Full Dark House(116)

‘Dr Runcorn has been over the stage equipment but he’s come up with nothing,’ said May, leaning against the sink with his hands thrust into his pockets. ‘The skycloth came down a fraction later and slightly further over to centre stage than it was supposed to, and the revolve stuck for a moment. The stagehands reckon they oiled the revolve before the performance but say it still judders occasionally.’

‘An unfortunate combination of factors. Although I daresay young Mr Bryant would have us believe something different if he was here.’ Finch rubbed a lotion into his fingers that was supposed to remove the smell of chemicals. ‘To be honest, it surprises me that Bryant could be so completely wrong. I mean, we’ve had our disagreements, and he’s certainly going to make mistakes during a time like this when you can’t get your hands on basic equipment, but there’s usually something vaguely right about his thinking. Are we having a farewell party?’

‘I don’t think any of us could stand it,’ said May despondently. ‘His landlady hasn’t seen him, only his boxes. He’s not been home for a change of clothes. It’s been two days now. I wondered if he might have gone to stay with relatives.’

‘He could be at his mother’s in Bethnal Green Road. Forthright tells me the house next door to Mrs Bryant’s got bombed out and she’s worried about her walls falling in. I know he wanted to help her move somewhere safer. She’s not on the telephone but I daresay someone in the local nick could run round.’ Finch leaned back on a stool and administered drops to his right pupil. The atmosphere of formaldehyde left him with perpetually red-rimmed eyelids.

‘Do you think Davenport will keep us open with Bryant gone?’ asked May.

‘That’s a tough one, seeing as he set you chaps up in the first place. It could be construed as failure on his part. He’ll probably merge you with one of the other divisions: fraud or this special squad that’s been set up to deal with looters. At least it’ll keep you afloat. Did Forthright mention that your Mr Biddle has had a change of heart? He’s decided to stay on after all.’

‘That’s good,’ May said. ‘Arthur thought he might come round. What happened to the tree he gave you?’

‘Bit of a sore point, that. It was too big for the bureau so I took it home, and now the wife won’t talk to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Her cat ate one of the leaves and died. She tried to chop it down with a kitchen knife and it leaked some kind of poisonous sap on her. The doctor reckons her arm should stay bandaged for at least a week, which is inconvenient because she plays the organ. I have a suspicion,’ he said, blinking the drops from his left eye, ‘that it was one of Bryant’s pranks. He really was the most impossible man.’

‘He’s not dead,’ said May.

‘Well, he is missing,’ responded Finch, dabbing his eyes on a flannel and blinking.

May was surprised by the way his partner had responded to failure, but his first duty was to the case. ‘He’ll turn up,’ he said unsurely. ‘You might try liaising a little more with Dr Runcorn rather than telling me you can’t find anything. Four dead, one vanished, a few near misses. I need physical proof fast, or we’ll all be out of a job. A couple of heel marks, no fingerprints, no real murder weapons to speak of, it’s not much to go on. You’d think we were dealing with someone who doesn’t exist in the real world.’

The annoying thing was that, although he had not believed Bryant’s explanation, his partner was still the only one to come up with any suggestions at all.

He looked in on Forthright and Biddle, who were continuing to check customs information from air, sea and freight terminals for the whereabouts of Jan Petrovic. At dusk he walked through brown smoke billowing across Lincoln’s Inn Fields, searching the darkness of the unsettled trees as he tried to work out how they had gone so wrong. Crows called loudly from the lower branches as he passed beneath them, their old eyes glittering between the leaves. An elderly man was hoeing a muddy trough through an allotment, one of many that had been dug across the once-perfect lawns.

Just when he was free to follow traditional procedures, May tried to imagine how Bryant would consider the evidence. Minos Renalda was dead, and with him died a motive for revenge. Forthright had confirmed that Andreas was a witness to his brother’s burial. The body had also been identified by close friends and relatives.

But what of Elissa Renalda? Her body had been too long in the water for proper identification. Suppose it hadn’t been her, and she had survived somehow? What if she had returned and disguised herself as a member of the cast, and was trying to destroy her husband for—what? Failing to save her from his brother? May angrily kicked a stone into the bushes. That was the trouble with thinking like Bryant, it made absolutely no sense.