by Cyril Hare
“I?” said Dixon quickly. “No, of course not. Why should I?”
“I just thought I’d mention it—I think she wants time to cool off. Because she particularly asked that she should be left entirely alone in the artist’s room until her time comes to go on to the platform. So if you are around then, keep out. I’ve warned all the orchestra.”
Dixon grinned.
“You needn’t worry about me,” he said. “That’s an old custom of Lucy’s, and nothing whatever to do with my faux pas over Zbartorowski. She always immures herself before she plays. It’s a form of nerves, I suppose. Not even husbands admitted—let alone has-beens.”
“I see,” said Evans. He remained standing irresolutely in the doorway for a moment, a reflective frown creasing his forehead.
“Is there anything else?” asked Dixon with a yawn. “Because if not——”
“I don’t think so,” Evans said slowly. “At least—there was something bothering me—a question of tempo, I think—but I can’t remember now what it was.” He came out of his abstraction abruptly. “Mrs. Basset, I think you were kind enough to say you would give me a lift home.”
He left, and Pettigrew, who felt as though he had been shut up in the little office for half a lifetime, made haste to follow his example.
6
A Concert Interrupted
It was with a feeling of anti-climax that Pettigrew returned to the City Hall at about a quarter to eight that evening. After the troubles that the rehearsal had produced he felt that the performance, however successful, would be comparatively flat. If he had not already paid for his ticket, he told himself, he would have been much inclined to stay away. He knew too much, however, to confide his sentiments to Eleanor, who was pardonably excited at the prospect of taking part in her first concert.
He left his wife at the artists’ entrance, and saw her carried away in a flood of eager, elated amateurs, leavened by a few business-like, phlegmatic professionals, before going round to the main door. The hall, he found, was already filling rapidly, and from his seat in the gallery he looked down on a sea of heads. Like everyone else who has been admitted, for however brief a space, behind the scenes at any spectacle, he wondered how many of the chattering, expectant throng had any idea of the amount of trouble and confusion that had had to be gone through to produce the two hours of entertainment which they were about to enjoy. “It’ll be all right on the night,” he told himself cheerfully, and settled down to read, with more admiration than understanding, the severely technical analytical notes which Clayton Evans had contributed to the programme.
His reading was shortly interrupted by someone pushing past him to the vacant seat at his side. Looking up, he saw, not without pleasure, that it was Nicola Dixon. She was, he told himself, the ideal neighbour for such a function—someone who would neither talk too much nor expect to be talked to, and who was at the same time agreeable to look at. Extremely agreeable to look at, he reflected, as he turned to greet her. Indeed, though he had always been sensible of the fact that she was a very handsome young woman, he did not think he had ever seen her to so much advantage before. Even to such a thoroughly unobservant man as himself it was apparent that she was exceptionally well turned out for the occasion. But it was not only that her dress—which Pettigrew could not have begun to describe—made the rather dowdy Markhampton matrons in the hall seem positively shabby in comparison, nor that she had obviously taken considerable pains with her make-up. In some indefinable way her whole countenance had gained in attractiveness. Her eyes were brighter, the colour of her cheeks more vivid and her usual rather languid charm had given place to an expression of animation and awareness that was enormously—Pettigrew searched for the word in his mind and was mildly shocked with himself when he found it—enormously seductive. It seemed strange that the prospect of a mere concert in the City Hall could so enliven her, he thought; her enthusiasm for music must be greater than he had supposed—greater, certainly, than her husband’s.
Reminded of Robert Dixon’s existence, Pettigrew remarked, “Your husband isn’t with you?”
Nicola shook her sleek auburn head.
“He never sits with me at these shows,” she explained. “He has a seat downstairs, somewhere near the back, so that he can scurry round to see that things are in order. Talking of scurrying, I thought I shouldn’t make it myself tonight. The damned car-park was so crowded, I had a job to find a place.” She looked impatiently at her wrist-watch as if, now that she had arrived, she grudged every moment before the concert should begin.
Meanwhile, things had been happening on the stage below. The members of the orchestra had assembled on the platform and the air was filled with fragmentary toots and twiddles as they tried over passages on their instruments. The exciting little turmoil of sound subsided, and was followed by a splutter of applause for Miss Porteous, who made her way to the leader’s desk at the head of the violins, striving to appear at ease, but pink with suppressed emotion. An expectant hush settled on the hall, and then there was a storm of clapping as Clayton Evans was seen at the back of the stage, which continued, growing in intensity, until he reached the rostrum. He acknowledged the greeting with the briefest of bows, turned, tapped his desk, and, almost before the applause had died away, brought orchestra and audience to their feet with the drum-roll that preluded the National Anthem.
It occurred to Pettigrew at this point to wonder for the first time since he had entered the hall whether the elusive clarinettist had put in an appearance. Jenkinson had certainly sounded a very positive and reliable individual on the telephone, not the kind of man who—once the little matter of Potter and Fullbright had been cleared up—would be likely to fail to keep an appointment. Still, he wished to be sure, and he scanned the ranks of the players with an anxious eye. Unfortunately, the gallery was almost at a level with the line of large chandeliers which illuminated the main body of the hall, and this made his view of the back rows of the orchestra rather difficult. None the less, as he looked along them it did seem as though, in the right-hand corner, next to the flutes, there was a blank space. He looked again, tried to account for all the players who obviously were there, in order to establish whether one was not. Two flutes—that was easy. Two of those fellows who blow into a little tube and make a kind of grunting sound—bassoons, of course, that was the name. And lastly, twisting his neck to dodge the blinding chandelier, he could distinguish three men blowing straight downwards into their instruments, and not sideways like flutes, or at an angle, like bassoons. Oboes and clarinets—and which was which and what was the difference between them he never could remember, though Eleanor had explained often enough. Three? Surely there should be four—two of each—unless for some obscure reason the oboe was a solitary, and didn’t go about in pairs like all his fellows? No, that would not do. Evans had distinctly said two oboes. It could only mean that the orchestra was short of a clarinet after all.
He had just reached this melancholy conclusion, and the last bars of the National Anthem were crashing out, when there was a slight stir in the right-hand back row of the orchestra. A desk was pushed on one side, two brass instruments and their players edged apart to make a gangway, and as the orchestra sat down, Pettigrew realized that the three players had become four. Jenkinson had cut it fine, but he had succeeded. It was most satisfactory. From where he sat Pettigrew could not distinguish his face, beyond the fact that it was ornamented with horn-rimmed spectacles, but he promised himself the pleasure of meeting him after the concert. From their brief chat on the telephone, he judged him to be quite a character. Meanwhile, he could sit back and enjoy the music and forget that he was a committeeman. Everything from now on was going according to plan.
It took less than half a minute for Pettigrew, in common with the rest of the audience, to realize that everything was not, after all, going according to plan. In his anxiety over that comparatively minor orchestral figure, the first clarinettist, he had taken for granted the presence of every
body else essential to the performance. It was Nicola Dixon who drew his attention to the fact that someone else was absent.
“Good Lord!” she exclaimed in an anxious voice. “Where on earth’s Billy Ventry?”
Looking towards the organ loft, Pettigrew saw to his horror that it was unoccupied.
To be even the spectator at a public function when a serious hitch occurs produces in the normal mind a certain feeling of distress, and Pettigrew, who rated himself as something more than a mere spectator, felt acutely uncomfortable. What added to his discomfort was the fact that one of the last people in the hall to realize that something had gone radically wrong was Clayton Evans himself. With serene confidence he stood there, Handel’s score open before him. He threw back his head in a characteristic gesture, gave his usual sharp tap to his desk to bring his orchestra to attention, extended his hands and looked hopefully in the direction of the organ loft.
“This is awful!” muttered Pettigrew. “The poor devil’s as blind as a bat. Won’t anyone tell him?”
Miss Porteous in fact told him, just as it seemed that the Alleluia Organ Concerto would be embarked upon without an organist. There was a hasty colloquy between the two, while a buzz of conversation broke out in the audience. Evans produced a watch from his pocket, held it close to his nose, replaced it, laid the baton down on his desk and stood for a few moments irresolute. His back was to the audience, but even from the gallery it could be seen that his long, sensitive hands were shaking.
“He’s not going to wait for him, surely,” Mrs. Dixon murmured. “I’ve never known Evans——”
Evans was not going to wait. With a visible effort he straightened his bent back and turned to face the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice well under control, “I am afraid it has become necessary to alter the order of the programme. We shall begin with the Prague Symphony of Mozart. The Handel Organ Concerto will be played after the interval.”
There was the usual polite applause that greets announcements of this nature, a hasty shifting of scores on the music desks of the players. Then Evans swung round to face his orchestra once more and the first concert of the season presented by the Markshire Symphony Orchestra was at last begun.
Those better able to judge than Pettigrew considered the performance of the Prague Symphony a highly creditable one. The last minute alteration in the arrangements had not been without its effect on the nerves of some of the amateurs, and there was some ragged playing at the outset. But before the first movement had run half its course Evans had asserted his authority, the orchestra was well in hand, and the music was being rendered with all the crispness and delicacy that Mozart demands. The applause at the end of the performance was a good deal more than polite.
None the less, to nine-tenths of the audience the symphony had been no more than an hors d’œuvre, and a rather prolonged hors d’œuvre at that. They had paid their money primarily to hear Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto—or rather, they had paid to hear Lucy Carless playing Mendelssohn, and the rearrangement, by inserting a substantial symphony before it, instead of a brief curtain-raiser, had left them restless and dissatisfied.
Clayton Evans must have felt the impatience of the audience, for his acknowledgment of their applause at the conclusion of the symphony was noticeably brief. He favoured them with a curt bow, laid down his baton and before the clapping had died away strode off the platform. It was his invariable practice to introduce visiting soloists to their audience. Like all good conductors he had something of the showman in his make-up, and he had brought to a fine art the technique of escorting a distinguished visitor on to the platform. The air of deftly compounded patronage and deference with which he performed the task was the result of long practice. The less reverent members of his orchestra imitated it among themselves when they foregathered for rehearsals. His faithful public regarded it as one of the high-lights of the evening. As Evans disappeared behind the players in the direction of the artist’s room, they sat back contented and expectant in their seats. “This,” their expressions seemed to say, “is what we were waiting for!”
They had to wait a good deal longer than usual.
After a delay that seemed interminable, but could not in fact have lasted more than a minute or two, a burst of applause greeted the conductor’s reappearance. It ceased abruptly as quickly as it had begun. Evans was alone. He came slowly on to the platform, his shoulders bowed, his chin upon his chest, walking like a man in a dream. There was dead silence in the hall as he dragged himself on to the rostrum. His hands gripping the rail as though he would have fallen without support, he stood there for a moment speechless—a silent man facing a silent gathering. Then he spoke, in a hoarse voice that was barely recognizable. His words were muttered, but in the utter stillness of the hall they were audible enough.
“There has been an accident,” he was heard to say. “A terrible accident. I want a doctor immediately.”
7
Introducing Trimble
A gale of rationalization, blowing strongly from Whitehall a few years previously, had swept away, with many other things, the Markhampton City Police Force. It was consequently a detective-in-spector of the City Division of the Markshire County Constabulary who came in answer to the urgent message, which reached him just as he was about to leave his headquarters after his day’s duty. Inspector Trimble was a young man for his rank in a service in which promotion is normally slow. He was also energetic and ambitious. His predecessor in the City force had been none of these things, and had gratefully accepted the offer of an early retirement on pension extended to him when the County Police took over. That easy-going man had not gone altogether unregretted by his subordinates, who viewed the bustling “new bloke” with a certain suspicion. Trimble was well aware that he had yet to prove himself in their eyes, and he was on the whole pleased that on this occasion he should be accompanied by an elderly, sceptical sergeant of the old dispensation. He had been seeking for an opportunity to impress Sergeant Tate with the virtues of the County organization in general, and of its detective-inspector in particular, and perhaps this case would provide it.
The inspector drove to the artists’ entrance of the City Hall. A white-faced porter opened the door to him. Inside, he found himself in a corridor packed to overflowing with men and women who fell abruptly silent as he entered. Their anxious faces turned to follow his progress as he pushed his way through.
There were doors opening out of the corridor on either side. Outside one of these, to his right as he entered, and in the direction of the concert hall, stood a police constable, red-faced and important, who drew himself up and saluted as Trimble approached.
“She’s in here, sir,” he said. “Dr. Cutbush is with the body. Nothing has been touched. I’ve——”
Trimble cut him short with a curt nod.
“I’ll take your report later,” he said. “Stay where you are until I send for you.”
Behind his back, Sergeant Tate favoured the constable with a sardonic grin as Trimble passed through the door, a slim, assured figure—possibly a shade too assured, ill-wishers might have thought.
The artist’s room was a small, square apartment. Its panelled walls were unbroken by windows, a skylight in the lofty ceiling taking their place. There was a second door opposite the one by which the inspector had entered. The furniture consisted of a table, two or three plain chairs and a deep arm-chair. On the table were several vases of flowers and a violin in its open case. Dr. Cutbush was sitting on one of the hard chairs. In the armchair was the huddled form of Lucy Carless.
Trimble looked quickly round the room before he approached the body. Then he walked across to the opposite door and opened it. He found himself looking into another corridor, roughly parallel to the one he had just left, but curving at either end to conform to the shape of the stage behind which it ran. After establishing the lie of the land he closed the door again and locked it from the inside.
�
��Has anybody been through this door since the body was found?” he asked.
“Well, I have, naturally, since I came from the body of the hall,” replied the doctor in a gentle, deprecating voice. “But so far as I am aware, no one else.”
“I see. Well, doctor, what have you to tell me?”
“Very little, I am afraid, further than that life was extinct when I arrived. The cause of death, as you can see”—here, he rose, walked to the armchair, and with wonderful tenderness pulled aside the mass of dark hair which shrouded the terribly distorted face—“the cause of death was evidently strangulation. What appears to be a silk stocking has been very tightly tied round the neck. But I have touched nothing. Your own medical officer will deal with that in due course, no doubt.” He let the hair fall back into place. “A sad loss, Inspector,” he said with a sigh. “She was a great artist.”
“How long would you say death had elapsed when you found her?”
Dr. Cutbush shook his head.
“I am afraid forensic medicine has never been a subject of mine,” he said. “It was certainly not long—half an hour perhaps, but little more than that. There again, I must leave you to the specialist.”
“I see. Well, doctor, if you will give your name and address to Sergeant Tate here he will take a formal statement from you in due course. I needn’t keep you any longer now.”
“Thank you. And may I take my little girl with me?”
“Your little girl?” asked Trimble.
“She is one of the orchestra—a first violin. I am sure she will have been terribly upset, and I should like to get her away.”
