‘Mr Graveney, the director of the play, has been waiting in the wings and, as planned, the two of you change places for this one short scene. Mr Graveney puts on the trench coat. He applies the bandage and the blood. Slowly, he walks onto the stage. The fact that he is limping will not be noticed over such a short distance and anyway, he is playing a wounded soldier. At the same time, Mr Fleet has removed the false moustache that he has worn for his performance. He puts on the hat and the jacket – which we will later find abandoned in the well. He runs through the auditorium, pausing only to stab the man sitting in seat E 23. How can he know that, moments before the play began, Mr Tweed and Mr Moriston exchanged seats and that the wrong man will die?
‘It happens very quickly. Mr Fleet leaves through the main door of the theatre, discards the hat and the jacket, then runs round the side in time to change places, once again, with Mr Graveney who has just exited from the stage. By now, the audience is in an uproar. All eyes are on the dead man. Nobody notices what occurs in the wings. Of course, the two men are horrified when they discover what has occurred. Their victim has been the completely blameless Mr Tweed. But these killers are cold and cunning. They concoct a story that suggests that Mr Moriston was attempting blackmail and two days later they poison him with hemlock stolen from the same laboratory that provided the scalpel. It is clever, is it not? The finger of blame points at the biology teacher, Miss Colne, and this time, their true motive is completely concealed …’
Extract from Death Treads the Boards by Donald Leigh
CHAPTER 21: THE FINAL ACT
It was very dark in the theatre. The light of the day was fading quickly outside and the ominous sky was full of heavy, ugly clouds. In just six hours time, 1920 would come to an end and 1921 would begin. But Detective Superintendent MacKinnon was already celebrating the New Year inside his head. He had worked it all out. He knew who had committed the murder and soon he would confront that person, pinning him to the floor with the ruthlessness of a scientist with a rare butterfly.
Sergeant Browne looked carefully at the suspects, asking himself for the thousandth time, which one of them could have stabbed the history teacher, Ewan Jones, in the throat on that unforgettable night? Which one of them?
They were sitting in the half-abandoned theatre, not looking comfortable, each one of them doing their best to avoid the other’s eyes. Henry Baker, the director of the play, was stroking his moustache as he always did when he was nervous. The writer, Charles Hawkins, was smoking a cigarette, which he was holding in those stubby fingers that were always stained with ink. Was it just a coincidence that he had been badly wounded at Ypres at the same time as the second victim, the theatre manager, Alastair Short, who had been mysteriously poisoned with arsenic a few days later? Could there be a connection? Short had two hundred pounds stashed away in his bedside cupboard and it looked very much as if blackmail could have been the name of his game. Where else could he have got the money? It was a shame that he hadn’t lived to tell the tale.
Which one of them? Browne still suspected Lila Blaire. His thoughts hurtled back to the moment when she had thrown herself at Short, screaming at him and accusing him of destroying her career. ‘I hate you!’ she had screamed. ‘I wish you were dead!’ And seventy minutes later he had indeed been dead, just as she had wanted. And what about Iain Lithgow? The young, handsome, smiling actor had been too young to fight at Ypres. There could be no connection there but he had gambling debts and people who need money desperately will often do desperate things. Browne waited for his boss to collect his thoughts.
And now the moment he had been waiting for arrived. As MacKinnon got to his feet, there was a brief roll of thunder in the heavy, oppressive air. The New Year was going to start with a bad storm. Everyone stopped and looked up as he adjusted his monacle and then began to speak.
‘On the night of 20 December,’ he began, ‘a murder was committed here, in the Roxberry Theatre, during a performance of Aladdin. But it was the wrong murder! Alastair Short was the real target but the killer got it wrong because, at the last moment, Mr Short and Mr Jones had swapped seats.’
MacKinnon paused for a moment, examining each one of the suspects as they drank in his words. ‘But who was the killer who ran off the stage and plunged the knife into Jones’s throat?’ he continued. ‘There were two people who it couldn’t have been. Charles Hawkins couldn’t have run through the theatre. He only had one leg. And as for Nigel Smith, he was on stage at the time, in full view of the audience. It couldn’t be him either.
‘At least, that’s what I thought …’
There can be no doubt that Alan stole Donald Leigh’s idea. He changed the time period from the twenties to the late forties and the setting from an end-of-the-pier theatre to a preparatory school, which he based on Chorley Hall, renaming it Fawley Park. Elliot Tweed is a thinly disguised portrait of his father, Elias Conway. Oh yes – and all the teachers are named after British rivers. The name of the detective, Inspector Ridgway, may have been borrowed from Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Another river. But the mechanism is the same and so is the motive. An officer abandons his men at a time of war and, years later, the only survivor joins forces with the son of one of the men who died. They swap places during the performance of a play, committing the murder in full view of the audience. Detective Superintendent Locke would have found it a tad unlikely, but in the world of whodunnit fiction, it worked just fine.
After I read the two books, I rang the Arvon Foundation, which, I correctly guessed, had hosted the course that Donald had attended. They were able to confirm that Donald Leigh had indeed been at their manor house at Totleigh Barton, Devonshire. It’s a lovely place, by the way. I’ve been there myself. I would have said that the chances of a visiting tutor stealing the work of one of his students was about a million to one, but looking at the two versions, that’s what had happened. I felt sorry for Donald. Frankly, he can’t write. His sentences are leaden, lacking any rhythm. He uses too many adjectives and his dialogue is unconvincing. Alan was right on both counts. But he didn’t deserve to be treated this way. Could he have done anything about it? He told me he had written to Charles and had received no reply. That wasn’t surprising. Publishers get crank letters all the time and this one wouldn’t have got past Jemima. She’d simply have binned it. The police wouldn’t have been interested. It would have been easy enough for Alan to claim that he had given the idea to Donald rather than the other way round.
What else could he have done? Well, he could have found Alan’s address in the records of the Ivy Club, travelled up to Framlingham, pushed him off the roof and ripped up the final chapters of his new novel. I’d have been tempted to do the same in his place.
I’d managed to spend most of the morning reading and I was meant to be having lunch with Lucy, our rights manager. I wanted to talk to her about James Taylor and The Atticus Adventures. It was half past twelve and I thought I’d slip out for a quick cigarette on the pavement outside the front door – but then I remembered the letter at the top of the pile, the one that had spelled my name wrong. I opened it.