Night at the Vulcan (23 page)

Alleyn said: “We are creatures of convention and like our tragedies to take a recognizable form.”

“I’m afraid this is not even a tragedy. Unless—” He turned his. head and looked at the other wall. “I haven’t seen Martyn,” he said, “since you spoke to her. She’s all right, isn’t she?” Before Alleyn could answer he went on: “I suppose she’s told you about herself — her arrival out of a clear sky and all the rest of it?”

“Everything, I think.”

“I hope to God— I want to see her, Alleyn. She’s alone in there. She may be frightened. I don’t suppose you understand.”

“She’s told me of the relationship between you.”

“The
relationship
!” he said quickly. “You mean—”

“She’s told me you are related. It’s natural that you should be concerned about her.”

Poole stared at him. “My good ass,” he said, “I’m nineteen years her senior and I love her like a boy of her own age.”

“In that case,” Alleyn remarked, “you can
not
be said to have run out of the appropriate emotions.”

He grinned at Poole in a friendly manner and, accompanied by Fox, went to his final interview — with Jacques Doré.

It took place on the stage. Dr. Rutherford had elected to retire into the office to effect, he had told Fox, a few paltry adjustments of his costume. The players, too, were all in their several rooms and Clem Smith had been wakened, re-examined by Fox, and allowed to go home.

So Jacko was alone in the tortured scene he had himself designed.

He looked a frightful scarecrow in his working clothes, with grey stubble on his chin, grey bags under his eyes and grey fuzz standing up on his head. His long crepe-y neck stuck out of the open collar of his tartan shirt. His eyes were bloodshot and his delicate hands were filthy.

“I have slept,” he announced, rising from the heap of old curtains which Clem had transformed into a bed, “like the Holy Innocents, though it is possible that I do not resemble any of them. However deceptive the outward man may be, gentlemen, the inner is entirely at your service.” He smiled ingratiatingly at them. His lips curled back and exposed teeth like a row of yellow pegs in a dice box. “What do we talk about?” he asked, and began to roll himself a cigarette.

“First of all,” Alleyn said, “I must tell you that I am asking for a general search through the clothes that have been worn in the theatre. We have no warrant at this stage but so far no one has objected.”

“Then who am I to do so?”

Fox went through his pockets and found a number of curious objects. — chalk, pencils, a rubber, a surgeon’s scalpel which Jacko said he used for wood carving, and which was protected by a sheath, a pocket-book with money, a photograph of Helena Hamilton, various scraps of paper with drawings on them, pieces of cotton-wool and an empty bottle smelling strongly of ether. This, he told Alleyn, had contained a fluid used for cleaning purposes. “Always they are messing themselves and always I am removing the mess. My overcoat is in the junk room. It contains merely a filthy handkerchief, I believe.”

Alleyn thanked him and returned the scalpel, the pocket-book and drawing materials. Fox laid the other things aside, sat down and opened his note-book.

“Next,” Alleyn said, “I think I’d better ask you what your official job is in this theatre. I see by the programme—”

“The programme,” Jacko said, “is euphemistic. ‘Assistant to Adam Poole,’ is it not? Let us rather say: Dogsbody in Ordinary to the Vulcan Theatre. Henchman Extraordinary to Mr. Adam Poole. At the moment, dresser to Miss Helena Hamilton. Confidant to all and sundry. Johannes Factotum and not without bells on.
Le
Vulcan,
c’est moi
, in a shabby manner of speaking. Also:
j’y suis, j’y reste
. I hope.”

“Judging by this scenery,” Alleyn rejoined, “and by an enchanting necklace which I think is your work, there shouldn’t be much doubt about that. But your association with the management goes farther back than the Vulcan, doesn’t it?”

“Twenty years,” Jacko said, licking his cigarette paper. “For twenty years I improvise my role of Pantaloon for them. Foolishness, but such is my deplorable type. The eternal doormat. What can I do for you?”

Alleyn said: “You can tell me if you still think Bennington committed suicide.”

Jacko lit his cigarette. “Certainly,” he said. “You are wasting your time.”

“Was he a vain man?”

“Immensely. And he knew he was artistically sunk.”

“Vain in his looks?”

“But yes,
yes
!” Jacko said with great emphasis, and then looked very sharply at Alleyn. “Why, of his looks?”

“Did he object to his make-up in this play? It seemed to me a particularly repulsive one.”

“He disliked it, yes. He exhibited the vanity of the failing actor in this. Always, always he must be sympathetic. Fortunately Adam insisted on the make-up.”

“I think you told me that you noticed his face was shining with sweat before he went for the last time to his room?”

“I did.”

“And you advised him to remedy this? You even looked into his room to make sure?”

“Yes,” Jacko agreed after a pause, “I did.”

“So when you had gone he sat at his dressing-table and carefully furbished up his repellent make-up as if for the curtain-call. And then gassed himself?”

“The impulse perhaps came very suddenly.” Jacko half-closed, his eyes and looked through their sandy lashes at his cigarette smoke. “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “Listen. He repairs his face. He has a last look at himself. He is about to get up when his attention sharpens. He continues to stare. He sees the ruin of his face. He was once a coarsely handsome fellow, was Ben, with a bold rakehelly air. The coarseness has increased, but where, he asks himself, are the looks? Pouches, grooves, veins, yellow eyeballs — and all emphasized most hideously by the make-up. This is what he has become, he thinks, he has become the man he has been playing. And his heart descends into his belly. He knows despair and he makes up his mind. There is hardly time to do it. In a minute or two he will be called. So quickly, quickly he lies on the floor, with trembling hands he pulls his coat over his head and puts the end of the gas tube in his mouth.”

“You knew how he was found, then?”

“Clem told me. I envisage everything. He enters a world of whirling dreams. And in a little while he is dead. I see it very clearly.”

“Almost as if you’d been there,” Alleyn said lightly. “Is this, do you argue, his sole motive? What about the quarrels that had been going on? The change of cast at the last moment? The handing over of Miss Gainsford’s part to Miss Tarne? He was very much upset by that, wasn’t he?”

Jacko doubled himself up like an ungainly animal and squatted on a stool. “Too much has been made of the change of casting,” he said. “He accepted it in the end. He made a friendly gesture. On thinking it over I have decided we were all wrong to lay so much emphasis on this controversy.” He peered sideways at Alleyn. “It was the disintegration of his artistic integrity that did it,” he said. “I now consider the change of casting to be of no significance.”

Alleyn looked him very hard in the eye. “And that,” he said, “is where we disagree. I consider it to be of the most complete significance: the key, in fact, to the whole puzzle of his death.”

“I cannot agree,” said Jacko. “I am sorry.”

Alleyn waited for a moment and then — and for the last time — asked the now familiar question.

“Do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”

There was a long silence. Jacko’s back was bent and his head almost between his knees.

“I have heard of him,” he said at last.

“Did you know him?”

“I have never met him. Never.”

“Perhaps you have seen some of his work?”

Jacko was silent.

“
Können Sie Deutsch lesen?
”

Fox looked up from his notes with an expression of blank surprise. They heard a car turn in from Carpet Street and come up the side lane with a chime of bells. It stopped and a door slammed.

“
Jawohl
,” Jacko whispered.

The outside doors of the dock were rolled back. The sound resembled stage-thunder. Then the inner and nearer doors opened heavily and someone walked round the back of the set. Young Lamprey came through the Prompt entrance. “The mortuary van, sir,” he said,

“All right. They can go ahead.”

He went out again. There was a sound of voices and of boots on concrete. A cold draught of night air blew in from the dock and set the borders creaking. A rope tapped against canvas and a sighing breath wandered about the grid. The doors were rolled together. The engine started up and, to another chime of bells, Bennington made his final exit from the Vulcan. The theatre settled back into its night-watch.

Jacko’s cigarette had burnt his lip. He spat it out and got slowly to his feet.

“You have been very clever,” he said. He spoke as if his lips were stiff with cold.

“Did Bennington tell you how he would, if necessary, play his trump card?”

“Not until after he had decided to play it.”

“But you had recognized the possibility?”

“Yes.”

Alleyn nodded to Fox, who shut his note-book, removed his spectacles and went out.

“What now?” Jacko asked,

“All on,” Alleyn said. “A company call. This is the curtain speech, Mr. Doré.”

Lamprey had called them and then retired. They found an empty stage awaiting them. It was from force of habit, Martyn supposed, that they took up, for the last time, their after-rehearsal positions on the stage. Helena lay back in her deep chair with Jacko on the floor at her feet. When he settled himself there, she touched his cheek and he turned his lips to her hand.

Martyn wondered if he was ill. He saw that she looked at him and made his clown’s grimace. She supposed that, like everybody else, he was merely exhausted. Darcey and Gay Gainsford sat together on the small settee and Parry Percival on his upright chair behind them. At the back, Dr. Rutherford lay on the sofa with a newspaper spread over his face. Martyn had returned to her old seat near the Prompt corner and Poole to his central chair facing the group. “We have come out of our rooms,” Martyn thought, “like rabbits from their burrows.” Through the Prompt entrance she could see Fred Badger, lurking anxiously in the shadows.

Alleyn and his subordinates stood in a group near the dock doors. On the wall close by them was the baize rack with criss-crossed tapes in which two receipts and a number of commercial cards were exhibited. Fox had read them all. He now replaced the last and looked through the Prompt corner to the stage.

“Are they all on?” Alleyn asked.

“All present and correct, sir.”

“Do you think I’m taking a very risky line, Br’er Fox?”

“Well, sir,” said Fox uneasily, “it’s a very unusual sort of procedure, isn’t it?”

“It’s a very unusual case,” Alleyn rejoined, and after a moment’s reflection he took Fox by the arm. “Come on, old trooper,” he said. “Let’s get it over.”

He walked onto the stage almost as if, like Poole, he were going to sum up a rehearsal. Fox went to his old chair near the back entrance. Martyn heard the other men move round behind the set. They took up positions, she thought, outside the entrances and it was unpleasant to think of them waiting there, unseen.

Alleyn stood with his back to the curtain and Poole at once slewed his chair round to face him. With the exception of Jacko, who was rolling a cigarette, they all watched Alleyn. Even the Doctor removed his newspaper, sat up, stared, groaned and returned ostentatiously to his former position.

For a moment Alleyn looked round the group, and to Martyn he seemed to have an air of compassion. When he began to speak his manner was informal but extremely deliberate.

“In asking you to come here together,” he said, “I’ve taken an unorthodox line. I don’t myself know whether I am justified in taking it, and I shan’t know until those of you who are free to do so have gone home. That will be in a few minutes, I think.

“I have to tell you that your fellow-player has been murdered. All of you must know that we’ve formed this opinion, and I think most of you know that I was first inclined to it by the circumstance of his behaviour on returning to his dressing-room. His last conscious act was to repair his stage make-up. While that seemed to me to be inconsistent with suicide, it was, on the other hand, much too slender a thread to tie up a case for homicide. But there is more conclusive evidence and I’m going to put it before you. He powdered his face. His dresser had already removed the pieces of cottonwool that had been used earlier in the evening and put out a fresh pad. Yet after his death there was no used pad of cotton-wool anywhere in the room. There is, on the other hand, a fresh stain near the gas fire which may, on analysis, turn out to have been caused by such a pad having been burnt on the hearth. The box of powder has been overturned on the shelf and there is a deposit of powder all over that corner of the room. As you know, his head and shoulders were covered, tent-wise, with his overcoat. There was powder on this coat and over his finger-prints on the top of the gas fire. The coat had hung near the door and would, while it was there, have been out of range of any powder flying about. The powder, it is clear, had been scattered after and not before he was gassed. If he was, in fact, gassed.”

Poole and Darcey made, simultaneous ejaculations. Helena and Gay looked bewildered, and Percival incredulous. Jacko stared at the floor and the Doctor groaned under his newspaper.

“The post mortem,” Alleyn said, “will of course settle this one way or the other. It will be exhaustive. No, it’s quite certain that the dresser didn’t go into the room after Mr. Bennington entered it this last time, and it is equally certain that the dresser left it in good order — the powder-pad prepared, the clothes hung up, the fire burning and the door unlocked. It is also certain that the powder was not overturned by the men who carried Mr. Bennington out. It was spilt by someone who was in the room after he was on the floor with the coat over his head. This person, the police will maintain, was his murderer. Now the question arises, doesn’t it, how it came about that he was in such a condition — comatose or unconscious — that it was possible to get him down on the floor, put out the gas fire, and then disengage the connecting tube, put the rubber end in his mouth and turn the gas on again, get his finger-prints on the wing-tap and cover him with his own overcoat There is still about one-sixth of brandy left in his flask. He was not too drunk to make up his own face and he was more or less his own man, though not completely so, when he spoke to Miss Tarne just before he went into his room. During the second interval Mr. Darcey hit him on the jaw and raised a bruise. I suppose it is possible that his murderer hit him again on the same spot — there is no other bruise — and knocked him out. A closer examination of the bruise may show if this was so. In that case the murderer would need to pay only one visit to the room: he would simply walk in a few minutes before the final curtain, knock his victim out and set the stage for apparent suicide.