Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) (2 page)

‘Another of them casuals,’ Grey then said disgustedly, lifting the body up slightly with one foot and letting it drop again.

‘Not from the pubs round here, sir, I know ’em all.’

Grey regarded the constable with dislike. Unknowns might mean trouble. ‘A casual’s what we call them,’ he told Rose loudly. ‘They hang around the pubs waiting for odd jobs, carrying and fetching from the docks, and don’t mind too much if they get ’em or not.’

Rose knew what a casual was all right, but he disapproved of Grey’s boot. A casual was a man, with a name, even if he alone knew it. ‘Nothing strikes you as odd?’ He squatted down by the body, and lifted it again.

A pause. ‘Not in this neighbourhood.’

‘He’s been stabbed. Knifed. Not much blood, because the knife’s still in it, driven in deep.’

The young constable flushed red, and seeing it, Rose added kindly: ‘You did right not to move the body, and there was no seeing without doing that.’

Overwhelmed with gratitude, the constable’s young face brightened. ‘I found this, sir, by his hand in a puddle. I took it for safe keeping.’

Rose looked at the small piece of shaped dark-red glass, examining it carefully. ‘Could be nothing, or it could be a garnet.’

‘He’s a thief then,’ Grey was impatient to be away. ‘Or a fence’s runner. I’ll take it. Valuable, is it?’

‘Not in itself.’ Rose replied absently. He was remembering this morning’s interview.

‘Can you describe the cross, Your Majesty?’

‘Silver with ivory, studded with precious stones.’

‘What kind of precious stones, sir?’

‘Mainly garnets,’
the King had replied promptly.

‘I’ll take it to the Yard.’ Rose scribbled a receipt. It was probably coincidence, but it might possibly be the tarragon in the sauce. He remembered Auguste once
saying that of an apparently insignificant detail. He shivered. There were smells in this narrow corridor that were far removed from an Auguste Didier kitchen. Smells of decay and death, that remained uncleansed by the rain still steadily beating down. And smells stirring in his mind as well – and those he didn’t like.

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’

The little man broke off. He looked perplexedly at his audience. ‘I ask you, you’d think he could
see
it was a dagger. “The handle toward my hand.” Now, is that poetry? No, that is a –’ he wildly searched for the right word – ‘a
perlice
report.’

The dancing dagger pranced along its invisible wire, as Will Lamb made valiant attempts to grasp it, leaping around the stage in increasing desperation as each time the dagger jerked out of his reach. ‘Come, let me clutch thee,’ he pleaded to it in vain. He appealed to his audience. ‘Now, if that was his old woman there I could understand it, but a dagger, well, I ask you, who’d want to clutch a dagger? Nasty unfriendly things. No, if you ask me,’ shaking his head sadly, ‘this Shakespeare fellow’s got it wrong.’

The literary context was familiar to him, but even if it had not been the comedy was irresistible and universal. Auguste Didier laughed helplessly in his private box at the back of the Empire Theatre’s grand circle.

Lamb’s anxious eyes bore the bewildered expression
of Everyman faced with a world of inanimate objects beyond his control. ‘Downright dangerous, I call it.’

‘Horrible, terrible,’ shouted out a jovial member of his audience.

The theatre rocked with laughter, as Lamb, peering anxiously round, made one final desperate glance of appeal to his audience, then plunged after his elusive quarry, and promptly tripped over, falling flat on the dagger, which had condescended to rest on the ground point upwards.

‘He is superb,’ Auguste cried enthusiastically to his companion. ‘He is another Grimaldi, a true clown.’

‘And a nice man, too.’ Gwendolen, Lady Westland, alias the former Magnificent Masher, the toast of the halls until her marriage, commented apparently casually. Auguste glanced at her, catching something odd in her tone, though she was laughing as hard as he. Was it just his imagination or could it be that the company of Auguste Didier was not the sole reason for her last-minute invitation to escort her this evening? Perhaps he longed too much for something just a little out of the ordinary to happen, and was seeing bears where only bushes existed. High society into which he had perforce been catapulted on his marriage provided a constrained life, and Tatiana had so far been more ingenious than he in squirreling out escape routes. She had her School of Motoring for Ladies, whereas his ten-volume work,
Dining with Didier
, was proving insufficient to satisfy his restlessness.

The troupe of brightly and lightly clad pierrots who concluded the first half of the programme were greeted with the polite but unrapturous applause to which they
were resigned, after the final chorus of the song that larded Lamb’s patter: ‘So I said to the Bard . . .’

As Auguste escorted Lady Westland through the notorious Promenade to the select champagne bar, his eyes strayed a trifle wistfully to right and left where soft birds of paradise sparkled in jewels and allure in search of custom for later this evening. Wistfully? He caught himself guiltily. He was a happily married man, he reminded himself, then cheered up as he reflected that to appreciate the aroma of the soup was not the same as sipping it.

The sight of the Veuve Cliquot awaiting them, as he advanced behind his hostess’s ample purple-satined posterior, cheered him even more, and it was well into the second glass before he ventured to put voice to his suspicions.

‘It is indeed a pleasure to be here, Lady Westland—’

‘But you want to know why, is that it?’ Gwendolen cut in cheerfully.

He nodded, relieved. After all, he hardly knew her. He had only met her once, and then only partially. He had visited Tatiana’s School of Motoring (an elegant title that discreetly failed to mention the motor garage, complete with engineering workshop, also on the premises), to discover his wife clad in hideous bloomers lying underneath a motorcar with someone in a similar state of dress. His wife emerged, Lady Westland had remained mostly hidden, as it appeared repairs were at a critical point. In her fifties now, Lady Westland had retired from the music-hall stage over twenty years ago. As the Magnificent Masher, she had stormed the music halls of the late seventies and eighties with her
male impersonations and comic abilities. Auguste suspected the comic potential of her life had seriously declined, and that she missed it in her present role of Magnificent Peeress.

‘Dear Tatiana asked me to entertain you while she was away.’

‘And why else, Lady Westland?’ he asked politely.

‘Nettie Turner’s got a job for you.’

Auguste had of course seen Nettie Turner on stage before – one could hardly avoid it. She was the darling of the halls in East and West Ends alike, and he seemed to remember hearing that it had been Lady Westland who had first spotted and encouraged her talent. Her warmth and vitality seemed to increase with the years, and she was well over forty now. How quickly magical illusion could vanish, however. As they went into her dressing-room after the performance, Auguste saw merely a middle-aged, tired woman, her face lined with more creases than laughter had provided, sitting in a room as plush and crowded with mementoes as any parlour. Where was the bewitching creature who had just held three and a half thousand people in the palm of her hand as she teased them, laughed with them, enchanted them? The innuendoes and movements accompanying her songs were carefully toned down for this audience, as she thrust her personality over the footlights, but Auguste had seen her in less refined halls. For Auguste, it was like meeting Sarah Bernhardt, but with her coster’s costume given way to a rather dull cream silk evening dress which emphasised the sallowness of a skin newly cleansed from greasepaint,
Nettie looked disappointingly ordinary – until she smiled at them. Immediately her face came alive, the warmth came back into her eyes and he saw then the strength of personality was just resting, not vanished. ‘Gwennie, me old dear. How’s the Gold Plate? Still keeping you on a ball and chain?’

‘Randolph is well, thank you, Nettie.’ Gwendolen correctly translated Plate as Mate. She ignored the jibe. ‘May I introduce Mr Auguste Didier, Nettie?’

For an instant, Auguste was aware of being appraised by the sharpest eyes he’d seen since he first met Egbert Rose, then the impression vanished, as she asked conventionally, ‘Enjoy the show, did you, Mr Didier?’

‘Who could not, with you topping the bill?’

‘Will
and me.’

‘Has he waited for us?’ asked Gwendolen.

‘We’re playing the Empire, Gwennie, not five halls a night. ’Course he’s still here. Have you met Will, Mr Didier?’

‘No, and I’d very much like to. He is a great artiste.’

‘There aren’t many nice people around in music hall,’ Nettie said soberly. ‘Many of us start out nice, and the higher we get on the bill the less nice we become. Will’s the exception. He’ll always do anyone a good turn. Money flows into one hand and jumps out of his other. He’s a bloody marvel. Most of us depend on a whole troupe of agents, writers, publishers, to prop us up. Not Will. He’s got an agent who looks after the business side, but as for the rest, he needs no one but himself. He writes his own material, the patter, the song, the whole act. His head’s full of music. He’s always scribbling; if he don’t want the stuff for himself, he’ll give it away. He let me have my Donkey Song, the one
I did tonight.’ She winked, wriggling her body suggestively in her chair, bursting out with ‘Everybody pats me, everybody strokes me, oh give me a carrot, oh do.’

Auguste blushed, and seeing this she roared with laughter. ‘That’s how I do it down East. But you didn’t blush out front tonight, did you?’

He laughed. ‘I did not.’

‘That’s better,’ Nettie said, relieved. ‘You’d better get used to our ways.’

‘Why?’ Auguste had a sudden foreboding.

‘You’re going to be Will’s personal detective.’

For a moment Auguste thought he’d misheard, but from the way in which he appeared to be the cynosure of both Nettie’s and Gwendolen’s eyes, he was greatly afraid he hadn’t. ‘I have had some success in solving crime,’ he began firmly, ‘but—’

Nettie blithely disregarded him. ‘Ever heard of the Old King Cole?’

Auguste racked his memory. Something came back to him, something Egbert Rose had once said, and not a polite something. ‘A music hall in the East End?’ he inquired cautiously.

‘Right. In St George’s Street, Wapping, down near the docks. Will and I both started our careers there. The owner’s an old rogue who sees bailiffs round every corner and no wonder. Percy Jowitt he’s called. This time he’s really in a bad way, and looks as if they’ll get him this time. He asked if we’d go back there for a week’s run to save him from the workhouse a bit longer. Will being a generous soul, too bloody generous this time, if you ask me, agreed.’

‘
That was indeed kind of him,’ Auguste said.

‘In this instance, not so bloomin’ kind, in fact. There’s an attraction who sat in the scales to add weight to Percy Jowitt’s arguments – he sent her to do his dirty business for him. A lady called Mariella Gomez. An auburn-haired English beauty married to a Portuguese juggler.’

‘She too is an artiste?’

Gwendolen caught Nettie’s eye and burst out laughing. ‘Adorable little doggies in frilly collars, sliding down a chute into a water tank.’

‘Come on, Gwennie. You’re not being fair,’ Nettie roared. ‘She’s a serio-vocalist.’ She relapsed into her stage persona as she piped out mockingly:

‘What’s a poor mermaid to do

When she’s only got a tail?’

‘She’d find out soon enough,’ Gwendolen snorted.

‘Provided it’s not with Will.’ Nettie sobered down. ‘He was crazy about her ten years ago, at the Old King Cole, but he was a four-foot-nine no one then, so she chose Miguel. She might have made the right choice in some ways –’ she caught Gwendolen’s eye in unspoken understanding – ‘but not the way Mariella chiefly cares about. Money.’

‘And that is why he needs a nursemaid?’Auguste was appalled.

‘No.’ Nettie instantly sobered. ‘He’s convinced someone’s going to murder him.’

Will Lamb’s dressing-room was a stark contrast to
Nettie’s, a plain working room with not a personal object to be seen. Yet the room didn’t seem empty, not with the nervous energy and personality of Will Lamb in it. He was sitting staring into the mirror, removing the last of the greasepaint from his eyebrows, but even at this mundane task he had the air of a bouncing ball merely awaiting the slightest touch to be back in play.

Nettie sailed in, wasting no time. ‘Will, I’ve brought your personal detective.’

Will leapt up, hurried towards Auguste, and pumped his hand warmly. ‘That’s really very generous of you, Mr Didier, very kind.’ He beamed.

‘I have explained, Mr Lamb, I am a chef,’ Auguste tried to protest, ‘and though I have experience of detection, I do not feel I am the right person to protect you.’

The two women exchanged a look, and Gwendolen grinned. ‘You could cook,’ Nettie said brightly. ‘We’ve arranged all that.’

Panic was replaced with cautious interest. ‘Cook?’