The Fall of the House of Cabal (18 page)

*   *   *

He was to be a little disappointed, however, as—by the time they returned—Miss la Morte had changed out of her stage clothes and was wearing an altogether soberer ensemble suitable for returning to her digs.

‘Engaged? Why, yes. To Max. But how is that relevant?'

Leonie Barrow was candid. ‘I have no idea. I am simply trying to form a full image of everybody and how they relate to one another. How did you meet Max Maleficarus?'

‘Rufus introduced us. His father was encouraging Rufus to spread his wings, to go out and put his own act together. Rufus is a very capable magician himself, you know.'

‘That was my understanding,' said Leonie, with a modicum of irony. ‘What happened to those plans?'

La Morte looked uncomfortable. ‘Max did. I did. We … we just got on very well, and all of a sudden Rufus's act didn't seem so pressing. Max needed a new assistant, and … it just seemed the obvious thing to do.'

‘And how did Rufus take this?'

‘He was confused about what was happening at first. Then he was angry. My God, he was angry. But he took a little time off, cooled down, and came back. He said perhaps it was as well he didn't go solo just yet. He wanted to work on his act a little more first, in any case.'

‘I see. Purely as a matter of curiosity, what sort of act was Rufus working towards? Something a little more dramatic than his father?'

‘Dramatic?' La Morte laughed uncertainly. ‘Max's act was dramatic enough. You should have seen him when the time was almost up and he struggled madly on the throne just to gee the audience up. Always made it out. Always.' She looked bleakly into nowhere.

‘Of course. I meant in tone. Something a little darker, perhaps?'

Miss la Morte smiled awkwardly. ‘Oh. I see. This is to do with my stage name?'

Leonie shrugged and smiled. Horst noticed it wasn't the warmest of smiles. There was something of frozen mercury and razor blades about it.

‘Roofy … Rufus thinks that stage magic has to keep moving on if it isn't to stagnate. People want sensation. Why not give it to them?'

‘What was Max's view of that?'

‘That change is inevitable, but that reaching for it too soon looks desperate, not challenging. The audience can smell desperation. He thought that Rufus was onto something, but its time had not quite come yet.' She looked from Leonie to Horst and back, her need to emphasise her sincerity palpable. ‘Max was entirely supportive of Rufus. Always has been. He loved his son.'

*   *   *

They found a quiet corner in which to compare notes. Horst's were mainly pictures of goats. ‘They're the only animal I can draw,' he said. ‘But, really, there's little to detect here, isn't there? We still don't have the faintest hint that this isn't what it looks like—a terrible accident. I agree the
ménage
between father, son, and beautiful assistant is a tad … unusual, but that doesn't mean the old man simply didn't have some wretched luck.'

‘There are five possible explanations for what happened on the stage tonight,' said Leonie Barrow. ‘Firstly, it is just as you say. Max Maleficarus simply didn't manage to undo the padlock in time for whatever reason. His concentration was off, he fumbled the lock pick, the apparatus malfunctioned and shot too soon, or a dozen other possibilities.

‘Secondly, that it was suicide. That he deliberately sat there and waited for the sand to tip the balance.

‘Thirdly, that Miss la Morte engineered his death.

‘Fourthly, that Rufus did. I'm considering that they were in cahoots as part and parcel of those possibilities.'

‘Cahoots,' said Horst for no other reason than the word felt nice in his mouth.

‘And finally, that Max Maleficarus was done to death by person or persons unknown to us at present.'

‘That sounds thorough. Which do you favour?'

‘I don't know. If we're not sure of motive, or even if there ever was a motive, it's hard to bring anything to the perpetrator's door. Method, perhaps. If it was murder and a method is detectable, then that might give us an idea as to the killer's identity.'

‘You're frightfully good at this,' said Horst. ‘You sound just like a real detective.'

‘While we're here, I
am
a real detective. Try to remember that, Horst.'

‘And I'm the slightly dim sidekick. I know, I know. I didn't mean it as an insult. More, you know … a compliment. You are good at this, Leonie.'

‘If I find out what happened on that stage tonight, then I'll agree. Until then, this is all playacting. Come on, let's do what I should have done right at the beginning and study the crime scene properly. Sherlock Holmes would be furious with me. I cannot theorise without data, and I'm a fool to try.'

*   *   *

The photographer had finished his work, and the police were on the point of removing the body by the time Leonie and Horst returned.

‘Might I crave your indulgence for just a few minutes, Inspector?' Leonie applied the hapless expression and joined hands suggestive yet not precisely analogous to an attitude of prayer, a combination that worked well on older men in her experience. Her father, any rate. As a ploy it seemed to have definite puissance, for paternal relays almost audibly clicked home in Inspector Lament's head, and he nodded indulgently.

‘Ten minutes and no more, Miss Barrow. We're all keen to wrap this one up for the evening.'

Leonie thanked him and went straight to business. She examined the body, the quarrel still thrust through the dead man's heart, the chains and padlock, the lock pick grasped in the cold fingers. Then she briefly looked over the paper screen pierced by the bolt and the marks on its reverse side that showed it had been repaired after the previous few times it had been penetrated.

Lament consulted his notebook. ‘They replace it after about eight performances on average.'

‘Eight? Why eight?'

‘That's a week's worth. One evening performance a day, matinees on Wednesday and Saturday. No performances on a Sunday, obviously.'

‘Eight a week.' She checked her pocket diary and found that it was full of notes she had no memory of making; entries made by the historical version of her that this playhouse of a reality had made for the real her, referring to other people, places, cases. It seemed she was quite busy and quite successful. It made her feel both a fraud and anxious not to let herself down, in several manners of speaking. She swiftly counted the repaired tears and counted seven. This tallied with her diary; it was Saturday evening. Somewhere in that fake city, fake newspapermen were writing up a fake story for fake people to read in the morning.

Faithfully followed by Horst, who was developing craning curiously to one side and rising on the balls of his feet to a minor art form, Miss Barrow next went to inspect the actual engine of death.

It was, she had to admit, a very competently wrought piece of engineering. Behind all the fanciful direction lurked a device of brilliant simplicity built to a very high standard. Everything about it demonstrated forethought, from the steep angles of the sand reservoir to prevent clumping to the precision bearings on the balance itself, all built into a steel frame that would not admit warping or any other cause for imprecision that might result in the sort of terrible accident that had occurred that evening.

‘This is the dead man's design?' asked Leonie, sprawling unladylike upon her back to inspect the device's underside.

‘It was, miss.'

There was silence for a moment, and the assembled company of men looked just about everywhere but at the pair of lady's ankles so indecorously exposed as Miss Barrow lay beneath the device like a mechanic beneath a car. Finally, her voice wafted out. ‘And he built it?'

‘No. The son, Rufus, is the engineer. He built it.'

Leonie climbed back to her feet and dusted herself off. ‘He knows his job. I can't see anything obviously wrong. Or any way it might be influenced.'

She turned her attention to the contents of the scale. It seemed at first her interest would be as brief as her other investigations had, perforce, to be, yet this time she hesitated.

She took a pinch of sand and sprinkled it along one of the prop's horizontal struts. Then she reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew—with, to Horst's eye, evident delight—a magnifying glass. This she used to examine the grains for a few seconds.

Lament came over, his indulgent air giving way to professional interest. ‘Have you found something, miss?'

‘Possibly.' She squinted at the sand through the glass for a few moments more. ‘Horst!'

‘At your service!'

‘Would you fetch a fire bucket for me, please?'

Nonplussed yet obliging, Horst trotted off into the wings. Presently he re-emerged carrying a battered bucket upon which was helpfully painted the word
FIRE
.

‘Thank you.' Leonie took a pinch of sand from it and sprinkled it a little further along the same strut. She then spent the next minute examining first one sample and then the other without saying a word, causing her audience inexpressible frustration.

Finally, she stepped away, offering her magnifying glass to the inspector. ‘Take a look, Lament. Tell me what you see.'

Perplexed, the inspector spent a few moments looking at them. ‘Two samples of sand, miss. Quite different. One is very fine and pale, beige, I suppose you'd call it, and the other has larger grains and more of a red colour to it.'

‘And that's all?'

‘Well, it would be easier if you'd kept the samples further apart, miss. They've become a bit mixed up with one another.'

‘Take another look.'

Conscious of his subordinates' eyes upon him, Inspector Lament's patience was wearing thin. ‘There's nothing else of note. Just that…' He started to say something extraordinarily salty, remembered there was a lady present, and turned a fierce pejorative into a short collection of nonsense syllables. ‘I'm a fool! The samples aren't mixed up at all. Well, not by you. The sample from the fire bucket has none of the finer grains, but the sample from the balance is riddled with coarse sand. How is that?
Why
is that?'

For her answer, Leonie probed into the fallen sand on the balance and, pinched neatly between thumb and forefinger, produced a cigarette butt. Horst glanced into the fire bucket; the surface was specked with similar fag ends.

‘I would suggest that you find a clumsy stagehand, Inspector. Occam's razor always suggests we should look for incompetence, accidents, and pure rotten luck before assuming conspiracy. I think Maleficarus the Magnificent may very well have been done in by the former.'

*   *   *

The body had finally been removed while further enquiries had been made. Finally, the unwitting culprit was discovered; a stagehand called Jacobey who was neither more nor less clumsy than any of his fellows, but neither was he immune to the confoundments of wretched luck. A young man and eager to make a fist of it in the theatre, he had been dismayed that, in stowing away the crossbow device after the previous evening's performance, he had caught the well-built but ungainly frame on a corner and succeeded in spilling much of the sand from the scale pan.

Being of a practical mind, he had gathered up as much as he could in a dustpan and put it into an empty bucket he had secured for the job. A good quantity of the sand, however, was lost between the boards, and he was momentarily baffled as to where he might make up the shortfall. Then he remembered the fire buckets that so many of the staff used as convenient ashtrays and sought one out. The sand hadn't looked
exactly
the same, but after some stirring, the two types seemed to mix well enough, and he was sure that, thanks to his quick thinking, there would be no trouble.

Then Maleficarus the Magnificent had ended up dead, and Jacobey had decided this was the ideal opportunity not to tell anyone about it, because ‘Manslaughter' can look very bad on a
curriculum vitæ.

‘I'm awfully dense, I'm sure,' said Horst in the heavy tone of somebody who knows it is his role to be awfully dense and to make the protagonist look terribly clever, but that doesn't mean he has to like it, ‘but why would mixing the sand change anything?'

‘You're close to the money already,' said Leonie. ‘It's all about density. You saw that machine; it's a precision piece of engineering.
Any
change in the way it's operated could affect how long Maleficarus had to perform his escape. The rough sand added to the fine sand the apparatus had been calibrated for was enough to alter the density of the mixture. It made it trigger a little early; not very long, but quickly enough to catch Maleficarus by surprise.'

‘Oh.' Horst seemed a little underwhelmed. ‘I'm a little underwhelmed,' he said, confirming it. ‘What about all this backstage drama and jealousy and Rufus being such an utter arse that he couldn't possibly have done it?'

‘He didn't do it.'

‘I know, but it shouldn't just have been down to one silly ass of a stagehand, should it?'

Leonie shook her head. ‘Aren't you even slightly impressed that I solved this?'

‘Of course I am. You're terribly clever. I've never said you're not. Just I was hoping for a little more
Sturm und Drang,
you know? At the very least, a bit of a “You may be wondering why I've called you all here today” moment. I'm not disappointed that you solved all this, just that what you solved turned out to be a silly accident. That boy won't get in trouble, will he?'

‘Not from the police. There was no reasonable way he could have known what would happen. His career at the Alhambra might be over, though.' She tightened her lips. ‘You're right. It is a bit underwhelming. I wonder if that's the lesson this place is supposed to teach us.'