Stagestruck

by Peter Lovesey

Equally, Clarion’s killing required special knowledge, the news that the injured star was secretly visiting the theatre. Really only three people knew in advance. Others may have worked it out for themselves after the “ghost” was sighted, but the killing didn’t have the feel of a last-minute decision. The murderer had come prepared with the airtight killing bag and chosen the short span during the interval when the curtain was lowered and most of the audience were outside. A muffled cry of distress from the box hadn’t been noticed. He or she had left unseen, probably by the rear door. It was hard to imagine one of the actors having committed the murder on the spur of the moment and then going back on stage for the second half.

  Realistically, Shearman, Melmot and Binns were the prime suspects. Binns wasn’t on the staff, but it was his job to patrol the building and he knew the security codes and could come and go at will.

  Reassured that he’d drawn the net as tightly as he could, Diamond looked into the CID room again. ‘Anything I should be told?’

  ‘Keith just called from the theatre a minute ago,’ Ingeborg said. ‘He said to tell you about a fourth suspect.’

  Telepathy seemed to have been at work here. Galvanised, he said, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Kate, the wardrobe lady. Like the others, she knew Clarion was on her way to the theatre the evening she was killed.’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  ‘Talk to Keith, guv.’

  ‘Has he been talking to her?’

  ‘No. To Hedley Shearman. They’re close, those two.’

  ‘I’ve seen how close. Did he say any more?’

  ‘It sounded as if he was still with Shearman when he was speaking. He couldn’t talk freely.’

  ‘I’d better get down there.’

  ‘Would you like someone else to go?’ Ingeborg asked in a tone that was almost motherly.

  He felt a rush of blood. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘In case you’re needed here.’

  They both knew what she was on about. She was the sharpest observer on the squad.

  He told himself by now he was over the paranoia or whatever it was that afflicted him each time he visited that theatre. Familiarity breeds confidence. Peter Diamond, detective superintendent, head of CID, scourge of the luvvies, would show them how to make an entrance.

  ‘I’m needed there and I’ll go,’ he said.

  He took his car, left it on the double yellow line outside, took a deep breath, crossed the pavement and… felt the first wave of nausea. Nothing had altered. If anything, it was worse. He stopped like a beast smelling blood at the slaughterhouse door.

  Ridiculous.

  Another gulp of air and he forced himself to go in.

  There was a notice saying all performances had been cancelled until next week. The foyer was empty, the box office closed. He could turn round and leave. No one would know.

  Instead he gritted his teeth, took the security card from his pocket and pressed the keys that admitted him to the royal circle. Inside it was darker than usual. Only a few side lights were on. He heard voices from the bar and one was Halliwell’s. Thank God he wouldn’t need to look into the auditorium.

  Keith was in there seated across a table from Shearman. ‘Are you okay, guv? You look pale.’

  ‘Bit breathless. Out of condition, I expect.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

  He pulled up a chair. ‘You left a message, something about Kate.’

  Shearman twitched and looked away.

  ‘That’s right,’ Halliwell said. ‘Talking to Mr Shearman I discovered that she knew Clarion was in the theatre last evening.’

  ‘How is that?’ Diamond said, turning to Shearman. ‘You told her?’

  The little manager scraped his fingers down the side of his face, leaving white marks. ‘I’m sorry. It was stupid of me.’

  ‘You tipped her off about Clarion’s visit?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’

  ‘When? When did you tell her?’

  ‘During the first half.’

  Halliwell said, ‘Kate and Mr Shearman were at it in the wardrobe room.’

  ‘Shagging?’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Does this happen every night and twice on matinee days?’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Shearman said, blushing. ‘She’s been through a hugely difficult time and so have I. There’s no law against it.’

  ‘What exactly was said?’

  ‘I said I couldn’t stay long with her because I’d need to go up to the box during the interval. First of all I said it was a VIP I was taking care of, but of course she wanted to know who, and in the end I weakened and told her.’ He paused, and then emphasised each word with his forefinger. ‘She had nothing to do with Clarion’s death.’

  ‘Where is she now? Here in the theatre?’

  He shook his head. ‘She left earlier, after your man finished his search of wardrobe. She has nothing to keep her here.’

  ‘Tidying up would be good. Wardrobe was a mess when I saw it.’

  ‘Her heart isn’t in it anymore.’

  Diamond leaned closer to him. ‘So why did you lie?’

  ‘To protect her. It’s no secret now that she and I are close friends. I didn’t want her treated as a suspect, put through the mill, as some of us have been. She’s no murderer.’

  ‘Do you know where she’s gone?’

  ‘Home, I expect. She lives in Warminster, but I hope you’re not going to trouble her there. You’d be wasting your time. I’m sure she’s innocent.’

  Diamond turned to Halliwell. ‘Didn’t we ask everyone to stay in contact?’

  He nodded.

  ‘We have a phone number. Try it.’

  Halliwell took out his mobile and dialled. ‘Nothing. She’s switched off.’

  Diamond cast his thoughts back to the interview he’d had with Kate shortly after Denise had been found dead, the obvious coolness, if not open hostility. She’d used the phrase ‘tough as old boots’ about her colleague and said she was ‘calm as a lake in heaven’ when going off to attend to Clarion’s make-up. He’d questioned how anyone could be calm if they were about to smear caustic soda on another woman’s face and Kate had said he’d have to work that out for himself.

  He said to Shearman, ‘I picked up some tension between Kate and Denise.’

  ‘Did you?’ he said, as if it didn’t surprise him. ‘I wouldn’t make too much of that if I were you. Denise came under Kate’s supervision in the wardrobe department, but she’d worked here for six years, rather more than Kate had. There was bound to be some professional awkwardness.’

  ‘Kate didn’t seem too cut up about Denise’s death.’

  ‘I expect she was putting a brave face on it. A terrible thing like that takes people in different ways.’

  ‘Maybe. Just now I commented that wardrobe was a mess and you said her heart wasn’t in it. What did you mean by that?’

  Shearman hesitated. ‘Oh, I was talking about the dreadful things that have happened. It’s enough to sap anyone’s morale.’

  Smart answer, but not convincing, Diamond thought. ‘Going by the state of the place, it didn’t get like that in a couple of days.’

  ‘I’m sure the disorder is more apparent than real. She knows where everything is – or she did until your search party turned the lot upside down.’

  Diamond hadn’t been swayed by the manager’s defence. Kate was definitely in the frame now. Her strong dislike of Denise had been obvious all along. She’d portrayed her as tough, calm and so indifferent to Clarion’s scarring that she could well have inflicted it. Coming from a colleague, that was quite a character assassination. It wasn’t beyond her to have lured Denise upstairs, slipped her the drug and pushed her to her death to fake the suicide. Working so closely with Denise, she would be familiar with her signature and well able to forge the note. Up to that point everything seemed to be going to plan. Then she’d found out that Clarion was making this secret visit to the theatre. Did alarm bel
ls go off in her head – that Clarion had worked out the truth and was coming to confront her or even expose her as the killer? How simple to have picked up one of the many plastic bags in wardrobe and gone to the box and suffocated Clarion.

  He turned to Halliwell. ‘This stinks. I’m going out to Warminster to see her.’

  Shearman was shaking his head. ‘You’ll send her into a panic. She’ll think she’s under suspicion.’

  ‘She is. I don’t want you tipping her off,’ he said and told Halliwell to stay with Shearman for the next hour.

  ‘Don’t you people understand that I have a job to do?’ Shearman demanded.

  ‘There’s no job. The theatre is dark now.’

  ‘That’s when things get busy for me. I’ll be organising a team to strike the set.’

  ‘To what?’

  Halliwell said, ‘He means moving the scenery, guv. They want to clear the stage so it’s ready for the next production.’

  Diamond pointed a finger at Shearman. ‘Don’t even think about shifting it. Leave everything in place, exactly as it is. That’s an order.’

  20

  South-east of Bath in the thick of the Friday afternoon commute along the A36, Diamond drove at his usual steady forty, heading a procession increasingly desperate to overtake. At his side was a detective sergeant almost his own age who had transferred from Chipping Sodbury a couple of months back, a soft-speaking, dependable type. Lew Rogers had merged into the CID room almost unnoticed. This was a chance to get to know him better. About all Diamond had discovered was that he cycled to work from Batheaston. Either a fitness freak or a green, he had decided.

  ‘I’ll be relying on you to guide me to the street where this woman lives,’ Diamond said. ‘I generally steer clear of Warminster.’

  ‘Why is that? All the sightings of UFOs?’

  ‘No. The bypass.’

  They both smiled. Back in the sixties and seventies there had been persistent reports of flying saucers over Warminster and the nearby downs. There were claims that some local residents had been abducted. Books had been written about extra-terrestrial visitors.

  ‘Have you thought about getting a sat-nav?’ Rogers asked in his innocence.

  ‘Got one.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s you, sat here and navving for me. More reliable, I hope, and with extras, like hands. If you look in the glove compartment you’ll find some Softmints. Have one yourself.’

  ‘Thanks, but I won’t.’ Rogers said. He passed a mint to Diamond. ‘Does Kate live alone?’

  ‘As far as I know, yes.’

  ‘Are you going to nick her?’

  ‘If necessary.’

  ‘Is she on the run?’

  ‘Would I be driving at this speed if she was?’

  ‘I was told you don’t do more than forty in any situation.’

  Diamond looked ahead without even the suggestion of a smile. ‘You’re well informed. There’s a stretch of dual carriageway coming up. They can all overtake if they want. We’ll get there soon enough. We’re not far off now.’

  Two minutes later, all the brake lights started going on. Both lanes of the carriageway were blocked as far ahead as he could see.

  ‘Shouldn’t have spoken. What’s this about?’ he said. ‘One of those idiots who just overtook us, I wouldn’t wonder.’

  Everything came to a complete halt.

  ‘Could be road works,’ Rogers said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ He’d heard the two-tone wail of an emergency vehicle from behind. ‘Can they get by?’

  An ambulance snaked a route through the stationary traffic.

  Diamond switched off the engine and took out his phone. After speaking to traffic division he informed Rogers that the problem was half a mile ahead, almost in the town. ‘Some idiot managed to turn his car over and the fire service are using their cutting equipment. Fancy a game of I Spy?’

  ‘Perhaps I will have one of your mints, guv.’

  ‘Live dangerously.’ Fitness was Rogers’ thing, Diamond decided.

  He dialled CID for an update and was pleased when Ingeborg answered. She was better than any of the team at summing up what was happening, and was just back from interviewing the chairman of the board at Melmot Hall.

  ‘Learn anything new?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, and I would have called you if you’d kept your phone on.’

  ‘You’re in danger of nagging the boss, Inge. I was driving.’

  ‘You’ve got someone with you who could take a call, guv. Anyway, this will make you sit up. Melmot told me Kate is working her notice. He sacked her a week ago.’

  ‘Melmot sacked Kate?’ he said more to himself than Ingeborg, to gain a couple of seconds while the implications sank in.

  ‘He said there had been problems with her before, not doing the job properly.’

  ‘Now he tells us.’

  ‘She’d clung on because of her relationship with Shearman, who always backs her and says the criticism is unfair. But when Mel mot was approached about the state of the wardrobe room he went to see it for himself and was so appalled that he fired her.’

  ‘It was a dog’s breakfast when I saw it,’ he said, ‘but I’ve no experience of these places.’

  ‘You can’t run a theatre wardrobe in such a mess. Everything has to be in place and organised.’ That was one of Ingeborg’s favourite refrains. She was right, of course, whether it was a theatre wardrobe or a CID office.

  ‘Shearman was silent about this when I questioned him.’

  ‘He would be.’

  ‘He did say at one point that her heart isn’t in it any more. That should have alerted me. He doesn’t give much away.’

  ‘Do you want to know who the whistle-blower was?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Denise Pearsall.’

  He gave a whistle of his own. ‘That could be the clincher. Melmot told you this?’

  ‘He said she took some photographs of the wardrobe room with her phone and went to see him with them.’

  ‘She was asking for trouble, shopping her boss.’ The facts were slotting in like the last pieces of a jigsaw. ‘Kate must have known who dropped her in it. You can’t keep stuff like that to yourself. This is dynamite, Inge. It means she had a red-hot motive for revenge on Denise. And if she thought Denise had mentioned any of this to Clarion, she had a strong reason to kill Clarion as well.’

  Ingeborg sounded a note of caution. ‘Before we get carried away, guv, let’s not forget Shearman. He’s Kate’s lover. He could have killed Denise. In his case, there was a personal element because Denise ignored him, went over his head and complained to Melmot.’

  ‘Point taken. And he was the best placed of everyone to murder Clarion.’ He pressed back against the headrest and released some of the tension with a huge sigh. ‘Whoever it is, we’re onto them. When I get to see Kate, I’ll know. The one small problem is that I’m stuck in a bloody traffic jam. Nothing is moving.’

  A further ten minutes went by. The hold-up had reached the stage when people were out of their cars discussing what was going on. Diamond remained seated, thinking of other things, using the time to revisit each stage of the murders, down to such detail as the placing of the butterfly in dressing room one and the secreting of the suicide note in the stove. Nothing conflicted with either Kate or Shearman committing both murders.

  ‘When we finally get moving again and find the house,’ he said to Lew Rogers, ‘we’ll make sure she doesn’t see us coming and escape through the back. I’ve had that happen before. I’ll park some distance up the street and you can make the first approach. She knows me. I don’t think she’s met you.’

  ‘I was in the theatre last night with the others.’

  ‘But you didn’t speak to her. Anyway, you’re lower profile than I am.’

  Ahead there was the sound of doors being slammed and engines starting.

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  Progress was still slow, bu
t at least there was movement. It went from a crawl to a sedate ten-mile-an-hour cruise as far as the roundabout and then slowed again on the two-way approach road to Warminster. Rogers looked up from the street atlas. ‘There’s another way into the town, but it may be just as congested.’

  ‘We’ll settle for this.’

  Ahead was a police car with its blues flashing and a uniformed cop guiding the line of traffic past the scene of the accident.

  ‘Nasty,’ Diamond said as they came alongside a mangled blue saloon being lifted onto a breakdown truck. ‘Must have hit that tree. I wonder if it was fatal.’ Then he realised he was rubbernecking and gave his attention to the road ahead.

  Lew Rogers was good with the map. Away from the town centre, Warminster is a maze of side streets and dead ends. He directed them unerringly off the High Street and over a railway bridge to the estate where Kate lived. The houses there must have been built as army quarters to support the nearby barracks, functional brick buildings without much to distinguish them. Some boys were kicking a football in the road.

  Diamond succeeded in reaching the end without running over a child and parked at the curbside. ‘Did you spot the house?’

  ‘I did. It’s the one with the yellow door about halfway along.’

  The way the houses were sited, an escape route from the back looked unlikely. Tall fences enclosed the back gardens.

  ‘Shall I see if she’s in, guv?’ Rogers asked.

  ‘Why not? Give me a wave if she is.’

  Rogers started the walk back, watched covertly in the rearview mirror by Diamond and openly by the young footballers.

  Rogers went through the gate and rang the bell on the yellow door.

  Diamond watched and waited. The footballers had suspended play.

  No one came to the door.

  Presently Rogers returned to the car. ‘Nothing doing. The kids say they know when she’s home because she parks her car outside, a blue Vauxhall Astra.’

  A disquieting thought popped into Diamond’s mind, but he dismissed it.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Rogers said.

  ‘We can at least see if she comes along in the next half-hour. She could have been caught in the traffic jam, like us.’

  The evening light was still good although the shadows were lengthening. Behind the houses, the downs were turning pink. A fertile imagination wouldn’t have had much difficulty in seeing flying saucers.