As he watched it swing lower, May realized that not all of Orpheus’s group had moved clear of the revolve. Public Opinion, with her great trailing skirt, was still on the turning disc. The edge of the skycloth, weighted with a steel rod, dropped down sharply, moving towards Valerie Marchmont. Before May could do anything, it had swung down to her face, shattering the china tragedy mask she wore and yanking her off the stage like Eurydice’s doll, but the audience noticed nothing because now the long-awaited cancan dancers were pouring on, screaming and high-kicking their way onto the extended runway of the stage.
May ducked out of the stalls’ side entrance and ran towards the pass door, but it was shut tight. He hammered on it until someone pulled the handle on the other side, then pushed his way through to the rear of the stage. Behind the fallen skycloth, Marchmont lay on her back, her skull smashed through by the iron pole. Blood pumped from her severed carotid artery across the floor to the rear wall, pouring down into the run-offs that led to the main drain.
May looked around for Sidney Biddle and saw the young officer scaling his way along the iron-rung ladders that led between the first and second gantry levels above the stage.
Sidney had seen something from the corner of his eye, a blurred bluish figure strobing beneath the coloured lenses of the lights, but as he scrambled across one of the stage bridges, feeling it sway beneath his weight, he suddenly lost his sense of direction. The stage lighting distorted shadows, throwing them at mad angles across the scrims.
The dancers were screaming and whooping beneath him, a shimmering mass of white flesh and crimson silk. Above his head a shape shifted, knocking over a coil of cable, sending it unravelling down the side of the wing. Biddle ran forward, but the end of the bridge was blocked with equipment. There was no way of reaching the far side. He lowered himself over the bridge and swung his feet out until they touched the next gantry. Once he had established a foothold, he threw the upper half of his body forward and stretched out his arms, but even as he did so he felt the bridge beneath his feet kick away beneath his police-issue boots.
His right hand seized the railing of the gantry, but his left missed. He swung violently out above the stage.
As he hung from the bridge, his fingers slipping slowly from the rusty iron rail, the figure above him disappeared, a wraith returning to a realm of prismatic red and blue shadows.
The muscles in Sidney’s arm betrayed him, and with a cry he fell to the level below.
49
THE PROTECTION OF THE GODS
The house lights were fully turned up in the stalls, giving the auditorium a shabby, melancholic air. Runcorn had taped off the rear of the stage. Wyman, a photographer from West End Central, was testing his flashgun on the blood spatters covering the backstage floor. The two halves of Public Opinion’s white mask lay cracked in a coagulated crimson pool. It was now five minutes past midnight, and all unnecessary members of staff had been dismissed.
In true theatrical tradition the show had not been interrupted by the death of Public Opinion. The main purpose of the continuation was to buy the unit time before the news spread through the audience. Valerie Marchmont’s body had been removed through the royal entrance on Shaftesbury Avenue and taken to University College Hospital in an unmarked van, the fourth they had used in a week.
‘Has anybody heard from Arthur yet?’ asked May anxiously.
‘We’ve got him, John. He says somebody shut him in one of the rooms upstairs.’ Gladys Forthright had slipped PC Crowhurst’s rubber police cloak over her sweater. She had put her own coat down in the rush to help Biddle, and had lost it among the racks of costumes that hung like shucked carapaces behind the stage. Biddle had fallen onto a pile of folded backcloths but had split the cartilage in his left ankle, the tissue swelling so quickly that the theatre’s medical officer had been forced to cut off his sock and boot with the blade of a pocket knife.
Arthur Bryant appeared to be in a state of great anxiety. ‘I got locked in the archive room,’ he said excitedly. ‘He struck again, didn’t he?’
May pointed to the rear of the stage. ‘Public Opinion. Surprise meeting with a steel pole, fractured skull, killed instantly.’
‘In front of everyone? How could that have happened?’
‘One of the backdrops—dropped.’
‘It came down right on cue,’ said Mr Mack. ‘Weren’t our fault.’
Helena looked distraught and ready to sink a bottle of Scotch. ‘The revolve should have carried her clear, but it halted suddenly. She was the last one off the stage.’
‘One of the skycloth rods slipped out of its mooring,’ May explained. ‘It went right through her head, like a spoon hitting a soft-boiled egg, punched her backwards into the wall behind. Most of her brains are still on the bricks.’