The Strangling on the Stage (12 page)

There were pass doors on either side, but the simplest route up on to the stage was by the steps in the middle (much used for audience participation when the SADOS did their pantomimes). Jude stepped up, pushing the curtains aside, in search of the light switches.

But what she saw on stage stopped her in her tracks. The wooden cart had been pushed to one side. From the noose on the gallows dangled the still body of Ritchie Good. His face was congested, his popping blue eyes red-rimmed.

This time he wasn't play-acting.

J
ude's mobile was in her basket. She knew she should ring the police straight away. But Ritchie Good was unarguably dead, and a few minutes' delay was not, so far as she could see, going to make a lot of difference to the official investigation. She moved closer to the hanging corpse and looked up at the rope tight around his neck.

It was as she suspected. The noose which had strangled Ritchie Good was not the fake one with the Velcro linkage. It was the unbroken one whose strength Gordon Blaine had demonstrated in the run-up to his coup de théâtre.

Jude moved far enough away to see the top of the gallows. Fixed there was a large backward-facing hook, on to which the ring at the end of the noose had been fixed. From it the rope ran through a channel at the beam's end, so that it could dangle in its appropriate position over the cart.

For anyone who knew the structure of the gallows, switching the two nooses would have been a matter of moments. But who on earth could have done it? And how had they persuaded Ritchie Good so helpfully to have stood once again on the cart and placed the noose around his neck?

Though still in a state of shock, Jude found her mind was buzzing with possibilities. She tried to think back over the last half-hour, to remember who had appeared in the Cricketers and in what order. Also who had left the pub, and who hadn't even gone in in the first place.

While these thoughts were scrambling through her mind, Jude became aware of a noise in the empty hall. She heard a low whimpering, sounding like an animal, and yet she knew it to be human. It was coming from the small annex to the side of the stage, which during their productions SADOS used as a Green Room.

She moved softly through and found Hester Winstone collapsed on a chair, incapable of stopping the flow of her tears.

The woman looked up as she heard Jude approaching and said brokenly, ‘It's my fault. I'm the reason why he's dead.'

J
ude would have liked to talk to Hester, to offer comfort, to find out what exactly her words had meant, but they were interrupted by a scream from inside the main hall. Jude rushed through to find an aghast Davina Vere Smith.

The director must have come into St Mary's Hall to lock up, then, just like Jude, have gone to turn the lights off on stage. Where she too had been confronted by the grisly sight of Ritchie Good's dangling body.

Once she had recovered from her initial shock, Davina had no hesitation about ringing the police straight away. Somehow drawn by bad news, a few other SADOS members had drifted over from the Cricketers. The sight of Ritchie's corpse prompted all kinds of emotional displays, making it difficult for Jude to talk privately to the still-weeping Hester Winstone.

And once the police and an ambulance had arrived, such a conversation became impossible. Two uniformed officers came first, but they were quickly calling up plain clothes reinforcements. The paramedics from the ambulance were allowed to confirm that Ritchie Good was dead, but then the police asked them to keep off the stage. Soon after they left St Mary's Hall. Moving the body would happen later, after photographs and other essential procedures.

Jude was struck by how little information the police have when they first arrive at the scene of a crime (or indeed an accident). They'd probably never heard of SADOS; they'd need an explanation of the rehearsal process which had brought everyone to St Mary's Hall. And that was before they started even getting the names of the individuals involved.

But the two officers, later backed up by detectives, showed great patience in their questioning as they began to build up a background to the events of that afternoon. Their job was not made any easier by the histrionic tendencies of the SADOS members. All of them seemed to have something to contribute, and in many cases it was something that placed them centre stage in the day's drama.

Eventually St Mary's Hall was cleared. The police had by then established the identity of the victim. They had also taken names, addresses and contact numbers from everyone present and said that further follow-up questions might be necessary at a later date. The SADOS members were then left in no doubt that it was time for them to leave. Which – with some reluctance, they were enjoying the theatricality of the situation – they did.

They were also forbidden to tell anyone about what they had witnessed in the hall that afternoon. But if the police thought that instruction was likely to be followed, then they had never met anyone involved in amateur dramatics.

Jude was kept till last. As one of the first into the hall after Ritchie Good's death, she was told that a full statement would be required from her. Not straight away – the police needed time to examine the scene of the incident – but the following day, either at her home or the local police station, according to her preference.

‘But I'm free to go now, am I?' she asked.

‘Yes. You'll get a call in the morning.'

‘And …' Jude looked across to where the weeping Hester Winstone was being comforted by a female officer. ‘What about …?'

‘No, Mrs Winstone won't be leaving straight away,' said the detective.

During the drive back to Fethering in her Smart car Storm Lavelle went into full drama queen mode. ‘I mean, it's just such a
shattering
thing to happen. Ritchie's such a good actor, it's such a
waste
! And God knows what's going to happen to
The Devil's Disciple
now.'

Jude was relieved to hear that her friend seemed more worried about the production than heartbroken about Ritchie Good's death. Storm must've been too busy with rehearsals to have any time to start throwing herself at Ritchie.

‘What, you mean they're likely to call the whole thing off out of respect for Ritchie?'

‘Oh, good Lord, no. The show must go on.' She spoke the words devoutly; they were, after all, the basic principle of amateur dramatics. No matter what disaster might occur during the rehearsal period,
The Devil's Disciple
would still be presented to the paying public in St Mary's Hall on the promised dates.

‘No, Jude, Davina'll just juggle the cast around. Presumably Olly Pinto will be boosted up to Dick Dudgeon … which will please him no end, because he always thought he should have been playing the part in the first place. And, I don't know, one of the boys playing the soldiers will get boosted up to take on Olly's old part of Christy.'

‘Will it make a lot of difference to you, playing Judith Anderson to a new Dick Dudgeon?'

‘I don't think it will that much, actually. I mean, Ritchie's a very good actor, but you never feel he's really engaging with you onstage. You know, he's thought through how he's going to play his part and that's what he does, regardless of what he's getting back from the rest of the cast. Ritchie's a great technician, but he isn't the kind of actor with whom you can get any kind of emotional roll going. He's very self-contained. It's a bit like having a very cleverly programmed robot on stage with you.'

Jude was interested to hear how closely Storm's assessment of Ritchie Good's acting skills matched that of Neville Prideaux. And Storm's was more objective; she wasn't motivated by jealousy.

‘What do you think killed him?' asked Jude, in a manner that was meant, but failed, to sound casual.

‘Well, obviously, strangulation by the noose round his neck.'

‘Yes, but why did it happen?'

‘An accident. He and Gordon must've been doing some adjustment to the gallows and unfortunately—'

‘Gordon wasn't there. He was in the group that came straight over to the Cricketers at the same time as I did.'

‘Oh well, Ritchie may have just been fiddling about with it.'

Storm seemed so remarkably incurious about the circumstances of the death that Jude didn't feel inclined to raise suspicions by asking further questions. Instead she said, ‘The police want me to make a statement for them tomorrow. Have you got to do the same?'

‘No, they just took my address and mobile number. Said they might be in touch, but didn't make it sound very likely.' There was a silence, then Storm said, ‘Hester looked in a pretty bad way, didn't she?'

‘Yes. So far as I could work out, she'd found Ritchie's body just before I had. She was in a terrible state of shock.'

‘Hm. And she started off pretty neurotic, didn't she?'

‘Is that the impression she gave?' asked Jude, surprised at her friend's powers of observation. Then she reminded herself that Storm was also a healer, used to analysing the sufferings of her clients.

‘No, on the surface she was fine, but I did get the impression that she was very tense, holding a lot in.'

‘Yes, I felt that too.'

‘So,' said Storm, ‘if Hester doesn't recover, we'll be short of a prompter. And, judging from this afternoon's display, just when her services will be most in demand.'

‘Oh, surely there are lots of SADOS members around who could do that?'

‘You'd think so, wouldn't you? But a lot of the potential prompters, mature ladies who're unlikely to be cast in plays any more … well, they're part of the contingent that walked out with Elizaveta Dalrymple.'

‘And might they not be lured back?'

‘Oh, Good Lord, no. Not until
The Devil's Disciple
boycott is complete. Anyone who breaks through the picket line on that will receive the full blast of Elizaveta's anger.'

‘I'm surprised that would worry anyone. I got the impression that she was rather a spent force in the SADOS.'

‘A spent force she may be, but there are still a lot of members terrified of getting the wrong side of her. They might be excluded from the guest list for her famous “drinkies things”.'

‘Oh dear. Well, maybe Hester will make a full recovery and no replacement prompter will be needed.' But as she said the words, Jude wasn't feeling as positive as she sounded. After all, what Hester Winstone had said to her in the Green Room could have been interpreted as a confession to murder. Whose consequences could make her unavailable for
Devil's Disciple
rehearsals, as well as many other areas of her life.

‘Anyway, if Hester is ruled out,' said Storm, ‘you wouldn't by any chance have a friend who might step into the breach as prompter, would you?'

Jude could hardly prevent herself from giggling at the thought, as she replied, ‘Yes, you know, I think I might.'

O
n the Monday, by arrangement, the police had come to Jude's home to take her statement. She had described to the best of her recollection exactly what she had witnessed the previous day at St Mary's Hall. She had told the truth, but not quite the whole truth, omitting to report Hester Winstone's words about the death being her fault. Jude had glossed over that, saying that Hester was too hysterical to say anything coherent.

Her motives for telling the lie were instinctive and benign. She recognized Hester's mental fragility and didn't want to get her into any more trouble than she already was.

But she decided not to tell her neighbour what she'd done. Perhaps because of her Home Office background, Carole strongly disapproved of lying to the police.

Now that there was a corpse involved, Carole Seddon suddenly found the doings of SADOS a lot more interesting. Her voice was full of suppressed excitement as she asked, ‘You say Ritchie Good was hanged, Jude? Was his neck broken?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Then it would have been a very painful death.'

‘Oh?'

‘Humane hangmen usually arrange it so that the force of the drop breaks the victim's neck. Then death – or at least unconsciousness – is more or less instantaneous. If the neck isn't broken, the victim dies slowly of strangulation. It can take ten – or in some cases up to twenty – minutes. Pretty nasty way to go.'

Jude looked at her friend in surprise. ‘Is that something you learned at the Home Office? I know there was a lot of back-stabbing there; I didn't know they went in for strangulation too.'

‘Ha, ha, very funny. No, it's just information I picked up,' Carole replied airily. She had an increasing interest in the mechanics of crime, and had started filling directories on her laptop with the fruits of her research on the subject. But it was not a hobby she ever talked about, even to Jude.

It was the Tuesday, two days after Ritchie Good's death. They were having coffee at Woodside Cottage. The two women hadn't seen each other for a few days. Carole's daughter-in-law Gaby had been struck down at the weekend by a particularly nasty bout of a sickness bug and Granny had been summoned to the rescue in their house in Fulham. Since Carole absolutely worshipped her granddaughter Lily, this was no hardship for her. And with Gaby confined to bed, she even got over her customary unease at staying anywhere other than High Tor. She had taken Gulliver with her, and she was much entertained by the bonding between dog and granddaughter.

Because of her absence from Fethering till the Tuesday afternoon, this was the first Carole had heard about the death in St Mary's Hall. Jude recognized the sparkle of interest in her pale-blue eyes as she asked, ‘So do you reckon that this Ritchie Good person was murdered?'

‘I really don't know. It's an odd one. I've been going through the facts, revisualizing everything I saw on Sunday night. And it strikes me there are two major questions that need asking. First, who switched the safe noose with the Velcro joint in it for the real, unbroken one? And, second, why on earth did Ritchie allow the noose to be put around his neck?'