‘Someone from outside the production?’ asked May.
‘No, that’s his Orpheus role. His real name’s David Cumberland—you know, like the sausages. He doesn’t get going until act three, basically gets one decent number to himself and joins in with the others for some melodramatic dialogue. But perfect for Tanya.’
‘Why?’
‘Darling, you can’t have an affair with someone if they’re always on stage the same time as you.’
‘You say an “affair”.’
‘Yes, he’s got a civilian wife tucked away somewhere. It was probably a matter of mutual convenience. There’s nothing like a good tension-releasing fuck after you’ve been singing at the top of your lungs all day, pardon my French.’
‘Any link between her and Charles Senechal that you can think of? Did they spend much time together offstage?’
‘I don’t think they even knew each other. In the early stages of a production you can address the most intimate dialogue lines to a stranger and not get to have a real conversation with them at all. Particularly if there’s a celebrity performer among you. They make the less experienced members of the cast nervous. The stars have to break the ice first. Protocol, my dear. I’m not from a stage background like the rest of them, so it doesn’t wash with me.’
‘How did you get the part, then?’
‘Mercury is a pretty physical role.’ Corinne topped up their mugs. ‘Lots of charging about on winged feet. I saw someone do it on roller skates at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. Helena came to one of my humorous monologues and asked me to attend a casting session. They were seeing lots of other short fat people. Comedy women, you know the sort of thing. If they’re fat they must be funny.’
‘Will you do me a favour, Miss Betts?’
‘Corinne, please. Theatres are intimate places. We should be on first-name terms.’
‘You seem to have a fairly objective outlook. Would you tell me if you hear anything unusual?’ He looked up at the posters of demonic heads lining the walls, different productions of Orpheus around the world. ‘I mean, unusual by theatrical standards.’
‘You can’t ask me to spy for you, Mr May. They’re my friends.’
‘I appreciate that. But Mr Bryant thinks something is happening here that goes beyond the scope of normal criminal investigation.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I’m not sure. This is my first actual case.’
‘They’ve sent a boy to do a man’s job.’ She gave a dark chuckle. ‘Isn’t that the war all over.’
‘We don’t have the facilities to protect everyone. We don’t even have the means of finding out who else might be at risk.’
‘I see your problem,’ said Corinne. ‘It’s like acting. You don’t get very far with a role until you’ve established your motivation. If you can’t find anything to relate to, you never get a grip on the piece.’
‘Then perhaps we understand each other,’ said May, smiling gently.
‘You’re a nice man, John.’ Corinne brushed his jaw with the back of her hand. ‘Don’t let anything happen to the rest of us.’
Corinne Betts waited twenty minutes for a 134 bus, but it was raining and the first two were completely full, so she decided to start walking. She liked John May a lot. She had always been drawn to younger men. They had a sense of innocence that she no longer had the strength to muster.
She wondered if there was a link between Tanya and Charles that she had missed. It was fun in a Conan Doyle–ish way: an old, dark theatre, a murderer on the loose. Except that Conan Doyle had been dead for a decade. His Strand magazine stories now belonged on the bookshelves of elderly aunts, and the war had stolen away the vicarious pleasures of murder.
It set her wondering about motives again. You’d have to be pretty angry with someone to plan their death, particularly at the moment when there was every chance that they might disappear under a bit of falling masonry. And to be annoyed with two people as different as Charles and Tanya made no sense at all. If someone was trying to stop the production, why not just set fire to the theatre? It wasn’t as if there were any likely suspects. In fact, the more she thought about it, the stranger everything became—an air of Greek tragedy, the severing of limbs, the compass falling from the sky. Something began to prick at her skin. She resolved to take a long bath and have a smoke before going to bed.
She had reached the top of Tottenham Court Road before another 134 came along, and although she waved at it, the damned thing refused to stop. The rainswept corner of Euston Road had become one of the bleakest and most exposed points in central London, now that so many craters of brick and stone had transformed tarmac into the surface of the moon. They said an old woman had been blown out of her house in her iron bedstead, and had not woken up until the rescue squad reached her. ‘They’ said a lot of things. It was becoming impossible to know who to believe.
The few people she passed were carrying bags and suitcases, heading to stations, or to houses that had roofs. A hearse passed her with perhaps a dozen children in it, their faces pressed against the windows, evacuees being taken to their train. The distant plane trees of Euston Road were just visible in the downpour, the tops of their branches rustling and twisting in the rain-laden wind. Here the street was preternaturally empty, the boarded-over shop fronts as dull as the terraced houses set back from the road. She hated the blackout, the dead carapaces of buildings, their rooftops darker than the sky.
Corinne was about to cross the road beside the tiled wall of Warren Street tube station when she became aware of someone else moving on the street. Grey veils of rain fell ahead of her, blurring the view, but a figure appeared to be waiting on the opposite pavement. It was dressed in a black rubber raincoat, with the hood raised. There was something wrong with its face, she thought: too white, too still. The figure twisted back and forth, clasping itself, its head bouncing from side to side, as though it was laughing, or in terrible pain.
Corinne walked to the striped traffic island in the centre of the road. From the corner of her eye she saw the figure shift again, passing across the dimmed lights from the station ticket hall. She watched as it reached the edge of the pavement, and found herself staring into a distorted face as pale as porcelain, the crying tragedy mask of traditional theatre. A passing truck churned its way through a lake of rainwater. When she looked up once more, the figure had vanished.
It had seen her alarm, she was sure. Angered and frightened, she ran across the road, moving past the taped crosses of shop windows, until she realized that she was running in a hard panic, and forced her pace to a walk.
She could not understand where the fear had come from. She was only aware that she had felt it, a chill prickling between her shoulder blades, a primal warning that someone or something meant her harm or, worse still, wanted her.
28
VENOM
‘Mr Bryant, wait, I’d like a word with you.’
It was late on Wednesday evening when Oswald Finch came running after the young detective, who was backing a black Wolseley out of the half-flooded car park behind Bow Street police station. He had requisitioned the car from the pool in order to visit his aunt in Finchley. She had trouble getting about, so he was taking her a joint of beef. Bryant affected to ignore the pathologist and almost ran over his foot. Exasperated by the obstruction that had placed itself between his vehicle and the exit, Bryant jemmied open the window with the end of a soup spoon set aside for the purpose, and eyed him brightly. ‘Oh, Oswald, it’s you. They still haven’t fixed this window. What do you want?’
‘Mr Bryant, there’s an enormous plant in my office. Your constable told me you put it there.’
‘Well, I didn’t personally move it, it’s far too heavy for me to touch, with my back.’ Bryant searched about for the handbrake. ‘I had Atherton bring it up. Do you like it?’
‘Well, frankly no, I don’t.’ Finch bobbed down to look at him. ‘It’s six feet tall and blots out all the light, and it
smells strange.’
‘That’s just a bit of root rot. It’s been sitting in contaminated water, a broken sewage main, I imagine. A house in St Martin’s Lane got bombed out and they were clearing the site. There are insects of some kind living in its soil, I thought you might know what they are. They’ve got a bite rather like a mosquito, brought me up in livid red lumps, some kind of tropical necrosis. I once found something similar in a flat belonging to an Ethiopian student in Tufnell Park. We still don’t know what killed him. I thought you’d be interested.’
‘Floral virology’s really not my field, and it’s in the way. I can barely get the door open.’ He rocked hesitantly back and forth in front of the automobile as Bryant throttled impatiently.
‘I’d keep it open for a few days if you can, Oswald, just until you’re used to the smell. It’s quite overpowering. The buds shed a sort of purple pollen, very sticky, gets everywhere. I knew you’d be fascinated. Don’t get any on your shirt, it seems to burn.’
‘Look, I really don’t think—’
‘Jolly good. How are you getting on with the tissue samples from Tanya Capistrania?’
‘Er, well, that’s just it. I’ve carried out some more detailed analysis, and I think poison was ingested. In fact I’m sure—’
‘Ingested? That could be anything, couldn’t it? I mean, you can die from having water injected into your spine, or air into your brain or anything. Can’t you be more specific?’
‘Well, er, something she ate.’
‘You mean the chicken? The chicken sandwich?’ Bryant released the handbrake and the car hopped forward.
‘It wasn’t chicken. It was quail.’
‘I don’t see a difference.’
‘Ah, but there is. You remember I got a positive test for coniine. Well, there’s a plant rather like parsley or London rocket in appearance, Conium maculatum, not at all uncommon, springs up on waste ground, especially around bomb sites. Causes the kind of muscular paralysis I described. There’s no real antidote beyond gastric lavage, and only if it’s performed moments after ingestion. It’s a long-recognized poison, most commonly known as hemlock.’
‘Hemlock? It supposedly killed Socrates, didn’t it?’
‘I really have no idea. The thing is, some birds are immune to the plant. Quail eat the seeds without suffering any damage, but their flesh becomes highly toxic. It’s feasible that the victim just got a bad quail. The perils of a rich diet.’
‘Wouldn’t she have experienced symptoms?’
‘Yes, any time from half an hour to three hours after consumption, but she might not have recognized them as such. Dancers suffer muscular pain all the time.’
‘You’re telling me she may not have been murdered at all, Oswald?’
‘That’s right. She may simply have become paralysed, fallen down and been unable to move when the lift started up.’
‘Well, thank you, that makes my evening.’ Bryant ground the gear lever forward, forcing Finch to jump out of his path. Blithely ignoring the horn blasts from behind, the Wolseley thumped up the kerb in front of the station as Bryant beckoned to his partner. John darted towards the vehicle with a late edition of the Evening News held over his head as Arthur threw open the passenger door.
‘John, Runcorn is going to conduct some kind of tension test on that prop globe, isn’t he?’ said Bryant, trying to clear the condensation from the windscreen with his sleeve. ‘Can you run the wire ends under a microscope and check the shear?’
‘I’ll do it, but the waiting time for equipment isn’t good. The samples will probably have to go over to Lambeth.’ John smiled. ‘I saw you talking to Mr Finch. He’s very upset about that plant.’
‘He works faster when he’s upset about something. I’m annoyed about his chemical theory.’
‘You should be pleased to hear about Miss Capistrania,’ said May, puzzled. ‘It may mean we’ve just stumbled upon an unfortunate series of circumstances.’
‘Very unfortunate when you consider that her feet managed to turn up in the possession of a chestnut vendor. Who is entirely innocent, by the way. His movements are fully vouched for. If we’re not looking for a murderer, somebody out there must have a pretty black sense of humour.’
‘There’s a lot of it about. None of Tanya’s colleagues liked her very much.’
‘How much do you have to hate someone to hide their feet? I’ll tell you, John, right now the unit could do with a renewed funding pledge, and we’ll only get that if we find a culprit quickly.’
May peered through the windscreen. ‘Don’t pull out just yet, there’s a lot of traffic.’
‘Well, I don’t believe it,’ said Bryant, twisting the wheel hard and stamping on the accelerator to a chorus of screeching tyres, ‘it’s all too absurd, quails and hemlock and falling planets. The chances of two people undergoing such colourful ends in close proximity is positively Jacobean, and I don’t swallow it for a moment.’
‘Strange things happen all the time,’ May felt compelled to point out. ‘Do you have something against the laws of chance?’
‘I do, as it happens. I think while we’re under bombardment, all sorts of peculiarities might emerge, just not in this fashion.’
‘I say, you’re driving awfully fast without lights. Why are you in such a rush?’
‘After I’ve visited my aunt I’m taking Alma out tonight, and I’m running late.’
‘Your landlady? You’re taking your landlady out to dinner?’ A traffic policeman loomed out of the dark at them, and jumped from harm’s way like a startled hare. Bryant was a terrible driver. His priorities corresponded to none of the ones mentioned in the Highway Code. Nor did his signals, for that matter.
‘Nobody mentioned dinner. She happens to consider me companionable.’
‘Still, it’s a date. I thought you were working on Miss Wynter.’
‘Miss Wynter is already spoken for. Her first love is the theatre. I suspect she enjoys her status as a spinster. Alma knows how to enjoy herself.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re planning a night of love.’
‘If you’d met her, you’d know you were being disgusting. Alma is religious and respectable. We have a couple of shilling seats for Gone With the Wind. She has an unfathomable obsession with Clark Gable, and can’t find anyone else to go with her.’
‘Well, at least you can watch with an easier mind.’
‘Far from it,’ said Bryant, ‘I’m going back to the theatre afterwards. They’ll be rehearsing late because the weather’s too bad for bombing. I want to make sure nothing else happens.’
‘You mean you want to be there if it does.’
Bryant swerved the vehicle over to the side of the road. Horns honked and tyres screeched in the darkness. ‘How’s this for you?’
May reluctantly opened the door. ‘It’s not at all where I’m going but never mind, I’ll get a bus, it’s safer.’ He pushed his long legs out into the rain. ‘Try to have a relaxing evening with Alma. You know where your nearest shelter is?’
‘Alma will, she’s very practical. I won’t take anything in, you know, I shall be thinking about severed feet. I daresay you’re off to enjoy yourself with your busty sexpot.’
‘Actually, I’m taking a night off to recuperate,’ said May. ‘From what you’ve told me, your landlady sounds most keen. Perhaps you should consider the benefits of matrimony.’
‘It seems an awful lot of effort just to get regular sex and someone to wash your socks. I mean, she already washes my socks.’
‘Which still leaves the sex. I bet you can’t remember your last time.’
‘Oh yes I can,’ called Bryant, pulling away from the kerb. ‘Saturday night.’ He indicated left and turned the wheel right. ‘It could have been perfect, but for one thing.’
‘What’s that?’ May hopped onto the pavement and squinted through the rain.
‘I wasn’t with anyone,’ laughed Bryant as he plunged back into the unlit traffic.
29
Eve Noriac loved the smell of an old theatre.
It was something no amount of carpentry or repainting could remove, a richly human odour. She had grown up on the south coast of France, in a small town outside Nice called Beaulieu, so sun-caressed that the area around it was known as La Petite Afrique, and her arrival in England had coincided with the most prolonged period of rainfall the country had seen in a decade. Within a fortnight she had resolved to go home, but then in May her homeland had been invaded, and she had been forced to stay.
It was then that she discovered the theatres. The Lyric, the Apollo, the Fortune, the Criterion, the Cambridge, each had its own stamp and style, but they all exuded the same sense of shared life. The diurnal passage of each play brought platoons of awestruck schoolchildren and seasoned veterans, locals and tourists, suffering spouses and devoted worshippers. The challenge was to unite them all and win them over.
No two shows were ever the same, even though they appeared identical from the front of the stage. A nightly war was waged for the hearts and minds of those watching. Ground was gained and lost as each evening peppered itself with small victories and defeats. Much-rehearsed movements were swallowed up or skimmed past unnoticed. Flaws were observed or concealed. Each script was a recipe for pleasing the crowd; moments rose perfectly to the intention of the text or fell flat. The subtle ebb and surge of the performances made for different emphases that could alter the total effect of the entertainment within the batting of an eye.
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