Death Of A Hollow Man Read online

  “Amenable!” cried Harold. “Me?”

  “There are many people I know who regarded his refusal to take direction as revealing supreme confidence. I disagree. It is putting yourself in a director’s hands, trying different ways of working, taking risks, that shows an actor’s confidence. And I gradually came to the conclusion that ambition and self-assurance were two things that Esslyn Carmichael had very little of.”

  He got a lot of puzzled looks at that, but none of actual disbelief. More than one person seemed to find the idea feasible. Rosa, while looking a little mystified, also nodded.

  “And yet …” Barnaby left his position at the pass door and walked slowly up the aisle. Every head followed. “There were certain signs that this aspect of his personality was undergoing some sort of change. The feeling I picked up during questioning was that over the last few months, he had become openly argumentative, querying or defying Harold and castigating the only other actor in the company who was any serious threat.” Nicholas looked rather pleased at that remark, and gave Cully a wide smile. “Now,” continued Barnaby, “why should that be?”

  The company recognized the question as purely rhetorical. No one spoke. In fact, two people looked so deeply disturbed you could have been forgiven for thinking that they might never speak again. “I believe that once we know the answer to that, we shall know why he was murdered. And once we know why, we shall know who.” Troy found his mouth was dry. At first guarded and resentful of his chief’s deductive progress, he had sat outside the circle with a slightly defiant air, knowing his place, showing his detachment disdainfully. Now, in spite of himself totally gripped by the thrust of Barnaby’s narrative, he leaned forward, caught in the storyteller’s net.

  “I’d like to jump to the first night of Amadeus, and the drama within the drama. I’m sure you all know by now that rumor and misinformation were running rife, and that Kitty and Nicholas were both attacked by Esslyn during the course of the evening.” At this indication that his previous declaration had been validated, Nicholas looked even more pleased. “This naturally put them high on the list of suspects. In any case, I’m afraid the widow of a murdered man is usually thrust into this unenviable position. Kitty had the motive—he’d discovered she was unfaithful, and once the baby had ‘disappeared’ would perhaps have turned her out. And she had the perfect opportunity—”

  “I didn’t kill him!” shouted Kitty. “With all the witnesses I’d got to physical cruelty, I could’ve got a divorce. And maintenance.”

  “That sort of procedure can take a long time, Kitty. And not always end to your advantage.”

  “I never touched the bloody thing.”

  “Certainly your prints were not on the razor, but then neither were anybody else’s until the dead man picked it up. But then, the most inept delinquent knows enough to wipe the handle of a murder weapon clean. Even so, all my instincts set themselves against this simple solution.” Kitty and Rosa engaged glances. Triumph and disappointment sizzled back and forth.

  “I also decided that David, Colin, and Deidre were in the clear, and in each case for pretty much the same reasons. I’ve known them all a long time, and although I’d never be foolish enough to say that none of them are capable of murder, I very much doubt if they were capable of this particular murder. But of course they did have the opportunity. And this was my real stumbling block. Because, until earlier this evening, it seemed all the wrong people had the opportunity and all the right people had none.”

  “What happened earlier this evening, then?” asked Harold, who had been quieter for longer than anyone present could ever remember.

  “I discovered there were two razors.”

  The remark fell into the silence like a stone. Ripples of emotion spread and spread. Some faces looked eager, some were flushed and serious, one turned ghastly pale. Avery, noticing, thought, Oh, God—he knows something. I was right. Then, not caring whether or not he was publicly rebuffed, he took his lover’s hand and squeezed it; once for comfort and twice for luck. Tim didn’t even notice.

  “This, of course, opened up the whole thing. Almost anyone could have taken it, left the substitute, removed the tape when it was convenient, and then slipped the original back.”

  “Who’s the ‘almost,’ Tom?” asked Nicholas.

  “Avery. He didn’t return to the wings till the play was over. Now I knew how,” continued Barnaby, “I was left with the two whys. Why should anyone wish to murder Esslyn in the first place and, much more puzzling, why choose to do it in front of over a hundred people? Frankly, I still haven’t understood the second, but I have become quite sure about the first.”

  Now, he retraced his steps and, once again, every head, as if yoked together on one invisible string, turned. He leaned back against the thrust of the stage, hands in pockets, and paused. The old ham, observed Cully admiringly. And I thought I got it all from me mum.

  “Putting aside the motives we first thought of—namely, passion and money—we are left with a third, equally powerful and, I believe, the correct one. Esslyn Carmichael was killed because of something he knew. Now, our investigation has proved that, unless he’s been ordering his affairs with special cunning, there have been no large sums of money coming his way, and that seems to rule out using this knowledge for financial coercion. But a blackmailer’s demands can be other than monetary. He can put sexual pressure on people, or he can use his secret to obtain power. I thought the first, as he was so newly married and, according to his imperceptive lights, quite satisfied, was unlikely. Yet how much more unlikely, given my understanding of his character as lacking ambition and confidence, was the latter. And yet I became more and more certain that it was in this area of investigation that my solution lay.

  “Like all of you, I’m sure I have thought of this murder as a theatrical one. Although on this dreadful evening reality crept upon the stage in certain unpleasant ways, we all knew, until the very last minute, that we were watching a play. Esslyn wore makeup and costume, he spoke lines, and executed moves that he had rehearsed. Whoever killed him was a member of the company. It seemed so plain that everything centered on the Latimer that I hardly took into account the rest of Esslyn’s life—the larger part of it, after all. It was Kitty who reminded me that from nine till five Monday to Friday Esslyn Carmichael was an accountant.”

  At this point Tim covered his chalk-white countenance with his hands and lowered his head. Avery put an arm around his shoulders. As he did so, his mind became crowded with bathetic images. He saw himself visiting Tim in prison every week, even if that meant for years. He would bake a cake with a file inside. Or smuggle in a rope beneath his poncho. At the thought of prison food, Avery felt his tummy start to chum. How would Tim survive?

  “If you remember, Kitty”—Avery forced his attention back to what Tom was saying—“I asked you if you had noticed any change recently in your husband’s routine, and you said he had gone to work the Saturday morning before he died. I don’t know, Rosa, if you recall … ?”

  “Never.” The first Mrs. Carmichael shook her head. “He was quite firm on that. Said he had enough of facts and figures during the week.”

  “He had gone to the office, Kitty told me, to ‘call something in.’ A strange phrase, surely. One you’d be more likely to hear from the lips of a gambler than an accountant. Or a debt collector. Because that’s what the phrase means. You ‘call in’ a debt. And I believe this is what Esslyn was about to do. What was owed and for how long we don’t know. But he had apparently decided that it had gone on long enough.”

  “But, Tom,” interrupted Joyce, her voice harsh and nervous, “you said he was killed because he knew something.”

  “And also”—Nicholas took advantage of the breach— “owing someone money isn’t much fun, but it’s not the end of the world. Certainly not worth killing for. I mean, the worst that can happen is you get taken to court.”

  “Oh, there was much more than that at stake. To discover precisely what, w
e have to go back to the point I reached earlier and ask again what happened several months ago—six, to be exact—to give Esslyn the confidence to start throwing his weight about?”

  Barnaby paused then, and the silence lay ripe with suspicion and stabbed by startled looks. At first dense, it slowly became more lightsome, gathering point and clarity. Barnaby was never sure who first fingered the Everards. Certainly it was not him. But, as if telepathically, first one head, then another, pointed in their direction. Nicholas spoke.

  “He got himself a pair of toadies.”

  “I see nothing wrong—” rushed in Clive Everard. “Neither do I,” said Donald.

  “—in becoming friendly with—”

  “—in devotedly admiring—”

  “—even venerating—”

  “—someone of Esslyn’s undoubted talents—”

  “—and remarkable skills.”

  “You bloody hypocrites.” Barnaby’s voice was so quiet that for a moment people glanced around, uncertain from where that damning indictment had arisen. Troy knew, and his adrenaline shot up. Barnaby walked to the edge of the row in which the brothers were sitting and said still softly, “You malicious, wicked, meddling, evil-minded bastards.”

  Pasty-faced, their nostrils pinched in tight with alarm, the Everards shrank closer together. Kitty gazed at them with dawning horror, Cully, unaware that she was gripping Nicholas’s arm very tight, half rose from her seat. Avery’s expression of misery was suddenly touched with a glow of hope. Joyce felt she would choke on the suspense, and Harold was nodding. His head wagged back and forth as if it were loose on his shoulders, like the head on those gross Chinese Buddhas found sometimes in antique shops.

  “You’ve no call to speak to us like that,” cried one of the Everards, recovering fast.

  “Since when has it been against the law to admire an actor?”

  >“Admire.” Barnaby almost spat out the word, and the volume of his voice increased tenfold. He pushed his angry face close to theirs. “You didn’t admire him. You led him around like a bear with a ring through its nose. And he, poor bugger, never having had a friend in his life, thought no doubt that this was what friendship was. Court toadies? Quite the reverse. Whatever that might be.”

  “Eminences grises?” suggested Boris.

  “And directly responsible for his death.’’

  At this, Donald Everard flew out of his seat. “You heard that!” he screamed, flapping his arms at the rest of the gathering. “That’s slander!”

  “We shall sue!” shrieked his brother. “You can’t go around saying we killed Esslyn and get away with it.”

  “We’ve got witnesses!”

  “All these people!”

  “I didn’t say you had killed him,” said Barnaby, stepping back from these hysterics with an expression of deep distaste. “I said I believed you were responsible for his death.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Not quite. As you’ll realize if you’ll stop flinging yourselves about and settle down to think about it.” When they had reluctantly, with many an injured cluck and toss of a gel-stiffened crest, reseated themselves, Barnaby carried on. “So we now have a puppet, a hollow man with someone pulling his strings. And what do they do, oh so subtly, so slyly, these puppeteers? At first they encourage intransigence. I can just hear it … ‘You’re not going to take that, are you? You’re the leading man … don’t you realize how powerful you are? They couldn’t do anything without you.’ But after a few weeks that rather modest mischief starts to pall. They’ve gone about as far as they can go with that one. So they look around for something more interesting, and I suspect it was about this time that Esslyn shared with them the information that was to instigate their grand design and lead directly to his death.

  “In fact, it was something my sergeant said in the office today that pointed me in the right direction.” His sergeant, suddenly in the spotlight, attempted to look intelligent, modest, and invaluable. He also managed a surreptitious wink at Kitty, who promptly winked back. “He’s given to making feeble, atrociously unfunny jokes,” continued Barnaby (Troy immediately looked less intelligent), “the latest being a play on the word ‘putsch,’ but, as these things sometimes do, it reminded me of something very similar from a recent interview. I don’t know if you remember, Kitty… ?”

  Suddenly addressed, Kitty, who was still ogling Troy, blushed and said, “Sorry?”

  “You told me that Esslyn spoke to you of the dramatic effect he intended to make on the first night.”

  “That’s right, he did.”

  “And because he was admiring himself in his costume, you assumed that he referred to his own transformation.” “No—you said that, Tom. When you explained that funny French bit.” Barnaby almost repeated the phrase, making it a question, and Kitty said, “That’s right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Kitty looked around. Something was amiss. People were staring at her. She suddenly felt cold. What had she done that they should stare so?

  “Yes, Tom, quite sure. Why?”

  “Because what I just said was not the same phrase.” So near though, and it had taken him two days to get it. “What I said—what Esslyn said—was ‘coup d’etat.’ A seizing of power.”

  “Oh, God—” The fragment of sound from Deidre was almost inaudible, but David immediately handed the dog to his father and took her hand.

  “Twice a phrase was misheard or misinterpreted. And in both instances the correct readings would have provided vital clues.”

  “What was the other, Tom?” asked Boris, the only member of the group who seemed relaxed enough to speak.

  “Esslyn tried to tell us with his dying breath of the plan that had undone him. Only one word, and that word was thought to be ‘bungled.’ But I performed a simple experiment earlier today, and I’m now quite sure the word in fact was ‘Uncle.’ And that if time had been granted him the next word would have been ‘Vanya.’ Isn’t that right, Harold?” Harold’s head continued to nod like a Chinese Buddha.

  ‘‘Did you not pick up the razor as you went through the wings, remove the tape in the interval, wipe the handle with your yellow silk handkerchief, and put it back on the tray? And while you had it in your pocket, did you not put this in its place?” He produced an old-fashioned razor from his pocket and held it aloft.

  There was a terrible pause. Everyone looked at each other, shocked, excited, horrified by this revelation. Joyce covered her eyes with her hands and gave a muffled cry.

  ‘‘Yes, that’s right, Tom,” said Harold pleasantly.

  ‘‘And with an audience prepared to swear you never left your seat, you would be in the clear.”

  ‘‘Certainly that’s how I envisaged it. And it all seemed to work terribly well. I can’t imagine how you spotted the substitution.” Barnaby told him. “Imagine that,” continued Harold ruefully. “And I always thought David rather a slow-witted boy.”

  David did not seem to take offense at this, but his father glared at the back of Harold’s head, and Deidre flushed angrily.

  “I shall have to have a firm word with Doris about letting you root among my private possessions.”

  “She had no choice in the matter. We served a warrant.”

  “Hm. We’ll see about that. Well, Tom, I expect now you know how, you’d like to know why?” Barnaby indicated that he would indeed, and Harold rose from his seat and started pacing in his turn, thumbs hooked into his vest pocket, the DA making his closing speech.

  “To elucidate this rather annoying matter, we have to go back some considerable time. In fact, fifteen years, to the building of the Latimer and the formation of my present company. Money was short. We had a grant from the council, but not nearly enough for something that was to become the jewel in Causton’s crown. And when that drunken old sot Latimer dropped dead, his successor was not nearly so sympathetic. I believe he had leftish tendencies—and cut our grant. No doubt he would have preferred to see a bingo ha
ll. So almost from the beginning, we had cash-flow problems. And naturally one had to keep up a certain lifestyle. An impresario can’t go round in a Ford Escort dressed like a shop assistant.” Harold broke here, having reached the top of the stairs, wheeled dramatically, took a deep breath, and continued.

  “I have an import-export business, as you may know, and flattered myself that the hours I worked yielded very satisfactory returns. I kept my domestic expenses to a minimum and put my profits where they showed—that is, about my person and into the Latimer productions. However, healthy as these profits usually were, a huge percentage of them went to the Customs and Excise sharks for the VAT on import duty, and another great slice to the Inland Revenue. Obviously I resented this, especially when the scrap I got back in the form of a grant was slashed. So I decided to even the situation out a little. Of course, I intended to pay some tax and a proportion of the VAT required—after all, I’m not a criminal—but a judicious rearrangement of the figures saved me, in that first year, several hundred pounds, most of which went into The Wizard of Oz, our opening production. I don’t know if you remember it, Tom?”

  “A splendid show.”

  “Of course, when Esslyn prepared my accounts, I expected him to recognize my sleight of hand, but I was sure, as the company’s star, he would appreciate the necessity for such a procedure. However, to my amazement, he said nothing. Just submitted them as usual. Naturally I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, no one wants an accountant so incompetent he can’t spot a necessary juggle or two. On the other, it augured very well for the future. And so it proved. I kept back a little more every year—several thousand when I bought the Morgan— and every year no comment was made. But do you know what, Tom?”

  Harold had come to rest near Barnaby. His head, which had been doing no more than gently bob in time to his movements, now began to jiggle and shake alarmingly. “He had known what I was doing all the time. He had known and said nothing. Can you imagine anything more deceitful?”