Murder in the Limelight (25 page)

Maisie ran down the steps and through the dimly lit corridor linking the restaurant to the entrance the other side of the theatre, past Props’ room and the stage door corridor
and up the stairs towards the dressing room. ‘Bridie,’ she risked shouting as she got there.

‘Bridie, where are you?’ Her voice fell into emptiness and she knew before she even reached the dressing room that it was empty of life.

She paused on the threshold, steadying her nerves, afraid of what she might find: Bridie, strangled, with staring eyes and purple face. She gulped in anticipation as she pushed open the door. It was in darkness and she turned up the gas jet: with trembling fingers she turned on the stopcock, the pilot light bringing the jets flickering to full light. She let out a sigh of relief. There was no one. No body. It had been her imagination working overtime. Bridie wasn’t here. She must get back. Back to the warmth and security of the restaurant. She was not fanciful, but it was creepy here. She turned out the gas lights and turned to go. It was then she heard the footsteps. Measured, they were. Slow and heavy. Whoever it was was in no hurry.

‘Watch?’ she cried hopefully.

There was no reply. The footsteps paused and briefly continued. Up the stairs towards her. He’d been quick. He must have run – heard her. Now she was here. Alone with him. Maisie Wilson, the Angel Murderer’s fourth victim.

‘Props,’ she shouted, trying to sound reassuring. ‘It’s only Maisie Wilson. Not Miss Page. She’s waiting outside for you. Just as you wanted.’

The footsteps halted. She waited, breathless.

‘It’s you, miss. You I wanted.’

‘Who’s that?’ she said falteringly. It wasn’t Props. But the voice, she knew.

‘Bates, miss. Only Bates,’ came the reply. Flat, normal, conversational.

Not Props,
Bates
! That’s whom Auguste had been after. He’d never intended to kill Bridie. It was her,
her
, he had been waiting for all along. He hadn’t seen her leave the theatre for the restaurant and had assumed she was still
there. And she had walked right back into his hands. His hands. She shivered. Though old, he was a tough man. There was no way she could defend herself. If she tried to reach the window he would get her first. She forced her voice to sound as natural as possible. ‘Just coming, Obadiah, sorry to keep you waiting. Just coming out now.’

Fool that she’d been! The recollection of how she had insisted Summerfield meet her before Obadiah’s lodge flashed through her mind. She had been signing her death warrant. Her crime in his eyes was all the worse because he thought she was betrothed to Auguste. Auguste! She forced the thought of him away. If she was to see him again, she needed to think calmly.

‘I’ll come in, miss, if I may.’ Still the calm flat voice. Perhaps she was wrong – perhaps, it was imagination . . .

‘No, really, I’m just coming. Here—’

She stepped out of the door, turned swiftly and threw several of the chorus girls’ frou-frou skirts over his head. Taken by surprise he fought off the layers of gauze for several precious seconds while she frenziedly pushed her way past him and down the stairs. She glanced back to see a Bates she did not know freeing himself from the last of the folds. Then he was at the steps – and she was in pitch dark. He had turned off all the corridor lights. And then the steps came again. Measured. Towards her. She hesitated for one fatal second and turned in panic, not towards the corridor and safety, but the front door.

He heard the sound of the rattling door. He heard her scream. ‘It’s locked, miss. You won’t get through.’ His voice came out of the blackness, so eminently reasonable, as though he were explaining the non-appearance of a bouquet of flowers.

‘Watch,’ she croaked.

‘He’s not here, miss. I told him I’d stay tonight.’ He was standing still, by the sound of his voice. Her searching
hands found the side wall and she crept along it towards him. She had to pass him.

‘But you like me, Obadiah. You wouldn’t want to harm me.’ She forced herself to sound calm. ‘They’ll find out if you kill me. The police are outside. Then you won’t be able to work at the Galaxy again.’ Stop talking and hurry forward.

‘I must still do my duty, miss. I always do. You know that. I always do that.’

She was level with the voice, soon to be past. But he sensed her presence. She felt a movement. She ran into the dark, then stopped as she felt his breath, his presence barring her path. As he lunged at her she pushed, knocking him off balance and half fell through the door to the stage area and wings. And light, blessed light. Low, but sure. She was younger than he, and despite the impediment of her skirts, nimbler. She slammed the door shut, running through the cluttered backstage area towards the wings. The door was opening and she leapt quickly into the stage manager’s corner. Implacably Obadiah Bates moved on like an automaton, his movements dictated by some other power.

‘It’s God’s mission, miss. He wants you there, you see. It’s for your own good.’

He stood by the wings blinking, looking round slowly, taking his time.

Her very heart beat so loudly she thought it would betray her. But his eyes stopped lower. A fold of her dress must have been showing for his eyes riveted on the ground at her feet and a smile crossed his face. His eyes were blank as he strode towards her corner.

With a cry she ran in the only direction she could – across the stage lit with dim gas-tees. Then darkness swept over her as Bates found the gas plate and plunged the stage and wings into pitch dark.

‘Don’t you worry, miss, I can see. Comes of being an old soldier. You have to with them Pathans around, you see,’
he said reassuringly, spookily, his voice coming from nowhere, as if it were in one of Maskelyne’s magic tricks.

The dark disorientated her. She turned round, then was still. Which way was she facing? The floats? The back of the stage? Or the far side with its wings. If she ran, would it be to freedom – or to
him
? The world swam around her; impotently, she heard the footsteps of Obadiah Bates coming towards her through the blackness, and could do nothing.

‘The restaurant. I left her in the restaurant,’ Auguste hurled back over his shoulder at Rose and his squad pounding along behind him.

Through Exeter Street, into Wellington Street, and first Auguste, then Rose, plus six uniformed constables and an apparent transvestite fell through the doors of the Galaxy Restaurant.

The diners paused,
foie gras
on forks, fascinated at the scene.

Auguste looked wildly round then rushed to the door of the kitchen, colliding with a
veau farci
borne by the youngest of his waiters.

‘Maisie,’ he said, clutching the unfortunate youth by the lapels of his jacket. ‘Where is Miss Wilson?’

The youth gazed back in terror. It was left to Gladys to answer: ‘Miss Wilson went into the larder, Mr Didier. That one.’

The kitchen staff looked on in bewilderment as their lord and master rushed into his own private larder, followed by the might of Scotland Yard, like a scene out of a Gilbert & Sullivan opera.

Sixty diners watching through the open door wondered why. Opium den? Or was the chef the murderer? They looked with less enthusiasm at the food in front of them.

‘But you like me, Obadiah.’ I must stay calm, keep him talking.

‘Oh yes, I’m very fond of you, Miss Maisie. I always was. That’s why I’ve got to do it. I can’t let you go to the bad – that’s what I told them all, if only they’d stuck to their own class they’d have been all right. Now if you’d been content with Mr Auguste, you’d have been happy. But now I’ve got to save your soul. God has ordered me to. It’s a penance, see. For not saving her.’ He kept on coming towards her.

‘Her?’ said Maisie in a voice she did not recognise as her own. ‘Who is she?’

‘“You lost her for me, Obadiah,” He says, “so you save all the others.” And I do. You know how fond of all you girls I am. I’d do anything for you. It’s a pity you saw me, of course. It’s more painful this way. The others didn’t.’

She should run. Try to escape. But where? In the dark he’d catch her. As if divining her thought, he reached out of the blackness and caught hold of her. She screamed.

‘It won’t take long, miss, you’ll see.’

‘But you must give me time to say a prayer, Obadiah,’ said Maisie quickly. ‘If I am to meet my God.’ How can my voice sound so steady, she thought crazily, when inside I feel like this?

Obadiah considered. ‘Very well, but don’t go thinking I’ll not do my duty. You’ll like it up there with the angels.’

With his arm still grasping hers, she knelt down on the stage.

‘Dear Lord, who made me—’ Please, please Lord, let me have wit enough to think of something, she was thinking to herself, forcing her voice to go on talking.

‘I’ve got a knife too,’ said Obadiah chattily, ‘when you’re done. If you think you’d prefer that. Here, you feel. It’ll slide into you as easy as anything.’

‘I haven’t finished my prayer, Obadiah,’ said Maisie through stiff lips. ‘And I pray for—’

It was at the moment that Maisie screamed that Auguste and Rose arrived, with the help of electric torches, at the door of the wings.

Listening, aghast, Auguste was about to rush through but Rose restrained him. ‘He’s mad, Didier, one sound from us and he’ll kill her before we can get there. Remember, he doesn’t care about himself.’

‘But—’

‘Think. Isn’t there any way we can get to him without crossing that stage. Swing down on him, maybe?’

‘Dear Lord who made me . . .’

Memories of the Galaxy, of burlesque, of the infinite possibilities of theatre, crossed Auguste’s mind.

‘Not up. Down,’ he said suddenly. ‘Down.’

‘And I pray for . . .’

Maisie’s voice echoed down through the floorboards of the Galaxy stage.

‘That’s enough now, Miss Maisie,’ said Obadiah. ‘Time to go now.’

Flight was impossible. There was nowhere to go. Desperation took hold of her.

Perhaps it was her subconscious, perhaps it was her training from Auguste never to overlook anything out of order, however trivial, in the perfect dish. Whichever, she cried out the first thing that entered her head.

‘The dolls, Obadiah. Why the dolls?’

‘I killed them,’ he replied. As he spoke several things happened. A scream from above their heads in the darkness, a long drawn out ‘Dolls’, the darkness itself transformed by an overpowering shaft of light from the flies, fixing, mesmerising Obadiah Bates as he held Maisie with knife poised at her throat. Simultaneously, behind him, Auguste Didier shot up through the star trap like the demon king, propelled from below by six sturdy policeman.

Grabbed by Auguste, caught in the brilliant limelight, Obadiah dropped the knife. Sobbing, Maisie crawled away. But Auguste was no match for Obadiah, who with one blow of his fist knocked him senseless into the unlit floats.

With a polite smile Obadiah, a manic figure in the wavering limelight, picked up the knife again and dragged Maisie to her feet. But into the limelight danced another figure, maddened, manic and determined. Props was going to get his revenge at last. With no one to control it, the light wandered on and off the fighting men. In the shadows Rose’s men stood impotently by, waiting to see their target. Props too was no match for Obadiah. Hands were round the younger man’s neck, choking him, strangling him.

From the stage manager’s corner, Maisie screamed. Taken by surprise Obadiah relaxed his grip and Props broke free. She took a desperate gamble. She pulled the lever on the only down trap to be controlled from stage level, and Obadiah Bates disappeared. There was no blanket underneath to catch him.

‘It was like your pudding,
mon coeur
,’ said Auguste, palely theatrical, holding court in Rose’s office next day, a bandage around his head, elegantly adjusted over his thick dark hair. ‘Upside down. We thought Miss Lytton was
le rôti
, the girls the forcemeat,
les légumes
. But she was not the top of the pyramid. She, like the girls, was attacked for what she represented. And when one perceived that, the sauce clarified. Is that not so,
monsieur l’inspecteur
?’

‘Naturally, Mr Dupin – er, Didier,’ said Rose gravely.

Auguste managed a weak smile. ‘It is true that the greatest detectives, as the greatest cooks, are called Auguste, and I am honoured to count myself a successor of Mr Poe’s hero.
Je vous remercie.’

Maisie laughed, a little shakily. She had not yet recovered from the events of the day before and was unusually silent.

‘And if,’ continued Auguste, ‘the girls were not attacked
for sexual reasons, then why,
hein
? This is what we ask ourselves, me and the good Inspector Rose here. What do they have in common? They were to be escorted by Lord Summerfield.
Alors
, Inspector Rose, with your help,
ma mie
’ – Auguste could not resist adding – ‘has discovered it is not Lord Summerfield who is our murderer. Then perhaps it was because of
what
he was? A peer. An English milord. Yet why should anyone want to stop these girls being courted by a lord? It does not make sense. It is a brilliant future for them. Jealousy? An extreme form to lead to murder.’

‘Florence wasn’t going to marry a peer though,’ Maisie pointed out.

‘True,’ said Auguste. ‘So we seek another reason. When did these dolls appear? At the dress rehearsal of a play. A new kind of play. A play with the theme of a lady disguised as a simple country girl, with whom a lord falls in love not knowing she is the
Lady
Penelope. But this is not the same theme as the girls and Lord Summerfield. Then I remembered that Obadiah had only seen part of
Miss Penelope’s Proposal.
He did not know that our simple country maid is really a peeress in disguise, and Obadiah believed very firmly that girls should marry within their own class. But why should he feel so strongly about it as to
murder
? It did not make sense. He was devoted to the Galaxy, to the girls. He had worked there for fifteen years. Then I remembered what Inspector Rose said about the psychopath – that he has a blind spot, that where it is concerned moral judgement is suspended, twisted. But why a blind spot? Perhaps someone close to him had been betrayed by a milord. Deserted, seduced. Perhaps even his wife? She had been dead many years. His daughter also dead. Yet his favourite play was
King Lear.
Henry Irving was his hero, coming on stage with Cordelia in his arms – dead. Gone to heaven.