The Mousetrap and Other Plays Read online

  (CARBERY shakes his head at GERARD, goes to the marquee and calls.)

  CARBERY. (Calling) Mr. Boynton. (He moves below the table.)

  (RAYMOND and SARAH enter from the marquee and move to Left of CARBERY.)

  (He hands the phial to RAYMOND.) Have you ever seen this before?

  RAYMOND. (Wonderingly) No.

  CARBERY. And yet one of my Arab fellows found it in the pocket of the clothes you were wearing yesterday.

  RAYMOND. (Utterly taken aback) In my pocket?

  CARBERY. (His manner now quite different; no longer vague) That’s what I said.

  RAYMOND. I simply don’t understand what you are talking about. What is this thing?

  CARBERY. It’s got a label on it.

  RAYMOND. (Reading) “Digitoxin.”

  CARBERY. Digitoxin is a heart poison.

  SARAH. What are you driving at, Colonel Carbery?

  CARBERY. I’m just anxious to know how that phial of digitoxin got from Doctor Gerard’s case into Mr. Boynton’s pocket.

  RAYMOND. I know nothing about it.

  CARBERY. You deny taking it from Doctor Gerard’s case?

  RAYMOND. Certainly I do. I’ve never seen it before. (He tips the phial.) Anyway, it’s nearly empty.

  GERARD. It was quite full—yesterday afternoon. (He takes the phial from RAYMOND and moves Centre.)

  RAYMOND. (Turning a startled face on GERARD) You mean . . .?

  CARBERY. (Quickly) Doctor King. Do you own a hypodermic syringe?

  SARAH. Yes.

  CARBERY. Where is it?

  SARAH. In my tent. Shall I get it?

  CARBERY. If you please.

  (SARAH crosses and exits Right.)

  RAYMOND. What you’re suggesting is impossible—quite impossible.

  CARBERY. I’m not aware that I’ve suggested anything.

  RAYMOND. What sort of a fool do you take me for? The inference is perfectly plain. You think my mother was—(He swallows) poisoned?

  CARBERY. I haven’t said so.

  RAYMOND. Then what do you mean?

  CARBERY. I just want to know why Doctor Gerard’s phial was in your pocket.

  RAYMOND. It wasn’t.

  CARBERY. One of my fellows found it there.

  RAYMOND. I tell you I never touched the . . . (He stops, suddenly assailed by a sudden memory.)

  CARBERY. Sure about that?

  (SARAH enters Right and crosses to CARBERY. She carries her hypodermic case.)

  SARAH. Here you are. (She hands the case to CARBERY.)

  CARBERY. Thank you, Doctor King. (He opens the case, looks at RAYMOND, then at SARAH.)

  SARAH. What . . . ?

  (CARBERY holds the case out.)

  (She sees the case is empty.) Empty?

  CARBERY. Empty.

  SARAH. But—how extraordinary. I’m sure I never . . . (She stops, beginning to be frightened.)

  GERARD. That is the hypodermic case you offered to me yesterday afternoon. You are sure it was in the case then?

  SARAH. Yes.

  CARBERY. (Crossing to GERARD) Any idea when it was taken out, Gerard?

  GERARD. (Upset) I do not believe . . . (He breaks off.)

  CARBERY. Now what don’t you believe?

  GERARD. (Moving Right Centre) C’est impossible. C’est impossible.

  SARAH. Jinny?

  CARBERY. Jinny? Is that your sister, Mr. Boynton?

  (RAYMOND does not answer.)

  Perhaps you would ask her to come here.

  GERARD. (Sharply) No.

  CARBERY. (Turning a mildly surprised eye at him) She may be able to clear up the matter. If you’d just fetch her, Mr. Boynton.

  (RAYMOND crosses and exits Right. CARBERY crosses above the table to Left of it.)

  GERARD. You do not understand. You do not understand the very first principles. Listen, my dear sir, this girl will not be able to clear anything up.

  CARBERY. But she handled this case—yesterday afternoon. (He puts the case on the table.) That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what’s worrying you?

  GERARD. Jinny couldn’t possibly have used that hypodermic. It would be entirely out of character. I—ah, mon Dieu, how am I to make you understand?

  CARBERY. (Sitting Left of the table) Just go on telling me.

  GERARD. (Crossing and standing up Right of the table) Ginevra Boynton is at the moment in a highly abnormal mental condition. Doctor King will bear me out.

  SARAH. (Moving Right) Doctor Gerard is one of the greatest living authorities on this subject.

  CARBERY. (Amiably) I know. I know all about him.

  (SARAH moves to the deckchair down Right and sits.)

  GERARD. If Ginevra Boynton took that syringe from Doctor King’s case, she certainly did not take it for the reason you are suggesting.

  CARBERY. (Plaintively) But I’m not suggesting anything. It’s you people who are doing all the suggesting.

  (RAYMOND and GINEVRA enter Right. GINEVRA crosses to Left Centre. CARBERY rises and indicates the chair Right of the table. GINEVRA thanks him with a little royal inclination of her head and sits Right of the table.)

  (He resumes his seat.) Just want to ask you something, Miss Boynton. There’s a hypodermic syringe missing from this case. Do you know anything about it?

  GINEVRA. (Shaking her head) No—oh, no.

  CARBERY. Are you sure you didn’t take it?

  GINEVRA. Why should I take it?

  CARBERY. Well—(He smiles at her) I’m asking you.

  GINEVRA. (Leaning forward) Are you on my side?

  CARBERY. (Startled) Eh, what’s that?

  GINEVRA. Or are you one of them?

  (GERARD makes a gesture of frustration.)

  (She turns swiftly and looks at GERARD.) Ask him. He knows. He came here—he followed me from Jerusalem—to protect me. To keep me safe from my enemies.

  CARBERY. What enemies, Miss Boynton?

  GINEVRA. I mustn’t say. No, I mustn’t say. It isn’t safe.

  CARBERY. What do you know about this hypodermic?

  GINEVRA. I know who took it. (She nods.)

  CARBERY. Who?

  GINEVRA. It was meant for me. They were going to kill me. After dark. I should have been asleep. I shouldn’t have cried out. They knew, you see, that I’d not got the knife.

  CARBERY. What knife?

  GINEVRA. I stole a knife. He—(She looks at GERARD) took it away from me. I ought to have had it—to protect myself with. They were plotting to kill me.

  GERARD. (Moving behind GINEVRA and shaking her by the shoulders) You must stop this playacting—none of that that you please yourself by imagining is real. You know in your heart that it is not real.

  GINEVRA. It’s true—it’s all true.

  GERARD. (Kneeling by her) No, it is not true. Listen, Ginevra, your mother is dead and you will lead now a new life. You must come out of this world of shadows and fancies. You are free now—free.

  GINEVRA. (Rising) Mother is dead—I’m free—free. (She crosses to Right Centre.) Mother is dead. (She turns suddenly to CARBERY.) Did I kill her?

  GERARD. (Rising and moving up Centre.) Ah! Mon Dieu!

  SARAH. (Rising, fiercely) Of course you didn’t kill her.

  GINEVRA. (Turning a mad lovely smile on SARAH) How do you know?

  (GINEVRA exits Right)

  SARAH. (After a moment’s stunned pause) She doesn’t know what she’s saying.

  CARBERY. (Rising) The question seems to be, did she know what she was doing.

  SARAH. She didn’t do anything. (She moves Right Centre.)

  CARBERY. I wonder.

  (LENNOX and NADINE enter Right. Their faces are anxious.)

  NADINE. (Moving Right Centre) What have you been doing to Jinny? She said—she said . . .

  CARBERY. What did she say, Mrs. Boynton?

  NADINE. She said. “They think I killed Mother.” She was smiling. Oh!

  GERARD. It all fits in. It is the instinct to dramatize herself. You have given h
er a new role, that is all.

  NADINE. (Crossing to Right of the table) You don’t understand, Colonel Carbery. My sister-in-law is not well. She is suffering from a kind of nervous breakdown. It’s all so fantastic. Just because my mother-in-law unfortunately died . . .

  CARBERY. Unfortunately?

  NADINE. What do you mean?

  CARBERY. It was, if you’ll excuse me for saying it, not such a very unfortunate death for all of you, was it?

  LENNOX. (Crossing to Right of NADINE) What are you hinting at? What are you trying to say?

  CARBERY. We’d better have it quite clear. (He pauses, moves down Left Centre a little, then speaks in a dry official voice.) Cases of sudden death, Mr. Boynton, are always investigated if there has been no physician attending the deceased who can give a death certificate. There will have to be an inquest on Mrs. Boynton. The object of that inquest will be to determine how the deceased came to her death. There are several possibilities. First, there is death from natural causes—well, that’s perfectly possible. Mrs. Boynton was suffering from a heart complaint. But there are other possibilities. There’s accidental death. She was taking digitalis. Could she have taken by some mistake—an overdose? (He pauses) Or could she have been given—(Significantly) by mistake, an overdose?

  NADINE. I . . .

  CARBERY. I understand, Mrs. Boynton, that it was you who habitually administered digitalis to your mother-in-law.

  NADINE. Yes.

  CARBERY. Is there any possibility that you might have given her an overdose?

  NADINE. No. (Clearly) Neither by accident nor, Colonel Carbery, by intention.

  CARBERY. Come come, now, I never suggested that.

  NADINE. It is what you meant.

  CARBERY. I was just considering the possibilities of accident. (He crosses to Left Centre.) So we come to the third possibility. (Sharply) Murder. Yes, just that, murder. And we have got certain evidence to support that view. First, the digitoxin that disappeared from Doctor Gerard’s case and reappeared in Raymond Boynton’s pocket.

  (GERARD moves to Left of the table.)

  RAYMOND. I tell you I know nothing about that—nothing.

  CARBERY. Secondly, the hypodermic needle that is missing from Doctor King’s case.

  SARAH. (Crossing to Right) If Ginevra took it, it was playacting, nothing more.

  CARBERY. (To LENNOX) And thirdly, Mr. Boynton, we come to you.

  LENNOX. (Starting) To me?

  SARAH. One of your Arab fellows has found something else, I suppose?

  CARBERY. One of my Arab fellows—as you put it, Doctor King—saw something else.

  LENNOX. Saw?

  CARBERY. Yes. Yesterday afternoon most people were out walking or else resting from a walk, Mr. Boynton. There was no one—or you thought there was no one—about. You went up to your mother as she was sitting up there. (He nods towards the cave.) You took her hand and bent over her wrist. I don’t know exactly what you did, Mr. Boynton, and my Arab fellow couldn’t see what you did, but your mother cried out.

  LENNOX. (Agitated) I can explain. I—she—her bracelet had come undone. She asked me to fasten it. I did. But I was clumsy—I caught the flesh of her wrist in the hinge at the back. That’s what made her cry out.

  CARBERY. I see. That’s your story.

  LENNOX. It’s the truth.

  NADINE. I know that bracelet. It was tight-fitting. It wasn’t at all easy to fasten.

  (CARBERY nods quietly.)

  LENNOX. (Shrilly) What do you think I did?

  CARBERY. I was wondering whether you gave her a rapid injection. (To GERARD) Death would result, I think you said, very quickly from rapid palsy of the heart.

  GERARD. That is correct.

  CARBERY. She would cry out and try to rise—and that would be all.

  GERARD. That would be all.

  LENNOX. It’s not true. You can’t prove it.

  CARBERY. There is a mark on her wrist. It is the mark of a hypodermic needle—not a mark caused by the hinge of a bracelet. I don’t like murder, Mr. Boynton.

  LENNOX. She wasn’t murdered.

  CARBERY. I think she was.

  SARAH. It’s fantastic. You built up all this from what a few Arabs have pretended to find or to see. They’re probably lying.

  CARBERY. My men don’t lie to me, Doctor King. They’ve found what they say they’ve found where they said they found it. And they’ve seen what they said they’ve seen. And they’ve heard what they’ve said they heard. (He pauses.)

  GERARD. Heard?

  CARBERY. (Crossing down Left and turning) Yes—heard. Don’t you remember? “One of us has got to kill her.”

  CURTAIN

  Scene II

  SCENE: The same. The same afternoon.

  When the curtain rises, the four BOYNTONS are sitting on the rock up Right, which is now in shadow. They are quite still and are lost in a stupor of despair. NADINE and GINEVRA are seated on stools with their backs to the audience. LENNOX is leaning on the rock Left of the cave mouth. RAYMOND is seated halfway up the steps. SARAH is pacing up and down Right Centre. Her hands are clenched and she is obviously fighting misery and doubt. COPE enters down the slope Left. He is fatigued and despondent. He looks at the group on the rock, then moves Centre.

  SARAH. Have you got a cigarette?

  COPE. (Moving to SARAH) Why, certainly. (He proffers his case.)

  SARAH. (Taking a cigarette) Thanks.

  COPE. (Lighting her cigarette) I suppose we shall be leaving before long.

  SARAH. (Crossing and sitting Right of the table) I suppose so. I wish we had never come here.

  COPE. (Crossing and sitting Left of the table) Amen to that. I’m the kind of guy who’s born to be a stooge. As soon as the old lady went west I knew my number was up. Why the heck did she have to die just then? Now—well, Nadine will never leave her husband now. She’ll stand by him now, whatever he’s done.

  SARAH. (Sharply) Do you think he—did it?

  COPE. Lennox is a queer guy. I’ve never been able to size him up properly. You’d say, to look at him, that he wouldn’t have the guts to do anything violent—but, well, you never know what a man’s like underneath. I’d still like to think that the old lady died a natural death. After all, she was a very sick woman.

  SARAH. (Rising and looking up at the BOYNTONS) Look at them.

  COPE. (Staring up at the BOYNTONS) You mean—they don’t think so? (He rises and moves to Left of her.) It—yes, it sort of gets you, the way they sit there, not saying anything. Almost Wagnerian, isn’t it? The twilight of the gods. Symbolical in a way, sitting in that shadow.

  SARAH. Her shadow.

  COPE. Yes—yes, I see what you mean.

  SARAH. (Crossing down Left; desperately) She’s got them still. Her death hasn’t set them free after all.

  COPE. (Shaking his head) I guess this has been a very trying day for all of us. Oh, well, I guess I might as well let Abraham show me where the Natabeans are buried.

  (COPE crosses and exits Right. GERARD enters down Right.)

  SARAH. (Crossing to GERARD) When we get back to civilization, what will happen?

  GERARD. It will depend largely on the result of the autopsy.

  SARAH. There’s a very strong chance that it won’t be conclusive.

  GERARD. I know.

  SARAH. (Desperately) Why can’t we do something?

  GERARD. What do you want to do?

  SARAH. That’s easy. I want Raymond. It was a battle between me and that old she-devil. This morning I thought I’d won. Now—look at them.

  (GERARD looks up at the BOYNTONS, then studies SARAH.)

  GERARD. (After a pause) Do you think he killed her?

  SARAH. (Fiercely) No. (She crosses to Left of the table.)

  GERARD. You don’t think so, but you’re not sure.

  SARAH. I am sure.

  GERARD. One of them killed her.

  SARAH. Not Raymond.

  GERARD. (Shrugging his shoulders) Enfin, you
are a woman. (He crosses to Right of the table.)

  SARAH. It’s not that. (With courage) Oh, well, perhaps it is. But they didn’t plan to kill her. (She moves down Left.) They may have thought of killing her, but it’s not the same thing. We all—think of things.

  GERARD. Very true. All the same, one of them did more than think.

  SARAH. Yes.

  GERARD. The question is, which of them? One can make out a case against any one of them. Raymond actually had the digitoxin in his possession.

  SARAH. (Moving and sitting Left of the table) That’s a point in his favour. If he had used it he wouldn’t be so idiotic as to leave the bottle in his pocket.

  GERARD. I don’t know. He may have been quite confident that her death would be attributed to natural causes—as it would have been but for my discovery of the missing phial.

  SARAH. It wasn’t Raymond. I watched his face when Colonel Carbery produced that bottle.

  GERARD. Eh bien! (He sits Right of the table.) Then there is Nadine Boynton. She has plenty of nerve and efficiency, that quiet young woman. Nothing easier for her than to administer a lethal dose of digitoxin in Mrs. Boynton’s medicine. Then she slips the bottle in Raymond’s pocket.

  SARAH. You are making her out a revolting character.

  GERARD. Women are unscrupulous. She plants suspicion against her brother-in-law in order to be sure that no suspicion falls on her husband.

  SARAH. Suspicion did fall on him.

  GERARD. Yes. Is his story of the bracelet true? Myself I do not believe it.

  SARAH. (Rising) What you mean is that you don’t want it to be your precious Jinny.

  GERARD. (Rising, excitably) Of course it was not Jinny. I tell you it is psychologically impossible.

  SARAH. (Crossing to Right) You Frenchmen! It is not at all psychologically impossible that Jinny should kill someone—and you know it.

  GERARD. (Following her; excitedly) Yes, but not in that way. If she killed, she would kill flamboyantly, spectacularly. With the knife—that, yes, I can imagine it. But she would have to dramatize her act.

  SARAH. Couldn’t it be someone outside altogether?

  GERARD. (Moving Left Centre) It would be pleasant to think so—but you know only too well that what you say is unsound. After all, who is there? The good Jefferson Cope. But the death of the tyrannical old woman deprives him of the lady of his affection.

  SARAH. Oh, it isn’t Jefferson Cope. As you say, he’s no motive. Nor have the others. But there’s you—and there’s me. You know, Doctor Gerard, I had a motive—and it is my syringe that is missing.