Max Mephisto hated snow. But then he liked to say that he hated all weather. He was happiest indoors, in a bar or a club or, best of all, in a theatre. When he dreamt of leaving the business (which was quite often these days), he knew that what he would miss most would not be the applause or the satisfaction of a neatly executed trick but that particular backstage smell—greasepaint and Calor gas and musty costumes—the same the world over. In a theatre the outside world didn’t matter. Rain or shine, it was always night-time in a theatre. But this winter it was hard to ignore the weather, and cold was what Max hated most. He wondered if this was a legacy from his long-dead Italian mother. Surely he was made for sun and fast cars and drinking Campari in roadside cafes, not for slogging through grey slush in his best shoes, sleeping with his overcoat on and, when he woke in the night, seeing his breath vaporising around him like the ectoplasm in Mamie Gordon’s fake medium act.
Max had chosen his lodgings in Upper Rock Gardens solely because they were the only theatrical digs available that boasted central heating. When he got to the thin, melancholy house with its shallow bay windows and aura of having seen better days, he discovered that the much-vaunted heating consisted of a single radiator in his attic bedroom. It was only on during the day, so when Max was rehearsing on the pier presumably the place was positively toasty but by the time he returned the radiator and the room were both icy cold.
On Wednesday morning Max looked out of his bedroom window and saw that the snow was still falling. The houses opposite—gracious Regency edifices like this one, now mostly flats and B&Bs—were barely visible and, at the bottom of the hill, the sea had merged into the grey sky. He surveyed the scene dourly, smoking his first cigarette of the day. Walking to the pier would be no fun in this weather but it was the technical rehearsal so he’d have to get there. The technical was important because he was performing several magic tricks in the show. It was the only thing that had resigned him to the role of Abanazar.
Max had always sworn that he would never do pantomime. It was the final straw, the end of the line, the graveyard of hopes. Ingénues past their prime, comedians who were no longer funny, acrobats getting a bit stiff in the knees—they were all to be found in the cast lists of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Aladdin. Every summer the requests started coming in and every year Max refused them. He tried to take a break over Christmas, maybe even go abroad. Anything to get away from the men in drag, the baying children, the shouts of ‘Behind you!’ It was like some existential nightmare. Where’s the grim reaper? Behind you.
So why, this year, was Brighton’s Palace Pier Theatre advertising ‘for the first time ever’ Max Mephisto in Aladdin? Why were there posters all over the town showing him in a ghastly green robe waving a lamp that looked more like a gravy boat? Well, partly it was because the show was being produced by Bert Billington, a hugely influential show-business impresario. An invitation from Bert Billington was not to be turned down lightly, even if it involved wearing false whiskers and pushing an ageing Principal Boy into a papier mâché cave (crash of cymbals, green lightning, evil laugh). If Bert liked his performance, then he might book him for a tour of provincial Number Two theatres, maybe even a Number One. Then there was the appeal of Brighton itself. Max had always liked the town and now it was the home of his daughter, Ruby. Not to mention his old friend Edgar. But Ruby and Edgar presented an altogether different problem, one that he didn’t like to confront too often. Even so, a season in Brighton was not the same as Blackpool or somewhere in the frozen north. There were quite a few decent restaurants in Brighton.
Finally, the bitter truth was that work was thin on the ground these days, even for the great Max Mephisto. The new comedians were taking over and their baleful influence was everywhere. Magicians like Tommy Cooper were going on stage, getting the tricks deliberately wrong and—even worse—showing the audience how they were done. There was no mystique any more, no glamour. Then there was television. Apparently most families in America owned a set and, if TV’s popularity ever spread to Britain, variety would die quicker than you could say ‘abracadabra’. So, all in all, well-paid work from November to January was not to be sneezed at. And it was not as if he was playing Wishy Washy or Buttons. He was Abanazar, the Demon King, and the villain always had the best lines.
So Max dressed in his warmest clothes and prepared himself for the walk to the pier. He still had his beloved Bentley but that was locked in a garage in Kemp Town. Besides, cars would be no good today. In the hall he met his landlady, Joyce Markham, a dyed blonde with a head for business and a good line in sardonic banter.
‘Morning, Mr M. Lovely day.’
‘Indeed it is, Mrs M. Just going out for a stroll along the promenade.’
‘Mind you don’t get too chilled. I’ve known many a pro die from the cold in Brighton.’
‘That’s a jolly story, Mrs M. I’ll look forward to hearing it one evening.’
‘Are you not having breakfast? Can I press you to a kipper?’
‘Charming as that sounds . . .’ Max reached for his hat. Joyce eyed him with amusement. ‘Not exactly dressed for it, are you?’
Max looked down at his cashmere coat and brogues. ‘This is my arctic attire, Mrs M.’
‘I’ve got some gumboots that belonged to my late husband. Not that it did him any good, poor fool.’
Joyce always talked about her husband as if his death were some frivolous indulgence designed solely to inconvenience her. Max was horrified at the thought of the gumboots but there was no doubt that the snow wouldn’t do his shoes much good.
‘That would be very kind. Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me, thank Arthur. If he can hear you where he is.’
‘Max Mephisto in gumboots. Never thought I’d live to see the day.’
‘Well, now you can die happy.’
Lou Abrahams, the stage manager, didn’t seem in a hurry to die. Chortling to himself, he put down his paper and retreated into his cubbyhole. Max hoped that he was making him a cup of coffee. He sat down and pulled off the boots. In their ugly, rural practicality they reminded him of his father, who liked nothing better than striding over fields looking for wildlife to kill. Still, there was no denying that they’d kept his feet dry. He took his brogues out of the paper bag given to him by Mrs M and put them on. He was feeling better. The smell of coffee was emanating from the cubbyhole and it was pleasantly warm in Lou’s office. He pulled the paper towards him. It was the local rag, the Evening Argus.
‘Desperate search for lost children’ screamed the headline. Max read on: ‘Police are continuing to search for Mark Webster and Annie Francis, who vanished yesterday whilst playing outside their homes in Freshfield Road, Kemp Town. The children were last seen walking to Sam Gee’s corner shop to buy sweets. Mr Gee says that the children never arrived. Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens, who is leading the hunt, says that the police will leave no stone unturned in their search for the missing youngsters. “We know how much the parents must be suffering,” said DI Stephens, “and we ask everyone to be on the lookout for Mark and Annie.”’
The paper was yesterday’s. Max thought of the snow covering Upper Rock Gardens. If the children were still outside, surely they’d be dead by now. He thought of Edgar continuing to search, marshalling his men, knowing that he would have to face the grieving parents at the end of the day. He would take it hard, Max knew. He didn’t think that Edgar would have used the cliché about ‘no stone unturned’ either.
Lou placed a cup of black coffee in front of him. ‘Terrible thing about those kiddies, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘Terrible.’
‘They’ll be dead now, mark my words.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Max. He felt curiously reluctant to accept Lou’s gloomy prognosis, though it was what he’d been thinking a few moments ago. ‘They could just have run away. They could be with grandparents or friends. I ran away from school a few times.’ Once he’d run to an old nanny who’d been good to him, once he had caught the train to Portsmouth and tried to join the navy. Both times he’d been sent straight back to school. He’d never thought of running to his father.
‘No, they’ll be dead,’ said Lou. ‘There are a lot of bad people out there.’
Max could hardly argue with this. He looked out of the tiny porthole window. The sea ran grey and silver all around them. The garish colours of the pier had been softened by the snow, the helter-skelter a spectral white tower. Brighton itself had disappeared.
‘My money’s on the shopkeeper,’ said Lou.
Other people also suspected Sam Gee. He was a married man with children but, as Frank Hodges had pointed out that first day, that didn’t stop him from being a murderer. Edgar had interviewed Mr Gee himself and had found him believable, if slightly nervous (and that too was only to be expected). Sam Gee had known the children by sight but had been certain that neither Mark nor Annie had visited his shop on Monday afternoon. ‘I would have remembered,’ he said. ‘They were quiet kids. Polite kids. Not like some of the others. But I would have remembered them. The girl had red hair and the boy had glasses. Nice kids.’ There had been nothing odd in the way that Gee had recalled Annie’s red hair and Mark’s glasses. He’d just been anxious to help and concerned for the children. Even so, Edgar had told Bob to go back to the shop today. It wouldn’t be the first time that a member of the public had faked concern to hide their own part in a crime.
That was Annie’s grandfather’s first question when he opened the door of his Brunswick Square flat. ‘Have you arrested the shopkeeper? He was the last person to see them.’
‘But he didn’t see them, Mr Warrington,’ said Edgar. ‘Can I come in?’
The flat in Brunswick Square told him what he had suspected before: that Sandra Francis had married beneath her. The house in Freshfield Road was a basic two-up two-down, housing parents and four children. Annie’s father, Jim, was a labourer. But this flat boasted antimacassars and side tables, even an upright piano. There was a coloured photograph of all four Francis children on the piano, their bright hair rendered almost orange by the colourist. Annie, the eldest, was in the middle, seated with her youngest brother, still a baby, on her knee. The other two—twins, Edgar seemed to remember, a boy and a girl—squatted awkwardly on either side.
The red hair obviously came from their grandmother. Mrs Warrington’s hair, pulled into a neat bun, was a faded version of this colour, liberally streaked with white. She saw him looking at the picture. ‘Annie was a little mother to her sister and brothers,’ she said. ‘Such a lovely girl.’ Edgar rather doubted this. There was something stiff in the way that Annie was holding her little brother, something in the way that her head was tilted. She didn’t look like a girl who saw motherhood as her vocation. Annie was clever, everyone agreed that. Edgar wondered what dreams she had for her future. He hoped to God that she still had a future. He noticed that her grandmother, unlike her mother, used the past tense.
‘Does Annie come here often?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Warrington. ‘She comes most weekends, sometimes in the week too. Gets the bus here by herself. She likes to look at the books.’ She gestured proudly to a small glass-fronted bookcase beside the door. ‘She’s a lovely little reader.’
Edgar wandered over to look at the books. He sometimes found it easier to ask questions without eye contact.
‘Does she sometimes find it a bit much at home?’ he asked. ‘All those siblings.’
‘Sometimes,’ Mrs Warrington admitted. ‘She shares a room with the others, shares a bed with Betty. She doesn’t get much time to read or do her homework. She likes the peace and quiet here.’
‘Does she take after her mother?’ asked Edgar, examining the spine of The Golden Bough. ‘Did she like to read?’
‘Oh, our Sandra was ever so clever. She could have been a teacher if she hadn’t married that Jim Francis. Michael was a teacher. He’s retired now.’ She pointed to her husband in the same way that she had gestured towards the bookcase. Michael Warrington frowned.
‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. Why haven’t you arrested that shopkeeper?’
‘I’ve got no reason to arrest him, Mr Warrington,’ said Edgar. ‘But I promise you I have interviewed him and I’ll do so again. I’ve got officers going door-to-door in Kemp Town at this very moment. But it’s possible that Annie might have gone missing of her own accord. As you say, she’s a bright girl. She might have planned this. So I wanted to ask you, please, to rack your brains. Apart from her parents, you’re the people who know her best. Is there anywhere you think she might have gone? Anyone she might have run to?’
The grandparents sat side by side on the chintz sofa. They looked at each other for a long moment, during which Edgar heard the cuckoo clock in the hall strike eleven.
‘There’s Uncle Brian,’ said Mrs Warrington at last. ‘He’s friendly with all the children.’