‘A kiss then.’
He pulled a face and made a retching sound. Little Annie laughed again. But Eddie could tell that she was making light of her disappointment. She always did. One day perhaps he would give her a kiss, and see if she laughed then. Faint from the shock, more like.
Everyone called her little Annie, though she was as old as Eddie and slightly taller. But her dad, the baker, would tousle her hair with his floury hands and call her his little girl. Eddie liked Annie. He liked the way the flour flecked her dark hair, the way she half-smiled when she tried not to laugh. The way her eyes widened when she saw Eddie, and most of all the way she kept yesterday’s rolls for him.
‘Annie?’
She could sense he was going to ask her something serious, and frowned. ‘Yes?’
‘You know anything about talking to the dead?’
The frown froze on her face, lining her forehead and wrinkling the skin by her nose. ‘You’re weird, you are, Eddie Hopkins,’ she said. ‘Who do you know who’s dead?’
Eddie grinned at her. ‘Lots of people,’ he said. He laughed out loud to see her flinch at that. But inside, he wasn’t laughing.
A policeman called mid afternoon. He assured Liz and her father that a post mortem on Albert Wilkes was to be carried out that evening, and that the poor man’s widow had been informed and the relevant permissions obtained. He made it sound very formal, and despite the way in which events had come about, Liz supposed it was.
That evening, after reading evensong from his battered Book of Common Prayer, Liz’s father announced that he would retire early. Relieved, Liz helped him up the stairs. She did not want to be late meeting George Archer, and she had another appointment she intended to keep before that.
She sat on the top stair until the sound of her father’s gentle snores was rhythmic and settled. Then Liz spent another fifteen minutes washing up the crockery and cutlery from supper and tidying the living room. She crept up the steps again, listening carefully to check her father was still settled and deeply asleep.
In the drawer of the kitchen table where Liz kept her playscript there was a sheet of cartridge paper. On it she had written a short message. The ink was faded from age and the paper was curling at the edges, but she saw no reason to write it out again. It was a short note to her father and he had never read it. Liz hoped he never would. She placed the sheet of paper prominently on the table in the living room where he would be sure to see it if he woke and came downstairs. It was not much of a letter, and while it did not tell the whole truth it was not actually a lie:
The Chistleton Theatre was not an imposing building. Standing slightly back from the road, it was easy to miss unless you knew it was there. The frontage was narrow and bland, nothing like the decorated facades of the larger London theatres. It rarely boasted much of an audience, but the people who did come were keen and loyal.
Liz Oldfield barely glanced at the front of the building. It was dark and quiet — there was no performance this evening. A new play was in preparation, and Liz could just hear the sounds of the rehearsal. A deep voice was proclaiming loudly about the merits of afternoon tea, pausing at the end of each line of the script. She recognised it at once as the theatre’s leading man — Nigel Braithwaite. He was loud and brash and not talented enough to have made it in the larger theatres. But he was also intelligent and modest enough to recognise the fact. Despite his bluff manner, he was willing to listen to the producer’s advice and on the night he would be word perfect if not a hundred per cent convincing.
Braithwaite’s volume increased when Liz opened the door, and continued to grow as she made her way through the narrow backstage corridor towards the auditorium. She stood in the flies, just off stage, hoping not to be noticed as she watched Marcus Jessop attempt to tone down his star’s performance. Mary Manners was standing quietly beside Braithwaite on the stage, patient as ever.
‘And Mary,’ Jessop finished, ‘that was fine thank you.’
The woman smiled thinly. She was playing the leading lady, which meant that both the main characters were rather older than the author had intended. But they complemented each other well, Liz thought. If she felt a moment’s stab of regret that she had herself turned down Jessop’s offer of a leading role — again — then she did not admit it, even to herself. One day, she had promised, one day she would take up that offer. One day she would have the time to commit herself to the theatre. But she scarcely dared think when that might be, or of the events that would have to take place to give her that freedom.
Until then, she would swell the crowd scenes, help with the props, perhaps even serve as prompter. Jessop had promised her a walk-on part, and she hoped and prayed she would not have to let him down. He seemed to have faith in her and she had earned a round of applause for her brief appearance in the last play — to Mary Manners’s distinct annoyance and Nigel Braithwaite’s generous congratulation.
‘You’ve got something I have to admit that I haven’t,’ Braithwaite had said quietly to Liz in the wings after the last night’s performance. ‘Talent. Skill. The audience responds to you.’
Jessop’s voice jolted Liz back to the present: ‘Is that Miss Oldfield I see lurking in the wings there?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, stepping forward. ‘I ordered the dresses and the hats. They should be delivered later in the week.’
‘That’s terrific, thanks ever so much,’ Jessop told her. He ran down the centre aisle of the theatre from where he had been sitting half way back, and leaped on to the stage as if he was in his early twenties rather than his forties. ‘Sorry you’re reduced to helping with Wardrobe this time.’
Liz shook her head. ‘That’s all right. I’ll do anything I can.’
Jessop nodded sympathetically. He had thinning dark hair and thin-framed glasses that caught the lights as his head moved. ‘I know,’ he said quietly. He had a bushy moustache that bristled and twitched when he spoke, and Liz always found herself watching that instead of meeting his eyes. ‘Maybe next time, eh?’
‘Maybe,’ Liz said. It was what she always said, and at some point he would stop asking. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she told him. ‘I have to leave in a few minutes, but I wanted to let you know that it is all in hand. And if there’s anything else I can do to help …?’
Jessop blew out a long sigh. ‘Not unless you have any idea how we can make that ashtray …’ He paused to indicate a silver-plated ashtray on a low wooden table on the stage beside them. ‘Make that ashtray fly across the room and land in Mr Braithwaite’s lap.’
Liz looked at the ashtray. Then she looked across the stage to where Braithwaite was sitting.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Like the policeman in the play, I haven’t a clue.’
‘Pity,’ Jessop said. He turned and made his way less enthusiastically back to the auditorium. ‘Still, I expect we’ll think of something.’ He did not sound convinced.
The mortuary was little more than a hut with a wooden table standing unevenly in the middle of the damp floor. Doctor Jones washed his hands in a cracked tin basin in the corner of the room and then turned his attention to the final job of the day.
The body was already on the table. Jones was annoyed that the clothes had been removed. Someone had washed the corpse, which made Jones doubly-angry. How many times had he told them that the deceased was not to be touched save by himself. To have the clothes removed was to take away possibly vital evidence. To clean the body was to wash away more evidence. Even though this one had been in the ground for a week, he would still have liked to have met the man in his original condition. Preferably still in the coffin.
This was not morbid fascination on the part of Jones. Rather, it was typical of the methodical and meticulous way he approached his work. He did not pretend to enjoy his work for the police, and would have been happy to go home after finishing his general practice. But he suffered from a sense of duty, and he was very aware that if he did
