10

Thursday, 5 October 2023

Hattie had hoped that, following her prompt, Shane would speak to Davina that night. But either he didn’t talk to her, or the conversation didn’t go as planned, because the next morning Davina messaged Hattie to say just that she wouldn’t be coming in. Hattie replied, recommending that she take the rest of the week off, quietly cursing as she did so. Atlanta’s death hadn’t slowed down the pace of rehearsals. If anything, it had spurred them on to an ever more manic cadence, meaning Davina’s absence would be all the more sorely missed. For once, Hashi and Keith were in complete agreement on something: both wanted to side-step the time-consuming re-casting process. So when the energetic and ambitious Regine helpfully volunteered to step into the role, they both jumped at the offer. The fact that Regine was about thirty years younger than Atlanta and a completely different shape, size and temperament wasn’t a problem, apparently. To be fair, Atlanta had, to Hattie’s mind, been horribly miscast in the role in the first place. Jaquenetta was a fairly bland comedy wench, whose main purpose was as a plot device to give both the clown Costard and the foreign nobleman Don Armado someone to fall in love with. Atlanta, while eminently fall-in-love-with-able, was older than both the male actors combined, which, at best, played as a slightly uncomfortable joke where her age was the punchline. Despite her very different looks and unproven acting ability, having Regine in the role was, purely considering the quality of the overall production, probably not a fundamentally bad thing.

With Atlanta’s part thus re-cast, Hashi and Keith were keen to press on as if nothing had happened, and rehearsals continued much as they had before.

Hattie dropped into St Eustace’s on Thursday before the start of the morning’s session to catch up with Kiki, and the first thing she noticed was a gaggle of actors sitting in a clump on the floor, chatting away, furiously excited.

‘… jealous lover? I mean, she didn’t exactly… you know…’

‘But I mean, come on, wasn’t she a bit past all that? I know she had stories, but they were all from years ago.’

‘It just seems a bit… unbelievable to me.’

‘Well, yes, I know what you mean, but affairs of the heart are the most common motive, aren’t they?’ said Bums excitedly.

‘I thought it was family disputes…’

‘… pretty sure it’s money.’

‘Guys, do we have to?’ pleaded Adam.

‘What?’ asked Bums, innocently.

‘I mean, come on. There’s people here,’ Adam responded.

Bums followed his gaze, saw Hattie, frowned, and then snorted.

‘Well I don’t think she cares,’ she said dismissively.

‘Cares about what, my love?’ asked Hattie, sweetly but with a soupçon of edge.

‘Atlanta,’ Bums replied. ‘The police are involved, they’ve been calling us all, there’s an inquest and everything. So… you know.’

‘Ye-es…?’

‘It’s murder. Right? I mean, they think it’s a murder,’ said Emile, uncertainly.

‘I really don’t think so,’ said Hattie. ‘They told me she died of pulmonary asphyxiation. That just means she choked. I think they’re just going through the motions while they wait for the post-mortem results. I really don’t think it’s that exciting.’

She said the words with more conviction that she felt, being very strongly of the opinion that even if there was a sinister aspect to this whole affair, it shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with the rehearsal process. If that made it her job to downplay the thing, then so be it. She was there to get the job done.

‘But they won’t say how she was asphyxiated. She could have been strangled, for all we know,’ insisted Bums. ‘And they found her in the theatre. There’s no reason she should have been there in the first place. You’ve got to admit, it’s pretty suspicious that she sneaked backstage and then wound up dead. They kept on asking me if I had any idea who she might have been meeting with there.’

‘They asked me the same thing!’ added another of the cast ladies, delightedly. ‘So it must be important.’

‘I don’t think it’s that surprising that they asked you all the same questions,’ countered Hattie, but the conversation was already flowing away from her.

‘Maybe she was shagging Keith!’ announced Bums, eliciting a few gasps and groans from her peers.

‘Seriously?’

‘Well, they did have a sort of chemistry, didn’t they?’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it but… I mean he’s very, very gay,’ said Emile.

‘Is he?’

‘Oh God yes. Trust me, he plays on our team.’

‘Maybe that was it then. Unrequited love. Classic.’

‘Wait… she had unrequited love for him? So… who killed her?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Keith’s boyfriend got jealous.’

‘Does Keith have a boyfriend?’

‘He seems like the kind of man to have several.’

The door slammed suddenly, and Hattie realised Adam was no longer with the group. Perhaps he had walked out in protest at the crude and increasingly ghoulish turn the conversation was taking. Hattie couldn’t blame him. She opened her mouth to encourage the cast towards a little more respect for the dead, but was interrupted by Hashi, who at that moment emerged performatively from the kitchen, prompting all the actors to jump to their feet.

‘My warrior-poets! Time for another day’s battle…’

Hashi was back in full creative flow, and as a result his requests for props were getting increasingly frequent and outlandish, and really required the attention of a full-time ASM. So, in Davina’s absence, for the rest of the morning Hattie buried herself in propping, trying to source, among other things, a bag of golf clubs, a large metal bin – large enough for Dull to hide in, with a lid and strong enough handles to allow two cast members to carry it while it was occupied – and three large two-handed water pistols, all on a budget of slightly under a hundred pounds. It was all doable, but it required pulling in a lot of favours, sweet-talking some strangers, and a little bit of creative research, which, put together, meant for a busy morning.

She was made for a busy morning. It was only at lunchtime that she checked her phone and saw a message from Keith:

Everyone paid. Get cracking. Start with Steve and Moira. Remember what’s at stake. Tick tock. xx

Typical Keith, she thought. Rude and demanding, with a couple of kisses thrown in at the end as if that cancelled it out. What a distasteful little man. But still, he’d given her a job to do. She reached for her handbag.

She found Steve working in a small glass-and-steel corner office, at the end of a glass-and-steel corridor, on the fifth floor of a glass-and-steel building, tucked out of the way in Holborn. It was quiet, bright, and soulless. Safe to say this was not the natural habitat of a theatre technician.

‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ said Steve coolly. Then his face cracked into a small but warm smile.

‘Well, this is swish,’ remarked Hattie. ‘What on earth are you doing in a place like this?’

‘I know a guy who owed me a favour,’ Steve replied cryptically. ‘Needed somewhere to work from.’

Hattie realised she hadn’t seen a single other person on this floor of the building. Steve’s office was almost entirely empty, apart from his chair and desk, which had on it a battered old laptop and a small pile of paperwork, including a set of technical drawings of the Tavistock auditorium.

‘I thought you were going to be based in the office up at the Tavistock.’

‘Tried it. Not my scene,’ Steve responded, with a slight wrinkle of the nose.

‘Didn’t like the mess?’

‘That too.’

‘Hmm. Speaking of, have you checked your bank account? Keith’s finally delivered the goods.’

Steve just grunted.

Hattie considered her next words carefully. Steve gave little away at the best of times. There wasn’t an easy way of saying what she’d come here to say.

‘Pissed you off, didn’t it? The whole pay thing,’ she tried as an opener.

‘It’s just unprofessional. If you’re producing a show your number one responsibility is to pay people on time. And then the bastard asked me to smooth it out with the crew, rather than take responsibility himself. I don’t like weasels.’

‘Especially given that we know he’s not short of money,’ Hattie suggested. ‘I mean, that mask…’

She left the suggestion dangling, and watched Steve’s reaction carefully. But his face remained characteristically inscrutable.

‘I hope that thing is worth as much as he makes out,’ he replied. ‘Because I don’t think he’s got much else. Tavistock was always a money pit. Keith would have driven it into the ground years ago if Joan and her pals hadn’t kept bailing it out.’

‘How did you know about the mask, anyway? I thought it was a secret.’

Steve snorted.

‘Some secret. Every time I was over at the theatre in pre-production Keith was on the phone to someone or other, always banging on about the mask. He seems to think it’s the holy grail.’

‘Well,’ replied Hattie carefully, ‘let’s hope he can hold on to it then. I’m sure it would be better for everyone if the Tavistock’s future wasn’t jeopardised right before we’re supposed to open a show there. I think the outcomes wouldn’t be great, for any of us, if Keith was put in a position where he felt he had to cancel the production.’

Steve scratched the side of his nose.

‘Nah. If anything were to happen to it I don’t think you’d have to look far to find the person to blame. Not far at all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I know a crook when I see one, and Keith’s a crook. He’s up to no good in that office. I don’t know what precisely, but I can’t abide it.’

The vehemence in Steve’s tone caught Hattie by surprise, and gave her pause for thought. On the one hand, his dislike of Keith marked him out as a more likely suspect. On the other, would someone who’d just committed premeditated burglary be capable of such genuine-sounding disdain for ‘crooks’? Steve always did have a strong sense of right and wrong, despite the rumours about his past.

‘Anyway, enough of that,’ he said. ‘You want a cuppa?’

‘Can’t stop, I’m afraid. I’m on my way across town, just thought I’d drop in and see your fancy digs. Doesn’t it get a bit lonely here, when it’s this quiet?’

Steve only smiled.

Hattie had known that Moira’s studio was out of the way, but, turning down yet another back alley, her hip pain flaring up, she was forced to admit that she had underestimated quite how out of the way it was. She was walking amidst a jumble of Victorian warehouses and factories, 1940s council estates and anonymous, windowless, metal-clad buildings with no discernible exits or entrances. Hattie didn’t like east London.

Eventually she came across a railway line, running above a series of brick arches, each of which had been walled up with a small door in the middle. Going through the fourth of these doors, she found herself in a dingy space under the archway, with rusty industrial light fittings and a concrete floor. On either side of the bare, central space were rows of little closed-off cubicle studios. A radio was playing BBC Radio 6 Music in one of them, loud enough for it to reverberate round the entire space. Hattie dimly remembered Rod explaining something about the unusual acoustic properties of barrel ceilings. Each cubicle had a wooden door, all in different states of repair, some dirty, some painted, some rotted. Each was emblazoned with a number. In some cases it was done using neat metal numerals screwed into the woodwork, while in others the number was scrawled in pencil.

Studio 36 had its number written in felt-tip pen on a scrap of paper that had been stuck to its plain wooden door with yellowing sticky tape. Underneath the number was written ‘(MOIRA MCLEOD)’ in careless lettering. Hattie knocked, and Moira’s voice from inside called her in.

Moira’s studio was a mess. Glorious, chaotic, overwhelming. Every wall was lined with shelves, every shelf held countless assorted plastic tubs, and every tub was overflowing with fabrics, beads, buttons, hats, feathers, tights, shoes, fluff, foam, paint, pins, and smaller boxes of undisclosed contents. There seemed to be no consistency in what items went in which container, and in the vast majority of cases the contents overflowed their containers entirely, lying sprawled across two or three tubs in big amorphous mounds.

In what space was left in the middle of the studio sat a chair, a desk with a sewing machine on it, as well as, of course, yet more piles of stuff, a couple of battered tailor’s dummies, and Moira, looking her usual grouchy, sleepy self.

‘Hello, Hattie,’ she said in her gentle Scottish brogue, peering disinterestedly through jam-jar glasses. ‘Tea?’

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ replied Hattie, suddenly aware that she was gasping for a cup following her long journey.

Moira frowned.

‘Right… I don’t suppose you brought a cup with you?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘OK, OK. Well, let me see if I can borrow one. Come wi’ me.’

Hattie followed Moira out of her cubicle to a tiny kitchen area at the back of the arch, where a very elderly kettle with a frayed electrical cord perched precariously on the drainer of a small, stainless-steel sink. In the basin were sitting several assorted grubby mugs. Moira picked out one that had printed on it: ‘I’ll deal with your bullsh!t when I’ve finished this coffee’. After a pause she picked up another one, white, chipped, with the logo of a sheet metal supply company on it.

‘I think Barry’s away today,’ she muttered, sticking the kettle on. From under the sink she produced a couple of teabags of dubious provenance, and a carton of UHT milk.

‘So how are you, my love?’ asked Hattie, while they waited for the water to boil.

‘Oh, I’m all right. Tough news about Atlanta, eh?’

‘Did you know her at all?’

‘Not really. We did a couple of shows together, had a natter backstage a few times. But actors come and go, don’t they? Very sad life she had, though.’

‘Really? From what I heard she made it sound like she spent her entire time drinking with celebrities.’

‘Aye,’ said Moira, with a serious look. ‘And did you ask her what it was drove her to spend her entire time drinking in the first place?’

Hattie hesitated. ‘No… no I didn’t think of it like that.’

‘Not a happy lady. Not sure why. Lost someone very close to her very young, I believe. Never really recovered. Shame that she grew up in a world where mental health wasn’t talked about. Instead I think they taught her to put a brave face on it, you know? Just guessing that bit, from her personality, mind. I always worried she’d decide to go before her time.’

‘You mean… commit suicide?’

Moira tutted. ‘Don’t call it that. Only crimes are committed. Leaving early is a choice.’

‘But the police said… I mean, do you think that’s what it was, then?’

‘I’d have thought so,’ shrugged Moira. ‘By herself, in a theatre. That’s how I’d do it, y’know? Here you go.’

Hattie accepted the cup and took a sip. The long-life milk made it taste pretty vile, but beggars can’t be choosers.

‘Anyway, what can I do for you? Is this about the fur coats? Cuz I told Steve, I can get them for way cheaper if you just leave it with me.’

‘Oh really? Sorry. He didn’t pass that on.’

‘Oh… well maybe I didn’t tell Steve. Either way, I don’t mind it coming out of my budget, but if it is, at least let me save some money on it.’

‘Of course. Sorry, I did mean to call you about it earlier, but… this week has been a bit mad.’

‘No bother,’ said Moira, starting to limp back towards her studio.

‘Actually the real reason I’m here is I wanted to check whether you’d been paid now.’

Moira stopped and gave her a suspicious look.

‘You came all the way out here to ask me about that? You could have just rung.’

‘I know, I know, it’s just… well, on Friday a lot of people got riled up about the whole thing.’

‘Did they? I suppose if people had been banking on having the cash sooner… but you’d have thought they’d have double-checked before making assumptions.’

‘I think it was more that some people thought it was unfair that the cast got treated differently from the crew even though the contract was the same.’

Moira rolled her eyes.

‘For God’s… They are different. I swear, I don’t know if it’s everyone getting woke or something, but the whole industry’s getting more and more pissy about treating everyone identically. It’s mad.’

‘So you’re not fussed about the payment thing?’

‘God no. Rag-tag production like this, I’m just glad to be getting paid at all. Now that Joan’s not about, I need to take the Tavistock off my list, it’s just not worth the bother. Keith’s fine, and I wish him well, but…’

Moira made a face, and then resumed her slow walk back to her studio. Hattie looked at her hobbling form. No way, she thought. There’s no way this woman broke into a theatre and nicked an expensive piece of jewellery. This had been a wasted trip.

*

Having spent most of her afternoon hopping around London, and with her hip complaining at her, Hattie took herself back to ACDA, and decided to do the rest of her check-ins by phone. She rang Miguel, on the pretext of double-checking that he had now received his first week’s pay. She used a similar line to the one she’d tried on Moira and Steve, emphasising that now that the money had been sorted it would be better for everyone if things could go back to the way they were. He seemed as much bewildered as anything else, and she came away from the call with no clearer sense of whether he had anything to do with the mask disappearing.

She also finally managed to get hold of Regine, who claimed to have spent Sunday night at a meet-up for aspiring female theatre directors. Apparently it was as much an emotional support network as a networking event. Hattie could well believe it: the world of directing was famously cut-throat, and the industry was still one where men had all the top jobs, so being a woman automatically put you at a disadvantage, and left a certain sort of (normally male) producer feeling that, as a result, he was entitled to take advantage of any woman who dared try to get a foothold. In such a climate one did well to find allies. More pressingly, here was an easily verifiable alibi, and furthermore, Regine scoffed as soon as she mentioned pay.

‘The money is the least of my worries. Being blunt, it became clear pretty quickly that Hashi’s coat-tails aren’t ones to attach yourself to. No one has a good word to say about him, and frankly, being his AD was starting to look like a black mark on my CV. I’m much happier to be doing this project as an actor, to be honest. Not that I’m happy about… you know… the circumstances, of course.’

After that, Hattie was about to settle down to some actual show work when Kiki called.

‘We’ve, um, we’ve had a bit of an upset here,’ she said without preamble.

‘What happened?’

‘Bums found a note.’

‘As in… a suicide note?’ asked Hattie hesitantly, thinking back to her conversation with Moira.

‘I wish. I mean, I don’t wish that, but honestly… this was like something out of a slasher movie. There was a piece of paper left in her handbag. It’s got a couple of quotes from the play on it, all about death, and also: Atlanta didn’t make the cut. I wonder who else will have corpsed by opening night…’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Hattie, after a pause. ‘How did the cast react?’

‘Dramatically, as you’d expect. Some of them wanted to call the police right away. Bums has gone full-on Famous Five, and is launching her own investigation. She’s started drawing up suspect lists and all. I think I’ve managed to convince them all to let us handle it. But I wanted to check in with you before anything else.’

‘Thank you. Crumbs.’

‘So… should we call the police?’

Hattie thought about it.

‘Well, it’s weird, I’ll give you that. But it’s not exactly a threat, is it? Or a confession?’

‘So… what? Do you think it was some sort of prank?’ asked Kiki.

‘Is there any chance Bums could have written the note herself?’

Kiki thought about it.

‘I mean, it’s possible, I suppose. She’s a bit self-involved, but that seems extreme even for her.’

‘I just don’t know,’ said Hattie, screwing up her face. ‘OK, tell you what: you tell the cast that we’ll handle it. Then let’s chat about it in tomorrow’s production meeting. I don’t want to go overreacting here.’

‘Fair enough. Unless… you don’t think anyone’s in any imminent danger, do you?’

‘I may live to regret this, but… no. I don’t think so.’

‘OK,’ said Kiki, still somewhat hesitant. ‘OK, we’ll figure it out in the meeting tomorrow.’

‘Last thing on that, though: was the note handwritten in Sharpie on an A4 piece of paper?’

‘Handwritten on A4, yes, but no, this was written in biro, not Sharpie. Why?’

‘Oh… no reason,’ said Hattie. Was there a connection to the note left in Keith’s office? There was no real way of knowing, was there?

Her call with Kiki complete, Hattie decided to ignore the work piling up in her inbox and allowed herself to go home. She cooked some pasta, spooned in a splodge of pesto, and ate at the little kitchen table as she worked her way through a crossword. From time to time she’d look up in thought, and invariably her gaze would land on the mantelpiece through the doorway in the sitting room, and the little box that sat on it. On days like these it was particularly hard to resist, but she held firm. Merlot and pesto were to be her only vices tonight. Well, and one of those posh yoghurts from M&S, the ones that are as much cream and sugar as they are yoghurt. A girl needed some comforts, after all.