Full Dark House(45)

An accordion folder labelled Orphée aux enfers lay on the nearby desk. May pulled it out and began sifting through the floor plans and set blueprints. He found the design for the second tableau, Mount Olympus crowned by clouds, its great azure sphere pinned in the heavens, and carefully folded it into his jacket pocket.

The anguished cry that tore its way along the corridor made his scalp tingle. It was the call of a human in terrible pain. May jumped to his feet and ran outside, but there was nothing to be seen. He heard it again, softer and more in sorrow this time, but the acoustics were so dead that it was impossible to pinpoint the location of the sound. The other doors along the corridor were all sealed. Some looked as if they had not been opened for many years. Panic crawled over his skin, sending him back to the lift and the light.

He had just pulled the trellis door shut when he heard the cry again, a miserable low bellow that reverberated in the lift shaft. May jammed his thumb on the descent button and the cage dropped down through the building, recalling him to life and safety. He was nineteen and impressionable. The city was blacked out every night, and the dark held hidden terrors. In years to come, his dreams would vividly recall his haunted week at the Palace.

‘You imagined it,’ said Bryant, poking about in the pockets of his battered gaberdine raincoat for a Swan Vesta. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of, old chap. We’re all a bit jumpy. This building hasn’t seen daylight since the start of the war.’ He lit his pipe while May unfolded the sheet of paper he had removed from the archive. ‘So this is the original design for the globe and compasses?’ Bryant asked Mr Mack as May smoothed the stage plan flat on a workbench.

‘It looks the same as the finished model,’ commented May distractedly. He was still thinking about the deep cry echoing in the corridors.

‘Does it? Would you say that the compasses occupy the same position as they do in the drawing, Mr Mack? Do you have a first name?’

‘Mr Gielgud always calls me Mr Mack because of his memory,’ explained the carpenter. ‘We used to talk about table tennis.’ He spat a mouthful of chewing tobacco into his handkerchief and examined the plan. ‘Blimey, you’re right. The point of the needle is higher on the full-scale version by about a foot.’

‘Who told you to raise it?’

Mr Mack studied the drawing in discomfort. ‘It’s not like me to make a mistake. There should be a master diagram. This is one of the earlier sketches. Someone must have moved the globe.’

‘I don’t know how much more evidence you need to prove a case of premeditation,’ Bryant told his partner.

‘The carpenters reckon accidents happen all the time in the theatre,’ said May.

‘That’s right,’ agreed Mr Mack. ‘You’ve got a lot of people jumping about in a very small space, surrounded by moving mechanical objects, some of them weighing tons. Feet get crushed, arms broken, ankles shattered. Arthur Lucan fell through this very stage.’

‘But they don’t normally die, do they?’

‘That’s true, sir, they don’t.’

‘And the problem with these two deaths is that we lack any kind of a link between them,’ whispered Bryant.

May consulted his notebook. He felt that someone should keep a record in case Davenport decided to question their tactics. ‘Well,’ he pointed out, ‘they were both represented by the same agent, weren’t they?’





21

FREEDOM FROM MEMORY

He was searching for something in the files. John May sat in the archive room of the Palace Theatre and rested his aching, aged bones.

He was perched on a canvas stool with a mildewed cardboard box on his lap. Many of the photographs, plans and notes beneath his fingers were stuck together with time. They bore marks of damp, tea, candle grease. He wished he knew what he was looking for. He knew only that Bryant had been here before him, just days before he died.

In the years following the investigation, more photographs had been added to the files of the Palace: Jimmy Cagney, tap-dancing in a USO camp show; Betty Grable singing; Laurence Olivier grinning gap-toothed in Osborne’s The Entertainer; John Tiller’s Girls, high-kicking their way through the 1958 season; a thousand forgotten variety acts armed only with funny walks and silly catchphrases; the cast of Les Misérables, changing yet changeless across the years. And a grey police file on the Palace Phantom, dated November 1940, left to be rediscovered over sixty years later.

Here were the typed interviews they had conducted with the cast and production crew of Orpheus at the onset of that terrible season. The last pages of the file were missing. Only the interviews remained. But there had clearly been other pages here. The freshly torn staples at the top of the file attested to that. He looked through the interview list again. Corinne Betts, Miles Stone, Eve Noriac, Geoffrey Whittaker . . . he could barely put faces to the names. Elspeth Wynter, Arthur had fallen for her, but had it been out of love or pity? Who knew now, and what did it matter? He imagined the faces of Londoners, photographs pinned to an immense police board stretching hundreds of miles back into the past, across two thousand years of continued inhabitancy. So many dead, so many yet to come . . .