Cast For Death by Margaret Yorke

chosen and would have accepted – probably all through his agent. He might have come up to arrange about digs or something like that. I don’t know. Why?’
    ‘Oh, I was just curious,’ said Patrick. ‘It seems odd that he should jump in the river when he’d got a season here planned. What else was he going to be?’
    ‘Oh, something or other in Julius Caesar – Cinna, was it?’
    ‘Cinna the poet? Or the other one?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Hm. Cinna the poet came to a sticky end too,’ said Patrick.
    ‘Irwin’s career does seem to have been rather a stop-go one. Maybe he didn’t feel he could cope with the challenge here,’ said Denis, with surprising insight. ‘He’d have had at least one more part – probably not a very big one – in Henry V.’
    ‘You mean he may have got stage fright?’
    ‘Could be.’
    Some shock or other had made Sam’s heart stop before he could drown. Was it the sudden chill of total immersion, or the terror of being bound and stuffed in a sack? But why should anyone want to tie him up and stuff him in a sack? It all came back to that.
    Patrick walked back with Denis to the theatre, with the aim of trying to get a ticket for the evening performance. Just as they arrived, he saw Sergeant Bruce, last seen in Sam’s Hammersmith digs, and an older man in plain clothes, leaving the stage door. They got into a large black car and drove away.
    So the police had learned of Sam’s commitment here and come to enquire about it. And they had come from London, not merely asked for a report from the local force.
    He wondered what they had been able to learn. What a pity the case was not a Yard one; then he could have asked Colin.
    He decided to postpone Othello until another time.

 
2
     
    It was not at all difficult to discover the name of Sam Irwin’s agent. Patrick simply went round to the stage door of the Fantasy Theatre and asked, after driving straight to London from Stratford-upon-Avon. By this time the cast were beginning to come in for the evening performance. The stage door-keeper telephoned somebody, and a man appeared whom Patrick recognised as the actor playing Malcolm. He supplied the answer straight away, said he was grieved about Sam, and announced that he meant to go to the funeral.
    Patrick was glad to find some evidence that Sam had been regarded, if not with affection, at least with esteem, by his colleagues. It was too late to call on the agent now; that must wait. The evening lay blankly ahead, and he thought of Liz. He got into the car and drove to Bolton Gardens, where she lived.
    Liz took some time to answer the bell, and he had almost given her up when at last he heard her disembodied voice over the entry-phone as he stood on the step outside the old house in which she had a flat. She sounded surprised when she heard who it was below, but bade him enter, and the door unlocked to admit him.
    Her flat was on the third floor. It had only two rooms, apart from the bathroom and kitchen, but they were large. Patrick had not been there for some time; there was a comfortable feeling of familiarity, however, as he walked through the door which Liz had left slightly ajar and into the hall, where a vase of daffodils stood on a small table under an old, gilt-framed mirror. Liz appeared at once, wearing a towelling robe.
    ‘I was having a bath when you rang,’ she said.
    Patrick kissed her. He always did when they met, but chastely. Now he suddenly kissed her a second time, and with more fervour.
    She looked surprised, but pleased.
    ‘You look very seductive,’ he said.
    ‘Do I?’ She laughed, blushed slightly, and added, ‘Good.’
    It was Patrick’s turn to look surprised.
    ‘Are you expecting anyone?’ he asked suspiciously.
    I should say yes, thought Liz, but she answered truthfully.
    ‘No. I’ve got a manuscript to read. I was going to spend the evening with it.’ Liz was a publisher’s editor.
    ‘Come out to dinner instead,’ said Patrick, and