Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(5)

So: what to do next?

‘To ask oneself,’ said Inspector Cockrill, though the question had been clearly rhetorical, ‘why there had been fifteen minutes’ delay in sending for the police.’

‘Why should you think there had been fifteen minutes’ delay?’

‘The man said it was twenty minutes before you arrived. But you told us earlier, you were just across the street.’

‘No doubt,’ said the old man, crossly, ‘as you have guessed my question, you would like to—’

‘Answer it,’ finished Inspector Cockrill. ‘Yes, certainly. The answer is: because the cast wanted time to change back into stage costume. We know they had changed out of it, or at least begun to change…’

‘I knew it: the ladies were not properly laced up, Iago had on an everyday shirt under his doublet—they had all obviously hurriedly redressed and as hurriedly re-made up. But how could you…?’

‘We could deduce it. Glenda Croy had had time to get back into her underclothes. The rest of them said they had been in the Green-room discussing the threat of her “affair”. But the affair had been going on for some time, it couldn’t have been suddenly so pressing that they need discuss it before they even got out of their stage-costume—which is, I take it, by instinct and training the first thing an actor does after curtain-fall. And besides, you knew that Othello, at least, had changed and changed back.’

‘I knew?’

‘You believed it was Othello—that’s to say James Dragon—who had been in the room with her. And the door-man had virtually told you that at that time he was not wearing his stage costume.’

‘I fear then that till this moment,’ said the great man, heavily sarcastic, ‘the door-man’s statement to that effect has escaped me.’

‘Well, but…’ Cockie was astonished. ‘You asked him how, having seen his silhouette on the window-blinds, he had “known” it was James Dragon. And he answered, after reflection, that he knew by his voice and by what he was saying. He did not say,’ said Cockie, sweetly reasonable, ‘what otherwise, surely, he would have said before all else: “I knew by the shape on the window-blind of the raised arms in those huge, padded, cantaloupe-melon sleeves.” ’

There was a horrid little silence. The host started the port on its round again with a positive whizz, the guests pressed walnuts upon one another with abandon (hoarding the nut-crackers, however, to themselves); and, after all, it was a shame to be pulling the white rabbits all at once out of the conjurer’s top hat, before he had come to them—if he ever got there! Inspector Cockrill tuned his voice to a winning respect. ‘So then, do tell us, sir—what next did you do?’

What the great man had done, standing there in the Green-room muttering to himself, had been to conduct a hurried review of the relevant times, in his own mind. ‘Ten-thirty, the curtain falls. Ten-fifty, having changed from their stage dress, they do or do not meet in here for a council of war. At any rate, by eleven o’clock the woman is dead: and then there is a council of war indeed… Ten minutes, perhaps, for frantic discussion, five or ten minutes’ grace before they must all be in costume again, ready to receive the police…’ But why? His eyes roved over them: the silks and velvets, the rounded bosoms thrust up by laced bodices, low cut: the tight-stretched hose, the jewelled doublets, the melon sleeves…

The sleeves. He remembered the laxly curved hands hanging over the head of the divan, the pointed nails. There had been no evidence of a struggle, but one never knew. He said slowly: ‘May I ask now why all of you have replaced your stage dress and make-up?’

Was there, somewhere in the room, a sharp intake of breath? Perhaps: but for the most part they retained their stagey calm. Emilia and Iago, point counterpoint, again explained. They had all been halfway, as it were, between stage dress and day dress; it had been somehow simpler to scramble back into costume when the alarm arose… Apart from the effect of an act rehearsed, it rang with casual truth. ‘Except that you told me that “when the alarm arose” you were all here in the Green-room, having a discussion.’

‘Yes, but only half-changed, changing as we talked,’ said Cassio, quickly. Stage people, he added, were not frightfully fussy about the conventional modesties.

‘Very well. You will, however, oblige me by reverting to day dress now. But before you all do so…’ He put his head out into the corridor and a couple of men moved in unobtrusively and stood just inside the door. ‘Mr. James Dragon—would you please remove those sleeves and let me see your wrists?’