“Oh, Laura, it most certainly would! Could you make it quite soon? I want them out of the house before all the fun begins.”
“The fun being what?—or mustn’t I ask until we meet?”
“The police, we think, and the reporters, will be here.”
“We’ll be right over.” Laura was as good as her word and her arrival with Dame Beatrice coincided with that of the police. While Jonathan was interviewed by them, Deborah presented the children. They were ready to leave, Rosamund clutching the Victorian posy which she had been given for her performance and from which she refused to be parted, Edmund with the dog-collar Peter Woolidge had begged from Tom to give him.
“It’s awfully good of you to take them off our hands,” said Deborah to Dame Beatrice, leading her relative by marriage out of earshot while Laura was coping with an enthusiastic account of the play from the children. “We had a serious accident here on the last night, and there will have to be an inquest and the children will be far better out of the way.”
“What happened?”
“There was a mix-up of props and the stand-in who was playing Pyramus picked up the wrong dagger and stabbed himself to death. Jon says it’s the sort of accident which can easily happen, but in this case I don’t think that’s true.”
“How would it be if we sent the children off with Laura and I stayed to hear the details of the story? I was present at the first performance of the play, as you know, so I shall have no difficulty in following your account of what occurred.”
“Oh, if you would stay and help us out, it would be a tremendous relief to me.”
“So what happened exactly?” asked Dame Beatrice again when Laura had gone off with the children.
“Mr Rinkley, the man who played Bottom the Weaver, was taken ill about three-quarters through the play and was rushed to hospital with suspected food poisoning. I must ring them and find out how he is.”
“So the understudy took his place—”
“Well, we don’t have understudies the way the professionals do. We have to find somebody else in the cast who can fill in, and in this case it had to be Donald Bourton. He was playing Oberon and was off-stage when Rinkley collapsed, so he was free to play in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene.”
“But surely Oberon comes on again at the end of that scene?”
“Yes, but we cut the fairy ending. As it was, we were running late, so nobody minded. We wouldn’t have had the fairies, anyway, because the children were all in bed or asleep on their parents’ laps in the auditorium, so the scene would have lost a lot of its attraction, anyway.”
“Yes, I noticed the absence of the fairies at the end of the performance I attended. So you had to substitute Mr Bourton for Mr Rinkley.”
“Yes. What happened after that is still a mystery, but perhaps the inquest will clear it up. Well, actually, of course, we know what happened, but we don’t know how such a mistake could have been made. You remember that Pyramus is supposed to stab himself? Well, in some extraordinary way the daggers got mixed up. Instead of using the retractable thing which had been provided, and which was harmless, poor Donald pulled a real dagger out. Where it came from and how it got into the pocket in the sword-belt is an absolute mystery. Somebody put it there, but I doubt whether there is going to be any owning-up.”
“Could any of the children—there were a dozen or more in the fairy scenes, I noticed—have had access to the properties and played with them?”
“Well,” said Deborah, “of course I’ve thought of that, but, honestly, I don’t believe it’s the answer. Yolanda Yorke, the eldest of the children—she took Philostrate—was with her parents all the time except when she went to the summerhouse to see that the bloodhounds were all right, but the summerhouse is in a clearing in the woods and quite a long way from the tables on which the props and things were laid out.”
“But she was not under her parents’ eye the whole time.”
“I’m sure Yolanda wouldn’t have meddled with anybody else’s things. She is a most serious, responsible little girl, although she is only nine. In any case, as I say, I can’t see that she would have had the opportunity. There were people in the wings all the time.”
“And the younger children?”
“Oh, dear!” In spite of the gravity of the situation, Deborah laughed. “If they could have escaped from Signora Moretti’s eagle eye I should be the most surprised woman in Europe. She assumed complete charge of them. They had cushions they were made to sit on and no chance whatever to escape her vigilance. She had a couple of mothers to help out, and young Peter Woolidge, who was Puck and a wizard with children, was there, whenever he was off stage, keeping them amused and happy.”
“And were Rosamund and Edmund under the same surveillance as the rest?”
“You bet they were, and Ganymede and Lucien, too. When they and the other fairies were not on stage they were all under the very strictest supervision. It’s impossible that they could have tampered with anything on the actual nights of the play.”
“And before the play?”
“All the properties and costumes were locked away and Jon gave the key of the room to Marcus Lynn. When they were taken out, instead of being distributed to the cast in the dressing-rooms, they were put out on the trestle tables at the side of the stage so that they could be picked up by the actors as and when they were needed. It was thought better to keep all the props together until people had to use them. There was just time, you see, for Pyramus to get into his armour and Thisbe her skirt and Wall to hitch on the cardboard fore-and-aft thing representing the lime and roughcast, and all Moonshine had to do was to pick up her lantern, dog and bush of thorns, and Lion only needed to assume the tatty bit of synthetic fur complete with lion’s-head cap. This was all done while the court party were discussing what their evening entertainment was to be.”
“It sounds as though the daggers were changed over before the play began. So far as I remember, there was no point during the actual scenes when only one person was off the stage and so in a position to have sole access to the properties, was there?”
“I can’t think of one. When the court party was ‘on’ at the beginning, the fairies and the workmen were ‘off’, and it went on in a Box and Cox sort of way right through the four acts, but surely nobody would have done such a thing deliberately, although I did have doubts at first. Of course Rinkley himself would not have made a mistake, but somebody unaccustomed to the daggers might have got them mixed up. The theatrical dagger looked very realistic. Marcus Lynn had it copied from a valuable one, I believe.”
“Where did the lethal dagger come from?”
“Oh, Marcus Lynn has rather a good collection of swords and daggers. He brought along a number to the first full rehearsal and let people choose their own. He took the rest away with him, I thought, but there must have been one left over. He himself had the only key to the props cupboard, so I suppose he would know.”
“The police, I suppose, have the dagger with which Mr Bourton killed himself. Is it possible that he committed suicide deliberately?”
“I suppose it’s possible on the grounds of ‘what private griefs they have, alas! I know not’, but I should consider it most unlikely. It’s true that his wife was away from home a good deal—she’s a professional actress and was only ‘between shows’ when she consented to lend herself to us for The Dream—but from what I’ve heard, Donald Bourton usually managed to console himself during her absences. This I’m sure she knew, and, apparently, she did not resent it.”