THE RAIN did not return and the Wednesday evening was idyllically warm.
It was positively hot in the caravan dressing room as they waited for the ‘beginners’ call. Charles felt uncomfortable in his thick Sir Toby Belch costume. He also felt uncomfortable because Vasile Bogdan was there too. Still, no immediate danger – they weren’t alone together. Russ Lavery, Benzo Ritter and Tottie Roundwood were also present, lounging around, pretending they weren’t nervous and glancing idly through the newspaper reports of Sally Luther’s death.
‘Dreadful business, isn’t it?’ said Charles, for want of something else to say.
The others agreed it was.
‘She was so young.’
Russ Lavery, wearing a dress for Viola’s first appearance in Illyria and sitting in a neat feminine pose, nodded uneasily. ‘Kind of thing happens too often for my liking. Chum of mine, only my age, just got married, suddenly keeled over a couple of months back. Heart attack. Dreadful.’
From the nodding reactions of the others, it seemed no one thought there was anything suspicious about Sally’s death. But, since he’d raised the subject, Charles dared to probe a little further. ‘I wonder what she died of?’
‘Heart? Brain tumour?’ Tottie Roundwood suggested. ‘Usually one of those when it’s as unexpected as that.’
‘What do you think, Vasile?’
The only reaction he got was a shrug of the shoulders.
Charles decided to be even braver. ‘Funny nobody’s suggested the possibility of foul play . . .’
‘Foul play?’ Benzo Ritter echoed.
‘Yes, foul play. Murder.’
‘Don’t be morbid, Charles,’ said Tottie mildly.
Vasile Bogdan’s reaction was anything but mild. ‘That’s a filthy suggestion!’ he stormed. ‘The poor girl’s not been dead twenty-four hours. What on earth made you say that, you bloody fool?’
He’d gone too far. Charles tried to ease the situation with a Twelfth Night quote.
“‘Now Mercury endue thee with leasing, for thou speakest well of fools.”’
Vasile, about to come back with a fierce rejoinder, was stopped by a tap on the caravan door. ‘Act one beginners, please.’ And they all trooped out for the opening dumb-show.
Thanks to the day’s newspaper coverage – both sensational and artistic – all of the fixed seats for Twelfth Night were taken and spectators on folding chairs and rugs were densely spread over the surrounding slopes. Some of the audience that evening found the production a bit bizarre – it wasn’t Shakespeare’s play as they knew it – but the newspaper critics had told them it was good, so it must be. Anyway, they all enjoyed their picnics.
Charles Paris was very wary throughout the performance, watchful whenever Vasile Bogdan was in sight, and watching out for him when he wasn’t. He knew he had to find some proof to back up his suspicions, and a plan was forming in his head as to how he might achieve that.
The show was a bit second-nightish. The audience wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss, but the cast knew they hadn’t quite scaled the peaks of the previous performance. There had been an inevitable sense of anti-climax, which many of the company proposed to counteract by a meal at the Great Wensham Tandoori.
Charles Paris, mindful of what had happened after the last communal Indian meal – and with his own plans for the rest of the evening – said he wouldn’t join them. Nobody made any attempt to dissuade him from his decision.
In the cramped caravan, he removed the Sir Toby Belch costume and put on his street clothes. He felt the reassuring weight of a half-bottle of Bell’s in his jacket pocket. What he was planning to do could well require some Dutch courage. In his other pocket were a pencil torch and a screwdriver.
Charles got a lift with the rest of the company in the festival minibus, which stopped outside the Great Wensham Tandoori. Studiedly dilatory in getting out of the bus, he was able to check who went into the restaurant.
He ticked off Alexandru Radulescu, Vasile Bogdan and Tottie Roundwood in the crowd that passed through the door. Good, that gave him at least an hour while they had their meal.
An hour, Charles reckoned, would be long enough. He reached into his pocket for the Bell’s and prepared to snap the seal, but found the metal cap already loose. Dear oh dear, he must have had a swig earlier. Never mind. He braced himself with another long swallow.
The house that Tottie, Vasile and Alexandru were renting was on the outskirts of the town, conveniently without near neighbours. Charles had been prepared to use his screwdriver to force a lock or break a pane, but fortunately he found a downstairs window insecurely latched. Carelessness seemed to accompany hot weather.
After another emboldening swallow of Bell’s, Charles Paris was quickly inside. His pencil torch showed he was in the sitting room. He moved through to the hall and up the stairs. Though not certain what he was looking for, he felt sure he was most likely to find it upstairs.
There were four doors – presumably three bedrooms and a bathroom – leading off the small landing. Charles opened one, and flashed his pencil light across the room.
His eyes were immediately caught by a pile of books on the bedside table. Drawn by the line of his torch beam, he approached them.
One looked ominously familiar. Light reflected from the dull gold lettering on the green spine: Hay – British Fungi.
The other books were more authorities on the same subject. Charles took a triumphant swig from his Bell’s bottle. He felt vindicated. There had to be something in this room that would positively incriminate Vasile Bogdan.
He swung his beam across the room to a rack of small opaque glass jars. Each seemed to contain a dry powder and was neatly labelled in a calligraphic hand. He moved forward to read the contents.
‘Aconite’, ‘Arsenic’, ‘Belladonna’. . . Good God! He just had time to register that he’d found an entire poisoner’s armoury before his attention was snatched away by something behind the rack.
A dress drooping from a coat-hanger.
He moved the torch beam round, revealing more dresses, skirts and blouses, some of which he recognised. The dressing table was littered with pots of face cream and make-up.
He was in Tottie Roundwood’s room.
Just as he formulated this thought, Charles Paris heard the sound from downstairs of the front door opening.