Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8)
Read Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) Online
Authors: Amy Myers
Murder at the Music Hall
Amy Myers
The eighth Auguste Didier crime novel
Copyright © 1995 Amy Myers
The right of Amy Myers to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by
Headline Publishing Group in 2013
All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical characters – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
elSBN 978 1 4722 1389 1
Cover illustration by Tim Gill
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About the Author
Amy Myers was born in Kent. After taking a degree in English Literature, she was director of a London publishing company and is now a writer and a freelance editor. She is married to an American and they live in a Kentish village on the North Downs. As well as writing the hugely popular Auguste Didier crime series, Amy Myers has also written five Kentish sagas, under the name Harriet Hudson, that are also available in ebook from Headline.
Praise for Amy Myers’ previous Victorian crime novels featuring Auguste Didier, also available in ebook from Headline:
‘Wittily written and intricately plotted with some fine characterisation. Perfection’
Best
‘Reading like a cross between Hercule Poirot and Mrs Beeton . . . this feast of entertainment is packed with splendid late-Victorian detail’
Evening Standard
‘What a marvellous tale of Victorian mores and murders this is – an entertaining whodunnit that whets the appetite of mystery lovers and foodies alike’
Kent Today
‘Delightfully written, light, amusing and witty. I look forward to Auguste Didier’s next banquet of delights’
Eastern Daily Press
‘Plenty of fun, along with murder and mystery . . . as brilliantly coloured as a picture postcard’
Dartmouth Chronicle
‘Classically murderous’
Woman’s Own
‘An amusing Victorian whodunnit’ Netta Martin,
Annabel
‘Impossible to put down’
Kent Messenger
‘An intriguing Victorian whodunnit’
Daily Examiner
Also by Amy Myers and available in ebook from Headline
Victorian crime series featuring Auguste Didier
1. Murder in Pug’s Parlour
2. Murder in the Limelight
3. Murder at Plum’s
4. Murder at the Masque
5. Murder makes an Entrée
6. Murder under the Kissing Bough
7. Murder in the Smokehouse
8. Murder at the Music Hall
9. Murder in the Motor Stable
And Kentish sagas written under the name Harriet Hudson also available in ebook from Headline
Look for Me by Moonlight
When Nightingales Sang
The Sun in Glory
The Wooing of Katie May
The Girl from Gadsby’s
It’s 1902 and Auguste Didier finds himself reluctantly recruited for a week’s work at the Old King Cole music hall in the East End. Ostensibly there as chef of its greasy run-down eating house, Auguste has another role: to prevent a possible foul murder by being constant bodyguard to famous comedian Will Lamb.
At first Will’s fears of being the victim of someone’s murderous intentions seem unfounded. After all, he’s only had a portentous dream and he’s really rather popular. But when other more sinister omens occur, Auguste begins to sense real danger – and Will Lamb dies on stage in front of his eyes. The search is on for a killer – and it has to be someone who’s had access to the props.
Auguste’s job is made more complicated by the fact that a national treasure has also been reported missing from Windsor Castle. And there are enough tenuous threads to indicate that the crimes must somehow be linked. . .
For Richard and Barbara
with love
Rain plopped down the collar of Chief Inspector Egbert Rose’s ulster, despite the umbrella. Changing its tactics with the gusting wind through the dock, it assaulted his face and mocked his eyes. He was far from happy.
‘We’ve missed the boat, sir.’ There was no glimmer of a smile on Inspector Grey’s face, whether he was conscious of his pun or not. Rose regarded Grey without enthusiasm.
The boat’s missed
you
, Grey,’ he retorted grimly. ‘Six o’clock you told me the
Lisboa
was due to leave. It’s six now, and she sailed two hours ago.’ The North Quay of London Docks was no place to spend a Saturday, even a wet dismal September afternoon. He thought of Edith cosily taking toasted crumpets and seed cake at Highbury, and compared her lot to his.
‘To catch the tide, sir.’ Grey’s reply had the desperation of the cornered rat. ‘She’ll dock again in two weeks.’
‘Think she’ll come steaming back with the loot still tucked under the captain’s arm? Any chance of the river boats catching her?’
Grey shook his head. ‘She’ll be outside territorial waters. It would be piracy. Unless you think we’d be
justified . . .’ He broke off, as his companion’s umbrella jerked irritably.
‘Much as I’d like to don eye patch and broadsword, it ain’t precisely going to soothe Portuguese prickles, is it? There’s been enough fuss over this cross; there’ll be more when it comes out it’s been nicked from Windsor Castle. What’s His Majesty going to say if the Stepney police and Scotland Yard start dancing around like the pirates of Penzance, eh?’
‘In Stepney,’ Grey replied stolidly, ‘we have more to think about than His Majesty’s embarrassment.’
Rose envied him. It was no joke to be summoned to Buckingham Palace at Saturday luncheon time by an irate monarch ordering him to track down a missing relic of incalculable value, before it left the country for good; an event, His Majesty informed him, that would ensure not only the severing of diplomatic relations with England’s oldest ally, but probably his own enforced abdication, a mere month or so after his coronation. Every coastal and dockyard police force from Harwich to Plymouth had been alerted with descriptions of the two villains. In the Thames, the most obvious departure point, the dockyard police had orders to detain every piece of shipping with any connection with Portugal till cleared. Then at three-thirty, surprisingly, Special Branch had come up with a name, the
Lisboa.
Unfortunately the
Lisboa
was now in mid-ocean, ploughing its way home, in all likelihood taking Prince Henry the Navigator’s cross with it. And what the press would do with that, Rose preferred not to imagine. Half of them delicately, and sometimes not so delicately, had been suggesting that Portugal ought to have the cross
back anyway, and the other half had foretold the end of the monarchy if it did. Now he had to report failure to His Britannic Majesty King Edward VII, and very little imagination was required to foresee the results of that conversation. Crumpets retreated to the same odds as a castle in Spain – or Portugal.
Around them loomed the tall forbidding rain-swept warehouses of the London Docks, their cranes idle now, but stretching out threatening dark arms towards their prey; before them were moored steamers from unknown ports, their crews hurrying in the twilight towards the excitement of Saturday night in the pubs, gin palaces and less savoury institutions eagerly awaiting them. At least it was no longer Rose’s job to mop up the resulting mess. As a raw newcomer to the force, his beat had taken in the docks, not to mention the nearby St George’s Street; the latter might be more salubrious than he remembered it, but off it still lay some of the poorest slums in London.
‘Sir.’ A wet Dock Police constable materialised from the gloom at Grey’s side. From underneath his helmet, two scared eyes peered out, torn between relief at the presence of two superior-ranking officers, and anxiety since neither belonged to his own force.
‘What is it, Constable?’ Grey barked irritably.
‘A body, sir. In Nightingale Lane. Been there an hour or two, I reckon. Sucking the monkey, I reckon.’
‘What monkey?’
‘Dock talk, sir. Siphoning port wine with a tube through the bung-hole of the cask. Strong stuff.’
‘Then most likely he’s drunk, you fool,’ Grey snarled.
The constable held firm. ‘Dead, sir.’
‘Nightingale Lane, you say?’ Rose’s attention was suddenly diverted from the absent
Lisboa
, as he was mentally catapulted back from the autumn of 1902 to the 1870s. So Nightingale Lane hadn’t changed. Hardly surprising, he supposed. You’d have to burn it down and plant a rose garden before you could make Nightingale Lane respectable – and even then the roses would smell of sewers. ‘Show me.’
‘There’s no need—’ Grey began.
‘Let’s go.’ His tone of voice made it clear Rose was going anyway, if only to make Grey squirm.
They squelched in the constable’s wake through the labyrinth of warehouses on the western boundary of the docks, through a locked and barred gateway into the narrow winding lane that had probably seen more murders than any other London thoroughfare. There was no sign to Rose’s eyes that anything had changed. Here the rain made no difference, for the sun was shy of the high wall of St Katherine’s Dock on the one side and the tall warehouses of London Docks facing it. The bends and twists of the lane made it an admirable place for the disposal of grudges. The police torch shone in the puddles, as the constable flashed it in a narrow entrance between two of the dock buildings. There, half-hidden behind a pile of rotting rubbish, overflowing and burying the zinc pail it was aimed at, was the body, its shape indistinct in the gloom. For a moment the only sound was the pelting rain.
