Death at the Pantomime

by Evelyn James

  “What a shame the killer could not have kindly left a fingerprint behind in this blood,” she said, before realising how that must sound to the anxious Maddock. She glanced in his direction, but he did not seem to have noticed. “Mr Maddock, you must call the police at once.”

  “Police?” Maddock said, managing to look even more horrified than before. “I can’t have the police here! The cast would be traumatised. Policemen are terrible bad luck in a theatre.”

  “I would say Mr Hutson has used up all the bad luck going around,” Clara said grimly. “The fact remains, Mr Maddock, this is a murder and the police must be summoned.”

  “I thought you could solve it without a fuss,” Maddock said with a pleading tone to his voice.

  “I am willing to assist in this matter, if that is what you desire, but it would be against the law for me to do so without reporting this incident to the police. There is no question in the matter, the police must be summoned.”

  Maddock looked miserable, then he slowly nodded.

  “I suppose you are right, but I must allow the cast to leave first. They are always tense after a performance, especially on the opening night. This would upset them terribly.”

  “What about Donald Hutson, he must be wondering about his father?” Tommy said.

  Maddock had wrapped his fingers together and turned his fists into a ball, he was unable to take his eyes from the laundry basket.

  “We… that is…” Maddock cleared his throat. “It is not unheard of for Stanley to… disappear.”

  Maddock was clenching his hands together so tight his knuckles were going white.

  “Stanley, in recent years, has suffered from a very slight drinking problem,” he said, downplaying the information. “It has never interfered with his work before, but he has been known to go off on a binge when he is… upset. The incident earlier this evening with the audience member who booed him, led to Stanley having one of his more dramatic moments. We had trouble convincing him to go back on stage. When he was nowhere to be found during the interval, we all assumed he had gone to get a drink to calm himself. When he did not return, we were concerned, but only because it was unlike him to miss a performance. Fortunately there was Donald.”

  “Well, you can safely say he was not getting a drink,” Tommy observed dryly.

  “Strange to think that a person accidentally booing him could have caused Mr Hutson such anxiety,” Clara said, staring at the sad face of the dame. With the make-up smudged and the wig missing, all the magic of the performer had evaporated and what was left was an old, bald man who had once been racked by demons. “I would have thought he could brave such a storm, he seemed so confident in himself.”

  “That is actors for you,” Maddock replied. “They act. Upon the stage they are heroes, bravely projecting themselves to the audience. Backstage they are nervous wrecks, riddled with doubts about their abilities and talents. Stanley Hutson was the greatest dame of his generation, yet he was never happy, always finding fault with his performance. Actors need constant reassurance, you see, they need applause and adoration to keep them going. Even the villains feed off the audiences enjoying their performance and hissing and booing at them. But for a hero to be booed, that is like swearing at a vicar, it is just something you would not do. So shocking, so upsetting. It cut through Stanley straight to the part of him that was holed with self-doubt.”

  “Might it be possible he took that upset to an extreme?” O’Harris said. “Might he have felt so bad he slit his own throat?”

  “He hardly threw himself in here,” Clara answered before Mr Maddock could speak. “And there is simply not enough blood for him to have died in this basket, nor a knife.”

  “So, he killed himself and then someone dumped him in here?” O’Harris suggested. “To keep the show going.”

  His pointed gaze settled on Maddock.

  “Me? I would never…”

  Clara stopped him.

  “We are missing the vital thing that makes this an unlikely suicide. The accusation on the apron,” Clara spoke. “Mr Hutson could not have written that. Aside from the difficulty of writing upside-down while dying, he was hardly likely to make such a statement. If he felt guilt about something and wanted to confess, why not leave a note? This word ‘thief’ indicates plainly that someone else was with Mr Hutson when he died. But he did not die here.”

  Clara stepped away from the laundry basket.

  “Do you have any thoughts on where this murder took place, Mr Maddock?” She asked the director. “There has to have been a lot of blood, this would have been messy.”

  Maddock nodded uneasily.

  “I understand, but I can’t offer an answer. I went to Stanley’s dressing room and there was no sign of blood there. I searched most of the used rooms backstage too.”

  “What about unused rooms?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to look everywhere,” Maddock admitted. “And I stopped once I had found Stanley.”

  Maddock winced as his words brought back to him the moment of discovery yet again.

  “How much time passed between the moment Mr Hutson was last seen coming off the stage and you found him?” Clara asked.

  Maddock shrugged.

  “Stanley is in the final scene before the interval, when Aladdin returns triumphantly with the lamp. He is also in the first scene of the second half. But Donald had to take over for that. I would say it was not long after that scene started I found him. That makes about fifteen or twenty minutes he was missing.”

  “Roughly the length of the interval,” Clara said.

  Maddock nodded.

  “That is a relatively short time to murder a man and dispose of his body,” Clara stared sadly at the deceased dame. “I doubt Mr Hutson was killed far from here. The murderer would not wish to be seen dumping this body. I suggest we look at those unused rooms.”

  Maddock nodded again, his face forlorn.

  “There are some dressing rooms along this corridor. They are out of use for the moment due to a problem with the ceilings. And there is a small room that contains ropes and pulleys that raise and lift the scenery. We don’t use those as there is a newer system of ropes backstage. No one would have gone into that room during the show.”

  “They seem as good a place as any to start looking for our crime scene, but Mr Maddock, you must send for the police at once.”

  Maddock looked truly despondent. His shoulders slumped and you might have imagined he had been accused of the crime himself.

  “I suppose it won’t be so bad,” he muttered to no one in particular. “The cast will have all gone home, but, Miss Fitzgerald, you will keep looking into this, won’t you? I have never had much faith in the police.”

  “I think you are wrong to doubt the police’s capabilities, but of course I shall continue to assist you, if that is what you want.”

  “I do,” Maddock agreed swiftly, a look of hope returning to his face. “Do you think you can solve this quickly, before it becomes a scandal?”

  Clara did not care to ask him what he meant by ‘quickly’, he might be under the impression she could name the killer before the morning and she was not going to commit herself to any time scale.

  “I shall do what I can to find the murderer,” her assurance was necessarily vague.

  Maddock seemed to accept it.

  They departed the laundry room, Maddock heading for the front of house to find a telephone to summon the police, and the others heading the opposite way to explore the unused rooms and hopefully find the crime scene.

  “Makes you wonder about that fire,” Tommy said once Maddock was out of the way. “Was it a lucky coincidence for the murderer, or a deliberate distraction?”

  “I had been thinking about that too,” Clara said as she pushed open the door to the first unused dressing room. “It was convenient. That is for sure. What better way to have the backstage near deserted than to have everyone think there is a fire? Actors are certainly not going to han
g around in their dangerously flammable costumes.”

  The moment Clara stepped into the room she saw why it was currently avoided. When Mr Maddock had said there was a problem with the ceilings, he had not mentioned that they were largely absent. There was a gaping hole above their heads, revealing the beams of the floor above. By the looks, there had been a burst pipe that had flooded through the plaster and ripped out the ceiling. The room smelt nastily damp and there was an ominous patch of black mould growing on a wall. Due to the lack of a ceiling, there was naturally no electric lighting in the room. Clara had to use the light from the corridor to examine the small room. It was obvious no crime had been committed here. Wherever Stanley Hutson was killed, there would be a lot of blood.

  “You know, going backstage of a theatre rather destroys the veneer of glamour it tries to project to the audience,” O’Harris looked grimly at the ceiling.

  “I imagine, like a lot of places, this theatre is still recovering from the bleak years of the war,” Tommy replied. “Most theatres were closed for the duration. I know this one was. That’s a lot of lost income.”

  They exited the room and went to the next. The story was the same with the ceiling here, though remarkably the damage was even worse. The old dressing room mirrors, fixed to the wall, had been smashed possibly when the ceiling caved in. Clara glimpsed a dozen versions of herself reflected in the broken glass, but there was no blood.

  They moved on again, finding the same story in the two dressing rooms on the opposite side of the hallway. Finally, they came to the room Maddock had described as containing the old pulley system. It was not precisely a room, more a corridor leading off the hallway that ran straight to the stage. At some point, someone had put a curtain up to mask off the ropes and winches for anyone walking past. Presumably it was to please the aesthetics of the actors using this corridor.

  At one time the stage had been set further forward, the theatre being much smaller and then these old pulleys would have been in the right place to haul up and down scenery. Then the theatre was expanded, the stage moved back and these ropes were redundant. It would have taken more time and money to remove the old system than just to leave it where it was, so it was curtained off and forgotten about.

  Clara pulled back the curtain and discovered the hallway was too dark, even with the light from the parallel corridor, to see anything. She shook her head.

  “I need a lamp, or something.”

  They returned to the inhabited dressing rooms searching for a light. It was there that Maddock found them.

  “Any luck?” He asked with a little too much optimism in his voice. It sounded wrong to be so keen to find the place a murder occurred.

  “We were going to explore that old pulley room, but it is too dark,” Clara explained. “We were hoping to find a candle or something.”

  “Oh,” Maddock said, then he darted into the corridor. They could hear him opening a door, before he returned with a torch. “There is one in the emergency cupboard, in case the lights go out. These corridors are pitch black without the electrics.”

  Clara gladly took the torch, only wishing Maddock had mentioned it before, and headed back to the pulley room. She pulled back the curtain and shone the light into the dark, narrow space. There was several feet of empty floor before the rope system started, but Clara did not have to go that far. The torch beam caught the edge of something glinting on the ground – a shard of glass. It looked like a piece of the broken mirror from the unused dressing room, and it was covered down one edge with a burgundy red substance.

  There was more blood just beyond where it lay, a great pool of it on the floor, and streaks spattered up the narrow walls. There could be no doubt that here was where Stanley Hutson, the greatest Dame of his age, had met his end.

  Clara shone the torch slowly over the scene, only able to take in fragments at a time. Maddock pushed back the curtain beside her and stared in horror, the colour draining from his face at the ghastly sight before him. He suddenly stumbled backwards and O’Harris stepped forward thinking the man was going to faint. Maddock kept his feet, but he looked sick to his stomach.

  “Who knew about this old corridor?” Clara asked him.

  Maddock seemed dazed as he answered her.

  “Anyone who has walked down here, most of the cast, certainly all the stagehands. Most are employed by the theatre and are completely familiar with its secrets. I have a few I employ for the company, they have been doing this for years. They know this theatre inside and out too.”

  Not a secret place then, which ruled out one means of discovering who was behind the murder. Clara was still casting her light about the small space. There was something sinister about the old ropes hanging under tension and in perfectly vertical lines. They made her think uncomfortably of nooses, though she considered it unlikely there was any such symbolism for the killer when he chose this place to kill Hutson. No, it was just a convenient place, out of the way, unused and dark – very dark. Hutson probably never saw the attack coming.

  “You think the killer could have been kind enough to leave us some clue,” Tommy grumbled, his words partly said to alleviate the tension in the air. “A bloody footprint or handprint would have been helpful.”

  “He left us the murder weapon,” Clara pointed out, shining her torch on the glass shard. “I dare say that were we to pick up that fragment, it would fit one of those broken mirrors we glimpsed perfectly. And that tells us something.”

  “It does?” Mr Maddock looked both baffled and hopeful in the same instant.

  “It tells us the murderer did not bring their own weapon. It suggests this was a spontaneous act of violence, using a weapon near to hand…”

  Clara was interrupted by the sound of boots coming down the corridor.

  “I left the front doors unlocked,” Maddock explained quickly.

  Clara stepped back into the corridor. The police had arrived.

  Chapter Seven

  Inspector Park-Coombs was a worthy and valiant ally to Clara in her detective work, but he could also be grumpy and surly. He was a man in his early fifties, who liked his routines, his sleep and a biscuit with his morning cup of tea. He did not like being called out late on a Saturday evening – just when he was looking forward to his day off – to be confronted by a crime scene that, as one constable put it, looked like an episode from Alice in Wonderland. In short, he was in a bad mood before he reached the bloody corridor and his moustache was twitching on his face. Clara greeted him politely.

  “Hello Inspector, you shall find the murder was committed through here. We have touched nothing.”

  Clara pulled back the curtain and kindly shone her light into the hallway. Park-Coombs took several moments to absorb the scene.

  “And the body?”

  “Dumped into a laundry basket a few rooms down. There was a message written on the murdered man’s clothing. It describes Mr Hutson as a thief, though I don’t understand the significance.”

  Park-Coombs gave a familiar groan. He was always gloomy at the start of a murder case, fearing that he might face insurmountable odds in attempting to solve it and end up with no solution to the crime.

  “Mr Stanley Hutson,” he said solemnly. “I saw him play Widow Twanky in London once. Never would it have crossed my mind I would be coming to the place he was murdered years later.”

  “This is Mr Maddock, the director of the Stratford Company,” Clara introduced the unfortunate man, who had regained a little of his composure.

  Inspector Park-Coombs turned and nodded at him in acknowledgement.

  “You found the body?” He asked Maddock.

  “Yes, Inspector,” Maddock replied.

  “When was that?”

  Maddock blinked fast, as if the question had been completely unexpected.

  “Oh, well, what is it now?” He glanced at his watch and for the first time Clara felt there was something odd about Maddock’s demeanour. “About… about quarter past eight.”

>   “That’s over two hours ago!” Park-Coombs blustered. “Why was I not called sooner?”

  “We had to finish the performance…” Maddock became uneasy.

  “You mean you went on with the pantomime when one of your cast was lying dead in a laundry basket?” Park-Coombs’ appalled tone reminded Clara that she had not thought to ask the same question. Perhaps she was a little more familiar with the nature of theatrical folk – the show must go on, even when one of the main stars was dead.

  “I didn’t want to upset people,” Maddock replied, as if that was obvious. “The cast would have been so shaken. Besides, Mr Hutson would not have wished for the panto to stop.”

  “I don’t give a damn what Mr Hutson might or might not have wanted,” Park-Coombs snorted. “You know it is a crime to delay reporting something like this to the police? It can be seen as interfering in police business.”

  “Well, I didn’t want you here at all,” Maddock snapped, his words imprudent. “If Miss Fitzgerald had not insisted I summon you, I would have gladly not done so!”

  Clara felt it was wise to intercede at this point, before Maddock ended up incurring the inspector’s wrath and potentially incriminating himself.

  “The matter has been reported now,” she told Park-Coombs. “And I doubt the delay has made much difference. Whoever the killer was, they were long gone before Maddock came across the body.”

  The inspector grumbled under his breath, but he moderated his tone when he next spoke.

  “I best see Mr Hutson, then.”

  Maddock led the way to the laundry room, agitated and jumpy. He seemed to half-expect to be arrested at any moment. Clara wondered what had occurred in his past to make the theatre director so wary of the police.

  They arrived at the laundry room and Maddock lifted the lid of the central basket. Mr Hutson was still inside, his bald head slumped to his right, looking as if he had just dozed off, if you did not take into account the bloody gash across his throat. His skin had taken on the grey, waxy appearance Clara had seen too often upon a corpse. His lips were devoid of colour and it would be impossible to consider him a living person, no matter how peacefully his head seemed to repose.