The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  “Even if they were sharper,” said Charlie, “I don’t think they could have been the weapon. They’re so long and flexible that you couldn’t get the force on that apparently was used. It really has to be a dagger…. The program says that Leonora is stabbed at the end. What with?”

  Bob shrugged again, a favorite gesture, obviously.

  “It happens offstage. Since the men have just been dueling, the logical conclusion is that her brother has run her through with his sword.”

  “No go, then,” said Rani.

  Charlie pondered. “At the end of the first scene, when all the stage lights suddenly go out, I thought I saw the tenor run over and pick up the gun he’s just thrown down and killed her father with.”

  “That’s right, he does. The audience is not supposed to see, but of course the darkness is never complete. You may have noticed the dead father sneaking offstage as well. He has to get off, and the pistol has to be got off too. The scene changes to an inn. As you’ll have seen the set is basically a gun shape: at this point it fractures in the middle, benches and a table pop up, and the chorus and baritone come on. It’s all done in less than a minute, and it’s convenient for the tenor to remove the gun himself.”

  “It’s a big gun?”

  “Flintlock pistol, like I said. We wanted a big one. The producer wanted the shape of the gun in Alvaro’s greatcoat pocket to mirror the shape of the set.” Seeing Charlie’s skeptical expression, Bob shrugged again. “OK, I doubt whether anyone could really see that beyond the first few rows of the stalls, but that’s producers for you.”

  He took another key from his pocket and opened a large box standing on one of the little room’s tables. “See, here it is. When Colm gets offstage he then comes back here, with his own key, and puts it away.” He pointed to three guns in the box. “These are the three the Armouries lent us—all pretty substantial weapons that had a chance of making a distinct shape in the pocket and being seen. That’s the one we decided to use, but it doesn’t much matter which.”

  Charlie bent down and looked more closely, first at the gun that had just been used onstage, then at the other two. Rani sneaked a look in from the side, and his body suddenly stiffened. Charlie straightened up and pointed.

  “That’s an odd one.”

  The props man nodded. He seemed to take it up with a certain reluctance.

  “Quite common in the early nineteenth century, though. Combined percussion pistol and dagger. The blade slots in under the barrel of the gun, and can quite easily be flicked forward—like this, see.” A short but substantial blade came clearly into view—menacing, dangerous. “It’s a pretty basic, all-purpose weapon, this.”

  “So we can see,” commented Charlie. “Choose your weapon, bullet or blade.”

  “That’s the idea. But that’s not the weapon we decided to use onstage.” There was tension in his voice, and had been since the box was opened. He looked down still, not wanting them to see his eyes. He knew what they were talking about. Charlie put his hand forward and ran his finger along the blade. His eyes were cold.

  “On Saturday night,” he said quietly, “did you check after the first scene that all these guns were back in this box?”

  Bob Holdsworth shuffled his feet. “Not immediately. It was the first night, and we all had new, unaccustomed routines to follow. Checking the guns wasn’t a top priority.”

  “When did you check?”

  Bob looked down still more obstinately. “End of performance, actually.”

  Charlie removed a plastic evidence bag from his pocket and gently took up the gun. Through the transparent plastic it gleamed, heavy and deadly.

  “Do you have some kind of carrier, to make it less obvious?” he asked.

  Bob Holdsworth nodded miserably, rummaged in a drawer, and came up with a Morrison’s bag. He then locked the gun box and the cupboard where the swords had been stored, and they left the room, Bob locking it behind him. Lured by the music, Charlie strayed toward the stage, from which came the sound of two powerful male voices. The tenor one soared in angelic sweetness.

  “Ah now I die contented…”

  “Oh dear,” said Charlie, moved by the beauty of it, but not just that. He began to walk away. “Where’s Madam?” he asked Bob.

  “In her dressing room and not to be disturbed.”

  “Who is it tonight?”

  “The man playing Fra Melitone. He must have come up to scratch. It was him on Thursday night too.”

  Charlie nodded, then he and Rani made for the stage door and out into the open air. Their walk to Millgarth Police Headquarters was done in total silence, and even when he handed in his prize for forensic tests Charlie felt a weight of depression on him that made him gruff and uncertain, with nothing of the triumph that often gripped him when the end of a case was in sight. He told the duty sergeant to ring Mike and tell him who they were about to interview. Then they went back into the night, and for a long while tramped the streets, once again hardly exchanging a word. I suppose coppers in the old days felt like this, only worse, when a man they’d convicted was about to be hanged, Charlie thought. Eventually they went back to the Grand and saw the last scene of the opera.

  “She’s singing like an angel,” said Charlie.

  “Lover boy must have performed well too, at interval,” said Rani.

  The cheers rang out at the final curtain, and when she took her solo curtsy Olivia seemed to be purring. Colm Fitzgerald was more sober, though he was generously cheered. Charlie and Rani let the happy, excited audience pour out, the triumph encouraging excited chatter among them. Then the pair of them slipped out and round to Harrison Street and the stage door.

  “Mr. Fitzgerald’s dressing room number?” asked Charlie, looking Syd steadily in the eye.

  “Number seventeen,” he said. “Sir.”

  Backstage everything was at sixes and sevens, but even so Charlie had a distinct impression that people were determinedly not looking at them. There were moments when he hated his job, and hated himself, though they were few. He found the corridor of dressing rooms and knocked on the door of number seventeen.

  “Come in.”

  The voice somehow sounded already defeated.

  Colm Fitzgerald was sitting at his dressing table, and the mirror reflected a face with makeup smeared, the process of removal having been interrupted by their knock, or possibly by an access of remorse or despair, because from the sleeves of his shirt it looked as if his face had been in his hands. There was a horrible contrast between the strength of the body, the memory of the confident and clear voice Charlie had heard onstage, and the dispirited, beaten air of the man caught in private.

  “Have you come to arrest me?”

  “We’ve come to have a talk with you.”

  “You’ve taken the pistol away, haven’t you? The one with the built-in blade?”

  “Yes. It’s with Forensics now.”

  “They said backstage you were there after the interval. They said you went off with something in a bag, and I knew what it had to be. There doesn’t seem much more to say, does there?”

  Charlie left a silence, thinking it might be more useful than any words. Then Colm Fitzgerald started speaking again.

  “The funny thing is, it didn’t affect my performance tonight. Made it better if anything. I suppose poor old Alvaro is a defeated individual right from the start. Despair suits him…. I love her, you know.”

  “I guessed you must.”

  “You won’t understand unless you get that straight. She’ll say things like that I wanted to be her standard tenor, getting engagements with her because managements would be willing to take the two of us as the price they paid for getting her. Or that I wanted to be her manager and get my share of the loot that way. She can be a bitch when she wants to be.”

  “That certainly is my impression,” said Charlie, sitting down in the one armchair and nodding to Rani to stand at the door.

  “It made no difference—makes no di
fference. She’s like no woman I’ve ever known. From the moment I saw her, at first rehearsal, I felt my blood boiling. I felt myself alive as I’d never been before. It was a wonderful time and a terrible time. You may not realize, but we have hardly any scenes together.”

  “We’ve seen the first half, and the ending,” put in Rani.

  “Then you’ve seen all there is of us together.”

  “We’ve only just realized that she has almost all the first half of the opera, and you almost all the second half. It meant both of you had an hour or more when you weren’t onstage.”

  “Yes. And it meant we had hardly any rehearsal periods together. They were so special, the ones we did have. Olivia realized we could make a really good-looking pair of lovers. Like Gheorghiu and Alagna. She got very frustrated that Verdi had given us so little to do together. I did too.”

  “But eventually the rehearsals got to your bits?”

  “Yes. Some weeks into the rehearsal period. She’d been…going with the Padre Guardiano mostly in the first weeks, and with one or two of the chorus. Then we started to do the opera as a whole. I realized she’d been tantalizing me, saving me up. The coming together of the two lovers in the opera had to be something special. Finally it happened, and I was on cloud nine. She was so vital, so crazy for me, so full of—passion you have to call it. For a week, ten days, she was my sun and I was her moon.”

  There was silence as he remembered.

  “And then?”

  “Then I’d served my purpose. Then I became her luggage porter, her chauffeur, her dresser—whatever. Now and then she’d…take me, if nothing else offered. Mostly she used me, and liked humiliating me. She’d have me drive her to Alderley, then dismiss me as if I were a hire-car driver. You can’t imagine how painful that was. I’d been sure that what we were having was something special, something totally different from all her other beddings. And it wasn’t. I was just another of her flings.”

  Just like Caroline, thought Charlie. Just like Caroline and Marius.

  “Did you ever meet Marius Fleetwood?” he asked.

  “Oh yes, briefly. Caroline insisted that she bring me in for tea and cakes. I met the whole family. Liked them…I got the idea then that something was in the wind between Olivia and Marius. I tried to tell myself I was imagining it, but the looks between the two told me different. And there was worse: I thought Olivia was wanting me to see it, wanting me to know that she and Marius were either lovers already, or were contemplating it.”

  “I think she probably did. It would be in character.”

  “Oh, I know her character. Better than you ever can…After that I became insanely jealous for a time. I’d watch her, see who she went with, go to her dressing room when she wasn’t there to see if there was any evidence of her and him together.”

  “Hold it a minute. You knew Olivia was having other lovers now you and she were practically finished, didn’t you?”

  “Oh yes, I knew. Olivia was not the sort to be without lovers.”

  “But it was Fleetwood you were jealous of. Why did you feel that that was different?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “Leave me out of it. Why did you feel like that?”

  There was silence for a few moments as he tried to sort out his emotional responses.

  “I was jealous. But I was also nauseated. He was old enough to be her father, for a start. He was her mother’s partner—not just lover, but in Caroline’s eyes something tantamount to a husband. I could tell that from her ways of treating him: it was tremendous love, but also confidence that they were a stable couple. He was like a father to the two younger ones too. It made it so like…so like incest.”

  He almost spat the word out. Charlie was horribly intrigued.

  “Do you by any chance know about incest from close hand?”

  Colm nodded miserably.

  “Yes…. Do we have to talk about it? Oh, I suppose we do. My father abused my sister for years. He virtually destroyed her. It was the reason I left Ireland and went to study in America. Nothing happened to him. When she finally accused him it was in the past and there was no way of getting evidence. There’s a lot of covering-up in Ireland, especially where pillars of the community and the Church are concerned. So that’s why I was nauseated by what was happening between those two.”

  “And did you find your evidence?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes, I did. I found a pad on her dressing table, and a note had been written on the sheet above in Biro. I tore the top sheet off, and took it back to my dressing room. When I sprinkled black powder on it, it brought the words up.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “I can tell you exactly. It read: ‘OK. Crescent Hotel ca. 8:45. Looking forward to it. The eternal O.’”

  “I see. But there was nothing to identify Marius Fleetwood.”

  “No, there wasn’t. And when I’d looked up the Crescent in the telephone directory and gone along to take a peek at it, it seemed as unlike a place he would choose for an amorous assignation as you could imagine. So for a while I damped down my jealousy. But then I remembered that he always left concerts and musical events early—they’d told me that when I was down there. And eight-forty-five was about when the first half of Forza would have finished and Olivia would be free for more than an hour. Thinking it over, the closeness of the place made it very suitable for a meeting and so—well, I changed my mind again, and I thought they just might be meeting there on the first night.”

  “So on that night you went straight out of the theater after the first scene?”

  “That’s right, out the little door in the loading entrance, into the little side alley—Harrison Street, it’s called—and then down to Vicar Lane, which was likely to be more deserted than Briggate.”

  “Yes, it would be normally. But it was in Vicar Lane that you were spotted and followed.”

  Colm looked at Charlie dully. He didn’t really care whether the police had evidence or not.

  “Who was I seen by?”

  “Someone who thought the big cinema that used to be at the top there was still going, and went to see what was on.”

  He shook his head. What did it matter?

  “Anyway, I’m not denying anything or holding anything back.”

  “No, you’re not. But how did you come to have that percussion pistol in your pocket?”

  “I just dashed out as soon as the scene ended. It was still there.”

  “That particular pistol, sir. It wasn’t the one that had been agreed would be used in that scene.”

  “They were all three perfectly suitable. I just took the nearest one.”

  “Well, that was very much your bad luck, wasn’t it? And his.”

  He glumly nodded.

  “Anyway, I walked fast, and got to the part of North Street where the Crescent is, and when I stopped and looked back to see what traffic there was, Fleetwood was coming towards me from the top of Briggate. He was walking along, very full of himself, practically dancing, dressed up like this was a first night at La Scala, Milan. He turned to look for the traffic too, and I came up behind him and said, ‘Can I have a word, Mr. Fleetwood?’ He turned back, recognized me, and said, ‘Oh God. I can’t deal with jealous lovers.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I said, ‘Please, I just want a word.’ I drew him up onto the grass, and he walked as if he was being dragged through a pig farm. We got a bit away from the road, and I said, ‘Look, you’re her mother’s partner, practically a father to her other children.’ And he just shrugged and said, ‘Not much mileage left in that relationship.’ I said, ‘You’re practically a father to her,’ and he said, ‘I’m nothing of the sort.’ I was beginning to get hysterical, I think. I said, ‘I know all about incest. My father abused my sister for years.’ That’s when he made his mistake. He said, ‘Look, get this into your head. I’m not her fucking father. I’m her fucking lover, or I will be in half an hour or so.’”

  “That
’s when you took out the pistol?”

  Colm Fitzgerald swallowed.

  “Yes. He looked at it and sneered. He said, ‘That’s just your stage gun. I recognize it. You can’t frighten me with that.’ So I flicked the blade forward. Then he really went pale. He was a coward underneath.”

  “Most of us are cowards, faced with a man with a knife,” said Charlie, who had been there, as had Rani.

  “Maybe. Anyway, he paled, like I said, then looked round as if for somewhere to run. That’s when I plunged it in. And that’s really all there is to tell.”

  “Where were you? Not where he was found.”

  “No. The bushes were a few yards away. I pulled the knife out. I knew he was dead, and I dragged him behind one of the bushes, so that he probably wouldn’t be found at least until morning.”

  “If there’d still been life in him, would you have summoned help?”

  “No.”

  “So you went back to the theater. All this wouldn’t have taken long, I suppose. The first part would still be on.”

  “It was. Olivia was singing like an angel. In anticipation, I suppose. I went to see her at interval. I wanted to tell her not to go to the Crescent. In the end I couldn’t. Self-preservation, I suppose.”

  “And you went onstage and sang as normally, did you?”

  “Yes, I did. Funny old game, isn’t it? Funny old world. I’ll come with you now. No need for handcuffs.”

  And he stood up, with a certain big, strange dignity, and let Charlie and Rani come on either side of him as he walked out of the theater and toward the police car that Charlie had ordered Millgarth to have waiting for them outside. Both of the policemen felt for him something approaching admiration. They felt silenced by the terrible force of his passion.

  Later, when Fitzgerald was in the cells for the night, Rani drove Charlie home. He was silent at first, then asked, “What view will they take of it?”