by Clara Benson
‘I’m going to hang around here until they’ve finished scraping her up,’ said Corky. ‘It’s just too late to get anything in for the morning edition, but I ought to make something rather good of it for the later ones.’
Freddy followed him half-unwillingly, but the body of Dorothy Dacres had already been removed, and there was little to be seen, apart from a police constable, who had been stationed there to discourage the curious. Corky went across and attempted conversation with the man, but was given short shrift.
‘Nothing to be had there,’ he said, returning to Freddy. ‘Still, never mind. I have plenty of colour to put in. This is going to make the most marvellous story.’
And so saying, he departed. Freddy glanced around and up at the looming building. It was too dark to see much, six floors up, and he sighed. There was nothing to be done now, so he went home.
True to form, the Herald next day printed a lurid account, embellished with all kinds of ‘facts’ of dubious veracity, of the party at which Dorothy Dacres had died. The Clarion’s account was a much more muted affair, for that morning Freddy, somewhat to his puzzlement, had been summoned into the presence of Sir Aldridge Featherstone and instructed to tone it down.
‘Why’s old Feathers letting the Herald steal a march on us?’ he said to Jolliffe at the next desk. ‘This is a huge story, and he’s letting them get away with the best of it.’
‘Oh, didn’t you know? He and Penk are in cahoots now,’ said Jolliffe. ‘Or at least, they will be soon. Sir Aldridge is to take a small share in Aston-Penk Productions and he’s going to finance part of the film. I gather Henry Aston has been getting nervous about the whole business. It’s quite a new enterprise, you know, and the first few pictures they made were awful flops, and he’s been making noises about pulling out. Penk was here partly to look for some extra funds in case Aston finally gets cold feet and backs out of the whole deal. I say, I wonder whether Aston’s heard about Dorothy Dacres. Do you think that will frighten him off once and for all?’
‘If he has any sense he’ll realize that the extra publicity can only be a good thing,’ said Freddy. ‘That’s if the film goes ahead at all now it’s lost its leading lady.’
‘Oh, but I’m sure they can find someone else,’ said Jolliffe. ‘Film stars are two a penny nowadays. Weren’t they talking about Augusta Laing for the rôle?’
‘Yes,’ said Freddy. He was thinking about the events of last night and wondering what the police had found out, if anything. At length he picked up the telephone and called Gussie. She was at home.
‘Thank you, I’m much better today,’ she said in reply to his inquiry. ‘I did make rather a fool of myself last night, didn’t I? Listen, why don’t you come round? I’ve seen one or two reporters hanging about outside, and I need your help to chase them off, because I want to go and see Patience and chew on what happened last night. You must promise to be discreet, though. No printing it all in that rag of yours.’
‘I promise I shall be as silent as the grave,’ said Freddy.
Gussie was ready when he arrived, and came out to meet him.
‘Have those awful men gone?’ she said, glancing about. ‘No, there’s one of them now. He’s been hovering outside all afternoon, making me nervous.’
‘It’s Clarkson from the Bugle,’ said Freddy, then, as the man approached them, ‘Do push off, there’s a good fellow. Miss Laing doesn’t want to talk to you.’
‘Not today, at any rate, but thanks all the same,’ Gussie added hurriedly. ‘Might as well keep him sweet,’ she whispered. ‘You never know when I might need him.’
‘I see you have a natural gift for this sort of thing,’ said Freddy.
They found a taxi and jumped in.
‘I haven’t had a wink of sleep all night,’ said Gussie, as the cab went through Russell Square. ‘Poor Cora.’
Freddy noticed she did not say, ‘Poor Dorothy.’
‘I thought she and Dorothy didn’t get along,’ he said.
‘Oh, they hated one another most of the time. I hate Pam and Vi half the time too, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be devastated if something happened to either of them. That’s how families work, isn’t it?’
‘Isn’t Cora in films?’ said Freddy.
‘She was once, but didn’t get very far, so gave it up. It’s a shame, as she’s every bit as pretty as Dorothy, and I heard she was very talented too. But Hollywood works in mysterious ways. They started out together, but Dorothy was the one who was championed by the studio Eugene Penk used to work for, and she’s the one who became the star. It can’t have been much fun for Cora to see her sister receiving all the attention while she struggled to get a contract, and so I imagine she stopped to save her pride in the end.’
‘Was it Penk who championed Dorothy in the early days?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. I heard they had a prickly relationship, but he would certainly have had the power to make or break her career.’
‘Then was it he who decided to give her the part of Helen Harper?’
‘I suppose it must have been. He or Henry Aston, at any rate. I was thinking about it last night, and it suddenly came to me that it was all nonsense to start with—any hope of my getting the part, I mean. Ken wanted me, you see, and Penk wanted Ken, and so he strung him along until he’d agreed to direct the picture. Then once Ken had signed, Penk announced that Dorothy had got the part. I was never really in the picture at all.’
‘You seem fairly cheerful about it, considering,’ said Freddy.
She gave him a sideways look.
‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘Last night I thought all was lost, but today—’
‘Today?’
She hesitated, then suddenly gave him a brilliant smile.
‘Well, let’s just say things look a little brighter now,’ she said.
‘I see,’ said Freddy, and relapsed into silence for the rest of the journey.
At the Neales’ house all was in confusion, for Mrs. Neale had had the rugs taken up for beating, and furniture was piled up everywhere as maids scurried about busily. Kenneth Neale was barking down the telephone at someone called Lulu, who seemed to be a man, and from another room floated the sounds of Adorable Ada hammering out harmonic minor scales on the piano as though she meant to kill it. Every so often she would sing along in an operatic warble that sounded far too old for her.
‘Oh, Augusta,’ said Patience Neale when she saw them. ‘Do excuse the mess. What about this dreadful business? What are they saying in the papers? I haven’t had time to read them yet.’
‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ said Freddy. ‘It’s mostly fiction. To read it you’d be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing had happened in a Limehouse opium den.’
‘But what happened? Did she jump, do you suppose? What do the police say?’
‘I can’t imagine it was suicide,’ said Gussie. ‘She was so beastly full of herself after the announcement that I can’t think what would have made her miserable enough to take her own life an hour later—unless someone had just told her she had six weeks to live, or something.’
‘Hardly likely, is it?’ said Patience.
Kenneth Neale entered the room in his shirt sleeves and slippers.
‘Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen now,’ he said. ‘I expect filming will have to be put back a while. I can’t say I’m sorry for it, after what’s happened. I’m having the solicitor go over the agreement, my dear, although he seems to think it will be water-tight. That’ll teach me to believe the word of one of these Hollywood sharks again. Why, to think I let Penk fool me in that way! I thought I was wise enough not to fall for that sort of thing. Didn’t I give him a piece of my mind! Of course, he made all kinds of excuses—said his hands were tied, and he’d done his best to get Aston to agree to casting Augusta, and that he’d made damn’ sure she got
the supporting rôle—but I didn’t believe a word of it. I could hardly keep quiet when the silly Dacres woman was making that speech of hers, prattling about how much they wanted me for the picture, and how she was determined to prove herself worthy of me. Prove worthy of me! What do I care about a little has-been who hasn’t made a decent picture in three years, and who couldn’t act if her life depended upon it? I wanted someone who could do the job. I don’t mind saying I could cheerfully have strangled her at that moment.’
‘Careful, Ken, Freddy’s press, you know,’ said Gussie.
‘Figure of speech, figure of speech,’ said Neale hurriedly.
‘Oh, don’t mind me, sir,’ said Freddy. ‘I’m off duty. And you’re not the only one to say something similar. I gather she’d put a few people’s backs up lately.’
‘Goodness, yes,’ said Gussie. ‘She snubbed Bob Kenrick’s intended and went all out to draw him away from her, poor girl. She’s obviously not used to these circles. Every time I saw her she looked as though she were trying not to cry. And Bob didn’t seem too happy either. I think Dorothy had been throwing her weight about—you know the sort of thing: do as I say or I’ll see to it that nobody will ever hire you in Hollywood. He’s quite the coming thing, you know. Not the cleverest chap, perhaps, but he has tremendous screen presence, and I think Dorothy had some idea of hanging onto his coat-tails, since her career had been waning rather in recent years. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to find she’d tried to vamp him. Who else was there? Oh, yes—she was unkind to Ada, too.’
‘It was most unnecessary,’ put in Patience.
‘And didn’t Cora say something about her having lost Cosgrove his job?’ said Freddy, remembering.
‘Oh, Seymour,’ said Gussie impatiently. ‘He’s impossible, but I suppose one ought to feel sorry for him. He’s wanted to go to America for as long as I’ve known him, and I happen to know he needed the money urgently, too.’
‘He must have been pretty sick when he found out that Dorothy had told them he wasn’t coming,’ said Freddy.
‘Seymour, do you mean?’ said a voice, and they turned to see Adorable Ada, who had stopped practising the piano and had come to see what the grown-ups were talking about. ‘He wasn’t happy at all, I think. I don’t know what Dorothy did, but I overheard him talking to her last night. He was very angry and said he was going to kill her.’
‘You mustn’t repeat things like that, darling,’ said Patience after a pause. ‘And you oughtn’t to have been listening to other people’s conversations in the first place.’
‘How can I help it if people stand next to me and talk?’ said Ada. ‘I can’t shut my ears, can I?’
‘A well-bred young lady would pretend not to have heard,’ said Patience.
‘Oh,’ said Ada, and thought about this for a moment. ‘Well, I shall know next time. Still, I think it was very ill-bred of them to talk in front of me as though I hadn’t been there.’
She went out, and shortly afterwards began hammering on the piano again. Freddy looked after her thoughtfully, for he had just remembered the remark Seymour had made while Dorothy was announcing that she had got the part of Helen Harper. ‘Someone’s going to murder that woman one day,’ Seymour had said. Had he been right?
‘So it was certainly cocaine, then?’ said Sergeant Bird to Inspector Entwistle, who was reading a report.
‘Looks like it,’ said Entwistle. ‘Not much of it—barely enough for half an hour’s fun, in fact, but there’s no getting away from it: Dorothy Dacres kept a small quantity of cocaine in a little silver box on her dressing-table.’
‘What did Penk say about it?’
‘Just about what you’d expect. He was all aghast and horrified, had no idea she was doing anything of the sort, wouldn’t have dreamed of giving her the leading rôle in the film if he’d known, and so on and so on.’
‘Think he was telling the truth?’
‘Well, we’ve no proof he wasn’t.’
‘What about that sister of hers? Cora—what is it?—Drucker? Why not Dacres?’
‘Oh, Dorothy Dacres wasn’t her real name, of course. She was born Irma Drucker and changed it on the say-so of the studios. But the sister claims to have known nothing about the dope either, and swears Dorothy never touched it. We searched the place thoroughly while Cora and the maid were staying elsewhere, and we never found any drugs in among Cora’s things—in fact, that little box was the only trace of the stuff we found, so for the moment I think we’ll have to assume she’s clean, and that Dacres was the only one who had anything to do with it.’
‘What about this Beckwith fellow?’ said Bird. ‘He was there that night trying to dig up a story, and said he’d heard about the dope from our lot. Is that true?’
‘It is true that the stuff’s been turning up all over the place in London lately,’ conceded Entwistle. ‘You remember the case of Lord Menwith back in the summer. He wouldn’t say where he’d got it, but it was obvious his wife was also heavily addicted—and a good few of his cronies, too, if I’m not much mistaken. Talbot’s been put onto that. It’s been making its way into high society somehow.’
‘Carelli up to his tricks again?’ suggested Bird.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve found nothing on him or his associates, but they know we’ve been watching them so they’ve been extra careful. I expect this Beckwith has got his information from Talbot.’
‘He certainly had a bee in his bonnet about it,’ said the sergeant. ‘He insisted Dorothy Dacres was a cocaine fiend and that she jumped off the terrace while under the influence.’
‘Well, we’ll soon find out when we hear from Ingleby,’ said Entwistle. ‘I told him to test for cocaine in her blood, and anything else he can find.’
‘This other reporter, Pilkington-Soames, says she seemed sober enough to him at the party.’
‘Yes—and what was he doing there, by the way?’ said the inspector. ‘Rather a suspicious coincidence, after all that funny business last month.’
‘He’s a friend of Augusta Laing’s, he says, and wasn’t working that evening. He didn’t think much of the accident theory.’
‘Well, he can keep his thoughts to himself,’ said Entwistle.
‘He was there on the spot, though, sir, and saw a lot of what was happening. He’s right when he says that the railing was too high for her to have fallen over it accidentally. And suicide is most unlikely too; everyone we’ve spoken to says Dorothy Dacres was as happy as a sandboy that evening, and had no reason at all to kill herself—although I suppose it’s always possible the cocaine gave her a brainstorm of some kind and drove her to do it.’
‘Hmm, the drugs again,’ said Entwistle. ‘Well, we don’t know yet that she’d actually taken any, so let’s look at the rest of the facts.’ He took out his notebook. ‘Now, let’s see: we know for certain that at half past ten or so Dorothy Dacres stood up and announced to everybody that she was to play the lead rôle in this film. As far as we can tell, she then spent the next twenty minutes sweeping around the room, demanding and receiving everybody’s congratulations. But nobody seems to know where she went after that.’
‘Presumably out on the terrace,’ said Bird.
Entwistle looked back at his notes with a frown.
‘She was found in the street at just before twenty past eleven by a group of passers-by, who raised the alarm. It seems that when they heard the commotion quite a lot of the guests upstairs rushed out to look over the railing, as they thought there’d been an accident in the street.’
He pursed up his mouth in distaste.
‘Just curiosity I expect, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘It’s human nature, after all.’
‘Not exactly pleasant, though. At any rate, we have half an hour or so in which we don’t know what she was doing—or even where she was. We know she fell from the terrace, but we don’t know for sure
that she spent half an hour out there.’
‘It seems unlikely,’ said Bird. ‘It was cold, and that evening-gown of hers was pretty flimsy.’
‘We need to find out who was the last to see her alive,’ said Entwistle, looking at the report again. ‘Johnson said he couldn’t find anyone who saw her go out onto the terrace. She spoke to a largish group of people at just before ten to eleven, then went off somewhere, and nobody seems to have seen her after that.’
‘Did Johnson speak to all the guests?’
‘Most of them. There were about a hundred people there and I asked him to eliminate the obvious ones. Many of them were nothing more than hangers-on, and didn’t have much connection to the dead woman, or only spoke to her for a minute or two, but there are a few I dare say we’ll want to speak to again. Let’s see.’ He paused a moment, referring again to his own notes. ‘We may as well start with Penk,’ he said at last. ‘He seems to be the one in charge.’
‘Who is this chap, anyway?’ said Bird. ‘Did he have some personal connection to Dorothy Dacres? Or was it purely business?’
‘He’s the head of Aston-Penk Productions—that’s the studio that was going to make this film,’ said Entwistle. ‘I gather he’d come to England to woo a few people, too. He wanted to persuade Kenneth Neale to direct it—succeeded in that, it seems. Then there was Sir Aldridge Featherstone. Penk was hoping to get him to back this film and perhaps others. Now, who else have we? Cora again. She presumably knew her sister better than anyone.’
‘I heard a rumour they didn’t get on,’ said Bird. ‘Perhaps they had a row on the terrace and it ended in violence.’
‘What, two little girls like that? I can’t see them throwing each other off the top of a building, can you?’
‘You’d be surprised at what women can do,’ said the sergeant darkly. ‘I’ve got two sisters, and some of the stories I could tell you would make your hair curl.’
Entwistle, who had no sisters, looked unconvinced.
‘Anyway,’ he went on after a moment, ‘Miss Drucker says she hardly spoke to Dorothy at all that evening. She already knew her sister was getting the part, and so didn’t need to congratulate her after the big announcement. She says she talked to various people, then went onto the terrace for a couple of minutes at about eleven, where she spoke to Robert Kenrick. A minute or two after that Miss Laing and Mr. Pilkington-Soames came out, then they all went inside.’
