Death at the Pantomime

by Evelyn James

  Park-Coombs carefully pulled down the edge of the apron to read the accusatory word ‘thief’ written upon it.

  “Whoever wrote this can spell. Lots of people are caught out by the word thief and misspell it,” he said conversationally, some of his ire had dissipated now he was involved in the case. “Any thoughts on the relevance of the word?”

  Maddock shook his head.

  “I can’t think of the logic. Mr Hutson made a lot of money as a performer. He would not have to steal anything.”

  “Might not mean a material thing he stole,” the inspector persisted. “Anyone among your company have a grudge against him?”

  “No,” Maddock shook his head even harder. “Mr Hutson was well respected among us. He had been loyal to the company, even during the slim years of the war.”

  “No one looking to take his place, maybe?” Park-Coombs pushed.

  “No one would even consider it!” Maddock said in horror at the thought. “Mr Hutson was the greatest dame of our age! I would never think to replace him!”

  “What about his son,” Clara interjected. “He clearly possessed his father’s talent and was able to mimic him perfectly during the second half. He was indistinguishable from his father.”

  “Donald is very good,” Maddock agreed. “But he would never think of replacing his father, not like that.”

  “Rather makes you think Donald was walking in his father’s shadow,” Tommy whispered in Clara’s ear. She gave him a look that said she had thought the same.

  “When was Mr Hutson missed?” Park-Coombs now asked.

  “Shortly before the curtain was due to go up on the second half,” Maddock explained. “I have an assistant who makes sure all the performers are present and ready to go on the stage before each scene. She noticed that Mr Hutson was absent and informed me. When I could not find him and discovered that his first costume of the second half was sitting in his dressing room, I had to make a split-second decision. I asked Donald to take-over while I looked for his father.”

  “Donald did not know where he was?”

  “No,” Maddock was struggling to take his eyes off the recumbent figure in the basket. “Donald said his father had been upset after the first half and wondered if he had gone to get a drink. I should emphasise, Inspector, it was extraordinary for Mr Hutson to miss a curtain call.”

  “Then you must have been worried about him?” Park-Coombs pried.

  “I was. There was some unpleasantness at the start of the panto. An audience member booed Mr Hutson when he entered on stage as the dame. I rather felt Hutson had taken the comment to heart. It was probably just an accident.”

  “And Mr Hutson liked to drink when he was upset?” Park-Coombs was not giving Maddock any leeway and the director was starting to sweat.

  “He had been known to drink when a performance had not gone well,” Maddock admitted. “But I had never known him to miss a show. That was why I was worried, but I never suspected he was dead. I thought I would find him in a pub, drinking away his woes. I only found the body by chance.”

  The inspector seemed to accept this answer.

  “Anything else unusual happen tonight?”

  Maddock gave a small, uncomfortable cough.

  “There was a fire, in the prop room,” he confessed. “I’m not sure how it began, but a papier mache rock we use in the cave seen was at the centre of the trouble. It was blazing away and a number of other props caught light. I evacuated the theatre while a couple of stagehands doused the flames.”

  The inspector was clever enough to suspect the two events – the fire and the murder – were connected, just as Clara had done.

  “Any idea how the fire began?” Park-Coombs asked.

  “Not really, but I was rather distracted from that after I found…” Maddock waved his hand in the vague direction of Mr Hutson’s corpse and fell silent.

  “I’ll need a full list of everyone in your company,” Park-Coombs said casually, starting to move away.

  “What?” Maddock startled.

  “I thought that was plain enough? I’ll need to speak to everyone, find out if they saw or heard anything.”

  “But, Inspector, if you do that, how shall I ever get them to perform?” Maddock said desperately. “Actors are such precious creatures. A murder investigation shall have them falling to pieces.”

  “What you have to bear in mind, Mr Maddock, is that among your ‘precious creatures’ is a murderer. For all we know it was one of Mr Hutson’s fellow actors,” Park-Coombs was blunt. “This was a personal attack, someone out for revenge, and they wanted people to know about it, hence the message. Strikes me, that is the sort of thing a rival actor might do.”

  Clara almost corrected the inspector for jumping to conclusions, then changed her mind. He was pushing Maddock, seeing what he could get.

  “Your company is likely harbouring a murderer. Until this matter is resolved, every person at this theatre is a suspect and that includes you, Mr Maddock.”

  Maddock looked like he might faint at this information. He gulped hard and had to excuse himself from the room, rushing to the nearest bathroom to be sick. The inspector shook his head and tutted as the man departed.

  “These theatrical types are so sensitive,” he said.

  “Mr Maddock has been under a great deal of strain,” Clara reminded him. “He has lost one of the main members of his crew, discovered a corpse, had to deal with a fire in the prop room and is now contemplating that among those people he has known and worked with for years is a murderer. I think he can be excused his reaction, under the circumstances.”

  Park-Coombs was duly chastened by her gentle rebuke and had the decency to blush a little.

  “You are right, I am being harsh. I’m tired, that’s all,” Park-Coombs’ moustache did one of its little twitches that suggested its owner was feeling thoughtful. “We have been working our fingers to the bone trying to sort out this business with the mysterious alley gang, the one who attacked Private Peterson.”

  Clara nodded, not daring to speak. Her mind had flicked back to Brilliant Chang.

  “Progress, if you can call it that, is slow. No one is talking and anytime we try to interview someone they seem to have magically disappeared. Honestly, I am frustrated,” Park-Coombs scratched at his ear. “Does it sound awful that I actually feel better to have just a run-of-the-mill murder to solve?”

  “I understand,” Clara promised him. “If I can do anything…”

  “You stay out of this gang business, Clara, it’s far too dangerous,” Park-Coombs told her firmly.

  Clara chose not to argue, even if she was not precisely staying away from the matter.

  Maddock returned, wiping his mouth with a white handkerchief.

  “The panto can carry on, can’t it, Inspector?” He asked desperately.

  “I don’t see why not,” Park-Coombs replied, his tone kinder. “Once everything has been investigated here, you can return to normal, well, as normal as possible under the circumstances.”

  Maddock looked relieved.

  “I don’t know what we will do without Mr Hutson,” he said miserably.

  At that moment Dr Deáth, the police coroner arrived, humming to himself in the happy-go-lucky fashion that seemed so at odds with his job. He smiled at everyone; clearly, he did not hold a grudge for being disturbed from his sleep. The coroner was one of the kindest and gentlest men Clara knew. Some might find his cheerful attitude to death disrespectful, but it was nothing of the sort, Dr Deáth simply saw no reason for being morbid about such things. He had utter respect for the dead, which was why he did not mope about around them. He had a job to do and he would do it to the best of his abilities.

  “Well, well,” he said, peering in at Stanley Hutson. The coroner was not an overly big man and he had to pop up onto his toes to get a good look. “This is unexpected. Though, very seasonal.”

  Inspector Park-Coombs muttered something under his breath, Clara suspected he was findin
g the coroner’s jolly demeanour irritating when he was craving his bed.

  “You know what is very curious, Inspector?” Clara said to him.

  Inspector Park-Coombs looked at her with an expression that indicated he did not know.

  “Considering the amount of blood Mr Hutson lost, and that his killer must have had to carry him here, the culprit ought to have been positively covered in blood. Yet, no one witnessed a person so drenched,” she elaborated.

  “Clara is right,” Dr Deáth emerged from him work. “When you cut a man’s throat you don’t instantly kill him. The heart keeps pumping and it causes blood to shoot out from the wound. And a big, deep wound like this, that would cause a lot of blood to splatter around. The killer must have been stained.”

  “And yet we are in a theatre, with lots of potential changes of clothing,” Park-Coombs pointed out grumpily. “The killer does his messy work, then changes into a different costume.”

  “And with the fire as a diversion, he would have been able to work without too much fear of being spotted,” Tommy added.

  “What are the odds the killer dumped his soiled clothes somewhere around here?” Clara said quietly to her brother.

  “Not a lot of time to hide them, what with disposing of the body. He had to lure Hutson to the old pulley room, kill him, start a fire, hide the body and then get rid of the clothes.”

  “And, as far as the killer knows, the body has yet to be discovered,” Clara reminded him. “Maddock told no one aside from us of his discovery, and I bet these laundry baskets are not collected until the morning.”

  “You mean, maybe the killer left his blood-stained clothes hidden here, hoping to retrieve them later?”

  “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Eight

  Clara explained her idea to the inspector, hoping to distract him from grilling poor Maddock, who the policeman seemed to suspect of being the murderer. The fraught director was beside himself with alarm and looked fit to collapse. Clara’s second suggestion, after she proposed searching for the murder clothes, was that someone take Maddock to a quiet place and get him a stiff drink. Annie volunteered, as she was beginning to feel queasy hanging around a corpse. Park-Coombs sent a constable to accompany her and Maddock, just to be sure, as he put it.

  That left several people to go through the large laundry baskets that contained a vast amount of clothing. The number of costume changes during the panto, not just for the main cast, but for the chorus, was immense, and over the course of the night the costumes were torn, frayed, ripped and stained in the actors’ haste to don them or remove them.

  Clara found herself elbow deep in sweaty linen, searching for an outfit that looked bloodstained. The simplest means of making sure each basket was thoroughly searched was to tip it over and empty the contents, then return each item one by one. The process went quite smoothly until one constable discovered that his laundry basket contained several items of feminine underwear and he was so embarrassed he could barely continue. Clara shut her ears as Park-Coombs barked at the prudish constable and dragged a sequined tunic from among her pile. It had some dark patches on the sleeve, but when she sniffed them she discovered they were unmistakably wine stains – someone had been celebrating the first night in their costume.

  In the background, Dr Deáth continued his work with cheerful disregard for what was going on around him. He was talking to himself as he examined Hutson, making comments under his breath about skin discoloration, temperature changes and wound patterns. Clara had one ear on him, not meaning to, but finding it hard to tune out the man’s steady conversation with himself. She finished searching through her pile of clothes and threw the last item back in the basket with a despondent look. Glancing around she saw her fellow searchers were also nearly done, and no one had found a bloody outfit, not even one solitary item that could be linked to the crime.

  “Maybe the killer took the clothing away, after all,” Tommy shrugged to her as he discarded a pair of blue tights, the sort Aladdin wore, into his basket.

  Clara bit on her lower lip, thinking. The killer had had so little time, it seemed logical that he would abandon his clothes somewhere in the theatre to retrieve later. But if not in the laundry, well they could be anywhere. Clara thought of the holes in the ceiling of the abandoned dressing rooms, those would make good hiding places, no one would think to look there. Then, as she let her mind wander, she found herself imagining all sorts of places you could hide something in a theatre. You could spend weeks searching this place and never uncover all the hidden nooks and crannies. And that really worried Clara.

  “Hmm, that was a dead end,” Inspector Park-Coombs said moodily, before noticing Clara’s forlorn expression. “It was a good idea though. Killer had to have changed his clothes. Anyway, I want to look at the remains of this suspicious fire.”

  “May I come?” Clara asked.

  Park-Coombs raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Surprised you asked permission, you don’t normally, and, of course,” Park-Coombs walked out of the laundry room door and stood in the corridor. “Where is the prop room, anyway?”

  They ended up having to ask Maddock for directions, and it turned out there was more than one room used for storing props, since the theatre had far too many of them. When the inspector mentioned perhaps throwing some away, Maddock looked at him as if he had suggested cutting off the man’s hands. Clearly you did not ‘throw things away’ in the theatre business. The place where the fire had been discovered was actually the largest of the prop rooms. It was a vast space filled with shelves and a few clothes racks, though Maddock was quick to explain that most clothing items were kept in a separate space known as the wardrobe. He showed them into the room and down a central aisle. It was easy to spot the remains of the fire, no one had bothered to clean up the ashes or remove those items charred by the flames. No doubt that was another job being left until tomorrow. Clara got the impression that the second a performance ended, everyone was altogether too glad to get home to their beds and tedious tasks were left for the next day.

  “It was fortunate we spotted it before it caused a lot of damage,” Maddock remarked, nudging the ashes with the toe of his shoe. “It happened we needed a spare sabre, the tip of the vizier’s having snapped off during the cave scene. If not, the fire would have spread a lot further before we realised. As it was, it damaged these shelves nearest it.”

  Park-Coombs gave a whistle.

  “This place is like a tinder box. So much wood and fabric. A flame in here is a frightening thought.”

  “Inspector, I near enough had a heart attack when I was told what was occurring,” Maddock grimaced. “I had people rushing to put it out, but there was a possibility we would not succeed. That is when I evacuated the audience and cast. I wasn’t going to take any chances.”

  Park-Coombs picked up an old lamp from a shelf, it was a big policeman’s bull’s eye lamp and when he sniffed it, he smelt paraffin.

  “Had this been touched by the fire, things would have been a lot worse,” he handed it to Clara, who smelt the oily aroma.

  “A lucky escape,” she shook her head. “What is a full paraffin lamp doing in here?”

  “It’s another prop,” Maddock explained. “Not sure for what play, but sometimes you have real lamps on stage and the actors cast light on the audience, or something like that. I suppose no one thought it important to empty it afterwards.”

  Clara turned her attention to the charred debris from the fire. Most of the items were burned beyond recognition, but she noticed what might have been the handle of a wooden sword, and a dummy block of cardboard books.

  “This was deliberate,” she said, poking about in the ashes and producing a used matchstick that had miraculously escaped the worst of the blaze.

  Maddock was gnawing on his lower lip, enough to make it bleed.

  “I feared as much. I mean, sometimes accidents occur. A stray cigarette thrown down thoughtlessly, for instance, or
a fault with the gas or electrics, but I saw all these things on the floor and thought to myself ‘someone meant to start a fire here’.”

  Clara worked through the remains, trying to work out what the items were and if they were at all useful to her. She assumed most of the burned objects had been added to the fire as fuel and had no real significance to the case at hand. She poked about in a clump of items with the remains of the wooden sword and suddenly noticed something.

  “There is cloth here!”

  She pushed aside a sheet of wood cut into the shape of a giant mushroom and revealed a black lump. Pulling carefully at its edge, she dragged out a bundle of material. It was badly burned, but where it had been folded on itself, the fabric had been protected and it was possible to see the original pattern. As Clara gingerly unfurled the costume, she revealed a set of trousers and a jacket. Maddock was peering over her shoulder.

  “That’s a royal guard costume,” he remarked, sounding astounded by what she had found.

  “A bright red jacket,” Clara observed. “Not bad for hiding blood stains, but look here Inspector, at the cuffs.”

  She indicated where the material was stiff with dried blood and a slightly different colour. Much of the jacket was too badly destroyed to reveal where Hutson’s blood had spattered upon it, but Clara had no doubt this was the outfit the killer had worn during the murder. It made sense; the killer burned the stained costume to destroy evidence, along with creating a distraction sufficient enough to give him time to dispose of Hutson. Knowing that the missing dame would be looked for, the killer hoped to place the body somewhere it would not be found until morning, giving him time to slip away. He could have left him in the pulley room, but he might have been discovered there too soon. He had to take a chance that someone might notice the blood, but with the body hidden it would buy precious time.

  “How many royal guards are in the panto?” Inspector Park-Coombs asked Maddock.