six

Bill Welsh and Ben Higgins were preparing to leave after their interviews with Detective Sergeant Antonescu who, Rex felt sure, had been keeping his beady eyes on him since he had mounted the steps to the stage with the inspector.

“Fancy a quick pint at t’Bells?” one of the pair, a Yorkshireman by the sounds of it, was asking the other. They might have been brothers, so similar in appearance were they, both with shaved heads and of medium build, sporting maroon tee-shirts with CREW stencilled across the back in white letters.

“Too right, but just the one. The missus will be waiting up for the latest news.”

“Excuse me, I’d like a word,” Rex said, intercepting them before they could reach the double doors leading into the lobby.

“Ey up,” the one from Yorkshire warned his friend, just loud enough for Rex to hear.

“I’m not a reporter nor a detective,” Rex hastened to explain. “My wife knows Penny Spencer.”

“We were just off to the pub if you want to tag along,” said the Yorkshireman’s friend.

“To drown our sorrows, like.”

There was nothing Rex would have enjoyed more than a draught Guinness, but Helen was waiting, patiently, and he rather doubted she would relish going to the pub at this hour.

“Thank you, but this will only take a minute. Are you Bill or Ben?”

The lookalikes chuckled, holding their beer bellies as they rocked back and forth on their trainers.

“Bill, for my sins. Ben’s the handsome one,” the Yorkshireman joked.

The only significant difference that Rex could see was that Ben wore glasses and Bill’s chin sprouted a scraggly goatee. Rex handed each his business card.

“A QC from Edinburgh,” Bill read with exaggerated interest. “I could tell right off you were from across the border. What brings thee ’ere then?”

“Penny invited us to the play.” Rex decided some extra bona fides were required to gain the stagehands’ cooperation. “Detective Inspector Fiske permitted me to see the crime scene.”

“Why would he do that?” Ben asked with a puzzled glance at Bill.

“I solve cases in my spare time, what I have of it, and usually only by invitation. Penny asked for my help.”

“We just spent the past two hours giving information to t’police,” Bill baulked.

“I understand. I was simply wondering how the theatre curtains work.” Rex turned towards the expansive panels of red velvet.

Bill’s expression visibly relaxed. “Ah, well, as you can see, them’s a pair of traverse-style curtains.”

“Opening at the centre,” Ben explained. “Unlike the guillotine type, which comes straight down.”

“They’re mounted on a mechanism what operates them at the press of a button.”

“A bit like at the dry-cleaner’s,” Ben added.

These two were a veritable tag team, Rex thought in amusement. “Can you show me?”

“We can’t go back there,” Ben objected, pushing his glasses back up his bulbous nose. “Crime scene investigators will be all over the stage combing it for clues like they do on the telly.”

“They were packing up when I went back there, but I only want to see where the button is located. I’ll clear it with the inspector first.”

Rex did so, and he and the two stagehands made their way up the steps leading to the stage from the right, accompanied by the constable on guard, who held aside the edge of the curtain so they could enter.

“Please keep to the edge,” he instructed. “The centre stage is off limits.”

Bill parted the black drapery panels that lined the side wall and showed Rex a red control button situated near the curtains. Rex looked up and saw the track along which they moved back and forth, concealed from the audience behind a valence of red velvet. In the cavernous space above, lighting and sound systems were attached to the crossbeams.

“Is this the only button?” he asked.

“Aye,” Bill affirmed.

“Who operated the curtains just before the interval?”

The Yorkshireman scratched a cauliflower ear. “Eh, I was supposed to, but ’appen I forgot.”

“You soft pillock,” Ben upbraided him mildly.

“Well, someone closed them before the shot occurred,” Rex stated.

“Would’ve been Ron,” Ben said. “It’s his job to make sure everything’s foolproof.” He flicked Bill’s temple.

The problem with that scenario, Rex considered, was that Inspector Fiske had said the producer left the building before the final scene to fetch his migraine pills from his car. “Why did you forget?” he asked Bill.

“Why does anybody? Ye just do.” Bill moved towards a projector set up on a tripod. “I was stood here, and last thing I did was switch this on for t’final scene where t’dagger is projected on yon back scrim. Then I took off for a fag.”

“Did you pass anyone on your way backstage?”

“They were all offstage by then, except Cassie, who came up through t’floor. I didn’t see nowt unusual.”

The trap door was barely visible in the darkness that had re-descended on the set after the forensics team had finished processing it. Lady Naomi had stood with her profile to the audience, facing where Rex was now positioned. He stared at the ghostly chalk outline of her fallen body, which had been taken to the mortuary.

He turned to find Bill and Ben gazing on the crime scene in grim silence as the constable stood stoically by, his shoulder radio emitting squawks of static, ready to hold them back if necessary.

“Trey discovered her body and called t’police,” Bill murmured, sadly shaking his bald head. “Ee was waiting in t’dressing room and went back to look for her when she never appeared.”

“We only found out about the shooting when we got back from our smoke,” Ben elaborated. “It was pandemonium backstage, the women crying and everyone asking questions. But nobody knew anything.”

“Any sign of Ron Wade at that point?” Rex asked.

“Ee came in soon after we did.”

“And the director?”

“Tony was there, white as a sheet and speechless from shock,” Ben replied.

“Do you know him well?”

“Bill had more to do with him. They painted all the scenery. I do the sound effects and help shift the heavy stuff around. Tony has a bad back, so he says, and all the lifting was left to us. And Ron likes to micromanage, but doesn’t like getting his lily-white hands dirty.”

“I’ve yet to see him.”

“You’ll know him from his ginger hair,” Bill put in. “Bit like your own.”

“I was not aware of many sound effects in the play,” Rex remarked, reverting to the subject of Ben’s duties.

“There were more coming up. The second act starts with dark, melodramatic music as Lady Naomi lies fatally stabbed on the attic floor.” Ben’s raised fingers prodded the air as he hummed a few bars of a sinister tune. “But she reappears as a ghost.”

“Ah. I thought her role might end with the attic scene.”

“No, you see her flitting about the parlour in a sheer white dress, invisible to the others while they try to suss out who murdered her.”

“So the play contains a paranormal element?”

Ben nodded with enthusiasm. “Right, and it’s quite entertaining because only she knows who killed her, but she can’t communicate in the normal way, so she resorts to moving objects around and placing clues where the sleuths can’t miss them.”

“She’s a poltergeist,” Bill explained. “Might sound a bit daft until you see it. Which like as not you won’t now.”

“Penny said there was a recording of the dress rehearsal.”

“So there is,” Bill said. “I forgot.”

It seemed to Rex that Bill was rather forgetful.

“Cassie never killed herself,” Ben muttered, staring again at the white chalk outline. “She had everything to live for.”

“And you were where, precisely, when it happened?” Rex asked in a nonaccusatory tone.

“With Bill outside, or on our way outside. Before that, I was below stage to see that Cassie got up the ladder safely in her narrow skirt and heels, and then I slammed the trap door shut for dramatic effect, but also to make sure she didn’t step back without thinking and fall through the opening.” Ben spread his hands out in despair. “But it might’ve been better if she had. The worst thing to happen would’ve been a broken ankle.”

Rex looked about him. If Cassie’s death had not been a suicide, the murderer had to have been hiding behind one of the dark panels screening the wall, unseen by Bill. There was nowhere on the set to conceal oneself, and the killer could not have come up after Cassie through the trap door because Ben had closed it when she stepped onstage.

It was becoming apparent that the shooter would have had to be someone who knew their way around and who knew the play by heart, if their intent had been to murder Cassie undetected and at the very moment her character’s death was supposed to occur.

“Presumably there’s access from the lobby corridor into the backstage area,” Rex probed.

“There’s a door into the dressing room, which leads into a storage area behind the stage,” Ben acknowledged, while Bill checked his watch, no doubt impatient to get off to the pub.

“I’d like to see it.” Rex glanced at the policeman, who immediately requested permission from the inspector on his radio. He reminded them to stick to the edge of the stage and not to touch anything.

They proceeded in single file after Ben.

“Mind how you go,” he cautioned in the dim passageway between the stage sets and outer wall.

To their left, the main part of the stage was obstructed from view by rolling panels that provided the parlour scene wall on which was painted the window through which Father Brown had stared forlornly at imaginary rain.

It felt surreal to Rex to be among the props of a play he had viewed from afar earlier that evening, a trifle bored and uncomfortable in his chair. A glancing touch of something cold on the back of his neck made him catch his breath and spin around, but there was nothing and no one close by, the constable a few paces behind and talking on his radio. He dismissed the strange feeling and followed the stagehands into the bowels of the theatre.