Ha'penny (36 page)

“It’s a perfectly good street dress,” I said, though I had chosen it with ice cream in mind and it obviously wouldn’t do. I couldn’t say to Mrs. Tring that there would be no meeting Hitler afterwards, and possibly no Hitler. I couldn’t really imagine there being an afterwards.

“Doublet and hose or which Hamlet dress then?” Mrs. Tring asked.

I laughed and put my arm around her. “What do you think?” I asked.

“Well, he saw the blue dress at the Embassy party. He’ll have seen the rest on stage as well, but I think the russet one from the gravedigger scene would be the best, and that way Mollie can wear her gold one. It was all very well for you to match on stage, but it might be a bit odd off.”

I was taking off my gold dress and putting on my white nightdress for the next scene as we spoke. “It’ll do,” I said. “Thanks. My change out of it is a really quick one, but get it ready again for me for after.”

“Sit down and let me do your shadows,” she said. I was supposed to have shadows under my eyes in the second half. I stared into the mirror as she did it and thought that I might never put on the doublet and hose and I’d certainly never put the russet dress on again later. I was back where I had been at the very beginning, mentally, as if the whole bomb thing was a play and everything with Devlin, everything since I met Siddy outside the Empire, was real but only in its own terms, as Hamlet’s tragedy was, as if the bomb could explode and yet everything in the real world and my real life would go on as it had been, the way it did at the end of a play. Mrs. Tring always used to express wonder at how Mollie and I learned our lines, and say our heads must be packed full with all the plays we knew. I don’t know how it was for Mollie, but although I lived and breathed the play while it was taking shape and while it was running, I would forget my lines afterwards and it would start to recede into the general shape of what I knew. I could feel this business doing the same thing, taking on a dramatic shape in my mind.

“Five minutes,” the boy said.

“I must lace Mollie,” Mrs. Tring said, and almost ran out. I made my way up to the wings. Antony was still there, and still looking out. “It seems a very happy house,” he said. “A lot depends on the critics, of course, and they may be paying more attention to our distinguished audience than to us, but I think things are going as well as can be expected.”

He’d have said he thought we had a hit if he wasn’t so superstitious. “Break a leg,” I said, and he patted me on the arm. Then Mollie and Tim were exchanging their lines and Mollie got into bed and Tim stepped behind the arras and that was my cue so I went on again.

32

T
he bobby in the corridor outside the Hampstead box was the unimaginative and anti-Semitic one Carmichael had met outside Gilmore’s house. Jacobson had followed Carmichael; now he waved him back and shut the door of the box. He needed to act quickly, and he wanted no visible disturbance in case they were being watched.

Out in the curved corridor, the bobby looked at Carmichael incuriously. “There’s a possibility there may be a bomb,” Carmichael said. “It’s not sure, but it’s enough of a risk I need to investigate further. I need to speak to the guards on the Royal Box.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Just go around the curve and keep going.”

Carmichael ran around the curve, his bad leg dragging and slowing him. His heart was racing. There were two German soldiers outside the entrance to the Royal Box. They brought their pistols up and trained them on him as he approached. “I am Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard,” he said. He had never expected to be mistaken for a crazed assassin. He showed them his papers, which they examined minutely without a word.

“Has Viola Lark been up here today?” he asked.

They looked at each other. One of them said something in German. “Yes, she flowers bring-ed,” the other said.

Carmichael felt almost calm now his guess had been confirmed, although he knew that the bomb she must have brought could go off at any moment.

“Those flowers were probably a bomb. We need to evacuate the box, get everyone out quietly, do you understand? There could be a timer, or there could be someone in the audience who could set it off if they see trouble.”

“Ja,”
the soldier said, and rapped twice on the door of the box. A tall SS captain came out immediately and gave Carmichael an assessing look. The soldier spoke to him in German. His eyebrows raised.

“I suppose you have evidence?” he said. “Let me see your papers.”

“I have a chain of circumstantial evidence,” Carmichael said. “Miss Lark’s sister Siddy is a communist and has been part of a plot to put a bomb in this box, along with an Irishman who is still at large.” Carmichael handed over his papers and waited while the SS man examined them, almost beside himself with impatience. He could hear the sudden hush and then the opening words of the play beginning again.

The captain frowned. “I find this very hard to believe, but very well. I will bring the Fuhrer out, and then the others.”

“Do it with as little disturbance as possible. If there’s someone in the audience watching the box they could set off the bomb as soon as you move.”

“Give me some credit,” the captain said. “Besides, I think this is all a horse’s nest. Lady Viola’s other sister is sitting beside the Fuhrer. And why would they wait this long, all the first half of the stupid play? But I will move carefully.” He unholstered his pistol and went back into the box.

Carmichael stepped away down the corridor as the captain went back in. The door opened again after a moment, and Hitler came out, closely followed by Celia Himmler. Carmichael saw Normanby behind them, then there was a shot from the box. Hitler came another few steps down the corridor towards Carmichael, and then the whole wall of the box blew out, knocking Normanby forward. Hitler staggered a little, and Carmichael steadied him. Celia Himmler opened her mouth as if she were screaming, but Carmichael didn’t hear her. Blast deafness, from the concussion. He remembered it from the war.

He pushed her out of the way and went towards Normanby and the German soldiers who were on the floor. Normanby was unconscious, and had a large chunk of wall on top of him. The gash on his forehead was bleeding sluggishly, so he was probably alive, for now at least. Carmichael couldn’t see anything immediate to do for him. One of the German soldiers was as unquestionably dead as Royston. The other, the one who had said that Viola Lark had brought flowers, was staring in horror as blood pulsed out of his arm. He had been on the safe side of the corridor, like Carmichael, but he had been unlucky and hit by a piece of flying shrapnel. It must have nicked an artery. Carmichael remembered that from the war too. Funny that these very men might have been trying to kill him then. He took out the silk handkerchief folded into his jacket pocket and made it into a tourniquet, then twisted his pencil into the knot. “Hold it!” he shouted at the soldier.

Then, suddenly, there were police and German uniformed soldiers everywhere. “Get an ambulance,” Carmichael bellowed.

One of them detached the hysterical Celia Himmler from Hitler, whom she had been embracing, and led her off down the corridor. Most of the others then started to fuss over Hitler, who was unharmed, but some of them came over and started to clear the fallen bricks from Mark Normanby. Another said something he couldn’t hear and looked apprehensively at Carmichael. He couldn’t understand why until he looked down at himself. He laughed. “It’s not my blood,” he shouted. “Have you called an ambulance?”

The policeman nodded emphatically, having worked out that Carmichael couldn’t hear. He would have a terrible earache later, he remembered, and a whistling noise that might last for weeks.

Hitler was pointing at Carmichael and saying something. One of the SS men, not the captain he had spoken to before, came over and tried to speak to Carmichael. He pointed at his ears and gestured. The German took out a pad and wrote neatly in small letters, “The Fuhrer thanks you for your warning and for the first aid to the guard. He will see you are given a German medal for bravery.”

Carmichael stared at it for a moment then waved it away. He looked up and saw Hitler smiling at him. The bricks had been removed from Normanby, and people were lifting him carefully onto a stretcher. Carmichael moved to let someone come past him and found himself looking down at the dead face of Daphne Normanby as she was carried past him. She looked years younger, all the wariness drained out of her with her life.

He swallowed hard and felt the half-forgotten yet familiar sensation of pain in his ears. Jacobson arrived, running. “We have to stop the audience from leaving,” Carmichael said, in an ordinary tone of voice. They could hear him even if he couldn’t hear them. “And I have to go around to the front and arrest Viola Lark. Don’t talk to me, I’m deaf from the blast, but I’m all right. Come on.”

Jacobson hesitated for only a moment, then nodded. The SS man helpfully offered him the pad and paper. He wrote neatly, “One man shot dead. Audience fleeing.” Carmichael read it then led the way down the corridor to where the bobbies had linked arms to control the crowd.

“Don’t let anyone leave,” Carmichael said. “Check everyone’s papers.”

The bobby’s lips moved. Jacobson touched his arm, and wrote, “Lots of people left already, crowding out from the ha’pennies and the stalls. Shot, explosion, panic.”

Only to be expected really. Carmichael sighed. “And heaven knows what the newspapers will be saying. Too late. All the same, check as many papers as you can. Hold any Irishmen, Jews, foreigners.”

The bobby nodded, and Jacobson added something. Then the stretcher bearers came up behind them with Mark Normanby groaning between them, and they moved aside to let them through.

Carmichael and Jacobson followed them downstairs and into the stalls. The two policemen at the doorway saluted and let them through. The stalls had clearly been emptied out in a rush. Some seats had coats lying on them. Empty chocolate boxes and programs caught under Carmichael’s feet. The stage was empty of actors, though still dominated by a bed and something that looked like a great fire screen. Carmichael rubbed his ears, which were beginning to ache. He realized he had no idea how long it had been since the explosion.

There was a uniformed bobby standing over the body in the front row. He had fallen with his head towards the stage, so it was clear that he must have been standing. He had something clutched in his hand. “Radio detonator!” the bobby bellowed, pointing.

“German?” Carmichael asked. His ears were ringing now, and his hearing was beginning to come back.

“Probably Russian,” Jacobson wrote, then underlined the last word. Germans had developed the radio detonator but the Russians had not been slow in copying them. Another communist connection?

Carmichael put the detonator out of his thoughts and stared at the bomber. He had been shot through the head, and was unquestionably dead. Any questions he could have answered were dead with him. By his build, he was the Irishman who had been introduced to Carmichael as Connelly. “Get Viola Lark, bring her here right away,” Carmichael said to the bobby. Then, as he scurried off, Carmichael turned to Jacobson. “Keiler must have got him,” he said, “I warned him, and he went in and warned the others, and this fellow must have stood up and pushed the button and Keiler was looking and shot him right away. I’m surprised he had time to push the button, really. It must have been damn near simultaneous.”

He looked up at the ruins of the box, where uniformed German soldiers were poking about, then back at the body. Jacobson was saying something he couldn’t hear. Then the bobby came back with Viola Lark. He was holding her arm protectively, but she was not struggling. She looked pale and somehow shrunken. Her face had no expression at all. She was wearing a white nightdress, which, with her still face, made her look like a sleepwalker.

“Here she is, sir!” the bobby bawled.

“Arrest her under the Defence of the Realm Act,” Carmichael said to Jacobson. He half-heard Jacobson going through the ritual words. She didn’t react at all, she was looking past them, to the body.

“I am Inspector Carmichael, of Scotland Yard,” he said, making an effort not to shout, and wondering if this was the last time he would introduce himself that way, as he would have his new Watch title soon. “We met once before.”

“Just about here,” Viola Lark said, not shouting, but pitching her voice to project, so he could hear her more plainly than he could hear the others.

“You introduced this dead man as Devlin Connelly. Is that his name, or is he in fact Sir Aloysius Farrell?”

She looked down at the body, tenderly, averting her eyes from the blown-away face. Then she looked up for an instant at the empty theater, not at the ruined box but farther up, towards the ha’pennies. “Of course he is,” she said. “And he’ll be buried in the Farrell tomb in Arranish, in Ulster, with gold sovereigns on his eyes, not shoveled into a pauper’s grave making do with a pair of ha’pennies.”

Carmichael wondered if she were entirely unhinged. “Did he make you do this?” he asked, gently. “He and Siddy, Lady Russell?”

“ ‘For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot,’ ” she said, and began to cry. Carmichael recognized the words from the play, she had said them about Hamlet’s father being remembered, but could not see their relevance.

Just then Celia Himmler, clearly recovered from her hysterics, swept up to them. “Stop bullying my sister!” she demanded.

This took Carmichael’s breath away. “Your sister has been part of a conspiracy which killed your husband and Mrs. Normanby and almost killed you, and I was asking her to identify the body of her coconspirator.”

“There must be some mistake,” Celia Himmler said.

“Oh Pip, Pip, I’m sorry,” Viola Lark said. She would have stepped forward towards her sister but for the bobby’s protective grip on her arm.

Celia stared at her sister for a moment, then slapped her face. “Pull yourself together,” she said, ignoring the rest of them and holding out a hand to Viola, who shrank away. “Now come on.”