The rehearsal was to begin at five o’clock. Up to the last second Santley did not think that things would be ready. “The hour should have been five a.m. tomorrow, not p.m. today,” he said to Ayres, who, looking very tired, nodded assent, as he staggered along under a load of what the shops call soft furnishings. But Santley was wrong. To the minute, Ayres and Goodenough were able to pull their curtains apart and show the first of the “Pictures”, A Rembrandt Interior.
It was a great success. So were the ones that followed. But the honors of that particular part fell to the last. The Spanish Bull-fighter gained the reward of a second’s dead silence before it was clapped. There was no invited audience today. But those not wanted on the stage or not busy dressing would slip into a seat and watch the stage a minute.
With the end of the tableaux quite a good many of the seats were filled. Friends and neighbors who had come in their cars to take part in the Pictures waited in good-natured interest to see what the entire show would be like. Santley knew some of them in spite of their fancy dresses, and his roving eye was caught by another face that he knew too, though less well. The man of Battersea Park, the man whom Moncrieff had seen in the garden yesterday talking to Edwards. Santley wondered whether he had any right to be here. He was neatly dressed, but he kept himself well flattened against the wall near the door. Then Ayres gave an unexpectedly amusing skit of an old gentleman trying to get his cat to perform for some friends. Afterwards he touched Santley on the shoulder.
“We’re not going to do The Conjurer’s Disappearance,” he whispered. “Moncrieff has only just got back from town. He still has to change.” Ayres slid away again, as Flavelle Bruton stepped on to the stage. She alone had not altered her dress from the tweed which she had worn in the morning. Santley stared at her. Was this Flavelle Bruton? This tall, ugly, girl whose eyes wore an expression of fury that fairly singed what they fell on.
Santley remembered now that he had not seen her for hours. What on earth had happened to her in the meantime? Had the tension between herself and Moncrieff culminated in a quarrel? Was that madman’s face above the open razor to do with her, and was that why Lavinia had dared to go back alone into the room?
Miss Bruton came forward to the edge of the stage. She had decided, she said, to recite some verses from Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came instead of from Rabbi ben Ezra, as was down on the programs.
She began at: “Burningly it came on me all at once—“ and everyone in the room was listening; everyone felt that before them something real and terrible was happening, though they could not see it.
Her voice seemed to swell to the very roof. Standing rigid, she spoke the words as though from behind clenched teeth.
“By Jove, this is either fury incarnate, or it’s genius!” whispered Doctor Andrews, got up for a Franz Hals. He was a well-known medical man from near by.
“Wild cats in a red hot iron cage—“ rang out and the doctor nodded meaningly.
In a great rush, like dark wings uprising, the words went on. But when she came to: “Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—In a bad dream, perhaps.” the voice cracked, the words were like sobs. Then it went on, harsh as before, until with a wild cry that shook them all of:
“Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!” the right hand swept up and above the head, and then crashed down in a blow that drove an unseen knife deep into the vitals of something that lay before her.
Santley hardly heard the rest of the lines, not even when, with an imaginary horn to her lips, she rang out the finale:
“Childe Roland to the dark Tower came.”
For a moment she stood, her hands now clenched at her side, a grim glare slowly passing around her spellbound audience. Then she walked off the stage, and a door crashed shut behind her. Santley drew a deep breath. Everyone in the room drew a deep breath. Pop eyes asked of pop eyes, dropped jaws of dropped jaws, what on earth they had been watching. Was this acting? Or was this how dear old Browning should be recited, or was it special to this particular poem, or was this merely a lady in a rousing, rearing, swearing rage? If so, what had caused it? Did she often come unstuck like this? Santley was glad of the next item, a couple of Eastern Dances by some young girls, execrably stiff and amateurish, in spite of next to nothing on.
“Exercises to keep warm,” mumbled Doctor Andrews scathingly from behind his pipe.
Then came The Sheikh.
The curtains were drawn back to show a large tent. In it Lavinia lay bound and gagged on a padded table covered with a scarlet Eastern shawl. Ayres and Goodenough, once the curtain cords were fastened back, were to go upstairs and be on hand to help Moncrieff should he get hooked up in anything. It was Ayres’ suggestion. He was always offering to be on hand to help people. And Moncrieff had come in late.
Lavinia looked very white and very done, Santley thought, as she lay with closed eyes and a becomingly adjusted gag which she had fastened herself. He thought—rightly—that exhausted, she had fallen asleep before the Sheikh appeared on the stage through a door in the back of the tent. He made a magnificent figure as he stood there, towering above her with feathers in his huge turban, a long embroidered scarlet coat, voluminous white satin trousers, enormous green cummerbund from which dangled a perfect, arsenal of weapons, and scarlet slippers with turned-up toes. Yes, Moncrieff was in a hurry, Santley thought. He cut out all the explanations about his captive’s ransom not having arrived. Instead, after merely waving his hands in the air while his long black beard quivered, and his eyeballs rolled, he drew out a sword and drove it down into the heart of the geranium cluster on Mrs. Moncrieff’s breast. This part was exactly as rehearsed, and again an audible in taking of breath could be heard, as everyone craned forward. Lady Murdoch gave a little excited giggle.
“Marvelous, isn’t it!” she murmured of someone beside her. “Always so thrilling!”
Lavinia again gave her effective shudder. It was shorter and quicker over than this morning, but it was a very effective shudder. Then the Sheikh turned, and with a loud cry of what those who heard him considered effective “Easternry,” and with both hands flung into the air, he rushed back off the stage. There was a pause.
“Forgotten his ring,” thought Santley.
“Gone for a drink,” muttered Doctor Andrews, who was short-sighted and had not changed his spectacles to the right ones in time to get the full benefit of what was passing on the stage.
“Breathtaking!” came from someone behind Santley appreciatively.
A sound reached them from somewhere in the house. It was either a door banged, thought Santley, or a tire burst. Then there was silence again. It grew rather long. People stirred in their seats. The ring had got mislaid thought Santley, but surely any ring would do...at a rehearsal?
A woman who had posed as A Vandyke Lady, said rather sharply, “Well, I really must be getting back home...shall I help you down, Mrs. Moncrieff? Evidently it’s the Sheikh who’s been captured by some rebel tribesmen this time.”
Everyone laughed. More than the words called for. Pent-up emotions found an outlet. That thrust, and that silent shudder had been very dramatic. The lady stepped up on to the stage.
“Shall I help you down?” she repeated, bending over’ the table. Then she gave a cry. “Doctor! Doctor Andrews! She’s hurt! She’s bleeding. She’s—she’s—”
Doctor Andrews was beside her in a moment. So was Santley.
“Good God, she’s dead!” came from the medical man as he bent over Mrs. Moncrieff.
Mrs. Moncrieff was most certainly dead by the look on her face from which the doctor had snatched the gag, and by the blood that had been soaking beneath her, and around her. Santley had often read the expression of feeling as though one were in a nightmare. Now he knew what it meant. The next thing he remembered amid the buzz of horror and exclamations was hearing someone rattle the handle of the door leading into the hall, the door by which the audience would enter tomorrow. It was not locked, Santley knew, and he thought it showed how unnerved everyone in the house was, that whoever was outside did not walk in as usual.
A voice reached him. It did not sound at all like the voice of a rattled man. “Kindly open this door, someone!”
No one else seemed to pay any attention, but Santley, still half in a dream, crossed to it. Miss Bruton stood beside it, he now saw. At the same moment the voice spoke again, in a louder tone.
“I am Superintendent Tomlinson. Please unlock the door.”
“The key must be on your side,” Miss Bruton replied in a quiet, level voice. “Are you sure it’s not?” In reply to a quick negative. “Just a minute then, it must have dropped out.” She stood there, not looking for anything, but—to Santley—quite patently waiting. Something in her face sent a chill through him.
“The other door—“ Flavelle Bruton now said, still speaking very quietly, “what about the other door? That’s not locked.”
“Yes, it is,” came the instant reply. “Has anything happened inside there? Please find the key at once, if so. It sounds as though there were some sort of trouble. We must open the door ourselves if the key can’t be found at once.” The tone was not a threat but as one who promises support, and is anxious to relieve anxiety.
“The key has evidently dropped out. We shall find it,” came from Flavelle, “or the lock has gone wrong. No one could have locked the door.”
“What are you listening for?” Santley asked her abruptly.
She turned her eyes on him. He never forgot the expression in them. “Sh! That might have been a door that slammed,” she murmured. Then as he stared at her, she threw at him impatiently, but still in a very low tone, “That noise just now. It might only have been a door. We must give him time.”
“Give who time?” Santley was still dazed, but he whispered the words. “Time for what?”
Then he understood. Perhaps she was right. Of course she was right. It was the only way out for poor Moncrieff. But then there surged through his brain, unbidden, unwelcome as such visions can be, the picture of a demoniac face above an open, old-fashioned razor. And he was not so sure. Was this girl holding the police there until Moncrieff should escape? That must not be.
He spoke through the door.
“You’d better break in. We can’t find the key. Mrs. Moncrieff has been killed. By a blunder.”
In a second the door burst open under a blow that sounded as though a cannon had been fired.
The superintendent, rubbing his shoulder, came in with two policemen. Doctor Andrews looked delighted to see them. Everyone looked delighted to see them—except the girl by the door who stood in the shadow. As for Santley, he eyed two more policemen who showed on the other side of the doorway. The constabulary seemed to have turned up in force. And before the accident too. Why, it might have been a crime which they had expected to happen, not a ghastly blunder. Again he saw that face and that razor, again he refused to look at them. The doctor was speaking now: “Quite dead. Instantaneous. Right through her heart. Poor woman. And poor man! He got hold of the wrong knife. Ghastly affair. No wonder he gave such a cry as he rushed off.”
And suddenly Santley remembered what he had thought only natural at the time, that that cry had sounded forced—artificial—overloud—
The superintendent looked at the body before him. Santley saw his cheek muscles move as though he were clenching his teeth. He noticed how moved he looked as he stared down at the blood-stained cloth. Yet in spite of that, it spoke volumes for the training of our police, Santley thought, that in a situation which must have been absolutely novel to the officer, he appeared perfectly calm and collected.
“Please stay here until I have time to have a word with each of you.” He addressed the room in general. “As you know, there appears to have been a dreadful accident. Mrs. Moncrieff is dead. I’ll try to be as quick as possible.”
“What had the Major forgotten?” suddenly asked a voice at the door, “and why is the back door locked? What’s wrong?”
Everyone stared at Ayres. Surely it was hours ago that the Major had rushed away with that loud cry? Ayres was looking from policemen outside to policemen inside. A screen stood between him and the table on which the body lay.
“What’s gone wrong?” he repeated in his agitated babble, “he almost knocked me down just now in the passage. Oh!”
The superintendent had made a gesture. His two men outside had stepped clear of the doorway. Ayres had come in and now saw the table. “Oh!” came from him again in tones of horror. “Who—what—how in the world—”
“Where did you say you saw the Major? Quick, sir!” demanded the superintendent. But Ayres only gaped.
“I say, what’s the matter with Moncrieff?” came again from the open door. “He’s bolted himself in and won’t answer. He dashed in like—“ Goodenough stopped abruptly. In one stride he pushed through the two constables and was in the room, in another he was at the table and staring at what lay on it.
“Where is the Major?” asked the superintendent. “This lady is dead. Take us to his room at once, please.”
“Poor devil! The wrong knife!” Goodenough looked at Santley and spoke the words under his breath, as he nodded to the superintendent and turned away with him. He wasted no time in asking how the accident had happened, nor how the police had got there so quickly. Santley followed the two. So did the doctor. So did Ayres.
Before leaving, the superintendent said a low word to his men, who took up positions by back door and window.
“This is the room—“ Goodenough led the way up to the “property room.” “I saw him rush in, and heard the bolt click.”
One heave of the superintendent’s shoulder as he grasped the knob and the door was open. The bolt fastened to the inside had but the flimsiest of holds, they saw afterwards. The superintendent rushed through the door with a look that suggested that for once something unofficial as well as official was moving him. Then he stopped, almost in the middle of his stride. There, sprawled on the floor, was the body of Major Moncrieff. A revolver lying half in and half out of his outflung right hand explained his position and the silence of the room.
“Thank God! He’s taken the only way out,” breathed Santley. The superintendent flashed him a non-committal but rather scathing glance. Sounds of agreement came from the doctor and Goodenough. Even little Mr. Ayres on the threshold nodded a stricken acquiescence.
“Shot himself through the right ear—bullet still in the brain...been dead only a minute or so…” the doctor, all professional now, murmured. “The best thing he could do,” he too added. “Poor fellow! Poor fellow! I suppose he telephoned to you to come, and then pulled the trigger!”
The superintendent did not reply. He never went anywhere without a folding pocket camera, and he asked the doctor to stand back a moment while he took a few exposures.
“What for?” Doctor Andrews asked rather unwittingly.
“The coroner likes ‘em,” was the explanation and Andrews nodded. He had heard that Mr. Bennett liked all the red tape that he could get.
“Yes, put the pistol into his right ear and fired. There’s the scorch ring.” And again the doctor ended up with the remark that Moncrieff had done the best thing, and again the others murmured agreement, and again Santley thought that the superintendent gave them all a particularly unsympathetic glance; but that, he reflected, was probably the official attitude towards any suicide. Probably every police officer disapproved of felo de se as thoroughly as might a priest. His camera work done, the superintendent was carefully examining the revolver before wrapping it in waxed paper. Doctor Andrews meanwhile scribbled a line to say that the wound fitted the size of automatic found in the dead man’s hand, that the wound bore every indication of being, as the position of body and weapon suggested, self-inflicted; that death had certainly taken place a very few minutes before they had all entered the room, certainly not more than five. “Here you are,” he went on, holding the paper out to the superintendent, who put it away carefully. “Now, I suppose you’ll send everybody about their business, and then I take it you’ll have Mrs. Moncrieff’s body brought up here too, and I’ll get that knife out for you. It won’t come out at a touch, been driven into a bone, or I’m much mistaken. Which was why I left it where it was. Not a pretty sight to see it wrenched loose.”
The superintendent agreed. “A dreadful affair, this.”
“Dreadful affair,” Doctor Andrews repeated. “An hour ago, half an hour ago, here were these two young people full of life and happiness. And now both dead. Both by the same hand, poor fellow!”
The superintendent nodded, and again Santley noticed the unsympathetic look that he gave the speaker.
“I’ll have her body brought up, and leave one of my men with you in case you want him,” was all he said, as with a gesture he swept Santley and Ayres and Goodenough out into the passage with him, leaving the doctor and a man in blue alone. A word over the balusters to a constable in the hall, and the superintendent turned to the three men beside him.
“There’s sure to be some little room on the ground floor, near where it happened, where I can ask a few questions? Just so,” as Ayres offered to show the way, “thank you, sir. Only just an outline of what happened.”
“But that’s what we none of us know,” bleated Ayres as he closed the door of the morning-room on them. “I was upstairs in the passage, in case I was wanted to lend a hand to Moncrieff in getting out of his things.”
The superintendent stopped him with a hand like a traffic signal. “You, sir,” he turned to Santley, “you were inside. What happened?”
Santley told him of the rehearsal this morning, and its repetition just now. “The same in every detail except that he cut out all his patter. He was in a great hurry, as he had only just got back from town, Mr. Ayres here had already told me, and the show was just the barest essentials. Mrs. Moncrieff, a knife, a thrust.” He explained about the sheath into which the property knife should have slipped.
“But it wasn’t the property knife that killed Mrs. Moncrieff. It was that Spaniard’s sword!” Goodenough said, looking at him as though the artist must surely have seen as much at a glance. And Santley knew now that something about the blade as it flashed down had struck him as familiar and yet unfamiliar.
“Good God!” came from Ayres, “but he snatched it off that belt of his! How did it get among his things?”
The superintendent was already at the door. “Perhaps you’d better come back upstairs with me, gentlemen.”
On its big table now lay two covered figures. Doctor Andrews was examining a formidable looking blade as they came in.
“I put on gloves, though there’s no question of fingerprints here. But this isn’t a property weapon. Of course we knew that.” He held out what was certainly Don Plutarco’s sword. The others said as much.
“I’ll have him fetched at once,” said the superintendent. “Where was he at the time?”
No one knew.
“Don Plutarco!” called Ayres down the passage, and the door of a room in another part of the house could be heard opening.
“Yes?” said a voice, harsh and resonant at the same time. The voice of the Spaniard. “I am wanted?”
Ayres went out. So did the superintendent.
“This is Don Plutarco Ramón,” said Ayres to the latter as the Spaniard, wearing his usual well-cut tweeds, came round the corner towards them, and Santley, watching with the others, noticed that he stepped towards them without a sound over the uncarpeted floor. He looked like a black panther, Santley thought. Something in his face suggested the idea, something oddly unhuman. And when Ayres told him what had happened, and the superintendent added a confirmatory word or two, the expression did not change. Don Plutarco expressed horror and sympathy, but neither was to be seen in his tight lips, his cold eyes. He identified the sword on the instant as his. He had last laid it on the mantel in the room where he had posed for his picture. Why had he put it there? Major Moncrieff had told him this morning that he would very much like to compare it with one supposed to be French, which belonged to him, and as the weapon in question was locked away in the Major’s cupboard at the moment, Don Plutarco left his own downstairs for him to examine and compare at his leisure.
“He must have taken it to the property room,” Ayres pointed out, “and somehow, as such things will, he collected it together with his property things and hung it on his belt without noticing what he was doing.”
The Spaniard gave a slight bow, as though to say that doubtless the speaker was right, but, as he looked at the body of the Major, Santley would have said that a ghost of a smile flitted over the well-cut mouth for a second. The ghost? Rather the demon of a smile, the artist corrected.
The superintendent was now examining in detail the cummerbund worn by the Major. It too was a “property “affair, fastened on the side with a zip fastener, as did all Sheikh clothes which he wore over his own usual garments. On each side of the broad green belt fasteners were sewn, from which dangled an array of cutlery, murderous in appearance, absolutely harmless in reality, unless they hit you in the eye.
“This is the knife that would fit the sheath that Mrs. Moncrieff was wearing.” The doctor had loosened the girdle with its bunch of geraniums, and the superintendent saw for himself how difficult it was to miss the opening, and how impossible for the property sword to do any damage, even should it be thrust in awkwardly. The superintendent was very careful to make this quite plain to himself, and the Spaniard, standing a little apart from the others, now and again threw a rapid, half contemptuous, glance towards him. Most of the time he stared out of the window.
As for Superintendent Tomlinson, watching him Santley had an idea that what he was seeing, and what he was hearing, fitted in with something already in the officer’s mind, making a total quite clear to himself.
The police officer asked Don Plutarco where he had been just now. The Spaniard said that he had gone at once upstairs after posing for his “picture,” and after changing, had been folding and laying away his bull-fighter’s dress and paraphernalia.
The doctor bent over Moncrieff, sniffing. Patently sniffing. Ayres and Goodenough exchanged a glance, and Goodenough nodded.
“Just so. Reeks of it. That’s the explanation of the whole thing.”
“You mean the whisky smell?” said the superintendent, looking up from his notebook. “Yes, very noticeable,” and again he jotted down something.
“I certainly noticed it when he passed me,” Ayres said apologetically, “and as he’s the most abstemious of men…”
“He rocketed down the passage and into this room none too steady on his pins, and, as you say, shedding an aura of Double Scotch around him,” agreed Goodenough. “I suppose the rush of getting back in time from town, and all that...isn’t that so, superintendent?”
“Major Moncrieff smells of whisky,” the superintendent said, putting his notebook away, and reaching for his case, “that’s as far as I care to go at present, gentlemen. Now, this sword of yours, sir,” he turned to Ramón, “it must go with me, of course. We will take the greatest care of it. And it will be returned to you as soon as the inquest, and so on, is over.”
“Thanks,” said Ramón gravely, “I value it exceedingly.”
Santley told himself again that he was too much upset to be his usual self, for really the Spaniard’s voice, and a glint in his eye, suggested to him that what had happened, the dreadful tragedy of just now, lent the steel an added worth. Which was an absurd and ridiculous as well as a horrible fantasy.