Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 6: Opening Night, Spinsters in Jeopardy, Scales of Justice

‘Superstitious?’

He made an inexplicable gesture towards the gas-fire. ‘You know,’ he said, grinning horridly at her.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t tell me you never ’eard abaht the great Jupiter case! Don’t they learn you nothing in them anti-podes?’

The heater reddened and purred.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘it’d be before your time. I wasn’t here myself when it occurred, a-course, but them that was don’t give you a chance to forget it. Not that they mention it direct-like but it don’t get forgotten.’

‘What was it?’ Martyn asked against her will.

‘Sure yer not superstitious?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You ain’t been long in this business, then. Nor more am I. Shake ’ands.’ He extended his hand so pointedly that she was obliged to put her own in it and had some difficulty in releasing herself.

‘It must be five years ago,’ he said, ‘all of that. A bloke in number four dressing-room did another bloke in, very cunning, by blowing dahn the tube of ’is own gas-fire. Like if I went nex’ door and blew dahn the tube, this fire’d go aht. And if you was dead drunk like you might of been if this girl friend of yours’d been very generous with ’er brandy you’d be commy-toes and before you knew where you was you’d be dead. Which is what occurred. It made a very nasty impression and the theatre was shut dahn for a long time until they ’ad it all altered and pansied up. The guvnor won’t ’ave it mentioned. ’E changed the name of the ’ouse when ’e took it on. But call it what you like the memory, as they say, lingers on. Silly, though, ain’t it? You and me don’t care. That’s right, isn’t it? We’d rather be cosy. Wouldn’t we?’ He gave a kind of significance to the word ‘cosy’. Martyn unlocked the suitcases. Her fingers were unsteady and she turned her back in order to hide them from him. He stood in front of the gas-fire and began to give out a smell of hot dirty cloth. She took sheets from the suitcase, hung them under the clothes pegs round the walls, and began to unpack the boxes. Her feet throbbed cruelly and, with a surreptitious manipulation, she shuffled them out of her wet shoes.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘Dry ’em orf, shall we?’

He advanced upon her and squatted to gather up the shoes. His hand, large and prehensile, with a life of its own, darted out and closed over her foot. ‘’Ow abaht yer stockings?’

Martyn felt not only frightened but humiliated and ridiculous: wobbling, dead tired, on one foot. It was as if she were half caught in some particularly degrading kind of stocks.

She said: ‘Look here, you’re a good chap. You’ve been terribly kind. Let me get on with the job.’

His grip slackened. He looked up at her without embarrassment, his thin London face sharp with curiosity. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No offence meant. Call it a day, eh?’

‘Call it a day.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said and got to his feet. He put her shoes down in front of the gas-fire and went to the door. ‘Live far from ’ere?’ he asked. A feeling of intense desolation swept through her and left her without the heart to prevaricate.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to find somewhere. There’s a women’s hostel near Paddington, I think.’

‘Broke?’

‘I’ll be all right, now I’ve got this job.’

His hand was in his pocket: ‘’Ere,’ he said.

‘No, no. Please.’

‘Come orf it. We’re pals, ain’t we?’

‘No, really. I’m terribly grateful but I’d rather not. I’m all right.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said again, and after a pause: ‘I can’t get the idea, honest I can’t. The way you speak and be’ave and all. What’s the story? ’Ard luck or what?’

‘There’s no story, really.’

‘Just what you say yourself. No questions asked.’ He opened the door and moved into the passage. ‘Mind,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘it’s against the rules but I won’t be rahnd again. My mate relieves me at eight ack emma but I’ll tip ’im the wink if it suits you. Them chairs in the greenroom’s not bad for a bit of kip and there’s the fire. I’ll turn it on. Please yerself a-course.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘could I? Could I?’

‘Never know what you can do till you try. Keep it under your tifter, though, or I’ll be in trouble. So long. Don’t get down’earted. It’ll be all the same in a fahsand years.’

He had gone. Martyn ran into the passage and saw his torchlight bobbing out on the stage. She called after him:

‘Thank you – thank you so much. I don’t know your name – but thank you and goodnight.’

‘Badger’s the name,’ he said, and his voice sounded hollow in the empty darkness. ‘Call me Fred.’

The light bobbed out of sight. She heard him whistling for a moment and then a door slammed and she was alone.

With renewed heart she turned back to her job.

IV

At ten o’clock she had finished. She had traversed with diligence all the hazards of fatigue: the mounting threat of sleep, the clumsiness that makes the simplest action an ordeal, the horror of inertia and the temptation to let go the tortured muscles and give up, finally and indifferently, the awful struggle.

Five carefully ironed dresses hung sheeted against the walls, the make-up was laid out on the covered dressing-shelf. The boxes were stacked away, the framed photographs set out. It only remained to buy roses in the morning for Miss Helena Hamilton. Even the vase was ready and filled with water.

Martyn leant heavily on the back of a chair and stared at two photographs of the same face in a double leather case. They were not theatre photographs but studio portraits and the face looked younger than the face in the greenroom: younger and more formidable, with the mouth set truculently and the gaze withdrawn. But it had the same effect on Martyn. Written at the bottom of each of these photographs, in a small incisive hand, was ‘Helena from Adam. 1950’. ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘he’s married to her.’

Hag-ridden by the fear that she had forgotten some important detail, she paused in the doorway and looked round the room. No, she thought, there was nothing more to be done. But as she turned to go she saw herself, cruelly reflected in the long cheval-glass. It was not, of course, the first time she had seen herself that night; she had passed before the looking-glasses a dozen times and had actually polished them, but her attention had been ruthlessly fixed on the job in hand and she had not once focused her eyes on her own image. Now she did so. She saw a girl in a yellow sweater and dark skirt with black hair that hung in streaks over her forehead. She saw a white, heart-shaped face with smudges under the eyes and a mouth that was normally firm and delicate but now drooped with fatigue. She raised her hand, pushed the hair back from her face and stared for a moment or two longer. Then she switched off the light and blundered across the passage into the greenroom. Here, collapsed in an armchair with her overcoat across her, she slept heavily until morning.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_9807e3da-dc12-58f8-aa9f-a0621e73f47d)

In a Glass Darkly (#ulink_9807e3da-dc12-58f8-aa9f-a0621e73f47d)

Martyn slept for ten hours. A wind got up in the night and found its way into the top of the stagehouse at the Vulcan. Up in the grid old back-cloths moved a little and, since the Vulcan was a hemp-house, there was a soughing among the forest of ropes. Flakes of paper, relics of some Victorian snowstorm, were dislodged from the top of a batten and fluttered down to the stage. Rain, driven fitfully against the theatre, ran in cascades down pipes and dripped noisily from ledges into the stage-door entry. The theatre mice came out, explored the contents of paste-pots in the sink-room and scuttled unsuccessfully about a covered plate of tongue and veal. Out in the auditorium there arose at intervals a vague whisper and in his cubby-hole off the dock Fred Badger dozed and woke uneasily. At one o’clock he went on his rounds. He padded down corridors, flicking his torchlight on framed sketches for décor and costumes, explored the foyer and examined the locked doors of the offices. He climbed the heavily carpeted stairs and, lost in meditation, stood for a long time in the dress-circle among shrouded rows of seats and curtained doorways. Sighing dolorously he returned back-stage and made a stealthy entrance on to the set. Finally he creaked to the greenroom door and impelled by who knows what impulse furtively opened it.

Martyn lay across the chair, her knees supported underneath by one of its arms and her head by the other. The glow from the gas-fire was reflected in her face. Fred Badger stood for quite a long time eyeing her and scraping his chin with calloused fingers. At last he backed out, softly closed the door and tiptoed to his cubby-hole, where he telephoned the fire-station to make his routine report.

At dawn the rain stopped and cleaning vans swept the water down Carpet Street with their great brushes. Milk carts clinked past the Vulcan and the first bus roared by. Martyn heard none of them. She woke to the murmur of the gas-fire, and the confused memory of a dream in which someone tapped gently at a door. The windowless room was still dark but she looked at her watch in the fire-glow and found it was eight o’clock. She got up stiffly, crossed the room and opened the door on grey diffused daylight. A cup of tea with a large sandwich balanced on it had been left on the floor of the passage. Underneath it was a torn scrap of paper on which was scrawled: ‘Keep your pecker up matey see you some more.’

With a feeling of gratitude and timid security she breakfasted in the greenroom, and afterwards explored the empty passage, finding at the far end an unlocked and unused dressing-room. To this room she brought her own suitcase and here, with a chair propped under the door handle, she stripped and washed in icy water. In clean clothes, with her toilet complete, and with a feeling of detachment, as if she herself looked on from a distance at these proceedings, she crossed the stage and went out through the side door and up the alleyway into Carpet Street.

It was a clean sunny morning. The air struck sharply at her lips and nostrils and the light dazzled her. A van had drawn up outside the Vulcan and men were lifting furniture from it. There were cleaners at work in the foyer and a telegraph boy came out whistling. Carpet Street was noisy with traffic. Martyn turned left and walked quickly downhill until she came to a corner shop called Florian. In the window a girl in a blue overall was setting out a large gilt basket of roses. The door was still locked, but Martyn, emboldened by fresh air and a sense of freedom and adventure, tapped on the window and when the girl looked up, pointed to the roses and held up Mr Grantley’s card. The girl smiled and, leaving the window, came to let her in.

Martyn said: ‘I’m sorry to bother you but Mr Grantley at the Vulcan told me to get some roses for Miss Helena Hamilton. He didn’t give me any money and I’m afraid I haven’t got any. Is this all very irregular and tiresome?’

‘That will be quayte OK,’ the girl said in a friendly manner. ‘Mr Grantley has an account.’

‘Perhaps you know what sort of rose I should get,’ Martyn suggested. She felt extraordinarily light and rather loquacious. ‘You see, I’m Miss Hamilton’s dresser but I’m new and I don’t know what she likes.’