Full Dark House (15 page)

He located the theatre archive in a room at the darkest turn in the corridor. Within the cramped suite were dozens of overstuffed boxes and damp cardboard files cataloguing productions and stars. Dim light was provided by the bare bulb overhead. He glanced across the titles on the lids of the boxes and pulled out some of the Palace’s monochrome publicity photographs. Buster Keaton performing with his father, the pair of them bowing to the audience in matching outfits. The jagged profile of Edith Sitwell, posturing her way through some kind of spoken-word concert. A playbill for W. C. Fields starring in a production of
David Copperfield
. Another presenting him in his first appearance at the Palace as an ‘eccentric juggler’. The four Marx Brothers, gurning for the camera. Fred Astaire starring in
The Gay Divorcée,
his last show before heading to Hollywood.

The dust on the lower boxes betrayed an even earlier age. The infamous Sarah Bernhardt season of 1892; Oscar Wilde’s
Salome
was due to have been performed at the theatre, but had fallen foul of the Lord Chamberlain’s ruling about the depiction of religious figures. The legendary Nijinsky, seen onstage just after his split with Diaghilev. According to the notes, he had left the Palace after discovering that he was to appear at the top of a common variety bill. Cicely Courtneidge in a creaky musical comedy, her dinner-jacketed suitors arranged about her like Selfridge’s mannequins. The first royal command performance, in 1912. Anna Pavlova dancing to Debussy. Max Miller in his ludicrous floral suit, pointing cheekily into the audience—’You know what I mean, don’t you, missus?’ Forgotten performers, the laughter of ghosts.

An accordion folder labelled
Orphée aux enfers
lay on the nearby desk. May pulled it out and began sifting through the floor plans and set blueprints. He found the design for the second tableau, Mount Olympus crowned by clouds, its great azure sphere pinned in the heavens, and carefully folded it into his jacket pocket.

The anguished cry that tore its way along the corridor made his scalp tingle. It was the call of a human in terrible pain. May jumped to his feet and ran outside, but there was nothing to be seen. He heard it again, softer and more in sorrow this time, but the acoustics were so dead that it was impossible to pinpoint the location of the sound. The other doors along the corridor were all sealed. Some looked as if they had not been opened for many years. Panic crawled over his skin, sending him back to the lift and the light.

He had just pulled the trellis door shut when he heard the cry again, a miserable low bellow that reverberated in the lift shaft. May jammed his thumb on the descent button and the cage dropped down through the building, recalling him to life and safety. He was nineteen and impressionable. The city was blacked out every night, and the dark held hidden terrors. In years to come, his dreams would vividly recall his haunted week at the Palace.

‘You imagined it,’ said Bryant, poking about in the pockets of his battered gaberdine raincoat for a Swan Vesta. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of, old chap. We’re all a bit jumpy. This building hasn’t seen daylight since the start of the war.’ He lit his pipe while May unfolded the sheet of paper he had removed from the archive. ‘So this is the original design for the globe and compasses?’ Bryant asked Mr Mack as May smoothed the stage plan flat on a workbench.

‘It looks the same as the finished model,’ commented May distractedly. He was still thinking about the deep cry echoing in the corridors.

‘Does it? Would you say that the compasses occupy the same position as they do in the drawing, Mr Mack? Do you have a first name?’

‘Mr Gielgud always calls me Mr Mack because of his memory,’ explained the carpenter. ‘We used to talk about table tennis.’ He spat a mouthful of chewing tobacco into his handkerchief and examined the plan. ‘Blimey, you’re right. The point of the needle is higher on the full-scale version by about a foot.’

‘Who told you to raise it?’

Mr Mack studied the drawing in discomfort. ‘It’s not like me to make a mistake. There should be a master diagram. This is one of the earlier sketches. Someone must have moved the globe.’

‘I don’t know how much more evidence you need to prove a case of premeditation,’ Bryant told his partner.

‘The carpenters reckon accidents happen all the time in the theatre,’ said May.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Mr Mack. ‘You’ve got a lot of people jumping about in a very small space, surrounded by moving mechanical objects, some of them weighing tons. Feet get crushed, arms broken, ankles shattered. Arthur Lucan fell through this very stage.’

‘But they don’t normally die, do they?’

‘That’s true, sir, they don’t.’

‘And the problem with these two deaths is that we lack any kind of a link between them,’ whispered Bryant.

May consulted his notebook. He felt that someone should keep a record in case Davenport decided to question their tactics. ‘Well,’ he pointed out, ‘they were both represented by the same agent, weren’t they?’

21

FREEDOM FROM MEMORY

He was searching for something in the files. John May sat in the archive room of the Palace Theatre and rested his aching, aged bones.

He was perched on a canvas stool with a mildewed cardboard box on his lap. Many of the photographs, plans and notes beneath his fingers were stuck together with time. They bore marks of damp, tea, candle grease. He wished he knew what he was looking for. He knew only that Bryant had been here before him, just days before he died.

In the years following the investigation, more photographs had been added to the files of the Palace: Jimmy Cagney, tap-dancing in a USO camp show; Betty Grable singing; Laurence Olivier grinning gap-toothed in Osborne’s
The Entertainer;
John Tiller’s Girls, high-kicking their way through the 1958 season; a thousand forgotten variety acts armed only with funny walks and silly catchphrases; the cast of
Les Misérables,
changing yet changeless across the years. And a grey police file on the Palace Phantom, dated November 1940, left to be rediscovered over sixty years later.

Here were the typed interviews they had conducted with the cast and production crew of
Orpheus
at the onset of that terrible season. The last pages of the file were missing. Only the interviews remained. But there had clearly been other pages here. The freshly torn staples at the top of the file attested to that. He looked through the interview list again. Corinne Betts, Miles Stone, Eve Noriac, Geoffrey Whittaker . . . he could barely put faces to the names. Elspeth Wynter, Arthur had fallen for her, but had it been out of love or pity? Who knew now, and what did it matter? He imagined the faces of Londoners, photographs pinned to an immense police board stretching hundreds of miles back into the past, across two thousand years of continued inhabitancy. So many dead, so many yet to come . . .

The ring of his mobile phone startled him. He pulled the Nokia from his pocket and answered it.

‘John? It’s me, Alma. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Me? No, how are you?’

‘My legs are wicked, no change there, just getting old. Janice said you were back, and I was worried because someone’s been in Mr Bryant’s flat.’ She called him John; she always referred to Arthur as Mr Bryant.

‘How do you know someone’s been in there?’

‘There was some stuff left out and now it’s gone. I know because I did the dusting. I told you I didn’t like to throw anything away. I don’t want to let the rooms out no more.’

‘Was the door forced?’ asked May. ‘Did they break in?’

‘No, nothing’s damaged, the front lock’s in one piece. They must have got them skeleton keys.’

‘I don’t think that’s very likely, Alma. But it’s a standard lock, it isn’t too hard to open. I’ve done it before now. What did they take?’

‘Just some pieces of paper from the table.’

‘You don’t happen to remember what they were, do you?’

‘I know because I typed them out for him myself,’ explained Alma. ‘They were Mr Bryant’s dental records.’

May walked down Charing Cross Road and cut through to the back of the National Portrait Gallery, carefully avoiding the junk-food swill of Leicester Square. He detested the swirling scrum of the pedestrianized zone, the latent danger, the shoving, dislocated crowds that filled a once-beautiful space. It was hard to imagine, but the area had been pleasanter to stroll through when traffic had traversed it. Now, the tourist hot spots of the city were the very parts that made it like everywhere else. Was it possible to imagine those buildings without inhaling the animal-fat stink of McDonald’s or KFC? He never thought London would cease to appeal to him, but the little faded glory it still possessed was being scuffed away by the dead hand of globalization. On his down days he saw London as a crumbling ancient house, slowly collapsing under the weight of its own past.

As he pushed his way through a herd of name-tagged visitors in matching baseball caps, he wondered if he had left it too late to retire to the continent. France seemed a good bet, more at ease with its history. Crucially, he had never visited the place with his old partner. Perhaps he could be freed from memories there. He thought of his embittered son, recovering from years of addiction in a French commune, of his wife and daughter, and how he had survived them both, but even then he remembered Nathalie, how Bryant had loved her and lost her . . .

Damn you, Arthur, he thought, let me go.

He knew there was only one way he could stop himself from subsiding into the silent past: he needed to settle the murder of his alter ego. Without the truth, there would be no rest. Not now, not ever.

22

BLOCKING

‘I’m offended that you should even ask,’ Benjamin Woolf bristled. He never looked more suspicious than when he was trying to appear injured. ‘I represent a great many artists.’

‘I’m not saying you had anything to do with their deaths, even though no one actually saw you at the time of Senechal’s impalement,’ Bryant snapped. ‘You’re very touchy for an agent.’

‘We don’t all have hides like rhinos, Mr Bryant.’

‘How many other performers in the company do you represent?’

‘Oh, quite a few.’

‘
Exactly
how many?’

Woolf made an effort to look innocent and failed. ‘I’d have to work that out and get back to you.’ The detectives had set up a base in the company office, and were seeing everyone who had been present in the auditorium when Charles Senechal had met his death.

‘Do you have some kind of special deal going on with the cast members you represent?’ asked Bryant.

‘Something like that.’ Woolf ran a finger along his thin moustache.

‘Are you on friendly terms with them all? How close were you to Miss Capistrania and Mr Senechal, for instance?’

‘I keep a respectable distance from all my clients. I’m there when they need me. I give them advice and support, I listen to their problems, nothing more.’

‘But it’s a twenty-four-hour job, isn’t it? You take their calls when they come off stage at night, cope with their insecurities, assuage their doubts?’

‘Of course. All theatrical agents worth their salt do.’

‘Do you know much about their personal lives? Who they were closest to, who they were amorously involved with?’

‘Some are forthcoming, others aren’t. I don’t pry, if that’s what you mean. They have to tell you some things, obviously.’

‘What did Tanya Capistrania have to tell you?’

‘You must understand she had very few friends in this country. She told me she was seeing someone in the company. I don’t know much about Charles except that he’s married and has a flat in Paris. His wife and son are on their way here right now.’

‘So Miss Capistrania was having an affair and Charles wasn’t.’ Bryant sucked hard on his pipe, trying to keep it lit.

‘For all I know he could have been. Performers become very tight-knit during the course of a run. They form liaisons that last only while they’re working together.’

‘Would you care to divulge the identity of the man Miss Capistrania was seeing?’

‘I suppose it won’t do any harm to the young lady now,’ sighed Benjamin. ‘But you musn’t say I told you. It was Geoffrey Whittaker.’

‘The stage manager?’ Bryant was surprised. He didn’t look the type to conduct a torrid affair.

‘It’s not the first time he’s got up to this sort of thing. He’s pretty well known by the Piccadilly commandos.’ He was referring to the squad of prostitutes who brazenly worked around the Circus, stepping out of doorways to accost servicemen on leave.

‘He’s a bit old to be a Lothario. What about Miss Capistrania?’

‘Tanya was famous for upstaging her fellow players. She was very driven to succeed. The usual story, pushed by her family from an early age. Nobody’s got much good to say about her.’

‘And Charles Senechal?’

‘The opposite. Everyone thinks—thought—he was wonderful. He’s played all three of the baritone roles in
Orpheus
before, a consummate professional and a wonderful singer.’

‘I see. What about some of the others who were there when it happened, Harry—what’s his surname, Cowper? And Corinne Betts?’

‘Corinne’s seeing one of the shepherds. A boy in the chorus. I don’t think it’s anything more than mutual convenience. Harry, well, he’s a bachelor. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘So there are a few
amours
in the background. Any risk of blackmail with Harry?’

‘I suppose there’s always a risk, but the theatre’s safer than most places. Outside the Palace, people keep asking if I’m a visiting calypso player. In here, nobody cares about the colour of my skin. Why are you interested?’

‘The globe could have been intended to hit anyone, couldn’t it?’

‘Oh, I see. Harry’s well liked. There’s often someone like him in a theatre company, born to be a den mother to the rest. Runs around after people making them feel better. Nurses the bruised egos. Corinne’s got a bit of a mouth on her, but I don’t know that she’s made any real enemies. Some of the cast went to Café de Paris to see her perform her comedy routine a couple of weeks ago, and she bought them all drinks afterwards. It won her a lot of friends.’

‘So there are no real connections that you can see, apart from the fact that Miss Capistrania and Mr Senechal were both performers represented by you.’

‘May I remind you that I’m the one losing out here.’ Woolf made a further effort to look pained, but appeared to be suffering from heartburn. ‘They were more than my clients. They were investments.’

‘I’d say everyone’s investments are in danger of disappearing now, wouldn’t you?’

‘No,’ replied Woolf, ‘no, I wouldn’t. Don’t you know the show always goes on?’

‘If I find reason to suppose that anyone else’s life is in danger, I won’t hesitate to close down the production.’

‘Aren’t you a bit young to have that authority?’ asked Woolf, alarmed.

‘I’m not sure,’ Bryant admitted, giving up on his pipe, ‘but it would be interesting to find out. Let me get this clear in my head. While the globe was being cut loose, there were four people actually on the stage: Mr Senechal, Miss Betts, Miss Wynter and Mr Cowper. Mr Mack was further back in the wings, Miss Parole was in the stalls with Mr Whittaker, Miss Penn, Mrs Thwaite and Mr Varisich, heading in the direction of the pass door. Stan Lowe was manning the stage door, and you were out in the front box office. What were you doing before the siren sounded?’

Benjamin thought for a moment. ‘I was talking to Elspeth. I left the auditorium, but then I heard the commotion and ran back in.’

‘To your knowledge, was there anyone else near the stage or in the stalls?’

‘I don’t think so—wait, Anton was still in the orchestra pit. Eve and Olivia were arguing about something as they came out, a problem with a dress, so they must have been nearby.’

‘Do you think it likely that any of them could have climbed the gantry to the globe and cut it loose?’

‘I don’t see how,’ interrupted May. ‘The gantry is clearly visible from the stage.’

‘Then there’s someone we haven’t accounted for,’ said Bryant, prodding his partner in the shoulder. ‘Someone else in the theatre. Someone up there, in the dark.’

23

OFF TO THE REALM OF DARKNESS

‘Have you heard? They’re killing all the poisonous snakes and reptiles at London Zoo, in case the cages get bombed,’ Betty Trammel, one of the
Orpheus
chorus girls, told John May that afternoon. Like most of the other female dancers, she had long legs, a tiny midriff and shapely breasts that the detective found himself covertly watching. ‘And they’ve had to put sandbags around the pink flamingos because they’re suffering nervous breakdowns.’ She smiled at the detective and rolled her enormous eyes. They were set in a heart-shaped face, framed with blond curls. ‘I used to cut home through Regent’s Park to my place in Camden, but they’ve closed the public path past the zoo. It’s getting so a girl doesn’t know what’s safe any more.’ Betty spoke with more refinement than the other chorines. She had a smile that could put a froth on a cup of coffee, and she knew it.

‘I’m in Camden. I can walk you home if you like,’ May offered gallantly.

‘I might just take you up on your proposal.’ She placed her hands on spangled hips and grinned. ‘Give me two minutes to get changed.’

Bryant watched in disgust as Betty bounced off into the wings. ‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘that makes girls go so damnably gooey-eyed over you? I don’t understand it. You only have to stand next to them and they start rolling bits of themselves about like Betty Boop.’

‘I think they just feel, you know, comfortable around me,’ said May, surprised by his own powers.

‘Well, they don’t do that with me,’ Bryant complained, scratching the back of his ear in puzzlement. ‘I can’t see why not. I’m a bloody good catch. I have prospects. I have an enquiring mind. You’d think that would be appealing.’

May stared at the aisle carpet, embarrassed. He could not tell his new friend that there was something about his fierce energy that disturbed people. The more Bryant tried to be sympathetic, the less believable he was. It was an unfortunate effect that was to bedevil him throughout his life.

‘And the types that go for you,’ Bryant continued, ‘well!’

‘What’s wrong with their “type”?’ asked May, offended.

Bryant searched the air, almost at a loss for words. ‘You can’t see it? My dear fellow, they’re so—obvious.’

‘Look, if it bothers you that much, I don’t see why you don’t find a date of your own. Go down to the box office and ask Elspeth out, she’s keen as mustard. I’ve seen the way she looks at you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ Bryant poked his pipe-stem down into his top pocket, considering the idea. ‘Do you really think so?’

‘I’m sure of it. Go on, ask her. She’ll be glad to get out of here.’ The blackout made houses stuffy and airless at night. Even in a building as large as the Palace, the still atmosphere weighed heavily in the lungs.

‘All right,’ vowed Bryant, grinning bravely, ‘I will. I’ll go and ask her right now.’ And he did.