Full Dark House (40 page)

‘For God’s sake, Arthur,’ May shouted, ‘you’d remember Edna bloody Wagstaff well enough if she was still alive. Well, take a look at this.’ He dumped the carrier bag on the pavement and pulled the stuffed cat from it. Time had not been kind to the Abyssinian. Most of its fur had been eaten away with mange, its remaining eye had fallen out and one of its back legs was missing.

‘You remember Rothschild?’ May thrust the deformed cat carcass in his partner’s face. ‘It was her familiar. Squadron Leader Smethwick used to send messages through it. Edna left it to Maggie Armitage in her will.’

It was the only thing he had been able to lay his hands on that Bryant might recognize. Rothschild had sat on his desk like a moulting familiar for over twenty years. Slowly, very slowly, the light of recognition began to return to the elderly detective’s eyes. Finally, he opened his dry, cracked lips.

‘John, what are you doing here?’

‘It lives! It speaks!’ He turned excitedly to Longbright, who had reached them. ‘Look who this is—Janice is here!’

‘Why are you talking to me as if I’m a child?’ Bryant complained. ‘Is there something wrong with you? Hello, Janice. Have you got anything to eat?’

Then he fainted.

May caught him and sat him against the balustrade while Longbright rang for an ambulance.

59

THE CRUELTY OF THE MOON

‘Sergeant Forthright has got your landlady stationed across the stairs,’ May explained.

‘What on earth for?’

‘She thought we might need reinforcements. We’ve only got Crowhurst and Atherton in the auditorium.’

‘The White Witch of Camden gave me a warning about tonight,’ Bryant cautioned. ‘The killer can’t go back to his lair because I took the key to his room out of the tortoise box.’

‘I think it’s this one.’ May pointed out the brown door that led to the first of the understage areas. ‘What’s been going on?’

‘Well, it struck me that if you removed Jan Petrovic from the victim list, all of the deaths took place in the theatre. Why? I asked myself, knowing there could only be one answer. They happened here because the murderer hardly ever leaves the building. Elspeth Wynter has been trying to close down the show because she needs to be free of this house. But she’s become agoraphobic. I remember her sweating in the restaurant when we went out to lunch. She can’t bear to be trapped in here any longer, but on that day she couldn’t wait to get back. Hiding her boy all these years was easier than hiding her own feelings, but she managed that as well. Hardly surprising, seeing as she’s spent her life in the theatre watching people fake emotions. In a way, she’s more talented than any of them.’

Bryant pulled the door shut behind them and flicked on his torch. Ahead lay a maze of bare wooden walls. Makeshift timber railings prevented them from falling to the lower levels.

‘She couldn’t have killed anyone,’ May pointed out. ‘You only have to look at her, she’s tiny.’

‘She staged the murders for her son to carry out. He’s getting too big for her to take care of any longer, creeping around the theatre frightening the ladies in their dressing rooms. He’s down here somewhere. Elspeth can never have a life, never be close to anyone, never ever leave so long as a production continues. She needs the show to close so she can finally escape. And now it’s all too late.’

He led the way along the wooden bridge that ran round the central dark square. ‘We’re nearly under the orchestra. Look up.’ Above them was the dust-caked wire mesh that indicated the start of the orchestra pit.

‘So you were right, in a way. It was about the assassination of theatre gods—just not the ones you thought. Mind your head.’ The corridor was lower now. They passed several rusted iron-rung ladders leading to the star traps, segmented doors through which an actor could be catapulted onto the stage under cover of smoke. At the downstage centre point stood the grave trap. Light from the spots above the dancers shone down through the grille.

‘I don’t like this, Arthur. He could be hiding anywhere.’

Bryant pulled something metallic from his pocket. The click of a ratchet sounded.

‘Are you armed?’ asked May.

‘It’s a service revolver that belonged to my brother.’

‘I didn’t know you had a brother. Do you know how to use it?’

‘The principle’s not hard to grasp. Trigger here, bullets come out of the end. It’s my understanding that he kept it loaded. I don’t think the boy is on this level.’ Bryant peered over the side of the rickety balustrade and shone his torch into the darkness below. ‘We’re going to have to go further down.’

‘I don’t like this at all,’ May complained, feeling for the steps ahead. From the stage above their heads came the sound of the orchestra launching into the show’s grand finale set piece, the cancan.

The stamping of the dancers dislodged showers of dirt. Sawdust sifted past their faces. Bryant pulled out a handkerchief and discreetly coughed into it.

‘Are you sure he’s down here?’ May shifted uncomfortably. He was starting to feel shut in.

‘Listen.’ They stopped as they reached the middle of the three floors constructed beneath the theatre. The music was distorted by the gurgling steam pipes that ran all around them. Bryant shone his torch beam over the walls. The shadows of the stage props, a dozen twisted demon heads, stretched and fell away. The giant eyes of Cerberus, the watchdog of Hell, gleamed wetly at them from a corner. Spiders and mice scuttled from the light. Ahead, just out of the beam, something moved.

‘I think that’s him.’ Bryant’s eyes widened. ‘Stone the crows.’

The boy caught in the torchlight seemed more frightened than angry. His pale, fleshy face was cicatrized with the marks of a badly healed infection, the skin pulled taut and shiny across his skull, his right eye milky with cataracts. His chin was sunk into the bulky mass of his chest, so that he appeared to have no neck at all. Having never left the confines of the theatre, he had the typical deficiencies of a human deprived of sunlight and nutrition. His bones were twisted with the effects of rickets.

‘The light’s hurting his eyes, keep the torch trained on him,’ Bryant called over his shoulder as they advanced.

‘Go away from me. I know she sent you,’ cried Todd suddenly, throwing his hands across his eyes and edging from the circle of brilliance cast by May’s torch. The voice was as dry and dead as the air in the theatre, no louder than the rasp of a scrim sliding in its oiled wooden groove, and yet its tone was clear and cultured. He had spent his life listening to actors’ declamations.

‘Todd, we don’t mean you any harm, we want to help you, but you’ll have to come with us.’ Bryant took a step closer.

‘She intends to leave me here, all alone here.’ The boy backed away with his arms still raised.

‘No, she doesn’t, your mother is going to take you with her,’ Bryant promised.

‘I’ve seen you, both of you. I did it for her, so we can get out. But I know she’s not taking me.’

‘Where did he get this idea from?’ whispered May.

‘I hear everything through the grilles and traps. I heard her telling you.’ Todd thrust an accusing finger. ‘You, the short one.’

‘I’m not short,’ said Bryant indignantly.

Todd suddenly broke free from the light and dropped down the wooden staircase leading to the lowest level of the theatre. The detectives were forced to move forward over the narrow footbridge, one behind the other. Far above them, thirty dancers bared their thighs and hammered out the steps of the cancan.

Beneath the three great turbine engines, the steam pipes and oiled cables that led to the flies, Todd darted along the open corridors, loping from side to side like an ape, dislodging props and items of clothing that hung along the walls, a half-wild creature at home in a penumbral world of brick and iron.

‘Keep away from me.’ They heard him before May could shift the torchlight onto his face. He was on the far side of the understage. The ground beneath the detectives’ feet had turned from planks to stone and earth.

‘Keep the torch trained on him, John.’

May picked out the boy’s twisted features with his beam. Todd released a despairing bellow of pain as the light seared his eyes.

‘All right, wait.’ May moved the circle of light lower, over the boy’s chest, until he had grown calmer.

‘I didn’t want to hurt her,’ he called back, ‘the dancer, she was so beautiful, but Mother poisoned her. Then she started the lift and it ruined everything. She wanted to shock the outsiders. Poor precious feet, I threw them from the window of the smoking salon, hoping someone would see. But outside was all black, there was no one about.’

‘The air raid,’ murmured Bryant. ‘You weren’t to know.’

‘My mother says it is too dangerous to go outside, there are bombs falling from the sky. But I’ve been out. I know how to drive a bike.’

Todd reached down and picked up something that looked like a length of oak. May lowered the torch and saw that it was a sledgehammer.

‘She’ll leave me, and I will have to stay here alone in Hell, with Eurydice.’ He shifted his weight until he was standing astride something grey and heavy, and raised the sledgehammer in his broad fists.

‘Don’t go any closer, Arthur.’ May’s torch picked out the object at Todd’s feet, an absurdly bomb-like thing with tail fins, spattered in white dust, in a round steel case as tall as a man, tapering to a point. How it had reached the basement was a mystery; the ceiling above it was intact.

May had seen enough photographs of unexploded bombs in the
Evening News,
with proud ARP men standing beside them. By the end of the war, fifty thousand would have been defused in streets, factories, shops and homes. Sixty years later, they would still be discovered and deactivated.

‘We’ll all go together, to the real Hell, not one made of paint and plaster,’ said Todd sadly. ‘It’s for the best.’ He raised the sledgehammer higher over his head.

‘No’—Bryant threw up his hands—’don’t do it, Todd. Remember all the girls above us, the young dancers, like the one you didn’t want to hurt.’

‘None of them will have me. Who would want me? I’m a man, not a child. I have no face. I have no life. Can’t go. Can’t stay. And now I am a murderer.’

‘Todd, please.’ A sense of dread flooded over Bryant. He was horribly aware of Maggie’s warning, that death would come from an unexploded bomb. He held out his hands. ‘Please,’ he begged the boy again. May was standing right in its path.

The muscles in Todd’s arms flexed, and he swung the sledgehammer down into the bomb with all his might. Bryant and May threw themselves down onto the floor.

The only sound that followed was a violent splintering of wood. May groped for the fallen torch and twisted its beam back towards the boy. The head of the sledgehammer was lodged firmly inside the bomb case.

‘It’s a prop, a bloody balsa-wood stage prop,’ cried May.

‘Blimey.’ Bryant rose clumsily to his feet as May ran past him. He saw his partner wrestling with the boy, then watched as they fell with a crash that jolted aside the torch beam. Grunts and shouts filled the enveloping darkness. A few moments later came a terrible cry. Bryant thought of Maggie’s death warning again.

‘John!’ he shouted, but there was no reply. Nothing but silence in the turgid claustrophobia of the darkened underworld.

60

THE MOON IN A BOX

Biddle pulled a Woodbine from behind his ear and kept his eyes on Elspeth Wynter as he dug around for a light. He didn’t like the look of her. Panic was flickering in her eyes. She was searching for a way out. From the street outside came the familiar whine of the siren mounted on the roof of St Anne’s Church. For a moment he thought she was going to drop in her tracks.

‘It’s all right, Mrs Wynter, our lads will find your son. Everything’s going to be fine.’ It was the reassurance everyone gave each other throughout the war.

‘He’s very strong,’ she warned. ‘I feel a little faint. Do you mind if I sit down over there, where it’s cooler?’

‘Here.’ He took her arm and helped her to the stool in the box-office booth. ‘They timed the raid well tonight. The show’s just turning out.’

Behind them, the ushers opened the auditorium doors as the sound of applause billowed into the foyer. Moments later, they were engulfed by members of the audience, leaving quickly to obey the warning of the air-raid siren. Biddle took his eyes off her for only a second. When he looked back at the booth, Elspeth Wynter had gone.

‘John, where are you?’ called Bryant. ‘Shine your torch.’ He heard a strangled grunt in the dark. Water was dripping somewhere.

‘Over here.’ May was coughing, trying to catch his breath. He grappled for the Valiant and pointed its beam up once more. Bryant saw that he was sitting beside the mouth of the artesian well. He limped over and joined May at the glistening ring of stone.

‘Down there.’ May shone the torch over the side and saw Todd hanging by one claw-like hand from the slippery green brickwork.

‘Good Lord, look how deep it is.’ Bryant got onto his knees and leaned as far over the well mouth as he dared. ‘Todd, give us your hand. We can get you out of there.’ He turned to May. ‘You’re taller than me, you can reach further.’

The boy was shaking his head rhythmically, scraping the damaged skin of his forehead along the brickwork until a dark caul of blood veiled his eyes. ‘No,’ he called up. ‘I come from deep inside the Palace. This is where I belong. I see the stars from the skylight, lying up on the grid, just under the roof. The moon is always in a box, and the box is only full of tricks. I want something to be real. Death is real.’

As the detectives cried out in unison, Todd opened the fingers of his left hand and dropped down the centre of the well, a fall of almost seventy feet before he hit the black water below. There was nothing either of them could do. For a moment they lost him from view. Then they turned the torch on the distant oily surface until it settled once more into an unbroken mirror, the remaining effect of a vanishing act.

Biddle pushed through the crowds, shoving his way out of the congested theatre foyer. His one chance to make good, to do something positive, and he had messed up. He threw his cigarette aside and looked around desperately as the theatregoers began making their way towards the shelters. There was no sense of urgency on the street, no rush or panic. Couples crowded the narrow pavement outside the Palace as ARP wardens directed them to the nearest shelter. He couldn’t see her. There were people everywhere. As Biddle searched the faces, the detectives arrived beside him.

‘Where’s Elspeth?’ asked Bryant, wheezing badly. ‘What have you done with her?’

‘It’s my fault,’ Biddle admitted. ‘She ran out as the stalls started emptying into the hall. My eyes were off her only for a second.’ He looked at Bryant’s dirt-covered clothes. ‘What happened to you?’

‘We have to find her, Sidney.’

‘She can’t have got far. Here, give us a hand up.’ Biddle leaned on the detective’s shoulders and hoisted himself onto the edge of a stone horse trough. On the other side of Cambridge Circus he saw the back of a woman in a brown cardigan and skirt, fleeing in the direction of the British Museum. ‘I can see her. Come on.’

The detectives lost precious seconds extricating themselves from the crowds. When they managed to catch sight of Elspeth Wynter again, she was running blindly across the intersection beside the Shaftesbury Theatre.