their outlines and the sounds they made. The Heinkels were German bombers, rearguarded by Junkers during night raids. Hurricanes and Spitfires were ours, and provoked cheers. Sometimes pieces of plane fell right into the road. Oxford Street had been knocked flat, as had the whole of Stepney.
On the first night of the Blitz, the East End fires had burned so fiercely that you could read a newspaper by their light in Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘Get-You-Home’ booths had been set up around town, staffed by officials who could explain alternative routes. Commuter trains were being bombed and strafed with machinegun fire. A direct hit had killed twenty in a Marble Arch subway. A group of teenage girls had been buried alive in a busmen’s canteen. Parachute bombs drifted through the dust-filled skies like deadly jellyfish, frightening the life out of passers-by. A bomb had destroyed a London perfumery, filling the air with the scent of tropical flowers. A sixteen-year-old boy had appeared in court charged with lighting fires to guide German aircraft inland, Nazi paraphernalia having been discovered in his bedroom. These were disturbing times.
Elspeth felt a draught across her legs and looked up, thinking that someone had opened one of the doors, but the entrance hall was empty. She was waiting for the detectives to return for their tour of the theatre. She instinctively knew when someone was in there with her – the foyer of the Palace was more familiar than her own bedroom – but now it felt different, tainted by death.
At the stage door, Stan Lowe set aside his newspaper and listened. The pastry girl in Maison Bertaux swore she had seen a body being carried out to an ambulance parked in Greek Street. Now Stan had been informed that Tanya had gone – you didn’t need a sixth sense to figure out that something wicked had happened to her. Dancers suffered falls that could wreck their careers in a single mistimed step, but to take someone out in silence suggested that she was dead.
Although he had barely met her, it was the idea of bad luck befalling someone in the theatre that disturbed him. Acts of betrayal and revenge unfolded nightly beneath the proscenium arch, but something like this, with police and doctors spiriting away a covered body, felt like an ill omen.
As the sound of the orchestra died away, the balding velvet curtains tied back above the entrance to the stairs shifted slightly, as though a theatrical ghost had just brushed by them. Could somebody have come in and slipped past the window? The buzz of the stage intercom made him start, but he was thankful for something to occupy his mind.
¦
“The theatre first opened as the Royal English Opera House on the thirty-first of January eighteen ninety-one, five years before the first films arrived in London.” Elspeth Wynter pushed open the rear door to the stalls and led the detectives down the centre aisle. “It was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream for Sir Richard D’Oyly Carte, but the dream lasted only a year. Sullivan’s grand opera
Elspeth had clearly conducted the tour before. Dressed in shapeless brown cardigan and skirt, she marched between the rows, pointing out details as she passed, keeping her voice in a practised low register. “We’ve lost the key to the left-hand pass door, and it’s been painted over so many times I doubt anyone could get it open without a chisel, so we have to use the right one. Stan Lowe keeps the key to that and won’t lend it out to anyone he doesn’t know. Follow me.”
Bryant watched Elspeth’s wool-clad bottom as she walked ahead and wondered what it was that attracted him to older women. He speculated on the idea of asking her out. “Is there any way of turning more lights on?” he asked.
“This is as bright as it gets, I’m afraid. Parts of the theatre are always in darkness. It gets worse beneath the stage and up near the roof.”
May peered up into the gloom, but could discern little more than the vague outlines of four boarded upper windows. The interior had once been green and gold, with red draped curtains, but had subsequently been painted a depressing chocolate brown because a job lot of railway paint had become available at low cost. The sepia walls were rubbed through to the original gilt where members of the audience had paused to touch the plaster cherubs in the friezes, as though they had the talismanic power of saints.
“Theatres are much more artificial than most people realize,” said Elspeth, leading them down a passage beside the stalls. “Much of the auditorium decoration is built from painted papier mache. The marble panels you see around the proscenium arch are false. There are no pillars blocking views because the whole structure is made from steel cantilevers, like Tower Bridge. The bricks are mere cladding. Along this side used to be the entrances to the cheaper seats. There were several kiosks selling drinks and cigars, and here is the royal entrance, nine steps up to the royal box, which is partitioned and has its own retiring room, the idea being to keep the classes quite separate. There are other boxes, ten in all. The sightlines are poor, but of course they’re for being seen in, not for seeing from. The company office is to the right of the stage door, as is dressing room two. All the dressing rooms are on this side, along with the front-of-house changing room and a number of quick-change areas, but it would take a week to discover all the hidden spaces.”
“You’d have to find a way of gaining access to the building before you could hide yourself,” Bryant pointed out.
“Quite,” agreed Elspeth, opening the door that led to the lift where Capistrania had died. “We’ll take the stairs if it’s all the same to you. The entresol floor has three dressing rooms, a smoking lounge and salon, and the booth for the projectors.”
“Projectors?”
“The music hall would show a short silent film as part of the variety bill,” Elspeth explained. “In nineteen twenty-two they premiered
“I had no idea the place was so enormous,” said May.
“Five floors no member of the public ever sees.” Elspeth pulled back a curtain leading through to the balcony. “Be careful here, it’s so steep that some people become sick. Please use the handrails.”
Bryant took one look down and put his hand over his eyes. “I can’t,” he admitted. “How could anybody sit up here?” Some fourteen rows of seats were arranged in plunging descent to a low parapet over the auditorium. “I don’t think we need to see this, do you, John?”
“You’ve seen the public and business side of the theatre. Now I’ll show you the mechanical areas. We’ll have to go single file.” She led the way into a musty narrow corridor filled with boxes and wiring, and pointed through an archway. “I can’t get you across without returning to the pass door, but you can see from here. There are three gantry levels, a carpenter’s bridge, five stage bridges, two hanging bridges. The slopes and bridges raise scenery, and there’s a flying counterweight system that’s hardly ever used. At the top is a drum and shaft mechanism capable of lifting half a dozen backcloths at a time. There are a further three floors under the ground,” explained Elspeth. “I hope neither of you has a problem with confined spaces.”
If Bryant had discovered that he suffered from vertigo, May found the backstage areas claustrophobic. It was impossible to imagine what these areas were like when they were filled with staff and actors. They were now inside an
“As you can see, the lower levels are crowded with chariot cuts and sloat cuts. Sloats are cut-out pieces of scenery. There’s a chariot and pole system for the wing flats, but it’s all too elaborate even for grand opera, and no one has ever really used it to the full extent for which it was designed. There’s the grave trap and the revolve, the star traps, and lots of other little doors. It’s terribly over-elaborate.”
“What powers it all?” asked May, peering uncomfortably into the darkness.
“In nineteen hundred and seven they started producing their own electricity from three coal-fired boilers which drove the steam turbine engines.”
May tried to imagine the hellish scene below, with stagehands stoking glowing furnaces, and felt sicker than ever.
