The Opening Night Murder (23 page)

The men settled into seats, chatting among themselves. They appeared to be enjoying their outing, and Daniel—Suzanne decided it
was
him—did quite a bit of the talking himself. She peered at the others to see who they might be, but they were too far away and their hats made strong shade over their faces in the bright afternoon sunlight. Suzanne let it go and focused her attention on the stage below as performers entered from upstage.

That afternoon’s performance began with a short
commedia
play, the one involving the cuckolded husband. The mummers had today’s audience laughing well and quickly, and in a few minutes they left the stage with the entire audience of nearly four thousand people in a good mood. To Suzanne, this was the wonderful thing about the theatre: to have that many gathered together in one place and everyone having a good time. One could do that in a public house with alcohol, cards, and women, but a pub could host only a fraction of the souls a theatre could. A day at the theatre was like a party so enormous only the king might rival it as a host.

She looked across at Daniel and saw his smile flash. Yes, making people laugh could be a good way to live.

The play began, and Matthew lit up the stage as King Henry, young and eager to prove himself to the world as a ruler to be reckoned with. The audience was as caught up as she. They shouted advice to Henry, and in response Matthew invented bawdy asides in spite of the directive to keep to
Shakespeare’s own words. Suzanne supposed so long as the asides were not political or slanderous they might go unnoticed. In any case, she hoped nobody in the house tonight was likely to go running to the king, tattling.

Then the battle of Agincourt. The French king and his dukes in desperation. The murder of the boys in the luggage. The horror of that cowardly act. Suzanne was caught up in the story as if she hadn’t seen the play a dozen times before. Even as she gasped along with Henry and his dukes, she thought what a fine time she was having. For a moment she thanked William for leaving her and forcing her to find something so worthwhile to do with her life.

A scream lifted from the audience, and she thought how wonderfully involved everyone was. Then something thudded on the stage below like a sack of rags or flour. More screaming and confusion moved the audience, some surging forward and others falling back. Suzanne leaned over the banister for a better look, and saw a man lying on the stage, writhing and grasping at a crossbow bolt stuck in his neck. One brave boy ran forward to yank out the bolt, and a gout of blood poured over the stage. The pool spread quickly, and though two actors tried to stanch the flow with their hands, it was hopeless. The fallen man weakened and stopped struggling, finally going limp in the arms of those who tried to help him. The play had come to a halt.

Suzanne leapt to her feet and ran down the rear stairs to the stage. All the actors in the troupe were there, those not in the scene having emerged from the ’tiring house to see, gathered around the body, while those in the pit attempted to climb onto the stage for a look. The audience was abuzz, and some shouted advice to those on the stage as if it were all part of the performance. Suzanne shoved men aside and attempted
to take charge, but all she could manage was to enter the circle to see. There, she cried out in shock.

The dead man was William.

He lay on her stage in a pool of blood, killed by a crossbow. His ragged clothing was turning red, his shirt soaking up the draining blood. The red stain slowly crept along the white fabric, and more of it enlarged the pool on the stage boards as it ran downstage.

She said to the boy standing by with the crossbow bolt still in his hand, “Go fetch the constable. Tell him we’ve found William Wainwright, but the crown is unlikely to have much information from him.”

B
y the time the constable came the next morning, most of the nearly four thousand people who had witnessed the murder had gone home. Suzanne supposed there would be no information forthcoming from anyone in the audience who might have chanced to be looking up when William was shot. Certainly nobody was likely to step forward for questioning. In her experience the appointed authorities could never be trusted and had no respect for the rabble they monitored. Everyone in Southwark was raised to understand that too much involvement with those who had the power to arrest was never a good idea. So the audience had scattered, and none but the performers would ever admit to having been there that night.

Performers scattered as well. The mummer troupe had packed up and disappeared during the night, and the constable’s tardy appearance gave them plenty of lead in their flight. Only the Globe Players were on hand that morning,
readying for rehearsal, and there was much speculation about who of the nonresident actors would show up that day.

When he finally arrived to ask questions, Constable Samuel Pepper appeared as by magic, standing on the stage and staring down at the bloodstain. He was a short, rotund man, rocking back and forth heel-to-toe in absentminded habit. His breeches were too long for fashion and too short for warmth, and his leggings were tight at the calf and sagged at the ankle. They bunched into his shoes as if tucked there hastily to hide excess length. The faded brown velvet jacket had bare spots at elbow and collar, and he wore an old-fashioned plain black hat that had not been meant to be worn over the constable’s new wig and so was too small. It teetered atop the mass of gray hair and swayed with each rocking movement heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe.

The deceased was gone, William having been carried off to his wife for burial. There wasn’t much left to see here.

Nobody had noticed Pepper entering the theatre, though when Suzanne caught sight of him as she happened to be walking through the pit, she saw that the large front entrance doors were slightly ajar. She wondered whether the battering that bolt had taken from the soldiers had caused it to come loose, or if someone had let in the constable, then wandered away without telling anyone there were visitors. In any case, if the bolt was broken, she’d want Piers to attend to it.

Pepper, of course, was familiar to Suzanne from her days as a prostitute, when she and her friends had often had bad scrapes with the authorities over one thing and another. But she’d spent the past decade avoiding him and had been mostly successful during the years she’d been with William. He had never paid her much attention even then, and now she reckoned he was unlikely to remember her. She knew him as not
terribly trustworthy, and his laziness was legendary, evidenced by his late arrival to the scene of a murder.

“Good morrow, constable.” She shielded her eyes from the sun as she looked up at him on the stage.

He started as if he’d been unaware of her presence until that moment. “Oh. Hello. Mistress…?” He peered at her, with no light of recognition in his eyes, plainly expecting her to introduce herself. Good, he didn’t remember her.

She came to the side of the stage and climbed the steps. As she approached him she adjusted her silk jacket. “Suzanne Thornton. My son manages this establishment.”

He eyed her breeches. “Then your husband is…”

“A figment of the imagination, I’m afraid.” She’d never been apologetic for not having a husband, for apology never got her anywhere.

He nodded. “I see. Is your son about, then?”

“I’m afraid he is meeting with a business partner across the river.” Piers was at Whitehall, discussing the previous night’s excitement with Daniel. Suzanne had wanted to go with him, but stayed behind in compliance with Daniel’s decree she not show herself at the palace. Pepper’s visit suggested it had been a wise choice for her to stay, but she still wished to be with them in Daniel’s quarters.

Pepper turned to gaze down at the bloodstain again. “You were here last night, then?”

“I saw the entire thing.”

He heaved a sigh of satisfaction. “Ah, then, I expect my job here is finished and I can return to my office without delay. If you saw the whole thing, you might tell me who shot the bolt.” He said it with a smile, so she understood it was a joke, but underlying the joke was perhaps a wish she could have saved him a bit of trouble after all by revealing the culprit herself.

She didn’t think him very funny at all, but she chuckled just to make certain he understood the humor was nothing more than that and she had no idea who the murderer was. But then a puzzled look crossed his face and she realized he hadn’t been joking at all. He’d seriously thought she knew the name of the murderer and could tell him whom to arrest. He was too lazy to investigate. “Alas,” she said, “I never saw the bolt or where it came from. We were all attending to the players on the stage, you see, which of course is what one does during a play. I doubt anyone on the premises could tell where the murderer stood when he fired.”

“There were several on the stage with crossbows, I expect. The play was
Henry V
, yes? You staged a battle last night and the players were armed.”

“Some were. Four or five, I think; that’s how many crossbows we own. But nobody goes onstage with his weapon cocked. It’s far too dangerous; the trigger mechanism too easily could unlatch and send the bolt God knows where.”

“Which might have been the case last night. The weapons are all functional, yes?”

“Except that, as I said, we never allow them to be cocked. Nobody onstage had a cocked crossbow.”

“You’re certain of that?”

The despairing feeling grew that Pepper was looking for a quick solution to the crime so he could go home. If the thing were found to be an accident, there was no murderer to catch and no more work to be done on this case. William might have been a thoughtless lover and a dangerous madman, but surely even he didn’t deserve for his murderer to go free. She lowered her chin and gazed straight into his face. “Yes, I’m certain. Nobody wants to risk the accidental death of a fellow player, and besides, it takes great time and effort to cock
a crossbow; it never happens inadvertently. That’s why longbows, which are easily and quickly drawn, were so loved by Edward Longshanks, whose armies darkened the skies with arrows all over the kingdom. William surely was murdered, by someone who intentionally shot him with an intentionally cocked crossbow.”

Pepper threw her a cross look, then put a hand to his chin, thinking. Suzanne waited patiently for his next question, wondering which way he would leap in his logic. He said, “May I speak to the actors who carried bows onto the stage?”

“Certainly.” She looked upstage and saw several faces peeking from the doors there. “Matthew! Have the five who carried crossbows last night come for a chat with the constable.”

Matthew ducked away, and a moment later several others came forward from the doors, quickly enough that they must have all been listening from behind. Five men who had populated the stage the day before as soldiers in King Henry’s army at Agincourt made their way downstage toward Constable Pepper and Suzanne.

While four of them came on with a straightforward gaze at Constable Pepper, the one boy in the group, whose name was Christian, looked as if he wished he were anywhere but there. He hung back and had to be urged to join the others on the stage before the constable. His gaze never left the boards at his feet. Suzanne watched him, and wondered whether they’d found their culprit. She’d never seen anyone look so guilty. But why on earth would Christian have shot William? As far as she knew, Christian had never laid eyes on him.

Constable Pepper asked the actors as a group, “You each had a crossbow onstage?”

The four men nodded. Christian said nothing, and never
indicated he heard the question. Suzanne saw this, but also saw that Pepper didn’t seem to take note of him at all. As if his youth made him beneath notice. Pepper’s next question seemed to ignore the lad and he addressed the men. “Did any of you have any quarrel with William Wainwright?”

Christian, who had never met William, still said nothing, and Suzanne wondered why. Pepper didn’t appear to notice him. She fell silent, stepped back, and availed herself of the luxury of observing reactions to questions asked by another without being observed herself. The actors were alert to him and ignoring her, so she was able to see little behaviors that told the meaning beneath their words.

The men all shook their heads. They had no quarrel with the victim. One of them was Louis, who had helped restrain William the night of the intrusion, so at least one of them was lying. “No, sirrah,” said Louis. His hands were clenched into fists, though he let his arms dangle loose in an attitude he surely hoped appeared more insouciant than it was. His chin rose in defiance. Plainly he had something to hide, and Suzanne wondered whether it was only that he’d thrown William from the theatre, or if he’d had some other conflict with William he didn’t want known. Suzanne wanted to ask, but unfortunately his willingness to speak made him the specific target of the constable, who focused on him. She would have to ask later. “Tell me your name, young man.”

“Louis.”

“Your surname, Louis?”

“I’ve none.”