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  “Please forgive an ignorant, self-educated fellow,” the letter ran, “as I have no notion how to word this request. There is a lot of pressure on me concerning Bourton’s death, as I sponsored the play and provided all the daggers.

  “I do realise how eminent you are in your own line, so I hesitate to ask whether you ever accept commissions. The point is that it seems quite obvious that somebody who was in the play had a grudge either against Rinkley or against Bourton and must have provided that lethal dagger and substituted it for the retractable one. If you could possibly find out when that substitution took place, I think I might work out who the offender was. Any further information I can supply—well, you have only to ask for it.

  “One pointer, if I can call it such, I have been able to give the police. Because of my hobby I have a specialised knowledge of weapons and I am pretty sure that the dagger with which Bourton killed himself did not begin life as a dagger, but was made from a cut-down rapier. The murderer (one has to use the word, I’m afraid) needed a finely-pointed, narrow-bladed weapon and may have come across this rapier by accident without, at the time, having any evil intentions. Later on perhaps he realised its possibilities, and it is more than likely, I think, that he got hold of a blacksmith and had the dagger made to his own specification. If I am right, the original rapier may have been in his possession for some time, possibly for several years, so I think the police should look for the blacksmith and, in view of the serious nature of what has happened, I doubt whether the smith would be a local man, so they may have their work cut out to find him. Of course, in these days of handymen and precision tools, the fellow may even have done the job himself.

  “If you will accept a commission, dear and honoured lady, it would be to investigate the relationships between the various members of the company, their activities on the third night of the play and whether by any chance an outsider could have had any chance of changing over the daggers. I am a student of psychology in an amateur way, and I do not rule out the possibility that the murderer is a woman, particularly if the right (!) person was killed and the dagger was indeed intended for Bourton and not for Rinkley.”

  Dame Beatrice showed the letter to Jonathan and Deborah. Deborah said, “Emma wrote that, but Marcus supplied the summary for it.”

  Jonathan asked whether Dame Beatrice intended to accept the commission. She cackled and replied that he who supped with the devil must have a long spoon.

  Chapter 11

  Mytilus Edulis Has Orange Gills

  “An actor, too, perhaps, if I see cause.”

  « ^ »

  Give you a summary of the loves and hates among the cast, my most eccentric and delightful of aunts?” said Jonathan. “Nothing easier, but then I think you had better canvas Deb’s opinion. We see eye to eye in all aspects of living and loving, but we don’t always agree in our reactions towards our acquaintances.”

  “That only applies to the people each of us knew before we married,” said Deborah. “It’s a funny thing, and I’ve often noticed it, but hardly any wife can put up with the friends and cronies of her husband’s bachelor days, and that goes for the husband’s view of his wife’s girlhood confidantes. He can’t stand them, as a general rule, unless he falls for one of them. Then the fat really is in the fire.”

  “If you are accepting Lynn’s commission,” said Jonathan, “mind you sting him good and plenty. He’s got oodles of money and will be glad to write you off against tax.”

  “He couldn’t do that, could he?” asked Deborah seriously.

  “I ought to demand payment by results,” said Dame Beatrice. “Payment must be geared to productivity. We are always being told so. Of course, the first thing which would strike an unbiased observer is that the offer of this commission is an attempt, and a crude one, to throw dust in my eyes. You see, other things being equal, (which, of course, they never are), my primary suspect would be Mr Lynn himself. He held the only key to the cupboard in which the properties were kept, so it is obvious that he, among all of you, had very much the best chance of substituting one dagger for another without being detected. I said at the beginning, and I adhere to it, that the daggers were changed over before the last performance began.”

  “If that is so, it seems to let out Narayan Rao,” said Jonathan. Dame Beatrice looked enquiringly at him. “Narayan lost an appeal against Rinkley for damage to his car. I don’t know the details. It happened some time ago, but Narayan was on the loser’s end and can’t have been very pleased about it.”

  “Would he have been in a position to change over the daggers?”

  “Well, he had a chair in the wings not too far from the trestle tables, but the third performance was the only one he saw, so although he may be familiar with the text of the play—he’s got a London B.A. degree in English—he certainly knew nothing of our production of it. I really think he should be ruled out.”

  “How came it that he was given a seat in the wings?”

  “He lent us his two-year-old son as the fairy changeling.”

  “I do not remember the child.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. He had a tummy upset on the first and second nights and did not appear, but he was all right on the Saturday, so Narayan Rao brought him along and looked after him until he was needed. Little Sharma was only on stage for a few minutes and, when Deb handed him back, his father changed him into his street clothes, left his little gold tunic and headband on the chair and took him straight home. The chap Lynn hired to supervise the parking of cars saw them go.”

  “So Narayan Rao knew nothing of Mr Rinkley’s illness?”

  “Not at the time, nor, of course, that Bourton killed himself with the substituted dagger. He knows by now, I suppose. Even if he doesn’t read the papers he must have heard the gossip. The story is all over the town. It takes Cook and Carrie twice as long as usual to do the marketing, and as for Deb and me, we dread having to stick our noses outside the front door. Fortunately the servants love all the notoriety and fuss and Cook, I believe, lives in hope of selling her story to one of the Sunday papers and reaping a rich harvest.”

  “Are you really accepting a commission from Lynn?” Deborah asked, as Dame Beatrice took out a notebook and, seated at the breakfast table which had just been cleared, began to write.

  “I am not in a position to do so. He is not calling me in as consultant psychiatrist, but to find a murderer. The Home Office sometimes calls upon me to do that, and no man can serve two masters.”

  “You don’t really suspect Lynn of changing over the daggers, do you?” asked Jonathan.

  “My previous point, that he would have had much the best opportunity to do so, should be borne in mind, and there is another thing which may be of equal importance. On his own showing, he is an expert on weapons and would have seen the possibility of turning a narrow-bladed rapier into a dagger of the required size. He may also have known of a man who could do the work for him, a man who would have had no suspicions because he had repaired weapons, replaced lost parts, restored mountings and so on and so forth for Mr Lynn, probably over a period of years.”

  “If Lynn has anything on his conscience—and what you say, Aunt, does make one think a bit—wasn’t it rather rash of him to point out to you and to the police that the murder weapon was a cut-down rapier?”

  “I think he felt he had no option. If I myself had been given an opportunity to examine the weapon, the chances are that I should have known at once that it was made from a rapier. The expert the police will call in will not only realise the same thing, but will date the rapier and may even be able to make a fair estimate of when its transformation to a dagger took place. The weakness of my theory that a modern blacksmith did the work is that the cutting-down process may have been done as early as the seventeenth century, you see.”

  “In which case Lynn could be as innocent as I believe him to be,” said Jonathan.

  “Hasn’t Aunt Adela undermined your confidence in him just a little, though?” asked
Deborah.

  “Dented it a trifle; not undermined it.”

  “I have made a list of twelve people who were in the play,” said Dame Beatrice, indicating her notebook. “What I would like from you and Deborah is your view of the interrelationships among these twelve people so far as you were able to observe them during the rehearsals.”

  “Twelve people? Which of us are you leaving out?” asked Deborah.

  “Your two selves, Rosamund and Edmund, the fairies en bloc, the child Yolanda, the boy who played Puck and, only for the time being, the young man who was Egeus.”

  “The last one is Jasper Lynn, Marcus’s adopted son, whose head is too full of A-levels to bother itself with murder, and the other is Tom Woolidge’s younger brother Peter. You would be right to call him charming,” said Deborah. “He is quite the nicest possible type of really nice boy and has been wonderful in helping to look after the children. I’m glad you’ve left him out of your calculations.”

  “Pro tem only. I am like Long John Silver. He was fond of young Jim Hawkins and I always wonder whether even Fagin did not feel some affection for the Artful Dodger and the other little rapscallions. Categorically, how did Marcus Lynn regard the other eleven on my list?”

  “So far as we know, he got on well with all of them. People respected him for choosing anything but a star part for himself and were all grateful for his lavish sponsorship of the show.”

  “No case of having to hire your own costume and agree to take at least twenty of the most expensive tickets and either flog them to your friends or pay for them yourself and give them away, she means,” said Jonathan. “I have only one thing to add: he insisted on having his Emma cast as Hermia to begin with. At the first reading the poor girl was so terribly bad that I’m afraid opprobrious remarks were made and some of them may have come to Lynn’s ears. He would not readily forgive anybody who called his wife ‘a silly moo’ and said she would ruin the show.”

  “I thought she performed adequately, but not as Hermia.”

  “No, she swopped over with Barbara Bourton and then Deb took her in hand, and there weren’t any more complaints. If Lynn had it in for either Rinkley or Bourton, I really don’t think it would have been on Emma’s account. She got plenty of compliments in the end. The ladies who might have taken umbrage because of Rinkley’s comments on their acting were Susan Hythe, Robina Lester and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Caroline Frome.”

  “Would those be the women who took workmen’s parts?”

  “Yes, indeed. Susan was Flute, otherwise Thisbe, Robina was Starveling, alias Moonshine, and Caroline was Snout, who doubled up as Wall.”

  “I remember.”

  “Rinkley was anything but complimentary about their efforts during rehearsals, but I don’t think any of them would have gone to the lengths of changing over those daggers, even if they had had the opportunity.”

  “They all had access to the properties, no doubt.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s true. Susan had to pick up a wrap-over skirt and a small cloak-thing, Robina her thornbush, toy dog and lantern and Caroline the sandwich-board thing she wore as the stonework. I can’t see when any of them could have swapped over the daggers, though, especially as you think that was done before the performances began.”

  “Oh, it must have been. Nobody would have taken the risk of changing the daggers in full view of the rest of the cast. This murder was carefully planned. The thing about which I cannot make up my mind is whether the victim was the person the murderer intended to kill. I cannot see how anybody could have known beforehand that Mr Rinkley would be taken ill and that therefore Mr Bourton would play Pyramus and kill himself with the substituted dagger.”

  “I’m still most surprised that we needed an understudy at all. Rinkley must have thought he was at death’s door when those wretched bivalve molluscs reacted, or he would have crawled back on stage, chance what,” said Jonathan.

  “Whereas, thanks to Dr Delahague’s morbid concern with myelotoxin, he was bundled off to hospital. I note—I looked her up, of course—that she worked in the north of England before she and her husband came down here, so although it was likely that Rinkley merely had an allergy about which he ought to have known, there was just the chance of myelotoxin from the mussels, so, as a conscientious medical practitioner, she decided to take no chances.”

  Jonathan studied his small, spare aunt for almost a minute. She accepted the scrutiny and awaited the verdict with a reptilian smile.

  “You’ve got some reason for going all on about those mussels and Jeanne-Marie’s reactions, haven’t you?” said her nephew. “What’s cooking?”

  “Only the fleetest of idle thoughts. It occurred to me that, so quickly did Dr Delahague remove the allergist from the scene that he could have had no idea that Bourton was to take on the part of Pyramus.”

  “So you have already said, Aunt, but he must have had more than an idea. He knew Bourton was to be his understudy.”

  “I wish I could be sure of that. Were all the principal parts covered?”

  “Well, more or less. Of course, from one point of view the workmen’s play was our big number, so if the worst came to the worst I suppose we should have scrubbed some of the court party in that scene—telescoped the quips and interpolations, I mean—and Tom and I would have filled in for Pyramus, Prologue or Lion, Emma for Moonshine and Barbara Bourton for Thisbe, leaving Wall for Valerie Yorke. That would have left Brian Yorke as Theseus, and young Jasper Lynn to intone all the responses. Of course, not all—probably not more than one —of the workmen would have had to cry off, but, yes, all the parts were more or less covered, and in the earlier scenes, too, although everybody was keeping their fingers crossed, for we all hoped that nobody would have to double up for the lovers, who had much the longest parts in the show.”

  “How did Mr and Mrs Yorke get on with the other players?”

  “Excellently, so far as I know, but, of course, Deb and I are strangers here. Yorke seems to be the company’s regular producer and always picks himself an attractive although usually a secondary part. Valerie is quite a good actress but, for these days, rather strait-laced, and I believe it was on her insistence that Yorke kicked Rinkley out of his house.”

  “And you—but not on Deborah’s insistence—punched Rinkley in the stomach, I understand.”

  “Just one of those reflex actions.”

  “But probably deeply resented.”

  “He did ask for it.”

  “And seems to have learned little from it.”

  “Oh, you don’t know Valerie Yorke. If Rinkley had so much as tickled Yolanda in the ribs he would have been out on his ear the next minute.”

  “And quite right, too,” said Deborah. “It’s abominable of people to take advantage of children. You know, Aunt Adela, if I were asked to name the likeliest person to have changed over those daggers I would have no hesitation in picking any one of four.”

  “Would you not? You refer, no doubt, to Mrs Robina Lester, her son David, Miss Susan Hythe and Miss Caroline Frome. You have a point. As we have agreed, their properties were on the same table as those of Rinkley and Mr Lynn. There is only one difficulty. At least two of the four, and possibly three of them, would have had to be in collusion if the substitution of the daggers was to go unnoticed by the rest of the cast.”

  “Well,” said Jonathan, “all I know is that all four had had the rough side of Rinkley’s tongue at rehearsals when he thought they weren’t giving him enough support. Yorke told me that the women, in particular, had made so many complaints that if he could have found anybody else even half as good as Rinkley, we should have had another Bully Bottom in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. As it was, Yorke had to let a lot of things go on against his better judgment.”

  “Could Mr Yorke not control his leading man?”

  “It’s a tricky business producing for amateurs, and Rinkley really was damned good.”

  “Suppose there had been collusion—”

 
“Oh, that’s easy to answer,” said Jonathan. “It could have been mother and son—Robina is a strong-minded woman and I should think David is pretty much under her thumb—or David and one of the girls. He’s supposed to be keen on one of them, but which one I’ve never been interested enough to find out.”

  “But Miss Hythe and Miss Frome would not have conspired together?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. They’ve probably both got an eye on young David. They wouldn’t go into any sort of huddle with one another.”

  “They’ve both got an eye on Tom,” said Deborah.

  “I accept your judgment. That leaves us with Barbara Bourton, who would seem to gain financially from her husband’s death. Money is a strong incentive to commit a crime.”

  “But she was never in any position to change over the daggers, Aunt dear. She had no props to pick up, had no access to the daggers before the show opened and would have been spotted at once if she’d been seen—as she would have been—fiddling about on one of the trestle tables,” said Jonathan.

  “Edmund seems a bit sniffly this morning,” said Laura. “He may have picked up one of these summer colds.”

  “Cook says stuff a cold and starve a fever,” said Rosamund.

  “She is full of these old saws. An old saw,” added Laura quickly, “is a saying handed down from generation to generation and probably quite as sensible as anything the doctors tell you.”

  “Will Edmund have the doctor?”

  “I don’t know until I’ve taken his temperature.”

  “I think Cook and Carrie always have colds.”

  “Oh? What makes you think so?”

  “They are always eating. Mummy says they eat twice as much as the rest of us put together.”

  “Compensatory, perhaps. That means it may be their way of expressing dissatisfaction with something else in their lives.”

  “Mr Rinkley was eating some nasty things out of a jar. They had kind of orange-coloured bits on them.”