“Believe me, there’s no need for an innocent man to be frightened.”
“How can you be so sure of yourselves? Do you never make mistakes?”
“We do indeed. But not,” Alleyn said, “in the end. Not nowadays on these sorts of cases.”
“What do you mean these sorts of cases!”
“Why, I mean on what may turn out to be a capital charge.”
“I can’t believe it!” Parry cried out. “I shall never believe it. We’re not like that. We’re kind, rather simple people. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. We’re not complicated enough to kill each other.”
Alleyn said with a smile: “You’re quite complicated enough for us at the moment. Is there anything else you’ve remembered that you think perhaps you ought to tell me about?”
Parry shook his head and dragged himself to his feet. Alleyn saw, as Martyn had seen before him, that he was not an exceedingly young man. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing I can think of.”
“You may go to your dressing-room now, if you’d like to change into — what should I say? — into plain clothes?”
“Thank you. I simply loathe the thought of my room after all this but I shall be glad to change.”
“Do you mind if Lamprey does a routine search before you go? We’ll ask this of all of you.”
Parry showed the whites of his eyes but said at once: “Why should I mind?”
Alleyn nodded to young Lamprey, who advanced upon Parry with an apologetic smile.
“It’s a painless extraction, sir,” he said.
Parry raised his arms in a curve with his white hands held like a dancer’s above his head. There was a silence and a swift, efficient exploration. “Thank you so much, sir,” said Mike Lamprey. “Cigarette case, lighter and handkerchief, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Right. Take Mr. Percival along to his room, will you?”
Parry said: “There couldn’t be a more fruitless question, but it would be nice to know, one way or the other, if you have believed me.”
“There couldn’t be a more unorthodox answer,” Alleyn rejoined, “but at the moment I see no reason to disbelieve you, Mr. Percival.”
When Lamprey came back he found his senior officer looking wistfully at his pipe and whistling under his breath.
“Mike,” Alleyn said, “the nastiest cases in our game are very often the simplest. There’s something sticking out under my nose in this theatre and I can’t see it. I know it’s there because of another thing that, Lord pity us all, Fox and I can see.”
“Really, sir? Am I allowed to ask what it is?”
“You’re getting on in the service, now. What have you spotted on your own account?”
“Is it something to do with Bennington’s behaviour, sir?”
“It is indeed. If a man’s going to commit suicide, Mike, and his face is made up to look loathsome, what does he do about it? If he’s a vain man (and Bennington appears to have had his share of professional vanity), if he minds about the appearance of his own corpse, he cleans off the greasepaint. If he doesn’t give a damn, he leaves it as it is. But with time running short, he does not carefully and heavily powder his unbecoming makeup for all the world as if he meant to go on and take his curtain-call with the rest of them. Now, does he?”
“Well, no sir,” said Mike. “If you put it like that, I don’t believe he does.”
By half past twelve most of the company on the stage seemed to be asleep or dozing. Dr. Rutherford on his couch occasionally lapsed into bouts of snoring from which he would rouse a little, groan, take snuff and then settle down again. Helena lay in a deep chair with her feet on a stool. Her eyes were closed but Martyn thought that if she slept it was but lightly. Clem had made himself a bed of some old curtains and was curled up on it beyond the twisting stairway. Jacko, having tucked Helena up in her fur coat, settled himself on the stage beside her, dozing, Martyn thought, like some eccentric watch-dog at his post. After J.G. silently returned from the Greenroom, Gay Gainsford was summoned and in her turn came back — not silently, but with some attempt at conversation. In the presence of the watchful Mr. Fox this soon petered out. Presently she, too, fell to nodding. Immediately after her return Parry Percival suddenly made an inarticulate ejaculation and, before Fox could move, darted off the stage. Sergeant Gibson was heard to accost him in the passage. Fox remained where he was and there was another long silence.
Adam Poole and Martyn looked into each other’s faces. He crossed the stage to where she sat, on the left side, which was the farthest removed from Fox. He pulled up a small chair and sat facing her.
“Kate,” he muttered, “I’m so sorry about all this. There are haresfoot shadows under your eyes, your mouth droops, your hands are anxious and your hair is limp, though not at all unbecoming. You should be sound asleep in Jacko’s garret under the stars and there should be the sound of applause in your dreams. Really, it’s too bad.”
Martyn said: “It’s nice of you to think so but you have other things to consider.”
“I’m glad to have my thoughts interrupted.”
“Then I still have my uses.”
“You can see that chunk of a man over there. Is he watching us?”
“Yes. With an air of absent-mindedness which I’m not at all inclined to misunderstand.”
“I don’t think he can hear us, though it’s a pity my diction is so good. If I take your hand perhaps he’ll suppose I’m making love to you and feel some slight constabular delicacy.”
“I hardly think so,” Martyn whispered, and tried to make nothing of his lips against her palm.
“Will you believe, Kate, that I am not in the habit of making passes at young ladies in my company?”
Martyn found herself looking at the back of Helena’s chair.
“Oh yes,” Poole said. “There’s that, too. I make no bones about that. It’s another and a long and a fading story. On both parts. Fading on both parts, Kate. I have been very much honoured.”
“I can’t help feeling this scene is being played at the wrong time, in the wrong place and before the wrong audience. And I doubt,” Martyn said, not looking at him, “if it should be played at all.”
“But I can’t be mistaken. It has happened for us, Martyn. Hasn’t it? Suddenly, preposterously, almost at first sight we blinked and looked again and there we were. Tell me it’s happened. The bird under your wrist is so wildly agitated. Is that only because you are frightened?”
“I am frightened. I wanted to ask your advice and now you make it impossible.”
“I’ll give you my advice. There. Now you are alone again. But for the sake of the law’s peace of mind as well as my own you must take a firm line about your blushing.”
“It was something he said to me that morning,” she murmured in the lowest voice she could command.
“Do you mean the morning when I first saw you?”
“I mean,” Martyn said desperately, “the morning the photographs were taken. I had to go to his dressing-room.”
“I remember very well. You came to mine too.”
“He said something, then. He was very odd in his manner. They’ve asked us to try and remember anything at all unusual.”
“Are you going to tell me what it was?”
In a few words and under her breath she did so.
Poole said: “Perhaps you should tell them. Yes, I think you should. In a moment I’ll do something about it, but there’s one thing more I must say to you. Do you know I’m glad this scene has been played so awkwardly — inaudible, huddled up, inauspicious and uneffective. Technically altogether bad. It gives it a kind of authority, I hope. Martyn, are you very much surprised? Please look at me.”
She did as he asked and discovered an expression of such doubt and anxiety in his face that to her own astonishment she put her hand against his cheek and he held it there for a second. “God,” he said, “what a thing to happen!” He got up abruptly and crossed the stage.