by Cyril Hare
“The orchestra?” Trimble stroked his chin uncertainly. “Sergeant, do you know the lay-out of this building?”
“Yes, sir, very well. I’ve sung the Messiah in it many a time.”
“How do the orchestra get on to the platform?”
“By that corridor you were looking at just now. Either end of it leads on to the stage—right or left side, according. With steps to take you up to the back rows.”
“That was what I thought. Then anyone going on to the stage might pass this door on the way?”
“That’s right. And conversely, anyone coming out of this room might go on to the stage just as if he hadn’t. There are two or three other doors leading into that corridor, you see.”
Slightly nettled at his sergeant’s emphasizing the obvious, Trimble turned to Dr. Cutbush.
“I am afraid I shall have to keep the orchestra here for the time being,” he said. “But I hope it won’t be for long. Meanwhile you can join your daughter, if you wish.”
The doctor having departed, Trimble carried out a brief but intensive search of the room. He was conscious as he did so that the sergeant, while apparently assisting him, was at the same time subjecting him to a wordless but lively criticism. It was all the more annoying, therefore, that the search proved entirely fruitless. Nothing whatever in the room was out of order. Everything was perfectly normal—except for the still, silent figure in the armchair. Finally he sent for the constable at the door and ordered Sergeant Tate to take his place until another uniformed man from headquarters could arrive to relieve him. The constable was evidently bursting with information. He took a deep breath and began:
“I was on duty outside the main entrance, sir, when I became aware of a certain commotion inside.”
“What sort of commotion?”
“There were some screams and hysterics in the audience, sir, and a St. John’s Ambulance man reported that a lady had fainted. I went into the hall, and ascertained that a doctor had been sent for to the artists’ room. I accordingly made my way round to the back and came in through the stage door. I found Dr. Cutbush here with Mr. Evans, the conductor. Also Mr. Sefton.”
“Mr. Sefton?”
“I gathered that he was the husband of the deceased, sir. He was in a somewhat excited condition. I had some difficulty in persuading him to leave the room. He was making a number of wild accusations against a variety of individuals, including Mr. Evans.”
“Very well. And what action did you take?”
“Having ascertained from the doctor that life was extinct, sir, and that there was adequate reason to suspect that a felony had been committed, I deemed it my duty to take charge.”
“My question,” said Trimble icily, “was—what action did you take?”
“I requested a member of the City Hall staff who had accompanied me from the main entrance to notify headquarters by telephone, sir—not liking to leave the scene of the occurrence unguarded. Meanwhile, while awaiting assistance, I suggested to Mr. Evans that he should announce that the concert was abandoned and cause the audience to disperse, which I understand they have done, to a large extent.”
“Yes?”
“I then posted myself outside the door in the position in which you found me, sir, in order to prevent any interference. The matter was a little complicated by reason of the fact that the members of the orchestra had by this time come off the platform and were milling around, if I may so put it, sir, many of them carrying musical instruments of various shapes and sizes.”
“Are all these people outside members of the orchestra, then? There seem to be a great many of them.”
“No, sir. Not all of them. That was an additional complication. During the course of the events which I have endeavoured to describe, and before even I had arrived upon the spot, a certain amount of infiltration had taken place.”
“To put it shortly, a lot of people had got in who had no business to be there?”
“To put it shortly—yes, sir. You will appreciate, sir, that the great majority of the orchestra are local ladies and gentlemen, and they all had husbands and wives and so forth in the hall who naturally came round to see what was up and how”—the constable’s prose style recovered itself with a visible effort—“how their respective relatives were faring.”
“I see.”
“As soon as I was at liberty to do so, sir, I stationed a porter on the door to prevent the ingress of unauthorized persons.”
“The what?”
“The ingress, sir. Of unauthorized——”
“Yes, yes, I see. But until then there was no checking——”
“No checking their ingress, sir.”
“Damn their ingress!” said the inspector, losing his temper. “It’s egress that I’m interested in. No checking whether anyone went out?”
“Precisely, sir.”
“Which may prove rather more important to this enquiry than who came in afterwards.”
“That is so, sir, now you mention it.”
“Never mind,” said Trimble, repenting of his momentary loss of control. “I have no doubt you did the best you could in the circumstances, and I shall so inform the Superintendent.”
“I am very much obliged, sir.”
“I think I should see Mr. Evans next, and this Mr. Sefton you mentioned. Where are they, do you know?”
“I think you will find them in a room adjacent to this one, sir. The rehearsal room, it is called, on account of there being a piano in it. I suggested that they should await you there, so as to be free from interruption. There are one or two others with them, I fancy.”
There was a knock on the door, and Sergeant Tate’s head appeared.
“The Divisional Surgeon is here, sir,” he said. “And the fingerprint and photography squad.”
“Send them in,” said Trimble.
The little room became suddenly full of busy, purposeful specialists. Trimble gave instructions as to his requirements and then departed, leaving Sergeant Tate in charge. But he did not leave soon enough to prevent him hearing the sergeant remark to the fingerprint expert, “It’s no use your trying your blower on that door-handle, Bert. It’s got the inspector’s finger-marks all over it!”
“That man wants a lesson,” was Trimble’s unspoken comment. Oddly enough, it was precisely what Sergeant Tate was thinking at the same moment.
The inspector went at once to the room which had been indicated to him as the rehearsal room. It was in all respects similar to the one he had just left, except for an upright piano against one wall, and two or three music stands in one corner. Three men and a woman were standing uneasily by the table, and a fourth man was sitting hunched up in the armchair.
“I am Detective-Inspector Trimble of the Markshire County Constabulary,” he began. “Which of you is Mr. Evans?”
Before Evans could answer, the man in the armchair rose to his feet and came staggering across the room.
“My wife!” he muttered hoarsely. “Where is my wife? I must see her! I want to explain—to tell her——”
Trimble caught him by the arm in time to prevent him collapsing completely.
“Mr. Sefton,” he said kindly, “I think the best thing you can do is to go back to your hotel and try to get some rest. You shall see your wife in due course, but just now it is not—not convenient. There is a police car at the door to take you, and this officer will accompany you. Now go along, there’s a good fellow.”
With surprising meekness Sefton allowed himself to be shepherded out of the room. There was a brief silence before Evans spoke.
“My name is Evans,” he said. “This is Mrs. Basset, the chairman of our committee. Mr. Dixon, the secretary. Mr. Pettigrew, the treasurer.”
Trimble bowed stiffly. An unimpressionable man in the ordinary way, he found it impossible not to be impressed by Clayton Evans.
“I understand that it was you who discovered the body of the deceased,” he began, a trifle daunted by the smouldering eyes that stared d
own at him through the thick lenses of the spectacles.
“Yes. I did. You will of course require a statement from me as to that. I am entirely at your service. But first, if you don’t mind, I am a little anxious about my orchestra. They have all had a very trying experience, and the professionals will have trains to catch. It is quite out of the question that any of them could have anything to do with this terrible affair. Wouldn’t it be possible to let them go?”
Trimble considered the suggestion for a moment.
“I am in rather a difficulty about the orchestra,” he said. “I quite appreciate what you say, but from what I have been able to gather so far, one thing seems clear to me. Whoever was responsible for this crime must have had access to the part of the building lying on this side of the stage. There may have been many people in that position, authorized or unauthorized—I shall have to look into it—but obviously the members of the orchestra were among them. I am afraid I shall have to take statements from each of them, simply as a matter of routine.”
“Won’t it be sufficient for this evening if you take their names and addresses and let them go?” Pettigrew suggested. He had had some experience of police investigations, and saw the prospect of Eleanor being kept long past midnight while a policeman painstakingly wrote down a series of quite useless narratives. “You can interview them at leisure later on,” he added.
“Yes, I could do that. But there is a further little complication. From what I have been told, there was an appreciable time between the discovery of Miss Carless’s body and the arrival of the police. It would have been quite possible for anyone to slip out in the general confusion. How can I be certain that all the orchestra are still here?”
Evans for the first time looked rather helpless.
“I don’t know,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t even know them all by sight. They were all here when we played the Mozart. I should have heard the difference if anyone had been missing.” He turned to Mrs. Basset. “You know them all, of course.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Basset. “I can identify everyone to the inspector. Oh—but I was forgetting—there are the professionals. I don’t know them.”
“You needn’t worry about them,” Dixon put in. “I’ve got the list here. I had to arrange about getting ’em here and back to London again,” he explained. He produced a neatly typed list from his pocket, and handed it to Trimble.
“Very good,” said the inspector. “Now I think I shall be able to help you, Mr. Evans. Get all your orchestra into one room together, and we will deal with them straight away.”
In a surprisingly short time the combined efforts of Evans and Mrs. Basset had succeeded in separating the players from the interlopers who had mingled with them, and segregating them at one end of the corridor. Pettigrew, rather guiltily, remained in the rehearsal room with Dixon. He had been one of the first to come round to the artists’ entrance when he realized that a disaster had occurred, and his intention had been the laudable one of looking after his wife; but he had a horror of crowds, and when he had failed to find her at once he had gladly yielded to Mrs. Basset’s appeal to lend support to Evans at an informal and rather grisly sort of committee meeting. Twice before in his life he had found himself involuntarily dragged into the investigation of a murder, and this time he intended to stay out—even if Eleanor were to reproach him later on for his desertion.
Through the half-opened door he could hear the disposal of the orchestra proceeding expeditiously enough.
“First violins!” cried Mrs. Basset. “Miss Porteous!”
“Your name and address, please, miss, and may I see your identity card?” from a constable just outside the door, and Miss Porteous passed on, as the next name was called out. The process reminded Pettigrew of a sheep-dipping he had once attended—and, for the matter of that, some of the violins behaved very much like sheep when it came to such a simple matter as identifying themselves.
When Eleanor’s turn came he slipped out and collected her, thereby earning such credit for appearing when least expected that he escaped the scolding he richly deserved for not having joined her before.
“I’ll wait until the end, if you don’t mind staying,” he said. “From what I’ve seen of this inspector, he’ll only make trouble if he finds I’ve slipped away without leave.”
Fresh police reinforcements had arrived meanwhile, and there were now two officers taking names outside, so that it was not very long before Trimble, Evans and Mrs. Basset returned. Pettigrew noticed that the inspector looked rather worried.
“Well, that’s finished,” he said. “Only two people missing, which is rather better than I had feared. One of them is Miss Hilliard—a viola player. From what the others said, I think there is no doubt her mother got round early and took her home, but we shall have to check up on that. The other may be more troublesome, as it’s one of the professionals, and nobody seems to know anything about him.” He extended the list to Dixon. “I can’t make this name out,” he said. “You’ve pencilled it in above the name originally typed.”
Dixon looked at it and bit his lip.
“Good Lord!” he said. “Jenkinson!”
“Where does he come from?”
“Whitsea. I’ve got his address somewhere.” He began to search through his pockets.
“You can always get him through Potter and Fullbright,” Pettigrew could not resist murmuring.
At that moment there was an interruption. The sound of an altercation was heard outside, and then an apologetic constable put his head into the room.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. “But there’s a gentleman outside who insists on coming in. I told him your orders were that nobody was to be admitted but——”
The door suddenly opened wide and a high-pitched voice from without said, “Is this place a concert-hall or a lunatic asylum, I should like to know? I tell you, I am going to get in!”
And get in he did, in spite of all the officer could do to prevent him.
“Ah!” said Trimble coolly. “And who may you be?”
“My name,” said the newcomer, “is Jenkinson. And perhaps you’ll tell me what the devil’s been going on here?”
8
Jenkinson
Pettigrew, who was the nearest to the door, found his eyes level with the middle button of a dark blue overcoat. Looking upwards, he finally arrived at a thin, pale face with an angry and contemptuous expression, surmounted by a mane of white hair. His first reaction to the sight was that this was about the tallest man he had ever seen outside a fair-ground; his second, that at all events he had never set eyes on him before.
Jenkinson’s question had evidently been a rhetorical one, for without giving anyone a chance to reply he went on to speak in a voice which Pettigrew had little difficulty in recognizing as the one he had heard on the telephone that afternoon.
“I come over from Whitsea,” he said bitterly, “at some considerable personal inconvenience, in order to oblige Mr. Evans. I am met at the station by a lunatic or a practical joker—and I am not sure that that is not a distinction without a difference—who drives me to a dance-hall in the wrong town and then abandons me. And when finally, by unheard of efforts, I contrive to make my way to the right place in the right town, I find it entirely occupied by a horde of policemen who dispute my right to be there. I am aware that mine is an overworked, underpaid and generally maltreated profession, but there are limits—and I badly want the blood of whoever is responsible.”
Having so delivered himself, Jenkinson deposited a small black instrument case upon the table and favoured the company with an unexpectedly good-humoured smile. He had, apparently, succeeded in talking himself into a comparatively good temper again.
“And I should add,” he went on, “that I shall expect to be paid my full fee and expenses in any event.”
“This,” said Trimble quietly, “is extremely interesting.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” replied Jenkinson, looking down
on the inspector as from a mountain-top. “Although I am bound to say it falls a long way short of a complete explanation of this extraordinary occurrence. Are you Mr. Dixon, by any chance?”
“I am Detective-Inspector Trimble of the Mark-shire County Constabulary, and I am in charge of the horde of policemen you were referring to just now.”
“I am happy to make your acquaintance. May I ask what brings you here? I can hardly believe that all this police activity has been occasioned merely by my failure to arrive here on time.”
“I have reason to believe that a murder has been committed here,” said the inspector.
“I see. That explains the fact that the concert for which I have an engagement appears to have been abandoned, though not the extraordinary mismanagement which prevented my fulfilling it. It is not Mr. Dixon who has been murdered, by any chance?” he added hopefully.
“No. Mr. Dixon is here,” said Trimble, indicating him. “The person whose death I am enquiring into,” he added hastily, before Jenkinson could speak, “is Miss Lucy Carless.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” said Jenkinson gravely. “I have in my time prayed for the sudden death of a good many concert soloists, but Miss Carless was not among their number. She was a great artist. Well,” he picked up his bag again, “I shall not intrude any further on your work. The sooner I am back in Whit-sea the better. Mr. Dixon can make such explanations as he sees fit in writing, and my agents will render my account in due course.”
He was making for the door when Trimble stopped him.
“Just a moment, Mr. Jenkinson,” he said. “I understand you to say that you have only just arrived?”
“That was what I have been endeavouring to convey.”
“You were to have taken the part of”—he consulted the list of professional players in his hand—“of first clarinet?”
“Yes.”
“When were you engaged?”
“Only this afternoon. I was spoken to on the telephone, first by an ignoramus called Grew, or some such name, and then by this man here, Dixon. I was told positively——”
