An Honourable Murderer (34 page)

“Sir Philip posed the problem to me,” said Jonathan Snell. “It was a challenge, how we might make the world believe he was dead.”

“What are you going to do?” said Lady Blake to me, cutting across Snell. She wasn't interested in challenges and craftsmanship.

“It is rather what
you
are going to do, madam. All of you. You have the advantage, there are many more of you. You might, oh, I don't know, you might throw me from the edge of the roof over there or put me in this chair and cut the ropes.”

I said this pretty confident, by the by, that they would do none of these things.

“We are not murderers, sir,” said Tom Turner – or Sir Philip Blake.

“What about Giles Cass? What did you do to him? It was he who told me that you were being investigated for treason.”

“The charge is absurd, unless every man who has ever made a remark against the Spanish is to be hauled up before Lord Justice Popham,” said Blake, ignoring the question about Cass to concentrate on the treason. “Although most of the information brought against me was false, it would have brought dishonour on my family. But Cecil is rightly called the beagle by the King. He will not let go of the prey once he has it in his jaws. He likes bringing prizes to his new master. He more or less told me as much on the day the Spanish first arrived in London –”

Now I recalled seeing Blake in earnest conversation with Cecil on the river bank, my first glimpse of him.

“– I was to be a sacrifice on the altar of our new peace with Spain. Just as Raleigh was persecuted for the same reason. Raleigh has been allowed to live for the time being but I would not have been so fortunate.”

His wife put her hand on his arm as if to warn him that, even here in the hut on top of the Globe stage and surrounded by fellow conspirators, it was dangerous to be so outspoken. He paid no attention to her restraining hand.

“It doesn't matter what I say,” he said. “I am a dead man either way. Sir Philip Blake is dead as far as the world is concerned, and if you choose to resurrect me, Master Revill, then you'll certainly be condemning me to a real death. Cecil wouldn't let me get away a second time.”

“I could not condemn anyone, especially to a traitor's death. But, in return, you must tell me about Giles Cass.”

I looked again at the circle of faces. There was a silence before Bill Inman said, “None of us had a hand in Cass's departure, Master Revill. He believed that Sir Philip here was dead, like everyone else. We had no reason to act against him. I swear on my honour that I know no more than that he drowned.”

“He was struck on the head first,” I said.

“If so, then it wasn't by any of us,” said Inman.

“I think he must have tripped and fallen then,” I said. “There was blood on the steps leading down to the river.”

From the expressions on the faces of the group in the hut this seemed to be news to them. Maybe Cass had died exactly as I'd speculated at first, exactly as the coroner had pronounced. Not all appearances are deceptive. But there was yet another death to account for.

“Someone else died,” I said. “I visited the Three Cranes yard for a second time after receiving a certain – summons to go there.”

I glanced at Jonathan Snell, the son. He nodded somewhat uncomfortably.

“I wanted to tell you what was happening, Nick. I thought it was only right. Only I wasn't able to do it in public.”

(Yes, the father had been correct: Jonathan could not keep a secret.)

“While I was there I saw a dead man, a real dead man, not a mannequin, not someone with red paint smeared across his face. The dead man was called John Ratchett. He was lying on the ground, killed because he had fallen through a trapdoor. Are you going to say he did that to himself?”

I wasn't addressing anyone in particular. I waited to see who would take up the accusation.

“I can tell you about that, Master Revill.”

It was Ned Armitage who spoke. These were the first words he'd uttered.

“This gentleman you refer to – what was his name? –”

“Ratchett.”

“He came sniffing and snooping round our yard. I challenged him and we – we disagreed – there was a struggle –”

“I came sniffing and snooping round the yard too, Master Armitage, but you did not challenge me. You were courteous and helpful. You were painting a chest in red.”

“It's all right, Ned, you should not have to bear this burden alone,” said Sir Philip (or Tom Turner), clapping the other man on the shoulder. There was still something unsettling about hearing Blake's refined tones issuing from someone wearing an artisan's gear.

“Ned wasn't alone when Ratchett came calling. I was there as well. Ratchett recognized me. I was not wearing this at the time” – he tugged at his lank hair – “and he recognized me. I knew him too. He used to work for Secretary Cecil.”

“Cecil? I thought he worked for the French ambassador,” I said.

“Ratchett worked for anyone who would pay him,” said Blake. “I believe that he was one of those who was foremost in preparing false information about me to present to Robert Cecil. He was an unscrupulous man. He was a caterpillar. But we did not mean to kill him, not at first. He had seen me, seen that I was still alive. We were trying to stop him getting away. There was a struggle as Ned says. It was not a fair fight, of course, being two men against one. But you have my word, Master Revill, that we did not kill him. We did not even set out to kill him. I may be allowed to murder myself but I would not murder another.”

“And yet he died,” I said.

“We were struggling as I said,” continued Blake. “Ratchett was lying over the trapdoor, battered and hurt. Ned and I had backed away from him, not sure what to do next. I thought he was unconscious. But he was only dazed. He made to get up and without knowing what he was doing he grasped at the lever which opened the trap – took hold of it to help himself up. Even as he exerted his full weight on the lever the trapdoor opened and he tumbled through it. The man fell with a dreadful crack on the floor below. We hurried down but he was already finished. It was ironic that I had simulated just such a death and that now it had occurred in reality.”

“
Ironic
?”

“Yes. I won't pretend to a grief I didn't feel.”

“And you left him there,” I said.

“We went to fetch Jonathan,” said Blake. “Later that same night we returned and took away the body.”

“All of us helped,” said Bill Inman, as if reluctant to be left out of this grisly account.

He meant the men in the business, himself, Blake, both the Snells. That explained the son's near panic when he thought I'd gone to the yard on the previous evening. By the time I'd arrived apparently for our nine o'clock meeting
in the morning
, the case had changed. Maybe the younger Snell had been about to reveal the plot to me – that relatively harmless plot by which an honest man had been saved from a traitor's death – but now another man really was dead. No wonder Snell wanted to assure me that he'd been wrong about everything. It was to prevent me asking any more questions.

“And I saw him in the time between his fall and your return,” I said. “Ratchett was gone by the next day. What did you do with the body?”

“The body was sent to our country estate,” said Lady Blake. “We were in need of a body.”

Of course, the conspirators required a corpse to place in the family vault since the intended occupant of that vault was still alive and above ground. Ratchett would have been interred far from London and well above his station in life. From the set look on Lady Jane's face I realized that she had no qualms of conscience. If a man had to die in order that her husband might be protected, she was prepared to accept it, especially if that man was already her husband's enemy. While Sir Philip had been describing Ratchett's death, Maria More appeared uneasy, looking down at the ground and shifting from foot to foot. But she would never betray her mistress.

They were all involved – Sir Philip and Lady Jane Blake, Maria More and William Inman, the Snells and Ned Armitage – each and every one of them. I'd been looking for guilt in one or two people and found it shared out among seven. The question was not so much: who did it? The question was rather:who did not do it?

But done what exactly? Sir Philip Blake was not dead, either through accident or murder, but standing in front of me. If it's a crime to simulate death, then we actors are guilty every day of the week. As for Giles Cass, he had drowned in the Thames. (Nothing could have been more ordinary. Men, women and children fall into the river every day. Some come out. Some don't.) And when it came to that other death, I was inclined to believe Blake's account of how John Ratchett had perished. The man had pulled the lever that sent him plunging to his own death. An accident of sorts. And if it suited Blake and the others that Ratchett was dead, then it couldn't be denied that it suited me as well. The spy was not around to trick and bribe me, whether he was working for Cecil or the French ambassador or the man in the moon.

So where was the offence? Nowhere (or almost nowhere).

It was all a matter of show
.

“Well, Master Revill, you have the full story,” said Blake. “You are free to do what you want with it. We have done no murder but we are all of us complicit in a kind of crime, and I am the most responsible.”

“You have done one murder, at least,” I said to him. “You have murdered yourself, as you said.”

“If any murder may be called justified or honourable, it's that one, I suppose,” said Sir Philip Blake.

“You are as good as dead to me,” I said. “We should all go home to our beds and forget this conversation.”

“In that event,” said Blake, “I shall shortly be reborn as Robert Blake, an obscure country cousin who has the good fortune to be marrying Sir Philip's widow.”

He turned and smiled at his wife. She clasped his arm tightly.

“My congratulations,” I said.

I
waited until they'd filed out of the hut and across the roof and down the stairs of the gallery. They took two lanterns with them, thoughtfully leaving me with one to find my way out. I delayed until the last footsteps had died away before saying, “It's all right, Abel, you can come out now.”

My friend came round to where I was standing in the doorway of the hut. He stretched and bent down, rubbing at the calves of his legs.

“I was beginning to get a little uncomfortable back there. I didn't dare to move.”

“I hoped you would make your escape.”

“And leave you to it?”

“They weren't going to do anything to me,” I said. “You must have seen that just now, or heard it anyway. Sir Philip Blake is an honourable man and no murderer. He put himself in my hands.”

“So it turns out that you are a judge after all, with the power of life and death over people.”

“Just a poor player. I ought never to have got involved in this. Not a single thing would be different or changed if I'd never got involved.”

“A mystery is solved.”

“Yes, but only to satisfy our curiosity.”

“No, justice is done too. Sir Philip Blake will escape a false charge of treason. He'll start a new life and yet keep his wife and his property.”

I realized that Abel was intrigued by the idea of someone starting a new life with a new identity. I suppose it was akin to what he'd done himself when he joined the King's Men.

“Do you think he'll get away with it?” he said.

“If he's careful he should manage it. He and Lady Jane can get married – get remarried – in the obscurity of the country and keep out of London for a few months at least. He will grow his beard again but in a rustic style, he'll cut his hair differently. Any similarity can be explained away by the fact that he's Sir Philip's cousin. In a year or two everyone will have forgotten about Sir Philip. And despite what he said, Secretary Cecil won't last for ever.”

“I think we should leave this place, Nick.”

We were still sheltering in the hut on top of the stage. The single lantern cast its feeble glow over the machinery of the hoist and the vacant
deus ex machina
. Out of doors the moon, pale companion to our strange meeting, had risen almost directly overhead.

Abel and I reversed the process of several hours before, rapidly relocking playhouse doors and replacing playhouse keys. We slipped out of the window into the Brend's Rents alley, and I made a mental note to secure it again first thing in the morning before anyone should notice. Instead of crossing the Bridge and returning to Thames Street, I accompanied Abel to his lodging house in Kentish Street. It seemed the least I could do, since he had risked a great deal to keep me company in this half ridiculous, half intriguing enterprise. We passed a nightwatchman or two, and other less reputable travellers, but there was safety in numbers and no particular danger anyway to two indigent-looking players.

Abel was eager to talk about everything he'd seen and heard. It was still fresh and surprising to him – to me as well, even though the outline of the truth had become clear just before the first ‘visitors' arrived on the Globe roof. We both needed to talk.

“This was a very dangerous undertaking for the Snells,” he said.

“The father saw it as a challenge to his art and skill, I think. There was nothing exactly wrong with what he was doing, at first. Just pretending that a man was dead. The only mistake he made was in not letting his son in on the secret from the start. Jonathan wanted to tell me everything, suspicions and all. It was only when someone really died – Ratchett – that he clammed up. But if the father had told him the truth in the very beginning then this whole business would have been avoided because there would have been no hint of plots and murder, nothing to set me off.”