Full Dark House (14 page)

‘I’ve heard rumours,’ admitted Madeline Penn, the skinny, nervous ASM. ‘Stan’s been putting the fear of God up everyone as they sign in, but there’s been no real news. She’s walked out of jobs before, hasn’t she?’

‘He reckons she was carried out of this one in the dead of night,’ offered Charles Senechal, a chubby Anglo-French baritone who, like their Eurydice, was on loan from Lyon. ‘Slaughtered by a lover. Body parts missing.’

‘Well, if that’s the case, somebody made a jolly good job of cleaning up the blood,’ said Corinne.

‘If I had a franc for every story I heard circulating around a theatre I’d be rich by now.’ Charles had been assigned the role of Jupiter. It was a part he had performed so many times before that his performance was in danger of becoming petrified, but audiences loved him.

‘Apparently she was having a torrid affair with someone right here in the theatre,’ whispered Madeline.

‘I haven’t heard about that.’ Harry looked shocked. ‘I’m sure I would have seen her with someone.’

‘The trouble with you, Harry, is you never notice flirting between the sexes,’ snapped Corinne. ‘She was being rogered by someone in our esteemed cast. I should know, because I caught them at it. Walked into her dressing room thinking she’d gone for the night and there she was with her heels in the sink and her bloomers hanging from the light. She didn’t even make the effort of trying to look embarrassed.’

‘Who was it?’

‘That would be tittle-tattle, Harry, and I know you don’t approve. Besides, I was fascinated by the sight of his hairy bottom poking out of his shirt-tails.’

‘You should tell the detectives.’

‘What, and have them hanging around all week ogling the chorus girls? You know how I feel about outsiders. Elspeth, put that thing down, love. It weed all over the stage yesterday.’

Elspeth Wynter had been watching from the wings, where she had gone to retrieve Nijinsky. The tortoise refused to stay in its box, and regularly headed for the dim warmth of the backstage areas. ‘Sorry,’ she called, picking up the animal and putting it inside her cardigan. ‘Is that another air-raid warning?’ She cocked her head and listened to the distant rise and fall of the siren.

‘Bugger, does that mean we all have to go down to the understage again?’ Corinne complained. ‘
Quelle
bore. I’ll have to get another coffin nail from somewhere, I can’t do Woodies, they slaughter my throat. Doesn’t anyone smoke Park Drives or Kensitas these days? Charles, have you got
un clope,
love?’ Nearly all of the French contingent smoked.

‘I only have roll-ups,’ said Charles. ‘Three Nuns or Dark Empire Shag, take your pick.’

‘God, no thanks, I want some voice left.’

‘Then try the sparks.’

Corinne pushed past Jupiter and the young assistant, crossing to the far side of the stage, where Elspeth stood. Harry looked over and saw her searching for an electrician. As he idly watched, he noticed something was wrong. The stage had been cleared but the spotlights were still on, and the house lights had been dropped. The spots should have been off and the stalls lights raised. He could barely see beyond the edge of the stage.

‘Charles,’ called Corinne, her gravelly voice absorbed by the sound-deadening backcloths of the Hades set, ‘there’s nobody over here—ask someone on that side, would you?’

Harry turned in the direction of the shepherdesses, but they had gone down to the section of the basement that had been designated a shelter. He looked back over at Corinne, who was waiting in the flies, but could barely make her out. He felt Charles brush past him, and saw an unlit cigarette in his hand. Either he had asked someone for Corinne, or had decided to palm her off with one of his homemade specials.

Harry noticed that Charles was halfway across the stage when he heard something rip—later, he recalled the sound as being like someone tearing a sheet, which was also the noise a bomb made as it fell—and glanced up just in time to see the great blue planet break loose of its moorings.

He wanted to call out, but the words were stuck in his throat.

Charles had not noticed. The globe was swinging towards him in a graceful arc. Harry heard the impact that lifted the Frenchman off his feet. The sound was followed by a dull crack as Senechal’s head was slammed into the brick wall at the rear of the set. When Harry looked again he saw that the sphere had come to rest on the floor. It took him a few moments to realize what had happened.

As he lurched towards the giant prop he heard other shouts in the auditorium. Blood the colour of crushed blackberries pumped across the floorboards. A thick dark puddle was soaking into the backcloth. One end of the compasses had speared the baritone through his ribcage, just below his heart. Charles coughed loudly in the sudden silence, and sprayed the stage with blood. His left foot beat a reflexive tattoo on the floorboards before falling still.

He was dead before Harry, or anyone else, could reach his side.

20

SOMETHING IN THE ARCHIVE

‘Two deaths in the same theatre,’ said Bryant, rubbing the chill from his hands as they descended the stalls staircase of the Palace. ‘I’d call that a bit more than coincidence.’

‘You sound sorry you didn’t see it,’ May remarked.

‘Well, I am. Of course I am. From a professional point of view it would have been instructive.’

‘Two talented people just had their lives cut short,’ said May hotly. ‘You might be able to put their relatives at peace as to how and why they died.’ He was growing tired and irritable. The air-raid siren had proven to be a false alarm, and had caused them to miss the real drama. Bryant’s heartlessness bothered him. ‘People are suffering all around us, and there’s nothing one can do except try to keep the lives of their survivors in some kind of order. One must heal wounds by providing answers to questions.’

‘Quite, old chap. Still, two extreme acts of violence in a public auditorium.’ Bryant lightly tapped his partner’s arm. ‘They feel like symbolic rites, don’t you think? Signs that the mad illogic of the war is entering places of sanctuary. After all, British theatre is a bastion of common sense, civilized, safe, middle class, old-fashioned. Theatrical performances are structured on the principles of cause and effect. The auditorium exists outside of time or place, and only comes alive with the rising of the curtain.’

‘I really don’t see your point,’ said May.

‘My
point,
dear fellow, is that these murderous acts went unwitnessed by any audience, in a place where people come expressly to revel in sensation. Come on, let’s see what we’ve got.’

Charles Senechal’s body had been removed to an ambulance parked in Romilly Street. The stage had been cleared of all flats and cloths except the cotton duck and hessian frames that stood in the up-centre area against the gaudy crimson cyclorama of Hades. The great blue globe lay where it had fallen, sparkling beneath a profile spot and a pair of par lights.

‘What’s it made of?’ Bryant asked Mr Mack, the head carpenter, whose first name nobody seemed to know. Bryant walked round the globe, his fingers trailing lightly across its surface as if trying to divine some inner purpose from its topography.

‘Plaster, built around a central wood core. It weighs a bloody ton. Took three of us to get it up there. I hope it ain’t cracked.’

May followed the arc of the planet back up to the raised iron platform on the right side of the flies, the area above the stage where much of the scenery and lighting equipment was suspended. ‘How was it held in place?’

‘Two steel cables attached at forty-five-degree angles, locked in by bolts. One of the wires must have broken at the top end. The rest of the cable is still attached.’

‘So the right-hand wire snapped, leaving the globe to swing down on the left wire like a wrecking ball. Ever seen an accident like this before?’

‘Never, and this is my forty-third production,’ Mr Mack replied. ‘Those cables can take a lot of weight. Go up there and take a look.’

Bryant wasn’t thrilled by the idea of climbing along the gantry. He ascended the narrow steps leading to the first of the stage bridges like a man condemned. From where he stood he could see a large steel hook screwed into the wall. About two feet of wire hung limply down from it. ‘In order to be sure of catching someone, you’d have to keep them on their mark from when the wire was cut until the globe hit,’ he said absently.

‘What do you mean, their mark?’ asked May.

‘The prearranged spot you reach onstage, where you stand in any scene. All stages are divided into nine squares: up right, centre right, down left and so on. Sometimes there’s a front extension, an apron that makes a tenth area. Performances are spatially three-dimensional, and have to be learned accordingly, like chess moves.’ Taking a deep breath, Bryant reached over the catwalk railing and pulled up the wire, examining the end. ‘Tell me about the compasses, Mr Mack.’

‘They’re just pieces of pressed tin,’ the carpenter explained, ‘but each arm is four feet long, and we had to put a sharp point on the end of one because it didn’t look like a real set of compasses without a needle.’

‘Who told you to do that, the set designer?’

‘No, I answer to Geoffrey Whittaker, the stage manager. He takes care of my practical needs. Raymond leaves the materials up to me. He’s only concerned about the look of the stage once it’s lit, although he’ll tell you the difference between hardwood and composition board by the way light bounces off it.’

‘Raymond Carrington is the lighting chief,’ May pointed out.

‘The only access to the wire is from this gantry,’ said Bryant. ‘And you saw no one.’

‘No. This stage is narrow as working areas go, but it’s deep and we’re capable of producing a lot of mechanical effects. That’s why it gets the big song and dance shows; there are more scene changes in musicals, and more scenery has to be flown in. You can bring someone up from any part of the floor, lift whole sections of the stage, do revolves, put in a lot of filler flats and wing divisions, drop dozens of backdrops, scrims and props from above. The lighting is handled from a master board in one of the dress boxes, so there’s more room backstage for physical effects. Even I get confused up there sometimes, trying to figure out where each part of the scenery is.’

‘It’s not your job to fly them in and out?’

‘No, the stagehands do that, but I have to check and repair them all the time. Scenery gets damaged after virtually every performance.’

‘Had you repaired the globe recently?’

‘We’ve had no dress rehearsals yet, so there’s been no need to.’

‘You don’t think a stranger could have come in from the street after the siren sounded, climbed up the right-side gantry and waited for Mr Senechal to walk across the stage?’

‘I don’t see how,’ said Mr Mack, scratching the top of his head. ‘The only time the side bay doors are open is when we’re bringing scenery into the dock, and there’s always someone manning the stage door whenever the theatre’s being used. Besides, the gantries are in virtual darkness. There’s no way of easily climbing along them unless you know exactly where the footholds are.’

‘So, Miss Betts was in the wing looking for a carpenter with a cigarette. Miss Wynter was there with her retrieved tortoise. Miss Penn, Mrs Thwaite and Miss Parole were all in the process of heading to the basement, as were Harry, Mr Woolf and Mr Varisich. Up until the siren sounded, Mr Woolf had been watching the front entrance from the box office, and the stage door keeper—’

‘Stan Lowe. He has an assistant called Mouse. I s’pose he has a real name but I don’t know what it is—’

‘—was still in his booth at the base of the stairs, and neither of them saw anyone enter or leave. You were by the bay doors, which were locked. And there’s no other way in or out.’

‘I wouldn’t quite say that,’ said Mr Mack. ‘There is a pair of exits on to the roof, and they’re unlocked from the inside because of the current ARP regulations.’

‘You can get out of the building via the roof?’

‘Yes, but you can’t get in from them, and you can’t go very far once you’re out. Sometimes we have firewatchers stationed out there, but not today. They have to prop open the door with fire buckets when they go up because we’ve not enough keys.’

The Palace Theatre was one of the few London theatres standing in grand isolation. Its facia overlooked Cambridge Circus, but its sides were separated by Shaftesbury Avenue and Romilly Street. Only the rear section touched any other buildings, a short row of houses in the lower part of Greek Street, and the Palace roof stood considerably higher than those.

‘So no one entered or left during the rehearsal. See here, John.’ Bryant held the end of the wire aloft. ‘Even with my hopeless eyesight I can tell this was cut. A clean shear. There is no way that you could arrange it in advance.’

He carefully made his way down onto the stage to examine the wires that had been drilled into the globe. Corinne Betts, the comedienne playing Mercury, had been sedated by her doctor. Chorus girls were talking in shocked whispers in the wings.

‘Where would I find a copy of the design for the globe?’ asked Bryant.

‘The prop designs and stage plans are all in use,’ said Helena Parole, walking into the light thrown by one of the Fresnel spots. ‘They’re changed and updated all the time, so they’ll be scattered about in different offices. We mimeograph copies of everything and work from those.’

‘What do you do with the originals?’

‘They go up into the archive room. They’ll be clearly labelled.’ The lack of concern in her voice bothered May. ‘Do you want me to send someone for them?’

‘John, I wonder if you would oblige?’

‘Of course.’ May left the stage and went to the company office for the keys. He took the lift to the fifth floor, pulled open the trellis doors and stepped out into a dingy hall. The boarded-up end windows prevented light from entering, but the pairs of defunct gas mantles at either end of the hallway would have done little to dispel the creeping gloom, which was deepened by chestnut walls and threadbare brown carpets.

May flicked a brass switch at the head of the corridor, but nothing happened. According to Helena, there was barely a time when the electrics functioned correctly. The faint glow from the electroliers in the main stairway allowed him to make out the doors to his left, but none of them was labelled. He checked the first door but found that it had been fitted with a Yale. The key he had taken from the company office was a long-handled Victorian affair, scabbed with rust.