She knew Langley Halstead only by name, but the name was familiar enough. He and Sherwin Danson were cousins. Danson was comparatively well off — he had two or three thousand a year, and since he lived frugally and had no one to spend it on but himself, he appeared to be rolling in money to a spendthrift like Langley Halstead.
Langley Halstead was not well off. He went through life teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Danson was a sterling character, a splendid young man; Halstead came as close to being a scoundrel as he dared.
Halstead was Danson’s only heir.
With that background, the case practically wrote itself.
Unfortunately, there was no proof. Halstead would claim he was at the theatre at the time of the murder, and some twenty-five members of the Two Hundred would testify that on that night he attended their gathering at the Monica immediately after the play and gave every indication of having just seen it and been disappointed by it. He also would claim he hadn’t known his cousin was in London, and unless someone had seen the two of them together, that would be difficult to refute.
Lady Sara was convinced that he had seen the play a night earlier — skipping the club meeting afterwards — which was why he could give such a convincing critique of the play on the night of the murder, but she could no more prove that than she could prove that he was lurking behind the panelling with Sherwin Danson during Cecil Radcliffe’s ghostly performance, waiting to murder Danson as soon as the smoke became thick enough.
We still had to explain how Halstead had managed to find out about Cecil Radcliffe’s final theatrical performance and how he got himself and his cousin into Vincent Uppington’s salon with such precise timing.
We were almost better off when we didn’t have a case.
“I think,” Lady Sara said, “we will have to contrive something.”
“How?” I wanted to know.
“I knew this would happen so I have already started.”
Mr. Eldridge Barriman was a theatrical agent. Lady Sara had given him copies of Lynes’s drawing, and now he had something for her. We called at his office, taking Mrs. Owen with us, and Mr. Barriman paraded for us six likenesses of Sherwin Danson. Mrs. Owen had been forewarned, or she certainly would have collapsed all over again. They had used makeup to bring their appearances as close as possible to the drawing, and the resemblances were remarkable.
But that wasn’t sufficient for Lady Sara. She had each of them speak a few humdrum lines, and she asked Mrs. Owen which sounded most like her master. Mrs. Owen immediately opted for number five, who was more a tenor than a baritone — thus wiping out Sir Thomas Talmage’s scientific approach to post-mortem vocal appraisals — whereupon Lady Sara instructed the others to listen carefully to five’s voice and try to emulate it.
“We’re going to stage a drama,” she said. “How well you perform it will determine whether a man gets away with murder.”
We left them practicing their vocal imitations. As soon as their costumes were ready, there would be a dress rehearsal.
Lady Sara sent me off to inspect a warehouse in Pudding Lane, just off Lower Thames Street and not far from the river. I was to have a leading role in this drama myself, and she wanted me to make myself familiar with the setting.
The mention of Lady Sara’s name got me admitted at once, and I found the warehouse to be a scene of frenzied activity. It looked as though major modifications were underway, with partitions of wood being shuffled about to form a complicated maze. When I tired of jumping out of the way of the workmen, a stairway took me to an upper floor that no longer existed. From behind bales of coarse fabric that filled a narrow balcony, I could look down on the maze from above. The scenario Lady Sara was putting together still wasn’t clear to me, but at least I understood what I had to do, and I would be ready when the grand opening came.
Langley Halstead was of medium stature, but the moral shadow he cast was minute. He was a shabby man, and he occupied shabby premises. I wondered, in fact, how he managed to attract any clients at all. The appearance of the man, along with the appearance of his office, should have put them off. He greeted me with what he thought was a warm smile of welcome; it looked more like a grimace to me.
“I need some leases drawn,” I told him. “Is this the sort of thing you handle?”
“But of course,” he said soothingly.
“I own a warehouse in Pudding Lane just off Lower Thames Street. It is being partitioned into small units to be leased for storage purposes. Several of them are already spoken for. There will be twenty-five when the remodelling is finished. So, hopefully, I will need twenty-five leases — but not all at once, of course. Five or six to begin with and then one or two at a time until all the storage units are leased. Are you interested?”
Langley Halstead definitely was interested. Even if he had expectations of soon being heir to a fortune, he had to have money to keep going on. Probably Effie was demanding her wages, and the seedy-looking clerk in his office looked as though his wages were in arrears also. We made an appointment to visit my warehouse together the next morning.
I was perspiring when I left him. Everything had gone well, but I still couldn’t understand what Lady Sara was up to.
The next morning when I escorted Langley Halstead into the warehouse, the workmen were no longer visible, and the place was silent as an empty warehouse could be in that noisy neighbourhood. The scent of fresh sawdust still hung in the air, and probably it helped to assure Halstead that my project was genuine. He gave no sign of suspecting anything.
“The storage units open off this main corridor,” I told him. “Go ahead and look around. I want you to have the whole project in mind.”
“Mr. Radcliffe has a lifelong interest in the theatre,” Lady Sara whispered. “Except for your part, he has directed this scenario himself — and very competently too.”
Radcliffe nodded solemnly. He looked as nervous as an amateur actor about to make his first professional appearance.
Below us, Langley Halstead was making a show at doing a thorough job for me. The more pains he took, and the more time, the larger he could make his bill. As Lady Sara had anticipated, he poked into this area and that, going all the way to the far end of the warehouse before he turned back. As he moved along, workmen, carefully keeping out of his sight, silently swung the partitions into different positions. This scenario’s props had cost a pretty penny, and Lady Sara seemed pleased at the result.
When Halstead finally had seen enough and started back, he sensed at once that something was wrong. He took a turn he remembered and found himself in a long room he had never seen before. There was no other exit. As he began to retrace his steps, a ghastly scream froze him in his tracks. He spun around — and found himself facing the man he had murdered eight days before, a man looking exactly like Danson, and sounding like Danson, and dressed exactly as Danson had been on that fatal night in Uppington’s salon.
“You treacherous scoundrel!” the image of Sherwin Danson moaned. “Stab me in the back, will you? Now it’s your turn!” A cloud of smoke enveloped him. He charged out of it flourishing an ice pick and ran directly at Halstead, who uttered a choking scream himself and fled on feet that terror had lent wings to.
Unfortunately for him, he didn’t know exactly where he was. Everything was arranged differently from what he had seen on his way in. In his panicky scramble to get away from the ice pick — wielding ghost, he found himself in a blocked corridor where yet another ghostly Sherwin Danson was waiting.
Halstead froze momentarily, staring as though hypnotized until that figure also charged out of a cloud of smoke waving an ice pick. The scenario was repeated twice more. Finally, one of the ghostly figures got Halstead cornered, another joined him, and another, and in the end, Halstead found himself facing all six of them, all wielding ice picks, and all intent on extracting full payment for the murderous blow Halstead had struck. As they edged towards him, trickles of smoke still rising around them, Halstead turned again and fled. He crashed through a partition, crashed through another — on Lady Sara’s orders they had been flimsily constructed — and at length found himself at the street door where I had left him. It was still locked, of course, but he didn’t hesitate. He crashed through it and took off at top speed. He might have covered miles before his terror abated, but there were two large constables waiting, and with an “’ere, what’s all this?” they collared him.