Abracadaver

CHAPTER

4

‘SERGEANT LIKES TO TAKE a look

For anarchists and spies

Down the basement-stairs when cook

Bakes her rabbit pies,’

chorused the singing policemen, Salt and Battree, on special duty. In the best theatrical traditions, they had volunteered to return to the footlights and divert the audience until order was restored backstage. So in front of a hastily lowered act-drop of mountain scenery they padded the beat with truncheons drawn, singing hilariously about life in the Force.

On the other side of the cloth the great Albert lay in the ruins of his dais emitting heart-rending groans. Around him stood the interested group who could be counted on to materialise around any unfortunate, from a lost child to a broken-down cabhorse.

‘Animals on the stage are always the next thing to disaster,’ a small cigar-smoker in a dress-suit was informing the group. He was evidently the stage-manager. ‘I’ve had ’em all here—dogs, monkeys, mules and baby elephants. Perfectly docile off-stage. Put ’em in front of an audience and you’re in no end of trouble. If they don’t bite you they’re liable to knock the scenery down and if they don’t do that there’s ways of drawing attention to ’emselves I won’t go into. You wouldn’t believe the jobs I’ve had to tell my stagehands to do.’

‘Right now you can tell ’em to lift the lumber off this poor cove,’ barked Sergeant Cribb. ‘Where’s the medical chest? He’ll need attention.’

‘Keep your voice down, sir,’ appealed the manager. ‘No need for panic. We’re professionals here.’

‘The medical chest,’ hissed Cribb.

‘Yes. Now I’m not entirely certain where . . . No matter. You props over there! Start removing these battens, will you? You may need tools from the carpenter’s room. And you in the purple weskit, fetch some salt quick from the nearest bar. We’ll bathe his leg in salt water as soon as we’ve cleared the stage. You all right, Albert?’

A sonorous groan from the centre of the debris caused some pessimistic head-shaking among the rescue-party. Murmurs of concern rose in the ranks behind—for most of the company had abandoned the dressing-rooms at Albert’s first yell of pain, and now stood about the stage in what they were wearing (or not wearing) at the moment of crisis. Constable Thackeray, seated on the basket containing the bulldog, had given all his attention to fastening the straps securely. He was dimly conscious of a group clustered near him, but not that they were ballet-girls. When he raised his face it was within a yard of a surface normally concealed by a tutu. A veritable outrage on decency! He dipped his head instantly, like a bargee just seeing a low bridge. Then by degrees, and strictly in the cause of duty, he mastered his modesty and raised his eyes.

Then someone arrived with a crowbar. A sudden commotion, the intervention of a young woman in lilac and white crying shrilly, ‘Don’t you dare go near Albert with that!’ so alarmed the man that he dropped the implement with a clatter. The bulldog barked ferociously inside its basket and the unseeing audience exploded with laughter, ‘Watch yer-selves!’ shouted the resourceful P.C. Battree, ‘I’m watchin’ you!’

Albert’s protector was Miss Ellen Blake, the first act that evening. She now crouched by the shattered platform in a singularly affecting manner and put her hand comfortingly through a gap in the side. She withdrew it at once with a cry of horror. ‘His arm! It’s deathly cold!’

‘If you’ll stand up, miss, and look through here,’ suggested Cribb, ‘you’ll see that his head’s at the other end. You’ve just put your hand on the cross-piece of Albert’s barbell. Now stand back and let’s get him out.’

Two more planks were prised up. Cribb borrowed a lamp and peered in with the air of an Egyptologist uncovering his first mummy. ‘He’s not in bad shape. Two more boards and we can drag him out at this end.’

Miss Blake came forward again and to everyone’s relief a pale hand rose from inside to meet hers.

‘He’s quite all right now!’ announced the manager, clapping his hands. ‘Back to the dressing-rooms everyone except the ten-minute calls. The show goes on as billed.’ He added in an afterthought, ‘We’d better hurry. There can’t be many songs about policemen left.’

Cribb looked up at the gigantic prancing shadows of Salt and Battree projected through the act-drop. ‘Wouldn’t hurt those two to get the bird. Deuced poor impersonation they give of the police, anyway.’

The manager snapped his fingers. ‘I say, you’re not . . . ? I thought you had an air of authority. How did you happen—’

‘Never mind,’ said Cribb. ‘Where can we take Albert?’

‘The property-room’s the nearest.’

‘Very good.’

Still clutching Miss Blake’s hand as she walked beside him, Albert was borne off the stage and deposited on a dusty chaise-longue in the property-room. Thackeray followed, dragging after him the basket and its growling occupant.

‘Does that animal have to be here?’ were Albert’s first comprehensible words.

‘The dog is the evidence, blast it. A pukka investigator never lets the evidence out of his sight. You can’t trust a confounded soul,’ announced a new speaker from the doorway behind. He was the stage-hand in the purple waistcoat who had gone for salt: a man of slight build and soft, boyish skin, quite eclipsed by fierce blue eyes under a shock of upthrusting grey hair. ‘There’s been an uncommon demand for pies and baked potatoes in the hall tonight, and salt’s as scarce in there as upright women. So I borrowed this from the photographer’s studio next door.’ He held up a large brown bottle. ‘Iodine—the unfailing remedy for a dog-bite. It does a deuced fine job of disinfection, and if you pour it liberally over the wound it has a rare capacity for enlivening a dazed man.’

The manager beamed his admiration. ‘Good Lord, Major Chick, you’re the right man to have in an emergency. Allow me to introduce you to this gentleman. He is a policeman.’

‘Really? Wouldn’t have thought it—looks too blasted intelligent.’

‘Sergeant Cribb, sir.’ They shook hands. ‘And that’s Constable Thackeray on the dog-basket. What was your name, sir?’

‘Chick. Percival Chick. Major, retired. Late Adjutant of the 8th Hussars. Perhaps you have heard of me. I’m not, as you realise, a common scenery-remover. That was a mere subterfuge. Like you, Sergeant. I’m a detective now. But my investigations are limited to the private sphere.’

A private detective! Cribb inwardly snarled with a ferocity equal to the bulldog’s at the instant it sank its teeth into Albert. What an evening! Music hall policemen, and now a private detective! It was his first contact with one of the species, though he had seen their newspaper advertisements often enough, and the brass plates on their doors. Anyone who spoke with a plum in his mouth and could afford the price of lodgings in one of the nobbier areas of London could set up in business and derive a tidy income from it. You filled your rooms with barrowloads of old books and obsolete chemical apparatus and soon there was a stream of wealthy callers with fantasies of blackmail, kidnap and family scandals. So you fed their fears with a few quite spurious discoveries, pinned a crime on some wretched servant and claimed your fee in guineas, with a few choice remarks about the impotence of Scotland Yard. ‘Interested to make your acquaintance, sir. What’s your business here, if I may inquire?’

Major Chick looked cautiously around him. Only the manager, Miss Blake and the Scotland Yard men remained there, besides Albert. ‘I rather think my client, Mr Goodly, should explain.’

‘Why, of course,’ said the manager. ‘A series of unfortunate accidents in the London music halls led me to engage a detective. You see, I doubted whether they were, indeed, accidents. Almost every hall of any reputation has suffered in this way in the last month or two—except the Grampian. Our turn seemed inevitable before long. So Major Chick has been disguised as a stage-hand for the past week in readiness to investigate just such an occurrence as this— even though it appears most improbable that tonight’s small embarrassment was deliberately provoked. You can’t put a bulldog’s fickle behaviour down to Anarchists, now can you? However, I gather from your swift arrival on the scene that you were on the watch for trouble too.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Cribb. ‘Let’s attend to Albert. Hand me the iodine, Major.’ His voice bore the authority of a colonel at the very least and the Major almost clicked his heels as he obeyed the order. From that moment there was no question of who was in charge of the inquiries. ‘Your pocket-handkerchief, if you please, Thackeray.’

Among the bric-a-brac of the property-room was a card-table on which Cribb placed his jacket, before rolling back his shirt-cuffs like a conjuror. ‘Perhaps you will support the leg, Major, and you, Miss Blake, try to keep Albert from becoming distressed. Now, I shall remove this torn section of the tights and expose the wound . . . Capital! An ugly little bite, that. Not a lot of blood, but those teeth sank in a bit, eh Albert? I’ll just wipe the surface clean now, like that. Then I form a pad with the handkerchief, saturate it with iodine and apply it firmly—’

Albert drew in breath through his clenched teeth and made a sound like a sky-rocket ascending. Everyone grabbed and held down a limb as his muscles tensed. His eyes first shut tight, then opened wide, streaming with tears. His hand gripped Miss Blake’s so tightly that she squeaked with pain.

‘Beautiful job,’ Major Chick told Cribb. ‘You could make a living as an army-surgeon, you know. Dammit man, you’re wasting your time at Scotland Yard.’

Cribb surveyed his patient. ‘You’ll find it smarts a bit at first. Wounds need cleaning, though. Any other injuries?’ He held the iodine bottle in readiness.

Albert shook his head decisively. ‘Just the merest grazing where I fell through the platform. I’m sure the iodine won’t be necessary. It’s my ankle that hurts. I twisted it when I fell.’

‘You’ll be out of work for a week or two then,’ said the manager, without much sympathy. ‘And you can thank your dog for the lost wages. If you’ll take my advice you’ll have nothing to do with animals in the future. Just listen to the snarling brute! If you were mine, you ugly hound, I’d know what to do with you.’

Albert sat up. ‘But that isn’t my dog! That one’s white with brown patches. Beaconsfield is strictly black and white. Surely someone noticed—I’ve been doing the act for three weeks or more. Some blackguard put that vicious animal into Beaconsfield’s basket, knowing it would attack me as soon as it was released.’

‘Do I understand you right?’ asked the manager. ‘Are you sure that the bulldog in that basket isn’t yours?’

‘Beaconsfield wouldn’t attack me,’ said Albert, shocked by the suggestion. ‘He hasn’t got the energy. It’s all he can do to stand up on his four legs while I’m holding up the barbell, and then he sometimes needs prodding. I tell you he’s black and white, anyway.’

‘Shall I lift him out for you to have a closer look, Sarge?’ suggested Thackeray.

‘That isn’t necessary, Sergeant,’ Miss Blake interposed. ‘I know Beaconsfield and that is not him. If you look through the basket you can see a large brown patch where the Union Jack has ridden up on this dog’s back.’

‘A substitution, by Jove!’ exclaimed Major Chick. ‘Ingenious! Ah, the vagaries of the criminal mind! We’re on to a cunning enemy here, Sergeant.’

Cribb ignored the assumption that the Major was now a party to the investigation. ‘If that ain’t Beaconsfield, Albert, then where is his Lordship? When did you last see him?’

‘During the overture, when I brought him down here and put him in the wings in his basket. I like to watch Ellen’s— Miss Blake’s—act from the promenade, so I prepare everything for my own act first.’

‘Then the dogs could have been exchanged at any time during the first three acts?’

‘The first two, to be precise. I’m waiting with Mother in the wings from the beginning of the policemen’s act.’

‘It was done while Miss Blake or the Red Indians were performing then. Who would have been in the wings at that time, Mr Goodly?’

The manager smiled. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Sergeant. Music hall isn’t like the legitimate theatre, where everyone’s movements are planned and known. I’m managing a three and a half hour show with twenty-seven acts including dancers. I often have to change the order at very short notice to fit in with the commitments of the star billings. Tonight, for example, I’ve got Miss Jenny Hill on at eight o’clock. Nothing must alter that, because she’s appearing at the Royal Aquarium at nine and the London Pavilion at a quarter past ten. So I shall change the order of the acts to ensure that she goes on in time to make a cab journey across to Tothill Street. No two nights in the music hall are the same, you see.’

‘But you must have some notion who was in the wings at that time,’ insisted Cribb.

‘Very well,’ said the manager acidly. ‘Let’s make an inventory, if that’s the way Scotland Yard would like it. There would be the Red Indians, Henry and Cissie Greenbaum, waiting while Miss Blake was on, and the singing policemen, the Dalton brothers, and their assistant Vicky. Then there are up to nine stage-hands and scene-shifters dispersed on either side of the stage, two female dressers and one male, three fly-men looking after the curtain and the act-drops, two lime-boys on their perches in the flies, two callboys, the gasman at the index-plate, my assistant, myself and any one of the other twenty-four acts who cared to look in. I would say almost a hundred people had a right to be there, Sergeant.’

‘In that case someone must surely have seen the dogs being changed over.’

‘I doubt it. Most of us are far too occupied with our own duties to notice anything like that. Moreover, the wings are in semi-darkness for the whole of the Red Indian act, to achieve the special lighting effect onstage. That’s when the basket was opened, in my opinion.’

A murmur of assent on Cribb’s left provided him with a sudden thought. ‘Where were you positioned, Major?’

Major Chick coloured noticeably. ‘Why—er—in the gallery on the side-wall above the stage, where the ropes and so forth are controlled.’

‘The flies,’ explained the manager.

‘Didn’t you see anything?’

The Major pulled at his moustache. ‘I was observing the stage, dammit.’

‘But of course.’ Cribb placed a reassuring hand on Chick’s shoulder. ‘Well now, Major, I’m really uncommon fortunate having you here to advise me—a professional investigator on the scene of the crime a full week before it was committed. That’s a gift from Providence, wouldn’t you say?’

The Major nodded guardedly. He was plainly not used to being thought of in that way.

‘You’ve had time to meet the staff and performers and form an estimate of ’em,’ continued Cribb, ‘and you’ll have noted down anything irregular that happened this last week.’

It was plain from the Major’s expression that he had not. ‘Fact of the matter is, Sergeant, that there’s nothing regular at all in the music hall life, so far as I can see. You can’t even count on seeing the same faces from day to day. There are stage-hands being hired and sacked in the same week, stage-door Johnnies by the dozen wandering about backstage, out-of-work performers arriving for auditions—’

An unexpected outburst of barking from the picnic-basket halted the Major’s flow. To everyone’s amazement it was answered by a submissive whining from the doorway. Albert’s mother, still dressed in her white robe and ostrich feathers, filled the lower three-quarters of the door-frame. Cradled in her arms was a black and white bulldog that from its generally lethargic attitude had to be Beaconsfield.

‘Keep your animal quiet, Thackeray!’ ordered Cribb. ‘Push it behind the piano, for Heaven’s sake!’

‘He was shut away in the dark, weren’t you, my poor busy little Dizzie?’ crooned Albert’s mother, planting herself heavily on the chaise-longue, perilously close to her son’s injury. Beaconsfield slumped over her knees with lolling tongue, accepting the banalities impassively. ‘Shut in that horrid quick-change room without even a saucer of water. If Miss Charity Finch-Hatton hadn’t needed to repair her garter we might not have found you for hours and hours. Why the silly little baggage made such a scene when you jumped up to be rescued I cannot understand.’

‘Perhaps like the rest of us she thought Beaconsfield was a savage animal,’ suggested Cribb. ‘I’m a police officer, Ma’am, and I should like to take the liberty of asking you two questions.’

‘We shall answer them if we can,’ she said, caressing Beaconsfield’s dewlap with her fingertip.

‘Thank you. Could you tell me, then, why you didn’t notice before the act that the dog in the basket wasn’t Beaconsfield?’

She did not look up. ‘I never venture near the basket until the moment comes to release Dizzie. I wouldn’t want him to suppose me a traitor. It pains me to see him imprisoned there night after night. All that I noticed tonight was that a dog—and I presumed that it was my Beaconsfield—was in the basket and wearing the flag.’

‘Who do you think could be responsible for tonight’s mishap?’

‘If I knew that, Inspector, I should have repaid the scoundrel by now and you would be arresting me. I have a powerful pair of arms, you know, and I’m not afraid to use them when anyone is inconsiderate to my little pet.’

‘I’ll remember that, Ma’am—but I really think someone must attend to your son. Albert will need helping home tonight.’

‘Will he?’ said the fat woman in surprise, for the first time turning towards her son. ‘What’s wrong with you then? A dog-bite won’t stop you from walking a couple of streets, will it?’

‘I twisted my ankle when I fell,’ explained Albert.

‘Oh, congratulations, my son!’ she said sardonically. ‘So the strong man must take a rest for two weeks on account of his weak ankle, while his mother is forced to return to serio-comic singing to keep Beaconsfield and herself out of the workhouse. Kindly explain what I am supposed to do to get you to the lodgings—carry you on my back?’

‘We’ll see to him,’ said Cribb. ‘Miss Blake, perhaps you’ll be so obliging as to fetch his clothes.’

Major Chick rounded on Cribb in amazement. ‘But there are suspects to be interviewed—a case to investigate. You can’t leave the theatre, Sergeant.’

‘Who’s going to stop me?’ asked Cribb. ‘You’re a competent detective, ain’t you, Major?’

‘Indubitably, but—’

‘You’ve been here for a week, so you know everyone concerned?’

‘Yes—’

‘You understand, of course, that if you learn anything important from your inquiries you have a duty to pass it on to me?’

‘Naturally, Sergeant, but—’

‘Excellent!’ The matter was settled so far as Cribb was concerned. ‘Thackeray, whistle up a cab and have it wait at the stage-door, will you? We’ll have you home in half an hour, Albert. Oh—and don’t forget our four-legged friend in the hamper, Major. I leave him in your good care. We may need him later. Evidence, you know.’