“Surely grenades couldn’t have done so much damage?”
“Well, they weren’t all the same size, some were more powerful than others. The Mills grenade was really a small-barrelled missile containing up to three ounces of amatol. Modern blast sites smell different because they use more sophisticated chemical compounds. This was pure stuff. We found powder burns on the walls. The remains of your photocopier should be over there somewhere.” Finch pointed into a corner, and May and Longbright clambered across the bags in that direction.
“He was always playing tricks on me, you know,” called Finch as they went through the bags. “Gluing my furniture to the ceiling, putting fleas in my briefcase, weeing into my rain gauges, getting my keys recut so that they only fitted the ladies’ loo, replacing the fish in my tank with piranhas. Remember the tropical plant that made us all sick? A tarantula fell out of it and bit my wife. He had a very strange sense of humour. I suppose I’ll miss him.”
“Over here.” May unzipped the top of a sack and peered in. “This looks like it.”
“Let me give you a hand.” Longbright was as strong as her mother had been. Together they lifted out the buckled grey panels of the photocopier and set them on the floor. The quarter-inch plate-glass square was cracked, but had not shattered. Unfortunately, the plastic lid had melted tightly over the top of it, like Cheddar on a piece of toast.
“Give me your penknife.” May took the Swiss blade from Longbright and inserted it into a corner of the lid.
“You’re tampering with evidence,” complained Finch, turning his chair round. “I’m not a part of this, I’m not looking.” He couldn’t stop himself from glancing over his shoulder. “Aaah, you’re not even wearing plastics, you’re as bad as Bryant.”
May sawed the blade through the melted cover and gingerly pulled it away from the glass sheet. There beneath the cover was a single scorched sheet of paper. With the tips of his fingers he lifted it away from the glass.
“Looks like we’ve got it,” he told Longbright, grinning.
“You’re not taking evidence away, it’s illegal,” cried Finch. “Sixty years I’ve had to put up with this kind of behaviour. Why me?”
“Oh, stop moaning, Oswald, you can just pretend you never saw us,” said Longbright.
“You’re on the CCTV, I’m not going to lie for you and risk my job.”
“You’re eighty-four, this is no time to worry about being passed over for promotion.” Longbright rose and carried the sheet to a bench by one of the side sinks. “This is odd,” she said, after examining the scorched page for a minute. “It’s got Arthur’s notes scribbled in the margins, but it’s not a list at all.”
“What is it?” asked May.
“I think it’s an architectural plan,” she said finally. “Look at the stamp on the bottom. ‘Palace Theatre Revised Edition September nineteen…’ Can’t read the rest of the date.”
“He must have taken it from the archive room when he went back to the Palace. Then what did he do with the list of patients from the Wetherby clinic?”
“Maybe it was of no use, and he threw it away. He told you he’d been to the theatre, so he was either looking for this, or stumbled across it while he was researching his memoirs.”
“But what is it?”
“Dunno,” Longbright admitted. “Oswald, is there a lightbox anywhere?”
They laid the scorched sheet on a fluorescent panel and May studied it. “Looks like a layout of two long corridors, bisecting at one end. These shadings…the wall cross-sections look completely circular. What’s he written down the side?”
“Looks like a circumference measurement. You wouldn’t normally build a corridor with round walls, would you?”
“I wonder if it could be part of a theatrical set design. It would help to have a complete date. The Palace might keep records of the struck sets.”
“We could check it against them,” said Longbright. “That’s what Bryant would have done.”
“We don’t know what he was looking for. Anyway, I have a better idea.” May dug out his mobile. “Arthur had an architect friend called Beaufort. I think we should get an expert opinion.”
“Wait a minute, you’re not leaving here with evidence,” warned Finch, barring the door.
“Don’t be daft, Oswald. No one will know unless you tell them.” May moved him gently aside.
“What you’re doing is illegal,” Finch called as they left with the evidence. “You’re both as bad as him, you realize that, don’t you?”
? Full Dark House ?
34
JUNO’S SON
It was still raining hard in Charing Cross Road. The deluge vibrated across the roof of the auditorium. Somewhere, water was dripping onto metal, like the beat of a drum. It was impossible to keep the weather out of a theatre as old as the Palace. There wasn’t a Victorian building in London that didn’t have a damp patch somewhere, and the cracks caused by the continuous bombing made it worse.
Stan Lowe and PC Crowhurst sat inside the Greek Street stage door, at the rear of the theatre, watching the rain fall. Spatters of water leaked over a handwritten sign that Bryant had made Lowe place on the wall. It read: “NO VISITORS AFTER HALF-HOUR CALL OR DURING SHOW. DO NOT LEAVE THIS DOOR OPEN FOR ANYONE YOU DO NOT RECOGNIZE.”
For the first few weeks of the Blitz Stan Lowe had allowed the well-protected stage door area to be used as a first-aid post, but now he had been forced to add chains and a padlock. Most of the cast, orchestra and backstage crew had been signed in for the technical run-through. Crowhurst had taken names and addresses from everyone. He had heard the same piece of music, something Jack referred to as the ‘Sleeping Chorus’, echo through the backstage areas over a dozen times now, and was growing mightily sick of it.
“I suppose you know there’s a ghost,” said Stan matter-of-factly, knocking out his pipe on the emulsioned brick wall at his back. “You ain’t got any tobacco to spare, have you?”
PC Crowhurst poked about in his jacket and produced a halfounce of St Bruno Flake. “You can have that and welcome,” he said. “What sort of ghost? Not Dan Leno?”
“No, he haunts Drury Lane. Only time Leno’s ever appeared here is in a newsreel.” He pushed a wad of tobacco into his pipe and returned the packet with a nod. “This is some old Shakespearean actor. You know them bleeding great china dogs on the stair landing? They was his. This old cove was playing Polonius, and he gets to the arras scene, only the Dane’s sword is missing its button, see, and when ‘Amlet runs him through, he really runs him through, only nobody realizes because he’s behind the bleeding curtain, isn’t he, so they play out the rest of the scene, and it’s only when he’s supposed to get off the stage that they notices. Well, a’course by that time it’s too late to do anything for the poor old bugger, so every time there’s a new play coming on, he turns up as Polonius in a bloodstained doublet and hose, wandering about backstage putting the willies up the carpenters.”
PC Crowhurst looked sceptical. “Miss Trammel says he looked deformed, like he’d done something terrible to his face,” he pointed out. “She said it was like a mask of tragedy, you know, like a Greek mask. She was in a right state this morning.”
“His face was contorted ‘cos he’d been run through with a bleedin’ epinard,” said Lowe sagely. “Actresses suffer with their nerves. That’s why so many of ‘em take to the drink.” He flicked out a match and drew hard on the pipe. “Anyway, he was a bleedin’ awful Polonius. I could shit a better lecture to Laertes than that.”
Onstage it was the beginning of act two, and the gods slumbered on Mount Olympus. Venus, Mars, Cupid and the chorus went through their paces, but there was no Jupiter. Geoffrey Whittaker, the stage manager, was on the company office telephone trying to organize transport to collect their new head of Olympus, who was stuck on the wrong side of a bombed railway line in East London.
Helena was tired and irritable. She wanted a break and needed a whisky, but Harry and Elspeth were tailing her around the building to make sure that she didn’t find a way of breaking her contract. The technical run-through was necessary at this point because an unusual amount of scenery had to be flown through the tableaux, and Mouse, Stan Lowe’s boy, had been appointed to transcribe the complex stage manoeuvres in a movement
