‘What are you all doing?’ Sebastian George bellowed. ‘We’re in the middle of a play here. Get back to your positions, immediately, so that we can proceed with the next scene.’ Heads turned in his direction. Eyes looked at him, accusing him of callousness.
‘This is the theatre,’ George continued, still talking loudly, but now with a hint of defensiveness in his tone. ‘We have traditions by which we all live, and one of the most hallowed of those traditions is that whatever else happens, the show must always go on.’
‘But Mr Kirkpatrick’s sick,’ Dominic Smedley told him.
‘I’m not a fool — I can see that for myself,’ Sebastian George said exasperatedly. ‘But I’m not asking him to act on through the pain, am I? Fortunately, he’s already delivered his last line, so why not take the poor fellow back to his dressing room, where he can get some rest?’
‘It wouldn’t be a good idea to move him,’ Smedley said. ‘He’s very sick indeed. Truth is, I think he’s dying.’
Sebastian George shook his head in resigned frustration.
He’d have to give way, he told himself, because as loath as he was to abandon the performance, he could quite see that the body of dying man — lying in the centre of the stage — might well inhibit the feelings of joie de vivre which the closing scenes of the play were supposed to convey.
* * *
The curtain was pulled back slightly at the edge of the stage, and through the gap stepped a short man wearing a flamboyantly colourful frock coat.
Tor those few of you who may not recognize me, I am Sebastian George, the owner and manager of this theatre,’ he announced, ‘and, in that capacity, it is my unpleasant duty to inform you that the remainder of this evening’s performance has regrettably been cancelled.’
Several members of the audience booed, but Sebastian George chose to ignore them.
‘I must therefore ask you to leave the auditorium in a quiet, orderly manner,’ the impresario continued.
‘We paid good money to see this show!’ a man called out from the centre of the stalls.
‘And you have received excellent value in recompense for it,’ Sebastian George snapped back. ‘There is not a single production that I can think of, anywhere else in the West End, which comes close to this one for… ’ He pulled himself up short. ‘If you are prepared to leave your names and addresses at the theatre box office, I will personally ensure that you are given complimentary tickets for some future performance.’
‘And what if we don’t want to see another performance?’ some troublemaker in the stalls asked.
‘In that case… ’ the impresario visibly gulped, ‘… in that case, I am prepared to refund the price of your tickets, which, given that you have already seen most of the play, is more than generous.’
‘What happened to Pittstock?’ a third member of the audience wanted to know.
‘There is no Pittstock. There is only Mr Kirkpatrick, and he has been taken ill.’
‘Taken ill?’ the wag responded. ‘I’ll say he has! Looked to me like he was suffering from a serious case of being dead.’
‘So what’s the good of free tickets if the leading actor’s dead?’ a fourth voice demanded.
‘Mr Kirkpatrick was no more than a secondary lead,’ Sebastian George corrected the heckler. ‘And, in any case, the production is much greater than the sum of its parts. But that is neither here nor there. The performance is over for the evening, and the sooner you leave your names at the box office, the sooner you will be able to go home.’
The quicker-witted members of the audience were one step ahead of him, having already worked out that the sooner they reached the box office, the shorter the queue to leave their names. They had already risen to their feet as he was speaking, and soon everyone else was following their example.
No longer the centre of attention, Sebastian George suddenly seemed to remember that there was something else that he had meant to say to the audience — possibly much earlier.
‘Is there, by any chance, a doctor in the house?’ he asked his now-fleeing customers.
* * *
The bouncer, who’d been posted to keep the riff-raff away, looked with suspicion on the two people who were now about to mount the stage.
The man was very tall and very lean, with a nose which was almost a hook, a square jaw, and sharp, penetrating eyes. There was almost something of the Old Testament Prophet about him. He did not give the outward appearance of being a particularly ‘hard’ case, but the bouncer’s instinct immediately told him that was exactly what the man was.
The woman was much shorter than her companion — she was maybe five feet one or five feet two — and several years younger. She had dark brown hair, a delicate nose, and a mouth which was already developing laughter lines. Her body was lean and hard, like the man’s, but there was a pleasant swelling of her chest which the bouncer found most appealing.
As they reached the stage, the bouncer stepped forward to block their passage. ‘Authorized persons only allowed beyond this point,’ he said.
‘Your boss just asked for a doctor,’ the woman said.
‘And are you telling me he’s a doctor?’ the bouncer asked sceptically, noting that though the tall, thin man was wearing an evening suit, he certainly didn’t look very at home in it.
‘Of course he’s not a doctor,’ Ellie said. ‘He’d be about as much use in an operating theatre as a eunuch would be in a knocking shop.’
‘Come again?’ the bouncer said.
‘I’m the doctor,’ Ellie explained.
‘Then who’s he?’
‘He’s somebody else you might need if, as seems likely, there’s been a crime committed,’ Ellie said.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning he’s the Filth.’
* * *
Behind the curtain, nothing much was moving.
Actors and stage hands stood in a frozen tableau, not looking at each other — and certainly not looking at the man who had fallen to the stage.
Sebastian George, having positioned himself somewhat apart from the rest of his company, was puffing away energetically on a huge cigar, but otherwise showed no sign of life.
The woman in the balloon had stopped screaming, and was now quietly sobbing to herself.
Ellie Carr strode quickly across the stage, and knelt down beside William Kirkpatrick.
‘I need two bowls of water,’ she said to the stage manager, after she had taken a quick look at Kirkpatrick’s face. ‘One of them should be very hot, and the other very cold.’
‘Will that do any good?’ Dominic Smedley asked hopefully.
Ellie looked down at Kirkpatrick again. ‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘But we might as well try it, don’t you think?’
Kirkpatrick was in a pitiful state, Blackstone saw. His eyes were so wide open — either through fear or pain — that they seemed far too large for his face. His skin was turning purple, and his tongue had begun to swell up.
‘Can you speak?’ Ellie asked.
A hideous gurgling sound came from Kirkpatrick’s throat, and then he fell silent.
Ellie placed her finger gently against the pulse in his neck, then shook her head.
‘If you’re going to conduct a murder investigation, you might as well start it right now,’ she told Blackstone, ‘because there’s absolutely nothing more that you can do here.’
‘Is it murder?’ Blackstone asked.
Ellie shrugged. ‘A man’s been stabbed — there’s clear evidence of a knife-wound on his neck — and now he’s dead. Whether or not you call that murder is, I suppose, up to you.’
Blackstone crossed the stage to where Sebastian George was standing. George seemed to be so wrapped up in his own reveries that he didn’t even notice the inspector’s approach.
‘I hate to bother you, but I thought you might like to know that your leading actor has just died,’ Blackstone said, holding up his warrant card for the theatre manager to inspect.
George snapped back into life. ‘William wasn’t my leading actor,’ he said. ‘He was only —’
‘The secondary lead,’ Blackstone interrupted. ‘I know. Anyway, he’ll be giving his next performance on the celestial stage.’
‘He’ll be a very great loss to the theatrical profession,’ George said unconvincingly.
‘Not to mention to the poor bloody wife and children he left behind,’ Blackstone said dryly.
‘He had no family,’ George replied. ‘Like so many of us, he was married to his art.’
‘Even if he was only the secondary lead?’
‘A secondary lead is still a man of consequence,’ George said. ‘There are people who would kill to be in his position.’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Blackstone replied.
He turned to look at Ellie. She was watching a couple of the stage hands bring a trestle table on to the stage. She showed them where to place it, then pointed to the dead man. As the stage hands lifted the corpse on to the table, the woman in the balloon began to scream again.
‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea to get her down?’ Blackstone asked Sebastian George.
‘What?’
‘The woman in the balloon’? Don’t you think it would be a good idea to get her down?’
George nodded.
‘Why are you just standing there, you idiots!’ he screamed angrily at the stage hands who had been assisting Ellie. ‘Yes, it’s you that I’m talking to! Are you incapable of doing anything without an explicit order from me? Do you need my permission before you can even think of going to the crapper and opening your bowels?’
The two men looked confused. ‘Sorry, sir? I don’t quite understand,’ one of them said.
‘Look at Miss Devaraux, you fool! She’s still hovering above the stage like a wounded bloody seagull. Lower her down, for God’s sake!’
* * *
There were four of them in the leading lady’s dressing room. The leading lady herself, Charlotte Devaraux, sat on a padded stool in front of her make-up mirror — sobbing softly — while her dresser, a tiny woman called Madge, fussed and fretted over her. The other two present — Blackstone and Sebastian George — were both standing, George by the door and Blackstone a couple of feet away from the woman who he was intending to interrogate.
Charlotte Devaraux was much younger than the airborne character she had been playing, the inspector thought, but not quite as youthful as her publicity photographs would tend to suggest. Still, he was probably being unfair to judge her on her appearance at that moment. No woman looked her best when she’d just witnessed a murder — when, in fact, she’d committed it herself.
Blackstone coughed discreetly. ‘If you don’t mind, Miss Devaraux, I’d like you to tell me what happened,’ he said.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ Charlotte Devaraux said, between sobs. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘But you are aware that you did stab Mr Kirkpatrick, aren’t you?’ Blackstone asked, gently.
‘Yes, but I… but I… ’
‘What was supposed to happen’? Was it merely your intention to make it look as if you’d done it?’
‘No, I… I… ’
‘It wasn’t a real knife,’ Sebastian George interrupted.
‘It looked real enough to me,’ said Blackstone, who had retrieved the dagger from where Charlotte Devaraux had dropped it in the balloon basket. ‘Felt real enough, for that matter.’
‘The one you picked up — the one Charlotte used tonight — was real,’ George said. ‘But it’s not the knife she usually uses.’
‘How’s the one that she usually uses any different to the one I found?’ Blackstone wondered.
‘It’s a trick knife. At the push of a button, the blade immediately retracts into the handle. When she stabs William in the neck, it’s only the haft of the knife which actually touches him. Then, when she’s pulled the knife free, she touches a button again, and the blade reappears.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been much easier — and much safer — to use a rubber knife?’ Blackstone asked.
‘We are talking of the dramatic arts here!’ George said scornfully. ‘We are talking of the magic of the theatre! A rubber knife would never even begin to scale the heights of perfection that I demand from my productions.’
Heights of perfection! Blackstone repeated silently. What heights of perfection?
He was beginning to suspect that he and Sebastian George had seen two entirely different plays performed on the stage — but he wisely kept the observation to himself.
‘Even with a trick knife, it seems a pretty dangerous stunt to try and pull off,’ he said.
‘Perhaps that might be true if the “stunt”, as you choose to call it, were carried out by a rank amateur,’ Sebastian George countered, ‘but in the hands of a true professional, it is safe enough. And that is what Charlotte is — above all else — a true professional.’
‘A true professional!’ echoed Madge the dresser.
And the True Professional herself merely nodded, as if all this went without saying.
‘Still, there’s no disputing the fact that the poor bloke is dead,’ Blackstone pointed out, in fairness.
‘That is because someone substituted a real knife for the fake one,’ George countered.
‘And nobody noticed?’
‘That would seem to be self-evident.’
‘Not the props master? Not any other member of the cast? Not Miss Devaraux herself?’
‘As far as I can tell, the real knife is an exact copy of the fake one,’ George said. ‘I’ll wager it even weighs exactly the same.’
So someone — a person with easy access to the props — had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to stage an extremely elaborate murder, the inspector thought.
Well, that certainly did seem to rule out the possibility of a crime of sudden passion, didn’t it?
* * *
The body still lay on the trestle table, and Ellie Carr was bent over it, giving it a thorough examination.
Blackstone told Ellie about the trick knife, then took a closer look at the body himself.
‘I would have expected there to have been much more blood around,’ he said.
‘And you wouldn’t have been disappointed, if this had been a deep stab wound,’ Ellie replied. ‘Even if it hadn’t been deep, but had just managed to pierce the jugular, there would have been a veritable fountain of blood. But neither of those things happened — which is only logical, when you think about it.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course. Based on what you’ve just told me, I’m assuming Charlotte Devaraux believed that she’d be touching Kirkpatrick’s neck with the haft of the knife. Is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she’d still have exercised restraint, wouldn’t she?’
‘Because the haft, even on its own, could do serious damage if it struck hard enough?’
‘Exactly. So while she’ll have been aiming at making it appear as if she were using considerable force, her true intention will have been to achieve the merest whisper of a touch. But even a whisper of a touch can cause damage if the knife is as sharp as that one was.’ Ellie Carr stepped away from the table. ‘See for yourself, Sam.’
Blackstone bent over the corpse. The knife had indeed penetrated the skin on the neck, and while it would have been an exaggeration to have described the result as a mere pinprick, it didn’t really look like a serious wound either.
‘So what actually killed him?’ Blackstone asked. ‘The fall?’
‘The fall could easily have killed him. You can die rolling off a park bench, if you’re unlucky.’
‘But you don’t really think that’s what caused death in this case?’
Ellie sighed theatrically — which was quite appropriate, given their surroundings.
‘Why are you asking me that now, Sam?’ she asked. ‘You know that I hate to give a definite opinion on a stiff until I’ve s
lit him open and rummaged around in all the goo.’
‘Why don’t you give me a provisional opinion, then?’ Blackstone suggested.
‘Take another look at him,’ Ellie said. ‘You see how his facial muscles are contorted?’
‘Yes. But so would mine have been if I’d been stabbed in the neck and then fallen twelve or fifteen feet on to a hardwood floor.’
‘No, they wouldn’t,’ Ellie said dismissively. ‘At least, not quite in the way Kirkpatrick’s are.’
‘So what’s the answer?’ Blackstone asked, restraining his natural impatience, because experience had taught him that sort of approach simply didn’t work with Ellie Carr.
‘Whoever wanted Kirkpatrick dead would have known that the knife wound — if properly administered — wouldn’t kill him, and that the fall probably wouldn’t either,’ Ellie explained. ‘So, in order to ensure his success, he will have decided to bring a third element into the equation.’
‘And that third element was what?’
‘My guess would be that it’s some kind of quick-acting poison, which could have been smeared on the tip of the knife. The knife then serves as a perfect delivery system, much like a poison arrow would. Once the poison had worked its way into Kirkpatrick’s blood stream, he was finished.’
‘But why go to such elaborate lengths to kill Kirkpatrick?’ Blackstone wondered.
‘I wouldn’t know about that, Sam,’ Ellie said.
‘You don’t sound like you care much either,’ Blackstone commented.
‘Why should I?’ Ellie asked. ‘You’re the detective, and so you’re naturally interested in the “why” of things — but I’m a pathologist, and the “how” of a death is infinitely more intriguing to me. Fair enough?’
Fair enough, Blackstone agreed. His question had been addressed more at himself than at Ellie, anyway, and as he began to stride up and down the stage, the questions which followed it were also more for his own consideration than for the good doctor’s.
‘If he wanted him dead, then surely it would have been easier to follow him down some dark alley and stab him to death,’ the inspector mused. ‘Or, if that solution was too messy for the killer’s taste, why not simply slip some poison into Kirkpatrick’s tea?’
Blackstone and the Stage of Death (The Blackstone Detective series Book 5) Page 2
