Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) (17 page)

‘That is true, but Will’s idea of love is not perhaps every man’s. Miguel must have realised that, surely.’

‘Nothing physical, you mean?’

‘I would think not.’

‘Jealous men don’t think.’

There was a knock on the door but it was thrust open before Auguste could reach it. Inspector Grey glanced at him, but otherwise ignored him.

‘Ah, Grey, this is Mr Didier, helping me on this case.’

Auguste received a reluctant nod. He didn’t mind. In the course of the last few years he’d met a lot of Grey’s men, so busy climbing their ladder they never bothered to choose the best position.

‘Come and look at this.’ There was pride in Grey’s voice, as he threw open the door of Will’s dressing-room.

Rose whistled. ‘Your men been making a mess of things, have they?’

The room’s contents were chaotically strewn around; greasepaint, costumes, the few personal belongings, lay in heaps where they had been randomly thrown.

‘Not my men,’ Grey retorted with dignity. ‘This was done when we arrived.
Your
chap, perhaps.’

‘Joe?’ Egbert remembered the red-headed lad. ‘I doubt it. This was done earlier. Somebody wanted something badly.’

‘Not so badly, in fact.’ Grey announced his coup. ‘Look at this.’ He went to the costume chest, now half emptied of its contents. He plucked out an old stove hat and
thrust it beneath their noses. Inside was a roughly packed brown-paper parcel. ‘That’s how we found it,’ Grey said smugly. ‘Now look what’s in it.’ He took the parcel and unwrapped it. There, in his large hands, was a silver cross, with dark red stones set around the ivory body of Christ.

‘Here of all places,’ said Rose slowly.

‘Will wouldn’t have had anything to do with this,’ exclaimed Auguste.

‘Perhaps he forgot to mention it to you, Mr Didier,’ Grey gloated in his triumph.

Perhaps, but Auguste liked things to make sense, and this did not. ‘Surely Will could not be involved in pretending to be a Portuguese ambassador, in order to defraud His Majesty out of this relic,’ he exploded.

‘He
is
involved,’ Grey said shortly. ‘Look at this.’

‘A plant,’ said Auguste desperately.

Grey ignored him. ‘He was being blackmailed, you see.’

‘You deduce that, do you? Over what?’ asked Rose. ‘A woman?’

‘No. His tastes lay in other directions. He had some rather embarrassing items tucked away. Queer sort of cove, wasn’t he? One of them cross-dressers.’

‘You’re pulling my leg, Grey.’

‘Look, sir.’ Grey was greatly injured. He never pulled legs. He took out a paper bag from the chest where the cross had been found. Inside was an object of female clothing. ‘His size, wouldn’t you say?’

It was a red silk corset.

‘I’m going to enjoy reporting this to the Palace,’ Egbert
Rose said in satisfaction after Grey had gone.

‘Will’s odd taste in clothing?’ Auguste was still puzzled.

Egbert fixed him with a withering look. ‘No,’ he explained patiently.
‘This.
The cross. Remember?’ He wrapped the paper round it lovingly. ‘I’m going to enjoy returning it. Perhaps I’ll get on to Special Branch right away.’ Somewhat cheered, he went to Jowitt’s office to carry out this pleasant mission.

Nettie had had enough of playing wardress, and had no hesitation in informing the policeman outside the dressing-room of the fact. She strode over to Auguste who had been about to seize the opportunity to see what might be happening in ‘his’ kitchens.

‘What’s happening?’ she demanded.

What could he say? ‘The police will find whoever did it, Miss Turner.’

She brushed aside this placebo. ‘Don’t call me that. I’m Nettie. We’re on the same side.’

‘Even though I failed to protect him?’ Auguste asked quietly. It had been preying on his mind.

‘No more than I did, letting him come here. It was
his
choice, and
his
decision to come, remember. We’re human beings, not some kind of magic genie leaping out of a lamp to save him.’ She paused. ‘And I’ve been thinking. It must have been when you went back to the kitchens that the dagger was messed around with. That was what happened, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. It might have been accident, they can’t know for sure yet.’

‘No accident.
We
know that. Will banged on the wall
every five minutes, just like he said. But that doesn’t mean someone wasn’t playing around with the dagger while he was doing it.’

‘Did he tell you who his visitor was, when you went in to see him later?’

‘No. He was upset about something though. I asked him to cough up, but he wouldn’t. That was unlike Will.’

‘And you didn’t hear them through the wall?’

‘No. Only voices.’

‘Male or female?’

‘I think one of each, but, as I said, I wasn’t concentrating on that. I had a visitor too. The woman might have been the Portuguese tart.’

‘Mariella Gomez?’

‘Correct, Mr Didier. It was her got poor old Will here in the first place.’

‘Not Mr Jowitt?’

‘I don’t know whose idea it was, but I do know it was that Jezebel who persuaded him. Will told me she’d come to see him.’

She remembered Harry had boasted that it had been his idea to get Will back at the Old King Cole. She grimaced. That’s who her visitor had been, and it had not been pleasant. Threats, whines, and more threats. And not just against her, she recalled uneasily. Still, Harry wasn’t so daft as really to be jealous of Will, was he? He must know how keen Will was on Mariella. Just what had Harry been playing at? It wasn’t in Mariella’s interest to kill Will, but Harry – if he was crazy enough – just might have thought it in his.

Violet and Marigold sniffled inelegantly into
handkerchiefs. ‘Now we’ve missed our turn at the Shadwell Grand,’ Violet sobbed. ‘We’ll be blacklisted. What’s going to become of us now Will’s gone?’

‘How does that affect you?’ Egbert Rose asked mildly.

‘He was our
friend,’
they cried in unison.

‘Enough of a friend for you to pop in and see him before the performance tonight?’

They regarded him in astonishment.
‘That
was last night. Mr Didier was there.’

Egbert lifted an eyebrow at Auguste, who nodded.

‘Did you notice where he kept the dagger while you were there?’

‘No,’ very firmly. ‘Anyway, why should we want to kill darling Will? He was going to help us. My sister is expecting a little foreigner,’ Violet added in hushed tones.

‘Gomez?’ asked Rose.

‘A baby,’ Violet explained impatiently.

‘And Will was the father?’

‘Oh no!’ Marigold looked horrified. ‘But he was going to give us money to keep us all, and get Violet a turn at the Tivoli and the Alhambra and the—’

‘Might I ask who is the father, then?’ Rose cut in. You never knew, it might be relevant.

‘One might not,’ Marigold replied tartly.

Evangeline was not quite such tough meat – metaphorically speaking, at any rate. The large handkerchief at her eyes proclaimed her grief.

‘Did you visit Mr Lamb in his dressing-room before the performance began, Mrs Yapp?’

‘I did not. That man –’ she looked scornfully at
Auguste, ‘– refused to let me in. Yesterday he came between Will and me. I think he did this terrible thing himself.’

‘Mr Didier was only trying to do his best for Mr Lamb.’ Egbert kept a straight face.

‘I loved him, and he adored me.’

Auguste kept a discreet silence.

‘Mr Lamb?’

‘Certainly I speak of Mr Lamb. I am the reason he returned to the Old King Cole. Did you not realise that?’

‘No,’ said Egbert simply. Nor did he believe it.

‘My husband naturally was –’ Evangeline grew a little pink, torn between the excitement of being fought over and practical self-survival which told her that in the unavoidable permanent absence of Will Lamb, she would once again be needing the services of Thomas Yapp ‘– very fond of Will,’ she finished lamely.

Mariella swept graciously into Rose’s makeshift office with the air of a tragic heroine.

‘I understand Will Lamb was a friend of yours.’

‘A dear,
dear
friend.’

‘Did you see him before the performance tonight?’

She hesitated fractionally. Auguste could almost see her weighing up pros and cons. ‘Yes,’ she said brightly. ‘I fear my husband was not pleased, but Will and I were
great
friends. Will was a kind man, but I could not give him the love he so desperately sought.’ She opened large blue piteous eyes. ‘Find his murderer,’ she ordered.

‘Oh, we will, miss. So you had no plans to – er – deepen that friendship here?’

‘I am a married woman.’ She spoke with dignity.

‘Was it you suggested he come here?’

‘No, Chief Inspector.’

‘Yet Mr Didier tells me you were the one sent to ask him.’

‘Oh
yes,’
she agreed fervently, casting Mr Didier a filthy look, and then a second, less antagonistic one. ‘I believe it was felt I might have most influence. His landlady was present, naturally. It would have been most improper otherwise for me to have visited him in his rooms.’

‘And naturally, there was nothing improper in your relationship with him?’

‘Oh
no
, Inspector.’ She raised shocked eyes to him. The eyes that lingered appraisingly on Auguste did not display shock at all.

‘Then I won’t keep you from your birthday celebrations any longer,’ Rose cordially informed her.

She rose with great alacrity, only asking in some puzzlement, ‘My
what
, Inspector?’

The rumpus outside the temporary office grew too loud to ignore. Shouting men was one thing, a bawling youngster was quite another. Especially one that Auguste recognised all too clearly. Outside he found Little Emmeline, squaring up pugnaciously to Grey’s best men, and not, for the second time, getting her own way. Miguel had been extremely reluctant to buy her a bust improver, when she proposed this in return for her silence. Six fairies were prudently keeping a discreet distance away.

‘What’s this all about, little girl?’ Rose inquired impatiently.

‘Little girl’ were not words likely to fly straight to the heart, if deep down one lay buried, of Little Emmeline. She fixed Rose with a vicious eye. ‘You’re really a copper?’

‘I am.’

‘Then tell these geezers I want my property out of there.’ She jerked her finger towards Will’s dressing-room.

‘And what property do you have in there, might I ask?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Then you can’t have it.’ Rose prepared to close the door, and Emmeline hastily reconsidered and changed tactics. She wept.

‘It’s something I hid in there, something private.’

‘What?’ Rose asked.

She sobbed unrelenting. ‘A red corset.’

Rose guffawed, and not knowing the reason, Emmeline naturally took it amiss. She reverted to character and screamed with temper.

‘You’re a silly old man, and I know something you don’t know.’

‘You must tell the Inspector, Emmeline,’ Auguste said firmly, ‘if it’s about Will Lamb.’

‘Only if I get my corset back,’ Emmeline crowed in high glee.

‘Tell us what it’s doing in Will Lamb’s room first. Did he borrow it?’

Emmeline stared at him in amazement. ‘Whatever for? I hid it there, silly.’

‘Why?’

‘I needed a hiding-place. No one would look there.’

‘Now tell me what you know about Will Lamb.’

‘He was running away at the end of the week with Mariella,’ Emmeline said impatiently.

Rose glanced at Auguste. ‘You’re sure? How did you know?’

‘Everyone knows,’ Emmeline replied innocently.

‘Auguste,’ Rose said briskly, ‘go and get this nice young lady her corset.’

The Old King Cole by drab early morning light was shorn even of the distancing mystery and excitement lent to it by the lighting flares that beckoned so enticingly on the theatre front by night. Even the Shadwell fish market had lost its appeal this Thursday morning, as Auguste finished ordering his modest requirements and returned to the theatre to meet Egbert. Silent and grey, the building smelled of stale tobacco and unwashed plates, a fact Lizzie was already busy rectifying, cheerfully singing ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ while she did so. Auguste’s arrival brought an instant halt to her song as she guiltily remembered Mr Lamb.

‘I told me dad,’ she greeted him. ‘He was ever so sorry; he remembered him here in the old days. And Miss Turner. But he said it was no more than could be expected ’ere on the old ’Ighway. There were this sailor,’ she explained lugubriously, ‘who started killing folks. A poor old draper and his wife and tiny little baby, and then other geezers. Everyone locked their doors and there were lots, lots more ’orrible murders. They got him,’ she finished with relish.