Measure For Murder

Clifford Witting

Description

It is 1940 and Mrs Mudge, the cleaning lady is busy tidying the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics' society. But she is in for a surprise when she finds a corpse in the ticket office, stabbed with a dagger - a prop from the society's latest play, Measure for Measure. The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village on the South Coast in the period leading up to the Second World War. But then in the second half, after the revelation of the identity of the victim and the calling in of Witting's series detective Inspector Charlton to investigate, the reader finds out that there were rather a lot of people who had cause to visit that little theatre on the night of the murder... But can the police disentangle the complicated relationships to discover the real killer? It seems that this story had its roots in a real live production of Shakespeare's Mea

Informations

• Publié par: Galileo Publishing
• Date de parution: 27 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912916597
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also by Clifford Witting
subject-murder
the case of the michelmas goose
midsummer murder
let x be the murderer
dead on time
catt out of the bag
murder in blue


Galileo Publishers
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Australia: Peribo Pty Limited
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Australia
ISBN 978-1-912916-52-8
First published in 1941
This edition © 2021
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed in the EU


In May, 1939, I was present at a performance of “Measure For Measure” at the Bromley Little Theatre in Kent. From that visit, this story has been evolved; but although the Lulverton Little Theatre has many things in common with the Bromley Little Theatre, especially in being fashioned from an old bakery loft by amateur hands, it must not be supposed that the members of my L.A.D.S. have any relation to the players I watched on that tiny stage at Bromley.
My thanks are due to C. F. Greatbach for drawing the masks behind which Melpomene and Thalia hide their real feelings, and the dagger, which is a faithful copy of the stage weapon lent to me by Charles H. Fox, Ltd., the famous costumiers, who also gave me their kind advice on other theatrical matters.
C.W.


Contents
Prologue
Part One: Thirsty Evil
Part Two: Scarecrow of the Law




PROLOGUE
Death is a fearful thing. Measure for Measure Act III, Sc. 1.
As if she ran on invisible wheels, Mrs. Mudge, with her string bag on her arm, swept serenely along Harpur Street, turned without slackening her pace into Cooper’s Yard, swung to the left under the central archway of the old Bakehouse and, disregarding the door over which some amateur hand had painted “Stage Door,” stopped dead at the door marked “Entrance.”
Humming gently to herself, she fumbled in her bag, produced a shabby purse, extracted a Yale key and—awkwardly, for her hands were stiff with the cold—slipped it in the lock.
Mrs. Mudge, as was to be expected in a woman of her size, had no liking for stairs and it was like a breathless seal that she flapped up the narrow flight leading to the Lulverton Little Theatre. Even after she had laid down her string bag, hung her outdoor clothes on a hook in the cloakroom, donned her flowered apron and got out the vacuum-cleaner from the cupboard, she was still breathing heavily.
It was early in the morning of the first Thursday in 1940 and, although the ugly, bustling town of Lulverton was already going about the day’s affairs, the Little Theatre was silent and still—too silent and still for Mrs. Mudge, who had been known to admit over a milk stout that, even in broad daylight, the emptiness of the Little Theatre unnerved her. The low-ceilinged passage and rooms, the rows of seats in the tiny auditorium, the grim etchings and Grand Guignol photographs on the walls of the foyer, the Comedy and Tragedy masks above the stage—all gave her, she would confess over her second milk stout, the perishin’ creeps, so that every moment she expected to see the livid ghost of Maria Martin or have the dead white face of Sweeney Todd leering out at her from some shadowy corner. So now, when her breathing was more under control, Mrs. Mudge kept the spooks at bay by breaking into song and set about her work to the tune of “Roll Out the Barrel,” accompanied by the thin whine of the vacuum-cleaner.
There had been a dress-rehearsal on the previous evening and, if the whole place was to be spick and span for the first public performance that Thursday evening, there was much for Mrs. Mudge to do, particularly in the foyer, where the buffet, tables and window-sills were littered with empty coffee cups and ash-trays heaped with cigarette-ends—some of them tipped with cork, but most of them with lip-stick. But it was not long before she finished the foyer and turned her attention to the box-office.
With the still whining vacuum-cleaner dragging behind her like an unhappy dog on a lead, she went in and switched on the light. Then at the sight of the seated figure, fallen forward so that the arms hung down, with a dagger driven cruelly up to its ornamented hilt between the shoulder-blades, she screamed and ran from the place.
The vacuum-cleaner whined on.

The gods looked down.
“There!” said Melpomene, the muse of tragedy. “ What did I tell you?”
Thalia, the goddess of comedy, had a startled expression on her usually joyous countenance.
“I should never have thought it! ” she said at last.


PART ONE THIRSTY EVIL
Our natures do pursue.
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil . ..
Act I, Sc. 2.
I
We shall employ thee in a worthier place.
Act V, Sc. 1.
When Ballantyne and Henty supplied most of my reading needs, I had a particular fondness for stories that opened with the young hero giving a few details about his birth—that, for instance, he had come into the world one tempestuous night in ’89 on the restless bosom of the broad Atlantic—and finished with the pleasurable, yet a little sad, description of the same young man perched on the taffrail of the good ship Dolphin, as they said farewell to Tahiti (or Labrador, as the case might have been) and set a course for England, Home and Mr. Gladstone. And now that I am embarking on a story of my own—a story not of coral islands or the Far North, but of a plain man’s doings and sudden death—I see no reason why I should not begin in much the same fashion as did those adventurous lads.
I was born, then, at Lee, at that time in the County of Kent, but now in the County of London, on the 9th November, 1905. My father, John Tudor, was a chartered accountant, having offices in Bucklersbury, near the Mansion House in the City of London; and it was by his decree—against the wishes of my mother, who would have liked me to be named Percival Herbert after her brother, who had distinguished himself at Spion Kop—that I was christened Walter Vaughan, in commemoration of the fact that I came into the world on the same day as Mr. Walter Vaughan Morgan was made Lord Mayor of London.
With the name of Walter, one thing seems inevitable, yet I never had to answer to “Wally” or the even more horrible “Wal.” My parents always used my second name and when I went to school I was known by my surname until some bright form-mate was struck by the significance of my birthday and thereupon dubbed me “Turtle” Tudor.
Of my years as a day-boy at a school in Sidcup, which is still in the County of Kent, I have jumbled memories. It is strange, but I cannot be sure that many of the things I recall did actually happen to me or to some other boy or even to a character in a book. Yet there are pictures that stand out very clearly. For example, during my first term, a skin disease spread amongst the boarders; and while we uninfected ones were at our desks, they roamed the school grounds with their shaven heads covered by tight-fitting, black skull-caps. I vividly remember with what envy I watched them through the classroom windows, climbing the trees in the Grove or kicking a rugger pill about Big Field. How willingly then would I have fallen victim to ringworm!
There are other pictures: a boy fainting in the school chapel during the Armistice Day silence, the English master reading aloud from The Last Days of Pompeii on a sulky summer’s afternoon, a boy killing a frog by throwing it against a wall....
Then there are smells and tastes: a single whiff of floor polish and I am transported to those school corridors; of linseed oil, to the cricket-pavilion; of ammonia, to the chemmy lab.; of freshly sharpened pencils, to the class-rooms. One bite at a banana and I am carried back to the sandwiches that my mother prepared for my lunch and stowed away in my satchel before I left home in the morning.
At games my achievements were few. I played cricket and rugger because I was forced to, and under the same compulsion, entered every year for the school sports. The peak of my athletic career was reached in 1921, when I was second in the cross-country run and second again in the half-mile, both times being beaten by a boy called Ridpath.
It was curious about Ridpath. As I have said, I was a dayboy—or day-bug, as we used to be called. Ridpath was a boarder, his parents being abroad, and he and I were friends. That may not seem unusual, but at our school it was. There was a clearly defined barrier between day-boys and boarders, hence the scornful name of day-bug. Outside the classrooms, the boarders kept to themselves—and the day-bugs were expected to do the same. Of course, at that time the boarders were in the majority. Nowadays, at the same school, with the day-boys far outnumbering the boarders, there is a very different state of affairs.
Yet Ridpath and I were firm friends, not because he was out of sympathy with his fellow boarders, for no boy in the school was better liked than he, but because each of us found fellowship in the other. On Sundays during term-time, he sometimes came to tea with us at Lee and was a great favourite with my mother, who was accustomed to make cakes for him and slip them in my satchel with my books and banana-sandwiches. Once, as an alternative to spending his summer holidays in the lonely, empty school, he came away with us to Walton-on-the-Naze.
Just as I was called Tur