Stagestruck (24 page)

‘Horatio doesn’t do any singing,’ Georgina added, ‘but we couldn’t stage a production like
Sweeney
without him.’

There was a pause for thought.

‘Dawkins?’ he said, feeling the blood flushing his face. ‘Sergeant Dawkins is in the BLOGs?’

‘Hasn’t he told you? He’s our movement director. All the action sequences are co-ordinated by him. Dances, fights, stunts, swordplay.’

‘Movement director?’ His head reeling, Diamond was reduced to echoing her words.

‘He’s a trained dancer, you know.’

‘He told me that much. How long has he been doing this?’

‘Before I joined.’

Now it was revealed why Fred Dawkins had been plucked from the uniformed ranks and foisted on CID. He’d got to know Georgina through the BLOGs and worked his ticket. What a shaft.

‘I know exactly what’s going through your head,’ Georgina said, ‘and I have to tell you I moved him into CID on merit. He impressed me long before I joined the BLOGs. In fact, I’m surprised you hadn’t spotted him.’

‘I knew him,’ Diamond said. ‘He stood out.’

‘He’s a rising star.’

‘Risen.’

‘Don’t mistake his slow speech for woolly thinking. He’s got a quick brain. You need to be sharp to choreograph an entire show like
Sweeney
.’

‘He’s sharp, all right.’

She was missing all the irony. ‘You can safely send him off the building on an operation. I gather he’s frustrated being confined to barracks.’

‘Has he been complaining to you, ma’am?’

She backtracked a little. ‘It may have been mentioned in passing. He’s too gifted to be on the end of a phone all day long. Let him off the leash and I predict he’ll not let you down.’

‘He’s off the leash right now, making another search of the theatre with Ingeborg Smith.’

‘Splendid. If anyone can get results for you, Horatio will.’

He’d heard as much of this as he could take. ‘Is there anything else?’

On his way downstairs he forced some perspective into his thinking. Nothing fundamental had changed. He was still stuck with Dawkins and he’d have to give the man a chance. Everyone works the system and there were infinite ways of doing it. Fred hadn’t joined the BLOGs to cosy up to Georgina. He was already installed there. He’d got lucky and cashed in. Who wouldn’t have?

14

H
edley Shearman was on duty again in the Theatre Royal, bruised, but no longer bleeding, demanding to know what the devil the police were up to, poking around in the wings.

‘Searching,’ Ingeborg told him. A short answer can be a good riposte to bluster.

‘That’s obvious.’

‘Yes.’

‘But what do you hope to find?’

‘Make-up.’

‘The stuff Denise was using Monday night? I don’t think you’ll find it here. She was very organised. She wouldn’t have left anything lying around.’

‘She may have been so organised that she kept some handy in the wings for use before the show. That’s why we’re checking.’

‘Well, it had better not take long. We have a performance tonight and I don’t want you getting in the way of the actors.’ He took a second look at Dawkins and frowned. ‘Aren’t you the man in uniform who was here Tuesday morning putting me through the third degree?’

Dawkins had been obeying orders, keeping that low profile Diamond had decreed. Faced with open hostility, he broke his vow of silence. ‘I wouldn’t characterise it as such.’

‘You look and sound awfully like him.’

‘It was not the third degree. It wasn’t even the second.’

‘Oh, you don’t like the term,’ Shearman said, getting some of his bounce back. ‘I was on the receiving end and I know what it felt like. Why aren’t you in uniform today?’

Ingeborg was quick to head off an elaborate explanation. ‘He’s joined CID.’ She looked at her watch. ‘If you want us out before the show, better let us get on with it.’

Another glare and then Shearman moved off towards the dressing rooms.

Basic stage scenery is constructed as flats, canvas over a wooden framework, and when it is in position some of the horizontal battens form ledges. Small objects are sometimes lodged there, lucky mascots, bits of chalk, pens and torches. But it was doubtful if anything as big as a powder box would fit. More likely they’d find what they were looking for tucked away in a corner at floor level. Plenty of areas backstage needed checking. They went about the search systematically, each working at a different side of the stage, dividing the space into sections, lifting props, discarded cloths and coils of cable.

‘I’m getting less confident,’ Ingeborg called across the stage after twenty minutes. ‘If it’s here, it ought to be obvious.’

Dawkins didn’t answer and it wasn’t clear whether he disagreed or was still observing the embargo.

‘Putting myself in Denise’s place,’ Ingeborg went on, ‘if I had some powder laced with caustic soda I wouldn’t leave it lying around. I’d get rid of it.’

Still there was no answer from the opposite side.

‘But then,’ she added after more thought, ‘if someone else doctored the stuff, Denise wouldn’t have known.’

This time Dawkins couldn’t resist. ‘Don’t you think the someone else would also have got rid of it?’

‘In that case we’re wasting our time.’ Deadpan, as if she didn’t remember, she asked, ‘Whose idea was this?’

Dawkins became silent again.

Diamond had an in-built resistance to computers and he didn’t make a habit of checking for on-screen messages. If his own staff had anything to report, he expected to be told. Most of them knew this. To be fair to Fred Dawkins, anyone new on the team might have acted as he had, thinking it wasn’t unreasonable to expect the top man to make regular checks.

Dawkins was out of the office now, so Diamond stopped complaining about the call from Georgina he’d almost missed. Still the thought nagged at him that there could be other information waiting for him. Unseen by the team, he stepped into his office to check the in-box.

There wasn’t much. Headquarters had issued a new online procedure for budget reports. Stuff that, he said to himself. Keith Halliwell had called in from the mortuary. Old news. He’d seen Keith since then. Clarion Calhoun was moving out of the burns unit to a private hotel in Clifton called the Cedar of Lebanon and would become an out-patient. Nothing remarkable in that. There was always pressure on bed-space in hospitals. Finally, there was a note that the crime scene investigation team had started work in dressing room eleven.

He regarded one oval-shaped button on the keyboard as his friend. A tiny image of the moon put the computer into sleep mode. He pressed it and watched the screen go dark. Magic.

With two separate searches now under way, he could keep the appointment with his old school friend. On this fine afternoon, he chose to walk to the Abbey Churchyard and treated himself to the carnival atmosphere as he zigzagged between crocodiles of French schoolkids waiting to tour the Roman Baths and cheering the buskers balancing on unicycles juggling flaming torches. He didn’t have time to watch, unfortunately. No matter, he thought. Later, he’d do some flame-throwing of his own when he caught up with Sergeant Dawkins.

The short fat guy in a pork-pie hat was standing below the bottom rung of the famous ladder to heaven carved into the Abbey front, and not realising the symbolic stance he was making. The years had been kind to Mike Glazebrook; he could have passed for forty-five. Diamond shook his hand and suggested they had tea at one of the outdoor tables on the sunny side.

‘You’ve put on some weight since I saw you last,’ Glazebrook said. ‘Is it fattening, this police work?’

‘I was going to ask the same about structural engineering.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t get a safety certificate, but I hold up, just about.’

The banter was a useful way to roll back forty years and revive the mateyness that passed for friendship at school. They chose a table and each ordered a cream tea as if to affirm that healthy eating wasn’t for them.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,’ Diamond said. ‘It wasn’t as if we were at secondary school together.’

‘Spotted you straight away. It’s the onset of senility,’ Glaze-brook said, straight-faced. ‘The short-term memory goes, but we can recall trivial details from our childhood.’

‘Are you calling me trivial?’

‘Sorry. Make that significant.’

Straight to business, Diamond decided. ‘My recollection is that we got to know each other through that play we were in as the boy princes.’

‘
Richard III
.’

‘Except they didn’t call it that. Wasn’t it
Wicked Richard,
so as not to confuse it with the Shakespeare version?’

‘Shakespeare?’ Glazebrook rocked back and laughed. ‘Who did they think they were kidding? Even at that age I could tell it was crap. But you’re right about the title. Didn’t one of the actors write it?’

‘Very likely. Maybe the art teacher who recruited you and me. Now what was he called?’

‘Mr White – Flakey, to us kids.’

Diamond raised his thumb. ‘Of course.’ This was promising. The man had a reliable memory.

‘I don’t remember him doing any writing,’ Glazebrook added.

‘He painted the scenery, I expect.’

‘He must have, and probably did the posters and the programme.’

‘He would have been useful to them with his art skills and his link to the school,’ Diamond said. ‘That’s how we got roped in. There was no audition. I can’t think why he picked you and me out of all the kids.’

‘Can’t you?’ Glazebrook said with a suggestive smile.

‘We must have looked the part. Princely.’

Glazebrook laughed again. ‘No chance. We were two miserable little perishers. I used to have a photo of us in costume and we didn’t look overjoyed in our breeches and tights. My mother tore it up when she read about Flakey in the
News of the World
.’

Diamond tensed, played the words over and felt a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘Read what?’

‘Didn’t you hear? He wasn’t called Flakey for nothing. He was sent down for five years for interfering with schoolchildren, as they called it then. Dirty old perv.’

The pulsing spread through his arms and chest. ‘I heard nothing of this.’

‘Really? And you a cop? We’d long since left the school when he was found out. It must have been five or six years later. I was put through the inquisition by my parents, wanting to know if he’d got up to anything with me. He hadn’t, but I wouldn’t have told them if he had. You try and forget stuff like that.’

‘Right,’ Diamond said automatically, his thoughts in ferment.

‘He didn’t try it on with you, did he? You’d have told me at the time, wouldn’t you?’ He gave Diamond a speculative look. ‘I guess not, if I wouldn’t discuss it with my parents. But at this distance in time we can be open with each other.’

‘Sure.’

But he wasn’t. He was trying to remember.

‘In my opinion weirdos like that should be locked away indefinitely or offered the chance of chemical castration,’ Glazebrook was saying. ‘You can bet he didn’t serve five years. He’d have been out on probation, back in society, looking for more little kids to abuse.’

‘They wouldn’t have allowed him to teach again,’ Diamond said.

‘With his art, he could get other work, no problem. When he surfaced again at one stage he was illustrating books – for kids, no doubt. I mean, you don’t get pictures in books for grown-ups, do you?’

‘Covers?’

‘Covers is right,’ Glazebrook said. ‘Covers for pervy behaviour.’

‘Did you keep up with any of the others?’ Diamond asked, to move on. He couldn’t take any more of this.

They talked for another ten minutes, exchanging memories, but Diamond’s heart wasn’t in it. He was reeling from the shock. After he’d settled the bill, they shook hands and went their separate ways.

This time, he paused and stood with the crowd watching the unicyclists performing in front of the Pump Room. In fact he saw nothing. All of his perceptions were directed inwards. His brain was surfing incomplete memories of that time as a boy. He wanted the truth, however sickening it was, but it was elusive. Everything connected with school and that play took on a new and sinister significance. Yet he was finding it difficult to pinpoint any one incident. The brain has ways of blocking traumatic experiences, particularly from childhood. He understood that. The one certainty was that he couldn’t enter the theatre without fear. The whole truth wasn’t revealed yet. He could still only guess at what happened, but the guessing was more informed and more unpleasant.

A shout from the crowd brought him out of this purgatory. Time was going on and he needed to get his head straight, somehow put the conversation with Glazebrook to the back of his mind. He was required back inside the theatre, expected to function as a detective. He watched the buskers juggling with fire, keeping their balance. Then he moved on.

Francis Melmot was outside the stage door, chatting to some front-of-house people who must have thought they’d escaped for a smoke. He hailed Diamond with his usual bonhomie. ‘What a pleasure this is, inspector.’

Not for Diamond.

And ‘inspector’ was a demotion, but the matter wasn’t worth pointing out. Diamond touched his grey trilby and said he hadn’t expected an official welcome from the chairman of the board.

‘I just looked in to share some wonderful news with our loyal and much valued staff,’ Melmot said, at the same time despatching the much valued staff with a flap of the hand.

‘What it it?’ Diamond said with an effort to be civil. ‘A five-star review?’

‘Actually, no, even though we’ve had some excellent ones.’ Melmot drew his shoulders back and seemed to grow even taller. ‘I was advised an hour ago that Clarion has withdrawn her threat to sue.’

‘Who by?’

‘Her lawyers.’

‘That is good,’ Diamond said, and meant it, his mind speeding through possibilities. He could see this whole investigation coming to a swift end. ‘What happened? An out-of-court settlement?’

‘No, we’re not paying a penny. It’s unconditional.’

‘What a turnaround. When I saw the lady yesterday her mind was made up.’

‘Yesterday she was still in shock,’ Melmot said. ‘She’s had time to reflect since then. There’s even better news. She will be making a substantial private donation to the theatre.’