24 - Killer Dolphin, page 17
"I certainly did. Not very helpful when one is making one's preparation which I, at any rate, like to do."
"Method in her madness. Or is it," Harry Grove asked, "madness in her Method?"
"That will do, Harry."
"Dear Perry. Of course."
"You told us a moment ago, Mr. Random," Alleyn said, "that the boy didn't reveal the number."
"Nor did he. Not the correct number." Random said quickly.
Destiny Meade said: "Yes, but why were you so sure it was the wrong number?"
"It's the Dolphin telephone number, darling," Grove said. "Five-five-five-three-one. Remember?"
"Is it? Oh, yes. Of course it is."
"First thing to enter his head in his fright, I suppose," Random said.
"You really frightened him?" asked Alleyn.
"Yes, I did. Little horror. He'd have told me if he'd known." Random added loudly: "He didn't know the combination and he couldn't have opened the lock."
"He was forever badgering me to drop a hint," Winter Meyer said. "Needless to say, I didn't."
"Precisely," said Random.
Peregrine said: "I don't see how you can be so sure, Charlie. He might simply have been holding out on you."
"If he knew the combination and meant to commit the theft," Knight said, flinging himself down into his chair again, "he certainly wouldn't tell you what it was."
There was a general murmur of fervent agreement. "And after all," Harry Grove pointed out, "you couldn't have been absolutely sure, could you, Charles, that you hit on the right number yourself or even the right type of code? Or could you?" He grinned at Random. "Did you try?" he asked. "Did you prove it, Charles? Did you have a little twiddle? Before the treasure went in?"
For a moment Random looked as if he would like to hit him but he tucked in his lips, gave himself time and then spoke exclusively to Alleyn.
He said: "I do not believe that Trevor opened the safe and consequently I'm absolutely certain he didn't kill Henry Jobbins." He settled his shoulders and looked defiant.
Winter Meyer said: "I suppose you realize the implication of what you're saying, Charles?"
"I think so."
"Then I must say you've an odd notion of loyalty to your colleagues."
"It doesn't arise."
"Doesn't it!" Meyer cried and looked restively at Alleyn.
Alleyn made no answer to this. He sat with his long hands linked together on Peregrine's desk.
The superb voice of Marcus Knight broke the silence.
"I may be very dense," he said, collecting his audience, "but I cannot see where this pronouncement of Charles's leads us. If, as the investigation seems to establish, the boy never left the theatre and if the theatre was locked up and only Hawkins had the key to the stage-door: then how the hell did a third person get in?"
"Might he have been someone in the audience who stayed behind?" Destiny asked, brightly. "You know? Lurked?"
Peregrine said, "The ushers, the commissionaire, Jobbins and the A.S.M. did a thorough search front and back after every performance."
"Well, then, perhaps Hawkins is the murderer," she said, exactly as if a mystery-story were under discussion. "Has anyone thought of that?" She appealed to Alleyn, who thought it better to disregard her.
"Well, I don't know," Destiny rambled on. "Who could it be if it's not Trevor? That's what we've got to ask ourselves. Perhaps, though I'm sure I can't think why, and say what you like motive is important--" She broke off and made an enchanting little grimace at Harry Grove. "Now don't you laugh," she said. "But for all that just suppose. Just suppose--It was Mr. Conducis."
"My dear girl--"
"Destiny, honestly."
"Oh for God's sake, darling--"
"I know it sounds silly," Destiny said, "but nobody seems to have any other suggestion and after all he was there."
The silence that followed Destiny's remark was so profound that Alleyn heard Fox's pencil skate over a page in his notebook.
He said, "You mean, Miss Meade, that Mr. Conducis was in the audience? Not backstage?"
"That's right. In front. In the upstairs O.P. box. I noticed him when I made my first entrance. I mentioned it to you, Charles, didn't I, when you were holding me up. 'There's God,' I said, 'in the O.P. box.' "
"Mr. Meyer, did you know Mr. Conducis was in front?"
"No, I didn't. But he's got the O.P. box forever," Meyer said. "It's his whenever he likes to use it. He lends it to friends and for all I know occasionally slips in himself. He doesn't let us know if he's coming. He doesn't like a fuss."
"Nobody saw him come or go?"
"Not that I know."
Gertrude Bracey said loudly: "I thought our mysterious Mr. W.H. was supposed to be particularly favoured by Our Patron. Quite a Shakespearean situation or so one hears. Perhaps he can shed light."
"My dear Gertie," Harry Grove said cheerfully, "you really should try to keep a splenetic fancy within reasonable bounds. Miss Bracey," he said, turning to Alleyn, "refers, I think, to the undoubted fact that Mr. Conducis very kindly recommended me to the Management. I did him a slight service once upon a time and he is obliging enough to be obliged. I had no idea he was in front, Gertie dear, until I heard you hissing away about it as you lay on the King Dolphin's bosom at the end of Act I."
"Mr. Knight," Alleyn asked, "did you know Mr. Conducis was there?"
Knight looked straight in front of him and said with exaggerated clarity as if voicing an affront, "It became evident."
Destiny Meade, also looking neither to left nor right and speaking clearly, remarked: "The less said about that the better."
"Undoubtedly," Knight savagely agreed.
She laughed.
Winter Meyer said: "Yes, but--" and stopped short. "It's nothing," he said. "As you were."
"But in any case it can be of no conceivable significance," Jeremy Jones said impatiently. He had been silent for so long that his intervention caused a minor stir.
Alleyn rose to his considerable height and moved out into the room, "I think," he said, "that we've gone as far as we can, satisfactorily, in a joint discussion. I'm going to ask Inspector Fox to read over his notes. If there is anything any of you wishes to amend will you say so?"
Fox read his notes in a cosy voice and nobody objected to a word of them. When he had finished Alleyn said to Peregrine: "I daresay you'll want to make your own arrangements with the company."
"May I?" said Peregrine. "Thank you."
Alleyn and Fox withdrew to the distant end of the office and conferred together. The company, far from concerning themselves with the proximity of the police, orientated as one man upon Peregrine, who explained that Trevor Vere's understudy would carry on and that his scenes would be rehearsed in the morning. "Everybody concerned, please, at ten o'clock," Peregrine said. "And look: about the press. We've got to be very careful with this one, haven't we, Winty?"
Winter Meyer joined him, assuming at once his occupational manner of knowing how to be tactful with actors. They didn't, any of them, did they, he asked, want the wrong kind of stories to get into the press. There was no doubt they would be badgered. He himself had been rung up repeatedly. The line was regret and no comment. "You'd all gone," Meyer said. "You weren't there. You've heard about it, of course, but you've no ideas." Here everybody looked at Destiny.
He continued in this vein and it became evident that this able, essentially kind little man was at considerable pains to stop short of the suggestion that, properly controlled, the disaster, from a box-office angle, might turn out to be no such thing. "But we don't need it," he said unguardedly and embarrassed himself and most of his hearers. Harry Grove, however, gave one of his little chuckles.
"Well, that's all perfectly splendid," he said. "Everybody happy. We've no need of bloody murder to boost our door sales and wee Trevor can recover his wits as slowly as he likes. Grand." He placed his arm about Destiny Meade, who gave him a mock-reproachful look, tapped his hand and freed herself.
"Darling, do be good," she said. She moved away from him, caught Gertrude Bracey's baleful eye and said with extreme graciousness: "Isn't he too frightful?" Miss Bracey was speechless.
"I can see I've fallen under the imperial displeasure," Grove murmured in a too-audible aside. "The Great King Dolphin looks as if it's going to combust"
Knight walked across the office and confronted Grove, who was some three inches shorter than himself. Alleyn was uncannily reminded of a scene between them in Peregrine's play when the man of Stratford confronted the man of fashion while the Dark Lady, so very much more subtle than the actress who beautifully portrayed her, watched catlike in the shadow.
"You really are," Marcus Knight announced, magnificently inflecting, "the most objectionable person--I will not honour you by calling you an actor--with whom it has been my deep, deep misfortune to appear in any production."
"Well," Grove remarked with perfect good humour, "it's nice to head the dishonours list, isn't it? Not having prospects in the other direction. Unlike yourself, Mr. Knight. Mr. Knight," he continued, beaming at Destiny. "A contradiction in terms when one comes to think of it. Never mind: it simply must turn into Sir M. Knight (Knight) before many more New Years have passed."
Peregrine said: "I am sick of telling you to apologize, Harry, for grossly unprofessional behaviour and begin to think you must be an amateur, after all. Please wait outside in the foyer until Mr. Alleyn wants you. No. Not another word. Out."
Harry looked at Destiny, made a rueful grimace and walked off.
Peregrine went to Alleyn: "I'm sorry," he muttered, "about that little dust-up. We've finished. What would you like us to do?"
"I'd like the women and Random to take themselves off and the rest of the men to wait outside on the landing."
"Me included?"
"If you don't mind."
"Of course not."
"As a sort of control."
"In the chemical sense?"
"Well--"
"O.K.," Peregrine said. "What's the form?"
"Just that." Alleyn returned to the group of players. "If you wouldn't mind moving out to the circle foyer," he said. "Mr. Jay will explain the procedure."
Peregrine marshalled them out.
They stood in a knot in front of the shuttered bar and they tried not to look down in the direction of the half-landing. The lowest of the three steps from the foyer to the half-landing, and the area where Jobbins had lain, were stripped of carpet. The police had put down canvas sheeting. The steel doors of the wall safe above the landing were shut. Between the back of the landing and the wall, three steps led up to a narrow strip of floor connecting the two halves of the foyer, each with its own door into the circle.
Destiny Meade said, "I'm not going down those stairs."
"We can walk across the back to the other flight," Emily suggested.
"I'd still have to set foot on the landing. I can't do it. Harry!" She turned with her air of expecting everyone to be where she required them and found that Harry Grove had not heard her. He stood with his hands in his pockets contemplating the shut door of the office.
Marcus Knight, flushed and angry, said: "Perhaps you'd like me to take you down," and laughed very unpleasantly.
She looked coolly at him. "Sweet of you," she said. "I wouldn't dream of it," and turned away to find herself face-to-face with Jeremy Jones. His freckled face was pink and anxious and his manner diffident "There's the circle," he said, "and the pass-door. Could I--?"
"Jeremy, darling. Yes--please, please. I know I'm a fool but, well, it's just how one's made, isn't it? Thank you, my angel." She slipped her arm into his.
They went into the circle and could be heard moving round the back towards the Prompt-side box.
Charles Random said, "Well, I'll be off," hesitated for a moment, and then ran down the canvas-covered steps, turned on the landing and descended to the ground floor. Gertrude Bracey stood at the top near the remaining bronze dolphin. She looked at it and then at the mark in the carpet where its companion had stood. She compressed her lips, lifted her head and walked down with perfect deliberation.
All this was observed by Peregrine Jay.
He stopped Emily, who had made as if to follow. "Are you all right, Emily?"
"Yes, quite all right. You?"
"All the better for seeing you. Shall we take lunch together? But I don't know how long I'll be. Were you thinking of lunch later on?"
"I can't say I'm wolfishly ravenous."
"One must eat."
Emily said, "You can't possibly tell when you'll get off. The pub's no good, nor is The Younger Dolphin. They'll both be seething with curiosity and reporters. I'll buy some ham rolls and go down to the wharf below Phipps Passage. There's a bit of a wall one can sit on."
"I'll join you if I can. Don't bolt your rolls and hurry away. It's a golden day on the river."
"Look," Emily said. "What's Harry up to now!"
Harry was tapping on the office door. Apparently in answer to a summons he opened it and went in.
Emily left the theatre by the circle and pass-door. Peregrine joined a smouldering Marcus Knight and an anxious Winter Meyer. Presently Jeremy returned, obviously flown with gratification.
On the far side of the office door Harry Grove confronted Alleyn.
His manner quite changed. He was quiet and direct and spoke without affectation.
"I daresay," he said, "I haven't commended myself to you as a maker of statements, but a minute or two ago--after I had been sent out in disgrace, you know --I remembered something. It may have no bearing on the case whatever but I think perhaps I ought to leave it to you to decide."
"That," Alleyn said, "by and large, is the general idea we like to establish."
Harry smiled. "Well then," he said, "here goes. It's rumoured that when the night watchman, whatever he's called--"
"Hawkins."
"That when Hawkins found Jobbins and, I suppose, when you saw him, he was wearing a light overcoat."
"Yes."
"Was it a rather large brown and white check with an overcheck of black?"
"It was."
"Loudish, one might say?"
"One might, indeed."
"Yes. Well, I gave him that coat on Friday evening."
"Your name is still on the inside pocket tag."
Harry's jaw dropped. "The wind," he said, "to coin a phrase, has departed from my sails. I'd better chug off under my own steam. I'm sorry, Mr. Alleyn. Exit actor, looking crestfallen."
"No, wait a bit, as you are here. I'd like to know what bearing you think this might have on the case. Sit down. Confide in us."
"May I?" Harry said, surprised. "Thank you, I'd like to."
He sat down and looked fully at Alleyn. "I don't always mean to behave as badly as in fact I do," he said and went on quickly: "About the coat. I don't think I attached any great importance to it. But just now you did rather seem to make a point of what he was wearing. I couldn't quite see what the point was but it seemed to me I'd better tell you that until Friday evening the coat had been mine."
"Why on earth didn't you say so there and then?"
Harry flushed scarlet. His chin lifted and he spoke rapidly as if by compulsion. "Everybody," he said, "was fabulously amusing about my coat. In the hearty, public-school manner, you know. Frightfully nice chaps. Jolly good show. I need not, of course, tell you that I am not even a prodnct of one of our Dear Old Minor Public Schools. Or, if it comes to that, of a county school like the Great King Dolphin."
"Knight?"
"That's right but it's slipped his memory."
"You do dislike him, don't you?"
"Not half as heartily as he dislikes me," Harry said and gave a short laugh. "I know I sound disagreeable. You see before you, Superintendent, yet another slum kid with a chip like a Yule log on his shoulder. I take it out in clowning."
"But," Alleyn said mildly, "is your profession absolutely riddled with old Etonians?"
Harry grinned. "Well, no," he said. "But I assure you there are enough more striking and less illustrious O.B. ties to strangle all the extras in a battle scene for Armageddon. As a rank outsider I find the network nauseating. Sorry. No doubt you're a product yourself. Of Eton, I mean."
"So you're a post-Angry at heart? Is that it?"
"Only sometimes. I compensate. They're afraid of my tongue, or I like to think they are."
He waited for a moment and then said: "None of this, by the way and for what it's worth, applies to Peregrine Jay. I've no complaints about him: he has not roused my lower-middle-class rancour and I do not try to score off him. He's a gifted playwright, a good producer and a very decent citizen. Perry's all right."
"Good. Let's get back to the others. They were arrogant about your coat, you considered?"
"The comedy line was relentlessly pursued. Charles affected to have the dazzles. Gertrude, dear girl, shuddered like a castanet. There were lots of asides. And even the lady of my heart professed distaste and begged me to shuffle off my checkered career-coat. So I did. Henry Jobbins was wheezing away at the stage-door saying his chubes were chronic and believe it or not I did a sort of your-need-is-greater-than-mine thing, which I could, of course, perfectly well afford. I took it off there and then and gave it to him. There was," Harry said loudly, "and is, absolutely no merit in this gesture. I simply off-loaded an irksome vulgar mistaken choice on somebody who happened to find it acceptable. He was a good bloke, was old Henry. A good bloke."
"Did anyone know of this spontaneous gift?"
"No. Oh, I suppose the man that relieved him did. Hawkins. Henry Jobbins told me this chap had been struck all of a heap by the overcoat when he came in on Friday night."
"But nobody else, you think, knew of the exchange?"
"I asked Jobbins not to say anything. I really could not have stomached the recrudescence of comedy that the incident would have evoked." Harry looked sidelong at Alleyn. "You're a dangerous man, Superintendent. You've missed your vocation. You'd have been a wow on the receiving side of the confessional grille."
"No comment," said Alleyn and they both laughed.
Alleyn said, "Look here. Would anyone expect to find you in the realm of the front foyer after the show?"
