Thrones, Dominations

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘And not money?’

  ‘Glory, Charles. Parts. She was an indifferent actress and she longed for lead parts. Not only for herself, for her boyfriend too. She saw herself and her cronies taking over every part in Harwell’s productions from here to eternity. He sent her to eternity by a shorter route.’

  ‘She drowned. The autopsy found no signs of injury. She could have fallen off a bridge. It could have been any bridge in London.’

  ‘It could. But I think, don’t you, that it is time we had a look at the Cranbourne Theatre?’

  ‘I can get a warrant, if you like, and ransack the place.’

  ‘I thought I might go in for a spot of entrapment. I know you can’t dabble in the black arts, but I could. Harwell is a creature of impulse, I think.’

  ‘Impulse? You say that in the face of that elaborate farrago with the mask?’

  ‘Like a chess player who makes bad mistakes, but then is very good at recovering the position. A man who can’t bear to lose, who thinks he has a right to win, who thinks the rules of God and man do not apply to him. I do see, Charles, that the chances of connecting him beyond reasonable doubt with a body floating loose in the Thames are not too good. We need his help; we just might be able to shake him into saying something foolish. Look, this is what I have in mind . . .’

  19

  Down, down to Hell, and say I sent thee thither

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  The Cranbourne Theatre had been built in 1780, and retained some of the grace and glory of the baroque age. Its boxes and galleries curved gracefully round the stalls, its proscenium arch was crowded with riotous putti in ormolu bas-relief, and the ceiling was painted lavishly with blushing clouds and the undercarriages of flying angels. It had been built as an opera house, and in the days of Haydn and Mozart had served as one; now far too cramped for that purpose, with too small an orchestra pit and nowhere to store elaborate scenery, it had become simply one among many London playhouses, although still the most elegant.

  Wimsey presented himself at the stage door, and declared himself to be an architectural historian. He would be obliged if he could be shown round the building. He was especially interested in the fabric.

  The doorman was very sorry, but there was a rehearsal in progress; there could be no admittance to the stage or auditorium.

  ‘It affects their nerves to have people listening to rehearsals,’ he said. ‘These artistic people have terrible nerves, sir; you wouldn’t believe.’

  Wimsey quite understood; but as it happened the point of interest to him was the foundations of the building.

  ‘Funny you should say that, sir; you’d be amazed if I told you what we has down there. I’d like to take you, but I can’t leave the door.’

  Wimsey expressed himself willing to find his own way, given simple directions.

  ‘At your own risk, sir. You will be sure to mind your footing, won’t you?’

  Wimsey promised faithfully that he would. As a seeming afterthought he left his card on the counter.

  ‘If any of the managers is in the building . . .’ he said. He slipped round the back of the stalls, unseen, he supposed, by the actors on the stage. The director was sitting in the front row, shouting at his cast. Wimsey slipped through the doors marked Emergency Exit, and instead of pushing on the bar-locks and going out into the street, turned through an unmarked green door into the backstage area. At once the building turned its seedy private face to him. Not here the glorious gilded make-up of the foyers and auditorium; here everything was painted a dim and faded shade of green, the paint battered and flaking with age. Ancient worn lino covered the passage floor. Wimsey passed the wing-flats of the stage set, glimpsing sideways the actress in paroxysms of emotion, throwing her arms wide and her head back, and crying: ‘Duty! What is duty compared to love?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Suzie, get some feeling into it!’ yelled the director.

  Behind the stage was a cavernous gloomy space full of props, ropes, coils of electric wire, floodlights, unused equipment of every kind. Two young actresses were sitting quietly on a bench, smoking. Seeing Wimsey they made guiltily to put out their cigarettes – it was obviously forbidden to smoke among all these inflammables – but he raised a hand to them and slipped quickly through the door at the far back corner. It was totally dark beyond the door. Wimsey took a torch from his pocket, and by its pencil of light found a light switch. In front of him was a brick wall, but a flight of steps led downwards to his right. A chain across the steps held a swinging notice: ‘Authorised persons only’. Wimsey unhooked the chain and descended. A dank, unhealthy smell rose to meet him, the smell of cold stones and damp timbers, of country churches in winter.

  At the foot of the flight of stairs he found himself not in a basement, but at the top of a bottomless pit. He was on a kind of catwalk. At the far end another iron staircase led down to a lower walkway, and below that yet another. Dim light bulbs strung out on wires shed a scanty light. The walkways had a single strut by way of handrail on the right, and on the left were unguarded over the sheer drop. Wimsey whistled softly to himself, and began the zigzag descent.

  The lovely building above him was resting on massive timber piles which rose vertically out of the pit. Not single trees; the balks were made of bundles of tree-trunks, bound together with iron bands. Cross-bracing timbers wove a web between them. The iron walkways descended crazily like a path for Gulliver in the land of the giants. The light bulbs were defeated by the depth and extent of the darkness.

  Wimsey switched off his torch, and looked away from the lit platform on which he was standing. His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom. There was a forest of the standing timbers. He tried to understand. Had these supports been driven into marshy ground, as Venetian builders had done, to raise their fantastical structures? And since here there was no lagoon to be brimmed twice every day by the tide, had the marsh dried up, shrivelled down, been washed away, leaving the underpinning standing proud? Washed away – that was it – for he could hear the sound of water. A gentle running sound, filling the space, softly echoing all around him.

  Very gingerly Wimsey leaned over the inadequate railing, and shone his torch downwards. Way below him, as far down again as he had descended already, was a black stream. It ran in an open culvert across the floor of the pit. On one side it emerged from a brick arch, and on the other disappeared into a tunnel. There had once been an iron grating across this point of exit, but only rusty fragments of it remained.

  ‘The Cranbourne, I presume,’ said Wimsey. ‘I am pleased to meet you, though I find you in reduced circumstances.’

  He shuddered at his own thoughts as he looked down. And then he heard a door slam above and behind him, and rapid footfalls ringing on the iron grid of the catwalk.

  Harwell’s voice said, ‘What in hell are you doing here, Wimsey? You’re not an architect.’

  ‘I am looking for ways out of this building other than through the doors,’ said Wimsey.

  Harwell was silhouetted against one of the random light bulbs; it was too dark to see his face. His bulk, however, his broad shoulders and burly build, were clearly apparent. ‘And why would you be doing that?’ he asked. His voice told everything that his shadowy face did not: he was fighting for self-possession and there was in it the unmistakable undertone of fear.

  ‘I am trying to account for someone’s movements.’

  ‘Whose?’ asked Harwell. There it was again; the slightly raised pitch of the voice.

  ‘Miss Gloria Tallant,’ said Wimsey. ‘Unaccounted for between a mysterious audition in this theatre, and the mudflats of the tidal Thames. However, this’ – he pointed at the running river in the depths – ‘is clearly a possible route.’

  ‘One might certainly lose one’s footing here,’ said Harwell grimly, descending towards Wimsey.

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Wimsey. ‘Lure her as far as that last door and just bundle her over the rail?’

  ‘What did I do?’ as
ked Harwell. ‘How foolish you are, Wimsey, a true effete aristocrat. You suspect me of two murders; what makes you think I will stop at a third?’ He came down another flight of the crazy staircase. ‘You are rather vulnerable, standing there,’ he said, reaching Wimsey’s level.

  ‘I am well able to defend myself,’ said Wimsey coolly. ‘But in this narrow space I could not do so without tipping you over the edge. Be warned.’ But the truth was Wimsey could well see that any struggle would almost certainly lead to both of them going over. In the light of uncanny clarity cast by danger he saw suddenly that he was in peril that he should not so blithely have risked; he was a married man now, and his life was not unequivocally his own to hazard. Perhaps Harwell had come to the same conclusion as to the danger they were in; anyway he was standing on the other end of the length of walkway, poised but still. Wimsey said, ‘As a matter of fact, you are wrong. I do not suspect you of two murders. Only of one.’

  Harwell blinked. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t murder your wife, Harwell; you didn’t mean to kill her, did you?’

  Harwell shuddered. His face looked gaunt and hollow-eyed in the shadows.

  ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’ said Wimsey softly. When he got no answer he went on, ‘No jury would find it murder; no jury would want to hang you; if it were not for all that fooling around with the mask you would probably have walked free. Of course you will lose the sympathy of the jury when they see that your efforts to avoid confessing what had happened involved deliberately attempting to incriminate another man. But however severe they feel about that, they won’t find it murder. The prosecution would probably only try for a verdict of manslaughter. It’s the other one which is going to hang you. Why did you do it? She was blackmailing you, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You don’t imagine I would have anything to do with a little slut like that from choice? As a favour to her family I saw her once to advise her in a general way about a theatrical career; and then she saw me that night in the lane, as I was driving away. She could break me at any minute. I would have paid her, you know, Wimsey, paid her for the rest of her silly life, but she wanted something I couldn’t give her. I do have influence over productions that I finance; of course I do, but even I can’t make managements give good parts to bad actresses. She didn’t leave me any choice. And nor do you, of course. I’m sorry about you; I rather like you, though Rosamund didn’t. I like brains, even in meddling aristocrats. Besides,’ he said, pausing as though the thought had just struck him, ‘I’m sorry to upset your wife.’

  He lunged suddenly forward.

  ‘I shouldn’t do that, if I were you,’ said Chief Inspector Parker from the darkness over their heads. ‘It won’t help you; every word of your conversation has been overheard, by myself and my constables here. Just stand quite still while we come down to you.’

  ‘That’s a filthy trick, Wimsey,’ cried Harwell. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to corner a man like a rat?’

  ‘You are not quite cornered,’ said Wimsey quietly. ‘There is one move you could make. One short cut. You have only seconds to make it.’

  Harwell looked down at the forty feet or so of sheer drop from where he stood to the dark gurgling water below. Then he shook his head, baffled, and stood waiting for one of Parker’s men to handcuff him and lead him away.

  ‘I was so angry with her,’ said Harwell. ‘I just had a sort of brainstorm. She owed me everything – didn’t she, Wimsey?’

  There were four men in the little shabby cell in the police station: a stenographer, the Chief Inspector, Harwell and Wimsey.

  ‘You understand,’ Harwell said, appealing to Wimsey. ‘You know the story. I had done everything for her, I indulged her every whim, we were tremendously happy. . .’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘We should have been tremendously happy, but things kept going wrong somehow. I had to keep trying again; I had risked a ruinous deal to raise money for Amery’s play just to please her. I knew she flirted with Amery but I didn’t think she would . . . When I got down there unexpectedly and saw she was expecting someone I just saw red. That fool Amery was blundering about outside, so I knew it must have been him she was expecting, and she was lying down on the bed. I took her by the neck, and I shook her . . .’

  He looked up at his interrogators with an expression of baffled understanding, as though something had just come to him. ‘If I hadn’t loved her so much, I wouldn’t have been so angry,’ he said, ‘and I was shouting at her; she tried to hold me off, she was saying something; she was saying, “No, Laurence, no.” That’s what she usually said when I wanted her. Only this time I didn’t beg and coax. I overpowered her. I took what I wanted; my due. What she owed to me and nobody else. And then I realised – I realised that she . . .’ Harwell sank his head in his hands. ‘She lay so still. The damn dog kept barking and barking, and I was overwrought, so I – it’s quite hard to kill a dog, do you know that? It was harder than killing Rosamund.’

  ‘It’s all too easy to understand what happened so far,’ said Parker quietly. ‘What I don’t understand, sir, is why you didn’t face the music. All that moving the body and playing about with the mask, locking doors and breaking windows: why did you do it? It has only made things much worse for you.’

  Harwell looked up at them hollow-eyed. ‘I couldn’t face what people would say,’ he said. ‘We were the most talked-of lovers in London. I couldn’t bear people to know it had come to that. I had a reputation as her husband; it gave me cachet to be the one she relied on – and I did love her, really I did!’

  ‘So you took steps to escape the blame for it,’ said Parker.

  ‘I couldn’t bear her poor bruised and flushed face, lying there on the pillow, so I covered her with the mask. I was sitting beside her when I heard someone on the veranda, and I saw Amery looking into the window. And then I thought of something I could do.’

  ‘That was very wrong of you,’ said Parker.

  ‘It serves him right!’ said Harwell. ‘Rosamund was mine; mine alone. If he had left my wife alone I couldn’t have touched him. I thought I had managed it at first,’ said Harwell. ‘I thought I had covered my tracks. I locked the bedroom door, and then broke through it. I locked the front door behind me, and went round and broke a window so that it would look like a break-in. I didn’t think to try to open the door through the broken glass, so that wasn’t as clever as I thought it was. But I thought I was getting away with it, and Amery would have to take the blame. Then I got into one difficulty after another. That stupid poncing Frenchman wanting to put the portrait on display, for instance. I couldn’t have that. I didn’t want anybody to remember there had been a mask. So I burned the picture. And it was all I had left to remember her by . . .’ His voice shook.

  ‘Can we move on to the disappearance of Miss Phoebe Sugden?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Oh, her,’ said Harwell. ‘I thought you overheard about all that. Wimsey worked it out, curse him.’

  ‘I shall need a formal statement from you, overheard or not,’ said Parker.

  ‘She was a stupid little bitch,’ said Harwell. ‘She doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I think you will find, sir, that she does,’ said Parker.

  20

  For who hath but one mind hath but one face.

  JOHN DONNE

  ‘Pitiful, really,’ said Peter to Harriet, telling her about it. ‘A man without self-control, and without self-respect. One must make allowances, I suppose, for the power of a cold-hearted sexual tease to drive a man to distraction.’

  ‘Being a sexual tease is not a crime for which one deserves to die,’ said Harriet sadly. ‘But what do you mean about Harwell having no self-respect? I thought he had rather a good opinion of himself.’

  ‘They go together, oddly. Son of a famous father; he puts his money into a showy business, with a lot of glory washing round any success; he doesn’t do terribly well – not as well as Sir Jude Shearman, for example. And then he does something that makes e
veryone know his name and admire him. He can wear his beautiful wife as a woman wears diamonds in public. How she loves him! How he loves her! What a romantic story!’

  ‘So if people think she has been murdered by an intruder, or by a lover, he keeps the aura of a tragic hero.’

  ‘But if he is discovered to have murdered her himself the whole thing turns into Grand Guignol. He loses the name of virtue. Precisely.’

  ‘Do you feel any sympathy for him at all, Peter?’

  ‘Very little. Should I?’

  ‘People have been comparing Harwell rescuing Rosamund with you marrying me.’

  ‘Stupid of them,’ he said.

  ‘We are different?’

  ‘Yes. Look, Harriet, Chapparelle could not have made any kind of point about you by painting you twice in the same picture; you are unmasked all the time. You face the world as what you are, come what will. It is that which made me love you on first sight, and all these years since. It is that which I admire in you, and which I cannot manage for myself. I fool about all the time, covering myself in my title, my reputation, a capacity for foolish wit.’

  ‘But, now you come to mention it, Peter, you have been fooling rather less of late.’

  ‘I am grateful to you, Domina,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever for?’ she asked.

  ‘You do me the inexpressible honour of taking me seriously,’ he said.

  ‘But not gratitude, Peter. Not that. It’s such a hateful thing. A horrible great blunderbuss with a vicious recoil.’

  ‘It’s safe when it’s subsumed in love,’ he said.

  ‘Who is so safe as we?’ she murmured.

  ‘. . . Where none can do

  treason to us, except one of us two . . .’

  he said, and she heard the undertone of triumph in his voice. ‘You have unmasked me,’ he said, ‘and loved me all the same.’