Perhaps you can conduct your interviews out of the sightlines of my principals. It throws them off. I’ll have a folding chair put out for you over there, and do try to keep the noise down, thank you so much.”
Having put May publicly on the spot, she accepted his silence as agreement, thrust her hands into her baggy khaki trousers and went back to directing her cast. Bryant felt as though he had been dismissed from the auditorium. Helena’s eye rested easiest on men she found attractive, and clearly John May was in her sights. With a grimace of annoyance, Bryant stumped off to the side of the stage.
He found the goods lift separated off by wooden horses with warning boards tied to them by bits of string. The lift couldn’t have drawn more attention if Helena had given it a part in the production. The electrics had been switched off at the mains, but Bryant dug a torch from his pocket and shone it into the shaft, quickly spotting the vertical brown streaks that marred the concrete barrier between the floors. On the other side of the stairwell, another slim beam of light illuminated a crouching figure. It turned and stared at him.
“God, Bryant, you frightened the life out of me,” said Runcorn. “Must you creep about like that? I could have dropped this.” He held up something in a pair of tweezers.
“What is it?” asked Bryant.
“Muscle tissue by the look of it, probably torn from the victim’s ankle as it shattered. Don’t these lifts have fail-safe devices to halt them if a foreign body gets caught in the mechanism?”
“It’s half a century old. Safety wasn’t a priority then. The Victorians lost a few workers in everything they built, rather like a votive offering.”
Dr Runcorn, the unit’s forensic scientist, was one of the top men in his field, but his air of superiority, coupled with the punctilious manner of a civil servant, made him disliked by nearly everyone who came into contact with him. That was the trouble with a unit like the PCU: it was destined to be staffed with the kind of employee who had been rejected from other institutions in spite of their qualifications. Dr Runcorn was especially irked by Bryant, whose intuitive attitude to scientific investigation seemed at best inappropriate and at worst unprofessional.
“I haven’t finished here yet,” he warned, “so don’t start walking all over the area touching things.”
“I wasn’t going to,” said Bryant, affronted. “You surely don’t think it was an accident, do you?”
“A damned odd one, I agree, but stranger things have happened.”
“Hard to see how her feet ended up on a chestnut brazier, with that hypothesis,” Bryant pointed out.
“Oswald Finch took receipt of the cadaver from West End Central and has already run a few tests on it, reckons she might show positive for some kind of drug, possibly self-administered. These artistic types are noted for it.” Runcorn sniffed, rising from his crouched position and cracking his back. “I don’t know why he can’t test for more obvious causes of death first like any normal person: heart failure, stuff like that. I just know that her feet were cut off and she didn’t struggle. There are a couple of scuff marks here on the landing, the heel of a shoe, nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Suggestive, though.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Runcorn tugged at his ear, thinking. He was awkwardly tall and so thin that he looked lost inside his clothes. “It’s a backward scuff, but it faces forward to the lift. Like this.” He adopted an angular pose, something that came easily to a man who was six feet three and pigeon-chested. “As though you were bracing yourself against the trellis. You might make it if you were pulling something through the bars of the lift. As if you were trying to drag out a heavy box. Or pull something through the cage. Legs, perhaps.”
That was the good thing about Runcorn, thought Arthur. Like Finch, he operated on a secondary set of signals, pulses that passed invisibly beneath his rational senses.
“There’s another mark on the linoleum several feet away. It looks like it could be a match. If we can place someone outside the lift with the victim inside it, then you might have a murder case. But why cut off her feet?” Runcorn stared gloomily down into the lift shaft.
“She was a dancer,” Bryant replied.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Suppose she had somehow survived,” said Bryant. “Can you think of a better way to guarantee that she’d never perform again?”
? Full Dark House ?
13
LIVES IN THE THEATRE
Elspeth Wynter had spent her whole life, or rather the thirty-two years she had so far experienced, in the theatre. She came from a long line of theatre folk. Her grandfather had been a Shakespearean, once spoken of in the same breath as Burbage, Garrick or Keane. His wife had been cast in his shows as a perennial parlourmaid, and in true theatrical tradition had borne him a son in the rear of the stalls. Eight years into the new century, that son fathered his only child, Elspeth. Although his wife survived a pelvic fracture when she fell from the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, she ignored her doctor’s warnings about the perils of motherhood in order to bear a daughter. The birth killed her.
Elspeth’s father took the King’s shilling for the Great War, but grisly memories of Ypres wrought changes in his life from which he never fully recovered. Prevented from returning to the front by the state of his nerves, he resumed the family profession. In the twenties he delivered a shaky baritone in countless threadbare Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, but the shows closed as unemployment began to bite and the cinema became affordable to the lower classes who had filled the music halls.
Elspeth’s father could not look after himself, let alone a teenage girl. He had no family beyond his colleagues in the theatre, and drink coarsened his acting. Elspeth was raised by sympathetic ushers and nursed from fretfulness while her papa performed in the twicenightlies. As they trooped from one cold auditorium to the next, shivering in damp dressing rooms, shaking the fleas from lodginghouse beds, playing in faded costumes to dwindling audiences, this daughter of the stage looked about her moth-eaten, mildewed world and began to wonder if the possession of theatrical blood was really the gift that her father’s boozy friends claimed it to be.
Elspeth knew from an early age that although she was not destined for the boards, she would always be a part of the theatre; watching her father declaim each night from the box kept empty and permanently reserved for royalty – there seemed to be one in every playhouse – she watched the painful changes time wrought on his performances. The twenties were uncertain years, but not as lean as the thirties. Her father drank more as the audiences dried up. He too dried on stage, nightly forgetting his lines, relying on prompts, booed by an unforgiving audience weaned on cinema newsreels. The new medium had no truck with forgetfulness. Celluloid eradicated variable performances. To no one’s surprise, he finally died in make-up and costume, during a trouser-dropping farce in which he had already been dying nightly.
Elspeth did not attend his funeral; there was a matinee. She had graduated from programme seller to bar cashier to ASM, through the various stressful stages of management until she suffered a nervous collapse and returned to front-of-house work. She was a West End girl, one of theatre’s dedicated personnel, invisible to audiences but essential to everyone who worked there. As one show closed, another began rehearsals, and each run marked the periods of her life more completely than any calendar notation.
She had experienced a moment of passion just once, at the age of fifteen: pushed into a dressing room at the Palace and thrust into by a man she had only ever seen from the aisle of the stalls. He was playing the villain in a revival of
The theatre held no terrors for her. It was home, and filled with secrets, just like any family. It encompassed every happy moment in her life. As Elspeth paced the indistinct aisles of the Palace, its pervasive calm seeped into her. She could tell when the half-hour call was coming without looking at her watch. She sensed the rising tension of backstage activity, even though she was stationed in the front of the building.
¦
Geoffrey Whittaker was also dedicated to the theatre, as invisible and essential as a spark plug to a car. He too was the latest – and the last, it turned out – in a long theatrical line. As stage manager to the incumbent company, he was in charge of the administration, the set, the lighting, the props, the health and safety of his
