by Nicola Upson
‘That’s good, Bill, thank you. Of course, the world and his wife have walked past that decanter tonight, but McCracken had plenty of time alone with it.’
‘I don’t quite see why she’d kill the Simmons girl, though.’
Penrose thought about it for a moment. ‘Yes, Aubrey’s murder is much easier to understand because he was in a position to make enemies, but Elspeth’s death made a mockery of Richard of Bordeaux and we have all the evidence we need in those letters that McCracken resented that play and despised Josephine. I think we can also safely say that she’s not the most stable of people: I can imagine the person who writes notes like this being so full of spite that it could send her over the edge. There’s an arrogance about them, a vanity that we’ve seen in a lot of criminals. Before this happened, it occurred to me that Elspeth’s death might have been a mistake, that whoever did it had meant to kill Josephine.
Now, I can’t help feeling that what links these murders is more deep-rooted than professional jealousy, but it’s still a possibility that whoever is doing this is doing it to destroy the play. But we’re 146
getting away from this locked door business. Have you spoken to the stage doorman yet?’
‘Yes, and he swears that no one went up or down those stairs except Aubrey, Miss Beaumont and you. By the time the body was found, everyone else – actors and staff alike – had gone out through stage door or were waiting there with you. I gather that’s not unusual. He says no one ever hangs around for long and Aubrey is invariably the last person left in the building.’
‘Then nobody else should know about the murder, at least.
Except one person, of course. So how did that door get locked?’
‘Come with me, Sir, and I’ll show you.’
Penrose looked bewildered as Fallowfield led him out of Aubrey’s office and down the corridor. ‘Have you been reading John Dickson Carr again, Bill?’ he asked.
Fallowfield smiled. ‘It’s not as clever as that, Sir, I’m afraid.
Have you ever noticed that bridge that runs across St Martin’s Court?’
Penrose visualised the passage and immediately realised what Fallowfield was talking about. ‘Of course. It links the New to Wyndham’s. I’d never thought about it before.’
‘Go through that door, Sir, and you’ll be on it. Apparently Aubrey had it built as an extra fire exit for both theatres. We’d have found it soon enough – it’s no secret – but the stage doorman mentioned it and saved us a bit of time.’
Penrose did as he was told and found himself at one end of a small walkway. Moving to the centre of the bridge, he looked down into St Martin’s Court. The rain had started again and the crowds were long gone; stripped of its glitter, the passage that had buzzed with excitement just an hour earlier now looked squalid and depressing. ‘So it’s possible to get up here from Wyndham’s without going anywhere near stage door?’
‘Exactly. Not for every Tom, Dick and Harry, of course, because it goes through to private areas in both theatres, so the general public could only use it in an emergency.’
‘But the people we’re interested in would know about it.’
‘Yes they would. McCracken and White and the rest of the stage 147
crew work in both theatres anyway, so they’d be familiar with the layout and people would expect to see them there. But according to matey on stage door, there’s a lot of mingling among the actors as well. Aubrey employed both casts and they hang around together a lot, have a drink in each other’s dressing rooms – that sort of thing.’
Penrose thought about it. The play at Wyndham’s had run for around another fifteen minutes after the curtain fell on Richard of Bordeaux so, by the time the staff were leaving the New, the passage would have been at its busiest with audiences spilling out to go home or hanging around for autographs. Nobody would find it easy to get through those crowds, particularly actors waylaid by fans, but he had watched most of the Richard cast leave while he was waiting for Aubrey at the stage door, and they had not hung about. It would have been possible for them to get into Wyndham’s and up to this bridge, and so to the door of Aubrey’s office.
Whoever it was stood a chance of being seen through the glass on the walkway, but most people were either looking out for a famous face or walking head-down against the cold; it wasn’t much of a risk, compared with everything else. ‘God, it’s just hopeless,’ he said to Fallowfield. ‘The list is getting longer rather than shorter, and we can’t necessarily eliminate them from Elspeth’s murder, either. Her death occurred just before any of them would have been expected at the theatre last night. Lydia met Josephine and got back to the theatre in good time, so any of the people we’ve got here could feasibly have been at King’s Cross and not been missed.’
Fallowfield nodded. ‘Any of them could have passed through the scene dock and tampered with the whisky, and any of them could have come up here later on.’
‘But why do both, I wonder? If the whisky was in the decanter, from which only Aubrey was going to drink, he was already as good as dead. What would be the point of taking an extra chance to go to his office, assuming that the same person did both?’
‘To make sure he couldn’t get out and call for help, I suppose, Sir.’
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‘I would have thought the choice of poison made certain of that.
It must have acted immediately on entering his system. From what I’ve seen of his body, no one could have helped him, even if they’d found him alive.’
‘But what else could it be?’
‘I would have said to incriminate him with Elspeth’s murder weapon if it weren’t for the locked door. If somebody wanted to set Aubrey up, that would explain why the knife was swapped for the hatpin but the door instantly undermines the suicide theory and I don’t think we’re dealing with someone who would have panicked and locked it by mistake. No, those other things on the desk are central. The flower again, and the tin; they’re like the dolls in that railway carriage. It’s almost as if he or she is leaving an explanation at each scene – a message for us, or some sort of justification.’
‘I suppose whoever it was could have come here to fetch something, as well, something that might have been incriminating.’
‘Yes, Bill – that could easily be it, in which case McCracken’s ruled out because those letters would never have been left in the desk.’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’d better get back – the lads will have arrived by now. I need to talk to Lydia, and then I’ll pay a call on Mrs Aubrey while you bring McCracken in for questioning.’ He handed Fallowfield a piece of paper. ‘That’s a list of the phone numbers from Aubrey’s blotter – I want to know who they all are as soon as possible, so get someone back at the Yard onto that right away. And can you have a look at the Wyndham’s side of this bridge? Find out exactly where it goes and how easy it is to get to from the other side.’
‘Right-o, Sir, I’ll do it now. I just hope I don’t end up on stage in the middle of a performance.’
‘I can’t help feeling that the performance has been up here tonight – and we’ve missed it. I’ll see you in a bit.’
Penrose went back down the corridor and found that the disquieting calm of Aubrey’s room had been dispelled by forensics at work. By the desk, a couple of officers were carefully packing the empty whisky bottle and tumbler, preserving them for analysis.
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Another was perched on a set of steps, leaning out over the body to photograph it from above. Unexpectedly, the flash from the camera illuminated Aubrey’s face, and the image of death that it framed in that momentary explosion of light was so intensely familiar and so suddenly thrust upon him that he had to blink to rid himself of it, and to anchor himself firmly in the present.
‘Archie – there you are. You know, when I dressed for the theatre tonight this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’ Without any further preamble, Spilsbury joined Penrose by the body. ‘It’s nicotine, without a doubt. You can tell by the brown
mucus around the nostrils. I’ll expect to find a fairly hefty dose in the stomach and kidneys when we open him up – but you can be certain that’s what killed him.’
‘Can you say when it was taken?’
‘Not long ago. The tiniest measure can cause death in a few minutes. In animals, it has much the same effect as hydrocyanic acid –
a quarter of a drop can kill; for a man, one or two drops will be fatal. Exposure to nicotine in small doses through smoking or chewing tobacco can build up a tolerance to the toxic effects, and he obviously was a smoker, but nobody’s immune. A lethal amount would be the equivalent of absorbing all the nicotine in three or four cigarettes. That’s all, but what was it Goethe said?
“There’s no such thing as poison – it just depends on the dose.”’
‘Nicotine is used as an insecticide, isn’t it? I remember it as a child. My father swore death to the aphids on his roses, but he used to throw a blue fit if I went within fifty yards of the stuff.’
‘Yes, every gardener has some tucked away. It’s a fairly simple chemical process to extract the neat stuff from tobacco leaves, but there’s no need to go to all that trouble now – it’s readily available.
You could walk into a shop and buy more than enough to manage this, and the toxicologist will be able to tell us the likely brand.
You know, it’s becoming an increasingly fashionable way to do yourself in. I’ve had three times as many suicides from a dose of nicotine over the last twelve months as in the previous year. It’s a nasty way to oblivion, but it has the advantage of being a quick one. Is that what you’re looking at here? Suicide?’
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‘I’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘The door was locked from the outside and, in any case, it doesn’t fit with what I know of him. He was intelligent enough to find a less painful way if he wanted to kill himself. He could have taken it without being aware of it, I suppose?’
‘Absolutely. I’ve known several cases of people drinking insecticides by accident. In its natural state, it’s a sort of colourless, oily liquid but it soon changes on contact with air and looks remarkably like whisky. Of course, it takes so little to kill you that even if you realised what you’d done it would be too late. One swig would do it. An easy mistake, but an expensive one.’
‘In that case, there’s a decanter and glass downstairs that he drank from just before he died. It’s in the scene dock.’
‘Fine, we’ll go there next.’
‘So it could be murder?’
‘Well, it’s not a common choice for a planned killing, I have to say. I only know of one other case – a French count who killed his brother-in-law by forcing him to ingest nicotine – but that was nearly a hundred years ago. It’s usually self-inflicted or a practical joke gone wrong – snuff in beer, ridiculous amounts of cigars smoked in a row for a bet, that sort of thing. I had a child not long back who blew bubbles for an hour through an old clay pipe and died. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be murder, but it’s unusual.’
‘What are the symptoms?’
‘He would have collapsed almost immediately. If you’re right about that decanter, he did well to make it up the stairs at all.
Death would have followed in anything from five to thirty minutes.’
‘And in between?’
‘Briefly, the nicotine will have acted as a stimulant, but that will have given way to a depression of the central nervous system, lowered blood pressure, slowed heart rate and death from paralysis of the respiratory muscles.’
‘So he suffocated? That’s the cause of death?’
‘Asphyxia, yes. Along the way, he’ll have gone through nausea, 151
abdominal pain, heart palpitations and increased salivation; he’ll have experienced a burning sensation in the mouth, mental confusion and dizziness. Everyone is affected slightly differently, but you don’t need a post-mortem to tell you some of what he went through; it’s all too obvious here.’
‘And his eyes?’
‘I’m impressed, Archie. Yes, nicotine poisoning often affects the eyes – that’s true of a heavy smoker, not just these extreme cases.
It’s known as tobacco blindness – the sudden appearance of a rapidly growing dark patch in the field of vision, not dissimilar to alcohol.’
‘There was a lot of it in the trenches.’
‘Exactly. It was very common then, mostly because of home-grown or badly cured tobacco. That stuff often has a lower com-bustion temperature than properly prepared tobacco, so less of the nicotine is destroyed.’
‘If I told you that Bernard Aubrey spent his war underground and was clinically claustrophobic as a result, what would you say?’
Spilsbury stepped out of the way as his colleagues prepared to remove Aubrey’s body from the room. ‘Well, he died not being able to breathe or, in all probability, to see, so with the possible exception of being buried alive – which presents obvious practical difficulties – I’d say he had the worst death imaginable.’ He gestured to the desk where the bayonet had been found. ‘Are you linking this to the girl on the train?’
Penrose nodded. He had two deaths and two victims which, on the face of it, could not have been more different: a young girl and a man facing old age; a stabbing with relatively little suffering and an agonising, degrading end. But he was starting to see more connections and, although the theatre was the most obvious link, the past seemed to him more significant. Aubrey had died surrounded by reminders of the war – a war which was also the backdrop to an illegal and inevitably painful adoption. And even the causes of death, apparently so contrasting, had in common a spiteful appropriateness to their victim: Elspeth’s murder had undermined every-152
thing that mattered to her, had scorned her innocence; Aubrey, a man of wealth and authority all his life, had been physically humiliated and had died gasping for air. In both crimes, there was a terrifying lack of humanity, a mockery of the dead which chilled him even more than the loss of life itself.
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Eleven
Penrose stood at the door to the Green Room, and was not surprised to see that his cousins’ efforts to comfort everyone with tea and brandy had had very little effect: Lydia was dreadfully pale and clearly shocked to the core, while Josephine and the woman to whom he had been introduced earlier were united in solicitous concern for her. It was Marta who spoke first.
‘What the hell has happened, Inspector?’ she asked with a flash of anger which took him by surprise. ‘How can you have allowed her to walk in on something like that? You should have gone to find him, not Lydia.’
‘I’m truly sorry you’ve had to go through this,’ he said to Lydia with genuine compassion, ‘and I don’t want to cause anybody any further distress, but I do need to talk to you briefly about what happened tonight.’ He turned to the others in the room. ‘And to anybody else who saw or spoke to Bernard Aubrey in the last twenty-four hours.’
Marta was not so easily dismissed. ‘Can that really not keep until the morning? Right now, I’d like to take Lydia home to get some rest. She’s had enough.’
Penrose, who had already missed out on one vital interview that evening through having been made to wait, had no intention of letting it happen again, but he was saved the discourtesy of insisting.
‘It’s fine, darling, honestly it is,’ said Lydia, taking Marta’s hand.
‘I’d rather do it now. The sooner I stop having to talk about it, the sooner I can start trying to get that image out of my head.’ She smiled unconvincingly, as if recognising the naivety of her words, and turned to Penrose. ‘Although somehow I don’t think it will be 155
that easy, do you Archie? Can I still call you Archie, by the way, or does it have to be Inspector now that this is official?’
‘Archie’s fine. And I won’t keep you any longer than I have to.’
‘All right, but can I have a minute to pull myself together?’ She looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror which ran along one wall. ‘
I know it’s not the time to mention it, but I feel worse now than I ever have on my deathbed. I just need to pop to my dressing room for a moment.’
Penrose nodded, trying not to look too impatient. As soon as Lydia had left the room, accompanied by a seething Marta, Lettice took the seat opposite her cousin.
‘Can we tell you about our encounter with Aubrey before they get back,’ she whispered, nodding towards the door and glancing conspiratorially at Josephine, who understood immediately what she was getting at. ‘Something happened that would only upset Lydia even more, and I’d rather not mention it in front of her tonight.’
‘Go on. Josephine told me it wasn’t exactly an amicable meeting.’
‘No, not at all. In fact, it couldn’t have been frostier.’ She gave an uncharacteristically succinct account of the afternoon’s meeting, missing out many of the more entertaining asides which had been shared with Josephine over dinner, but leaving Penrose in no doubt as to how unpopular Aubrey had made himself.
‘So, by the time the meeting was over, Terry was put out, to say the least?’
‘Oh, face like a slapped arse, dear,’ confirmed Ronnie. ‘He was absolutely furious.’
‘But powerless to do anything about it, presumably.’ And impo-tence had a habit of making people dangerous, he thought. He had seen that quality in Terry’s performance earlier – a barely suppressed anger which had made his portrayal of the increasingly vulnerable Richard all the more convincing. But was it enough to drive him to murder? And did he have it in him to kill so mali-ciously? Arrogance, yes, he could believe that was in character, but spite? He turned to Josephine. ‘How serious do you think it is for Terry to miss out on a film like that?’
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She shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say, really. Artistically, it could take his career in a whole new direction, but I’m not sure he’d want that long-term. He’d be starting at the bottom again, you see, whereas on stage he’s so established and highly thought of that he can do virtually what he likes. There are very few people who’d dream of standing in his way in the theatre.’ And one of those was now dead, Penrose thought as Josephine continued. ‘Financially speaking, though, it’s a different matter. There’s simply no comparison between the money he could make in a film and what he gets for a stage role. And the girls were saying earlier that he seems more money-driven these days. I don’t know why that should be. He’s never struck me as the greedy type, except for praise, of course.’
