Buffet for Unwelcome Guests Read Online Free PDF

you?’
    It was as though an act which for a moment had broken down, reduced the cast to gagging, now received a cue from prompt corner and got going again. Leila Dragon said, ‘You were hysterical, you were losing control.’
    ‘How dare you?’ screamed the girl. Her pretty face was waspish with spiteful rage. ‘All I’ve done is to try to protect him, like the rest of you…’
    ‘Be quiet,’ said Mrs. Dragon, in The Voice.
    ‘Let her say what she has to say,’ the detective said. She was silent. ‘Come now. “He was wearing it when he came back”—the Othello costume. “ When he came back .” From finding the body, Miss Leila Dragon now says. But he didn’t “come back”. You all followed him to the dressing-room—you said so.’
    She remained silent, however; and he could deal with her later—time was passing, clues were growing cold. ‘Very well then, Mr. Dragon, let us get on with it. I want to see your wrists and arms.’
    ‘But why me?’ said James Dragon, almost petulantly; and once again there was that strange effect of an unreal act being staged for some set purpose: and once again the stark reality of a face grown all in a moment haggard and old beneath the dark stain of the Moor.
    ‘It’s not only you. I may come to the rest, in good time.’
    ‘But me first?’
    ‘Get on with it, please,’ he said impatiently.
    But when at last, fighting every inch of the way, with an ill grace he slowly divested himself of the great sleeves—there was nothing to be seen: nothing but a brown-stained hand whose colour ended abruptly at the wrist, giving place to forearms startlingly white against the brown—but innocent of scratches or marks of any kind.
    ‘Nor did Iago, I may add in passing, nor did Cassio nor the Clown nor anyone else in the room, have marks of any kind on wrists or arms. So there I was—five minutes wasted and nothing to show for it.’
    ‘Well hardly,’ said Inspector Cockrill, passing walnuts to his neighbour.
    ‘I beg your pardon? Did Mr. Cockrill say something again?’
    ‘I just murmured that there was after all, something to show for it—for the five minutes wasted.’
    ‘?’
    ‘Five minutes wasted,’ said Inspector Cockrill.
    Five minutes wasted. Yes. They had been working for it, they were playing for time. Waiting for something. Or postponing something? ‘And of course, meanwhile, there had been the scene with the girl,’ said Cockie. ‘That wasn’t a waste of time. That told you a lot. I mean—losing control and screaming out that he had been wearing Othello’s costume “at the very moment…” and, “when he came back”. “Losing control”—and yet what she screamed out contained at least one careful lie. Because he hadn’t been wearing the costume—that we know for certain.’ And he added inconsequently that they had to remember all the time that these were acting folk.
    But that had not been the end of the scene with the girl. As he perfunctorily examined her arms—for surely no woman had had any part in the murder—she had whispered to him that she wanted to speak to him: outside. And, darting looks of poison at them, holding her hand to her slapped face, she had gone out with him to the corridor. ‘I stood with her there while she talked,’ said the old man. ‘Her face, of course, was heavily made up; and yet under the make-up I could see the weal where Leila Dragon had slapped her. She was not hysterical now, she was cool and clear; but she was afraid and for the first time it seemed to be not at all an act, she seemed to be genuinely afraid, and afraid at what she was about to say to me. But she said it. It was a—solution: a suggestion of how the crime had been done; though she unsaid nothing that she had already said. I went back into the Green-room. They were all standing about, white-faced, looking at her as she followed me in; and with them, also, there seemed to be an air of genuine horror, genuine dread, as though the need