“Right.”
Dr. Harkness sat heavily on the sofa and Alleyn turned again to Marchant.
“Holding, as you say, a controlling interest,” he said, “she must have been a power to reckon with, as far as other employees of the Management were concerned.”
The lids drooped a little over Marchant’s very pale eyes. “I really don’t think I follow you,” he said.
“She was, everyone agrees, a temperamental woman. For instance, this afternoon, we are told, she cut up very rough indeed. In the conservatory.”
The heightened tension of his audience could scarcely have been more apparent if they’d begun to twang like bow-strings, but none of them spoke.
“She would throw a temperament,” Marchant said coolly, “if she felt the occasion for it.”
“And she felt the occasion in this instance?”
“Quite so.”
“Suppose, for the sake of argument, she had pressed for the severance of some long-standing connection with your management? Would she have carried her point?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow that either.”
“I’ll put it brutally. If she’d demanded that you sign no more contracts with, say, Mr. Gantry or Mr. Saracen or Miss Cavendish, would you have had to toe the line?”
“I would have talked softly and expected her to calm down.”
“But if she’d stuck to it?” Alleyn waited for a moment and then took his risk. “Come,” he said. “She did issue an ultimatum this afternoon.”
Saracen scrambled to his feet. “There!” he shouted. “What did I tell you! Somebody’s blown the beastly gaff and now we’re to suffer for it. I said we should talk first, ourselves, and be frank and forthcoming and see how right I was!”
Gantry said, “For God’s sake hold your tongue, Bertie.”
“What do we get for holding our tongues’?” He pointed to Warrender. “We get an outsider giving the whole thing away with both hands. I bet you, Timmy. I bet you anything you like.”
“Utter balderdash!” Warrender exclaimed. “I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, Saracen.”
“Oh pooh! You’ve told the Inspector or Commander or Great Panjandrum or whatever he is. You’ve told him.”
“On the contrary,” Gantry said, “you’ve told him yourself. You fool, Bertie.”
Pinky Cavendish, in what seemed to be an agony of exasperation, cried out, “Oh why, for God’s sake, can’t we all admit we’re no good at this sort of hedging! I can! Freely and without prejudice to the rest of you, if that’s what you’re all afraid of. And what’s more, I’m going to. Look here, Mr. Alleyn, this is what happened to me in the conservatory. Mary accused me of conspiring against her and told Monty it was either her or me as far as the Management was concerned. Just that. And if it really came to the point I can assure you it’d be her and not me. You know, Monty, and we all know, that with her name and star-ranking, Mary was worth a damn sight more than me at the box-office and in the firm. All right! This very morning you’d handed me my first real opportunity with the Management. She was well able, if she felt like it, to cook my goose. But I’m no more capable of murdering her than I am of taking her place with her own particular public. And when you hear an actress admit that kind of thing,” Pinky added, turning to Alleyn, “you can bet your bottom dollar she’s talking turkey.”
Alleyn said, “Produce this sort of integrity on the stage, Miss Cavendish, and nobody will be able to cook your goose for you.” He looked round at Pinky’s deeply perturbed audience, “Has anybody got anything to add to this?” he added.
After a pause, Richard said, “Only that I’d like to endorse what Pinky said and to add that, as you and everybody else know, I was just as deeply involved as she. More so.”
“Dicky darling!” Pinky said warmly. “No! Where you are now! Offer a comedy on the open market and watch the managements bay like ravenous wolves.”
“Without Mary?” Marchant asked of nobody in particular.
“It’s quite true,” Richard said, “that I wrote specifically for Mary.”
“Not always. And no reason,” Gantry intervened, “why you shouldn’t write now for somebody else.” Once again he bestowed his most disarming smile on Anelida.
“Why not indeed!” Pinky cried warmly and laid her hand on Anelida’s.
“Ah!” Richard said, putting his arm about her. “That’s another story. Isn’t it, darling?”
Wave after wave of unconsidered gratitude flowed through Anelida. “These are my people,” she thought. “I’m in with them for the rest of my life.”
“The fact remains, however,” Gantry was saying to Alleyn, “that Bertie, Pinky, and Richard all stood to lose by Mary’s death. A point you might care to remember.”
“Oh lawks!” Bertie said. “Aren’t we all suddenly generous and noble-minded! Everybody loves everybody! Safety in numbers, or so they say. Or do they?”
“In this instance,” Alleyn said, “they well might.” He turned to Marchant. “Would you agree that, with the exception of her husband, yourself and Colonel Warrender, Miss Bellamy issued some kind of ultimatum against each member of the group in the conservatory?”
“Would I?” Marchant said easily. “Well, yes. I think I would.”
“To the effect that it was either they or she and you could take your choice?”
“More or less,” he murmured, looking at his fingernails.
Gantry rose to his enormous height and stood over Marchant.
“It would be becoming in you, Monty,” he said dangerously, “if you acknowledged that as far as I enter into the picture the question of occupational anxiety does not arise. I choose my managements; they do not choose me.”
Marchant glanced at him. “Nobody questions your prestige, I imagine, Timmy. I certainly don’t.”
“Or mine, I hope,” said Bertie, rallying. “The offers I’ve turned down for the Management! Well, I mean to say! Face it, Monty dear, if Mary had bullied you into breaking off with Dicky and Timmy and Pinky and me, you’d have been in a very pretty pickle yourself.”
“I am not,” Marchant said, “a propitious subject for bullying.”
“No.” Bertie agreed. “Evidently.” And there followed a deadly little pause. “I’d be obliged to everybody,” he added rather breathlessly, “if they wouldn’t set about reading horrors of any sort into what was an utterly unmeaningful little observation.”
“In common,” Warrender remarked, “with the rest of your conversation.”
“Oh but what a catty big Colonel we’ve got!” Bertie said.
Marchant opened his cigarette case. “It seems,” he observed, “incumbent on me to point out that, unlike the rest of you, I am ignorant of the circumstances. After Mary’s death, I left the house at the request of—” he put a cigarette between his lips and turned his head slightly to look at Fox —“yes, at the request of this gentleman, who merely informed me that there had been a fatal accident. Throughout the entire time that Mary was absent until Florence made her announcement, I was in full view of about forty guests and those of you who had not left the drawing-room. I imagine I do not qualify for the star role.” He lit his cigarette. “Or am I wrong?” he asked Alleyn.
“As it turns out, Monty,” Gantry intervened, “you’re dead wrong. It appears that the whole thing was laid on before Mary went to her room.”
Marchant waited for a moment, and then said, “You astonish me.”
“Fancy!” Bertie exclaimed and added in an exasperated voice, “I do wish, oh how I do wish, dearest Monty, that you would stop being a parody of your smooth little self and get down to tin-tacks (why tin-tacks, one wonders?) and admit that, like all the rest of us, you qualify for the homicide stakes.”