Killer Dolphin (19 page)

Charles Random watched her with an expression of nervous distaste, and Emily Dunne with evident distress. Winter Meyer seemed to be ravaged by anxiety and inward speculation. He looked restlessly at Miss Bracey as if she had interrupted him in some desperate calculation. Peregrine, sitting by Emily, stared at his own clasped hands and occasionally at her. He listened carefully to Alleyn’s questions and Miss Bracey’s replies. Jeremy Jones, a little removed from the others, sat bolt upright in his chair and stared at Alleyn.

The characteristic that all these people had in common was that of extreme pallor, guessed at in the women and self-evident in the men.

Alleyn opened with a brief survey of the events in their succession, checked the order in which the members of the company had left the theatre, and was now engaged upon extracting confirmation of their movements from Gertrude Bracey, with the reactions among his hearers that have been indicated.

“Miss Bracey, I think you and Mr. Knight left the theatre together. Is that right?” They both agreed.

“And you left by the auditorium, not by the stage-door?”

“At Perry’s suggestion,” Marcus Knight said.

“To avoid the puddles,” Miss Bracey explained.

“And you went out together through the front doors?”

“No,” they said in unison, and she added: “Mr. Knight was calling on the Management.”

She didn’t actually sniff over this statement but contrived to suggest that there was something to be sneered at in the circumstance.

“I looked in at the office,” Knight loftily said, “on a matter of business.”

“This office? And to see Mr. Meyer?”

“Yes,” Winter Meyer said. Knight inclined his head in stately acquiescence.

“So you passed Jobbins on your way upstairs?”

“I — ah — yes. He was on the half-landing under the treasure.”

“I saw him up there,” Miss Bracey said.

“How was he dressed?”

As usual, they said, with evident surprise. In uniform.

“Miss Bracey, how did you leave?”

“By the pass-door in the main entrance. I let myself out and slammed it shut after me.”

“Locking it?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact I—I re-opened it.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see the time,” she said awkwardly, “by the clock in the foyer.”

“Jobbins,” Winter Meyer said, “barred and bolted this door after everyone had left.”

“When would that be?”

“Not more than ten minutes later. Marco—Mr. Knight—and I had a drink and left together. Jobbins came after us and I heard him drop the bar across and shoot the bolts. My God!” Meyer suddenly exclaimed.

“Yes?”

“The alarm! The burglar alarm. He’d switch it on when he’d locked up. Why didn’t it work?”

“Because somebody had switched it off.”

“My God!”

“May we return to Jobbins? How was he dressed when you left?”

Meyer said with an air of patience under trying circumstances, “I didn’t see him as we came down. He may have been in the men’s lavatory. I called out goodnight and he answered from up above. We stood for a moment in the portico and that’s when I heard him bolt the door.”

“When you saw him, perhaps ten minutes later, Mr. Jay, he was wearing an overcoat and slippers?”

“Yes,” said Peregrine.

“Yes. Thank you. How do you get home, Miss Bracey?”

She had a mini-car, she said, which she parked in the converted bombsite between the pub and the theatre.

“Were there other cars parked in this area belonging to the theatre people?”

“Naturally,” she said. “Since I was the first to leave.”

“You noticed and recognized them?”

“Oh,
really
, I
suppose
I noticed them. There were a number of strange cars still there but—yes, I saw—” she looked at Knight: her manner suggested a grudging alliance “—
your
car, Marcus.”

“What make of car is Mr. Knight’s?”

“I’ve no idea. What is it, dear?”

“A Jag, dear,” said Knight

“Any others?” Alleyn persisted.

“I
really
don’t know. I think I noticed — yours, Charles,” she said, glancing at Random. “Yes. I did, because it
is
rather conspicuous.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“A very, very old, old, old souped-up Morris sports,” said Random. “Painted scarlet.”

“And Miss Meade’s car?”

Destiny Meade opened her eyes very wide and raised her elegantly gloved and braceleted hands to her furs. She gently shook her head. The gesture suggested utter bewilderment. Before she could speak Gertrude Bracey gave her small, contemptuous laugh.

“Oh,
that
,” she said. “Yes, indeed. Drawn up in glossy state under the portico. As for Royalty.”

She did not look at Destiny.

Harry Grove said: “Destiny uses a hire-service, don’t you, love?” His manner, gay and proprietary, had an immediate effect upon Marcus Knight and Gertrude Bracey, who both stared lividly at nothing.

“Any other cars, Miss Bracey? Mr. Meyer’s?”

“I don’t remember. I didn’t go peering about for cars. I don’t notice them.”

“It was there,” Winter Meyer said. “Parked at the back and rather in the dark.”

“When you left, Mr. Meyer, were there any other cars apart from your own and Mr. Knight’s?”

“I really don’t know. There might have been. Do you remember, Marco?”

“No,” he said, widely and vaguely. “No, I don’t remember. As you say: it was dark.”

“I had an idea I saw your mini, Gertie,” Meyer said, “but I suppose I couldn’t have. You’d gone by then, of course.”

Gertrude Bracey darted a glance at Alleyn.

“I can’t swear to all this sort of thing,” she said angrily. “I — I didn’t notice the cars and I had—” She stopped and made a sharp movement with her hands. “I had other things to think of,” she said.

“I understand,” Alleyn said, “that Miss Dunne and Mr. Jay didn’t have cars at the theatre?”

“That’s right,” Emily said. “I haven’t got one anyway.”

“I left mine at home,” said Peregrine.

“Where it remained?” Alleyn remarked. “Unless Mr. Jones took it out?”

“Which I didn’t,” Jeremy said. “I was at home, working, all the evening.”

“Alone?”

“Entirely.”

“As far as cars are concerned that leaves only Mr. Grove. Did you by any chance notice Mr. Grove’s car in the bombsite, Miss Bracey?”

“Oh, yes!” she said loudly and threw him one of her brief, disfavoring looks. “I saw
that
one.”

“What is it?”

“A Panther ’55,” she said instantly. “An open sports car.”

“You know it quite well,” Alleyn lightly observed.

“Know it? Oh, yes,” Gertrude Bracey repeated with a sharp cackle. “I
know
it. Or you may say I used to.”

“You don’t think well, perhaps, of Mr. Grove’s Panther?”

“There’s nothing the matter with the
car
.”

Harry Grove said: “Darling, what an infallible ear you have for inflection. Did you go to R.A.D.A.?”

Destiny Meade let out half a cascade of her celebrated laughter and then appeared to swallow the remainder. Meyer gave a repressed snort.

Marcus Knight said, “This is the wrong occasion, in my opinion, for mistimed comedy.”

“Of course,” Grove said warmly. “I do so agree. But when is the right occasion?”

“If I am to be publicly insulted—” Miss Bracey began on a high note. Peregrine cut in.

“Look,” he said. “Shouldn’t we all remember this is a police inquiry into something that may turn out to be murder?”

They gazed at him as if he’d committed a social enormity.

“Mr. Alleyn,” Peregrine went on, “tells us he’s decided to cover the first stages as a sort of company call: everybody who was in the theatre last night and left immediately, or not long before the event. That’s right isn’t it?” he asked Alleyn.

“Certainly,” Alleyn agreed and reflected sourly that Peregrine, possibly with the best will in the world, had effectually choked what might have been a useful and revealing dust-up. He must make the best of it

“This procedure,” he said, “if satisfactorily conducted, should save a great deal of checking and counter-checking and reduce the amount of your time taken up by the police. The alternative is to ask you all to wait in the foyer while I see each of you separately.”

There was a brief pause broken by Winter Meyer.

“Fair enough,” Meyer said and there was a slight murmur of agreement from the company. “Don’t let’s start throwing temperaments right and left, chaps,” Mr. Meyer added. “It’s not the time for it.”

Alleyn could have kicked him. “How right you are,” he said. “Shall we press on? I’m sure you all see the point of this car business. It’s essential that we make out when and in what order you left the theatre and whether any of you could have returned within the crucial time. Yes, Miss Meade?”

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Destiny Meade said. She caught her underlip between her teeth and gazed helplessly at Alleyn. “Only: I don’t
quite
understand.”

“Please go on.”

“May I? Well, you see, it’s just that everybody says Trevor, who is generally admitted to be rather a beastly little boy, stole the treasure and then killed poor Jobbins. I
do
admit he’s got some rather awful ways with him and of course one never knows so one wonders why, that being the case, it matters where we all went or what sort of cars we went in.”

Alleyn said carefully that so far no hard and fast conclusion could be drawn and that he hoped they would all welcome the opportunity of proving that they were away from the theatre during the crucial period, which was between eleven o’clock, when Peregrine and Emily left the theatre, and about five past twelve, when Hawkins came running down the stage-door alleyway and told them of his discovery.

“So far,” Alleyn said, “we’ve only got as far as learning that when Miss Bracey left the theatre the rest of you were still inside it.”

“Not I,” Jeremy said. “I’ve told you, I think, that I was at home.”

“So you have,” Alleyn agreed. “It would help if you could substantiate the statement. Did anyone ring you up, for instance?”

“If they did, I don’t remember.”

“I see,” said Alleyn.

He plodded back through the order of departure until it was established beyond question that Gertrude and Marcus had been followed by Charles Random, who had driven to a pub on the South Bank where he was living for the duration of the play. He had been given his usual late supper. He was followed by Destiny Meade and her friends, all of whom left by the stage-door and spent about an hour at The Younger Dolphin and then drove to her flat in Cheyne Walk where they were joined, she said, by dozens of vague chums, and by Harry Grove, who left the theatre at the same time as they did, fetched his guitar from his own flat in Canonbury, and then joined them in Chelsea. It appeared that Harry Grove was celebrated for a song sequence in, which, Destiny said, obviously quoting someone else, he sent the sacred cows up so high that they remained in orbit forevermore.

“Quite a loss to the nightclubs,” Marcus Knight said to nobody in particular. “One wonders why the legitimate theatre should still attract.”

“I assure you, Marco dear,” Grove rejoined, “only the Lord Chamberlain stands between me and untold affluence.”

“Or you might call it dirty-pay,” said Knight. It was Miss Bracey’s turn to laugh very musically.

“Did any of you,” Alleyn went on, “at any time after the fall of curtain see or speak to Trevor Vere?”

“I did, of course,” Charles Random said. He had an impatient, rather injured manner which it would have been going too far to call feminine. “He dresses with me. And without wanting to appear utterly brutal I must say it would take nothing less than a twenty foot drop into the stalls to stop him talking.”

“Does he write on the looking-glass?”

Random looked surprised. “No,” he said. “Write what? Graffiti?”

“Not precisely. The word ‘Slash.’ In red greasepaint.”

“He’s always shrieking ‘Slash.’ Making a great mouthful of it. Something to do with his horror comics, one imagines.”

“Does he ever talk about the treasure?”

“Well, yes,” Random said uneasily. “He flaunts away about how—well, about how any fool could pinch it and—and: no, it’s of no importance.”

“Suppose we just hear about it?”

“He was simply putting on his act but he did say anyone with any sense could guess the combination of the lock.”

“Intimating that he had, in fact, guessed it?”

“Well — actually — yes.”

“And did he divulge what it was??’

Random was of a sanguine complexion. He now lost something of his colour. “He did not,” Random said, “and if he had, I should have paid no attention. I don’t believe for a moment he knew the combination.”

“And
you
ought to know, dear, oughtn’t you?” Destiny said with the gracious condescension of stardom to bit-part competence. “Always doing those ghastly puzzles in your intellectual papers.
Right
up your alleyway.”

This observation brought about its own reaction of discomfort and silence.

Alleyn said to Winter Meyer, “I remember I suggested that you would be well advised to make the five-letter key group rather less predictable. Was it in fact changed?”

Winter Meyer raised his eyebrows, wagged his head and his hands and said: “I was always going to. And then when we knew they were to go—one of those things.” He covered his face for a moment. “One of those things,” he repeated, and everybody looked deeply uncomfortable.

Alleyn said, “On that morning, besides yourself and the boy, there were present, I think, everybody who is here now except Miss Bracey, Mr. Random and Mr. Grove. Is that right? Miss Bracey?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with predictable acidity. “It was a photograph call, I believe. I was
not
required.”

“It was just for two pictures, dear,” little Meyer said. “Destiny and Marco with the glove. You know?”

“Oh, quite. Quite.”

“And the kid turned up so they used him.”

“I seem to remember,” Harry Grove observed, “that Trevor was quoted in the daily journals as saying that the glove made him feel kinda funny like he wanted to cry.”