EDMUND CRISPIN
Swan Song

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1947

Copyright © Rights Limited 1947

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2018 / Cover image: © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science and Society Picture Library - All rights reserved.

Edmund Crispin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008228033

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008228040

Version: 2018-01-11

TO

GODFREY SAMPSON

My dear Godfrey,

You’re not, I fancy, an habitual reader of such murderous tales as this, and in the ordinary way I should be decidedly shy of dedicating one of them to you. But a book with a background of Die Meistersinger – well, what else could I do? It was you who first introduced me to that noble work (in the days when the sum of my musical activity consisted in trying to evade piano lessons), and our mutual admiration of it is not the least of the many bonds of friendship between us. Accept the story, then, for the sake of its setting, and as a foretaste of the day when Wagner’s masterpiece returns to Covent Garden – without, let us hope, any of the dismal impediments which beset it in the following pages.

Yours as ever,

E. C.

Devon, 1946

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Footnotes

About the Author

Also in this Series

About the Publisher

Chapter One

There are few creatures more stupid than the average singer. It would appear that the fractional adjustment of larynx, glottis, and sinuses required in the production of beautiful sounds must almost invariably be accompanied – so perverse are the habits of Providence – by the witlessness of a barnyard fowl. Perhaps, though, the thing is not so much innate as a result of environment and training. This touchiness and irascibility, these scarifying intellectual lapses, are observable in actors as well – and it has long been noted that singers who are concerned with the theatre are more obtuse and trying than any other kind. One would be inclined, indeed, to attribute their deficiencies exclusively to the practice of personal display were it not for the existence of ballet-dancers, who (with a few notable exceptions) are most usually naïve and mild-eyed. Evidently there is no immediate and summary solution of the problem. The fact itself, however, is very generally admitted.

Certainly Elizabeth Harding was aware of it – perhaps only theoretically at first, but with a good deal of practical confirmation as the rehearsals of Der Rosenkavalier ran their course. She was therefore relieved to find that Adam Langley was considerably more cultured and intelligent, as well as more svelte and personable, than the majority of operatic tenors. It was her intention to marry him, and plainly the quality of his mind was a factor which had to be taken into account.

Elizabeth was not, of course, in any way a cold or calculating person. But most women – despite the romantic fictions which obscure the whole marriage problem – are realistic enough, before committing themselves, to examine with some care the merits and demerits of their prospective husbands. Moreover, Elizabeth had gained by her own talents a settled and independent position in life, and this was not, she had decided, to be abandoned improvidently at the behest of mere affection, however strong. She therefore reviewed the situation with characteristic thoroughness and clarity of mind.

And the situation was this, that she had fallen explicably and quite unexpectedly in love with an operatic tenor. In her more apprehensive moments, in fact, infatuation suggested itself to her as a more accurate term than love. The symptoms left her in no possible doubt as to her condition. They showed, even, so strong a resemblance to the tropes and platitudes of the conventional love-story as to be vaguely disconcerting. She thought about Adam before she went to sleep at night; she was still thinking about him when she woke up in the morning; she even – the ultimate degradation – dreamed about him; and she hurried to the opera-house to meet him with an eagerness quite inappropriate to a reserved and sophisticated young woman of twenty-six. In a way it was humiliating; on the other hand, it was decidedly the most delightful and exhilarating form of humiliation she had ever experienced – and that in spite of a sufficiency of practice in love and rather too much theoretical reading on the subject.

How it came about she was never able clearly to remember, but it seems to have happened quite suddenly, without gestation or warning. One day Adam Langley was an agreeable but undifferentiated member of an operatic company; the next he shone alone in planetary splendour, amid satellites grown spectral and unreal. Elizabeth felt, in the face of this phenomenon, something of the awe of a coenobite visited by an archangel, and was startled at the hurried refocusing of familiar objects which such an experience involves. ‘Fallings from us, vanishings …’ She would certainly have resented this gratuitous upsetting of her normal outlook had it not been for the unprecedented sense of peace and happiness which it brought with it. ‘Darling Adam,’ she murmured that night to a hot and unresponsive pillow, ‘darling ugly Adam’ – a form of endearment which its object would probably have greatly resented had he known of it. There was more to the same effect, but such ecstasies make a poor showing by the time the printer has finished with them, and the reader will either have to take them for granted or imagine them for himself.

The epithet was as a matter of fact slanderous. Adam Langley was entirely presentable, being thirty-five years of age, with kindly, regular, undistinguished features, thoughtful brown eyes, and a habit of courtesy which served admirably as a defence to his natural shyness. His chief defect lay in a certain vagueness which amounted sometimes to the appearance of aimlessness. He was trustful, modest, easily startled, and innocent of all but the most venial misdemeanours, and though at one time and another he had been moved to a gentle and – if the truth is to be told – rather clumsy amorousness, women had played no very important part in his peaceful and successful life. It was perhaps for this reason that he remained for so long totally unaware of Elizabeth’s feelings for him. He regarded her, at all events in the first instance, simply as a writer who had gained admittance to the rehearsals of Der Rosenkavalier in order to study the operatic background required for an episode in a new novel.

‘But schön!’ Karl Wolzogen hissed at him during a break in one of the piano rehearsals. ‘If she could only sing – ah, my friend, what an Oktavian!’ And more out of courtesy than because he was impressed by Karl’s enthusiasm – which tended, in truth, to be indiscriminate – Adam studied Elizabeth properly for the first time. She was small, he saw, exquisitely slender, with soft brown hair, blue eyes, a slightly snub nose, and eyebrows which were crooked and hence a trifle sardonic. Her voice – she was speaking at this moment to Joan Davis – was low, vivid, and quiet, with a not unattractive huskiness. Her lipstick had been applied with a rare competence, and of this Adam greatly approved, since it seemed to him that the majority of women must perform this operation in front of a distorting mirror or during an attack of St Vitus’s Dance. She was dressed soberly and expensively, though with a little too much masculinity for Adam’s taste. And as to character? Here Adam became a little bogged. He liked, however, her disciplined vivacity and her poise – the more so as there was no hint of arrogance about it.

Subsequently he was in the habit of attributing their marriage to the independent purposes of Herren Strauss and Hofmannsthal. The chief singing parts in Der Rosenkavalier are for three sopranos and a bass. Adam, being a tenor, had been fobbed off with the small and uninteresting role of Valzacchi, and this left him, at rehearsals, more often unoccupied than not. It was inevitable that he and Elizabeth should drift together – and so far, so good. But here an obstacle presented itself, in that it never for one instant occurred to Adam that Elizabeth might wish their relationship to rise above the level of disinterested affability on which it had begun. On this plane he obstinately remained, blind to winsomeness and affection, deaf to hints and innuendoes, in a paradisaically innocent condition of sexlessness which exasperated Elizabeth all the more since it was obviously natural and unconscious. For a time she was baffled. An open declaration of her feelings, she saw, was far more likely to put him on guard than to encourage him – and moreover her own characteristic reserve would invest such a declaration with a perceptible air of incongruity and falsity. It says much for the semi-hypnosis in which her mind was fogged that the obvious solution came to her only after a considerable time: plainly some third person must be found to mediate between them.

They had no mutual acquaintance outside the opera-house, and inside it there was only one possible choice for such a delicate mission. A woman was indicated – and a woman, moreover, who was mature, worldly, sensible, and friendly with Adam. So one evening, after the rehearsal was over, Elizabeth went to visit Joan Davis (who was singing the part of the Marschallin) at her flat in Maida Vale.

The room into which an elderly, heavy-footed maidservant ushered her was untidy – so untidy as to suggest the aftermath of a burglary. It soon became apparent, however, that this was the normal condition of Miss Davis’s belongings. The maid announced Elizabeth, clucked deprecatorily, made a half-hearted foray among a welter of articles on the sideboard, and then departed, tramping vehemently and muttering to herself.

‘Poor Elsie.’ Joan shook her head. ‘She’ll never reconcile herself to my slatternly ways. Sit down, my dear, and have a drink.’

‘You’re not busy?’

‘As you see’ – Joan waved a needle, a shrivelled length of silk, and a mushroom-shaped object constructed of wood – ‘I’m mending. But I can quite well go on with that while you talk to me … Gin and something?’

They chattered of commonplaces while they sat and smoked their cigarettes. Then, with some misgiving, Elizabeth broached the reason for her visit.

‘You know Adam,’ she began, and was taken aback at having made so idiotic a statement. ‘That is to say—’

‘That is to say,’ Joan put in, ‘that you’re rather taken with him.’

She grinned disconcertingly. She was a tall, slender woman of about thirty-five, with features which, though too irregular for beauty, were yet remarkably expressive. The grin mingled shrewdness with a cynical, impish vivacity.

Elizabeth was frankly dismayed. ‘Is it as obvious as all that?’

‘Certainly – to everyone except Adam. I’ve thought once or twice of letting even him into the secret, but it hardly does for an outsider to interfere in these things.’

‘As a matter of fact’ – Elizabeth blushed slightly in spite of herself – ‘that’s exactly what I came here to ask you to do.’

‘My dear, what fun. I shall enjoy it thoroughly …’ Joan paused to reflect. ‘Yes, I see now that it’s probably the only way. Adam is not, in our grandparents’ phrase, a “person of much observation”. But he’s a good-hearted creature, all the same. Blessings to you both. I’ll tackle him tomorrow.’

And this she did, carrying Adam off, in a suitably idle moment, to the green-room. What she had to tell him took him completely unawares. He expostulated, feebly and without conviction. Subsequently Joan left him to meditate upon her words and returned to the rehearsal.

His initial surprise gave place almost at once to an overwhelming sense of gratification – and this by no means for reasons of vanity, but because an obscure sense of dissatisfaction from which he had recently suffered was now entirely dissipated. For him, too, there was a refocusing, as though the pattern of a puzzle had at last become apparent – become, indeed, so self-evident that its previous obscurity was almost incomprehensible. Beatitude and embarrassment clamoured equally for recognition. Ten minutes previously he had regarded Elizabeth as a pleasant acquaintance; now he had not the least doubt that he was going to marry her.

He was recalled to the stage, and there participated with decided gusto in the discomfiture of Baron Ochs von Lerchenau.

But when actually confronted with Elizabeth his shyness got the better of him. During the week that followed, indeed, he went so far as to avoid her – a phenomenon which filled Elizabeth with secret dismay. She came to believe, as the days passed, that the news of her feelings must have offended him, though as a matter of fact the reason for his unsociability lay in a sort of coyness, for which he severely reproached himself, but which for some time he was quite unable to overcome. In the end it was his growing impatience with his own puerility which brought him to the point. It happened towards the close of the first dress-rehearsal. Bracing himself – in a fashion more appropriate to some monstrous task like the taking of a beleaguered city than to the wooing of a girl whom he knew perfectly well to be fond of him – he went to speak to Elizabeth in the auditorium.

She was sitting, small, demure, cool, and self-possessed, on a red plush seat in the centre of the front row of the stalls. Framed in the large rococo splendours of the opera-house like a fine jewel in an antique setting. Tier upon gilded tier of boxes and galleries, radiating on either side from the royal box, towered into the upper darkness. Callipygic Boucher cherubs and putti held lean striated pillars in a passionate embrace. The great chandelier swayed fractionally in a draught, its crystal pendants winking like fireflies in the light reflected from the stage. And Adam paused, daunted. The mise-en-scène was by no means appropriate to the intimate things which he had to say. He consulted first his watch and then the state of affairs on the stage, saw that the rehearsal would be over in half an hour at most, and invited Elizabeth out to a late dinner.

They went to a restaurant in Dean Street, and sat at a table with a red-shaded lamp in a stuffy downstairs room. A small, garrulous, mostly unintelligible Cypriot waiter served them. Adam ordered, with stately deliberation, some very expensive claret, and Elizabeth’s spirits rose perceptibly. Since it was obvious that the well-intentioned nagging of their waiter would be unpropitious to confidences, Adam deferred the business of the evening until the arrival of coffee forced the waiter at last to go away. He then embarked on the subject overhastily and without sufficient premeditation.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘I hear – that is to say, I understand – that is to say that my feelings – what I mean is—’

He stopped abruptly, dumbfounded at so much feebleness and incoherence, and drank the whole of his liqueur at a gulp. He felt like a man who has incomprehensibly lost his nerve on the middle of a tight-rope. Elizabeth experienced a transient exasperation at being kept for so long in suspense; certainly the omens were favourable, but one could not be completely sure …

‘Adam dear,’ she replied gently, ‘what on earth are you trying to say?’

‘I am trying to say,’ Adam resumed earnestly, ‘that – that I’m in love with you. And that I should like you to marry me. To marry me,’ he repeated with unwarranted ferocity, and sat back abruptly, gazing at her with open defiance.

Really, thought Elizabeth, one would imagine he was challenging me to a duel. But oh, Adam, my darling, my unspeakably shy and precious old idiot … With the utmost difficulty she resisted the temptation to throw herself into his arms. She soon observed, however, that the Cypriot waiter was once again looming, toothily affable, on to their horizon, and decided that the situation had better be dealt with as quickly as possible.

‘Adam,’ she said with a gravity which she was far from feeling, ‘I wish I could tell you how grateful I am. But you know, it isn’t the sort of thing one ought to decide on the spur of the moment … May I think about it?’

‘Any more liqueur, eh?’ said the waiter, materializing suddenly beside them. ‘Drambuie, Cointreau, Crème-de-Menthe, nice brandy?’

Adam ignored him; now that the worst was over he had recovered much of his self-possession.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘you’re being hypocritical. You know perfectly well that you’re going to marry me.’

‘Green Chartreuse, nice Vodka—’

‘Will you go away. Elizabeth, my dear—’

‘You like the cheque, eh?’ said the waiter.

‘No. Go away at once. As I was saying—’

‘Oh, pay the bill, darling,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And then you can take me outside and kiss me.’

‘Kiss ’er ’ere,’ said the waiter, interested.

‘Oh, Adam, I do adore you,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Of course I’ll marry you.’

‘Nice magnum of champagne, eh?’ said the waiter. ‘Congratulations, sir and madam. Congratulations.’ Adam tipped him recklessly and they departed.

For their honeymoon they went to Brunnen. Their rooms at the hotel overlooked the lake. They visited the Wagner-museum at Triebschen, and Adam, in defiance of all the regulations, played the opening bars of Tristan on Wagner’s Erard piano. They purchased a number of rather risqué postcards and sent them to their friends. Both of them were blissfully happy.

They stood on their balcony gazing across the water, now amethyst-coloured in the fading light.

‘How nice,’ said Elizabeth judicially, ‘to have all the pleasures of living in sin without any of the disadvantages.’

Chapter Two

The marriage would have been no more noteworthy than ten thousand others had it not been for a third party who was obliquely involved.

Edwin Shorthouse was singing Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier. Like Adam, he became acquainted with Elizabeth during the rehearsals. And he, too, fell in love with her.

‘Love’, as used in this connexion, is largely a euphemism for physical excitement. To the best of everyone’s knowledge, Edwin Shorthouse’s affairs with women had never risen above this plane. His habits suggested, in fact, a belated attempt to revive the droit de seigneur, and his resemblance to the gross and elderly roué of Strauss’s opera was sufficiently remarkable for it to be a subject of perpetual surprise in operatic circles that his interpretation of the role was so inadequate. Possibly he himself was uneasily conscious of the similarity, and felt the basic stupidity of Hofmannsthal’s creation to be a reflexion on his own way of life. Sensitivity, however, was not Edwin Shorthouse’s most outstanding trait, and it is more likely that his aversion to the part was instinctive.

There may have been something more than mere sensuality in his attitude to Elizabeth. Certainly it is difficult, on any other hypothesis, to account for the active malevolence which Elizabeth’s marriage to Adam aroused in him. Joan Davis held the view that it was his vanity which was chiefly concerned. Here was Edwin (she said); coarse-grained, middle-aged, ill-favoured, conceited, and almost continually drunk; and here, on the other hand, was Adam. The choice, to anyone but Shorthouse himself, must have seemed a foregone conclusion: to him it had undoubtedly been a wounding blow.

‘But don’t worry, my dears,’ Joan added. ‘Edwin’s concern is with the female form divine – not with particular women. As soon as another shapely girl comes along – and the world’s full of them – he’ll forget his tantrums.’

Elizabeth herself suggested frustration as the cause of Shorthouse’s immoderate annoyance. She had not seen a great deal of him at rehearsals, though whenever they met he had been markedly attentive.

‘I noticed that,’ said Joan. ‘He was always “undressing you with his eyes”, as the absurd phrase has it.’

Elizabeth agreed. But – she added – it had been difficult to deal with this attitude until the evening when Shorthouse had made efforts to transfer his somewhat cheerless imaginative pastime to the realm of actuality.

‘Naturally,’ Elizabeth concluded demurely, ‘I didn’t encourage him … Hence, as I say, he’s frustrated. That’s the answer.’

Adam had yet another theory. In his opinion, Shorthouse was really in love; within his opulent and unprepossessing frame, Adam maintained, there burned the flame which had destroyed Ilium and held Antony in sybaritic bondage by the Nile. ‘In other words, l’amour,’ said Adam. ‘More Levantine than spiritual, I agree, but, none the less, the genuine article.’

There seemed, in fact, to be no wholly satisfactory solution, and for a time they contemplated the phenomenon with no stronger emotion than a mild interest. Eventually, however, it became tedious, and at last irritating. Adam was obliged to be fairly often in Shorthouse’s company, and there are few things more exacerbating than an attitude compounded of sneers and snubs – and an attitude the more disconcerting, in this case, because of the real hatred which lurked behind it. In the early days of the engagement, moreover, Adam became aware that sundry vague and discreditable rumours concerning him were going the rounds of his acquaintance, and in one case they found such ready acceptance that he was estranged without explanation from a family with whom he had been for years on the friendliest possible terms. In his innocence Adam did not at first connect Shorthouse with this new affliction, and it needed a chance remark to enlighten him. Even so he controlled himself and carried on as if nothing had happened. Adam had some respect for his work and was determined if possible, to avoid complicating it by an open rift with Shorthouse.

The honeymoon, which followed the Rosenkavalier production, gave him a respite, and when he and Elizabeth returned from Switzerland to set up house in Tunbridge Wells they were too much occupied with organizing their joint ménage to worry about anything else. Shorthouse, presumably, would be simmering down by now; and luckily, their engagements kept the two men apart until November, when both of them were signed up for Don Pasquale. Adam went to the first rehearsal with mild apprehension, and returned perplexed.

‘Well?’ Elizabeth demanded as she helped him off with his coat.

‘The answer is in the affirmative. Edwin would seem to be cured. All the same …’ Adam, who had just removed his hat, absent-mindedly put it on again. ‘All the same …’

‘Darling, what are you doing? Was he friendly? You don’t sound at all sure about it.’ They went into the drawing-room, where a huge fire was burning, and Elizabeth poured sherry.

‘He was friendly,’ Adam explained, ‘in the most overpowering fashion. I don’t like it. In the old days Edwin’s notion of friendship was to bore one perennially with rambling, pointless anecdotes about his professional experiences. He no longer does that – with me, anyway.’

‘Perhaps he’s ashamed of himself.’

‘It’s scarcely likely.’

‘I don’t see why not. He can’t be quite devoid of humanity. Presumably he had a mother.’

‘Heliogabalus had a mother. We all had mothers … What I mean to say is that there’s something artificial about this change in Edwin, it’s decidedly insincere.’

‘But better, one supposes, than open warfare.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Adam dolefully. ‘I’m not at all sure about that. It’s the kiss of Judas, if you ask me.’

‘Don’t be melodramatic, darling, and above all, don’t slop your sherry on to the carpet.’

‘I never noticed I was doing that,’ said Adam.

‘In any case,’ Elizabeth went on, ‘I don’t see what High priest Edwin can have betrayed you to.’

‘Levi, perhaps.’

‘The only qualification Levi has for the part is his race. And anyway, he’d as soon get rid of Edwin as you.’

‘You’re perfectly right, of course.’ Adam frowned. ‘Well, I’ll see how things turn out. Have you got any news?’

‘A commission, darling, and a very profitable one. By the afternoon post.’

‘Oh? Congratulations. A new novel?’

‘No, a series of interviews for a Sunday paper.’

‘Interviews with whom?’

‘Private detectives.’

‘Detectives?’ Adam was startled.

Elizabeth kissed him, a little absently, on the tip of the nose. ‘You’ve still got a lot to learn about me, my precious. Didn’t you know that my first books were works of popular criminology? I’m generally supposed to understand something about the subject.’

‘And do you?’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I do … Unfortunately it’ll involve a certain amount of gadding about, and I shall have to settle down with Who’s Who and write a lot of tiresome letters tomorrow morning. Do you know any private detectives?’

‘There’s one.’ Adam spoke rather dubiously. ‘A man called Fen.’

‘I remember. There was some business about a toyshop, before the war. Where does he live?’

‘In Oxford. He’s Professor of English there.’

‘You must give me an introduction.’

‘He’s very unpredictable,’ said Adam, ‘in some ways. Are you in a hurry with these articles?’

‘Not specially.’

‘Well,’ said Adam, ‘there’s this Oxford production of Meistersinger in the new year. If it suits you, we’ll get hold of him then.’

The rehearsals of Don Pasquale passed off without incident. Shorthouse, without actually seeking Adam’s company, maintained his curious affability whenever circumstances made a meeting inevitable. And there came a time when he even went so far as to apologize for his earlier behaviour.

It was immediately after the second performance. Adam had lingered for a few minutes in the wings arguing with the producer about some minor awkwardness which had arisen during the evening, and on entering his dressing-room he was surprised to find Shorthouse there, inspecting, or possibly on the point of purloining, a half-empty jar of removing-cream. This, however, he returned hastily to its place when Adam appeared. He was wearing a voluminous dressing-gown and was still powdered, painted, and be-wigged for the name part of the opera, and Adam supposed that he had run short of removing cream and, their dressing-rooms being adjacent, had decided that this was the simplest way of replenishing his supply. It soon appeared, however, that removing-cream must be, at the most, only a subsidiary reason for his visit.

‘Langley,’ he said (and the air at once became aromatic with gin), ‘I’m afraid you’ve no reason to be fond of me. The fact is, I didn’t behave very well over your marriage.’

Adam, embarrassed, made a dull grunting sound. Shorthouse seemed to find this inspiriting, for he went on, with rather more confidence:

‘I came here tonight to apologize. To apologize,’ he repeated, sensing perhaps a certain bareness in his original statement. ‘For my ill-mannered behaviour,’ he added explanatorily after some thought.

‘Don’t think about it,’ Adam mumbled. ‘Please don’t think about it. I’m only too glad—’

‘We can be friends, I hope?’

‘Friends?’ Adam spoke without enthusiasm. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘It’s very generous of you to take it so well.’

‘Don’t think about it,’ said Adam again.

A silence fell. Shorthouse shifted from one foot to the other. Adam removed his wig and hung it with unnecessary deliberation on the back of a chair.

‘Good house tonight,’ said Shorthouse.

‘Yes, very good. They seemed to be enjoying themselves very much. They laughed,’ Adam pointed out, ‘quite a lot.’

‘Of course, it’s a brilliant piece.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘But I suppose from your point of view – that’s to say, there are better parts than Ernesto.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve got Cercherò lontana terra in the second act.’

‘Yes, so you have … Well,’ said Shorthouse, ‘I’ll go and get some of this muck off my face.’

‘Are you out of cream? I thought I saw—’

‘No, no, thanks very much. I was only wondering what kind you used. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ said Adam helplessly. ‘See you tomorrow.’

And Shorthouse lumbered from the room, leaving Adam greatly relieved at his departure. As he changed, Adam pondered Shorthouse’s sudden regeneracy. He continued pondering it all the way back to Tunbridge Wells. Arrived home, he narrated the events of the evening to Elizabeth.

‘Removing-cream?’ said Elizabeth indignantly. ‘He wasn’t trying to pinch that new jar I bought for you?’

‘No,’ Adam reassured her. ‘The old one. Yours was still in my coat-pocket. All the same, I shall keep my dressing-room locked from now onwards.’

‘Well then, the whole ridiculous business is over.’

‘I suppose so. But you know, my dear, I still don’t trust the man. He’s quite capable of playing Tartuffe if it suits his book. I’m not sure, if it comes to that, that he isn’t capable of murder.’

Adam spoke carelessly. But he was to find soon enough that Edwin Shorthouse was by no means unique in this.

Chapter Three

Adam and Elizabeth travelled up to Oxford on a raw, bleak afternoon late in January. The sky was pigeon-grey and the wind chilling. Adam, fretful at the possibility of hoarseness, was wound up in mufflers, but luckily their trains were adequately heated. From Oxford station they took a taxi to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’, where they had reserved rooms. Adam stood about and smoked while Elizabeth unpacked and put away their things. Afterwards they went downstairs to the bar, where they were pleased to find Joan Davis, sipping a dry Martini at one of the glass-topped tables.

From her Adam learned various details of the Meistersinger production.

Edwin Shorthouse was to play Sachs; the Walther and Eva were of course Adam and Joan; Fritz Adelheim, a young German, had the part of David, and John Barfield that of Kothner.

‘And this man Peacock, who’s conducting,’ said Adam. ‘Have you met him?’

‘My dear, yes. Very young but utterly charming. This is his first Big Chance, so you must forget all about what you did under Bruno and Tommy, and cooperate zealously.’

‘But is he any good?’

‘That remains to be seen. But I don’t think Levi would have put him in if he weren’t. Levi has quite an eye for operatic conductors.’

‘Who’s producing?’

‘Daniel Rutherston.’

‘As melancholy as ever, I don’t doubt. And Karl is régisseur?’

‘Yes. Very cock-a-hoop about it. You know what a fanatical Wagnerian he is. Come to think of it,’ said Joan, ‘I shan’t be sorry to get back to Wagner now the war-time interdict has lifted … Why was there an interdict, anyway?’

‘It’s a highbrow axiom,’ Adam explained, ‘that Wagner was responsible for the rise of Nazism. If you want to be in the fashion you must refer darkly to the evil workings of the Ring in the Teutonic mentality – though as the whole cycle of operas is devoted to showing that even the gods can’t break an agreement without bringing the whole universe crashing about their ears, I’ve never been able to see what possible encouragement Hitler can have got out of it … But you mustn’t get me on this subject. It’s one of my hobby-horses. You’ve been abroad, Joan, haven’t you?’

‘In America. Playing Bohème and dying of consumption five times weekly. As a matter of fact, I nearly died of over-eating. You should go to America, Adam. They have food there.’

The three of them passed an agreeable evening together and went early to bed. At ten o’clock next morning piano rehearsals began. Beneath an obstinately cinereous sky Adam and Joan walked to the opera-house in Beaumont Street.

While, in general, the English do not erect opera-houses if they can avoid it – preferring commonly such witty and ennobling occupations as Betty Grable and the football pools – Oxford has recently provided a notable exception to the rule. It stands on the corner of Beaumont Street and St John Street, at the side nearest to Worcester College, and is built of Headington stone. The foyer glows with a discreet, green-carpeted opulence. About it are ranged busts of the greater operatic masters – Wagner, Verdi, Mozart, Gluck, Mussorgsky. There is also one of Brahms – for no very clear reason, though it may perhaps be a tribute to his curious and fortunately abortive project for an opera about gold-mining in the Yukon. The auditorium is comparatively small, but the stage and orchestra-pit are capable of dealing with the grandest of grand opera. The stage equipment is replete with complex and fallible devices, and a menagerie of mechanical fauna inhabits the property-rooms. The dressing-rooms, too, are more luxurious than is usual; the two floors on which they are situated are even served by a small lift.

With such amenities, however, Adam and Joan were not for the moment concerned. They made their way to the stage door, and thence, directed by an aged janitor, to one of the rehearsal rooms.

Most of the others had already arrived, and were grouped round the grand piano. Apart from this, and a number of chairs constructed principally of chromium piping, the place was very bare. Its sole concession to aesthetic decorum was a lopsided photograph of Puccini, markedly resembling the proprietor of an Edwardian ice-cream stall.

Adam was introduced to Peacock, who proved to be a quiet man of about thirty, conventionally dressed, tall, thin, and with a prematurely sparse provision of red hair. Adam liked him immediately. Among the others present were Karl Wolzogen, a wiry little German, preternaturally energetic despite his seventy years; Caithness, at the piano, a dour and laconic Scot; Edwin Shorthouse, exhaling nostalgically the fumes of last night’s gin; and John Barfield, the Kothner. The remainder of the cast were not intimately concerned in the events which followed a fortnight later, and need not be specifically mentioned here. Most of them Adam knew, for the number of operatic singers in England is not large, and they are frequently thrown together.

The rehearsal went as well as such rehearsals do go, and it was pleasing to find that Peacock knew his business. Edwin Shorthouse took direction with such unaccustomed meekness that Adam became suspicious. He remained uneasy, indeed, as long as the piano rehearsals lasted. Such saintly forbearance as Shorthouse was displaying is rare in any singer, and in Shorthouse, Adam reflected, was positively unnatural. He was not altogether surprised, therefore, at the campaign of obstruction which coincided with the beginning of the orchestral rehearsals.

None the less, things went quite smoothly in the early stages, and up to the day of the murder only one incident occurred which it is necessary to relate. The protagonists were Shorthouse, Joan Davis, and a young girl named Judith Haynes.

It was a Monday evening. During the afternoon they had run straight through the last scene of act three, finishing at about six o’clock; and subsequently, Joan Davis remained in the rehearsal-room with Peacock to deal with various loose ends in her own part. Unknown to them, two other people were still in the theatre: Shorthouse, who was drinking heavily in his dressing-room (he had been by no means sober during the afternoon, though, as always, he sang magnificently), and Judith Haynes, a member of the chorus, who had stayed on with a view to altering her costume which fitted badly.

At seven Peacock left, and Joan went up to her dressing-room to fetch a coat and scarf. In the chorus dressing-room she found Shorthouse, exceedingly drunk, doing his best to remove the clothes from Judith Haynes, who was struggling inexpertly with him. Joan – by no means a puny or a nervous woman – acted with vigour and promptness. In falling, Shorthouse caught his head on the angle of the door, and this contributed a good deal to quietening him. In fact, he lay without moving.

‘And that is that,’ said Joan, gazing at his supine form with workmanlike pride. She turned to the girl, who was dealing, scarlet-faced, with buttons and shoulder-straps, Joan saw that she was slender, fair, and young. ‘Are you all right, my dear?’

‘Y-yes, thank-you,’ Judith stammered. ‘I – I don’t know what I should have done if you hadn’t come along. I – He’s not –?’

‘No, no,’ Joan reassured her. ‘Breathing stertorously and very much alive. You’d better go home, hadn’t you?’

‘Yes. I – I don’t know how to thank you.’ Judith hesitated, and then added with a rush: ‘Please – please don’t tell anyone about this, will you? I should hate anyone to know …’

Joan frowned slightly. ‘If it weren’t a bit too late to get a substitute, I should see to it that Edwin was kicked out of this production.’

‘No, you mustn’t.’ Judith spoke with surprising vehemence. ‘I should be so ashamed if people knew …’

Being above all a practical woman, Joan was momentarily puzzled. ‘Ashamed? But you’re not to blame, child. Why on earth –?’

‘It’s just – oh, I don’t know. But please – please promise.’ Joan shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Of course, if you want it that way. Where do you live? If it isn’t too far, I’ll walk home with you.’

‘It’s awfully kind, but you really needn’t bother …’

‘Nonsense,’ said Joan. ‘I should like to. It’s half an hour yet before my dinner-time.’

Judith was recovering her self-possession slowly. ‘What about’ – she nodded towards Shorthouse – ‘him?’

‘We’ll leave him,’ said Joan cheerfully. ‘Edwin is unfortunately one of those people who always recover from things … Have you got a coat? Then let’s make a move.’

On the way to Judith’s lodgings in Clarendon Street, Joan learned a little more about it. It appeared that Shorthouse had been making some kind of advances ever since rehearsals began, and that Judith, though repulsing these, had been too shy of his professional eminence to be actively rude to him. Moreover, there was a young man – also in the chorus – who had aspirations as a composer of opera, and Judith had thought that Shorthouse might be able to help or advise him.

‘I’ll advise him, my dear.’ said Joan. ‘And so will Adam, on pain of instant excommunication. But as to helping – well, virtually the only way to get a new opera put on is to be a multi-millionaire.’

She was very thoughtful as she walked back to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’. Edwin Shorthouse plainly was heading for a shipwreck from which not even his voice and his artistry would save him. It was a pity, Joan thought, that she could not assist in propelling him on to the rocks by publicizing this evening’s occurrence, but a promise was a promise. That she was obliged at least to break it was due to circumstances which few people could have foreseen.

Chapter Four

Presently the orchestral rehearsals began, and with them, trouble.

Adam sighed windily, took out a packet of Spearmint chewing-gum, and placed part of its contents slowly in his mouth. His gaze, roving over the auditorium, came to rest on John Barfield, who was slumped in one of the front stalls, gobbling a ham sandwich and dropping the crumbs down the front of his waistcoat. The rapid and rhythmical movement of his jaws was obscurely fascinating. Adam stared until Barfield looked up sharply and caught his eye; then turned, with some dignity, to reconsider what was going on on the stage.

Or rather, what was not going on. ‘It is extraordinary,’ thought Adam, ‘that Edwin is able to find something wrong even when he’s only sitting still, singing a monologue.’ The cause of the present stoppage had eluded Adam in the first instance, but it appeared from the logomachy that was now in progress that it had something to do with tempo. ‘Naturally I defer to you absolutely, Mr Peacock,’ Shorthouse was saying without a hint of deference across the footlights. ‘It’s simply that I’ve not been used to such a marked accelerando at that point, and I felt that Sachs’ dignity was rather lessened by it.’

George Peacock fidgeted with his baton and looked harassed. And well he might, Adam reflected: rehearsing Die Meistersinger with Edwin Shorthouse in the cast had unnerved many an older and more experienced conductor. It was really all a great pity; Peacock was an able young man; this production would certainly be important to his career; and after four weeks’ nagging by Edwin Shorthouse he might easily make a mess of the actual show. Moreover – Adam glanced at his watch – time was getting on; they still had the third act to get through that afternoon.

‘Why, in the name of God,’ he whispered to Joan Davis, ‘can’t Edwin shut his trap for ten minutes at a time?’

Joan nodded briskly. ‘Inelegantly put,’ she returned, ‘but I could scarcely agree with you more. I’m very sorry for that young man. It’s just the greatest pity in the world that Edwin happens to be so good.’

‘He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes if he hadn’t been,’ said Adam. ‘And I’m inclined to think that someone may stick a knife in him yet.’

‘… So if you’ve got no objection,’ Peacock was saying from the rostrum, ‘we’ll keep it as it was. I think the extra impetus is wanted at that point.’

‘Of course,’ said Shorthouse. ‘Of course. I must try to follow your beat more closely. If I might have a more definite down-stroke at “springtime’s behest”—’

‘Ass,’ Joan commented in a vehement whisper from the wings. ‘Contemptible ass. The wretched man’s beat is perfectly clear.’

‘If we have many more hold-ups,’ Adam replied gloomily, ‘we shall never get on to the third act at all. Not that I should be altogether sorry,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘I tried to sing a top A in my bath this morning, and nothing but a sort of whistling sound came out.’

The music began again. Adam had heard it hundreds of times, but still it cast its warm enchantment over him. They reached the disputed passage. Shorthouse was dragging.

‘Now we shall see,’ said Joan.

Peacock tapped with his baton and the orchestra faded into silence. ‘I’m afraid we were a little ahead of you. Mr Shorthouse,’ he said pointedly.

‘Oh, Lord,’ groaned Adam. ‘Not sarcasm. Not sarcasm, you fool.’

The result was as he expected. There was a moment’s dead silence, and then: ‘If my efforts displease you, Mr Peacock,’ said Shorthouse, ‘I would be obliged if you would tell me so in a straightforward way, and not by means of cheap witticisms.’

There was another silence. Peacock flushed scarlet. Then: ‘I think we’ll leave that passage for the moment,’ he said quietly, ‘and go on. We’ll take it from scene four – Eva’s entry. Are you ready, Miss Davis?’ he called.

‘Perfectly,’ Joan called back. ‘Even the pretence of flirting with Edwin,’ she said to Adam, ‘makes me shudder.’

‘Never mind. Perhaps he’ll object to something you do. Then you can give him hell.’

‘How nice that would be,’ said Joan dreamily. ‘But there’s not much hope of it. He only picks on the young and inexperienced, who can’t answer back … Here we go.’

‘Ta-ta,’ said Adam. ‘Meet you under the lime-tree, and don’t bring a friend.’ He returned to his reflexions.

The situation was, in fact, worrying. There could be no doubt that Peacock was breaking up under the strain of incessant objections, interruptions, and superfluous requests for information about tempo, dynamics, and all the paraphernalia which should have been, and in fact had been, settled at the piano rehearsals; doing a complex, five-hour opera is labour enough without any member of the cast’s making a wilful nuisance of himself. What made it more objectionable was that where the opera management was concerned, Shorthouse could twist Peacock round his little finger, for Shorthouse was the box-office attraction, and Peacock virtually a nonentity; so that although nominally Peacock’s word was law …

Adam sighed, took another piece of chewing-gum, and again caught the eye of Barfield, who was beginning to eat a tomato. Barfield grimaced and nodded meaningly at the stage. Adam grimaced back. It was a futile interchange. At the other side of the stage, Shorthouse and Joan chanted mellifluously at one another, while the orchestra tranquillized, with an occasional tender dissonance, in A flat. Adam noticed suddenly how exceptionally well they were playing, and his anger with Shorthouse rose afresh. To calm himself, he took a third piece of chewing-gum. It was a pity the stuff lost its taste so quickly, and became merely rubbery.

A few moments later he was joined by Dennis Rutherston, the producer, and a dark, rather ill-looking young man whom he vaguely remembered as being the apprentice whose sole duty it is, in the first act, to explain (in two words) the absence of Niklaus Vogel from the Masters’ gathering.

‘It’s a trial,’ said Rutherston, ‘not being able to move people when they’re singing. A convention, if you ask me.’ He was a melancholy, youngish man who was never to be seen without a battered trilby hat on his head.

‘It sends one out of tune,’ Adam told him kindly.

‘And what a nuisance Shorthouse is being … The meadow scene’s going to be an unholy muddle,’ Rutherston prognosticated gloomily. ‘These damned apprentices will not stand still when they get to their places. They seem to imagine that if they shift about from foot to foot it produces an appearance of animation. Actually, it looks like a mass attack of incipient D.T.s.’

Beyond them, the music ceased abruptly. ‘Hullo,’ muttered Rutherston. ‘What now?’

‘It seems impossible to rehearse this work for five minutes’ – Peacock’s voice was shaking – ‘without an obbligato of muffled altercation from the wings. Will you please be quiet!’

‘That’s us,’ said Rutherston, faintly surprised. ‘Well, anyway, I must be off.’ As the music started again, he drifted away, followed by the dark young man.

‘God help us all,’ said Adam to himself, with some feeling. He had not liked the nerve-racked tone of Peacock’s voice, which suggested an imminent explosion. And he knew from experience that if one person loses control of himself at a rehearsal, the rest always begin to sulk, and the only thing to do is to pack up and go home. He devoutly hoped that Shorthouse would keep quiet for a while.

Magdalena trotted to the stage and held her brief colloquy with Eva. It occurred to Adam that he had better get upstage in readiness for his entry, and he affixed his chewing-gum providently to a piece of scenery. Damn Shorthouse, he thought, as he passed Beckmesser twanging faintly at his lute; damn the man.

In another moment Joan was rushing to greet him. ‘Hero, poet, and my only friend!’ she sang, embracing him, and added under her breath: ‘You smell revoltingly of peppermint.’

Very much to Adam’s surprise, the rest of the second act passed without untoward incident. The lovers attempted to elope and were foiled by Sachs: Beckmesser performed his ludicrous serenade and was chased by David amid a rout of apprentices and masters (‘Looks like a lot of fairies,’ said Rutherston with disapproval, ‘dancing a ballet’); sleepy-eyed, the night-watchman came on, intoned his formula, blew his horn; and to echoes of the summer-night motif and of Beckmesser’s serenade the music came to an end. But Adam suspected that Shorthouse, whose tactics in nuisance were subtle, was merely holding his fire until the third act: and events proved him to be right.

The cast gathered on the stage to hear the respective strictures of conductor, producer, and chorus-master. There followed a quarter-hour break, in which people drifted out to get a cup of tea. Adam joined Joan Davis and Barfield, who was eating an apple, in the stalls.

‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when I really think we ought to get together and raise Hades about Shorthouse.’

‘Calm before the storm,’ said Barfield indistinctly. ‘That’s all this is. But if you ask me, the management wouldn’t take it kindly.’

‘For the simple reason,’ Joan put in, ‘that they don’t realize what a marvel Peacock is with the orchestra. He makes that cynical old gang of scrapers and blowers sound positively beautiful.’

‘It’s youth,’ Barfield mumbled through his apple. ‘Emotional osmosis.’

‘Where is he, by the way?’ Adam asked. ‘Has he gone out?’

He stared about him. On the stage a number of unlikely objects which had been temporarily employed to represent a Nuremberg street were now being shifted about to represent a meadow. In his gallery at the back, the electrician was conversing with a couple of apprentices. And several members of the chorus were wandering dispiritedly up and down the gangways of the auditorium. But of Peacock there was no sign.

‘Having a heart-to-heart with Shorthouse, perhaps,’ suggested Barfield. ‘Poor devil.’ He took out a piece of cake and offered it perfunctorily to Adam and Joan; he was obviously relieved when they refused.

The dark young man whom Adam had seen with the producer crossed the back of the stage, talking to Judith Haynes. ‘Who’s that?’ Adam enquired generally.

‘The man?’ Joan sat up to get a better look. ‘Oh, Boris somebody. One of the apprentices.’

‘Isn’t the girl something to do with Shorthouse?’

‘As to that,’ said Joan rather definitely, ‘I couldn’t say. If so, I’m sorry for her. She’s a pretty child.’

‘Chorus?’

‘Yes. One of the boatload of maidens. It’s she who dances with David.’

‘Oh, yes, so it is.’ Adam considered. ‘I felt sure I’d seen her with Shorthouse, but she looks very much attached to that young man.’

‘Promiscuous probably,’ said Barfield, dropping cake-crumbs on to his knee. ‘Are we doing scene one of the last act? If so, I’ve time to go out and get a bite to eat.’

Joan shook her head. ‘No, only the second scene. Just as well, too. Everyone’s a bit worn.’

Barfield was staring at the door leading backstage, which now opened. ‘Cripes,’ he said. ‘Here’s Mephisto. Turn on the charm, everyone.’

Shorthouse came up to them, sat down, and heaved a sigh. He smelled, as usual, of gin.

‘Thank God the show’s in a week,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand much more of this. Peacock’s all right,’ – he spoke with such manifest insincerity that Adam started – ‘but he can’t make up his mind about anything.’

Joan said: ‘Are you deliberately trying to harry him into a nervous breakdown, Edwin?’

‘Good heavens, Joan’ – Shorthouse looked genuinely shocked – ‘what’s put that idea into your head? I’m sorry if I’ve been holding the production up, but I must understand what I’m supposed to be doing. Yet every time I ask, I get some kind of vulgar insult hurled at me … Not that I mind, personally – the man’s inexperienced and he’s obviously nervous. But I’m worried about the production as a whole. This is the first time Meistersinger’s been done since before the war, and it seems to me that for that reason it’s more than ordinarily important to get everything exactly right.’ He paused, and involuntarily a smile flitted across his face. ‘I’ve been considering going to the management and asking them to replace Peacock.’

‘Don’t be such a damned fool,’ said Adam, more sharply than he had intended. ‘He’s under contract.’

‘So am I,’ Shorthouse countered unpleasantly. ‘But that’s not going to stop me walking out if rehearsals continue on the present lines. I can assure you it isn’t a personal matter: it’s only Wagner I’m thinking of.’

The notion that Shorthouse might be thinking of anyone but himself was almost too much for Adam; he uttered an incoherent snorting sound. Barfield was unwinding a packet of chocolate. Pogner strode across the stage, muttering fiercely to himself, and Rutherston appeared, gesticulating at the electrician in his gallery. A horn-player in the orchestra pit was engaged in a prolonged Jeremiad about some infraction of Union rules.

Ten minutes later the rehearsal was under way again. The Guilds entered; the boatload of maidens arrived; the apprentices danced (‘like a Sunday School treat,’ Rutherston remarked); and last of all came the Mastersingers, headed by a banner bearing an effigy of David and his harp. The chorus sang in honour of Sachs; as the acclamation died away, all was ready for the moving response of the cobbler-poet.

Chapter Five

And that was when the real trouble started.

There was a minor hitch over positioning, followed by a misunderstanding as to the point in the score at which the music was to be recommenced. Shorthouse snapped at Peacock; Peacock snapped back at him, and then they went for one another, as Adam afterwards put it, ‘like a nationalization debate in the Commons’. Although it was an eruption which everyone had expected, the embarrassment was general, since the sight of two grown-up men bawling at one another like children is at the best of times dispiriting. No one, however, interfered; only, when Peacock finally stalked out, after smashing his baton on the conductor’s desk in an access of blind fury, Adam went quietly after him. He heard the murmur of released tension as he left the stage.

Peacock was in the rehearsal-room. He stood quite still, gripping the lid of the piano with both hands and struggling to control his emotions. His bony, irregular, sensitive features betrayed the strain he was undergoing, and his eyes were momentarily vacant and unseeing. Adam hesitated for an instant in the doorway; then said briefly:

‘You have my sympathy.’

There was a considerable pause before Peacock replied. At last he relaxed and said with great bitterness:

‘I suppose I should apologize.’

‘Technically, yes,’ Adam commented. ‘Humanly, no. You must realize that everyone is on your side. Edwin is behaving intolerably.’

Peacock muttered.

‘I ought to be able to control a situation like that. After all, it’s all part of my job …’ He considered. ‘You’ve more experience of these things than I … Should I resign?’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Adam warmly. ‘Of course not.’

‘Naturally, I realize’ – Peacock spoke with difficulty – ‘the line it’s desirable to take. Genial but firm … The trouble is, my nerves won’t let me do it. I suppose really I’m unfitted for this kind of work.’ He looked so haggard that Adam was shocked. ‘But I’ve simply got to make a success of it. One way or another, it’s going to affect the whole of my future career.’

There was a silence. ‘What about the rehearsal?’ Adam asked.

‘Tell them it’s over, will you? I can’t face people at present.’

‘It would be better if you—’

‘For God’s sake tell them it’s over!’

Peacock checked himself abruptly, and a spasm of shame passed over his face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ said Adam, and hesitated.

‘For the love of heaven don’t do anything rash,’ he added, and returned to the stage.

There he made his brief announcement. Shorthouse, he observed, was not present to hear it.

People drifted away, chattering in a subdued fashion. The orchestra began to dismantle and pack up their instruments. Joan Davis accosted Adam.

‘How is he?’ she asked.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t like it at all. Where’s Edwin?’

‘He left immediately after Peacock.’

Adam sighed. ‘Well, there’s no point in lingering here. Let’s go back to the hotel and get a drink.’

‘Do you think we should have a conference?’

‘A conference … I scarcely see what would come of it.’

Joan smiled wryly. ‘Nothing, in all probability. But it might clear the air.’

‘After dinner, then – preferably over a drink.’

‘I’ll arrange something.’ Joan nodded briskly, and went off to her dressing-room.

At the stage door Adam met Shorthouse on the point of leaving.

On a sudden impulse: ‘What the hell is the matter with you, Edwin?’ he demanded.

Shorthouse looked at him queerly, almost blankly. His thin grey hair was dishevelled, and there was sweat on his cheeks and forehead. It came to Adam, with a sudden twinge of horror, that the man might be growing insane. Irrationally, and quite unexpectedly, Adam had a feeling of pity.

But it was wiped away when Shorthouse spoke – thickly, as though the movement of his mouth were painful to him.

‘I shall telephone Levi,’ he said, ‘and get that little whipper-snapper kicked out.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Edwin.’ Adam spoke sharply. ‘Even if Levi agreed, it’d be the beginning of the end for you. You can’t antagonize people beyond a certain point without suffering for it.’

But Shorthouse, surprisingly, took no offence. ‘Suffering,’ he repeated dully. ‘People don’t realize how I suffer already …’ He paused: then, collecting himself, blundered out into the early darkness.

Adam followed him shortly afterwards.

Dennis Rutherston, the inevitable hat perched on the back of his head, leaned back and stared fixedly at the pale amber of the whisky in his glass.

‘Why worry?’ he said. ‘It’ll smooth itself out. These things always do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam interposed with unwonted vigour. ‘But I don’t agree.’

They were in the bar of the Randolph Hotel, seated round a table near the door – Adam, Elizabeth, Joan, Rutherston, Karl Wolzogen, and John Barfield. It was eight o’clock of the same evening, and the after-dinner crowd had not yet collected. Nonetheless, a few persistent drinkers shared the room with them. At a neighbouring table, a tall, dark man with a green scarf round his neck was holding forth learnedly on the subject of rat-poisons to a neat middle-aged gentleman of military aspect and an auburn-haired youth with unsteady hands and a rose in his buttonhole. The place was predominantly blue and cream. It was blessedly warm after the cold outside. The clink of glasses, the angry fizzing of a beer-machine behind the bar, and the bell of the cash-register mingled agreeably with the hum of conversation.

Adam was argumentative. ‘This thing is cumulative,’ he stated, wagging his forefinger at them by way of warning. ‘It isn’t sporadic. And in Edwin’s case it seems to be complicated by self-pity. But what it amounts to in the end is this: that either Edwin or Peacock will have to go if we’re to open at all.’

‘… red squill,’ said the dark man at the next table. ‘It causes a very painful death.’

Rutherston sighed. ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ he asked. ‘A deputation to Levi?’

‘We’ve been over all this ground already.’ Joan Davis, whom the events of the afternoon had made a trifle reckless in the matter of smoking, lit a new cigarette from the end of the old. ‘Levi would never agree to getting rid of Edwin. Edwin’s still box-office, remember. No operatic management can afford to annoy him.’

‘Well, for that matter,’ said Adam irritably, ‘no operatic management can afford to annoy us.’

‘Dear Adam.’ Joan patted his hand affectionately. ‘Are you suggesting that we threaten to walk out if Edwin isn’t removed? Because I, for one, don’t feel much like dealing with an action for breach of contract.’

There was a silence, which was broken at last by Karl Wolzogen.

‘Ach!’ he snorted. ‘That fool! Art means nothing to him. The Meister means nothing to him. At the age of four I was presented to the Meister, in Bayreuth. It was the year before his death. He was abstracted, but kind, and he said—’

The others, though sympathizing with Karl’s enthusiasm for this elevating, if precocious experience, had all of them heard about it several times before. They hastened to bring the conversation back to the problem of Shorthouse.

‘Well, have you any views, John?’ Joan demanded.

Barfield, who was eating ginger biscuits from a paper bag on the table in front of him, choked noisily as a crumb lodged in his windpipe.

‘It seems to me that there’s only one answer,’ he announced when he had recovered. ‘And that is—’

‘Zinc phosphide,’ said the dark man at the next table. ‘A singularly effective poison.’

Barfield was momentarily unnerved by the appositeness of this.

‘I was going to say,’ he proceeded cautiously, ‘that we shall simply have to let Peacock go.’

There were cries of protest.

‘All right, all right!’ he added hastily. ‘I know it’s unjust. I know it’s detestable. I know the heavens will cry aloud for vengeance. But what other solution is there?’

‘Zinc phosphide,’ Elizabeth suggested. It was her first contribution to the discussion.

‘It would be nice,’ said Joan wistfully, ‘if we could poison him just a little – just so as to make him unable to sing.’

And perhaps it was at this point that the conference drifted away from the subject of Shorthouse. Certainly it had become apparent by then that no fresh light on the matter was forthcoming. At about nine the party broke up, and Adam walked back to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’ with Elizabeth and Joan.

It was after eleven when he discovered that his pocket-book was missing. Elizabeth was already in bed, and Adam was undressing. The process of disburdening his pockets revealed the loss, and he remembered that during the evening he had paid for drinks out of an accumulation of change.

‘Damn!’ he said, irresolute. ‘I believe I left it in my dressing-room at the theatre. I really think I’d better go and fetch it.’

‘Won’t tomorrow do?’ said Elizabeth. Adam thought that she looked particularly beautiful tonight, with her hair glowing like satin in the light of the bedside lamp.

He shook his head. ‘I really shan’t feel happy unless I go and get it. There’s rather a lot of money in it.’

‘But won’t the theatre be locked up?’

‘Well, it may be. But the old stage door keeper sleeps there, and he may not have gone to bed yet. I’ll try, anyway.’ He was dressing again as he spoke.

‘All right, darling.’ Elizabeth’s voice was sleepy. ‘Don’t be long.’

Adam went over and kissed her. ‘I won’t,’ he promised. ‘It’s only three minutes’ walk.’

When he got outside, he found that the moon was gibbous, very pale, and with a halo encircling it. Its light illuminated the whole of the south side of George Street, and at the end, at the junction with Cornmarket, he could see the steady green of the traffic signals. A belated cyclist pedalled past, his tyres crackling on the ice which flecked the surface of the road. Adam’s breath steamed in the cold air; but at least the wind had dropped.

He crossed Gloucester Green. There were still a few cars parked there, the pale moonlight on their metal roofs striped with the yellower rays of the street-lamps. It was very quiet, save for the persistent coughing of a belated wayfarer stationed ouside the little tobacconist’s shop on his left. Adam paused for a moment to read the concert announcements posted on a nearby wall, and then walked on into Beaumont Street.

He had no difficulty in entering the opera-house – indeed, the stage door stood wide open, though the little foyer inside, with its green baize notice-board and its single frosted bulb, was deserted. By about twenty-five past eleven he had retrieved his pocket-book and was preparing to depart.

His dressing-room was on the first floor, and his decision to go down in the lift must therefore be ascribed solely to enjoyment of the motion. He pressed the button, and the apparatus descended. He climbed in, and traversed the short distance to the ground floor. Then, feeling this short journey to be inadequate, he ascended again, this time to the second floor. Through the iron gates he could see the long, gloomy corridor of dressing-rooms, the gleam of the telephone fixed to the wall at the far end, and the rectangle of yellow light which came from the open door of the stage door keeper’s bedroom. After a moment, the stage door keeper himself shuffled out of it. He was an old man named Furbelow, with wispy hair and steel-rimmed spectacles. Adam, sensing perhaps that his presence required some explanation, opened the lift gates and greeted him.

‘Ah, sir,’ said the old man with some relief. ‘It’s you.’

Adam accounted dutifully for his late visit. ‘But I’m surprised,’ he added, ‘to find you still up.’

‘I’m always up till midnight, Mr Langley, and I keep the stage door open till then. But it’s cold down below, so I comes and sits up ’ere during the last part o’ the evening.’

‘I should have thought it was equally cold up here, if you keep the door of your room open.’

‘I as to do that, sir, when the electric fire’s on. Them things exude gases,’ said Furbelow a shade didactically. ‘You ’ave to ’ave ventilation when they’re alight.’

Adam, though doubting if there was much basis for this assertion, was not sufficiently interested in the stage door keeper’s domestic affairs to argue about it. He said goodnight and left the theatre. As he was walking away, a car drew up, and its occupant, a man, hurriedly entered the stage door. Adam experienced a mild curiosity, but he did not linger, and by the time he had arrived back at the hotel the incident was forgotten.

Meanwhile, in a dressing-room almost directly opposite to Furbelow’s open door, Edwin Shorthouse swayed a little in a cold draught. Now and again the rope creaked against the iron hook from which he was suspended, but that was the only sound.

Chapter Six

‘It argues a certain poverty of imagination,’ said Gervase Fen with profound disgust, ‘that in a world where atom physicists walk the streets unharmed, emitting their habitual wails about the misuse of science by politicians, a murderer can find a no more deserving victim than some unfortunate opera singer …’

‘You’d scarcely say that,’ Adam answered, ‘if you’d known Shorthouse. He will not be very much mourned.’

The three men paused on the kerb to let a lorry go by before crossing St Giles’. A little whirlwind of snow-flakes was swept among them by the wind.

‘All the same,’ Fen resumed when they were half-way across, ‘good singers are rare. And as far as I’m able to judge’ – his confident manner tended to nullify this reservation – ‘he was good.’

‘Certainly he was good. No one would have put up with him for two minutes if he hadn’t been … Is the snow going to lie, one wonders?’

‘It seems to me you’re overhasty in assuming it was murder,’ said Sir Richard Freeman, the Chief Constable of Oxford. He walked very upright, with short, rapid, determined steps. ‘Mudge implied that the circumstances suggested suicide.’ He frowned severely at this Jamesian hyperbole.

‘Mudge,’ Fen remarked with emotion. He buffeted his arms across his chest in the manner associated with taxi-drivers. ‘That hurts,’ he complained. ‘Anyway, if it was suicide, I scarcely see how it’s likely to interest me.’

‘Shorthouse. Any relation of the composer?’

‘Charles Shorthouse?’ said Adam. ‘Yes. A brother. Edwin sang in a good many of Charles’ operas, though as far as the normal repertory was concerned he specialized in Wagner. Wotan and Sachs. Mark. That chatterbox Gurnemanz. He was the obvious Sachs when they decided to put on Meistersinger here.’

They passed a public-house. ‘I should like a Burton,’ said Fen, gazing back at it with the lugubrious passion of Orpheus surveying Eurydice at hell-mouth. ‘But I suppose it’s too early. Shorthouse was hanged, wasn’t he?’

‘So it appears.’ Sir Richard Freeman nodded. ‘But not strangled. It seems to have been a kind of judicial hanging.’

‘You mean his neck was broken?’

‘Or dislocated. We shall get the full medical report when we arrive.’

‘It’s by no means a common way to commit suicide,’ Fen commented. His normally cheerful, ruddy face was thoughtful. ‘In fact, the arranging of it would involve a certain amount of knowledge and finesse.’ He buttoned at the neck the enormous raincoat in which he was muffled, and adjusted his extraordinary hat. He was forty-three years old, lean, lanky, with blue eyes and brown hair ineffectually plastered down with water. ‘I gather,’ he pursued as they turned up Beaumont Street by the Randolph Hotel, ‘that Shorthouse had been causing trouble at rehearsals.’

‘Trouble,’ said Adam grimly, ‘is an understatement. By the way’ – he turned to the Chief Constable – ‘I asked my wife along to the theatre this morning. I hope you don’t mind. You see, it’s rather in her line.’

‘Your wife,’ said Sir Richard, heavily, like one burdened suddenly with a dangerous secret. ‘I didn’t know you were married, Langley.’

‘Adam’s wife,’ Fen explained, ‘is Elizabeth Harding, who writes books about crime.’

‘Ah,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Nasty subject,’ he added rather offensively. ‘Yes, of course. By all means. Delighted to meet her.’

‘I rather think she wants to interview you, Gervase,’ Adam continued. ‘She’s doing a series on famous detectives for one of the papers.’

‘Famous detectives,’ said Fen with great complacency. ‘Oh, my dear paws. You hear that, Dick?’ he went on, banging the Chief Constable suddenly on the chest to make sure of his attention. ‘Famous detectives.’

‘Celebrated imbeciles,’ said Sir Richard crossly. ‘Ugh.’

‘Anyway,’ Adam put in, ‘here we are.’

Crossing the entrance to St John Street, they arrived at the opera-house, and made their way, Fen grumbling in quite a distressing way about the cold, to the stage door, which they found guarded by a constable. Nearby, a small group of seedy-looking men with instrument cases, their coat collars turned up against the biting wind and their fingers blue and numb, were conversing with a female harpist.

‘Morning, Mr Langley,’ said one of them. ‘Queer business, isn’t it? Shall we be getting a rehearsal, do you imagine?’

‘Not until the afternoon, anyway,’ Adam returned. ‘It depends on the police, I should say.’

‘They won’t cancel the production, will they?’

‘No surely not. We’ll get a new Sachs. But it’ll probably mean postponing the first show.’

‘Well, I’m for the boozer,’ said the oboist. ‘Coming, anyone?’

The constable saluted Sir Richard Freeman. He saluted Fen, more dubiously. He did not salute Adam at all. They went inside.

The stage door led into a small stone vestibule, from which flights of stairs ran up and down. There was a kind of cavity, furnished with a few elementary comforts, where in the daytime the stage door keeper lived, moved, and had his being, but this was at present empty. They pushed through a padded swing-door into the wings. Semi-darkness greeted them. Moving cautiously among ropes, floodlamps, and scenery poised precariously against the walls, they came within earshot, and soon within sight, of some kind of altercation which was in progress on the stage.

Beneath a single working lamp, high up among the battens, stood Elizabeth and an Inspector of police, both of them very angry indeed. Dimly in the background there were other forms hovering, like wraiths on the threshold of limbo, but these two appeared to be the centre of such activity as was going forward at the moment. The Inspector of police was small, wizened, and malevolent in appearance; and Elizabeth was standing with her hands on her hips, glowering at him.

‘You are an intolerable, pompous ass,’ she was informing him in measured, judicial tones. ‘A jack-in-office. A nincompoop. A giddy-brained pigeon.’

‘Listen to me,’ said the Inspector with theatrical restraint. ‘Just you listen to me. I’ve had quite enough of you. You’ve no right to be here, young woman. And if you don’t get out – now: instantly – I shall charge you with obstructing me in the performance of my duties.’

‘I’d like to see you try,’ Elizabeth replied, in a voice of such intense malignancy that even Fen was startled. She swung round to face the newcomers. ‘And if you think—’ She broke off, and her face suddenly brightened. ‘Adam!’

‘Darling, are you being a nuisance?’ Adam asked. ‘I want you to meet Sir Richard Freeman, the Chief Constable, and Gervase Fen. Elizabeth, my wife.’

‘Pleasure,’ said Sir Richard with manly gruffness. ‘It’s all right, Mudge,’ he added to the enraged Inspector.

‘As you say, sir,’ Mudge answered. ‘As you say, of course. As you say.’ He stood back, muttering waspishly.

‘Well, well.’ Fen beamed at Elizabeth like an ogre about to gobble up a small boy. ‘I am pleased. I could tell you some things about Adam,’ he went on with great amiability.

‘You’ve only rescued me just in time.’ Elizabeth’s voice still held a trace of peevishness. ‘Adam darling, you’re terribly late.’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Adam soothingly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Now,’ said Sir Richard, who was plainly not much interested by this interchange, ‘let’s have a few facts, Mudge. Is this where it happened?’

He gazed about him. The light from the stage faintly illuminated the front rows of the stalls. Half-painted flats projected from the wings. Backstage, the electrician’s gallery was visible. There was a lot of litter and a lot of dust. There were half-effaced chalk marks scrawled on the floor by the producer, to assist positioning at rehearsals. In the orchestra-pit, a tangle of brass stands could be seen. But there was nothing, apart from a good deal of rope, to suggest suicide or violence.

‘No, sir,’ Mudge informed his superior with perhaps more testiness than was altogether wise. ‘Not here. In the dressing-room.’

‘Well, take us there, then,’ said Sir Richard. ‘It’s absurd to stand about like a set of characters in a melodrama.’

Mudge sighed, and pronounced, as though it were a rune, the word ‘Furbelow’. The stage door keeper materialized from among the peripheral wraiths, and stood blinking at them. ‘Good morning, Mr Langley,’ he said uncertainly.

‘Furbelow, you’d better come with us.’ Mudge was peremptory. ‘Sir Richard will want to hear what you have to say.’

‘Who’s this?’ Sir Richard demanded with distaste.

‘The stage door keeper, sir. His evidence is important.’

‘Indeed?’ said Sir Richard, like one confronted too suddenly with a freak of nature. ‘Important. I see.’

‘Come on, come on,’ said Fen impatiently. ‘Or we shall never get started.’

They made their way off the stage. Adam wanted to take the lift, but it appeared that the aspen and decrepit Furbelow went in fear of lifts. The machinery broke, he explained, and one was precipitated with violence to the ground … In any case, this particular lift was too small to take all of them, so they walked up, encouraged by some remarks from the Chief Constable on the subject of muscular development – the Inspector first, Sir Richard following, Fen at his heels, then Adam and Elizabeth, and finally Furbelow. Having arrived at the second floor, they made their way in single file round an inconveniently placed iron ladder which led to the roof, and at last came to a door bearing a card with the inscription EDWIN SHORTHOUSE on it. The Inspector halted.

‘It’s here,’ he said.

‘Well, well,’ said Sir Richard, annoyed at the redundancy of this statement. ‘Let’s have a look at it. The – ah – he’s been moved, I suppose?’

‘Oh, yes, sir.’ Mudge was inserting a key into the lock. ‘In fact the post mortem ought to be over by now. I’m expecting Rashmole back here at any time.’

‘Have you got in touch with the brother?’

Mudge paused in his labours, to everyone’s great annoyance; the corridor was undeniably draughty. ‘I wired him earlier this morning, sir,’ he said. ‘And the reply came a few minutes before you arrived just now.’ He hesitated. ‘Rather an odd reply. Unnatural, to my thinking.’

‘Well, what was it?’

Mudge abandoned the door and groped in his pockets; a telegram was produced; they passed it from hand to hand; it ran:

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