Death Notes (A Phineas Fox Mystery)

by Sarah Rayne

  But to return to the Galway City venture. It appears that Cromwell’s men spent a couple of rumbustious weeks in the old church, stabling their horses in the nave, using stained-glass windows for archery practice, and, for all I know, carousing with ladies in the crypt. What they didn’t damage or destroy, the weather and local vandals did in succeeding centuries.

  Then, a couple of years ago, a committee was formed to raise funds to renovate the place. The money seems to have come partly from a grant made by the Dáil Éireann, partly from private sponsorship (I suspect this provided the lion’s share), and also from smaller donations made by the public. So now the church has been deconsecrated (I think this is the right term), and fitted out for use as a theatre and what they are calling a cultural centre. The letter is careful to explain that it is fairly small, and that the main area – which used to be the nave – seats only 350 people. To me, this is not so very small. I would not say this in public, but I’ve played to a lot fewer than 350 in my time.

  It’s to be called The Genesius. A quick forage of the dictionary (together with a consultation with Feofil), reveals that St Genesius is regarded as the patron saint of actors. I have committed this information to memory, so as not to be caught out, and I said to Feofil that I thought it a very nicely judged and well-chosen name for a church-turned-theatre.

  Feofil, deadpan, said, ‘Genesius is also supposed to be the patron saint of clowns and lawyers.’

  The Genesius is to open on 23 November, which is St Cecilia’s Day and, typically Irish, it’s thought it would be a fine fitting thing to make the first performance a musical concert.

  Why The Genesius directors should ask a has-been music-hall performer to organize such an important event, I have no idea, but I shall accept.

  I have begun work compiling a suitable musical programme for The Genesius opening. So far I have tracked down two choral societies, one in Galway and one in Connemara, and I shall take the motor and drive there to listen to them next week. I shouldn’t think it’s important that the furthest distance I have so far driven is along Kilcarne’s narrow main street. I daresay there won’t be many motor cars on the road between Kilcarne and Galway, anyway.

  It’s remarkable that I, who once quaked at attending auditions and hung on the every word of directors and producers, am now on the other side of the footlights, so to speak. I am resolved to be kindly and tactful with everyone, though.

  The choirs are splendid and this week I found some excellent folk groups – the Irish love their own music, they’re proud of it and rightly so, for it’s stirring and lively. We can have a medley of Irish songs – most probably the audience will join in.

  I am exercised in my mind as to whether I should sing something on my own account. It’s very tempting, but on consideration I don’t think it would be right. I would, though, love to find a really strong female singer to perform Marie Lloyd’s famous song – ‘One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit’. This is a tricky one, however. The Irish will tell extravagant stories of Oliver’s rampage across Ireland, and how his Ironsides roasted men alive and ate them, or beat Royalist leaders to death with their own wooden legs. They’ll relate it with complete sincerity, saying a shocking old time it was. But they can be unpredictable, and there’s no knowing how they might react to a British music-hall song about Cromwell. Even if it were being sung in a former ruin that Cromwell really did knock about.

  I’ve played in many a theatre in my time, and it’s fair to say I’ve probably seen every kind there is. From the spit-and-sawdust pub rooms, to the Italianate halls with frescoes – the pretentious Pavilions and the tawdry Tivolis … To the saloons where the floors are awash with ale and other unmentionable fluids as well, and the cellars where sometimes the audience sing along with the performer, and sometimes pelt him or her with rotten fruit … And even the dubious gaffs near Leicester Square where infamous ‘poses plastiques’ are offered.

  So I think I can regard myself as a reasonable judge of theatres, and I think I can say with authority that The Genesius Theatre is beautiful. There’s been no attempt to conceal the religious origins, and the stone arches and hammer beams are all still in place, as well as some of the marvellous rood screens with their intricate tracery. The story is that these screens were hastily smuggled into the crypt and hidden when Cromwell’s Ironsides marched in, and that they never found them.

  The stage is small as stages go – there’s no apron, but a proscenium arch has been created, with ornate, gilt-tipped curlicues and scrolls across the top. There are deep red velvet curtains, which open and close with a satisfying swish, and the auditorium seats have red velvet padding, as well.

  The directors want to engage a particular Irish pianist for the centrepiece of the evening. He is well known and much loved – also immensely gifted – and we have agreed that he will play two solos. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, which is a splendid dramatic composition, and a Mozart. We have yet to decide which Mozart. The pianist has accepted the request, and everyone is extremely pleased.

  The nightmare came last night. It’s been absent for so long I was almost starting to believe it had gone for good.

  I could blame a great many things for its reappearance – the large supper eaten in company with several convivial locals; my slight concern for Feofil who I notice is looking somewhat haggard recently (he brushes aside any concern, and says he is perfectly all right); even a small contretemps with the motor car when I drove to Galway yesterday. I daresay they will manage to replant the hedge, however, and the punctured tyre has already been replaced.

  But that very afternoon I had been listening to one of the Irish pianist’s gramophone records in preparation for meeting him. Feofil recently bought a splendid gramophone and some records. He is very critical of the recorded performances, and listening to him I remember that this is a man who met Prokofiev and knew Rimsky-Korsakov (he memorably said that Rimsky-Korsakov might ‘one day amount to something’), and who wrote that Tchaikovsky’s work was ‘intensely expressive’, but then observed that the Romantics were ‘never natural melodists’.

  This, too, is the man who was in the Mikhailovsky Theatre on that last night, and who later described Roman’s execution so vividly. ‘Roman Volf faced Death as if he was auditioning it to provide accompaniment for one of his concert hall performances.’ Later, in the Russian magazine, Golos, Feofil said, ‘A dark and suffocating web of tragedy wove itself around the last months of Roman Volf’s life, and it was believed by some that his descendants would be trapped in the spider-strands of that dark web for many years into the future …’

  Inevitably, listening to the gramophone records stirred the thready spider-web memories.

  In the dream, I was – as always – hemmed in by the screaming, jeering crowd in the prison’s courtyard. And this time the dream did not cheat. This time I saw everything. I saw the faces of the people, eager and avid and howling for blood. Roman Volf’s blood. They hated him. I understand that now. They hated the man who had been one of the glittering idols and icons of his era, who had charmed and seduced from concert platforms and sumptuous stages, and wrung out the souls from his listeners with his genius. But who had then been convicted of a squalid murder – that of the Tsar Alexander, known to thousands as the Liberator, the liberal, the reforming emperor. After the assassination, they forgot – or perhaps had never cared anyway – that he was also a man who, as well as fathering eight children inside his marriage, had had at least seven illegitimate children by several mistresses. All they could think was that their tsar’s body was torn into bloodied fragments by the assassins’ bomb, and to them it made him almost a martyr. As somebody (who?) once sagely observed, there is no hatred so great as the hatred that replaces adoration.

  In the dream, I could again see the pallid faces looking out of the tiny, barred windows high up in the stone walls – the other prisoners, and probably also guards waiting and wanting to see the execution. Uniformed
guards lined the square, rifles at the ready, bayonets glinting as spears of sun came in and out of the clouds.

  Then a massive dull crash echoed through the square, reverberating deafeningly. Showers of brick and stone dust and splinters cascaded on to the heads of the crowds, and there were startled cries, because most people had been watching the main door through which the guards had come, expecting the condemned man to appear there. But he did not. The crash was from a square platform that had been lowered from a window halfway up the wall. It jutted at right angles from the wall itself – there was a narrow ledge all round it, and over it was the grim outline of a gallows, with the hangman’s rope in place.

  People pointed and shouted, and a man standing near to me called out an explanation.

  ‘See that inner trapdoor at the centre of the platform,’ he said. ‘That’s where they’ll make him stand. And soon as the noose is round his murdering neck, they’ll release that inner trap and down he’ll go.’

  Recording these details, I am aware that in the dream I could again understand everything that was being said. And yet why would I not? If I was born in Russia, I would have spent those years speaking it. What I don’t understand is why I remember virtually nothing of the language now.

  The guards were starting to lower something over the edge of the massive trapdoor, by means of thick, ugly chains, and a ripple of puzzlement went through the crowd. Then there was an ugly clanging sound, and the strange structure fell down into place.

  It was a cage. A cage made from thick black iron bars, so small in comparison to its surroundings that it should have been insignificant. But it was not. Once you had seen it, you did not really see anything else. And in last night’s dream, for the first time I saw it clearly. It was oblong in shape, perhaps four feet across each of the sides and six feet from the base to the top. It hung from the iron chains hooked on to the underside of the trapdoor, and the guards pulled it this way and that, until it rested directly beneath the inner trap – the trap through which the hanged man would drop. He would go down through the trap and so into the cage.

  The child that I was in the dream did not fully understand the cage’s purpose, but the people around me did. They began to shout.

  ‘The cage! The burning cage! He’ll hang, then he’ll burn inside the cage!’

  As the shouts intensified, filling up the courtyard with sound and fury, there was a stir of movement from the room beyond the trapdoor, and the condemned man was brought out.

  I don’t think he struggled – his hands were bound behind his back, and he was wearing a deep blindfold, so that the guards had to guide him to stand on the waiting flap. Could he sense the presence of the rope directly over his head? He could certainly hear the crowds screaming below him, for at one moment he tilted his head, as if to catch every nuance of sound. I remember I let out a sob at this point, and that I wanted to press my hands over my eyes to shut out the sight. But I did not. He could not see what was happening, so I would see for him.

  The rope was slipped over his head, and the man next to me, who had pointed out the inner trapdoor, said, ‘They’re being quick.’

  ‘Merciful,’ said another voice.

  ‘Wasn’t merciful what happened to the tsar. Torn to bloody gobbets, he was.’

  ‘They say hanging’s a quick death, though. Eight seconds, isn’t it?’

  ‘If they get it right.’

  ‘If not—?’

  A shrug. ‘Slow strangulation.’

  But it seemed to me, still huddled in miserable terror, unnoticed by most of the crowd, that the men on the trapdoor were going to be very quick indeed. For a brief time I thought I heard and felt, once again, that pulsing heart – Roman’s heart, racing too quickly, to meet its final beat of his life.

  The noose was put in place, tightened, adjusted – the seconds stretched out – then at last the rapped-out command was given. For a split-second everything in that square seemed to stop, as if Time’s mechanism had frozen. Then the trap opened, and the condemned man dropped straight down with a sickening jerk into the cage’s confines directly beneath.

  At once an immense roar came from the watchers.

  ‘Cut him down!’

  ‘Light the fire!’

  ‘The burning cage – now, now, NOW!’

  The guards were already kneeling at the edge of the open, inner trapdoor, and two of them held aloft flaring torches. Using extreme care, they threw the flares down into the cage. The fire caught at once, and the guards stepped back, slamming down the inner, smaller trap that formed the cage’s roof, then going back inside the building.

  Leaving the man in the cage to burn.

  The stench of burning began to fill up the square, and the flames licked greedily around the bars, vivid and shocking against the dull grey stones and the leaden sky. Sparks showered down on to the crowd, who dodged back, but they did not move very far; they were still shouting, and they were so angry, those people, that they seemed hardly to care if they were scorched by the burning fragments raining down. They jeered and yelled, raising their fists in fury.

  ‘Burn him! Nothing to be left of him!’

  ‘Burn every bit of skin and flesh and bone and hair!’

  ‘Murderer! Assassin!’

  That was when arms came round me, and held me warmly and strongly, and Antoinette’s voice said, ‘I have been searching for you – searching the crowd – thank heaven I have found you at last. My dear boy, you must not be here. Come now with me.’

  I could not see her very clearly – either because the dream was blurring everything, or because the smoke from the cage was filling up the courtyard, or perhaps simply because my own eyes were misted with tears and fear. But I could hear her, and I clutched at her hands.

  I said, ‘He’s dead. Isn’t he dead?’

  Antoinette seemed to take a long time to answer. Then she said, ‘Yes. Yes, he’s dead.’

  I rubbed my eyes with my fists, trying to scrub the tears away. Then I said, ‘Maxim …’

  I stopped, but Antoinette seemed to understand. She said, ‘It’s all right. Maxim will be safe. I promise you.’

  The dream ended there. I suppose Roman’s story could be said to have ended there, as well.

  There was the carriage journey then – the remembered lights reflecting on the river – what river was it? – and the sense of urgency; the impression that we must get away as quickly as possible. But I was encased in fear and bewilderment and exhaustion, and I can only remember parts of the journey.

  What I do remember is the ache of loss for Roman.

  And the deeper ache because that was the day I knew I had lost Maxim.

  SEVENTEEN

  Mortimer Quince’s diary

  Some really exciting news has come today. The Genesius concert is to be recorded on cine film. The film will be shown in cinemas as part of newsreels of current events. This is immensely gratifying.

  ‘We like to include one or two light-hearted items to follow all the gloom of the week’s news,’ said the willowy young man from the film company who came to look at the theatre.

  He and his assistants have spent two afternoons calculating where the camera – there may be a plurality of cameras for all I know – should best be positioned. There were earnest discussions as to light and sound and acoustics. It’s important, they explained, not to distract the soloists by their activities. It’s fairly clear that by ‘soloists’ they mean the famous Irish pianist, and that he’s the real reason they’re making the cine film. But I don’t care, because this is all marvellous publicity for The Genesius.

  They’re going to set up the camera and its accoutrements halfway along the central aisle, so that it’s directly aimed at the dais and the piano itself. I pointed out, as politely as possible, that this meant people in the end aisle seats would not have a clear sightline to the pianist, but they said you could not have everything in life.

  Even with these disruptions and the probable annoyance of the people i
n those particular seats (who I suppose can be offered their money back if they complain), I am more delighted than I can say that the concert will be recorded for posterity.

  A disaster has struck.

  The Irish pianist has had to cancel his appearance. This is dreadful. It cannot be helped – the poor man has succumbed to appendicitis, and although the troublesome organ has been summarily removed, it will be some time before he can contemplate any public appearance. He is desolated. His agent is desolated. I am desolated. The entire Genesius Theatre group is aghast, and panic has engulfed the board of directors.

  We still have a wonderful concert, but the glittering heart – the pianist – has been torn out of it. Feofil says this is being melodramatic which, coming from Feofil, is a bit rich, since he is one of the most melodramatic people I have ever met. When I said so, he merely gave one of his philosophical shrugs and said life had a way of dealing blows, and blows had to be accepted.

  This is quite true, but Feofil does not have to placate printers, who will have to be told that the wording for the programme covers and posters must be changed at what’s almost the eleventh hour. As I write this, I have no idea what the programmes and posters will be changed to.

  I dare not even think how I am to tell the cine film people.

  There was no particular reason for me to go to The Genesius today. I had intended to spend the time in Galway engaging battle with the printers, but the theatre draws me, so, when I alighted from the omnibus (Feofil having gone off with the motor earlier in the morning), I walked past the printers’ offices, and went along to The Genesius. It’s a little removed from the main thoroughfare, within sight of a glint of the river, and the street is one of those unexpected pockets you find in almost any city – a place where you can believe that any footsteps you might hear are not completely your own, but might be footsteps of people long since dead, or even not yet born. Today I had the feeling more strongly than usual, that those long-ago footsteps walked with me. Twice, I even found myself trying to get into exact step with them.