It seemed a long, long walk.
But only one more bullet was fired.
It screamed away from a rock behind him.
When he finally reached the doorway of the hut, he could see Alex Household slumped against it, the arm holding the gun limp at his side.
Had he not known who to expect, he would not have recognised his friend. Through its beard and filth, the face was sunken and ghastly. The eyes flickered feverishly like guttering candles. From the hut came the nauseating stench of human excrement.
‘Alex.’
‘Charles, you shouldn’t have come.’ Alex Household shivered and the words tumbled out unevenly.
‘I’m your friend.’
‘J-j-j-judas was a friend,’ the filthy skeleton managed to say. ‘Why not just let me take my chance? If the police find me, that’s one thing. But for you to make the trip just to turn me in. .’
‘I haven’t come to turn you in.’
‘Of course you have. Don’t pretend. You all think I’m a murderer.’ The old light of paranoia showed in the feverish eyes.
‘No,’ said Charles. ‘I know that you didn’t shoot Michael Banks.’
‘What?’ Alex Household’s body suddenly sagged. He slipped down the door-post to the ground. When Charles knelt to support him, he saw tears in the sick man’s eyes.
‘You’re ill, Alex.’
The shaggy head nodded, and then was shaken by a burst of vomiting.
‘When did you last eat?’
‘I’d left some stuff here. From the summer. Tins and. . With the gun, too. This place was always my last line of defence, when they — when they came to get me. .’ Again the paranoia gleamed. ‘But I finished all the food. . I don’t know, two days ago, three. Of course, I still had water from the stream, and then. . the earth’s plenty. .’ He gestured feebly around at the hillside.
‘You mean grass and. .’
Alex nodded. ‘Yes, but it. .’ He made a noise that might have been a giggle in happier circumstances ‘. . made me ill. Ill.’ He retched again.
‘I must get you to a doctor. Quickly.’
Alex shook his head. ‘No, Charles, please. Just let me die here. It’s easier.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t spend my life in some prison. If I’m alive, I need to be free.’
‘But you will be.’
‘No, Charles. Everyone thinks I killed Micky Banks. Go on, be truthful. They do, don’t they?’
He couldn’t help admitting it. ‘But I know you didn’t, Alex.’
‘Clever old you.’ This was accompanied by the weakest of smiles. ‘What do you think happened then?’
‘I’ll tell you. Stop me when I’m wrong.’
‘Oh, I will, Charles. I will.’
‘This is what I think happened that night. I’ll grant you were in a bad state, which was hardly surprising after all the business with losing your part and then Lesley-Jane going off with Micky — incidentally, there was less in that than you thought, but that’s by the way. O.K., so you had all the motives, you even had the gun, but you didn’t do it.
‘The gun stayed in the pocket of your jacket in the Green Room until well into the second act. It was taken from there by the murderer, while you were still in the wings, in your shirt-sleeves, feeding Micky his lines through the deaf-aid. The murderer came into the wings with the gun and with the firm intention of shooting someone.
‘But this is the bit that took me longest to work out. It’s been screaming at me for days, but I just couldn’t see it.
‘The murderer had no intention of shooting Micky Banks. You were the target.’
‘When you saw the gun pointing at you, you realised the murderer’s intention and begged for mercy. You said, ‘Oh Lord! No. No, put it down. You mustn’t do that to me. You daren’t. Please. Please. .’ I should have realised that from the fact that Micky said “Oh Lord” — an expression incidentally, that wasn’t in the script of the play and that he had never used in his life — before he turned round from the Hooded Owl and looked into the wings. So it wasn’t a reaction from him. He was merely relaying what he heard over his deaf-aid.
‘I should have realised it earlier. I’ve been working with the deaf-aid for over a week, for God’s sake, and I realised how much I rely on it. When you’re using it, you just repeat the words you hear, regardless of the sense. I got caught last week because I got fed the wrong line. Even if it’s nonsense, you still repeat it.
‘Which is what Micky Banks did. He just kept repeating what you were saying. He knew there was something odd, which was why he turned round to look into the wings, hoping for some signal from you.
‘By then I reckon you had your back to the stage and were facing the barrel of the gun. At the moment the murderer squeezed the trigger, you threw yourself sideways, the bullet missed you, but hit Micky Banks, who was standing directly behind you.
‘You then looked round in shock to see him fall. At that moment Lesley-Jane saw your face — she told me you “looked over your shoulder at her”, but I didn’t at the time realise that meant you must have been facing away from the stage. Anyway, Lesley-Jane jumped to the conclusion that everyone else has since jumped to — that you shot Micky — and screamed.
The murderer was meanwhile standing, shocked at what had happened, but still holding the gun. Rather than risk the danger of another shot, you followed your natural instinct to run. You grabbed your jacket from the Green Room and rushed out of the theatre.
‘It was probably only when you got outside that you realised how much circumstances looked against you. All your recurrent fears of the world ganging up on you came to the surface, and you ran away. Somehow you got down here, where you have been since, quietly starving and poisoning yourself to death.
‘After you had gone, the murderer went backstage, abandoning the gun on the way. The hue and cry started for you, but you could not be found. Rumours spread that you had committed suicide. This was all good news for the murderer. So long as you didn’t reappear, or if, when you did reappear, you were dead, there was no danger of the police looking for any other killer.
‘The accidental shooting of Michael Banks must have been a shock, but, as time passed, the murderer must have begun to feel very secure from the danger of discovery.’
Charles looked at Alex’s haggard face, which now glowed with a new light. ‘How’m I doing so far?’
‘Bloody marvellous, Charles. That’s exactly what happened.’ A shadow passed over his face. ‘But how you’re ever going to convince anyone else that’s what happened, I don’t know. .’
‘If we explain to the police.’
Alex shook his head. ‘Come on, Charles. The police are not notorious for their imagination. Everything is stacked against me, you have to admit. I bet the gun was even covered in my fingerprints.”
Charles had to admit that it was.
‘So I know. And now, thanks to a very neat bit of deduction, you know. But I don’t see that either of us could produce a shred of evidence to support our extremely unlikely thesis, so I don’t see that we’re much further advanced. If I give myself up, I’ll be charged with murder.’
‘Hmm,’ said Charles. ‘Then what I’ll have to do is to get a confession from the real murderer.’
Alex snorted hopelessly. ‘Good luck.’
‘I think it may be possible. And that, of course,’ said Charles, ‘brings me to the identity of the real murderer.
‘Very difficult to work that out at first. So long as I was looking for someone who might want to murder Michael Banks, I was getting nowhere. But once I got the right victim, finding the right murderer became easier.’
‘Who do you think it was then?’ asked Alex. Charles told him.
‘Dead right,’ said Alex.
Charles looked a mess when he got back to the car, but Frances made no comment. Nor did she mention the fact that she’d been sitting there for nearly three hours.
‘How’s Anna Karenina?’
‘Fine. She is now living with Vronsky as if they were married.’