“Yes?” murmured Barnaby/Gepetto.
“I was angry at first. Very angry. I thought he was making a terrible mistake. But by the time the decree nisi came through, I had changed. I realized that, for the first time in years, I was free.” She flung her arms wide, narrowly missing Harold’s flowers. Her sailor’s gaze raked the far horizon. “Free!”
“And yet you remarried so quickly.”
“Ah.” The gaze became wary, contracted from the hemispheric, and swept the floor. “Love conquers all.”
They were back in fantasy land, observed Barnaby to himself, but he let it ride. For now. And fantasies were not entirely unrevealing. He repeated his first question.
“Well, Tom, I don’t know about anyone wanting to kill Esslyn, but Nicholas came down here just before the final curtain with a splinter in his thumb and said that Esslyn had tried to kill him!” Barnaby received this dramatic pronouncement with irritating self-control. “Under the table,” continued Rosa. “In the requiem scene. And he’d already damaged Nicholas’s hand.”
“Oh,” said Barnaby. Then, disappointing her: “If we could return to the razor. Did you see anyone touching it or handling the tray who shouldn’t have been?”
“No. And I’ll tell you why.” She looked with deep solemnity at both men. “When I’m acting … when I’m in that state of high concentration that we in the profession must be able to summon if the performance is going to work, I see nothing—but nothing—that isn’t measurably relevant to my part.”
“Even when you’ve no lines?” asked Barnaby.
“Especially then. Sans words, there’s only the action of the drama to anchor the emotions.”
“I understand.” Barnaby nodded, matching her gravity. Troy, unimpressed, wrote on his borrowed pad, “Saw nothing suspicious at props table.”
“What time did you arrive this evening, Rosa?”
“On the half. I went straight to my dressing room and didn’t come out till my first entrance. About ten minutes into Act One.”
Barnaby nodded again, then sat, silent, drumming his fingers absently against the arm of his chair. As the moments passed, Rosa shifted uneasily. Troy, long familiar with the chief’s technique, simply anticipated.
“Rosa.” Barnaby gathered himself and leaned forward. “It is my belief that, far from welcoming your freedom at the time of your divorce and wishing Esslyn well in his second marriage, you fought to keep your own going and have hated him ever since he left you.”
Rosa cried out then, and covered her clown’s mouth with her fingers. Her hands shook, and sweat rolled down her face. Barnaby sat back and watched the actorish deceit evaporate, leaving, oddly now that truth was present, doubt and childlike bewilderment.
‘‘You’re right.” Having said this she sounded almost relieved. She paused for a long time, then started to speak, stopping and starting. Feeling her way. “I thought it would fade, especially after I remarried. And Earnest is so good. But it persisted, eating at me. I wanted a child, you see. He knew that. He denied me. Persuaded me against it. And then to give one to Kitty.” She produced a handkerchief and rubbed at her face. “But the amazing thing, Tom— and I do mean this, I really do—is that all the hatred’s gone. Isn’t that extraordinary? Just as if someone somewhere pulled a plug and let it drain away. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? That something so strong it was poisoning your life could simply disappear. Like magic.”
After a few moment’s silence, during which Barnaby mulled over Rosa’s excellent motive for murder, he indicated that she was free to go. She stood for a moment at the door, looking, in spite of her cheap flamboyant robe and rampaging complexion, not entirely ridiculous. She seemed to be searching for some concluding remark, perhaps with the idea of ameliorating her former harshness. Eventually, almost as if memory had caught her by surprise, she said, “We were young together once.” Barnaby next interviewed Boris, who twitched and shook his way through the questions until Sergeant Troy, from pure pity, offered him a cigarette. Boris insisted that he had seen no one handle the razor all evening, and could not imagine why anyone would want to kill Esslyn. All the other bit-part actors came and went, saying the same thing. As each one left the scene dock, they were followed by a cry of fury as Harold protested against this disgraceful reversal of the natural order of precedence.
One scene-of-crime man arrived closely followed by Bill Davidson, untimely wrenched from his Masonic revels. After a briefing, they went about their business, working through the men’s dressing room first and releasing it for occupation. Cully took her mother home, Esslyn left for the county morgue, and Barnaby called for the Everards.
Clive and Donald came prancing in, their eyes aglow with anticipation, trailing clouds of schadenfreude. They were still made up, and their pointilliste complexions were the peculiar tea-rose pink of old-fashioned corsets. Barnaby chose to see them together, knowing their habit of egging each other on to ever more indiscreet and racy revelations. Now, preening and clucking like a couple of cassowaries, they circled the two chairs cautiously a couple of times before perching. They stared beady-eyed at Sergeant Troy and his notebook, and he stared boldly but uneasily back.
The sergeant liked men to be men and women to be glad of it. Here was a pair he couldn’t place at all. He always boasted he could tell a faggot a mile off, but he wasn’t at all sure about this particular combo. He decided they had probably been neutered at an early age and, having pinned them down to his satisfaction, heard Barnaby ask if they could think of anyone who would wish to harm the dead man and flipped over to a new page.
“Quite honestly,” said Clive Everard, taking a keen, deep breath, “it’d take less time to tell you who wouldn’t wish to harm him. I shouldn’t think there’s anyone in the company hasn’t come up against Esslyn at some time and been the worse for it.”
“If you could be a little more specific.”
“If it’s specific you want—” They exchanged glances glittering with spite. “Why not start with Deidre. He was telling this wonderful story in the dressing room—”
“—positively hilarious—”
“About her father—”
“Laughter and applause—”
“And suddenly there she was in the doorway. She must have overheard Esslyn call the old man senile—”
“Which of course he is.”
“But d’you think she’ll admit it? Absentminded … disoriented … poorly …”
“Poorly,” cackled Donald. “So what more natural than that she had a stab at getting her own back. Oops … Freudian slip there. Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry. His smile was as bright as a new penny as he added, “And of course who would have a better opportunity?”
“This happened when she called the quarter?” asked Barnaby, recalling Deidre’s distressed appearance as he had passed through the wings.
“That’s right. Would you care to hear the story?” Clive added politely.
“No,” said Barnaby. “Anyone else?” Then, when they appeared to be savoring a multitude of possibilities: “What about Nicholas?”
“Ahhh, you’ve snuffed out that little contretemps. Esslyn’d just discovered that his little kitten was having an affair.’’
“And I’m afraid,” murmured Donald, looking with shy regret at Sergeant Troy, “that it was rather our fault.”
“Not that we thought he’d react anything like he did.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“I mean, his complacency is legendary.” “Undentable.”
“So who,” asked Barnaby, “was she supposed to be having an affair with?”