And there came the three Weird Sisters: thin and misshapen crones, swathed in dark shrouds from which only their weathered faces and bony arms protruded. Each of them held a long wooden staff, their tops forked branches sharpened like lances, which they used to stir their potion.
Flashes of lightning and a roll of thunder shook the auditorium. The music reached its climax and then the hags began to chant their famous Double, double, toil and trouble.
Their wailing voices filled the theatre as they listed the ingredients for their noisome broth, the vapours now rising higher and higher. I had never paid much attention to the rhymes, so when I did, I winced at the most morbid lines: toad’s sweltered venom … Liver of blaspheming Jew … Finger of birth-strangled babe … Cool it with a baboon’s blood … The word ‘grimorium’ crept into my head, and I shivered.
Hecate, the witches’ goddess, hovered above the stage. A bright light shone on her head, glittering on sharp spikes braided into her hair. It was as if she wore one of those halos one sees in biblical paintings, and I could not fathom how they’d crafted that effect.
Any of those tragediennes could have passed for a convincing banshee!
I took a few steps ahead – just as the second witch uttered something wicked this way comes.
I then saw the man himself, Henry Irving.
Treading on to stone steps in full medieval costume, silhouetted against the crimson sky, tall, helmeted and carrying a sheathed broadsword on his shoulder, he looked as grand and terrible as the ghouls themselves. His face was undeniably suited for the theatre, as even from a distance I could make out his striking features: aquiline, clean-shaven except for a reddish moustache; his thick, bushy eyebrows framed a pair of cruel-looking eyes, whose black pupils were like wells against the pale skin; his chin was broad and firm, and the skin was tight around his sharp, protruding cheekbones. His was a face fierce enough to demand answers from the witches, and he did so in powerful, commanding tones.
The Weird Sisters readily obliged, cackling and stirring their cauldron with renewed power. There were majestic balls of fire erupting from the cleft, illuminating the entire theatre and making me take a small step back.
A triad of invoked apparitions came to them, ascending from the underground through thick, rolling fog. Of the three spirits, it was the second that caught my eye.
A young blonde girl, dressed in a pearlescent white gown, her wavy hair golden and shiny, as if reflecting the glow of lava. She had the most angelic face, with plump cheeks and bright blue eyes. The girl turned slowly, as the music rose with staccatos that announced doom, and my heart jumped when she revealed the other side of her face: red, blistered, ruined skin, made up with the most upsetting prostheses to resemble terrible burns.
The overall effect was grotesque. I felt a violent chill creeping up my spine as the girl delivered her part of the omens:
Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!
Be bloody, bold and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
A cold hand clutched my arm, and I jumped and gasped, only to hear the mocking laughter of McGray. Mr Stoker stood next to him.
‘Dandy, aren’t ye supposed to be working?’
I pulled my arm free, still feeling my quickened heartbeats.
‘I have been questioning people,’ I retorted, and quickly briefed him on the interview with Mrs Harwood. McGray, in exchange, told me about the reading from Madame Katerina.
‘The big opening of – our Scottish Play is, of course, scheduled for this Saturday,’ Stoker jumped in rather keenly, ‘the thirteenth of July.’
I covered my brow in frustration. ‘So the full-breasted, swindling enchantress accurately predicted something that has been in the newspapers all day! Oh, and the date of the opening night, which has been scheduled for at least a week!’ I did not let Stoker speak. ‘Nine-Nails, I need to question Mr Wheatstone and Henry Irving. The former must be backstage, fuelling the witches’ pot, and Irving is up there soliloquizing.’
‘Oh, I would not interrupt him right now,’ said Stoker. ‘He wants this scene –’
But McGray was already walking ahead with decisive strides. He jumped into the orchestra stalls, where the music instantly went discordant, and then he climbed on to the stage itself, pushing aside witches, apparitions and the parade of eight ghostly kings that had just emerged.
There was a roar, higher and more powerful than any instruments or even the thunder effects: the deep, bellowing voice of Henry Irving.
‘Who the hell is this clown?’
Everyone and everything came to a halt. Only the floating haze remained in motion, spiralling as the towering Irving strode across the stage to face Nine-Nails.
Stoker ran forward in a rather pathetic way. ‘These are the CID inspectors, Irving. They’ve come to –’
‘Get your filthy boots off my stage!’ As he bellowed, Irving pointed the heavy-looking sword at McGray’s face.
My colleague was not impressed. ‘Oi! Point yer wee toy-stick somewhere else! I’m bloody CID.’
‘You are but a sad fool,’ Irving spat, ‘trespassing on my premises!’
‘Yer prem– I don’t give a toss whose premises these are. Did ye nae hear? We’re the fucking police!’
‘You mouldy rogue! Away! Don’t you see we have work to do!’
I could not tell which man had the upper hand: they were of equal stature, and each sounded as imposing and determined as the other.
McGray took a step ahead, and with one swift movement knocked the sword from Irving’s hand.
‘I’m not moving until we’ve talked. Don’t force me to question ye at gunpoint.’
Irving would not move, and for an instant I feared McGray would indeed have to unholster his weapon.
Stoker shared my fears. He raised both hands, cold sweat already rolling down his temples. ‘Irving, please. These gentlemen are here to help us with the threats. And we have news to tell you.’
I felt as though I was watching a farce: the King of Scotland standing proud against the ludicrously attired McGray, the three witches whispering and giggling in the background, and about ten other ghouls scratching themselves and witnessing the quarrel.
Irving cast Stoker a petrifying look, but in the end he spoke sense.
‘You are not worth another word,’ he snapped, ripping the fake ginger moustache off his face, and then roared at his crew. ‘Everyone take half an hour rest!’
Before anyone could say a word, Irving vanished through the stage wing, and as soon as he left, a heavy gloom was lifted from everyone’s faces. Actors and actresses suddenly moved and talked at ease, their curious stares still on McGray and me.
I marched to the stage, catching a quick sight of Elgie. He was the only amused one; all the other musicians looked either weary or downright bored. Our interruption meant they’d surely be going home late.
‘Inspectors,’ Stoker said to us as we jumped on to the stage, ‘please, give Mr Irving a few minutes. He needs to take the edge off his temper.’
‘I’ll cut the edge o’ something else if the bastard doesnae come back soon,’ McGray replied, fanning away the fake mist.
I looked at the trapdoor through which the apparitions had emerged. A rudimentary timber staircase descended to the darkened basements, from where steam was still puffing, making my eyes water.
As if hearing my thoughts, McGray yelled, ‘Would youse turn that bloody thing off?’
Up came the squat figure of Mr Wheatstone, wearing a leather apron, his grey hair even more dishevelled than the witches’, and dripping sweat as if he’d just stepped out of a Turkish bath.
‘What on earth is going on?’ he demanded, but then he saw me. I recognized his shock even through his steamed-up spectacles.
‘You,’ I said, pointing directly at his face, ‘are the first person I would like to question.’
9
Mr Wheatstone begged us to ta
lk away from any curious ears and eyes, and we had to climb down – quite literally – through the witches’ cauldron, as he led us into the dingy understage.
It felt as if we were walking through the insides of a ship: rough timber beams, ropes and pulleys everywhere, and a plethora of ingenious machinery to produce the spectacular from the mundane: the ‘magic’ vapours were nothing but water ladled on to a crateful of red-hot charcoal; the explosions of hellish fire were clouds of lycopodium powder, thrown by hand and ignited with a long torch; and the mysterious light that had appeared like a sunrise was achieved with regulated electric current, as I would discover shortly.
A dozen sweating men and a few boys – most of them as lean and worn out as the enslaved rowers in a Roman warship – stood around awaiting orders, their body odours making the place a thousand times more foetid than the changing rooms of the gymnasium where I practise fencing.
‘Shall I keep the generator going?’ asked a little cockney man who’d come running. He was very short, incredibly thin and entirely covered with soot. The theatre must have its own coal-fired electricity generator. Such a production would soak up incredible amounts of power.
The man saw us and somehow recognized us as police inspectors, for he took his hat off with deference. I smiled at his clean, shiny bald head, which looked almost bleached against the rest of his blackened face. ‘Sorry to interrupt you, bosses.’
‘Yes, keep it going,’ replied Mr Wheatstone, ‘but turn it low. We’re supposed to restart in half an hour.’
The smoked man bowed and left quickly. Mr Wheatstone looked at the other men.
‘Go and have a drink, chaps, but I want you back in twenty minutes.’
There were a few claps but one of them, a particularly sweaty man, protested.
‘You said it won’t start for half an hour!’
‘Fifteen to you,’ McGray snapped, and the hireling left, saying no more.
Mr Wheatstone sat on a stool right next to a large artefact that instantly caught my attention: on a wooden base there were two large cylinders of identical dimensions, one mahogany and one brass, sitting in parallel, each with a crank to turn it. A thick, uninsulated electric wire was wound around them, like two bobbins sharing the one thread. It looked like something materialized from Mary Shelley’s novel.
‘Is that a rheostat?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Inspector. My madcap uncle, Charles, rest in peace, invented it. He was quite shocked when I told him I wanted to use it for such a ludicrous application.’
I had read about the older Wheatstone’s invention a few years ago. The more windings on the wooden cylinder, the more resistance to the electric current and the dimmer the light would be. By turning those cranks, Mr Wheatstone, or one of his men, would be able to regulate the intensity of the light with unmatched precision.
I was quite impressed – Irving’s company was using state-of-the-art technology – and also a little worried. Wire-wound rheostats could be made with ratings up to several thousand watts.
‘Is it not dangerous to keep all that current exposed?’ I asked, looking also at the buckets of water, the burning coal, the explosive powders and the wooden beams all around us. The place was an inferno in waiting.
Wheatstone simply pointed at his thick soldering gloves and his apron. ‘Minor details. I do protect myself, and nobody but me is allowed near the rheostat.’
McGray, always so eager to know everything about the supernatural, was congruently uninterested in those scientific tricks. ‘So, this is the lad who saw the banshee,’ he prompted.
‘While intoxicated,’ I remarked, but Wheatstone was already too flushed to look further embarrassed. I asked my first question: ‘Mr Wheatstone, what were you doing in a darkened corridor, all by yourself, on the night the first banshee was heard?’
His face twitched. ‘Ex– excuse me?’
‘You were seen cutting the gas supply to a corridor that led to the theatre’s back door. And I had it from the seamstress Harwood that you were not too keen to be followed.’
Mr Wheatstone threw his head back to laugh. ‘Mrs Harwood! Yes, I am sure she would offer such fiction. The poor woman is not well in her head, did anybody tell you that?’
‘Were you or were you not in that corridor?’ I pressed.
‘Yes, I was!’
‘To what end?’
‘To fetch another few sacks of lycopodium.’
‘What the hell is that?’ asked McGray.
‘A very special explosive we use on stage. It doesn’t ignite when it is lying still, but it does, and tremendously, when it is suspended in the air. That’s why I had to turn all the gas lights off: if a sack fell from the wheelbarrow and burst into clouds of the stuff –’
He explained in detail the chemistry of the powder (a spore, apparently), but I did not pay heed. His story tallied with Stoker’s statements – and Mrs Harwood’s too.
‘I assume that’s why you didn’t want anybody in the vicinity,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
‘Did you leave the back door open?’
‘I – I must admit I don’t recall. It was a very tense night.’
‘Did you see any trails of blood?’
He had to take his spectacles off. ‘Blood? No … Do you – do you think it was through the back door that they brought – the stuff they used to write those omens?’
McGray intervened. Like me, he probably thought it better not to disclose too many details, and Mr Wheatstone was clearly a very clever man. ‘Did ye see anybody around when ye were fetching the explosives?’
‘No, not a soul. As you know, the corridor wasn’t lit, and I had warned everyone to stay away until I returned.’
I took note of that. ‘How long before the “banshee’s cry” was this?’
‘Oh, a good while! I always replenish the stock after the beginning of Act IV. We use up a batch during the witches’ scene, but we need more for the climax towards the end of Act V, when the forest is on fire. There must be between twenty or thirty minutes between those two scenes.’
I massaged my temples. Anyone could have made their way to the backstage if the door had been open and the lights had been off for so long.
McGray was equally frustrated. That did not help his banshee theory either.
My next question came out quite bluntly.
‘Mr Wheatstone, can you tell us now why you revealed all of this to the papers?’
It was as if I’d pushed the man in the chest, for he nearly fell backwards. He composed himself quickly, though. ‘I knew you would ask that question.’
‘Then answer the dandy,’ said McGray.
Wheatstone mopped the sweat off his face with a soiled handkerchief.
‘It wasn’t me.’
My earnest ‘Ha!’ must have resounded throughout the building. ‘Mr Wheatstone, my colleague here would be prone to believe that a little green fairy was following you during your drinking spree and that it was she who alerted the press. I, on the other hand …’
‘I swear!’ Wheatstone snapped, tossing his handkerchief on to the floor. ‘I didn’t tell anything to the press …’ he raised his voice before we could interrupt him. ‘However – I did speak to someone else last night.’
McGray smiled. ‘And?’
Wheatstone, unexpectedly, sounded rather meek now.
‘After I spoke to you, Inspector, I went back to the Palace Hotel. There was someone still awake, protesting about something or other in the lobby. When he saw me so troubled, he forced me to tell him everything.’
‘And the man was …?’
‘Mr Irving.’
‘Of course!’ I exclaimed as McGray and I rushed to Mr Howard’s office. ‘I have just been told that if anybody is to benefit from ticket sales, that would be Henry Irving. He has a number of actresses who could have played the part of the banshee, and there is also a good chance that Mrs Harwood simply saw the impostor and thought it a true apparition.’
‘Don�
�t picture yerself drinking my whisky with yer pinkie all stuck out,’ McGray grunted. ‘There’s something that really worries me. If Madame Katerina’s right, the prophecy is true and someone is going to die by the end of the week. And the banshee didnae tell us who.’
We made it to Mr Howard’s office, only to find the door wide open and the man engaged in a heated argument with a very anxious Mr Stoker.
‘Oi!’ McGray barked to catch their attention. ‘We need to talk to that hosiery-wearing prancer o’ yers.’
Stoker was appalled. ‘Do not call Mr Irving that!’
Mr Howard raised a conciliatory hand, ‘I am afraid Mr Irving has left the building.’
‘What!’ McGray shouted. I, on the other hand, had to repress a belly laugh.
‘As we warned you, he was very distressed by the interruption,’ Stoker added. ‘He said he needed some fresh air to recollect himself.’
‘How convenient,’ I muttered.
‘Where did he go?’ McGray demanded.
‘He didn’t say,’ answered Stoker.
‘When’s he coming back?’
‘He – he didn’t say, either.’
‘Damn!’ McGray roared, making us all jump.
‘I thought these rehearsals were crucial,’ I added ironically. ‘He undoubtedly has an artistic temperament, to flounce off like that.’
Stoker looked at me as if he could strangle me. He had to leave the office, quite unable to contain his pique.
Mr Howard again tried to ease the mood. ‘Mr Stoker is very loyal to Irving. You must understand.’
Nine-Nails was not sympathetic at all. He punched the wall, leaving cracks on the paint, and then stormed out.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him.
He would not stop, snapping over his shoulder, ‘I cannae sit round here with a cup o’ tea ’til the bastard deigns to come back.’
A Mask of Shadows: Frey & McGray Book 3 (A Case for Frey & McGray) Page 8
