The Strangling on the Stage

by Simon Brett

  ‘Oh, Freddie.’ An expression of sheer hero-worship took over her face. ‘He was wonderful. Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘Didn’t have that pleasure,’ said Jude.

  ‘Though we’ve heard so much about him,’ said Carole, ‘that we feel as though we’ve met him.’

  ‘He was just a wonderful man. So talented. And so kind to everyone, particularly to new members of SADOS.’

  A look was exchanged between Carole and Jude. Each knew the other was thinking, ‘particularly to new, young, pretty members of the SADOS’. Who could benefit so much from Freddie’s assistance when working on their parts in his flat in Worthing. Another look between the two also made a silent agreement that they weren’t about to ask whether Mimi Lassiter had ever been the recipient of a star-shaped pendant. It just didn’t seem likely.

  ‘I gather,’ said Carole, ‘it was a great upheaval for the society when Freddie Dalrymple died.’

  ‘Oh, it was terrible. For a long time nobody knew what would happen to SADOS. It seemed impossible that the society could continue without Freddie. But that’s when Elizaveta really came into her own. She’s such a strong woman, you know.’

  Neither Carole nor Jude was about to argue with that.

  ‘Could we come back to this morning?’ Carole’s question was not one that would have brooked the answer no.

  ‘All right,’ said Mimi, instantly subdued.

  ‘And your attempt to kill Jude.’ Mimi did not argue with the phrasing. ‘You’ve told us you were in a bad state this morning, that you weren’t thinking straight, but you haven’t told us why you wanted Jude dead.’

  ‘I wanted both of you dead,’ said Mimi with refreshing honesty. ‘I still do.’

  An anxious look passed between the two women. Was their unwilling hostess about to produce a gun?

  ‘But Elizaveta told me that’s not the right way to proceed.’

  ‘I’d go along with that,’ Carole agreed. ‘But when did Elizaveta say this?’

  ‘Just now. The phone was ringing when I got back from Smalting.’

  ‘And had she rung you earlier in the morning as well?’

  ‘Yes. She told me you were both coming round. And she said you were coming because you thought Ritchie Good’s death might not be an accident.’

  ‘Which is why you were waiting for us in your Renault? To run us down?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mimi replied quietly.

  Jude took over. ‘Elizaveta said just now on the phone that what you’d done wasn’t the right way to proceed. Did she tell you what would have been the right way?’

  ‘Elizaveta had seen what had happened in the street outside her house. She knew that I had tried to kill you, and she said that I shouldn’t try to do things like that ever again.’ She made it sound like a child being chastised by a parent for not making her bed. And Jude was struck by the fact that Mimi Lassiter was childlike. There was something emotionally undeveloped about her, the little girl who could not make her own decisions, who had to be directed by a stronger woman. Like her mother … or Elizaveta Dalrymple.

  ‘Tell us about Ritchie Good’s death,’ said Jude gently.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You switched the real noose for the doctored one, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Once again there was pride in her voice.

  ‘And had you planned to do that,’ asked Carole, ‘after you’d heard Gordon Blaine describe the mechanism the previous day?’

  ‘That planted the idea in my head, yes.’

  ‘So what actually happened after the rehearsal that Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Well, it was very lucky, actually.’ Mimi was now talking with enthusiasm, and clearly not a vestige of guilt. ‘Most people had left St Mary’s Hall, but I was gathering my bits together, my bag and what-have-you. I’d left them in the Green Room, so I was near the stage, and I heard some people come in, and I recognized Ritchie Good’s voice, and Hester Winstone’s. And he was saying how she’d missed a really good show when he used the gallows and she must have what he called “a command performance”. Well, Hester didn’t sound very interested, and Ritchie was trying to persuade her, and I thought, “I’m never going to get a better opportunity than this.” So I went onstage, and the curtains were drawn and it was easy to get on to the cart and switch the two nooses around. And then I slipped out of the hall without them seeing me, and I went to the Cricketers.’ She smiled beatifically. ‘It all worked remarkably well, didn’t it?’

  There was a silence. Then Carole asked, ‘And did you do it because the night before you heard Elizaveta say that she wanted Ritchie dead?’

  Mimi looked at her curiously. ‘No, it was nothing to do with Elizaveta.’

  ‘Then why did you do it?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Well, obviously … because Ritchie Good was in a SADOS production while not being a member of SADOS. He hadn’t paid his subscription.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘What do you think we do about her?’ asked Carole, as she drove her white Renault the short distance back to High Tor.

  ‘Do you mean, do we shop her to the police?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’ Her voice took on its Home Office tone. ‘It would be the proper thing to do.’

  Jude grimaced sceptically. ‘Pretty difficult case for them to bring to court and secure a conviction. Also, what I always think in situations like this is: does a person like Mimi represent a danger to anyone else?’

  ‘Might I remind you, Jude, that we’re talking about someone who only this morning tried to kill you by running you over?’

  ‘Yes, I know. I really do think she’s got all that out of her system, though. She virtually said as much.’

  ‘But do you believe her?’

  ‘Yes, I do actually. What about you?’

  Carole was forced unwillingly to admit that she couldn’t see Mimi Lassiter as a public danger either.

  ‘I’m more worried,’ said Jude, ‘about the threat she might pose to herself.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She told us she’d got near to suicide when her mother died – or “passed”, as she insisted on saying.’

  ‘Well, this morning she seemed far from suicidal. Positively gleeful at having got away with killing Ritchie Good.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘And, Jude, you made her fix that appointment with her GP to talk about her issues with depression.’ Jude nodded. ‘In the circumstances I don’t think there was a lot more you could have done.’

  Over the next few months Carole’s words came back to haunt Jude. She felt an ugly tug of guilt. Perhaps there was a lot more she could have done. But during the run of The Devil’s Disciple both she and Carole had kept a cautious eye on Mimi Lassiter, and neither had seen anything untoward.

  They didn’t think there was anything significant about her absence from the last night cast party. In fact, to be honest, in such a raucous scrum of posing thespians they didn’t notice she wasn’t there.

  Every night during the run of The Devil’s Disciple, Mimi had dutifully done her (again unnoticed) performances in the Westerfield crowd at the near-hanging of Dick Dudgeon. That duty discharged, on the Saturday night she had packed up her belongings in St Mary’s Hall and driven in her white Renault back to her parents’ house (it still felt like her parents’ house) in Fethering. Once there she had run a hot bath, got into it, swallowed down about thirty paracetamol from the store she had stockpiled when previously feeling suicidal, and slit her wrists with her father’s old cut-throat razor.

  The reason she had killed herself had nothing to do with guilt about causing the death of Ritchie Good. That event, she thought, had been very just and appropriate. Mimi had almost as strong an aversion to ‘showing-off’ as Carole Seddon. Ritchie Good had always been a ‘show-off’ and it was ‘showing-off’ that had brought about his demise. Besides, he’d never paid his subscription to be a member of SADOS.

  But what had really made Mimi suicidal was the suspension of patron
age by Elizaveta Dalrymple. After the attempt to run over Jude, the grande dame of SADOS had decided that perhaps Mimi was no longer the sort of person she wished to have attending her ‘drinkies things’. By long tradition Elizaveta issued her invitations to her regulars on the Friday for the Saturday eight days away. By the end of the Friday which saw the penultimate performance of The Devil’s Disciple, Mimi Lassiter had received no such summons. And by the end of the Saturday she realized she wasn’t going to receive one. Mimi had been cast into the outer darkness. She would never get another invitation to one of Elizaveta’s ‘drinkies things’.

  Without her idol’s support, patronage and validation Mimi Lassiter crumpled like a rag doll. To her mind suicide was the only available option for her.

  Of course, at the cast party nobody knew of the gruesome event taking place in Fethering. It was afterwards they heard the news which caused Jude such disquiet.

  But at the party itself there was a high level of good cheer. This was because people in amdrams always like to let their hair down at the end of a production, rather than because The Devil’s Disciple had been a huge success. Neville Prideaux’s conviction that a wordy minor work by George Bernard Shaw was what the good burghers of Smalting were craving for had been proved completely wrong. They had stayed away in droves, and those who had attended had been unimpressed. In spite of all Carole Seddon’s assiduous one-to-one ‘line-bashing’ sessions, when faced by a live audience Olly Pinto’s memory appeared to have been wiped completely. He had ensured that Carole, in her role as prompter, had had a very busy week. And the people in the front row of St Mary’s Hall had heard more from her than they had from some of the actors.

  Storm Lavelle, on the other hand, had really built her performance throughout the run. She did have genuine talent and Jude wondered whether her butterfly brain would allow her to concentrate sufficiently on trying to get work in the professional theatre. Secretly, Jude rather doubted it. Like many aspiring actors, her friend had the talent, but lacked the tenacity required to make a go of it.

  Storm had had her hair done on the morning of The Devil’s Disciple’s final performance and, on removing Judith Anderson’s wig, revealed a fuschia-pink crop with a long jagged fringe. For the cast party she wore a diamanté top over silver leggings. She looked terrific, her sparkle increased by the knowledge of how well she had acted in the show.

  Storm seemed in such a relaxed mood that Jude thought she could ask about the strange moment when her friend had put the phone down on her. ‘Do you remember, I said it was something about Ritchie Good and Elizaveta …?’

  Storm looked embarrassed. ‘The fact is, I had a bit of history with Ritchie which I didn’t want anyone to hear about. And when you said it concerned that old cow Elizaveta too, I thought she might spread the news around SADOS.’

  ‘And what was this “history” you had with Ritchie? An affair?’

  ‘No, it didn’t quite get that far, but it still left me feeling pretty stupid.’

  ‘May I put forward a theory of what might have happened?’

  Storm looked puzzled, but shrugged and said, ‘If you want to.’

  ‘I suggest that Ritchie Good came on to you quite heavily, got you keen and interested, got you to the point where you’d agreed to go to bed with him, and then said he couldn’t go through with it because of his loyalty to his wife.’

  A thunderstruck expression took over Storm’s face. ‘How on earth did you know that?’

  ‘Let’s just say there was a pattern to Ritchie’s behaviour.’

  ‘Oh. Well, the thing that worried me was that, I suppose trying to curry favour with the old bat, I told Elizaveta what had happened. Which was very stupid, because it was a sure way of guaranteeing that everyone in SADOS would soon know. And there was one person I really didn’t want to know I’d had any kind of relationship with Ritchie Good.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  Jude’s question was immediately answered by the wide smile that came to Storm’s lips as she saw someone approaching them. It was Olly Pinto, grinning broadly.

  His disastrous showing as Dick Dudgeon during the week seemed not to have affected him one bit. Jude had noticed him earlier at the cast party, in extremely high spirits, downing beer after beer.

  And now she realized from the way he was looking at Storm Lavelle that there was another cause for his good cheer. Jude felt a bit silly for not having seen anything developing between the two of them earlier, because it was now clear that Olly Pinto was destined to be the next man to feel the full force of Storm’s adoration. Jude didn’t think it would do either of them any harm, and might in fact do them some good.

  As a result of The Devil’s Disciple’s failure to bring in the audiences, there was now a move among the younger members of the society to oust Neville Prideaux from the Play Selection Committee. His star had waned considerably. And some of this younger group at the party were arguing quite loudly that it wasn’t too late to change the SADOS’s next production from I Am A Camera to three episodes of Fawlty Towers. The mention of this led to a lot of the men going into comedy goose-stepping, as if auditioning for the part of Basil Fawlty.

  Elizaveta Dalrymple, who had somehow got entangled with this group, proved not to be as averse to the idea of doing the three television episodes as some might have expected. The reason was, of course, that she didn’t really think she was too old to play Basil’s wife Sibyl.

  Inevitably, Elizaveta had come back into the SADOS fold. As Olly Pinto had predicted, she had been at the first night (‘someone dropped out at the last minute’) and had met so many people there who were delighted to see her and urged her to attend the cast party on the Saturday night, that she couldn’t really disappoint them. This suited her very well, because she had really wanted to get back in ever since Ritchie Good’s death. With the man who’d insulted her removed, there was no reason for her not to reclaim her rightful place, the spider at the centre of the SADOS web.

  Her rift with Davina Vere Smith also seemed somehow to have been healed. Jude did not know how this had been achieved, but suspected some telephonic machinations on Elizaveta’s part, some agreement whereby Davina would never mention her involvement with Freddie and would always wear high collars at SADOS rehearsals.

  Of course, Hester Winstone was not at the cast party. Jude had been in touch with Rob at Casements about future healing work and heard that Hester had left the convalescent home. Where to, Rob couldn’t be sure, but he thought she had returned to her family. Jude didn’t envy Hester her reunion with Mike because, in her experience, cricketers remained the most misogynist of sportsmen. Maybe she’d try to give Hester a call to offer help, but she very much suspected that the carapace of middle-class respectability would once again have closed over, and the need for any assistance would be denied. Hester would assure her that ‘We are all right as we are.’ It was frustrating, but there was nothing Jude could do about it. She did definitely plan to do more work at Casements, though.

  The wine was flowing and some people were dancing. To provide the music, one of the younger members had produced a portable CD player. (Gordon Blaine had earlier set up a huge system of amplifiers and speakers in one corner of the room, but unfortunately it didn’t work.)

  Jude didn’t feel like dancing. Apart from anything else, her body was still wincing from the bruises caused by her encounter with Mimi Lassiter’s Renault. And her body language must have indicated her unwillingness to dance, because nobody asked her. Had Carole been thus neglected, although she ‘didn’t like dancing’, she would have taken it very personally indeed.

  Jude didn’t mind at all. She just wanted to go home.

  But it would be a while yet. Her transport, Carole, who ‘didn’t like dancing’, was in vigorous motion on the dance floor, mirroring the movements of the Heil-Hitlering young man in front of her (yes, it was a continuation of his Basil Fawlty impression).

  Her neighbour, Jude concluded with an inward giggle, was act
ually a little bit pissed. Tired after the evening’s concentration on trying to get Olly Pinto to deliver at least a few lines of genuine George Bernard Shaw, Carole had gulped down the first two glasses of wine quicker than she normally would. And now Jude found herself witnessing something she had longed for but never expected to see – Carole Seddon casting off at least some of her inhibitions.

  Jude didn’t want any more to drink, and wondered mischievously how an offer that she, being the more sober, should drive the Renault back to Fethering would go down with her neighbour. No, probably not a good idea.

  She looked around St Mary’s Hall. The main sets of The Devil’s Disciple had been dismantled with surprising speed. Jude could not keep out of her head Lysander’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘So quick bright things come to confusion.’ There was always a pleasing melancholy about the ending of a theatrical production. The stage crew, encouraged by copious draughts of beer, were still stripping away flats and props. Gordon Blaine was at the centre of the operation, clearly happier doing something useful than trying to be sociable.

  And, moved from the wings to the body of the hall, stood the chaise longue. Almost unnoticed by audience and critics alike, it had delivered another sterling performance. Jude didn’t think she’d suggest taking it home in the Renault that evening. Carole seemed to be enjoying herself too much for that. They could pick it up another day and take it back to Woodside Cottage. Where it could wait, draped with throws and cushions, till it received its next summons to become part of the magic of the theatre.

  Eventually it was clear that Carole’s programme of dancing had come to an end. When they stopped, the young man of the Basil Fawlty impressions wrapped her in a bear-hug and it was a rather flushed Carole Seddon who came across to join Jude.

  ‘Promise me I’ll see you on the next production, Carole!’ the young man called after her.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said with a little giggle. ‘Never say never.’

  Carole had driven with intense concentration from St Mary’s Hall back to Fethering. She had not infringed any speed limits or deviated from a line exactly parallel to the kerb of the road. But she had driven rather slowly.