The Strangling on the Stage

by Simon Brett

  ‘I was interested,’ said Carole, moving the conversation along, ‘in what you were saying at Elizaveta’s about the two nooses on your gallows …’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘… and how they got mixed up.’

  There was a new caution in his expression as he said, ‘What about it?’

  ‘You said you had some thoughts of people who might have switched them round, but then Elizaveta interrupted you.’

  Gordon Blaine was silent. He looked from one woman to the other. ‘Are you thinking that what happened to Ritchie might not be an accident?’

  ‘The thought had occurred to us, yes.’

  ‘Hm. The police were very interested in that possibility when they talked to me.’

  ‘But presumably they did come down on the side of accidental death?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Well, they’ve ended their investigation.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve just assumed it,’ said Carole. ‘Jude told me there’ve been no more enquiries. And they released Ritchie’s body for his funeral.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Gordon spoke as if he hadn’t thought of it before.

  ‘You sound relieved.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I am in a way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the gallows are my work. I built them. If there was anything unsafe about the design, it’d be my fault. And I’ve been worried about the police coming back to me at some point. So if their investigation is really over, that’s quite a relief.’

  ‘I don’t think you need worry any more,’ said Jude. Gordon looked pathetically grateful. Clearly the anxiety had been weighing on him. ‘Where are the gallows now?’ she asked.

  ‘People seemed a bit spooked by having them still there in St Mary’s Hall. So I brought them back to my workshop – that was in the brief period when my bloody Land Rover was working. I’ve been doing a bit of fine tuning on them.’

  ‘Where is your workshop?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’ The excitement in his voice showed that he very much hoped they would.

  And indeed, when they assented, there was a trace of schoolboy glee in the way he led them through to the back of his tiny kitchen. And once through the door they could understand why the front two rooms of the house seemed so cramped. The house must originally have had a sitting room at the front with an equally large dining room and kitchen behind it. But this space had been opened out and the wall to the garage taken down to create an extended working area. The slightly makeshift black-painted plasterboard walls suggested that Gordon had done the conversion himself.

  The bright overhead lights revealed something on the lines of a mad professor’s lab. There had clearly been attempts to impose order on the chaos. On the walls were rows of neat racks, but the tools that should have been stowed there lay on the floor or on work benches, along with paint pots, piping, rolls of wire netting, offcuts of wood and plastic. There was a musty smell of sawdust, oil and paint.

  The Devil’s Disciple gallows were there, but in the midst of a huge selection of other stage props. Papier mâché rat masks had perhaps featured in a SADOS pantomime, plywood battlements adorned a Shakespeare production. And the chairs with cut-out trees on the back were probably the famous ones designed for As You Like It.

  Also on the floor were car tyres, jacks and other automobile impedimenta. Clearly this was where Gordon had replaced the engine of his Land Rover. A procedure which, as Carole and Jude had cause to know, hadn’t worked properly. There hung about the workshop the aura of a great many things that hadn’t worked properly.

  ‘Wow,’ said Jude as they looked around the space. ‘So this is where you work your magic.’

  The beam on Gordon Blaine’s face showed that it had been exactly the right thing to say. Carole recognized rather wistfully that it was the kind of thing she’d never have thought of saying in a million years.

  ‘Would you mind showing us,’ Jude went on, ‘how the noose gets changed on the gallows?’

  ‘It’s very easy,’ said Gordon, more confident in his own environment. ‘Simple design. I always go for simple, no point in faffing around with stuff that’s more complicated than it needs to be.’

  He picked up a noose from a workbench, clattered a pair of metal stepladders over the floor to the side of the gallows and climbed up. There was already a noose in position hanging from the beam. ‘This is the doctored one,’ said Gordon, slicing down on to the loop with his hand and causing the Velcro joint to swing apart. ‘You see, as soon as that takes any weight, it gives way … greatly to the delight of the Health and Safety boyos.

  ‘But what holds it up, you see,’ he said, reaching to the top of the beam, ‘is this hook … from which the doctored noose can be simply removed –’ he matched his actions to his words – ‘and the real one hooked on … threaded through … and left to dangle … ready for its next victim.’

  ‘So the whole process,’ said Carole, ‘takes less than thirty seconds.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gordon agreed, as though accepting a compliment.

  ‘And anyone could work out how to do it?’

  ‘I would think so. Certainly anyone who’d watched me do the switch.’

  ‘Or someone who’d heard you describe how to do the switch,’ said Jude.

  ‘Sorry?’ He looked down in puzzlement from the ladder. ‘Don’t know what you mean?’

  ‘Well, we just heard, earlier this evening at Elizaveta’s, how you described the working of your gallows in meticulous detail at another of her “drinkies things”.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember that. Elizaveta seemed very interested in it. Which was unusual. Usually she shut me up when I got on to the details of the technical stuff. “Gordon darling,” she’d say, “I’m an actress. I deal with the emotional side of putting on a play. I can’t be expected to understand the nuts and bolts of the business.”’

  ‘And that particular “drinkies thing”,’ said Jude, ‘was three weeks ago.’

  ‘Was it really? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Three weeks to the day.’

  ‘The day before Ritchie Good got strangled,’ said Carole.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘Who is this speaking?’ asked the elocuted voice at the other end of the line.

  ‘Jude.’

  ‘Jude? Oh yes, Jude!’ said Elizaveta Dalrymple.

  ‘I was just ringing to say thank you so much for the party last night.’

  ‘Oh, hardly a party, Jude darling. Just one of my little “drinkies things”.’

  ‘Well, it was much appreciated, anyway. I really enjoyed it. And I’m sure Carole will be in touch soon to say thank you too.’ Though, actually, knowing Carole, she was much more likely to post a graceful note of thanks than use the telephone.

  ‘It was a pleasure to see you both. I do like to keep up with the new members of SADOS … even though I’m not involved in the current production.’

  ‘But presumably you’ll be back for others,’ suggested Jude, ‘now that Ritchie Good’s no longer around to insult you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, darling. I’m not as young as I was.’

  ‘You’re still looking very good,’ said Jude, shamelessly ingratiating.

  ‘Yes, well, of course I am lucky to have the bone structure. If you have the bone structure, the ravages of time are not quite so devastating. But,’ she concluded smugly, ‘so few people do have the bone structure.’

  Jude, whose face was too chubby for much bone structure to be discernible, made polite noises of agreement. Then she said, ‘Carole and I took Gordon Blaine back to his place yesterday.’

  ‘Really?’ Elizaveta sounded affronted. She didn’t like people in her coterie doing things she didn’t know about. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘His Land Rover had broken down.’

  ‘No surprise there. I must say, for someone who’s supposed to have engineering skills, dear Gordon is astonishingly i
nept.’

  ‘He showed us his workshop.’

  ‘Oh, that glory hole. He used to keep dragging Freddie down there to show him the development of his latest bit of stage wizardry – frequently rather less than wizard, I’m afraid. At times Gordon has qualities of an overeager schoolboy.’

  ‘Maybe. When he was talking yesterday he seemed to be worried about the future of SADOS.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, if you were not involved, he thought there was a danger the whole thing might pack up.’

  ‘Really? I hope not.’ But Elizaveta’s voice betrayed her attraction to the idea. ‘SADOS is more than one person, just as it was more than two people while Freddie was still alive. I owe it to his memory to keep the society going.’

  ‘Gordon seemed worried that, with you having walked out of The Devil’s Disciple, there might be—’

  ‘I did not walk out of The Devil’s Disciple. Ritchie Good’s behaviour put me in a position where I could no longer stay as part of the production.’

  ‘Well, however you put it, Gordon seemed worried that you might be so angry that you wouldn’t come back for another show.’

  ‘Oh, he shouldn’t have thought that. Of the many things I may be, Jude, vindictive is not one,’ Elizaveta lied. ‘If the right part comes up, and if I’m lucky enough to pass the audition, then I’m sure I’ll be back for the next production.’

  ‘And what is that? I haven’t heard yet.’

  ‘The autumn show’s going to be I Am A Camera.’

  ‘Isn’t that the play on which the musical Cabaret is based?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Based on the book by Christopher Isherwood.’

  ‘I’ve no idea who wrote it. I just know it wouldn’t have been my choice, but now Neville Prideaux’s on the Play Selection Committee all kinds of weird stuff’s getting through. If there really is a threat to the future of SADOS, it’s much more likely to be Neville Prideaux’s choice of plays driving the audiences away.’

  ‘But you will audition for it, Elizaveta?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose I’ll have to. I mean, Sally Bowles is meant to be quite a mature character.’

  Jude only just stopped herself from voicing her disbelief and saying, Oh, for heaven’s sake, there’s mature and there’s far too old for the part. But she didn’t want to break the confidential mood between them.

  ‘Last night Gordon was talking about his gallows and what had gone wrong with them.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he was. Gordon can be a very tedious little man.’

  ‘We were discussing how the two nooses might have got switched.’

  ‘Incompetence on his part, I would imagine.’

  ‘I wonder …’

  ‘What do you mean by that, Jude?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Are you suggesting the nooses might have been switched deliberately?’

  ‘It’s a thought, isn’t it? Which would have meant someone in the Devil’s Disciple company really had it in for Ritchie Good.’

  There was a silence. Jude could sense Elizaveta assessing her response. Then the older woman said, ‘Well, if you’re looking for that person, Jude, you might do a lot worse than remember what I said to you last night.’

  ‘Davina?’

  ‘You said it.’

  Both Carole and Jude were required for the rehearsal that Sunday afternoon. Rather boldly, the director had announced that they were going to do the whole play for the first time, ‘which, given the fact that we open in a month’s time, should put the fear of God into all of you.’

  If that was the sole aim of the exercise, it certainly worked. The unreadiness of the entire company was made manifest, and no one seemed less ready than Olly Pinto. His lines were still all over the place, and Carole as prompter had one of the busiest afternoons of her life.

  Olly’s incompetence seemed to infect the others like some quick-spreading plague. Even Jude, who’d always been rock solid on her lines, found herself stumbling and mumbling. And she was by no means the worst. By the time they got to the end of the play, the whole thing was a complete shambles. The final scene, the near-hanging of Dick Dudgeon, had never been rehearsed properly with all of the extras who were meant to populate the town square, and they milled around like sheep in search of a shepherd.

  As Davina’s mood grew increasingly frayed, Carole and Jude found themselves watching the director closely and trying to reconcile her with the suspicions raised by both Elizaveta Dalrymple and Neville Prideaux. What he had said did make a kind of sense. Until that Sunday afternoon Davina had been more relaxed in rehearsal without the presence of Ritchie Good. In Olly Pinto she’d got a much less convincing Dick Dudgeon, but a considerably more biddable actor. She seemed to revel in bawling him out, in a way she never would have done with Ritchie.

  Davina was dressed that day in jeans and a bright coral jumper with a high collar. Jude observed that she always seemed to wear high collars. She wondered whether this was a vanity thing, disguising the age-induced stringiness of her neck.

  And Jude tried, without success, to think of Davina Vere Smith as a murderer. It just didn’t fit, didn’t seem right.

  When the last line of the play had finally been spoken, at just before six o’clock, the director indulged herself in a major tantrum. This was all the more effective for being unexpected. Up until then in rehearsal, except for her regular verbal assaults on Olly Pinto, Davina had been conciliatory and friendly to the rest of the cast. So they all looked shocked to hear her finally losing her rag.

  ‘The whole thing was complete rubbish! I don’t know why I’ve been wasting my time with you lot for the last three months! This afternoon was an example of absolutely no one showing any concentration at all! OK, this is just an amateur production, and if you’ve come along for the ride and don’t care about the quality of the show and just want to have a giggle at rehearsals, then fair enough. I think you should leave now. We can very happily manage without you.

  ‘But I have certain standards I want to maintain. SADOS has certain standards it wants to maintain, and on the evidence of what I’ve seen this afternoon, we aren’t achieving any of them. But for the fact that the box office is already open and tickets have already been bought for The Devil’s Disciple, I would pull the plugs on the whole production now!

  ‘So …’ Davina paused for a moment to gather her breath and her thoughts. The Devil’s Disciple company were too shocked to say anything, as she continued, ‘I know it’s six o’clock and you’re all gasping to go to the Cricketers, but I’m afraid I’m not going to let anyone go until we’ve had another look at the blocking of that last scene. It’s a complete dog’s dinner and we need to do a bit of basic work on it.

  ‘So those of you who aren’t involved can go. Jude, obviously, since Mrs Dudgeon is long dead. And Carole, you can go. I’ll be concentrating on the movements not the words for this bit. But the rest of you … will you please all pull your bloody socks up and concentrate for the next half-hour!’

  It was a measure of the effect Davina’s unwonted outburst had had that nobody moaned about being kept from their liquid refreshment in the Cricketers. All of the company looked very chastened as Carole and Jude slipped out to the pub.

  ‘I was idly thinking about Davina’s neck,’ said Jude, as they settled down with their large Chilean Chardonnays. The pub was virtually empty, just Len behind the bar reading the Mail on Sunday. Again she wondered how the Cricketers would keep going without the regular custom of SADOS members.

  ‘Davina’s neck? What on earth do you mean?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Well, every time I see her at rehearsal she’s wearing these high collars. I assume it’s because – as happens at our age – her neck is getting a bit stringy and her cleavage a bit wrinkled.’

  ‘What do you mean – “as happens at our age”?’ Carole was quite put out. ‘I don’t believe I’m getting either stringy or wrinkled.’

  ‘No, but you’re so thin no w
rinkle would dare to sully your skin.’

  Carole looked beadily at her neighbour, unsure whether she was being sent up or not. Eventually she decided that what she’d just heard was probably a compliment. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘Davina’s cleavage is in very good condition.’

  ‘Oh? When have you seen it?’

  ‘First time I met her. First time I met her properly, that is. In the Crown and Anchor, when she tried to persuade me to take over as prompter.’

  ‘She not only tried to persuade you. She succeeded in persuading you.’

  ‘Well, all right. Anyway, on that occasion she was wearing a purple cardigan, unbuttoned to show quite a lot of cleavage. And, as I say, the cleavage in question was in very good condition.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Then I wonder why she always wears high collars at rehearsal?’

  ‘Up to her, I would have thought.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Incidentally, I don’t want you to get the impression that I make a habit of staring at other women’s cleavages.’

  When Carole made remarks like that, Jude could never be quite sure whether she was serious or not. Deciding on this occasion she probably was, Jude said, ‘Thought never occurred to me.’

  ‘The reason I noticed it on that occasion was that Davina was wearing a rather distinctive pendant.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Silver. Shaped like a star.’

  This prompted a much less casual ‘Oh.’ Jude’s brown eyes sparkled with excitement as she asked, ‘Was it like the one Elizaveta wears?’

  ‘I’ve never noticed Elizaveta wearing any particular jewellery.’

  ‘But she showed it that first evening in here. After we’d delivered the chaise longue.’

  ‘What? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Jude.’

  ‘Oh, of course you weren’t in the group with Elizaveta, were you? You were being bored to death by Gordon Blaine.’

  ‘I still don’t understand a word you’re saying. I just …’

  But Jude was already out of her seat, crossing to the bar and snatching the landlord’s attention away from his Mail on Sunday. ‘Len, do you remember the silver pendant that got left here after a pantomime rehearsal?’