Full Dark House

by Christopher Fowler

  Helena glared up into the darkness beneath the roof. ‘Benjamin, please, you’re an agent, lying is a professional qualification for you, like a merit badge or something. You can tell the press she’s joined the WAAFs and flown to Timbuktu on a mercy mission if you want, and they’d have no choice but to believe you. She’s frightfully upper class, and her reputation will need protecting.’

  Their conversation was punctuated by the noise of the wind section practising scales. Woolf had to raise his voice to be heard, but Helena did not wish to shout back. She knew how easily panic could infect a cast facing a deadline under already difficult conditions, but she was going to make sure that the Windmill wasn’t the only theatre to stay open throughout the war.

  ‘It’s difficult for all of us,’ she explained with feigned sufferance. ‘You’ll just have to do the best you can. I’m out of gaspers, darling, would you light me?’ Benjamin touched a match to a Viceroy and passed it to her. ‘These gentlemen are detectives, and hope to have the whole thing quickly sorted out. You know how easily these girls fall in with the wrong types.’

  ‘Perhaps we should continue this discussion in Miss Parole’s office,’ May suggested. ‘I think we’re in the way here.’ He looked back at Bryant and followed his partner’s gaze to the stage. Bryant’s attention had been drawn away by the arriving dancers, half a dozen long-legged girls who stood whispering and giggling in the shadows of the wings.

  Bryant was captivated by what he saw. The theatre held a special fascination for him. When John looked at posturing actresses angling their best sides to the audience, he saw nothing but mannequins and painted flats. Arthur saw something fleeting and indefinable. He saw the promises of youth made flesh, something beautiful and distant, a spontaneous gaiety forever denied to a man who couldn’t open his mouth without thinking.

  In Helena’s office May raised the window behind the battered oak desk and looked down into Moor Street, where men in black heavy rescue and white light rescue helmets were clearing sections of charred wood from a blackened shop front.

  ‘Am I right in thinking that, as the company’s artistic director, the production’s success lies in your hands?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Helena looked tense and angry. She brushed at the cigarette ash smudged in the cleavage of her tight white blouse. ‘I have a board of directors to answer to if Orphée aux enfers fails. I tried to keep Offenbach’s French title. They felt it would put people off. I said, “It shows solidarity with the people of France, and it’s the cancan, how much more accessible can you get?” Eighty years ago this was considered a trifle, an after-dinner joke. Now the English think it’s high art because three words are French. They’re such peasants. They’ll queue to see a mayoress open a fête but only fall asleep in opera houses. It’s not like this on the continent, you know. The French have more respect for their artists.’

  The thin November sunshine threw slats of light across her make-up as she unfurled a plume of cigarette smoke into the coils of her coppery hair. The exhalation softened her harshly painted eyes. Bryant realized that she was probably his new partner’s type, firm-jawed, full-busted, full of life. She had presence, like an expensively upholstered piece of furniture, a reminder of more luxurious times.

  Helena knew that it was important to care about the members of her cast. They weren’t actors, Benjamin had once told her, they were her children. But she had no children. What she had was a failed three-year marriage to her agent which had foundered over the argument of raising mixed-race infants in a land where black skin was still seen as a peculiarity. Now, because of the war and the lack of jobs in the theatre, she and her former husband had been forced into each other’s company again.

  ‘We have to find a way of keeping it out of the press.’ Helena joined May at the window. ‘Although the story would do wonders for the box office.’ She closed the window. Smoke still loitered in her hair, momentarily recalling an image of the Medusa. ‘This show represents a massive commitment of time, energy and money. It’s going to brighten up London and raise the morale of thousands of people every week.’ She turned to the detectives. ‘The board has been planning it for years, setting Orpheus up as a public company, raising finance on an international scale, waiting for cast availability. The war has made us redouble our efforts. None of us can afford a flop. We’re putting our futures on the line. If Orpheus fails to recoup its costs, the insurers will step in, and one of our greatest theatres will fall dark for the remainder of the hostilities, perhaps for ever. So, does anybody have to know what happened? They’re more concerned with their own safety than hearing about some dancer’s misfortune. We open in four days.’ Helena felt safer when others considered her incapable of kindness. ‘As far as we knew, she was working late on Sunday night and went home. Couldn’t she have decided the role wasn’t for her and left the country?’

  ‘Don’t you think you owe her something, Helena?’ asked Benjamin. ‘Suppose somebody has a grudge against the performers? What about the safety of the rest of the cast? The safety of the audience?’

  ‘You know as well as I do that the audience is always separated from the stage.’

  ‘Is that really true?’ asked May.

  ‘Backstage and front of house are two entirely different worlds. You can get from one to the other only by going through the ground-level pass doors. There are just two of those, and one has been locked for so many years I don’t think anyone knows where the keys are.’ She ground out her cigarette. ‘It was probably someone from the cast of No, No, Nanette, driven insane by Jessie Matthews.’

  ‘I can make a case for press restriction if you really think the play is in the interests of the city’s morale,’ Bryant offered.

  ‘It’ll be tough keeping things quiet this end. So long as an actor’s near a telephone, word always gets out. Death poisons the atmosphere in a place like this.’ Helena knew that performers were sensitive to the slightest undercurrents rippling the still air of an auditorium.

  ‘How are we going to explain that our dancer has disappeared?’

  ‘She had no friends.’ Helena stole another cigarette. ‘Nobody who pushes that hard ever does. She told me she was getting weird letters, Mr May. Sex-crazed men wanting her to walk on them with stilettos, that sort of thing. People were drawn to her aggression. It could be any one of them. They follow the movements of performers in the papers and turn up in the front row every night applauding in the wrong places, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘There is something,’ said May. ‘The telephone bookings for which you mail out tickets, we can cross-check the addresses of all the reservations so far.’

  ‘And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?’ asked Benjamin.

  ‘Resume rehearsals,’ said Bryant, taking his partner’s cue. ‘Behave as if nothing untoward has happened.’

  ‘You could make an announcement to the effect that Capistrania has been taken ill and has been placed in quarantine,’ added May. ‘Scarlet fever perhaps.’

  ‘Thank heaven someone around here is ready to take charge.’ Helena gave May a reassuring smile. ‘I already feel safer in your capable hands.’

  Bryant made a face behind Helena’s back, and was caught in the act when she turned round. He transformed his grimace into a cough as, somewhere far below, an oboe hit a warning note.

  ‘I thought you were jolly impressive with La Parole back there,’ said Bryant, bouncing along the corridor to the box office as they left. ‘We make a bloody good double act. Perhaps we should take to the stage: Bryant and May, detective duo, some juggling, a patter song and a sand dance, what do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re completely loopy,’ answered May truthfully. ‘It’s a murder investigation. I don’t have the training for this.’

  ‘You’re young enough still to have an open mind,’ said Bryant, laughing. ‘That’s all the training you need.’

  15

  SOMETHING POISONOUS

  ‘Hell
o, Oswald, something’s different in here, have you had the place decorated? I’m rather partial to the smell of new paint.’

  ‘Very funny, Mr Bryant.’

  Oswald Finch, the pathologist, sat back from his desk notes and cracked the bones in his wrists. His team had been forced to disinfect the department at West End Central after Arthur had presented him with a cadaver so slippery with infesting bacteria that it had reacted with their usual chemical neutralizers, causing the entire floor to reek of ammonia and rotting fish. This was no problem for Finch, who had the occupational advantage of being born without a sense of smell, but Westminster’s health officer had threatened to shut them down unless they did something about it.

  Apart from the nuisance factor of dealing with council officials, Finch couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He found the process of bodily decay fascinating. Bryant had suggested that, as a longtime supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, he was used to seeing things slowly fall apart.

  ‘At least we got you a nice fresh one this time,’ May pointed out cheerfully. There was something so depressing about being in Finch’s presence that people adopted an air of forced jollity around him. He had the suicidal expression of a Norwegian painter and the posture of a unstuffed rag doll. No one in the unit had been surprised when Oswald’s glamorous wife had left him for a dashing RAF officer. Rather, they were amazed that he had managed to marry anyone at all.

  ‘She’s been dead since Monday evening. Come and take a look.’ He rose and led the detectives through to a windowless green-tiled chamber behind his office. Scrubbed wooden workbenches and ceramic sinks alternated along opposite walls. One table was in use, its occupant covered with a white sheet more to reduce temperature change than to spare feelings.

  Unlike most autopsy rooms, this one had variable light settings instead of bright overhead panels. The reason became apparent when May studied the laboratory’s centrepiece, a mass of counterbalanced mechanics so advanced for the time that, as yet, the results it yielded could not be considered as admissible evidence. Having developed the system exclusively for the unusual demands of the PCU, Finch was now testing the prototype in the hope that it would become the new industry standard. The unit was so close to the discovery of computer technology that, years later, John May wondered how they had not managed to stumble upon the invention of binary code. But on that day, he had been so fascinated and horrified by the sight of a dead body that he saw little else.

  ‘I assume you’ve definitely ruled out some kind of bizarre accident?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘I’m not so sure. According to your man Runcorn, she didn’t fall down in the lift, she passed out. No fibre snags on the lift wall or something; you’ll have to speak to him about it. And I don’t think loss of consciousness was caused by anything natural like a narcoleptic fit. Her medical files indicate that she was in perfect health.’

  ‘You’ve already raised her records?’ asked Bryant. ‘I’m impressed. We don’t even have a typist.’

  ‘We don’t hang about here, Arthur,’ said Finch pointedly, ‘not when you can lose half an afternoon from an air raid.’

  ‘Do we now have a formal identification of the body?’

  ‘The theatre’s registered doctor knew her. She has no family living here. We think her father’s in Vienna. We’re trying to notify him now. Look at this.’ Finch drew back the sheet to expose the body’s right shoulder, then pressed the end of a nail file against the inside of Capistrania’s upper arm. ‘Ignore the lividity. The flesh clearly retains any indentation marks you make on it. In my book that’s a sign of infected tissue. The introduction of something poisonous. My first reaction was to check for evidence of a narcotic, stuff a dancer might possibly use to improve her performance.’

  ‘Is that what they do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Finch admitted. ‘I don’t know any dancers.’

  ‘You go to that hoochie-coochie place in Clerkenwell. Forthright used to see you queuing up outside as she was going home. Anything come up in the blood samples?’

  ‘This equipment’s faster than most, but there’s an awful lot to test for. I started by looking at cardiac glycosides, oldendrin, nerioside, toxic carbohydrate groups, but there’s no evidence of vascular distress, no common signs of poisoning.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I can’t, but convulsions in such a confined space would cause bruising on the limbs and some kind of organic material deposit at the site, which Runcorn has yet to find. There’s no indication of haemorrhage, diarrhoea or vomiting. I checked the stomach contents. She’d eaten a sandwich about three-quarters of an hour before death, some kind of poultry in the filling, nothing unusual, and a type of chocolate bar, something with nuts in—don’t Barker and Dobson do one? I don’t think it’s an allergic reaction of any kind. Still, the gastric juices are disturbed, and if we assume that assimilation was rapid, causing her to fall down shortly after she’d entered the lift, I’d say we were looking at something that paralysed her muscles. There’s a lot of clenched tissue in her limbs.’

  ‘So you know what she didn’t die of. What’s your initial reaction?’ Bryant had come to trust Finch’s instincts, even though they were unlikely to find their way into official reports until the appearance of corroborative evidence.

  ‘There’s some slight inflammation and discoloration on her right knee. Dancers bruise all the time, of course, but this one’s very fresh, consistent with falling in the lift. I think she just dropped suddenly in her tracks, which suggests a fast fall in the supply of blood to the brain or some kind of synaptic disruption, but I’d still expect more electrical activity.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Limbic convulsion. Aberrant behaviour from the nerve endings. Cuts on the hands, something to indicate a bit of thrashing about.’

  ‘You realize what you’re saying—it’s possible that she collapsed and got her feet caught.’

  ‘I have to say that because of the trace evidence.’ Finch moved down to the base of the table and rolled back the sheet. ‘You can see the avulsive trauma here in tissue dragged right from bone, separated from all of its connective materials. That’s how we know the skin and musculature around the ankles have been torn, not cut. These parallel scrape marks are actually scored deep into the cartilage, and the bones are severely compacted to a depth of an eighth of an inch. That’s consistent with the concrete ledge hitting the feet and breaking them off. You can get Runcorn to look along the ledge for vertical striations that include bone particles. Obviously the pain must have been appalling, and for a young lady to remain still while something like this happened, I just think it’s unlikely that she would have been conscious. There’s another thing. She’s very short, slender, very small-boned, virtually no body fat.’

  ‘A lot of dancers are tiny,’ May pointed out.

  ‘Small people are easier to poison, although there are exceptions to the rule. Women get drunk more quickly than men because they carry more fat. Dancers are a different kettle of fish, though. A fast-acting muscular poison, possibly something naturally occurring, would have taken care of her. I just ran tests for a substance called coniine, which paralyses the body in pretty much the same way as curare.’

  ‘Curare? I thought that caused heart failure. One has images of blowpipes being aimed in the jungle.’

  ‘That’s because it was used by Orinoco Indians. A plant resin. But I believe there’s a prescribed clinical version available in America. It’s not unheard of for doctors to inject it into pre-op patients in order to reduce the amount of anaesthesia needed. The point is, we’ve got a positive match for coniine, but not for curare. Something was definitely introduced into her body, but I’m at a loss to understand how. There are no visible puncture marks of any kind.’

  ‘What about in the feet?’

  ‘Obviously I’ve yet to examine those.’

  ‘But you don’t think it likely that she was injected.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.
I said there are no visible signs so far. Hypodermic injection sites can heal very quickly and disappear completely within two days.’ He tapped a pencil against his long yellow teeth. ‘There is something here, though. Take a look at this.’ He pointed to the small radiophonic monitor angled above the cadaver. ‘One of our new gadgets. I’m not sure how reliable it is yet. It’s taking subcutaneous readings from different levels in her body tissue. This is the balance of acids that occurs at cellular level. They should all be about the same height.’ The screen showed a number of bright green lines, but some were much taller than others.

  ‘And what does that mean?’ asked May, looking up at the chartreuse-tinged face of the pathologist.

  ‘That’s rather the problem.’ Finch narrowed his eyes as he studied the drifting pulsations. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  16

  OFF THE RADAR

  Janice Longbright was seated on a stack of Tampax boxes trying to type with two fingers. Outside, on the steps of Kentish Town police station, a gang of teenagers were screaming at each other. The former detective sergeant forced herself to block out the noise and concentrate. With the Mornington Crescent offices blown to smithereens, the unit’s surviving personnel had been evacuated to the nearest annexe, but with the force on full alert, no chairs or desks were available for them to work from. The Tampax boxes had been found in the boot of a boy’s car, cushioning a number of rifles and stolen army pistols, and made a passably comfortable seat.

  The sounds in the street were becoming more confrontational. Longbright looked around the overcrowded office at men and women barking into phones, and was unsurprised that no one had the energy to go outside and stop the fight before someone got hurt. The gang members would be at each other again the second the police departed. Trying to help them was like sticking a plaster on a cut throat.