The Death-Cap Dancers

evidence when the inquest is resumed. I hope you will accompany me, ma’am, when I go to see him. What he has to say may help to prove whether your ideas are right. I still have a kind of liking for my own.’

The meeting with the injured boy took place on that same afternoon. Mick was sitting up and smiled when he saw them.

‘Does this mean I can get out of this place?’ he asked. ‘I’m perfectly all right, you know.’

‘You won’t be here much longer, I’m sure, sir. You know who I am, don’t you?’

‘I haven’t lost my memory. Have you come to grill me again?’

‘Just to put a few questions. This is Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.’

‘Good Lord! They haven’t told you I’m crazy, have they? Have I been babbling while I was unconscious? You have to get two doctors, don’t you? I know Dame Beatrice is a supremo, but—’

‘Calm yourself,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am not here as a psychiatrist, but as one who is deeply concerned to prove the identity of the person who attacked you and who killed Mrs Tyne.’

‘And you and Mrs Tyne are not his only victims,’ said Ribble, ‘so tell us everything you know. First, did you know that Miss Peggy Raincliffe followed you into the changing-room?’

‘Trust her! She would!’

‘Steady on with your strictures, sir. I am afraid she pursued you once too often. The poor young lady is dead… Take it easy, sir. I thought you might have guessed.’

‘I had no idea, of course I hadn’t! All I know is that I opened the back door and went outside to get a breath of air. Besides, I thought I heard somebody knock.’

‘This was after you had changed your dance costume at the end of the show?’

‘Yes. The sword-dance team, with me in my whites and that stinking beard, had been photographed, and then they wanted a picture of the other dancers. Well, the other men didn’t have to change because they had kept on most of the morris gear for the last item — it’s a sword-dance, as I said — and Peggy didn’t have to change, either, because she played for the last item, she didn’t dance in it, so that only left me. Well, I changed in the washroom and then opened the door and just stepped out into that shrubbery bit, and before I knew anything about it, some frightful lout must have come up behind me and hit me over the head.’

‘And that is really all you remember, sir?’

‘Of course it is. I say, tell me about Peggy, will you?’

‘You were a long time gone, sir, so I understand that she volunteered, in an impetuous manner which forestalled anybody else among your company, to go into the changing-room to hurry you up. We think she must have been a witness to the assault on you.’

‘And this crazy devil turned on her…’

‘That is about the size of it, sir. He dared not leave her alive when he knew she had seen him.’

‘But why should the fellow want to attack me?’

‘We think that, once you had changed your clothes for the last photograph, he mistook you for your sister,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘But why should he knock on the door?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Ribble, ‘if Dame Beatrice is right, he must have seen you through the window when you came out of the washroom.’

‘The window is too high up.’

‘Too high up for anybody to get in by without a ladder, yes, sir.’

‘But not so high up that a lissom person could not leap up and take a look at the room,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘He probably heard you moving about and was actuated at first simply out of curiosity. When he saw what he thought was your sister who, so far as he knew, had no reason to suspect him of evil intentions, he knocked on the door which, for your own reasons, you had already decided to open.’

‘But why didn’t I see him?’

‘He had already taken cover.’

‘But what did he have against Pippa? — that is, if he mistook me for her.’

‘A deep wound to his vanity,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘But what about Judy? Why was she killed that day on the moors?’

‘The inference is that he met her, waylaid her and was repulsed, as your sister repulsed him. Mrs Tyne did not want his company, I think. He then knocked her off her bicycle and assaulted her, an assault which ended in her death. We shall never prove this, but it is a tenable hypothesis.’

‘But, if you know all this, why can’t you arrest him?’

‘Because, as Dame Beatrice says, we have no proof,’ said Ribble.

‘Oh, Lord! If only I hadn’t opened that damned back door!’

‘No need to blame yourself,’ said Dame Beatrice briskly. ‘You could not possibly have known that anybody would attack you or Miss Raincliffe.’

‘Granted that your theories about the murderer are right, ma’am,’ said Ribble, when they had left the hospital, ‘why was the murderer lurking? If he had it in mind to kill Miss Pippa, whom her brother so closely resembles, he must have known or found out that the back door was kept bolted. Why was he round there at all?’

‘Oh, Inspector, what a question! He was not there with intent to commit murder, but to carry out a natural function which the screening bushes made possible. It was when he had fulfilled his perfectly innocent purpose that he heard sounds from inside, leapt up to glance in at the window and saw (as he thought) Miss Pippa. The opportunity thus fortuitously offered him was too good to let slip. He had intended to follow her up and kill her at some time, in any case. Mr Marton’s very thick wig and Miss Raincliffe’s sudden appearance saved one life but destroyed the other.’

‘The other dancers would have known of Mr Marton’s claustrophobia, you know, ma’am.’

‘I see what you mean, Inspector.’

‘One, in particular, being closest to him, would have counted on him opening that back door when he found himself shut up alone in that changing-room with no window it was possible for him to open. What was to stop this man from slipping out of the main door while the rest of them were chatting with the photographer? It wouldn’t take him a minute to nip round the building, and Mr Marton would probably have recognised his knock on the door, but isn’t going to incriminate him.’

Dame Beatrice shook her head.

‘You are forgetting the tandem,’ she pointed out. ‘It had disappeared. That means that it was probably cycled on to the moor and hidden there. No member of the dance company could have been absent long enough to have carried out such an operation. Oh, no, Inspector, your theory will not hold water. Mr Nicolson is not our murderer.’

‘There’s the psychological angle, as you yourself agree, ma’am. In other words, I reckon Mr Nicolson had a stronger motive for murdering those two girls than anybody else we’ve considered. They were a menace, as I see it, to what might be called by some “a beautiful friendship”.’

‘But we’ve discussed that aspect. It does not account for the vicious attack on Mr Marton himself.’

‘Punishment for stepping out of line? Jealousy is a strange force, ma’am. That also we’ve discussed.’

‘Why do you suppose Mrs Beck’s records were stolen? That also we have talked about. You think they were taken as a blind, don’t you? I say that the murderer needed them because he did not know the home address of Miss Marton, and that he took the records from the forest warden’s filing cabinet because he did not know the home address of Tamsin Lindsay, or where the other girls live.’

Ribble spread out his hands.

‘I grant everything you say, ma’am,’ he admitted, ‘but my theory seems so much more likely than yours, if you’ll allow me to say so. Look, you say your man is still in the neighbourhood and you met him in the forest. Suppose I pull him in and question him? I can’t hold him, but his answers might give me a line. Why, in any case, should he have stolen the tandem? One of the bicycles would have been far easier for him to manage and much less noticeable on the road. And who’s to say whether the tandem was ever put into that shed at the church hall at all? I don’t suppose all the dancers turned their bikes in at exactly the same time.’

‘Mr Marton would have known if the tandem had been left in some other place.’