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

  ‘This dagger.’ Egbert held the dagger, now wrapped in a handkerchief, by its handle, and detached from its two wires. ‘Show me how it works.’

  The stage manager approached nervously. ‘I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Do him in.’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about, have you? Except helping me,’ Rose said firmly.

  Thus emboldened, the stage manager set out to be helpful. ‘Mr Lamb insisted on looking after this dagger himself. He took it home at night; it was his lucky dagger, he said –’ he avoided looking down at the corpse ‘– and brought it back the next day. He would keep it in the dressing-room, he told me, and I could call for it just before the performance started.’

  ‘You didn’t this evening,’ Auguste pointed out. ‘I saw you collect it during one of the turns.’

  ‘He told me he’d be busy,’ gabbled the stage manager, ‘and I could collect it after the curtain was up. So I did,’ he finished defiantly.

  ‘Did you check the mechanism was working correctly?’

  The stage manager hesitated, caught out. ‘There was no need, was there? Mr Lamb always checked it himself, so he told me.’

  ‘Then what happened to it?’

  ‘Len here fixes it straightaway on its wires.’

  Len shrank back. ‘Yes, I did. But it were Bill here looks after it during the show.’

  Rose studied the third man, who was trying hard to look invisible.

  ‘Bill does odd jobs like this while he’s up on the bridge, don’t you, Bill?’

  ‘It were an accident,’ Bill offered hopefully. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘They do, but not generally in the very week someone is expecting to be murdered.’ Carefully Rose detached the dagger from the wires to which it was hooked at either end.

  ‘Murder? In the Old King Cole?’ the stage manager gasped. He made the hall sound like a convent school. ‘He must have been imagining things.’

  ‘Apparently not.’ Rose looked down at the corpse. ‘Look at this.’ He partly unwrapped the dagger gingerly. ‘The blade’s been stuck, so it doesn’t retreat. Glue, probably.’

  ‘But Mr Lamb checked it,’ Bill wailed.

  ‘Does it have a sheath?’ The three men looked at each other. ‘Well, does it?’ Rose repeated sharply.

  ‘Yes. I take the sheath off and stick it in the flies, till the interval.’ The flyman’s voice trembled.

  ‘So you wouldn’t notice anything odd unless you peered at the dagger closely on the bridge up there?’ Auguste said.

  ‘No,’ agreed the stage manager, weak with relief at the intervention from this unlikely source.

  ‘It’s dark up there. I don’t notice nothing.’ Bill’s voice rose to a squeak.

  ‘I suppose I’d better take a look.’ Rose sounded unenthusiastic, and Auguste remembered he had been equally unenthusiastic about climbing up to the flies when, in their early acquaintance, murder had stalked the Galaxy musical comedy theatre in the Strand, where his dear Maisie had been a chorus girl.

  Nervously Len and Bill scuttled into the wings, where a narrow staircase led up to the lower flies, roughly parallel with the upper floor which Auguste had explored in his search for the raven. Here there were ropes, cables, chairs, capstans and the Old King Cole’s entire sound-effects department, it seemed – one sheet of copper for making thunder. A ladder led up to the higher range of flies, Len and Bill’s domain. Here, above the battens, intense heat made the air a cauldron, and gave them a worm’s eye view of the audience and of the stage beneath; it was from the bridge crossing the stage, Bill explained, that Will’s dagger had been controlled. Sandwiching Egbert between Bill and Len, Auguste brought up the rear, reminding himself that he had survived the Galaxy’s far higher, hotter upper levels. This, he instructed himself, was simple in comparison.

  ‘Here!’ Len reached out to them from the flies. ‘This is the sheath.’

  ‘You carry it down,’ Egbert said thickly to Auguste. Then to Bill: ‘You controlled the dagger on its wires, did you?’

  ‘Yes. The wires are attached to this board, see?’ Bill leaned over so far that even Auguste felt sick. ‘Mr Lamb showed me how – it’s quite easy, provided you watch ’im. Just the end bit—’ He broke off, looking at them with frightened face. ‘He said, soon as you see me stumble, jerk the wire and up it’ll come. It did,’ he added forlornly. ‘The handle’s weighted, you see.’

  ‘Even so, you’d think the weight of his body would knock it sideways,’ Auguste commented, puzzled.

  ‘Sometimes it used to, he told me; it didn’t matter much unless he knocked it too far and ruined the sketch, so he—’ he stopped.

  ‘He what?’ asked Auguste gently.

  ‘He used to fall so the audience couldn’t see him grabbing the dagger with the hand furthest from them, and steadying it, as he fell over it.’

  They stared down at the stage. The corpse had gone now, but in their imagination the scene was only too vivid. The hand reaching out – to ensure his own death.

  ‘Hell’s bells, I’m going to puke,’ Bill choked.

  Hastily Auguste clambered down with Egbert following in rapid pursuit. From sounds up above, Bill appeared to have fulfilled his prophecy.

  Percy Jowitt watched the remains of his hopes for the rescue of the Old King Cole vanishing on a stretcher from the stage door. His task as guardian of the men’s dressing-room had now been taken over by a policeman and he was free to ponder, wringing his hands like Lady Macbeth, over his fate.

  ‘When that body gets to the mortuary,’ Rose remarked to Grey as he regained terra firma with relief, ‘we’re going to have every newspaper in town descending on us.’ He pondered on whether this was help or hindrance to what had been and might still be his main inquiry.

  Jowitt, overhearing, brightened amidst his gloom, as the commercial prospects for the Old King Cole dramatically improved. Until he remembered the unfortunate fact that he had a major gap in his cast. Suppose Miss Turner too withdrew her services – not, he hoped, in the same way as Will, but the result would be the same? He clutched Auguste’s arm, seeing him as his saviour from bailiffs and all other ills that might affect his beloved theatre. ‘I’ve had to give back the box-office money for tonight. I face ruin, Mr Didier, now Mr Lamb has deserted me.’

  ‘Percy, can’t you give a thought to poor old Will for once?’ Nettie cried, irritated. She had had enough of being cooped up with Evangeline Yapp, and had come to see for herself what was going on. Her formidable personality had dismissed a mere constable without problem. ‘He did his best for you out of the kindness of his heart, and all you can think about it is your blooming theatre.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you are right, Nettie,’ Jowitt admitted eagerly. ‘I am ungrateful. But you will continue the week here, will you not, Nettie?’

  Nettie managed to laugh at that. ‘You, Percy, are an old reprobate. Yes, if the police let us carry on.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jowitt said humbly.

  ‘But not for your sake,’ she continued.

  ‘Naturally not,’ he agreed hastily. ‘For your public’s.’

  ‘No. For Will’s. I’m going to make sure whoever did this gets what they deserve, and I’m staying around here till they get it.’

  ‘What the bloomin’ heck’s going on?’ Max Hill came in on the late side for his second-half turn, and regarded them in astonishment. ‘Been an accident, ’as there, Nettie? Saw a body being loaded.’

  ‘Not an accident, Max. A murder.’

  ‘Ere? Cripes. Who?’

  ‘Will.’

  He stared at her, his face turning pale. ‘Will?’ he repeated stupidly. ‘Murdered? Are you sure?’

  She shrugged. ‘Ask the Chief there.’ She nodded towards Rose.

  ‘True, Chief?’

  ‘Looks like it. Where have you been?’

  ‘Having a drink. I come here for my turn and walk into this lot.’ A quaver in his voice belied his bravado. ‘This
what you were down here for, then?’

  ‘No.’ Rose firmly ushered Max and Nettie towards their fellow artistes. ‘Run through the order of those turns, Auguste.’ Rose commandeered Nettie’s dressing-room in preference to Percy’s office; he wasn’t going to budge too far from the dressing-rooms.

  ‘There was a change tonight. Usually Our Pickles is first, then the Tumbling Twins, followed by Miguel Gomez—’

  ‘He was first to reach the body, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Before me. And I think Will may have said something before he died which I couldn’t hear.’

  ‘Did he indeed? Who’s after him?’

  ‘Usually the Great Brodie, lion comique, Dolly Dadd, the country girl singer, then Fernando the strong man, followed by Will Lamb and then Little Emmeline. But tonight Pickles went on first, and then Brodie. The twins followed him, and Gomez had to wait till they’d finished.’

  ‘Why the change?’

  ‘I think because the audience was rowdy, and Brodie had the best chance of silencing them.’

  ‘He still here?’

  ‘No, he and Pickles have left for engagements in other halls. They sometimes have three or four engagements an evening.’

  ‘We’ll get them back.’

  Auguste’s heart sank. It was going to be a long night. ‘Is that necessary, Egbert?’

  Rose regarded him in some amazement. ‘Assuming Lamb didn’t bung up his own dagger with glue, someone did it for him. Perhaps his landlady did, but being practical, someone went to his dressing-room and did it here. It wouldn’t take long, even if Lamb were there, provided his attention was distracted for a minute or two.’

  ‘I saw all those that went there after the curtain rose,’ Auguste told him.

  ‘And before?’

  ‘There was half an hour or so before the performance started, when I returned to the kitchens.’

  ‘More important than guarding Lamb, was it?’

  ‘You do me an injustice, Egbert.’ Auguste was hurt. ‘Will told me he was expecting a visitor, and did not want me present. He promised to bang on the wall for Miss Turner next door to reassure her he was all right. Every five minutes. And he did.’

  Egbert had the grace to blush. ‘My apologies, Auguste. Don’t know what’s got into me. It’s always the same in these cases where royalty’s hovering over you.’

  ‘So you believe Will’s death is connected?’

  ‘I do. I know you think otherwise, but I don’t like coincidences. And that’s why I’m going to talk to Miguel Gomez first.’ He paused. ‘Want to stay?’

  Auguste brightened, relieved he was not being banished.

  Miguel arrived, looking extremely sulky.

  ‘We meet again, Mr Gomez,’ Rose said cheerfully with a remarkable volte face from a few minutes before. ‘Now perhaps you’ll tell me what you were still doing in the theatre. You’d finished your turn. Don’t you have another theatre to go on to?’

  ‘Yes, but tonight I stay here.’

  ‘Why’s that? What was so special about tonight?’

  ‘It is Mariella’s birthday. I wish to stay with her.’

  ‘Very conjugal of you, Mr Gomez, I’m sure. So why were you standing in the wings and not with her?’

  ‘I wanted to see Will Lamb’s performance,’ he said disarmingly. ‘He is – was, alas – a great artiste.’

  ‘Afraid he’d found out something about you?’ Rose asked gently. ‘About your outside activities, perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ shouted Miguel. ‘This is persecution. First you come to my house, you search it. Now you want to blame murder on me. No, no, no. I liked dear Will.’

  ‘Although he was in love with your wife?’ Auguste inquired.

  ‘Mere gossip.’

  ‘What was it he said to you before he died?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Mr Didier saw Mr Lamb say something.’

  ‘Nothing of importance,’ Miguel amended sullenly.

  ‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ Egbert said firmly.

  ‘It was silly. He just said “ghost”.’ He looked from one to the other triumphantly. ‘You see, it was nothing.’

  ‘No, not nothing,’ Auguste said. ‘I told you, Inspector, that Will believed that the ghost of William Terriss was haunting him; it was one of the reasons he believed that his life was threatened.’

  ‘By the ghost?’

  ‘He thought it had come to warn him.’

  ‘All right, Mr Gomez, you can go – for the moment,’ Egbert told him, to his visible relief.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Auguste?’ he asked after Miguel had departed.

  ‘Will did. That is the point. With many people such a ghost would have had a very practical explanation, but Will was so finely balanced between this world and his own that I think perhaps he might indeed have believed there was a presence.’

  ‘Or seen a reality and deduced a ghost?’

  ‘It is possible. Remember the raven, however.’

  ‘Coincidence.’

  ‘And the warning letters?’

  ‘Ghosts don’t write letters.’

  ‘Would-be murderers might.’

  ‘You think the same person that killed him also tried to warn him off?’

  ‘If so, it follows that it was not that someone did not want Will Lamb alive at all, but that someone did not want him alive and here.’

  ‘Back to Miguel, then. You said Will was in love with his red-headed wife.’

  ‘That is true, but Will’s idea of love is not perhaps every man’s. Miguel must have realised that, surely.’

  ‘Nothing physical, you mean?’

  ‘I would think not.’

  ‘Jealous men don’t think.’

  There was a knock on the door but it was thrust open before Auguste could reach it. Inspector Grey glanced at him, but otherwise ignored him.

  ‘Ah, Grey, this is Mr Didier, helping me on this case.’

  Auguste received a reluctant nod. He didn’t mind. In the course of the last few years he’d met a lot of Grey’s men, so busy climbing their ladder they never bothered to choose the best position.

  ‘Come and look at this.’ There was pride in Grey’s voice, as he threw open the door of Will’s dressing-room.

  Rose whistled. ‘Your men been making a mess of things, have they?’

  The room’s contents were chaotically strewn around; greasepaint, costumes, the few personal belongings, lay in heaps where they had been randomly thrown.

  ‘Not my men,’ Grey retorted with dignity. ‘This was done when we arrived. Your chap, perhaps.’

  ‘Joe?’ Egbert remembered the red-headed lad. ‘I doubt it. This was done earlier. Somebody wanted something badly.’

  ‘Not so badly, in fact.’ Grey announced his coup. ‘Look at this.’ He went to the costume chest, now half emptied of its contents. He plucked out an old stove hat and thrust it beneath their noses. Inside was a roughly packed brown-paper parcel. ‘That’s how we found it,’ Grey said smugly. ‘Now look what’s in it.’ He took the parcel and unwrapped it. There, in his large hands, was a silver cross, with dark red stones set around the ivory body of Christ.

  ‘Here of all places,’ said Rose slowly.

  ‘Will wouldn’t have had anything to do with this,’ exclaimed Auguste.

  ‘Perhaps he forgot to mention it to you, Mr Didier,’ Grey gloated in his triumph.

  Perhaps, but Auguste liked things to make sense, and this did not. ‘Surely Will could not be involved in pretending to be a Portuguese ambassador, in order to defraud His Majesty out of this relic,’ he exploded.

  ‘He is involved,’ Grey said shortly. ‘Look at this.’

  ‘A plant,’ said Auguste desperately.

  Grey ignored him. ‘He was being blackmailed, you see.’

  ‘You deduce that, do you? Over what?’ asked Rose. ‘A woman?’

  ‘No. His tastes lay in other directions. He had some rather embarrassing items tucked away. Queer sort of cove, wa
sn’t he? One of them cross-dressers.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg, Grey.’

  ‘Look, sir.’ Grey was greatly injured. He never pulled legs. He took out a paper bag from the chest where the cross had been found. Inside was an object of female clothing. ‘His size, wouldn’t you say?’

  It was a red silk corset.

  ‘I’m going to enjoy reporting this to the Palace,’ Egbert Rose said in satisfaction after Grey had gone.

  ‘Will’s odd taste in clothing?’ Auguste was still puzzled.

  Egbert fixed him with a withering look. ‘No,’ he explained patiently. ‘This. The cross. Remember?’ He wrapped the paper round it lovingly. ‘I’m going to enjoy returning it. Perhaps I’ll get on to Special Branch right away.’ Somewhat cheered, he went to Jowitt’s office to carry out this pleasant mission.

  Nettie had had enough of playing wardress, and had no hesitation in informing the policeman outside the dressing-room of the fact. She strode over to Auguste who had been about to seize the opportunity to see what might be happening in ‘his’ kitchens.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she demanded.

  What could he say? ‘The police will find whoever did it, Miss Turner.’

  She brushed aside this placebo. ‘Don’t call me that. I’m Nettie. We’re on the same side.’

  ‘Even though I failed to protect him?’ Auguste asked quietly. It had been preying on his mind.

  ‘No more than I did, letting him come here. It was his choice, and his decision to come, remember. We’re human beings, not some kind of magic genie leaping out of a lamp to save him.’ She paused. ‘And I’ve been thinking. It must have been when you went back to the kitchens that the dagger was messed around with. That was what happened, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It might have been accident, they can’t know for sure yet.’

  ‘No accident. We know that. Will banged on the wall every five minutes, just like he said. But that doesn’t mean someone wasn’t playing around with the dagger while he was doing it.’

  ‘Did he tell you who his visitor was, when you went in to see him later?’

  ‘No. He was upset about something though. I asked him to cough up, but he wouldn’t. That was unlike Will.’