Death and the Chaste Apprentice Read online

  “If only,” said Ronnie Wimsett, “if only we knew exactly when he died.”

  “Why?” asked Gillian.

  “Because, dear dumb cluck, if he died during the play and if he’s up there in his flat, you must see that no one of us could have done it.”

  “I never considered for a moment that one of us could have,” said Jason Thark. The silence that followed this was one of relief, as if Jason’s position as producer gave him some sort of authority in police matters as well. That his statement was untrue, however, he immediately revealed by his next. “I suspect that we can narrow down the time much more closely than merely that of the duration of the play. Because when I was getting my drink after the show, poor old Win was wondering where Des was, and that girl from the dining room—Dawn is her name?—said rather sharply: ‘It’s no good him showing up now. It was during interval that he was wanted and when he said he’d be here.’ So I rather suspect that the police will find that he’s been dead some time.”

  “Which will let us out,” said Ronnie Wimsett.

  “We-e-ell,” began Gillian, but she was interrupted by footsteps on the stairs. And not just footsteps. The carrying voices of the Galloways were unmistakable.

  “It was Des, dreadful Des” came Clarissa’s voice.

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “I heard the commissionaire, or doorman, or whatever you call him, say it to the constable by the main entrance. ‘His name is Capper, or was. Des Capper.’ Unless he’s gone out of his mind, the police are here because somebody’s dead, and that somebody is Des Capper.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned” came Carston’s impeccably well bred tones.

  They emerged blinking from the stairwell: Clarissa, Carston, and Susan Fanshaw, who characteristically was saying nothing. When they had got their bearings, Clarissa stared triumphantly at the assembled cast of The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe.

  “There! You see? Everyone’s here and discussing it, aren’t you, darlings?”

  “We are,” admitted Connie Geary. “But where have you been that you missed the fun?”

  “Oh, my dear, such a miscalculation! I wouldn’t have missed being first to hear of dreadful Desmond’s death for the world if I’d known! But how could I? We went to the Webster.”

  “Why on earth did you do that?”

  Clarissa had her audience and, as was her wont, immediately began acting a big scene, though it was a little enough matter she had to tell of.

  “Well, darlings, after the play and the curtain calls—only there is no curtain, and I do find that awkward!—Carston and I changed, because the fact is we do feel it a tiny bit unprofessional to mingle with the dear old general public in costume—” She gestured round at Ronnie and Peter, still in their apprentice’s costumes. “Call us old-fashioned if you like.”

  “Old-fashioned,” said Gillian, and was rewarded with a dazzling reptilian smile.

  “So when we were ready, we collected Susan Fanshaw, my husband’s sweet little mistress, who had had a heavy evening seeing you’d all got your swords and cudgels with you and that your wimples and codpieces were straight, or whatever codpieces are supposed to be, and we went out into the yard, and there were fans waiting for us, still waiting after all that time. . . . Well, we saw you all in the Shakespeare, and we thought we ought to spread ourselves around a bit so as to be fair, so we took the fans into the Webster and let them lavish on us the best hospitality their purses could buy. Poor dears, they loved it!”

  Susan Fanshaw looked at Clarissa (from behind her) with an expression of the utmost contempt on her face. Clearly she had been embarrassed by their sponging. Carston did not notice the glance and took her hand absentmindedly.

  “Anyway, the consequence was, you missed all the excitement,” said Brad Mallory. “Win’s announcement was a real Act One curtain, I can tell you.”

  “Darling, don’t torment me! I would so have enjoyed it. Because the fact that he’s been murdered—I take it, with all those police, murder is in question?—”

  “Apparently,” said Jason.

  “—the fact that he’s been murdered does seem a singularly apt retribution for his grubby little interference into my private life.”

  “Don’t say that to the police,” said Carston, sighing. “They might scent a whiff of megalomania. Or paranoia. It takes an odd kind of mind to find death an appropriate punishment for rummaging around in someone’s drawers.”

  “Carston, of course I am not so stupid as to talk like that to the dear policemen. Naturally I shall tell them what an interesting little man he was, with his homely medical advice and his entrancing accent and his fascinating memories of the last days of the Raj. I shall say that in the short time we have been here I had come to number him amongst my dearest friends.”

  “Don’t overdo it the other way either, Clarissa,” said Jason in a tired voice. “The police are trained to smell rats.” He added, rather insultingly: “And the last thing I need at this stage is to lose one of my leads.”

  “Fortunately I’ve always found the police to be charming and most respectful,” said Clarissa, hardly hearing. “I’ve always got on famously with them.”

  “Don’t I remember,” said Carston.

  “This is all getting way off the point,” said Gillian. “When you came, we were trying to establish when he’d been murdered. We rather think it must have been before Interval.”

  “Before about eight-thirty, then?” asked Carston.

  “That’s it. Or a few minutes after. We were running ever so slightly late.”

  “And it must have been after—oh—seven-ten, seven-fifteen,” contributed Carston.

  “Oh?”

  “Because he was standing at the back during the first scene and into my bit in the second scene. I’ve got good long sight, and there’s a moment when I peer into the audience, trying to see Sir Pecunius arriving from the Palace of Westminster. I saw him at the back then, and I saw him leave, which almost put me off my stride. So it was after that.”

  “Brilliant!” said Ronnie, rubbing his hands. “So we have a terminus post quem and a terminus ante quem. And they let all the actors out entirely. Because we’d have had to go through the kitchens, which had a card game going on in them, then through the dining room, which had most of the staff there, judging from their faces at the windows, then through the Shakespeare into the foyer. No way anyone could do that and then murder Des without being seen. Anyway, we were all behind the stage when we were not on it.”

  His words fell on an embarrassed silence. Gillian looked down at her hands and then dared to look up at Peter Fortnum. She found that Jason and Connie were looking at him too, and Natalya was looking at them and frowning in puzzlement.

  “Well, not quite all the time,” said Peter, brazening it out.

  “Come along, let’s go to bed,” said Connie briskly. “They’re going to want to question us in the morning. Let’s leave the question of my gin till then. We’ll go to bed and think things through.”

  And that was exactly what they did. Some of them had a great many things to think through.

  • • •

  While the actors and musicians had been chewing over things in the alcove, Superintendent Dundy had been sweating his way through some preliminary questioning of Mrs. Capper in the little manager’s office behind the reception desk.

  No, Mrs. Capper had said, she didn’t mind talking. Would rather, really. Would rather go to bed knowing she’d got it over. And if she talked it through with him, perhaps the memory of poor Des lying there with the dagger between his shoulder blades would become less horribly vivid.

  So talk she did, with Iain Dundy keeping her, at the start, on fairly neutral background topics.

  “When did we come to Britain? Let’s see, it was the time of the miners’ strike—not the last one, the one before that. Seventy-four, was it? I remember because there was no electricity most of the time, and lots of the industries were shut down, and the shops, and I
wanted to go home after I’d been here a couple of days, I can tell you.”

  “Home?”

  “New South Wales. Des was manager of a very nice hotel in Dubbo. I wish we’d never left. People don’t go sticking knives into each other in Dubbo.”

  Dundy let pass this romanticization of her past. “Why did you leave?” he asked.

  “Just chance, really. There was this English hotelier stayed with us, got pally with Des—everyone got on well with Des—and offered us a job. Des thought if we didn’t go then, we never would, though it wouldn’t have broken my heart if we never had. This was back in—oh, seventy-three, it must have been. So eventually we came over, and Des became bar manager of this big hotel in Bournemouth. Then it was manager of the Excelsior in Carlisle, then here. All of them hotels in the Beaumont chain. Des was very pleased to get Ketterick. It’s what he called a prestige hotel in the group, and it gave him a bit of a stake in this festival that’s going on now.”

  “You weren’t so pleased?”

  Win Capper shrugged. “Drinkers are pretty much alike wherever you are, that’s what I say. And the people who go on about what a lovely hotel it is don’t think of the amount of walking that’s involved!”

  “But what about your husband? Had he enjoyed his time since you both came here?”

  “Oh, yes. Happy as a lamb with two tails. All this airy-fairy arty stuff was meat and drink to him. But of course Des was a very well read man.”

  “And he got on well with people?”

  “Oh, yes! Des was always good chums with people right from the word go.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, he never put on airs. He was always chatty and always had an appropriate word for everybody. As I say, he knew an awful lot. He had an inquiring mind.”

  Iain Dundy wondered whether an inquiring mind was really likely to make a hotel manager popular. Des Capper was dead, after all. Perhaps he had pursued his inquiries in foolish or dangerous directions. He said: “You mean he was interested in everyone?”

  “Well, I meant more that he knew what everybody was interested in, so he was on their wavelength and could talk with them. Like about acting and singing with this lot now. He could give them tips, little bits of advice. And I think he was very useful on the festival committee. He’d really wised himself up on the play they’re doing, and he was starting to read up about this opera with the silly title. He said he had to be clued up, so he could discuss with the people staying here. He was very thorough, was Des. And a walking encyclopedia sometimes!”

  More like a barroom philosopher, Dundy guessed, and a know-all to boot. Des sounded quite unbearable.

  “So what exactly happened tonight?” he asked.

  “Oh, Lord . . . I wish I could forget it. . . . We opened at six, but just for members of the audience, because we don’t open to members of the public until after the play’s over. We were quite busy. I was behind the bar, and Des was going around talking to people in the Shakespeare, as he usually did. I had to call him over to help me, and I told him we wouldn’t be able to cope at interval time without him. He said he’d come. Then of course the audience started drifting out into the yard to take their seats, and Des knocked off. That was the last I saw of him until—”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He said he might go and watch the play for a bit from the back. Frank—that’s the doorman—says that’s what he did. Dawn and I were busy in the bar, so I didn’t think about him until he didn’t turn up at Interval.”

  “You and this other barmaid— Dawn is it?”

  “Yes. She’s one of the waitresses, and very capable.”

  “You were together in the Shakespeare Bar the whole time until Interval?”

  If Win Capper understood why he was asking this, she gave no sign. She just answered obediently, as if she were a child in class answering by rote.

  “Dawn went to fetch the snacks from the kitchen. That took three or four minutes, I should think. Otherwise we were together the whole time.”

  “And you had to cope together at Interval?”

  “That’s right. We were so rushed that I didn’t have time to ring around for Des.”

  “And after the Interval you didn’t get worried?”

  “I knew he would have come if he could.” She dabbed at her eyes, which were very full. “I didn’t think. How could I? And I knew we could cope after the show, because most people go straight off home. Dawn told me that; she’d helped out previous years. Anyway, after the interval we got everything shipshape again and got the glasses washed, and then, when the concert finished, people started coming in again.”

  “When was that?”

  “Twenty, twenty-five past nine. The Town Hall’s only five minutes away, and some of the residents came straight back here. Our interval had finished a bit before nine—ten or five to. Then, of course, when the play ended, towards ten, we filled up quite considerably.”

  “Tell me about finding him.”

  “Oh, my God, do I have to? You’ve seen—” She swallowed at the memory.

  “Try to do it quite objectively, as if it were someone else involved, someone else’s body.”

  She looked up at him as if hardly understanding, but then she swallowed again and tried.

  “We were quite busy until just after eleven, but after I’d called ‘Time’ I realized I hadn’t seen Des since before seven. And that wasn’t right. He’d have wanted to go round the Shakespeare and talk to people after the play, see how they thought it had gone. I wasn’t exactly worried, because he could have been in the Webster or the Massinger, but the Shakespeare is very much his bar and the easiest to get to from Reception and the flat. And then Frank said he hadn’t seen him since soon after the play started. That didn’t seem right, either. So I rang the flat, and there was no reply, and then I did start to wonder.”

  “Did your husband have any history of illness?”

  “No, always fit as a fiddle. Like I said, he had this thing about health and lots of little tips about how to keep in shape. He read up on it you know. . . . Still, he is over sixty. . . . Was . . . So you do think about heart attacks. . . . Anyway, I went to the manager’s office, and he wasn’t there, and I opened the door that leads up to the flat and called—”

  “Was the door unlocked?”

  “Yes. It usually was, except at night. So I went up the stairs and opened the door into our lounge, and—well, there he was. You couldn’t not see him.”

  “Was the body exactly as it is now? Did you disturb it in any way?”

  “No. Or not much. You see, I screamed, and then I knelt down and looked at his face, so I maybe touched his shoulders. But I know a dead body when I see one. And there was the knife between his shoulders—”

  “You recognized the knife?”

  “Oh, yes, it was a knife that Des brought back from India years ago. Had it before we were married. It was always on the little table by the sofa.”

  “Had you or your husband ever entertained any of the present festival guests at the hotel in your private flat?”

  “Not that I know of. Why would we?”

  Why indeed? Dundy thought.

  “Did you notice whether anything else had been disturbed in the flat?”

  “No, I just got up and . . . ran downstairs. Screaming. It was so horrible.”

  Iain Dundy looked at his watch. “I think that’s all we need from you tonight, Mrs. Capper. Have you got anything to make you sleep?”

  “Not personal. Des didn’t approve of things like that. But there’ll be something around somewhere in case one of the hotel guests asked for it.”

  “Then I suggest you take it. You’ll be able to use one of the hotel rooms to sleep in, won’t you? Oh—one last question: Did your husband, to your knowledge, have any enemies?”

  She looked at him, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, no. Des didn’t have an enemy in the world. Anyone’ll tell you the same.”

  He jumped up
and opened the door for her, and she walked across the foyer to where Dawn was waiting for her by the door into the Shakespeare. At the sight of a friend and female sympathy, Win tottered a little as she walked and then crumpled into her arms, to be led inside.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Dundy swung round and saw that there was a young man standing talking to the constable at the main entrance. He had an air of fledgling copper about him, but he wasn’t a policeman Dundy knew. This he was sure of because he was black, and black policemen were rare enough to notice. When he raised his eyebrows, the young man came over.

  “They sent me from the station, sir. I’m Metropolitan CID, but I was there visiting a mate from training days. They thought I might be useful because I was in the audience tonight.”

  “Here, for the play?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “You might well be useful. Are you free at the moment?”

  “Free for the next forty-eight hours.” He held out his hand. “I’m Peace, sir. Charlie Peace.”

  Chapter 9

  The Hotel Staff

  “I DON’T KNOW how much help I can be,” said Charlie Peace as Dundy gestured him to the vacant armchair in the small office. “The bloke on the door says he was killed in the hotel here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t say I registered much from inside the hotel while the play was going on. Women collecting up glasses in the bar, staff watching the play from the dining room—not much more than that.”

  “Why were you at the play?”

  “Came with a girlfr— Well, a girl. Student at London University. She asked me along, and I came to see if she was really interested or whether it was the okay thing these days for girl students to have a black boyfriend.”

  “And which was it?”

  “We said polite farewells at the gate.” Charlie’s mouth expanded suddenly into a great, generous grin. “Plenty more where that came from.”

  “But you’ve got a clear idea of the play itself?”

  “Oh, yes. It wasn’t half bad, really, and one or two good laughs. Oh, I remember what went on onstage. It’s what went on behind the stage that you’ll be interested in, won’t it, sir?”