in the royal box with several middle-aged men in smart black suits, who were busy ogling the chorus girls’ exposed thighs. The front rows were filled with corpulent broadsheet critics taking notes, writing without removing their eyes from the stage. The orchestra performed beneath their steel mesh cage, a precautionary measure taken because the apron had been brought out to the edge of the pit, and some of the dancers came very close to the edge, much to the pleasure of the woodwind section.
May left the corridor and made his way to the rear of the stalls. He could see Bryant’s tufted head poking over the parapet of the converted cigar kiosk.
“I thought you were keeping an eye on the backstage area,”
Bryant whispered.
“There’s nowhere to stand without being in the way. Did some body check the fly wires on Senechal’s replacement?” In the next part of the tableau, Jupiter was due to turn himself into a bluebottle in order to squeeze through the keyhole into Eurydice’s cell. This involved him being swung out over the heads of the audience on a rig.
“I mentioned it to Geoffrey Whittaker this morning. They’re using a double rig with a second set of cables attached. Did you hear about Senechal’s wife suing the company for negligence?”
“Can’t say I blame her. Gladys said she’d get in touch if she had any news on Petrovic. The girl Phyllis is adamant that she’s been abducted. I’d like to know how her kidnapper got in and out of the house.”
“The same way he got in and out of here,” Bryant muttered.
“Maybe he’s a magician.”
Onstage, there was a fiery explosion as Jupiter vanished through the floor and reappeared as a rather overweight insect. He rose from the ground and gracefully swung out across the front row of the audience, his wires glimpsed in the beam of the spotlights.
Bryant held his breath, half expecting something terrible to happen, but the god made it safely back, flapping across to down right in order to duet with his lover. Bryant watched John Styx exiting the stage left centre with a silver hoop of prison keys in his hand. “Tell me, who’s got the keys to the top-floor offices?” May thought for a moment. “You’ll probably find them in the box in the company manager’s office. Why?”
“Something I’ve been meaning to do,” Bryant whispered, bypassing May’s question. “I’ll use the pass door to the lift, I’m not facing all those stairs with my ticker.”
“Can’t you get Biddle to run up for you?”
“No, I have to find it myself. Hang on here and enjoy the show. It’s nearly the end of the scene.” Bryant felt his way out of the booth as a swarm of human flies invaded the stage and buzzed into a sprightly chorus.
The curtain fell at the close of the tableau, and reopened as the applause died down. Now they were at Pluto’s orgy on the banks of the Styx, and once again the stage had filled with cavorting golden-breasted women. There were worse things, May decided, than guarding a theatre on a cold winter’s night.
¦
Bryant tried the lights, but nothing worked on the top floor. The oppressive darkness increased his heart rate. He pushed open the door to the archive and shone his torch inside. Beneath the photographs and programmes he found Cruickshank’s desk. Beside it were piled damp-swollen books of building plans, blueprints filled with intricate arabesques of the understage structures, technical designs for a mechanized age too complex and cluttered for practical use. Bryant wedged the torch between his knees and flipped through the volumes, setting them aside one after the other. Finally he came to the volume he had been hoping to find, the one containing details of the building’s exterior.
There, at the pinnacle of the roof, was the statue and a set of accompanying notes. Her designation, the name that had eluded everyone, was Euterpe, and suddenly everything began to fall into place.
He had been fooled – who wouldn’t have been? – by the flaming torch she held aloft, because it wasn’t supposed to be there at all.
According to the typescript pinned beside the picture, the statue was a copy. The original figure had been removed by the impresario Emile Littler, who had wanted it for his garden, but it had been smashed to pieces on its journey. A replacement statue had been commissioned, but a mistake was made. Euterpe was holding a flaming torch instead of her traditional double flute. Bryant shook his head in wonder.
Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry. He found himself a sheet of paper and began hastily scribbling notes in the torchlight.
? Full Dark House ?
47
DEADLY DEPARTED
Euterpe and the flaming torch.
He recalled Bryant’s theory about the statue as he made his way through the crowded Camden streets. Euterpe had survived the war and was still cemented in place on the roof of the Palace Theatre, over half a century later. Not much else was, when you looked around the city. The Palladian stucco, the elaborate wroughtiron railings, the secluded courtyards and mysterious alleyways in permanent shadow, the absurd flourishes that gave the metropolis its character had mostly been removed, demolished, stolen. Developers had reinvented the future so ruthlessly that the London of his youth had disappeared. Offices were revealed behind glass walls, as though they had to offer proof of their profitability to pedestrians. There was no room in the modern world for anything unnecessary. At least Camden hadn’t changed as much as people said. The layout of the streets was exactly as he had always remembered it.
The rain had eased, but the damp air invaded his leg muscles and made walking a chore. May wondered if he was being followed by the fanged man. He checked the pavement behind him. Camden was filled with students and tourists wandering between the market stalls. Every tribe and fashion was represented; nose-rings, navel piercings, velvet hats, leather jackets, Goths and God-Squaders, skinheads and Sex Pistolettes. A permanent carnival atmosphere had settled across the area. May was the oldest person on the street. Outsized sculptures of a spacecraft, a tank, a Dr Marten’s boot, a rocking chair were suspended from the first floors of the high-street shops like toys discarded by a giant child. Camden Lock survived as a polyglot arrangement of stalls selling clothing, jewellery, incense, noodles and furniture. The pavements were dirty, noisy, chaotic, but alive in a way that the poplar-lined avenues of the suburbs could never be.
May felt bad about dismissing Longbright, but this had to be done alone. He stopped in front of the door leading to the flat above the World’s End pub. A chunk of floorboard had been nailed over the letter box, giving the entrance an air of dereliction. A scuffed steel plaque on the lintel read:
COVEN OF ST JAMES THE ELDER
North London Division
No Hawkers or Circulars
Below this, a photocopied sheet read:
Suppliers of Equipment to the Spiritualism Trade Wholesale Only
The woman who answered his knock had a square, friendly face framed by ragged curls of bleached hair. She appeared to have missed when applying her lipstick, and missed again with her eye shadow, so that she looked more like a confused plump poodle than a white witch.
“John, thank God, I was beginning to worry,” Maggie Armitage cried, propelling herself into his arms and hugging him fiercely. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to Arthur’s funeral but the vibrations would have overpowered me. Isn’t it awful? I mean, I know it’s a great adventure for him, navigating a pathway into the celestial beyond, but I’ll miss our monthly piss-ups. Sorry about the front door. Drunks kept being sick through the letter box. Don’t talk to me about care in the community. Come on up.” She led the way into a tilting dark passage. “Neema wanted to host a leave-taking ceremony for Arthur, but I couldn’t bear the idea. She’s a Muslim and I like to use dry sherry in the ritual, so we fell out.”
May followed the little witch into her front room, a riot of busy purple seventies wallpaper, battered Formica counters and plastic orange lamps. The thunder of a heavy metal band playing in the pub below was shaking the crockery in the kitchenette.
“What exactly is a leave-taking?”
