seven

Behind the anterior panels of the parlour set, into which the French doors had been cut, lay a narrow space backing onto a fly system of ropes and pulleys for operating the scrims and drops. To the right, a short flight of rubber-covered stairs descended into a storage area where cardboard boxes, loose cables, and tubs of wall paint claimed much of the cement floor.

A stack of large boards, the front one depicting a cobblestone street of half-timbered homes, lay propped against the back wall, beside which stood a crane with a winch.

“They made a reet mess in ’ere,” Bill lamented as he surveyed the jumble of props and equipment.

Wheeled racks sheathed in plastic, dispersed willy-nilly across the floor, held an assortment of costumes, one rack containing faux leather doublets, puffy knee-breeches, lace ruffs, and hose, presumably belonging with the crudely painted Elizabethan street scene.

Against the wall by the scenery boards, a row of sloping wood desks tattooed with initials and doodles indicated that Hill Grange Community Centre had once been a school. The lids, showing evidence of print dust, were labelled with white stickers, one denoting sewing items for the fitting of costumes, another listing the contents as eyewear, false beards, and moustaches. Above the desks, a set of shelves accommodated a musty array of sequined masks and hats and wigs from miscellaneous time periods, along with swashbuckling boots, dress shoes, and heeled slippers festooned with dyed feathers and studded with glass gems.

“An Aladdin’s cave,” Rex remarked.

“That it is,” Ben concurred. “Must be hundreds of fingerprints in here going back years, especially as the caretaker is a lazy old git who never cleans the place properly.”

“Not to worry. The investigation is in safe hands with Inspector Fiske and his team,” Rex said with a courteous nod towards the constable waiting a short distance away.

Wedged sideways under the stairs stood a table stained with dark circles; upon it, an unplugged tea kettle, a collection of mismatched mugs, and a half-consumed packet of milk chocolate biscuits.

“This here’s the trap room.” Ben switched on a light located in the alcove and pointed into the space beneath the stage, barely high enough for a man of average height to stand, let alone Rex, without bumping his head on the rafters. “And that there’s the ladder leading up onstage.”

“Is there just the one trap door?”

Ben nodded.

“And it was just you and Cassie down there?”

Ben nodded again. “It was dark, as we couldn’t have light shining up onto the stage for the attic scene. But it wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t see if someone else was in there.” He switched off the light and crossed to a door. “This is the dressing room.”

The space in here was redolent of hair lacquer and fitted with four tables and stools lined up beneath mirrors lit by Hollywood bulbs. Packets of cotton wool, pots of Ponds cream, and makeup brushes littered the yellowed laminate surfaces caked and smeared with a rainbow hue of cosmetics.

A series of black curtains suspended from a rod partitioned off one end of the room into four cubicles. In the last one, a pair of glasses with black frames lay on the built-in wood bench. From a peg dangled a green paisley-pattern scarf and matching umbrella.

“Those belong to Susan,” Ben said, reaching up for the items.

“Don’t touch anything,” the constable restated.

“Right, well, that’s the lot. This here’s the way out.” Ben preceded Rex and Bill through a window-panelled door, which the constable locked behind them.

The corridor floor, sealed in drab green linoleum, ended at a push-bar fire exit next to a stairway and ran in the opposite direction past the lavatories and into the lobby.

“Seen enough, Mr. Graves?” Ben asked as Bill made towards the front entrance.

“Aye, thank you.” Rex pulled two Bank of Scotland notes from his wallet. “Here you go. Your drinks are on me.”

“Ta very much. And good luck finding out what happened to our Cassie,” Ben added before hurrying after his friend.

Rex entered the main hall, pleased with his impromptu tour back stage, but unsure whether Helen would feel quite the same way. Patience had its limits, after all.

To his surprise, he found her talking to Susan Richardson, Aunt Clara in the play. Only she among the actors now remained in the hall which, emptied of the earlier crowd, was beginning to feel chilly. No one had thought to close the window beyond which night had descended.

“Susan’s daughter Hadley attends Oakleaf,” his wife informed him with a bright smile as he approached.

“Pleased to meet you.” Rex extended his hand to the woman in the purple corduroys and severe black blouse, clasped at the collar by a coffee-and-cream cameo. She had a shapely mouth covered in an unattractive mulberry shade of lipstick designed, he assumed, to make her look older for her role.

“I was just telling Helen what a lovely girl Cassie was. I can’t believe it. None of us can. Helen says you’re working on the case.” Mrs. Richardson held him in her direct green gaze. “What do you think happened?”

“Too soon to say, but a few people I’ve spoken to who knew Cassie think it impossible she took her own life.”

Susan emphatically shook her long, dark wavy hair streaked with grey. “She wasn’t depressed or anything this evening, just slightly nervous and giggly like the rest of us before we went on.” She stared wistfully towards the red curtains. “Cassie was in her element onstage. She was a natural.” Tears welled in her eyes, already smudged with mascara beneath the lower lashes. “What her mother must be going through!”

“Have you met Mrs. Chase?” Rex asked as Helen took a call on her mobile and stepped away, mouthing an apology.

“A few times,” Susan replied, making a valiant effort to compose her features. “She and Cassie’s aunt came to most of the rehearsals. They were so proud of her. Belinda, the aunt, lives on the same street as her sister and helps take care of her. Do the police think the gun went off by mistake?” she asked in a low voice, although there were few people about to overhear. “But how? Ron insists it was a sham gun. He’s the producer and the one who procured it. Cassie would never have exchanged it for a real one. Did someone else?”

“Can you think of anyone who might have?”

“On purpose? Or as a joke? No! Everyone adored Cassie.”

“She must have had several admirers,” Rex suggested, conjuring up in his mind the brooding director with his dark good looks. “Some secret, some not so secret?”

“Tony was sweet on her in a shy sort of way,” Susan said, confirming what Penny Spencer had told him. “He was very—I don’t know—solicitous around her.”

“And Ron Wade?”

“Ron’s a bit of a cold fish.” Susan shrugged her shoulders as much as she could in the restrictive black blouse. “Well, he may have fancied her, but he never let on. Anyway, Cassie and Trey were romantically involved,” she added casually.

Rex remembered the way Susan had looked at Trey Atkins earlier. “I didn’t know that was common knowledge.”

“They tried to keep it secret, but I saw them kissing in the car park one night. He’s in pieces, naturally.”

“Aye, I talked to him earlier.”

“I saw you go up onstage with Bill and Ben. Did you find anything?”

Rex shook his head. “Just your glasses and matching umbrella and scarf.”

Susan looked startled for a second. “Oh, in the dressing room, you mean. When the play was cancelled, I just had time to get out of the bottom half of my costume before we were all ushered out, and I forgot my scarf and umbrella. But the glasses aren’t mine. They were there when I went back to change. They could be Timothy’s.”

“Father Brown? He was wearing his when I saw him here in the hall.”

Susan Richardson pulled back the black cuff of her sleeve and checked her wristwatch. “Goodness. I should get going.”

“Us too,” Helen said, rejoining them and slipping her phone in her handbag.

The women hugged briefly and Susan took off in the direction of the exit.

“Had enough for one evening?” Helen asked him.

“I have. It’s been quite a night.”

“I’ll say. An actual death on the opening night of a murder mystery play. You do have a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Rex.”

“I perceive it more as being in the right place at the right time.” He took her arm and guided her towards the doors. “The timing of the murder, if such it be, is significant, don’t you think? As though someone were making a statement.”

“An act of bravado, certainly. But not on Cassie’s part. There’s nothing I’ve yet heard about her to suggest she was unbalanced or selfish enough to seek momentary fame by committing suicide onstage.”

“And literally staging her own murder to disguise it was suicide?”

Helen looked doubtful. “Do you honestly think that’s a possibility?”

“I think it more likely someone was waiting in the wings and staged her suicide. Here might be the right people to ask.”

Inspector Fiske and his sergeant stood together in the pool of light beyond the building’s entrance, looking up as Rex came through the glass doors. He was conscious of Antonescu’s gaze upon him, the black of his deep-set dark eyes enhanced by his almost translucently pale complexion.

“Any joy, Mr. Graves?” Fiske enquired amiably enough.

Rex paused in front of him, hands thrust in his jacket pockets. “It strikes me that Tony Giovanni is the missing link thus far.”

“Why’s that?” Fiske asked, while his sergeant shuffled his feet on the patio, making his presence and impatience felt.

Helen, buttoning up her raincoat, said she would bring the car around.

“Giovanni is the only person who might legitimately have closed the theatre curtains at the end of the first act in Ron and Bill’s absence,” Rex answered the inspector.

“The Yorkie stagehand with the goatee?” Antonescu enquired, his own chin immaculately shaven, the sort of man, Rex imagined, to carry an electric razor about his person at all times.

“The same.” Rex turned back to Fiske. “He said he forgot to press the button and that Ron, who oversaw the production, must have done so. But if Ron left before the attic scene to go to his car, he would not have had time to go back and see to the curtains. And no one else puts themselves front of stage in the minutes leading up to the shot. So, unless Giovanni or the Phantom of the Opera—of the play, in this instance—pushed the button, it must have been someone who does not want to be identified as the killer or as a key witness.”

“The director would be a logical choice for the curtains,” Fiske acknowledged. “Or the other stagehand.”

“Ben was working below stage.”

Fiske scratched the incipient stubble on his jaw. “Giovanni said he was backstage the whole time. I spoke with him by phone. He’s at home recovering from the shock of what happened.”

“The artistic temperament,” Antonescu put in with a sardonic smile.

“He told me he was drinking tea with the stagehands in the storeroom,” Fiske went on to inform Rex. “By the time Ben Higgins went to open the trap door and Bill left to lower the screen and work the lights and projector for the attic scene, the actors were all coming offstage. Trey Atkins, as Henry Chalmers, was the first to come down, and he saw Giovanni and the stagehands. All the actors had been onstage during the first act or waiting to go on, I’m told. But the butler was mostly off than on. He could see the director at the table looking as nervous as the actors felt on the opening night.”

A promising alibi for Tony Giovanni, Rex conceded, impressed by the inspector’s power of recall and his succinct summary. But if the director was in the clear, perhaps he had seen something while sitting by the back stairs and keeping an ear out for possible signs of trouble with the play. During that time, Ron Wade had been in the midst of the action behind the Chinese screen in case someone forgot their lines. All eventualities covered.

And yet, apparently not. Bill Welsh, if he was to be believed, had scarpered before attending to the curtains, and minutes later, Cassie Chase was dead.

If Fiske had been alone, Rex might have ventured to ask for an opportunity to speak with the elusive director, and then Helen’s Renault pulled up in front of them, and he took his leave.

“Was the inspector of any help?” his wife asked as they drove past the fleet of blue-yellow-and-white police vehicles and through the redbrick gateposts.

“Up to a point, but he doesn’t have the benefit of having seen the play.”

“Now you can watch the whole thing,” Helen said encouragingly. “Penny gave me the DVD of the dress rehearsal. It’s in the glove compartment.”

Rex smiled at her in the dimly lit car. “If we watched it tonight, I could offer to get it to the inspector tomorrow. Then perhaps I could gain access to your heartthrob, Tony Giovanni.”

“Heartthrob, indeed! I just said he looked like an actor and had a lovely name. You know, if we’re going to watch the play, I’ll need sustenance. Fancy some Indian take-away? There’s a Tandoori place just up the road. See that big orange sign?” Helen made a ruefully apologetic face. “It seems awful to be hungry at a time like this.”

“Quite normal, I think. That’s why there’s always a pile of food at funerals.”

Rex thought of the young woman on a mortuary slab and wondered again at the brazen killer who had put her there; for nothing he had learnt so far pointed to an accidental shooting or suicide, even if the players did appear to all have convenient alibis.