Detective Markham Mysteries Box Set

by Catherine Moloney

  ‘We’re looking forward to seeing the dancers perform, particularly Alexandra Fairlie.’

  Some colour returned to the other’s wan face.

  ‘Her movement’s amazing, isn’t it? George was absolutely bowled over. He used to say it was like an example of futuristic architecture, wonderful not just for classical ballet but for contemporary dance as well. Like a miracle of spatial harmony.’ The issue of Baranov’s infatuation was ignored like some sort of secret deformity that Bissell, the perfect host, was determined his guests should never see.

  The foyer was now virtually empty.

  ‘Move away from the quiche, Noakesy.’

  Their colleague jumped guiltily before deciding that attack was the best form of defence.

  ‘I was jus’ waiting to see where you were,’ he said, piggy eyes narrowing into slits of suspicion.

  ‘Mr Bissell was showing us his etchings,’ Markham said deadpan, eliciting a dry chuckle from the administrator.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Come on, let’s get in there and watch this – what was the word, Kate? – divertissement.’

  Isobel Kent was poetry in motion, thought Markham as he watched the ballerina’s languorous movement, her arms softly undulating like ribbons of water weed. It held the audience – occupying the front three rows nearest the stage – spellbound. Plucis too was superb, with space-devouring soundless jumps which gave him the appearance of some exotic big cat. The dancers performed to the sound of a single violin (the orchestra’s attendance being deferred until the full-dress rehearsal which would signal the start of the run). But even with this modest accompaniment, the effect was magical. It struck the DI that at its best a ballet partnership demonstrated a kind of exquisite awareness or superhuman courtesy which somehow raised everything to a higher plane.

  Against Ted Murphy’s strong objections, Markham had taken up a position in the wings, anxious as he was to have a panoramic view of the theatre. Noakes and Kate Burton stood on the opposite side of the stage while Doyle was at the back of the auditorium.

  Plucis moved to the centre, preparing for a solo sequence.

  Isobel gracefully moved to the rear of the stage on the side where Noakes and Burton waited.

  Markham saw her reach into the wings for something. It looked as though she was mouthing the word “water”.

  A stagehand turned round to the nearest table, picked up a plastic container which looked like a bottle of mineral water and held it out. Breathing heavily, the ballerina practically snatched it from his hand.

  In that instant, Markham heard Sheila Bloom’s voice in his mind. ‘The dancers use white spirit to clean any excess resin off their shoes.’

  White spirit.

  Not water at all.

  Feeling as though he had somehow divided into two – a part of him quite separate, watching himself and everyone else in a slow-motion dream – Markham leaped forward, crying hoarsely, ‘Isobel, don’t touch that! For God’s sake, don’t touch it!’

  As if in a nightmare, the woman who had just created patterns of unimaginable beauty onstage, jack-knifed to the ground in front of him, writhing in agony.

  ‘Bring down the curtain!’ a voice cried. And then more urgently, ‘Bring it down!’

  13. Doubts and Fears

  IN THE DREAM, MARKHAM was alone in an unknown cemetery. A phantom sun fell somewhere beyond the trees, but no rays filtered onto the path where he was blundering, unable to find his way out.

  Leaves, whipped up into brittle heaps by the freezing wind, whirled about his feet, entangling them.

  When he looked down in desperation, he could see that the ground was covered with tracks – human footprints. He heard something flutter in the spiky brambles behind him. When he turned round, a branch snaked out and scratched his face, drawing blood.

  He began to run, stumbling forward.

  Then he came to a clearing like a little amphitheatre. It was surrounded on three sides by empty wooden benches and framed by towering cypresses.

  George Baranov was sitting on the edge of the stage wearing dark trousers and a silk shirt that billowed in the wind.

  He beckoned.

  Markham was about to obey the mysterious summons when he found his way barred by a wraith in a diaphanous white tulle skirt and gauzy veil, who rose on pointe from the ground beneath his feet.

  He knew she was just a figment of his mind. All the things he was afraid of. All the things he had tried to escape.

  The ghostly figure waited, posed like a foreshortened Romantic lithograph.

  He lifted her veil and recognized Isobel Kent.

  Beyond her was Baranov. Waiting. Watching him with chilling calmness.

  Markham tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat.

  Suddenly, the ballerina extended her arms in front of her, the wrists crossed over each other, hands clenched into fists.

  Without being told, he knew the gesture meant Death.

  Then she sank slowly back down into the earth.

  Baranov’s face was stern, implacable as a carved totem.

  ‘What is your character?’ he asked in a sibilant hiss.

  When Markham was unable to reply, the choreographer rose to his feet and began to move away, disappearing into a vaporous mist that suddenly came down and covered the stage.

  ‘Stop! Wait! I need your help!’

  ‘You must have a name to dance.’

  Frantically, Markham searched his mind for an answer.

  But he was too late. Baranov was gone and he was alone once more.

  Markham woke to find Olivia looking down at him in concern.

  ‘You were having a nightmare,’ she told him, curling an arm about his shoulder, brushing dark hair away from his eyes. ‘Crying out to someone. You sounded pretty distraught.’

  The bedside clock read 4.30 a.m.

  ‘Go back to bed, dearest,’ he said gently. ‘I’m too restless to sleep.’

  Realizing that he didn’t want company, she readily complied.

  That was the marvellous thing about his girlfriend, he reflected. Never kittenish or coy, but always instinctively sensitive to his doubts and fears…

  And he had doubts and fears aplenty.

  Padding through to his study, nursing a whisky, he willed himself to recall the terrible events in the theatre earlier that night – the dreadful unravelling of that performance for the Friends of the Royal Court.

  Jake Porter, the young assistant stage manager, had been beside himself, watching as a doctor gave Isobel Kent CPR.

  ‘It was mineral water,’ Porter said over and over to anyone who would listen. ‘I always leave the bottle there for her. Everyone knows not to touch it.’

  Only it wasn’t mineral water.

  Isobel Kent had taken a huge swig of white spirit and then gone into shock, suffering a massive heart attack onstage while on the other side of the red curtain, the audience began to absorb the fact that something dreadful had happened.

  In her final paroxysm, Isobel Kent’s arms seemed to flutter up and then come down to rest as though she was impersonating a swan princess one last time.

  Then her arms stilled and the ballerina’s soul moved from earth to air.

  Barely able to get the words out, Markham made a short announcement to the effect that one of the performers had been ‘taken ill’. He doubted that anyone was deceived by the charade, but the audience dispersed swiftly and silently.

  The rest of the evening was pretty much a blur, apart from DCI Sidney pronouncing the death a ‘tragic accident’ to the dancers and staff assembled backstage, his beady cockatrice stare defying Markham to contradict him.

  But Markham was sure this was no accident.

  He recalled Kate Burton’s artless prattle about the qualities that made Isobel Kent a first-rank ballerina. Noakes and Doyle had been glassy-eyed with boredom, but the DI had been drawn in despite himself, intrigued by this glimpse into a dancer’s technical arsenal.

  ‘She s
ays that no matter how tired or out of breath she feels, she tries to disguise her breathing and not let the audience see her ribs moving in and out or her shoulders heaving up and down. Otherwise it destroys the illusion, and illusion is what they’re paying for… She just lets the musical beat become her own heartbeat, and then the heavy breathing stops… First chance she gets, she’ll drink some water in the wings to give her stamina for the next section. The stage crew always have a bottle ready for her.’

  Now music and heartbeat had ceased together, Markham thought with wrenching pity.

  Anger succeeded sadness as he evaluated the scenario.

  Isobel Kent’s backstage routine was well-known to all, right down to the bottle waiting for her in the wings.

  Someone had substituted white spirit for the ballerina’s mineral water. Someone whose maniacal hatred blazed as fiercely as the corrosive liquid which burned her insides.

  Why?

  Why attack Isobel Kent?

  The answer had to lie somewhere in that interview she had given to the Courier. Gossipy and indiscreet, she had known with a cat’s cunning how to let her readers feel the claw in her velvet paw. And in doing so, she had sealed her fate.

  As the whisky took effect, Markham began to feel less chilled and miserable, and began to think more clearly.

  Everyone in the company had access to the auditorium, therefore anyone could have done it.

  With all the toing and froing, it would have been the work of a minute to affect the substitution while bored stagehands bitched in corners about the fuss and frou-frou, grumbling about their bosses and speculating about overtime.

  Eddie Bissell had almost lost it with them. When he spotted one technician attempting to light a cigarette with shaking hands, he exploded. ‘Don’t you know where you are? You’re not in the street! This is not a gutter! This is where people dance!’

  Afterwards the administrator apologized fulsomely, but Markham could see he was in deep shock. It was left to Marguerite Aroldingen to take command and, in clipped short sentences, issue a litany of instructions to bewildered staff and dancers.

  ‘What do we do now? What do we do?’ one of the corps stuttered.

  ‘What do you mean, what do we do? We do what we always do. We keep going,’ the ballet mistress rapped.

  Markham thought back to his dream and George Baranov.

  The man at the centre of it all. The enigma.

  The ballet master darting among his nubile young dancers, tilting heads, curving torsos … like a bee among flowers.

  Was Baranov a deviant? Did the clue to these killings lie somewhere in the past, linked to sexual abuse?

  No. For all Isobel Kent’s sly innuendo, he just didn’t see it. By all accounts Baranov put women on a pedestal where they didn’t necessarily want to be. That just didn’t square with child abuse. Granted, some of his choreography was sexually explicit – an unnamed ‘friend’ had been quoted in Dancing Times as saying that if people could see into Baranov’s mind, he would be in prison – but this was a man whose conception of ballet was profoundly carnal. One of Kate’s press cuttings came back to him. ‘Dancing is rather like love-making,’ Baranov was supposed to have said. ‘We give to receive and receive to give. That is why we need applause.’ Language like that could be easily misunderstood.

  And the man was religious too. Which wasn’t to say that religious faith couldn’t coexist with depravity – Markham knew all too well that it could – but that there was something about Baranov’s simple piety which resisted the usual criminal taxonomies.

  Stretching his cramped limbs, he reached for The Daily Telegraph obituary, flipped on his desk lamp, and began to read.

  Baranov’s religious sensibilities were authentic but conventional… He always said he could not envisage God as an “essence”. God to him was an old man with a white beard, as portrayed by Michelangelo – a father with whom he liked to discuss matters face-to-face… He was a spiritual man. “Read Sermon on the Mount and Anna Karenina,” he was wont to say, “and you’ll understand everything.”

  For Baranov, dance represented something semi divine and the stage was his cathedral. “You have a sense of exultation. You become at one with God. And so it passes on, the thrill of being … the dissolving of the ego into the universe and the effacement of self. Art, when it’s great, is selfless. You need to get yourself out of the way and become transparent.”

  If anyone ever behaved less than respectfully towards a teacher, he would glare at them as if they had interrupted a church service with some blasphemous utterance… He loved the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Faith. A lifelong believer and practising member of the Church, he often talked about his childhood memories of Easter in Russia when he waited with heightened anticipation for the ritual opening of the holy doors. He had a great interest in iconography and in liturgical music… His friend Father Kyril pointed out that Baranov saw himself as a servant of God whose artistry had its foundations in his religious convictions. “God is the creator,” the choreographer used to say. “I just assemble his ingredients.” Baranov had a distinctly spiritual sensibility, for example, he wanted his production of The Nutcracker to evoke not just the fun but also the mystery and spirituality of Christmas. He insisted, “Parties, chocolates, gold paper angels, stars … all the shouting and running around you have today … that’s just one part of it. There needs to be a stillness and a waiting too. We shouldn’t forget who is being born.” Another friend and colleague, the former danseur noble Brian Shaw once said, “Ballet for Mr B was something sacred … an art of angels. Very idealized, beautiful and chivalric.” Many of his ballerinas too felt that they were taking part in a religion…

  Sometimes disparaged for undermining his leading men, Baranov’s critics observed that he seemed bent on making them disappear. But in fact, he created many glorious roles for male dancers and his “no stars” policy derived from a wish to prevent posturing and ego from creeping into the dancing – to keep the dancers honest, direct and innocent…

  No. George Baranov might have been of such a capricious nature as richly to justify the Telegraph’s final verdict that ‘he attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth by virtue of his ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant – not to mention sometimes ringing the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights of fancy from one quarter of an hour to the next.’ But a callous sexual opportunist, Markham felt sure he was not. Baranov’s idealization of women had led him to incur pain and rejection. ‘One has to be philosophical about old age. Que sera, sera. But if you’re interested in a young woman … seriously attracted… If you’re interested in one of them a lot, that can hurt deeply. Love means a lot towards the end. Even more than art.’ Not the words of a nonce, no matter what George Noakes might say.

  He put down the newspaper, flexing stiff fingers.

  What was it then? What had acted as the touchpaper for four murders? Something else in Baranov’s sexual history? A homosexual relationship?

  Sheila Bloom had hinted that Baranov might at some point have ploughed a homosexual furrow, but Brian Shaw and Ned Chester pooh-poohed the very idea…

  He needed to get Burton onto that cleaner of Baranov’s. Doris something or other… Hadn’t the nosy neighbour said she was frightened out of her wits by ‘goings on’ down in the country? It was probably something and nothing – just theatricals whooping it up – but she might be able to shed light on those screaming matches…

  Markham’s thoughts were going round in circles but he had no notion of going back to bed.

  There was a soft rustle beside him and Olivia’s hand stole into his.

  ‘I’m going to put some coffee on,’ she said. ‘How’re you feeling?’

  ‘As though somebody has put their hand on my head and is holding me under water and I don’t know when I’ll come up.’

  ‘Why don’t you meet me for lunch today in The Grapes?’

  Seeing h
im look uncertain, his girlfriend added firmly, ‘Look, Gil, you have to eat. And you’ve been up since stupid o’clock.’ A gentle pressure of the hand. ‘Once you’ve briefed the team and checked out the theatre, you’ll be ready for some time out.’

  Rain had been pelting the windows of the apartment all night, rattling incessantly as if some malicious youth lurked outside, tossing handfuls of marbles at them. But now the storm had subsided, dawn stippling the grey clouds with soft rose tints.

  ‘All right, you’re on.’

  ‘“Long live the sun and away with darkness!”’ his lover beamed.

  ‘Shakespeare?’ he ventured. After all, she was an English teacher. ‘Pushkin,’ she riposted smartly. ‘I have a feeling your Mr Baranov would have been quite a fan.’

  *

  By the time Markham reached the police station, there was a sun in the sky, albeit only a cold smear, its watery glow offering little in the way of consolation.

  Despite the early hour, Kate Burton was already at her desk, thumbing through her well-worn pile of magazines, newspapers and press cuttings.

  ‘Morning, Kate.’ He smiled at her. ‘You’ll be turning into a regular balletomane at this rate… Come into my office and let’s get a jump on the day.’

  When they were both ensconced at his desk, black coffees to hand, he observed mildly, ‘You look shattered. Bad night, then?’

  ‘Bad dreams, sir.’ The DS looked sheepish. ‘I ended up in a lake with all these swans … then it was like I was drowning … being dragged down.’ She gave a convulsive shiver. ‘My hands were covered with wet feathers from where I’d clutched at them… There was this bloke on the bank watching, all in black with a swan under one of his arms. I heard a voice in my head say, “Watch him! Watch him!” He started to do a slow pirouette when his hand suddenly shot out with a knife.’ Another shudder. ‘Then I woke up,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘Who was the man in black?’

  ‘Dunno, sir. I couldn’t see his face.’ She shifted uncomfortably. ‘You won’t tell the others will you, sir?’

  ‘I think you know me better than that, Kate. Anyway, I doubt Jungian analysis is Noakesy’s thing.’