Stagestruck (32 page)

‘He said the so-called classic signs were absent.’

‘Great. So how does he know she was suffocated?’

‘He found pressure marks at the base of her neck.’

‘She was
strangled
? I saw no marks.’

‘Will you let me explain, guv? This wasn’t a strangling. These marks were here.’ He tapped his own shoulders where the collar of his T-shirt met his neck. ‘About here, on each side, where the killer pressed into the flesh with thumbs and knuckles. You wouldn’t have seen because of that hooded jacket she was wearing. The pressure was through her clothes.’

‘To obstruct the arteries?’

Halliwell shook his head. ‘You’re getting ahead of me again. Dr Sealy said in his opinion she was suffocated with a plastic bag pulled down over her head and held there until she stopped struggling, which happened rapidly.’

There was an interval of silence while the method registered with Diamond. ‘An ordinary plastic bag?’

‘Except most carrier bags have little holes punched into them.’

‘Right. This one was airtight?’

‘She was already seated,’ Halliwell went on, ‘so the killer would have entered the box from behind and slipped the bag over her head.’

‘Simple as that?’

‘Not quite. You and I might think she died from lack of oxygen, but sometimes a neurochemical reaction kicks in and the death is from cardiac arrest. He said in cases like that, the skin turns pale rather than congested and there aren’t any of the signs you’d normally expect in asphyxia.’

‘As I noted at the scene,’ Diamond said with more than a hint of self-congratulation.

‘It was a quick death, apparently, and the panic in the victim very likely contributed to the speed of it.’

Diamond exhaled sharply. ‘Nasty.’

‘And it didn’t require much strength.’

‘Surely she’d have grabbed at the bag and tried to pull it off.’

‘Very likely, but the force downwards is stronger than her trying to get a grip and push it up. By grabbing the bag she was tightening the pressure against her nose and mouth. And she wouldn’t have been heard. She was out of sight of the audience, anyway.’

‘She may have scratched her attacker.’

‘I wouldn’t mind betting he – or she – wore gloves.’

Halliwell had sketched the scene vividly enough for Diamond to visualise how the killing may have worked, and it was gruesome in its efficiency. ‘And there’s no other way to read these marks?’

‘He said not. The bruising on the shoulders was definitely man-made, recent and prior to death.’

‘We didn’t find a bag at the scene.’

‘Well, the killer wouldn’t have left it there.’

He had to agree. ‘You’re right, Keith. This wasn’t the work of someone careless.’

‘Will you tell the press?’

A difficult question. It had crossed Diamond’s mind already, without any prompting from Halliwell. The police are trained to be selective with information. Sometimes details known only to the killer are held back for tactical reasons. The news that Clarion Calhoun was dead would get banner headlines. To reveal that she’d been murdered in this manner would put the media machine into overdrive and make his task that much harder to perform. Yet if they weren’t told, they’d ferret out the truth in a matter of hours. He could see no advantage in playing the long game. ‘I’ll lay out all the main facts.’

It was agreed that Halliwell would brief the CID team shortly before Diamond broke the news to the press. ‘Tell them to put their private lives on hold. It’s overtime for everyone.’

He kept the press conference down to under twenty minutes. His stark opening statement made the strong impact he intended and gave the hacks their juicy quotes. The questions that followed were mostly reactive to the crime rather than targeted to the investigation. He dealt with them in short answers and came out feeling less battered than sometimes.

In the CID room he braced himself for a more searching examination. Everyone was there, buoyed up by Halliwell’s briefing. Even Georgina had come downstairs to listen.

‘It’s the most public murder enquiry we’ve ever had in this city,’ Diamond told them. ‘We must be razor sharp. Speaking of which, where’s John Leaman?’

A hand went up at the back of the room.

‘You’re in charge of the search of the theatre. The box where she was killed has been gone through by the crime scene people, but the rest of the building hasn’t. Comb the place for the murder weapon, the plastic bag. The killer may have dumped it in some bin thinking it wouldn’t be noticed. Take as many coppers with you as uniform can spare. If you see anyone acting suspiciously, report it to me. Inge?’

‘Guv?’

‘Go through all the statements we took in the theatre last night. Look at everyone’s movements, especially during the interval. We have three obvious suspects, Shearman, Melmot and Binns. Each of them knew ahead of time that she was coming to the play. See if what they said checks out.’

‘Right, guv.’

‘Then there’s a second tier of suspects, the actors. They had a view of the box.’

‘Not a good view,’ Leaman said.

‘Did I use the word good? They could tell it was occupied if they happened to look and, as I understand it, that box isn’t used much.’

‘The Schneider woman admitted she saw someone,’ Halliwell said.

‘A ghost,’ Paul Gilbert said.

‘Saw something, then. And at the start of the interval she was busy telling everybody about it, enough to alert anyone with half a brain that someone had been sitting there.’

‘She told Gisella for sure,’ Ingeborg said.

‘And Preston Barnes,’ Diamond said. ‘Find out how they spent the rest of their interval. Did they go to their dressing rooms and stay there? Were they alone?’

‘Fräulein Schneider wasn’t,’ Halliwell said. ‘She had people with her trying to calm her down.’

‘Which people?’

‘Stagehands, she told me.’

‘We can’t ignore any of the crew,’ Ingeborg said. ‘They could have heard Fräulein Schneider panicking about the grey lady.’

‘The wardrobe woman,’ Halliwell said.

‘Not to forget the dramaturge,’ Fred Dawkins added. ‘He was with Schneider towards the end of the interval.’

‘Did you take his statement last night?’ Leaman asked.

‘No. I was Earping.’

‘What?’

‘Marshalling,’ Diamond said, not wanting a bout of wordplay at this stage. ‘Fred was making sure everyone got seen. Who was it who took Titus O’Driscoll’s statement?’

Halliwell raised his hand. ‘He told me the news of the grey lady’s appearance reached him in the Garrick’s Head and he went backstage for a first-hand account.’

‘Do you see what we’re up against?’ Leaman demanded, his hellfire preacher voice soaring. ‘The entire theatre was in on this. Some of the audience always step outside at the interval for a drag on a cigarette, so it was known on the streets as well. Any nutter could have gone up to the box and killed her.’

‘Get wise, John,’ Ingeborg said. ‘They didn’t know Clarion was in the building. Only three people knew that.’

‘And those three are firmly in the frame,’ Diamond said to get on track again. ‘We may be close to an arrest. I’m assigning Keith, Inge and Fred to getting the fullest possible profiles of our three main suspects – everything about them, their past, present and, above all, any link, however remote, to Clarion. And you don’t have to be too subtle about it. They know they’re under scrutiny.’

Fred Dawkins had heard his name and looked as if he’d won the lottery. ‘Which one is mine?’

‘That’s up to Keith.’

‘You can take Binns,’ Halliwell said at once.

‘I shall take him and dismantle him. No portion will go unexamined.’

‘Sounds painful.’

‘Not for me. I’m a fully fledged member of the team now.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Diamond said. ‘Let’s see how you cope.’

Then Georgina spoke. ‘Please bear in mind, Peter, that Sergeant Dawkins has a rehearsal tonight.’

He jerked back in disbelief. ‘Rehearsal? For what?’

‘
Sweeney Todd
. We’re doing a walk-through of the moves in the rehearsal rooms, the entire cast. As our choreographer, he’s indispensable.’

‘He’s on the strength, ma’am. We’re flat out on this murder enquiry.’

‘I appreciate that. I’ll speak to you presently.’

He felt his blood pressure rocket. He could protest, knowing he had right on his side, but it would get him nowhere. He hadn’t asked for Dawkins in the first place. The man was a pain, anyway. Let him do his bloody walk-through – walk through the door and out of CID for good.

With a huge effort, he controlled himself. ‘Let’s not lose sight of the other unexplained death at the theatre. There’s compelling evidence that Denise was not alone in the minutes before she fell to her death from the fly tower. I can’t at this moment see a definite link, but two violent deaths in two days make a double murder more likely than not.’

‘
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc
,’ a voice spoke up. It was Fred Dawkins.

‘Did you say something?’ Diamond asked, feeling a stronger throb in his veins.

‘Merely a warning to the unwary, guv,’ Dawkins said. ‘It’s Latin.’

‘What’s the use of that? We’re English.’

‘A rough translation would be: after this, therefore because of this. It articulates the fallacy that because one event follows another, it must be caused by the other. If, for example, a man eats some oysters and then gets indigestion, it may not be the oysters that were responsible. It may have been the rhubarb that he had as the dessert.’

‘I don’t what you’re on about.’

‘Perhaps it wasn’t a perfect analogy.’

‘Better shut up, then.’

‘I was trying to inject a note of caution about assuming a link between the deaths of Denise and Clarion.’

‘We heard,’ Diamond said and went back to addressing the meeting. ‘I was starting to say that the investigation into Denise’s death won’t be pushed into the background just because Clarion was a star performer. It’s still high priority. The so-called suicide note has gone for analysis and we should find out if it was genuine. From what we now know about Clarion’s self-harming, it appears Denise wasn’t responsible for the scarring, so she had no reason to blame herself.’

‘A double murder looks likely,’ Halliwell said. ‘Stuff the Latin.’

‘One more thing,’ Diamond said. ‘With all the media interest, we’re all of us liable to be approached by the press, by Clarion’s army of fans and every kind of snoop. Keep it buttoned, okay?’

The briefing over, he followed Georgina from the room and tapped her arm. ‘About Sergeant Dawkins…’

‘I hope you’re not going to make an issue of this, Peter.’

‘Either he’s on the squad or he isn’t.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ she conceded. ‘I spoke out of turn. It’s obvious that you’re fully stretched. But if you can see your way to releasing him for a couple of hours tonight I’ll make it up to you in human resources. We have some bright young bobbies in uniform keen to get CID experience.’

‘I’ll take Dawn Reed and George Pidgeon,’ he said at once.

Georgina looked surprised that he knew any names outside his own little empire. ‘Agreed.’ She moved at speed towards the stairs to her eyrie. She hated being outmanoeuvred.

I Am a Camera
was forced to end its run prematurely. The theatre would be dark for the next two nights. Even Hedley Shearman admitted that to have carried on would be insensitive. The actors and crew were asked not to leave Bath, to be available for more questioning if required.

Alone in his office, Diamond studied printouts of the statements made by theatre staff on the morning after Clarion’s face was damaged. Thanks to PC Reed’s speed writing and Fred Dawkins’ faultless typing, they were lucid accounts, but they didn’t yield anything new. Both Shearman and Denise had acted responsibly after the incident, losing no time in getting Clarion to hospital. As for their backgrounds, there was nothing on Shearman and not much on Denise. No doubt Fred Dawkins had done most of the talking. All he’d learned from Denise was that she had been with the theatre six years. More information about previous jobs had come later from Kate in wardrobe, a secondary source, not so dependable. A proper check was a high priority, and best left to Halliwell and his team. More would definitely emerge.

In the calm at the eye of the storm, Diamond’s thoughts returned to his own early life and what lurked there. He’d heard nothing back from any of the police authorities he’d contacted about Flakey White.

He knew the resources existed online to make an identity check. Still uncomfortable using the computer, he knuckled down and found how to search the death registers for White’s unusual set of names. Nothing came of it.

If alive, the man would be in his seventies. Was he known in cyberspace?

When he Googled the full name, it gave several hundred so-called ‘hits’ that he could tell straight away were nothing to do with Flakey. The entire resources of the internet were no help.

Disappointed, his prejudice against computers justified, he sat back and tried thinking of another way of tracing an ex-teacher with a prison record.

Then he remembered something Mike Glazebrook had said. It had barely sunk in at the time, such had been the shock of hearing about White’s court case.

He reached for the phone. Talking to a real person beat staring at a screen.

‘Mike? Peter Diamond here.’

‘Peter who?’

‘Your old schoolmate. The princes in the tower.’

‘I’m with you now.’

‘When we met and talked about Flakey White, you said something about him surfacing again as a book illustrator.’

There was a pause. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Actually, I do.’

‘Why? He’s a scumbag. Don’t have anything to do with him.’

He stretched the truth. ‘It’s a police enquiry.’

‘Is he still at it, then?’

‘We don’t know until we catch up with him.’

Glazebrook clicked his tongue and gave a snort that could be heard in John O’Groats. ‘Couple of years ago I saw something in a magazine in my barber’s, a feature about illustrators.

There were photos of these guys at work in their studios and one of them was called Mo White. It was definitely Flakey. He was white-haired and wore glasses, but the face hadn’t changed much, the beaky nose and the foxy eyes.’