Swan Song (23 page)

Fen seized it from him and was about to precipitate it through a front window when the little man, dismayed at such an intemperate and amateurish scheme, caught his arm.

‘Not 'ere,' he said. ‘Rahnd the back.'

They went round to the back and made an entrance through the kitchen window. Fen led the way up the stairs.

‘Doesn't look to me,' said the little man disapprovingly, ‘as if there's anything worth pinchin' 'ere. What we want is socialism, so as everyone 'll 'ave somethink worth pinchin' . . . Phew, what a stink o' gas.'

In this he did not exaggerate. Fen rattled unavailingly at the door behind which Adam lay. Then took several
steps back and hurled himself violently and uselessly against it. The little man watched these injudicious goings-on with great contempt.

‘All you'll do,' he announced, ‘is break yer collar-bone.'

‘I believe I have broken it,' Fen complained.

‘'Ere,' said the little man. ‘Let me get at it.' He took a bunch of skeleton keys from inside his coat.

‘You ought to be in prison,' said Fen amiably.

‘Bloody good thing for you I ain't . . . Ah. That's done it. Silly little lock, if you ask me. A child could pick it.'

They got Adam out of the room and into the open air. He had recovered from the blow on his head, and had not yet succumbed to the gas, the flow of which, owing to some defect in the fire, was very weak. But he felt decidedly ill. They held his head while he vomited.

‘Tryin' ter take yer own life,' said the little man reproachfully. ‘Ungodly, that's what it is.

‘Think of the nice birds,' he added encouragingly, ‘and the nice trees, and the nice bloody atom bombs, and all the things what make life worth living.' Having made this suggestion, he departed.

The fact that Adam's absence from the opera-house was not discovered until the overture was actually under way was not in itself surprising, for it was generally assumed, in so far as anyone thought about it at all, that he had arrived unnoticed and gone straight to his dressing-room. In the end it was Joan who was responsible for the news. Rousing herself from an agreeable day-dream at the call-boy's cry of ‘Act one beginners, please,' she looked into Adam's dressing-room on her way downstairs, found it empty, thought for a moment that he had preceded her to the stage, and then saw his act one costume draped tidily over the back of a chair. This spectacle sent her running frantically downstairs to Karl Wolzogen.

‘Karl!' she exclaimed. ‘Where's Adam?'

He failed at first to appreciate the situation. ‘How do I know where he is?' he said testily.

‘You don't understand . . .
He's not in the theatre
.'

‘What?' Karl was incredulous, alarmed.

‘He's just not here.'

Karl stared at her blankly for a moment. ‘
Lieber Gott
,' he whispered. ‘What are we to do?'

‘I don't care,' said Adam obstinately. ‘
I must go and sing
.'

Fen attempted to dissuade him. ‘After what you've been through,' he said, ‘you're quite incapable of standing up and bawling your way through a five-hour opera.'

‘I must try, that's all.'

‘I suppose if you insist . . . By the way, you didn't see the person who hit you?'

‘No.'

‘I thought not,' said Fen, undismayed. ‘But it was just as well to ask.' He perceived that across the road there was the shop of a dispensing chemist, and that it was still open. ‘Come over here,' he said, taking Adam by the arm, ‘and I'll get you some dope to help you keep going.'

The only occupant of the shop, which was small and overcrowded, was the chemist himself, a bald, paunchy, apprehensive middle-aged man.

‘Make this up,' said Fen, and uttered technicalities. His knowledge of science, though inaccurate, was varied and occasionally useful.

‘Have you a doctor's prescription, sir?'

‘No.'

‘Then I'm afraid it can't be done.'

‘Oh, yes, it can,' said Fen, producing his automatic pistol. ‘And if you don't get on with it at once, I shall shoot you, rather horribly, in the lungs.'

The chemist went very pale and put up his hands.

‘I didn't ask you to do that,' said Fen, peeved. ‘You can't make up a prescription standing in that attitude.'

He watched the chemist, issuing periodic instructions, as the man went to work. The result was a colourless liquid in a small glass, which Fen handed to Adam.
Adam, who had hitherto been too bemused to question these extraordinary proceedings, now lost confidence.

‘Is this stuff all right?' he demanded.

‘Perfectly. And for heaven's sake hurry up. It's nearly half past six now.'

Adam mustered his resolution and swallowed the draught. It made him feel better almost at once.

‘I hope to God,' he said, ‘that they discovered fairly early that I wasn't there.'

‘Take my wife's bicycle,' Fen suggested. He put the pistol back in his pocket and went outside to watch Adam pedal away.

After a moment the chemist came to the door of his shop. He did not at first observe that Fen was still in the immediate neighbourhood.

‘Help, help,' he said to a surprised passer-by. ‘Help.'

Fen was annoyed. ‘Be quiet,' he told the chemist sternly. ‘And don't be such a silly little man.' The chemist moaned with fear and rushed back into his shop. Greatly pleased at his previously unsuspected power of provoking terror in the breast of a fellow-being, Fen strode away.

Adam was horrified, when he arrived at the opera-house, to hear the music of the overture. It was about two-thirds of the way through, which meant, he calculated, that he had three minutes at the most to get changed and on to the stage. A concourse of incoherently agitated people met him. He forced his way past them and ran up the stairs, pulling off his coat. A belated lady of the chorus was startled to see him rushing towards her in the act of unbuttoning his trousers, and pressed herself against the wall, emitting faint, defensive screams, until he had gone by. There was no time for make-up – and of course the clothes were displaying that malevolent unmanageability with which they always reward anyone who is in a hurry to don or doff them. But somehow he got ready, and raced downstairs again, and was at his place as the
penultimate chord of the overture sounded from beyond the curtain. He waved incautiously at Joan, and on this bravura gesture – which struck most of the audience as a singularly unhappy innovation – the curtain went up.

Fen found a telephone box and rang up Mudge.

‘I'm sorry I wasn't able to get to you,' he said, ‘but there have been fun and games.'

‘Fun and games?'

‘I'll explain later . . . I want you to send a couple of men backstage at the opera, because there may be an attempt to kill Langley.'

‘Langley?'

‘Yes. And come there yourself as soon as you can. By the way, you'll probably be getting some reports about me before long. I threw a brick at a window and threatened to shoot a chemist.'

‘
Brick?
' Mudge said confusedly. ‘Chemist?'

‘Do stop repeating everything I say . . . I'll see you later. We'd better have a conclave after the performance. Bring that skeleton along, will you? – or anyway,
a
skeleton.'

He rang off and walked to the opera-house, where he watched the first act from the wings. The performance, quite evidently, was going well. Mudge's men arrived shortly after him, and he communicated certain possibilites to them. The Inspector himself, they said, would not be able to get away until later.

When the act was over, Fen after congratulating a cheerful and light-hearted cast, obtained a piece of information from Adam. Acting on this, he later searched one of the dressing-rooms, and, having found what he expected to find, took a taxi back to his home, where he ‘retired to the attic' – an improvised laboratory – to make certain experiments. His family, who had learned from experience that Fen's experiments were often explosive and always malodorous, retired to the kitchen for mutual solace and reassurance.

For about two hours Fen occupied himself with hydrochloric acid, water, a strip of copper-foil, a Bunsen burner, and a small sublimation tube. Finally he inspected the results of his work through a microscope, and was pleased, though scarcely surprised, to find his hypothesis confirmed. He returned to the theatre just in time to witness the event which brought Mr Levi backstage in a condition nearing apoplexy, and cursing vividly in several remote tongues.

The opera had about twenty minutes to run. Adam chanting the splendours of the Prize Song, became obscurely aware, during one of the choral comments which punctuate it, that in some manner all was not well. He risked a glance into the wings, and saw that a revolver was levelled at him.

What followed took the audience very much by surprise. Herr Walther von Stolzing, apparently becoming belatedly aware that marriage to Eva might not be quite the ecstatic thing which fiction so gaily postulates, abandoned the Prize Song in mid-career, gazed wildly about him, and after a moment, descending from his mound, fled incontinently from the stage. Almost immediately there ensued a violent detonation – to which the carefully-planned acoustics of the theatre gave full effect – and a sound of scuffling and shouting from the wings. The cast stood rigid with amazement. There was a moment's uncertainty and then the curtain was lowered.

Mr Levi was with difficulty dissuaded from addressing the audience, whose mystification his words would most probably have deepened rather than allayed. In about five minutes the curtain rose again, and the opera was played through from the beginning of the Prize Song to the final chord. But there was no longer any spirit in it. Too many people had seen the attempt to kill Adam. Too many people had seen Judith, her features twisted with rage, and hatred, dragged away by the Inspector's men.

THE INTERVAL DURING
which the cast changed and removed make-up was occupied by Fen in explaining matters to Sir Richard Freeman and to Mudge, who had arrived opportunely during the rather uncertain applause. At about a quarter past eleven Adam, Joan, Peacock, Karl, Charles Shorthouse, Beatrix Thorn, and Elizabeth, who had after all been present at the performance, assembled in the green-room. The first four were exhausted, and spoke of Judith in low voices. The Master approached Adam.

‘Ah, Langley,' he said amiably. ‘How very trying all this is. I was virtually
ordered
to present myself here . . . By the way, I should like you to sing Aegistheus in the New York production of my
Oresteia.
You or Melchior. Can that be managed, I wonder?'

Adam had endured much that evening; he found himself, for the moment, incapable of replying.

Presently Fen appeared, with Mudge and Sir Richard Freeman. A silence fell. Through it Elizabeth, who remained unacquainted with the Master and Beatrix Thorn, and whom no one had so far enlightened as to their identity, could be heard saying innocently:

‘But I thought Charles Shorthouse lived with some awful woman called Beatrix Thorn?'

Fen coughed noisily. ‘Here is Miss Thorn,' he anounced; and added, with great severity: ‘In the flesh.' Elizabeth blushed, and Beatrix Thorn's face grew murderous. Fen hastened to cover the general embarrassment.

‘There seems to be an impression among you,' he said ‘that Judith was responsible for the deaths of Edwin Shorthouse and of her husband. You may as well know at once that that is not so.'

He watched their faces as he spoke. Adam was sprawling in a chair. Near him was Peacock, still in full evening dress, but wan and almost incapable of movement. Charles Shorthouse, wearing a black coat and with his black Homburg hat crammed rakishly on to his head, stood incuriously, his hands in his pockets, with Beatrix Thorn small and vehement, at his side. Joan Davis, neat, worldly and self-possessed, was with Elizabeth. Another silence ensued, longer and more intense than the first. Adam broke it by saying:

‘But she tried twice to kill me. Why?'

‘That's very simple, my dear Adam,' Fen replied in a curious voice. ‘Very simple indeed. She tried to kill you because she hated you. And she hated you because she knew, even before we did, that it was you who killed her husband.'

Adam Langley went very white. His hair was tousled, and there was sweat on his forehead. He got to his feet. Elizabeth crossed the room, and took his hand in hers.

‘I suppose,' said Adam thickly, ‘that you also think it was I who killed Edwin Shorthouse?'

‘Oh, yes.' There was no hint of joking in the way Fen spoke. ‘You killed him too.'

‘You fool,' said Elizabeth in a low voice. ‘You damned fool.'

‘This afternoon,' Fen went on, ‘Judith visited the Radcliffe Science Library. She may have had shadowy suspicions before. But what she found, in a text-book of forensic medicine, amply confirmed them. She learned that arsenic could be administered externally, through the skin. She remembered that Boris had been practising make-up, for an hour every day. And she remembered, too, that he had been using a jar of removing-cream
which you, my dear Adam, had given him. So this afternoon she got you, by a false message, to her room, and tried to gas you there, choosing a time when no one else would be in the house. If Mudge hadn't happened to mention to me, quite casually, that she'd visited the Science Library, she would probably have succeeded. But having failed, she made a second attempt – with, I may add, the gun which you so carelessly left in an unlocked drawer in your dressing-room. She was, as they say, “mad with grief”; which is a conventional phrase we use to describe a very horrible reality.'

Fen became suddenly matter-of-fact and cheerful, and in that electric atmosphere his change of manner was a shock. ‘However,' he continued, ‘I mustn't alarm you unduly. I mean what I say, of course. You
did
kill both those men. Two traps were set, and by a curious irony you quite unknowingly sprang both of them. I may add that one of them was set for you.'