Ruddy Gore (16 page)

In the middle of the line was a young man whom Phryne did not recognise as Leslie Franklin until he began to sing.

‘When the foreman bares his steel,’ he sang robustly and the chorus echoed, ‘Tarantara! Tarantara!’ with no enthusiasm and very little volume.

‘We uncomfortable feel,’ continued Mr Franklin, wondering if there was anyone on stage with him and only partially reassured by the next ‘Tarantara!’ which had a little more force. ‘And we find the wisest thing,’ he went on bravely, ‘Is to slap our chests and sing ‘‘Tarantara!’’ ’ Not a tarantara followed and Leslie stopped and looked at his director for guidance.

‘Boys, what is the matter with you all?’

demanded Sir Bernard. ‘Castrated in the night?

These are policemen; I want beef, I want a big strong sound.’

‘Sir B . . . ’ ventured a tenor timidly, ‘I think we’re a bit
distrait
.’

‘
Distrait
, are you?’ said Sir Bernard Tarrant with withering scorn, taking on a pre-heart attack hue,

‘You’ll be
distrait
when I get hold of you. What’s the matter, then? Do you realise that we are going to take this show on tour exhibiting the sorriest lot of policemen who ever disgraced Gilbert’s 155

words and Sullivan’s music? Even New Zealand is going to notice!’

‘The ghost . . . ’ said the same young man, emboldened by the rest of the group who were clustering behind him. ‘Poor Prompt’s dead, Sir B!

It’s too much. We’re worrying about whether we are safe and that’s never good for the performance.What’s happening? Isn’t someone doing anything about it? Someone hates us!’ and the rest of the men gathered the speaker close, closing their ranks with what looked like military precision.

Heads nodded and eyes were fixed on the director.

‘Yes, all right.’ Sir Bernard rubbed his cheek.

‘Yes, I suppose you ought to know. The police are investigating, and this is Miss Phryne Fisher – the Honourable Miss Fisher. She’s a private detective, employed by me. Together we will get to the bottom of the problem.’

Phryne stood up and the cast looked closely at her. She was dressed in a dark suit and the big tiger’s eye brooch which secured her scarf winked reassuringly.

‘I’m working on several things at the moment,’

she announced. ‘One is the ghost. Have you seen her?’

‘Louis has seen her,’ said a bass. ‘So he says. And I saw something – a figure and a light and a scent.’

‘Where?’

Louis, the tenor, emerged from amongst his fellows and said, ‘I agree with Col. That’s what I saw, too.’

‘Where did you see her? What was she wearing?’

156

Louis plucked up his courage. ‘At the stage entrance – stage left. She was Rose Maybud – first act.’

‘Yes, sunbonnet and all,’ agreed Colin.

‘Were you frightened? Did you feel cold?’

Phryne was recalling her textbook, in which the Society for Psychical Research had measured the drop in temperature when some supernatural phe-nomena occurred.

‘Cold? My word,’ said Colin, ‘I felt like I’d been dipped in ice water.’ Beside him, Louis nodded.

‘Right. Did she speak to you?’

‘Phryne, are you taking this seriously?’ guffawed Sir Bernard, with an edge to his voice that she could not quite identify. Anxiety, perhaps?

‘You asked me to investigate, Bernard dear, and I’m investigating.’ The director subsided. Colin answered after consulting his colleague.

‘No, she didn’t speak and she didn’t move –

thank God, I would have died on the spot if she had.’

‘Have you ever seen a ghost before?’ asked Phryne, and both men shook their heads.

‘And I don’t want to see one again,’ added the bass with perfect certainty. ‘Eh, Louis?’

‘No,’ whispered Louis.

‘I’m on the trail of whoever is playing these tricks,’ Phryne assured them. ‘I’ve never failed yet.

I shall find out what is going on and I shall stop it, and you have the admirable Jack Robinson of the police force as well. You’ll see me around – if there’s anything you think might help me, please 157

have a word. Just a chat, and unless it’s germane to the issue, my confidence is absolute. All right?’

There was a general sigh of released tension and some of the actors grinned. Gwilym Evans had been fixing his hypnotic gaze on Phryne, and he smiled wickedly once he had made her look at him.

‘Right, good, then can we get on?’ asked Sir Bernard with restrained violence. ‘From ‘‘When a felon’’, Mr Franklin and policemen, if you please.’

Phryne wandered away as she heard the young man announcing that a policeman’s lot was not a happy one. The chorus were putting a lot more effort into their tarantara, and it echoed in the empty theatre.

She found the stage electrician, Mr West, puzzling and muttering over a pad of paper covered all over with arcane shorthand.

‘Hello, I’m Phryne Fisher, whatever is that? It looks like Babylonian cuniform.’

‘Patch sheet,’ grunted Mr West.

He was a short, stout man in a foreman’s dust-coat, under which he wore a suit – presumably to keep up the respectability of trade, Phryne concluded. He had brown eyes and thinning dark hair and a pencil was lodged behind his ear. He looked Phryne up and down and held out a hand covered with bits of sticking plaster.

‘You’re investigating, are you, Miss? Well, I can tell you about the lights and that’s all. I don’t do anything else but lights. Me and my assistants, we’re just lights.’

158

Phryne said that she would be delighted to learn about stage lighting and Mr West softened noticeably.

‘See, this diagram tells me where all the lights are, and what connects with what, and when I put it next to my running sheet on the circuit board,’

he led Phryne down into his little box and waved a hand at a large board made of bakelite and covered with switches, ‘it lets me alter the lighting.

See, this bank of switches is marked A to L and numbered. So if I want to know what colour gel is on light A6, this sheet tells me it is sunshine yellow and is one of the bank which are lit for the village scene, Act 1. Then if I want to know how to produce the blue and white of the Ruddigore castle, I look at the sheet and it tells me that M7

is midnight blue. So all I need to do to change the lighting is bring down A to L,’ he slid the switches of the top bank to zero, ‘and bring up M to Q and there’s your dark and haunted hall.’ The corre-sponding slides went up. ‘Light strength is from one to ten,’ he explained. ‘We dim the light by increasing the resistance, but that makes the resis-tors hot. You could boil a kettle on them.’ Phryne realised that the heat of the board explained the sticking plaster on Mr West’s hands. He must have permanent blisters.

‘So all the lighting is worked out and arranged before the performance?’ she asked, and Mr West scratched his head with the pencil.

‘Of course,’ he said patiently. ‘We decide on the lighting with the director and then the stage 159

manager and then we are up all night rigging the lights and doing a lighting rehearsal.’

‘How many lights do you have? Can I see one?’

‘Fifty-eight. Tim, lower a spot,’ yelled Mr West.

Someone answered from above. Phryne looked up and saw a figure twenty feet above the stage, perched on the iron gantry which boxed in the stage.

A large metal object was lowered gently down into Mr West’s arms.

‘See, this is the bulb – don’t touch it, now, a smear of fingermarks on the globe’ll break it, once it gets hot.’

‘Does it get very hot?’

‘Yes, Miss, far too hot to touch. This box has shutters at the side to allow us to narrow the beam and direct it. See, here’s the place where we put in a slide – a gel holder, it slips in here. The gel is made of dyed gelatine, to make a coloured light.

All the globes are just white, but if we put a slide over them it can be any colour you please. Undersea is green, sunlight is yellow, gloomy is blue. A lady’s boudoir in a Feydeau farce is pink,’ he added, smiling for the first time. ‘All right, haul up, Tim.’

The unwieldy metal box rose as the invisible minion hauled on a line, and there was a clunk as it was fixed in its place again.

‘There are the other lights,’ Mr West pointed at the dress circle, where Phryne noticed a bar from which several lights were suspended, ‘con-trolled from the board along with the others. Did 160

you see that aeroplane we had for Hinkler? You ask the carpenter Leonard Brawn about that.

Didn’t he go crook!’ he chuckled. ‘And so did I, they wanted to hang the bl . . . blighted thing over my lights. You can imagine how the management would have liked a bl . . . blasted huge shadow flicking over the stage during the performance. And when Bill told ’em about it they carried on like two bob watches. You see,’ the thinning crown bent and the voice became con-spiratorial, ‘no one notices us, Miss Fisher, and no one appreciates us. I can have been up all night fixing the lighting, half dead for lack of sleep, so tired I can’t see me own hand in front of me face and it all goes bonzer, then no one says a word. But if a change is a second out they’re round here howling for blood. Technicals, they call us. Just technicals. But if it weren’t for the technicals their show wouldn’t never go on.’

He cocked an eye at the singing policemen on stage. ‘They don’t know what we do for ’em.

Have you seen ’em up close? Hags, most of them actresses. But give ’em the right make-up and lighting and they look like princesses. The brighter the light on the face the fewer lines it has – electric light evens out the features. Only reason Mr Selwyn Alexander is still getting away with playing boys is the extra-bright Maj lights.

Oh, well,’ he shrugged, ‘there it is. Now, Miss, was there anything you wanted to ask me?’

‘Have you, or any of your assistants, seen the ghost?’

161

‘Nah,’ a sneer lifted the corner of his mouth.

‘Only players would believe in such things. There ain’t no such thing as ghosts. They’re just working

’emselves up to a tizz, a tantrum and a pay rise, you watch.’

‘And what about the curtain weight?’

‘Rope must’a frayed. Poor old Prompt. Never a cross word out of her – never a word, to tell the truth. Look, Miss, theatres get like this. One thing goes wrong and then another, as it will in the way of things, and then everyone starts jumping at every sound and expecting the end of the world.

We’ve only got another week and then we’re on the boat and it will all be forgotten by the time we sight Auckland.’

‘So you think I’m wasting my time?’

The electrican grinned. ‘Your time, but the management’s money,’ he said.

Phryne wandered behind the set and tripped over a tall man in overalls who was mending a sandbag.

He grabbed her as she fell and set her back on her feet.

‘You’re Miss Fisher?’ he said, unsmiling.

‘Leonard Brawn. I’m the stage carpenter.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘Everything that Jim West don’t.’ He was thin, about forty, and had a thatch of blond hair with paint in it and hands like spades. They were curiously out of proportion to the rest of him and also bore sticking plaster and smudges of iodine.

162

Phryne took the offered hand and observed that the thumb looked like it had been hammered too many times. His voice was deep and pleasant. ‘I make sets, fix machinery, paint cloths, rig scenery, make and repair furniture and props. I’m the one who gets lousy jobs like flying that blasted plane.’

‘Yes, I saw it. How did you manage it? Mr West told me they wanted to hang it over his lights.’

‘Yair, and then over the stage, till I put the mozz on that bright idea. There was an airforce chap here lording it over us mortals but I stopped him smartish. I dropped a line down through the dome, Miss, found the point of balance and hung it; then I had a couple of light ropes tethering it so it couldn’t swing out too far. Then one of boys just had to stand there and give the thing a little tug if it slowed down. After a few circles the propellors caught and it buzzed around good-o, though what the Gods would have seen of the stage is more than I can think. Still, they came to see Hinkler, not the show.’

‘Tell me, can we really go down under the stage?’

‘Yair, you’ve been there, lighting box steps are there.’

All Phryne had seen was a vast cavern which was lined with iron pipes and painted that depress-ing shade of rancid cream.

‘I’ll show you once I’ve got this rip sewn up.

Sand makes a noise underfoot and they’re all high-strung as it is. And I don’t want Mr Loveland-Almighty-Hall on my back.’

163

He knelt down again and drew the bag-needle through the canvas. On stage, a strong sad voice was lamenting:

Ah, leave me not alone to pine

Alone and desolate

No fate seemed fair as mine

No happiness so great!

Phryne saw that the carpenter had stopped sewing to listen to Leila Esperance’s voice. When she was answered by Gwilym Evans’ rich tenor, ‘Ah, I must leave thee here/In endless night to dream,’ he dragged the thread with a sawing motion through the canvas and finished his mending with a deft double knot, snapping off the waxed thread.

He beckoned Phryne to follow as he went down a flight of stone steps at the side of the stage. The lighting box was on the left and she was in a cavern floored with cobbles and roofed with bricks some twelve feet high.

‘You can come down through a trap in the stage itself,’ said the carpenter, ‘like the devil does at the end of
Faust
. But this is where all the sets are stored, the ones that aren’t flown up into the flies – that’s up above the stage. You saw the lighting gantry. Above that is the flies. We can lower sets down and haul the old ones up. That’s why you must never touch a rope. Lay a finger on it, move it or undo it, and you could kill . . . ’ he stopped abruptly.

164

‘Kill someone? Is that what happened to Prompt?’

‘No. That rope frayed. Now, here is the warehouse – through those double doors. We own this bit of Little Bourke Street, before the Chinks begin.’

‘You don’t like them?’

‘Yellow scum.’ Mr Brawn was only restrained from spitting, Phryne felt, because he had to clean the floor. ‘The stink from their bloody bananas can turn a man’s stomach. Well. That’s all, Miss Fisher.’