began by saying, “I felt it only fair to keep you abreast with the current investigations pertaining to the Carmichael case.” What a tease, thought Boris. As if the police ever kept a suspect abreast of anything. Tom’s setting something up. ‘‘And I’d like to talk for a moment if I may about the character of the murdered man. It has always been my belief that an accurate assessment of the victim’s personality is the first step in an inquiry of this kind. Random killing apart, a man or woman is usually done away with because of what they think or believe or say or do. In other words, because of the sort of person they are.”

‘‘Well, I hope we’re not going to waste much time going over that,” interrupted Harold. “We all know what sort of person Esslyn was.”

“Do we? I know what the general opinion was. I went along with it myself—why not? Until now, I’d no reason to go into the matter in any detail. Oh, yes, we all knew what sort of person Esslyn was. Eminently fanciable, vain, strong-willed, solipsistic, a wow with the ladies. But when I tried to get to grips with this character, I found he simply wasn’t there. There were outward signs, of course. Certain narcissistic posturings and Casanovian pursuits, but beyond this … nothing. Now why should this be?”

“He was shallow,” said Avery. “Some people just are.”

“Perhaps. But there is always more to any one person than what they choose to reveal. So I asked questions and listened to the answers and examined my own perceptions a bit more closely, and gradually a very different picture began to emerge. First, perhaps, we can look into the question of women. There is no doubt that he was loved, and very truly loved, by one.” His glance fell on Rosa, and her mouth folded tightly into a controlled line. “She accepted him for what he was. Or what she thought he was.”

“There’s no thought about it!” cried Rosa, her voice raw. “
I knew him.
”

“But who else ever cared? When I tried to pin this down, I got varying replies. Esslyn himself naturally fostered the illusion that they all cared. That, like Don Juan, he had no sooner had his way with one blossom than he moved on to pluck the next, leaving a trail of broken hearts. But I could find no actual proof of this. It was all hearsay, very vague. I did, however, come across one or two interesting comments. ‘Nothing ever lasted very long for Esslyn,’ and ‘They used to get fed up and drift off.’
They
, you’ll notice—not
he
. Certainly when he finally did break up his marriage for a pretty girl, she’d left him within the month. And his second wife had no love for him at all.”

Kitty’s eyes, already quite tarnished with crossness, glowered. Barnaby guessed at a recent visit to Mr. Ounce.

“And why was it such a piece of cake for her to lead this man, who supposedly had the pick of the bunch, to the altar by simply lying about a pregnancy?”

There was an audible intake of breath from several people at this revelation, and Rosa made a thick, choking sound. The Everards whickered like excited horses.

“To move on to his position as an actor. In this company, he was top dog. A big fish in a little pond—”

“I beg leave to take issue there, Tom. This theater is—”

“
Please.
” Harold subsided reluctantly. “A little pond. True, he had leading roles, but he did not have the talent, the perception, or the humility to make anything of them. Neither did he have the ambition to look for pastures new. There are bigger groups in Slough or Uxbridge where he might have stretched himself, but he never showed the slightest inclination to do so. Perhaps because he may not have found another director quite so amenable.”

“Amenable!” cried Harold. “Me?”

“There are many people I know who regarded his refusal to take direction as revealing supreme confidence. I disagree. It is putting yourself in a director’s hands, trying different ways of working, taking risks, that shows an actor’s confidence. And I gradually came to the conclusion that ambition and self-assurance were two things that Esslyn Carmichael had very little of.”

He got a lot of puzzled looks at that, but none of actual disbelief. More than one person seemed to find the idea feasible. Rosa, while looking a little mystified, also nodded.

“And yet …” Barnaby left his position at the pass door and walked slowly up the aisle. Every head followed. “There were certain signs that this aspect of his personality was undergoing some sort of change. The feeling I picked up during questioning was that over the last few months, he had become openly argumentative, querying or defying Harold and castigating the only other actor in the company who was any serious threat.” Nicholas looked rather pleased at that remark, and gave Cully a wide smile. “Now,” continued Barnaby, “why should that be?”

The company recognized the question as purely rhetorical. No one spoke. In fact, two people looked so deeply disturbed you could have been forgiven for thinking that they might never speak again. “I believe that once we know the answer to that, we shall know why he was murdered. And once we know why, we shall know who.” Troy found his mouth was dry. At first guarded and resentful of his chief’s deductive progress, he had sat outside the circle with a slightly defiant air, knowing his place, showing his detachment disdainfully. Now, in spite of himself totally gripped by the thrust of Barnaby’s narrative, he leaned forward, caught in the storyteller’s net.

“I’d like to jump to the first night of
Amadeus
, and the drama within the drama. I’m sure you all know by now that rumor and misinformation were running rife, and that Kitty and Nicholas were both attacked by Esslyn during the course of the evening.” At this indication that his previous declaration had been validated, Nicholas looked even more pleased. “This naturally put them high on the list of suspects. In any case, I’m afraid the widow of a murdered man is usually thrust into this unenviable position. Kitty had the motive—he’d discovered she was unfaithful, and once the baby had ‘disappeared’ would perhaps have turned her out. And she had the perfect opportunity—”

“I didn’t kill him!” shouted Kitty. “With all the witnesses I’d got to physical cruelty, I could’ve got a divorce. And maintenance.”

“That sort of procedure can take a long time, Kitty. And not always end to your advantage.”

“I never touched the bloody thing.”

“Certainly your prints were not on the razor, but then neither were anybody else’s until the dead man picked it up. But then, the most inept delinquent knows enough to wipe the handle of a murder weapon clean. Even so, all my instincts set themselves against this simple solution.” Kitty and Rosa engaged glances. Triumph and disappointment sizzled back and forth.

“I also decided that David, Colin, and Deidre were in the clear, and in each case for pretty much the same reasons. I’ve known them all a long time, and although I’d never be foolish enough to say that none of them are capable of murder, I very much doubt if they were capable of this
particular
murder. But of course they did have the opportunity. And this was my real stumbling block. Because, until earlier this evening, it seemed all the wrong people had the opportunity and all the right people had none.”

“What happened earlier this evening, then?” asked Harold, who had been quieter for longer than anyone present could ever remember.

“I discovered there were two razors.”

The remark fell into the silence like a stone. Ripples of emotion spread and spread. Some faces looked eager, some were flushed and serious, one turned ghastly pale. Avery, noticing, thought, Oh, God—he knows something. I was right. Then, not caring whether or not he was publicly rebuffed, he took his lover’s hand and squeezed it; once for comfort and twice for luck. Tim didn’t even notice.

“This, of course, opened up the whole thing. Almost anyone could have taken it, left the substitute, removed the tape when it was convenient, and then slipped the original back.”

“Who’s the ‘almost,’ Tom?” asked Nicholas.

“Avery. He didn’t return to the wings till the play was over. Now I knew how,” continued Barnaby, “I was left with the two whys. Why should anyone wish to murder Esslyn in the first place and, much more puzzling, why choose to do it in front of over a hundred people? Frankly, I still haven’t understood the second, but I have become quite sure about the first.”

Now, he retraced his steps and, once again, every head, as if yoked together on one invisible string, turned. He leaned back against the thrust of the stage, hands in pockets, and paused. The old ham, observed Cully admiringly. And I thought I got it all from me mum.

“Putting aside the motives we first thought of—namely, passion and money—we are left with a third, equally powerful and, I believe, the correct one. Esslyn Carmichael was killed
because of something he knew
. Now, our investigation has proved that, unless he’s been ordering his affairs with special cunning, there have been no large sums of money coming his way, and that seems to rule out using this knowledge for financial coercion. But a blackmailer’s demands can be other than monetary. He can put sexual pressure on people, or he can use his secret to obtain power. I thought the first, as he was so newly married and, according to his imperceptive lights, quite satisfied, was unlikely. Yet how much more unlikely, given my understanding of his character as lacking ambition and confidence, was the latter. And yet I became more and more certain that it was in this area of investigation that my solution lay.

“Like all of you, I’m sure I have thought of this murder as a theatrical one. Although on this dreadful evening reality crept upon the stage in certain unpleasant ways, we all knew, until the very last minute, that we were watching a play. Esslyn wore makeup and costume, he spoke lines, and executed moves that he had rehearsed. Whoever killed him was a member of the company. It seemed so plain that everything centered on the Latimer that I hardly took into account the rest of Esslyn’s life—the larger part of it, after all. It was Kitty who reminded me that from nine till five Monday to Friday Esslyn Carmichael
was an accountant
.”