7

Before she left the Tavistock building, Hattie popped into the pub. It was now late afternoon on the Monday, and the place was quiet, but not deserted. Behind the bar was a short, shaven-headed girl who looked about twelve.

‘Excuse me,’ asked Hattie, ‘Were you working here last night?’

The girl wrinkled her nose and grimaced apologetically.

‘Er, no. Sorry. I was here Saturday, if that helps?’

‘No, sorry, it’s the Sunday I’m interested in. I wonder if you could help me, then: I’d really like to speak to whoever was here.’

‘Um…’ replied the girl, uncertainly. ‘What for?’

‘Oh it’s nothing, it’s just… I’m working in the theatre, and there were just some comings and goings yesterday. I’m trying to work out who was around. For… compliance,’ Hattie offered, knowing that people would normally accept all manner of weird questions if you made them sound bureaucratic enough. ‘Do you happen to know who was behind the bar? I just want to ask them if they saw anyone going through that door into the auditorium last night. Some point between about half six and nine.’

‘Oh, goodness, OK,’ said the girl, still looking confused. ‘I can check with my manager when he’s back… he’ll know the rota. But I’m not sure I can, you know, give you their details. I think that might be… um, a privacy thing…’

‘Not to worry,’ replied Hattie. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble. But maybe if you could find out who was in, and then ask them to call me? My name’s Hattie, and I’m a stage manager for a show at the theatre.’

Hattie reached into her handbag and retrieved a pen and a Post-it note (a complete stationery set being the sort of thing that no self-respecting SM would leave home without, even when they weren’t working), and wrote down her details. She handed them to the girl, who took them slightly gingerly.

‘Thank you so much. What did you say your name was?’

‘Er… Rosie…’

‘Nice to meet you, Rosie. I’ll be popping in and out quite a bit over the next few weeks, so I expect I’ll see you again.’

Hattie said it cheerily, but the subtext she hoped to impart was, ‘So if you “forget” to pass on the message then you will have to look me in the eye and tell me about it later.’

Then she gave a friendly wave and took her leave.

She was overdue a check-in with Davina anyway, so she rang her as she walked towards the tube.

‘Hi, Hattie.’

‘Hello, my love. How are you?’

‘I’m… I’m fine,’ said Davina, not particularly convincingly. ‘Still tracking down “coloured orbs”. Hashi didn’t like any of the ones I found last week. Apparently they don’t look ethereal enough. I tried to explain that the way they look in a photo of an online shop isn’t what they’ll look like under stage lights, but he’s convinced we can find something a bit more “formless”.’

‘Oh dear. Well, I’m sure you’ll find something.’

Hattie knew she really ought to tell Davina about Atlanta, but she knew that that was likely to send her into a total tailspin, and she needed to do a little bit of detective work first. How to go about this?

‘So… how was your weekend?’

‘It was fine. Um. Pretty quiet.’

‘I thought I saw you on the tube yesterday evening.’

‘R-Really? Where?’

Was there a note of alarm in her voice? Hattie took a punt.

‘King’s Cross. At about seven, eight-ish.’

‘Oh, then no, it can’t have been me.’

‘Oh no? What were you up to?’ Hattie desperately hoped the question didn’t seem too contrived.

‘I was at the theatre. It’s Action To The Word’s new thing, at the Menier. A sort of musical version of Titus Andronicus, although that makes it sound a bit camp, which it really wasn’t. It was more like a play crossed with a heavy metal concert.’

‘Oh yes? Good, was it?’

‘Really good. I’m so glad they did a Sunday show, otherwise I wouldn’t have got to see it. Vix and I are basically Action To The Word groupies, we go to see everything they do.’

‘So you went with Vix, then?’

‘Yup. Why?’

‘Er… just making conversation,’ said Hattie, awkwardly. Vix was another ACDA grad, whom Hattie had interacted with a little bit during the previous term. An eminently sensible young woman, Hattie remembered.

‘So it wasn’t you I saw at Kings Cross.’

‘No, the show started at seven. I was out and about at other points in the weekend though? Just running errands.’

The Menier theatre was far too far south and east. Unless this was the shortest production of Titus Andronicus on record, there’d be no way Davina could have made it up to the Tavistock before or after the performance.

Good. Well, that was one name she could cross off her list immediately.

‘Fair enough. Well, sorry I haven’t been in the office today. Um, I’m afraid I’ve got some rather sad news…’

Davina, of course, was immediately in floods of tears, and Hattie found herself struggling to offer any real consolation over the phone. To her knowledge, Davina and Atlanta had met precisely once, at the read-through, and besides a conversation about camomile tea they had had no interactions whatever. Hattie reminded herself to be charitable, though: death is an upsetting topic for many people, and no matter how little contact they’d had, Davina and Atlanta had been on the same team, which mattered.

Eventually Davina seemed in a stable enough state that she could be trusted to take herself home, at which point Hattie hung up and did the same herself. She got back a little after six, by which point rehearsals would have just finished in St Eustace’s, and Kiki would be tidying up the room. She gave her a call.

‘I may kill him,’ growled Kiki, in place of a more traditional greeting.

‘Oh dear. What happened?’

‘He’s changed his mind about the concept. Thanks to the news about Atlanta he claims to have had a “conceptual breakthrough”. Apparently all this stuff with levels representing social status is too literal, so he’s ditching the blocks entirely, and now he wants to use colour of lighting to depict social status, how loud the background soundscape is to represent emotional intensity, and the actors’ blocking onstage is all about geometrical shapes that they create with their bodies – he keeps calling it “biomechanical”, by the way – so even though we haven’t even looked at the second half yet, we’re going back to the beginning and starting again, but he’s still not prepared to consider the actual shape and size of the actual stage, because apparently that’s just a “minor practicality”’ – she paused to draw a deep breath then continued – ‘which means I’m supposed to keep track of which colour each actor is supposed to be in each scene, and pass that on to Carrie, but she can’t use that information because she doesn’t know where the actors are, so she doesn’t know where to point the lights, and it’s… it’s just not how it’s supposed to be done!’ she finished with a wail.

‘Maybe this is just his way of dealing with the news?’ suggested Hattie placatingly.

Kiki grunted noncommittally.

‘Or maybe,’ Hattie tried again, ‘this is more of a case of common or garden director panic. He’s tried to throw himself into a new style of directing, he’s realised he’s not sure how to do it, and that means he’s second-guessing every decision he takes, and undoing it. He wouldn’t be the first. It’s just that normally directors get slightly further along before the panic sets in. But maybe that means he’s getting it out of the way early?’ she finished, hopefully.

‘He just doesn’t seem to understand how much he’s buggering up our jobs by not committing to any of this stuff. Poor Miguel just sits in the room all day, being asked every five minutes for a different sound effect, and Hashi never makes a final decision about what he wants. At best he just says, “That’ll do for now, we’ll come back and figure it out later.” But I don’t know when this magical “later” is supposed to be. Every day I have to produce the most wildly unprofessional rehearsal notes I’ve ever seen, with really vague, nebulous requirements for props and costume, and most of them contradict what I said the day before. I just… I hate this!’

Kiki, normally so reliably stoical, sounded remarkably close to tears.

‘It’s OK, my love. It’s OK,’ soothed Hattie. ‘Of course you hate it. You want to do a good job. You want things to be neat and tidy and disciplined. But you know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’

Kiki sighed. ‘Yes, but say it anyway, I need to hear it.’

‘All right: our job isn’t to produce neat and tidy notes, or make sure the plan never changes, or even ensure that it’s a good piece of theatre that gets put on at the end. Our job is to support the director in bringing his vision to life, and ultimately that means doing what we’re told. If he wants to do things in a ridiculous, unproductive way, then so long as you make clear, when necessary, the repercussions of his choices, then you’re doing the right thing by going along with them. Everyone in the company has a good sense of what that rehearsal room’s like, and no one’s blaming you that the notes coming out of it are a little… chaotic. You’re doing a great job. Honestly.’

‘Thanks, Hattie,’ said Kiki, warmly. ‘All right. I won’t kill him. Yet. And maybe… maybe this is me just getting overly emotional about it all because of… you know. The news.’

‘That’s completely understandable,’ replied Hattie, and then, because she had a job to do, she continued: ‘Now, changing the topic entirely, how was your weekend?’

‘Not too bad. Just had a quiet one with Miranda. Walked the dog. Watched some telly. Tried to have a proper date night last night. We cooked a fancy meal and all. But I think I ruined it by venting about work all evening.’

Hattie made sympathetic noises, while mentally crossing Kiki off her list.

Over the rest of the evening and the following morning Hattie rang round the remainder of the team for a casual check-in, to let them know and/or see how they were feeling about the news about Atlanta. In each case, feeling slightly ashamed as she did so, she used that as pretext to make only slightly unsubtle enquiries about everyone’s weekends. When she needed to press for specifics, she used her line about thinking she’d seen them on the tube on Sunday evening.

Everyone had a story, but not all of them were very convincing. Laura, who had seemed most angry about the payment situation, had arguably the most solid alibi: she had been at a barbecue with a group of friends that included Carrie. Carrie herself confirmed this, but was far more keen to talk about Atlanta than anything else:

‘I just… I feel awful. Because I didn’t like her. I mean, more than that, there were times when I literally wished her dead. Isn’t that terrible? Now she is dead, I just feel incredibly guilty. Like I wronged her, and now I have no way of putting it right. It’s doing my head in.’

Hattie had little consolatory advice to offer, so told her that that was understandable and normal and that it would all be all right in the end, and hoped that would be enough.

Meanwhile, Raven had been at a small gallery opening by a curator friend of hers, so was equally above suspicion. On the other side of things, Moira claimed to have been sorting out her studio by herself, Miguel was unforthcoming, and would only say he had been ‘working on some stuff’, while Steve cheerfully told Hattie to piss off and mind her own business, and she couldn’t get hold of Regine at all. So, for now, that left four theoretically viable suspects.

Hattie also made sure to let people know about Keith’s decision to bring forward payment, and gauged their reactions to the news. Everyone was pleased, but only Laura and Steve acted as though a great wrong had been righted. None of the iffy four gave the impression that they might have been so incensed about the whole thing that they’d consider stepping outside the law to take matters into their own hands.

Hattie considered the four suspects. They were an odd bunch: Steve did have a real temper. Miguel was, well, a bit strange, and did know quite a lot about lock-picking after all. She didn’t really know Moira, for all that her mobility issues made her an unlikely cat burglar. And Regine emanated ambition and determination, although whether and under what circumstances such determination could translate into larceny was anyone’s guess.

Keith, when Hattie reported back to him on the phone, was sounding much more assured and back to his usual self than he had the day before. Presumably the shock of it all had started to wear off. The tone of his dressing-down of Hattie was more disappointment than distress.

‘Well, ducky, you’ve not brought me very much, have you? You’ve barely ruled out half the crew, and have got nothing solid on anyone who’s left. Proof, that’s what we need. Like I said yesterday, it’s evidence that we’re after, otherwise we’ll never narrow it down. I need you to dig deeper.’

‘All right, Keith,’ replied Hattie, then added cautiously, ‘but you might recall that we agreed that the best way of de-escalating this whole situation would be for you pay everyone, and then I could make clear that there’d be a sort of amnesty if the mask was returned unharmed. And I can’t help but notice that my bank account is still empty…’

‘If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were using this whole situation just to squeeze more cash out of me,’ grumbled Keith.

‘Now that’s not fair, is it? I’m simply pointing out that if someone does have the mask in their clutches because they’re so angry with you, holding out on them isn’t going to help calm them down.’

‘I’m working on it. I’m just having to move some money around. Don’t worry, it’ll be done very, very soon.’

‘Well then. Once that’s done, I’ll see if I can drop a hint that returning the mask would put an end to the matter. OK?’

Keith grunted.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But I’m disappointed you haven’t been able to do more, to be honest. You’re a professional problem solver. And if the house has to shut down, and your show gets cancelled, that’s definitely your problem. So solve it. The clock is ticking.’

He hung up abruptly, and Hattie let out a little snort of frustration. Keith was a rude little man. Calling people ‘darling’ and ‘ducky’ didn’t much make up for constantly calling their competence into question. She wished she didn’t so desperately need him and his theatre.