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“What about women? Any woman who has had a lasting grudge against Miss Gregg?”
“Well,” said Jason Rudd, “you can never tell with women. I can’t think of any particular one offhand.”
“Who’d benefit financially by your wife’s death?”
“Her will benefits various people but not to any large extent. I suppose the people who’d benefit, as you put it, financially, would be myself as her husband, from another angle, possibly the star who might replace her in this film. Though, of course, the film might be abandoned altogether. These things are very uncertain.”
“Well, we need not go into all that now,” said Dermot.
“And I have your assurance that Marina will not be told that she is in possible danger?”
“We shall have to go into that matter,” said Dermot. “I want to impress upon you that you are taking quite a considerable risk there. However, the matter will not arise for some days since your wife is still under medical care. Now there is one more thing I would like you to do. I would like you to write down for me as accurately as you can every single person who was in that recess at the top of the stairs, or whom you saw coming up the stairs at the time of the murder.”
“I’ll do my best, but I’m rather doubtful. You’d do far better to consult my secretary, Ella Zielinsky. She has a most accurate memory and also lists of the local lads who were there. If you’d like to see her now—”
“I would like to talk to Miss Ella Zielinsky very much,” said Dermot.
Eleven
I
Surveying Dermot Craddock unemotionally through her large horn-rimmed spectacles, Ella Zielinsky seemed to him almost too good to be true. With quiet businesslike alacrity she whipped out of a drawer a typewritten sheet and passed it across to him.
“I think I can be fairly sure that there are no omissions,” she said. “But it is just possible that I may have included one or two names—local names they will be—who were not actually there. That is to say who may have left earlier or who may not have been found and brought up. Actually, I’m pretty sure that it is correct.”
“A very efficient piece of work if I may say so,” said Dermot.
“Thank you.”
“I suppose—I am quite an ignoramus in such things—that you have to attain a high standard of efficiency in your job?”
“One has to have things pretty well taped, yes.”
“What else does your job comprise? Are you a kind of liaison officer, so to speak, between the studios and Gossington Hall?”
“No. I’ve nothing to do with the studios, actually, though of course I naturally take messages from there on the telephone or send them. My job is to look after Miss Gregg’s social life, her public and private engagements, and to supervise in some degree the running of the house.”
“You like the job?”
“It’s extremely well paid and I find it reasonably interesting. I didn’t however bargain for murder,” she added dryly.
“Did it seem very incredible to you?”
“So much so that I am going to ask you if you are really sure it is murder?”
“Six times the close of di-ethyl-mexine etc. etc., could hardly be anything else.”
“It might have been an accident of some kind.”
“And how would you suggest such an accident could have occurred?”
“More easily than you’d imagine, since you don’t know the setup. This house is simply full of drugs of all kinds. I don’t mean dope when I say drugs. I mean properly prescribed remedies, but, like most of these things, what they call, I understand, the lethal dose is not very far removed from the therapeutic dose.”
Dermot nodded.
“These theatrical and picture people have the most curious lapses in their intelligence. Sometimes it seems to me that the more of an artistic genius you are, the less common sense you have in everyday life.”
“That may well be.”
“What with all the bottles, cachets, powders, capsules, and little boxes that they carry about with them; what with popping in a tranquillizer here and a tonic there and a pep pill somewhere else, don’t you think it would be easy enough that the whole thing might get mixed-up?”
“I don’t see how it could apply in this case.”
“Well, I think it could. Somebody, one of the guests, may have wanted a sedative, or a reviver, and whipped out his or her little container
which they carry around and possibly because they hadn’t remembered the dose because they hadn’t had one for some time, might have put too much in a glass. Then their mind was distracted and they went off somewhere, and let’s say this Mrs. What’s-her-name comes along, thinks it’s her glass, picks it up and drinks it. That’s surely a more feasible idea than anything else?”
“You don’t think that all those possibilities haven’t been gone into, do you?”
“No, I suppose not. But there were a lot of people there and a lot of glasses standing about with drinks in them. It happens often enough, you know, that you pick up the wrong glass and drink out of it.”
“Then you don’t think that Heather Badcock was deliberately poisoned? You think that she drank out of somebody else’s glass?”
“I can’t imagine anything more likely to happen.”
“In that case,” said Dermot speaking carefully, “it would have had to be Marina Gregg’s glass. You realise that? Marina handed her her own glass.”
“Or what she thought was her own glass,” Ella Zielinsky corrected him. “You haven’t talked to Marina yet, have you? She’s extremely vague. She’d pick up any glass that looked as though it were hers, and drink it. I’ve seen her do it again and again.”
“She takes Calmo?”
“Oh yes, we all do.”
“You too, Miss Zielinsky?”
“I’m driven to it sometimes,” said Ella Zielinsky. “These things are rather imitative, you know.”
“I shall be glad,” said Dermot, “when I am able to talk to Miss Gregg. She—er—seems to be prostrated for a very long time.”
“That’s just throwing a temperament,” said Ella Zielinsky. “She just dramatizes herself a good deal, you know. She’d never take murder in her stride.”
“As you manage to do, Miss Zielinsky?”
