Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House b&m-1

by Christopher Fowler

  He found the goods lift separated off by wooden horses with warning boards tied to them by bits of string. The lift couldn’t have drawn more attention if Helena had given it a part in the production. The electrics had been switched off at the mains, but Bryant dug a torch from his pocket and shone it into the shaft, quickly spotting the vertical brown streaks that marred the concrete barrier between the floors. On the other side of the stairwell, another slim beam of light illuminated a crouching figure. It turned and stared at him.

  “God, Bryant, you frightened the life out of me,” said Runcorn. “Must you creep about like that? I could have dropped this.” He held up something in a pair of tweezers.

  “What is it?” asked Bryant.

  “Muscle tissue by the look of it, probably torn from the victim’s ankle as it shattered. Don’t these lifts have fail-safe devices to halt them if a foreign body gets caught in the mechanism?”

  “It’s half a century old. Safety wasn’t a priority then. The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.”

  Dr Runcorn, the unit’s forensic scientist, was one of the top men in his field, but his air of superiority, coupled with the punctilious manner of a civil servant, made him disliked by nearly everyone who came into contact with him. That was the trouble with a unit like the PCU: it was destined to be staffed with the kind of employee who had been rejected from other institutions in spite of their qualifications. Dr Runcorn was especially irked by Bryant, whose intuitive attitude to scientific investigation seemed at best inappropriate and at worst unprofessional.

  “I haven’t finished here yet,” he warned, “so don’t start walking all over the area touching things.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” said Bryant, affronted. “You surely don’t think it was an accident, do you?”

  “A damned odd one, I agree, but stranger things have happened.”

  “Hard to see how her feet ended up on a chestnut brazier, with that hypothesis,” Bryant pointed out.

  “Oswald Finch took receipt of the cadaver from West End Central and has already run a few tests on it, reckons she might show positive for some kind of drug, possibly self-administered. These artistic types are noted for it.” Runcorn sniffed, rising from his crouched position and cracking his back. “I don’t know why he can’t test for more obvious causes of death first like any normal person: heart failure, stuff like that. I just know that her feet were cut off and she didn’t struggle. There are a couple of scuff marks here on the landing, the heel of a shoe, nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Suggestive, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Runcorn tugged at his ear, thinking. He was awkwardly tall and so thin that he looked lost inside his clothes. “It’s a backward scuff, but it faces forward to the lift. Like this.” He adopted an angular pose, something that came easily to a man who was six feet three and pigeon-chested. “As though you were bracing yourself against the trellis. You might make it if you were pulling something through the bars of the lift. As if you were trying to drag out a heavy box. Or pull something through the cage. Legs, perhaps.”

  That was the good thing about Runcorn, thought Arthur. Like Finch, he operated on a secondary set of signals, pulses that passed invisibly beneath his rational senses.

  “There’s another mark on the linoleum several feet away. It looks like it could be a match. If we can place someone outside the lift with the victim inside it, then you might have a murder case. But why cut off her feet?” Runcorn stared gloomily down into the lift shaft.

  “She was a dancer,” Bryant replied.

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Suppose she had somehow survived,” said Bryant. “Can you think of a better way to guarantee that she’d never perform again?”

  ∨ Full Dark House ∧

  13

  LIVES IN THE THEATRE

  Elspeth Wynter had spent her whole life, or rather the thirty-two years she had so far experienced, in the theatre. She came from a long line of theatre folk. Her grandfather had been a Shakespearean, once spoken of in the same breath as Burbage, Garrick or Keane. His wife had been cast in his shows as a perennial parlourmaid, and in true theatrical tradition had borne him a son in the rear of the stalls. Eight years into the new century, that son fathered his only child, Elspeth. Although his wife survived a pelvic fracture when she fell from the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, she ignored her doctor’s warnings about the perils of motherhood in order to bear a daughter. The birth killed her.

  Elspeth’s father took the King’s shilling for the Great War, but grisly memories of Ypres wrought changes in his life from which he never fully recovered. Prevented from returning to the front by the state of his nerves, he resumed the family profession. In the twenties he delivered a shaky baritone in countless threadbare Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, but the shows closed as unemployment began to bite and the cinema became affordable to the lower classes who had filled the music halls.

  Elspeth’s father could not look after himself, let alone a teenage girl. He had no family beyond his colleagues in the theatre, and drink coarsened his acting. Elspeth was raised by sympathetic ushers and nursed from fretfulness while her papa performed in the twicenightlies. As they trooped from one cold auditorium to the next, shivering in damp dressing rooms, shaking the fleas from lodginghouse beds, playing in faded costumes to dwindling audiences, this daughter of the stage looked about her moth-eaten, mildewed world and began to wonder if the possession of theatrical blood was really the gift that her father’s boozy friends claimed it to be.

  Elspeth knew from an early age that although she was not destined for the boards, she would always be a part of the theatre; watching her father declaim each night from the box kept empty and permanently reserved for royalty – there seemed to be one in every playhouse – she watched the painful changes time wrought on his performances. The twenties were uncertain years, but not as lean as the thirties. Her father drank more as the audiences dried up. He too dried on stage, nightly forgetting his lines, relying on prompts, booed by an unforgiving audience weaned on cinema newsreels. The new medium had no truck with forgetfulness. Celluloid eradicated variable performances. To no one’s surprise, he finally died in make-up and costume, during a trouser-dropping farce in which he had already been dying nightly.

  Elspeth did not attend his funeral; there was a matinee. She had graduated from programme seller to bar cashier to ASM, through the various stressful stages of management until she suffered a nervous collapse and returned to front-of-house work. She was a West End girl, one of theatre’s dedicated personnel, invisible to audiences but essential to everyone who worked there. As one show closed, another began rehearsals, and each run marked the periods of her life more completely than any calendar notation.

  She had experienced a moment of passion just once, at the age of fifteen: pushed into a dressing room at the Palace and thrust into by a man she had only ever seen from the aisle of the stalls. He was playing the villain in a revival of Maria Marten, or The Murders in the Red Barn, and had barely paused to peck her on the cheek and pull up his trousers before returning to catch his entrance cue. While her seducer ranted across the boards, twitching his moustaches, his shirtsleeves flecked with Kensington Gore, she too bled and suffered, and burrowed away in the crimson darkness to forget the world outside.

  The theatre held no terrors for her. It was home, and filled with secrets, just like any family. It encompassed every happy moment in her life. As Elspeth paced the indistinct aisles of the Palace, its pervasive calm seeped into her. She could tell when the half-hour call was coming without looking at her watch. She sensed the rising tension of backstage activity, even though she was stationed in the front of the building.

  ♦

  Geoffrey Whittaker was also dedicated to the theatre, as invisible and essential as a spark plug to a car. He too was the latest – and the last, it turned out – in a long theatrical line. As stage
manager to the incumbent company, he was in charge of the administration, the set, the lighting, the props, the health and safety of his audience, the scene changes, the laundry mistresses, the wardrobe people and the carpenters. He knew how to get scorch marks out of a starched collar, how to fix a cellulose filter over a follow-spot, how to unjam the springs on a star trap and how to keep bills unpaid until the receipts were in.

  Like Elspeth, he was unmarried and probably unmarriageable, because his career constituted a betrothal of sorts. Unlike Elspeth, he had a sex life, rather too much of one. In addition to dating girls in the shows, he made visits to a private house in the East End, where for a reasonable fee his needs were taken care of. This abundance of sexual activity allowed him to concentrate on his job without becoming distracted by the dancers’ bodies during rehearsals. He had grown up in the Empires and Alhambras, helping his parents prepare for the night’s performance, and could imagine no other world. Colours were duller outside, and the skies were not painted but real, which made them untrustworthy. In the theatre, you always followed the script. Beyond this world there were only unrehearsed moves, mistimed entrances, lines spoken out of turn.

  The start of the second great war brought unwelcome transitions to Geoffrey’s hermetic world. Venues were changing hands, falling empty, getting bombed. Philanthropy had been replaced by the desire for quick profit. Boxing matches and coarse variety acts moved in to entertain a new type of audience: commoner, louder, one that lived from moment to moment. Now there was something less comforting in the atmosphere before a show, something contaminated by the urgent, hysterical laughter that nightly rang from the stalls. Theatres were more frenetic, and companies diminished as the most able-bodied men went off to war. The Shaftesbury was bombed, the Strand and Sadler’s Wells went dark. It was like a game of musical chairs, and nobody knew when the music might suddenly stop.

  But Elspeth and Geoffrey still heard the audiences of their childhoods above the sound of hot water gurgling in the pipes, still listened to the ticking of the warm-air conduits, the backstage footfalls of departing painters. They were still the sounds of home.

  And something had irreversibly changed. Elspeth had sensed it first at the outbreak of the war, a creeping disquiet that felt wholly out of place between the gaudy vermilion aisles of the Palace Theatre. She was alive to the smallest changes around her, and could detect any eddy of emotion in the silent building.

  Late one night, closing up after a performance, she had suffered a terrible premonition, and her life had passed before her eyes. She told no one about the dark, scarred thing that stalked behind her in the rufescent rows of the dress circle, creeping down the vertiginous steps of the balcony. She experienced a sense of panic more with each passing performance, never knowing at what hour it might strike, for there is no day and night in a theatre. She only knew that it was there, watching and waiting, that it meant harm, and that something wicked had to happen.

  Anxious to escape, she slipped out of the building and into the blackout, following the white stripes that had been painted on the paraffin lamps hanging from the protection boards around the front wall of the theatre. The Palace was her habitat, but she was lately being driven from it. She stopped and looked up at the entresol windows, and glimpsed the terrible visage, a pale oval peering out of the smoking salon at her, its features so distorted that it could barely be considered human.

  Geoffrey had seen the faceless creature too, scurrying between the rows of the balcony, loping across a distant corridor, but he had not believed his senses. It was the war, he told himself, shaking his head. The constant fear played tricks on you. Last month a bomb had fallen through the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, destroying the high altar. For many it had seemed like a blow struck against God himself. If Hitler was the devil kept at bay, perhaps his acolytes were already here, moving among them, and wouldn’t they choose such a godless place as a theatre from which to corrupt the innocent?

  Geoffrey Whittaker sat in his office on Sunday evening and smoked, but his hands shook. Nothing could drive him from the only world he understood. He told himself that, at forty-six, he was too old for an attack of nerves. There were men out there less than half his age fighting to preserve his freedom, even though he did not want to be free. He was a willing prisoner of the theatre, its plans and strictures. His life was patterned on the stage directions of a dog-eared script. But something had crept inside his world that had no place in the production. His trembling fingers pulled another cigarette from the pack and inserted it between his lips.

  Outside the Palace, Elspeth Wynter ran on into the blackout, through the empty city streets, her breath ragged behind her ribs, daring herself to go forward into darkness, frightened to return. But the home that had nurtured her for so many years could not be left so easily. It too was her domain, and beyond it, beyond the blackouts, there was no structure, no control, only the terrible light of freedom.

  For Elspeth and Geoffrey, and hundreds like them, theatres were the last repose of stasis and sanity in a world hurtling beyond sense. But even they would be touched by the bloody hand of madness.

  ∨ Full Dark House ∧

  14

  DOUBLE ACT

  “What the hell are you talking about, keep it out of the press?” asked Benjamin Woolf. “I’ve already had a call asking why she didn’t keep an appointment with a photographer this morning. What am I supposed to do?”

  “This is a tragedy for all of us, Ben,” said Helena Parole, whose earnest attempts to empathize with others were undermined by the fact that she didn’t care about anyone else. “I understand your feelings entirely.” She compounded the hypocrisy by rolling her eyes at May coquettishly.

  That Tuesday morning, the mood at the Palace Theatre was fractious. Thanks to a night of bright moonlight there had been bombing raids until dawn, and no one had slept well. Sloane Square tube station had been hit, killing many. In the morning’s papers, questions were being raised about the efficacy of public shelters. Not enough people were using them, and there were rumours among those who did that infection was rampant. Sanitation remained haphazard, and there was a general feeling that the unchanged air spread all manner of germs. Most Londoners preferred to stay at home, tucked inside cupboards, under the stairs, sleeping in ground-floor rooms or outside in an Anderson shelter: fourteen arched sheets of corrugated iron bolted together and half buried under earth that flooded in wet weather but could survive everything except a direct hit.

  The stage was still empty. Few of the cast had yet arrived, but members of the orchestra were seated in the pit, patiently waiting to resume rehearsals. They usually practised in airy rooms behind Waterloo Station, but those had been requisitioned by the War Office, and now the musicians were crammed before the stage in a dimly lit theatre instead of playing in a sunlit space overlooking the river. The most able-bodied among them had been taken by conscription, and they had been forced to fill up their ranks with fiddlescratchers from the twice-nightlies and even a couple of Leicester Square buskers.

  Luckily their conductor, Anton Varisich, like many great conductors, was as adept at diplomacy as he was at extracting mellifluous harmonies from his motley crew. He had topped up the percussion and woodwind sections with exiled Spanish and French players, lending the arrangements a jaunty cosmopolitan air in keeping with Offenbach’s play, but previously unheard in London. The nation’s music still owed more to the palm court than the boulevard, and consequently the players were having a whale of a time because they were doing something new. Quite how they’d manage to rehearse when the cast turned up and wanted to practise their lines would remain to be seen.

  “Will you understand when I tell the next person who calls that your star dancer might be a little late for rehearsals on account of not having any feet?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “That’s what they’re saying.” Woolf threw his long body back down onto seat C15 and smoothed a hand across his brilliantined hai
r. There was an ever-present aura of sarcasm about him that no one responded to positively. “The police are crawling all over the building, you won’t tell any of us what’s going on and I’m supposed to act like everything’s tickety-boo.”

  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.