Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

56

A DEATH FORETOLD

If John was now thinking like Arthur, the reverse was also true. Bryant was pursuing a more logical line of enquiry. Forget mythology, he told himself. Don’t be misled by the intrigues of the Renalda family. The feud is a red herring. Start afresh, follow a new path. How, he asked himself, would a sensible, methodical man like John May interpret the facts?

After his humiliating experience at Renalda’s house, the young detective had carefully rethought his strategy. Seated on his favourite bench by the river, as close as he could get to the memory of his fiancée, armed with the blue crystal fountain pen that Detective Sergeant Forthright had given him on his twenty-second birthday, he mapped out the personal details of the Palace’s victims. Immediately, one name separated itself from the others. One of the two key factors, he felt sure, was Jan Petrovic. Phyllis, her housemate, had told May that Petrovic wanted to leave the show because she wasn’t up to the part. Two days later she had gone missing.

The other key was the fact that, however much you allowed for coincidence or fate, the deaths were patterned exactly on Renalda’s family mythology. It followed that the murderer not only knew about his past, but was attempting to shift the focus of blame onto him. But why? To take revenge on him for some perceived slight?

Possibly. Surely it was more likely to have been arranged out of convenience? The killer was going to commit acts of violence whatever happened, and it made sense to deflect suspicion by implicating an innocent man.

Bryant raised his head and looked across the sluggish brown river, out towards the open sea, the breeze lifting his fringe from his eyes. Two further possibilities presented themselves. Either the person he was looking for had read about Renalda’s background – according to the tycoon, it wouldn’t have been difficult – or Renalda himself had provided the information. Which meant that it was someone he trusted, somebody close to him in the production. Petrovic’s flatmate said she had lied her way into the job, and was unable to handle it. Suppose she had used the murders as a way of disappearing? She fitted Renalda’s mythological beliefs perfectly – almost any chorus girl would have done so – and it was easy to fake her own abduction. But in her haste she had made a mistake, failing to allow her ‘abductor’ any method of entering the flat. The doors had been shut from the inside, and the neighbours had seen only Petrovic herself entering and leaving the house.

Bryant gently shook ink into the nib of the pen, and drew a series of connecting lines on his pad. Petrovic had wanted to break her contract. Her fellow performers at the Palace were mysteriously disappearing, so she used it as a chance to vanish, to set herself free from a contract she didn’t feel capable of honouring. She couldn’t provide a body, of course, just a few tiny drops of blood, and a smear of crimson nail polish when they didn’t look enough. The rest was easy. When someone had a little money in their pocket and didn’t want to be found, Bryant knew, it was difficult to track them down. With the war on, it seemed that everyone was on the move. Bryant studied the missing section of his diagram. Who knew about Petrovic’s problem, and had been able to provide her with a solution? Who told her about Andreas Renalda’s Muses, and could explain how her own vanishing act might work?

It had to be the same person the tycoon had confided in. One person linked them both together. Bryant stared at the blue question mark he had scored on the pad, and pensively scratched at his unshaven chin.

What puzzled him most of all was why someone would go to so much trouble. Why was it in their interests to make it look as if Petrovic had also been attacked by the Palace Phantom? He assumed he had been locked in the archive room by the killer, but at the very same moment Valerie Marchmont had been murdered onstage. How could her attacker have been in two places at once?

The odder pieces of the puzzle sharpened into focus. The picture of the statue in the archive room. The canopy that hung over the east face of the theatre. The reason why the murders had been made to look like accidents.

Actors, damned actors, covering up their secrets, hiding behind their masks.

He had been lied to, again and again and again. He was young and eager, blinded and sidetracked by the mythology of a famous family, all because their story so perfectly matched the opera they were presenting.

Bryant released a groan as he realized the truth. Something far simpler, far more apparent, something that had been staring him in the face for the past week. He needed to get back to the theatre, to check the paintwork on the other pass door – the door that Stan Lowe’s boy was supposed to be jemmying open to comply with the safety regulations.

There was only an hour to go before the curtain went up on Monday night’s performance of Orpheus. It took him nearly twenty minutes to locate a working telephone in the Aldwych, and then, in his haste to find someone who could help him, he managed to call the woman who was most likely to make his mission more difficult. “Who is this?” shouted Maggie Armitage, practising white witch and founder member of the Camden Town Coven.

“Who have I called?” Bryant asked himself aloud.

“Don’t you know, you silly man?” she shouted more loudly. “If this is Trevor Bannister from the Southwark Bridge Supernaturals, I’ve already told you, we don’t want your South London call-outs, thank you. Five shillings for spirit clearance, it’s not worth the taxi fare. I’m not wiping up other people’s ectoplasm for less than seven and six.”

“Maggie, I’m sorry, I seem to have dialled without concentrating…” Bryant had been staying with the spiritualist for the past two days. He had felt the need to be away from people who knew about the case, and his landlady was in daily contact with DS Forthright. “Arthur? Is that you? Your dinner’s ruined, I’d give it to the dog but turnips give him wind. I had a feeling you were going to call. It’s about the Palace, isn’t it? You think you know who’s behind the murders.”

“I, er, ah…”

“Your timing is spot on, we just finished a séance. We were going to have a few madrigals, but my harpsichord has suffered some minor bomb damage. I used to be able to slice hardboiled eggs through the top chords, but of course it’s all powdered stuff now. Do you want me down there? The auspices are very good tonight. Fog always helps the ectoplasmic manifestations. I hear the show is absolutely disgusting, can you get comps?”

“I’m on my way there. I think I’m going to make an arrest,” he foolishly admitted.

“I can do you a quick reading on the telephone if you like. I get the vibrations from the tone of your voice.”

“That’s clever,” said Bryant. “What do you know about fear of open spaces?”

“That’s psychology, dear, not spiritualism. It can set in when a susceptible person doesn’t get out of the house for a long time, especially if they’re undergoing some kind of personal crisis. You think your murderer is agoraphobic?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Be careful, though, won’t you? Phobics can be very nasty when they get into a state of panic. Phobias are powerful vehicles for aggressive feelings. They condense anxiety. Intrusive phobias aren’t part of general personalities, they just kick in at key moments. They’re a defence against intense trauma, fear of intimacy, stuff like that.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I once performed an exorcism for a bonce doctor. He was broke and paid me off in therapy. Oh, I’m sensing something very dangerous.”

“In what way?”

“The war. An unexploded bomb. I’m seeing fire and screaming. An explosion, Arthur, a terrible explosion that I’m rather afraid causes the death of one of you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely, as sure as if it has already happened. In a way, of course, it already has. I don’t think you should go to the theatre tonight.”

“I have no choice.”

With the witch’s warning words ringing in his ears, Bryant hung up and ran grimly on towards the Palace. When he arrived there, he immediately headed for the right-hand backstage area. He knew he would find the proof he needed on the lintel of the second pass door.