Stagestruck

by Peter Lovesey

  In this case, enough for huge concern. This man picked his words with care.

  The tannoy crackled again. This time the voice was Pidgeon’s. ‘House lights are on, guv.’

  ‘Okay, I’m coming,’ he said. His words weren’t going to be heard. He spoke them to release some tension. He moved fast around the outside of the set, pushed open the scenic double doors and crossed the stage. The curtain held none of those childhood fears now.

  He parted the heavy lengths of velvet and stepped forward, and the horseshoe auditorium was before him in all its magnificence, the best view of the house you would get, every light now glowing, including the central chandelier. The great actors of seven generations had stood on this spot and delivered curtain speeches. But the significance was lost on Diamond. He was watching for a movement, and there was nothing. No one was in sight.

  The sound of a handclap began, a slow, ironic slapping of palms. One pair of unseen hands was mocking his appearance in front of the curtain. He couldn’t tell where it was from, except that it seemed close, not the back of the theatre or the upper tiers. Presently it died away.

  If nothing else, he knew for certain that the killer was out front and could see him. Some kind of resolution was imminent.

  He decided to remain where he was. This was as good a vantage point as any. Staring out at the rows of empty seats, he tried to picture the sequence of events. Dawn had been out of sight crouching down in the stalls. Presumably she’d been discovered, attacked and taken somewhere nearby. Moving her upstairs would have been impractical.

  A voice surprisingly close called out, ‘Do you want a prop? A skull would do nicely.’

  He knew who it was. As ever, the words were spoken with deliberation and wrapped in some allusion he didn’t understand. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What are you up to, standing centre stage? Is this an audition? You’ll never make a Hamlet, but you might get by as one of the gravediggers.’

  He glanced right and left. No one was in front of the curtain with him and the voice hadn’t come from behind. It wasn’t amplified.

  ‘That’s a clue for you, the Hamlet reference. They always use the trap for the graveyard scene. Her body is below where you are standing, in the understage,’ the voice continued, relishing its advantage. ‘I don’t suppose you knew there was anything down there. You get to it through the band room. No need to hurry, however. You’re too late to make any difference.’

  Now he could see the speaker – in the lower of the two boxes to his right: the Agatha Christie, a fitting place for a murderer’s last stand.

  Fred Dawkins.

  The traitor had been speaking just out of Diamond’s line of sight, masked by the near side of the box. Now he had stepped into view, close enough to shake hands if Diamond were to move along the front edge of the stage.

  A handshake was not in the plans of either.

  ‘Keep your distance. I’m still holding the hammer,’ Dawkins warned. ‘I’ll pay you a compliment, superintendent. I was streets ahead of you before tonight. Now I’m a mere half dozen yards away and I don’t flatter myself that I’ll walk out of this theatre a free man. So let’s exchange some home truths. What changed your mind? You weren’t planning to come here when we last spoke.’

  Centre stage was new territory for Peter Diamond. He wasn’t comfortable in this position, being invited to lay out his case, yet he couldn’t risk walking off when he had the man in sight. The sensible response was to engage with Dawkins for as long as possible in the hope that George Pidgeon would see what was going on and come to his aid. So he started to voice some of the things that properly should have been spoken under caution in an interview room with a tape running. ‘I got your number, quite literally,’ he told Dawkins. ‘Five-one-eight-nine, on a seven year rap in Manchester Prison, Strangeways as it was known then, 1983 to 1990, for fraud, embezzlement, false pretences, depriving old ladies of their life’s savings. I spoke to the deputy governor this evening. You’re a con man, known at that time as Hector Dacreman.’

  ‘Quite a leap from Strangeways to Sergeant of Police,’ Dawkins said, unimpressed, as if there was room for doubt.

  ‘Yes, but you’re good at what you do. I asked for the names of prisoners active in the drama group that flourished then, the group Denise Pearsall supervised as a visiting tutor, and I was told convict Dacremen, 5189, was one of the leads in the 1988 production of Waiting for Godot. There is even a photo from the prison magazine, scanned and emailed to me. The likeness satisfies me. It would satisfy anyone.’

  ‘It’s of Estragon, presumably.’

  ‘Dacreman, I said. That was the name you were known by.’

  ‘Is the actor wearing make-up? Is it really me, do you think? They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world.’

  ‘You kept the same initials, too. Hector Dacreman. Horatio Dawkins.’

  He gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘Nothing gets past you.’

  ‘They’re sending your fingerprints.’

  ‘One way or another, you seem to think you have snared me.’

  ‘You snared yourself,’ Diamond said, ‘the first day you worked in CID.’

  A slight frown. ‘How was that?’

  ‘Your version of the interview with Denise in the case file. I asked you to type up all the witness statements. When I compared the printout with the notes Dawn Reed made with her speed-writing, I noticed you left off the first words Denise spoke when she saw you: “Have we met before?”’

  ‘Small talk,’ Dawkins said. ‘You don’t put small talk in a witness statement.’

  ‘Not small in this case. It came as a huge shock for you that Denise thought she recognised you. You quickly glossed over that by saying she must have seen you patrolling the streets of Bath and she seems to have accepted that. She wouldn’t have expected one of her former convict actors to reinvent himself as a police officer.’

  Dawkins smirked in self-congratulation.

  ‘In your prison days she wouldn’t even have known you were a con artist,’ Diamond continued. ‘It’s not the thing for visiting tutors to ask the inmates about their crimes.’

  ‘Please go on. I’m learning volumes.’

  ‘So the moment you met again at the theatre and she thought she knew you, she was at risk of being murdered. You’re a vastly ambitious man. Conning your way into the police after serving a prison term was a triumph, difficult and dangerous, but you managed it, a massive investment of time and deception. I’ve seen your record, the lies, the forged references that got you into Hendon as a recruit.’

  ‘And if you’ve seen my file you’ll know Horatio Dawkins was the star of his year at Hendon.’

  ‘Amazingly, yes. Praised for supporting the young recruits straight out of school and improving morale. Eighteen weeks of training and then a job in the Met, and within four years a sergeant’s stripes and the move to Bath Central. Not enough. You set your sights on a transfer to CID. And what an opportunity arrived when the Assistant Chief Constable joined the BLOGs group you were choreographing.’

  He smiled again. ‘There is a saying: he dances well to whom fortune pipes.’ His ego couldn’t resist these asides, regardless that they were confirming Diamond’s case.

  ‘And yet Denise had the knowledge to destroy all you’d achieved. She had to be eliminated. You thought of a way of killing her that would be passed off as suicide. You set an elaborate trap. First you armed yourself with Rohypnol. As a sergeant from uniform you’d had ample opportunities to acquire the drug, confiscating it from night-clubbers. An opportunist like you isn’t going to surrender all the drugs he snatches.’

  ‘Speculation.’

  ‘We found traces in dressing room eleven.’

  ‘I know that, but you can’t link it with me.’

  ‘Forensics will. Let’s stay with the trap you set for Denise. You sent her some kind of message to lure her into the theatre on Tuesday night after everyone else had left. My guess is that you offered to tell her
the true explanation for Clarion’s accident. Poor woman, she was distraught about it, half fearing she’d made some terrible mistake with the make-up, so the chance of redemption was sure to reel her in. She was to meet you in dressing room eleven. You’re familiar with the layout of the theatre, having choreographed several BLOGs productions. Knowing the door codes, as you did, you could come and go at will. You met Denise, slipped Rohypnol into her drink, took her onto the riggers’ platform in the fly tower and pushed her off. It was meant to be interpreted as suicide.’

  ‘And does that complete the case for the prosecution?’ Dawkins asked in a measured voice as if he was a judge, not the accused.

  ‘No. There’s more. It became increasingly clear to me that someone on our side of the investigation was bent. The murderer was getting inside information.’

  ‘Such as…?’

  ‘The call that came in from Bristol Police about Clarion discharging herself from hospital. You put it on computer instead of telling me directly.’

  ‘I acted properly, filing the call. As a newcomer I wasn’t to know you need telling everything by word of mouth.’

  ‘That wasn’t the reason. You were alarmed. Clarion was a loose cannon. None of us knew what she’d been thinking while she was stuck in hospital or what she intended to do next. You could see the suicide theory being blown out of the water.’

  ‘Immaterial,’ Dawkins said. ‘You insisted on keeping an open mind about Denise’s suicide.’

  ‘Which was precisely why you decided the time had come to remove all doubt.’

  ‘You can’t believe the suicide note was my doing.’

  ‘Oh, but I do. I know. It was deviously planned, I give you that. You came up with the suggestion that an extra powder-box spiked with caustic soda was hidden somewhere backstage. I sent you and Ingeborg to search for it. You had the fake note ready in your pocket. While you were making the search, you planted the note in the German oven and of course it was discovered after I arrived. Neat. But there was a flaw.’

  ‘The famous specks of ink?’ Dawkins said, still unruffled.

  ‘Yes. I had Paul Gilbert checking everyone’s printer and he couldn’t find the right one. The reason is that it was in our own CID room. Tonight after everyone had gone I examined the statements you typed and I looked at Denise Pearsall’s and saw the telltale specks in exactly the formation we found on the suicide note. It was bloody obvious that it had been printed in our own office and we had a killer on the team.’

  ‘No prizes for guessing who you thought of first.’

  ‘I had to be certain. I wanted to know precisely who Horatio Dawkins was and how he came to join the police service. I had a hunch that you used the old trick of stealing a dead man’s identity, so I looked in the death registers for someone called Dawkins of about your age who fell off the perch between 1990 and 1994. I found him, got his date and place of birth and matched them to the details on your file.’

  ‘Admirable,’ Dawkins said in a flat voice. It may have been meant as sarcastic, but it sounded like defeat.

  ‘Getting back to Clarion,’ Diamond said, ‘Bristol Police told you the hotel she was staying in.’

  ‘The Cedar of Lebanon. Nothing secret about that.’

  ‘Except that you decided to drive over there last night and find out what was going on. You called on her at the hotel, didn’t you?’

  ‘What makes you think I did?’

  ‘It’s the logical explanation. Clarion wanted to talk. She had a bad conscience about what she’d done on the first night, the caustic soda she’d smeared on her own face without fully realising how damaging it was. Denise was dead and the theatre faced a commercial disaster. She wanted to make amends, give money to the theatre. But the danger for you was that she was about to destroy the theory of Denise’s suicide you’d painstakingly built up. Denise didn’t use the caustic soda. Clarion did. Clarion was a chronic self-harmer. You learned that she was about to confess everything to the theatre management.’

  ‘What am I supposed to have done about it?’

  ‘You must have thought about murdering her in the hotel. It would have been simpler, but I guess something went wrong. Maybe you were seen on a security camera. Whatever it was, you could afford to wait for the next opportunity. You got back in your car and followed her limo to the theatre and murdered her there. Nobody suspected you because nobody knew you were in the building that night. You let yourself in through the side entrance while the first half was in progress, waited for the interval, entered the box and suffocated her with a plastic bag. You were out of there and away without anyone seeing you.’

  ‘Leaving no traces.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on that. The scene of crime people have been through. As you and I know, DNA is a marvellous aid to detection, but getting a result takes time. The men in white coats can’t keep up with the pace in a fast-moving case like this one.’

  ‘So it’s down to you and me to sort things out,’ Dawkins said.

  ‘You, me and the armed police waiting at every exit. Waiting for Godot.’

  ‘Estragon, to be precise,’ Dawkins said. ‘I played Estragon.’

  ‘That’s good, because the only thing I know about the play is that Godot never arrived.’ Diamond paused. ‘Where are you?’

  Dawkins had vanished.

  Simple, of course, to do a disappearing act when all it needs is a step backwards into the box. And Diamond had no way of stopping him. The mobile would have been useful at this point, but he’d forgotten it existed.

  With all exits sealed, Dawkins could hide, but he wouldn’t escape. Diamond’s mind was on a more disturbing duty.

  He stepped to the front of the stage and let himself down to floor level, the orchestra pit. He tried the door to the understage area normally used by the musicians and found that it opened. There were steps down into the band room. The light from the auditorium allowed him to see a little way ahead and he found a light switch.

  He discovered Dawn Reed lying on the floor towards the back. She was bound and gagged with duct tape, as George Pidgeon had been. Like him, she was still alive. Dawkins had conned and lied to the last.

  Peter Diamond wasn’t a religious man, but he thanked God, just the same.

  25

  The final-night party for Sweeney Todd was held in September that year in the Garrick’s Head. No question: the show had been a resounding success. Every performance had sold out and the reviews were better than anyone could remember for a BLOG production. If some of the choreography had looked a little under-rehearsed, not one of the critics mentioned it. Allowance was made for the loss of the movement director before the rehearsals really got serious.

  Georgina was triumphant. She’d reserved a whole row in the stalls for her colleagues in the police and they didn’t let her down. Paloma was there in her own right as costume consultant and she insisted that Diamond was present the same evening.

  ‘A good show?’ Paloma asked him after he’d downed a large beer.

  ‘Very good. Pretty graphic, I have to say, some of the throat-cutting.’

  ‘Don’t throw a wobbly, whatever you do. You’re over all that, I thought.’

  ‘Happily, yes.’

  ‘And the case? Is that all wrapped up now?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Georgina was telling everyone at the bar about young PC Pidgeon making the arrest on the staircase behind the boxes. Apparently he did a brilliant job, got an armlock on the guilty man and delivered him to the police van. He and Dawn Reed are both being recommended for promotion.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘Well, the armed police weren’t needed after all.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Georgina is pissed off about the cost of the operation. It was all double-time, being at night, and we’re way over budget. I told her if she hadn’t insisted on Dawkins joining CID, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘You won’t get a commendation for tact.’

  ‘It was
the truth.’

  ‘Are you certain of that?’

  ‘Well, I guess he would still have done the murders as a uniformed sergeant, but it would have been more difficult covering them up.’

  ‘When will the case go to trial?’

  ‘Not this year. The law works slowly.’

  ‘And then he’ll get life?’

  ‘That’s automatic, but don’t waste any sympathy on him. I feel sorry for the prison governor who gets him.’

  Titus O’Driscoll joined them, a glass of wine in his hand. ‘Do you mind if I butt in? There’s something I’m anxious to know.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Briefly, Diamond wondered if it was about his relationship with Paloma, but it was not.

  ‘When you and I went backstage and looked at the number one dressing room, we found a tortoiseshell butterfly, dead, and to my embarrassment I passed out.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Furthermore, I was informed that when you searched the box where Clarion was murdered, you found a second butterfly caught in a cobweb.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘My question is this: did the murderer have anything to do with the butterflies?’

  ‘You mean did he place them there himself?’ Diamond paused for thought. ‘It’s one question he wasn’t asked. You’re thinking about the superstition, aren’t you? If you want my opinion, Titus, they found their own way there. It was a natural occurrence, or supernatural, depending on your point of view, and I think I know what yours is.’

  Titus smiled.

  Peter Lovesey

  ***

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