The Sans Pareil Mystery (The Detective Lavender Mysteries Book 2) (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

Constable Woods was fed up. He had endured about as much of preening thespians as he could stand. The men strutted around like cocks and were just as bird-brained, and the women were lewd, foul-mouthed, jealous doxies who spat like wildcats at imagined slights. It hadn’t taken him long to realise that several of the cast were embroiled in jealous squabbles or simmering feuds. The only good thing about Woods’ second day in the theatre was that his bruised buttocks had recovered from the twanging they had received the previous day at the nippy fingers of John Isaacs. Isaacs had lost interest in him and had found another niffynaffy fellow to torment, the new stagehand.

Woods dragged a stool out into the corridor and spent as much time as he could lolling against the wall pretending to be asleep with his mop idle by his side. He wanted to become so inconspicuous that no one would notice or question his presence. His ploy was working: no one had spoken to him all day. He had blended into the background.

During the afternoon rehearsal, two of the feuding actresses came to blows over some silly mistake one of them had made in the previous night’s performance. ‘You did it deliberately, you poxy old slamkin!’ screamed the complainant as she leapt onto her rival, yanked at her dress and ripped off her sleeve. The screaming women whirled in a hair-pulling, face-scratching frenzy. Three of the men struggled to break it up. Woods found it hard to resist his ingrained response to arrest both of the hellcats for affray.

He decided to slink away and hide for a while in the office that Jane Scott used for meetings. As he approached the room, he heard the desk banging hard against the floorboards and the unmistakeable grunts and groans of a copulating couple.

‘
Ah mon petit villain! T’es méchant, toi
!
’ shrieked the woman.

Isn’t that French?
Woods stopped in his tracks. His eyebrows met across his brow in a frown. He went through a mental list of the actors and actors in his mind and soon realised that he hadn’t seen William Broadhurst for some time – or the Italian actress, Miss Helena Bologna.

‘
Mon Dieu
!
’ the woman screamed again. Woods stepped away embarrassed. If Miss Bologna’s moans of delight were anything to go by, then Broadhurst gave as good a performance offstage as he did as an onstage lover. But it was the new discovery about Miss Bologna’s nationality that distracted him the most. He filed this bit of information carefully in the back of his mind; after all, they were looking for the members of a French spy ring and if there was one thing he had learnt this week, it was that the female of the species could be as devious as the male.

Woods dragged his bucket of filthy water outside the stage door and climbed up the short flight of stone steps to empty it out into the street. The chill, coal-scented air of the capital was a welcome escape from the musty odours inside the theatre. It was almost dusk and folks were hurrying to get home before it got dark. The chimney stacks and church spires of the skyline were silhouetted against a flaming-red sky and dark, billowing clouds. The lamplighters were already out and the streets were full of carriages taking home the wealthy shoppers and workers from the city. Empty wagons rumbled northwards towards the farms and market gardens of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They would be refilled with produce overnight and returned to Covent Garden before dawn. The appetite of the capital was gargantuan.

He wondered where Lavender was today and frowned when he remembered Lavender’s argument with Magistrate Read over the Duke of Clarence and Read’s disparaging comment about Lavender’s ‘Spanish widow’. That hadn’t been uttered in jest. The two men usually worked well together. Read had an incredible encyclopaedic memory: he remembered nuance and mundane details about the criminals who passed through his dock and the other citizens of London who appeared in his news-sheet. And none of the other principal officers at Bow Street possessed Lavender’s incredible ability to make sense of the twisted, corrupt behaviour and motives of the criminal and insane. He could unravel a case in half of the time it took the others. Read relied heavily on him and was ferociously protective of his best detective. He had brushed off several attempts by other London police offices to poach or borrow Lavender.

Woods knew that ever since poor Vivienne had died, his friend had thrown himself into his work like a demented fiend. Lavender stormed through the seedy underworld of the city, slicing through one unpleasant case after another. He solved mysteries with the same speed and precision that Sir Richard Allison carved up a cadaver. Even the criminals themselves had a grudging respect and fear for Stephen Lavender’s amazing powers of detection, and everyone at Bow Street assumed that the man was married to his job.

Well, folks might be in for a surprise soon
, Woods thought smugly – especially Magistrate Read. He had worried in the past about Lavender’s involvement with Doña Magdalena, whom he knew was a feisty filly even on a quiet day. But he had it on good authority from Betsy that the pair of them were well-matched and that Stephen Lavender was in love. This had calmed his fears because Betsy was rarely wrong about such things.

Magistrate Read might curl up his lip and complain about Doña Magdalena’s religion, but Woods knew that once Stephen Lavender made up his mind to do something, there wasn’t anything on earth that would stop him. He suspected that Magistrate Read knew this too. Still, it wasn’t good for Bow Street that the magistrate and his cleverest detective were at odds.

Sighing, Woods clomped back down to the stage door and resumed his vigil on his stool. The peace and quiet in the draughty corridor suggested that Broadhurst and Miss Bologna had finished their tryst and left the office. He slumped down against the wall and pretended to be asleep.
Not long now
, he realised.

April Clare returned to the Sans Pareil just before six. She swept down the corridor in a shimmering, black chiffon gown edged with dark green lace and black beads. A fashionable black ostrich feather curled around the mound of glossy black hair piled on her head. Woods gasped. Her resemblance to her dead sister was uncanny. Then he remembered why they were here. He glanced down and noted with satisfaction that she had her play script clutched in her gloved hands.
Good.

As soon as April Clare walked through the gaping doorway into the green room, the noise level rose dramatically. The theatre cast swarmed around her like buzzing insects.

‘April! April,
darling
!’ She was passed from one embrace to another. Even the three actresses who had so bitterly bemoaned Miss Clare’s return now fawned all over her and squealed with delight. For a moment, she was pulled into the centre of the room and he lost sight of her. Then she reappeared with Jane Scott in front of the fireplace. Jane Scott clapped her hands to get attention. ‘Quiet!’ she shouted. ‘I would just like to say a word or two about darling April’s return to the Sans Pareil – and then we must toast her miraculous resurrection!’

‘Excuse me one moment, Miss Scott,’ said April Clare. ‘I’ll just put my play script down on the table.’ The actress couldn’t have timed it better. Everyone in the theatre watched in near silence as she placed her play script, containing the list of naval information, back into exactly the same place where she had left it the week before.

Good gal.
Woods grunted with satisfaction and sat back to wait.

It didn’t take long. After a brief speech and the toast, the party dispersed and everyone moved along to the dressing rooms to prepare for that evening’s performance. Woods had counted them all into the green room; now he counted them out. Eventually, there was only one person left who remained out of sight, lurking in the shadows at the bottom end of the room. Woods sat perfectly still, leant against the wall and watched through half-closed eyes.
Here he comes.

Gabriel Gomez, the Spanish actor, walked to the front of the green room. Woods remembered Lavender complaining about Gomez’s indifferent acting earlier in the week and had identified the Spaniard yesterday. Gomez had his back to the door and the shadowy corridor where Woods sat, but Woods knew that he was rummaging through April Clare’s script. Suddenly, Gomez stopped and turned towards the blazing candelabra over the fireplace. He scanned the paper in his hand and folded it before slipping it into his coat pocket. His actions only took seconds but it was enough.

Got you – you sly fox.
Woods felt satisfaction sweep through him. Gomez left the green room. Woods closed his eyes, held his breath as he waited for the Spaniard’s next move. The actor went into one of the dressing rooms, retrieved his coat and hat then headed for the stage door. Woods gave him a moment before he turned up the collar of his own coat, pulled his hat low over his eyes and rose to follow Gomez out onto the street. Captain Sackville’s instructions had been clear:
Follow the spy to his lair so we can round up as many of this gang as possible.

Woods leapt up the stone steps outside the theatre and joined the heaving throng on the busy street. He glanced around and caught sight of the actor weaving in and out of the crowds. Suddenly, a gloved hand reached out and grabbed him by the arm. It was Lavender.

‘It’s that Spaniard – Gabriel Gomez.’ Woods pointed to the dark figure hurrying down the road. ‘He‘s got the list in his pocket and I’m trailin’ him.’

‘Good work, Ned,’ said Lavender. ‘We’ll follow him together.’

There was no time for any further exchange of news. It was dark; the pavement was a sea of bobbing heads, hats and bonnets. It wasn’t easy to follow a black-coated, dark-haired man in a hat amongst so many others similarly attired. Sometimes they lost him in the shadows and always breathed a sigh of relief when he stepped out again into a pool of light thrown out from an open tavern door or the occasional wall lantern. They followed closer than normal, desperate not to lose sight of their quarry.

‘Let’s hope that he doesn’t jump into a cab,’ Lavender said. They closed the gap until they were less than a dozen yards behind Gomez. When they reached Shaftesbury Avenue, the Spaniard glanced back. For a moment, his eyes rested on the two police officers. He turned and quickened his pace.

‘We need to split up,’ Lavender said and weaved his way through heavy traffic onto the other side of the road. Gomez didn’t turn round again until he reached the corner of Bedford Square. This time he looked straight at Woods and Woods saw the fear in the Spaniard’s eyes before Gomez broke into a run and disappeared around the corner.

‘Damn it.’ Woods quickened his own pace. Lavender crossed back over the road and fell into step beside him, matching his stride. ‘He knows we’re on his tail,’ Woods said.

They heard a house door slam as they turned the corner into Bedford Square but neither of them saw which house Gomez had entered. The elegant square, with its sides of neat brick houses, was quiet, empty and dimly lit, although candles flickered behind the closed drapes of several homes. Nothing moved except the wind-rustled dead leaves in the undergrowth of the park in the centre. There were no sounds except the distant barking of a dog and the rumble of traffic on Bloomsbury Street behind them. Their quarry had vanished.

‘Where did he go?’ Lavender asked.

‘He must be inside one of them houses,’ Woods said.

Lavender’s voice rose sharply. ‘But which one? Which house?’

Woods shrugged helplessly.

Fifty yards further down the pavement, the drapes at one of the ground-floor windows suddenly twitched and parted. Light flooded out onto the pavement. Gomez was framed in the window, illuminated by the blazing candelabra behind him. The Spaniard looked fearful and seemed to be looking for them. His eyes found them. He mouthed something, as if talking to someone else in the room. Then he disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.

‘What’s that about?’ Woods asked.

‘It’s almost as if he wanted us to know where he is,’ Lavender said.

‘What do we do now?’

Woods never got a reply. The unmistakably sharp crack of a pistol shot suddenly shattered the evening peace. A blue flash of gunpowder flared up in the gap between the drapes of the window where they had just seen Gomez.

‘Heaven and hell!’ They broke into a run and leapt up the stone stairs to the front door of the house. They heard women screaming inside. Lavender pulled his pistol out of his pocket quickly followed by Woods, who muttered a thankful prayer that he had retrieved his own weapon from Betsy’s hiding place. Lavender rapped loudly on the front door.

Another pistol shot reverberated around the inside of the house, fired just inside the hallway on the other side of the door. The women’s screams intensified and Lavender banged harder.

‘Police! Open this door!’

‘Gawd’s teeth, it’s a massacre!’ Woods exclaimed. Suddenly, Lavender stopped hammering and tried the handle. It was unlocked. The door gave way and the two policemen half fell and half ran into the dimly lit hallway.

‘Detective Stephen Lavender and Constable Woods – Bow Street Police!’ Lavender yelled.

The two terrified women were pressed against the balustrade at the bottom of the stairs. They screamed again and clutched each other, but neither seemed to be hurt.

Lavender and Woods turned in the direction of the pistol shots. The doorjamb and the side of the door to their left were a mass of jagged splinters. Someone had shot off the lock. Shards of wood crunched beneath their boots as they stepped cautiously into the room. Lavender led the way, the arm holding his pistol outstretched before him.

It was a man’s study. Bookcases towered up the walls around them. A warm fire flickered in the grate. Before them on the thick carpet, Gabriel Gomez lay dead. His lifeless eyes stared up at the crystal chandelier in the centre of the ornate ceiling above. Blood seeped from the hole in his skull onto the white muslin of his cravat; he had been shot in the head.

Standing in front of him, with dishevelled hair and a horrified expression on her face was Doña Magdalena. She leant on the high back of a winged armchair for support with one hand. In the other, she limply held a pearl-handled pistol. Smoke still curled from the barrel.