Abracadaver (4 page)
‘Sometimes they try it again blindfold,’ suggested Cribb to Thackeray, who was paler than the Indian maiden.
Then—surprise—normal gaslight was restored and there were two unmistakably European performers removing their head-dresses to receive their salute from the enraptured audience.
‘Capital act!’ said Cribb, applauding energetically.
‘It’s left me feeling like a glass of beer gone flat.’
A large 3 was already in place on the frame to their right where the order of the acts was charted. Nobody appeared to have a programme, so the information was valuable only to the chairman. ‘If that last act ’orrified the ladies a little too much, I’ve got some news to set your minds at rest, girls. We ’ave with us tonight two outstandin’ guardians of the peace. Yes, the boys in blue are with us tonight . . .’
‘Blimey, Sarge. We’ve been spotted.’
‘Steady, Constable.’
‘. . . Those two favourite myrmidons of the Law, P.C.s Salt and Battree!’
The act-drop had been lowered during the announcement, and now two performers dressed as uniformed police officers marched in step to the centre of the stage, the second ludicrously close behind the first. Predictably, there was a collision when they stopped in mid-stage, emphasised with cymbals.
‘Lord save us!’ said Cribb. ‘Not one of these lunatic displays!’
‘Watch yerselves!’ shouted one of the performers. ‘I’m watching you!’
‘Guying the Force is just about the favourite occupation of your fair-minded British general public,’ grumbled Cribb. ‘There ain’t been a pantomime since Grimaldi without a flatfooted constable blundering about with a string of sausages. And there’s more bluebottles on the music halls than there is in the Metropolitan: Vance, Stead, Arthur Lloyd, Edward Marshall—even Gilbert and Sullivan are up to it now. Blasted scandal, it is. Home Secretary wants to look into it, in my opinon.’
‘I’m the man wot takes to pris’n
He who steals wot isn’t his’n
X yer know is my Division
Number ninety-two,’ sang P.C. Salt.
Both artistes now produced authentic police-rattles, which they sprang, to the delight of the audience.
‘We could take ’em in for having police property, Sarge,’ suggested Thackeray.
‘It ain’t the night for it,’ growled Cribb, hunched over the box-front, with his hands over his face, watching the performance between his fingers.
Another song got under way:
‘They gave us an ’elmet and a greatcoat
And armlets to wear upon our sleeve
An ’andsome tunic too
In regulation blue
But now we’ve rattled our rattles we want to leave—
All together now—But now we’ve rattled our rattles we want to leave.’
‘Damned disgrace!’ said Cribb.
‘Watch yerselves!’ shouted P.C. Battree, ‘I’m watching you!’
‘These buffoons earn more for five minutes of this rubbish than you and I would get for a week’s beat-bashing,’ continued the sergeant. ‘And here we are protecting ’em. If this pair suffer an attack, you and I are taking the long way down to the stage, Thackeray.’
Whistles from the audience greeted a pretty young woman who had joined the officers on the stage. Her dress had a certain theatricality about it, but it was her mode of walking—characterised by a singular mobility in the region of the hips—that left no-one in any doubt as to the class of person she represented. After several exaggerated backward glances, P.C.s Salt and Battree began their final chorus:
‘Poor old feet
Out on the beat
Pursuin’ the enforcement of the Law.
But you gets a saucy wink
And the offer of a drink
And that prevents yer feet from gettin’ sore—
Once more now—And that prevents yer feet from gettin’ sore!’
Then, with arch nods and pointing, to leave the audience in no doubt of their intention, they trotted off in pursuit of their assistant, shortly afterwards returning with her to take their bow.
‘At least we didn’t have to go to their aid,’ said Thackeray, conscious of the fury in Cribb’s silence.
‘If I ever meet ’em in the course of duty, they’ll need aid all right.’
The curtain descended and the limelight returned to the chairman’s table. ‘And now, my friends, after that rare entertainment, not being a temperance-observer, I shall enjoy a tipple of fizz generously subscribed by the table on my right. The show proceeds with a redoubtable display of manly vigour from that sovereign of strong men, the ’Ercules of Rotherhithe, the great Albert.’
Albert’s props were the most interesting so far. He stood like some eccentric costermonger behind a substantial platform on wheels, neatly stacked with an extraordinary array of articles: books, folded clothes, the plinth for a statue, a top-hat, flags, a picnic-hamper and three sets of bar-bells. With a nod to the conductor, a cue for the Anvil Chorus, Albert mounted his platform and stood with legs apart, chest inflated and head in profile to the auditorium, and then clasped his hands so that his biceps bobbed up like ferrets in a sack. He was wearing a one-piece costume of the type introduced by Leotard, the original Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Generous applause greeted this display of muscularity, so Albert climbed on to his plinth, leaned forward, positioned his legs carefully, and assumed the classic stance of the Discobolus.
‘Pose Plastique,’ explained Cribb authoritatively. ‘The man’s got a fine body. Pity about the moustache, though. Don’t look like ancient Greece to me.’
Albert now descended and progressed to a series of lifts with the bar-bells, accompanied by intermittent chords from the brass section and exhortations from the gallery. Just as the interest was threatening to flag, a novelty was introduced, in the person of an extremely stout, florid-faced woman in long white robes and a hat with red, white and blue ostrich feathers.
‘Blimey!’ shouted someone from the gallery. ‘Keep away from Albert, missus. You’ll rupture ’im.’
The lady’s contribution to the performance was soon made clear, however. While Albert ducked behind his platform to change his costume, she curtseyed and made the following announcement: ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, in a tribute to a most distinguished member of our race, my son Albert gives his unique portrayal of the bard, Shakespeare!’
There, leaning against his plinth in the pose of the monument in Westminster Abbey, was Albert, with legs crossed, one arm resting on a pile of volumes on the plinth, the other holding an unfurled scroll. He wore breeches, doublet and cloak and a false beard. When the impact of this tableau was fully appreciated, he placed both hands on the edge of the plinth and gracefully upended himself into a slow handstand, the cloak draping itself elegantly over the back of the plinth. Then to a drum-roll and a powerful gesture from his mother’s right arm, Albert removed one of his hands from the plinth and remained poised on the other. The audience broke into open cheering. Theatres like Drury Lane and the Lyceum might have their Shakespeare; only the Grampian had him upside down on one hand!
‘Had me worried for a moment,’ admitted Cribb, when the strong man had righted himself. ‘There was the makings of a nasty little accident there. What are they doing now?’
Albert had disappeared behind the platform again for a change of costume while his mother occupied the centre of the stage with a Union Jack. To the strains of a patriotic tune, she began singing in a strong contralto,
‘O’er all the mighty world by British sons unfurled
The red and white and blue!
But to drag it in the mire now seems the sole desire
Of Gladstone and his crew.’
Unshaken by the mixed reception this got, she proceeded to:
‘Oh England, who shall shield thee from the shame?
And thy sons and thy daughters who shall save?
But we cherish in our hearts that one undying name—
Lord Beaconsfield, now lying in his grave!
Ladies and gentlemen, my son Albert now portrays the Greatness of Britain and her Empire!’
From the dangerous area of political controversy, the limelight made a timely return to Albert, now standing on the platform, which had been cleared of everything but a huge bar-bell and the picnic-basket. He was dressed convincingly as John Bull. A portentous thrumming from the orchestra-pit promised something even more spectacular than Shakespeare upside down.
John Bull spat into each hand and crouched at the bar-bell as the drumming slowly increased in volume. He braced, strained and began to lift, his veins protruding with the effort. The bar itself bowed impressively as it took the weight of the massive iron balls. He hauled it to the level of his knees. His hips. The Union Jack on his chest. His chin. His top-hat. Finally the lift was complete, his arms fully extended above his head, his legs vibrating with the colossal strain.
The role of the picnic-basket was now explained. While Albert bravely held his stance, his mother began unstrap-ping the lid.
‘Fancy bothering to strap it up, Sarge,’ murmured Thackeray. ‘The poor cove has to stand holding that lot above his head while she—Good Lord!’
One second of action transformed the scene. From the basket struggled a large white bulldog with a Union Jack tied about its middle. Snarling ferociously, it sank its teeth into the nearest of Albert’s quivering calves. His howl of pain echoed through the theatre, even after the crash of the bar-bell descending straight through the platform. Man and dog, still attached, disappeared in a mass of splintered wood.
‘That’s it, Thackeray!’ shouted Cribb. ‘Get the dog!’
Whether Thackeray used the route he had planned he could not remember afterwards; his descent was a four-second fumbling confusion among gilt bosoms and bottoms and torn curtains. But his debut on the stage was impeccable. The great Irving could not have moved with more despatch to the battered structure at the centre of the stage, pulled the debris aside with more vigour or seized the collar of the bulldog with more resolve. So surprised was the animal that it relaxed its grip on Albert and found itself hoisted by collar and tail-stump and clapped into the basket before uttering another growl.
‘SERGEANT LIKES TO TAKE a look
For anarchists and spies
Down the basement-stairs when cook
Bakes her rabbit pies,’
chorused the singing policemen, Salt and Battree, on special duty. In the best theatrical traditions, they had volunteered to return to the footlights and divert the audience until order was restored backstage. So in front of a hastily lowered act-drop of mountain scenery they padded the beat with truncheons drawn, singing hilariously about life in the Force.
On the other side of the cloth the great Albert lay in the ruins of his dais emitting heart-rending groans. Around him stood the interested group who could be counted on to materialise around any unfortunate, from a lost child to a broken-down cabhorse.
‘Animals on the stage are always the next thing to disaster,’ a small cigar-smoker in a dress-suit was informing the group. He was evidently the stage-manager. ‘I’ve had ’em all here—dogs, monkeys, mules and baby elephants. Perfectly docile off-stage. Put ’em in front of an audience and you’re in no end of trouble. If they don’t bite you they’re liable to knock the scenery down and if they don’t do that there’s ways of drawing attention to ’emselves I won’t go into. You wouldn’t believe the jobs I’ve had to tell my stagehands to do.’
‘Right now you can tell ’em to lift the lumber off this poor cove,’ barked Sergeant Cribb. ‘Where’s the medical chest? He’ll need attention.’
‘Keep your voice down, sir,’ appealed the manager. ‘No need for panic. We’re professionals here.’
‘The medical chest,’ hissed Cribb.
‘Yes. Now I’m not entirely certain where . . . No matter. You props over there! Start removing these battens, will you? You may need tools from the carpenter’s room. And you in the purple weskit, fetch some salt quick from the nearest bar. We’ll bathe his leg in salt water as soon as we’ve cleared the stage. You all right, Albert?’
A sonorous groan from the centre of the debris caused some pessimistic head-shaking among the rescue-party. Murmurs of concern rose in the ranks behind—for most of the company had abandoned the dressing-rooms at Albert’s first yell of pain, and now stood about the stage in what they were wearing (or not wearing) at the moment of crisis. Constable Thackeray, seated on the basket containing the bulldog, had given all his attention to fastening the straps securely. He was dimly conscious of a group clustered near him, but not that they were ballet-girls. When he raised his face it was within a yard of a surface normally concealed by a tutu. A veritable outrage on decency! He dipped his head instantly, like a bargee just seeing a low bridge. Then by degrees, and strictly in the cause of duty, he mastered his modesty and raised his eyes.
Then someone arrived with a crowbar. A sudden commotion, the intervention of a young woman in lilac and white crying shrilly, ‘Don’t you dare go near Albert with that!’ so alarmed the man that he dropped the implement with a clatter. The bulldog barked ferociously inside its basket and the unseeing audience exploded with laughter, ‘Watch yer-selves!’ shouted the resourceful P.C. Battree, ‘I’m watchin’ you!’
Albert’s protector was Miss Ellen Blake, the first act that evening. She now crouched by the shattered platform in a singularly affecting manner and put her hand comfortingly through a gap in the side. She withdrew it at once with a cry of horror. ‘His arm! It’s deathly cold!’
‘If you’ll stand up, miss, and look through here,’ suggested Cribb, ‘you’ll see that his head’s at the other end. You’ve just put your hand on the cross-piece of Albert’s barbell. Now stand back and let’s get him out.’
Two more planks were prised up. Cribb borrowed a lamp and peered in with the air of an Egyptologist uncovering his first mummy. ‘He’s not in bad shape. Two more boards and we can drag him out at this end.’
Miss Blake came forward again and to everyone’s relief a pale hand rose from inside to meet hers.
‘He’s quite all right now!’ announced the manager, clapping his hands. ‘Back to the dressing-rooms everyone except the ten-minute calls. The show goes on as billed.’ He added in an afterthought, ‘We’d better hurry. There can’t be many songs about policemen left.’
Cribb looked up at the gigantic prancing shadows of Salt and Battree projected through the act-drop. ‘Wouldn’t hurt those two to get the bird. Deuced poor impersonation they give of the police, anyway.’
The manager snapped his fingers. ‘I say, you’re not . . . ? I thought you had an air of authority. How did you happen—’
‘Never mind,’ said Cribb. ‘Where can we take Albert?’
‘The property-room’s the nearest.’
‘Very good.’
Still clutching Miss Blake’s hand as she walked beside him, Albert was borne off the stage and deposited on a dusty chaise-longue in the property-room. Thackeray followed, dragging after him the basket and its growling occupant.
‘Does that animal have to be here?’ were Albert’s first comprehensible words.
‘The dog is the evidence, blast it. A pukka investigator never lets the evidence out of his sight. You can’t trust a confounded soul,’ announced a new speaker from the doorway behind. He was the stage-hand in the purple waistcoat who had gone for salt: a man of slight build and soft, boyish skin, quite eclipsed by fierce blue eyes under a shock of upthrusting grey hair. ‘There’s been an uncommon demand for pies and baked potatoes in the hall tonight, and salt’s as scarce in there as upright women. So I borrowed this from the photographer’s studio next door.’ He held up a large brown bottle. ‘Iodine—the unfailing remedy for a dog-bite. It does a deuced fine job of disinfection, and if you pour it liberally over the wound it has a rare capacity for enlivening a dazed man.’
The manager beamed his admiration. ‘Good Lord, Major Chick, you’re the right man to have in an emergency. Allow me to introduce you to this gentleman. He is a policeman.’
‘Really? Wouldn’t have thought it—looks too blasted intelligent.’
‘Sergeant Cribb, sir.’ They shook hands. ‘And that’s Constable Thackeray on the dog-basket. What was your name, sir?’
‘Chick. Percival Chick. Major, retired. Late Adjutant of the 8th Hussars. Perhaps you have heard of me. I’m not, as you realise, a common scenery-remover. That was a mere subterfuge. Like you, Sergeant. I’m a detective now. But my investigations are limited to the private sphere.’
A private detective! Cribb inwardly snarled with a ferocity equal to the bulldog’s at the instant it sank its teeth into Albert. What an evening! Music hall policemen, and now a private detective! It was his first contact with one of the species, though he had seen their newspaper advertisements often enough, and the brass plates on their doors. Anyone who spoke with a plum in his mouth and could afford the price of lodgings in one of the nobbier areas of London could set up in business and derive a tidy income from it. You filled your rooms with barrowloads of old books and obsolete chemical apparatus and soon there was a stream of wealthy callers with fantasies of blackmail, kidnap and family scandals. So you fed their fears with a few quite spurious discoveries, pinned a crime on some wretched servant and claimed your fee in guineas, with a few choice remarks about the impotence of Scotland Yard. ‘Interested to make your acquaintance, sir. What’s your business here, if I may inquire?’
Major Chick looked cautiously around him. Only the manager, Miss Blake and the Scotland Yard men remained there, besides Albert. ‘I rather think my client, Mr Goodly, should explain.’
‘Why, of course,’ said the manager. ‘A series of unfortunate accidents in the London music halls led me to engage a detective. You see, I doubted whether they were, indeed, accidents. Almost every hall of any reputation has suffered in this way in the last month or two—except the Grampian. Our turn seemed inevitable before long. So Major Chick has been disguised as a stage-hand for the past week in readiness to investigate just such an occurrence as this— even though it appears most improbable that tonight’s small embarrassment was deliberately provoked. You can’t put a bulldog’s fickle behaviour down to Anarchists, now can you? However, I gather from your swift arrival on the scene that you were on the watch for trouble too.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Cribb. ‘Let’s attend to Albert. Hand me the iodine, Major.’ His voice bore the authority of a colonel at the very least and the Major almost clicked his heels as he obeyed the order. From that moment there was no question of who was in charge of the inquiries. ‘Your pocket-handkerchief, if you please, Thackeray.’
Among the bric-a-brac of the property-room was a card-table on which Cribb placed his jacket, before rolling back his shirt-cuffs like a conjuror. ‘Perhaps you will support the leg, Major, and you, Miss Blake, try to keep Albert from becoming distressed. Now, I shall remove this torn section of the tights and expose the wound . . . Capital! An ugly little bite, that. Not a lot of blood, but those teeth sank in a bit, eh Albert? I’ll just wipe the surface clean now, like that. Then I form a pad with the handkerchief, saturate it with iodine and apply it firmly—’
Albert drew in breath through his clenched teeth and made a sound like a sky-rocket ascending. Everyone grabbed and held down a limb as his muscles tensed. His eyes first shut tight, then opened wide, streaming with tears. His hand gripped Miss Blake’s so tightly that she squeaked with pain.
‘Beautiful job,’ Major Chick told Cribb. ‘You could make a living as an army-surgeon, you know. Dammit man, you’re wasting your time at Scotland Yard.’
Cribb surveyed his patient. ‘You’ll find it smarts a bit at first. Wounds need cleaning, though. Any other injuries?’ He held the iodine bottle in readiness.
Albert shook his head decisively. ‘Just the merest grazing where I fell through the platform. I’m sure the iodine won’t be necessary. It’s my ankle that hurts. I twisted it when I fell.’
‘You’ll be out of work for a week or two then,’ said the manager, without much sympathy. ‘And you can thank your dog for the lost wages. If you’ll take my advice you’ll have nothing to do with animals in the future. Just listen to the snarling brute! If you were mine, you ugly hound, I’d know what to do with you.’
Albert sat up. ‘But that isn’t my dog! That one’s white with brown patches. Beaconsfield is strictly black and white. Surely someone noticed—I’ve been doing the act for three weeks or more. Some blackguard put that vicious animal into Beaconsfield’s basket, knowing it would attack me as soon as it was released.’
‘Do I understand you right?’ asked the manager. ‘Are you sure that the bulldog in that basket isn’t yours?’
‘Beaconsfield wouldn’t attack me,’ said Albert, shocked by the suggestion. ‘He hasn’t got the energy. It’s all he can do to stand up on his four legs while I’m holding up the barbell, and then he sometimes needs prodding. I tell you he’s black and white, anyway.’
‘Shall I lift him out for you to have a closer look, Sarge?’ suggested Thackeray.
‘That isn’t necessary, Sergeant,’ Miss Blake interposed. ‘I know Beaconsfield and that is not him. If you look through the basket you can see a large brown patch where the Union Jack has ridden up on this dog’s back.’
‘A substitution, by Jove!’ exclaimed Major Chick. ‘Ingenious! Ah, the vagaries of the criminal mind! We’re on to a cunning enemy here, Sergeant.’
Cribb ignored the assumption that the Major was now a party to the investigation. ‘If that ain’t Beaconsfield, Albert, then where is his Lordship? When did you last see him?’
‘During the overture, when I brought him down here and put him in the wings in his basket. I like to watch Ellen’s— Miss Blake’s—act from the promenade, so I prepare everything for my own act first.’
‘Then the dogs could have been exchanged at any time during the first three acts?’
‘The first two, to be precise. I’m waiting with Mother in the wings from the beginning of the policemen’s act.’
‘It was done while Miss Blake or the Red Indians were performing then. Who would have been in the wings at that time, Mr Goodly?’
The manager smiled. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Sergeant. Music hall isn’t like the legitimate theatre, where everyone’s movements are planned and known. I’m managing a three and a half hour show with twenty-seven acts including dancers. I often have to change the order at very short notice to fit in with the commitments of the star billings. Tonight, for example, I’ve got Miss Jenny Hill on at eight o’clock. Nothing must alter that, because she’s appearing at the Royal Aquarium at nine and the London Pavilion at a quarter past ten. So I shall change the order of the acts to ensure that she goes on in time to make a cab journey across to Tothill Street. No two nights in the music hall are the same, you see.’
‘But you must have some notion who was in the wings at that time,’ insisted Cribb.
‘Very well,’ said the manager acidly. ‘Let’s make an inventory, if that’s the way Scotland Yard would like it. There would be the Red Indians, Henry and Cissie Greenbaum, waiting while Miss Blake was on, and the singing policemen, the Dalton brothers, and their assistant Vicky. Then there are up to nine stage-hands and scene-shifters dispersed on either side of the stage, two female dressers and one male, three fly-men looking after the curtain and the act-drops, two lime-boys on their perches in the flies, two callboys, the gasman at the index-plate, my assistant, myself and any one of the other twenty-four acts who cared to look in. I would say almost a hundred people had a right to be there, Sergeant.’
‘In that case someone must surely have seen the dogs being changed over.’
‘I doubt it. Most of us are far too occupied with our own duties to notice anything like that. Moreover, the wings are in semi-darkness for the whole of the Red Indian act, to achieve the special lighting effect onstage. That’s when the basket was opened, in my opinion.’
A murmur of assent on Cribb’s left provided him with a sudden thought. ‘Where were you positioned, Major?’
Major Chick coloured noticeably. ‘Why—er—in the gallery on the side-wall above the stage, where the ropes and so forth are controlled.’
‘The flies,’ explained the manager.
‘Didn’t you see anything?’
The Major pulled at his moustache. ‘I was observing the stage, dammit.’