‘No, tragic because it would mean the ruin of a human being.’
‘But you do think it’s possible?’
‘Mr Paris, I think it’s extremely unlikely. Behaviour of that sort would be totally inconsistent with what I know of him from the past and with all that I have ever encountered in other cases. But I suppose, if you force me to say yea or nay, it is just possible.’
Charles Paris looked at his watch. It was a quarter to one. In two and a quarter hours Christopher Milton had a meeting arranged on the stage of Queen’s Theatre, Brighton, with the girl who had stolen the show from him the night before.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There is no stillness like the stillness of an empty theatre. As Charles stepped on to the stage, he could almost touch the silence. And the fact that the building wasn’t completely empty seemed to intensify the loneliness. Somewhere behind the circle people were busy in the general manager’s office. In a distant workshop someone was using an electric drill. Traffic noise was filtered and reduced by the ventilation system. But onstage there was a deep pool of silence.
Len the stage doorman had not been in his little room, though he had left his radio on and was presumably somewhere around in the silent building. But he didn’t see Charles enter.
It was ten to three. The stage had been preset for the evening performance after the morning’s rehearsal. One light in the prompt corner alleviated the gloom. Charles stood behind a flat down right in a position from which he could see the entire stage. He looked up to the fly gallery. If sabotage were planned, the easiest way would be to drop a piece of scenery or a bar loaded with lights from above. But the shadows closed over and it was impossible to distinguish anything in the gloom.
The old theatre had an almost human identity. The darkness was heavy with history, strange scenes both on- and offstage that those walls had witnessed. Charles would not have been surprised to see a ghost walk, a flamboyant Victorian actor stride across the stage and boom out lines of mannered blank verse. He had in his bed- sitter a souvenir photograph of Sir Herbert Tree as Macbeth from a 1911 Playgoer and Society Illustrated, which showed the great actor posed in dramatic chain mail, long wig and moustache beneath a winged helmet, fierce wide eyes burning. If that apparition had walked onstage at that moment, it would have seemed completely natural and right.
There was a footfall from the far corner near the pass door. Charles peered into the shadows, trying to prise them apart and see who was approaching. Agonisingly slowly the gloom revealed Lizzie Dark. She came to the centre of the stage, looked around and then sat on a rostrum, one leg over the other swinging nervously. She looked flushed and expectant, but a little frightened.
She hummed one of the tunes from the show, in fact the song with which Christopher Milton had promised to help her. It was five past three, but there was no sign of her mentor.
As Charles watched, she stiffened and looked off into the shadows of the opposite wings. She must have heard something. He strained his ears and heard a slight creak. Wood or rope taking strain maybe.
Lizzie apparently dismissed it as one of the unexplained sounds of the old building and looked round front again. Then she rose from her seat and started to move gently round the stage in the steps of the dance which accompanied the song she was humming. It was not a flamboyant performance, just a slow reminder of the steps, the physical counterpart to repeating lines in one’s head.
Charles heard another creak and slight knocking of two pieces of wood from the far wings, but Lizzie was too absorbed in her memorising to notice. The creaks continued, almost in rhythm, as if something were being unwound. Lizzie Dark danced on.
Charles looked anxiously across into the wings, but he could see nothing. His eye was caught by a slight movement of a curtain up above, but it was not repeated. Just a breeze.
The noise, if noise there was, had come from the wings. He peered across at the large flat opposite him and wished for X-ray eyes to see behind it. There was another, more definite movement from above.
He took in what was happening very slowly. He saw the massive scaffolding bar with its load of lights clear the curtains and come into view. It hung suspended for a moment as if taking aim at the oblivious dancing girl and then started its descent.
With realisation, Charles shouted, ‘Lizzie!’
She froze and turned towards him, exactly beneath the descending bar.
‘Lizzie! The lights!’
Like a slow-motion film she looked up at the massive threatening shape. Charles leapt forward to grab her. But as he ran across the stage, his feet were suddenly jerked away from him. His last thought was of the inadvisability of taking laughs from Christopher Milton, as the Star Trap gave way and plummeted him down to the cellar.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The first thing he was conscious of was pain, pain as if his body had been put in a bag of stones and shaken up with them. And, rising above all the others, a high, screaming pain of red-hot needles in his right ankle.
He lay like an abandoned sack at the bottom of the Star Trap shaft. It was even darker in the cellar. He didn’t know whether or not he had passed out, but time, like everything else, seemed disjointed. He remembered crying out to Lizzie, then crying out as he fell and then he remembered being there swimming in pain. There was an interval between, but whether of seconds or hours he didn’t know.
He was aware of some sort of commotion, but he couldn’t say exactly where. Onstage maybe, or in the auditorium. A door to the cellar opened and light flooded in.
Len was the first to arrive. The old doorman came towards him nervously, as if afraid of what he would see. ‘It’s all right. I’m alive,’ Charles said helpfully, hoping he was speaking the truth.
‘Who is it? Mr Paris?’
‘That’s right. Is Lizzie all right?’
‘Lizzie?’
‘Lizzie Dark. Onstage. There was a bar of lights that — ’
‘It missed her. She’s all right.’
‘Thank God.’
‘Can you move?’
‘I wouldn’t like to make the experiment.’
Other people came down to the cellar. Lizzie. She looked pale and on the verge of hysterics. Some of the staff from the general manager’s office who had heard the commotion arrived. So did Dickie Peck. Spike and a couple of his stage crew came from the workshop. Charles lay there in a daze of pain. He knew that he had been the victim of another of Christopher Milton’s insane jealousies, but there seemed nothing to say and talking was too much effort.
They carried him upstairs. Spike and another of his men took an arm each. As the shock of the various pains subsided, it was the ankle that hurt most. It was agony when it dragged on the ground, so they lifted him up to sit on their joined hands. It still hurt like hell.
Since the dressing-rooms were up more stairs they took him into Len’s little room by the stage door. There was a dilapidated sofa on which he was laid. The general manager’s staff went back to phone for an ambulance. Len went off to make some tea, which was his remedy for most conditions. Dickie Peck and Lizzie Dark vanished somewhere along the way. Spike stayed and felt Charles’ bones expertly. ‘Used to do a bit of first aid.’ His diagnosis was hopeful for everything except the ankle. Charles wouldn’t let him get near enough to manipulate it, but Spike insisted on removing his shoe. Charles nearly passed out with pain.
‘Spike,’ he said, when he was sufficiently recovered to speak again. ‘That Star Trap, it must have been
