waistcoat who had gone for salt: a man of slight build and soft, boyish skin, quite eclipsed by fierce blue eyes under a shock of upthrusting grey hair. ‘There’s been an uncommon demand for pies and baked potatoes in the hall tonight, and salt’s as scarce in there as upright women. So I borrowed this from the photographer’s studio next door.’ He held up a large brown bottle. ‘Iodine—the unfailing remedy for a dog-bite. It does a deuced fine job of disinfection, and if you pour it liberally over the wound it has a rare capacity for enlivening a dazed man.’
The manager beamed his admiration. ‘Good Lord, Major Chick, you’re the right man to have in an emergency. Allow me to introduce you to this gentleman. He is a policeman.’
‘Really? Wouldn’t have thought it—looks too blasted intelligent.’
‘Sergeant Cribb, sir.’ They shook hands. ‘And that’s Constable Thackeray on the dog-basket. What was your name, sir?’
‘Chick. Percival Chick. Major, retired. Late Adjutant of the 8th Hussars. Perhaps you have heard of me. I’m not, as you realise, a common scenery-remover. That was a mere subterfuge. Like you, Sergeant. I’m a detective now. But my investigations are limited to the private sphere.’
A private detective! Cribb inwardly snarled with a ferocity equal to the bulldog’s at the instant it sank its teeth into Albert. What an evening! Music hall policemen, and now a private detective! It was his first contact with one of the species, though he had seen their newspaper advertisements often enough, and the brass plates on their doors. Anyone who spoke with a plum in his mouth and could afford the price of lodgings in one of the nobbier areas of London could set up in business and derive a tidy income from it. You filled your rooms with barrowloads of old books and obsolete chemical apparatus and soon there was a stream of wealthy callers with fantasies of blackmail, kidnap and family scandals. So you fed their fears with a few quite spurious discoveries, pinned a crime on some wretched servant and claimed your fee in guineas, with a few choice remarks about the impotence of Scotland Yard. ‘Interested to make your acquaintance, sir. What’s your business here, if I may inquire?’
Major Chick looked cautiously around him. Only the manager, Miss Blake and the Scotland Yard men remained there, besides Albert. ‘I rather think my client, Mr Goodly, should explain.’
‘Why, of course,’ said the manager. ‘A series of unfortunate accidents in the London music halls led me to engage a detective. You see, I doubted whether they were, indeed, accidents. Almost every hall of any reputation has suffered in this way in the last month or two—except the Grampian. Our turn seemed inevitable before long. So Major Chick has been disguised as a stage-hand for the past week in readiness to investigate just such an occurrence as this— even though it appears most improbable that tonight’s small embarrassment was deliberately provoked. You can’t put a bulldog’s fickle behaviour down to Anarchists, now can you? However, I gather from your swift arrival on the scene that you were on the watch for trouble too.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Cribb. ‘Let’s attend to Albert. Hand me the iodine, Major.’ His voice bore the authority of a colonel at the very least and the Major almost clicked his heels as he obeyed the order. From that moment there was no question of who was in charge of the inquiries. ‘Your pocket-handkerchief, if you please, Thackeray.’
Among the bric-a-brac of the property-room was a card-table on which Cribb placed his jacket, before rolling back his shirt-cuffs like a conjuror. ‘Perhaps you will support the leg, Major, and you, Miss Blake, try to keep Albert from becoming distressed. Now, I shall remove this torn section of the tights and expose the wound . . . Capital! An ugly little bite, that. Not a lot of blood, but those teeth sank in a bit, eh Albert? I’ll just wipe the surface clean now, like that. Then I form a pad with the handkerchief, saturate it with iodine and apply it firmly—’
Albert drew in breath through his clenched teeth and made a sound like a sky-rocket ascending. Everyone grabbed and held down a limb as his muscles tensed. His eyes first shut tight, then opened wide, streaming with tears. His hand gripped Miss Blake’s so tightly that she squeaked with pain.
‘Beautiful job,’ Major Chick told Cribb. ‘You could make a living as an army-surgeon, you know. Dammit man, you’re wasting your time at Scotland Yard.’
Cribb surveyed his patient. ‘You’ll find it smarts a bit at first. Wounds need cleaning, though. Any other injuries?’ He held the iodine bottle in readiness.
Albert shook his head decisively. ‘Just the merest grazing where I fell through the platform. I’m sure the iodine won’t be necessary. It’s my ankle that hurts. I twisted it when I fell.’
‘You’ll be out of work for a week or two then,’ said the manager, without much sympathy. ‘And you can thank your dog for the lost wages. If you’ll take my advice you’ll have nothing to do with animals in the future. Just listen to the snarling brute! If you were mine, you ugly hound, I’d know what to do with you.’
Albert sat up. ‘But that isn’t my dog! That one’s white with brown patches. Beaconsfield is strictly black and white. Surely someone noticed—I’ve been doing the act for three weeks or more. Some blackguard put that vicious animal into Beaconsfield’s basket, knowing it would attack me as soon as it was released.’
‘Do I understand you right?’ asked the manager. ‘Are you sure that the bulldog in that basket isn’t yours?’
‘Beaconsfield wouldn’t attack me,’ said Albert, shocked by the suggestion. ‘He hasn’t got the energy. It’s all he can do to stand up on his four legs while I’m holding up the barbell, and then he sometimes needs prodding. I tell you he’s black and white, anyway.’
‘Shall I lift him out for you to have a closer look, Sarge?’ suggested Thackeray.
‘That isn’t necessary, Sergeant,’ Miss Blake interposed. ‘I know Beaconsfield and that is not him. If you look through the basket you can see a large brown patch where the Union Jack has ridden up on this dog’s back.’
‘A substitution, by Jove!’ exclaimed Major Chick. ‘Ingenious! Ah, the vagaries of the criminal mind! We’re on to a cunning enemy here, Sergeant.’
Cribb ignored the assumption that the Major was now a party to the investigation. ‘If that ain’t Beaconsfield, Albert, then where is his Lordship? When did you last see him?’
‘During the overture, when I brought him down here and put him in the wings in his basket. I like to watch Ellen’s— Miss Blake’s—act from the promenade, so I prepare everything for my own act first.’
‘Then the dogs could have been exchanged at any time during the first three acts?’
‘The first two, to be precise. I’m waiting with Mother in the wings from the beginning of the policemen’s act.’
‘It was done while Miss Blake or the Red Indians were performing then. Who would have been in the wings at that time, Mr Goodly?’
The manager smiled. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Sergeant. Music hall isn’t like the legitimate theatre, where everyone’s movements are planned and known. I’m managing a three and a half hour show with twenty-seven acts including dancers. I often have to change the order at very short notice to fit in with the commitments of the star billings. Tonight, for example, I’ve got Miss Jenny Hill on at eight o’clock. Nothing must alter that, because she’s appearing at the Royal Aquarium at nine and the London Pavilion at a quarter past ten. So I shall change the order of the acts to ensure that she goes on in time to make a cab journey across to Tothill Street. No two nights in the music hall are the same, you see.’
‘But you must have some notion who was in the wings at that time,’ insisted Cribb.
‘Very well,’ said the manager acidly. ‘Let’s make an inventory, if that’s the way Scotland Yard would like it. There would be the Red Indians, Henry and Cissie Greenbaum, waiting while Miss Blake was on, and the singing policemen, the Dalton brothers, and their assistant Vicky. Then there are up to nine stage-hands and scene-shifters dispersed on either side of the stage, two female dressers and one male, three fly-men looking after the curtain and the act-drops, two lime-boys on their perches in the flies, two callboys, the gasman at the index-plate, my assistant, myself and any one of the other twenty-four acts who cared to look in. I would say almost a hundred people had a right to be there, Sergeant.’
‘In that case someone must surely have seen the dogs being changed over.’
‘I doubt it. Most of us are far too occupied with our own duties to notice anything like that. Moreover, the wings are in semi-darkness for the whole of the Red Indian act, to achieve the special lighting effect onstage. That’s when the basket was opened, in my opinion.’
A murmur of assent on Cribb’s left provided him with a sudden thought. ‘Where were you positioned, Major?’
Major Chick coloured noticeably. ‘Why—er—in the gallery on the side-wall above the stage, where the ropes and so forth are controlled.’
‘The flies,’ explained the manager.
‘Didn’t you see anything?’
