Half Moon Street (18 page)

“Round?” Pitt said quickly. All the pictures he had seen in Cathcart’s house had been rectangular, as had been the portraits in the houses of his clients.

“Yes.” Hathaway smiled. “Of course that’s amateurs. I know the professionals use the square ones, but these are pretty good, you know. When they are all done you send the whole camera back to them and they process the film and return you the camera reloaded. It all costs about five guineas.” He looked a trifle uncomfortable. “As I said, it is rather expensive. But I’d rather do that than any other pastime I can think of.” He jutted his chin out defiantly, daring Pitt to say he was wasting money.

“That is most interesting,” Pitt said quite sincerely. “Thank you for your candor, Mr. Hathaway, and your instruction. If anything else occurs to you, please let me know. Good day.”

Pitt spoke to every other member of the camera club, but no one else could help. One young man had seen the quarrel but could only describe the participants, he did not know them by name.

“Oh yes,” he agreed vehemently. “Very heated. I thought at one moment they would come to blows, but the taller young man stalked off, leaving the other very red in the face and mighty uncomfortable.”

Nothing Pitt asked could elicit anything more, except numerous details on the marvels of photography, the newest technical advances, the miracle of Mr. Eastman’s roll of film—although it could apparently be used only outside and in natural daylight, which explained largely why Delbert Cathcart, who frequently worked in subdued light or inside a room, still worked with the old plates.

The club members were all male, and it had not occurred to them as worthy of comment that there were no women among them, but they were ardent in their admiration for female photographers, and not the least hesitant in accounting them great artists in their field, and indeed possessing an excellent and comprehensive grasp of the techniques involved as well. Their thoughts did not advance Pitt’s detection in the slightest, but in spite of himself he was interested.

From Hampstead, Pitt went to seek Orlando Antrim. The next necessary step would be to ask him what the quarrel had been about and where and when he had last seen Cathcart. Pitt was dreading the moment when he might have to accuse him of the murder. But some confrontation was unavoidable.

He found Orlando at the theatre rehearsing his part in
Hamlet
, which he was due to play within a week.

Pitt was required to explain himself to the doorman and prove his identity before he was allowed in.

“They’re in rehearsal,” the old man said, fixing Pitt with a gimlet eye. “Don’t you go interruptin’ ’em, now! You wait till yer spoke to. Mr. Bellmaine’ll tell you when it’s your turn. Mustn’t upset actors, isn’t fair. Plainer than that, it isn’t right.”

Pitt acknowledged the stricture and obediently tiptoed along the dusty passages as he had been directed. After a few false starts, he eventually ended up in the wings of the huge stage, bare except for two embroidered screens and a chair. A tall lean man stood towards the front, perhaps a couple of yards from the orchestra pit and a little to the left. His cadaverous face was fired with emotion and he held one arm high as if hailing someone in the distance.

Then Pitt saw her, coming from the shadows of the wings opposite him into the light of the stage: Cecily Antrim, dressed in very ordinary gray-blue, a simple blouse and skirt with a slight bustle. Her hair was caught up untidily in a few pins, and yet it was extraordinarily flattering. It looked casual and youthful, full of energy.

“Ah, my dear!” the tall man said warmly. “Ready for Polonius’s death. From the top. Where’s Hamlet? Orlando!”

Orlando Antrim emerged from the wings behind his mother. He too was dressed in the most ordinary of clothes: trousers, a collarless shirt and a waistcoat which matched nothing. His boots were dusty and scuffed and his hair tousled. A look of fierce concentration darkened his face.

“Good. Good,” the tall man said. Pitt assumed he was the Mr. Bellmaine the doorman had referred to. “Hamlet, from the right. Gertrude, you and I from the left. This is the arras in question. Let us begin.” He led the way off the stage, his footsteps echoed across the boards, then he turned and walked back beside Cecily.

“ ‘He will come straight,’ ” he began. “ ‘Look you lay home to him . . .’ ” His voice sounded no more than a conversational level, and yet it filled the stage and the auditorium beyond. “ ‘Pray you, be round with him.’ ”

“ ‘Mother, Mother, Mother!’ ” Orlando called from the wings.

Cecily turned to Bellmaine. “ ‘I’ll warrant you: Fear me not— withdraw, I hear him coming.’ ”

In a single, oddly graceful movement for one aping age, Bellmaine slipped behind the screen.

Orlando came onto the stage. “ ‘Now, Mother, what’s the matter?’ ”

“ ‘Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended,’ ” Cecily answered, her voice carrying the same considered music.

Orlando’s face was strained, his eyes wide and dark. There was a harshness in him of emotion so tightly held in, and yet so tormented, he was at the edge of breaking. “ ‘Mother, you have my father much offended.’ ”

Pitt watched in fascination as people he had seen in totally different characters took on the roles familiar to every generation for nearly three hundred years. He had studied Hamlet in the schoolroom on Sir Arthur Desmond’s estate. He had read the soliloquy himself with Matthew and pulled it apart to its separate elements. Yet in front of him it now became a story of people with lives as real as his own. He watched the queen’s guilt, Polonius’s death, Hamlet’s torture, all created with voice and gestures on a bare stage and then shattered in an instant as the actors stopped, threw parts aside, and became themselves again.

“Too quick,” Bellmaine criticized, looking at Orlando. “Your accusation blurs the words. Hamlet is in fury and indignation, but the audience still needs to hear the substance of his charge. You are too realistic.”

Orlando smiled. “Sorry. Should I hesitate before ‘heaven’s face doth glow’?”

“Try it,” Bellmaine agreed with enthusiasm. He turned to Cecily. “You are pleading. Guilt is angrier. You are trying too hard to win the audience’s sympathy.”

She shrugged an apology.

“Again,” he ordered. “From Hamlet’s entrance.”

Pitt watched them go through it a second time, and a third, and a fourth. He marveled at their patience, and even more at the emotional energy that invested them with passion each time, picking up halfway through a scene, with its changing moods, and throwing themselves into it. Only twice did anyone need prompting, and then continuance was immediate. They seemed able to create the illusion of an entire world by the power of their own belief, and yet to remember someone else’s words and speak them as if they were their own.

Finally Bellmaine allowed them some respite, and for the first time Pitt noticed that several other actors and actresses had appeared, ready to rehearse their parts. He tried to imagine them in the costumes of a far earlier period, and see them as they would be in character. A young woman with fair hair and a high forehead he thought to be Ophelia, and as soon as the recognition came to him, he saw Delbert Cathcart obscenely splayed out in the punt, dressed in the green velvet gown in parody of ecstasy and death.

He rose to his feet from where he had been sitting on a pine box.

“Excuse me . . .”

“My dear fellow,” Bellmaine said straightaway. “I can’t be doing auditioning now. Go and see Mr. Jackson. He’ll talk with you. If you can be prompt, come and go exactly as you are told, stay sober and only speak when you are spoken to, a guinea a week and you have begun your career on the stage.” He smiled, and his whole countenance was illuminated with sudden charm. “You never know where it will lead. Tour with us in the provinces, get a small part and we’ll pay you up to twenty-five shillings . . . thirty-five in time. Now be a good chap and go and look for Jackson. He’s probably around at the back somewhere, scenery and lighting, don’t you know.”

Pitt smiled in spite of himself. “I’m not looking for a career on the stage, Mr. Bellmaine. I am from the Bow Street police station . . . Superintendent Pitt . . .”

Cecily looked up from the edge of the stage where she was sitting. “My goodness, it’s the policeman friend of Joshua’s. Polonius is alive and well, I assure you!” Since Bellmaine was standing between them, that was incontestable.

“I should hardly arrest Hamlet, ma’am,” Pitt promised. “The nation would never forgive me.”

“The world would not, Mr. Pitt,” she answered. “But I am delighted you have such an excellent sense of priorities. We fluffed a few lines but our performance was hardly a crime.” She sat back a little, hugging one knee. “What brings you here? Not my protest against the Lord Chamberlain, surely? Now, if you read my mind as to what I would like to do to the wretch, that may well be arrestable.”

“I cannot arrest you until after you have done it, Miss Antrim,” he pointed out, trying to hide his amusement. It was not a time for it, and yet it rose unbidden within him.

She understood far too quickly. Her face broke into a lovely smile. “How very kind of you. Thank you so much!”

Bellmaine stepped between them. “You have come for something, sir. Pray what is it? We cannot afford to stop for long. This may not appear much to you, but it is our living, and far harder than it seems.”

Pitt turned to him. “It seems extremely hard, Mr. Bellmaine,” he said honestly. “I have to speak to Mr. Antrim. I shall keep it as brief as possible. Is there a scene you can rehearse without him?”

“
Hamlet
without the Prince? You jest, sir? Ah . . . I suppose so. A little. Laertes, Ophelia! Come! We have no time to idle. Scene three. From the top, if you please. Begin . . . ‘My necessaries are embarked’ . . . pay attention!”

Pitt walked across the boards towards Orlando, his footsteps loud and solitary for a moment until the arrival of Laertes and Ophelia muffled them, and the drama began instantly with well-schooled voices and passion lit as if the whole story leading to it were barely dismissed the moment before.

“What is it?” Orlando asked with a frown. “Is it to do with the censorship thing? I protested, but quite peacefully.”

“No, Mr. Antrim, it has nothing to do with censorship at all. As far as I know, you have broken no laws in this matter.” He walked beside Orlando farther into the wings and behind the stage, where bare brick walls stretched up into the darkness out of sight and huge painted backdrops for a dozen different worlds hung or were stacked in layers.

“Then what?” Orlando faced him, standing with grace so deeply learned he did it without thought.

“Do you belong to a gentlemen’s camera club near Hampstead?” Pitt asked.

“What?”

Pitt began to repeat the question.

“Yes!” Orlando interrupted. “Yes, I do . . . at least, I go there occasionally, not very often, but I do belong. Why?”

“Did you join them near the Serpentine last Tuesday quite early in the morning?” He watched Orlando’s face, and was not sure in the uncertain light whether he saw him pale or not.

“Yes . . .” Orlando said guardedly. He swallowed and coughed. “Yes, I did. Why? Nothing unusual happened, so far as I am aware.”

“You met a Mr. Delbert Cathcart there, and had a heated disagreement with him.”

“No.” He looked startled, as if the question had taken him completely by surprise. “You—you mean the photographer who was killed? If he was there I certainly didn’t see him.”

“But you were there?”

“Yes, of course I was there. It was an excellent morning, clear early light with a sort of whiteness to it, and not many people about. I didn’t have to rehearse and I hadn’t been too late the night before. Who told you Cathcart was there?”

“Do you know him?”

“No.” The answer was very quick. Orlando’s eyes did not leave Pitt’s and they were unnaturally steady. But then he knew Cathcart had been murdered. Any normal man would be nervous. “No, I don’t,” he repeated. “He was a professional, one of the best, so everyone says. I am completely amateur. I just enjoy it. But I think I’ll have to give it up. I haven’t time.”

Pitt could believe that without the slightest difficulty. He could not even imagine the amount of mental and emotional energy needed to play a role like Hamlet, let alone the physical endurance.

“You quarreled with someone that morning and left in some heat. If it was not Cathcart, who was it?” he asked.

Orlando flushed. He hesitated several moments before replying, and when he did so he looked away first.

“A friend,” he said a touch defiantly. “A fellow I’ve known for a little while. I’d rather not get him concerned in this. It was a simple disagreement, that’s all. I daresay it looked more violent than it was. There was no ill will, just a . . . a difference of opinion as to what was right. Not the sort of thing you would lose a friendship over, let alone come to blows.”

Pitt disliked what he had to do, but to omit it would be irresponsible, even though he half believed Orlando.

“Others have identified the man as Cathcart, Mr. Antrim. If it was not he, then I need to verify that. The name of your friend?”

Orlando hesitated again, then his face set. “I’m sorry.” He waited for a moment to gauge Pitt’s reaction. He must have seen no yielding. “Actually he is out of town anyway, and I couldn’t get in touch with him. So there would be no point in my giving you his name . . . or address.”

“If he is out of town, Mr. Antrim, there would be no harm either, would there?” Pitt resumed.

“Well, yes there would. It might do his reputation some damage, and he would not be there to protect it.”

“Mr. Antrim, all I wish to do is confirm that it was he you quarreled with the morning of the day Mr. Cathcart was killed, no more than that.”

“Well, you cannot, because he is not here. But surely if a man of Cathcart’s standing and reputation had been at the camera club, of all places, some other member would be able to confirm it?”