Lovers Make Moan

“Narayan lost an appeal against Rinkley for damage to his car. I don’t know the details. It happened some time ago, but Narayan was on the loser’s end and can’t have been very pleased about it.”

“Would he have been in a position to change over the daggers?”

“Well, he had a chair in the wings not too far from the trestle tables, but the third performance was the only one he saw, so although he may be familiar with the text of the play—he’s got a London B.A. degree in English—he certainly knew nothing of our production of it. I really think he should be ruled out.”

“How came it that he was given a seat in the wings?”

“He lent us his two-year-old son as the fairy changeling.”

“I do not remember the child.”

“No, you wouldn’t. He had a tummy upset on the first and second nights and did not appear, but he was all right on the Saturday, so Narayan Rao brought him along and looked after him until he was needed. Little Sharma was only on stage for a few minutes and, when Deb handed him back, his father changed him into his street clothes, left his little gold tunic and headband on the chair and took him straight home. The chap Lynn hired to supervise the parking of cars saw them go.”

“So Narayan Rao knew nothing of Mr Rinkley’s illness?”

“Not at the time, nor, of course, that Bourton killed himself with the substituted dagger. He knows by now, I suppose. Even if he doesn’t read the papers he must have heard the gossip. The story is all over the town. It takes Cook and Carrie twice as long as usual to do the marketing, and as for Deb and me, we dread having to stick our noses outside the front door. Fortunately the servants love all the notoriety and fuss and Cook, I believe, lives in hope of selling her story to one of the Sunday papers and reaping a rich harvest.”

“Are you really accepting a commission from Lynn?” Deborah asked, as Dame Beatrice took out a notebook and, seated at the breakfast table which had just been cleared, began to write.

“I am not in a position to do so. He is not calling me in as consultant psychiatrist, but to find a murderer. The Home Office sometimes calls upon me to do that, and no man can serve two masters.”

“You don’t really suspect Lynn of changing over the daggers, do you?” asked Jonathan.

“My previous point, that he would have had much the best opportunity to do so, should be borne in mind, and there is another thing which may be of equal importance. On his own showing, he is an expert on weapons and would have seen the possibility of turning a narrow-bladed rapier into a dagger of the required size. He may also have known of a man who could do the work for him, a man who would have had no suspicions because he had repaired weapons, replaced lost parts, restored mountings and so on and so forth for Mr Lynn, probably over a period of years.”

“If Lynn has anything on his conscience—and what you say, Aunt, does make one think a bit—wasn’t it rather rash of him to point out to you and to the police that the murder weapon was a cut-down rapier?”

“I think he felt he had no option. If I myself had been given an opportunity to examine the weapon, the chances are that I should have known at once that it was made from a rapier. The expert the police will call in will not only realise the same thing, but will date the rapier and may even be able to make a fair estimate of when its transformation to a dagger took place. The weakness of my theory that a modern blacksmith did the work is that the cutting-down process may have been done as early as the seventeenth century, you see.”

“In which case Lynn could be as innocent as I believe him to be,” said Jonathan.

“Hasn’t Aunt Adela undermined your confidence in him just a little, though?” asked Deborah.

“Dented it a trifle; not undermined it.”

“I have made a list of twelve people who were in the play,” said Dame Beatrice, indicating her notebook. “What I would like from you and Deborah is your view of the interrelationships among these twelve people so far as you were able to observe them during the rehearsals.”

“Twelve people? Which of us are you leaving out?” asked Deborah.

“Your two selves, Rosamund and Edmund, the fairies en bloc, the child Yolanda, the boy who played Puck and, only for the time being, the young man who was Egeus.”

“The last one is Jasper Lynn, Marcus’s adopted son, whose head is too full of A-levels to bother itself with murder, and the other is Tom Woolidge’s younger brother Peter. You would be right to call him charming,” said Deborah. “He is quite the nicest possible type of really nice boy and has been wonderful in helping to look after the children. I’m glad you’ve left him out of your calculations.”

“Pro tem only. I am like Long John Silver. He was fond of young Jim Hawkins and I always wonder whether even Fagin did not feel some affection for the Artful Dodger and the other little rapscallions. Categorically, how did Marcus Lynn regard the other eleven on my list?”

“So far as we know, he got on well with all of them. People respected him for choosing anything but a star part for himself and were all grateful for his lavish sponsorship of the show.”

“No case of having to hire your own costume and agree to take at least twenty of the most expensive tickets and either flog them to your friends or pay for them yourself and give them away, she means,” said Jonathan. “I have only one thing to add: he insisted on having his Emma cast as Hermia to begin with. At the first reading the poor girl was so terribly bad that I’m afraid opprobrious remarks were made and some of them may have come to Lynn’s ears. He would not readily forgive anybody who called his wife ‘a silly moo’ and said she would ruin the show.”

“I thought she performed adequately, but not as Hermia.”

“No, she swopped over with Barbara Bourton and then Deb took her in hand, and there weren’t any more complaints. If Lynn had it in for either Rinkley or Bourton, I really don’t think it would have been on Emma’s account. She got plenty of compliments in the end. The ladies who might have taken umbrage because of Rinkley’s comments on their acting were Susan Hythe, Robina Lester and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Caroline Frome.”

“Would those be the women who took workmen’s parts?”

“Yes, indeed. Susan was Flute, otherwise Thisbe, Robina was Starveling, alias Moonshine, and Caroline was Snout, who doubled up as Wall.”