The Strangling on the Stage (28 page)

Her neighbour nodded and the two women got out of the car with, in Jude's case, some discomfort. Even in the short journey from Smalting, as the shock of the impact wore off her individual injuries were starting to give her a lot of pain.

Carole knocked on the door, which was promptly opened. Mimi Lassiter looked unsurprised to see her visitors, though perhaps a bit disappointed that one of them was Jude.

‘I think you know why we've come to see you,' said Carole, very Home Office.

‘I think I probably do. Come in.'

The sitting room into which she led them reminded both women of Gordon Blaine's. It was not just the small dimensions – in this case due to the original builder rather than the owner's DIY conversion – but the furniture, the ornaments and the pictures on the walls were all from an earlier era. The house had been decorated in the time of Mimi's parents and she had either not wanted to – or not dared to – change a thing.

It wasn't an occasion for pleasantries or offers of coffee. Mimi Lassiter sat in a cracked leather armchair, set facing the television, and her guests in straight-backed chairs either side of the box.

‘Rather rash of you this morning, wasn't it?' said Carole. ‘Making a public attack on Jude by driving straight at her? There'd have been lots of witnesses on the seafront at Smalting. I'm sure someone would have taken note of your registration number.'

‘I wasn't thinking very straight this morning,' said Mimi, sounding as ever like a rather pernickety maiden aunt. ‘I was upset.'

‘Do you often get upset?' asked Jude.

‘Not very often, but I do. My mother used to look after me when I got upset, but since she's passed, I've had to manage it on my own.'

‘And,' said Carole, ‘do you regard trying to run someone down in cold blood as “managing it on your own”?'

‘It made sense. I couldn't see any other way out. And when I heard from Elizaveta that you two were actually investigating Ritchie Good's death … as I say, I wasn't thinking very straight. It probably wasn't the most sensible thing to do.'

To Carole and Jude this seemed like something of an understatement.

‘No,' said Mimi. ‘I've been very foolish. My mother always used to say, “At times, Mimi, you can be very foolish.” And she had ways of stopping me being foolish, but now she's gone …'

‘How long ago did your mother die?' asked Jude.

‘Nine years ago. It was just round the time when I was retiring from work.'

‘What did you do when you were working?'

‘I trained in Worthing as a shorthand typist. I was very good. I got a diploma. I could have got a job anywhere, even in London. But I didn't want to leave Fethering. Mummy needed help with Daddy. He was virtually bedridden for a long time. So I got a secretarial job at Hadleigh's. Do you know them?'

‘No.'

‘Big nursery, just between here and Worthing. Lots of glasshouses. Well, they were made of glass when I started there. Now they're mostly that polythene stuff. Still a very big company, though. I did very well at Hadleigh's. They very nearly made me office manager. But I wasn't as good on the computers as I had been on the typewriter, so they appointed someone else. I never really took to computers in the same way I took to the typewriter. So they kept me on at Hadleigh's, but there was never any more chance of promotion. Then they opened up a Farm Shop and they suggested I might work in there. But I didn't like it. Some members of the public can be very rude, you know.'

‘So,' Jude recapitulated, ‘your mother died around the time you retired. That must have been a very big double blow for you.'

‘Oh, it was. Two days before I left Hadleigh's. And it wasn't real retirement. I mean, I hadn't served all the time that … They gave me my full pension, but it was really …'

‘Early retirement,' suggested Carole, whose experience of the same thing still rankled.

Mimi nodded. She looked shaken by the memory. ‘I was in a very bad state round then, I remember. I know it's wrong, but at times I did think about ending it all. I just felt so isolated.'

‘Are you saying you attempted suicide?'

‘No, not quite. But I thought about it. I even started stockpiling paracetamol, but then things got better.'

‘In what way?' asked Jude. ‘Was it because you'd joined SADOS?'

Mimi nodded enthusiastically. ‘Fortunately that happened fairly soon after Mummy passed. That's what really got me out of the terrible state I was in. Elizaveta Dalrymple used to come to the Farm Shop while I was still working there. And she said how the society was always looking for new members and she persuaded me to come along to a social meeting. She can be very persuasive, Elizaveta.'

‘Yes,' Carole agreed drily.

‘So that's how I started with SADOS. As a very humble new member … little knowing that I would one day end up at the dizzy heights of Membership Secretary.' Clearly the appointment was one that meant a great deal to Mimi Lassiter.

‘I'd never wanted to act,' she went on. ‘I couldn't act to save my life, but they found things for me to do backstage. And occasionally I'm in crowd scenes … like I am for
The Devil's Disciple
. Elizaveta always makes me feel part of the company, though, and she even started inviting me to parties at her home.'

‘Her “drinkies things”?'

‘Yes.'

‘Of course. Where we saw you on Saturday.'

‘Yes.'

‘And what about Freddie? Did you have much to do with him?'

‘Oh, Freddie.' An expression of sheer hero-worship took over her face. ‘He was wonderful. Did you ever meet him?'

‘Didn't have that pleasure,' said Jude.

‘Though we've heard so much about him,' said Carole, ‘that we
feel
as though we've met him.'

‘He was just a wonderful man. So talented. And so kind to everyone, particularly to new members of SADOS.'

A look was exchanged between Carole and Jude. Each knew the other was thinking, ‘particularly to new,
young, pretty
members of the SADOS'. Who could benefit so much from Freddie's assistance when working on their parts in his flat in Worthing. Another look between the two also made a silent agreement that they weren't about to ask whether Mimi Lassiter had ever been the recipient of a star-shaped pendant. It just didn't seem likely.

‘I gather,' said Carole, ‘it was a great upheaval for the society when Freddie Dalrymple died.'

‘Oh, it was terrible. For a long time nobody knew what would happen to SADOS. It seemed impossible that the society could continue without Freddie. But that's when Elizaveta really came into her own. She's such a strong woman, you know.'

Neither Carole nor Jude was about to argue with that.

‘Could we come back to this morning?' Carole's question was not one that would have brooked the answer no.

‘All right,' said Mimi, instantly subdued.

‘And your attempt to kill Jude.' Mimi did not argue with the phrasing. ‘You've told us you were in a bad state this morning, that you weren't thinking straight, but you haven't told us
why
you wanted Jude dead.'

‘I wanted both of you dead,' said Mimi with refreshing honesty. ‘I still do.'

An anxious look passed between the two women. Was their unwilling hostess about to produce a gun?

‘But Elizaveta told me that's not the right way to proceed.'

‘I'd go along with that,' Carole agreed. ‘But when did Elizaveta say this?'

‘Just now. The phone was ringing when I got back from Smalting.'

‘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.'

‘W
hat 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'.