Death Of A Hollow Man (20 page)

“Oh,” said Barnaby. Then, disappointing her: “If we could return to the razor. Did you see anyone touching it or handling the tray who shouldn’t have been?”

“No. And I’ll tell you why.” She looked with deep solemnity at both men. “When I’m acting … when I’m in that state of high concentration that we in the profession must be able to summon if the performance is going to work, I see nothing—but
nothing—that
isn’t measurably relevant to my part.”

“Even when you’ve no lines?” asked Barnaby.

“Especially then.
Sans
words, there’s only the action of the drama to anchor the emotions.”

“I understand.” Barnaby nodded, matching her gravity. Troy, unimpressed, wrote on his borrowed pad, “Saw nothing suspicious at props table.”

“What time did you arrive this evening, Rosa?”

“On the half. I went straight to my dressing room and didn’t come out till my first entrance. About ten minutes into Act One.”

Barnaby nodded again, then sat, silent, drumming his fingers absently against the arm of his chair. As the moments passed, Rosa shifted uneasily. Troy, long familiar with the chief’s technique, simply anticipated.

“Rosa.” Barnaby gathered himself and leaned forward. “It is my belief that, far from welcoming your freedom at the time of your divorce and wishing Esslyn well in his second marriage, you fought to keep your own going and have hated him ever since he left you.”

Rosa cried out then, and covered her clown’s mouth with her fingers. Her hands shook, and sweat rolled down her face. Barnaby sat back and watched the actorish deceit evaporate, leaving, oddly now that truth was present, doubt and childlike bewilderment.

‘‘You’re right.” Having said this she sounded almost relieved. She paused for a long time, then started to speak, stopping and starting. Feeling her way. “I thought it would fade, especially after I remarried. And Earnest is so good. But it persisted, eating at me. I wanted a child, you see. He knew that. He denied me. Persuaded me against it. And then to give one to Kitty.” She produced a handkerchief and rubbed at her face. “But the amazing thing, Tom— and I do mean this, I really do—is that all the hatred’s gone. Isn’t that extraordinary? Just as if someone somewhere pulled a plug and let it drain away. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? That something so strong it was poisoning your life could simply disappear. Like magic.”

After a few moment’s silence, during which Barnaby mulled over Rosa’s excellent motive for murder, he indicated that she was free to go. She stood for a moment at the door, looking, in spite of her cheap flamboyant robe and rampaging complexion, not entirely ridiculous. She seemed to be searching for some concluding remark, perhaps with the idea of ameliorating her former harshness. Eventually, almost as if memory had caught her by surprise, she said, “We were young together once.” Barnaby next interviewed Boris, who twitched and shook his way through the questions until Sergeant Troy, from pure pity, offered him a cigarette. Boris insisted that he had seen no one handle the razor all evening, and could not imagine why anyone would want to kill Esslyn. All the other bit-part actors came and went, saying the same thing. As each one left the scene dock, they were followed by a cry of fury as Harold protested against this disgraceful reversal of the natural order of precedence.

One scene-of-crime man arrived closely followed by Bill Davidson, untimely wrenched from his Masonic revels. After a briefing, they went about their business, working through the men’s dressing room first and releasing it for occupation. Cully took her mother home, Esslyn left for the county morgue, and Barnaby called for the Everards.

Clive and Donald came prancing in, their eyes aglow with anticipation, trailing clouds of
schadenfreude.
They were still made up, and their pointilliste complexions were the peculiar tea-rose pink of old-fashioned corsets. Barnaby chose to see them together, knowing their habit of egging each other on to ever more indiscreet and racy revelations. Now, preening and clucking like a couple of cassowaries, they circled the two chairs cautiously a couple of times before perching. They stared beady-eyed at Sergeant Troy and his notebook, and he stared boldly but uneasily back.

The sergeant liked men to be men and women to be glad of it. Here was a pair he couldn’t place at all. He always boasted he could tell a faggot a mile off, but he wasn’t at all sure about this particular combo. He decided they had probably been neutered at an early age and, having pinned them down to his satisfaction, heard Barnaby ask if they could think of anyone who would wish to harm the dead man and flipped over to a new page.

“Quite honestly,” said Clive Everard, taking a keen, deep breath, “it’d take less time to tell you who wouldn’t wish to harm him. I shouldn’t think there’s anyone in the company hasn’t come up against Esslyn at some time and been the worse for it.”

“If you could be a little more specific.”

“If it’s
specific
you want—” They exchanged glances glittering with spite. “Why not start with Deidre. He was telling this wonderful story in the dressing room—”

“—positively hilarious—”

“About her father—”

“Laughter and applause—”

“And suddenly there she was in the doorway. She must have overheard Esslyn call the old man senile—”

“Which of course he is.”

“But d’you think she’ll admit it? Absentminded … disoriented … poorly …”

“Poorly,
” cackled Donald. “So what more natural than that she had a stab at getting her own back. Oops … Freudian slip there. Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry. His smile was as bright as a new penny as he added, “And of course who would have a better opportunity?”

“This happened when she called the quarter?” asked Barnaby, recalling Deidre’s distressed appearance as he had passed through the wings.

“That’s right. Would you care to hear the story?” Clive added politely.

“No,” said Barnaby. “Anyone else?” Then, when they appeared to be savoring a multitude of possibilities: “What about Nicholas?”

“Ahhh, you’ve snuffed out that little
contretemps.
Esslyn’d just discovered that his little kitten was having an affair.’’

“And I’m afraid,” murmured Donald, looking with shy regret at Sergeant Troy, “that it was rather our fault.”

“Not that we thought he’d react anything like he did.”

“Heaven forbid.”

“I mean, his complacency is legendary.” “Undentable.”

“So who,” asked Barnaby, “was she supposed to be having an affair with?”

“Well, we heard from Rosa who got it from Boris who got it from Avery who got it from Nicholas that it was David Smy.”

“And where did Nicholas get it from?”

“My dear, apparently he actually saw them,” cried Donald. “Going at it like the clappers in Tim’s lighting box.”

Barnaby supposed stranger things had happened. Himself, he would not have thought that Kitty, whose winsome appearance masked, he felt sure, a self-serving duplicitous little nature, would have fancied the rather stolid David. Mind you, if she was looking for a change, no one could have been a greater contrast to Esslyn.

“And as he was our friend,” said Donald with an unctuous wriggle, “we felt he ought to know.”

“So we told him.”

“In the middle of a performance?”

“Well, you know what an old pro he is … was. Nothing fazed him.” No need to ask how Barnaby knew precisely when. Act II spoke for itself. “Or so we thought.” “But my God—the effect!”

“We didn’t take his ego into account, you see. He’s like Harold. Sees himself as a prince … or a king. And Kitty belonged to him. No one else was allowed to touch.”
“Lese-majeste. ”

“He went white, didn’t he, Clive?”

“Quite white.”

“And his eyes blazed. It was really frightening. Like being a messenger in one of those Greek plays.”

“Where you hand over the bad news, then they take you outside and rearrange your innards with a toasting fork.”

“He got hold of my arm. I’ve still got the marks, look.” Donald rolled back his sleeve. “And he said
who?”

“Just the one word, ‘
who?’
”

“And I looked at his face and I looked at my arm and I thought, Well
I’m
not going to be the one to tell him who.”

“Friendship can be taken just so far.”

“Absolutely,” said Barnaby, ignoring his nausea and giving an encouraging smile. “So … ?”

“So I said,” continued Donald, “better ask Nicholas. And before I could say another word—”

“Before either of us could say another word—”

“He’d stormed off. And I never had a chance to add, “ ‘He’s the one who knows.’ ”

“And we realized once we’d got down to the dressing rooms that Esslyn’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick and thought that Nico was actually the man!”

“And you didn’t feel like disabusing him?”

“The place was packed, Tom.” Clive sounded reproving, if not scandalized. “You don’t want everyone knowing your business.”

Even Troy, so impassive in his role of bag-carrier that suspects occasionally thought he had entered a period of hibernation, choked back an astonished laugh at this astounding example of doublethink. The Everards turned and studied him carefully. Clive spoke.

“He’s not writing all this down, is he?”

Deidre ran on. And on. She seemed to have been running for hours. Her legs and feet ached, and a savage wind repeatedly plastered strips of soaking-wet hair over her eyes and mouth. She felt, from the soreness of her throat and totally clogged mucous membranes, that she must be crying, but so much water was pouring down her cheeks that it was impossible to be sure. Her father’s now-sodden coat, still clutched to her bosom, felt as heavy as lead. She peeled her hair away from her face for the hundredth time and staggered into the doorway of Me Andrew’s Pharmacy. Her heart leaped in her breast, and she tried to take long, deep breaths to calm it down. She averaged about one in three, the rest being broken by deep, shuddering sobs.

She rested between the two main windows. On her left stacks of disposable diapers and Tommy Tippee teething rings all supported by surging polystyrene worms. On her right a display of carboys, cans of grape concentrate, and coils of lemon plastic tubing like the intestines of a robot. (Be Your Own Fine Wine Merchant.)

Deidre moved to the edge of the step and stared up at the arch of the black thundering sky, a soft anemone violet when she had first left home. The stars in their courses, never all that concerned with the welfare of the human race, tonight looked especially indifferent. Through the rivulets making their way down Deidre’s glasses, individual stars became blurred, then elongated into hard, shining lances.

She had been running in circles. Starting in the High Street, then working outward in concentric rings. She had looked in all the shop entrances and checked Adelaide’s and the Jolly Cavalier, although a public house was the last place she would normally expect to find her father. In both places bursts of laughter had followed her wild appearance and speedy withdrawal. She scurried round and round, obsessed by the idea that she was just missing him. She saw him, old and cold and drenched to the skin, just one street ahead or a hundred yards behind or even in a directly parallel path concealed only by a house or dark gathering of trees.

Twice she had called in at home, checking every room and even the garden shed. The second time she had been terribly tempted by the still faintly glowing embers in the kitchen grate to take off her wet clothes and make some tea and just sit by the fire for a while. But minutes later, she was driven out to the streets again, afraid she would never find him yet compelled by love and desperation to keep on trying.

So now she stood, her hand pressed against her pounding heart, her skin stinging under the arrowheads of rain, unable to take another step. Not knowing which way to turn. She tormented herself with pictures of her father lying in a gutter somewhere. Or huddled against a wall. No matter that, having covered every gutter and every wall, if he had been, she would have long since discovered him. The ability to think rationally vanished the moment she had stepped into the clubroom and seen the empty chair, and blind panic took its place. She pressed her face against the cold glass and stared into the window.

Once more she turned her face toward the savage constellation of stars. God was up there, thought Deidre. God with His all-seeing eye. He would know where her father was. He could direct her if He chose. She locked her fingers together and prayed, choking on half-remembered fragments of childhood incantations: “Gentle Jesus … now I lay me down to sleep … in Thee have I trusted … neither run into any kind of danger …” Numb with cold, her hands pressed against each other in an urgency of supplication as she stared beseechingly upward.

But nothing changed. If anything, the great wash of iridescent stars looked even more distant, and the milky radiance of the moon more inhumanly bright. On one of Deidre’s lenses a rivulet spread sideways; the lance became a stretched grin.

She recalled her father’s years of piety. His simple confidence that he was loved by his Lord. Overlooked always by that luminous spirit and safe from all harm. Slowly anger began to course through her veins, unfreezing her blood, thawing out her frozen fingers. Was this to be his reward for years of devotion? To be allowed to slide into madness, then abandoned and left to caper about in the howling wind and rain like some poor homeless elemental? A wave of anguish swept over her. Followed by feelings of fury directed at a God she was no longer sure even existed. She stepped out of her shelter into the torrential rain and shook her fist at the heavens.

“You!” she screamed. “You were supposed to be looking after him!”

The police escort, alerted by the constable outside the Latimer, had just missed Deidre several times. Now, Policewoman Audrey Brieriey gave her companion a nudge and said, “Over there.”

Deidre had stopped yelling by the time they got out, and just stood with sad resignation awaiting their approach. Very gently they persuaded her into the car and took her home.