And for any of these suspects to have done it, one had to posit a very unlikely set of circumstances. They would have had to know where Alex’s gun was in the Green Room, they would have had to run the risk of being observed on the O.P. side of the stage when they committed the murder. . This last was not such a great risk, because most of the stage staff were needed on the Prompt Side at that point in the play for a forthcoming scene change.
But there was one witness the potential murderer could not avoid, and that was the main suspect. No one could have gone into the O.P. wings and shot Michael Banks without being seen by Alex Household.
At that point all theories of alternative murderers fell apart.
Alex Household had a history of mental instability and paranoia. He had recently had a starring part and a new girl-friend, both of which he saw as part of a new start in his life, taken away by Michael Banks.
He had voiced threats against the star, and that very evening showed signs of starting another breakdown.
He had been sitting all evening in exactly the spot from which the gun had been fired. He was still there right up until the moment of the shooting, because Michael Banks, who didn’t know his lines, was still delivering them correctly and therefore still having them fed to him.
The gun that had shot the star was Alex Household’s gun, on which, Charles had discovered at dinner that evening, the police had found no fingerprints but those of the owner.
And, if anyone needed further proof of guilt after that, Alex Household had run away from the scene of the crime. And, in spite of police demands that he give himself up and intensive searches, he was still at large.
Anyone who tried to prove Alex Household didn’t do it, when faced with all that evidence, needed his head examined.
Oh, sod it. It was five o’clock. Charles went back on his resolution and poured himself a large Bell’s. Maybe lull himself into a little sleep. All this thought of death was unsettling him.
He remembered the words of Tate Wilkinson, the eighteenth-century actor-manager. ‘No actor can speak of death without a bottle in his hand.’
Charles Paris knew what he meant.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Saturday’s performances of The Hooded Owl were not very good. In the euphoria of getting through the first night, Charles had forgotten how much concentration that effort had taken, and found it difficult to get back the rhythm of his lines with the A.S.M.. The sleepless night and the excesses which it had incorporated did not help, either.
And the rest of the cast were less altruistically supportive. They too were suffering from exhaustion after recent events, and had less energy to carry Charles; their main concern was just to keep themselves going. They had all reached that stage following a crisis, which can often be more difficult than the crisis itself, when it is no longer a matter of one superhuman push, but husbanding resources for an indeterminately prolonged period of stress. There was huge relief when the curtain fell on the Saturday night performance. No talk of going out for meals then, the cast rushed off to their respective homes, grateful for the knowledge that they would not have to be back in the Variety Theatre until the ‘half’ on the Monday evening.
There was still no news of Alex Household, though police investigations were being vigorously pursued. Either he had gone to ground very effectively and was in hiding, or — and this was a rumour that spread increasingly amongst the cast — he had killed himself. The more days went by, the more likely it became that the end of the police search would be the discovery of a corpse. It was a thought that depressed Charles considerably.
He slept a lot of the Sunday and Monday and, when awake, just mooched about his bed-sitter in the gloom that inevitably followed moments of high excitement.
He thought of ringing Frances, but something deterred him. She had spoken of meeting the following weekend and going down to Juliet’s. That possibly meant that she had something else on this weekend. Or would be busy sorting things out at school with the run-up to half-term. He didn’t feel up to the mildest of rebuffs from her; he seemed to have got back to a relationship like an adolescent infatuation, reading rejection in the most innocent of her actions.
His mood also deterred him from ringing Dottie Banks. It was something he still intended to do, but he felt he should be at a peak of confidence to arrange such an encounter.
Still, the rest did him good, and the performance on the Monday evening was better. It was well received by a fairly small house. About a third full. The publicity of Michael Banks’s death had now been replaced in the public’s mind with news of fresh disasters, and the show was running on its own impetus. The Variety Theatre’s position off the main West End beat, the obscurity of the play, and the (pace George Birkitt) lack of star names — all the elements which pessimists had predicted would work against the show — were now beginning to take their toll.
Paul Lexington seemed, as ever, undaunted by the small audience. It was Monday night, he said, and that was always bad. The following for this kind of play would build up by word-of-mouth, he insisted. The coach-parties hadn’t started to come in yet. And he was going to give a rocket to Show-Off, whose performance on the publicity front had been absolutely dismal. Get another burst of publicity in the second week, and the show would be fine. Every production went through troughs.
As ever, he sounded terribly plausible, and Charles was as willing as all the rest of the cast to believe what he said. How true it all was, Charles didn’t wish to investigate. And how the show was now funded, how tightly Paul Lexington was running his budget, what his break-even percentage of audience was, indeed how much of the audience was made up of paying theatre-goers and how much of free seats; all these were questions to which he knew he was unlikely to get answers.
All they could do was work from day to day, from performance to performance, and through the second week, Charles started to feel his confidence in the part building up again. The play settled down with its new cast. The size of the audience didn’t increase noticeably, but the faithful few who did turn up seemed appreciative.
He even got another nice review. Obviously there had been no notices after the first night, and few of the critics of the major papers would have had time, let alone interest, to give the play a second viewing; but a North London local paper with a weekly deadline had sent along its critic on the Monday of the second week, and their review appeared on the Thursday.
The significant sentence read as follows: ‘The part of the father, played by an actor unfamiliar to me, Charles Paris, grows in stature through the evening until the powerfully climactic scene of confrontation with his daughter.’
It was not, of course, unambiguous praise. Indeed, it could have been read merely as appreciation of Malcolm Harris’s writing; it was the part, after all, not the acting, which was said to grow in stature. And, to the cynically analytical mind which Charles usually applied to praise, the review could be read to mean that the part grew in stature until the powerfully climactic scene of confrontation with his daughter, at which point, in the hands of this actor, it diminished considerably.
But, on the whole, he thought it was good. Like all actors with reviews, he checked through it for quotability, and decided that, with only slight injustice to the meaning, and the excision of a comma, he could come up with the very serviceable sentence, ‘Charles Paris grows in stature through the evening’.
He even wondered if he ought to suggest to Paul Lexington that that sentence was put on a hoarding outside the theatre, but didn’t quite have the nerve. The Producer had been satisfied with snipping out from the same review the words, ‘a thoroughly solid evening’s entertainment’, to join the other encomiums that guarded the Variety’s portals.