‘I’ll find out how it was done first,’ she said to Meadows.
She walked over to Turnbull, introduced herself, and held out her hand. His grip was weak and slightly clammy, and even at that hour of the morning, she thought she could smell alcohol on his breath.
Paniatowski sat down opposite him and gave him the quick once-over.
Geoff Turnbull was probably no more than fifty-one or fifty-two, but if that was the case, he certainly hadn’t aged well. He had very bloodshot eyes and bitten-down fingernails, and he seemed to Paniatowski to be carrying a huge weight of defeat on his shoulders.
‘My colleagues tell me you can explain how it was done, Mr Turnbull,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Oh yes, that’s easy enough,’ Turnbull agreed. ‘Both the rope and the harness were attached to a bar up in the fly system and—’
‘The fly system? What’s that?’
‘It’s a system of ropes, pulleys and weights high above the stage. It’s what we use to raise and lower curtains, move scenery on and off the stage, and allow Peter Pan and his ilk to fly. Some of the lighting is up there, as well.’
‘I see. Carry on.’
‘It was the harness which took all the weight. The noose looked, from the front of the house, as if it was drawn tightly around the neck, but it wasn’t. It was only just starting to close fully when the harness did its work. It was all perfectly safe if it had been left as it was.’
‘What do you mean? Left as it was?’
‘Well, somebody interfered with the harness, didn’t they?’
Paniatowski shot Meadows a look which said, Has anybody been talking out of turn?
And Meadows shook her head to indicate that no one had.
‘How do you know someone interfered with the harness, Mr Turnbull?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘It’s obvious. If someone hadn’t interfered with it, it would never have broken.’
‘It may have got worn.’
‘It hadn’t. I checked it yesterday lunchtime, after we’d done a final run-though, and it was fine. And it wasn’t just the harness which was interfered with – it was the rope, as well.’
‘Could you explain that?’
‘Even with a broken harness, Mark Cotton shouldn’t have been in that much trouble, because he’d only have fallen a couple of feet. That’s what they call a short-drop hanging. It was how they executed people until about 1850, and it was slow death by strangulation. With the short drop, it took between ten and twenty minutes to die, and Mark would have been pulled back on to the platform after only a few seconds. He’d have had some bruising and a sore throat – he might even have put his back out a little – but that would have been the full extent of it.’
‘And that didn’t happen because …?’
‘It didn’t happen because somebody must have replaced the rope that was already there with a longer one, so that instead of falling two feet, he fell round about eight.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it, Mr Turnbull,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Are you saying I did it?’ Turnbull demanded, with a sudden show of aggression.
‘No, I’m not saying that at all – I’m just saying you seem to know a lot about it.’
Turnbull sighed. ‘Before we put the play on the first time, back in 1957, I consulted Albert Pierrepoint, who ran a pub over in Much Hoole, near Preston. Have you ever heard of him?’
‘He was England’s Chief Executioner.’
‘That’s right. In his time, he hanged four hundred and thirty-five people, including a number of German war criminals, so he probably knew what he was talking about. And when we put the play on this time, I read through the notes I’d made back then, and checked to see if Mark Cotton was still the same weight – which he was. So yes, I do know a lot about it.’
‘And you’re convinced that the rope was substituted.’
‘It had to have been.’
‘Do you have any idea at all where the killer might have got the second rope from?’
Turnbull laughed. ‘This is a hemp house,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Some theatres use steel cables in the fly systems. They can carry heavier loads, but they’re very inflexible, and when you are a repertory theatre, flexibility is what you need, and so you tend to stick to rope – hence, hemp houses. So where could the killer have got the rope from, you ask. From here! We’ve got bloody miles of the stuff.’
‘And is getting up to the fly system difficult?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘There’s a ladder up to it, and once you get there, there’s a series of interconnecting walkways around the whole system, so it’s only a problem if you have no head for heights,’ Turnbull said.
‘Great!’ Paniatowski said. ‘Bloody superb!’
The last time Paniatowski had seen Edgar Gough, it had been when he was briefing the senior officers’ meeting about the Bad Buds. He had seemed supremely confident then, but now he looked a little shaken – which, given the circumstances, was perfectly understandable.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he told Paniatowski.
‘Did I say it was?’
‘No, but it’s what you’re thinking. For a start, you’re wondering why I didn’t have my people inside the theatre last night, aren’t you?’
‘And why didn’t you have your people inside?’
‘Mr Cotton wouldn’t allow it. He said he felt safe in the theatre. Besides, he didn’t want the other actors thinking he was a wimp.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Yesterday morning, I sent a team to check the theatre before Mr Cotton arrived,’ Gough said crisply. ‘Once he was inside, I posted men in the street, next to the entrances, and they remained there for the rest of the day, because we didn’t want any Buds sneaking in while the place was empty.’
‘What happened at lunchtime?
‘I personally escorted Mr Cotton to his hotel, and then back to the theatre in the late afternoon.’
‘And during the performance?’
‘I was at the stage door with one of my operatives – that’s where the Buds usually try to get in – and I had a couple of my men posted at the main entrance. We were there until your lot took over from us.’
The harness must have been safe enough during the morning run-through, so it had to have been sabotaged some time after that, Paniatowski thought. And if Gough was sure that absolutely no one but the cast and crew had been allowed in the theatre …
‘Did everyone leave the theatre at lunchtime?’ she asked.
Gough took a notebook, and flicked it open.
‘Yes.’
‘Did they leave as a group – or individually?’
‘Individually – apart from the camera crew.’
So the rope and the harness must have been tampered with either just before lunch or during the early evening – and whoever the murderer was, he or she had to be either a member of the cast or one of the stagehands.
The two uniformed constables who’d been assigned to search the dressing rooms, toilets and props rooms were called Hollis and Grimshaw. It was not the happiest of pairings, since Hollis, as a keen member of the Whitebridge Gilbert and Sullivan Society, was in seventh heaven at finally getting behind the scenes in a professional theatre, whilst Grimshaw, a hard-headed rugby player, thought that all actors were poofs.
The two officers had already searched the dressing rooms – Hollis fighting the urge to fondle all the props, Grimshaw afraid that if he touched anything he might catch homosexuality – and had finally reached the props room.
It was a big space, large enough to accommodate scenery for everything from a Shakespeare historical play to a Noel Coward drawing room comedy, but since the repertory company was only just starting up again, it was mostly empty, except for shelving and several large wood and canvas flats which had proved to be surplus to requirements.
‘Well, here we are, in the hall of the fairy king,’ Grimshaw said.
He sniffed
loudly, to make his disdain for the place even more evident than it already was, sniffed again, then sniffed for a third time.
‘If you ask me, something has definitely gone bad in here,’ he said.
‘Methinks there is something rotten in the state of Denmark,’ Hollis misquoted.
‘Yeah, I wouldn’t be the least surprised,’ agreed Grimshaw, who included foreigners in his long list of dislikes.
He walked around the room, continuing to sniff, and came to a halt in front of one of the larger flats, which was leaning against the wall.
‘It’s behind here,’ he said.
He took one corner of the flat in his massive rugby-player’s hands, and tilted it so he could look behind it.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter?’ Hollis asked alarmed.
‘Go and get the DCI,’ said Grimshaw, who looked as if he was about to throw up. ‘Go and get her right now.’
TEN
Paniatowski glanced briefly behind the large canvas flat, then took a few steps backwards.
‘Could you shift that for me, lads,’ she said.
The constables took one end of the flat each and lifted it clear to reveal the squalor which lay behind it.
There were empty corned beef cans and crushed crisp packets. There were plastic bottles and half-eaten sandwiches. And there was the woman.
She was lying on the floor with her face towards the wall, and though she was breathing regularly, she had not moved an inch while the flat was being removed. She was wrapped in a black-and-white coat and wearing high-heeled shoes which were much too dainty for her large ungainly feet – and from the smell, it was clear that she’d soiled herself quite spectacularly.
Paniatowski squatted down beside her.
‘Can you hear me, love?’ she asked gently.
There was no response.
Paniatowski grasped the woman’s shoulder, and slowly rolled her over on to her back.
‘Can you hear me now?’
The woman’s eyes were open, and when Paniatowski waved her hand over them, she blinked. But though the eyes were working on a purely biological level, there was no sign in them of any understanding of her current situation.
‘Call the hospital,’ Paniatowski said to PC Hollis. ‘I want a stretcher team down here right away.’
Florrie Hodge liked to think of her establishment more as a community – albeit a temporary one – than a boarding house, and she saw the lounge as being at the very heart of that community. In the fifties, she’d decorated it with signed photographs of her paying guests. Some had gone on to acquire modest fame as minor characters in soap operas or loyal assistants in low-budget detective series, though there were others who had long ago given up the struggle and allowed themselves to be sucked deep into the whirlpool of obscurity.
After the theatre had closed, the commercial travellers, who had become her core business, had made unkind comments about the ‘nancy boys’ on the wall, and to protect the actors’ dignity, Florrie had taken the pictures down and replaced them with prints of Highland glens and steam trains, which these philistines who sold dental powder and corn plasters found much more appropriate. But now, her thespians were back, and so were the signed photographs – some of which were of people who, twenty years on, were in the lounge at that moment.
No one had summoned the company to the lounge – no one had even so much as suggested holding a meeting – yet there they all were.
‘The police are bound to suspect that it was one of us who killed Mark, don’t you think?’ Tony Brown asked.
Bradley Quirk laughed. ‘Well, of course they are – after all, it was one of us who did actually kill him.’
‘You can’t know that for sure,’ Phil McCann said.
‘Then who else could have done it?’ Quirk demanded. ‘Are you suggesting that one of the audience managed to sneak out of his seat, make his way up to the fly loft unobserved, and switch the ropes?’
‘It could have been one of the crew,’ Lucy Cavendish suggested. ‘They’d know how to do it.’
‘Yes, they would,’ Quirk replied, ‘but what would be their motive? Did they hate him?’
‘They could have.’
‘Listen, whilst I’ve always had the greatest faith in Mark Cotton’s ability to piss people off, it’s stretching that faith beyond credulity to believe that in one short week he could have pissed off one of our petty bourgeois stagehands – who he’d never met before – to such an extent that they would kill him and damn the consequences. Oh no, my dears, you have to face the facts – this is purely a family affair.’
‘We need to have a united front,’ Jerry Talbot said.
‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’ Phil McCann wondered.
‘We should all try to remember when we were alone last night, and then ask another of the cast to say that they were with us. If everybody has an alibi for the whole of the evening, we should be safe.’
‘I can think of three good reasons why we shouldn’t do that,’ Phil McCann said. ‘The first is that the police would never believe it – because nobody could possibly have an alibi for the whole time. The second, which follows on from the first, is that they’d probably charge us all with obstruction of justice, because what you’re proposing is illegal, Jerry.’
‘And what’s the third reason, Phil?’
‘The third is, at least from my own viewpoint, probably the most important of all. I didn’t like Mark Cotton twenty years ago, and I liked him even less this time around – but I still want to see whoever did it tracked down and punished.’
‘Well, of course, we all want that,’ Jerry Talbot said, somewhat unconvincingly.
‘Hello, Mrs H,’ Tony Brown said loudly, since he seemed to be the only one who had noticed that the landlady was standing in the doorway.
‘Can we help you, Mrs Hodge?’ Phil McCann asked.
‘I was just wondering if any of you boys and girls fancied a cup of tea,’ Florrie Hodge said.
‘No, thank you,’ Phil McCann replied.
‘I’d put out some biscuits, as well.’
‘We really don’t want anything at all.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Florrie Hodge turned her attention to Bradley Quirk. ‘While I was cleaning your room, I noticed that one of your socks had a hole in it,’ she said with a smile, ‘and luckily, I had just the right coloured wool in my wool basket, so I darned it for you.’
‘You’re just like a big sister to me, Mrs H,’ Quirk said.
‘I don’t know about that,’ the landlady said, blushing. ‘Well, if there’s nothing else you want, I’d suppose I’d better get on with my jobs.’
‘What a remarkable woman she is,’ Bradley Quirk said. ‘I swear that if she walked in here and three of us were lying dead on the floor, she’d ask the survivors whether they wanted chocolate biscuits or digestives.’
‘Let’s get back to the matter in hand,’ Phil McCann said. ‘Do either of you girls have any thoughts?’
The Audley sisters had been sitting slightly apart from the rest of the group, and so far had kept very quiet, but now Sarah burst into tears.
‘I miss him so much already,’ she sobbed. ‘I know he was a bit of a bastard, but I really do miss him.’
Ruth put her arm around her younger sister’s shoulders.
‘There, there,’ she cooed.
‘I think … I think that perhaps I was still a little bit in love with him,’ Sarah said.
Most of the company looked down at their own knees, and were silent, but Bradley Quirk put his hands together and applauded.
‘Bravo,’ he said. ‘A truly outstanding performance. And now you think you’ve completely ruled yourself out as a suspect – because how could you have killed him when you were still in love with him? But you see, my dear, we’re all actors here – and we can all put on a show when the occasion demands it.’
‘You’re being horrid,’ Ruth Audley said.
‘I’m b
eing truthful,’ Quirk countered.
‘Has it ever occurred to you that people might think that this cynicism of yours is just as much a mask as Sarah’s tears?’ Phil McCann asked. ‘And that they might further conclude that behind the mask, you did actually hate Mark enough to kill him?’
‘So you admit Sarah’s tears are, in fact, nothing more than a mask?’ Quirk said.
‘Has it occurred to you?’ Phil McCann persisted.
‘Well, of course it has,’ Quirk said. ‘I doubt that you’ve ever had a clever thought that hasn’t occurred to me first. But you see, I’m not bothered, because I know I didn’t kill Mark Cotton.’
‘That could be just another bluff,’ Jerry Talbot said.
‘Yes,’ Quirk agreed, ‘it could.’
The woman being carried out of the theatre on a stretcher showed no more awareness of her situation than she had when she’d been discovered, hidden behind the flat, by Constable Grimshaw.
Edgar Gough watched her progress. His face was mostly impassive, though occasionally a look which seemed to combine shame and anger flashed across his features.
When he saw Paniatowski looking at him, he shrugged and said, ‘What can I tell you? One of my men screwed up, and when I find which one it was, he’ll be looking for a new job – as a eunuch.’
Paniatowski laughed – though she wasn’t entirely sure that he was joking.
‘She probably hadn’t shat herself when your men were searching,’ she said charitably. ‘That was a great help to us.’
‘I know her,’ Gough said. ‘She’s Maggie Maitland, Queen of the Bad Buds.’
‘Tell me about her,’ Paniatowski suggested.
The first time Mark Cotton comes across Maggie Maitland is in the Grand Hotel in Leeds. He is doing a promotional tour for the second series of DCI Prince. He hates the tour, because it necessitates him being nice to people all the time – and that kind of acting can be very tiring. Still, it will soon be over, he thinks as he waits for room service to bring him his breakfast.
A maid arrives, pushing a trolley, and his first thought on seeing her is that surely an expensive hotel like the Grand could afford to employ somewhat prettier staff.
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