Stagestruck (18 page)

‘And you did some acting.’

‘Me? Get away!’

‘In that one-act play at Surbiton.’

Another memory came back. His art teacher at junior school had recruited him for a costume piece about Richard

III. He’d played one of the boy princes murdered by the king in the Tower of London. ‘You’re right, except I wouldn’t call it acting. All I had to do was pretend to die. Fancy you remembering that.’

‘It got up my nose, that’s why. Mum and Dad had booked that holiday in North Wales, a week on a farm to coincide with my eleventh birthday, and we were supposed to be leaving home on the Friday and driving through the night, but thanks to you and your play we lost two days and finally did the journey on the Sunday.’

‘And it rained. I remember that.’

‘Did it rain! Every day. The whole holiday was a washout. We didn’t even get much sleep through that cow making pathetic sounds all night because the farmer had separated it from its calf.’

‘That’s coming back to me now.’

‘And to cap it all, on the day of my birthday for a treat they took us to the Arcadia theatre at Llandudno to see a variety show and that was when you came over all peculiar and absolutely refused to stay in there. The show hadn’t even started. You were fighting with Dad to get out. We had to leave. Oh yes, that was a birthday to remember.’

‘I wasn’t allowed to forget it,’ he said. ‘I can only think something upsetting must have happened in the play the weekend before, but I can’t work out what. I remember it as a bit of a laugh. There were two of us. I wish I could recall the other boy’s name. What age would I have been at the time?’

‘Easy. It was my eleventh birthday, so you were eight.’

‘I wonder if the actor playing the king scared me. They were only amateurs.’

‘You wouldn’t know this, Pete, not having had kids of your own,’ she said, ‘but young boys of that age don’t show their fears. They have this shell of bravado or just plain cheek, but under it are all sorts of insecurities.’

She’d touched a raw nerve, speaking of parenthood. ‘It doesn’t take a parent to know that,’ he said. ‘I was a boy myself.’

‘Why have you called me then, if you know it all?’

‘Calm down, big sister.’

‘I must admit it still irks me,’ Jean said. ‘Llandudno wasn’t the only place it happened.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘
Julius Caesar
at the Old Vic when I was fifteen. I was in real trouble for ducking out of that.’

‘And some other shows we might have gone to as a family. It’s a shame, but there’s no point now in making an issue of it.’

Even so, he’d heard the resentment coming down the phone. ‘We did get to one Christmas show.’

‘
Treasure Island
at the Mermaid Theatre with Bernard Miles as Long John Silver,’ Jean said at once.

‘Your memory is phenomenal.’

‘It was a rare treat. How did you get up the courage for that?’

‘The theatre hadn’t long been opened and we were taken on a tour as part of a school trip, so I knew what to expect, I suppose.’

‘We all wondered if you’d make a dash for the exit, but you were fine.’

‘I enjoyed it.’

‘You see? It’s all in the mind.’

He didn’t need telling. ‘You’ve been helpful.’

‘Ring me again if you ever get to the bottom of this,’ she said. ‘I’m rather curious.’

Rather curious? It’s not a crossword clue, he thought.

The call to Jean had stirred some memories, but it made no difference to the mounting tension as he walked from his car to the theatre that evening. The only consolation was that he and Ingeborg were going backstage and not into the auditorium. A notice on the stage door said
Autographs Wait Here Please
and he would have been happy to do so… indefinitely. He swallowed hard and followed his assistant up the steps. The security man, Charlie Binns, gave Ingeborg’s warrant card a longer look than Diamond’s, and passed no comment. The eyes registered much, however, not least that he wouldn’t, after all, be gracing the
Independent
colour section this week or in the foreseeable future.

Inge went first, moving confidently past the theatre notices, down more steps and across the fly floor, the area behind the scenery. Diamond, tense, but trying to appear as comfortable as she was, glanced upwards to make sure the body had been removed from the catwalk, and it had. On the prompt side, they stood in the shadows. The pre-show activity, crew members in black criss-crossing on various duties, brought home to him how many anonymous helpers were involved in the play, apart from the actors. He’d thought there would be a closed circle of suspects backstage. Quite some circle.

Above them in a precarious cubbyhole reached only by ladder, the deputy stage manager was directing operations from a console. They heard him call the five minutes and then overture and beginners. Preston Barnes, the actor playing Isherwood, appeared from behind them and walked straight on stage, his eyes expressionless as if all his thoughts were turned inwards.

‘He’s there when the curtain goes up,’ Ingeborg said in a low voice to Diamond. ‘Now watch.’

They edged forward for a view of the stage. Barnes had seated himself at the table downstage. And of crucial importance to the investigation, a young woman moved in to dust his face with a make-up brush.

‘Who is she?’ Diamond whispered.

‘Belinda. Straight out of drama school, I expect. This is how they get experience. This way now.’ Ingeborg tugged at his sleeve.

‘No. We must question her.’

‘Shortly. Trust me, guv.’ She steered him away and right around the back of the set to the OP side. Everything was dimly lit, even the stage.

‘If you don’t mind,’ someone said in a stage whisper that was more of an angry hiss. A large woman in a pinafore, black dress and carpet slippers wanted to pass them. She was carrying a lace tablecloth.

‘Fräulein Schneider,’ Ingeborg muttered to Diamond after they’d stepped aside.

‘Big star?’

‘Just big.’

The make-up girl came off the stage and checked Schneider with a mere two flicks of the brush – as if to confirm that she was a minor player. Diamond noticed that the powder came in a black cylindrical box.

Some accordion music was playing. ‘And curtain up,’ a low voice said through the tannoy.

The mechanism whirred and the curtains parted and the stage came alight. For a moment no words were spoken. Preston Barnes as Christopher Isherwood was in the spotlight at the desk, writing.

Rather than looking at the stage, Diamond had been watching the young make-up artist. He didn’t want her to vanish as suddenly as she’d arrived. Helpfully, two more actors, a man and a woman, both young, were ready to go on. She was attending to one of them with more than the token flicks of the brush.

‘Gisella,’ Ingeborg murmured. ‘Overnight star.’

His first sight of the understudy, the fledging actress with a clear motive for ousting Clarion. Similar in figure, she was prettier, he thought, and didn’t look at all nervous. She’d been given generous reviews, the first big break of her career. How much would an ambitious young actor dare to do for stardom?

Barnes spoke his first lines, reading back the words his character was supposed to have written, about Nazis rioting in the streets of Berlin. This opening speech gave some background on Isherwood’s attempt to scrape a living as a writer. He moved seamlessly into the ‘I am a camera’ line and was only interrupted by Fräulein Schneider’s knocking on the double doors.

‘Come in, Fräulein,’ Barnes said, and the big woman entered and started tidying in preparation for Sally Bowles and getting a few guarded laughs from the audience as she spoke of her own love life and how sad it was that her bosom only grew large after the death of her partner, ‘a man for bosoms’.

Diamond continued to watch Gisella in the wings. She was in a black silk dress with a small cape over it and patent leather high heels and was carrying a handbag. A page boy cap at a jaunty angle completed the look. She turned her head and their eyes met and Diamond was the first to look away. Under her gaze he felt reviled, like a Jew in Berlin in the thirties. Either she was in the role already or she wasn’t nice to know.

He had to remind himself that he’d come to see the girl with the make-up brush now attending to the young male actor playing Fritz. But a problem was emerging. If each of the actors was given the last-minute touch-up from the same powder box, there was an obvious flaw in his theory.

He was still brooding over this when sound effects rang a doorbell. The make-up girl stepped back and the actor playing Fritz approached the doors.

From the wings, the flurry of action on the brilliantly lit stage was compelling. The business of the door being opened by Preston Barnes, Fritz entering with hat and cane and Fräulein Schneider coming out with an empty beer bottle, glass and plate, all within touching distance, absorbed Diamond. When he looked away, the make-up girl had gone.

‘Where’d she go?’ he asked Ingeborg.

She, too, had been dazzled by all the action. ‘I’m not sure. Up the stairs, I think.’

‘That’s a guess, isn’t it?’

She nodded, biting her lip. ‘Trust me,’ she’d said earlier. A mistake.

‘You go up. I’ll try round the back.’ The urgency of getting this right pushed his own disquiet out of court. He swung right, straight into an avalanche of hot flesh: Fräulein Schneider’s enfolding bosom.

‘Do you mind?’ she said.

‘I didn’t see you.’

‘A likely story.’

An angry ‘Ssshhh’ came from behind them. Diamond backed off, jigged left and moved as fast as he could across the fly floor towards the prompt side. In the near darkness at the back of the scenery he thought he spotted the pale gleam of the young woman’s face on the far side, turning right. A shout might have halted her. It might also have halted the play. In his haste to follow, he tripped on a cable and just avoided falling face down. As it was, he staggered two or three steps to save his balance and somehow remained on his feet.

On the other side, eyes down for a whole obstacle course of cables, he saw nobody like the make-up girl and he now had a choice of routes. The dressing rooms seemed the better way. He dodged past some waiting stagehands and away from the wings. No one was in the narrow passageway ahead. She must really have shifted to be out of sight already, unless she was still over the other side where Ingeborg was searching.

A man wired up with headset and mike appeared from the number two dressing room. Diamond asked if Belinda had come this way.

‘Who’s that?’

‘The make-up girl. Small, dark hair. She was in the wings just now with a face brush checking the actors.’

‘Why don’t you ask in wardrobe?’

Good suggestion – if he could find it. Wardrobe was part of the undercroft suite, along with the band rooms and the company office. Earlier, when he’d interviewed Kate, he’d got there by another route.

The headset man pointed the way.

Simple.

Downstairs, around a couple of turnings, he recognised the door and opened it. Kate was at the far end grappling with what he took to be one of her tailor’s dummies until he spotted that her dress was pulled up to her waist and the dummy had a head of curly black hair with a bald spot and was the back view of Hedley Shearman without trousers humping her against a wall as if there was no tomorrow.

With his police training, Diamond first thought rape was being committed and it was his duty to intervene. Just in time, he registered that Kate was shouting, ‘Yes!’ with every thrust.

Belinda wasn’t in the room. In the circumstances it would have been odd if she were.

He left them to it, too involved to have noticed him, and closed the door.

Where now? After that distracting spectacle, he needed to refocus on the search for Belinda. His ignorance of the layout backstage was a huge handicap. He took the steps up to stage level intending to look into the main dressing rooms. Before he got there the phone in his pocket vibrated. He put it to his ear. ‘Found her?’

Ingeborg’s voice told him, ‘Yes, guv. First floor, dressing room ten. Can you get here?’

‘Try and stop me.’

He knew his way to the OP side and there he asked one of the crew. The nearest stairs were pointed out.

‘Dressing room ten. Is it somewhere nearby?’

‘You can’t miss it.’ The promise that guarantees the opposite.

In fact there was only one dressing room and Ingeborg must have heard his heavy tread.

‘Guv?’

He found her standing beside the make-up girl, who looked about sixteen and terrified. Short, and slightly built, with dark, cropped hair, in a black T-shirt and form-fitting trousers, she was still holding the brush and box.

‘Exactly who are you?’ he asked.

‘Belinda Craigie. I work here.’

‘What’s in the box?’

‘Talc.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘Positive.’

‘Hand it across.’

‘But I need it for later.’

He opened the box and sniffed. Tentatively he touched the powder with his little finger. There was no reaction. He wetted another finger and made a light contact. Nothing happened. ‘Where did you get this, Belinda?’

‘The wardrobe department. It’s a fresh box, opened this afternoon. I took the wrapper off myself.’

‘So you know why I’m asking?’

‘Clarion Calhoun?’ Alarm showed in her eyes. ‘I had nothing to do with that.’

‘Is it your job to touch up the actors’ make-up before they go on?’

‘One of my jobs. I help out in the box office and take phone calls. ’

‘And were you here Monday evening?’

She nodded.

‘Checking the actors’ faces?’

‘Not all of them. Only those who needed it.’

‘Clarion?’

A vigorous shake of the head. ‘Her dresser looked after her. Denise.’

‘Are you certain of that?’

‘Hundred per cent. I watched her.’

‘Denise putting powder on Clarion’s face while she was waiting in the wings?’ This was dynamite if it was true.

‘Yes.’

‘Was she using the same stuff as you?’

‘I don’t know. She had her own powder box.’

‘From the wardrobe department, like yours?’