“Never mind,” Alleyn said. “This was only a beginning. Lattienzo thinks you will do better things.”
“Did he say so?”
“He did indeed.”
“The duet, I suppose. He did say something about the duet,” Rupert admitted.
“The duet it was.”
“I rewrote it.”
“So he said. Greatly to its advantage.”
“All the same,” Rupert muttered after a pause, “I shall burn it.”
“Sure?”
“Absolutely. I’m just going behind. There’s a spare copy; I won’t be a moment.”
“Hold on,” Alleyn said. “I’ll light you.”
“No! Don’t bother. Please. I know where the switch is.”
He made for a door in the back wall, stumbled over a music stand, and fell. While he was clambering to his feet, Alleyn ran up the apron steps and slipped through the curtains. He crossed upstage and went out by the rear exit, arriving in a back passage that ran parallel with the stage and had four doors opening off it.
Rupert was before him. The passage lights were on and a door with a silver star fixed to it was open. The reek of cosmetics flowed out of the room.
Alleyn reached the door. Rupert was in there, too late with the envelope he was trying to stuff into his pocket.
The picture he presented was stagy in the extreme. He looked like an early illustration for a Sherlock Holmes story — the young delinquent caught red-handed with the incriminating document. His eyes even started in the approved manner.
He straightened up, achieved an awful little laugh, and pushed the envelope down in his pocket.
“That doesn’t look much like a spare copy of an opera,” Alleyn remarked.
“It’s a good-luck card I left for her. I — it seemed so ghastly, sitting there. Among the others. ‘Good Luck!’ You know?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Let me see it.”
“No. I can’t. It’s private.”
“When someone has been murdered,” Alleyn said, “nothing is private.”
“You can’t make me.”
“I could, very easily,” he answered and thought: And how the hell would that look in subsequent proceedings?
“You don’t understand. It’s got nothing to do with what happened. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” Alleyn suggested and sat down.
“No.”
“You know you’re doing yourself no good by this,” Alleyn said. “If whatever’s in that envelope has no relevance it will not be brought into the picture. By behaving like this you suggest that it has. You make me wonder if your real object in coming down here was not to destroy your work but to regain possession of this card, if that’s what it is.”
“No. No. I am going to burn the script. I’d made up my mind.”
“Both copies?”
“What? Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve said so.”
“And where is the second copy, exactly? Not in here?”
“Another room.”
“Come now,” Alleyn said, not unkindly. “There is no second copy, is there? Show me what you have in your pocket.”
“You’d read — all sorts of things — into it.”
“I haven’t got that kind of imagination. You might ask yourself, with more cause, what I am likely to read into a persistent refusal to let me see it.”
He spared a thought for what he would in fact be able to do if Rupert did persist. With no authority to take possession forcibly, he saw himself spending the fag end of the night in Rupert’s room and the coming day until such time as the police might arrive, keeping him under ludicrous surveyance. No. His best bet was to keep the whole thing in as low a key as possible and trust to luck.
“I do wish,” he said, “that you’d just think sensibly about this. Weigh it up. Ask yourself what a refusal is bound to mean to you, and for God’s sake cough up the bloody thing and let’s go to bed for what’s left of this interminable night.”
He could see the hand working in the pocket and hear paper crumple. He wondered if Rupert tried, foolishly, to tear it. He sat out the silence, read messages of goodwill pinned round the Sommita’s looking glass and smelled the age-old incense of the makeup bench. He even found himself, after a fashion, at home.
And there, abruptly, was Rupert, holding out the envelope. Alleyn took it. It was addressed tidily to the Sommita in what looked to be a feminine hand, and Alleyn thought had probably enclosed one of the greeting cards. It was unsealed. He drew out the enclosure: a crumpled corner, torn from a sheet of music.
He opened it. The message had been scrawled in pencil and the writing was irregular as if the paper had rested on an uneven surface.
Soon it will all be over. If I were a Rossi I would make a better job of it. R.
Alleyn looked at the message for much longer than it took to read it. Then he returned it to the envelope and put it in his pocket.
“When did you write this?” he asked.
“After the curtain came down. I tore the paper off the score.”
“And wrote it here, in her room?”
“Yes.”
“Did she find you in here when she came for you?”
“I was in the doorway. I’d finished— that.”
“And you allowed yourself to be dragged on?”
“Yes. I’d made up my mind what I’d say. She asked for it,” said Rupert through his teeth, “and she got it.”
“ ‘Soon it will all be over,’ ” Alleyn quoted. “What would be over?”
“Everything. The opera. Us. What I was going to do. You heard me, for God’s sake. I told them the truth.” Rupert caught his breath back and then said, “I was not planning to kill her, Mr. Alleyn. And I did not kill her.”
“I didn’t think that even you would have informed her in writing, however ambiguously, of your intention. Would you care to elaborate on the Rossi bit?”
“I wrote that to frighten her. She’d told me about it. One of those Italian family feuds. Mafia sort of stuff. Series of murders and the victim always a woman. She said she was in the direct line to be murdered. She really believed that. She even thought the Strix man might be one of them — the Rossis. She said she’d never spoken about it to anyone else. Something about silence.”
“Omertà?”
“Yes. That was it.”
“Why did she tell you then?”
Rupert stamped his feet and threw up his hands. “Why! Why! Because she wanted me to pity her. It was when I first told her that thing was no good and I couldn’t go on with the performance. She — I think she saw that I’d changed. Seen her for what she was. It was awful. I was trapped. From then on I — well, you know, don’t you, what it was like. She could still whip up—”
“Yes. All right.”
“Tonight — last night — it all came to a head. I hated her for singing my opera so beautifully. Can you understand that? It was a kind of insult. As if she deliberately showed how worthless it was. She was a vulgar woman, you know. That was why she degraded me. That was what I felt after the curtain fell— degraded — and it was then I knew I hated her.”
“And this was written on the spur of the moment?”
“Of course. I suppose you could say I was sort of beside myself. I can’t tell you what it did to me. Standing there. Conducting, for Christ’s sake. It was indecent exposure.”
Alleyn said carefully: “You will realize that I must keep the paper for the time being, at least. I will write you a receipt for it.”