Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

42

MR MAY PRESENTS HIS THEORY

The follow-up to Coventry’s night of terror was a bombing raid on London that proved almost as devastating as the attack of 15 October, when the city seemed to combust with over nine hundred fires. On that occasion all railway traffic had been halted, and the shattered Fleet sewer emptied its poisoned waters into the train tunnels at King’s Cross.

On Saturday, those who survived the night arose to find great chunks of the city alight or simply gone. Hospitals, schools and stations had been hit, and doctors cut their way into unsafe buildings to administer morphine to the injured. Pumps and water towers were drained to fight the raging blazes spread by incendiary bombs. Because the city’s water was routinely turned off at the weekend, the fire hoses had run dry, so riverside cranes were used to drop trailer pumps into the Thames from offshore barges.

Looters struck, risking their lives to pillage from the ruins of shops and houses while residents took cover, but most of the cases went unreported for fear of harming morale. A deep crater had been blown in the centre of Charing Cross Road, exposing the underground trains to daylight. In Farringdon, a fish shop was hit by a bomb that loosened a great girder, causing it to fall on a queue of housewives. Not even gangs of men could move the beam, and the women had to wait and die while a crane was sought.

Brick dust settled across the roads and buildings as thickly as falling snow, a pale cloak of mourning. All sounds were deadened. People moved quietly through the ashes like determined ghosts.

John May had spent the night under the stairs at his aunt’s house in Camden. The noise had been deafening and almost constant, the explosions preceded by the droning of aircraft, the thunder of antiaircraft guns and the ghostly wail of the sirens, one of which was mounted on the roof of the primary school opposite. The early fog was so dense, and the blackout still so effective, that May could see no more than a few feet ahead as he walked into Covent Garden, listening to the fall of masonry, accompanied by the chinking tumble of London bricks. The rescue squads were pulling down cracked chimney stacks and walls.

In Long Acre the atmosphere changed; the costermongers were still in fine voluble form, singing and bellowing jokes across their wicker stacks. Many offices asked their exhausted workers to handle extra shifts. With so many lines of communication cut, the daily push and pull of commerce slowed. But the size of London worked in favour of its population. No matter how much havoc had occurred in the night, it always seemed there was another way to get things done.

Bryant had spent the night in the office and needed to clear his head with a walk beside the river. He felt close to the truth and wanted to talk to Andreas Renalda, but nobody knew his whereabouts. There was no answer from the telephone at the tycoon’s Highgate home, and his office was shut for the weekend.

The premiere of Orpheus was still planned for tonight, come incendiary bombs, hellfire murders or the Lord Chamberlain himself. The day was grey and dull, the skies louring with the threat of rain. Everyone was praying for a deluge to dampen the fires, and for clouds to hide the city.

An Orpheus lyric rattled around in Bryant’s brain. ‘The Metamorphoses Rondo’, in which Cupid sings, “What do these disguises prove? Only that you find yourself so ugly that whenever you want to be loved, you daren’t show yourself as you really are.” If Andreas Renalda’s brother was here, he could have adopted the identity of anyone. Tonight the theatre would open for the grand premiere, and the invited public would be admitted. How much harder would it be to spot a rogue face in the crowd?

Bryant studied the water, watching the chromatic petrol ripples of a passing boat blossom on the surface in diseased ziggurats. Then there was the matter of the missing girl, lost in a city of missing people. If Jan Petrovic had been kidnapped, why had no one heard from her abductor? What was to be gained from removing someone so unimportant to the production? He thought back to Edna Wagstaff’s nervous chatter about the ghosts of the theatre, and how they walked through walls. How had someone been able to enter and leave the Palace unnoticed? When the building wasn’t locked up, the two entrances had staff posted at them. There were two pass doors between the backstage area and the front of house, and one of those was kept permanently locked. The doors to Petrovic’s flat were also locked from the inside. It was as if…

Edna had spoken of desperation, but someone desperate to do what? The police at Bow Street and West End Central were far too busy to help the unit. Sergeant Nasty-Basket Carfax next door had laughed in his face when he had requested assistance. Suppose Minos Renalda had infiltrated the staff of the theatre? He would be forty now, which eliminated quite a few members of the orchestra, about half of the cast and all but one of the house staff. Forthright was checking the ages of the backstage crew.

Bryant let his mind roam loose. In 1922, the Palace had premiered The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Gilbert and Sullivan longed to trump Offenbach, and set Thespis among the gods of ancient Greece, but Thespis was now lost. The painting in the Palace Theatre’s foyer was The Concert, a Greek revival subject. Offenbach’s hero helped Jason to find the Golden Fleece. The brown interiors of the Palace were rubbed gold by the hands of patrons. Mythic links but also Masonic links, the compass and the globe. Orpheus’s mother was Calliope. The Maenads tore Orpheus limb from limb for preaching male love, and his head floated down the River Hebrus still singing. Which Greek goddess carried a scythe? Wasn’t a scythe like a razor?

His mind was reeling with impossible associations. But there was a more prosaic possibility. The show was already being accused of blasphemy, indecency, blatantly unwholesome sexuality. Could some guardian of moral standards really have become so incensed by its perceived perversions that they were prepared to kill? The idea didn’t sit well with him. The crimes felt passionless, almost accidental. It was as though anyone could have died in place of Capistrania and Senechal.

“I thought I’d find you here,” said May, laying a hand on his shoulder and passing him a silver flask. “This’ll warm you up.”

“I’m trying to think, old bean. Am I to be allowed no privacy?” Bryant grumbled, but unscrewed the cap and took a swig. “This business is giving me the pip. If I had to paint a picture of the person we’re looking for,” he said, passing the flask back, “I’d reckon we were up against an older male, middle class, with some kind of grudge against the play itself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Traditional theatre, by which I discount the music halls and picture palaces, is largely ignored by working-class youths. It’s not really a public place but a sealed arena. Unless you’re a paying customer or a member of the production, there’s no easy way in or out of the building. Our killer acts with the kind of confidence that comes with experience. He’s male because of the sense of distance from his victims. He’s unemotional. Statistically, women make passionate murderers. He has a grudge against the play because the players themselves are unimportant to him. There’s a plan, and we haven’t seen its culmination yet.”

“Do you see any way of stopping it?”

“The theatre opens its doors tonight. The time for deciphering clues is over.”

“All we can do is be vigilant,” May agreed. “Every attack points in a different direction.”

“Do they, though? Couldn’t our killer be fulfilling a ritual? Orpheus faced the rigours of Hell before he was allowed to climb towards the light. I believe true evil is dispassionate, faceless, selfish. A game is being played out right before my eyes. Our perpetrator knows this and is unconcerned, or is so blinded by the need to take action that he’s prepared to take risks.”

May had not seen his partner in this fugue state before. “I think you’re wasting your time with all this mythological stuff.”

“Oh?” Bryant turned to look at him. “Do you have a better idea?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s better, but I do have a theory.”

“Would you care to share it with me?” Bryant jammed an absurdly large briar pipe in his mouth and waited for May to give him a light. He had misplaced his regular pipe. May would spend the next sixty years locating lost objects for his partner.

“Renalda’s brother is implicated in the death of the tycoon’s wife. Now he’s missing, possibly here. Who would he want to strike at most? At Andreas himself. So he attacks the theatre to destroy his brother’s empire.”

“But then he gains nothing financially.”

“What if it has nothing to do with financial benefit, but is simple revenge?” May leaned on the balustrade, watching the red fireboats pumping water.

“Why would he have waited until now to take action?” Bryant checked his watch. “I have to find Andreas. He can’t be far from the theatre. Let’s have him removed directly to the unit for questioning, show him we mean business.”

“That’s more like it.” May looked up at the dark, scudding sky. “Listen.”

Bryant cocked an ear. “What? I can’t hear anything.”

“Neither can I.” May grinned. “Wonderful, isn’t it?”