Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders (16 page)

The sour- sweet smell of burning human hair filled the hall as the girls wept.

‘I trust I have made my point.’ The Lady was ram-rod straight in her chair, her face a mask. ‘When any of you question me, when any one of you displeases me, you strike at the heart of your family. Do you understand?’

The hall was silent.

‘Do you understand?’ the Lady asked again and received mutterings and nods in reply as she carried on. ‘A family is a precious thing, but it is also a fragile thing. There are many who cast envious eyes over my children – many who wish them harm. But I will continue to protect you all, as long as you show me the respect I demand. “Honour thy father and thy mother.” That is what the Bible tells us, is it not? If any of you bring dishonour on this family, make no mistake, I will deal with it.’

Lady Ginger leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, and she didn’t open them when she spoke again. ‘Now, Mr Leonard, I wish to talk to you in private. Come.’

From the look on Mr Leonard’s face I could tell he’d rather be shorn in public like Frances and Sukie than face The Lady alone. The lascar at the top of the steps by the stage moved aside and Mr Leonard climbed up them like they was a scaffold. When he reached the middle of the stage just a few steps from The Lady, the curtains came down.

Just as Lucca said, there was no time for a run-through that afternoon. Tell truth, none of us was much in the mood for it after that little performance. And we weren’t exactly in the frame of mind for the evening neither. Mr Leonard didn’t reappear so Fitzy stepped in for the night, ordering the hands around and eyeing up the chorus.

The Comet girls were in a right state. I kept finding fussy little knots of them crying in corners, but when I tried to talk to them they clammed up tight and gave me daggers like I was somehow responsible for what had happened to Frances and Sukie.

When one of them actually spoke to me at all it confirmed everything I suspected. ‘We was all right here, Kitty Peck, until you moved in with your cage and your high ways.’

Louisa Tyke was stringy as an old alley cat and sharp-clawed with it. ‘You’ve brought bad luck to The Comet – you and your one-eyed, foreign boyfriend.’ She spat on the boards near my foot and flounced off.

It didn’t help that Fitzy called me into Mr Leonard’s office for a little private conversation about an hour before curtain up. There was a pile of jumbled papers on the desk in front of him and the drawers were hanging open – a couple were upturned on the floor.

‘Is this how the jemmy boys left it?’ I asked, looking round the room. Behind Fitzy’s chair – as formerly occupied by Mr Leonard – there was a big coffin of a cupboard with a lock on it the size of a mastiff’s head. Like the drawers it was gaping wide open and inside I could see stacks of paper all done about with strings and ribbons piled up on the shelves.

Fitzy grunted and started to sort through the papers on the desk. He licked his thumb as he turned through the pages. When he’d got to the end of his counting he grunted again, puffed out his cheeks and pulled at the end of his greasy whiskers. Finally he looked up at me and his moist little eyes were redder than ever.

‘This room is exactly how Solly found it this morning.’ Solly was Mr Leonard’s Christian name – in a manner of speaking. Fitzy narrowed his eyes. ‘Now here’s a thing. Nothing is missing. Me and The Lady have been through this most particular, and now she’s got me checking it again, but if anything’s been lifted then I’m one of her Chinamen.’

I didn’t understand. ‘If nothing’s gone, why did The Lady come over here today for a gathering?’ I looked at the papers and the drawers. ‘Looks to me like someone was searching for something.’

Fitzy drummed the leather desk top with his fat, stained fingers. ‘Or trying to make it look that way? I never thought I’d see this day, but The Lady is rattled, so she is. Right now she’s
talking
to Solly and I wouldn’t want to be in that man’s shoes tonight if it meant I could swap places with Finn McCool himself. The point is that someone is sticking two fingers up at her and that’s never happened before. First the missing girls and now this – someone is putting their mark on Paradise.’

So, that explained all the theatricals with Frances and Sukie. The Lady was stamping her territory in the most notable way, but if nothing had gone missing I didn’t see the point of anyone breaking in and I said as much.

Fitzy’s face flushed up scarlet. ‘It’s a direct challenge and a threat. These things are happening right under her nose and they have to stop.’ He thumped the desk and knocked the papers to the floor with a swipe of his paw. He stood up and leaned towards me. I could smell the rot on his breath as he held his face close to mine.

‘You heard from Peggy?’

I shrank back and shook my head. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but that muscle started working under his eye. It struck me then that he might actually feel something for her, after all.

He looked down at the desk top and delicately shifted a glass paperweight to one side. ‘At least there’s one thing, girl. The cage has worked. You’ve lured them in, like we wanted. The Lady wants you to pay particular attention to the audience tonight. She thinks they’ll be here this evening – in the house. And if not this evening, then sometime soon.’

He paused and stared at me. His eyes darted across my face like he was looking for something. ‘She’s also under the impression you might recognise them.’

‘How did she make that out then?’ I gestured at the desk and the cupboard. ‘It looks like just another crowbar job to me. Everyone knows The Comet is a good house, so why wouldn’t any bob-tag jemmy crew have a go? What makes Lady Ginger think this has anything to do with me and the cage?’

‘Take a look at this.’ He opened his jacket and reached to the top inside pocket. As he did so, the smell of sweat and stale tobacco rolled most powerful across the desk. He’d never been much of a one for the personal dainties, but recently he’d got worse.

‘Nothing was taken last night, but this was
left
here, pinned to the inside of Solly’s door, so it was.’

He handed me a plain envelope. ‘Open it.’

For some reason my hand trembled. I didn’t want Fitzy to see I was afraid, so I tried to mask it, but when I pulled out the sheet of paper inside and unfolded it I covered my mouth with my hand. I couldn’t help myself.

The girl in the drawing was me. There was no question of that.

In the picture I was half-naked and huddled up in the cage with a chain around my neck. My shoulders were a knot of bones and shadow, my feet were bare and my toes wrapped around the bar like claws. The artist – if you could call him that – clearly intended the viewer to think of me as a fancy bird kept in someone’s drawing room. Only this bird was sickening for something. A pair of mangy wings drooped at my back and a couple of stray feathers etched into the space beneath my perch suggested the drop below. In the drawing, my eyes were huge and beseeching. The artist had worked them over and over in heavy black ink so that they were almost scratched through the page.

I’d been with Joey once when we’d run into a backstreet dog fight. I say run into it, but actually Joey was running an errand – and now I knew who for. We’d got there just at the end when the punters were closing in round the exhausted dogs – the men were baying for blood twice as loud as the animals. Joey had tried to pull me away, but I wouldn’t budge. I was horrified and transfixed at the same time. He tried to cover my eyes, but I just shook him off. The point is that one of the dogs – the loser – made a lunge for it and broke through the edge of the ring. Before the men kicked him back I saw his eyes and I knew then that he was dead, even though he was still panting and bleeding and whining.

That’s what I looked like in the drawing. The paper shook in my hands.

‘What do you think of that then?’

I gripped the paper and said nothing. ‘Fold it down again.’ Fitzy’s voice was brash, almost like he was enjoying this.

I shook the sheet and the last fold flapped down to reveal some writing. The words were scrawled beneath the drawing in large, jagged letters that tore through the paper in places.

At night your cagebird sings an ugly song.
The black ‘s’ in the word ‘song’ had ripped the paper.

And beneath that there was another line etched fainter in a more composed hand like it had been added later as an afterthought.

Fitzy licked his lips. ‘Someone of an artistic bent took the trouble last night to break into The Comet and leave that here – nothing else. They’re interested in you, girl, just as we wanted. The Lady is particularly taken with that line there – the one about her cagebird. I very much doubt it means her damned parrot.’

I stared at the black writing confused. I’d been performing the song nearly every night for three weeks now, so if someone had taken offence, they’d been a long time working out what I was really singing about.

At night your cagebird sings an ugly song.

I traced my finger over the scrawl and felt how deep the pen had cut into the paper. The first stroke of the letter ‘n’ in ‘night’ slashed through the page too.

At night?

A cold thought wormed itself into my head, but it wasn’t one I wanted to share with Fitzy. Of a sudden I knew I was going to have to tell Lucca a lot more about James Verdin than I’d intended. I stared at the other neater words, but I couldn’t make sense of them. They weren’t London English that’s for sure.

‘Anything to say for yourself?’

I shook my head.

The cane whipped through the air just past my ear and smacked into the desk so hard that it made a dent in the wood. ‘Well, I’ve got something to say to you, Kitty Peck, and it comes straight from The Lady herself. Seven days – that’s all you have left, or to be more accurate, that’s all your brother has left.’

By the time the punters started queuing outside that evening we were running late. I sat down on the swing seat in the cage and braced my feet against the bars.

‘You can take me up, lads. I’m ready.’

Four of the hands started pulling on the guide ropes and the big chain connected to the centre of The Comet’s plaster ceiling started to grate. I wasn’t surprised Danny hadn’t remembered to oil it, what with Peggy and everything.

I swung out from the stage over the centre of the hall. I was about forty foot up and the cage was juddering and swaying about as usual. Fitzy must have given the order to open the doors because punters had started to take up their places – a couple of them were already standing just below me and calling up, but I wasn’t in the mood for banter.

The limelight flares were firing up along the front of the stage and Professor Ruben and the boys had started up with some jaunty song. If only they knew, I thought. My temples throbbed when I thought of Lady Ginger. Seven days. It was hopeless. I’d failed everyone – all the girls and even my own flesh and blood. Joey was a dead man.

The hall smelt of smoke and gin and bodies. It was almost good to be up here, away from everything that could touch me. I spread out the net of my skirt and breathed deep. It was a rotten world where a girl felt safer hanging seventy foot up without a safety net to catch her than she did going about her normal business.

At night your cagebird sings an ugly song.

When I’d touched that line under the drawing something James Verdin had said repeated in my head –
Thank you for a most entertaining evening. You tell a chap the most extraordinary things when you are . . .
When I was
drunk
, that was what he meant.

What
had
I told him when I was under the influence of that lixir? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed possible to me that it wasn’t what I’d done with James a couple of nights ago that I should be worrying about. No, it was what I’d
said
to him. If I’d babbled about missing girls and paintings and he’d recognised what I was saying, then no wonder he was on to me. He could draw too – he’d sent me that picture of my head and shoulders. And now the vicious sketch of me in the cage
.

If I was right, then James Verdin was likely a mad man and a murderer.

The cage jerked and I clung tight to the ropes of the swing. The air was thick with smoke, but that was nothing to what was coiling about inside my head.

That couldn’t be right, could it? If James really was the
unknown hand
behind
The Cinnabar Girls
, why hadn’t he taken me like the others when he’d had the chance? After all, I’d offered myself to him on a platter. Perhaps that was too easy? Was it like a game he was playing – like a cat with a mouse, or a
songbird
?

The thoughts were going round and round my head as the cage swung upwards. There were just a few more feet to go now until it reached the centre of the ceiling. In the four corners of the hall below me, the hands were pulling the guide ropes tight and beginning to lash them to big metal hooks set into the walls. The ropes kept the cage steady, the chain kept it up.

That chain was scraping away so loudly tonight I couldn’t hear the orchestra boys below. I hoped it would quieten down a bit once I was locked into place. Not far now.

I looked up; one of the plaster cherubs was right over my head, strumming away on a harp or something. I felt that if I reached out I could touch his little bum – Nanny Peck had a pottery shepherd boy in her room and she patted his shiny round rump for ‘the luck of it’ every time she went out.

The luck of it!
Now, that was something I needed. I pulled myself up and reached out from the swing, but just as I was about to push my hand through the bars, the harp in the boy’s hands seemed to quiver. A crack appeared across the strings, snaking out across the instrument and up his arm. I could feel powder on my hand now and a second later a load of the stuff came down from the ceiling, covering my head and shoulders.

I began to cough, rubbing my eyes with one hand and hanging on with the other.

Next thing I know that harp and the cherub’s arm were slowly peeling off the ceiling, the harp bouncing on the outside of my cage as it crashed to the floor – the arm just hanging out, the fingers pointing down. Then my cage began to judder and sway – a lot more freely than I was comfortable with – the chain was making a right racket now as it grated around the big hook overhead. The groaning noise sounded like the wooden hull of one of the tall ships down the docks when it’s trapped in the ice.

‘Kitty! Watch out!’

One of the hands called up as a guide rope broke free from the wall below and snapped up into the air just beneath my feet. The chain linking me to the ceiling above squealed and the cage dropped about five feet, lurching violently to the left.

I lost my balance, slid to the edge of the swing and tipped off the seat. Madame Celeste’s voice rang out in my head.
Never let go.
As I toppled forward I thrust out my arms and caught at the golden bars. The cage was hanging at an angle now, with two more of the guide ropes on the right side flailing free below. My breathing came fast and shallow and I tried not to think about the space gaping beneath me. My left knee stung where it had scraped against the inside of the cage when I fell.

I pulled myself further in and managed to wedge my feet between the lower bars. Then I bent low and clung tight. Behind me there was a ripping sound as the last of the guide ropes broke free. Now the cage jerked, tilted even more and began to spin – all the while the chain grating and yowling overhead. I could hear voices – shouts and screams. People were calling my name.