“Instead of coming to you or me with his discovery, he tried to blackmail the murderer. I don’t mean that Adeane sneaked up to the murderer in a dark corner and hissed: Ten thousand dollars by midnight or I will tell all! I don’t believe it was even blackmail for money. I think he wanted to enlist the murderer’s help in getting his precious play produced. That was an obsession with him. And just as he hinted to Margot Ingelow that she owed him something for his giving her an alibi, I suppose he let the murderer know indirectly by some hint or innuendo the nature of the thing he had discovered assuming mistakenly that the murderer would buy his silence by helping with the play.”
The Inspector was dubious. “Would a man connive at murder just for the sake of getting a play produced?”
“Ask any unproduced playwright! No, seriously, Adeane was a completely callous egoist, consumed with his own ambition. These men with vast ambitions and slender talents who prey on the arts since the arts became profitable in the last hundred years or so are not quite human. If you have no talent you have to rely on tricks in order to get on, and such a career hardly develops the ethical sense. If you had cornered Adeane he would have said that the thing he discovered didn’t prove murder absolutely, so he wasn’t really sure of it; but it did cast suspicion in a certain direction, and so . . . what’s the harm in making use of that? Such things are done in business every day old man, so why not in play producing, etc., with a wink and nudge, one man of the world to another.
“He played with murder as innocently as a child plays with a loaded gun, and—the gun went off. What we must ask ourselves now is simply this: What did Adeane know that no one else knew?”
“You say Adeane was the witness who gave Margot Ingelow her alibi?” said Foyle. “Could that have anything to do with it?”
“Hardly likely since Margot Ingelow was with Pauline, Milhau, and me tonight when the second murder was committed. She seems to be cleared.”
“How did Adeane happen to take the part of Vladimir?” asked Foyle.
There was a sudden glint of amusement in Basil’s eyes. “That question can be answered easily, if you send for the boy who was to have played the singing peasant boy in the last act.”
A few moments later a patrolman escorted the peasant boy onto the stage. He really looked like a peasant now in the gay green and red costume Pauline had designed for him—a handsome, virile peasant with gold earrings in the lobes of pointed, faun ears under the wavy black hair.
“Tell the Inspector what you did at rehearsal this afternoon,” said Basil.
The moist black eyes rolled uneasily. “Aw, gee it was only a gag. I spoke the last line, and they all got mad at me. It’s supposed to be bad luck. The guy who was gonna play Vladimir says he won’t play, and then Adeane. says he’ll do it, he’s not superstitious. What the heck, it wasn’t my fault. How could I tell that—that—” The boy’s eyes rolled toward the alcove. There was nothing there now but the crumpled coverlet on the couch. He swallowed and dropped his eyes. His hands were twitching.
Basil’s voice came into the silence quietly. “How much did you get for that?”
“Ten bucks.” The boy kept his eyes on the ground.
“From whom?” cried Foyle eagerly.
“Don’t you know?” The boy looked up in surprise. “From Adeane himself. He wanted to play Vladimir.”
The Inspector was disappointed.
“All right, you can go,” said Basil.
The boy scuttled through the wings to the stage door.
“Why on earth did Adeane want to play Vladimir?” demanded Foyle. “In order to test some theory about the murder by seeing the play from Vladimir’s point of view?”
“Nothing so impersonal and disinterested,” returned Basil. “He did it to attract Milhau’s attention to himself and his plays, and he succeeded. He actually got Milhau to say he’d read the stuff.”
“And then—just as he got his first real chance—he was murdered.” Foyle brooded. “If only he’d given us a hint of what he knew—”
“He wasn’t interested in helping us. Adeane was never interested in anything but Adeane.”
Foyle turned back to the knife on the table as if he greatly preferred a tangible clue to all these tenuous suppositions. A new idea came to him. “Did Rodney Tait carry that surgical bag on stage tonight?”
“Yes, but the bag was empty. This afternoon all the remaining knives were left in Milhau’s office safe.”
“Were they counted first?”
“No. Rod just dumped them on Milhau’s desk in a heap. Anyone in the theater could have helped himself to a knife before they were put in the safe.”
“They should have been counted. I’ll have to ask Tait a thing or two about that.” Foyle rose grimly. “I’m going to question the whole bunch now in Milhau’s office. Want to come?”
“No, I think I’ll look around here a bit.”
The plywood door at left quivered after Foyle’s departure. Alone, Basil prowled restlessly around the stage. He had little faith in the sort of inquisition going on now in Milhau’s office. Official questions put people on guard. They only let slip the important things in their unguarded moments when everything was casual and spontaneous. Foyle had left Adeane’s copy of Dr. Heiser’s autobiography on the table. Apparently he thought it of no importance. Again Basil turned the pages. Why had Adeane bought the book when it was available at the medical library? A passage on native medical diagnosis in India caught Basil’s eyes. He read it with growing interest. . . .
A light footstep distracted him. He turned and saw Margot through the gap in the wings at left. She paused. “It’s all right, Dr. Willing. The Inspector questioned me first and said I could go.”
He waited as if he expected something more of her. She came through the wings onto the stage. She was carrying the white hat; the smooth brown hair was slightly disordered, the black and white linen dress crumpled. She looked tired. As they were on the stage, he gave her a cigarette and lighted it.
She sank into Fedora’s armchair before the fire. “You hold me responsible for this latest development don’t you?”
“I haven’t said so.”
“But you’ve looked it.”
“I’m more responsible than you,” he replied soberly. “I felt it was all wrong this morning at rehearsal, but I didn’t put a stop to it because it was only a feeling—nothing positive.”
“I don’t think either of us is responsible,” she answered. “People make their own lives and their own deaths. Adeane made his. He was the sort of fool who would think it smart to bait a murderer.”
Basil held out his hand. “Will you give me the staples you took from his manuscript?”
She looked at him astonished and indignant. “I don’t know what you mean!”
“Will you let me see your bag?”
She hesitated. Gently he took it from her—the same patent leather bag she had carried yesterday. He opened it. There were all the usual things—coin purse, handkerchief, lipstick. He opened the zipper compartment. There were a pair of brass staples, and other things—a diamond ring, a bright new paper clip, a tin bottle top, a small pair of gold nail scissors, a shining new copper penny, a glass clip from some Woolworth store, and a scrap of tin foil.