‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Runcorn tugged at his ear, thinking. He was awkwardly tall and so thin that he looked lost inside his clothes. ‘It’s a backward scuff, but it faces forward to the lift. Like this.’ He adopted an angular pose, something that came easily to a man who was six feet three and pigeon-chested. ‘As though you were bracing yourself against the trellis. You might make it if you were pulling something through the bars of the lift. As if you were trying to drag out a heavy box. Or pull something through the cage. Legs, perhaps.’
That was the good thing about Runcorn, thought Arthur. Like Finch, he operated on a secondary set of signals, pulses that passed invisibly beneath his rational senses.
‘There’s another mark on the linoleum several feet away. It looks like it could be a match. If we can place someone outside the lift with the victim inside it, then you might have a murder case. But why cut off her feet?’ Runcorn stared gloomily down into the lift shaft.
‘She was a dancer,’ Bryant replied.
‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘Suppose she had somehow survived,’ said Bryant. ‘Can you think of a better way to guarantee that she’d never perform again?’
13
LIVES IN THE THEATRE
Elspeth Wynter had spent her whole life, or rather the thirty-two years she had so far experienced, in the theatre. She came from a long line of theatre folk. Her grandfather had been a Shakespearean, once spoken of in the same breath as Burbage, Garrick or Keane. His wife had been cast in his shows as a perennial parlourmaid, and in true theatrical tradition had borne him a son in the rear of the stalls. Eight years into the new century, that son fathered his only child, Elspeth. Although his wife survived a pelvic fracture when she fell from the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, she ignored her doctor’s warnings about the perils of motherhood in order to bear a daughter. The birth killed her.
Elspeth’s father took the King’s shilling for the Great War, but grisly memories of Ypres wrought changes in his life from which he never fully recovered. Prevented from returning to the front by the state of his nerves, he resumed the family profession. In the twenties he delivered a shaky baritone in countless threadbare Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, but the shows closed as unemployment began to bite and the cinema became affordable to the lower classes who had filled the music halls.
Elspeth’s father could not look after himself, let alone a teenage girl. He had no family beyond his colleagues in the theatre, and drink coarsened his acting. Elspeth was raised by sympathetic ushers and nursed from fretfulness while her papa performed in the twice-nightlies. As they trooped from one cold auditorium to the next, shivering in damp dressing rooms, shaking the fleas from lodging-house beds, playing in faded costumes to dwindling audiences, this daughter of the stage looked about her moth-eaten, mildewed world and began to wonder if the possession of theatrical blood was really the gift that her father’s boozy friends claimed it to be.
Elspeth knew from an early age that although she was not destined for the boards, she would always be a part of the theatre; watching her father declaim each night from the box kept empty and permanently reserved for royalty—there seemed to be one in every playhouse—she watched the painful changes time wrought on his performances. The twenties were uncertain years, but not as lean as the thirties. Her father drank more as the audiences dried up. He too dried on stage, nightly forgetting his lines, relying on prompts, booed by an unforgiving audience weaned on cinema newsreels. The new medium had no truck with forgetfulness. Celluloid eradicated variable performances. To no one’s surprise, he finally died in make-up and costume, during a trouser-dropping farce in which he had already been dying nightly.
Elspeth did not attend his funeral; there was a matinee. She had graduated from programme seller to bar cashier to ASM, through the various stressful stages of management until she suffered a nervous collapse and returned to front-of-house work. She was a West End girl, one of theatre’s dedicated personnel, invisible to audiences but essential to everyone who worked there. As one show closed, another began rehearsals, and each run marked the periods of her life more completely than any calendar notation.
She had experienced a moment of passion just once, at the age of fifteen: pushed into a dressing room at the Palace and thrust into by a man she had only ever seen from the aisle of the stalls. He was playing the villain in a revival of Maria Marten, or The Murders in the Red Barn, and had barely paused to peck her on the cheek and pull up his trousers before returning to catch his entrance cue. While her seducer ranted across the boards, twitching his moustaches, his shirtsleeves flecked with Kensington Gore, she too bled and suffered, and burrowed away in the crimson darkness to forget the world outside.