“She will never put that sort of stuff across,” said Jonathan, “any more than you can put across lots of the poetry of the same period. Times have changed. People don’t want cosy domestic comedy and storms in tea-cups, or verses that actually scan and rhyme. They want a challenge, toughness, art which reflects life instead of cushioning it. In a way, you know, Bourton has brought The Dream up-to-date by actually killing Pyramus.”
“Let’s adjourn and look at the catalogue Marcus has brought,” said Deborah. “You seem very familiar with A.A.Milne’s plays,” she added to Emma as they went into the drawing-room together.
“Barbara told me of her plans weeks ago, when we first began rehearsals, so I got the plays and read them. I could see her in the various parts as I read. Of course she hadn’t got the capital at that time to form her own company, but Donald seems to have left a lot of money and all of it, Marcus tells me, comes to Barbara, so she will be able to realise all her ambitions now.”
There were more than thirty daggers listed and described and the catalogue was written up in beautiful copperplate. Some of the entries were familiar to Jonathan, since about a dozen of the daggers had been brought along to the dress rehearsal so that he and Tom could make their choice. Listed were a bowie knife, three Italian cinquedeas of the late fifteenth century, two French rondel daggers of a century later, a quillon dagger, a ballock or kidney dagger, probably Flemish, and a queer-looking, so called ‘ear’ dagger, all of about the same date.
To the next century belonged a couple of English and Scottish daggers, two left-hand daggers from France and Spain respectively, two Spanish plug-bayonets, a collection of horn-handled, silver-mounted hunting knives and there was a late nineteenth-century Corsican dagger, the property in former times, no doubt, of a brigand.
A second part of the catalogue was devoted to more modern weapons—Commando knives, a German NSKK leader’s dagger and an SS officer’s dagger of the same era, a very elegant, narrow-bladed dagger which had belonged to a German naval officer, and, separately listed again, a collection of weapons, mostly with curved blades, from the Orient.
Lynn turned back the pages and put his finger down on one of the early entries. The quillon dagger, he said, was nearest in appearance to the retractable dagger ‘which, as a matter of fact, I had copied from it’, but he went on to say that when the police allowed him to draw the lethal dagger from its sheath, he realised that the point of the dagger nowhere near reached the end of the sheath. The blade, instead of being nearly fifteen inches long, was a bare six inches in length,
“Coincident with what the doctors think was the length of the wound,” he said. “Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?”
“Well,” said Jonathan to Dame Beatrice when the guests had gone, “it does make you think a bit. The harmless dagger retracted right into the hilt so that all its inches could be assumed to be in Pyramus.”
“They would have pinned him to the ground,” said Deborah.
“Ah, but, with the retractable dagger, that problem would not arise. With the murderous blade, as somebody had the wit to foresee, it might cause a problem, so he took care to make the blade short enough to get to the right spot with no redundant inches.”
“So we really are talking about murder or suicide,” said Deborah.
“Oh, accident was ruled out long ago, as the police spotted very early on.”
“I wonder why Donald didn’t realise that the blade was much too short? Surely he must have noticed, the minute he drew the thing out.”
“I doubt whether he had ever seen the retractable blade drawn out of the sheath. As Oberon he had been given a sword. He wouldn’t have taken any interest in anybody else’s ‘props’. People are so self-centred, especially when they’ve got a pretty decent part in a play.”
“But if the dagger was meant for Rinkley, he would have spotted the short blade at once and realised it was the wrong dagger,” said Deborah.
“Possibly not, you know. He might have thought that the dagger had already retracted itself a bit while it was in the sheath. Anyway, he would probably have been rolling his eyes around in a fine frenzy of ham acting and not really looked at the dagger. Besides he, like most of the others, was a bit sloshed, and the lighting, as everybody will testify, was geared to the fairy scenes and not terribly helpful to the rest of the play.”
“Brian wanted it that way. He said that the operative word in the title was Night and that a sense of midsummer mystery must be maintained. Marcus had offered to step up the floodlighting, but he would have none of it.”
“Of course Yorke didn’t like Rinkley much,” said Jonathan. “Remember how he chucked him out of the house because of Yolanda?”
Dame Beatrice asked for an explanation of this. At the back of her mind was something the child Rosamund had said at the Stone House.
“Yolanda? Oh, we don’t know any details and didn’t ask for any,” said Deborah. “Apparently—but it was a long time ago, I believe—Rinkley was involved in a rather unsavoury case of child molestation, so, as there were a number of children in the play, I suppose people kept an eye on him which, perhaps, was rather unfair. We stopped him playing a harmless game with Rosamund because she did not like being tossed up into the air. I think it upset her dignity. As to what happened with Yolanda when Brian gave Rinkley houseroom while his flat was being done up, we have no idea, as I say, but the upshot was that instead of having to put them off because Rinkley was occupying the spare bedroom, the Yorkes could put up our two babes after all.”
“The Yorkes were probably over-zealous,” said Jonathan, “but it was a fault on the right side, I feel.”
“Was Rinkley convicted in the case you mentioned?”
“No, aunt, he wasn’t. The trouble is that these things stick. It’s extremely unfair, but there it is.”
The next development emanated from Lynn, although, having met both of them, Dame Beatrice decided that the actual wording of his letter had been dictated by the far more self-effacing and tactful Emma.
“Please forgive an ignorant, self-educated fellow,” the letter ran, “as I have no notion how to word this request. There is a lot of pressure on me concerning Bourton’s death, as I sponsored the play and provided all the daggers.
“I do realise how eminent you are in your own line, so I hesitate to ask whether you ever accept commissions. The point is that it seems quite obvious that somebody who was in the play had a grudge either against Rinkley or against Bourton and must have provided that lethal dagger and substituted it for the retractable one. If you could possibly find out when that substitution took place, I think I might work out who the offender was. Any further information I can supply—well, you have only to ask for it.
“One pointer, if I can call it such, I have been able to give the police. Because of my hobby I have a specialised knowledge of weapons and I am pretty sure that the dagger with which Bourton killed himself did not begin life as a dagger, but was made from a cut-down rapier. The murderer (one has to use the word, I’m afraid) needed a finely-pointed, narrow-bladed weapon and may have come across this rapier by accident without, at the time, having any evil intentions. Later on perhaps he realised its possibilities, and it is more than likely, I think, that he got hold of a blacksmith and had the dagger made to his own specification. If I am right, the original rapier may have been in his possession for some time, possibly for several years, so I think the police should look for the blacksmith and, in view of the serious nature of what has happened, I doubt whether the smith would be a local man, so they may have their work cut out to find him. Of course, in these days of handymen and precision tools, the fellow may even have done the job himself.