get some humility into her. She couldn’t act.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?” asked Agatha. “She had the power to sack you, didn’t she? I mean, she was the money behind the whole thing. She hired you, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but I got a contract out of her, so she could do bugger all about it.”
“Why Bosnia?” asked Agatha.
“That’s what she kept asking. Don’t you see, that whole play was about the abuse of military might?”
Agatha decided to leave that one. “I gather Harry Witherspoon wasn’t in the cast.”
“Oh, that little shopkeeper who murdered his mother? No. He was beefing about his hay fever and asthma.”
Agatha sat up straight. “Blast! Why didn’t I think of it before?”
“What?” asked Paul.
“Gas masks, of course. Not only a disguise, but a protection against gas. Robin would just think it was one of the cast. But it needn’t have been. Could have been anyone from outside.”
“You’ll need to ask Freddy, who mans the stage door.”
“Where can we find him?”
“If the police aren’t grilling him, you’ll find him at his digs in Coventry Road. Little cottage at the end.”
“Where’s Coventry Road?” asked Paul.
“It’s nearly in the country on our road out. One of the roads leading off the Fosse. I’ll tell you when to turn off.”
“We never ask the right questions,” mourned Paul.
“Like what?”
“Simple ones. Like what’s Freddy’s second name? What kind of person is he?”
“We’ll soon find out,” said Agatha. “Turn off down here on the left, just past that garage.”
Paul swung round into Coventry Road and they cruised along slowly, past shops and council houses. “We’re nearly out into the country,” said Paul. “I don’t see any cottage.”
“Try round the next bend.”
“There it is,” said Paul.
A little white cottage stood on its own by the road. “And that’s another thing we should have asked,” said Paul. “What’s his phone number? He may be out for the evening.”
“Stop complaining. We’ll soon find out.”
A worried-looking woman with her hair in curlers answered the door. “We’re looking for Freddy, the stage-door keeper,” said Agatha.
“Dad’s at his allotment. Who’s asking?”
Patiently Agatha went through the whole thing again. “He’s a bit shaken up about things. You’d best leave him alone.” And with that, she slammed the door in their faces.
“Well, at least we know he’s at some allotments. Let’s ask along the road. Someone at that garage might know where the allotments are.”
At the garage, a man volunteered the information that the allotments were off Barney Lane. “Can’t miss them,” he said. “Go back to Haydon’s Close on your right, go along a few yards, make a left down Blackberry Road, then second right is Barney Lane.”
They made a few false turns, Agatha having forgotten the instructions and Paul unfairly saying that women never knew how to navigate to cover up the fact he had forgotten most of the instructions himself. At last they found the allotments, little strips of land where men were tending vegetables.
They asked the first man they came across for Freddy, and he jerked his thumb towards an old man who was bent over a vegetable bed.
They approached him and went through the usual preamble of who they were and why they wanted to speak to him. “Freddy Edmonds,” he said, holding out an earthy hand which they both shook.
“Come into my office,” he said, a grin creasing up the wrinkles on his face.
His “office” was a shed beside his strip of allotment where lines of lettuce, cabbage plants and potatoes and various other plants they did not recognize were stretched out in neat rows.
He sat on a box, removed a greasy cap from his head, and pulled a pipe out of his pocket. Paul sat on another box and Agatha on an old car seat.
“The police have been at me earlier,” he began, stuffing tobacco from a tin into his pipe. Agatha often wondered why anyone could be bothered smoking a pipe. There was always all that work of getting it filled, tamping the tobacco down, lighting it, then lighting it again frequently when it went out, and then scraping out the resultant mess from the bowl only to start the process again.
“They were asking me if anyone went in through the stage door while the performance was on. I told them, no one. First one was that reverend who came to see Mrs. Barley.”
“And what about people leaving? I mean, you would notice if someone walked past you still in costume? You see, it could have been someone not in the cast, but wearing a gas mask.”
“Well, you see,” he said, exhaling a cloud of foul-smelling smoke, “when the reverend raised the alarm, they were all still in their dressing-rooms, and the police, they arrived in minutes and two were left to guard the stage door.”
“And is there no other way out?”
“Not a one. They go past me or not at all.”
There was a long silence and then Agatha said, “It must be a very boring job. Have you always done it?”
“No, I worked on the railway until I retired. Saw an ad in the local paper and got the job. I remember when it was the Gaiety Theatre in the old days. It was lying empty for quite a bit until Mrs. Barley bought it.”
“Yes, we’ve just learned she actually bought it.”
“I was hoping they’d call it the Gaiety like the old vaudeville days, but it’s just the Mircester Players, and amateurs at that. Still, it’s a job.”
Above Freddy’s head was a shelf crammed with gardening books and magazines.
“You read a lot about gardening,” said Paul.
“Everything I can get.”
Agatha had a sudden mental picture of Freddy, sitting in his cubicle at the stage door-bound to be a sort of cubicle, they all were-and avidly reading some book or magazine on gardening while some shadowy figure slipped past him.
“It was a warm evening,” she said. “Was the street door open?”
“Yes, I had to let some air in.”
“So you wouldn’t hear anyone come in?”
“I’d hear their footsteps and look up.”
“Could someone got past you at a crouch-under your line of vision?”
“I s’pose they could,” he said uneasily.
“Didn’t you have to go and pee?” asked Paul.
He puffed at his pipe for a long moment. “That I did. But I shut and locked the outside door while I went off.”
“And how often did you go?” asked Agatha.
“Three times. My bladder ain’t what it used to be. Age. You know what it’s like.”
“Not yet,” said Agatha frostily.
“And you shut the door each time you went?” asked Paul.
Another long silence while Freddy puffed energetically on his pipe. “Sure I did,” he said.
“Tell us about Robin Barley,” said Agatha. “Did anyone really hate her?”
“She got up the noses of a lot of people, that’s for sure. But they’re all a bunch of prima donnas. Sometimes I come across them in their day jobs, at the bank or in the shops, and they’re as quiet as mice. But the minute they get in their theatre, they all think they’re Alec Guinness and Edith Evans.”
“Did you know Robin very well?”
“As well as anyone, I suppose,” said Freddy. “Mind you, she did a lot of good work for the church, and let’s face it, without her money there wouldn’t be any Mircester Players and I wouldn’t have a job. She loved the theatre.
