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  “When do you expect Simon and Penelope back?” asked Dame Beatrice.

  “Oh, in about a fortnight, I suppose.”

  “Well, Laura and I are perfectly willing to keep the children with us. You will be glad to have them out of the way of the police. Perhaps you would prefer my company?”

  Deborah picked up Dame Beatrice’s yellow hand and pressed it gratefully.

  “You’ll be a tower of strength against the police,” she said.

  “We shall have the reporters, too! We’ve had quite a bucketful of those lads already, and now that the inquest has been adjourned, with all the sinister overtones caused by that sensational proceeding, they’ll be round us like flies round a honey-pot,” said Jonathan.

  “Yes, I’m afraid they will,” Dame Beatrice agreed. “It was indeed a sensational ending to what, at first glance, seemed a straightforward case of accidental death.”

  “Whereas now, in spite of Barbara Bourton’s declaration, suicide seems more likely,” said Jonathan. “After all, Barbara can’t know all that much about Bourton’s private affairs. They don’t seem to have cohabited all that often owing to her stage career and, I suppose, his business interests.”

  “One thing has been mentioned,” said Deborah, “so it can be mentioned again. I suppose one of his clients didn’t hit on a way of getting rid of him so as to avoid paying racing debts?”

  “There are other kinds of debts,” said Dame Beatrice. Deborah nodded.

  “Such as those owed by cuckolded husbands, I suppose,” she said. “Yes, Donald was a dashing lad, in his way, and somebody may have taken exception to that fact.”

  “But surely not to the point of murdering him,” said Jonathan.

  Chapter 10

  Further Suggestions

  “What, a play toward! I’ll be an auditor.”

  « ^ »

  Jonathan changed the subject.

  “You mean,” he said to his aunt, “you do mean you can stay on for a day or two and see us through?”

  “And leave poor Laura the responsibility for Rosamund and Edmund,” said Deborah. “How thankful I am, though,” she added. “I hate the thought of coping with more police questioning. They must suspect something is wrong with Donald’s death, or they would never have asked to have the inquest adjourned. Obviously that wasn’t on the agenda.”

  “I think the police will be busy finding out where the extra dagger came from. I doubt whether they will trouble you very much. Their main targets, so far as the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is concerned, will be Mr Yorke and the Lynns. Nobody else seems to have had access to the properties until they were laid out in the wings ready for the actors and, from what I have gathered, it would have been almost impossible for one dagger to have been exchanged for another without somebody witnessing the substitution,” said Dame Beatrice.

  “While the death was regarded as accidental I don’t suppose people charged their memories about anything they may have noticed,” said Jonathan, “but, once the reporters get busy about the adjournment, maybe somebody will remember something which was not in the least questionable at the time, but may bear considerable significance now.”

  “The local papers are bound to go to town in a big way,” said Deborah. “I bet they haven’t had a story like this for years. I almost wish I were a reporter. How I could spread myself on the romantic setting, the perfect summer night, the delightful comedy complete with fairy lore—and then the sudden change, bizarre and terrifying, to tragedy and dire confusion.”

  “There wasn’t dire confusion,” said Jonathan. “Dr Jeanne-Marie and Marcus Lynn between them saw to that.”

  “Well, anyway, the reporters will make hay. I dread them much more than I dread the police.”

  “If I were you,” said Dame Beatrice, “I would go out for the day and leave me to cope.”

  “Won’t they think that fishy?”

  “Why should they? So far as you two are concerned the death was the result of a completely unforeseen accident.”

  “No,” said Jonathan, “we’ll stay. If we try to dodge them today, they will only come back tomorrow. Well are they called newshounds. Once on the trail they never give up, and the more I think about it the more it seems to me that they could be following a very hot scent indeed.”

  The reporters, however, were not the menace which Deborah had expected. Before the inquest they had photographed the outside of the house and such parts of the grounds as interested them, so when they did turn up it was to reinforce what had become their theme-song. This can be summarised in the words of a banner headline in the Graphic Newsletter, which screamed from the front page, Where did the lethal weapon come from?

  Other papers were asking the same question in the same or similar words, inspired, no doubt, by the police, who, not for the first time, were finding the local newspapers extremely useful. There was also the local radio station, which, like the newspapers, furnished a description of the weapon. There was also a placard outside the county police station. It showed not only a photograph, but accompanied it with an annotated drawing of the dagger and the caption: Have you seen this weapon? The poster was sent to every antiques dealer and junk shop within a radius of fifty miles with a request that if such an object had been sold within the last three months the police would welcome details.

  It was the Chief Constable who had suggested the time limit. Police questioning of Lynn and Yorke separately had elicited the information that it was at the March meeting of the dramatic society, held almost at the end of the month, that Lynn, only lately a patron of the amateur players, had asked that the next production should be of The Dream and should be performed out of doors.

  He told the meeting (with the disarming frankness to which he owed much of his success, although his detractors averred that this seemingly engaging quality covered Machiavellian manoeuvres of such magnitude that they would turn the gnomes of Zurich to plaster of Paris if ever they became generally known) that he wanted a good part in the play for his wife and was prepared to foot the bills for the whole production if she were given the choice of the women’s rôles in the play.

  The dramatic intervention of the police in asking for an adjournment before the coroner pronounced his verdict had changed the whole nature of the enquiry. From appearing to be a case of unfortunate although dreadful accident, there now seemed to be every chance that the death of Donald Bourton would be attributed either to suicide or murder. Lynn’s declaration that the death-dealing dagger had never formed part of his collection gave weight to both theories and the first thing which Detective-Inspector Conway wanted to find out was whether Bourton himself had purchased the dagger. If he had, the case was as good as over and a verdict of suicide the appropriate one. If somebody else had purchased it, the case would remain wide open unless malice aforethought could be proved against person or persons (so far) unknown.

  “And while you’re making the rounds of the antiques dealers,” Conway was advised, “we’ll get on to Dame Beatrice and ask her to have a good hard look at the people who were in the play. She’s bound to be watching the interests of her nephew and his wife who are occupying the house and grounds where the fatality happened, so I’m sure she will be prepared to co-operate with us.”

  “So long as she isn’t watching their interests too closely,” said Conway to his sergeant.

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, dammit, you know what I mean. How unbiased is she going to be when it comes to the crunch? Bradley and his wife had that house to themselves, except for a couple of womenservants and four tiny kids, on each night the play was performed. I’ve had a look at the cupboard the properties were in. A child of three, given a hairpin, could have picked the lock and we’ve been told there was no love lost between Bradley—who’s a gorilla if ever I met one—and Rinkley, for whom obviously the substituted dagger was intended.”

  “The theory seems to be that Rinkley would have detected the substitution, sir.”

  “Ye
s, if it had been made on the first night of the play. We’ve been told that he was a bit chary of using the retractable blade on himself at the early rehearsals. Bear in mind, though, that he had already used the thing three times, once at the dress rehearsal and twice at the Thursday and Friday performances, with no ill effects. To my way of thinking, Rinkley wouldn’t have given the thing a thought on the third night. He admits as much. I’ve had the daggers weighed and although the lethal one is a bit heavier than the theatrical one, there isn’t so much in it as all that.”

  This point was being debated elsewhere. Marcus Lynn had come up to the house on ‘demolition day’, as he termed it, to make sure that his workmen under their foreman carried out the task of clearing up as expeditiously, neatly and unobtrusively as possible, and Deborah had invited him to stay to lunch. The day following the inquest she renewed the invitation over the telephone to include Emma. She added the name of the Lynns’ adopted son, but Emma, accepting for herself and her husband, explained that Jasper was in a last frenzy of revision, since his advanced-level examinations started in two days’ time.

  It was Dame Beatrice who introduced the topic which was in all their minds after the unexpected adjournment.

  “And how, Mr Lynn, do you account for the cuckoo in the nest?” she asked.

  “I don’t account for it; I can’t account for it,” he replied. “When the inquest was adjourned and the court was cleared, I was given that dagger to handle. The police had all sorts of questions to ask concerning it. They were very reluctant to believe that I had never seen the thing before. In the end I took them to my house and asked Emma to get the catalogue of my collection of weapons. I don’t only collect cold steel, you see. I’ve got some quite valuable guns of various kinds and such things as maces, lances, spears, pikes and so forth. An entire room is devoted to the collection and I keep the catalogue up-to-date myself. Of course it was only the daggers which concerned the police, and I may tell you that they checked and re-checked the items very carefully indeed. I hoped you would be interested, Dame Beatrice, so I’ve brought along the catalogue, and the exhibits themselves I can show you, if you’d care to see them, at any time which is convenient to you. I’m afraid I can’t show you the lethal weapon. The police have impounded that.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “Oh, yes, near enough. It is not unlike one in my collection, except that the blade is shorter and had been honed down to razor sharpness. They let me take it out of its sheath and I only touched the edge of it with my thumb, yet it parted the skin. It must have gone into poor Bourton like a hot knife into butter.”

  “Well, it certainly missed any ribs, it seems.”

  “Have you heard of similar cases, Dame Beatrice? I mean, cases of stabbing with no outward signs of blood?”

  “There is the classic case which the police surgeon was prevented from quoting. Usually, I think, there would be some bleeding from the nose and mouth, if not outwardly from the wound itself.”

  “I suppose that could be taken superficially as a nosebleed. I believe some such thing was mentioned.”

  “Marcus, dear, you are spoiling my lunch,” said Emma.

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Dame Beatrice, to have dragged you into such a discussion. I went to see Barbara Bourton before we came here this morning.”

  “Ah, yes. I saw her yesterday,” said Deborah. “She seems to be bearing up all right.”

  “She is touring again next week, and later on she wants to run her own company. She proposed to resurrect A.A.Milne’s light comedies,” said Emma. “I wonder how they will go down with present-day audiences?”

  “I should think they might go down very well. At least they are pleasant and well constructed.”

  “She is going to play Kate Camberley in the one-act Camberley Triangle as a curtain raiser. The part is made for her. Then she will follow it up with Belinda and, for a change, if she can attract the other people she wants, she will play Eustasia in The Dover Road, and she might vary that with Olivia in Mr Pim Passes By.”

  “She will never put that sort of stuff across,” said Jonathan, “any more than you can put across lots of the poetry of the same period. Times have changed. People don’t want cosy domestic comedy and storms in tea-cups, or verses that actually scan and rhyme. They want a challenge, toughness, art which reflects life instead of cushioning it. In a way, you know, Bourton has brought The Dream up-to-date by actually killing Pyramus.”

  “Let’s adjourn and look at the catalogue Marcus has brought,” said Deborah. “You seem very familiar with A.A.Milne’s plays,” she added to Emma as they went into the drawing-room together.

  “Barbara told me of her plans weeks ago, when we first began rehearsals, so I got the plays and read them. I could see her in the various parts as I read. Of course she hadn’t got the capital at that time to form her own company, but Donald seems to have left a lot of money and all of it, Marcus tells me, comes to Barbara, so she will be able to realise all her ambitions now.”

  There were more than thirty daggers listed and described and the catalogue was written up in beautiful copperplate. Some of the entries were familiar to Jonathan, since about a dozen of the daggers had been brought along to the dress rehearsal so that he and Tom could make their choice. Listed were a bowie knife, three Italian cinquedeas of the late fifteenth century, two French rondel daggers of a century later, a quillon dagger, a ballock or kidney dagger, probably Flemish, and a queer-looking, so called ‘ear’ dagger, all of about the same date.

  To the next century belonged a couple of English and Scottish daggers, two left-hand daggers from France and Spain respectively, two Spanish plug-bayonets, a collection of horn-handled, silver-mounted hunting knives and there was a late nineteenth-century Corsican dagger, the property in former times, no doubt, of a brigand.

  A second part of the catalogue was devoted to more modern weapons—Commando knives, a German NSKK leader’s dagger and an SS officer’s dagger of the same era, a very elegant, narrow-bladed dagger which had belonged to a German naval officer, and, separately listed again, a collection of weapons, mostly with curved blades, from the Orient.

  Lynn turned back the pages and put his finger down on one of the early entries. The quillon dagger, he said, was nearest in appearance to the retractable dagger ‘which, as a matter of fact, I had copied from it’, but he went on to say that when the police allowed him to draw the lethal dagger from its sheath, he realised that the point of the dagger nowhere near reached the end of the sheath. The blade, instead of being nearly fifteen inches long, was a bare six inches in length,

  “Coincident with what the doctors think was the length of the wound,” he said. “Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?”

  “Well,” said Jonathan to Dame Beatrice when the guests had gone, “it does make you think a bit. The harmless dagger retracted right into the hilt so that all its inches could be assumed to be in Pyramus.”

  “They would have pinned him to the ground,” said Deborah.

  “Ah, but, with the retractable dagger, that problem would not arise. With the murderous blade, as somebody had the wit to foresee, it might cause a problem, so he took care to make the blade short enough to get to the right spot with no redundant inches.”

  “So we really are talking about murder or suicide,” said Deborah.

  “Oh, accident was ruled out long ago, as the police spotted very early on.”

  “I wonder why Donald didn’t realise that the blade was much too short? Surely he must have noticed, the minute he drew the thing out.”

  “I doubt whether he had ever seen the retractable blade drawn out of the sheath. As Oberon he had been given a sword. He wouldn’t have taken any interest in anybody else’s ‘props’. People are so self-centred, especially when they’ve got a pretty decent part in a play.”

  “But if the dagger was meant for Rinkley, he would have spotted the short blade at once and realised it was the wrong dagger,” said Deborah.

  “
Possibly not, you know. He might have thought that the dagger had already retracted itself a bit while it was in the sheath. Anyway, he would probably have been rolling his eyes around in a fine frenzy of ham acting and not really looked at the dagger. Besides he, like most of the others, was a bit sloshed, and the lighting, as everybody will testify, was geared to the fairy scenes and not terribly helpful to the rest of the play.”

  “Brian wanted it that way. He said that the operative word in the title was Night and that a sense of midsummer mystery must be maintained. Marcus had offered to step up the floodlighting, but he would have none of it.”

  “Of course Yorke didn’t like Rinkley much,” said Jonathan. “Remember how he chucked him out of the house because of Yolanda?”

  Dame Beatrice asked for an explanation of this. At the back of her mind was something the child Rosamund had said at the Stone House.

  “Yolanda? Oh, we don’t know any details and didn’t ask for any,” said Deborah. “Apparently—but it was a long time ago, I believe—Rinkley was involved in a rather unsavoury case of child molestation, so, as there were a number of children in the play, I suppose people kept an eye on him which, perhaps, was rather unfair. We stopped him playing a harmless game with Rosamund because she did not like being tossed up into the air. I think it upset her dignity. As to what happened with Yolanda when Brian gave Rinkley houseroom while his flat was being done up, we have no idea, as I say, but the upshot was that instead of having to put them off because Rinkley was occupying the spare bedroom, the Yorkes could put up our two babes after all.”

  “The Yorkes were probably over-zealous,” said Jonathan, “but it was a fault on the right side, I feel.”

  “Was Rinkley convicted in the case you mentioned?”

  “No, aunt, he wasn’t. The trouble is that these things stick. It’s extremely unfair, but there it is.”

  The next development emanated from Lynn, although, having met both of them, Dame Beatrice decided that the actual wording of his letter had been dictated by the far more self-effacing and tactful Emma.