Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) (3 page)

‘The Old King Cole serves food in its bar – quite a famous local eating-house it’s become,’ Nettie said airily. ‘They need a cook, and Will needs someone to protect him.’

Auguste looked at her suspiciously. ‘But how can I do both?’

‘There’ll be staff there, of course, Percy says. I’ll see Will to the theatre, then you nip backstage and keep an eye on him. You can watch the acts if you like. Rubbish, most of it. The regular turns Percy can afford to put on don’t keep him in bangers and mash.’

Will looked anxious. ‘Harry?’ he murmured.

‘Oh yes.’ Nettie roared. ‘Harry Pickles. He’s my husband, not that you’d notice. We don’t see much of each other. Fancy your remembering, Will. Husband number three,’ she explained to Auguste. ‘I told him if he don’t keep his name clean, he’ll be out and Will here can be number four.’

‘That will be nice, Nettie,’ Will said valiantly.

‘Don’t worry, old cock. I’m too fond of you to wish that on you.’

For a moment Auguste glimpsed the pain behind the bravado. It was common knowledge. None of Nettie’s marriages had given her happiness. ‘Mr Lamb, why do you think someone wishes to murder you?’ Auguste asked firmly, getting back to the heart of the matter.

Will looked anxious. ‘Dreamed it,’ he told Auguste apologetically.

‘Dreams are not real.’ Auguste said with relief.

‘Will’s are,’ Nettie remarked glumly.

It was then he remembered that Will Lamb had had several breakdowns and was always in fragile health. Yet after all, there could be nothing to a mere dream, so the job of protecting Will would not be onerous, and the temporary job of cook would be an
adventure.
He was not sure Tatiana would approve of either task, let alone His Majesty, but after all, neither, he told himself, would ever know.

‘He dreamed of Bill Terriss. He was a friend of his,’ Nettie explained sombrely.

Auguste understood immediately. The murder of the famous actor William Terriss a few years ago, at the stage door of the Adelphi, committed by a crazy super who imagined his path from crowd scenes to leading
man had been blighted by Terriss, had shocked the theatre world and public alike. Who in their right mind would want to murder Terriss – or Will Lamb?

As if following his thoughts, Nettie said robustly, ‘I’ve told him it’s ridiculous – isn’t it, Will?’

‘No.’ Will Lamb’s large eyes looked dolefully at them. ‘On the morning of the day Bill died, his understudy told me he’d had a dream the previous night of dear old Bill lying on the stairs with a group of people round him, one of whom was his leading lady. He died. And that evening his dream was re-enacted in real life. So you see, dreams
can
be warnings.’

Perhaps, Auguste thought to himself, but even if recognised, how can they be acted upon? But aloud he spoke briskly. ‘Then please do not go to Wapping, Mr Lamb. Let Miss Turner go alone.’

Will Lamb stared at him blankly. ‘Oh no, I must go. I must. Don’t you see?’

‘No, I don’t, Will,’ Nettie said forthrightly. ‘If it’s just because of that woman, then arrange to meet her somewhere else, for cripes’ sake.’

‘No, Nettie,’ Will said gently. ‘I have promised, you see. You don’t understand. We—’ He broke off, but his face was as excited as a child’s watching the curtain rise on a pantomime.

‘These dreams are your only evidence?’ Auguste asked gently, curiosity aroused by that sudden excitement. A child – but a child with a secret.

Will shook his head sadly. ‘No.’

‘And what else has happened?’ Auguste’s spirits sank.

‘Communications.’ Will fished in the pocket of his overcoat, and produced a crumpled piece of paper with
letters cut out from some form of print and stuck on. Its message was stark.

‘Keep away from the Old King Cole.’ And it was signed, ‘The Raven.’

‘I’ve had one every day this week,’ Will told him dolefully.

‘And when did you have your dream?’Auguste asked carefully.

‘Tuesday, or perhaps it was Wednesday. Yes, it must have been Wednesday because of the pickled egg. Tuesday’s my night for caviar, or is it oysters, at any rate my cook won’t give me pickled egg and oysters, so it must have been Wednesday,’ Will informed him brightly.

‘I see.’ Auguste was quite sure he did. ‘So the dream could have been sparked off by the letters.’

‘You mean Bill wrote the letters?’ Will was puzzled.

‘No, you associated Bill’s murder with the threat to murder you.’

‘But he was here tonight.’

‘Who was?’

‘Bill.’

Auguste glanced at Nettie, who came to his aid.

‘Will, old chum, you’ve been on the beer.’

‘No, no, he
was
here. You heard him, you must have done.’ Will looked appealingly from one to the other. ‘I heard him calling out, “Horrible, terrible,” that’s what he said. That’s what poor Bill said to his wife a few days before he was killed, he said it about being killed with a knife. And he
was.’

‘But, Mr Lamb, that is mere coincidence,’ Auguste soothed.

‘And the letters?’ Will asked anxiously, eager to be convinced.

‘Warning from a friend,’ Gwendolen said heartily. ‘Reminding you that Percy’s an old rogue. Or someone jealous of you.’

‘Signed “The Raven”?’ Auguste asked. If there was cause for concern, then Will should be on his guard, not lulled into false security.

Will pumped Auguste’s hand again. ‘I like you, Mr Didier,’ he assured him earnestly.

‘“The raven himself is hoarse”,’ Auguste quoted almost to himself, as three pairs of eyes fixed on him in horror. ‘From
Macbeth,’
he explained, startled. ‘It’s a reference to your act.’

‘You
quoted!’
Nettie’s voice was grim.

‘Of course, you’re French, Mr Didier,’ Gwendolen said kindly. ‘You cannot know there’s a superstition that it is very bad luck to quote from or even name that play offstage in a theatre.’

‘Don’t worry, Mr Didier,’ Will reassured him gaily. ‘It reverses the curse to say it backwards. You
see? Esraoh si flesmih nevar eht.
Never ate? Now what a foolish thing. No wonder the poor bird feels a little cross. Talking of which . . .’ He chattered on, giving Auguste time to recover, then picked up his stage dagger with its retractable blade. ‘I’m armed, you see, and now you have agreed to be my detective and cook, I defy any murderous chop to get past this. Chop meet dagger, dagger meet chop.’

Had he agreed? Even as he laughed, Auguste reflected, he couldn’t remember doing so. Yet after all, it offered great possibilities. What could he cook? How
could he educate an entirely new and receptive clientele in the joys of dining with Didier? He would offer them such delights as they had never tasted before. Just as Alexis Soyer had both cooked and set down his recipes for all men, whether rich or poor, so now would he. A whole new area of cuisine might be revealed to him. True, His Majesty had forbidden him to cook for profit, after his marriage last year, but this job could be said to be a form of charity, and even if it wasn’t, it was unlikely Buckingham Palace would ever hear about his adventures in Wapping. Excitement welled up inside him. Tatiana would not be returning for at least ten days from her road race in France, and the boredom of ten days without her was banished. He could
cook.

True, he had also to ensure that nobody murdered Will Lamb, but this, he managed to convince himself, was a simple task. Somehow those communications did not have the ring of a serious intent to murder. Indeed, given Will’s disposition, they might even have been composed by Will himself to give substance to his dreams. Splendid though Workers’ Educational Classes were, it was unlikely that anyone at the Old King Cole would be up to quoting from Shakespeare. Auguste managed in his optimism to ignore two facts. Firstly, that since Will’s most famous songs and lines of patter were based on Shakespeare, the notes were, to say the least, relevant. And secondly, that St George’s Street, where the Old King Cole was situated, was a name only a few decades old. Before that, the street had another name, the Ratcliffe Highway, at one time notorious for murder.

An anonymous figure in cap and rough jacket threaded his way through the costers’ stalls of Whitehorse Street, having emerged from the London and Blackwall railway into the Commercial Road. Egbert Rose whistled thoughtfully as he made his way towards St Dunstan’s Church and Stepney Green; then, having ensured no interested eyes watched his progress, plunged off to the right, into a network of narrow streets, alleys and courts. Some of them appeared in dark blue or black in Mr Booth’s poverty map of London. That had been charted in 1889, but the colours hadn’t changed much in thirteen years to his way of thinking, as he got deeper into the warren. Still pretty nearly as bad as you could get, whole families in one stinking room in some of these places.

He crossed Eastfield Street and strolled past the identical small houses, controlling his impulse to look down to see what he was walking in. He needed his eyes on the level. He was observed all right, by children playing in the gutters, by women glaring at him from doorsteps. Strangers were noticed and remembered. He clutched his battered suitcase, the passport for his presence. He dived off through one of the alleyways and when he emerged, walked quickly back the way he had come, and then into one of the small courts that peppered the street. He had arrived.

‘Morning, Ma,’ he roared. The damp heat was immense, and steam curled under an inner door. As Ma Bisley waddled through, it hissed then billowed in triumph round the hitched-up serge skirt and curled itself around the broad beaming face.

‘Yer oughta know better than to come here on a
Monday morning. Boiler time. I got a living to make,’ she told him amiably.

He shook his head firmly. ‘Too much at stake not to, Ma, even for the sake of your washing.’ Around him were ticketed bundles, the mangle, washing boards and flat irons arranged in orderly fashion, the paraphernalia of her business. One of her businesses, in fact; the other was providing information to him through a team of runners, within strictly observed guidelines.

‘What is it this time?’

‘I don’t know yet, Ma. May be nothing, may be a can of stinking worms.’

His Majesty had taken the bad news of the disappearing
Lisboa
surprisingly philosophically for him. Rose had emerged with his head, and even his job, which was more than he had expected. The British ambassador to Portugal would be informed, the Portuguese ambassador to Britain would be informed, and, somewhat less enthusiastically, the British public would be informed that the cross had disappeared without trace, and that it was unlikely in the extreme that the Portuguese royal family were in any way involved, since the theft from Windsor Castle had been carried out by bogus representatives of their government who were doubtless anarchists in disguise. Staff had been reprimanded for not checking credentials, and the Metropolitan Police for failing to apprehend the villains.

Rose had inwardly seethed, and commented mildly that Special Branch might wish to be more actively involved if anarchists were the villains; he had earned himself a glare and the ruling that ‘politics were politics,
but property was property’. In his relief at still finding himself employed, it was not until Sunday that he had realised he was smelling something unsatisfactory – and that it was not for once Edith’s burnt roast beef. He had foregone his evening glass of ale at the Queen’s Arms in order to eradicate the smell. ‘Any news on that corpse?’ he shouted through the telephone at the unfortunate Grey.

‘Yes, sir. As I said, he was a casual, a villain by the name of Jack Knight, place of loitering the Three Tars in Limehouse. Employment putting away as many pints of porter as he could. Time of death between three and four.’

‘Far off his usual beat, wasn’t he?’

‘They take what’s offered, that sort.’

Rose knew.
That
sort of casual (as opposed to those of their more energetic brothers who stormed the dock gates daily hoping for the odd day’s work) loafed in pubs waiting for work to come to them. Never sought it out. They fetched and carried merchandise, legal or illegal, to the ships, and never asked questions. For that reason, most were ‘safe’. Yet this one got murdered, and not on his usual beat.

As if reading his thoughts, Grey told him: ‘We’ve checked the pubs round Nightingale Lane, if you’re thinking he might have got into a fight after spending his dosh.’

‘Nice job, carrying jewels,’ Rose said thoughtfully. ‘Must have paid him well.’

‘Might have been Auntie Maisie’s engagement ring. Or Uncle Sam Fence’s runner. We’re working on that.’

‘Family?’

‘Casuals don’t have ’em.’

‘They don’t come out of nowhere. He didn’t look like he slept out at nights, so he laid his weary head somewhere. Even if it’s only Medland Hall.’ He thought of the nearby lodging house for the destitute, and the long dreary queues that formed there waiting hopefully and hopelessly for the seven o’clock opening time.

‘No one’s come forward. I don’t waste my men’s time. I’ve got witnesses he was given a job around two-thirty. Someone remembers him buying a pie to take with him. That any help? If you need to know the name of his board school teacher, let me know.’

If Grey meant this sarcastically, he was disappointed. Rose thanked him cordially, and hung the receiver up. He was a happy man. He could still smell something fishy, and he knew the fish was distinctly off.