‘So it was certainly cocaine, then?’ said Sergeant Bird to Inspector Entwistle, who was reading a report.
‘Looks like it,’ said Entwistle. ‘Not much of it—barely enough for half an hour’s fun, in fact, but there’s no getting away from it: Dorothy Dacres kept a small quantity of cocaine in a little silver box on her dressing-table.’
‘What did Penk say about it?’
‘Just about what you’d expect. He was all aghast and horrified, had no idea she was doing anything of the sort, wouldn’t have dreamed of giving her the leading rôle in the film if he’d known, and so on and so on.’
‘Think he was telling the truth?’
‘Well, we’ve no proof he wasn’t.’
‘What about that sister of hers? Cora—what is it?—Drucker? Why not Dacres?’
‘Oh, Dorothy Dacres wasn’t her real name, of course. She was born Irma Drucker and changed it on the say-so of the studios. But the sister claims to have known nothing about the dope either, and swears Dorothy never touched it. We searched the place thoroughly while Cora and the maid were staying elsewhere, and we never found any drugs in among Cora’s things—in fact, that little box was the only trace of the stuff we found, so for the moment I think we’ll have to assume she’s clean, and that Dacres was the only one who had anything to do with it.’
‘What about this Beckwith fellow?’ said Bird. ‘He was there that night trying to dig up a story, and said he’d heard about the dope from our lot. Is that true?’
‘It is true that the stuff’s been turning up all over the place in London lately,’ conceded Entwistle. ‘You remember the case of Lord Menwith back in the summer. He wouldn’t say where he’d got it, but it was obvious his wife was also heavily addicted—and a good few of his cronies, too, if I’m not much mistaken. Talbot’s been put onto that. It’s been making its way into high society somehow.’
‘Carelli up to his tricks again?’ suggested Bird.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve found nothing on him or his associates, but they know we’ve been watching them so they’ve been extra careful. I expect this Beckwith has got his information from Talbot.’
‘He certainly had a bee in his bonnet about it,’ said the sergeant. ‘He insisted Dorothy Dacres was a cocaine fiend and that she jumped off the terrace while under the influence.’
‘Well, we’ll soon find out when we hear from Ingleby,’ said Entwistle. ‘I told him to test for cocaine in her blood, and anything else he can find.’
‘This other reporter, Pilkington-Soames, says she seemed sober enough to him at the party.’
‘Yes—and what was he doing there, by the way?’ said the inspector. ‘Rather a suspicious coincidence, after all that funny business last month.’
‘He’s a friend of Augusta Laing’s, he says, and wasn’t working that evening. He didn’t think much of the accident theory.’
‘Well, he can keep his thoughts to himself,’ said Entwistle.
‘He was there on the spot, though, sir, and saw a lot of what was happening. He’s right when he says that the railing was too high for her to have fallen over it accidentally. And suicide is most unlikely too; everyone we’ve spoken to says Dorothy Dacres was as happy as a sandboy that evening, and had no reason at all to kill herself—although I suppose it’s always possible the cocaine gave her a brainstorm of some kind and drove her to do it.’
‘Hmm, the drugs again,’ said Entwistle. ‘Well, we don’t know yet that she’d actually taken any, so let’s look at the rest of the facts.’ He took out his notebook. ‘Now, let’s see: we know for certain that at half past ten or so Dorothy Dacres stood up and announced to everybody that she was to play the lead rôle in this film. As far as we can tell, she then spent the next twenty minutes sweeping around the room, demanding and receiving everybody’s congratulations. But nobody seems to know where she went after that.’
‘Presumably out on the terrace,’ said Bird.
Entwistle looked back at his notes with a frown.
‘She was found in the street at just before twenty past eleven by a group of passers-by, who raised the alarm. It seems that when they heard the commotion quite a lot of the guests upstairs rushed out to look over the railing, as they thought there’d been an accident in the street.’
He pursed up his mouth in distaste.
‘Just curiosity I expect, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘It’s human nature, after all.’
‘Not exactly pleasant, though. At any rate, we have half an hour or so in which we don’t know what she was doing—or even where she was. We know she fell from the terrace, but we don’t know for sure that she spent half an hour out there.’
‘It seems unlikely,’ said Bird. ‘It was cold, and that evening-gown of hers was pretty flimsy.’
‘We need to find out who was the last to see her alive,’ said Entwistle, looking at the report again. ‘Johnson said he couldn’t find anyone who saw her go out onto the terrace. She spoke to a largish group of people at just before ten to eleven, then went off somewhere, and nobody seems to have seen her after that.’
‘Did Johnson speak to all the guests?’
‘Most of them. There were about a hundred people there and I asked him to eliminate the obvious ones. Many of them were nothing more than hangers-on, and didn’t have much connection to the dead woman, or only spoke to her for a minute or two, but there are a few I dare say we’ll want to speak to again. Let’s see.’ He paused a moment, referring again to his own notes. ‘We may as well start with Penk,’ he said at last. ‘He seems to be the one in charge.’
‘Who is this chap, anyway?’ said Bird. ‘Did he have some personal connection to Dorothy Dacres? Or was it purely business?’
‘He’s the head of Aston-Penk Productions—that’s the studio that was going to make this film,’ said Entwistle. ‘I gather he’d come to England to woo a few people, too. He wanted to persuade Kenneth Neale to direct it—succeeded in that, it seems. Then there was Sir Aldridge Featherstone. Penk was hoping to get him to back this film and perhaps others. Now, who else have we? Cora again. She presumably knew her sister better than anyone.’
‘I heard a rumour they didn’t get on,’ said Bird. ‘Perhaps they had a row on the terrace and it ended in violence.’
‘What, two little girls like that? I can’t see them throwing each other off the top of a building, can you?’
‘You’d be surprised at what women can do,’ said the sergeant darkly. ‘I’ve got two sisters, and some of the stories I could tell you would make your hair curl.’
Entwistle, who had no sisters, looked unconvinced.
‘Anyway,’ he went on after a moment, ‘Miss Drucker says she hardly spoke to Dorothy at all that evening. She already knew her sister was getting the part, and so didn’t need to congratulate her after the big announcement. She says she talked to various people, then went onto the terrace for a couple of minutes at about eleven, where she spoke to Robert Kenrick. A minute or two after that Miss Laing and Mr. Pilkington-Soames came out, then they all went inside.’
‘Robert Kenrick was already on the terrace, was he?’ said the sergeant with interest.
‘Ah, I see that point struck you too,’ said Entwistle.
‘Do we know at what time he went out there?’
‘He’s a bit vague on the subject, but he claims he didn’t speak to Dorothy at all after she made her grand announcement. He says he can’t remember exactly what he did, but he wandered around the room talking to various people, then went outside for some fresh air.’
‘Didn’t he bring a girl with him to the party?’ said Bird.
‘Yes, he did, but it looks as though they didn’t spend much of the evening together.’ Entwistle glanced at the list of names. ‘This is the one: Sarah Rowland.’
‘Some falling-out there, do you think?’ said the sergeant.
‘Could be. I wonder whether Kenrick and Dacres were up to no good. You know what these actors are like—they hop from one to the next as easy as winking. I think we’ll have to have a word with young Kenrick, and see what he has to say for himself.’
‘He looks a likely one, if he was actually out on the terrace at around the time Miss Dacres died,’ said the sergeant. ‘Who else have we got?’
‘Seymour Cosgrove,’ said the inspector thoughtfully.
Bird threw his superior a keen glance.
‘You like this one, do you, sir?’
‘He’s another very convenient suspect,’ said Entwistle. ‘He’s a hot-headed chap, I understand, and by all accounts had a grudge against her, as she’d just lost him his job.’
‘Did he tell you this?’
‘No—Dacres herself told several people about it. Cosgrove was all set to go and work for one of these fashion magazines in America, but she wanted him as her own personal photographer, and so saw to it that he didn’t. He was furious, but she thought it was all a huge joke.’
‘Where was he that evening?’ said the sergeant.
‘He told Johnson he was around and about, talking to various people, but there are times we haven’t been able to account for. There’s one fifteen-minute period in particular, just after eleven o’clock, when nobody seems to have seen him. We’ll have to look into that more closely. It would help if we knew at exactly what time she died.’
‘It would certainly help us eliminate some of them,’ agreed the sergeant. ‘Or even all of them, assuming it wasn’t deliberate at all, but suicide or an accident.’
‘Whichever it was, we’re going to have the devil of a job proving it,’ said Entwistle.
‘Leave it for the inquest to decide,’ said the sergeant comfortably.
‘Augusta Laing,’ went on Entwistle. ‘She’d just lost the part she wanted to Dorothy Dacres.’
‘Did she take it badly?’ said Bird.
‘No—everyone says she took it very well, as a matter of fact. However, she’s meant to be a good actress, so that might mean anything or nothing. She’d be able to hide her disappointment all right. Still, it’s the same with her as with Cora. It would take some strength to chuck a full-grown woman off a balcony. That wall is high so you couldn’t just push her over. I can’t see a woman having done it, but we’ll leave her on the list for now.’
‘Any others?’
‘Just Kenneth Neale, I think. He’d wanted Augusta Laing to play the part of Helen Harper—had only agreed to direct the film on that condition, in fact—so he was furious when the news was announced, and made no secret of it. He admits he followed Penk out onto the terrace and laid into him about it.’
‘Oh, so they were out on the terrace too, were they?’ said the sergeant.
‘Not that terrace,’ said Entwistle. ‘They went onto the smaller one off Dacres’ bedroom.’
‘How long were they there?’
‘It doesn’t say here,’ said the inspector. ‘We’ll have to do some more digging.’
‘I should have thought Neale was furious with Penk, not Dorothy,’ said Bird. ‘He might have thrown Penk over the balcony, but not her.’
‘True enough. But perhaps he talked to her afterwards and she angered him in some way. Anyway, those are the main suspects—if indeed we’re looking for suspects. There’s also Mrs. Neale, Sir Aldridge Featherstone, and these Kibbles, who were apparently singing at the piano all evening. Perhaps they can tell us more about what was going on.’
‘Basil and Birdie,’ said the sergeant reminiscently. ‘I saw them at the Palais during the war. Very funny, they were.’
Entwistle scribbled a note or two.
‘I wonder whether it was murder,’ he said after a pause.
‘It’ll make our job a lot easier if it wasn’t,’ said Bird. ‘I mean to say, if it turns out she’d had a skinful of cocaine then she might have tipped herself over the edge without anyone coming near her. “Temporarily unsound mind,” they’d call it.’
‘Yes. Perhaps you’d better get on to Ingleby, then,’ said Entwistle. ‘The sooner we find out whether she was taking the stuff, the better.’