“In that case,” Alleyn remarked, “you can not be said to have run out of the appropriate emotions.”
He grinned at Poole in a friendly manner and, accompanied by Fox, went to his final interview — with Jacques Doré.
It took place on the stage. Dr. Rutherford had elected to retire into the office to effect, he had told Fox, a few paltry adjustments of his costume. The players, too, were all in their several rooms and Clem Smith had been wakened, re-examined by Fox, and allowed to go home.
So Jacko was alone in the tortured scene he had himself designed.
He looked a frightful scarecrow in his working clothes, with grey stubble on his chin, grey bags under his eyes and grey fuzz standing up on his head. His long crepe-y neck stuck out of the open collar of his tartan shirt. His eyes were bloodshot and his delicate hands were filthy.
“I have slept,” he announced, rising from the heap of old curtains which Clem had transformed into a bed, “like the Holy Innocents, though it is possible that I do not resemble any of them. However deceptive the outward man may be, gentlemen, the inner is entirely at your service.” He smiled ingratiatingly at them. His lips curled back and exposed teeth like a row of yellow pegs in a dice box. “What do we talk about?” he asked, and began to roll himself a cigarette.
“First of all,” Alleyn said, “I must tell you that I am asking for a general search through the clothes that have been worn in the theatre. We have no warrant at this stage but so far no one has objected.”
“Then who am I to do so?”
Fox went through his pockets and found a number of curious objects. — chalk, pencils, a rubber, a surgeon’s scalpel which Jacko said he used for wood carving, and which was protected by a sheath, a pocket-book with money, a photograph of Helena Hamilton, various scraps of paper with drawings on them, pieces of cotton-wool and an empty bottle smelling strongly of ether. This, he told Alleyn, had contained a fluid used for cleaning purposes. “Always they are messing themselves and always I am removing the mess. My overcoat is in the junk room. It contains merely a filthy handkerchief, I believe.”
Alleyn thanked him and returned the scalpel, the pocket-book and drawing materials. Fox laid the other things aside, sat down and opened his note-book.
“Next,” Alleyn said, “I think I’d better ask you what your official job is in this theatre. I see by the programme—”
“The programme,” Jacko said, “is euphemistic. ‘Assistant to Adam Poole,’ is it not? Let us rather say: Dogsbody in Ordinary to the Vulcan Theatre. Henchman Extraordinary to Mr. Adam Poole. At the moment, dresser to Miss Helena Hamilton. Confidant to all and sundry. Johannes Factotum and not without bells on. Le Vulcan, c’est moi, in a shabby manner of speaking. Also: j’y suis, j’y reste. I hope.”
“Judging by this scenery,” Alleyn rejoined, “and by an enchanting necklace which I think is your work, there shouldn’t be much doubt about that. But your association with the management goes farther back than the Vulcan, doesn’t it?”
“Twenty years,” Jacko said, licking his cigarette paper. “For twenty years I improvise my role of Pantaloon for them. Foolishness, but such is my deplorable type. The eternal doormat. What can I do for you?”
Alleyn said: “You can tell me if you still think Bennington committed suicide.”
Jacko lit his cigarette. “Certainly,” he said. “You are wasting your time.”
“Was he a vain man?”
“Immensely. And he knew he was artistically sunk.”
“Vain in his looks?”
“But yes, yes!” Jacko said with great emphasis, and then looked very sharply at Alleyn. “Why, of his looks?”
“Did he object to his make-up in this play? It seemed to me a particularly repulsive one.”
“He disliked it, yes. He exhibited the vanity of the failing actor in this. Always, always he must be sympathetic. Fortunately Adam insisted on the make-up.”
“I think you told me that you noticed his face was shining with sweat before he went for the last time to his room?”
“I did.”
“And you advised him to remedy this? You even looked into his room to make sure?”
“Yes,” Jacko agreed after a pause, “I did.”
“So when you had gone he sat at his dressing-table and carefully furbished up his repellent make-up as if for the curtain-call. And then gassed himself?”
“The impulse perhaps came very suddenly.” Jacko half-closed, his eyes and looked through their sandy lashes at his cigarette smoke. “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “Listen. He repairs his face. He has a last look at himself. He is about to get up when his attention sharpens. He continues to stare. He sees the ruin of his face. He was once a coarsely handsome fellow, was Ben, with a bold rakehelly air. The coarseness has increased, but where, he asks himself, are the looks? Pouches, grooves, veins, yellow eyeballs — and all emphasized most hideously by the make-up. This is what he has become, he thinks, he has become the man he has been playing. And his heart descends into his belly. He knows despair and he makes up his mind. There is hardly time to do it. In a minute or two he will be called. So quickly, quickly he lies on the floor, with trembling hands he pulls his coat over his head and puts the end of the gas tube in his mouth.”
“You knew how he was found, then?”
“Clem told me. I envisage everything. He enters a world of whirling dreams. And in a little while he is dead. I see it very clearly.”
“Almost as if you’d been there,” Alleyn said lightly. “Is this, do you argue, his sole motive? What about the quarrels that had been going on? The change of cast at the last moment? The handing over of Miss Gainsford’s part to Miss Tarne? He was very much upset by that, wasn’t he?”
Jacko doubled himself up like an ungainly animal and squatted on a stool. “Too much has been made of the change of casting,” he said. “He accepted it in the end. He made a friendly gesture. On thinking it over I have decided we were all wrong to lay so much emphasis on this controversy.” He peered sideways at Alleyn. “It was the disintegration of his artistic integrity that did it,” he said. “I now consider the change of casting to be of no significance.”
Alleyn looked him very hard in the eye. “And that,” he said, “is where we disagree. I consider it to be of the most complete significance: the key, in fact, to the whole puzzle of his death.”
“I cannot agree,” said Jacko. “I am sorry.”
Alleyn waited for a moment and then — and for the last time — asked the now familiar question.
“Do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”
There was a long silence. Jacko’s back was bent and his head almost between his knees.
“I have heard of him,” he said at last.
“Did you know him?”
“I have never met him. Never.”
“Perhaps you have seen some of his work?”
Jacko was silent.
“Können Sie Deutsch lesen?”
Fox looked up from his notes with an expression of blank surprise. They heard a car turn in from Carpet Street and come up the side lane with a chime of bells. It stopped and a door slammed.
“Jawohl,” Jacko whispered.
The outside doors of the dock were rolled back. The sound resembled stage-thunder. Then the inner and nearer doors opened heavily and someone walked round the back of the set. Young Lamprey came through the Prompt entrance. “The mortuary van, sir,” he said,
“All right. They can go ahead.”
He went out again. There was a sound of voices and of boots on concrete. A cold draught of night air blew in from the dock and set the borders creaking. A rope tapped against canvas and a sighing breath wandered about the grid. The doors were rolled together. The engine started up and, to another chime of bells, Bennington made his final exit from the Vulcan. The theatre settled back into its night-watch.
Jacko’s cigarette had burnt his lip. He spat it out and got slowly to his feet.