‘And had she rung you earlier in the morning as well?’
‘Yes. She told me you were both coming round. And she said you were coming because you thought Ritchie Good’s death might not be an accident.’
‘Which is why you were waiting for us in your Renault? To run us down?’
‘Yes,’ Mimi replied quietly.
Jude took over. ‘Elizaveta said just now on the phone that what you’d done wasn’t the right way to proceed. Did she tell you what would have been the right way?’
‘Elizaveta had seen what had happened in the street outside her house. She knew that I had tried to kill you, and she said that I shouldn’t try to do things like that ever again.’ She made it sound like a child being chastised by a parent for not making her bed. And Jude was struck by the fact that Mimi Lassiter was childlike. There was something emotionally undeveloped about her, the little girl who could not make her own decisions, who had to be directed by a stronger woman. Like her mother … or Elizaveta Dalrymple.
‘Tell us about Ritchie Good’s death,’ said Jude gently.
‘What about it?’
‘You switched the real noose for the doctored one, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Once again there was pride in her voice.
‘And had you planned to do that,’ asked Carole, ‘after you’d heard Gordon Blaine describe the mechanism the previous day?’
‘That planted the idea in my head, yes.’
‘So what actually happened after the rehearsal that Sunday afternoon?’
‘Well, it was very lucky, actually.’ Mimi was now talking with enthusiasm, and clearly not a vestige of guilt. ‘Most people had left St Mary’s Hall, but I was gathering my bits together, my bag and what-have-you. I’d left them in the Green Room, so I was near the stage, and I heard some people come in, and I recognized Ritchie Good’s voice, and Hester Winstone’s. And he was saying how she’d missed a really good show when he used the gallows and she must have what he called “a command performance”. Well, Hester didn’t sound very interested, and Ritchie was trying to persuade her, and I thought, “I’m never going to get a better opportunity than this.” So I went onstage, and the curtains were drawn and it was easy to get on to the cart and switch the two nooses around. And then I slipped out of the hall without them seeing me, and I went to the Cricketers.’ She smiled beatifically. ‘It all worked remarkably well, didn’t it?’
There was a silence. Then Carole asked, ‘And did you do it because the night before you heard Elizaveta say that she wanted Ritchie dead?’
Mimi looked at her curiously. ‘No, it was nothing to do with Elizaveta.’
‘Then why did you do it?’ asked Jude.
‘Well, obviously … because Ritchie Good was in a SADOS production while not being a member of SADOS. He hadn’t paid his subscription.’
THIRTY-TWO
‘What do you think we do about her?’ asked Carole, as she drove her white Renault the short distance back to High Tor.
‘Do you mean, do we shop her to the police?’
‘Yes, I suppose I do.’ Her voice took on its Home Office tone. ‘It would be the proper thing to do.’
Jude grimaced sceptically. ‘Pretty difficult case for them to bring to court and secure a conviction. Also, what I always think in situations like this is: does a person like Mimi represent a danger to anyone else?’
‘Might I remind you, Jude, that we’re talking about someone who only this morning tried to kill you by running you over?’
‘Yes, I know. I really do think she’s got all that out of her system, though. She virtually said as much.’
‘But do you believe her?’
‘Yes, I do actually. What about you?’
Carole was forced unwillingly to admit that she couldn’t see Mimi Lassiter as a public danger either.
‘I’m more worried,’ said Jude, ‘about the threat she might pose to herself.’
‘Oh?’
‘She told us she’d got near to suicide when her mother died – or “passed”, as she insisted on saying.’
‘Well, this morning she seemed far from suicidal. Positively gleeful at having got away with killing Ritchie Good.’
‘Mm.’
‘And, Jude, you made her fix that appointment with her GP to talk about her issues with depression.’ Jude nodded. ‘In the circumstances I don’t think there was a lot more you could have done.’
Over the next few months Carole’s words came back to haunt Jude. She felt an ugly tug of guilt. Perhaps there was a lot more she could have done. But during the run of The Devil’s Disciple both she and Carole had kept a cautious eye on Mimi Lassiter, and neither had seen anything untoward.
They didn’t think there was anything significant about her absence from the last night cast party. In fact, to be honest, in such a raucous scrum of posing thespians they didn’t notice she wasn’t there.
Every night during the run of The Devil’s Disciple, Mimi had dutifully done her (again unnoticed) performances in the Westerfield crowd at the near-hanging of Dick Dudgeon. That duty discharged, on the Saturday night she had packed up her belongings in St Mary’s Hall and driven in her white Renault back to her parents’ house (it still felt like her parents’ house) in Fethering. Once there she had run a hot bath, got into it, swallowed down about thirty paracetamol from the store she had stockpiled when previously feeling suicidal, and slit her wrists with her father’s old cut-throat razor.
The reason she had killed herself had nothing to do with guilt about causing the death of Ritchie Good. That event, she thought, had been very just and appropriate. Mimi had almost as strong an aversion to ‘showing-off’ as Carole Seddon. Ritchie Good had always been a ‘show-off’ and it was ‘showing-off’ that had brought about his demise. Besides, he’d never paid his subscription to be a member of SADOS.
But what had really made Mimi suicidal was the suspension of patronage by Elizaveta Dalrymple. After the attempt to run over Jude, the grande dame of SADOS had decided that perhaps Mimi was no longer the sort of person she wished to have attending her ‘drinkies things’. By long tradition Elizaveta issued her invitations to her regulars on the Friday for the Saturday eight days away. By the end of the Friday which saw the penultimate performance of The Devil’s Disciple, Mimi Lassiter had received no such summons. And by the end of the Saturday she realized she wasn’t going to receive one. Mimi had been cast into the outer darkness. She would never get another invitation to one of Elizaveta’s ‘drinkies things’.
Without her idol’s support, patronage and validation Mimi Lassiter crumpled like a rag doll. To her mind suicide was the only available option for her.
Of course, at the cast party nobody knew of the gruesome event taking place in Fethering. It was afterwards they heard the news which caused Jude such disquiet.
But at the party itself there was a high level of good cheer. This was because people in amdrams always like to let their hair down at the end of a production, rather than because The Devil’s Disciple had been a huge success. Neville Prideaux’s conviction that a wordy minor work by George Bernard Shaw was what the good burghers of Smalting were craving for had been proved completely wrong. They had stayed away in droves, and those who had attended had been unimpressed. In spite of all Carole Seddon’s assiduous one-to-one ‘line-bashing’ sessions, when faced by a live audience Olly Pinto’s memory appeared to have been wiped completely. He had ensured that Carole, in her role as prompter, had had a very busy week. And the people in the front row of St Mary’s Hall had heard more from her than they had from some of the actors.
Storm Lavelle, on the other hand, had really built her performance throughout the run. She did have genuine talent and Jude wondered whether her butterfly brain would allow her to concentrate sufficiently on trying to get work in the professional theatre. Secretly, Jude rather doubted it. Like many aspiring actors, her friend had the talent, but lacked the tenacity required to make a go of it.