Stagestruck

by Peter Lovesey

  Methodically he went through the process of sorting fact from mere suspicion. Between documents, he paused and stared at the wall, deep in thought. Until recently the killing of Denise had seemed like a direct consequence of Clarion’s scarring. Now he was considering it in isolation.

  He returned to the statement made by Denise about the scarring incident and read the opening words for the umpteenth time:

  I’ve worked here six years and never experienced anything as awful as this.

  Later developments had given this apparently innocuous document an importance he hadn’t grasped until now. Thanks to Dawn Reed’s speed-writing and Fred Dawkins’ thoroughness it was a virtual transcript of the words Denise had used, ranging over her admission that she’d applied the make-up using her own kit, on the instructions of the director, Sandy Block-Swell, who had flown to America – which had led into a typical Dawkins red herring about double-barrelled names, leading on to a discussion about Clarion’s stage name and other showbiz examples. Not all the conversational asides in the speed-written version were in the printed statement, but her testimony about the Clarion incident was entirely accurate.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  He held the witness statement closer and stared at it. He had the answer in his hand. He reached for the fake suicide note and re-examined that.

  He was stunned, but there was only one conclusion. Both documents had been printed on the same machine.

  He knew what he must do. He went back to the computer and accessed the personal files of his own CID team. Then he turned to the brief notes he had on Denise’s early career, the assortment of jobs she’d had, from undertaker’s assistant to touring Bosnia.

  Manchester Prison interested him most. He phoned there and asked for the duty governor. The man on the end of the line had obviously been asleep. He sounded peeved to get a call at this late hour, but he soon understood the urgency and promised to check for the information Diamond was requesting.

  Meanwhile there was more to check. Flying in the face of his prejudice against the internet Diamond went online to search for names on the death registers. Next he phoned the National Identification Service at Scotland Yard and challenged another unfortunate on night duty to come up with information. He was getting close to a result and the indications couldn’t have been worse. His reasoning was taking him into territory he hadn’t visited until tonight, moving from disbelief to inescapable fact to near horror.

  A mass of information was faxed from Manchester. He leafed through it rapidly and with a heavy heart.

  Then his mobile rang. It came as a shock at this hour. He delved into his pocket for it. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Guv, this is Dawn Reed, in the theatre.’

  ‘Speak up. It’s a poor line.’

  ‘Dawn Reed. I’m worried. Someone has got into the building. George and I heard noises. We separated, to cover both sides of the place. We arranged to stay in contact on our personal radios. Now his has gone silent. I can’t raise him.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘The front stalls, crouching down between the seats.’

  ‘Don’t move from there, whatever happens, do you hear me? I’m coming at once.’

  23

  The timing had brought its own problems. The key members of Diamond’s team were all off duty, settling into deep sleep by now. He could rouse them, tell them he needed them at the theatre in the shortest possible time, but for what? He didn’t know yet, so there was no way of briefing them. They would come ready for action, expecting an emergency. Experience told him it was a huge error to go in with all guns blazing. Lives could be at stake here. Better, surely, for him to make a recce, assess the dangers, take the crucial decisions at the scene. But he would still need back-up.

  All of this went through his head as he hurried downstairs. He paused at the front desk to tell a startled duty sergeant a major incident was taking place. Armed police were needed immediately at the Theatre Royal, enough to cover every exit. They were to stand guard outside the building pending further instructions. No one except himself was to be allowed in or out. Then he dashed to his car and headed for Saw Close.

  He blamed himself for the cock-up. When he’d asked PCs Pidgeon and Reed to patrol the theatre at night it had seemed a smart idea, a baited trap. The killer would surely want to retrieve that so-called suicide note. Huge mistake. The note was not bait at all. What he’d done was set up the young officers as targets and now they were in danger of becoming the next victims.

  They could be dead already.

  He drove through the quiet streets at a speed that by his standards was death-defying, ignoring traffic lights, burning rubber at the turns.

  The square three-storey façade with its balustrade skyline loomed over Saw Close, a sinister grey-black monolith deprived of any of the magic of theatre. All the lighting at the front of the old building was off at this hour. Diamond glimpsed the outline as he entered the forecourt from Upper Borough Walls and shuddered so strongly that it showed in the steering. He tightened his grip on the wheel, looked away from the theatre, brought the car to a screeching halt in front of the entrance and resolved that this was no time to let his hang-ups get to him. He was going in, come what may.

  He’d made good time. He stepped out and looked around. He could hear a siren wailing not far off, but no response cars had arrived.

  This was it, then. He was going in, alone and in darkness.

  A side entrance would be best. This side of the Garrick’s Head in the paved alley were two doorways with the Victorian signs for “Pit” and “Gallery” still engraved above them. Hell or heaven? He chose hell. He fished in his pocket and – after a galling moment of doubt whether he’d brought it with him

  – took out the card with the door codes. He stepped back from the shadow to catch some faint illumination from the streetlamps in Saw Close. He could just read the combination.

  The lock on the door was a bigger challenge. There wasn’t enough light to make out the numbers. In the days of cigarette lighters, he’d have known what to do. After sinking to his knees for a closer look, he still couldn’t see enough.

  Smash the door down? He might have to. But he didn’t want to announce his arrival in such an obvious way.

  Resourceful as always in an emergency, he felt in his pocket for his mobile, opened it fully and the light was enough to see by. He stabbed in the code, pushed the door inwards and closed it behind him without a sound.

  Total darkness. Good thing he knew he was in the corridor to the left of the auditorium. He’d be acting on memory from this point on. Maybe as his eyes adjusted he’d be able to make out a little more. Two tentative steps forward and he reached out and felt his palms against a cold, glassy surface that moved. He’d almost knocked a picture off the wall. He turned away and took a step left, a longer one than he intended. The floor was raked, like the auditorium.

  By a series of shuffling steps he progressed down the slope as far as the door he remembered going through to enter the stall seating area. On reaching out, he found it was already ajar. Either the young officers or the killer must have come this way. The advantage was that he could pass through silently.

  Dawn Reed had said on the phone that she was crouching between rows of seats, but where? He groped his way forward until he felt the padded arm of a seat and then grasped it while he listened for some sign of life.

  Absolute silence.

  He made a throat-clearing sound that wouldn’t carry far at all. If she was close and heard him she might respond.

  Nothing.

  He looked around him. His eyes were adapting because he could make out the nearest row of seat backs, the vertical pillar of the proscenium structure and the curve of the royal circle. Yet he was getting a sense he was alone in this theatre, and with it came the suspicion that he was too late.

  He could see enough now to move along the gangway to check whether Dawn Reed was still hiding between the rows of seats as he’d ordered.
He would surely make out the dark form of someone crouching. She’d said the front stalls. He checked them all, going way past the front section, under the overhang of the royal circle and then across and down the other side.

  She wasn’t there.

  Failure overwhelmed him. He’d obviously got here too late. Those hours in his office dissecting the statements had taken too long. Twenty minutes earlier and he’d have saved her.

  Then he heard a small sound. Something had fallen and hit the floor not far away. In an old building like this it could have been boards contracting, or a fragment of plaster dropping off a damaged section of ceiling. A mouse could have dislodged something.

  The sound had come from up on the stage. Up to now he’d avoided looking there. He turned.

  His nightmare. The huge velvet curtains presented by the Chaplin family hung across the proscenium, thirty feet in length, crimson and gold when the lights were up, black as sin right now and he knew for certain that Paloma had been right about the fear he’d had since childhood. He was terrorised by curtains, drawn curtains hiding something unimaginably bad.

  Pull them aside, Peter Diamond, and see what you get.

  The shakes began. They started in his hands and spread rapidly through his entire body. Exceptional conditions, the dark, the solitude, the cold surroundings, his closeness to the curtains and the absolute necessity of seeing behind them, combined to make this experience more alarming than any of his previous panic attacks.

  Get a grip, Diamond. This is your trauma. Engage with it. Analyse. Understand.

  He stared at the place where the curtains met. His heart thumped against his ribcage. An image was forming in his brain.

  As an eightyear-old he was back in the farmhouse his family had rented for their Welsh holiday. Night-time: his sleep disturbed by a strange sound between a bellow and a howl of pain, repeated several times over. Driven to discover more, he’d got out of bed and crept downstairs. The sound was close by, outside the house.

  In the living room, a modern feature had been added, most likely as a selling point to visitors who rented the place, a floor-to-ceiling picture window that looked out across a field towards Snowdonia. A stunning view by day. By night long curtains were drawn across.

  He had crossed the room and pulled the curtains aside.

  He pictured what he’d suppressed all these years: the massive head of a beast with gaping, blood-red jaws and hairy lips drooling saliva in long threads. A huge pink lolling tongue. Manic staring white-edged eyes. And devilish horns.

  He’d seen it as a child and never wanted a sight of it again.

  Stay with it, Diamond.

  He clung to the memory, hideous as it was. Part of his brain resisted, wanting to cut the scene. He refused. He had to know the truth. By force of will he succeeded. Out of the horror came an explanation. After all the years, he recognised the monster for what it was: a cow. His sister had told him on the phone about the distressed cow parted from its calf and keeping the family awake with its heart-rending sounds of distress. The poor beast was in the field behind the farmhouse. It had come close to the house, right up to the window, to make its protest. Man had taken away its calf. Man lived in the house. Man should hear its calls.

  To a young boy unused to the country, the sudden close-up of the cow’s head at a level with his own had been horrific, enough to traumatise him. From that night on, drawn curtains would induce this petrified reaction while the censor in his brain would dumb down the real cause, refusing to revisit the image. He’d experienced the first such crisis the same week in the theatre at Llandudno. He’d panicked. He’d been incapable of explaining why. The effect had repeated itself each time he saw long curtains. Even the prospect of going into a theatre became an ordeal because of what was inside.

  Was the fear conquered? Knowledge is strength. To understand is to overcome, he told himself.

  Dawn Reed wasn’t where she’d said she would be. She was in danger of being murdered. It was essential to look behind those curtains.

  He reached up to the stage. The level was higher than he expected and he was no athlete, but the strength returned to his limbs.

  He hauled himself up, thrust his arms between the heavy drapes and parted them.

  24

  Some lights were on, not powerful, but dazzling to Diamond’s eyes. The set of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin flat was still in place as he’d instructed, the three walls lined with the solid-looking furniture dominated by the stove. On the sofa at centre stage lay PC George Pidgeon, bound hand and foot with duct tape. A strip of it was across his mouth. His eyes were open, but not moving.

  Dead?

  Diamond pushed the curtain aside and crossed the stage.

  The eyes slid to the right and fixed on him. George Pidgeon was alive. He braced his body and struggled.

  Diamond leaned over the young man and started easing the gag from his cheek, but Pidgeon jerked his face away, the tape ripped from his skin and he yelled, ‘Behind you!’

  In the microsecond before the shout, Diamond had seen Pidgeon’s eyes widen in alarm. He flung himself across the constable’s body and the blow intended for his skull caught his shoulder instead. It was a glancing hit rather than full impact because it slid down his ribs, but it still felt as if it had splintered his shoulder blade. All he could do for protection from another blow was make a piston movement with his arm. His elbow struck something solid. There was a grunt from behind.

  Pidgeon yelled, ‘Guv!’

  He rolled left. The weapon whizzed past his ear, struck the upholstery and ripped a gash in the fabric. It was a claw hammer.

  Diamond’s reflex action brought him crashing to the stage floor. All he could do from here was make a grab for his attacker’s legs. He got a hand on one leg, but the other kicked his arm away. Even so, he’d done enough to unsettle his assailant. He watched the legs step away, turn and run off the stage.

  Now it was down to priorities: go in pursuit, or release Pidgeon? His right arm felt numb after the hammer blow. He was going to need assistance. Besides, he had to find out what he was dealing with. He got to his feet and worked at the tape around Pidgeon’s wrists.

  ‘Guv, you won’t believe who did this,’ Pidgeon started to say.

  ‘I don’t need telling,’ Diamond said. ‘Where’s Dawn?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ve been here. He grabbed me from behind and put something over my face. I think it was chloroform. When I came to, I was lying here, trussed up.’ The last of the tape parted from his arms. ‘I can untie my feet.’

  ‘She phoned me,’ Diamond told him. ‘Said she was hiding somewhere between the seats, but she’s not there any more. He means to kill her if he hasn’t already.’

  ‘Dawn? Why?’

  ‘There isn’t time to explain. He must have got her backstage.’

  ‘He could have left the building.’

  ‘No chance. All the exits are covered. He’s in here somewhere. We need the house lights on. There must be a control room.’

  ‘Back there.’ Pidgeon pointed towards the auditorium. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He finished freeing his legs.

  ‘Right. I’ll check behind the scenes.’

  ‘You’re not armed. D’you want my baton?’

  ‘Keep it. After that whack on the shoulder I couldn’t lift it.’ He crossed to the prompt side, glanced up in the wings to make sure no one was in the DSM’s position, and moved along the passage towards the three main dressing rooms. He located a light switch and was relieved when it worked. On trying each of the doors, he found them locked. What next, then? He could dash upstairs to four, five, six and seven, but would a killer on the run risk being trapped up a staircase that led nowhere else? Anyone so familiar with the layout would surely have taken a route with more chances of escape.

  He moved on to the fly floor. Faint beams of light leaking from the other
side of the scenery allowed him to see his way at ground level but the vast space above his head could have been the inside of a coffin. For a moment he stopped and listened. There was no sound. It was wise to remember that if the killer was lurking here he, too, had just enough light to see. He edged forward with caution, primed for another hammer attack.

  He’d just crossed to stage right when he was stopped in his tracks by a voice speaking his name immediately above his head.

  Impossible. Nobody was there.

  He heard the hiss of static. He squinted in the poor light and found himself looking at a loudspeaker.

  The speaker boomed again. ‘You can stop charging around like a demented elephant. She’s been dead twenty minutes.’

  ‘You bloody maniac. Where is she?’ he shouted back, and got no reply except the click of a disconnection. ‘You gain nothing by killing her. You’re finished.’

  The last word echoed back to him from the fly tower.

  He turned and ran back towards the opposite side, thinking that the DSM’s console must be the source, but nobody was there. Obviously there were other points in the building linked to the loudspeaker system.

  Dead twenty minutes: callous words spoken with the disregard he expected of this killer. If true, this was the worst outcome imaginable. Dawn Reed was young, inexperienced, brave. The killing of any police officer on duty is rightly treated as the ultimate crime. She’d been here obeying orders, his orders, his alone. He should never have sent her in.

  He shuddered, more in horror than fear. Urging himself to concentrate on what he had to do, he accepted that some, at least, of the killer’s words couldn’t be denied. This was, indeed, a pointless pursuit. The building was too large for two men to search. Soon there would be reinforcements he could call on. The arrest would follow. The real urgency had been to save Dawn’s life. How much reliance could he place on the words of a murderer on the run?