But last night, there had been no audience. NObody, that is to say, had been facing the stage set that Miss Marple was now facing. The audience, last night, had been sitting with their backs to that particular stage.
How long, Miss Marple wondered, would it have taken to slip out of the room, run along the corridor, shoot Gulbrandsen and come back? Not nearly so long as one would think. Measured in minutes and seconds a very short time indeed…
What had Carrie Louise meant when she had said to her husband: ‘So that’s what you believe – but you’re wrong, Lewis!’
‘I must say that that was a very penetrating remark of the Inspector’s,’ Alex’s voice cut in on her meditations.
‘About a stage set being real. Made of wood and cardboard and stuck together with glue and as real on the unpainted as on the painted side. “The illusion,” he pointed out, “is in the.eyes of the audience.”‘
‘Like conjurers,’ Miss Marple murmured vaguely.
‘They do it with mirrors is, I believe, the slang phrase.’ Stephen Restarick came in, slightly out of breath.
‘Hallo, Alex,’ he said. ‘That little rat, Ernie Gregg – I don’t know if you remember him?’
‘The one who played Feste when you did Twelfth Night? Quite a bit of talent there, I thought.’
‘Yes, he’s got talent of a sort. Very good with his hands too. Does a lot of our carpentry. H°wever, that’s neither here nor there. He’s been boasting to Gina that he gets out at night and wanders about the grounds. Says he was wandering round last night and boasts he saw something.’ Alex spun round.
‘Saw what?’
‘Says he’s not going to tell. Actually I’m pretty certain he’s only trying to show off and get into the limelight. He’s an awful liar, but I thought perhaps he ought to be questioned.’ Alex said sharply: ‘I should leave him for a bit. Don’t let him think ‘we’re too interested.’ ‘Perhaps – yes, I think you may be right there. This evening, perhaps.’ Stephen went on into the library.
Miss Marple, moving gently round the Hall in her character of mobile audience, collided with Alex Restarick as he steptied back suddenly.
Miss Marple said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Alex frowned at her, said in an absent sort of way: ‘I beg your pardon,’ and then added in a surprised voice: ‘Oh, it’s you.’ It seemed to Miss Marple an odd remark for someone with whom she had been conversing for some considerable time.
‘I was thinking of something else,’ said Alex Restarick.
‘That boy Ernie -‘ He made vague motions with both hands.
Then, with a sudden change of manner, he crossed the Hall and went through the library door, shutting it behind him.
The murmur of voices came from behind the closed door, but Miss Marple hardly noticed them. She was uninterested in the versatile Ernie and what he had seen or pretended to see. She had a shrewd suspicion that Ernie had seen nothing at all. She did not believe for a moment that on a cold raw foggy night like last night, Ernie would have troubled to use his lockpicking activities and wander about in the Park. In all probability he never had got out at night. Boasting, that was all it had been.
‘Like Johnnie Backhouse,’ thought Miss Marple, who always had a good storehouse of parallels to draw upon selected from inhabitants of St Mary Mead.
‘I seen you last night,’ had been Johnnie Backhouse’s unpleasant taunt to all he thought it might affect.
It had been a surprisingly successful remark. So many people, Miss Marple reflected, have been in places where they are anxious not to be seen!
She dismissed Johnnie from her mind and concentrated on a vague something which Alex’s account of Inspector Curry’s remarks had stirred to life. Those remarks had given Alex an idea. She was not sure that they had not given her an idea, too. The same idea? Or a different one?
She stood where Alex Restarick had stood. She thought to herself, ‘This is not a real Hall. This is only cardboard and canvas and wood. This is a stage scene…’ Scrappy phrases flashed across her mind. ‘Illusion -‘ ‘In the eyes of the audience.’ ‘They do it with mirrors…’ Bowls of goldfish… yards of coloured ribbon. vanishing ladies… all the panoply and misdirection of the conjurer’s art.