What Dread Hand? (18 page)

‘Sent for the door-keeper and checked the stories together,’ said Cockie promptly.

This was (to his present chagrin) precisely what the Great Detective had done. The stories, however, had proved to coincide pretty exactly, to the moment when the light had gone out. ‘Then I heard footsteps from the direction of the Green-room, sir. About twenty minutes later, you arrived. That’s the first I knew she was dead.’

So: what to do next?

‘To ask oneself,’ said Inspector Cockrill, though the question had been clearly rhetorical, ‘why there had been fifteen minutes’ delay in sending for the police.’

‘Why should you think there had been fifteen minutes’ delay?’

‘The man said it was twenty minutes before you arrived. But you told us earlier, you were just across the street.’

‘No doubt,’ said the old man, crossly, ‘as you have guessed my question, you would like to—’

‘Answer it,’ finished Inspector Cockrill. ‘Yes, certainly. The answer is: because the cast wanted time to change back into stage costume. We know they had changed out of it, or at least begun to change…’

‘I
knew it: the ladies were not properly laced up, Iago had on an everyday shirt under his doublet—they had all obviously hurriedly redressed and as hurriedly re-made up. But how could you…?’

‘We could deduce it. Glenda Croy had had time to get back into her underclothes. The rest of them said they had been in the Green-room discussing the threat of her “affair”. But the affair had been going on for some time, it couldn’t have been suddenly so pressing that they need discuss it before they even got out of their stage-costume—which is, I take it, by instinct and training the first thing an actor does after curtain-fall. And besides, you
knew
that Othello, at least, had changed and changed back.’

‘I knew?’

‘You believed it was Othello—that’s to say James Dragon—who had been in the room with her. And the door-man had virtually told you that at that time he was not wearing his stage costume.’

‘I fear then that till this moment,’ said the great man, heavily sarcastic, ‘the door-man’s statement to that effect has escaped me.’

‘Well, but…’ Cockie was astonished. ‘You asked him how, having seen his silhouette on the window-blinds, he had “known” it was James Dragon. And he answered, after reflection, that he knew by his voice and by what he was saying. He did not say,’ said Cockie, sweetly reasonable, ‘what otherwise, surely, he would have said before all else: “I knew by the shape on the window-blind of the raised arms in those huge, padded, cantaloupe-melon sleeves.”’

There was a horrid little silence. The host started the port on its round again with a positive whizz, the guests pressed walnuts upon one another with abandon (hoarding the nut-crackers, however, to themselves); and, after all, it was a shame to be pulling the white rabbits all at once out of the conjurer’s top hat, before he had come to them—if he ever got there! Inspector Cockrill tuned his voice to a winning respect. ‘So then, do tell us, sir—what next did you do?’

What the great man had done, standing there in the Green-room muttering to himself, had been to conduct a hurried review of the relevant times, in his own mind. ‘Ten-thirty, the curtain falls. Ten-fifty, having changed from their stage dress, they do or do not meet in here for a council of war. At any rate, by eleven o’clock the woman is dead: and then there is a council of war indeed… Ten minutes, perhaps, for frantic discussion, five or ten minutes’ grace before they must all be in costume again, ready to receive the police…’ But
why?
His eyes roved over them: the silks and velvets, the rounded bosoms thrust up by laced bodices, low cut: the tight-stretched hose, the jewelled doublets, the melon sleeves…

The sleeves. He remembered the laxly curved hands hanging over the head of the divan, the pointed nails. There had been no evidence of a struggle, but one never knew. He said slowly: ‘May I ask now why all of you have replaced your stage dress and make-up?’

Was there, somewhere in the room, a sharp intake of breath? Perhaps: but for the most part they retained their stagey calm. Emilia and Iago, point counterpoint, again explained. They had all been halfway, as it were, between stage dress and day dress; it had been somehow simpler to scramble back into costume when the alarm arose… Apart from the effect of an act rehearsed, it rang with casual truth. ‘Except that you told me that “when the alarm arose” you were all here in the Green-room, having a discussion.’

‘Yes, but only half-changed, changing as we talked,’ said Cassio, quickly. Stage people, he added, were not frightfully fussy about the conventional modesties.

‘Very well. You will, however, oblige me by reverting to day dress now. But before you all do so…’ He put his head out into the corridor and a couple of men moved in unobtrusively and stood just inside the door. ‘Mr. James Dragon—would you please remove those sleeves and let me see your wrists?’

It was the girl, Bianca, who cried out—on a note of terror: ‘No!’

‘Hush, be quiet,’ said James Dragon: commandingly but soothingly.

‘But James… But James, he thinks… It isn’t true,’ she cried out frantically, ‘it was the other man, we saw him in there, Mr. Dragon was in here with us…’

‘Then Mr. Dragon will have no objection to showing me his arms.’

‘But why?’ she cried out, violently. ‘How could his arms be…? He had that costume on, he did have it on, he was wearing it at the very moment he…’ There was a sharp hiss from someone in the room and she stopped, appalled, her hand across her mouth. But she rushed on. ‘He hasn’t changed, he’s had on that costume, those sleeves, all the time: nothing could have happened to his wrists. Haven’t you, James?—hasn’t he, everyone?—we know, we all saw him, he was wearing it when he came back…’

There was that hiss of thrilled horror again: but Leila Dragon said, quickly, ‘When he came back from finding the body, she means,’ and went across and took the girl roughly by the arm. The girl opened her mouth and gave one piercing scream like the whistle of a train; and suddenly, losing control of herself, Leila Dragon slapped her once and once again across the face.

The effect was extraordinary. The scream broke short, petered out into a sort of yelp of terrified astonishment. Mrs. Dragon cried out sharply, ‘Oh, no!’ and James Dragon said, ‘Leila, you
fool
!’ They all stood staring, utterly in dismay. And Leila Dragon blurted out: ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It was because she screamed. It was—a sort of reaction, instinctive, a sort of reaction to hysteria…’ She seemed to plead with them. It was curious that she seemed to plead with them, and not with the girl.

James Dragon broke through the ice-wall of their dismay. He said uncertainly: ‘It’s just that…We don’t want to make—well, enemies of people,’ and the girl broke out wildly: ‘How dare you touch me? How dare you?’

It was as though an act which for a moment had broken down, reduced the cast to gagging, now received a cue from prompt corner and got going again. Leila Dragon said, ‘You were hysterical, you were losing control.’

‘How dare you?’ screamed the girl. Her pretty face was waspish with spiteful rage. ‘All I’ve done is to try to protect him, like the rest of you…’

‘Be quiet,’ said Mrs. Dragon, in The Voice.

‘Let her say what she has to say,’ the detective said. She was silent. ‘Come now. “He was wearing it when he came back”—the Othello costume.
“When he came back.”
From finding the body, Miss Leila Dragon now says. But he didn’t “come back”. You all followed him to the dressing-room—you said so.’

She remained silent, however; and he could deal with her later—time was passing, clues were growing cold. ‘Very well then, Mr. Dragon, let us get on with it. I want to see your wrists and arms.’

‘But why me?’ said James Dragon, almost petulantly; and once again there was that strange effect of an unreal act being staged for some set purpose: and once again the stark reality of a face grown all in a moment haggard and old beneath the dark stain of the Moor.

‘It’s not only you. I may come to the rest, in good time.’

‘But me first?’

‘Get on with it, please,’ he said impatiently.

But when at last, fighting every inch of the way, with an ill grace he slowly divested himself of the great sleeves—there was nothing to be seen: nothing but a brown-stained hand whose colour ended abruptly at the wrist, giving place to forearms startlingly white against the brown—but innocent of scratches or marks of any kind.

‘Nor did Iago, I may add in passing, nor did Cassio nor the Clown nor anyone else in the room, have marks of any kind on wrists or arms. So there I was—five minutes wasted and nothing to show for it.’

‘Well hardly,’ said Inspector Cockrill, passing walnuts to his neighbour.

‘I beg your pardon? Did Mr. Cockrill say something again?’

‘I just murmured that there was after all, something to show for it—for the five minutes wasted.’

‘?’

‘Five minutes wasted,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

Five minutes wasted. Yes. They had been working for it, they were playing for time. Waiting for something. Or postponing something? ‘And of course, meanwhile, there had been the scene with the girl,’ said Cockie. ‘That wasn’t a waste of time. That told you a lot. I mean—losing control and screaming out that he had been wearing Othello’s costume “at the very moment…” and, “when he came back”. “Losing control”—and yet what she screamed out contained at least one careful lie. Because he hadn’t been wearing the costume—that we know for certain.’ And he added inconsequently that they had to remember all the time that these were acting folk.

But that had not been the end of the scene with the girl. As he perfunctorily examined her arms—for surely no woman had had any part in the murder—she had whispered to him that she wanted to speak to him: outside. And, darting looks of poison at them, holding her hand to her slapped face, she had gone out with him to the corridor. ‘I stood with her there while she talked,’ said the old man. ‘Her face, of course, was heavily made up; and yet under the make-up I could see the weal where Leila Dragon had slapped her. She was not hysterical now, she was cool and clear; but she was afraid and for the first time it seemed to be not at all an act, she seemed to be genuinely afraid, and afraid at what she was about to say to me. But she said it. It was a—solution: a suggestion of how the crime had been done; though she unsaid nothing that she had already said. I went back into the Green-room. They were all standing about, white-faced, looking at her as she followed me in; and with them, also, there seemed to be an air of genuine horror, genuine dread, as though the need for histrionics had passed. Leila Dragon was holding the wrist of her right hand in her left. I said to James Dragon: “I think at this stage it would be best if you would come down to the station with me, for further questioning…”

‘I expected an uproar and there was an uproar. More waste of time. But now, you see,’ said the old man, looking cunningly round the table, ‘I knew—didn’t I? Waiting for something? Or postponing something? Now, you see, I knew.’

‘At any rate, you took him down to the station?’ said Cockie, sickened by all this gratuitous mystificating. ‘On the strength of what the girl had suggested?’

‘What that was is, of course, quite clear to
you
?’

‘Well, of course,’ said Cockie.

‘Of course, of course,’ said the old man angrily. He shrugged. ‘At any rate—it served as an excuse. It meant that I could take him, and probably hold him there, on a reasonable suspicion: it did him out of the alibi, you see. So off he went, at last, with a couple of my men; and, after a moment, I followed. But before I went, I collected something—something from his dressing-room.’ Another of his moments had come; but this time he addressed himself only to Inspector Cockrill. ‘No doubt what that was is also clear to you?’

‘Well, a pot of theatrical cleansing cream, I suppose,’ said Inspector Cockrill; almost apologetically.

The old man, as has been said, was something of an actor himself. He affected to give up. ‘As you know it so well, Inspector, you had better explain to our audience and save me my breath.’ He gave to the words ‘our audience’ an ironic significance quite shattering in its effect; and hugged to himself a secret white rabbit to be sprung, to the undoing of this tiresome little man, when all seemed over, out of a secret top hat.

Inspector Cockrill in his turn affected surprise, affected diffidence, affected reluctant acceptance. ‘Oh, well, all right.’ He embarked upon it in his grumbling voice. ‘It was the slap across the girl, Bianca’s, face. Our friend, no doubt, will tell you that he paid very little attention to whatever it was she said to him in the corridor.’ (A little more attention, he privately reflected, would have been to advantage; but still…) ‘He was looking, instead, at the weal on her face: glancing in through the door, perhaps, to where Leila Dragon sat unconsciously clasping her stinging right hand with her left. He was thinking of another hand he had recently seen, with a pink mark across the palm. He knew now, as he says. He knew why they had been so appalled when, forgetting herself, she had slapped the girl’s face: because it might suggest to his mind that there had been another such incident that night. He knew. He knew what they all had been waiting for, why they had been marking time. He knew why they had scrambled back into stage costume, they had done it so that there might be no particularity if James Dragon appeared in the dark make-up of Othello the Moor. They were waiting till under the stain, another stain should fade—the mark of Glenda Croy’s hand across her murderer’s cheek.’ He looked into the Great Detective’s face. ‘I think that’s the way your mind worked?’

The great one bowed. ‘Very neatly thought out. Very creditable.’ He shrugged. ‘Yes, that’s how it was. So we took him down to the station and without more delay we cleaned the dark paint off his face. And under the stain—what do you think we found?’

‘Nothing,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

‘Exactly,’ said the old man, crossly.

‘You can’t have found anything; because, after all, he was free to play Othello for the next three weeks,’ said Cockie, simply. ‘You couldn’t detain him—there was nothing to detain him on. The girl’s story wasn’t enough to stand alone, without the mark of the slap: and now, if it had ever been there, it had faded. Their delaying tactics had worked. You had to let him go.’