Smoke and Mirrors (8 page)

The pipes had frozen again, so Edgar’s flat was as cold as the streets outside. He picked up the post in the communal hall, noting with a lurch of the heart that there was a letter from Ruby. He let himself into his flat, keeping his coat on. There was a gas heater somewhere; he’d find it and then he’d sit and read Ruby’s letter. The heater was the old-fashioned kind with a Calor gas cylinder. When he lit it, there was a blue flame and a pungent smell of gas, adding to the permanent aroma that hung around the flat however often he opened the windows. The actual temperature didn’t seem to change that much. Edgar found a heel of bread and some cheese, fetched the eiderdown from his bed and settled down on the sofa.

Ruby’s writing was flowing and bold; sometimes there were only two or three words a line, at other times the words ran into each other and bunched up at the edge of the page.

‘Darling Edgar,’ he read. Well, that was something, unless Ruby had become the kind of show-business girl who called everyone ‘darling’.

Edgar leant back against the sofa cushions. He couldn’t decide whether he felt better or worse after reading Ruby’s letter. It was dated Thursday 29th, so Ruby wouldn’t have known about the children’s bodies being found. But she would have known about them being missing if she ever looked at a paper, which he doubted. Even so, he felt that she should have known and asked about his work first rather than plunging straight into how awful the show was and what a lech Buttons was. (How old was Buttons exactly? Was he the sort of lech who could safely be ignored?) Some things about the letter just sounded like the outpourings of a spoilt schoolgirl. Worthing is boring but Mummy and Daddy have been down and taken her out for the day. But even this is misdirection. Ruby’s father is not the man she calls Daddy but Max, who deigned to send her a postcard. This makes everything more difficult for Edgar, of course. Can he really have a relationship with his best friend’s daughter? Were he and Ruby having a relationship? She had called him ‘darling’ and asked when she was going to see him. And she had mentioned the day at the ice rink. On the whole, he thought he felt better.

He had met Ruby when she was Max’s assistant for a season. He hadn’t know then that she was Max’s daughter (and nor had Max) but, even then, she had seemed part of Max’s world, under his protection. That summer season had ended in tragedy but, from the wreckage, Edgar managed to maintain some contact with Ruby. They had been out together twice. The first time was to the cinema, when they had both spent much of the evening avoiding talking about murder. The second time had been magic. They had gone to the SS Brighton ice rink and it had been like being in heaven for a day. Ruby clinging to his arm, her cheeks pink, her hair flying. The music playing, the ice gleaming, the moments when he could actually put his arm round Ruby’s waist. He could skate quite well (he’d been taught by a Swedish sailor in Norway) and he’d enjoyed being the teacher, the one who stopped Ruby from falling, who encouraged her to glide out on her own. ‘The strong arm of the law,’ she’d laughed as he had scooped her up just in time, swinging her into a waltzing turn that made her breathless. Afterwards they had gone for chips and hot chocolate. And then he’d kissed her.

Did this make Ruby his girlfriend? He isn’t sure. Apart from the inconveniences of her parentage, she is ten years younger than him, childish in some ways, frighteningly adult in others. And, anyhow, he is no position to be asking himself questions like ‘Is she my girlfriend?’ as if he’s a character in one of those ‘real life’ magazines Lucy used to read. He is a policeman and he has to catch a murderer. Real life is serious.

He put the letter aside and turned to the books he had brought home. There were
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
, a newer book called
The Secret Life of Children’s Stories
and a rather sickly-looking tome called
Bedtime Stories for Little Ones
. If he was going to understand this case, he had a shrewd feeling that he would need to understand these narratives. He opened
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
and searched for ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

Although he had a vague memory of the story (children, forest, gingerbread, witch), he’d forgotten a lot of it. Hansel and Gretel have a wicked stepmother. She tells their father to take them into the wood and lose them. He does so (why?) but Hansel fools him by laying a trail of white pebbles that leads them back home. The stepmother forces the father to abandon them a second time; again they come home, and find the doors locked. They wander into the forest until they come to a house made of gingerbread. They are starving and so start to eat the roof. The owner of the cottage, a witch, comes out and captures them. She intends to keep them in a cage until they become fat enough to eat. Again, Hansel saves them by putting a bone through the bars of the cage. The short-sighted witch, thinking that the bone is Hansel’s finger and that the children are still too thin to make a good meal, keeps feeding them. Eventually, though, she loses patience and takes Hansel out of the cage, intending to eat him. Hansel says the oven isn’t working and persuades the witch to look inside. When she does so, he pushes her in and she is burnt to death. They children then go home and find the wicked stepmother dead. They and their father live happily ever after.

Edgar thought of the snowy ground on the top of Devil’s Dyke, the brightness of sweet wrappers leading their way to the dead children. The sweet trail didn’t save this Hansel and Gretel. The wicked witch had done her worst and little bodies lay in the snow, curiously peaceful as they lay there turned towards each other. In Annie’s play the siblings had hated each other. Edgar hoped that wasn’t true in real life. He hoped that they’d been able to get some comfort from each other’s presence, even in death.

He flicked through the other stories and a shape caught his eye, an illuminated ‘A’ made to look like a flowering tree, its roots snaking down through the page. It reminded him of Annie’s margin drawings. The title of the story was ‘The Juniper Tree’. ‘A woman,’ he read, ‘wished for a child as red as blood and as white as snow.’ For a moment he sat staring at the page, as the words ‘blood’ and ‘snow’ seemed to twist and mutate before his eyes.

It was a horrible story. The woman has a son but dies shortly afterwards and is buried underneath a juniper tree. Her husband grieves for a long time, then gets married again. His second wife gives birth to a daughter, Marlinchen, but she hates her stepson and plots to kill him. To this end she offers him an apple from a box and, when he reaches in to get it, slams the heavy lid on him, beheading him. She then takes a bandage and ties his head back on. She tells Marlinchen to ask her brother for the apple, and if he doesn’t give it to her, to give him a good box on the ear. Marlinchen asks for the apple, and getting no reply, boxes him on the ear. The head falls off and Marlinchen is horrified, believing that she has killed her brother. Her mother comforts her and says that they will tell the father that the boy has gone to stay with his uncle. The stepmother then turns the boy’s body into a stew, which the father eats, pronouncing it delicious. Marlinchen, however, keeps the bones left over from the meal and buries them beneath the juniper tree. Immediately a beautiful bird flies out of the tree. The bird goes and sings a song to a goldsmith about its cruel death at the hands of its mother. The goldsmith gives the bird a golden chain because the song is so beautiful. The bird then sings the same song to a shoemaker, who gives it a pair of red shoes, and to a miller, who gives it a millstone. It then flies back home and sings its song in the tree. The father goes out to see who is singing such a beautiful song and the golden chain falls about his neck. The bird sings again and Marlinchen goes out and the red shoes fall to her. All this time the stepmother is complaining of heat, claiming she has hellfire burning in her veins. The bird sings for a third time and the stepmother goes out, whereupon the millstone drops on her, crushing her to death. When Marlinchen and her father come out of the house, they find that the tree has disappeared in a puff of smoke. When the smoke clears, they see the son standing there. Then they all go inside and live happily ever afterwards.

Edgar sat back and let the book fall to the floor. Despite the cold, it felt as if his veins too were pulsing with hellfire. Who on earth would let a child read this stuff? He remembered Miss Young recounting the plots of various fairy tales.
Parents killing their children. The jealous stepmother. The princess dancing until she drops down dead. The Little Mermaid dying slowly for love. The wicked Queen demanding Snow White’s heart. The stone falling on the bad mother and crushing her.
All horror is here: the longing for a child, the untimely death, the unnatural mother, murder, cannibalism, cruel retribution. Even the wicked touch about the mother making the daughter think that she was the one who killed the boy. It’s all misdirection, sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors. But, when the smoke clears away, the dead walk again.

Leafing through
The Secret Life of Children’s Stories
, he found a section on ‘The Juniper Tree’. Marlinchen, he read, might be a corruption of Mary Magdalene and the boy coming to life could be seen to mirror the Resurrection. The millstone too has biblical echoes (‘better a millstone round the neck than to cause a child to sin’) and the tree could represent the Garden of Eden with the stepmother in the age-old role of Eve, the first temptress. This struck Edgar as a rather far-fetched explanation. Wasn’t the story just about plain old evil, dressed up with fantastical birds and just punishments falling from the sky?

He couldn’t face reading any more stories so he just flicked through the rest of the pages looking at the illustrations. Princesses on golden thrones, ghostly ships rising out of the sea, creatures in thorny forests, blood, snow, poison, apples. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades. A wave of nausea swept over him and he closed his eyes. Blood on the snow. The bird singing in the tree. The golden apple. The poisoned shoes.

The heavy scent in the room was lulling him to sleep.
Lie down and I’ll give you rest for ever.
He sat up with a jolt and switched off the gas heater. Then he opened the window, gulping down the freezing night air. That was a close thing. Detective found gassed in his room. He could imagine the headlines. Would Ruby come to his funeral? Would they think he had done it on purpose, tormented by his failure to find the Hansel and Gretel killer? Well, he wasn’t ready to give up yet. Edgar pushed the heater through the kitchen and out into the yard. It sat there, like a misshapen troll crouching in the shadows. If there had been a juniper tree handy, Edgar would have buried it underneath.

*

‘Fantastic show, old boy.’

Diablo stood in the doorway, wearing a red dressing gown over his Emperor’s robes and a triumphant smile on his face.

‘The audience loved it.’

Of course they loved it, Max wanted to say. It’s a pantomime. They’d love it even if the actors just stood on stage endlessly repeating ‘Behind you’ and ‘Oh no you don’t’. But there was something endearing about Diablo’s delight. He might be a veteran of countless shows but he wasn’t immune to first-night excitement.

‘You were the star, of course,’ Diablo was saying. ‘The way they cheered you at the end.’

‘They booed me.’

‘Of course they booed you. You’re the villain! But they loved you all the same.’

Actually, the boos and hisses had come as rather a surprise. He understood that they were in the tradition but he was so used to coming on to applause, even to a whoop or two, that the audience’s delighted hatred had slightly taken him aback. They had cheered at the end but during the show his every entrance – from the villain’s stage left – had been greeted with a bovine chorus of booing. Max had wanted to whip off the green cape and say, ‘It’s me. You love me. Remember?’ Just goes to show how the business makes a fool of you in the end. It was never him they loved anyway, just the idea of Max Mephisto, the great magician. And Diablo was right, the boos were a tribute of sorts.

‘I thought the Emperor was a bit of a favourite too.’

Diablo looked modest. ‘Well, the old jokes always go down well with this sort of crowd.’

‘What was Nigel Castle saying to you after the curtain call?’

‘Nigel who?’

‘The scriptwriter.’

‘Oh, just something about my lines. I told him not to worry, I’d improved them if anything.’

Max would have given much to listen to this exchange. Diablo’s next line, though, was not a surprise.

‘Fancy coming for a snifter? There’s a crowd of us going to the Pavilion Tavern.’

Max was impressed at the speed with which Diablo had acquired drinking companions. All the same, a solitary scotch in his room was looking more appealing by the second.

‘I think I’ll just head straight back to my digs,’ he said. ‘I don’t really feel like company.’

The expression on Diablo’s make-up-streaked face was surprisingly kind. ‘Don’t take this case of Edgar’s to heart, old boy. Terrible things do happen in the world.’