‘I’d like to, sir, but we’re not sure ourselves. Mr Darvell, the boy who was attacked in the balcony, is the son of a member of the cast. He and a friend were watching the run-through. The friend left, Darvell was seen to stand up at the front and turn his back to the stage, he was cut and fell over the parapet. It’s a low rail, and the floor slopes steeply. The fall broke his nose, his jaw and his collarbone, he lost too much blood and died. The person he nearly landed on, Miles Stone’s mother, glimpsed his attacker from below, and what she saw matches the description of the man Miss Trammel gave last night. This is the man who got away on the stolen bike.’
‘What a bloody nightmare. It wasn’t Darvell’s friend?’
‘He was already in the pub when it happened.’
‘I suppose you know that the press has got the story now.’
‘We kept it back as long as we could,’ said May, ‘but the chestnut vendor was discovered by the News of the World. Luckily that particular rag only comes out once a week.’
‘You really are a dunderhead, Bryant,’ Davenport complained. ‘Half their stringers do double duty with the Daily Sketch. There’s bound to be something in tomorrow’s paper.’
‘I think you’re overestimating the Daily Sketch’s interest in theatre,’ Bryant protested. ‘Coverage of Orpheus is too intellectual for their readership.’
‘You think a murderer loose in an old music hall is too intellectual? “Hellfire Show Summons the Devil”, that sort of thing, a bit too brainy for the masses? You may be academically on the button but you’re not much good at understanding people, Bryant. I suggest you go down there,’ he slapped his hand against the window, ‘and see how the ordinary man in the street is passing his days. There’s a typing pool sitting out on the corner of the Aldwych in the pouring rain, working under a makeshift shelter of corrugated iron because the roof’s been blown clean off their office. You’re telling me they don’t want to have their minds diverted by a juicy murder?’
Chastened, Bryant fell silent. It seemed to May that their superior might have a point.
‘The partially digested meat in Miss Capistrania’s stomach showed positive for hemlock,’ he pointed out. ‘There was an empty sandwich tin in one of the wings, and hers are the only prints on it. Nobody seems to know where she got her food. Quail is not the sort of item you often find outside of Simpson’s in the Strand these days. We’ve checked with all the butchers’ shops in the area. There’s a place in Brewer Street that sells quail, but they don’t recall serving her, and besides, they’re noted for carrying out stringent quality checks on their meat.’
‘Anything new on Senechal?’ asked Davenport.
‘The cable ends were examined under a microscope and came back with an open verdict on them.’
‘What do you mean? Either the wire was cut or it wasn’t.’
‘Dr Runcorn thinks there’s a possibility that it sheared under its own weight. He reckons the cable had been reused so many times that it was probably full of stress fractures. But if it was cut, the person who cut it had to be standing on the gantry at the time in order to judge the moment for the globe to hit Mr Senechal.’
This news made Davenport far from happy. He liked the unit’s cases to be tied up neatly so that he could present them to his superiors as solved and closed, another job well done. He wanted someone to blame. He would have put everything down to sheer bad luck if it wasn’t for this latest attack. And, of course, there were the feet.
‘How the hell did they get onto a chestnut stand?’ he asked again. ‘Come on, Arthur, you must have an idea by now.’
‘I do, but you won’t like it much.’
‘Try me.’
‘I think they were thrown into the cart from the canopy of the theatre.’
‘What on earth makes you say that?’
‘The evening was dry, and the vendor had griddled his fire before the air-raid siren called him away. On the morning of the discovery, PC Crowhurst noted that the coal dust on the pavement was unmarked by any footprints. Mr May and I saw it for ourselves. There are several sets of small mullioned windows above the canopy. One on the second landing has a pane missing, and another has a broken hasp. They’re not big enough for a person to climb through, but you could stick an arm out of them. I think somebody dropped the feet out of the window, intending them to land on the canopy. Instead, they rolled off and fell onto the chestnut stall, which happened to be standing by the kerb below.’