Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

12

INTO THE PALACE

Dr Runcorn had already instructed the Palace not to open its doors to the public that morning. The last thing he wanted was for customers to tramp any remaining evidence through the magenta pile of the foyer carpets.

Theatrical rehearsals were under way for Orpheus in the Underworld. The production was due to open without previews on the coming Saturday night. The unusual step of premiering on a day when the critics had normally gone to the country was deliberate. Nearly all of the first week’s performances were sold out, thanks to shocked stage whispers along Shaftesbury Avenue that the production would not survive for more than a few performances before the Lord Chamberlain closed it down. Nobody knew exactly what had been altered in this radical reworking of Offenbach’s operetta, but the scenery going in depicted all the damnations of Hell, including several freshly invented for the occasion. The carpenters were telling their mates in the public bars that they had never heard such dirty language recited on the London stage, and there were tales of skimpy costumes on the girls that put the Windmill in the shade and left nothing to the imagination.

Bryant knocked at the theatre’s main entrance. PC Crowhurst nodded to him through a gap in the boarded-over glass, and hastily unlocked the door. The interior of the Palace was mock-Gothic, with a central marble staircase that offered views back on itself like a recurring image from an Escher etching. Its steps and walls were worn pale, scoured by their nightly brush with more than a thousand bodies. Dusty electroliers hung down through the stairwell, their crystals gleaming dully like ropes of low-grade pearls.

“Hm. Nobody home.” Bryant peered into the frosted-glass lozenge of the box-office booth. “Let’s try the floor above.” He enthusiastically took the stairs in pairs and triples, forcing May to trot beside him. “We’re not going to give the press anything on this one. Davenport wants us to screw the lid down tight because of the victim’s background.”

“Which is what?”

“Apparently her parents are Austrian. She trained in Vienna, mother’s dead, father’s Albert Friedrich, the international concert organizer. He’s a pretty well-known chap, worked with C.B. Cochran here in the twenties, but Friedrich has lost a lot of good faith lately over his attitude towards the Jews. He has enough right-wing connections in neutral territories for the FO to keep files on him. He’s also a professional litigant. I imagine he’d be prepared to make trouble for everyone if anything unsavoury leaks out about his daughter. Do you have a girl?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was wondering if you had a girl. You know, a sweetheart. I don’t, more’s the pity.” Bryant sighed and shook his head with incredulity. “It’s not through lack of trying. I don’t understand it. There’s supposed to be a shortage of decent men. You just don’t seem to meet the right ladies in this job.”

“I don’t have a girl at the moment,” May admitted. “I was seeing someone, but she’s been posted to Farnham and isn’t keen on writing letters.”

“Oh well, we anchor in hope, as the sailors say. Our contact here is a woman called Elspeth Wynter, supposed to be a mine of information.” He held up the cloth bag and checked that it was still dry. “I must walk these feet back soon so that Oswald can get started on them.”

“Which one is Oswald?” asked May.

“Finch, our pathologist over at West End Central. Keen as mustard but such a stick you can’t help winding him up. At least, I can’t.” He stopped and studied the framed posters arranged along the corridor ahead. “Thank God No, No, Nanette came off. All those performances of ‘Tea for Two’ would turn anyone into a murderer. I don’t understand it; America gets Ginger Rogers and we get stuck with Jessie Matthews. Nobody up here. Let’s try again.”

Bryant turned on his heel and dodged past the confused May, rattling back down the stairs to pass into the theatre’s centre foyer. “I used to be quite a fan of the theatre,” he called over his shoulder, “but I haven’t been since the war began. They’re all variety halls now, of course. People have lost the taste for anything serious. Who can blame them?” He looked about and sniffed the air. “Theatres have a particular smell, don’t you find? Mothballs and Jeyes fluid. It’s so gloomy in here with the windows boarded up and all this cold marble, like a morgue. I wonder what D’Oyly Carte would make of the place now.”

“Wasn’t this where Carte set up his national opera house?” asked May.

“Oh, it was to be his crowning glory. Nearly one and a half thousand seats spread across four floors, five bars, unrivalled backstage facilities, a modern mechanical marvel with room for more scenery than any other house in London. Poor chap opened it with Sullivan’s Ivanhoe in 1891. The thing ran for a while, but it was a real plodder by all accounts, po-faced, arse-numbing, no good tunes, riddled with self-importance. Audiences wanted the bouncy songs and jokes of The Mikado, not wailing British epics about duty and fortitude. They tried a few more serious operas, then gave up the ghost and turned the place into a variety hall.”

He rapped on the box-office window with the handle of a furled umbrella he had spotted leaning against the wall. “I say, are you in there?”

The frosted glass slid back to reveal a small tired-looking woman in a shapeless brown jumper and skirt. Knitted into the jumper was the title of Offenbach’s operetta, the capitals picked out in blue wool. An overpowering smell of 4-7-11 cologne assaulted the detectives. The woman had an old-fashioned marcel wave, her hair held in place with kirby grips, and wore a pince-nez. May guessed that she was nowhere near as old as she appeared to be. She had nice eyes, large and rather sad.

“Ah. You must be Mr Bryant. I was wondering when you’d get here.”

“Miss Wynter? I see you’re already advertising the show.”

“Oh, this.” She pulled at her jumper, embarrassed. “Isn’t it awful? Insistence of the new management.”

“John, this is the front-of-house manager, Elspeth Wynter. My partner, John May.”

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr May.”

“A pleasure to meet a lady of the theatre,” said May, in the charming tone he unconsciously reserved for women.

“We looked in once but couldn’t see anyone.”

“No, you wouldn’t. I was on the floor with Nijinsky.” Elspeth opened the door of her office and emerged carrying a tortoise in a straw-filled cardboard box. “I keep him under my stool because of the electric heater,” she explained, “but I can’t leave him alone because he chews through the wiring. Nijinsky’s supposed to be hibernating but he’s an insomniac. It’s the bombs, they’re enough to wake the dead. Do you want to go down and meet the company? They’re about to start today’s rehearsals.”

Bryant looked surprised. “Have they been told what happened?”

“Only that Miss Capistrania went missing yesterday and will be replaced.” She walked ahead of them with the tortoise box under her arm, leading the way to the stalls. “The artistic director is a lady, Helena Parole. This is a bit of a comeback for her. She’s been away for a while, if you know what I mean.” She made a drinking gesture with her cupped right hand. “Problems mixing grape and grain. The insurers aren’t allowing her to touch a drop for the entire run.” She pointed down to the group standing in front of the bare stage. “Not all of the sets have arrived, and everyone’s getting nervous because they can’t finish blocking.”

“Forgive me – blocking?”

“Fixing their physical movements, Mr May. Talk to me if you want to know anything. I’m always here, and I keep tabs on them all. The one in the yellow bandanna is Helena. The coloured gentleman with the artistic haircut is Benjamin Woolf, Miss Capistrania’s agent. The confused-looking fellow is Geoffrey Whittaker. He’s the stage manager. The girl beside him is Madeline Penn, the ASM, she’s on loan from RADA because our other girl got bombed out and had a nervous breakdown. The man sitting down on the box steps in the snappy cardigan is Harry, he keeps the peace around here. They’ll introduce you to the company.”

“Is it necessary to meet them all?” asked May, who was not at home in theatrical surroundings.

“It might throw some light on Miss Capistrania.” Bryant shrugged. “We need to know if she was close to anyone, that sort of thing.”

Helena Parole had a handshake like a pair of mole grips and a smile so false she could have stood for Parliament. “Thank you so much for taking the time to come down and see us,” she told May, as though she had requested his attendance for an audition. Her vocal cords had been gymnastically regraded to dramatize her speech, so that her every remark emerged as a declaration. May felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle with resentment. “I haven’t told them a thing,” she stage-whispered at him. “The spot where we found the corpse has been made off-limits, but they think it’s because of repair work on the lift. Everybody!” She clapped her hands together and waited for the members of the company to quieten down and face her. “This is Mr May, and this is Mr…” She leaned over to Bryant. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Mr Bryant.”

“Oh, like the matches, how amusing. Is that a nom de plume?”

“No it’s not,” snapped Bryant.

Helena turned back to her cast. “Mr Bryant,” she enunciated, thrusting her tongue between her teeth in an effort to extend the name beyond two syllables. “They’re going to be asking you a few questions about Miss Capistrania. It shouldn’t cut into our time too much, should it, Mr May? We do have rather a lot to get through. Perhaps you can conduct your interviews out of the sightlines of my principals. It throws them off. I’ll have a folding chair put out for you over there, and do try to keep the noise down, thank you so much.”

Having put May publicly on the spot, she accepted his silence as agreement, thrust her hands into her baggy khaki trousers and went back to directing her cast. Bryant felt as though he had been dismissed from the auditorium. Helena’s eye rested easiest on men she found attractive, and clearly John May was in her sights. With a grimace of annoyance, Bryant stumped off to the side of the stage.

He found the goods lift separated off by wooden horses with warning boards tied to them by bits of string. The lift couldn’t have drawn more attention if Helena had given it a part in the production. The electrics had been switched off at the mains, but Bryant dug a torch from his pocket and shone it into the shaft, quickly spotting the vertical brown streaks that marred the concrete barrier between the floors. On the other side of the stairwell, another slim beam of light illuminated a crouching figure. It turned and stared at him.

“God, Bryant, you frightened the life out of me,” said Runcorn. “Must you creep about like that? I could have dropped this.” He held up something in a pair of tweezers.

“What is it?” asked Bryant.

“Muscle tissue by the look of it, probably torn from the victim’s ankle as it shattered. Don’t these lifts have fail-safe devices to halt them if a foreign body gets caught in the mechanism?”

“It’s half a century old. Safety wasn’t a priority then. The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.”

Dr Runcorn, the unit’s forensic scientist, was one of the top men in his field, but his air of superiority, coupled with the punctilious manner of a civil servant, made him disliked by nearly everyone who came into contact with him. That was the trouble with a unit like the PCU: it was destined to be staffed with the kind of employee who had been rejected from other institutions in spite of their qualifications. Dr Runcorn was especially irked by Bryant, whose intuitive attitude to scientific investigation seemed at best inappropriate and at worst unprofessional.

“I haven’t finished here yet,” he warned, “so don’t start walking all over the area touching things.”

“I wasn’t going to,” said Bryant, affronted. “You surely don’t think it was an accident, do you?”

“A damned odd one, I agree, but stranger things have happened.”

“Hard to see how her feet ended up on a chestnut brazier, with that hypothesis,” Bryant pointed out.

“Oswald Finch took receipt of the cadaver from West End Central and has already run a few tests on it, reckons she might show positive for some kind of drug, possibly self-administered. These artistic types are noted for it.” Runcorn sniffed, rising from his crouched position and cracking his back. “I don’t know why he can’t test for more obvious causes of death first like any normal person: heart failure, stuff like that. I just know that her feet were cut off and she didn’t struggle. There are a couple of scuff marks here on the landing, the heel of a shoe, nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Suggestive, though.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Runcorn tugged at his ear, thinking. He was awkwardly tall and so thin that he looked lost inside his clothes. “It’s a backward scuff, but it faces forward to the lift. Like this.” He adopted an angular pose, something that came easily to a man who was six feet three and pigeon-chested. “As though you were bracing yourself against the trellis. You might make it if you were pulling something through the bars of the lift. As if you were trying to drag out a heavy box. Or pull something through the cage. Legs, perhaps.”

That was the good thing about Runcorn, thought Arthur. Like Finch, he operated on a secondary set of signals, pulses that passed invisibly beneath his rational senses.

“There’s another mark on the linoleum several feet away. It looks like it could be a match. If we can place someone outside the lift with the victim inside it, then you might have a murder case. But why cut off her feet?” Runcorn stared gloomily down into the lift shaft.

“She was a dancer,” Bryant replied.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Suppose she had somehow survived,” said Bryant. “Can you think of a better way to guarantee that she’d never perform again?”