“What, Carmichael?”
“No, of course not. Use your nous.” Barnaby picked up a ball-point and started scribbling. “And don’t look so affronted,” he continued, not looking up. “Think, man!”
While Troy thought, Barnaby reflected minutely on the times and the names and positions he had jotted down. If everyone was where they said they were at the times they said they were, doing what they said they were doing, then he was up a creek. So someone was lying. Fair enough. You expected murderers to lie. But when you had a theater full of people prepared to stand by what was, after all, the evidence of their own eyes and back him up then you were in a real bind. Especially when two of the eyes were your own.
But he knew he was right. He knew in his blood and in his bones. Over the years he had come to this point in a case too many times to be mistaken. Details might be unclear, practicalities elusive, methodology right up the Swanee, but he knew. The backs of his hands prickled, his neck in the stuffy, overheated office crawled with cold. He knew and could do nothing.
“Oh, fuck it, Troy!” The sergeant jumped as Barnaby’s fist hit the desk. “I’m bloody hemmed in. Nobody can be in two places at once … can they?”
“No, sir,” replied Troy, feeling for once on pretty safe ground. He was not displeased to see Barnaby foxed. You could put up with just so much swaggering about. Now, there were two of them without a bloody clue. He watched his chief’s fierce frown and tightly clamped jaw. Any minute now, the little brown bottle would appear. And here it was. The chief inspector shook out two indigestion tablets and chased them down with cold coffee. Then he sat and stared at his piece of paper for so long that the neat black letters became meaningless.
“This is where,” he said to Troy, “if I were a religious man, I should start praying for a miracle.”
And—such is the wickedly unfair tilt of things in a world where a monk can spend his life on his knees and never get a nibble—for Tom Barnaby, sometimes profane, moderately decent, frequent faller by the wayside, the miracle occurred. Buzz, buzz. He picked up the phone. It was David Smy. Barnaby listened for a moment, responded “You’re quite sure?” and replaced the receiver.
“Troy,” he said, presenting an awesome countenance. “When all this is over, remind me to send a hefty check to a worthwhile cause.”
“Why’s that then, chief?”
“Strokes of luck like this must be paid for, sergeant. Otherwise whoever’s sending them gets annoyed.”
“So what did they say? Whoever it was.”
“If you remember,” said Barnaby with a smile so broad it seemed to touch his ears, “David thought there was something odd about the tray he took on.”
“But he described it all and there wasn’t.”
“Quite right. But you’ll recall from his statement that as it was a personal prop he gave the tray a quick look-see about the five. Now, the razor that Young supplied and that the murdered man used to cut his throat had a mother-of-pearl design of flowers and leaves on one side of the handle and a little line of silver rivets on the reverse. The reason David Smy thought there was something odd when he entered the wings with it lying sunny-side down on his tray was because he noticed the rivets.”
“So?”
‘‘When he gave the tray the once-over just before eight, the rivets were not there.”
“Then”—Troy picked up the inspector’s excitement— “there were two?”
“There were two.”
“So all our problems with the time … ?”
“Gone. The whole thing’s wide open. It could have been tinkered with any time between when Deidre checked it and ten o’clock, when David took it on.”
“So … whoever it was left the substitute, took the tape off, and slipped the original back in his or her own good time.”
“Precisely. I’d thought of that option, of course, but assumed no one would dare risk leaving the tray on the props table minus the razor for more than a few minutes, even with the wings dark. But, as we now see, they didn’t have to.”
“So you’re no longer boxed in, sir?” Troy struggled hard not to sound peevish. He didn’t wish to appear mean-spirited, but really, the way information fell into some people’s laps was beyond a joke. Then he recalled that some of the kudos at the end of a successful case always fell on the bag-carrier and cheered up. “So we’ve got a full house, then? Anybody could have done it?”
“I think we’ll have to except Avery Phillips. He didn’t come out of the box till after the murder. But apart from him, yes … anybody.” He got up, suddenly full of vim and vigor, and grabbed his coat. “I’m going to sort out a warrant. Get the car round.”
“We looking for the other razor, sir?”
“Yes. I expect whoever it is has had the sense to chuck it by now, but you never know. We might strike lucky.” By the time Barnaby returned from Superintendent Penrose’s office, Troy, sub-Burberry tightly belted, had brought the car around.
“Where to first, chief?”
“We’ll start at the top and work our way down.”
Deidre opened the front door of the house and stepped inside. It was eerily quiet. She had always thought of her father’s presence as a silent one; now, she realized it instigated many subtle sounds. The creak of his armchair, the soft rub of his clothes against the furniture, the snatched papery rustle of his breath. She took off her coat and Sunny’s leash and hung them in the dingy hall, then walked to the kitchen, where she stood uncertainly, looking at the dishes that had been sitting in the sink, gravied and custard-streaked, for the past four days. They looked as much a fixture as the spotted chrome taps and grubby roller towel. Best to keep busy, the medical social worker had said, and Deidre knew this was good advice. Even as she stood there, she saw herself sweeping and polishing and dusting. Hanging gay new curtains, placing a bright geranium on the windowsill. But vivid as these pictures were, they paled beside a concomitant weight of ennui so great that after a few more minutes attached to the hearth rug, she began to believe she would never move again.
Sunny, who had gone in for the most dashing leaps and runs when they were out, had already sensed the situation and now sat quietly at her feet. Deidre picked up her copy of Uncle Vanya, interleaved and crammed with production ideas and sketches for the set. One of the nicest things during her stay with the Barnabys had happened on Wednesday morning, when she had discussed the theater for hours with Cully, at first tentatively, then, as her companion responded with great interest, more and more enthusiastically. They had talked through lunch (extraordinarily inedible) and well into the afternoon, in fact right up to the time Deidre had had to leave for the hospital. She couldn’t understand now why she had ever thought Cully sneering and standoffish.
Sunny made a hopeful sound, stretching his lips in that strange manner that dogs have; half yawn, half grin. Deidre started guiltily. He had not eaten all day, and had made no complaint till now. There were three cans of meat and a large bag of Winalot in her bag, and she put some food on a plate, then filled his stone dish marked dog with clean water. She left the sound of steady lapping behind as she climbed the stairs.
In her father’s room she started automatically to make his bed, then stopped, sharply recalled to the complete pointlessness of her task. She looked around, a fall of green blanket in her arms, taking in the bottle of medicine and little bottles of pills on the bamboo table; the Bible open at the First Book of Kings showing an engraving of Elijah being delicately fed by ravens; two pieces of Turkish delight in a saucer.
Gradually, and with the deepest apprehension, she absorbed the full enormity of what had happened. Her father was not poorly or a little unstable or susceptible to queer turns. He had Alzheimer’s disease and was a danger to himself and others; the balance of his mind disturbed. Deidre had a sudden vision of some old-fashioned scales and an impersonal hand dishing out wholesome grains of sanity with a little brass scoop. They were white and clean like virgin sand. Into the other shallow metal saucer was poured a hot dark flux of irrationality until the saucer overflowed and the chaste pale granules were first swamped, then quite washed away, in the black froth of madness.