Graham and I had seen a few corpses in our time but we’d never had anyone poisoned right in front of us like that. We were both pretty shaken. Everyone was. It was now blindingly obvious that Tiffany’s stalker hadn’t been making empty threats – he really did want her dead. When Geoff was carried away on a covered stretcher, Tiffany’s lower lip started wobbling. You could almost see the thought bubble floating above her head that if she hadn’t spilt his tea it would have been her lying there with a sheet over her face.
What was less clear was how the poison had got into her cup.
“It must have been one of us!” Cynthia cried dramatically after Geoff’s body was removed from the building. “Somebody here, on the stage, right now.”
“Oh I don’t think so! No! Surely not!” protested Tiffany, looking around at everyone.
“A stranger couldn’t have got in,” insisted Cynthia. “Maggie wouldn’t have let anyone through the stage door!”
“But the fire escape was open when I went to make another cup of tea,” said Tiffany. “Didn’t you notice?”
Cynthia blinked and looked at her. “Was it?”
Tiffany nodded.
“Well, yes…” Cynthia frowned as she tried to remember. “I suppose it must have been. I wondered where the draught was coming from. The stalker must have put the poison in your tea when I went to ask Geoff to help me carry the trays. It’s so awful!”
Awful as it was, Cynthia visibly relaxed. Everyone did. The prospect of having a killer in the theatre was too much to bear. Before they started talking to the cast and crew, the police examined the fire escape door and confirmed it had been jemmied open from the outside. So everyone in the theatre seemed to be Off the Hook.
The police began by interviewing Tiffany in her dressing room. We were allowed off the stage into the auditorium, where at least the chairs were comfy. The shock of Geoff’s death suddenly hit Cynthia like a sledgehammer. One minute she was crooning “We’ll Meet Again” to herself and the next she was crying her eyes out while Elizabeth – who was looking pretty near the edge too – patted her arm helplessly. In between convulsive, snorting sobs Cynthia wailed, “Poor Geoff. He was retiring next year. What will his wife do now? They were planning to go on a cruise. Oh dear. It’s too ghastly!”
“It is,” agreed Peregrine. “He was a good man as well as a good technician. We’re going to miss him.”
“A premature exit. A role cut short. It’s utterly tragic,” sighed Rex.
I listened to the grown-ups talking while my brain ticked over. Personally, I wasn’t convinced about the fire escape and said so to Graham.
“There are stairs all up the side of the building,” he said, shaking his head. “It would be easy for someone to get in that way.”
“But the door could just as easily have been opened from the inside,” I replied.
“It’s a valid theory,” he conceded.
I combed my fringe down over my eyes and peered out from under it, examining each and every face in the rows of seats. Most people looked worried, or tearful, or shocked, or a combination of all three. One or two of the kids were actually quite excited – they didn’t know Geoff personally and having him drop dead was pretty sensational. Nothing like that had ever happened to them before and their eyes were shining with the unexpected thrill of it. Peregrine’s face had gone grey and his hands were shaking while he tried to make notes on his script. Timothy and Brad looked pretty rattled but Rex was beginning to look more bored than upset. He gave a big yawn and complained to no one in particular, “All this hanging around waiting. It’s worse than being on a film set.”
As for Hannah: she didn’t seem to be suffering from any excess of grief but she was certainly troubled. She was sitting four seats away from us with a newspaper across her lap that was open at the Sudoku page. Her forehead was creased into a frown as if she was concentrating hard and every so often she’d fill in one of the boxes in the square grid.
Eventually it was our turn to be interviewed by the police. Graham and I got up and edged down the row of seats to where Cynthia was waiting to accompany us. Hannah had her legs stretched right out and her bag was blocking the way. She moved so we could squeeze past her and it was then that I glanced down at her paper. With a prickle of unease I noticed that she hadn’t been writing down numbers at all.
She’d filled all the boxes of the puzzle with tiny little skulls.
“The show must go on.” That’s what Peregrine told us just before we were finally allowed to go home. “Tiffany is absolutely determined to go ahead,” he said, holding out his hand to his leading lady. She took it and gave him one of her scared-but-determined smiles. “And I wholeheartedly support her. This production must succeed.” I noticed that his eyes had taken on a slightly fanatical gleam.
“Told you he was worried about money,” Rex muttered to Timothy out of the corner of his mouth. “He can’t afford a flop.”
“He’s got too much at stake,” Timothy hissed back.
“We can’t let one crazed madman stop us doing our job,” declared Peregrine to his cast and crew. “Geoff wouldn’t have wanted that. The police are stationing men right here in the building so we’ll all be perfectly safe. There’s no way on earth the stalker will get in again, I have Inspector Humphries’ personal guarantee of that. We’ll call it a day now – you can return to your homes. But be back here bright and early tomorrow morning. I expect to see you at 8.30 a.m. sharp to start blocking.”
“What’s blocking?” I whispered to Graham.
“No idea,” he said. “I suppose we’ll find out.”
Blocking turned out to be extremely tedious.
What happened was that Peregrine told everyone where to stand and when to move, and the actors read out their lines. We had to walk through the basic dance moves without the music and everyone had to scribble things down on their scripts so they’d remember what to do next time. It was all very slow and boring. Of course, Graham and I didn’t have to do much more than sit at the back of the stage so after an hour I was beginning to wish I’d paid more attention to him and we’d never auditioned in the first place.
But then Jason turned up and things started to get interesting.
the new technician
Jason Cotton was Geoff’s replacement and he was panicking. He burst on to the stage looking tight with stress and immediately started gabbling at Peregrine: “Sorry I’m late! I know I was supposed to get here first thing but my stupid car wouldn’t start and then it did but of course I got stuck in traffic and then the wretched Sat Nav sent me down a one-way street by mistake and when I finally got here I couldn’t find anywhere to park – it was a complete nightmare!”
Peregrine said, “Never mind, you’re here now. And we’re only blocking at the moment.” But the soothing words didn’t quite match his facial expression – he looked cross and Jason seemed well aware of it.
“It won’t happen again,” he mumbled.
“Tsk, tsk,” Rex whispered to Cynthia. “Not a good start on his first day.”
“Poor boy,” she said. “He’s been trying to get a job with the company for weeks. He’s been ever so persistent. I do hope he’s not going to mess it up.”
Jason seemed absolutely determined to compensate for being late. He unzipped a huge holdall and started pulling out cables, speakers and microphones.
Without a word he dashed over to Tiffany and tried to clip a tiny black mike to her lapel. Before he’d even got a hand on her collar her bodyguards shot out from the wings to protect her. The speed with which they moved was really quite impressive.
“It’s OK guys,” Tiffany said, batting them away. “I’m sure Mason is trustworthy.”
“Jason,” he corrected her.
“Jason,” she repeated. “Sorry.” She must still be bothered by what had happened the day before, I thought. I mean, Jason was quite good-looking but she didn’t attempt to dazzle him with one of her smiles. Instead she was chewing her lip, staring in
to space. She didn’t even glance at him as he clipped a microphone on each of her lapels. As far as she was concerned he didn’t exist.
Jason moved on to Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. He did the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. In a few minutes he’d clipped teeny-tiny mikes onto the chests of all the grown-up actors.
Peregrine seemed a bit impatient. “Hurry it up, boy,” he said.
But Jason wasn’t going to be rushed. “I’d like to get the sound system sorted as soon as I can but it’s going to be difficult to get the right acoustic balance in an old theatre like this. It might take me a while to work it out.”
“Very well,” sighed Peregrine. “Do what you must.”
Rex muttered to Cynthia, “In my day we used our diaphragms to project our voices. We had no need of technology.” He pronounced “technology” as if it was a filthy swear word and looked with disgust at the microphone clinging to his collar. “That’s the problem with employing television actors. They don’t know how to use their voices.” He carried on moaning for quite some time but I stopped listening to him, because when Jason reached Hannah, something odd happened.
As he walked towards her she took a tiny step back, then half turned as if she had a sudden impulse to run away. It was only for a millisecond and the next moment she was standing still, chin up as if she was confronting him. “I’m only the understudy,” she told him briskly. “I won’t need a mike.”
“Oh,” he said, “OK,” and moved on to the speaking Munchkins.
Jason showed absolutely no sign whatsoever of recognizing Hannah. There wasn’t even a faint glimmer of anything in his eyes. I would happily have bet all my pocket money that he’d never met her before.
But I was equally sure that she knew him.
“That’s strange,” I said to Graham.
“Yes,” he replied. But it turned out that Graham’s mind was running on a completely different track to mine. “I always thought theatres had good acoustics, especially old ones,” he said, puzzled. “They were built to magnify the human voice. I don’t understand why everyone has to have microphones. And why’s Tiffany got two? I wonder what kind of amplification system Jason’s using?”
I didn’t bother answering him. I thought he was being fantastically boringly nerdy. I wasn’t remotely interested in technical stuff. But that was a big mistake: if I’d paid more attention to Graham another murder might have been prevented.
murderous munchkins
It wasn’t until much later that morning that we finally got to hear Tiffany sing.
By then we’d worked out the basic moves for the first section and Peregrine said that right after the tea break he wanted to do it all again, this time with music. “At this early stage I expect it to be more of a stagger than a walk-through,” he said. “But it will at least give us a sense of the direction we’re heading in.”
His words were greeted with an expectant buzz of chatter and even I felt quite excited.
Tiffany went off to her dressing room “to mentally compose herself” and “get into character” but everyone else stayed on the stage. While the grown-ups drank tea and scoffed biscuits they also did a lot of whispering in a lot of corners. I had a glass of orange squash in one hand and my script in the other – open, as if I was trying to memorize it. As I wandered about casually I managed to overhear a few snatches of muttered conversations.
There was a whole load of not-very-generous speculation from Brad, Timothy and Rex about whether Tiffany’s voice would be any good. Hannah didn’t say anything, but she sniggered nastily when Rex said he “fully expected our star to have the vocal quality of a rusty harmonica”.
Elizabeth wasn’t catty but she looked anxious when she told Cynthia, “I do hope Tiffany’s going to be good enough. She had a dreadful cold when Peregrine auditioned her. He had to take her agent’s word for it that she could sing.”
I studied our director for a second. He was sitting bolt upright in the front row of the stalls and sipping his tea – “no milk, just a slice of lemon” – from a bone china cup. His face looked perfectly calm but his shoulders had risen to just below his ears and were a dead giveaway: he was a worried man.
Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.
After the break we started the show from the beginning. Pretty soon we’d reached the scene when Dorothy’s sitting alone on stage. Us kids were crammed into the wings ready to come on when the house gets carried to Munchkinland.
As the opening chords of “Over the Rainbow” struck up I glanced across at Hannah. She was staring fixedly at Tiffany, her black-lipsticked mouth twisted into a grimace of undiluted spite. She was literally licking her lips in anticipation as Tiffany opened her mouth and drew in a breath.
A sweet, pure sound electrified the stage and filled the auditorium. When Tiffany sang it made goosebumps ping up all over my arms. It wasn’t just that she hit the right notes – she filled them with such sad longing that it cut right through me and brought tears to my eyes. It was amazing.
“The voice of an angel,” Cynthia muttered. “Oh, I wish poor Geoff had been here to listen. He would have loved it!”
Everyone was utterly awestruck by her performance. Well, nearly everyone. Rex, Brad and Timothy looked extremely disappointed: they’d banged on so much about how TV actors couldn’t perform on the stage that it must have annoyed them to be proved wrong.
But if they were cross, Hannah was incandescent.
When Tiffany had started the song, Hannah’s jaw had dropped and her heavily mascaraed eyes had grown wide. But her reaction quickly moved from astonishment to shock and then to confusion. By the time Tiffany had finished singing – to a spontaneous burst of applause from the rest of the cast and wildly enthusiastic congratulations from Peregrine – Hannah’s expression had changed again. I’d never seen anything so clearly written on anyone’s features.
Hannah was feeling positively murderous.
At lunch time, when I was coming back from the toilets, another odd thing happened. Hannah and Rex were in the corridor behind the stage and no one else was about. As I got nearer I caught a snippet of their conversation.
“Are you quite sure?” Rex demanded. His hands were on Hannah’s shoulders and he was staring intently into her face.
“Positive,” she said.
“Good heavens! Who would have believed it?”
When they saw me they sprang apart and didn’t say anything else. I don’t suppose I’d have thought any more about it if they hadn’t looked so guilty. And the fact that they’d been standing so close together was odd too: it was like they knew each other really well. Yet on stage they’d always behaved like perfect strangers.
By the afternoon we’d reached the first big dance routine: the one where Dorothy’s house crash-lands and she heads off along the yellow brick road towards the Emerald City. Graham and I had originally been told by Cynthia that all we’d have to do was sit and waft from side to side but it turned out to be more complicated than that. Even though we were plants and therefore should – in theory – have been rooted to the spot, we were supposed to get up and twirl full circle three times on three separate occasions during the song. It took a fair bit of concentration to do it without getting our limbs entwined but we managed without a fuss, which was a lot more than could be said for the Munchkins.
I’ve never seen so many kids trying so hard to outdo each other. Once the music started they all wanted to sing louder, smile brighter and dance better than anyone else. Everyone was desperate to be noticed. The girls put in their own little twirls and flounces with each step, and the boys ended up elbowing each other out of the way so they could be at the front. When a fist fight broke out among the male Munchkins, Tiffany got knocked backwards and ended up sitting in the flower bed with me and Graham. She wasn’t hurt but Jason ran in from the wings completely freaked. I thought he was worried about Tiffany but after he’d helped her up he had a major hissy fit, shrieking at us kids about the sensitivity of the
sound equipment and how much it would cost to replace anything that got broken.
It was too much for Graham’s nerdy curiosity. When Jason paused to draw breath Graham put his hand up as if we were still at school and said, “Excuse me. I’ve always understood theatre equipment to be remarkably robust. Could you tell me which system you’re using?”
Jason turned red but didn’t answer. Luckily we were spared a detailed account of the technical complexities by Peregrine impatiently waving Jason off the stage. “Let’s get on shall we? We’ve a lot to get through.”
Peregrine had to do a whole load of shouting to make the kids work together that afternoon. “You’re a team,” he kept yelling. “Not a collection of prima donnas. You’re here to support Tiffany, not upstage her.”
Only Graham and I did exactly as we were told. We followed the instructions to the letter – did the floral thing with no twiddly bits, no extra steps, no arguing. It was on account of this – Peregrine called it our Solid Professional Approach – that we ended up getting extra roles. To audible sighs of disgust from the other kids, Peregrine announced that he’d chosen us to be the flying monkeys in the second half. We would kidnap Dorothy and whisk her away to the witch’s castle.
I was madly excited about it. It would be the ideal opportunity to observe Tiffany close up. We’d be right in the thick of things and I’d really get to find out what made her tick.
But Graham was less thrilled. “Do you know what the likelihood is of us both getting irreversible muscular strain?” he asked. “I read somewhere that flying in a stage harness is physically very demanding. We could be damaged for life.”
“You have to suffer for art,” I told him. “You ought to be pleased. The other kids would kill for these parts. Did you see their faces? They looked vicious.”
Dying to be Famous Page 3