Death at the Pantomime

by Evelyn James

  She hoped Tommy would be amenable to a train trip, while she continued delving closer to home.

  Clara reached home just as a heavy rainstorm struck. She hastened in the door to be greeted by Bramble, their small poodle, who had distinctly wet paws. Clara sighed at the marks on her skirt, then patted the little dog’s head.

  “Where is your master?”

  Bramble scampered off to the morning room, and Clara was about to follow him when she noticed there was a letter for her on the hall table. She grabbed it up and headed to Tommy. Her brother was sitting by a window, making use of the wan winter light, as he worked on some papers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Compiling a list of potential suspects,” Tommy announced, showing her the papers. “Seemed to me there were a lot of people present backstage last night. There are fifteen cast members, including the chorus and Donald Hutson who was understudy to his father. Then there was Maddock, the stage manager, numerous stagehands and the musicians, who have a room backstage to relax in during the interval. That is a long list of suspects. I thought we ought to start coordinating them all.”

  Clara looked at the long list of names and felt a wave of despondency. She rather wished he had not made the list. It made the task seem overwhelming.

  “How did things go with Donald Hutson?” Tommy asked.

  “He was upset, genuinely as far as I could tell. He says he was outside the theatre in the alley when the fire happened. If we assume the fire was a distraction to enable the killer to hide the body, then one way of eliminating people is to discover who was in that alleyway during the commotion.”

  Tommy nodded his agreement.

  “You know what intrigues me?”

  Clara motioned she did not and that he should carry on.

  “The mysterious audience boo-er,” Tommy declared. “Think about it, was he just a fool? Or did he have a reason for deliberately booing Mr Hutson? And if it was deliberate, does that mean he was somehow involved in the man’s death.”

  “Finding out who the man was will be tricky. I never saw him.”

  “No,” Tommy agreed. “But we know roughly where the sound came from and if we can work out who was seated in the area, someone must have noticed the man. That’s the sort of thing people remember.”

  “You are talking about a lot of legwork for what is an unlikely lead,” Clara said. “How would a member of the audience get backstage unnoticed?”

  Tommy dipped his shoulders, a gesture that indicated he understood her thoughts.

  “Just a coincidence then, that the night Stanley was killed someone disrupted his performance?”

  “I won’t say the possibility does not exist it was something else, but I think there are more promising avenues to pursue as yet,” Clara answered him. “Which brings me to an idea I have started to formulate. I was wondering if you would be prepared to go to London and dig into Hutson’s background? There is something there that sparked his murder. His son does not think he had any enemies and could not fathom what the word ‘thief’ meant, but there must be something that triggered this killing.”

  “You think there was someone in his past who held a grudge against Stanley,” Tommy rubbed his chin. “You know, the world of theatricals is pretty cutthroat at times. I suppose someone could feel that Stanley Hutson wronged them, cost them a part or something?”

  “It has to either be something pretty dramatic, or someone with a very disturbed nature to have led to him being violently murdered,” Clara observed. “You know, it strikes me that this was a very deliberate crime. There was more meaning to this than just that bloody word on the apron. Hutson could have been killed at a location and time that would have been more convenient for the killer. Maybe as he walked home from the theatre. Certainly there must have been occasions when he was alone and the murderer could have struck and then vanished. Surely the worst time to kill him was during the middle of a performance, with lots of people around and a bare minimum of time before Hutson was missed?”

  “You mean there could be a symbolism to Hutson being killed while he was playing a dame?”

  “It has crossed my mind,” Clara dropped onto the sofa and looked at the letter in her hand. “The Inspector seems to think Donald a promising suspect, at least that is what Donald believes.”

  “And you?”

  Clara shrugged.

  “He seemed upset over his father’s death and shocked too. I like to think he is not a good enough actor to fake such emotion. I could be wrong.”

  Clara slipped her finger under the envelope flap and ripped open the upper edge. Tommy drew his papers back towards him.

  “I was going to draw a plan of the theatre next, so we can look and see who would have been around the area where Hutson died. You are right, the killer took a big risk attacking the man when anyone could have discovered him. If Hutson had just cried out… Did he know his killer and allowed himself to be lured to the old pulley room, or was there another reason he was there?”

  Clara was not listening to him. The letter in her hand had a distinctive script upon it, the script of a hand that has not always held a pen and to who the letters of the alphabet are not as familiar as the symbols of another written language.

  Clara had been summoned by Brilliant Chang. He had something for her.

  She folded up the letter and returned it to the envelope without saying a word, hoping her demeanour had not revealed what she had just read, or the nerves fluttering in her belly. She had made the decision early on to keep her arrangement with Chang a secret from Tommy and Annie, for their own sake, and she did not want to now ruin that.

  “Are you listening?”

  Tommy’s demanding question broke her thoughts. Clara glanced up, her mind working fast.

  “Donald Hutson is too big for the royal guard uniform,” she threw in the comment, something that had rattled about her brain for some time. “We assumed the killer was wearing the uniform as it appeared to have stains of blood, and why burn it other than to hide the evidence? Donald Hutson takes after his father and would not have fitted into that uniform.”

  “Good point,” Tommy agreed. “And the costume contained the name of Erikson, the man from the chorus. Seems case closed, doesn’t it? Except you don’t like things so simple.”

  Tommy was grinning at his sister. She did not take his words as an insult, or an implication that she saw complication where there was none.

  “I am not ruling out the possibility that Erikson is that stupid, and failed to remove incriminating evidence about his role in killing Hutson,” she replied. “It would be nice to have such a simple case. Trouble is, we don’t know any motive for Erikson to kill Hutson. I’m going to speak to him this afternoon and maybe that will give us an idea. Oh, and Donald saw him in the alley with his arm around Aladdin during the fire, which makes it less likely he is the killer.”

  “But not impossible. Depends how quickly he hid the body after he set the fire.”

  Clara conceded that.

  “Just seems a lot of trouble to go to, only to leave your very identifiable costume behind.”

  “He might have thought it would be destroyed entirely in the fire,” Tommy reminded her. “People make mistakes.”

  “True,” Clara nodded.

  The envelope was feeling hot in her hand, as if the words were burning her. Chang had asked her to come to him as soon as she could. There was time now before she returned to the theatre.

  “You are happy to go to London?” She asked Tommy to distract herself.

  “Sounds like an opportunity to take Annie for a bit of Christmas shopping in the city. And I am sure if I pick the right theatre companies I shall learn a secret or two about Hutson. There is a list in the programme of who he has performed with before,” Tommy began rifling through his papers again. “Good place to start. There is always someone prepared to speak ill of the dead.”

  Clara had risen from the sofa. She was calculating how long it would tak
e to get to the address Chang had given her. Should she take a direct route or meander her way there? Depended on whether she feared being followed or not. Clara was not used to this level of skulduggery and wished she could say something to Tommy. He would no doubt have read about such activity in one of his many American books about private detectives, but she felt happier with him ignorant. The fewer people who knew about Chang and his sister, the better. In any case, Tommy might start saying this was all too dangerous, and it was dangerous. But she could see no other way to finally stop the mischief that was happening in Brighton.

  If Chang was correct (and she had no reason to doubt he was) that his sister was behind the troubles, then things would likely get a lot worse before they got better, and the police would struggle to do anything. She had seen enough of how Chang operated to know there were certain levels of criminality the police could not penetrate, at least not easily.

  In her darkest moments, she envisioned people being hurt trying to stop Jao Leong. Policemen being stabbed or shot, innocent people getting caught up in violence. If she could nip this all in the bud by working with Chang, then surely she had to at least try? Brighton was in danger of becoming a hotbed of gang crime, she could not allow that to happen.

  “I am going to my office, I left some paperwork there,” she said casually to Tommy over her shoulder, leaving the room before he responded.

  He was already back on his list of suspects and only half-heard what she said. He mumbled something as she headed into the hallway, but she was not sure what it was.

  Clara collected her hat, coat and an umbrella. Chang’s rented house was some way out of town and would require her to change buses at least once. She doubted she would be followed, but, just in case, she would use the slow bus, which stopped at numerous villages along the way. She could even get off at one and wait for the next bus. Her hands were trembling as she walked outside and popped open her umbrella. What was she doing? She had promised everyone she would stay out of the alley gang business.

  Then again, maybe it was because everyone kept saying she was over her head, and that this was a step too far for her, that she could not resist becoming involved. Clara’s old stubbornness, the part of her that was known to get her into trouble, disliked being told she could not do something. She was trying to pretend that was not why she was helping Chang, but deep down she knew what this was really about.

  She wanted to prove Park-Coombs wrong.

  She wanted to prove she was not afraid.

  Chapter Twelve

  Several bus stops later, Clara found herself stood before an old house set on a slight rise in the land. The house was lonely and isolated, the nearest property was a rotting windmill, with only one sail, that looked as though it had not been used in decades. The windows of the house looked out on open pastures, one filled with black and white cows, and beyond them, just visible in the curve of the land, the rooftops of a village. If Chang’s intention was to be as remote as possible while still within reach of civilisation, he had certainly achieved it.

  The bus did not go past this house, instead the driver had dropped Clara at a crossroads and pointed her in the right direction. According to him, the house had been empty for years, rumours being that it was haunted, though he was more inclined to think damp and a leaking roof, along with a lack of internal plumbing, was the reason no one with any sense wanted to rent it. He could not fathom why Clara was heading in that direction, and when she remarked that a friend was renting the house she might as well have said she was going to commune with the fairies, the look on his face was so incredulous.

  The house itself was early Victorian in appearance, made from a greyish stone Clara did not recognise as common in the district and with the woodwork painted a similar shade of grey to match it. The paint had peeled and there were large parts of bare wood exposed to the elements. Clara thought about what the bus driver had said concerning damp; she suspected much of the wood was rotten too.

  The house was set back from the road, a rough lawn stretching up the curve of the rise and badly in need of being cut. Straggly bushes obscured the ground floor windows and there were numerous thorny brambles looping over the garden wall and forming a dense hedge several feet thick. Stray ornamental shrubs battled through the decay to remind the world of what had once been. They were in their winter clothing, but Clara recognised the dead, bulbous heads of hydrangeas and the teardrop shaped leaves of old English tea roses.

  Clara pushed open the worn iron gate, which creaked loudly on its hinges and stuck halfway. No amount of shoving, or even kicking, would entice it to open further and she had to lever herself through the narrow gap available to her, hoping she would not end up with rust marks on her clothes. The gravel path was rapidly being eaten up by the encroaching grass either side of it, but Clara could still hear its crunch beneath her feet. She wondered if anyone had noticed her arrival. If there were lookouts posted in the windows, they were well hidden. As far as she could tell, each aperture was shrouded by heavy curtains and not a soul peered out.

  She was not surprised, however, that a man opened the front door and glowered at her long before she was close to the house’s porch. He was one of Chang’s thugs, an Englishman with a badly smashed nose, scars across his cheeks and a completely bald head. One of his eyes had a glassy look, that suggested he had sustained some permanent injury to it. He was dressed in a dark suit, well cut and not what you might expect such a man to wear. Clara guessed Chang made sure his highest-ranking men dressed smartly.

  The man had not asked her anything, just scowled at her. Clara stopped before him and refused to speak first. She had no idea who he was or how much he knew about her arrangement with Chang. Silence seemed wisest until she had properly assessed the situation. The man’s scowl deepened, his mouth twisting into a grimace, still Clara waited for him to make his move. She stood upright before him, her face neutral and her hands before her showing she was unarmed. The stalemate seemed to drag on for a considerable time, both reaching a stage where it would feel awkward to say something. Neither wanted to lose face before the other.

  At last the thug got impatient.

  “We don’t want any Bible passages, or knitted socks or clothes pegs, or anything else you are trying to hock.”

  Clara snorted.

  “Do I look like I sell socks or clothes pegs? As for distributing Bible passages, I think if that was my intention, I would have unloaded my entire lot on you and disappeared as quickly as possible,” Clara gave the house a careful look. “Besides, everyone thinks this house is unoccupied. Why would they come to an empty house to sell anything?”

  “All right, so you are clever,” the thug snarled. “How do you know we are here?”

  He had gone from annoyed to threatening in a matter of seconds. Clara decided it was time to answer him and stop playing games.

  “Mr Chang sent for me,” she produced the letter from her handbag and showed it to him.

  “Oh, so you are Clara Fitzgerald,” the thug’s demeanour changed again, this time mellowing. “Why didn’t you just say?”

  “I was waiting for you to ask,” Clara replied simply.

  The thug muttered something rude under his breath.

  “You could have been in a lot of trouble, you get that?”

  “That is a normal state of affairs for me,” Clara said with the hint of a smile. “I believe that is why Mr Chang employed me.”

  The thug’s scowl had returned.

  “I don’t like women with attitude.”

  “And I don’t like gentlemen who scowl all the time, therefore we are even. Can I see Mr Chang now? I do have other things to get on with, and this house is miles outside of Brighton. Do you know how many buses I was required to take to get here?”

  “You sound like my sister,” the thug grumbled, moving back so Clara could step into the house. “And I don’t speak to her.”

  “Does that please your sister?” Clara asked in her sweetest tone.
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br />   The thug cast her a look.

  “If you weren’t a guest of Mr Chang…”

  “Yes, yes, you would threaten me with violence,” Clara brushed off the comment. “This is not my first encounter with men of your calibre, Mr…?”

  “His name is Rodney Blunt,” Brilliant Chang’s voice purred from his mouth as he stared at them both in amusement. He had appeared at the doorway of a downstairs room. How long he had been watching the exchange was difficult to say. “Rodney, the reason I have always had a soft spot for Miss Fitzgerald is her peculiarly irritating nature. She masks her fear with sarcasm. Also, she is surprisingly stubborn in the face of danger, it makes her quite belligerent.”

  Clara was unsure if she was being complimented or insulted. She chose not to respond.

  “Rodney is my bodyguard, Miss Fitzgerald, and very good at it too. I consider him exceptionally loyal; it is his most endearing quality. Please do not upset him, we are all on the same side, after all,” Chang continued.

  Clara cast a look at Rodney who was managing to look both confused and surly at the same time. She decided to ease the tension.

  “Nice to meet you Mr Blunt,” she held out her hand to the baffled bodyguard.

  “Yeah, well…” Blunt took her hand a little harder than necessary and shook it.

  She was aware of the implication; Blunt wanted her to know that he was a tough and nasty man, and she was only being tolerated because Chang needed her.

  “Come into my sitting room, Miss Fitzgerald,” Chang ushered her through the doorway and Rodney disappeared back to his duties. Chang made sure the door behind them was shut. “I have attempted to make this place somewhat bearable. You will forgive its shabbiness, under the circumstances.”

  The room was long and once would have been a stunning reception room, but now the big bay window was masked by the overgrown garden and the wallpaper was faded and peeling from the walls. Plaster was missing from the ceiling, revealing the joists of the floor above. The room was dark and smelt of damp. Chang had brought his own furniture and the modernistic pieces sat uncomfortably in the middle of the sullen decay.