two

A revived audience rose from their seats and headed for the back of the hall where trestle tables draped in white linen had been set up, one on each side of the double doors, and stacked with bottles of wine and light snacks. Rex and Helen joined the queue.

“That was a very realistic scream,” she remarked.

Several people waiting in line agreed. Rex, for his part, thought it might not prove to be such a dull play after all, but at this point he just felt glad to be able to walk around and stretch his limbs.

“It made my blood run cold, right enough!” said a dapper old gentleman standing in front of them.

“Quite the best part so far,” added his female companion, likewise dressed up for the occasion.

“Why did the detectives let the girl go up to the attic alone?” a man behind Rex asked. “And is it a fancy dress? I mean, Sherlock Holmes was a Victorian, wasn’t he? And Poirot and Marple were later.”

“It’s only a play,” rejoined a female voice. “You don’t have be so literal, Dave!”

“It could involve time travel, I suppose,” Dave said, sounding dubious.

Rex turned to find a young couple.

“Anyway, I think it’s brilliant,” the girl said, smiling back at him.

“Sherlock is as stiff as plasterboard,” the elderly man in front commented. “And that Poirot looks all shifty-like, if you ask me.”

His female companion chuckled. “I bet you the bumbling Father Brown had the dagger hidden in his cassock all along!”

“I think it’s the suitor what got shot, by mistake. He went out to take that phone call just before it happened, remember. Won’t the young lady be heartbroken when she realizes what she done!”

“That girl playing Lady Naomi is such a darling. I’m sure she’ll go far with her looks and talent.”

The line moved forward.

“I’ll take white,” the old gent told the bartender after confirming the price. “Violet?”

When their turn came, Helen asked for white wine and Rex a red, and they helped themselves to sausage rolls and cheese-and-pickle sticks. As they wandered back towards their seats, balancing their plastic cups and paper plates, Penny Spencer passed in the aisle, an air of preoccupation casting a shadow over her patrician features.

“Well done!” Helen congratulated her. “Quite a cliffhanger!”

“Oh!” Penny said, distracted. “Thank you. Not sure what that loud bang was,” she fretted, amethyst earrings jiggling beneath her dark, upswept hair. Rex recalled she had been flushed and nervous when they first entered the hall, where she had stood at the entrance welcoming the spectators. She looked even more flustered now. “It must have been something falling onstage,” she concluded.

“It sounded like a shot,” Rex said. “Or perhaps a firework.”

“Well, it’s not in the play. I should probably go back there and find out. You will stay for the party afterwards, won’t you, to meet the producer and cast?” Penny asked them both.

“We’d love to,” Helen readily agreed.

Rex felt less enthusiastic about having to make small talk with a bunch of earnest theatrical types. However, he wasn’t going to throw a damper on things. Penny seemed all right, and Helen was into supporting the arts, especially when someone she knew was involved.

As they reached the front row, a tall, mature man in a greyish-green gabardine suit pushed through the far edge of the velvet curtain and made his way to the lip of the stage, where he asked everyone to please return to their seats until the police arrived.

A murmur lifted in the hall, receding to a lull as the audience waited for details. There had been an accident, the man stammered, his handsome face pasty-white above his black bow-tie, and he begged for everyone’s patience.

After he retreated behind the curtain, the hall buzzed and news of the accident spread to the spectators who had temporarily left the hall during the interval. Rex and Helen overheard that the man who had made the announcement was the play’s director, one Tony Giovanni. Conversation grew rife with conjecture as everyone wondered what could have happened. Had a piece of stage equipment fallen on someone? Had an actor tripped over and actually broken a leg, as so often exhorted by well-wishers to ward off bad luck? But then, why would the police be involved? Perhaps the gun in Lady Naomi’s hand had gone off accidentally. And yet, Rex knew from Penny that no gun was supposed to have been discharged in the play, not even a blank. Most likely it was only a prop, a toy gun.

“Can’t someone just go backstage and find out what’s going on?” a man in the crowd demanded.

Rex placed his cup and plate on his chair and raised his hands. “Let’s all calmly take our seats, as the director requested. I’m sure we’ll know what happened soon enough.”

“Well, in case we don’t,” someone stated, “I’m going to grab some nosh before it all disappears.”

The last of the audience presently regained their seats and, food and drink in hand, continued to exchange opinions about what might have gone wrong. Some of the spectators claimed to have heard a muffled cry and several people running about onstage within minutes of the scream and the bang, but they had put it down to directions being called out and props being moved for the following act. Rex, who had been with Helen getting refreshments at the time, had not heard anything beyond the scraping back of chairs as people got up amid general conversation.

Yet another person suggested the announcement was all part of the play, a device to add to the suspense, and the notion gained traction for a while. Someone even quipped that the play should have been called Stage Fright.

After more than fifteen minutes had gone by, the average duration of an interval, the notion of intentionally misleading the audience for dramatic effect was discarded, and the crowd grew impatient and tense, alternately glancing back at the large double doors in the hall and at the red velvet curtains, which remained resolutely shut, concealing who knew what.

“Should we leave?” Helen asked Rex as they sat sipping the last of their wine. “I could ring Penny later for news. She looks a bit tied-up at the moment.”

“I think we should stay. It might be more dire than we think.”

Helen swept pastry crumbs off her lap. “I hope you’re not suggesting there’s been a murder.” She almost laughed. “You really do have a one-track mind.”

“One of the many reasons you married me, I’m sure.”

“More fool me!” she joked.

Mobile phones, which signs posted around the hall had requested be turned off during the performance, were reactivated. Many of the spectators knew someone in the cast, all of whom remained backstage, and frenzied calls flew back and forth. Information was disseminated, compared, and corroborated. Members of the audience moved chairs out of alignment to better converse with neighbours.

Three facts soon emerged: that a death, and not merely an accident, had occurred, followed minutes later by confirmation that the victim was Lady Naomi, played by twenty-four-year old Cassie Chase, and that she had been shot.

Alarm replaced the jittery excitement. Had the gun gone off by mistake or on purpose? A woman in a wheelchair positioned in the aisle fainted. While someone attended to her and another asked around for a doctor or nurse, a man hurried to one of the nearly depleted refreshment tables to fetch the invalid a small bottle of water. It soon transpired through hearsay that she was Cassie Chase’s mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis.

Rex consulted the programme he had discarded on the floor and searched for the bio of her daughter. Cassie had studied drama at the University of Derby and performed in local theatres and festivals, and currently managed an organic bakery. Rex pondered the word “currently” with a heavy heart.

Helen leaned in to see what he was reading. “‘Her passions include amateur dramatics, tap-dancing, and her dog Peek-a-Boo, a five-year-old Pekinese,’” she quoted. “It’s always the good ones, isn’t it? Oh, I hope it’s not true. I wonder what she could have done to deserve this?”

“It could have been self-inflicted.”

“You mean, accidentally? Or are you saying it might have been suicide?”

Rex had no time to reply. A wail of sirens engulfed the car park of the community centre, and within minutes, ambulance personnel had rushed Cassie’s mother out of the hall. The stage curtains rippled and billowed from activity behind them. A handful of uniformed police brought the cast and crew into the hall through the double doors and sequestered them at the back. Rex flexed his fingers. There was little he disliked more than enforced inactivity for extended periods and being kept out of the loop.

“I need to find Penny,” Helen announced suddenly.

They found the playwright on her phone by the doors, clutching a cup of white wine, a mottled rash spreading up her neck above the white square collar of her black cocktail dress. She ended her call. “I wish there was something stronger,” she said, holding up her drink.

“I’m so very sorry,” Helen soothed. “Is it really true about Cassie?”

Penny Spencer nodded with a shuddering sigh. “I was talking to Ron, our producer, just now. He’s backstage with the detectives. He was doubling up as prompter, but left before the attic scene because there are no lines in it. He was in the car park and didn’t see or hear what had happened until afterwards. You were right about it being a gunshot, Rex. Lady Naomi is actually stabbed in the play.”

“Was she shot with the gun she was holding?” Rex asked.

“It appears so. Ron said it was lying by her side. I was very fond of Cassie,” Penny went on, barely holding her tears in check. “She was the leading lady and very concerned about getting everything right, and she would consult with me frequently.”

Helen put an arm around her. “Such a dreadful thing to have happened. For Cassie’s family and friends, naturally, but for you too. I was really caught up in the play.”

“It’ll have to close now, of course.”

Helen gave Penny’s shoulders a squeeze. “Is there anything we can do?”

“I told Ron about Rex and his success in investigating murder cases—because what else could it be? The gun we used wasn’t real, and I can’t believe Cassie committed suicide.” Penny shook her head, a puzzled and frightened look on her face. “It just doesn’t make sense. Anyway, Ron said he would talk to the lead detective. I hope you don’t mind.” She looked up at Rex in entreaty.

“Of course he doesn’t,” Helen replied for him. “Do you, darling? He’ll be in his element.”

Rex smiled in acknowledgment of this statement. Murders were a nasty business, and would that they never happened. However, the deplorable fact remained that they did, and he felt his knack for solving them should not go to waste. But on the off-chance Cassie Chase had taken her own life, what had driven her to such a desperate act? That, too, posed a mystery. And why would she have done so in front of two hundred people, with an invalid mother in the audience?

He felt his deductive juices going into overdrive. As Cassie’s character had declaimed, “Let us get to the bottom of this wretched business without further ado!” And he had every intention of doing so, Derbyshire Police permitting.