Stagestruck

18

‘Convince me,’ Diamond said. Halliwell gave his humour-the-boss grin. He was back from the mortuary and looking drained, not from attendance at the autopsy, but the prospect of explaining the result to his crotchety superior. ‘Dr Sealy wasn’t in any doubt.’

‘I’m no pathologist,’ Diamond said, ‘but even I know they turn purple if they suffocate. I saw the body. She was as pale as your shirt. What is more, they get those little blood marks in the eyes and the skin.’

‘Petechial haemorrhages,’ Halliwell said from his long experience of listening to pathologists.

‘Well, there weren’t any.’

‘He said the so-called classic signs were absent.’

‘Great. So how does he know she was suffocated?’

‘He found pressure marks at the base of her neck.’

‘She was strangled? I saw no marks.’

‘Will you let me explain, guv? This wasn’t a strangling. These marks were here.’ He tapped his own shoulders where the collar of his T-shirt met his neck. ‘About here, on each side, where the killer pressed into the flesh with thumbs and knuckles. You wouldn’t have seen because of that hooded jacket she was wearing. The pressure was through her clothes.’

‘To obstruct the arteries?’

Halliwell shook his head. ‘You’re getting ahead of me again. Dr Sealy said in his opinion she was suffocated with a plastic bag pulled down over her head and held there until she stopped struggling, which happened rapidly.’

There was an interval of silence while the method registered with Diamond. ‘An ordinary plastic bag?’

‘Except most carrier bags have little holes punched into them.’

‘Right. This one was airtight?’

‘She was already seated,’ Halliwell went on, ‘so the killer would have entered the box from behind and slipped the bag over her head.’

‘Simple as that?’

‘Not quite. You and I might think she died from lack of oxygen, but sometimes a neurochemical reaction kicks in and the death is from cardiac arrest. He said in cases like that, the skin turns pale rather than congested and there aren’t any of the signs you’d normally expect in asphyxia.’

‘As I noted at the scene,’ Diamond said with more than a hint of self-congratulation.

‘It was a quick death, apparently, and the panic in the victim very likely contributed to the speed of it.’

Diamond exhaled sharply. ‘Nasty.’

‘And it didn’t require much strength.’

‘Surely she’d have grabbed at the bag and tried to pull it off.’

‘Very likely, but the force downwards is stronger than her trying to get a grip and push it up. By grabbing the bag she was tightening the pressure against her nose and mouth. And she wouldn’t have been heard. She was out of sight of the audience, anyway.’

‘She may have scratched her attacker.’

‘I wouldn’t mind betting he – or she – wore gloves.’

Halliwell had sketched the scene vividly enough for Diamond to visualise how the killing may have worked, and it was gruesome in its efficiency. ‘And there’s no other way to read these marks?’

‘He said not. The bruising on the shoulders was definitely man-made, recent and prior to death.’

‘We didn’t find a bag at the scene.’

‘Well, the killer wouldn’t have left it there.’

He had to agree. ‘You’re right, Keith. This wasn’t the work of someone careless.’

‘Will you tell the press?’

A difficult question. It had crossed Diamond’s mind already, without any prompting from Halliwell. The police are trained to be selective with information. Sometimes details known only to the killer are held back for tactical reasons. The news that Clarion Calhoun was dead would get banner headlines. To reveal that she’d been murdered in this manner would put the media machine into overdrive and make his task that much harder to perform. Yet if they weren’t told, they’d ferret out the truth in a matter of hours. He could see no advantage in playing the long game. ‘I’ll lay out all the main facts.’

It was agreed that Halliwell would brief the CID team shortly before Diamond broke the news to the press. ‘Tell them to put their private lives on hold. It’s overtime for everyone.’

He kept the press conference down to under twenty minutes. His stark opening statement made the strong impact he intended and gave the hacks their juicy quotes. The questions that followed were mostly reactive to the crime rather than targeted to the investigation. He dealt with them in short answers and came out feeling less battered than sometimes.

In the CID room he braced himself for a more searching examination. Everyone was there, buoyed up by Halliwell’s briefing. Even Georgina had come downstairs to listen.

‘It’s the most public murder enquiry we’ve ever had in this city,’ Diamond told them. ‘We must be razor sharp. Speaking of which, where’s John Leaman?’

A hand went up at the back of the room.

‘You’re in charge of the search of the theatre. The box where she was killed has been gone through by the crime scene people, but the rest of the building hasn’t. Comb the place for the murder weapon, the plastic bag. The killer may have dumped it in some bin thinking it wouldn’t be noticed. Take as many coppers with you as uniform can spare. If you see anyone acting suspiciously, report it to me. Inge?’

‘Guv?’

‘Go through all the statements we took in the theatre last night. Look at everyone’s movements, especially during the interval. We have three obvious suspects, Shearman, Melmot and Binns. Each of them knew ahead of time that she was coming to the play. See if what they said checks out.’

‘Right, guv.’

‘Then there’s a second tier of suspects, the actors. They had a view of the box.’

‘Not a good view,’ Leaman said.

‘Did I use the word good? They could tell it was occupied if they happened to look and, as I understand it, that box isn’t used much.’

‘The Schneider woman admitted she saw someone,’ Halliwell said.

‘A ghost,’ Paul Gilbert said.

‘Saw something, then. And at the start of the interval she was busy telling everybody about it, enough to alert anyone with half a brain that someone had been sitting there.’

‘She told Gisella for sure,’ Ingeborg said.

‘And Preston Barnes,’ Diamond said. ‘Find out how they spent the rest of their interval. Did they go to their dressing rooms and stay there? Were they alone?’

‘Fräulein Schneider wasn’t,’ Halliwell said. ‘She had people with her trying to calm her down.’

‘Which people?’

‘Stagehands, she told me.’

‘We can’t ignore any of the crew,’ Ingeborg said. ‘They could have heard Fräulein Schneider panicking about the grey lady.’

‘The wardrobe woman,’ Halliwell said.

‘Not to forget the dramaturge,’ Fred Dawkins added. ‘He was with Schneider towards the end of the interval.’

‘Did you take his statement last night?’ Leaman asked.

‘No. I was Earping.’

‘What?’

‘Marshalling,’ Diamond said, not wanting a bout of wordplay at this stage. ‘Fred was making sure everyone got seen. Who was it who took Titus O’Driscoll’s statement?’

Halliwell raised his hand. ‘He told me the news of the grey lady’s appearance reached him in the Garrick’s Head and he went backstage for a first-hand account.’

‘Do you see what we’re up against?’ Leaman demanded, his hellfire preacher voice soaring. ‘The entire theatre was in on this. Some of the audience always step outside at the interval for a drag on a cigarette, so it was known on the streets as well. Any nutter could have gone up to the box and killed her.’

‘Get wise, John,’ Ingeborg said. ‘They didn’t know Clarion was in the building. Only three people knew that.’

‘And those three are firmly in the frame,’ Diamond said to get on track again. ‘We may be close to an arrest. I’m assigning Keith, Inge and Fred to getting the fullest possible profiles of our three main suspects – everything about them, their past, present and, above all, any link, however remote, to Clarion. And you don’t have to be too subtle about it. They know they’re under scrutiny.’

Fred Dawkins had heard his name and looked as if he’d won the lottery. ‘Which one is mine?’

‘That’s up to Keith.’

‘You can take Binns,’ Halliwell said at once.

‘I shall take him and dismantle him. No portion will go unexamined.’

‘Sounds painful.’

‘Not for me. I’m a fully fledged member of the team now.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Diamond said. ‘Let’s see how you cope.’

Then Georgina spoke. ‘Please bear in mind, Peter, that Sergeant Dawkins has a rehearsal tonight.’

He jerked back in disbelief. ‘Rehearsal? For what?’

‘Sweeney Todd. We’re doing a walk-through of the moves in the rehearsal rooms, the entire cast. As our choreographer, he’s indispensable.’

‘He’s on the strength, ma’am. We’re flat out on this murder enquiry.’

‘I appreciate that. I’ll speak to you presently.’

He felt his blood pressure rocket. He could protest, knowing he had right on his side, but it would get him nowhere. He hadn’t asked for Dawkins in the first place. The man was a pain, anyway. Let him do his bloody walk-through – walk through the door and out of CID for good.

With a huge effort, he controlled himself. ‘Let’s not lose sight of the other unexplained death at the theatre. There’s compelling evidence that Denise was not alone in the minutes before she fell to her death from the fly tower. I can’t at this moment see a definite link, but two violent deaths in two days make a double murder more likely than not.’

‘Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,’ a voice spoke up. It was Fred Dawkins.

‘Did you say something?’ Diamond asked, feeling a stronger throb in his veins.

‘Merely a warning to the unwary, guv,’ Dawkins said. ‘It’s Latin.’

‘What’s the use of that? We’re English.’

‘A rough translation would be: after this, therefore because of this. It articulates the fallacy that because one event follows another, it must be caused by the other. If, for example, a man eats some oysters and then gets indigestion, it may not be the oysters that were responsible. It may have been the rhubarb that he had as the dessert.’

‘I don’t what you’re on about.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t a perfect analogy.’

‘Better shut up, then.’

‘I was trying to inject a note of caution about assuming a link between the deaths of Denise and Clarion.’

‘We heard,’ Diamond said and went back to addressing the meeting. ‘I was starting to say that the investigation into Denise’s death won’t be pushed into the background just because Clarion was a star performer. It’s still high priority. The so-called suicide note has gone for analysis and we should find out if it was genuine. From what we now know about Clarion’s self-harming, it appears Denise wasn’t responsible for the scarring, so she had no reason to blame herself.’

‘A double murder looks likely,’ Halliwell said. ‘Stuff the Latin.’

‘One more thing,’ Diamond said. ‘With all the media interest, we’re all of us liable to be approached by the press, by Clarion’s army of fans and every kind of snoop. Keep it buttoned, okay?’

The briefing over, he followed Georgina from the room and tapped her arm. ‘About Sergeant Dawkins…’

‘I hope you’re not going to make an issue of this, Peter.’

‘Either he’s on the squad or he isn’t.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ she conceded. ‘I spoke out of turn. It’s obvious that you’re fully stretched. But if you can see your way to releasing him for a couple of hours tonight I’ll make it up to you in human resources. We have some bright young bobbies in uniform keen to get CID experience.’

‘I’ll take Dawn Reed and George Pidgeon,’ he said at once.

Georgina looked surprised that he knew any names outside his own little empire. ‘Agreed.’ She moved at speed towards the stairs to her eyrie. She hated being outmanoeuvred.

I Am a Camera was forced to end its run prematurely. The theatre would be dark for the next two nights. Even Hedley Shearman admitted that to have carried on would be insensitive. The actors and crew were asked not to leave Bath, to be available for more questioning if required.

Alone in his office, Diamond studied printouts of the statements made by theatre staff on the morning after Clarion’s face was damaged. Thanks to PC Reed’s speed writing and Fred Dawkins’ faultless typing, they were lucid accounts, but they didn’t yield anything new. Both Shearman and Denise had acted responsibly after the incident, losing no time in getting Clarion to hospital. As for their backgrounds, there was nothing on Shearman and not much on Denise. No doubt Fred Dawkins had done most of the talking. All he’d learned from Denise was that she had been with the theatre six years. More information about previous jobs had come later from Kate in wardrobe, a secondary source, not so dependable. A proper check was a high priority, and best left to Halliwell and his team. More would definitely emerge.

In the calm at the eye of the storm, Diamond’s thoughts returned to his own early life and what lurked there. He’d heard nothing back from any of the police authorities he’d contacted about Flakey White.

He knew the resources existed online to make an identity check. Still uncomfortable using the computer, he knuckled down and found how to search the death registers for White’s unusual set of names. Nothing came of it.

If alive, the man would be in his seventies. Was he known in cyberspace?

When he Googled the full name, it gave several hundred so-called ‘hits’ that he could tell straight away were nothing to do with Flakey. The entire resources of the internet were no help.

Disappointed, his prejudice against computers justified, he sat back and tried thinking of another way of tracing an ex-teacher with a prison record.

Then he remembered something Mike Glazebrook had said. It had barely sunk in at the time, such had been the shock of hearing about White’s court case.

He reached for the phone. Talking to a real person beat staring at a screen.

‘Mike? Peter Diamond here.’

‘Peter who?’

‘Your old schoolmate. The princes in the tower.’

‘I’m with you now.’

‘When we met and talked about Flakey White, you said something about him surfacing again as a book illustrator.’

There was a pause. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Actually, I do.’

‘Why? He’s a scumbag. Don’t have anything to do with him.’

He stretched the truth. ‘It’s a police enquiry.’

‘Is he still at it, then?’

‘We don’t know until we catch up with him.’

Glazebrook clicked his tongue and gave a snort that could be heard in John O’Groats. ‘Couple of years ago I saw something in a magazine in my barber’s, a feature about illustrators.

There were photos of these guys at work in their studios and one of them was called Mo White. It was definitely Flakey. He was white-haired and wore glasses, but the face hadn’t changed much, the beaky nose and the foxy eyes.’

‘What was he illustrating?’

‘It looked like comics to me.’

‘For kids, you mean?’

‘Who else reads comics?’

‘There are books for adults called graphic novels. They’ve got popular.’

‘Porn, you mean?’

‘Not necessarily. I suppose you don’t recall where he was working?’

‘It didn’t say. And there was nothing about his evil past. I bet his employer didn’t know.’

‘If he was working as an illustrator he must have had a publisher,’ Diamond said, thinking aloud. ‘They ought to have contact details. They have to pay royalties.’

‘Get on the case, then, if you really want to wallow in the mud,’ Glazebrook said.

‘You said you saw this magazine a couple of years back. Can you recall the title?’

‘No chance. And when I say a couple of years I could mean five or six.’

Thanks a bunch, mate, he thought.

‘One other thing, Peter.’

‘What’s that?’

‘When you put the boot in, give him one for me.’

Even Diamond was shaken by that. ‘He must be seventy-five, at least.’

‘So what? He didn’t care about the age of the kids he abused.’

The internet finally came in useful. He found a website devoted to graphic novels and their illustrators. An artist called Mo White was credited with rendering Dickens novels into illustrated books for adults. The latest were A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, both in 2003. The publisher was Stylus of New Oxford Street, London.

The woman at Stylus confirmed that White had produced the two books for them and she believed he’d retired soon after. The ‘Mo’ stood for his initials: Morgan and some other name beginning with ‘O’. She was guarded when Diamond asked for a contact address. It was company policy not to give out personal information.

Silently he cursed the Data Protection Act. ‘What a disappointment after all the research I’ve done,’ he said, sounding as if his world had caved in. ‘He was my art teacher forty years ago. It’s a school reunion. I was so looking forward to seeing the look on his face.’

She melted. White was living in Forest Close, Wilton.

Wilton, near Salisbury. Only about an hour’s drive from Bath.

The reunion was a must.

A call came in from an unexpected quarter: Duckett, the crime scene investigator, in a skittish mood. ‘How was the fish?’

‘What?’

‘The last thing you said to me was that you had other fish to fry.’

‘Do you want me to laugh?’ Diamond said.

‘You should be on your knees in gratitude. I have information for you. It’s not my full report. You’ll get that when I’m ready. But we found something of particular interest in dressing room eleven and I thought I’d pass it on at the first opportunity. You’ll recall that we established that two people were in the room, one presumably Denise, and one her possible attacker?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there were the base marks of a bottle and two wine glasses in the dust?’

One of the many annoying things about forensics experts was that they kept going over the obvious. ‘Of course.’

‘We analysed the dust nearby and found some particles of a chemical called flunitrazepam.’

‘Really?’ Another annoying thing was that they talked in a foreign language.

‘Better known as the date rape drug, Rohypnol.’

Now Diamond was fully alert. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s a prescription drug ten times more potent than Valium. In its original form it was colourless, odourless and tasteless, but since 1998 the manufacturers have added a blue dye that will appear when it dissolves.’

‘That much I know.’

‘There are still supplies in circulation of the pure version. This tested neutral, so it must be pre-1998. At least one capsule had obviously been opened to disperse the chemical in the drink. Have you had the blood test results from the post-mortem on Denise Pearsall?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I would expect them to confirm that she was drugged.’

‘For sex?’ Diamond said. ‘Nothing about recent intercourse was mentioned by the pathologist.’

‘No. I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on the date rape connection. The purpose would have been to induce passivity. Within ten minutes the subject feels euphoric and relaxed. She would then have allowed herself to be taken across to the gallery from which she fell or was pushed. In other words, Mr Diamond, I have just provided you with potential evidence of malice aforethought.’

‘I’m obliged to you.’

‘Have you found the glass she drank from?’

‘Her killer is too smart to have left it behind,’ Diamond said. ‘And I don’t suppose it’s any use trying to trace the source of the drug if it’s as old as you say. Who uses this stuff legitimately?’

‘People with severe sleep disorders. Personally I prefer Horlicks.’

Shortly after, Diamond stepped into the CID room to tell the team and they seamlessly picked up from where he’d ended the phone conversation with Duckett.

‘How do people get hold of this drug?’ Paul Gilbert asked.

‘It’s no big deal,’ Halliwell said. ‘I expect you can get it on the internet.’

‘This was old stock.’

‘Plenty of it was changing hands in the nineties and is still in circulation. We’ve taken it off blokes going into night clubs. They don’t seem to have any problem acquiring it. There are evidence bags downstairs with the stuff.’

‘There must have been a lot of it around.’

‘How many pharmacies are there in the country? How many doctors over-prescribe?’

‘Of more importance to us,’ Diamond said, ‘who in the Theatre Royal would be likely to have a supply of the stuff?’

Fred Dawkins said, ‘The pocket Lothario.’

‘Come again.’

‘Hedley Shearman. The little man with the large libido.’

‘Fred’s right,’ Halliwell said. ‘Shearman is just the kind of shagbag who would use the date rape drug. He has plenty of form as a seducer, as we’re finding out. Before coming to Bath, he was front-of-house manager at a theatre in Worthing and got one of the box office ladies pregnant. His second wife divorced him on the strength of it.’

Diamond was less convinced. ‘There’s no evidence that he or anyone else had sex with Denise.’

‘He could have made a play for her some other time,’ Halliwell said, clearly liking this scenario. ‘Maybe she gave him the brush-off and threatened to report him to the board. He got scared and set this trap for her.’

‘Is that enough to justify murder?’

‘He’s still paying for the divorce. Losing his job would be a disaster. That’s the motive and we know the opportunity was there. As manager he could move around backstage without anyone paying attention.’

‘But would he risk the theatre closing?’

‘It didn’t, guv. Everything carried on as usual after Denise’s death. He was one of the keenest to let the show go on. He argued with you about the matinee that was cancelled.’

‘True.’

‘He looks the strongest suspect we have,’ Paul Gilbert said.

Diamond was reluctant to pin it on Shearman at this point. ‘Are you also suggesting he murdered Clarion?’

‘He was the man on the spot, wasn’t he?’ Halliwell said. ‘He arranged for her to be seated in the Arnold Haskell box. He could have gone there any time during the play. He was the only one of the theatre staff we know for sure was in there with her. He admits she was dead at the interval and he delayed reporting it until the show was over. If that isn’t guilty behaviour, what is?’

‘But why? Why murder Clarion?’

Halliwell shrugged. ‘He’s unstoppable. He fancied his chances with her.’

‘Little Hedley Shearman?’ Diamond shook his head. ‘With an international pop star?’

‘You’ve got to remember how vulnerable Clarion was at that stage. She’d been scarred. She’d come back to the theatre, his territory. He felt he had power over her, placing her in the box. He came on strong with her, she told him to get lost and he snapped and killed her.’

‘With a plastic bag he happened to have brought along for the seduction? I don’t think so, Keith.’

Halliwell wasn’t giving up on his suspect. ‘Well, he tried it on earlier, before the interval, and she laughed in his face. He was humiliated, so he went back with the bag and suffocated her.’

‘Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind,’ Diamond said in a tone suggesting the opposite. ‘Has anything else of interest been uncovered yet?’ He moved around the room looking over people’s shoulders. He could be an intimidating presence. Everything went quiet again apart from the tapping of keyboards and the occasional beep of the phones.

One of the civilian staff called him to the phone. ‘DI Leaman would like a word, sir. He’s at the theatre.’

He picked it up. ‘John?’

‘Guv, we’ve started the search here.’

‘Any joy?’

‘I’m in wardrobe, with Kate.’

‘Lucky man.’

‘You asked us to look for carrier bags. The thing is, Kate has to do shopping for costumes and materials. She has a stack of bags. So far I’ve counted forty-seven.’