Death of a Dancer

by Caro Peacock

He laughed. ‘Sometimes a man’s debts are the most interesting thing about him. I’m sure that’s true in Hardcastle’s case.’

  He sounded much more light-hearted about that than the rest of our conversation. I remembered Amos’s information that Mr Disraeli, too, owed a lot of money. Because of my own money worries, the easy-going attitude rankled with me.

  ‘You’re looking disapproving, Miss Lane. Debt and credit keep the world spinning.’

  I didn’t answer, not wanting to reveal my weakness.

  ‘So, what do you propose to do?’ he said, serious again.

  ‘Try to prove that Jenny Jarvis didn’t kill her.’

  ‘You believe you can accomplish that?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m not about to sit quietly by while the poor girl is hanged just so that people whose line goes back to before the Conqueror can sleep peacefully in their beds.’

  He stared.

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘I think you know something you’re not telling me,’ I said.

  ‘That isn’t true. I’ve gone to some trouble to tell you all I know.’

  We stared at each other. He had fine, dark eyes that shone with sincerity. He was a politician.

  ‘Then I shall thank you and wish you good day,’ I said. ‘I turn off here.’

  I’d come some distance out of my way already and I sensed that he was not going to tell me more until I found some way of unsettling that poise.

  ‘May I call you a cab?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Then, if you’ll permit me, I’ll call one for myself. Good day, Miss Lane.’

  Disraeli raised his hat to me and walked away down Duke Street, signalling for a cab. One trotted to the kerb beside him as promptly as if he’d had it on the end of a wire. It would, of course.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I stood on the pavement for a while, giddy at where I found myself. I’d as good as thrown down a challenge to Disraeli, and I had nothing whatsoever to back it up. After a while I found I was walking and my steps seemed to be taking me eastwards towards Long Acre and the Augustus Theatre. The answer lay at the theatre, I was sure of it. So far, there was no reason to doubt the maid’s evidence that Columbine had eaten nothing but the syllabub. Only a person familiar with Madame’s daily routine or the backstage talk in that particular production could have known about the syllabub. Narrowing the field still further, only people involved in the production could have known about Jenny’s basket of herbs. Which, on the face of it, ruled out most people Disraeli was likely to know. A gentleman backstage would have been as conspicuous as a parrot among pigeons. The obvious exceptions were young Hardcastle and his coterie of clubmen. Their enthusiasm for ballet girls, if not for ballet, meant that they were often to be found backstage. The management might not approve, but customers who rented boxes by the season must not be offended. I was prepared to bet that, with nothing much to fill their time, these gentlemen would gossip like farmwives at market. Some of the dancing girls would have gentlemen as their protectors, and perhaps the gossip from Hardcastle’s circle would filter down to them. I hoped to find a dancer or two in an idle moment, prepared to talk to me.

  When I went in by the side door of the theatre, the clicking of castanets echoed along the deserted corridor. It came from the dancers’ dressing room. I waited for a pause, knocked and went in. The only dancer there was the dark-haired girl of fourteen or so, who’d been kind about Jenny’s basket. She stood in the middle of the room wrapped in an assortment of old knitted shawls against the cold, not much more than a pair of castanet-wielding arms and wide brown eyes sticking out. She looked scared when she saw me.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be here so early, only I couldn’t take the clickers back home because the people I share with ’d go off with them, and I have to practise with them, see.’

  She was so naïve that she even saw me as a figure of authority who might throw her out. I guessed she’d been thrown out of a lot of places in her short life, like an unwanted kitten.

  ‘You’ve more right to be here than I have,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I watch?’

  Her eyes glinted. The arms stretched out, shaping sinuous curves on the air and the castanets clattered like a miniature cavalry charge. I started humming a tune I usually played on the guitar and she began stamping and whirling, shedding shawls as she went. We went faster and faster until she collapsed laughing into a chair so rickety it almost broke apart, even under her small weight.

  ‘Oops! Got me proper warmed up, that has, better’n brandy.’

  ‘You’re very good,’ I said, meaning it. ‘What’s your name?’

  I felt like asking what she knew about brandy at her age, but had no right. She smiled at the compliment.

  ‘Bel, short for Belinda. They’ve given me a bit of a solo, that’s why I got to practise with the clickers. A bob a night more, I get for that. Pauline’s sick to the guts about it, stupid cow. She thinks any solos ought to come her way. I’ll have to look out or she’ll be going for me the way Columbine did Jenny.’

  She stood up, moved to the mirror, draped a piece of black muslin round her head.

  ‘It needs the comb thing to make it stand up. There it is.’

  ‘About Columbine and Jenny …’

  ‘Do you think it makes me look Spanish?’

  ‘Very. Do you know why Columbine was so angry with Jenny?’

  Up to that point she’d been chattering away as happily as a sparrow. Now she paused, picked up a battered artificial rose and started trying to straighten its stiff gauze petals.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘I think you do know.’ I said it as gently as possible. ‘I think all the girls know, but you’re not telling anybody.’

  She’d turned her back to me, but her face was reflected in the mirror. All the sparkle had gone out of it.

  ‘Pauline’ll kill me if she knows I’ve been talking about it.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Will it help Jenny if I tell you? I liked Jenny. She’s the only one of the lot of them ever said a kind word to me.’

  ‘How can I know if it will help Jenny unless you tell me?’

  She swivelled round to face me.

  ‘It wasn’t fair. She was the only one of us what hadn’t done it, only Columbine didn’t know that.’

  ‘Done what?’

  She made an unmistakeable gesture, still grasping the rose. Shock at the crudity of it, in contrast with the delicacy of her looks, must have shown on my face.

  ‘Don’t look so strange at me,’ she said. ‘You’re as bad as Jenny was.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Him, of course. Rodders. Columbine wouldn’t have minded otherwise, would she?’

  ‘You mean, Columbine thought Jenny had been making love with Rodney Hardcastle?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, if that’s what you call it.’

  ‘But why should she think that?’

  ‘Because Pauline told her so.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Columbine had got a whiff that something was going on, and if she knew it was all of us, there’d have been hell to pay. Pauline was angry with Jenny in any case, because she was the only one what wouldn’t do it. So telling Columbine paid her out and got the rest of us off.’

  ‘But why should Pauline be angry?’

  ‘She said it was because Jenny thought she was better’n the rest of us. Only some of the other girls say he’d offered Pauline a cut if he won his bet.’

  ‘Bet?’

  My head was reeling, but Bel was talking as matter-of-factly as if we were discussing the price of stockings.

  ‘His friends had bet him he couldn’t get all of us to bed within a week.’

  ‘All the dancers?’

  ‘Yes. He’d have done it easy, if it hadn’t been for Jenny.’

  ‘You mean, you did too?’

  She stared at me as if the question shouldn’t need asking. Her eyes looked into mine as if into
a mirror. It wasn’t that they were hardened, because that would imply that they’d been soft once. Simply, this was her life and she couldn’t imagine any other.

  ‘But why?’

  A stupid question. It got the answer it deserved.

  ‘Five bob.’

  I heard a door slamming at the far end of the corridor, distant footsteps. Bel jumped up.

  ‘It might be Pauline. Don’t tell her I told you. She’ll kill me.’

  She grabbed a couple of shawls and clutched them round her, as if for protection.

  ‘This bet – did Jenny know about it?’

  ‘Not at first, she didn’t. She thought he was just asking us all out to supper. Then she got up and ran out. I told her she shouldn’t of done that. It gets a girl a bad name.’

  The footsteps came closer, several pairs of them, and a child’s voice chattering. Bel relaxed.

  ‘It’s all right, that’s just the Surreys.’

  ‘You discussed all this with Jenny?’ I said.

  ‘I tried to talk to her, make her see sense. She shouldn’t have come to London really. She just wanted to dance. Only, it isn’t just about dancing, is it? Jenny couldn’t see that. She couldn’t look after herself.’

  At a rough estimate, Jenny must have been five or six years older than Bel, but to listen to her you’d think it was the other way round. Perhaps it was, in most ways that mattered.

  ‘Did she know that Pauline had lied to Columbine about her?’

  A nod.

  ‘Didn’t Jenny tell Columbine it wasn’t true?’

  ‘She tried. Columbine threw a perfume bottle at her, so she didn’t dare try again.’

  I thought Bel’s story explained why Columbine had been angry with Hardcastle, though Columbine hadn’t known the worst of it.

  ‘Surely Hardcastle must have realised Columbine would hear something about it,’ I said.

  Bel shrugged.

  ‘Don’t think he cared. He was leaving her anyway.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because he’s getting married.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Don’t know, but at the supper we went to, some of his friends were laughing at him about being the bride groom. That’s why they made the bet when they did.’

  ‘Because he was going to be married?’

  ‘Yes. “Last gallop round the course”, that’s what they said. He didn’t like it, them laughing at him. He said he didn’t want to get married in any case, only he had to because of the money.’

  ‘So he’s going to marry a rich wife?’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘Poor woman. Do you happen to know where Pauline lives?’

  She looked scared.

  ‘You’re not going to tell her I’ve been talking to you, are you?’

  ‘No, I promise I won’t tell her.’

  ‘Last I heard, she was at a place called the Egyptian Palace, just up from Leicester Square.’

  With a name like that, I supposed it was a public house. A memory came to me of the first time I’d seen Pauline.

  ‘Tell me, is Pauline a church-goer?’

  ‘Church-goer!’

  The amazement in Bel’s voice gave me my answer. I wished her luck with her Spanish dance and left.

  Outside, the cloud had lifted, with patches of blue sky showing, though the wind from the east was biting. With two hours or so of daylight left, I decided to head off and look for Pauline. I was so angry I wanted to shake her till her teeth rattled like Bel’s clickers.

  Even in fleeting sunshine, Leicester Square was its usual depressing self. A columned building that had been a theatre in the past century was now a draper’s warehouse. Its old name, Sans Souci, was just visible above a banner advertising three shirts for the price of two. A pile of bricks from a builder’s yard had toppled over the uneven pavement. Judging by the dirt and dead leaves that had collected round them, nobody was hurrying to collect the bricks up again. The smell of drains hung over everything. In spite of all that, a building in the far corner made my heart rise with memories of childhood. It was a rotunda the shape of an upturned egg-cup, several storeys high. The sign said Burford’s Famous Panorama. Now exhibiting the Wonders of Old Peking. The painted panoramas changed every so often. When Tom and I had been taken there as children, they were still featuring patriotic old favourites like Admiral Nelson’s Victories or The Field at Waterloo. You paid your threepence at the door, climbed the stairs to the circular gallery inside, and walked around with the enormous oil paintings encircling you, larger than life. I was surprised to find it still in business.

  But this was no occasion for childish things. I found a crossing sweeper, tipped him a penny, and asked if he knew where I’d find the Egyptian Palace. He gave me an incredulous look.

  ‘Gyppy Palace?’

  ‘If that’s what they call it, yes.’

  From his reaction, I guessed it was a particularly rough place. Some of the public houses in that area were no more than thieves’ kitchens.

  ‘Up there, first on the right, halfway along.’

  When I crossed the street and turned to look back, he was where I’d left him, leaning on his broom and staring after me.

  The first on the right was a cul-de-sac with a public house called the Red Cockade on the corner. Two rows of terraced houses in blackened brick faced each other across a muddy street, too narrow for anything except a donkey cart. The only building of any size was a more substantial house on the left, three times the width of the others. Crumbling stone columns on either side of the front door supported a triangular porch, with a sphinx lounging uncomfortably in the middle of it. The windows on the ground floor were high and broad, but curtains were drawn across, showing their yellowed cotton linings to the street. The glint of a candle shone at a gap where the curtains didn’t quite meet. What sort of place drew the curtains and wasted candles by daylight? A gambling den, I supposed. Certainly the place didn’t have the air of a public house.

  As I waited on the far side of the street, wondering whether to simply knock and ask for Pauline, the door opened and a man came out. He looked respectable enough in terms of dress, black coat and top hat, with rounded shoulders as if he spent his working days at a clerk’s stool. The door closed behind him at once. He turned up his coat collar, pulled the hat down over his forehead and scuttled down the steps as if he wanted to be away from the place. I watched him as he went at a good pace up the street, hesitating and looking round at the corner as if fearful of meeting anybody he knew.

  Best to wait, I thought. Pauline would have to come out at some time to go to the theatre. I had my suspicions now of what the place was, and the kind of reception I might expect if I presented myself at the front door. I moved towards the end of the cul-de-sac, where I could keep the house under observation. In the next half-hour or so, one man went inside and two came out, separately, looking as furtive as the first one. By then, my suspicions had been confirmed. I wondered what Tom would say if he knew his sister was waiting outside a brothel; for the first time since he’d left, I was glad he was thousands of miles away.

  I’d been waiting for perhaps an hour when Pauline came out. There was nothing furtive about her. She wore her red cloak and hat, and came swinging purposefully down the steps. I’d started towards her when a better idea came to me. She looked as if she was off to keep some appointment. I’d follow her for a while and see where she was going. She went to the corner and turned without pausing, towards Leicester Square. I hurried up the street and when I turned the corner she was still in sight. She turned left into the square, across the front of the shirt warehouse. Then she disappeared. One moment the red cloak was whisking along, the next it was gone. There was only one place she could possibly have entered – Burford’s Panoramic Rotunda.

  I stopped. Not for one moment did I think that Pauline had come to look at the pictures. If she’d gone inside – and she must have gone inside – then it was to meet somebody. Quite probab
ly the same person she’d met in St Paul’s Church. A leap of logic, I admit. An even bigger leap of logic to connect it with Columbine’s murder, and yet I was almost certain of it. I felt in my pocket and was relieved to find three pennies. I waited for a count of a fifty for her to get past the pay booth, then went inside.

  A sleepy-looking boy took my money. There was no sign of Pauline or anybody else on the spiral staircase that led to the viewing gallery, no sound of footsteps. On a winter afternoon, there weren’t many customers for the Rotunda. I went up the stairs as quietly as I could. She must be in the gallery above me. No sound of voices, so perhaps the person she was meeting hadn’t arrived yet. In that case, it was time for my conversation with her. If necessary, I’d stand between her and the stairs so she couldn’t get past me. But the gallery was empty. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt about it, and there was no place to hide. On one side was a high circular balustrade that protected customers from the stairwell, on the other the imperial palace in Peking, glowing with red and gold in the gaslight, writhing with dragons as large as ponies, peopled by moon-faced mandarins with curling fingernails and drooping moustaches. I walked all round, not believing it. Pauline must be in here. Then I heard the scream.

  A woman’s scream. It came from below and echoed round the dome. I rushed down the stairs, tripped on my skirt hem and practically fell over the no longer sleepy boy. We held each other up. He was trembling.

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  Still holding on to me, he pointed to a dim corridor with ropes hanging down one side. I supposed they were used to haul the pictures into position. Since the corridor curved like the rest of the building, you couldn’t see more than a yard or two along it. Shaking myself free of the boy, I walked along the corridor.

  ‘Pauline –’

  Something dark came round the curve of the corridor and cannoned into me. A man, that was all I could tell from his height and his weight. Quite tall and in dark clothes, with bad breath. Even those details, such as they were, came back to me later. All I was conscious of was being pushed back against the wall as he passed, hitting my head. By the time I could decide whether to follow him, the outside door had banged and he’d gone.