“No one knows. Only four people had the opportunity. Three are actors who’ll be on stage with you tonight: Wanda Morley, Rodney Tait, and Leonard Martin. The fourth is the wife of the murdered man, a Mrs. Ingelow.”
“What’s the idea of going on with the show?”
“It’s the only way Milhau can get any return on the money he’s already invested in it.”
“Money.” Russell grew thoughtful. “I could certainly use fifty bucks a week, but I don’t much like stepping into a dead man’s shoes and a murdered man’s at that. . . . Do you think it would be—well—dangerous?”
“I don’t see how,” answered Basil. “You have no connection with anyone else in the cast or with the Ingelow family, have you?”
“No. I’ve seen Miss Morley and her company on the stage from a gallery seat, and I’ve been turned down by Milhau’s secretary once or twice when I asked for a job; but that’s the sole extent of my connection with any of them. I never even heard of this Ingelow and his wife.”
“Then I should think you could enjoy your fifty bucks a week without worrying,” said Basil.
“Coming, Russell?” called Milhau from the footlights.
“Yes, sir!” The boy hurried down to the stage.
Basil followed more slowly, taking in every detail of the scene. Instead of a shadowy auditorium with a single work light dangling from a wire on stage, all the lights were blazing. Evidently Milhau was a sufficiently shrewd practical psychologist to realize that his cast would see all sorts of ghosts in dark corners and shady vistas. Adeane was standing near the footlights at the edge of the stage with a new book in a fresh dust jacket tucked under one arm. As he saw Basil and the others coming down the aisle from Milhau’s office, Adeane leaned forward to greet Basil. “Well, doc, have you found out who killed Cock Robin yet?”
As Basil disliked being called “doc” by anyone except Inspector Foyle, he did not reply in kind to Adeane’s jarring laugh.
Adeane seemed in unusually high spirits. His freckled, usually sallow face was flushed, and there was a reddish glint in his hazel eyes. Had he been drinking? Or had something more subtle than alcohol intoxicated him? He called loudly across the footlights:
“It was I,
Said the Fly,
With my little Eye . . .”
“Is this a confession?” murmured Basil.
Adeane laughed again. “Oh, no—I didn’t do it, and I didn’t even see it done. But I know whom I’d make the murderer if I were writing a play about it.”
“Who?”
“That’s telling.” Adeane rattled on. “I must thank you for sending me to that medical library. I got enough dope on disease there to last me twenty years. When I got home I had aches and pains in every part of my body—head, heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys, and I would have had a pain in the pancreas if I’d known where the pancreas is! I read a lot about diseases of the pancreas in your friends Barr, Tice, and Cushny. A bit too technical for me, they were. But I got hold of a book by Victor Heiser that was really something. A lot of stuff about native medicine in India and so forth that was very interesting . . . ve-ry interesting indeed!” Adeane smiled his slow, thick-lipped smile which Basil had found so unpleasant from the first moment they had met.
On stage the first-act set looked as if it had not been touched since the other evening. Already the actors playing
Russell stopped short. There was a deathly stillness. Then Milhau called out: “That isn’t funny, Adeane! Go in the alcove and shut the door, Russell. We’re ten minutes late already.”
His top sergeant brusqueness restored order. But it could not scatter the unpleasant aftertaste of that moment. Russell entered the alcove. The double doors closed slowly, hiding him from view.
Leonard’s voice spoke in Basil’s ear. “It’s absurd, but I hate the look of those closed doors. After what happened last time I wish I weren’t the one who has to open them. I can’t help being afraid I’ll find him dead, though I know it’s entirely unreasonable. I wonder why I feel that way?”
“Suggestion,” answered Basil. “A scene can revivify memory just as intensely as an odor or a musical phrase. Memory has more to do with the senses than reason.”
Leonard turned away to take up his place in the wings ready for his entrance a few minutes later. Milhau was sitting with an assistant producer in the second row center. Basil took a place beside Pauline in the third row.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered.
“Been reading about ‘eternal recurrence’ like Hutchins?”
“No, it’s just—”
“What?”
