Death on the Air (7 page)

I came round, let myself in, and listened. All quiet upstairs, but the lamp still on in the study, so I knew he would come down again. He'd said he wanted to get the midnight broadcast from somewhere
.

I locked myself in and got to work. When Sep was away last year, Arthur did one of his modern monstrosities of paintings in the study. He talked about the knobs making good pattern. I noticed then that they were very like the ones on the radio and later on I tried one and saw that it would Jit if I packed it up a bit. Well, I did the job just as you worked it out, and it only took twelve minutes. Then I went into the drawing room and waited
.

He came down from Isabel's room and evidently went straight to the radio. I hadn't thought it would make such a row, and half expected someone would come down. No one came. I went back, switched off the wireless, mended the fuse in the main switchboard, using my torch. Then I put everything right in the study
.

There was no particular hurry. No one would come in while he was there, and I got the radio going as soon as possible to suggest he was at it. I knew I'd be called in when they found him. My idea was to tell them he had died of a stroke. I'd been warning Isabel it might happen at any time. As soon as I saw the burned hand I knew that cat wouldn't jump. I'd have tried to get away with it if Chase hadn't gone round bleating about electrocution and burned fingers. Hislop saw the hand. I daren't do anything but report the case to the police, but I thought you'd never twig the knobs. One up to you
.

I might have bluffed through if you hadn't suspected Hislop. Can't let you hang the blighter. I'm enclosing a note to Isabel, who won't forgive me, and an official one for you to use. You'll find me in my bedroom upstairs. I'm using cyanide. It's quick
.

I'm sorry, Alleyn. I think you knew, didn't you? I've bungled the whole game, but if you will be a super-sleuth…Goodbye
.

Henry Meadows

I Can Find My Way Out
was first published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
(USA) in 1946

A
t half past six on the night in question, Anthony Gill, unable to eat, keep still, think, speak or act coherently, walked from his rooms to the Jupiter Theatre. He knew that there would be nobody backstage, that there was nothing for him to do in the theatre, that he ought to stay quietly in his rooms and presently dress, dine and arrive at, say, a quarter to eight. But it was as if something shoved him into his clothes, thrust him into the street and compelled him to hurry through the West End to the Jupiter. His mind was overlaid with a thin film of inertia. Odd lines from the play occurred to him, but without any particular significance. He found himself busily reiterating a completely irrelevant sentence: ‘She has a way of laughing that would make a man's heart turn over.'

Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘Here I go,' he thought, turning into Hawke Street, ‘towards my play. It's one hour and twenty nine minutes away. A step a second. It's rushing towards me. Tony's first play. Poor young Tony Gill. Never mind. Try again.'

The Jupiter. Neon lights:
I CAN FIND MY WAY OUT
–
by Anthony Gill
. And in the entrance the bills and photographs.
Coralie Bourne with H J Bannington, Barry George and Canning Cumberland
.

Canning Cumberland
. The film across his mind split and there was the Thing itself and he would have to think about it. How bad would Canning Cumberland be if he came down drunk? Brilliantly bad, they said. He would bring out all the tricks. Clever actor stuff, scoring off everybody, making a fool of the dramatic balance. ‘In Mr Canning Cumberland's hands indifferent dialogue and unconvincing situations seemed almost real.' What can you do with a drunken actor?

He stood in the entrance feeling his heart pound and his inside deflate and sicken.

Because, of course, it was a bad play. He was at this moment and for the first time really convinced of it. It was terrible. Only one virtue in it and that was not his doing. It had been suggested to him by Coralie Bourne: ‘I don't think the play you have sent me will do as it is but it has occurred to me—' It was a brilliant idea. He had rewritten the play round it and almost immediately and quite innocently he had begun to think of it as his own although he had said shyly to Coralie Bourne: ‘You should appear as joint author.' She had quickly, over emphatically, refused. ‘It was nothing at all,' she said. ‘If you're to become a dramatist you will learn to get ideas from everywhere. A single situation is nothing. Think of Shakespeare,' she added lightly. ‘Entire plots! Don't be silly.' She had said later, and still with the same hurried, nervous air: ‘Don't go talking to everyone about it. They will think there is more, instead of less, than meets the eye in my small suggestion. Please promise.' He promised, thinking he'd made an error in taste when he suggested that Coralie Bourne, so famous an actress, should appear as joint author with an unknown youth. And how right she was, he thought, because, of course, it's going to be a ghastly flop. She'll be sorry she consented to play in it.

Standing in front of the theatre he contemplated nightmare possibilities. What did audiences do when a first play flopped? Did they clap a little, enough to let the curtain rise and quickly fall again on a discomforted group of players? How scanty must the applause be for them to let him off his own appearance? And they were to go on to the Chelsea Arts Ball. A hideous prospect. Thinking he would give anything in the world if he could stop his play, he turned into the foyer. There were lights in the offices and he paused, irresolute, before a board of photographs. Among them, much smaller than the leading players, was Dendra Gay with the eyes looking straight into his.
She had a way of laughing that would make a man's
heart turn over
. ‘Well,' he thought, ‘so I'm in love with her.' He turned away from the photograph. A man came out of the office. ‘Mr Gill? Telegrams for you.'

Anthony took them and as he went out he heard the man call after him: ‘Very good luck for tonight, sir.'

There were queues of people waiting in the side street for the early doors.

At six thirty Coralie Bourne dialled Canning Cumberland's number and waited.

She heard his voice. ‘It's me,' she said.

‘O God! darling, I've been thinking about you.' He spoke rapidly, too loudly. ‘Coral, I've been thinking about Ben. You oughtn't to have given that situation to the boy.'

‘We've been over it a dozen times, Cann. Why not give it to Tony? Ben will never know.' She waited and then said nervously, ‘Ben's gone, Cann. We'll never see him again.'

‘I've got a Thing about it. After all, he's your husband.'

‘No, Cann, no.'

‘Suppose he turns up. It'd be like him to turn up.'

‘He won't turn up.'

She heard him laugh. ‘I'm sick of all this,' she thought suddenly. ‘I've had it once too often. I can't stand any more…Cann,' she said into the telephone. But he had hung up.

At twenty to seven, Barry George looked at himself in his bathroom mirror. ‘I've got a better appearance,' he thought, ‘than Cann Cumberland. My head's a good shape, my eyes are bigger and my jaw line's cleaner. I never let a show down. I don't drink. I'm a better actor.' He turned his head a little, slewing his eyes to watch the effect. ‘In the big scene,' he thought, ‘I'm the star. He's the feed. That's the way it's been produced and that's what the author wants. I ought to get the notices.'

Past notices came up in his memory. He saw the print, the
size of the paragraphs; a long paragraph about Canning Cumberland, a line tacked on the end of it. ‘Is it unkind to add that Mr Barry George trotted in the wake of Mr Cumberland's virtuosity with an air of breathless dependability?' And again: ‘It is a little hard on Mr Barry George that he should be obliged to act as foil to this brilliant performance.' Worst of all: ‘Mr Barry George succeeded in looking tolerably unlike a stooge, an achievement that evidently exhausted his resources.'

‘Monstrous!' he said loudly to his own image, watching the fine glow of indignation in the eyes. Alcohol, he told himself, did two things to Cann Cumberland. He raised his finger. Nice, expressive hand. An actor's hand. Alcohol destroyed Cumberland's artistic integrity. It also invested him with devilish cunning. Drunk, he would burst the seams of a play, destroy its balance, ruin its form and himself emerge blazing with a showmanship that the audience mistook for genius. ‘While I,' he said aloud, ‘merely pay my author the compliment of faithful interpretation. Psha!'

He returned to his bedroom, completed his dressing and pulled his hat to the right angle. Once more he thrust his face close to the mirror and looked searchingly at its image. ‘By God!' he told himself, ‘he's done it once too often, old boy. Tonight we'll even the score, won't we? By God, we will.'

Partly satisfied, and partly ashamed, for the scene, after all, had smacked a little of ham, he took his stick in one hand and a case holding his costume for the Arts Ball in the other, and went down to the theatre.

At ten minutes to seven, H J Bannington passed through the gallery queue on his way to the stage door alley, raising his hat and saying: ‘Thanks so much,' to the gratified ladies who let him through. He heard them murmur his name. He walked briskly along the alley, greeted the stage-doorkeeper, passed under a dingy lamp, through an entry and so to the stage. Only working lights were up. The walls of an interior set rose
dimly into shadow. Bob Reynolds, the stage manager, came out through the prompt entrance. ‘Hello, old boy,' he said, ‘I've changed the dressing rooms. You're third on the right: they've moved your things in. Suit you?'

‘Better, at least, than a black-hole the size of a WC but – without its appointments,' HJ said acidly. ‘I suppose the great Mr Cumberland still has the star room?'

‘Well, yes, old boy.'

‘And who pray, is next to him? In the room with the other gas fire?'

‘We've put Barry George there, old boy. You know what he's like.'

‘Only too well, old boy, and the public, I fear, is beginning to find out.' HJ turned into the dressing room passage.

The stage manager returned to the set where he encountered his assistant. ‘What's biting
him
?' asked the assistant.

‘He wanted a dressing room with a fire.'

‘Only natural,' said the ASM nastily. ‘He started life reading gas meters.'

On the right and left of the passage, nearest the stage end, were two doors, each with its star in tarnished paint. The door on the left was open. HJ looked in and was greeted with the smell of greasepaint, powder, wet white, and flowers. A gas fire droned comfortably. Coralie Bourne's dresser was spreading out towels. ‘Good evening, Katie, my jewel,' said HJ. ‘La Belle not down yet?'

‘We're on our way,' she said.

HJ hummed stylishly: ‘
Bella filia del amore
,' and returned to the passage. The star room on the right was closed but he could hear Cumberland's dresser moving about inside. He went on to the next door, paused, read the card, ‘Mr Barry George,' warbled a high derisive note, turned in at the third door and switched on the light.

Definitely not a second lead's room. No fire. A washbasin, however, and opposite mirrors. A stack of telegrams had been placed on the dressing table. Still singing he reached for them,
disclosing a number of bills that had been tactfully laid underneath and a letter, addressed in a flamboyant script.

His voice might have been mechanically produced and arbitrarily switched off, so abruptly did his song end in the middle of a roulade. He let the telegrams fall on the table, took up the letter and tore it open. His face, wretchedly pale, was reflected and endlessly re-reflected in the mirrors.

At nine o'clock the telephone rang. Roderick Alleyn answered it. ‘This is Sloane 84405. No, you're on the wrong number.
No
.' He hung up and returned to his wife and guest. ‘That's the fifth time in two hours.'

‘Do let's ask for a new number.'

‘We might get next door to something worse.'

The telephone rang again. ‘This is not 84406,' Alleyn warned it. ‘No, I cannot take three large trunks to Victoria Station. No, I am not the Instant All Night Delivery. No.'

‘They're 84406,' Mrs Alleyn explained to Lord Michael Lamprey. ‘I suppose it's just faulty dialling, but you can't imagine how angry everyone gets. Why do you want to be a policeman?'

‘It's a dull hard job, you know—' Alleyn began.

‘Oh,' Lord Mike said, stretching his legs and looking critically at his shoes, ‘I don't for a moment imagine I'll leap immediately into false whiskers and plainclothes. No, no. But I'm revoltingly healthy, sir. Strong as a horse. And I don't think I'm as stupid as you might feel inclined to imagine—'

The telephone rang.

‘I say, do let me answer it,' Mike suggested and did so.

‘Hullo?' he said winningly. He listened, smiling at his hostess. ‘I'm afraid—' he began. ‘Here, wait a bit – Yes, but—' His expression became blank and complacent. ‘May I,' he said presently, ‘repeat your order, sir? Can't be too sure, can we? Call at 11 Harrow Gardens, Sloane Square, for one suitcase to be delivered immediately at the Jupiter Theatre to Mr Anthony Gill. Very good, sir. Thank you, sir. Collect. Quite.'

He replaced the receiver and beamed at the Alleyns.

‘What the devil have you been up to?' Alleyn said.

‘He just simply wouldn't listen to reason. I tried to tell him.'

‘But it may be urgent,' Mrs Alleyn ejaculated.

‘It couldn't be more urgent, really. It's a suitcase for Tony Gill at the Jupiter.'

‘Well, then—'

‘I was at Eton with the chap,' said Mike reminiscently. ‘He's four years older than I am so of course he was madly important while I was less than the dust. This'll larn him.'

‘I think you'd better put that order through at once,' said Alleyn firmly.

‘I rather thought of executing it myself, do you know, sir. It'd be a frightfully neat way of gate-crashing the show, wouldn't it? I did try to get a ticket but the house was sold out.'

‘If you're going to deliver this case you'd better get a bend on.'

‘It's clearly an occasion for dressing up though, isn't it? I say,' said Mike modestly, ‘would you think it most frightful cheek if I – well I'd promise to come back and return everything. I mean—'

‘Are you suggesting that my clothes look more like a vanman's than yours?'

‘I thought you'd have things—'

‘For Heaven's sake, Rory,' said Mrs Alleyn, ‘dress him up and let him go. The great thing is to get that wretched man's suitcase to him.'