Take No Prisoners (21 page)

They were among the first to arrive. The Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake had laid out the hard wooden chairs in neat rows from the front of the hall to the back, but so far only a handful of people were there to sit on them. Ignoring each other's protestations, the Romfords strode determinedly down the central aisle to settle themselves firmly as near to the middle of the front row as possible.

This was their big night out, and they wanted to miss nothing.

They weren't to be disappointed, although the magic they would see would not be quite of the kind they expected.

Romford chewed steadfastly on the stem of his dead pipe for what seemed like hours as the Hall filled slowly up. He recognized most of the people there, of course: Mrs. Dora Griggs of Griggs House, still in mourning for the death of young Clarence; Dr. Smithee, the bluffly reliable GP who had played such a hand in that case; Donald Glover, who ran the garage ... all the noteworthies of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, in short, each of them looking as eagerly anticipatory as he himself.

At last it was time for the lights to dim.

A hissy recording of a fanfare split the air.

The silence throbbed.

Mrs. Romford opened a packet of peanuts.

Someone sneezed.

Breath was bated.

And the curtain jerked open to reveal the Seven Deadly Finns standing in a triangle atop each other, poised on tiptoe – particularly difficult, Romford thought, for the three load-bearers on the bottom, but they showed no signs of strain – and with their arms outstretched, fingers pointing towards the wings. They were dressed in silver lamé suits, and the even teeth in their uniformly broad smiles glistened and gleamed every bit as much as the suits.

The recording lurched into something by Strauss, and the topmost Finn tumbled forward in a somersault to land perfectly at the very front of the stage. The audience applauded as if this were the greatest thing they'd ever seen, and then the performance started in earnest.

Bodies flew all over the stage in a blur of lamé and an endless confusion of stray limbs. Every now and then the Finns would stop in some multi-bodied contortion, and the watchers took this as their cue for yet another round of applause. Romford, hands still, thought around the stem of his pipe that team acrobats must have to bath a lot, what with constantly having to stuff their faces up each other's ...

Mrs. Romford interrupted his reverie. "Aren't they grand?" she whispered.

"Very grand," he agreed.

"You should steer clear of celery seeds when you're pregnant," she added significantly, then turned back to her peanuts.

Baffled, Romford carried on watching the spectacle.

The Family Brød's performance was far too short or far too long, depending on the way you looked at it. So far as Romford was concerned, he was glad when it was finally over: sounds, patterns and the inevitable bursts of applause made him feel as if someone had been using his head as a punchbag. Rather like when Mrs. Romford put Wagner on the CD player.

There was a short interval, during which they drank warm orange squash from Mrs. Romford's thermos and ate their sandwiches, and then the lights dimmed once again.

If the tension had been palpable before the Family Brød's performance, now it was as if you could have grabbed handfuls of it from the air and used it for chewing gum. Romford's knuckles whitened around his pipestem. Mrs. Romford dropped her crême caramel and it lay unnoticed at her feet. The silence was like an encaged beast, pacing the confines of its hated cell, until ...

Blue lightning coruscated over the audience's heads and a blast of thunder shook the floor. One moment the stage curtain was there; the next it was replaced by a blaze of brilliant illumination that almost blinded Romford. A flock of snow-white doves appeared from nowhere and circled cacophonously around the ceiling. Somewhere in the midst of the melee there was a haunting strain of music that could have been Egyptian, could have been Korean, could have been just the tape had stretched.

There was a sudden puff of green smoke in the middle of the stage, and out of it stepped the cadaverously imposing figure of The Mighty Thrombosis. He threw his arms wide as if to welcome himself to the proceedings; the inside of his full-length cloak was golden with, embroidered on it, white doves in representation of those that still wheeled and whirled above.

"Greetings from the world of the unknown," the figure intoned. "People will tell you that what you see tonight is mere trickery, but in truth it is a lifting of a veil – the veil that lies between our humdrum lives and the magical kingdom, where truth is falsehood and falsehood truth."

As if to prove the point, he pulled out a cauliflower from behind his ear.

The audience gasped.

Smiling and nodding briefly in acknowledgement, the Mighty Thrombosis proceeded to yank a string of the flags of all nations from behind the other.

The applause was deafening.

The Mighty Thrombosis bowed more deeply this time, then looked to his left, focusing the audience's attention on the emergence from the wings of a statuesque blonde wearing about three carats of gold and very little else. She too bowed, her unbound hair falling in front of her like a bolt of yellow gauze.

And then the serious magic began. Packs of cards turned into flocks of wrens; baseball bats turned, mid-juggle, into spitting kangaroos; streamers turned into bunches of chrysanthemums complete with little plastic tags displaying the watering instructions. (At this point Romford checked his pipe nervously to make sure it hadn't turned into anything.) A casket with the beautiful assistant gagged and padlocked inside it was pierced by swords, cut in half with a chainsaw and finally incinerated using a flamethrower, and yet she stepped out of the ashes unscathed. The Mighty Thrombosis himself took an iron bar that had been tested for authenticity by half a dozen randomly selected beefy members of the audience and bent it easily into a passable imitation of his own signature. A bucket of water was covered with a red cloth and then, when the cloth was removed, was seen to have become a perfect representation in miniature of the Niagara Falls – whose waters continued to flow despite the fact that there was
no visible water supply
.

After an hour or more The Mighty Thrombosis spoke again, for the first time since his brief introduction.

"And now, ladies and gentleman ... and others" – there was a little ripple of tamed laughter – "for the finale to my act. Many false magicians the world over have perfected the illusion of pulling a rabbit from a top hat, but I – I, The Mighty Thrombosis – am the only one to use genuine magic to perform the same feat ... and with, not a rabbit, but a live tyrannosaurus rex!"

There was a roll of drums and the luscious assistant, bearing a perfectly ordinary-seeming black opera hat, insinuated herself across the stage by dint of muscles that Romford had never even known existed.

The Mighty Thrombosis took the hat with a grave little nod of thanks and, using both hands, held it aloft.

Silence fell.

He turned it this way and that, showing the entirety of his audience that it was indeed empty. He flipped open its lid so that they could see right through it. He pressed it flat and then straightened it out again. He pulled a revolver from his trouser pocket and fired a couple of shots through it. There could be no doubt about it: the thing was as empty as an Aberdeen street on a flag day.

Again the drums rolled as with his right hand he held the hat out in front of him, so that the audience could see it was well clear of his body. With his free hand he waved a blue-spotted handkerchief so that everyone could see that it, too, was guileless. Next he lowered the handkerchief down over the upturned aperture of the hat.

Pause.

Then, every eye glued on his hand, he slowly drew away the handkerchief.

The assistant simpered but was ignored.

Dragging out the seconds for dramatic effect, The Mighty Thrombosis reached into the hat and produced ...

... a severed hand.

Someone screamed. Blood dripped. The gorgeous assistant collapsed pneumatically, unnoticed by all save Romford, who was sitting forward in his seat, staring intently.

The Mighty Thrombosis himself looked utterly aghast. "This ... this was not ... intended to happen ..." he stuttered in an Essex accent, quite unlike the voice he had earlier projected.

Then the curtains closed swiftly.

It was the first orthodox event since the start of the wonder show.

~

"I was on my mobile phone immediately, as you can guess," said Romford, looking pointedly at his empty glass. Obediently I picked it up, went to the bar and replenished it with Old Peculier. Once we were settled again he looked up at me; his hands were clenching and unclenching.

"Sergeant Mutton had lads there within seconds – the Hall's just round the corner from the nick, as you know. Even before they'd got there I'd had the staff seal the whole place up. A mouse could have got out of there without our knowing about it, but not a very fat mouse."

He took a ruminative gulp.

"The Mighty Thrombosis – Albert MacGregor as he really is – was still standing on the stage looking at the thing when we got him," he continued. "Hadn't even gone to help his assistant up off the floor – Missus R had to do that."

"Whose hand was it?" I said.

"That was, of course, a problem – but not such a problem as we'd have thought it might be." Another gulp. "Thrombosis – MacGregor – told us hisself. There was a ring on its finger that he recognized: made out of cast bronze and showing a dragon eating its own tail."

"Yes?"

"He said he'd recognize that ring anywhere, and his wife – his assistant – confirmed it as soon as she was feeling properly herself again."

"And?"

"The hand was that of The Even Mightier Spongini – a.k.a. Gerald Dukes – the greatest of all MacGregor's rivals. There was some palaver in the upper – inner, I s'pose – echelons of the Magic Circle five years back, you may have read about it in the newspapers, MacGregor claiming Dukes was stealing the secrets of his tricks, in particular something called The Collapsible Hippogryph, you know the sort of thing. The two men hated each other's guts. And there was more to it than that."

"Oh?"

"Dukes was messing around with MacGregor's wife, Zelda. Common knowledge backstage, we was told. That was what the
real
argument was about – not the tricks, stolen or otherwise."

This time it was me gulping down beer. From what Romford had been telling me, it seemed an open-and-shut case: Thrombosis had offed Spongini and was creating an elaborate smokescreen to muddle up the coppers.

"But all they did was identify the ring," I said, just for something to say. "That doesn't mean it was Spongini's hand the ring was actually
on
, does it?"

Romford looked at me in disgust. "We thought of that. Took fingerprints. Faxed 'em to the Yard. Asked 'em if they were Dukes's. Answer came back within the hour. They were Dukes's, all right. No doubt about it. He was on file because of a bit of pot twenty years ago when he was young and foolish."

He looked down at his flexing hands, then up again.

"And all this time, mark you," he said, "we had the whole place locked up tighter than a nun's ... well, you get the drift. We had trained men searching it from top to bottom, rafters to basement. Because you see there was something missing ..."

"A body," I said. Even if I hadn't known this already – that empty hopper – it'd have been pretty obvious.

"Precisely. Or even a man with one hand missing, 'cept people tend to make a hell of a lot of a fuss if someone chops a hand off of them, you know. And that hand was
fresh
– it was still bleeding when MacGregor hoicked it out of the hat. So it was really a body we was after. A corpse. A stiff.
Anything
. But not a whisper."

"You interviewed everyone, I assume?"

"Everyone. Started with the Finns – they're from Belfast, by the way, Finns ain't what they used to be, I said to Sergeant Mutton – and worked our way on downwards. Me and Mutton tackled all the interviewing ourselves, we did. Had to let them go in the end, every last one of them. No one knew nothing. Well, maybe ..."

"There's a lot of room in that 'maybe,' my friend."

"Well" – he let the word hang for a few moments, shifting his gaze towards where two drunks were trying to get it together to score a game of darts – "
maybe
, on reflecting on it, there was something. Zelda."

"The Mighty Thrombosis's wife?"

"'Xactly. The lady herself. She seemed to be in shock –
seemed
to be – so it was no picnic trying to get much sense out of her, but the missus told me afterwards over the cocoa that Zelda appeared a deal less disorientated than you'd have expected when she came out of her faint. If it
was
a faint."

"So you think she might have known something about it? Might have been warned it was going to happen?"

"Yes. Except that only makes matters worse. 'Cause Dukes was her hanky-panky merchant. So if she'd known about things aforehand she'd have done her best to stop 'em, and if she
didn't
know about them then she'd have been
more
in shock, not less."

"Maybe she'd fallen out with him? You know, when the slap and tickle has to stop sort of thing?"

"She said she hadn't. She was totally open about the whole affair, said her husband was" – Romford's eyes glazed briefly, as if he were reading from invisible notes – "was a 'right bastard, brute and utter plonker, used to play practical jokes on me when he'd got a few inside him, which was most of the time, wish it was his
head
came out of that hat, not Gerry's hand, no wonder I looked elsewhere for virile masculine affections, officer, and found them in the brawny arms of my svelte-thewed lover.'" He looked glum. "Or words to that effect. Quite a lot of 'em."

"Which means that the only person you know about with a motive to kill Dukes was The Mighty Thrombosis? The whole business with the severed hand was just a smokescreen, a bluff? The only person who could have got the hand into the hat was MacGregor himself?"