Full Dark House (33 page)

His right hand seized the railing of the gantry, but his left missed. He swung violently out above the stage.

As he hung from the bridge, his fingers slipping slowly from the rusty iron rail, the figure above him disappeared, a wraith returning to a realm of prismatic red and blue shadows.

The muscles in Sidney’s arm betrayed him, and with a cry he fell to the level below.

49

THE PROTECTION OF THE GODS

The house lights were fully turned up in the stalls, giving the auditorium a shabby, melancholic air. Runcorn had taped off the rear of the stage. Wyman, a photographer from West End Central, was testing his flashgun on the blood spatters covering the backstage floor. The two halves of Public Opinion’s white mask lay cracked in a coagulated crimson pool. It was now five minutes past midnight, and all unnecessary members of staff had been dismissed.

In true theatrical tradition the show had not been interrupted by the death of Public Opinion. The main purpose of the continuation was to buy the unit time before the news spread through the audience. Valerie Marchmont’s body had been removed through the royal entrance on Shaftesbury Avenue and taken to University College Hospital in an unmarked van, the fourth they had used in a week.

‘Has anybody heard from Arthur yet?’ asked May anxiously.

‘We’ve got him, John. He says somebody shut him in one of the rooms upstairs.’ Gladys Forthright had slipped PC Crowhurst’s rubber police cloak over her sweater. She had put her own coat down in the rush to help Biddle, and had lost it among the racks of costumes that hung like shucked carapaces behind the stage. Biddle had fallen onto a pile of folded backcloths but had split the cartilage in his left ankle, the tissue swelling so quickly that the theatre’s medical officer had been forced to cut off his sock and boot with the blade of a pocket knife.

Arthur Bryant appeared to be in a state of great anxiety. ‘I got locked in the archive room,’ he said excitedly. ‘He struck again, didn’t he?’

May pointed to the rear of the stage. ‘Public Opinion. Surprise meeting with a steel pole, fractured skull, killed instantly.’

‘In front of everyone? How could that have happened?’

‘One of the backdrops—dropped.’

‘It came down right on cue,’ said Mr Mack. ‘Weren’t our fault.’

Helena looked distraught and ready to sink a bottle of Scotch. ‘The revolve should have carried her clear, but it halted suddenly. She was the last one off the stage.’

‘One of the skycloth rods slipped out of its mooring,’ May explained. ‘It went right through her head, like a spoon hitting a soft-boiled egg, punched her backwards into the wall behind. Most of her brains are still on the bricks.’

‘She must have felt the revolve stop. Why didn’t she move forward?’

‘Because the procession had to file offstage in a single column,’ Harry explained.

‘It’s not my bloody fault,’ exclaimed Helena, furiously digging through her bag for cigarettes. ‘There wasn’t enough room to take everyone off any faster. Getting into the wings is a tricky business. You have to wait your turn. Bloody,
bloody
hell, who’s got a cigarette?’

‘What happened to our cuckoo?’ Bryant indicated Biddle, who was lying across two stalls seats having his ankle fitted into a wooden splint.

‘Fell off the blooming gantry,’ said Biddle. ‘I saw someone standing near the drum cable looking down, and tried to reach him.’

May turned to his partner. ‘What were you doing in the archive room?’

‘I had an idea,’ said Bryant conspiratorially. ‘I need to discuss it with you in private. I think I have enough to make an arrest.’

‘You found someone up there?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Greek legends percolate through our lives and live in our collective subconscious. You’d think knowing about the misfortunes of the gods would keep us from repeating their mistakes and go some way towards protecting us, but we’re too blind.’

‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ May exploded, shocking everyone. ‘We’ve just had another death, that’s four to date, with one more missing presumed dead and one of our men injured, and you’re lecturing me on Greek mythology?’

‘You know my conclusions are, ah, well, tangentially approached,’ stammered Bryant, taken aback by his partner’s outburst. ‘I can’t follow your operational procedures, I warned you about that.’ He blinked steadily, as though facing bright daylight for the first time, and scrunched his hat onto his head.

‘Where are you going?’ May demanded to know.

‘To talk to—to—find out if I’m—I know who’s on the list, the death list. There are still another four to die, they must die before the thing can be broken, that’s the whole point.’ He turned, holding on to the back of the seat in front of him. ‘I can’t believe you have no faith in me.’

‘I didn’t say that, but if you knew then why the hell didn’t you do something?’

‘How could I?’ cried Bryant. ‘I was locked in the blasted room upstairs. I couldn’t get to the stage.’

‘Wait,’ said May, ‘let me get someone to go with you.’

‘No, leave me alone, I’ll be fine.’ Bryant turned, stopped in confusion, then walked off up the aisle.

‘John, go after him,’ urged Forthright. ‘Just call in when you get to wherever he’s going. I’ll clear up here and get the archive door dusted for prints.’

May caught up with his partner on the steps outside. The rain had stopped and the night had turned bitter. Their breath distilled in the frozen air. ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you, Arthur, it’s just that . . .’ He tried to give shape to his frustration. ‘How can I be expected to help if you don’t tell me what’s inside your brain? Do you appreciate how dangerous things have become around here?’

‘You’ll think I’m mad,’ said Bryant quietly, leading the way across Cambridge Circus, ‘but I’ve got proof. If you believe in evil, you have to believe in devils. I mean the kind that live in your mind, the ones that are put there by people with the best intentions.’ He unlocked the door of the Wolseley from the Bow Street car pool and levered himself inside, reaching across to pull open the passenger handle.

‘I’ll come with you, but let me drive,’ May insisted. He could hear his partner’s chest wheezing. Bryant was sweating hard, wincing in pain. ‘Come on, out. You’ve had a shock. Sit back and get your breath. Then you can tell me where we’re going.’

Tottenham Court Road was in total darkness. Someone had hit the traffic lights by the police station opposite Heal and Son and had knocked the pole to a forty-five-degree angle. Bryant prised open a window and drew in some cold night air. ‘We have to get to Andreas Renalda.’

May spun the wheel to avoid the damaged post. ‘You think his life’s in danger?’

‘No, not at all,’ said Bryant, peering sadly through the smeared windscreen of the Wolseley. ‘We have to arrest him before he kills anyone else.’

50

GRECIAN MOCKERY

The Wolseley pulled up outside the sandbagged gates of Andreas Renalda’s Highgate house just as it began to rain again. May tried to use the windscreen wipers, but the Bakelite control knob came off in his hand. He chucked it onto the back seat and stared out of the window, impotent and furious.

‘Helena says Renalda’s Rolls left immediately after the performance to bring him back here,’ Bryant explained anxiously. ‘If he’s innocent he shouldn’t know what’s happened yet, unless someone’s managed to telegraph him.’

May pulled up the handbrake and climbed out. Bryant loosened his tie and fumbled with the passenger door until May yanked it open. ‘I’m rather nervous about doing this,’ he admitted. ‘You know—accusing someone.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to support you,’ May sighed. Being angry wasn’t going to solve anything. ‘How’s your chest?’

‘A little better, thank you.’

‘Renalda has a very good reason for wanting to sabotage his own production.’ Bryant clutched at his partner’s sleeve. ‘Wait, before we go in, listen to me. The whole thing starts with his brother Minos. Something bothered me when I read Summerfield’s article: if Minos murdered Andreas’s wife, why did he stop there? Because their mother had made him believe that Andreas was protected. She wanted Minos to think that he couldn’t harm Andreas without hurting himself.’

‘I’m with you so far,’ said May, turning up his collar.

‘To do this, she had to make her crippled son believe it, otherwise he would have made them both vulnerable. From the day Sirius decided that this child would own his empire, Diana filled the boy’s head with tales of old gods, and Andreas grew up believing in his protectors. He’s even built a shrine to them in the Palace Theatre. That’s why he chose the Palace, because of the statue of Euterpe on the roof. It was a sign to him. The building was guarded by a Muse.

‘I hadn’t realized who the statue represented at first, because nobody in the theatre could remember, and I was misled because the statue is wrong. Euterpe has a flaming torch in her hand instead of a flute. The original figure had been smashed, so it had to be rebuilt from scratch, but the delicate instrument she held, hard to see from the ground, and much less dramatic, was replaced with a burning brand. This much I know. But now I see how everything fits together.’

‘For God’s sake, let’s get back in the car until you’ve finished. It’s falling like stair rods out here.’ May settled back into his seat and turned on the Wolseley’s heater. ‘Come on then, give me the rest of your hypothesis.’

‘Which gods did Renalda’s mother believe in?’ There was excitement in Bryant’s voice. ‘Euterpe was one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology. Diana summoned the Muses to protect her son. These nine sacred goddesses nurture and inspire, bringing continued wealth and good fortune. But if you’ve ever studied mythology, you’ll know that every request made to the gods exacts a price. The price for this protection was losing Elissa, Andreas’s wife. Andreas believes that everything in his life has been decided by the Muses his mother invoked. Now that Diana is dead, Renalda is exorcizing his guardian spirits, getting rid of them one by one. He no longer has need of them. Worse, they’ve become his gaolers.’

‘What do you mean, his gaolers? I thought they were helping him.’

‘My guess is he doesn’t want their help any more. He wants to prove himself, to make his own way, just as his father did. So what does he do? First he negates Euterpe’s power by daring to stage a sacrilegious play in her temple, the building over which she presides in the form of a debased statue.

‘Then he chooses Offenbach’s version of the Orpheus legend, because it’s a cruel mockery, and because it will give him access to all the representatives of the Muse. The mother of Orpheus was Calliope, one of the Muses, remember?

‘After this, the removal of his gods begins in earnest. He drugs Tanya Capistrania with hemlock, a poison his mother would have taught him how to use, but panics when he can’t tell whether the drug has worked. He isn’t sure the dancer is dead, so he drags Capistrania’s feet through the trellis of the lift to make certain. Tanya, a representative of Terpsichore, the Muse of dance, loses her feet, you see?

‘Next, Renalda impales Charles Senechal, a perfect living example of Urania, Muse of astronomy. How better to kill him than with a giant planet? Urania is usually depicted carrying a globe and compasses.’

May shook his head, trying to free it from the clouds of Bryant’s madness. ‘But surely Senechal was the wrong sex to represent a Muse.’

‘Come on, John, gender is virtually interchangeable in Greek legend. So, where are we? Ah, yes.’ Bryant nodded vigorously. ‘Andreas watches and waits for his next opportunity. Nobody knows when he’s in the theatre, he told us that himself. He spots Zachary Darvell, the son of the performer representing the Muse Clio, proclaimer of history, smoking up in the gods. He waits until Darvell is alone and attacks him with a razor he has taken from one of the dressing rooms, pushing the body over the balcony.

‘Why Darvell? Because in ancient mythology, Clio’s son was murdered. Renalda nearly got two for the price of one, because the real-life mother of the stage Orpheus—Calliope, the chief of the nine Muses, represented by Miles Stone’s mother, Rachel—was seated in the dress circle underneath. But Zachary yelled as he fell, enough for her to look up and get out of the way.’

‘Do you have proof for any of this?’ asked May, shaking his head sadly.

‘I bet you anything that we’ll find out Zachary is, you know, a confirmed bachelor. Clio’s son was murdered by his male lover, and a flower sprang up in the blood he shed. The blood-spattered silk carnation in Darvell’s buttonhole, remember? Whoever gave it to him is implicated in the murder, but we don’t know where he got it. Which brings me to the woman he missed, Stone’s mother. She had time to get clear, and it’s ironic that she was alerted by the shrill blast of a flute, because it’s the sound that always accompanies Calliope in Greek mythology.

‘Andreas partially failed this time, but he can’t allow himself to stop, so he must go on removing the power of each Muse, moving towards the day when he will be free of them all. Thalia, one of the three Graces, represented by Jan Petrovic, is missing presumed dead, then Melpomene, in her mask of tragedy, represented by the figure of Valerie Marchmont, Public Opinion, gets flattened. Five Muses down, four more—Erato, Polyhymnia, Clio and Calliope—still to go. Then he’ll finally be liberated from his mother, and free to act for himself.’

‘He’s a cripple, Arthur. He can barely manage to get out of a chair.’

‘For a man who makes a noise like a pile of saucepans falling downstairs when he walks, we still had no idea he was attending rehearsals. He knows every inch of the theatre. Everyone keeps telling you the building is filled with hiding places. It’s a mechanical hall of mirrors.’

‘I don’t know—he doesn’t sound like the person Betty Trammel saw when she stayed overnight in the theatre. How could he have vanished from the roof right in front of the firewatcher? And how could he have got in and out of Jan Petrovic’s flat without being seen? Anyway, why is it so damned important for Andreas Renalda to be free of his protectors?’

‘Because they prevent him from doing the one thing he longs for most of all.’