Inge went first, moving confidently past the theatre notices, down more steps and across the fly floor, the area behind the scenery. Diamond, tense, but trying to appear as comfortable as she was, glanced upwards to make sure the body had been removed from the catwalk, and it had. On the prompt side, they stood in the shadows. The pre-show activity, crew members in black criss-crossing on various duties, brought home to him how many anonymous helpers were involved in the play, apart from the actors. He’d thought there would be a closed circle of suspects backstage. Quite some circle.
Above them in a precarious cubbyhole reached only by ladder, the deputy stage manager was directing operations from a console. They heard him call the five minutes and then overture and beginners. Preston Barnes, the actor playing Isherwood, appeared from behind them and walked straight on stage, his eyes expressionless as if all his thoughts were turned inwards.
‘He’s there when the curtain goes up,’ Ingeborg said in a low voice to Diamond. ‘Now watch.’
They edged forward for a view of the stage. Barnes had seated himself at the table downstage. And of crucial importance to the investigation, a young woman moved in to dust his face with a make-up brush.
‘Who is she?’ Diamond whispered.
‘Belinda. Straight out of drama school, I expect. This is how they get experience. This way now.’ Ingeborg tugged at his sleeve.
‘No. We must question her.’
‘Shortly. Trust me, guv.’ She steered him away and right around the back of the set to the OP side. Everything was dimly lit, even the stage.
‘If you don’t mind,’ someone said in a stage whisper that was more of an angry hiss. A large woman in a pinafore, black dress and carpet slippers wanted to pass them. She was carrying a lace tablecloth.
‘Fraulein Schneider,’ Ingeborg muttered to Diamond after they’d stepped aside.
‘Big star?’
‘Just big.’
The make-up girl came off the stage and checked Schneider with a mere two flicks of the brush – as if to confirm that she was a minor player. Diamond noticed that the powder came in a black cylindrical box.
Some accordion music was playing. ‘And curtain up,’ a low voice said through the tannoy.
The mechanism whirred and the curtains parted and the stage came alight. For a moment no words were spoken. Preston Barnes as Christopher Isherwood was in the spotlight at the desk, writing.
Rather than looking at the stage, Diamond had been watching the young make-up artist. He didn’t want her to vanish as suddenly as she’d arrived. Helpfully, two more actors, a man and a woman, both young, were ready to go on. She was attending to one of them with more than the token flicks of the brush.
‘Gisella,’ Ingeborg murmured. ‘Overnight star.’
His first sight of the understudy, the fledging actress with a clear motive for ousting Clarion. Similar in figure, she was prettier, he thought, and didn’t look at all nervous. She’d been given generous reviews, the first big break of her career. How much would an ambitious young actor dare to do for stardom?
Barnes spoke his first lines, reading back the words his character was supposed to have written, about Nazis rioting in the streets of Berlin. This opening speech gave some background on Isherwood’s attempt to scrape a living as a writer. He moved seamlessly into the ‘I am a camera’ line and was only interrupted by Fraulein Schneider’s knocking on the double doors.
‘Come in, Fraulein,’ Barnes said, and the big woman entered and started tidying in preparation for Sally Bowles and getting a few guarded laughs from the audience as she spoke of her own love life and how sad it was that her bosom only grew large after the death of her partner, ‘a man for bosoms’.
Diamond continued to watch Gisella in the wings. She was in a black silk dress with a small cape over it and patent leather high heels and was carrying a handbag. A page boy cap at a jaunty angle completed the look. She turned her head and their eyes met and Diamond was the first to look away. Under her gaze he felt reviled, like a Jew in Berlin in the thirties. Either she was in the role already or she wasn’t nice to know.
He had to remind himself that he’d come to see the girl with the make-up brush now attending to the young male actor playing Fritz. But a problem was emerging. If each of the actors was given the last-minute touch-up from the same powder box, there was an obvious flaw in his theory.
He was still brooding over this when sound effects rang a doorbell. The make-up girl stepped back and the actor playing Fritz approached the doors.
From the wings, the flurry of action on the brilliantly lit stage was compelling. The business of the door being opened by Preston Barnes, Fritz entering with hat and cane and Fraulein Schneider coming out with an empty beer bottle, glass and plate, all within touching distance, absorbed Diamond. When he looked away, the make-up girl had gone.
‘Where’d she go?’ he asked Ingeborg.
She, too, had been dazzled by all the action. ‘I’m not sure. Up the stairs, I think.’
‘That’s a guess, isn’t it?’
She nodded, biting her lip. ‘Trust me,’ she’d said earlier. A mistake.
‘You go up. I’ll try round the back.’ The urgency of getting this right pushed his own disquiet out of court. He swung right, straight into an avalanche of hot flesh: Fraulein Schneider’s enfolding bosom.
‘Do you mind?’ she said.
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘A likely story.’
An angry ‘Ssshhh’ came from behind them. Diamond backed off, jigged left and moved as fast as he could across the fly floor towards the prompt side. In the near darkness at the back of the scenery he thought he spotted
