Light Thickens

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “It’s possible. It’s perfectly possible but does it throw a spa

“Rangi,” said Fox without enthusiasm.

“He would do the murder at the earlier time. He’d wait till the last minute, then rush around to Gaston and say Sir Dougal’s fainted and he, Gaston, will have to go on for the fight with Macduff. All right so far?”

“It’s all right,” said Fox, “as far as you’ve got. Motive, though?”

“Ah. Motive. His great-grandfather knew how to deal with this sort of nonsense. He told me in the nicest way imaginable. He cut off the other chap’s head and ate him.”

“Really!” said Fox primly. “How very unpleasant. But I suppose he could have done a return to his greatgrandfather’s state of mind and killed Macbeth. You know, reverted to the Stone Age, sort of.”

“Any of the others could have done the same thing.”

“You don’t mean —”

“I don’t mean the chopper and cooking-pot bit, and I’ll thank you not to be silly. I mean, could have gone to Gaston at the last moment and asked him to fight. The catch in that is, it’d be a damnable bit of evidence against him, later on.”

“Yerse,” said Mr. Fox. “And whoever he was, he didn’t do it.”

“I know he didn’t do it. I’m simply trying to find a way out, Fox. I’m trying to eliminate and I have eliminated.”

“Yes, Mr. Alleyn. You have. When do we book the gentleman?”

“I doubt if we’ve got a tight enough case, you know.”

“Do you?”

“Blast the whole boiling of them,” said Alleyn. He got up and walked about the room. “Do you know what they’re doing now? At this precise moment? Holding auditions for the replacement. A good play by Jay built around the death of Shakespeare’s young son and the arrival of the Dark Lady. So far they haven’t cast the murderer but there’s no guarantee they won’t. What’s more it’s the play they were doing with great success when this theatre reopened. There was a mess then. Remember?”

“I remember,” said Fox. “Proper turn-up for the books, that one was.”

“And a right proper young monster the boy was. This is altogether a different story. D’you know who this kid is?”

“No. Ought I to? Not anything in our line of business, I suppose.”

“No — well, that’s not quite true. He’s a nice, well-brought-up little chap and he’s the son of the Hampstead Chopper. He doesn’t know that and I’m extremely anxious that he won’t find out, Fox.”

“Harcourt-Smith, wasn’t it?”

“It was. His mother dropped the Harcourt. He knows his father’s in a loony-bin but not why.”

“Broadmoor?”

“Yes. A lifer.”

“Fancy that, now,” Fox said shaking his head.

“One of his father’s earlier victims was a Mrs. Barrabell.”

“You’re not telling me —”

“Yes, I am. Wife. Barrabell put those practical jokes together. He hoped the management would think the boy was responsible and give him the sack.”

“Has he told you? Barrabell?”

“Not in so many words but as-good-as.”

“He’s a member of some potty little way-out group, isn’t he?”

“The Red Fellowship. Yes.”

“What do we know about them?”

“The usual. Meeting once a week on Sunday mornings. Genuine enough. No real understanding of the extraordinary and extremely complicated in-fighting that goes on at sub-diplomatic levels. A bit dotty. He and his mates iron everything out to a few axioms and turn a blind eye to all that doesn’t fit. The terrible reality of Bruce Barrabell rests in the fact that his wife was beheaded by a maniac. I think he believes, or has brooded himself into believing, that the child has inherited the father’s madness and that sooner or later it’ll emerge and then it’ll be too late.”

“I still don’t know where Sir Dougal fits in. If he does.”

“Nor do I. Except that he was a far from subtle funster and Bruce came in for his share of the ragging. He was forever making snide references to leftish groups and so on.”

“Hardly enough to make Bruce cut his head off.”

“Not if we were dealing with anything like normal people. I’m begi

“All right. So what, to get down to our weekly pay packet, do we do to earn it?”

“Find a conclusive reason that will give us the time, as being immediately after Brandish’d by man that’s of a woman born. Find alibis for all but one of the company at that time and then face him with it. That’s the ideal, of course. Let’s tackle the alibis and see if we can do it with both feet on the ground. Now, the troops and all the extras and doubles are already engaged in battle. All the thanes; the doctor, disguised as one of Macbeth’s soldiers; Malcolm; Siward. Macduff’s out. That leaves Rangi, Gaston, and Banquo. The King. Props.”

“He was in and out of the O.P. corner fixing the claidheamh-mor. And that’s all,” said Fox.

“And we can cut out the King, I imagine.”

“Why?”

“Too silly,” said Alleyn. “And too elderly.”

“All right. No King. How about Props? Any motive at all?”

“Not unless something turns up. In a way he’s tempting, though. Nobody would pay any attention to him slipping into or out of the O.P. corner. He’d be there with the naked claidheamh-mor when Macbeth came off and could kill him and put his head on it.”

“He’d have to give the phony message to Gaston, but I think it would hold up,” said Fox. “Gaston’s hanging about there and Props says to him, ‘For Gawd’s sake, sir, he’s fainted. You’ve got this one speech and the fight. You know it. You can do it.’ And later on when the body’s found he says it was so dark he just saw it lying there and realizing there was only a matter of minutes before Macbeth’s entrance for the fight he rushed out, found Gaston, and asked him. It hangs together. Except —”

“No motive? Bloody hell, Fox,” shouted Alleyn, “we’ve lost our touch. We’ve gone to pieces. Gaston being told Macbeth’s fainted doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with anyone asking him to do it. He’d have told us. Of course he would. Back to square one.”

There was a long silence.

“No,” said Alleyn at last. “There’s only one answer.”

“I suppose so,” said Fox heavily.

The auditions were nearly over and the play almost fully cast from the present company. In the office, a

The discordant note was sounded, needless to say, by Gaston. He had not, of course, auditioned but there he was at the theatre. No sooner had an audition finished than he began. He buttonholed one nervous actor after another and his subject was the claidheamh-mor. He wanted it back. Urgently. They tried to shut him up, but he kept recurring like a decimal and complaining in an audible rumble that he would not be held responsible for anything that happened to anyone into whose care it had been consigned.

He asked to see Alleyn and was told he and Fox were not at the theatre. Where had they gone? Nobody knew.