Through a haze of cigarette smoke Basil saw a group of men and women clustered around a
“Aren’t you going to watch the performance?” he asked Milhau.
“Oh, yes.” Milhau chuckled like Santa Claus with a surprise in his pack. “Grab a cocktail and a plate of creamed chicken, and I’ll show you.”
“I’ve just had dinner, thank you.”
Milhau led the way to the end of the room where Pauline and Margot were sitting. He stepped to the wall and touched a spring. A panel in the wall slid back noiselessly. Basil looked down through the opening into a brilliantly lighted world. The walls were painted red and blue and green. There was a silver samovar in front of a fireplace and a table set for dominoes in the center. It was an oblique of the stage.
“Mrs. Ingelow didn’t want to appear in public this evening,” went on Milhau. “So I told her we could watch the whole performance very comfortably from up here without anyone knowing she was in the audience.”
Basil’s glance circled the stage. “You can’t see the alcove from this angle?”
“Only when the doors are open. Then we get a foreshortened view of it.”
Basil told Milhau about the canary.
“That’s too bad. Lazarus is attached to that bird. He’s had it three or four years. I can’t understand anyone playing a joke on a nice old man like that.”
“It happened before you know. Just before the other murder.”
“I know, but what can I do?”
“Why not tell Adeane he needn’t play
“A dummy always looks like a dummy.” Milhau pouted like a spoiled child. “A rich man like Ingelow is always making enemies, but nobody has it in for Adeane. He’s a harmless little guy who writes bum plays. Just because he’s playing
“Besides what?”
“It’s too late now.”
Basil’s glance followed Milhau’s through the gap in the wall. The curtain was rising.
By this time Basil knew that wretched play of Sardou’s by heart. Even the fact that he was seeing it from a bird’s-eye view failed to give it any novelty. He marveled at the ability of the actors to put so much freshness and vitality into those never-to-be-forgotten lines.
“Too fast, too fast!” muttered Milhau in real distress.
Basil, his eyes on the stage, heard Pauline’s voice: “They’re nervous. All of them.”
He turned his head to smile at Pauline and caught the glitter of triumph in Margot’s eyes. After all, this was why she was doing it—to rasp all their nerves until the guilty one broke down.
It was impossible to see the actors’ faces. Even their figures were rudely foreshortened. But their voices came through clearly, each one taut and humming as wire stretched to breaking point. Their words tumbled out of their mouths faster and faster, as if they were frightened amateurs. The gestures that were so carefully formed the first night and even at the rehearsal were sketchy and blurred now—rather like a shorthand version of something that had been written in precise script.
“I’m glad the audience is here from morbid curiosity,” whispered Milhau. “Nothing else would hold them in their seats with a performance like this!”
“I don’t like the effect of that white dress of Wanda’s,” said Pauline suddenly. “It is too stark and bleached for such a somber background.”
The people clustered around the peephole could feel the breathless hush in the unseen audience below as Leonard threw back the double doors. From this angle they could just see the hump under the coverlet made by Adeane’s body and the arm that dangled, but his head was hidden from view.
“Well, anyway he didn’t move this time,” said Milhau.
Just then Adeane’s arm shifted slightly. It was hardly more than a shiver, but the audience must have seen it. There was a single shrill titter. Then a ripple of giggling—cheerless and hysterical. Milhau swore under his breath. Margot was vastly amused. Pauline was worried.
