Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) Read online

  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

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also by Amy Myers

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  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

  About the Book

  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

  Prologue

  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.

  ‘Another of them casuals,’ Grey then said disgustedly, lifting the body up slightly with one foot and letting it drop again.

  ‘Not from the pubs round here, sir, I know ’em all.’

  Grey regarded the constable with dislike. Unknowns might mean trouble. ‘A casual’s what we call them,’ he told Rose loudly. ‘They hang around the pubs waiting for odd jobs, carrying and fetching from the docks, and don’t mind too much if they get ’em or not.’

  Rose knew what a casual was all right, but he disapproved of Grey’s boot. A casual was a man, with a name, even if he alone knew it. ‘Nothing strikes you as odd?’ He squatted down by the body, and lifted it again.

  A pause. ‘Not in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘He’s been stabbed. Knifed. Not much blood, because the knife’s still in it, driven in deep.’

  The young constable flushed red, and seeing it, Rose added kindly: ‘You did right not to move the body, and there was no seeing without doing that.’

  Overwhelmed with gratitude, the constable’s young face brightened. ‘I found this, sir, by his hand in a puddle. I took it for safe keeping.’

  Rose looked at the small piece of shaped dark-red glass, examining it carefully. ‘Could be nothing, or it could be a garnet.’

  ‘He’s a thief then,’ Grey was impatient to be away. ‘Or a fence’s runner. I’ll take it. Valuable, is it?’

  ‘Not in itself.’ Rose replied absently. He was remembering this morning’s interview.

  ‘Can you describe the cross, Your Majesty?’

  ‘Silver with ivory, studded with precious stones.’

  ‘What kind of precious stones, sir?’

  ‘Mainly garnets,’ the King had replied promptly.

  ‘I’ll take it to the Yard.’ Rose scribbled a receipt. It was probably coincidence, but it might possibly be the tarragon in the sauce. He remembered Auguste once saying that of an apparently insignificant detail. He shivered. There were smells in this narrow corridor that were far removed from an Auguste Didier kitchen. Smells of decay and death, that remained uncleansed by the rain still steadily beating down. And smells stirring in his mind as well – and those he didn’t like.

  Chapter One

  ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’

  The little man broke off. He looked perplexedly at his audience. ‘I ask you, you’d think he could see it was a dagger. “The handle toward my hand.” Now, is that poetry? No, that is a –’ he wildly searched for the right word – ‘a perlice report.’

  The dancing dagger pranced along its invisible wire, as Will Lamb made valiant attempts to grasp it, leaping around the stage in increasing desperation as each time the dagger jerked out of his reach. ‘Come, let me clutch thee,’ he pleaded to it in vain. He appealed to his audience. ‘Now, if that was his old woman there I could understand it, but a dagger, well, I ask you, who’d want to clutch a dagger? Nasty unfriendly things. No, if you ask me,’ shaking his head sadly, ‘this Shakespeare fellow’s got it wrong.’

  The literary context was familiar to him, but even if it had not been the comedy was irresistible and universal. Auguste Didier laughed helplessly in his private box at the back of the Empire Theatre’s grand circle.

  Lamb’s anxious eyes bore the bewildered expression of Everyman faced with a world of inanimate objects beyond his control. ‘Downright dangerous, I call it.’

  ‘Horrible, terrible,’ shouted out a jovial member of his audience.

  The theatre rocked with laughter, as Lamb, peering anxiously round, made one final desperate glance of appeal to his audience, then plunged after his elusive quarry, and promptly tripped over, falling flat on the dagger, which had condescended to rest on the ground point upwards.

  ‘He is superb,’ Auguste cried enthusiastically to his companion. ‘He is another Grimaldi, a true clown.’

  ‘And a nice man, too.’ Gwendolen, Lady Westland, alias the former Magnificent Masher, the toast of the halls until her marriage, commented apparently casually. Auguste glanced at her, catching something odd in her tone, though she was laughing as hard as he. Was it just his imagination or could it be that the company of Auguste Didier was not the sole reason for her last-minute invitation to escort her this evening? Perhaps he longed too much for something just a little out of the ordinary to happen, and was seeing bears where only bushes existed. High society into which he had perforce been catapulted on his marriage provided a constrained life, and Tatiana had so far been more ingenious than he in squirreling out escape routes. She had her School of Motoring for Ladies, whereas his ten-volume work, Dining with Didier, was proving insufficient to satisfy his restlessness.

  The troupe of brightly and lightly clad pierrots who concluded the first half of the programme were greeted with the polite but unrapturous applause to which they were resigned, after the final chorus of the song that larded La
mb’s patter: ‘So I said to the Bard . . .’

  As Auguste escorted Lady Westland through the notorious Promenade to the select champagne bar, his eyes strayed a trifle wistfully to right and left where soft birds of paradise sparkled in jewels and allure in search of custom for later this evening. Wistfully? He caught himself guiltily. He was a happily married man, he reminded himself, then cheered up as he reflected that to appreciate the aroma of the soup was not the same as sipping it.

  The sight of the Veuve Cliquot awaiting them, as he advanced behind his hostess’s ample purple-satined posterior, cheered him even more, and it was well into the second glass before he ventured to put voice to his suspicions.

  ‘It is indeed a pleasure to be here, Lady Westland—’

  ‘But you want to know why, is that it?’ Gwendolen cut in cheerfully.

  He nodded, relieved. After all, he hardly knew her. He had only met her once, and then only partially. He had visited Tatiana’s School of Motoring (an elegant title that discreetly failed to mention the motor garage, complete with engineering workshop, also on the premises), to discover his wife clad in hideous bloomers lying underneath a motorcar with someone in a similar state of dress. His wife emerged, Lady Westland had remained mostly hidden, as it appeared repairs were at a critical point. In her fifties now, Lady Westland had retired from the music-hall stage over twenty years ago. As the Magnificent Masher, she had stormed the music halls of the late seventies and eighties with her male impersonations and comic abilities. Auguste suspected the comic potential of her life had seriously declined, and that she missed it in her present role of Magnificent Peeress.

  ‘Dear Tatiana asked me to entertain you while she was away.’

  ‘And why else, Lady Westland?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Nettie Turner’s got a job for you.’

  Auguste had of course seen Nettie Turner on stage before – one could hardly avoid it. She was the darling of the halls in East and West Ends alike, and he seemed to remember hearing that it had been Lady Westland who had first spotted and encouraged her talent. Her warmth and vitality seemed to increase with the years, and she was well over forty now. How quickly magical illusion could vanish, however. As they went into her dressing-room after the performance, Auguste saw merely a middle-aged, tired woman, her face lined with more creases than laughter had provided, sitting in a room as plush and crowded with mementoes as any parlour. Where was the bewitching creature who had just held three and a half thousand people in the palm of her hand as she teased them, laughed with them, enchanted them? The innuendoes and movements accompanying her songs were carefully toned down for this audience, as she thrust her personality over the footlights, but Auguste had seen her in less refined halls. For Auguste, it was like meeting Sarah Bernhardt, but with her coster’s costume given way to a rather dull cream silk evening dress which emphasised the sallowness of a skin newly cleansed from greasepaint, Nettie looked disappointingly ordinary – until she smiled at them. Immediately her face came alive, the warmth came back into her eyes and he saw then the strength of personality was just resting, not vanished. ‘Gwennie, me old dear. How’s the Gold Plate? Still keeping you on a ball and chain?’