‘Why? – apart from your recognising him, I mean.’
‘Come, come! Is this the student who harassed her junior English lecturer with enquiries regarding the minor early seventeenth-century poets?’
‘Richard Crashaw, 1613 (perhaps) to 1649? R. Crashaw! So you do mean it’s Lawrence up to his old game of changing his name!’
‘Well, one cannot blame him for not wishing to go down to posterity as a jail-bird.’
‘Then our sumptuous blonde could be as we thought.’
‘If you mean the young woman who was greeted on stage as Molly Brazen, yes, that is the first Mrs Lawrence whom I met in Blackpool as Coralie St Malo.’
‘So, that’s settled, too, is it? Very interesting. Well, it seems that she and Lawrence, alias Crashaw, have teamed up again. I wonder why?’
‘It gives one furiously to think, does it not?’
‘It gives me a headache. Do you think they spotted you at the rehearsal?’
‘I have little doubt of that, but what of it? The truth is obvious.’
‘Coralie murdered the second Mrs Lawrence and Lawrence buried the body. Consequently they now have to keep the tabs on each other. That would account for their getting together again.’
‘This perspicacity is uncanny!’
‘But if they know you’ve seen them not only together but so obviously part of the same set-up, aren’t they going to ask themselves a few questions?’
‘Again, I say, what of it?’ The car slowed down to turn into the gateway of the drive up to the Stone House as she added, ‘ “He whom the gods love dies young.” I used to think that this referred only to one’s numerical age. I know better now, so let us cast care aside and repair to our beds “weary and content and undishonoured”.’
The car pulled up outside the front door and George saw his passengers out.
‘We shan’t need the car in the morning, George,’ said his employer, ‘so have your full quota of sleep. I am sorry to have kept you up so late.’ She and Laura passed on into the house where they were greeted by a clucking Célestine in her dressing-gown.
‘Henri has placed sandwiches and some wine in the dining-room, madame, and I am to make coffee.’
‘No, no,’ said Dame Beatrice peremptorily, for Célestine was known to be obstinate. ‘You go to bed. As for Mrs Gavin and myself, we shall probably make a night of it.’
Célestine made disapproving Gallic noises and took herself off to join her slumbering spouse. Dame Beatrice and Laura went into the dining-room, where Dame Beatrice took one sandwich and a glass of sherry and Laura drank whisky and wolfed the rest of the provender.
‘One thing,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re right and that, after all this time, nobody, least of all Lawrence and Coralie, is going to rake up the past.’
‘I have an uneasy feeling,’ said her employer, ‘that the past is going to rake itself up.’
‘What makes you say that? I’m the one who gets these premonitions, not you – and I’m very often, although not always, wrong.’
‘This is not merely a premonition. I am uneasy on account of William Caxton.’
‘Good heavens, why?’
‘You told me that he came to one of the rehearsals with Mrs Blaine.’
‘What of it? – as you would say. It was like her cheek to turn up, considering that she’s done everything she can to sabotage our show.’
‘Do you remember that, some time ago, I queried the name William Caxton?’
‘Yes, but you gave me best over that, when I pointed out that it could be a common enough name.’
‘The murdered Mrs Lawrence had a brother named Bill.’
Laura, a sandwich poised halfway to her mouth, lowered it and stared wide-eyed at her employer.
‘You aren’t suggesting—?’ she said.
‘Mrs Lawrence’s maiden name was Caret,’ Dame Beatrice pointed out.
‘A bit unusual, perhaps, but that’s all.’
‘Unusual, perhaps, as a surname, but not unusual in the printing trade.’
‘In the printing —? Oh, that little upside down V or Y which means something has been left out and is to be inserted? You don’t suppose Caxton is proposing to insert a dagger into Lawrence, do you?’
‘I suppose, going on the evidence of his not infrequent visits to his sister, that Mr Caret was fond of her, and you and I, I recollect, once had a conversation on the relationship between brothers and sisters.’
‘But you think Coralie, not Lawrence, committed the murder. Lawrence only tried to cover it up by burying the body. That’s your theory, isn’t it?’
‘We once mentioned Macbeth. There is no doubt – there was none in the troubled mind of Lady Macbeth – that both husband and wife shared guilt over the murder of King Duncan. In the case under review, just as Duncan’s death was carried out at the instigation of the woman, but by the hand of the man, so the murder of Mrs Lawrence could have been at the instigation of the man, but carried out by the woman.’
‘Well, she’s strong enough, as we’ve said before, but you thought, after you’d met her in Blackpool, that she was one of these large, bonhomous women.’
‘Henry the Eighth, by all accounts, was a large, bonhomous man. It did not prevent him from turning into a monster when monstrous behaviour suited his purpose.’
‘And Coralie’s purpose?’
‘As I believe we have said before, after Sir Anthony’s death Lawrence had become a very wealthy man. I still think Lawrence wanted his wife out of the way because she knew – or he thought she knew – something about that death which, if it were told to the police, might incriminate him, and I think that Coralie wanted her out of the way…’
‘To clear a path to a re-marriage with Lawrence?’
‘If, indeed, they were ever divorced. We have only Coralie’s word that they were.’
‘No wonder, if Lawrence spotted Caxton at that rehearsal to which Clarice brought him, our Macheath refused to shave off his beard for the performances! I must sleep on this. You offer food for thought, dear Mrs Croc.’
Dame Beatrice did not attend the dress rehearsal proper. It went off so well that Denbigh was delighted, Laura filled with forebodings and the cast jubilant and self-congratulatory. There was only one hitch and that was merely temporary. The dressing-rooms at the town hall were at floor-level, not stage level. To reach the stage and its wings, therefore, the actors had to mount a short flight of stairs from the back of the O.P. side and pass the back-drop if their entrance was on the Prompt side.
Before the ingenious erection of carpentry and cardboard which represented the hangman’s cart had been put together, therefore, the width of these stairs had been carefully measured and a wooden ramp made so that the contraption, mounted on perambulator wheels, could be pushed up on to the stage without damage to its flimsy sides. The perambulator wheels were disguised by curtains of hessian on which large, tumbril-like wheels had been painted by the indefatiguable students, and the cart had no back to it, as only its front elevation would be seen from the auditorium. The ‘cart’ was kept off the stage until what should have been the last scene in the opera as John Gay wrote it.
In Denbigh’s production, between this last scene and the preceding one in which, confronted by four more of his wives – ‘Four women more, Captain, with a child apiece’ – Macheath announces that he is prepared to be executed – ‘Here, tell the Sheriff’s officers I am ready’ – the curtain was to come down and to rise again to show Macheath standing on the fatal cart with his arms pinioned, a white cap over his face and head and the rope (a loop without a running noose) already around his neck. At the announcement of the reprieve, white cap and noose were to be whipped off and his arms ceremoniously freed, although there actually would be no knots to untie, as that might hold up the action.