Murder at the Mikado (7 page)

Drew tried to hide a grin. “And Benton?”

“Well, he can still play the young’uns, if you don’t look too close.”

“So he’s doing all of Ravenswood’s old roles now?” Nick asked. “Does he have that sort of voice?”

The man gave him a gap-toothed grin. “The orchestra’s had to raise the key on some of the songs, but Mr. Benton’s not half bad. Come along and hear for yourself.”

Drew hurried after as the man led them presumably toward the stage. “Mr. . . . ?”

“Name’s Grady.”

“Very well, Mr. Grady, I would—”

“Not Mr. Grady. Grady Hibbert.”

“I see. Mr. Hibbert then. I would—”

“Nope. Just Grady. My granddad was Mr. Hibbert. My dad was just Pop. He kept this stage in Queen Victoria’s time, God bless her, and if he didn’t need no surname, then I’ll do without as well.”

“Grady it is.” Drew shook his hand to seal the bargain. “Now, I would very much like to find out about how the stage is set up and the arrangement of the dressing rooms and so forth. What would you say to letting me and my friends here have a look round inside? Scene of the crime and all that? We needn’t stay long.”

Grady scratched behind one ear. “I dunno. They’re rehearsing. Going into
Penzance
and
Pinafore
starting Saturday. Not that they don’t know ’em already, but just polishing up, as it were.”

“I see,” Drew said. “Mind if we have a peep? We’ll try to stay quiet at the back.”

“They’ll never know we’re there,” Madeline promised, bright-eyed.

“Well . . .”

Drew jingled the coins in his pocket, and Grady gave him that gap-toothed smile again.

“Well, if you put it that way, don’t like to say no to a gentleman. Mind you, if you’re seen you have to swear you snuck in on your own.”

Drew slipped him a half a crown. “Your secret is safe with us. Come along, Madeline. Nick.”

The four of them crept into a dim, narrow hallway. Grady tapped the side of his nose, warning them to silence, and led them around the side of the stage and down another longer hallway into the lobby.

“Quiet as mice now,” he whispered.

He opened the door to the theater just enough for them to squeeze through. As stealthily as they could, Drew, Madeline, and Nick stole to the back row of seats and sank down. On the stage, swords crossed, stood two men. One was lithe and catlike and looked to be thirty or so, handsome and well made. He had to be Conor Benton. Drew fought a smile. He did have a bit of a weak chin.

The other was not so graceful and looked quite young, eighteen at most. There was still a bit of that awkwardness about him, though it would probably not have been so noticeable with anyone else onstage.

“No! No!” Benton said. “Don’t clomp around as if you were mucking out a stable! A little grace, man! A touch of style, if you can manage it.”

The young man jabbed his sword at the air next to Benton’s head, and Benton turned it away with an easy flick of his wrist.

“Sorry,” Hazeldine murmured, pushing his hair back from
his damp forehead and taking a better grip on his blade. “Let me try again.”

“All right.” Benton crossed the stage and stood next to Hazeldine. “We’ll do it together. The police say, ‘So to Constabulary, pirates yield!’ And then the girls have their line.”

He looked at the rather bland young woman sitting at the corner of the stage, script in hand, her legs curled under her. She had her eyes fixed on him, and there was a certain wistfulness in her expression that Drew had seen before in stagestruck young ladies.

Benton raised his eyebrows. “The girls? Tess?”

“Oh, sorry, Conor. Sorry.” She glanced at the script. “ ‘Oh, rapture!’ ”

He gave her an encouraging smile and then turned back to Hazeldine. “Right. Now, the minute the girls do their line, you lunge at Dave with your sword. Don’t let it drag.”

A sturdy-looking man with a handlebar mustache gave Hazeldine a nod.

“Now,” Benton said. “ ‘So to Constabulary, pirates yield!’ ”

“ ‘Oh, rapture!’ ” the girl called Tess chimed in.

Benton and Hazeldine lunged in unison toward the man with the mustache. He gave a comic leap straight into the air and then parried both their swords with his truncheon.

“That’s it,” Benton said as he and Hazeldine continued the fight at a snail’s pace, upstage and downstage. “Better, better. One, two, count in your head, five, six, seven, eight. Good.”

Finally, Dave lay prostrate at Hazeldine’s feet. The boy was looking at Benton again, waiting for Benton’s assessment.

“Not so much like a cart horse that time,” Benton said. “Now if our police sergeant would—”

Drew stepped forward. “I beg your pardon.”

There was a sudden silence onstage, and then a lanky blonde stepped out from behind some scenery and shaded her eyes, squinting into the darkness of the house. “Who’s there?”

Drew nudged Madeline, and she and Nick both stood.

“Miss Cullimore,” Drew said. “Good afternoon. My name is Drew Farthering, and this is my fiancée, Madeline Parker, and my friend, Nick Dennison.”

Benton narrowed his eyes. “This is a private rehearsal. How did you lot get in here?”

“How do you know my name?” the blond woman asked. “Are you with the police?”

“No,” Drew said. “But we are looking into the death of your husband.” Drew turned his hat in his hands. “I’ve seen you onstage before. Do accept my condolences.”

“Farthering?” She looked him up and down. “Who sent you? You aren’t newspapermen, are you?”

Nick chuckled, and she gave him a poisonous glare.

“No,” Drew assured her. “We’re making a private investigation, trying to make sure the guilty party is discovered as quickly as possible and that the innocent are let alone.”

“Who are you working for?” Benton asked, arms crossed. “Whoever it is, we haven’t time for your nonsense. We open day after tomorrow, and we’ll hardly get everything done as it is. Now, if you’ll let us carry on.”

He looked pointedly toward the doors, but the blonde crossed over to him and put one hand on his arm. “Who did you say you were working for?” she asked Drew.

“I didn’t, in point of fact, but it’s a Mr. Landis. I doubt you’ve heard of him, but—”

The woman laughed. “The Landis who’s married to Fleur
Hargreaves? He sent you?” She nodded, eyes narrowed again. “I shouldn’t wonder. He sent you to clear her?”

“That was rather his hope,” Drew said. “I merely said I’d look into the thing. I couldn’t possibly make him any guarantees.”

“Farthering.” She nodded several times. “I knew I’d heard that name before, and now I remember. You fancy yourselves detectives, don’t you? You and your friend there? And that must be the American girl. Your fiancée, is she? Frightfully lucky girl.”

“Come on, Simone,” Benton said. “We don’t have to—”

“No, let them stay.”

She smirked at Drew, and Benton scowled in return.

“I’ve got better things to do just now than spend the afternoon talking to a bunch of toffs who fancy themselves Sherlock Holmes.” He stalked down the center aisle and out the lobby door, calling back to them, “Don’t think we’re even near being ready to open on Saturday.”

“Come along then,” Miss Cullimore said, evidently amused by him. “Come up here, everyone, and we’ll all have a nice chat.” She motioned with both hands. “Gather round, children.”

The players made a semicircle around her, and Drew realized there weren’t all that many present. Benton, the Pirate King, had already taken himself off, but that left Hazeldine as Frederic, Dave as the First Policeman, the man they called Clive as the Sergeant. Drew assumed the rather rotund and red-faced older man was the Major General, and Miss Cullimore herself was playing the dewy-eyed Mabel. At least for rehearsal purposes, it seemed the script girl, Tess, was everyone else.

“Now,” Simone said, “Mr. Farthering is going to ask us questions, and we’re going to tell him everything we know. Won’t that be fun?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Simone,” said the older man. “You should let the police see to things about Johnnie’s death.”

“It’s all right, Ronald. The police don’t seem to be moving very quickly on this case. Perhaps Mr. Farthering and his friends can find some evidence they’ve overlooked.”

Drew glanced at Nick. “And just who do you think is the guilty party?”

“Fleur,” Simone said. “At least Conor says so.”

Madeline glanced at Drew but kept silent.

“Do you believe him?” Nick asked.

“Why shouldn’t I? I don’t know who else would.” Simone sat down on a plaster boulder. “She and my husband had been at odds for a while now. He didn’t much care what she did, but she hated him with a true passion.”

Drew looked up at her. “Because . . . ?”

“It was hardly a secret, you know. Not round here. He’d been seeing her off and on from the time they were in that company together in Oxford—can’t remember what it was called now—until about four or five years ago. Then she up and marries this Landis fellow. Only one explanation for that, if you ask me.”

“Which is?”

She gave Drew a knowing look. “She was being an unbearable nuisance, making demands on him, insisting he leave me and marry her. I don’t know why she’d think he’d do that. He didn’t do that for any of the others. Why should he for her?”

“Then you knew about their . . . liaison at the time?”

“I always knew. He wasn’t exactly very good at keeping
secrets, and it’s not as if he even tried to keep that sort of thing from me. He and I were over years ago. I think he married me only because I told him he couldn’t have me any other way. And I meant it. But I shouldn’t have expected to change him. I knew how he was. We weren’t married long before he’d fairly much moved on to someone else. And someone else, and someone else.” She glanced at the script girl. “Once he made one of his conquests, it didn’t take long for him to start looking for the next challenge.”

“Why didn’t you divorce him?” Madeline asked.

“I should have.” The actress managed a faint smile. “I really should have divorced him for it, but once I resigned myself to it all, somehow I didn’t care. I was still rather fond of him, and I certainly didn’t want to marry someone else. Not after seeing what marriage was like with him. I must give Fleur credit for keeping him amused longer than any of the others.”

Tess kept her eyes on the script in her hands.

The leading lady’s mouth turned up in a smirk. “He usually lost interest the minute they gave in to him. He was a charmer, I’ll give him that. He could sweet-talk you into or out of anything. You saw him onstage in Oxford, didn’t you?”

Drew nodded.

“Well, what you saw onstage was exactly how he was offstage,” she said. “Bigger than life. Always a smile. Merrily doing as he ruddy well pleased.”

Drew looked at her for a moment, trying to read her thoughts. Actors and actresses earned their bread pretending to be who they weren’t.

“And that bothered Mrs. Landis—his doing as he pleased?”

Miss Cullimore nodded. “Or at least him not doing as
she
pleased. But really, I don’t know any details. She has always
bored me to tears, and I expect Johnnie felt the same way. Especially recently.”

“Why recently?”

“She was rather annoying, to be frank. Dropping in at odd hours, insisting on talking to him. It’s funny, because he was quite good-natured about it all, as if he were humoring her and still going to do just as he wanted.”

“And what did she want him to do?” Madeline asked. “Or stop doing.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the actress said. “They were always squabbling, and I really didn’t have the patience to listen to it. Nothing to do with me, at any rate.”

“Then just who would know?” Drew asked pleasantly.

“You might talk to that newspaper reporter he was so thick with.”

“Newspaper reporter?”

Miss Cullimore made a sour face. “Jo Tracy. Writes for the most awful scandal sheet I’ve ever read. Do you know it?”

“I have seen it a time or two,” Drew admitted. “Not precisely
Times
quality, eh?”

“Not precisely. But she has quite a following.”

“She?” Madeline said.

“Josephine, I believe, darling,” said Drew. “One of those
très moderne
career women, it seems.” He looked at the actress again. “She and your husband were friends?”

“Now,” Miss Cullimore replied. “They were something more for a time, but I believe that fizzled out a couple of years ago. They were still quite chummy. She picked up a lot of material for her column just by listening to Johnnie ramble about our friends and acquaintances when he’d had too much to drink. I heard she wanted to be a novelist or something,
and I suppose she observed a great deal about human nature, too. Actors
are
human, aren’t they?”

“You tell me,” Drew said.

She laughed. “I suppose the jury’s out yet on that one. Anyway, she’s the only one I can think of who might have any idea what Johnnie was up to. As I told the police, I went home after we had our little anniversary party with the cast.”

“Five years at the Tivoli, was it?”

“That’s right. Only Johnnie and I and Ronald, naturally, had been here the whole five years. Ronald, he does all the parts for gentlemen of a certain vintage, fathers, major generals and such. He’s been at the Tivoli just ages. Poor chap.”

“And no one saw anything out of the ordinary last night?” Drew asked, looking around the half circle of thespians. “What about the stagehands? Or those in the orchestra?”

Miss Cullimore shook her head. “They all clear out fairly quickly after a performance is over most nights. And Johnnie didn’t invite any of them to our gathering that night, I know that much.”

“All right,” Drew said. “Mrs. Landis wasn’t at the party, was she? Had anyone seen her at all earlier that night?”

“I hadn’t.” The leading lady looked at the others. “Anyone?”

The gathered players looked at one another, shaking their heads and murmuring in the negative.

“And yet you think she’s the one who killed your husband?”

Miss Cullimore shrugged. “She was the only one he was at odds with as far as I can tell. And she could be awfully pushy when she wanted something.”