Full Dark House (24 page)

Helena Parole allowed a beat of defiance to pass before complying with the conductor’s request, then made her way to the side of the stage. She had worked with Varisich before and had survived his angry outbursts often enough to know that he was relatively easy to mollify. It was a matter of letting him see that she appreciated the subordination of the stage performance to the music. Text was updated and retranslated at regular intervals, but the music remained sacrosanct. So long as she respected this rule, they would work well together. She tried to imagine a tall glass filled with Glenfiddich, and donned her most quenching smile. Varisich was going to complain about the presence of outsiders at the run-through, and about the levels of noise they were creating, but now somebody was yelling. On stage, several members of the chorus were pointing into the centre of the building.

It wasn’t until they ran towards the screaming woman in Row A of the upper circle that they looked up and saw the man, now a twisting, bloody blur, flail and fall from the edge of the balcony.

35

MANIFESTATION OF GUILT

Zachary Darvell’s nose had been pushed into his skull by the fall. His face was a crimson mask. The segmented flesh was efflorescing with bulbous bruises, pink jelly the colour of an infected gum protruding through slashed skin. His jawbone was exposed in a shockingly severe white line. The iron fork was sticking out of his gullet. He looked like a prop demon removed from the set after a particularly arduous run. His left arm hung at an unnatural angle to his body. There was a member of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade in attendance, uselessly armed with a tin box full of crêpe bandages, calamine lotion and smelling salts. Barbara Darvell had rushed up from the stage and was cradling her son’s head.

‘What happened?’ asked Bryant, who had just entered the auditorium in time to hear Juno’s son plummet noisily from the balcony.

‘He’s dead.’ Barbara Darvell swallowed thickly. ‘I looked up and saw him. He had his back to me. Someone was standing behind him. A tall man. I could see his arms moving. I couldn’t make sense of it from where I was.’ She pointed feebly down at the illuminated set of Hades. Droplets of blood had spattered the artificial carnation that still stuck from Zachary’s jacket lapel.

‘What’s that?’ Bryant pointed to the fork handle protruding from Darvell’s throat.

‘Aristaeus’ fork. It went missing from the prop box.’

‘I’ve just been up in the balcony. It’s deserted.’ Geoffrey Whittaker dropped to his knees and tried to catch his breath. ‘Let’s get everyone back to their dressing rooms for a few minutes,’ he suggested. ‘There was no one else up there, no one at all.’

‘How do you know?’ yelled Barbara Darvell. ‘How could you look everywhere? We can’t see in this damned gloom!’

‘I was in the stairwell and ran in,’ Geoffrey explained.

‘I certainly didn’t see you,’ said Harry.

The assistant’s remark took Whittaker by surprise. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Just that I know who was in the stairwell and you weren’t there.’

Whittaker was angered by the idea of having to defend himself. ‘If you must know, I’d gone upstairs to get something from my office, and stood at the back of the balcony for a moment. Mr Darvell was sitting in the front row by himself. I left the auditorium and was coming back down the central staircase when I heard a shout and a crash from the floor below. Then I ran down to him. He only just missed landing on that lady over there.’ He pointed at Miles Stone’s shocked mother.

‘He landed a seat away,’ gasped Rachel. ‘I nearly died.’

‘Then the person who pushed Mr Darvell must have passed you on the staircase,’ Harry insisted.

‘No one passed me.’

‘I don’t see how you could have missed him, Geoffrey.’

‘My son is dead, could you show some restraint?’ cried Barbara Darvell.

‘Perhaps we should leave the matter until the police have finished searching the building,’ Harry suggested.

‘You can manage here, can’t you?’ Bryant strode along the row of seats and raced down the stairs to the stage door. There he found Lowe and Crowhurst looking puzzled.

‘Has anyone left in the last few minutes?’ he asked, trying to get his breath back.

‘No, sir. Only the gentleman Mrs Darvell’s son came in with. What’s going on?’

‘There’s been another one,’ Bryant explained. ‘You’ll let me know if anyone tries to leave?’

‘Of course, sir, I—hang on, that’s the royal entrance.’ Beyond them came the muffled slam of a door.

Bryant stuck his head out into the street and saw a broad figure in a shiny black raincoat divorce himself from the shadow of the royal entrance. He turned and saw John May walking from the other direction, towards the stage door.

‘John!’ he shouted. ‘That’s our man! Stop him!’

The dark figure started and broke into a run, instantly followed by May. Night had fallen and the blackout was once more in full force. Shaftesbury Avenue, blurred and smeary with rain, was almost deserted as they turned into it.

I’ve got him, thought May, watching the figure ahead as it hit a thicket of parked motorcycles belonging to the army despatch riders. There was something round the man’s neck, a raised collar or hood that obscured his head. He looked to be around six feet tall, but in the gloomy drizzle of the early evening it was hard to make out any further detail. To May’s horror, the raincoated figure vaulted the first motorbike and landed hard on the kick-start, firing up the engine. The army engineers kept their Matchless bikes in racks beside the road, ready to take them to emergencies. May grabbed the nearest machine and mounted it. He knew how to ride, but with the lights of London extinguished and the roads wet, he wasn’t sure whether he would be able to give chase. The engine barked into life on first kick, and he released the handlebar valve lift as he took off, slamming into the road so closely behind his quarry that their wheels almost touched.

The motorcycle in front fishtailed sharply and skittered across the oncoming traffic in the direction of Piccadilly Circus. May felt his back wheel slip as he followed, and was able to keep the bike upright only by hammering his boot along the tarmac and forcing the machine into a vertical position. He concentrated on the black square of the numberplate in front, LR109. The figure hunched low as he throttled up, the engine’s roar deepening as he passed between a pair of unlit taxis. May forged ahead too, trying to draw alongside, but the bike was pushing beyond a safe speed. They passed the side of the London Pavilion and the darkened cinema opposite, hitting the Circus traffic at such speed that buses were forced to brake and swerve. The electric advertising hoardings that had become such an area landmark were extinguished, lending the buildings a drab, derelict air. LR109 cut the wrong way round the boarded-over fountain and shot into Piccadilly with May in pursuit. A policeman, visible only by the white stripes on his cuffs, raised his hands and ran towards them, then backed off when he saw that neither bike was going to stop. The sound of his whistle was quickly lost as the pair raced on past the Royal Academy into oncoming traffic.

Bryant’s going to kill me if I don’t catch him, thought May as he accelerated. The young detective felt chill rain pitting his face as the wheels lost their purchase on the slippery road, found it again and pushed him on. The buildings on either side were great grey blocks, no light showing anywhere. Ahead, just beyond Green Park, a bomb had heavily cratered the middle of the road, and rubble-removal trucks indistinctly lined its edges. As they came closer, May saw that the entire causeway was cordoned off. He can’t get through, he told himself, watching in disbelief as LR109 pounded up over the kerb and into the long portico under the Ritz. May felt the kerb slam his tyres as he followed, the back wheel juddering as he shot beneath the arches, his engine reverberating in the tunnel as he scattered the shrieking evening-gowned women who were exiting the hotel.

At the end of the colonnade, the bike in front swung sharply to the right off the main road and thundered into the maze of narrow streets that constituted Mayfair. May tried to close the gap between them, but was forced to slow in order to turn the heavy machine. He could hear LR109 revving and braking, but caught only glimpses of its brake light as the machine raced ahead of him. At Curzon Street the lead bike was forced to slow as pedestrians ran for safety, and May gained a few yards. As they turned into the dark chasm of Bruton Street, the detective saw the thick brown earth and bricks strewn across the road, and knew that his tyres would not cope with them. The other bike had bypassed the mess by mounting the pavement. He hit hard, the Matchless’s handles jumping out of his hands as the machine jerked from his control. He knew that if it went over now it would trap his leg beneath the engine, and forced himself to roll backwards, leaving the bike seconds before it toppled and slid along the street in a shower of sparks, to vanish over the side of an unfilled pit.

Bryant ran round to the foyer and checked on the FOH box office. He doubted that May would be able to track their man for long in the blackout. Elspeth was almost asleep when he knocked on the glass, startling her so badly that she nearly fell off her stool.

‘Did you see him come past here?’

‘No, no one’s been through.’ She straightened her cardigan, embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid I was having forty winks. The phones are down. Seamus told me they’ve found an unexploded bomb across the road and the Heavy Rescue people have severed a line getting to it.’

‘Who’s Seamus?’

‘Our milkman. He was dropping off some rhubarb from his allotment.’ She held up a paper bag full of purple stalks. ‘I said it would be nice to see a banana again but there are limits to his powers.’ She patted a stray lock of hair into place and smiled vaguely. By the entrance doors, a heavyset woman in a pinafore rose from her mop bucket and came over to the detective.

‘Did you just wake her up? Poor lady was trying to have a rest.’

‘She’s been here with you?’

‘All the time. You’re one of them detectives, ain’t you?’ she asked. ‘Several of the chorus girls are talking about a phantom roaming the theatre, have you heard? Apparently it’s got hands like claws and eyes that glow red in the dark. And Miss Betts said it followed her up Tottenham Court Road, wearing a mask.’

‘I need to use your phone,’ said Bryant.

‘I just told you, the lines are cut. And you don’t want to listen to her silly gossip,’ warned Elspeth, raising the tone of her voice by half a social caste. ‘Actresses get such first-night nerves, it always shows itself in silly stories.’

‘Where’s the nearest call box?’ asked Bryant.

‘That’ll be the other side of Cambridge Circus. Oh, it’s quite the norm, lurid imaginations working overtime. During the rehearsals for
No, No, Nanette
one of the saxophonists dropped dead, and rumours went around that he’d been cursed by Negroes because he played late-night sessions in a jazz club and owed them some money. People get such funny ideas.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Bryant uncertainly, heading for the door. He nodded to the cleaner. ‘If you hear any more talk about a Palace phantom, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’

‘He’ll be back,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Not that he worries me. I’ve got nothing to fear.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

‘He’s not real,’ the char explained, hitching up her bolstered bosom. ‘It’s just guilt. These young girls, they’re a bit loose, a bit wild, living for the moment, running around with boys and getting up to God knows what in the dark. Extroverts and introverts, it’s all in their collective unconscious, a manifestation of guilt, if you ask me.’

‘Well, your manifestation of guilt just killed someone with a cut-throat razor,’ he snapped.

Bryant had not expected an earful of Jungian theory from the charlady. He stepped carefully over the wet marble and stood on the step outside, looking up at the sky. A pall of brown smoke hung over the buildings to the east, most likely dust from building clearance. The clouds were starting to break now, giving the bombers a clear path into the city. He wondered what terrors the night would bring this time.

Poking the last of his tobacco into his pipe, Bryant headed off in the direction of the phone box, a theory shifting uneasily at the back of his brain. The globe, the compass, the flute, the wind, the mask of tragedy, the statue on the roof of the theatre, Stone’s mother, the flower in Darvell’s lapel, things he could not make sense of without sounding deranged.

If he was wrong, it would not just be the finish of a promising career, it would end the credibility of the unit for good.

36

THE BROADER PICTURE

‘What on earth happened to you?’ asked Bryant. His partner was covered in streaks of mud, his jacket torn from shoulder to waist.

‘Came a bit of a cropper on an army motorbike,’ May explained, examining himself. ‘Our man moved like a bat out of Hell. I lost him in the back streets, didn’t Biddle tell you?’

‘He said you stole an army emergency vehicle and smashed it up. Don’t worry, I’ll square it with them later. Are you all right?’

‘Took the skin off my hands, no real damage. What are you doing?’

Bryant was standing on an upended metal milk crate in the car park of Bow Street magistrates’ court, preparing to throw a muslin-wrapped leg of pork onto an iron sheet that was balanced on a pile of masonry rubble. ‘I’m testing out a theory,’ he explained, swinging the leg and letting it go. ‘Bloke fell out of the balcony. I suppose they told you. Slashed to bits with a straight razor. Not one of the cast, though.’ He climbed down from the crate and bent over the joint of meat, which had landed squarely on the metal sheet. ‘It’s all right, condemned black-market pork, quite inedible, but it’s about the same weight.’

‘As what?’ asked May, bemused.

‘As a pair of feet, obviously.’ Bryant threw him an old-fashioned look as he hoisted the leg for another swing.

May had no time for such foolishness tonight. He was starting to wonder if his partner was all there. ‘Mr Davenport’s waiting for us in your office,’ he warned. ‘At least, I assume it’s him.’