shot dead. We found him in the Circle. I’m sending for the police. It’s the man you spoke to, Fred.”
There was a grim silence for a moment and every spark of colour went out of Allerton’s cheeks. Lincross nodded towards the foyer and went on his way.
“And a dead man queers my supper,” growled Alcot.
“Not just dead, Dick—murdered,” Allerton said pointedly.
“Either way it has nothing to do with us,” Alcot insisted.
“But we stay just the same—because the boss says so,” Peter Canfield observed, locking the projection-room door and handing Allerton the key. They went down the stairs into the foyer. Behind them, her face pensive, came Maria Black. Then Nancy Crane came down to her side.
“‘I suppose, Miss Black, this is right up your street? Everybody round here knows you’re a detective—not official though. You got a lot of publicity when you solved how that girl who came to your school was hanged. Remember?”
“You’d better find the usherettes,” Maria murmured. “Join me afterwards.”
Nancy nodded and hurried ahead. Once in the foyer Maria picked a plush armchair for herself and settled in it calmly. Presently Nancy came back, her work of rounding-up completed.
She settled in the chair close to Maria and looked at her earnestly. “It must be exciting to be a detective, Miss Black!”
“It has its moments, Nancy,” Maria admitted. “However, don’t forget that I am a Headmistress. Criminology is merely a hobby. In any case I cannot upset police procedure.... Yet,” she finished, smiling inscrutably, “here am I sitting here, when I could be on my way home if I chose. As a member of the audience and seated behind the dead man, I am not at all suspect. It is a fact that a criminal puzzle draws me irresistibly, Nancy.”
The girl nodded and looked about her as the staff began to assemble in the foyer. Fred Allerton, Alcot, and Peter Canfield kept in a tight little group by the pay-box. Violet Thompson and Sheila Brant, the two Stalls usherettes, fully dressed in overcoats and with scarves wrapped over their heads, hesitated by the exit doorway. Bradshaw the doorman was upstairs as yet, changing into his ordinary clothes.... Mary Saunders was touching up her auburn hair before the mirror near the Circle stairway. Molly Ibbetson was seated on a distant chair, swinging her short chubby legs and adjusting the bandeau round her ebon hair.
From her position at the far end of the foyer Maria Black could study each one of them under the bright lights—and she did, quite impartially, as though surveying a class of girls at Roseway...then she glanced round as Lincross came hurrying out of his office, beads of perspiration on top of his bald head.
From the centre of the foyer he looked round on the assembly.
“I’ve phoned Inspector Morgan,” he announced. “He’ll be here soon—and until then I’m afraid you will have to stay. Except you, Miss Black. There is no reason why....”
“I am here from choice, Mr. Lincross,” Maria smiled. “I know Inspector Morgan very well—a most worthy representative of the local constabulary. I’ll be quite interested to see what he does.”
Lincross shrugged, then he glanced towards the stairs as Bradshaw came down them in mackintosh and cap. “Afraid you can’t leave, Bradshaw,” Lincross said.
“I know,” Bradshaw grunted. “And this means I’ll be late for my goodnight drink.... Rotten do, I call it “
He sat down in a chair and lighted a cigarette. Sensing he was conspicuous standing in the centre of the assembly, Lincross too found a seat. The uneasy silence that enfolds employer and employee when circumstances bring them into close proximity dropped....
At ten-fifteen by the foyer clock, ten minutes after Lincross’s phone call, there came the noise of a car stopping near the outside entrance. A few seconds the glass doors swung apart to admit the persevering Inspector Morgan and Sergeant Claythorne of the local constabulary.
Morgan was of medium height, but packed as solidly as a West Highland bull; and he was very nearly as pugnacious. His eyebrows were the most obvious thing about him—black, astonishingly bushy, overhanging eyes of sapphire blue. A short nose and a prominent chin completed a face that typified dogged persistency rather than actual keenness. From under the edges of his official cap hair peeped in close-cropped bristles
Sergeant Claythome was very different—tall and twenty-six, with the delicate complexion of a girl. His height and by no means dull intellect were the sole qualifications that had shoe-horned him into the local force. Maria Black could still recall the day when he had been a highly sensitive schoolboy.
“Evening, sir....” Morgan directed his attention to Lincross after his gaze had encompassed the assembly; then he glanced for the second time towards the figure in a distant comer and added with emphasis, “And good evening, Miss Black!”
Maria nodded imperceptibly and Morgan cleared his throat.
“Sergeant, you’d better wait outside the front doors there.”
“Right, sir.”
The doors opened and shut behind Claythorne’s lanky figure; then Morgan tugged out a notebook from the breast pocket of his uniform and looked at Lincross.
“Man dead in the Circle, you said? Where is he?”
“Still in the Circle,” Maria remarked dryly, getting to her feet.
“I meant, has he been moved?” Morgan’s voice was bitter.
“No, Inspector—he’s just where he was,” Lincross answered.
Morgan nodded and cast a disapproving blue eye at Maria Black, then he followed Lincross up the staircase to the Circle then down to Row A. The Inspector came to a stop before the motionless man in seat 11 and looked at him critically. After a long scrutiny of the puncture in the man’s forehead, he gazed across the cinema towards the dusty, closed curtains covering the screen—then up above at the ceiling with its big ventilator arch and the fan-grids over the stalls.
“Interesting business, Inspector, isn’t it?”
Morgan turned sharply as he saw Maria Black seated with her umbrella at the end of row B watching him. Morgan could have sworn that in an indirect way she was laughing at him.
“Yes,” he answered briefly, feeling that her forbidding presence upset his authority. Then he glanced at Lincross standing beside the balustrade. “I’ve got fingerprint and photograph men on the way from Lexham. Be here any time—though I don’t see a fingerprint man is much use with no weapon in sight. Dr. Roberts won’t be long, either.... For the moment I think we’ll go back into the foyer.”
The two men and Maria returned below to find the assembly talking among themselves impatiently.
“This won’t take long,” Morgan told them, looking round. “I just want a few questions answered, that’s all. Who found the body?”
“I did.” Nancy Crane stood up nervously.
“You did. And you’ll be—an usherette?”
“Miss Nancy Crane is my supervising usherette,”
