Full Dark House (9 page)

He rapped on the box-office window with the handle of a furled umbrella he had spotted leaning against the wall. ‘I say, are you in there?’

The frosted glass slid back to reveal a small tired-looking woman in a shapeless brown jumper and skirt. Knitted into the jumper was the title of Offenbach’s operetta, the capitals picked out in blue wool. An overpowering smell of 4-7-11 cologne assaulted the detectives. The woman had an old-fashioned marcel wave, her hair held in place with kirby grips, and wore a pince-nez. May guessed that she was nowhere near as old as she appeared to be. She had nice eyes, large and rather sad.

‘Ah. You must be Mr Bryant. I was wondering when you’d get here.’

‘Miss Wynter? I see you’re already advertising the show.’

‘Oh, this.’ She pulled at her jumper, embarrassed. ‘Isn’t it awful? Insistence of the new management.’

‘John, this is the front-of-house manager, Elspeth Wynter. My partner, John May.’

‘I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr May.’

‘A pleasure to meet a lady of the theatre,’ said May, in the charming tone he unconsciously reserved for women.

‘We looked in once but couldn’t see anyone.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. I was on the floor with Nijinsky.’ Elspeth opened the door of her office and emerged carrying a tortoise in a straw-filled cardboard box. ‘I keep him under my stool because of the electric heater,’ she explained, ‘but I can’t leave him alone because he chews through the wiring. Nijinsky’s supposed to be hibernating but he’s an insomniac. It’s the bombs, they’re enough to wake the dead. Do you want to go down and meet the company? They’re about to start today’s rehearsals.’

Bryant looked surprised. ‘Have they been told what happened?’

‘Only that Miss Capistrania went missing yesterday and will be replaced.’ She walked ahead of them with the tortoise box under her arm, leading the way to the stalls. ‘The artistic director is a lady, Helena Parole. This is a bit of a comeback for her. She’s been away for a while, if you know what I mean.’ She made a drinking gesture with her cupped right hand. ‘Problems mixing grape and grain. The insurers aren’t allowing her to touch a drop for the entire run.’ She pointed down to the group standing in front of the bare stage. ‘Not all of the sets have arrived, and everyone’s getting nervous because they can’t finish blocking.’

‘Forgive me—blocking?’

‘Fixing their physical movements, Mr May. Talk to me if you want to know anything. I’m always here, and I keep tabs on them all. The one in the yellow bandanna is Helena. The coloured gentleman with the artistic haircut is Benjamin Woolf, Miss Capistrania’s agent. The confused-looking fellow is Geoffrey Whittaker. He’s the stage manager. The girl beside him is Madeline Penn, the ASM, she’s on loan from RADA because our other girl got bombed out and had a nervous breakdown. The man sitting down on the box steps in the snappy cardigan is Harry, he keeps the peace around here. They’ll introduce you to the company.’

‘Is it necessary to meet them all?’ asked May, who was not at home in theatrical surroundings.

‘It might throw some light on Miss Capistrania.’ Bryant shrugged. ‘We need to know if she was close to anyone, that sort of thing.’

Helena Parole had a handshake like a pair of mole grips and a smile so false she could have stood for Parliament. ‘Thank you so much for taking the time to come down and see us,’ she told May, as though she had requested his attendance for an audition. Her vocal cords had been gymnastically regraded to dramatize her speech, so that her every remark emerged as a declaration. May felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle with resentment. ‘I haven’t told them a thing,’ she stage-whispered at him. ‘The spot where we found the corpse has been made off-limits, but they think it’s because of repair work on the lift. Everybody!’ She clapped her hands together and waited for the members of the company to quieten down and face her. ‘This is Mr May, and this is Mr . . .’ She leaned over to Bryant. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Mr Bryant.’

‘Oh, like the matches, how amusing. Is that a
nom de plume
?’

‘No it’s not,’ snapped Bryant.

Helena turned back to her cast. ‘Mr Bryant,’ she enunciated, thrusting her tongue between her teeth in an effort to extend the name beyond two syllables. ‘They’re going to be asking you a few questions about Miss Capistrania. It shouldn’t cut into our time too much, should it, Mr May? We do have rather a lot to get through. Perhaps you can conduct your interviews out of the sightlines of my principals. It throws them off. I’ll have a folding chair put out for you over there, and do try to keep the noise down, thank you so much.’

Having put May publicly on the spot, she accepted his silence as agreement, thrust her hands into her baggy khaki trousers and went back to directing her cast. Bryant felt as though he had been dismissed from the auditorium. Helena’s eye rested easiest on men she found attractive, and clearly John May was in her sights. With a grimace of annoyance, Bryant stumped off to the side of the stage.

He found the goods lift separated off by wooden horses with warning boards tied to them by bits of string. The lift couldn’t have drawn more attention if Helena had given it a part in the production. The electrics had been switched off at the mains, but Bryant dug a torch from his pocket and shone it into the shaft, quickly spotting the vertical brown streaks that marred the concrete barrier between the floors. On the other side of the stairwell, another slim beam of light illuminated a crouching figure. It turned and stared at him.

‘God, Bryant, you frightened the life out of me,’ said Runcorn. ‘Must you creep about like that? I could have dropped this.’ He held up something in a pair of tweezers.

‘What is it?’ asked Bryant.

‘Muscle tissue by the look of it, probably torn from the victim’s ankle as it shattered. Don’t these lifts have fail-safe devices to halt them if a foreign body gets caught in the mechanism?’

‘It’s half a century old. Safety wasn’t a priority then. The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.’

Dr Runcorn, the unit’s forensic scientist, was one of the top men in his field, but his air of superiority, coupled with the punctilious manner of a civil servant, made him disliked by nearly everyone who came into contact with him. That was the trouble with a unit like the PCU: it was destined to be staffed with the kind of employee who had been rejected from other institutions in spite of their qualifications. Dr Runcorn was especially irked by Bryant, whose intuitive attitude to scientific investigation seemed at best inappropriate and at worst unprofessional.

‘I haven’t finished here yet,’ he warned, ‘so don’t start walking all over the area touching things.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Bryant, affronted. ‘You surely don’t think it was an accident, do you?’

‘A damned odd one, I agree, but stranger things have happened.’

‘Hard to see how her feet ended up on a chestnut brazier, with that hypothesis,’ Bryant pointed out.

‘Oswald Finch took receipt of the cadaver from West End Central and has already run a few tests on it, reckons she might show positive for some kind of drug, possibly self-administered. These artistic types are noted for it.’ Runcorn sniffed, rising from his crouched position and cracking his back. ‘I don’t know why he can’t test for more obvious causes of death first like any normal person: heart failure, stuff like that. I just know that her feet were cut off and she didn’t struggle. There are a couple of scuff marks here on the landing, the heel of a shoe, nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Suggestive, though.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Runcorn tugged at his ear, thinking. He was awkwardly tall and so thin that he looked lost inside his clothes. ‘It’s a backward scuff, but it faces forward to the lift. Like this.’ He adopted an angular pose, something that came easily to a man who was six feet three and pigeon-chested. ‘As though you were bracing yourself against the trellis. You might make it if you were pulling something through the bars of the lift. As if you were trying to drag out a heavy box. Or pull something through the cage. Legs, perhaps.’

That was the good thing about Runcorn, thought Arthur. Like Finch, he operated on a secondary set of signals, pulses that passed invisibly beneath his rational senses.

‘There’s another mark on the linoleum several feet away. It looks like it could be a match. If we can place someone outside the lift with the victim inside it, then you might have a murder case. But why cut off her feet?’ Runcorn stared gloomily down into the lift shaft.

‘She was a dancer,’ Bryant replied.

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

‘Suppose she had somehow survived,’ said Bryant. ‘Can you think of a better way to guarantee that she’d never perform again?’

13

LIVES IN THE THEATRE

Elspeth Wynter had spent her whole life, or rather the thirty-two years she had so far experienced, in the theatre. She came from a long line of theatre folk. Her grandfather had been a Shakespearean, once spoken of in the same breath as Burbage, Garrick or Keane. His wife had been cast in his shows as a perennial parlourmaid, and in true theatrical tradition had borne him a son in the rear of the stalls. Eight years into the new century, that son fathered his only child, Elspeth. Although his wife survived a pelvic fracture when she fell from the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, she ignored her doctor’s warnings about the perils of motherhood in order to bear a daughter. The birth killed her.

Elspeth’s father took the King’s shilling for the Great War, but grisly memories of Ypres wrought changes in his life from which he never fully recovered. Prevented from returning to the front by the state of his nerves, he resumed the family profession. In the twenties he delivered a shaky baritone in countless threadbare Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, but the shows closed as unemployment began to bite and the cinema became affordable to the lower classes who had filled the music halls.

Elspeth’s father could not look after himself, let alone a teenage girl. He had no family beyond his colleagues in the theatre, and drink coarsened his acting. Elspeth was raised by sympathetic ushers and nursed from fretfulness while her papa performed in the twice-nightlies. As they trooped from one cold auditorium to the next, shivering in damp dressing rooms, shaking the fleas from lodging-house beds, playing in faded costumes to dwindling audiences, this daughter of the stage looked about her moth-eaten, mildewed world and began to wonder if the possession of theatrical blood was really the gift that her father’s boozy friends claimed it to be.

Elspeth knew from an early age that although she was not destined for the boards, she would always be a part of the theatre; watching her father declaim each night from the box kept empty and permanently reserved for royalty—there seemed to be one in every playhouse—she watched the painful changes time wrought on his performances. The twenties were uncertain years, but not as lean as the thirties. Her father drank more as the audiences dried up. He too dried on stage, nightly forgetting his lines, relying on prompts, booed by an unforgiving audience weaned on cinema newsreels. The new medium had no truck with forgetfulness. Celluloid eradicated variable performances. To no one’s surprise, he finally died in make-up and costume, during a trouser-dropping farce in which he had already been dying nightly.

Elspeth did not attend his funeral; there was a matinee. She had graduated from programme seller to bar cashier to ASM, through the various stressful stages of management until she suffered a nervous collapse and returned to front-of-house work. She was a West End girl, one of theatre’s dedicated personnel, invisible to audiences but essential to everyone who worked there. As one show closed, another began rehearsals, and each run marked the periods of her life more completely than any calendar notation.

She had experienced a moment of passion just once, at the age of fifteen: pushed into a dressing room at the Palace and thrust into by a man she had only ever seen from the aisle of the stalls. He was playing the villain in a revival of
Maria Marten, or The Murders in the Red Barn,
and had barely paused to peck her on the cheek and pull up his trousers before returning to catch his entrance cue. While her seducer ranted across the boards, twitching his moustaches, his shirtsleeves flecked with Kensington Gore, she too bled and suffered, and burrowed away in the crimson darkness to forget the world outside.

The theatre held no terrors for her. It was home, and filled with secrets, just like any family. It encompassed every happy moment in her life. As Elspeth paced the indistinct aisles of the Palace, its pervasive calm seeped into her. She could tell when the half-hour call was coming without looking at her watch. She sensed the rising tension of backstage activity, even though she was stationed in the front of the building.

Geoffrey Whittaker was also dedicated to the theatre, as invisible and essential as a spark plug to a car. He too was the latest—and the last, it turned out—in a long theatrical line. As stage manager to the incumbent company, he was in charge of the administration, the set, the lighting, the props, the health and safety of his audience, the scene changes, the laundry mistresses, the wardrobe people and the carpenters. He knew how to get scorch marks out of a starched collar, how to fix a cellulose filter over a follow-spot, how to unjam the springs on a star trap and how to keep bills unpaid until the receipts were in.

Like Elspeth, he was unmarried and probably unmarriageable, because his career constituted a betrothal of sorts. Unlike Elspeth, he had a sex life, rather too much of one. In addition to dating girls in the shows, he made visits to a private house in the East End, where for a reasonable fee his needs were taken care of. This abundance of sexual activity allowed him to concentrate on his job without becoming distracted by the dancers’ bodies during rehearsals. He had grown up in the Empires and Alhambras, helping his parents prepare for the night’s performance, and could imagine no other world. Colours were duller outside, and the skies were not painted but real, which made them untrustworthy. In the theatre, you always followed the script. Beyond this world there were only unrehearsed moves, mistimed entrances, lines spoken out of turn.