Lovers Make Moan

you would be interested, Dame Beatrice, so I’ve brought along the catalogue, and the exhibits themselves I can show you, if you’d care to see them, at any time which is convenient to you. I’m afraid I can’t show you the lethal weapon. The police have impounded that.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Oh, yes, near enough. It is not unlike one in my collection, except that the blade is shorter and had been honed down to razor sharpness. They let me take it out of its sheath and I only touched the edge of it with my thumb, yet it parted the skin. It must have gone into poor Bourton like a hot knife into butter.”

“Well, it certainly missed any ribs, it seems.”

“Have you heard of similar cases, Dame Beatrice? I mean, cases of stabbing with no outward signs of blood?”

“There is the classic case which the police surgeon was prevented from quoting. Usually, I think, there would be some bleeding from the nose and mouth, if not outwardly from the wound itself.”

“I suppose that could be taken superficially as a nosebleed. I believe some such thing was mentioned.”

“Marcus, dear, you are spoiling my lunch,” said Emma.

“Yes. I’m sorry, Dame Beatrice, to have dragged you into such a discussion. I went to see Barbara Bourton before we came here this morning.”

“Ah, yes. I saw her yesterday,” said Deborah. “She seems to be bearing up all right.”

“She is touring again next week, and later on she wants to run her own company. She proposed to resurrect A.A.Milne’s light comedies,” said Emma. “I wonder how they will go down with present-day audiences?”

“I should think they might go down very well. At least they are pleasant and well constructed.”

“She is going to play Kate Camberley in the one-act Camberley Triangle as a curtain raiser. The part is made for her. Then she will follow it up with Belinda and, for a change, if she can attract the other people she wants, she will play Eustasia in The Dover Road, and she might vary that with Olivia in Mr Pim Passes By.”

“She will never put that sort of stuff across,” said Jonathan, “any more than you can put across lots of the poetry of the same period. Times have changed. People don’t want cosy domestic comedy and storms in tea-cups, or verses that actually scan and rhyme. They want a challenge, toughness, art which reflects life instead of cushioning it. In a way, you know, Bourton has brought The Dream up-to-date by actually killing Pyramus.”

“Let’s adjourn and look at the catalogue Marcus has brought,” said Deborah. “You seem very familiar with A.A.Milne’s plays,” she added to Emma as they went into the drawing-room together.

“Barbara told me of her plans weeks ago, when we first began rehearsals, so I got the plays and read them. I could see her in the various parts as I read. Of course she hadn’t got the capital at that time to form her own company, but Donald seems to have left a lot of money and all of it, Marcus tells me, comes to Barbara, so she will be able to realise all her ambitions now.”

There were more than thirty daggers listed and described and the catalogue was written up in beautiful copperplate. Some of the entries were familiar to Jonathan, since about a dozen of the daggers had been brought along to the dress rehearsal so that he and Tom could make their choice. Listed were a bowie knife, three Italian cinquedeas of the late fifteenth century, two French rondel daggers of a century later, a quillon dagger, a ballock or kidney dagger, probably Flemish, and a queer-looking, so called ‘ear’ dagger, all of about the same date.

To the next century belonged a couple of English and Scottish daggers, two left-hand daggers from France and Spain respectively, two Spanish plug-bayonets, a collection of horn-handled, silver-mounted hunting knives and there was a late nineteenth-century Corsican dagger, the property in former times, no doubt, of a brigand.

A second part of the catalogue was devoted to more modern weapons—Commando knives, a German NSKK leader’s dagger and an SS officer’s dagger of the same era, a very elegant, narrow-bladed dagger which had belonged to a German naval officer, and, separately listed again, a collection of weapons, mostly with curved blades, from the Orient.

Lynn turned back the pages and put his finger down on one of the early entries. The quillon dagger, he said, was nearest in appearance to the retractable dagger ‘which, as a matter of fact, I had copied from it’, but he went on to say that when the police allowed him to draw the lethal dagger from its sheath, he realised that the point of the dagger nowhere near reached the end of the sheath. The blade, instead of being nearly fifteen inches long, was a bare six inches in length,

“Coincident with what the doctors think was the length of the wound,” he said. “Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?”

“Well,” said Jonathan to Dame Beatrice when the guests had gone, “it does make you think a bit. The harmless dagger retracted right into the hilt so that all its inches could be assumed to be in Pyramus.”

“They would have pinned him to the ground,” said Deborah.

“Ah, but, with the retractable dagger, that problem would not arise. With the murderous blade, as somebody had the wit to foresee, it might cause a problem, so he took care to make the blade short enough to get to the right spot with no redundant inches.”

“So we really are talking about murder or suicide,” said Deborah.

“Oh, accident was ruled out long ago, as the police spotted very early on.”

“I wonder why Donald didn’t realise that the blade was much too short? Surely he must have noticed, the minute he drew the thing out.”

“I doubt whether he had ever seen the retractable blade drawn out of the sheath. As Oberon he had been given a sword. He wouldn’t have taken any interest in anybody else’s ‘props’. People are so self-centred, especially when they’ve got a pretty decent part in a play.”

“But if the dagger was meant for Rinkley, he would have spotted the short blade at once and realised it was the wrong dagger,” said Deborah.