Stagestruck

24

Some lights were on, not powerful, but dazzling to Diamond’s eyes. The set of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin flat was still in place as he’d instructed, the three walls lined with the solid-looking furniture dominated by the stove. On the sofa at centre stage lay PC George Pidgeon, bound hand and foot with duct tape. A strip of it was across his mouth. His eyes were open, but not moving.

Dead?

Diamond pushed the curtain aside and crossed the stage.

The eyes slid to the right and fixed on him. George Pidgeon was alive. He braced his body and struggled.

Diamond leaned over the young man and started easing the gag from his cheek, but Pidgeon jerked his face away, the tape ripped from his skin and he yelled, ‘Behind you!’

In the microsecond before the shout, Diamond had seen Pidgeon’s eyes widen in alarm. He flung himself across the constable’s body and the blow intended for his skull caught his shoulder instead. It was a glancing hit rather than full impact because it slid down his ribs, but it still felt as if it had splintered his shoulder blade. All he could do for protection from another blow was make a piston movement with his arm. His elbow struck something solid. There was a grunt from behind.

Pidgeon yelled, ‘Guv!’

He rolled left. The weapon whizzed past his ear, struck the upholstery and ripped a gash in the fabric. It was a claw hammer.

Diamond’s reflex action brought him crashing to the stage floor. All he could do from here was make a grab for his attacker’s legs. He got a hand on one leg, but the other kicked his arm away. Even so, he’d done enough to unsettle his assailant. He watched the legs step away, turn and run off the stage.

Now it was down to priorities: go in pursuit, or release Pidgeon? His right arm felt numb after the hammer blow. He was going to need assistance. Besides, he had to find out what he was dealing with. He got to his feet and worked at the tape around Pidgeon’s wrists.

‘Guv, you won’t believe who did this,’ Pidgeon started to say.

‘I don’t need telling,’ Diamond said. ‘Where’s Dawn?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t know how long I’ve been here. He grabbed me from behind and put something over my face. I think it was chloroform. When I came to, I was lying here, trussed up.’ The last of the tape parted from his arms. ‘I can untie my feet.’

‘She phoned me,’ Diamond told him. ‘Said she was hiding somewhere between the seats, but she’s not there any more. He means to kill her if he hasn’t already.’

‘Dawn? Why?’

‘There isn’t time to explain. He must have got her backstage.’

‘He could have left the building.’

‘No chance. All the exits are covered. He’s in here somewhere. We need the house lights on. There must be a control room.’

‘Back there.’ Pidgeon pointed towards the auditorium. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He finished freeing his legs.

‘Right. I’ll check behind the scenes.’

‘You’re not armed. D’you want my baton?’

‘Keep it. After that whack on the shoulder I couldn’t lift it.’ He crossed to the prompt side, glanced up in the wings to make sure no one was in the DSM’s position, and moved along the passage towards the three main dressing rooms. He located a light switch and was relieved when it worked. On trying each of the doors, he found them locked. What next, then? He could dash upstairs to four, five, six and seven, but would a killer on the run risk being trapped up a staircase that led nowhere else? Anyone so familiar with the layout would surely have taken a route with more chances of escape.

He moved on to the fly floor. Faint beams of light leaking from the other side of the scenery allowed him to see his way at ground level but the vast space above his head could have been the inside of a coffin. For a moment he stopped and listened. There was no sound. It was wise to remember that if the killer was lurking here he, too, had just enough light to see. He edged forward with caution, primed for another hammer attack.

He’d just crossed to stage right when he was stopped in his tracks by a voice speaking his name immediately above his head.

Impossible. Nobody was there.

He heard the hiss of static. He squinted in the poor light and found himself looking at a loudspeaker.

The speaker boomed again. ‘You can stop charging around like a demented elephant. She’s been dead twenty minutes.’

‘You bloody maniac. Where is she?’ he shouted back, and got no reply except the click of a disconnection. ‘You gain nothing by killing her. You’re finished.’

The last word echoed back to him from the fly tower.

He turned and ran back towards the opposite side, thinking that the DSM’s console must be the source, but nobody was there. Obviously there were other points in the building linked to the loudspeaker system.

Dead twenty minutes: callous words spoken with the disregard he expected of this killer. If true, this was the worst outcome imaginable. Dawn Reed was young, inexperienced, brave. The killing of any police officer on duty is rightly treated as the ultimate crime. She’d been here obeying orders, his orders, his alone. He should never have sent her in.

He shuddered, more in horror than fear. Urging himself to concentrate on what he had to do, he accepted that some, at least, of the killer’s words couldn’t be denied. This was, indeed, a pointless pursuit. The building was too large for two men to search. Soon there would be reinforcements he could call on. The arrest would follow. The real urgency had been to save Dawn’s life. How much reliance could he place on the words of a murderer on the run?

In this case, enough for huge concern. This man picked his words with care.

The tannoy crackled again. This time the voice was Pidgeon’s. ‘House lights are on, guv.’

‘Okay, I’m coming,’ he said. His words weren’t going to be heard. He spoke them to release some tension. He moved fast around the outside of the set, pushed open the scenic double doors and crossed the stage. The curtain held none of those childhood fears now.

He parted the heavy lengths of velvet and stepped forward, and the horseshoe auditorium was before him in all its magnificence, the best view of the house you would get, every light now glowing, including the central chandelier. The great actors of seven generations had stood on this spot and delivered curtain speeches. But the significance was lost on Diamond. He was watching for a movement, and there was nothing. No one was in sight.

The sound of a handclap began, a slow, ironic slapping of palms. One pair of unseen hands was mocking his appearance in front of the curtain. He couldn’t tell where it was from, except that it seemed close, not the back of the theatre or the upper tiers. Presently it died away.

If nothing else, he knew for certain that the killer was out front and could see him. Some kind of resolution was imminent.

He decided to remain where he was. This was as good a vantage point as any. Staring out at the rows of empty seats, he tried to picture the sequence of events. Dawn had been out of sight crouching down in the stalls. Presumably she’d been discovered, attacked and taken somewhere nearby. Moving her upstairs would have been impractical.

A voice surprisingly close called out, ‘Do you want a prop? A skull would do nicely.’

He knew who it was. As ever, the words were spoken with deliberation and wrapped in some allusion he didn’t understand. ‘What did you say?’

‘What are you up to, standing centre stage? Is this an audition? You’ll never make a Hamlet, but you might get by as one of the gravediggers.’

He glanced right and left. No one was in front of the curtain with him and the voice hadn’t come from behind. It wasn’t amplified.

‘That’s a clue for you, the Hamlet reference. They always use the trap for the graveyard scene. Her body is below where you are standing, in the understage,’ the voice continued, relishing its advantage. ‘I don’t suppose you knew there was anything down there. You get to it through the band room. No need to hurry, however. You’re too late to make any difference.’

Now he could see the speaker – in the lower of the two boxes to his right: the Agatha Christie, a fitting place for a murderer’s last stand.

Fred Dawkins.

The traitor had been speaking just out of Diamond’s line of sight, masked by the near side of the box. Now he had stepped into view, close enough to shake hands if Diamond were to move along the front edge of the stage.

A handshake was not in the plans of either.

‘Keep your distance. I’m still holding the hammer,’ Dawkins warned. ‘I’ll pay you a compliment, superintendent. I was streets ahead of you before tonight. Now I’m a mere half dozen yards away and I don’t flatter myself that I’ll walk out of this theatre a free man. So let’s exchange some home truths. What changed your mind? You weren’t planning to come here when we last spoke.’

Centre stage was new territory for Peter Diamond. He wasn’t comfortable in this position, being invited to lay out his case, yet he couldn’t risk walking off when he had the man in sight. The sensible response was to engage with Dawkins for as long as possible in the hope that George Pidgeon would see what was going on and come to his aid. So he started to voice some of the things that properly should have been spoken under caution in an interview room with a tape running. ‘I got your number, quite literally,’ he told Dawkins. ‘Five-one-eight-nine, on a seven year rap in Manchester Prison, Strangeways as it was known then, 1983 to 1990, for fraud, embezzlement, false pretences, depriving old ladies of their life’s savings. I spoke to the deputy governor this evening. You’re a con man, known at that time as Hector Dacreman.’

‘Quite a leap from Strangeways to Sergeant of Police,’ Dawkins said, unimpressed, as if there was room for doubt.

‘Yes, but you’re good at what you do. I asked for the names of prisoners active in the drama group that flourished then, the group Denise Pearsall supervised as a visiting tutor, and I was told convict Dacremen, 5189, was one of the leads in the 1988 production of Waiting for Godot. There is even a photo from the prison magazine, scanned and e-mailed to me. The likeness satisfies me. It would satisfy anyone.’

‘It’s of Estragon, presumably.’

‘Dacreman, I said. That was the name you were known by.’

‘Is the actor wearing make-up? Is it really me, do you think? They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world.’

‘You kept the same initials, too. Hector Dacreman. Horatio Dawkins.’

He gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘Nothing gets past you.’

‘They’re sending your fingerprints.’

‘One way or another, you seem to think you have snared me.’

‘You snared yourself,’ Diamond said, ‘the first day you worked in CID.’

A slight frown. ‘How was that?’

‘Your version of the interview with Denise in the case file. I asked you to type up all the witness statements. When I compared the printout with the notes Dawn Reed made with her speed-writing, I noticed you left off the first words Denise spoke when she saw you: “Have we met before?”’

‘Small talk,’ Dawkins said. ‘You don’t put small talk in a witness statement.’

‘Not small in this case. It came as a huge shock for you that Denise thought she recognised you. You quickly glossed over that by saying she must have seen you patrolling the streets of Bath and she seems to have accepted that. She wouldn’t have expected one of her former convict actors to reinvent himself as a police officer.’

Dawkins smirked in self-congratulation.

‘In your prison days she wouldn’t even have known you were a con artist,’ Diamond continued. ‘It’s not the thing for visiting tutors to ask the inmates about their crimes.’

‘Please go on. I’m learning volumes.’

‘So the moment you met again at the theatre and she thought she knew you, she was at risk of being murdered. You’re a vastly ambitious man. Conning your way into the police after serving a prison term was a triumph, difficult and dangerous, but you managed it, a massive investment of time and deception. I’ve seen your record, the lies, the forged references that got you into Hendon as a recruit.’

‘And if you’ve seen my file you’ll know Horatio Dawkins was the star of his year at Hendon.’

‘Amazingly, yes. Praised for supporting the young recruits straight out of school and improving morale. Eighteen weeks of training and then a job in the Met, and within four years a sergeant’s stripes and the move to Bath Central. Not enough. You set your sights on a transfer to CID. And what an opportunity arrived when the Assistant Chief Constable joined the BLOGs group you were choreographing.’

He smiled again. ‘There is a saying: he dances well to whom fortune pipes.’ His ego couldn’t resist these asides, regardless that they were confirming Diamond’s case.

‘And yet Denise had the knowledge to destroy all you’d achieved. She had to be eliminated. You thought of a way of killing her that would be passed off as suicide. You set an elaborate trap. First you armed yourself with Rohypnol. As a sergeant from uniform you’d had ample opportunities to acquire the drug, confiscating it from night-clubbers. An opportunist like you isn’t going to surrender all the drugs he snatches.’

‘Speculation.’

‘We found traces in dressing room eleven.’

‘I know that, but you can’t link it with me.’

‘Forensics will. Let’s stay with the trap you set for Denise. You sent her some kind of message to lure her into the theatre on Tuesday night after everyone else had left. My guess is that you offered to tell her the true explanation for Clarion’s accident. Poor woman, she was distraught about it, half fearing she’d made some terrible mistake with the make-up, so the chance of redemption was sure to reel her in. She was to meet you in dressing room eleven. You’re familiar with the layout of the theatre, having choreographed several BLOGs productions. Knowing the door codes, as you did, you could come and go at will. You met Denise, slipped Rohypnol into her drink, took her onto the riggers’ platform in the fly tower and pushed her off. It was meant to be interpreted as suicide.’

‘And does that complete the case for the prosecution?’ Dawkins asked in a measured voice as if he was a judge, not the accused.

‘No. There’s more. It became increasingly clear to me that someone on our side of the investigation was bent. The murderer was getting inside information.’

‘Such as…?’

‘The call that came in from Bristol Police about Clarion discharging herself from hospital. You put it on computer instead of telling me directly.’

‘I acted properly, filing the call. As a newcomer I wasn’t to know you need telling everything by word of mouth.’

‘That wasn’t the reason. You were alarmed. Clarion was a loose cannon. None of us knew what she’d been thinking while she was stuck in hospital or what she intended to do next. You could see the suicide theory being blown out of the water.’

‘Immaterial,’ Dawkins said. ‘You insisted on keeping an open mind about Denise’s suicide.’

‘Which was precisely why you decided the time had come to remove all doubt.’

‘You can’t believe the suicide note was my doing.’

‘Oh, but I do. I know. It was deviously planned, I give you that. You came up with the suggestion that an extra powder-box spiked with caustic soda was hidden somewhere backstage. I sent you and Ingeborg to search for it. You had the fake note ready in your pocket. While you were making the search, you planted the note in the German oven and of course it was discovered after I arrived. Neat. But there was a flaw.’

‘The famous specks of ink?’ Dawkins said, still unruffled.

‘Yes. I had Paul Gilbert checking everyone’s printer and he couldn’t find the right one. The reason is that it was in our own CID room. Tonight after everyone had gone I examined the statements you typed and I looked at Denise Pearsall’s and saw the telltale specks in exactly the formation we found on the suicide note. It was bloody obvious that it had been printed in our own office and we had a killer on the team.’

‘No prizes for guessing who you thought of first.’

‘I had to be certain. I wanted to know precisely who Horatio Dawkins was and how he came to join the police service. I had a hunch that you used the old trick of stealing a dead man’s identity, so I looked in the death registers for someone called Dawkins of about your age who fell off the perch between 1990 and 1994. I found him, got his date and place of birth and matched them to the details on your file.’

‘Admirable,’ Dawkins said in a flat voice. It may have been meant as sarcastic, but it sounded like defeat.

‘Getting back to Clarion,’ Diamond said, ‘Bristol Police told you the hotel she was staying in.’

‘The Cedar of Lebanon. Nothing secret about that.’

‘Except that you decided to drive over there last night and find out what was going on. You called on her at the hotel, didn’t you?’

‘What makes you think I did?’

‘It’s the logical explanation. Clarion wanted to talk. She had a bad conscience about what she’d done on the first night, the caustic soda she’d smeared on her own face without fully realising how damaging it was. Denise was dead and the theatre faced a commercial disaster. She wanted to make amends, give money to the theatre. But the danger for you was that she was about to destroy the theory of Denise’s suicide you’d painstakingly built up. Denise didn’t use the caustic soda. Clarion did. Clarion was a chronic self-harmer. You learned that she was about to confess everything to the theatre management.’

‘What am I supposed to have done about it?’

‘You must have thought about murdering her in the hotel. It would have been simpler, but I guess something went wrong. Maybe you were seen on a security camera. Whatever it was, you could afford to wait for the next opportunity. You got back in your car and followed her limo to the theatre and murdered her there. Nobody suspected you because nobody knew you were in the building that night. You let yourself in through the side entrance while the first half was in progress, waited for the interval, entered the box and suffocated her with a plastic bag. You were out of there and away without anyone seeing you.’

‘Leaving no traces.’

‘I wouldn’t count on that. The scene of crime people have been through. As you and I know, DNA is a marvellous aid to detection, but getting a result takes time. The men in white coats can’t keep up with the pace in a fast-moving case like this one.’

‘So it’s down to you and me to sort things out,’ Dawkins said.

‘You, me and the armed police waiting at every exit. Waiting for Godot.’

‘Estragon, to be precise,’ Dawkins said. ‘I played Estragon.’

‘That’s good, because the only thing I know about the play is that Godot never arrived.’ Diamond paused. ‘Where are you?’

Dawkins had vanished.

Simple, of course, to do a disappearing act when all it needs is a step backwards into the box. And Diamond had no way of stopping him. The mobile would have been useful at this point, but he’d forgotten it existed.

With all exits sealed, Dawkins could hide, but he wouldn’t escape. Diamond’s mind was on a more disturbing duty.

He stepped to the front of the stage and let himself down to floor level, the orchestra pit. He tried the door to the understage area normally used by the musicians and found that it opened. There were steps down into the band room. The light from the auditorium allowed him to see a little way ahead and he found a light switch.

He discovered Dawn Reed lying on the floor towards the back. She was bound and gagged with duct tape, as George Pidgeon had been. Like him, she was still alive. Dawkins had conned and lied to the last.

Peter Diamond wasn’t a religious man, but he thanked God, just the same.