The Twist of a Knife

9 Seven Suspects

It was a very different experience returning to the Vaudeville Theatre that evening. Two nights before, I had been nervous almost to the point of feeling sick – but it was clear to me now that I’d got things out of proportion. The failure or success of Mindgame was rather less significant than the prospect of twenty years in jail, and although I knew I hadn’t gone anywhere near Harriet Throsby, I could see the evidence inexorably piling up against me with two malignant police officers bulldozing their way to a false conviction. Why had Olivia been so malicious? She knew I hadn’t threatened her mother. Worse still, why had Hawthorne been so ready to believe her? His lack of faith was almost as dispiriting as the accusation itself, and although it was true that he’d managed to delay the police investigation – with Kevin’s help – that was all he’d done so far. Couldn’t he at least have been a bit more worried about me? Weren’t we supposed to be friends?

I was also aware that time was trickling away. Hawthorne had said that we had forty-eight hours to solve the crime and two of those had already gone. Fighting my way into the station, getting stuck behind a woman searching for her Oyster card, waiting for the next train, which, the departure board told me, was going to take an infuriating seven minutes to arrive, stopping at a red signal with the driver refusing to announce when we would be moving … all this played havoc with my nervous system. I’m the sort of person who gets panic attacks about the average-speed cameras on a motorway. Having Grunshaw and Mills lumbering up in the fast lane behind me, flashing their lights and shouting ‘Murder’, terrified me. It was something that had never happened to me before.

But Hawthorne was in no hurry as we climbed back up to street level at Charing Cross station. I saw him take out his cigarettes and knew what he wanted. ‘Fancy a coffee?’ he asked.

‘Not really,’ I said. I looked at my watch. ‘The play begins in an hour.’

‘I’ve already seen it.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting we go in and see it, Hawthorne. I mean—’ I played back what he had said. ‘You’ve seen it? When?’

‘I went to the Wednesday matinée. I was on my way home when you called from the custody centre.’

‘What did you think of it?’ After everything that had happened in the last two days, was that really the question I’d just asked? But it was out of my mouth before I could stop it. It really mattered to me.

‘I thought it was very good. Very witty. William enjoyed it too.’

‘You took your son?’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘His school closed early for staff training and the kids had the afternoon off.’

‘He didn’t think it was too violent?’

‘You should see his school!’ Hawthorne lit a cigarette before I could stop him. ‘He didn’t get some of it, but nor did I – and that gave us something to talk about afterwards.’

I felt an unusual sense of warmth towards Hawthorne and I was annoyed with myself for what I’d just been thinking. ‘You should have let me buy the tickets,’ I said. ‘I could have got them half-price.’

‘That’s OK, Tony. They were selling them two for the price of one anyway.’

The theatre was right in front of us. The pavement outside the main entrance was deserted. Not a good sign.

‘I suppose we’re here to see the actors,’ I said. ‘They’ll be onstage in an hour.’

‘Plenty of time, mate. Lucky it’s a small cast!’

We ducked round the side and went up Lumley Court, one of those old, forgotten alleyways that London does so well. On one side, the wall was topped with razor wire. On the other, a set of double doors provided an emergency exit from the theatre itself. Hawthorne tested the doors – he did it without thinking – and seemed to be pleased that they were firmly secured. We then climbed a short flight of concrete steps that led up to Maiden Lane and the stage door.

I remembered coming here after the first-night party when I was still hoping the play would be a success. It felt like a lifetime ago … and someone else’s life.

The back of the theatre felt even more deserted than the front, but, as always, Keith was perched at his desk, surrounded by old-fashioned telephones with large punch buttons and four small TV screens. I have described him as the deputy stage-door manager, but he’d only been at the theatre for a short while and it was unclear if he was temporary or permanent. He was only in his thirties – most of the stage-door managers I’d met had been much older than that and very much the cornerstone of the buildings they guarded. Keith was more wayward, sitting with his legs stretched out, displaying grubby jeans and trainers. Whenever I went past him, he seemed to be rolling a cigarette, although I’d never actually seen him smoke one.

‘Good evening, Keith,’ I said.

‘Oh, hello, Anthony! How are you doing?’ One thing that he’d definitely got right was that he was always cheerful. Bad reviews, poor audiences, murder … he took them all in his stride.

‘I’m OK, thanks, Keith.’ He had never told me his surname. ‘How are we doing?’

He had a rash on his neck and he scratched it. ‘We’ve taken a knock with some of those reviews,’ he admitted. ‘Critics can be bastards. But we’ve got a decent audience. Not too bad for midweek.’

It was actually Thursday.

‘It’ll pick up at the weekend,’ he went on. ‘These days it’s all about word of mouth. You’ll see.’

Meanwhile, Hawthorne had been examining the television screens. There were only four of them, but they showed six different views of the theatre, the fuzzy black-and-white images shifting as one camera took over from another. I saw the main entrance to the foyer with a few early arrivals trickling in, the stage door and a stretch of Maiden Lane, the stairs leading down to the dressing rooms, the entire length of Lumley Court looking down to the Strand, the auditorium – with row upon row of empty seats waiting, perhaps forlornly, to be filled – and the stage itself, with a stagehand sweeping the floor. ‘Do these just show you what’s happening, or do they also record?’ he asked.

‘This is Daniel Hawthorne,’ I explained. ‘He’s a detective. He’s looking into the murder of Harriet Throsby.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Keith’s face fell. ‘I’ve had it up to here with that, to be honest with you. We had the police in and out all day yesterday, asking all sorts of stupid questions. Did I see Harriet Throsby arrive? Of course I did!’ He pointed at the screen showing the front entrance. ‘That’s what I’m here for! They went on and on about those bloody knives. I didn’t buy them! I just handed them over. And they’ve only gone and closed the green room. Why would they do that? She wasn’t murdered there! They still haven’t told me if I’m allowed to open it …’

‘You saw her arrive,’ Hawthorne said, repeating what Keith had just told him.

‘That’s right.’

‘How did you recognise her?’

‘You get to know all the critics, working in this job.’ Keith eyed Hawthorne suspiciously, as if he resented this further interrogation. ‘I was at the Lyric before I came here and there was a picture of her in the laundry room.’ He smirked. ‘Complete with Hitler moustache.’

‘How long have you been at the Vaudeville?’

‘Two months.’

‘Do you enjoy it?’

‘It’s all right. I used to work in hospitality. Barman at the Best Western in Avonmouth. Night manager at the Bristol Marriott. This is a lot more interesting. We had Emily Blunt in this morning!’

‘Did she buy tickets?’ I asked.

‘No. It was the wrong theatre. She was looking for the Aldwych.’

Hawthorne cut in. ‘So, do the cameras record?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Keith shook his head disdainfully. ‘All this equipment is rubbish. It’s years out of date. I’m meant to see everything and if there’s anything funny going on, I call Pranav, the stage manager. That’s if the phones are working, but half the time the line’s down!’

‘Did you see anything unusual on Tuesday night?’

‘I already told the police – that fat one and her ratty assistant. It was a first night. Everyone was a bit tense and there was a lot of movement at the stage door. Flowers arriving. Champagne. The weather wasn’t too good, so no one was hanging around. It was a full house, of course. Lots of people milling around at the front …’

‘What about after the play?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about, Mr Hawthorne. You can’t think that anyone working here had anything to do with it. I mean, she was a critic. She didn’t like the play. But there’s no way an actor would ever have wished her harm.’

‘Or a writer,’ I added.

Hawthorne ignored both of us. ‘You were here all evening,’ he continued.

‘That’s right. Yes. I’m always the last to leave. Make sure everything’s secure, lock up and home by midnight, except when it’s Shakespeare and then it seems to go on half the bloody night.’ He sighed. ‘The curtain came down at nine forty-five, but there was a party and then the cast came back for drinks downstairs, so it was almost one o’clock before I got away.’

‘Do you know what time they all left?’

‘We have a book.’ He pointed at the table behind us. ‘Everyone has to sign in and sign out. The management is very strict about that.’

Hawthorne swung the book round and turned back a couple of pages. Sure enough, everyone who had been in the green room had left a record of their visit.

Name

Time In

Time Out

Ewan Lloyd

10.20 pm

12.45 am

Tirian Kirke

10.20

12.25

Jordan Williams

10.30 pm

00.50 am

Sky Palmer

10.45

12.35

Anthony Horowitz

10.50 pm

12.40 am

Ahmet Yurdakul

11.25

12.55

Maureen Bates

23.25

00.55 am

The times accorded with what I already knew. Ewan and Tirian had been drinking in the green room when I arrived at the theatre and went down. Jordan had met me. He was still upstairs in his dressing room. Sky had arrived moments ahead of me. I had caught up with her outside as she shook off her umbrella.

At the end of the evening, after reading the review that had brought the party to a close, Tirian had been the first to leave, followed by Sky. I had been the third out of the door and remembered looking at my watch and scribbling the time in the book. Ahmet and Maureen, it turned out, had been the last to depart, shortly after Jordan. I couldn’t help wondering what they’d got up to in those last few minutes.

‘So you saw everyone on the way out.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Did you talk to any of them?’

‘None of them were in the mood for a chat after that review. Tirian mentioned it – but only briefly. He was catching the last train to Blackheath and he only had ten minutes to get down to Charing Cross.’

‘He didn’t have his motorbike?’ I asked.

‘He’d have been mad to get on that fancy bike of his after the amount you lot had had to drink. I cleared away the bottles! Sky had a cab waiting for her. Mr Lloyd called an Uber.’ Keith frowned. ‘I’m not sure if I saw you, Anthony. Maybe you slipped out while my back was turned!’ He said this as if I had done something wrong. ‘I didn’t see Jordan either, but I checked you’d both signed the book before I locked up. I spoke to Mr Yurdakul for quite a few minutes. He was the last to leave. He wasn’t at all happy.’

‘According to this, he was with his assistant, Maureen Bates,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Yes. She was with him. She was holding on to his arm. He didn’t look well.’

After one bad review? Wasn’t that a bit of an overreaction?

‘Can we get into the green room?’ Hawthorne asked.

Keith thought for a moment. ‘You can do what you like,’ he said. ‘It’s no skin off my nose. The police haven’t said anything more to me and we can’t keep it locked up for ever. It’s not as if anything happened there – and anyway, I cleared up after everyone left, so if there were any clues or whatever it is you’re looking for, I’d have got rid of them, I’m afraid.’

‘When you say you cleared up, what do you mean?’

‘Well, they’d had a cake. I put what was left of it in the fridge. I suppose it’s still there. I did the washing-up, which didn’t take a minute. Like I said, I cleared away the bottles. There was some sparkling wine, which I put on the side, and I threw away a couple of empties … whisky and vodka, I think. That was it.’

‘Did you find an ornamental knife? A dagger?’

‘You mean from the producer? They all got one … I know because when they were delivered, I had to take them in. There were five of them, stacked up in the office … first-night presents. And the answer to your question is yes. One of them was left behind in the green room. Someone had stuck it in the cake.’

That was Jordan Williams’s knife. I remembered him stabbing the cake after Sky had read the review. It was something I would never forget.

‘What did you do with it?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I washed it and left it in the sink.’

‘Were there any other daggers in the room?’

‘There may have been. I didn’t really look.’ Keith frowned. He had suddenly remembered something. ‘And there was the broken glass!’ he exclaimed. ‘I cleaned that up too.’

‘What broken glass?’

‘I should have mentioned it to you earlier. You asked me if I’d seen anything unusual. But I didn’t see it exactly. I heard it.’ He paused. ‘It was twenty past twelve and I was just thinking of going downstairs to tell everyone it was time to get moving. They weren’t meant to be there after midnight. That was what we’d agreed and it wasn’t as if I was being paid extra to stay here. Anyway, that’s when I heard the sound of breaking glass – on the other side of those doors.’

He pointed at the double swing doors that led into the backstage corridor.

‘Did you find out what it was?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘Yeah. It was really strange. It turned out that one of the light bulbs had exploded. I can’t imagine how that happened because there was nobody around. I had to get a dustpan and brush and look here … !’ He held out his hand, showing us a cut on his finger. ‘I did that picking up the pieces. I was looking for a plaster when Tirian came up and told me about the review and the party finishing. Maybe the light bulb was a bad omen!’

‘Does that happen often? Electrical appliances blowing up?’

‘Well, I haven’t been here very long so I can’t say. But a lot of the fittings in this theatre are very old. Maybe it’s haunted? I don’t know.’

Keith handed over the key to the green room – an old, prison-style key on a wooden block – and we passed through the swing doors. It seemed strange to me that he’d recognised Harriet Throsby. He’d seen a photograph of her in another theatre – and one that had been defaced. It surely wouldn’t have been easy to pick her out in a crowd, the image projected onto a blurry black-and-white TV.

I said as much to Hawthorne.

‘She had quite distinctive looks,’ he said. ‘You recognised her too.’

‘I’d seen her at the Old Vic,’ I countered, back on the defensive.

We reached the staircase. Looking around me, I noticed that both upstairs and downstairs, the backstage area was brightly lit. ‘Do you think someone broke the bulb deliberately?’ I asked.

‘It’s possible.’

‘Maybe they were trying to hide something,’ I suggested. ‘There was something they didn’t want Keith to see too clearly.’

‘That’s possible too.’

Hawthorne had nothing more to add. We continued downstairs, past the dressing rooms and back underneath the stage-door manager’s office. The green room was in front of us. Hawthorne unlocked the door and we went in.

I wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but the room was exactly as I remembered it: warm and secluded, a refuge from difficult audiences and bad reviews. It had been dark and raining when we had gathered here on the first night. Now it was early evening and the weather had improved – not that either of these things made much difference. The glass in the window was frosted and even if we’d been able to look out, the alleyway wouldn’t have allowed much light to penetrate. I thought I could smell alcohol, but that was probably the carpet. Instinctively, I ran my eyes over the various surfaces, hoping to see the dagger I had been given and which, after all, I might have forgotten and left behind. Of course it wasn’t there. The last time I’d seen it, it had been in Cara Grunshaw’s evidence bag.

It should have been obvious all along, but I’m afraid the truth of my situation only occurred to me at that moment. Somebody had taken my dagger. They had done it quite purposefully, using a towel or a plastic bag to make sure that they didn’t add their fingerprints to my own. In other words, long before Harriet Throsby was killed, they had decided to frame me. Somebody hated me. And it could only be one of seven people.

Six of them had been in the green room with me that night: Ewan, Tirian, Jordan, Sky, Ahmet and Maureen. The seventh was Keith, and although I couldn’t think of an earthly reason why the deputy stage-door manager would want to do Harriet Throsby harm, he had been the last person to enter the green room and he could easily have picked up the dagger belonging to me, so it seemed only reasonable to add him to the list. It was an unpleasant thought that one of them had been lying from the start, smiling at me and jollying me along while, all the time, they were planning to send me to jail. But the cloud had one silver lining. Seven suspects! That made it easy. Hawthorne would have solved the whole thing before breakfast.

I watched him as he went over to the dustbin and pulled out two empty bottles: Sky’s vodka and the whisky that Tirian had brought. He glanced at it and was about to put it back in again when he noticed something else. He leaned down and took out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. I saw the branding – L&M – the white letters printed sideways on a bright red background. I recognised them immediately. ‘Those are Ahmet’s,’ I said.

Hawthorne opened the packet. ‘He left three inside.’

I looked more closely. It was true. There were three cigarettes inside the package. They had been broken up when the carton was crumpled. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘What makes you think it was him?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘That’s definitely his brand. And he was smoking them after the party.’ I tried to come up with an answer. ‘Maybe he decided to give up.’

‘A bit of a strange time to make a decision like that, mate.’ He slipped the pack and the broken cigarettes into his pocket.

‘Listen, Hawthorne …’ I was excited to share what I had just worked out. ‘My knife was taken from this room. I’m sure of it. It only had my fingerprints on it. That means someone deliberately set out to frame me!’

‘You think so?’ He sounded surprised.

‘How else could one of my hairs have ended up on Harriet’s body? The killer must have done that too.’

‘Can you remember anyone pulling a hair out of the back of your neck?’

‘No!’ Was he being deliberately facetious? ‘But I told you. I never went near her. So it follows that someone must have put it there.’

Hawthorne considered what I’d just said. ‘Then the question is, who hated you enough to want to do that?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘They were all probably a bit pissed off with you. After all, you’d written the play.’

‘They all liked the play,’ I said. ‘That’s why they agreed to do it. Nobody could blame me for the bad reviews.’

‘Harriet Throsby did: “ … his talents fall lamentably short of what is required for an entertaining evening in the more adult arena of the West End and he must take much of the blame for what ensues.” That’s what she wrote. Maybe there was someone else in the cast who agreed.’

Had Hawthorne really learned the whole bloody review, word for word?

‘I don’t know what the reason was for killing her,’ I said. ‘But it’s crystal clear. Whoever did it wanted to make sure I got the blame.’

‘It’s definitely a possibility.’

And yet the way he said it made it sound unlikely.

I heard the bang of a door somewhere above and a deep voice making inarticulate sounds. It was Jordan Williams. He had signed in at the stage door and was making his way to his dressing room, doing some sort of voice exercise.

Hawthorne looked up. ‘Seven suspects,’ he said. ‘And it looks as if the first is right next door.’