Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(3)

He called her a filthy name and, standing there, blind with his mounting disgust and fury, added filth to filth. She struck out at him then like a wild cat, slapping him violently across the face with the flat of her hand. At the sharp sting of the slap, his control gave way. He raised his arms above his head and brought them down—slowly, slowly with a menace infinitely terrible: and closed his hands about her throat and shook her like a rag doll—and flung her back on to the bed and started across the room in search of the paper. It was in her handbag as she had said. He took it and stuffed it into his pocket and went back and stood triumphantly over her.

And saw that she was dead.

‘I had gone, as it happened, to a restaurant just across the street from the theatre,’ said the Great Detective; ‘and they got me there. She was lying on the couch, her arms flung over her head, the backs of her hands with their pointed nails brushing the floor; much as I had seen her, earlier in the evening, lying in a pretence of death. But she no longer wore Desdemona’s elaborate robes, she wore only the rather solid undies of those days, cami-knickers and a petticoat, under a silk dressing-gown. She seemed to have put up very little struggle: though there was a red mark round her right wrist and a faint pink stain across the palm of her hand.

‘Most of the company and the technicians I left for the moment to my assistants, and they proved later to have nothing of interest to tell us. The stage door-keeper, however, an ancient retired actor, testified to having seen ‘shadows against her lighted windows. Mr. James was in there with her. They were going through the strangling scene. Then the light went out: that’s all I know.’

‘How did you know it was Mr. Dragon in there?’

‘Well, they were rehearsing the strangling scene,’ the door-keeper repeated, reasonably.

‘Now, however, you realise that she really was being strangled?’

‘Well, yes.’ He looked troubled. The Dragon family in their affluence were good to old theatricals like himself.

‘Very well. Can you now say that you know it was Mr. Dragon?’

‘I thought it was. You see, he was speaking the lines.’

‘You mean, you heard his voice? You heard what he was saying?’

‘A word here and there. He raised his voice—just as he does on those lines in the production: the death lines, you know…’ He looked hopeful. ‘So it was just a run-through.’

‘They were all sitting in what, I suppose, would be the Green-room: James Dragon himself, his father who, besides producing, played the small part of Othello’s servant, the Clown; his mother who was wardrobe mistress, etcetera and had some little walking-on part, Leila Dragon who played Emilia, and three actors (who, for a wonder, weren’t members of the family), playing respectively, Iago, Cassio and Cassio’s mistress, Bianca. I think,’ said the Great Detective, beaming round the circle of eagerly listening faces, ‘that it will be less muddling to refer to them by their stage names.’

‘Do you really?’ asked Inspector Cockrill: incredulous.

‘Do I really what?’

‘Think it will be less muddling?’ said Cockie: and twiddled his thumbs again.

The great man ignored him. ‘They were in stage make-up, still, and in stage costume: and they sat about or stood, in attitudes of horror, grief, dismay or despair, which seemed to me very much like stage attitudes too.

‘They gave me their story—I use the expression advisedly as you will see—of the past half-hour.

‘The leading-lady’s dressing-room at the Dragon Theatre juts out from the main building, so angled, as it happens, that the windows can be seen from the Green-room, as they can from the door-keeper’s cubby. As I talked, I myself could see my men moving about in there, silhouettes against the drawn blinds.

‘They had been gathered, they said, the seven of them, here in the Green-room, for twenty minutes after the curtain came down—Othello, Othello’s servant the Clown, Emilia and Mrs. Dragon (the family) plus Iago, Cassio and a young girl playing Bianca; all discussing “something”. During the time, they said, nobody had left the room. Their eyes shifted to James Dragon and shifted away again.

‘He seemed to feel the need to say something, anything to distract attention from that involuntary, shifting glance. He blurted out: “And if you want to know what we were discussing, we were discussing my wife.”

‘ “She had been Carrying On,” said Mrs. Dragon in a voice of theatrical doom.

‘ “She had for some time been carrying on a love affair, as my mother says. We were afraid the affair would develop, would get out of hand, that she wouldn’t want to come away on our American tour and it would upset our arrangements. We were taking out As You Like It. She was to have played Rosalind.”