diagram. This is one of the earlier sketches. Someone must have moved the globe.”
“I don’t know how much more evidence you need to prove a case of premeditation,” Bryant told his partner.
“The carpenters reckon accidents happen all the time in the theatre,” said May.
“That’s right,” agreed Mr Mack. “You’ve got a lot of people jumping about in a very small space, surrounded by moving mechanical objects, some of them weighing tons. Feet get crushed, arms broken, ankles shattered. Arthur Lucan fell through this very stage.”
“But they don’t normally die, do they?”
“That’s true, sir, they don’t.”
“And the problem with these two deaths is that we lack any kind of a link between them,” whispered Bryant.
May consulted his notebook. He felt that someone should keep a record in case Davenport decided to question their tactics. “Well,” he pointed out, “they were both represented by the same agent, weren’t they?”
? Full Dark House ?
21
FREEDOM FROM MEMORY
He was searching for something in the files. John May sat in the archive room of the Palace Theatre and rested his aching, aged bones.
He was perched on a canvas stool with a mildewed cardboard box on his lap. Many of the photographs, plans and notes beneath his fingers were stuck together with time. They bore marks of damp, tea, candle grease. He wished he knew what he was looking for. He knew only that Bryant had been here before him, just days before he died.
In the years following the investigation, more photographs had been added to the files of the Palace: Jimmy Cagney, tap-dancing in a USO camp show; Betty Grable singing; Laurence Olivier grinning gap-toothed in Osborne’s
Here were the typed interviews they had conducted with the cast and production crew of
The ring of his mobile phone startled him. He pulled the Nokia from his pocket and answered it.
“John? It’s me, Alma. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“Me? No, how are you?”
“My legs are wicked, no change there, just getting old. Janice said you were back, and I was worried because someone’s been in Mr Bryant’s flat.” She called him John; she always referred to Arthur as Mr Bryant.
“How do you know someone’s been in there?”
“There was some stuff left out and now it’s gone. I know because I did the dusting. I told you I didn’t like to throw anything away. I don’t want to let the rooms out no more.”
“Was the door forced?” asked May. “Did they break in?”
“No, nothing’s damaged, the front lock’s in one piece. They must have got them skeleton keys.”
“I don’t think that’s very likely, Alma. But it’s a standard lock, it isn’t too hard to open. I’ve done it before now. What did they take?”
“Just some pieces of paper from the table.”
“You don’t happen to remember what they were, do you?”
“I know because I typed them out for him myself,” explained Alma. “They were Mr Bryant’s dental records.”
¦
May walked down Charing Cross Road and cut through to the back of the National Portrait Gallery, carefully avoiding the junkfood swill of Leicester Square. He detested the swirling scrum of the pedestrianized zone, the latent danger, the shoving, dislocated crowds that filled a once-beautiful space. It was hard to imagine, but the area had been pleasanter to stroll through when traffic had traversed it. Now, the tourist hot spots of the city were the very parts that made it like everywhere else. Was it possible to imagine those buildings without inhaling the animal-fat stink of McDonald’s or KFC? He never thought London would cease to appeal to him, but the little faded glory it still possessed was being scuffed away by the dead hand of globalization. On his down days he saw London as a crumbling ancient house, slowly collapsing under the weight of its own past.
As he pushed his way through a herd of name-tagged visitors in matching baseball caps, he wondered if he had left it too late to retire to the continent. France seemed a good bet, more at ease with its history. Crucially, he had never visited the place with his old partner. Perhaps he could be freed from memories there. He thought of his embittered son, recovering from years of addiction in a French commune, of his wife and daughter, and how he had survived them both, but even then he remembered Nathalie, how Bryant had loved her and lost her…
Damn you, Arthur, he thought, let me go.
He knew there was only one way he could stop himself from subsiding into the silent past: he needed to settle the murder of his alter ego. Without the truth, there would be no rest. Not now, not ever.
? Full Dark House ?
22
BLOCKING
“I’m offended that you should even ask,” Benjamin Woolf bristled. He never looked more suspicious than when he was trying to appear injured. “I represent a great many artists.”
“I’m not saying you had anything to do with their deaths, even though no one actually saw you at the time of Senechal’s impalement,” Bryant snapped. “You’re very touchy for an agent.”
“We don’t all have hides like rhinos, Mr Bryant.”
“How many other performers in the company do you represent?”
“Oh, quite a few.”
“
Woolf made an effort to look innocent and failed. “I’d have to work that out and get back to you.” The detectives had set up a base in the company office, and were seeing everyone who had been present in the auditorium when Charles Senechal had met his death.
“Do you have some kind of special deal going on with the cast members you represent?” asked Bryant.
“Something like that.” Woolf ran a finger along his thin moustache.
“Are you on friendly terms with them all? How close were you to Miss Capistrania and Mr Senechal, for instance?”
“I keep a respectable distance from all my clients. I’m there when they need me. I give them advice and support, I listen to their problems, nothing more.”
“But it’s a twenty-four-hour job, isn’t it? You take their calls when they come off stage at night, cope with their insecurities, assuage their doubts?”
“Of course. All theatrical agents worth their salt do.”
“Do you know much about their personal lives? Who they were closest to, who they were amorously involved
