“Oh, it’s quite easy, especially in the Town Hall. The stage lighting is thoroughly weak, so that it doesn’t blind you, and, in any case, I always look out for my husband.”
“Oh, yes. Your husband is not a member of the drama club, I believe?”
Mrs Gough laughed happily. It would be unfair to class it as giggling, Laura thought.
“Trevor? He lives to play golf and to work in the garden. The Muses are not for him, poor man. He has no feeling whatever for the arts. I took him once to a Picasso exhibition, but I had to warn him that I didn’t want any funny remarks. He did point out what he insisted on calling Pop-Eye the Sailor, and, of course, the Fish Hat, but we got out of the place without being lynched, which was something, I suppose.”
Laura’s heart began to warm towards Mrs Gough. Kitty, she felt, had misrepresented her.
“Talking of lynching,” she said, “is there any known reason why the poor little chap who played Falstaff was done in on the night of the pageant?—apart from the alleged horseplay, I mean.”
“We’ve worried and worried about it,” said Mrs Collis. “We’ve all been given a most horrible time. The police, you know. They now seem to think that, because two of our members have been murdered, the guilty person must be one of us, but, Henry VIII or no Henry VIII, I don’t concede that for one moment. As for the horseplay, that’s nonsense. Nobody in the club would be such a fool.”
“I suppose you can’t think of anybody from outside who doesn’t like the club very much, and who would be glad to know that your members were having a bad time?”
“Yes, there’s your husband, Brenda, isn’t there?” said Mrs Collis nastily. “He hates you to come to rehearsals and to hear you your part. You’ve often told me about it.”
Brenda Gough laughed, but not in her former pleasant fashion.
“Poor old boy!” she said. “Yes, he does kick up a shindy sometimes, but I can’t imagine him killing poor little Luton. Besides, if he had, he would have told me long before now. Anyhow, what about your own husband? Didn’t he want to do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, or something else utterly unsuited to his age and appearance?” At the end of this question came the giggle prophesied by Kitty.
“He wanted to do Henry V before Agincourt, but, anyway, he couldn’t, or where would you have come in? Of course, as I pointed out to him, it wouldn’t have been fair to choose Henry V when we have more women than men in the club. All I can say is that I do so wish my advice had been taken and we’d never had anything to do with the wretched pageant. Oh , I’m sorry, Mrs Trevelyan-Twigg! I’d forgotten for the moment that the thing was your idea.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t, you know,” protested Kitty. “I mean, it was really wished on me by that daft nephew of mine.” (Anything to keep the peace, she signalled to Laura.)
“What daft nephew?” asked Laura, backing her up.
“Councillor Julian Perse. You’ve met him, so you must know what a moron he is.”
“All the Council are morons,” said Mrs Gough, giggling.
“We all know your husband wasn’t elected on to it,” said Mrs Collis. “Still, that wasn’t his fault, or yours, I’m sure. And, talking of morons, what about that idiotic Giles Faudrey up at the Hall?”
“Why, what about him?” asked Kitty.
“Don’t you know? I thought it was all over the borough. Oh, but, of course, you don’t live in Brayne, do you? All the same, as you were at the open-air thing in the park at Squire’s Acre, I should have thought you’d have heard rumours about the goings-on. He’s a menace where the local girls are concerned. I wonder the Batty-Faudreys tolerate him.”
“All I know is that Mr Faudrey came in with a girl—one of your members, actually—I remember her in the pageant—half-way through tea, and took her to sit at table with the Batty-Faudreys and the Mayor and Mayoress,” said Kitty.
“So we heard. We also heard that Mrs Batty-Faudrey could have killed him for doing it. I mean, he had no right whatever to have made her and Caroline so conspicuous.”
“Yes, Caroline was a bit conspicuous,” agreed Kitty, “if she’s the girl I’m talking about. Her trousers were so very tight and her curves were so very glamorous! I’m not surprised Mrs Batty-Faudrey took a dim view.”
“She took a dimmer one when Caroline had a shot at seducing the Colonel,” said Mrs Gough, with another outbreak of laughter.
“Good gracious me!” exclaimed Kitty. “Did she really?”
“Yes, indeed. It’s an old story now, I suppose, but it was Teddy Luton’s fault in a way. He did do such idiotic things! Anyway, I shall never forgive him for breaking up our Town Hall show.”
“I should have thought it was his killer who shouldn’t be forgiven,” said Laura, bluntly.
“Oh, well, his killer wasn’t one of our members,” said Mrs Gough.
“Is that certain?” asked Laura, although she had gathered from her husband that he thought it was.
“Well, it must be, mustn’t it? I mean, “the show must go on” is our motto. None of the members would be dirty enough to break up a performance by fooling about with a sword and killing someone,” protested Mrs Collis.
“Well, that means murder, then. Can you tell us why anybody should want to murder Falstaff?”
“That’s where it doesn’t make sense. He was quite harmless,” said Mrs Gough, “except for this genius for putting his foot in things, of course.”
“Nobody is harmless,” said Mrs Collis.
“I agree with you,” said Laura. “I’ve said it before. Every one of us is a menace to somebody. There’s not a soul who wouldn’t deserve to be liquidated, for some good reason or other, so, now, what about this Luton? Exactly how did he offend?”
“Well, there was that time when he loosed off an Army rifle instead of bursting a paper bag in the wings as he’d been told to do. Remember?” said Mrs Gough to Mrs Collis.
“He always denied it about the rifle,” said Mrs Collis. “He said he was scared of firearms.”
“All the same, he couldn’t tell us who had fired it, could he?”
“You mean he wouldn’t, not that he couldn’t.”
“Oh, nonsense! He wasn’t all that Public School!”
“Public schools aren’t the only places where you don’t split on a pal!”
“Oh, I grant you all those delinquent gangs. They don’t split on one another because they daren’t.”
“Is that so different from the public schools, then? They only don’t split because their lives wouldn’t be worth living if they did! And, anyway, what about that donkey at the dressage? I bet that was Luton’s idea of a joke.”
Kitty jumped in where Laura feared to tread.
“This is getting us nowhere,” she declared. “That donkey got out of control, that’s all. Now, then, what were you saying about this Caroline dim-wit seducing the Colonel?”
Mrs Gough giggled.
“It happened when the Batty-Faudreys gave a fancy-dress party to celebrate the silver jubilee of the house.”
“I thought the house was older than that.”
“I mean the silver jubilee of their ownership of it.”
“Oh, yes, of course. And was this Caroline invited to the party?”
“In a sort of way. Mrs Batty-Faudrey wanted a masque-like—Comus, you know—so, of course, the drama club were asked to do one. Well, the whole thing was rather difficult because, except for Comus, nobody knew of any masques, and, somehow, Comus seemed unsuitable unless we could alter it quite a bit, which is what we did, and then we combined it with a bit of Everyman and a bit of Midsummer Night’s Dream, you see.”