himself for making you conspicuous. You, I suppose, feeling sorry for him, gave him a kiss and obtained a response which, as a beautiful and experienced woman, you ought to have foreseen and allowed for.”
“I was never more astonished in my life. To me he was just an abashed and awkward schoolboy and suddenly to find myself locked in his arms and having to listen to the kind of stuff that would have made Antony and Cleopatra turn in their graves with embarrassment—well, it was not only ludicrous; it was quite alarming.”
The story unfolded. Dame Beatrice listened and decided to keep any questions unasked, if possible, until the narrative came to an end. Jasper had written a letter couched in the humblest and most contrite terms begging forgiveness ‘for my unpardonable conduct’, promising that he would ‘never again precipitate such a situation’, but offering ‘eternal homage and beseeching you to grant me the benison of your friendship’.
“After that,” continued Barbara, “I must say that, apart from adoring glances from him in the first scene, nothing happened because he was revising for his examinations, so, as he had no more speeches, he did not stay for the last scenes but went straight home to study. There was no fear, I mean, of his following Tom and me into the woods, or anything of that sort.” Barbara went on to say that the rehearsals continued as smoothly as could be expected considering that Rinkley of the unkind tongue and Donald Bourton of the amorous inclinations were in the cast. Then Deborah and Jonathan gave their cocktail party to which only the married couples were invited. This occurred some weeks before the dress rehearsal and was followed, at the next rehearsal, by a statement from Jasper which, at the time, scarcely registered with Barbara. Helping her off with her coat and laying it reverently on one of the trestle tables which, later, would be used for the props, he asked her how she would like it if he could make her a rich woman.
“ ‘I have the means, you know,’ he told me,” said Barbara. “ ‘You mean your father is a wealthy man? But it will be a long time, I hope, before you inherit anything from him and, when you do, you will think twice before giving any of it away,’ I said, laughing. ‘Oh, but,’ he said, ‘I’m not talking about my father’s money. I have no expectations there. Everything will go to Emma. That’s the usual arrangement between husbands and wives, isn’t it? It’s not as though I’m his son, you see.’ Well, this meant nothing to me at the time, Dame Beatrice. All I said was that I believed the wife was entitled to claim something when the husband died, and that, in my case, I knew that I was well provided for. ‘Anyway, I am more than likely to die before Donald does,’ I remember saying. He asked me what I would do if I had a lot of money. ‘Oh, I should form my own company and pick the parts I wanted for myself instead of having to wait for offers and then perhaps get saddled with something unsuitable,’ I told him, ‘and have to do the best I could with it.’ ”
“And now you are in a position to realise all your ambitions,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Well, yes, but if I had ever dreamed of how it would come about…”
“Quite; however, one cannot foresee some things.”
“Nobody could have foreseen that Rinkley would be taken ill at the last performance.”
“Oh, I am sure young Jasper had made sure of that. I suspect there had been something added to the drinks Mr Rinkley took back-stage.”
“Some of the men overdid it and not only Rinkley. Sometimes I think that if only Donald hadn’t been so drunk he might have realised, the minute he took it out of his belt, that he’d been given the wrong dagger. We all thought it must have been meant for Rinkley, though, if it wasn’t just somebody’s carelessness. Rinkley wasn’t popular, you know, and he would have known, as Donald should have, that he had the wrong dagger and no harm would have been done.”
“That point was made long ago and disposed of. The substitution of the lethal dagger for the harmless one can only have been made by one of the three persons who carried the properties from the house to the stage. Of these, Brian Yorke would have had no reason to harm any of his actors; the same applies to Marcus Lynn, who had subsidised the production and certainly would not want it disrupted. That leaves young Jasper, who, like a dutiful son, helped to carry down the properties each evening after the costumes had been distributed to the performers. Well, I think we may approach the end of this very unhappy story, don’t you?”
“Before we do, there is something I have to ask you. I see you know it all, and no doubt you have all the evidence you need. What will happen to Tom and Peter and me? The police are still looking for a murderer.”
“I am afraid you will have to tell them your story, but the verdict, now that the identity of the young boy’s body is not in doubt, will be suicide while the mind was disturbed. Where that suicide actually took place is beside the point, in a way, but it was a mistake, perhaps, on the part of one of you, to add the suicide weapon to Mr Lynn’s collection. However, he seems convinced that Jasper himself placed it there and that he killed himself with some other form of cold steel.”
“Yes the police have thought all along that it was murder. I’ve been living in a state of terror. I would have gone to them except for implicating Tom and Peter. Why have you decided it was suicide?”
“The pathologist found three small puncture marks on the front of the body and suggested that suicide was at least as likely as murder. Suicides are on record as being hesitant and experimental before they pluck up the courage to deal themselves
“So what happens now?”
“Nothing, except that you are going to tell me the rest of the story. The suicide, I suppose, took place here in your house.”
The rest of the story was soon told. After his parents had gone to Italy and he himself was supposed to have joined his friends for the touring holiday in France, Jasper had turned up at the Bourtons’ house to find Barbara still clearing up in preparation for putting the property up for sale and moving to London.
“I didn’t recognise him until he spoke,” she said. “There was this completely bald object dressed in T-shirt and jeans and carrying what looked like a cricket bag and I was alone in the house because it was past half-past eight in the evening and my maid had given me my dinner at seven, washed up and gone home. She was the only one of Donald’s household that I had kept on. Well, I thought at first that the boy might have found out that the house was empty, except for me, and was up to no good, and I was about to slam the door on him when he spoke.
“ ‘It’s Jasper,’ he said. ‘I say, the hot water at our place has conked. Could you let me have a bath?’
“He sounded perfectly normal and sensible, so, of course, I let him in and asked what he had done with his hair. He said he had decided to turn Buddhist and go to a monastery in Tibet.
“ ‘I thought you were going to France,’ I said. ‘Oh, you can have a bath, of course. First floor, at the top of the stairs. What about towels?’
