A Series of Murders by Simon Brett

Author:Simon Brett [Simon Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
Published: 2012-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

TWO PLAINCLOTHES policemen arrived at the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants to interrupt rehearsals on Wednesday morning. They were making some inquiries into the death of Sippy Stokes, ‘just checking out,’ as they put it, ‘how exactly she met her end.’ The word murder was not mentioned, but its shadow immediately loomed in the minds of everyone present.

The new Director was furious at this disruption in his schedule. ‘I am the Director of this show,’ he kept saying, ‘and it’s my job to see that it gets made.’

The policemen were impassively firm; they knew he had a job to do, but they also had a job to do. Could they please talk to the members of the cast and production crew who had been in the studio on the previous Wednesday morning? Grudgingly, the new Director gave way, and the relevant members of his team were trooped away to be questioned in the St. John Chrysostom Mission for Vagrants Great Hall.

The police said that they had no reason to believe that the death of Sippy Stokes had been anything other than accidental, but in cases like this they did feel an obligation to find out as much about the background as possible.

Charles wondered what new evidence they had uncovered. As he had many times before in his detective career, he envied the police their research facilities. There’s nothing like an encounter with a professional criminal investigation to make an amateur sleuth profoundly aware of his amateur status. Why couldn’t Charles Paris have been blessed with a convenient brother-in-law on the force, like Lord Peter Wimsey’s Inspector Parker? Even Stanislas Braid was not above picking Sergeant Clump’s so-called brains when he needed a little privileged information.

But Charles had no such handy informant. He could only guess the stage of investigation that the police had reached. Perhaps something had come up at the post-mortem. Maybe the doctor’s bland conviction that all he had to do was find the relevant fallen object to fit the dent in Sippy Stokes’s skull had proved inadequate. None of the objects had fitted? They were now looking for a murder weapon? An anonymous letter had been sent to the police announcing that Sippy had been murdered? Charles could only conjecture.

The policemen didn’t give the impression that their inquiry was particularly urgent, though. They seemed to be going through the motions rather than conducting a life-or-death investigation. Their manner was that of men who had been given a directive from above to make certain inquiries; they were doing as they were told but didn’t have much faith in the value of what they were doing. Whether that was actually the case, or whether their apparent diffidence masked an uncompromising determination to get at the truth, was another question at whose answer Charles could only guess.

They asked the assembled crowd of actors and production staff what they had been doing between eleven and twelve the previous Wednesday morning, and all the answers conformed with what Charles had witnessed in the canteen and Studio A during that period.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.