All Hell erupted. The off-stage Negro music came to an abrupt halt – one would almost swear to having heard the scratch of a needle as it was yanked off a record – the library door opened once more, opened wide this time, the light was switched on again and, squeezed into the doorway, faces as white as shirt-fronts, cigarettes, cigars and cocktail glasses clutched in trembling hands, were a half-dozen horrified guests – one of them, as Trubshawe remarked, togged out in full kilted regalia.
Another, as he also remarked, was Cora Rutherford. The quintessence of pre-war chic in a long black evening gown and matching elbow-length gloves, she seemed scarcely altered from the woman he had encountered and indeed interrogated those many years before at ffolkes Manor. At once taking charge of the situation, she strode superbly across the stage, bent over the victim’s body exactly (in Trubshawe’s memory) as he himself had so often done in his career, put her ear to his chest – meanwhile shoving aside an exquisite tear-drop pearl earring as conspicuously as though she actually intended to raise a smile from the audience – felt his pulse, drew down both his eyelids, then looked back up at the others.
‘He’s dead.’
This announcement caused an even greater commotion. What was to be done? The police would have to be called in, of course; but in the meantime, there being no doubt whatever that the murder had been committed by one of those present, how were they to spend the time in the uneasy truce that would follow?
Now it must be said that even in those of Evadne Mount’s whodunits he had found most satisfying it was the obligatory but, to his way of thinking, faintly tiresome connective tissue that Trubshawe had always least looked forward to; and here too, after such a suspenseful opening scene, his mind began to wander. So it was that he chanced temporarily to turn his attention away from the stage and towards the novelist who, from the very start of the sketch, had been utterly absorbed in the to-ings and fro-ings of her own creations.
As he watched her from the corner of his eye, however, he saw her features suddenly twitch with a spasm of disbelief, of shock, almost of horror.
A moment later, she caught his wrist in a painfully tight grip and, half-moaning, murmured:
‘Oh no … No …’
‘Why, what is it?’ whispered Trubshawe.
‘Look!’ she cried out, seemingly forgetting that she was in a theatre. ‘The blood! It’s wrong! It’s all wrong! There’s not supposed to be any blood!’
While some spectators immediately attempted to shoosh this blithering female who had had the nerve, so they imagined, to interrupt the show with her own dim-witted chatter, others who had recognised Evadne Mount as the author of the playlet and on whom the ominous implication of her words was already having its effect, began to wonder aloud if there really could be …
As for the performers on stage, they were visibly at a loss to know what to do next. Should they continue to deliver the lines as they had been written? Or should they pay heed to this grotesque if, all the same, anxiety-inducing outburst from the woman who had written them?
Their minds were made up for them by the eventual realisation, on both sides of the footlights at once, that from the ‘dead body’ of the character who had just been ‘murdered’ a thin trickle of blood had indeed started to snake its way downstage and was even now dripping into the orchestra pit, right in front of the seat occupied by, precisely, Evadne Mount.
This was too much for her. Without addressing another word to her companion, she leapt to her feet, hurriedly climbed the half-dozen steps leading up to the performing area and, in front of the entire cast, the petrified audience and a Trubshawe who for the moment was too discombobulated to think of taking any rational action, bounded onto the stage.
Like Cora Rutherford before her, she bent over the body. Bracing herself, she gently turned the young actor’s face upward. The audience gasped again – except that this was a different type of gasp, the gasp no longer of spectators at a theatrical show but of bystanders at a car crash. Blood was now sweating freely through the snow-white dickey of the actor’s tuxedo, forming an ever-expanding circular stain that resembled nothing so much as the Japanese national flag.
Evadne Mount looked up grimly, straight at the audience instead of at the members of the cast.
‘Oh my God, ladies and gentlemen, this is real blood. The bullet – the bullet wasn’t a blank!’
Hearing these words, one of the actors, a sixtyish, silver-templed gentleman who had been cast as a retired military officer – so at least intimated the lavishly beribboned and bemedalled lapels of his dinner jacket, the pronounced limp with which he had walked onto the stage and, not least, the monocle which dangled from a red ribbon about his neck – at once stepped forward (now minus the limp) and, prompting yet another gasp, held up what Trubshawe recognised as a German army pistol, a Luger.
‘I – I got it from props,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t even take a look inside it. Why should I? I naturally assumed everything was …’
Even before he had completed his piece, his fellow cast members could all be seen gradually distancing themselves from him and gathering in a nervous huddle at the opposite end of the stage.
‘Oh, come now. You can’t possibly suspect me of … Look here, I had no earthly reason to murder Emlyn. Not like this. Not in full view of everybody. No, no, no, that’s not what I meant to say. I had no reason to murder him anyway – at all! But if I’d had a reason – I mean, just for the sake of the argument – if I had had a reason – which, I repeat, I didn’t have – I certainly wouldn’t …’
His voice trailed off in a series of inaudible ramblings. The audience sat as though collectively turned to stone. They were so mesmerised by the extraordinary events which had taken place on stage, it hadn’t occurred to any of them to propose that the police, the real police, be instantly summoned.
Except that there was a real policeman, a real ex-policeman, in the house. Trubshawe had finally come to his senses. Realising that he alone of all those present in the Theatre Royal was qualified to ensure that the appropriate protocols would be implemented from that point on, he rose up from his seat.
And he was just about to follow Evadne Mount onto the stage by the same half-dozen steps when she herself stared back at him from the supine body over which she was still crouching and, to his stupefaction, she winked at him!
Winked at him? Winked at him??? Could it be …? Surely not? Surely everything that had happened wasn’t just …?
Then, for Trubshawe as for the rest of the audience, the penny dropped.
Already, centre-stage, the novelist Evadne Mount and her most celebrated character, Alexis Baddeley, the former played by herself, as it were, the latter played by the actress known to be her oldest friend, were squabbling (exactly as he recalled them squabbling at ffolkes Manor) as to who had priority in investigating the murder of the juvenile lead. Every gibe, every aside, every taunt and twit, was greeted with gales of laughter as, in their turn, the other members of the cast, all of them famous, though not to Trubshawe, also started insulting each other with coded comments about private lives and loves, professional successes and, even more gleefully, professional failures.
‘I never smoke. I never drink. I never take drugs,’ was the high-minded claim of one cast member who, in real life, had become notorious for trumpeting each of these abstemious virtues of his in the illustrated magazines.
‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ riposted Evadne Mount, who had naturally given herself the best of her own lines, ‘how do you find the time to do all these things you never do?’