Murder on Stage (7 page)

‘Sarah,’ whispered Alfie. ‘There are two people working here who might have had a motive to murder Harry Booth – two chaps that hated him. Harry Booth scarred the face of
one of them – John Osborne was his name. The other was Francis Fairburn – Harry Booth stole Francis Fairburn’s girl and then there’s the theatre manager – he’s
someone that we’ll have to investigate as well . . .’

‘Wait till I do this and then we can —’ Suddenly Sarah stopped.

The dust from the floor of the stage was made up of a mixture of grime and of varnish ground to a pale grey, fine powder by feet: feet striding the stage, feet fidgeting, feet walking, feet
dancing and feet running. This fine powder from her dustpan had fallen on the table, but it had also covered the glass phial.

And outlined by the dust were the prints of greasy fingers; a broad thumb on one side and, on the other side, three fingers.

Sarah stared at the glass phial. She opened her mouth to speak and then turned her head in alarm at the sound of a door opening noisily.

‘Shh, they’re coming back,’ she whispered. ‘That’s a policeman. Quick, hide – go now.’

Alfie was gone in a flash, sliding between the two halves of the curtain, his bare feet making no sound on the wooden floor. By the time the policeman appeared, she was alone on the stage.

Sarah was trembling. She was pleased to feel her knees shake and hoped that she looked even paler than usual when one of the two policeman came back down the aisle between the seats. Sarah did
not try to hide, but waited for him with her head hanging. Now was the moment for her performance on stage. She hoped it would be a convincing one.

‘Hey, you girl, have you seen . . .’ and then, with a note of relief in his voice, as he spotted the phial, he said, ‘There it is!’

Sarah faced him. ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ she said, allowing her voice to quiver. ‘I had a bit of an accident. I spilt the dirt from the pan. Look at the phial. It’s
all covered in dust.’

‘That’s all right, girl,’ he said in quite a kind way. ‘Don’t worry about it. That’ll brush off.’

He reached out, but before he could touch it Sarah gave a gasp. ‘Don’t touch it, sir; don’t touch it. Look! Look, it’s got the print of the murderer on it!’

‘Murderer!’ He said the word slowly. He withdrew his hand and knelt on the ground, ignoring the wet on the board and stared hard at the phial. Then he looked up at her. ‘What
do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry, sir!’ Sarah gulped.

‘Officer Grey.’ He said the words almost mechanically, still staring at the finger marks on the phial.

‘I’m sorry, Officer Grey, I couldn’t help hearing what you said a minute ago. I was cleaning.’

‘And a good job you’ve made of it, too.’ He got up, looked ruefully at the damp patches on his knees and went across to the edge of the stage. Sarah’s eyes followed him.
He was fiddling with the gas pipes that ran along the edge. Sarah was glad that she had given them a good dust and polish. They had been black with grime.

Officer Grey took a box of matches from the pocket of his waistcoat, struck one and then bent down. Sarah could hear a soft hiss and then smelt the sickly smell of gas. Officer Grey put the
match to the tiny nozzle and a jet of flame leapt up, pointing directly at the candle-shaped block of lime. Almost immediately that began to glow, the white light spreading rapidly until the whole
block glowed. After a minute the limelight was strong enough to hurt her eyes. Officer Grey came back to the table and very carefully, placing his thumb at the bottom of the phial and his
forefinger over the top opening, grasped the small bottle. He picked it up and carried it over to the limelight.

‘You can see them easy now, Officer Grey.’ Sarah allowed her voice to get quite eager. She looked carefully at his face. He was frowning slightly. Her heart gave an excited leap.

‘Terrible the way fingers leave marks on glasses, isn’t it?’ she said in a chatty way. ‘It’s something that I learnt when I first went into service. The parlour
maid always gave the glasses an extra polish after I had washed them just in case there was a print left on one of them. She used to say that men were the worst. Their hands were greasier. I learnt
to look for them myself and not get into trouble when she checked them.’

He said nothing, just stared thoughtfully at the phial.

Then she gave a theatrical start. ‘Looks like three fingers, don’t it, sir?’ she said forgetting to call him Officer Grey.

He did not correct her. He turned the phial around, still keeping his finger and thumb in the same position.

‘Perhaps his little finger didn’t go on to it,’ he said after a minute.

‘But the first finger mark should be opposite to the thumb, that’s right, ain’t it?’ Sarah looked at his face as she said those words and saw him slowly nod. ‘And
that last one looks like a little finger, don’t it? Look, you can see how small and narrow it is. Looks like the first finger is missing.’

‘Pretend to put your hand around it,’ he said slowly. ‘Don’t touch it. Just go near to it.’

Sarah curved her hand, putting her thumb near to the thumb mark. Her forefinger was just opposite to a place where no mark showed, but the other three fingers were near to the marks on the
glass. Once again, he nodded.

‘Looks as though you’re right,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well, three fingers. That’s interesting.’

‘Grey!’ came a shout. ‘Grey, where the blazes have you got to?’

Officer Grey straightened up. ‘Keep this to yourself,’ he said. To her dismay he slipped the phial into his pocket and strode off. Then he came back and handed her a sixpence.

‘Keep this to yourself,’ he repeated in a low voice and then raised it to shout, ‘Coming, sir.’

Sarah went on with her work, bringing a damp cloth to various grimy places that showed up by the white limelight. She wondered whether to turn it off, but decided that it was none of her
business. Officer Grey should have done that. As she worked she kept an ear open for Alfie and when she heard a faint noise, she picked up her duster, brooms, bucket and mop and made her way
backstage. She opened her mouth to tell him about her discovery, but she could not do so. There was a sound of footsteps coming down the aisle, then climbing up the stairs that led to the
stage.

Alfie melted away once more and Sarah climbed on a chair and vigorously began to dust the top of a tall cupboard.

‘Can you see that? Those limelights are good for the actors but they don’t give much light on high.’ The man who had come in was dressed in overalls and carried a candle. He
raised it up high so that the top of the cupboard was illuminated. ‘There, is that better?’ he asked.

It was a beautiful voice, deep, musical, as smooth as hot chocolate. A voice for ladies to dream about!

But the face that Sarah saw by the light of the candle was a nightmare, slashed from side to side, puckered and with lumpy white scar tissue.

Sarah stared at him and then hurriedly looked away. This must be John Osborne, the man whose face had been slashed by Harry Booth. She caught her breath in sympathy. What must it be like to see
a face like that in the looking glass, to see the horror in the eyes of everyone who met him, to know that he could never again play the part of a hero at the theatre?

And it was Harry Booth who had done that to him.

Had John Osborne taken a terrible revenge on the man who had mutilated him for life? Especially if he considered that Harry Booth had done it on purpose . . .

Was she looking into the face of Harry Booth’s murderer?

As he left the cellar, Tom felt furious. He walked along the foggy street, kicking at lamp-posts and muttering to himself. That Sarah was just too bossy! What right had she to
order him about? Come to that, what right had Alfie to order him to do things? Why should he do what any of them told him? He was fed up. Fed up with being hungry, fed up with being the one who was
given all the worst jobs to do. Things hadn’t been too bad when his friend Charlie had lived with the gang, but now Charlie had gone back to the countryside where he had been born.

Tom stopped at a shop and gazed longingly in. It was a dairy shop, full of huge round cheeses, tempting slices of each of them lying on wooden platters, great brick-sized lumps of fresh butter,
salted butter – every kind of butter, with small cubes for housewives and cooks to taste and choose. There were custard pies on tin plates and milk jellies wobbling on others.

But the shop was empty of customers and the shopkeeper, a large man with ginger whiskers, was standing there towering over his cheeses and glaring at Tom as he peeped in. There was no hope of
stealing anything.

It was the same at Covent Garden market. The freezing fog had made everyone head for home quickly. There was no press of people, no crowds where a boy who had just stolen an apple pie from a
stall could hide himself. Shopping was almost over for the day. Many of the stallholders had begun to put away their goods. And every one of them was on the alert when they saw a ragged, barefoot
boy approach.

Perhaps Sammy had been luckier, thought Tom. He stopped for a moment. He had determined that he wasn’t going to do what he was told, but now he was inclined to search for his cousin. He
wasn’t obeying Sarah, he told himself. It just made sense to find Sammy. The combination of being blind and having a good singing voice often worked when nothing else did; there might be a
capful of money by the time that he found Sammy. He would tell Sammy that Alfie had ordered him to bring home some sausages. At the thought of them, Tom’s mouth watered.

There was still no sign of Sammy outside either of the two usual churches, St Martin-in the Fields and St Mary-le-Strand, so Tom began to ask passers-by. There were a few more people around
– clerks finishing a day’s work, shopkeepers taking in boards from the wet pavements, but no one had noticed a blind boy and a hairy dog. Tom stood and thought. The chances were that no
one on the Strand had stopped to listen to Sammy. So what would Sammy do? He hadn’t gone home, so where had he gone?

Tom wandered along Fleet Street. No sign of Sammy there. He tried asking a few of the newspapermen dashing in and out of their offices, but they brushed him away – like I was a bluebottle,
he thought to himself indignantly. Next he went up through Aldwych and along Drury Lane. There was no sign of Sammy anywhere, but there was an elderly well-dressed lady standing alone outside a
greengrocer’s shop. Tom approached her with a hand outstretched.

‘Please ma’am, would you spare a penny,’ he whined. ‘I’ve had no food for nearly two days.’

‘Get off with you,’ she shouted. ‘Go home and wash your face and get yourself a job and don’t go preying on a defenceless person like myself. Officer!’ her voice
rose to a shrill note as she beckoned to a nearby policeman.

‘I’m going,’ muttered Tom furiously, running as fast as he could in the opposite direction to the policeman, down Drury Lane and back into the Strand.

I’ll try Smithfield, he thought.

It made sense for Sammy to go there. Bad weather would not stop people going to Smithfield. The meat had to be bought and butchered and taken to the shops, cut up into neat little joints and
chops, wrapped in brown paper and delivered by the butchers’ boys to the homes of the toffs.

Smithfield was a place full of queues where the shoppers would be glad to pass their time listening to a song and would spare their halfpence, pence, groats and sixpences to reward the singer.
It was a dangerous place for a blind boy – Alfie would never have suggested that Sammy go there on his own. You needed to have eyes in the back of your head to avoid being trampled by cattle,
pigs or even sheep at Smithfield. But Sammy would know that they were all desperate for food and might go to take his chance there.

Worth a try, thought Tom to himself and he set off east towards the meat market.

Tom had never been to church, but once he had listened to an outdoor sermon about hell. He had been just passing by, but the words had grabbed him and he stayed, open-mouthed
at the descriptions of what happened to the wicked after they had died. He had had nightmares about hell for months and was reminded of it just now. Smithfield was a hell: a hell of blood and foam
and death. As he watched, he saw a child go down, slipping in the ankle-deep river of liquid animal muck. Tom turned away quickly from the screams. There was nothing he could do. He was sorry now
that he had come.

And then he thought of Mutsy.

Of course, Mutsy would steer Sammy away from the terrible danger and he would guide him to the stalls at the outside of the market. As soon as he thought of that Tom began to hurry. Now he
guessed where Sammy might be. The chestnut seller at Smithfield was quite a friend to the gang. He had invited Sammy to come and sing at his stall as often as he liked. You only had to say
‘chestnuts’ to Mutsy and he would lead you straight to one of those men with a portable iron brazier who roasted chestnuts on street corners. Mutsy had got to love chestnuts and so did
Tom. His mouth began to water at the thought.