Cringle had left Poole’s room in exquisite order. Telegrams were pinned in rows on the walls. A towel was spread over the make-up. A cigarette had been half-extracted from a packet and a match left ready on the top of its box. A framed photograph of Helena Hamilton stood near the glass. Beside it a tiny clock with a gay face ticked feverishly. It stood on a card. Alleyn moved it delicately and read the inscription. From Helena. To-night and to-morrow and always — bless you.
“The standard for first-night keepsakes seems to be set at a high level,” Alleyn muttered. “This is a French clock, Fox, with a Sèvres face encircled with garnets. What do you suppose the gentleman gave the lady?”
“Would a tiara be common?” asked Fox.
“Let’s go next door and see.”
Helena’s room smelt and. looked like a conservatory. A table had been brought in to carry the flowers. Jacko had set out the inevitable telegrams and had hung up the dresses under their dust sheets.
“Here we are,” Alleyn said. “A sort of jeroboam of the most expensive scent on the market. Price, I should say, round about thirty pounds. ‘From Adam.’ Why don’t you give me presents when we solve a petty larceny, Foxkin? Now, I may be fanciful, but this looks to me like the gift of a man who’s at his wit’s end and plumps for the expensive, the easy and the obvious. Here’s something entirely different. Look at this, Fox.” It was a necklace of six wooden medallions strung between jade rings. Each plaque was most delicately carved in the likeness of a head in profile and each head was a portrait of one of the company of players. The card bore the date and the inscription: From J.
“Must have taken a long time to do,” observed Fox. “That’ll be the foreign gentleman’s work, no doubt. Mr. Doré.”
“No doubt. I wonder if love’s labour has been altogether lost,” said Alleyn. “I hope she appreciates it.”
He took up the leather case with its two photographs of Poole. “He’s a remarkable looking chap,” he said. “If there’s anything to be made of faces in terms of character, and I still like to pretend there is, what’s to be made of this one? It’s what they call a heart-shaped face, broad across the eyes with a firmly moulded chin and a generous but delicate mouth. Reminds one of a Holbein drawing. Doré’s sketch in the Greenroom is damn good. Doré crops up all over the place, doesn’t he? Designs their fancy dresses. Paints their faces, in a double sense. Does their décor and, with complete self-effacement, loves their leading lady.”
“Do you reckon?”
“I do indeed, Br’er Fox,” Alleyn said and rubbed his nose vexedly. “However. Gibson’s done all the usual things in these rooms, I suppose?”
“Yes, Mr. Alleyn. Pockets, suitcases and boxes. Nothing to show for it.”
“We can let them come home to roost fairly soon, then. We’ll start now to see them separately. Blast! I suppose I’ll have to begin with checking Darcey’s statement with the Gainsford. She gives me the horrors, that young woman.”
“Shall I see her, Mr. Alleyn?”
“You can stay and take your notes. I’ll see her in the Greenroom. No, wait a bit. You stay with the others, Fox, and send young Lamprey along with her. And you might try again if you can dig up anything that sounds at all off-key with Bennington over the last few days. Anything that distressed or excited him.”
“He seems to have been rather easily excited.”
“He does, doesn’t he, but you never know. I don’t believe it was suicide, Fox, and I’m not yet satisfied that we’ve unearthed anything that’s good enough for a motive for murder. Trip away, Foxkin. Ply your craft.”
Fox went out sedately. Alleyn crossed the passage and opened the door of Bennington’s room. Sergeant Gibson was discovered, squatting on his haunches before the dead gas fire. “Anything?” Alleyn asked.
“There’s this bit of a stain that looks like a scorch on the hearth, sir.”
“Yes, I saw that. Any deposit?”
“We-ll—”
“We may have to try.”
“The powder pads deceased’s dresser cleared away were in the rubbish bin on the stage where he said he put them. Nothing else in the bin. There’s this burnt paper on the floor, but it’s in small flakes — powder almost.”
“All right. Seal the room when you’ve finished. And Gibson, don’t let the mortuary van go without telling me.”
“Very good, sir.”
Alleyn returned to the Greenroom. He heard Miss Gainsford approaching under the wing of P.C. Lamprey. She spoke in a high grand voice that seemed to come out of a drawing-room comedy of the twenties.
“I think you’re too intrepid,” she was saying, “to start from rock bottom like this. It must be so devastatingly boring for you, though I will say it’s rather a comfort to think one is in the hands of, to coin a phrase, a gent. Two gents, in fact.”
“Chief Inspector Alleyn,” said P. C. Lamprey, “is in the Greenroom I think, Miss.”
“My dear, you do it quite marvellously. You ought, again to coin a phrase, to go on the stage.”
Evidently Miss Gainsford lingered in the passage.
Alleyn heard his subordinate murmur: “Shall I go first?” His regulation boots clumped firmly to the door, which he now opened.
“Will you see Miss Gainsford, sir?” asked P. C. Lamprey, who was pink in the face.
“All right, Mike,” Alleyn said. “Show her in and take notes.”
“Will you come this way, Miss?”
Miss Gainsford made her entrance with a Mayfairish gallantry that was singularly dated. Alleyn wondered if she had decided that her first reading of her new role was mistaken. “She’s abandoned the brave little woman for the suffering mondaine who goes down with an epigram,” he thought, and sure enough, Miss Gainsford addressed herself to him with staccato utterance and brittle high-handedness.
“Ought one to be terribly flattered because one is the first to be grilled?” she asked. “Or is it a sinister little hint that one is top of the suspect list?”
“We have to start somewhere,” Alleyn said. “I thought it might be convenient to see you first. Will you sit down, Miss Gainsford?”
She did so elaborately, gave herself a cigarette, and turned to P. C. Lamprey. “May one ask The Force for a light,” she asked, “or would that be against the rules?”
Alleyn lit her cigarette while his unhappy subordinate retired to the table. She turned in her chair to watch him. “Is he going to take me down and use it all in evidence against me?” she asked. Her nostrils dilated, she raised her chin and added jerkily, “That’s what’s called the Usual Warning, isn’t it?”
“A warning is given in police practice,” Alleyn said as woodenly as. possible, “if there is any chance that the person under interrogation will make a statement that is damaging to himself. Lamprey will note down this interview and, if it seems advisable, you will be asked later on to give a signed statement.”
“If that was meant to be reassuring,” said Miss Gainsford, “I can’t have heard it properly. Could we get cracking?”
“Certainly. Miss Gainsford, you were in the Greenroom throughout the performance. During the last interval you were visited by Mr. J. G. Darcey and by your uncle. Do you agree that as the result of something the deceased said, Mr. Darcey hit him on the jaw?”
She said: “Wasn’t it too embarrassing! I mean the Gorgeous Primitive Beast is one thing, but one old gentleman banging another about is so utterly another. I’m afraid I didn’t put that very clearly.”
“You agree that Mr. Darcey hit Mr. Bennington?”
“But madly. Like a sledge-hammer. I found it so difficult to know what to say. There just seemed to be no clue to further conversation.”