Either of those would have done the trick, but the killer had rejected both options. And instead of making the murder a purely private affair — as most murderers would — he had deliberately arranged things so that when Kirkpatrick died, he would do so in front of a couple of thousand witnesses.
Chapter Three
Blackstone stood at the front of the stage, and looked down at the dozen or so uniformed constables — and two uniformed sergeants — who were looking back up at him expectantly.
So this was what it was like to be a performer, he thought. It was quite intoxicating, in its own little way.
As he clasped the lapels of his rented evening jacket between his thumbs and forefingers, he felt a sudden temptation come over him to say something at least vaguely Shakespearean.
Then, recognizing it was not a good idea, he resisted it, and when he did speak it was in his Scotland Yard voice.
‘Your sergeants will divide you into two groups,’ he announced. ‘One group will talk to everyone connected with either the play, or with the theatre. I want all their names and addresses taken down, and I want to know if any of them noticed any unusual occurrences in the two hours which led up to the murder.’ He paused for a moment. ‘The second group will search the theatre, both front-of-house and backstage — and I mean search every square inch of it — for clues. Are there any questions so far?’
The two sergeants exchanged quick glances, and then one of the raised his hand.
‘Yes?’ Blackstone said.
‘What clues will you want us to be looking for, exactly, sir?’ the sergeant wondered.
‘It would be rather pleasing if you could come up with a bloody big knife with a retractable blade,’ Blackstone told him.
The sergeant nodded. ‘Right, sir.’
‘And it would be even more pleasing if the bloody big knife you found had a clear set of fingerprints on it,’ Blackstone continued. ‘Failing that, I’d like to see anything you discover that you think has no place in a theatre — or does have it’s place in a theatre, but isn’t in that place.’
Or to put it another way, he thought to himself, I’m buggered if I know what we’re looking for!
* * *
As the uniformed officers set about their work with a slightly mystified enthusiasm, Blackstone found himself wondering where his invaluable assistant, Sergeant Patterson, was.
If there was one place Patterson wouldn’t be, he reflected, it was in one of his favourite chop houses.
Not now.
Not since THE EDICT.
It was Patterson’s fiancée, Rose, who had brought about the change in the sergeant’s usual way of life, when she had informed him that though he might get away with describing himself as ‘pleasantly plump’ while they were still only walking out together, she did not want to be engaged to a man who others might perceive as bordering on being fat.
As a consequence of all this, a diet sheet had been drawn up, and handed down — by Rose, to Patterson — with much the same gravity and sense of purpose as God must have displayed when handing the Ten Commandments to Moses. And since he would rather face down half a dozen East End cut-throats than admit to Rose that he had fallen off the wagon — and under the wheels of the gravy train — Patterson had been following the diet with rigour, though not without pain.
‘Is there anything I can do to hurry this whole awkward business along?’ asked a voice to Blackstone’s left.
Now that was a novel way to describe a murder, the inspector thought — a whole awkward business!
He turned to look at the man who addressed him. Sebastian George was standing not more than a couple of yards from the trestle table on which the body that had started the ‘whole awkward business’ still lay, and was puffing on the largest cigar Blackstone had ever seen.
‘No, I’m afraid there isn’t anything that you can do, Mr George,’ Blackstone said.
‘But surely, since, after all, this is my show… ’
‘It stopped being your show when Mr Kirkpatrick got himself killed,’ Blackstone told the impresario. ‘Now, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s very definitely my show.’
‘I’m not sure I care for your attitude, Inspector,’ Sebastian George told him, with some disdain.
‘I’m bloody certain I don’t care for yours,’ Blackstone replied. ‘But you were asking me if there was anything you could do to hurry matters along, and now I think about it, there is.’
‘Yes?’ George said eagerly.
‘You can tell me who was in charge of the dagger before it came into Miss Devaraux’s possession.’
‘That would be the properties manager,’ George said, his eagerness rapidly transforming itself into a sulk.
‘Where might I find him?’ Blackstone wondered.
‘In the props room, of course.’
Blackstone sighed. ‘And is there any danger of you telling me where that might be, do you think?’ he asked.
Sebastian George took another puff of his huge cigar. ‘It’s in the basement, behind the stage,’ he said. ‘Where else would it be?’
* * *
There was a whole different world in the theatre basement — a world of narrow corridors with numerous doors leading off them.
It was, Blackstone thought, a little like being below stairs in one of the grand houses on the edge of Hyde Park. Here, as there, countless minions sweated and slaved to ensure that what appeared above ground was perfect and faultless. And the theatre audience, just like the grand families in their big houses, gave little thought to all the effort that had gone into creating that perfection for them — if they ever thought about it at all!
The properties room was located in one of these warrens. The far end of it was clearly used for storage, but in the area closest to the door was a very large table, presided over by a small, middle-aged man with receding brown-grey hair and very alert eyes.
‘I’m Norman Foster,’ he said, when Blackstone had shown him his warrant card. ‘I’m the props master.’
He made the announcement with some considerable pride. But that was hardly surprising, for just as some men are born warriors or born painters, he had the look of a born custodian about him. He was the kind of man, Blackstone thought, who probably came out of the womb fretting about whether or not the doctor would put his instruments away properly, and then proceeded to spend the rest of his life worrying over objects most other people considered of little importance.
‘Am I right in thinking that it’s your job’ Blackstone began.
‘Do you know what’s wrong with my job?’ Foster interrupted.
‘No, I —’
‘Actors! That’s what wrong with it! It’d be a perfect position for anyone to hold if it wasn’t for the bloody actors. You have no idea what they’re like. I tell them all to look after the props, but do they listen?’
‘I imagine not.’
‘Do they hell-as-like! Some of them don’t even know which prop I’ve assigned to them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, take a “for instance”. We did Julius Caesar a couple of years ago, and I made sure each one of the conspirators had his own personal dagger right from the start — this one for Brutus, that one for Casca, the other one for Cassius. I even had their character’s names painted on the hafts in tiny letters. It made no bloody difference at all to the actors. They’d come into the property room and just grab the first dagger that came to hand.’
‘And did that matter?’
‘Of course it mattered! You have to have order in this life. You never get anywhere without order.’
‘What about the dagger that killed William Kirkpatrick?’
‘Wasn’t one of mine,’ the props master said, with a finality which suggested that since it didn’t come within his realm of responsibility, it could be of no possible interest to anybody. ‘He wouldn’t be lying there stone dead now, if it had been one of mine.’
‘But Miss Charlotte Devaraux thought it
was one of yours,’ Blackstone pointed out.
I’m not surprised. One of your men showed the one she actually used. I couldn’t tell it from one of my own, and I’m an expert.’
‘So it was probably made by the same craftsman who provided the fake dagger,’ Blackstone mused.
‘Highly unlikely,’ Norman Foster said dismissively. ‘Virtually impossible, in fact.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The men who strive for perfection in the gentle art of prop creation — those unsung heroes, those da Vincis of theatrical illusion — would never soil their hands with anything so sordid as producing a murder weapon.’
‘Unless they didn’t know what the knife they were producing was intended to be employed as,’ Blackstone said. ‘Where was the fake dagger kept, when it wasn’t being used?’
‘Under lock and key. Every night, when the curtain goes down for the final time, I check through the props, and then I lock them up. I have to do that, you know, or some of them would go missing.’
‘They’d be stolen?’
‘Oh yes. You’d be surprised at the number of things that I’ve lost in my time. Swords, helmets, even complete suits of armour!’
‘Really?’ Blackstone said.
‘A grandmother clock!’ Foster pressed on. ‘A grandfather clock! One night, during a production of Hamlet, I lost Yorick’s skull. It turned up eventually, of course — in some pub or other, where, no doubt, one of the so-called actors had been using it to get a cheap laugh from his lowlife friends — but by then it was too late.’
‘Too late?’ Blackstone asked, curious despite himself.
‘ “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio.” That’s what Hamlet’s supposed to say as he looks down at the skull — but it’s hard for him to make it sound convincing when all he’s talking to is his own bloody hand, isn’t it? So I had to get another skull before the next performance, didn’t I? And don’t ask me where I got it from —’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘— because I won’t tell you, you being a policeman, and all that. But let me assure you, it was bloody expensive!’
Blackstone sighed, and found himself wishing he’d left the questioning of the props master to his sergeant.
‘When do you unlock the props, Mr Foster?’ he asked.
‘Just before the start of the performance. Then I lay them out on this table, all in the right order — the first one to be used in the top left-hand corner, the last in the bottom right. I ask the actors to put them back exactly where they found them, but of course, they never do.’
‘So at the start of every performance of this particular play, you place the dagger on the table?’
‘Yes.’
‘And does Miss Devaraux come and collect it?’
‘You must be joking!’
‘Must I?’
‘She’s an artiste — and you’d better not forget it, because she never does. It would be beneath her dignity to actually pick up a prop herself, however vital the part it’s about to play in her performance.’
‘So you deliver it to her, do you?’
‘Certainly not! I have my professional standards to maintain, too, you know! If I’d wanted to be a delivery boy, I’d have bought myself a bicycle and gone to work for a butcher.’
‘So how does she get her hands on the dagger?’
‘One of the errand boys comes for it. She usually sends Horace, who is halfway to becoming her own personal little monkey.’
‘And was it Horace who picked it up tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘So am I correct in assuming that you had the dagger under close observation from the time you took it out of the cupboard until the moment you handed it over to Horace?’
Foster suddenly began to look a little uncomfortable. ‘Well, not exactly,’ he confessed.
‘Why not?’
‘In the middle of the first act, I got called away to the telephone. They said it was an emergency.’
‘Who said it was an emergency?’
‘The errand boy who delivered the message.’
‘And who told him?’
‘Whoever was calling.’
Blackstone sighed again, and really began to wish that he’d waited for Patterson to arrive.
‘What was the name of this caller of yours?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Foster admitted.
‘Didn’t he tell you?’
‘I never got to speak to him. The phone’s in the porter’s office, and by the time I reached it, there was nobody on the other end of the line.’
Now wasn’t that convenient, Blackstone thought.
‘How long were you away, answering this non-existent telephone call?’ he asked.
‘It couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes.’
‘And when you got back, the dagger was still here?’
‘I assumed it was still here. Why wouldn’t I? But it was in its sheath, wasn’t it? And even if it hadn’t been, I’d never have noticed, because, like I said, the real one and the fake one are as alike as two peas in a pod.’
Chapter Four
There were occasions on which Detective Sergeant Archibald Clarence Patterson told himself that whilst his decision to join the police may have been a great gain for the forces of law and order, it was a correspondingly great loss to the fields of science and technology. But these moments were rare. Most of the time, he happily conceded that though he had boundless enthusiasm for both these areas of study, he was also cursed with a lack of the brain power he would have needed in order to make any significant contribution to them.
And so, denied the chance to become a technical innovator himself, he settled for being a follower of innovation, and pursued his chosen course with a dedication which would have made avid stamp collectors question their own commitment, and keen bird watchers wonder if they were not, perhaps, being a little too lukewarm towards their feathered friends.
Thus, it would scarcely have surprised anyone who knew Patterson at all that, on arriving at the George Theatre, he did not immediately set out in search of his boss — as he should have done — but instead found himself irresistibly drawn to the theatrical machinery below stage.
What he found down there amazed him. The days of ropes, pulleys and hand-operated levers were now gone, and in their place was a complicated network of machines which could do anything and everything, from rotating the stage one hundred and eighty degrees to drenching it with artificial snow. But it was the electric ‘bridge’ which truly took his breath away — for it was one thing to read about a machine which could be used — and had been used — to raise fully-grown elephants up on to the stage, but it was quite another thing to have the opportunity to actually stand next to it.
As his hunger for the new and innovative began to abate a little, he was becoming aware of a different kind of hunger — a purely physical one — which had been gnawing away at his insides ever since Rose had decided that he needed to slim down a little.
‘Very nice of you to finally turn up, Sergeant, even if it is only in the pursuit of your hobby,’ said a voice from somewhere behind him.
Patterson turned. ‘I’m not here for my own pleasure, sir,’ he said, with mock-indignation. ‘I’m working.’
‘Working?’ Blackstone repeated.
‘Working!’ Patterson reaffirmed.
He did not sound entirely convincing — even to himself —but considering he was arguing his case in the face of the overwhelming evidence against it, he thought it was not a bad effort.
Blackstone gave him a sardonic grin. ‘And precisely what kind of work are you currently involved in, Sergeant?’ he asked.
What kind indeed, Patterson wondered.
‘You’ve always taught me that the three vital strands of a murder investigation are means, motive and opportunity, sir,’ Patterson said, improvising wildly. ‘And that the “opportunity” strand of the equation is as much a factor of physical geogr
aphy as it is of timing. So that’s why I’m down here — I’m thinking about the physical geography of the theatre.’
‘Very useful, considering the murder took place at least fifty feet above where you’re standing now — and is separated from it by a floor several feet thick,’ Blackstone said dryly. ‘Anyway, you weren’t thinking about the murder at all — you were thinking about food’
‘I most certainly was not.’
‘You most certainly were. I could hear your stomach rumbling, nineteen-to-the-dozen, even from upstairs.’
‘Not true,’ Patterson said, trying to avoid blushing. ‘A scientifically calculated diet, such as the one I have been following, is well known to be both nutritious and filling.’
But not as nutritious as a beefsteak! he added silently. Not as filling as a suet pudding!
‘What I don’t understand,’ he continued, in an attempt to quickly move away from the twin subjects of food and his presence in the machine-room, ‘is why the killer should have chosen the method he did. You have to admit, sir, it was pretty hit-and-miss.’
‘Hit and miss? It worked, didn’t it? Kirkpatrick is dead! And you don’t get much more “hit” than that.’
‘But it might not have worked,’ Patterson argued. ‘Charlotte Devaraux could have realized the knives had been swapped. Or she could have missed her target completely, and —’
‘She’s a professional,’ Blackstone interrupted. ‘Everybody — from Sebastian George himself, right down to Madge, her dresser — has been at great pains to point that out to me. The murderer could have been pretty sure that she’d strike where she was intended to.’
‘But even so, there are much more reliable murder weapons down here,’ Patterson argued.
‘That electric bridge must weigh several tons,’ Blackstone said. ‘Even a big lad like you would be hard pressed to pick it up and bang somebody over the head with it.’
‘You’re missing the point, sir,’ Patterson told him.
‘I rather thought that I might be,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘So what is the point, Sergeant?’
‘The murderer could have opened a trapdoor when he knew the victim was standing over it.’
Blackstone and the Stage of Death (The Blackstone Detective series Book 5) Page 3