Then Terry’s distinctive voice cut through the atmosphere.
‘How Robert would have laughed,’ he said, delivering his famous closing line with a hollow amusement which was all the more powerful for its restraint, and the curtain dropped. As the applause broke out – louder than ever, if that were possible – he left the stage, a glint of triumph in his eyes, and raised his glass for a new toast.
‘To memorable exits,’ he said, his eyes fixed on Aubrey, and drank the wine in one go. His defiance shocked even McCracken, whose acts of rebellion were always less overt, but Fleming simply laughed and replaced his glass untouched on the tray. As the cast assembled round them, ready for the first of many curtain-calls, McCracken watched Aubrey pour the last of the Scotch into his glass, down it with a grimace and head for the stairs to his office.
Penrose waited impatiently at stage door for Aubrey to keep their appointment, and tried not to show how irritated he was by the doorman’s constant chatter. ‘I haven’t seen fans like this for twenty-five years or more,’ he said, looking in wonder at the crowds that had gathered in the passageway outside as though it were his first night on the job. ‘Of course, it was different back then – all hansom cabs and evening clothes, bunches of flowers and black canes with silver tops. Now they come dressed as they like and ask for signed photographs. Still, it’s almost like the old days. A bit of the old magic’s come back, that’s for sure.’
While privately wondering what sort of man was happy to do a job that involved sitting in the same chair for years on end, Penrose smiled and nodded. There was no denying the truth of what he said, though: his drone only just carried over the noise outside, where an undisciplined but good-natured crowd of enthusiasts waited for their respective favourites to appear. Terry was the first to brave the adoration, plunging into the noise and notice-ably drawing the schoolgirl contingent away from the rest of the bunch. Fleming soon followed, and Penrose was amused to note that his rougher good looks appealed almost uniformly to the housewife market. He must remember to compliment Aubrey on 133
his shrewdness in casting someone for all possible tastes: it must have helped ticket sales tremendously.
‘The number of times I’ve been offered a small fortune just to run downstairs with a note,’ the doorman continued, oblivious to any lack of interest on Penrose’s part. ‘Take Miss Lydia, for example: she’s always been popular. When she was here a few years ago, there was one gent who’d come every night and insist on reciting a poem to her. Terrible, they were – even I could tell that – but she smiled through the lot of them. A real lady, she is.’
Not entirely comfortable in a world where an immunity to bad verse was a sign of moral rectitude, Penrose was relieved to be distracted by the sight of his sergeant. Fallowfield pushed his way steadily through the crowds, which were building again as Sheppey drew to a close at Wyndham’s, the proximity of the two theatres doubling the bustle and confusion in St Martin’s Court.
‘Give me a nice film any day, Sir,’ he said as he moved a couple of gentlemen out of the way to reach the comparative calm inside the building. ‘None of this nonsense – just home for a cup of tea.’
He greeted the stage doorman politely, then – recognising the type
– moved to one side to talk more discreetly to Penrose. ‘No sign of White at his digs, Sir. Maybrick called in to say that Simmons got back home about half an hour ago, but he was alone and there’s no one else at the house. Any luck here?’
‘No, but I’m hoping that might be about to change.’ He brought Fallowfield quickly up to date and shared his hopes for the imminent interview with Aubrey. ‘It might be nothing to do with this, but he’s not the type to make something sound more important than it is. Whatever he’s got to say, he seems to have taken White under his wing so it’s the most promising thing we’ve got to go on at the moment.’
A renewed murmuring at the door signalled the end of the wait for the male stragglers in the crowd. Lydia signed all the autographs that were requested of her, graciously accepted more flowers, then collected the handful of letters and cards that had been left with the doorman, while Josephine introduced Marta to Archie and Fallowfield. ‘I don’t suppose you know if Bernard Aubrey is on his 134
way, do you?’ Penrose asked. ‘I gather he’s meeting you for a drink, but I need to talk to him first.’
‘I’ll go and hurry him up,’ said Lydia, overhearing. ‘God knows what he’s doing at this time of night, but he always has to be forcibly dragged away from his desk. The man’s obsessed with work.’ While Marta and Josephine exchanged a look that silently spoke the words pot, kettle and black, the Motleys came in from the passage.
‘Sorry we’re late but we got stopped in the foyer by that lovely young couple who got their tickets outside at the last minute,’
Lettice said, unwrapping her last toffee and handing the empty box to the doorman with an apologetic smile. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody so excited.’ She turned to Josephine. ‘They asked me to tell you . . .’ but she was unceremoniously interrupted by her cousin before she could deliver the message.
‘What did you say?’ asked Penrose.
Lettice looked at him, surprised. ‘Nice to see you, too, Archie. I was just saying that this couple were over the moon to have seen the play at last. They’ve just got engaged, you see, and . . .’
‘No, no – what did you say about the tickets?’
‘I said they got them at the last minute. Someone outside was selling two that he couldn’t use. His girlfriend was ill or something.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me that before?’ Penrose asked, more than a little unreasonably, and Ronnie glared at him.
‘Because we left our crystal ball and our police uniforms at home tonight,’ she said tartly. ‘If we’d known we were working under-cover, we’d have issued a full statement during the interval.’
Ignoring her, Penrose scowled at Fallowfield. ‘I thought Bravo was supposed to be watching out the front?’ he barked. ‘If I find out he’s left his post for a second and missed our prime suspect, I’ll personally make him wish he’d never been born.’ He turned back to Lettice. ‘I’m sorry. Will you take Sergeant Fallowfield back to the front of the theatre and see if you can find this couple?’
‘Of course I will,’ said Lettice, who always remained admirably untouched by her family’s sparring. ‘How exciting!’
135
The Yard’s newest recruit had been gone only a moment or two when the others heard footsteps coming quickly down the stairs and Lydia reappeared, paler than she had ever been when dying on stage. She gripped the handrail as if it were the sole thing holding her upright and stared at the small group below, seemingly at a loss to understand how they could all be so calm. It could only have been a matter of seconds but it felt like an age before she spoke, and Penrose had the odd sensation of being cast in a bad melodrama, waiting for the next line to be delivered and knowing only too well what the gist of it would be.
‘For God’s sake, come quickly,’ she cried, confirming his worst fears but soon departing from the expected script. ‘He didn’t deserve this.’
136
Ten
Bernard Aubrey’s body lay just inside his office and Penrose silently acknowledged the truth of Lydia’s words: surely no one deserved this. There was nothing restful about the finality of the moment, no indication that the man at his feet had found in death a peace from which the living could take comfort, and he imagined the absolute horror that Lydia must have felt on encountering the aftermath of such suffering. In truth, despite his years of experience, he was not entirely immune to it himself.
A dress suit was draped over the back of the settee but Aubrey had not had time to change after the performance, and the stage clothes lent an artifice to his death which might have been convincing had his face and neck not been visible, clearly showing the signs of poison which no amount of make-up could simulate.
Penrose considered the possibilities. Antimony, perhaps, or mer-cury; arsenic, of course, and he had seen cases of boric acid which looked similar. The most obvious symptoms in front of him could be attributed to any of these substances, but the post-mortem would provide the answers. Whichever it was, the attractive features that age had not been able to undermine were altered almost beyond recognition by the agony of those final moments. Aubrey’s eyes, glazed and unyielding, stared out from sockets which now seemed barely able to contain them and their blank expression, coupled with parted lips and sagging chin, gave the face an ugly stupidity which it had never possessed in life. The upper part of his costume, a tunic of false chain mail made from felt, had been violently torn away from his chest and neck, and his throat was covered in raw scratch marks where he had clawed at his clothes and 137
skin, presumably in a desperate struggle for air. One hand remained clenched at his chest, the other reached towards the door, fingers outstretched and palm upwards, as if begging for a little more time.
The expensive but well-worn Persian rug on which Aubrey had collapsed had been caught up in his convulsions, and Penrose stepped carefully over its rucks and past several books and a small card table which had been knocked to the floor. The force of his struggle with death must have been quite incredible: he was a strong man, tall and heavily built and, even now, his limbs seemed to strain towards life, but he had not been able to withstand whatever had invaded his body. Kneeling at his shoulder, Penrose put his hand lightly against Aubrey’s cheek. His skin was cold to the touch, unnaturally so for someone in whom life had only very recently been extinguished, and there was a brownish, salivary substance about his nose which mixed with the vomit around his mouth and ran in narrow lines down his face and onto the carpet.
The stench of urine and diarrhoea was unmistakable. Even to Penrose, who had encountered the effects of poison many times, it was sickening, almost intolerably so, and just for a second he had to turn away. Looking back, he was struck by how the squalid physicality of Aubrey’s death was made all the more humiliating by the bizarre state of his dress: the false armour might hint at the nobility of a soldier fallen in battle, but there was no dignity here; for all man’s emotional and spiritual aspirations, Penrose thought with sadness, it was invariably the body that decided his fate in the end.
‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ said Fallowfield from the doorway. ‘That’s ruined our chances of finding anything out from him, Sir.’
It was hardly something that Penrose needed to have spelt out for him and his sergeant had put it a little more bluntly than was tactful, but he shared the sentiment. If he had only insisted on speaking to Aubrey at the interval, he might still be alive; at worst, they would have a clearer understanding of what – if anything –
linked this violent, messy death with the less agonising but no less theatrical murder of a young girl in a railway carriage. ‘Go back 138
downstairs and call the team in,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the telephone in here touched until it’s been dusted. Make it clear I want the works and they’re to be here immediately. And it must be Spilsbury.’
‘I’ll send a car to his house right away, Sir.’
‘No, it’s Saturday night – he’ll be at the Savoy Theatre. Get someone to nip up the road – it’ll be quicker. Then have the whole place sealed off. Ask anyone who’s here to stay until I’ve spoken to them, but on no account is anyone else to be let in through either entrance. Make that clear to the fellow at stage door until our lot get here. We’ll need Aubrey’s home address and a next of kin – can you sort that out?’
‘Of course, Sir. Was he married, do you know?’
‘Yes, I believe he was, but I remember Josephine saying something once about it not being a particularly happy marriage. We’ll go and see his wife as soon as we’ve finished here. Did you see Miss Beaumont on your way up? She found his body.’
‘Yes, Sir, she’s still down there with Miss Tey and another lady –
and your cousins, of course. They’re looking after her, but she’s in a terrible state. I can’t say I’m surprised,’ he said, looking down at the body. ‘I gather they were friends.’
‘Yes, they were. Will you take them somewhere more comfortable and get them a drink? I’ll be down to see them as soon as I can. If they’d rather go across the road to Number 66, that’s fine, but I don’t want them to be left alone.’
‘I’ll tell them, Sir. Just one thing before I go, though – we found that couple outside, and it was definitely White they got the tickets off. Fits the description to a tee.’
‘Then keep that idiot Bravo out of my sight for his own sake, and have a car go over the area. White might still be nearby if he’s had anything to do with this.’