American investors are here. It is the time of Orpheus’s big duet. We have the
“Fine,” whispered May. “I’ll come in and tell you why I think your wife is in this theatre. Then you can try to convince me that you’re not an accessory to murder.”
Even in the dim light of the box, he could see Renalda blanch. “Help me up, damn it,” he hissed. May opened the door wider, ushering him out into the corridor. For the first time since they had met, Renalda looked unsure of himself. May wondered if he was deciding whether to lie again.
“Can we talk where your clients can’t hear us?” May asked as he pulled the box door shut behind them.
“Here, this is the eviction staircase, nobody uses it any more.” Renalda unlocked a door on their right and led the way onto a concrete landing faced by damp-tainted ochre walls. “What do you need to know about Elissa?”
“You could start by telling me how long you’ve known she’s alive.”
The millionaire rubbed at his broad forehead, as if afflicted by a migraine. “You’re saying that – ”
“Any delay now risks everything you’ve worked for.”
Renalda sighed heavily. “She contacted me about eighteen months ago. A phone call out of the blue. At first I did not believe her.”
“But you arranged to see her.”
“We met for a drink at the Savoy. She told me that she had been ordered off the island by my brother. Minos had acted in good faith. It is the way of our family, to protect one another. She was very beautiful, very young, and I was blind, a cripple bewitched by a girl who tricked me into marriage. Minos scared her away for my sake. The police found the body of a drowned swimmer a month later, and after I spoke to them, they conveniently decided that it was my wife’s. It suited us for her to appear dead. No loss of face, you understand.
“But she was alive. Elissa timed our meeting well. I was about to sign the deal with the theatre. She asked me to sign half of my holdings in Three Hundred International over to her. If I did not agree to do so, she said she would go to the press, tell everyone that she was still legally my wife, that I had conspired to have her killed and that she had survived the attempt. Me, who had only ever loved her! I could not allow an ugly court case, just when I was fighting to make a name for myself in London. I was not prepared to risk losing the confidence of our shareholders. But I would not sign over my father’s empire. We drank, and I let her talk until she talked too much. She said she had heard about Minos’s death.”
“She caused his accident, didn’t she?”
“She was in the other car, the one that ran him off the road. I saw in her eyes that I had won. She had only one card to play, you see. Any accusation from her would bring a far more serious accusation from me. How the press would have loved that! We had reached an impasse.”
“So she followed you here, and the trouble began. Do you know where she is now?”
“Of course. She is here all the time, where I can keep an eye on her at every single performance.”
“Who is she?”
“Who do you think? That girl in the chorus, the one you spent the night with.”
May’s jaw fell open. “Betty Trammel?”
“Elissa. Elissabetta. Betty. You see? She is a little older and more experienced than she looks. What could I do, tell Helena not to hire her because she was my wife?”
“She’s not only your wife, she’s a murderess,” said May, horrified that he could have been such a poor judge of character.
“She followed Minos in a state of frustration and anger, and ran him off the road. She did not mean to kill him. And I don’t think she’s harmed anyone in this theatre.” Renalda gave a sour smile. “Although she’s broken a few hearts. I imagine she found it exciting to seduce a boy who could have her arrested.”
“Where is she now?”
“Backstage, I suppose, waiting to go on. She’s a natural performer, as I’m sure you have discovered.”
Andreas Renalda pressed his hands against the sides of his calipers to steady himself. “God spare me from the designs of angry women.”
? Full Dark House ?
56
A DEATH FORETOLD
If John was now thinking like Arthur, the reverse was also true. Bryant was pursuing a more logical line of enquiry. Forget mythology, he told himself. Don’t be misled by the intrigues of the Renalda family. The feud is a red herring. Start afresh, follow a new path. How, he asked himself, would a sensible, methodical man like John May interpret the facts?
After his humiliating experience at Renalda’s house, the young detective had carefully rethought his strategy. Seated on his favourite bench by the river, as close as he could get to the memory of his fiancee, armed with the blue crystal fountain pen that Detective Sergeant Forthright had given him on his twenty-second birthday, he mapped out the personal details of the Palace’s victims. Immediately, one name separated itself from the others. One of the two key factors, he felt sure, was Jan Petrovic. Phyllis, her housemate, had told May that Petrovic wanted to leave the show because she wasn’t up to the part. Two days later she had gone missing.
The other key was the fact that, however much you allowed for coincidence or fate, the deaths were patterned exactly on Renalda’s family mythology. It followed that the murderer not only knew about his past, but was attempting to shift the focus of blame onto him. But why? To take revenge on him for some perceived slight?
Possibly. Surely it was more likely to have been arranged out of convenience? The killer was going to commit acts of violence whatever happened, and it made sense to deflect suspicion by implicating an innocent man.
Bryant raised his head and looked across the sluggish brown river, out towards the open sea, the breeze lifting his fringe from his eyes. Two further possibilities presented themselves. Either the person he was looking for had read about Renalda’s background – according to the tycoon, it wouldn’t have been difficult – or Renalda himself had provided the information. Which meant that it was someone he trusted, somebody close to him in the production. Petrovic’s flatmate said she had lied her way into the job, and was unable to handle it. Suppose she had used the murders as a way of disappearing? She fitted Renalda’s mythological beliefs perfectly – almost any chorus girl would have done so – and it was easy to fake her own abduction. But in her haste she had made a mistake, failing to allow her ‘abductor’ any method of entering the flat. The doors had been shut from the inside, and the neighbours had seen only Petrovic herself entering and leaving the house.
Bryant gently shook ink into the nib of the pen, and drew a series of connecting lines on his pad. Petrovic had wanted to break her contract. Her fellow performers at the Palace were mysteriously disappearing, so she used it as a chance to vanish, to set herself free from a contract she didn’t feel capable of honouring. She couldn’t provide a body, of course, just a few tiny drops of blood, and a smear of crimson nail polish when they didn’t look enough. The rest was easy. When someone had a little money in their pocket and didn’t want to be found, Bryant knew, it was difficult to track them down. With the war on, it seemed that everyone was on the move. Bryant studied the missing section of his diagram. Who knew about Petrovic’s problem, and had been able to provide her with a solution? Who told her about Andreas Renalda’s Muses, and could explain how her own vanishing act might work?
It had to be the same person the tycoon had confided in. One person linked them both together. Bryant stared at the blue question mark he had scored on the pad, and pensively scratched at his unshaven chin.
What puzzled him most of all was why someone would go to so much trouble. Why was it in their interests to make it look as if Petrovic had also been attacked by the Palace Phantom? He assumed he had been locked in the archive room by the killer, but at the very same moment Valerie Marchmont had been murdered onstage. How could her attacker have been in two places at once?
The odder pieces of the puzzle sharpened into focus. The picture of the statue in the archive room. The canopy that hung over the east face of the theatre. The reason why the murders had been made to look like accidents.
Actors, damned actors, covering up their secrets, hiding behind their masks.
He had been lied to, again and again and again. He was young and eager, blinded and sidetracked by the
