She was thinking of Gaylene. As the voice thrilled out in a virtuoso display of fireworks she was thinking of Gaylene—sweaty, red, and screaming that day in the Methodist Hall: ‘He’s a nigger. He’s a bloody black!’
She was seeing Gaylene in her mind’s eye, but ironically enough the lady herself was at that moment in the theatre, looking not unlike President Amin after he has been left by one of his wives. She was standing in the gangway along the back of the gallery, her eyes bulging, her face shining with sweat, and with anger, jealousy and contempt oozing out of every pore. As the orchestra brought the aria to a close, and a great bray of triumphal, hysterical appreciation burst from the lusty young lungs of the gallery, she turned and shoved her way violently through the swing doors to the stairs.
Sergeant Harrison was standing by the door. He didn’t know much about opera, but he was man of the theatre enough to have scented an approaching triumph several minutes before, and had crept in to be part of it. He was also man of the theatre enough to recognize professional jealousy when he saw it. Watching Gaylene’s departure, he smiled to himself a little smile of recognition.
• • •
Gaylene barged through the gallery door to the street, her eyes and mouth set hard. To the casual observer she looked thoroughly disagreeable: to anyone who knew her better she looked menacing. She marched straight ahead down the centre of the pavement, and policemen and dockers in her path moved cautiously aside. She commandeered a bus, and slapped her fare into the conductor’s hand. When she reached the old Victorian house which included her own flat, she tramped up the long staircase with a heavy, even, measured stomp, and banged the flat door behind her. She strode to the kitchen cupboard, poured out a half-tumblerful of whisky, splashed a dash of tap-water in it, and began sluicing it around her large mouth in venomous meditation.
One and a half hours later she was feeling and looking (though not smelling) a lot better. She was meeting Hurtle for an after-match supper at the Bristol, and she had put on a bright pink dress, very low-cut, and leaving to the imagination only the question of how it was kept up. Above the great expanse of brawny shoulders and fleshy arms her face had been well painted to hide the effects of drink and rage. Her long black hair had been slapped magisterially into place, and sprayed there, and her feet were decked out in gold, spangly evening sandals. All in all, she felt she looked good. Manchester didn’t deserve her. But then, nor had Coonabarrabran.
She looked around the flat, and turned off the light. She felt for the switch to the light on the stairs, and clicked it. Nothing happened.
‘Damn,’ she boomed in a voice that reached down to the occupants of the flat below. ‘Bloody landlord!’
She hitched up her skirt and trod gingerly on the top stair. Then she clomped heavily on to the next, and with added confidence on to the next and the next. At the fifth step the elderly couple downstairs heard the regular thuds of her descent being succeeded by a slither, a bellow, and a succession of thumps, and finally a sound like a ton of coal reaching the floor of an exceptionally deep coal-hole. When they opened their door and let the light flood out on to the landing, they saw a great heap of pink silk, red flesh and gold lamé, and a pair of bright, vicious eyes.
‘Christ in Hell,’ roared Gaylene. ‘They nearly got me that time.’
CHAPTER VI
La Commedia E Finita
It was Thursday 7 September. Ten o’clock in the morning.
Gaylene Ffrench woke gradually, but did not open her eyes. She pulled the sheet and blanket well over her face, but she felt over to the other side of the double bed. Her hand met nothing until it reached the far side of the mattress. Under the bedclothes Gaylene’s lower lip protruded itself in a pout.
Ten minutes later she rose and walked a little uncertainly towards the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later the door opened agtin, and steam, an overpowering smell of body-lotion, and Gaylene emerged. She had nothing on. The curtains of her living-room were not drawn, and Gaylene glanced surreptitiously towards the offices of a small insurance company on the other side of the street. Someone was in the window, looking at her. Gaylene smiled to herself and went towards the kitchen to cook her breakfast.
One plate of sausage, bacon, kidney, mushroom and egg and two slices of toast and honey later Gaylene went to her wardrobe and stood before it in meditation. It was the first rehearsal at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Costume would be worn, but since Gaylene did not appear until the last act, she would be sitting around criticizing the others for much of the time. She selected a tight, shiny dress, quite unsuitable for her figure and for the weather. She walked through the living-room to the big mirror in the hall, all the time keeping half an eye on the window of the insurance office across the street. She peered into the mirror and inspected a bluish bruise on the left side of her face. Then she looked at her hair. It was a mess. She made experimental dabs at it with pudgy fingers and grimaced. She reached for the phone, seized it with her large hand and took it with her into the living-room. She perched on the side of an armchair, always with half an eye on the houses opposite. She rang her hairdresser and asked him if she could be fitted in that morning—or rather told him that she could. She did not notice any ambiguities in the tone of his assent.
‘Be there in twenty minutes flat,’ she said, and slammed the telephone down.
Then she stood in the middle of the living-room and slipped on the dress she had selected. And very little else. She slapped powder and cream on her face, paying particular attention to the bruise on the left side. She drew a vivid red line around her great mouth, and admired the forties-era sexiness about her preferred shiny brand of lipstick. Now she seemed to be ready. She took up a plastic bag, in which she had placed fruit and cakes, and took a last look round the flat. She opened the front door, switched on the staircase light, fixed now, and descended the stairs without mishap. When she reached the street she registered a face or two in the office, now above her, but she contrived to give the impression of complete unconsciousness as she turned right and swaggered up the street. People looked at her, and turned to look at her again. If she had had the right mechanism, she would have purred.
Arriving at the hairdressers’ she at once took over the shop. She commandeered a place and demanded the attention of her favourite assistant. She was one of the establishment’s better-known clients, and was allowed to do what she wanted. She sent out for all available Northern papers, and gave directions about what to do with her hair. She talked loudly, and in the manner of people who do not need to give a second thought to the question of whether or not shop-assistants and other menials hate them. Among the girls behind the chairs some glances passed, but nothing was said.
‘Never known it so hot, have you?’ said the assistant who had been chosen to attend to Gaylene’s hair.
‘You call this hot?’ said Gaylene scornfully. ‘This is a cool day where I come from.’
From this truth she proceeded to certain other comparisons between Australia and Great Britain, not all based so securely on fact, but all utterly to the detriment of the latter country. The assistant showed every sign of thinking her own thoughts.
The papers arrived, and Gaylene snatched them without a word of thanks. At last she shut up, and her fingers worked their way feverishly through the pages. Towards the back of the Manchester Globe she found what she wanted. A smile lit up her heavy face, and she opened the paper up to get a better look.
‘That’s me,’ she said to the assistant.
The picture showed Gaylene and Hurtle eating their evening meal at the Bristol the night before. Underneath there was a short paragraph headed ‘ “They’ve tried again,” says Soprano’. The inaccurate description of her voice did not seem to worry Gaylene. She gazed at the picture with infinite self-satisfaction.
‘I like your dress,’ said the assistant.
‘Cost a packet,’ said Gaylene complacently.
‘Your boy-friend looks nice,’ said the girl sincerely. ‘
I like the cheery type, don’t you?’
Gaylene’s glance strayed for the first time to the beaming face of Hurtle. It seemed to consort ill with the story under the picture. The smile left her face.
‘Bloody fool sometimes,’ she said.
She riffled through the rest of the papers. Two of them contained tiny paragraphs on the incident of the night before. Gaylene read them with signs of only a very moderate satisfaction. Then she settled down in the chair to contemplate in the mirror her own physical perfection.
A moment later a thought seemed to occur to her. She jerked herself up, to the irritation of her hairdresser, and grabbed the Guardian. She turned to the Arts Page. In the far right-hand column there was a long review headed ‘A Glorious Debut’.
The assistant had never seen anybody snarl before. She saw it now. If it hadn’t been one of the things frowned on in Coonabarrabran Gaylene would have spat. She read on:
The Northern Opera Company has attracted a great many talented young singers to Lancashire, but last night it created its first star. Bridget Lander, a last-minute replacement, had the Prince of Wales Theatre in the palm of her hand from her first entry, and by the end of the evening there was cheering and applause such as can seldom have been heard in Manchester even for the visiting London companies. It was well-deserved: the voice is full, well-controlled and quite exceptionally beautiful. It is used with an artistry extraordinary in one of Miss Lander’s years. Her acting was at first rudimentary, but it gained in confidence as the evening progressed. This is a splendid performance of Fiordiligi, and is on the way to becoming a great one. In the part of Ferrando, Robert Harshaw was less remarkable . . .
It appeared that the sun had gone in for Gaylene. She sat, frowning and sulking, and the hairdresser’s great mirror reflected every shade of her ill-temper. She snapped at the assistant, hurried her on, then criticized the results of her work. When she went she left a small tip and a nasty atmosphere. She stuffed the newspapers deep in her bag, so that no one would think she had been concerning herself with anything as totally irrelevant as Bridget’s reviews. She walked out into the sun again, moving her shoulders in an aggressive swagger. After a moment or two her mouth twisted into an unpleasant smile, as if she had thought of something brutal to say during rehearsal. She sweated.
She came to the Prince of Wales Theatre and pushed open the stage-door. Sergeant Harrison was not around. Usually Gaylene rather liked exchanging stentorian greetings and parade-ground insults with him, particularly during the recent series of test matches, when she had invariably had the trump card. But last night he had seen her leave the theatre. Perhaps it was just as well he was not there. She flicked through the mail in the stage-door-keeper’s office, peered at the provenance of everyone else’s, and took up one addressed to herself. Bound to be an offer. The smile seemed to anticipate that it would be one to make the rest green with envy. She drew her fleshy arms across her forehead.
‘Bloody heat,’ she said to Bob, assistant stage-door-keeper, as he came towards her and seemed to be about to protest that she was not allowed to go through the mail. ‘It’s worse than Australia, because here the cities are so bloody dirty. Look at my dress, will you? It’s positively clinging to me!”
She thrust her body forward. Her dress was, indeed, positively clinging to her. That’s some compensation, anyway, she seemed to say as she looked down at herself with superb self-satisfaction.
She didn’t open the letter, but she started towards her dressing-room, clutching it, and covering it with sweaty marks. She marched purposefully through the dark, dusty passageways. Passing Calvin Cross she saluted him distantly. Passing Owen Caulfield, looking busy and self-important on this, a big day for him, she greeted him more affectionately. Gaylene always had a soft spot for people she had slept with. She came to her dressing-room, did not notice the metal doormat in front of it, put down her bag, and clutching the letter in her left hand, put her right hand on the doorknob.
CHAPTER VII
Gendarmes’ Duet
Gaylene had been electrocuted. That much was certain.
The light-socket over the dressing-table near the door had been dismantled, and connected with a length of new wire to the old brass doorknob and to a metal doormat which had been placed outside the door. Gaylene, sweaty and scantily dressed, had stood on the doormat, placed her hand on the knob, and had thus made a perfect circuit.
That much, then was certain. Gaylene had died almost instantly, had not even had time to wonder which of her various chickens had come home to roost. That was left to the police.
Three hours after Gaylene’s fleshy form had quivered for the last time, the situation in the Prince of Wales Theatre was a pattern of extreme contrasts—contrasts of activity in one part of the building with lethargy in another, memories of a life departed here, signs of life continuing there. Perhaps the oddest of the signs of life continuing was in the foyer, where queues had formed for future performances of the Northern Opera. Successful as they had been in attracting audiences, the box office had never known such a day. Even from the early hours, the reviews of Bridget’s Fiordiligi the night before had stimulated an interest well beyond the normal, but the news of Gaylene’s death—broadcast over the local radio stations and reported in the stop-press of the evening papers—aroused in Mancunians such a desire to patronize opera that two windows were now open for booking—one for Così, one for other performances, and the two ladies behind the windows were so busy parrying questions that they had no time to catch up on the latest developments themselves.
Calvin called the two queues that had formed the connoisseurs and the ghouls. He himself had been spotted by someone in the ghouls’ queue—his skin made him instantly recognizable—and he had had to make a hasty and undignified retreat into the auditorium pursued by five or six Mancunian vultures, pretending to ask for his autograph but in fact only eager for carrion and quite careless of behavioural niceties in the acquisition of it.
‘What a mob!’ said Calvin, in the empty vastness of the stalls. Then he perceived a shadowy form, hunched in the middle of the auditorium, looking towards the stage. It was Owen, deep in thought, or perhaps orchestrating a rehearsal that was not in fact taking place. ‘What a mob!’ repeated Calvin, going towards him. ‘They looked as if they’d like to have torn me limb from limb.’
Owen grunted, and then said: ‘Leave me alone, will you, Calvin? I’ve got a lot to think about.’
Calvin left him without another word. Looking back from one of the side exits he saw he had resumed his pensive pose. He never understood Owen. Was he trying to say he was grief-stricken for Gaylene? And if so, was it true? No—it couldn’t possibly be. It occurred to Calvin that Owen adopted poses, and that he did it not so much to impress other people as to bolster up himself to himself. But Calvin was not one to psychoanalyse his colleagues, and he put the thought from him.
Then something else occurred to him. Could Owen have some idea who had done it? Could he have seen something that gave it away—for example, in Gaylene’s dressing-room?
For in point of fact, Owen had had a pretty nasty day. He had greeted Gaylene as he passed her in the corridor, and then, as he turned a corner into a passage leading to the stage, something had made him look back. Gaylene had been in a rigid, ludicrous position, as if glued to the doorknob. Owen had shouted for the assistant stage-door-keeper, and as they had watched, Gaylene had sunk slowly to the floor, very, very dead. Trying to pull her from the knob, Owen had had a minor shock, then he and Bob had raced together round to a small, dimly-lit passage which ran between the Prince of Wales and the neighbouring Woolworth’s, and from there they had wriggled, pushed and squirmed their way through a dirty little window which was the only connection that the dressing-room had with the outside world. When, after a time, their eyes had managed to accustom themselves to the gloom, they had seen the little device of wires passing from the light-socket to the door. At that point, Owen had collapsed on a chair and had
been very sick.
• • •
Raymond Ricci had arrived from the airport barely half a minute after the police had gone in. He had found a little knot of company members outside the stage door, aimless and glum. They knew little beyond the obvious fact of the death, and they had been registering their impressions of the policemen who, if their suspicions were correct, seemed destined to be poking their noses into everybody’s private business for the next few days or weeks.
‘What’s up?’ called Raymond cheerily as he paid off his taxi. ‘Are the brokers in?’
There was an awkward pause. Nobody has managed to coin a polite formula to cover the fact that someone has been murdered.
‘It’s Gaylene,’ said Bridget finally.
‘Christ!’ said Raymond Ricci. ‘What does that mean—hospital visiting with grapes? Fruit for the fruity?’
‘It means she’s dead,’ said Simon Mulley flatly. Then, because that was what everyone was assuming, he added: ‘Murdered.’
‘Christ,’ said Raymond Ricci again, looking genuinely shocked, though not particularly sorry. Then no one seemed to know what to say, and they just stood around a little longer in their aimless group.
‘I suppose no one wants to hear about Oslo?’ said Raymond Ricci at last.
But nobody did.
• • •
As soon as he got the call from the theatre Superintendent Nichols knew this was going to be one hell of a case. As he looked at the little device attached to the doorknob and doormat he felt that his instinct had been jusified. So simple; so silly, even. And yet, it had worked to perfection. The contributory factors that had made it so doubly lethal—the hot day, the fact that she was sweating profusely, all these were things the murderer could have, and probably had, counted on, and thus he had managed to bring about a quick, perfect kill.
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