The Death of Lucy Kyte (Josephine Tey Mystery 5)

by Nicola Upson

  ‘At least we won’t have to bother with a pantomime this year,’ Marta muttered as they got up for the interval, but she had hissed and clapped with the best of them and Josephine knew she was enjoying herself. ‘Let’s go and get a drink.’ Their aisle seats gave them a head start to the tearoom. Like the rest of the theatre, it was tastefully decorated with pale yellow walls, Japanese prints and an Angelica Kauffman painting salvaged from the original ceiling, but the effect was confused by the temporary conversion of the room into Mrs Lovett’s Pie Shop. A table at the far end promised pies ‘to last you to Aldgate pump and back’, and Marta shook her head in admiration. ‘No one can accuse them of taking themselves too seriously,’ she said. ‘I bet the regulars who come here every week have had the shock of their lives.’

  ‘Mm. Especially if they’re vegetarian. What’s it to be? Pork or chicken and ham?’

  ‘Assuming that is what’s in them, why don’t we try one of each?’ They found a table in the corner, and Marta ordered tea. ‘Before you say anything, I give in – he’s very, very good. Much better than I expected.’

  ‘Thank God. There’s nothing worse than going backstage after a performance and having to lie. “Darling, you were wonderful!” doesn’t trip easily off my tongue, even when it’s true.’

  ‘That’s a shocking admission. You’ll never be a proper playwright. But I was thinking about the Hollywood lot when I was watching him, and he’s just as convincing as Karloff or Lugosi. All right, so he milks it for all it’s worth, but you do genuinely believe he could dispatch someone without breaking a sweat, and that’s what you want from a villain.’

  ‘And the actual plays are brave, too, when you cut through the stereotypes. They might be period pieces to us, but they were dealing in their own time with crime and class and gender, and I suppose that was quite progressive.’

  Marta looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure about that. The next time I pinch your cheek and say “upon my soul, you’re a delightful little baggage”, you’ll have to remind me of how liberated we’re being.’

  Josephine laughed. ‘I wasn’t trying to claim it as a feminist classic. I just meant that the scenarios must have seemed far more shocking to a contemporary audience than they do to us.’ Before she could explain herself further, Tod Slaughter himself appeared in the bar, still in his bloodstained apron, and called everyone back in for the second half. The barber’s crimes escalated as the play romped through to its conclusion, and Josephine watched in admiration as the audience was drawn along by the power of the company and by good, honest dialogue; if anyone had come to sneer at a second-rate drama, they were wrong-footed. Marta was right about Slaughter’s villainous credentials: the laughter dwindled in the second half, and he played his character’s growing insanity completely straight, never once allowing himself to lapse into burlesque. There was an integrity to the performance that equalled anything Josephine had seen on stage at the New or the Garrick, as if the actor really believed in good and evil, in a morality that had a thousand years of history behind it. Melodrama was not unlike detective fiction in that sense, she thought: a dream world with dream justice, ordered as it should be, not as it was, and peopled with characters who behaved exactly as they were expected to and got what they deserved. Hester had lived most of her life in that world, and Josephine wished with all her heart that the illusion had not been shattered before her death.

  ‘You’d better go and find the stage door,’ Marta said, as the company took the last of four curtain calls.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘Would you mind if I gave it a miss? Between Lydia and the Hitchcocks, I see more than enough of actors and dressing rooms.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind.’

  ‘Unless you think Mr Slaughter is a crazed killer with a passion for murder relics, and all this is actually an elaborate double bluff?’

  ‘That hadn’t occurred to me and I’ll bear it in mind, but I think I’ll be safe enough in a busy theatre. What will you do?’

  ‘Go for a walk by the river, I think, and watch the lights come on from Westminster Bridge. Then I’ll wait for you in the bar. Don’t hurry, though – there’s plenty of time before dinner.’

  They fought their way through the crowds in the foyer and parted in John Street. At the stage door, Josephine was a met by a woman of around sixty, no longer in costume but easily recognisable as the Demon Barber’s partner in crime, Mrs Lovett. ‘I’m Jenny Lynn,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Tod’s wife. Come with me – he’s just wiping the blood off, but he’s looking forward to meeting you.’

  Josephine followed her along a labyrinthine sequence of corridors and stairs. ‘That was quite some performance,’ she said. ‘Are you in every production?’

  ‘Most of them. He’s killed me twice a night now for thirty years, and it doesn’t seem to matter if I’m a beggar or a duchess – I’m never breathing by the end of the play.’ She smiled, suddenly seeming much younger. ‘There were times during the early days when I was every corpse in Burke and Hare. Fortunately the company’s a bit bigger now.’ Judging by the scene-shifting that was going on overhead, the dressing room area was directly under the stage, and the thickness of the walls suggested that they were standing in the old bank’s original strongrooms. ‘Tod’s over there. I’ve made you some tea – unless you’d like something stronger after the matinee?’

  ‘No, thank you. Tea would be lovely.’

  ‘Good. You’ve got nothing to worry about. We keep chickens when we’re not on tour, and he’s far too soft even to polish them off, so you’ll be quite safe.’ She squeezed Josephine’s arm, as if welcoming a distant member of the family back into the fold. ‘He was so pleased to hear from you, you know. Hester was very important to him – to both of us, actually. That’s how we met – working for her and Walter. Go and make his day.’

  Touched, Josephine looked across the green room to where Mr Murder sat surrounded by his company, enthralling them all with another tall tale. He tore himself away as soon as he noticed her, and kissed her hand. ‘Miss Tey – how delightful. Thank you so much for coming.’ From his welcome, it would have been easy to believe that it was she doing him the favour – the old-fashioned gallantry of a different generation – and a number of the cast looked at her curiously. ‘Did you like the show?’

  ‘Yes, very much.’ Close up, the actor’s face was beginning to sag a little, but the twisted stage smile was now a broad one, and eyes that had been filled with madness were friendly and intelligent. The question was more than polite conversation; he seemed genuinely interested in her opinion, and Josephine was happy to give the answer he was hoping for. ‘I can’t actually remember when I enjoyed a performance quite as much.’

  ‘I’m so glad. It’s good old stuff, isn’t it? I know it’s fashionable these days to sit around on stage, smoking cigarettes and being witty, but I prefer to save that for my club. Give me the shadow of the noose and the scream in the dark any day – the good old plum-duff.’

  His fondness was sincere. There was none of the resentment or false modesty that Josephine had seen in actors who were doing something that they felt was beneath them, and she liked him instantly. ‘A lot of people are with you on that,’ she said. ‘You’ve sent a crowd home very happy today, and I imagine they’ll keep coming as long as you’re happy to entertain them. There’s something timeless about it.’ It was true, she thought; the heroes in her plays – Richard II, Mary Queen of Scots – had been given a contemporary relevance that had proved extremely popular, but she doubted that they would still draw an audience in thirty years’ time; the plays about Sweeney Todd, however, or Jack the Ripper and William Corder, had outlived the moment in which they were written, and continued to flourish in a very different age – anti-heroes, almost, for each new generation.

  ‘I’m pleased you said that – they’re age-old truths,’ Slaughter agreed, ‘and keeping them alive after the war is the thing I’m proudest of. I cut my teeth on those
stories forty years ago, and I still love them – when something catches you young, it usually holds on. I’ll tell you a story,’ he added, and Josephine suspected it would be the first of many; if she wasn’t careful, Marta would still be on Westminster Bridge when the sun came up. ‘We had Edgar Wallace in when I was at the Elephant, and you’ll appreciate this, being a thriller writer. I kept a box for him but he wouldn’t sit in it, and we had to shift four people out of the front row of the gallery for his party. At the end of the night, he got up on stage and told the audience that the first pennies he’d earned as a boy selling newspapers were spent on a gallery seat at the Elephant and Castle. That was where he learned to write – and look what it’s given us. They call them thrillers now, but it’s the same glorious stuff that I learned all those years ago from your godmother. She was a splendid woman, and I’m so sorry you never knew her – but let’s see if we can do something about that, shall we?’

  He opened a door for her – not dressing room number one, as she had expected, but an office and living room combined, which made it clear that he saw himself as an old-school actor-manager rather than a star. The room was busily furnished, and it took her a moment to establish that the things she was looking at – ornately framed portraits, a heavy oak settle and a fine collection of Toby jugs – were personal treasures and not props, objects designed to make the couple feel more at home during the long hours spent at the theatre. Tea was laid out on a central table, and she took the seat offered to her, feeling as though she had just walked into the pages of Nicholas Nickleby. ‘I’ve brought you these,’ she said, taking a small bundle of photographs out of her bag. ‘I thought you might like to have some pictures of your early days with Hester and Walter.’

  He took them from her, delighted with the gift. ‘My goodness, these take me back.’ He looked through the sepia images, smiling in disbelief at his younger self. ‘The pantomime shots were taken in Inverness – did you know that? Babes in the Wood, I believe it was.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She told him about the photograph she had found of herself as a child on Hester’s knee. ‘I realised then how much I owe her.’

  ‘She’d be pleased with that. It was never easy for her to perform there after everything that happened. Tell me – are they as sniffy about the theatre now as they were in Hester’s day, or have they warmed to your success?’

  Josephine gave him a knowing smile and accepted a cigarette. ‘I’d say tepid at best.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s not bad. Hester told me there was a civil war in the family when she announced she wanted to go on the stage.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Her parents had decided that she was going to be a teacher. They never stopped to wonder if she was capable of teaching anybody anything, but the only other thing she could do was cook, and that smacked of service, God forbid.’

  ‘My grandparents were exactly the same, except – as far as I know – my mother was happy to teach, and sorry when she had to give it up. Was Hester supposed to teach anything in particular?’

  ‘Piano. All girls played the piano then, whether they could or not. Every house groaned under the protestations of the Collard and Collard.’ Josephine smiled, remembering the upright that stood in the study at Red Barn Cottage to this day: it was indeed a Collard and Collard. ‘The piano was her destiny. Or the pianoforte, as my dear grandmother insisted on calling it to her dying day. Hester hated it.’

  ‘Did she? She still had one when she died.’

  ‘That will have been Walter’s. He was a wonderful musician. He arranged all the songs for the shows, and Hester loved to listen to him – except when he played Gilbert and Sullivan. If they’d had a row – which they often did – he’d play a medley from H.M.S. Pinafore and train his dog to lie on the loud pedal.’

  Josephine laughed, picturing the scene in her mind. ‘So what happened? Hester obviously got her own way about becoming an actress.’

  ‘She took lessons in private at first. No one found out – they all thought she was still intending to take money under false pretences by teaching an instrument she could never hope to learn, but it was only a matter of time before she got a part. Cornelia Carlyle in East Lynne, I think it was – a maiden lady of a certain age. No one could accuse that director of typecasting: Hester was such a pretty young thing. These days, it’s about looking the part whether you can act it or not, but then there was a fetish for never letting people play their own age.’ He was right, but Josephine hadn’t come here for a discourse on modern theatre and she moved him on as subtly as she could. ‘There was a hell of a row,’ he continued. ‘As far as Hester’s family was concerned, actresses were no better than prostitutes; they both painted their faces, especially Hester for that first part – she always said she looked like a close-up of Clapham Junction, there were so many lines. But they really did believe that actresses were fallen women, you know – they must have thought she’d found her vocation in Maria, bless her. Then there was all the money that had gone to waste on piano lessons, when she’d chosen to sleep on the Embankment and die in the gutter. It’s easy to see where she got her sense of drama from, isn’t it?’

  ‘I hadn’t realised that it was such a struggle,’ Josephine said. ‘I knew there was trouble over Walter, but not over the theatre in general.’

  ‘Walter was all part of it, I suppose. Hester was simply proving them right by running off with her leading man. A flagrant disregard of loyalty and morality, they called it – but you will never see a couple more loyal and more devoted than those two.’

  ‘When did you meet them?’

  ‘In 1901, at the Assembly Halls in Durham. I was sixteen, and they hired me for a pound and a shilling a week to play walk-on parts, open the show with a song and make myself generally useful. There were no contracts and no written agreements – just a handshake and a promise, and I’ve never regretted that. It’s how I work to this day.’

  ‘What was it like, being on tour at that time?’ Josephine had vowed to stick to questions about Hester, but she had been sucked in as always by the romance of theatre, and she allowed herself a brief diversion.

  ‘Magic, pure magic. Utterly exhausting, but we were far too excited to notice. We played halls and corn exchanges, mostly in towns that didn’t have their own theatre, and we took everything with us, including the stage. The staff – if I can use such a grand term for a crew of four – built the whole thing up from scratch.’

  ‘I’ve seen some of the sets,’ Josephine said. ‘They were in Hester’s garage when I first went to the cottage.’

  ‘Then you’ll know how makeshift and how splendid they were. We built the stage on trestles, and often had to run the gas to the stage from the other side of the building, but I promise you something – that curtain was never late. And I was being paid to see the whole country – seventy-odd towns in five months.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘I’ll never forget how I felt when I walked onto the station platform and saw the notice on the carriage window: “Reserved for the Walter Paget Company”. And I had a right to be there. It was freedom, especially at that age, and a very fine life. It still is.’

  Josephine remembered her conversation with Jane Peck, and how the secretary had said that Slaughter seemed to prefer his garden to acting these days, but he didn’t strike her as a man who was jaded with the stage; he sounded like the man who had listed his hobby as ‘work’ in Who’s Who; perhaps it was just the sadness of the occasion that had made him seem tired of the profession. ‘What was Hester like to work with?’ she asked.

  ‘Unforgettable. It was Walter’s company, but she was the lifeblood of it, a real force of nature. I was terrified of her until she’d licked me into shape. She was a martinet about language and pronunciation, and I still had a trace of my Geordie accent back then. It infuriated Hester. Every rehearsal she’d shout at me if I lapsed. She did it in a performance once. Her voice rang out through the house, and I was so embarrassed. I never did it a
gain, so I suppose her parents got their way after all – she was a marvellous teacher.’