Quick Curtain

by Alan Melville

  “Maybe. I don’t see how it could be very incriminating, though. After all, I should think Watcyns took pretty good care to equip himself with a gun the same type as the one he’d planted on to Foster. But it’s possible…perfectly possible.”

  “More champagne?” asked Mr. Douglas. “And then what happened?”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Wilson, handing up his glass. “Well, it’s supposed to be bad policy for a detective ever to assume anything. Sometimes it’s rather helpful, though, and in this case Derek and I assumed that we were on the right track with the synchronized-murder-from-behind-the-curtain idea. The next thing was to find out someone who, unlike Mr. Foster, had a motive for putting Brandon Baker out of the way. And Mr. Baker himself was a great help in putting us on the right track. Speak no ill of the dead, I know…but Mr. Baker hadn’t exactly been leading a very…er…virtuous life for some years. Cutting out the details, we found that he was living with Gwen Astle at the time of his death. Cutting out some more details, we found that Gwen Astle and Ivor Watcyns had been exceedingly friendly—if that’s the word—for about a year previous to this.”

  “We found that out later,” said Derek. “You’re off the rails chronologically.”

  “So we did—sorry. But in any case it proved the old, old story of the eternal triangle. And whenever you get an eternal triangle you get a possible motive for a possible murder. That’s in Euclid somewhere, but I forget what proposition.”

  “Women!” said Mr. Douglas vehemently, and poured out a further supply of champagne as though to drown the entire sex. “Women! Why they don’t shoot the entire sex right away without bothering about shooting the other men in the case, I don’t know. Save a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “I got a summons from Miss Astle a day or two after the murder. Would I come round and see her right away, as she had something very important to tell me about Brandon Baker’s death? I went—right away, but not right away enough, apparently. Miss Astle had disappeared, and from the look of her flat she’d been removed with a certain amount of force. And the only clue to her whereabouts was the word ‘Craile’ written on a chunk of wallpaper in one of her rooms.”

  “Craile?” said Mr. Amethyst. “What is it—a beef extract?”

  “No. It’s a village in Buckinghamshire. It didn’t take me very long to find that out.”

  “Liar,” said Derek.

  “Perfectly right,” admitted Mr. Wilson. “You see, Gwen Astle had started to get suspicious about the Brandon Baker business. I don’t think she suspected Watcyns of killing him on his own, but I do think she suspected him of planting the murder on to Foster. She threatened to throw up her part in the show; Watcyns had to keep her in it and keep her mouth shut.”

  “Now that you mention it,” said Mr. Douglas, “Watcyns was round in my office in a hell of a state because Gwen Astle was thinking of walking out of the show.”

  “And from there he went to her flat. Upset the flat considerably, too. You don’t think he would go to all that exertion simply for the sake of keeping his leading lady, do you?”

  “He might,” said D.B.D. “He was sweet on her, you know. But it’s unlikely.”

  “Very unlikely,” said Mr. Wilson. “No, he had other business to transact than just that. And so he packed her off to a one-eyed hotel in a one-horse village in an attempt to bring her round to his way of thinking. From which point in the narrative, the heir to the Wilson millions had better take over the microphone. Because I sent him down to Craile on his own to look into things down there.”

  “Disguised as a hiker,” said Derek. “And on a push-bike. The things I do for England!…Well, I soon found Watcyns and the fair Gwendoline. They were living in the one and only pub in the place—as Mr. and Mrs. Wright. Funny name to choose, but there it is. And the rum part about it was that the proprietress of the pub was a wife—genuine, not synthetic—of Brandon Baker.”

  “Good God!” said Mr. Douglas. “Which one? He had a couple that I knew of.”

  “I know. Dad met one at the funeral, and I bumped into Number Two at the inquest, funnily enough. I don’t know which this one was—short, thin woman, rather tired look about her, nice fair hair”

  “I’ve got you. He met her at a concert party. Gwen Astle upset that little romance as well…little bisom!”

  “I know. It was a pretty awkward situation down there. If ever this proprietress female got to know that the woman staying in her pub was the same woman who’d wrecked her life and been responsible for the death of her husband, there’d have been hell to pay. She wouldn’t have stopped at…I say!…”

  “What’s up?” asked Mr. Wilson.

  “I suppose it isn’t possible that she did get to know? And—”

  “Don’t ramble. We know who killed Gwen Astle. Get on with the broadcast.”

  “Okay. Well, nothing much happened until the night after I arrived. Gwen had had a shot at getting back to the town during the day, but Ivor Watcyns put amen to that. At night, he announced that his wife—Mrs. Wright—was leaving for town by the last train, and he was driving her to the station. He made such a fuss about it in the bar that I might have known there was something hooey about the business.”

  “When my son says ‘hooey’ he means peculiar,” said Mr. Wilson.

  “Quite. Well, Watcyns drove Gwen away in the car. Not to the station, though—we found that out from the booking-office when we’d brought them to life—he took her into the woods about a mile or so from the village, bumped her off, and left her in a ditch.”

  “Mon Dieu!” said M. Miltonne, remembering his nationality.

  “That was Gwen silenced for good and all. Then he came back to the hotel and went to bed. Another goodly fuss he made about it, too—coming into the bar for a drink, telling all the maids he wanted waking in the morning, and planking his boots outside his door with a clatter that would have roused the dead. All this, of course, as part of an alibi. I believe he paid you a visit late that night, Mr. Douglas?”

  “He did,” said D.B.D. “He came to me at the Rialto. I have a cabaret running there just now. I’d asked him to come back to town at the earliest opportunity to discuss some changes in the show that were necessary because M. Miltonne couldn’t—because M. Miltonne here has a different style of acting to Brandon Baker.”

  “But it wasn’t essential that he should pay you a visit on that particular night?”

  “No, of course not. I was damned surprised to see him as a matter of fact. Said he’d just got a new idea for the opening of Act Three, and come round from his flat to see me about it.”

  “Exactly. You see, he established an alibi that worked two ways. He left his car ready and waiting for him at Craile. Went to bed. Slinked out of the hotel when the place was quiet. Hopped into the car and came off to London. Saw you at the Rialto. And got back to the pub in the early hours of the morning. Result—Mr. Wright who was living at the pub down in Craile couldn’t be mixed up with the crime, since he’d been safe and sound in bed all night. And Mr. Watcyns most certainly couldn’t be mixed up in it, since he’d been in London that night and talking to you, Mr. Douglas.”

  “But they were bound to identify the body sooner or later,” said Mr. Amethyst.

  “As Gwen Astle, yes. But as Mrs. Wright, who had left Craile earlier in the evening? No fear. Besides, I don’t suppose half a dozen people had seen Gwen Astle since she arrived at Craile. She was kept under lock and key all the time. Right…any more questions?…no…carry on, Dad.”

  “There’s not much more really,” said Mr. Wilson. “No thanks, Douglas, not another drop. I could have arrested the man straight away. As a matter of fact, he left Craile early the next morning. Naturally I thought he’d clear out for good and all—I was a bit surprised to find him working at the theatre with you, Douglas, as though nothing had happened. He meant to bluff the thing out, evidently. And there’s
only one way to catch a bluffer—get him at the psychological moment. The psychological moment seemed to me to be the exact time the first murder was re-enacted on the stage at to-night’s performance. With Mr. Douglas’s help, we got him installed in the box he’d occupied on the night of Brandon Baker’s death. He wasn’t keen on turning up at the show to-night, but I suppose he was afraid it would look suspicious if he backed out. So here he came, and I laid a strong right arm on his shoulder just when you, M. Miltonne, were being shot at by the new Rebel Leader from the mountain heights. He got the biggest shock I’ve ever seen any man get. But he recovered pretty quickly—quick enough to have a shot at taking poison, anyway.”

  “Poison?” said Mr. Amethyst, who was wondering by this time how all this was possibly going to be included in a single issue of his paper.

  “I don’t know what kind for sure yet. Cyanide of potassium, I think. He had a hefty box of chocolates with him…just in case. He got a bite of an innocent-looking specimen before I could stop him—and then flopped. I’ve got him along at the doctor’s now—I’ll get a report in the morning. It’s all right. He won’t die…yet.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” said Mr. Douglas, “there we have it. Just about the neatest bit of work I’ve ever come across. You could tell that man had brain from the stuff he wrote—yes, I know, Blue Music was an exception, but I told him I wanted a box-office hit, and he gave me one—but I never reckoned on him having the brains to carry a thing like this through.”

  “It’s so—so watertight,” said Mr. Amethyst admiringly. “I mean the idea of synchronizing that shot with the shot fired by the fellow on the stage. It was a thousand to one against him being found—especially after Foster committed suicide.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Wilson. “As I say, there was one snag only—the direction of the bullet. Funny that a man who must have thought the whole thing out so carefully should forget a simple thing like that.”

  “Well—if that’s the only snag you can see, I’ll make you a present of another,” said Derek. “It’s been worrying me ever since the inquest. The expert chappie who did the post-mortem examination—what was his name? Bone or something—didn’t he give evidence that the bullet had entered Brandon Baker’s body in such a way that, from the position in which he was found lying, the bullet could only have been fired at the back of the stage?”

  “God!” said Mr. Amethyst. “So he did. I remember reading that in the report. The coroner asked him if there was any chance of the shot being fired from any other position, and he said no—only from the part of the stage where Hilary Foster stood.”

  “Which squashes the whole ruddy argument,” said M. Miltonne, again lapsing from the Latin tongue.

  “Not a bit of it,” said Mr. Wilson. “You two don’t know your own theatre. What’s at the side of the stage, just at the point where Watcyns stood to fire his shot?”

  “The switchboard up above. And the revolving-stage controls below.”

  “Exactly. The revolving-stage controls. If you shoot a man, and wish it to appear that he had been shot by another man standing at an angle of forty-five degrees from you, wouldn’t you have a shot at moving the position of the body to suit the circumstances? That’s what Ivor Watcyns did. And since he couldn’t go on to the stage and rearrange the body just as it suited him, he pulled the revolving-stage controls and brought the whole affair round just the few necessary inches. There were only two people on the revolving part of the stage at the time—one of them dead. The other one—Miss Turner—says she thought she felt the stage move round after the shot had been fired, but she wasn’t feeling so good at the time, and put it down to her own dizziness. The other man who was in a position to see was Gasnier, the conductor of the orchestra. He says he thought he saw the stage move round slightly, but put it down to his imagination. He wasn’t feeling up to the mark either. Sounds fantastic, I know—but remember that stage moves round as smoothly as water running over a billiard-ball. Sometimes you hardly know it’s on the go. I’ve been on it and tried. We’ve no proof that that happened, of course, but I’m willing to stake my worldly possessions that it did.”

  “Have a drink,” said Mr. Douglas. “You deserve it.”

  Mr. Wilson, junr., retrieved his hat from amongst M. Miltonne’s make-up.

  “If the party’s over, I think my paper might be interested in some of to-night’s revelations,” he said. “And remember, Inspector Wilson, you promised me on your oath that this was exclusive to the Gazette. Mr. Amethyst heard all this as a strictly ordinary human being—not as a newspaper man. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Mr. Wilson, showing that something attempted, something done, can make a man forget himself in the matter of choosing his words. “Don’t wake me up when you come home.”

  Mr. Douglas B. Douglas poured the last of the last bottle of champagne into his glass and scoffed it with a single and exceedingly noisy gulp.

  “Oh, boy!” said Mr. Douglas happily. “The publicity of it. I couldn’t have thought of anything better myself!…”

  Chapter Thirteen

  There were four letters in the Wilson post at the last delivery on the following evening. The strange thing about them was that after reading each of the four Mr. Wilson, senr., said, “My God!”

  Letter to Mr. Wilson, senr., from the proprietress of the Craile Arms Hotel, bearing a London postmark of the same date:

  Dear Inspector Wilson,

  I see in the papers this morning that you’ve arrested Ivor Watcyns on a charge of murdering Brandon Baker and Gwen Astle. I don’t know anything about the death of Brandon Baker—maybe he did do it, I shouldn’t be surprised—but I can tell you something about the other. And that is that Ivor Watcyns didn’t kill that woman.

  Brandon, as you know, was my husband. He left me for Gwen Astle years ago. I hadn’t seen her for ten years, and when she and Ivor Watcyns came to my hotel last week I didn’t recognize either of them. I never knew Watcyns, and somehow I never suspected the woman with him of being Gwen Astle. If I had, I don’t suppose I’d have let them inside the hotel, and then a lot of trouble might have been saved all round. I’ve wanted to meet that woman for years. She took my man away from me, and right from the beginning she’s been responsible for the kind of life he led. She was rotten—and she made poor Brandon just about as rotten as herself, I’m afraid. At first I used to try to get him back—I don’t mean just back to me, but back to a decent kind of life—and every time I thought I’d done it that woman came along and upset it all.

  I killed her that night in Craile Woods. I began to suspect who she was when a young journalist started asking questions one day in the hotel. I made a few enquiries and I found out that it was Gwen Astle all right. I couldn’t believe at first that she was living under my own roof. I think the idea of her living down here and enjoying life in her own rotten way while I was slaving away running a third-rate hotel—I think that sent me sort of mad. I couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t been for her Brandon would still have been alive and still with me—she was mixed up in his death, I’m sure of that—and I killed her. I’m glad I did, too.

  Watcyns drove her to the station that night to catch the last train to London. The train was late—he didn’t wait. I think they’d had a row. I don’t know what made her change her mind, but she didn’t board the train when it came in. Maybe she planned to go back and have another night with her man. She came out of the station and started to walk slowly back to the village. She went by the long way—through the edge of Craile Woods. I made up on her just as she was going into the Woods. I told her who I was—we had a row. I shot her. I got an automatic two years ago, when I was scared living down here by myself in the winter. I’m sorry that you can’t see it and get some evidence that way, but I’m using it again.

  As I say, I’m glad I killed her. If ever anyone deserved to die, it was Gwen Astle. She caused nothing but trouble and unhap
piness all her life, and she didn’t care a damn for it all. I’ve told you all this because I don’t want Watcyns to suffer for something he didn’t do. I shouldn’t bother about looking for me—it’s not worth it, really. Don’t look in Craile Woods, anyway—I’m choosing somewhere a bit less public to finish this business.

  Muriel Baker.

  “My God!” said Mr. Wilson once again.

  “But the car—why the blazes did Watcyns come into town that night?” asked Derek. “Why all the damned alibi?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Mr. Wilson. “You said it was an alibi that worked two ways. He had to see Douglas about the show, hadn’t he? Seems it wasn’t an alibi at all.…”

  “And it’s in the papers,” said Derek. “That’s the damnable part of it. It’ll mean dropping the second charge against him.”

  “It might mean dropping both charges,” said Mr. Wilson seriously.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You’d better read that. Another long screed. It’s from that Millicent Davis woman—the wench who came and visited us after Brandon Baker’s murder…wife, official or otherwise, of Hilary Foster.…”

  Letter to Mr. Wilson, senr., from Miss Millicent Davis, latterly engaged in the part of matron to Abdul Achmallah’s Harem in the show Blue Music:

  Dear Sir,

  I’ve read the reports in the newspapers this morning about the arrest of Ivor Watcyns. I only wish there could be some real grounds for thinking that he did kill Brandon Baker. My life hasn’t been exactly rosy since Hilary committed suicide and everyone—except yourself, it seems—assumed that he’d killed Baker.

  I came and told you after the inquest that I didn’t believe Hilary had killed Brandon Baker. That was the truth—then. Since then I’ve found something that changes the whole thing. I couldn’t believe it when I found it, and I didn’t see the necessity for making the thing public, seeing that nothing could be done with Hilary dead. But now you’ve arrested an innocent man for killing Brandon Baker and I’ve got to tell you what I now know about the whole rotten business.