Dead on Cue

by Guy Compton, D.G. Compton

Genres: Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

A deadly role becomes murder in the theatre...

When writer Ben Anderson goes to Downshead Repertory Theatre company to see the rehearsals for his first play, he is not prepared for what follows.

Sitting in the audience, he witnesses a horrific murder: a prop gun has been swapped with the real thing with deadly consequences. And when a second killing occurs, and the local CID officer is suspicious of Ben's part in the mysterious events, things go from bad to much, much worse...

Release date: March 22, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 208

Sample

PETER took the gun from the drawer. He hoped it was glinting evilly in his hand. He looked across to Faith, where she sat sobbing on the end of the camp bed. He sighed, and breathed deeply the stale smell of size.

‘They’ll be coming soon,’ he said. ‘Best be ready for them. Ought to put up a bit of a show.’

Both of them were used to the brightness of the lights. But the heat in the squalid tenement room was something you never got used to. In the rebellion-tossed Budapest outside the window it was October, the temperature sub-zero. Yet Peter could feel drops of moisture in a line above his eyebrows, and the sweat trickling down inside his shirt. The coarse material of his uniform was stifling, he thought he was going to faint.

‘They’ll come up the fire escape,’ he said. ‘You must keep back out of the line of fire.’

Faith continued to sob, her head in its peasant scarf bowed low over the filthy blanket. There was a long pause.

‘Right back,’ said Peter desperately. ‘Right back, Katusha, right back out of the line of fire.’

Somewhere in Faith’s head two frail nerve ends suddenly joined. She was Katusha. She jerked into action.

‘What use is it’ – her accent was broken and throbbing with patriotism – ‘what use is it for me to live if you, Harry, do not? Give me a gun and we will fight together.’

‘There is only one gun, Katusha. That is for me – you must see that. I’ve quite a score to settle with the chief of police and his minions. …’

From where they were watching in the back row of the stalls James gripped Ben Anderson’s arm. He leaned close, breathing halitosis.

‘My God,’ he whispered, ‘that’s not the prop gun.’

Ben cheered up. He was glad of a diversion, any diversion. The first two and a half acts of Swords against the Darkness had been bad enough to be funny, but by now the joke was wearing thin.

‘Does it matter? I mean, was the prop gun special?’

‘The police lent it to us. Together with a box of blanks.’

‘Where d’you think that one’s come from then?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

When Ben had heard that the Downshead Rep. was willing to give his first murder play a try-out he had been delighted. Any try-out was better than none. Now, seeing this other chap’s play, he wasn’t so sure. …

Up on the stage, Katusha and brave Major Harry Wentworth were embracing. Night was falling in the drab Budapest suburb, bringing a hot smell of overloaded dimmers from the switchboard in the corner. The electrician was fanning them with his copy of the script. The Major suddenly dragged himself out of Katusha’s arms and started scribbling feverishly with a stub of pencil on the margin of a newspaper.

‘Here, my darling, take this. Get away from here. Carry this paper to Underwood. He will know what to do. Take it openly for all to see and nobody will suspect.’

‘But you – what about you?’

‘I shall join you later. Things may be a little hot here for a while. I’ll contact you at Grishkin’s. Now go.’

Little Faith Fulton rose from the bed clutching the newspaper, hoping nobody could see it was Saturday’s Daily Mirror. She moved slowly to the door down right.

‘Will it make any difference?’ whispered Ben. ‘It’s a gun – I mean, surely the type doesn’t matter?’

‘But we’d tested the other one. What if this one doesn’t go off?’

What if it does, thought Ben, his crime writer’s mind galloping on delightedly. What if it does go off, and somebody dies? What a magnificently dramatic way of doing murder. But the play’s producer was sitting next to him and seemed quite sufficiently agitated as it was, so Ben kept his thoughts to himself.

‘It’s the climax of the whole play,’ said James Bolsover. ‘If it doesn’t go off the whole thing’s completely ruined.’

Peter and Faith were embracing again by the door. Beyond the darkened room the moon had risen abruptly, and blue light flooded through on to the dusty floor. There were the black silhouettes of the Budapest skyline against the star-studded night sky.

‘Go now.’ Peter thrust her from him. ‘Go! Tell Underwood not to be afraid. With us or without us the oppressed will one day triumph. Now, go!’

She opened the door and turned for the last time, yearning for him. Outside the window a man in a soft hat and a mackintosh appeared. Peter turned from her and levelled his gun. The click of the safety catch could be heard throughout the theatre.

‘Good …’ James rubbed his hands. ‘That’s good. Pete knows how to use his props. He’s a good boy. We’ll keep it in.’

‘Will he know it’s not the same gun?’ asked Ben.

‘He may do. It won’t throw him. Plenty of experience – nothing throws young Pete.’ James peered at one of his bits of paper in the half dark and wrote something. ‘If it doesn’t go off, though – that’s what’s worrying me. God knows what he’ll do then.’

Ben was worried by something rather different. Suddenly his idea about the gun and the murder didn’t seem so silly – in fact it seemed obvious and inevitable. He wondered if there was anything he ought to say, anything he ought to do. Otherwise the brave Major in his innocence would aim the gun and squeeze the trigger. And the poor fool outside the window would suddenly and genuinely be dead. Indeed, he would suddenly be the only genuine thing in the whole tatty outfit. Ben supposed there were things he ought to say and do – but also he could imagine how bloody silly he’d look if he turned out to be wrong and there was nothing in the gun but paper caps. So he said nothing and did nothing. He just sat tight and watched, fascinated.

The poor fool outside the window was in fact the stage manager in a walking-on part. He knew he had to get the window open, and it was worrying him. At the dress rehearsal that afternoon it had stuck half open till a hammer was fetched to it. Since he had helped the stage designer to make it in the first place he knew just what was involved, and he prised it now with tenderness and care. It opened beautifully.

Anna had slipped out through the door and Major Harry was alone in the pool of yellow light from the landing beyond. Somehow the secret policeman on the fire escape could not see him. He pulled his hat lower over his eyes and began to climb in at the window. He paused, seeming almost to be waiting to be shot. The hunted Englishman, hounded through the streets of Budapest and at last at bay, steadied his hand against first night nerves and fired twice, in quick succession.

James needn’t have worried. The gun went off fine. It went off very fine indeed.

The noise in the theatre was deafening. Somewhere back-stage Ben heard a bullet ricochet off the brick wall and whine away into the darkness. The stage manager had a moment’s astonishment and fear, his eyes wide with suspended horror. He was aware of two holes in the canvas wall beside him – one bullet hole roughly level with his chest, the second way above his head where the recoil of the first had jerked the automatic. Nine or ten inches this way and he realized he would have been dead.

For a moment in the theatre there was the most perfect silence ever recorded – a silence heightened because of the hundred or so people who were making it. Smoke drifted in the number eleven blue moonlight, and the stage manager could see Peter Mace’s face pale and shocked and sweating. Then he remembered what was expected of him and pitched forward through the window on to the stage. He lay motionless.

A woman in row H screamed faintly. The rest of the audience shifted and coughed, uncomfortably feeling that realism could perhaps be taken just a little too far. In the back row of the stalls James Bolsover was struggling to his feet and Ben was trying to hold him back.

‘Let me go, you fool. Tony’s been shot – what if he’s dead?’

‘He’s perfectly all right. He wasn’t even touched. Sit down and stop worrying.’

‘But the rounds in that gun were live. I heard the bullets.’

‘A bullet striking you makes an impact. Like a punch, you move back from it. You’re hit and you react. That man never moved a muscle.’

James half sat down. He was still undecided.

‘You seem very certain,’ he said.

‘It’s the sort of thing you have to find out, if you write my kind of books.’

On the stage Peter Mace was discovering for himself if Tony was dead or not. He had crossed to the body and turned it gently over. Gently and fearfully where the stage directions said tensely and impersonally. He peered anxiously into Tony’s face. Anxiously where the script said scornfully. Tony winked up at him.

Peter straightened. He could see the two holes in the wall by the window and he was trying to remember what on earth the stage directions said he should do next. All he wanted to do was go up to those holes and stare at them.

‘Papers!’ hissed Laura Paget from the prompt corner. ‘Don’t forget the papers. …’

Peter gathered himself and stooped to search the body of his fallen enemy for the papers that were to be his passport to safety. The papers that would carry him unquestioned over three frontiers. Him and little Anna together.

James was still fidgety.

‘What about back-stage?’ he muttered. ‘What if somebody’s been hurt back-stage?’

‘Don’t you think you’d have heard?’ Ben was practical. ‘Don’t you think there’d have been a scream or a fuss or something?’

The producer subsided. He smoothed his suspiciously black hair with the back of his hand and settled to making notes again on his board with the spring clip.

The rest of Swords against the Darkness Ben watched with little interest. He kept his face towards the stage and his eyes directed at the people moving about on it, but his mind was on other matters. There could be no doubt that he and ninety-three other people had just witnessed an attempted murder. And a murder attempted in a most circuitous and melodramatic way. Murder interested him – it was to a certain degree his special subject. He spent what remained of the last act of the play in idle, pleasurable, and completely pointless speculation.

The first thing he decided was that the murderer was very unlikely to be the man who had actually fired the gun. Either this man Peter Mace was a shockingly bad shot or he had been used as an unknowing tool. No doubt many people could have put the gun in the drawer for him – it would be intriguing to find out exactly who. This was the best kind of puzzle; nobody was actually dead, so none of it really mattered.

The fact that the wish to kill had been strong in somebody’s mind he chose to overlook. Also that the wish, thwarted once, would still be around somewhere seeking a second opportunity. He overlooked all this and concentrated instead on a stupid sort of guessing game.

He watched the chief of police arrive on the scene, and wondered if the elderly actor the programme said was called Glyn Evans was the man who had changed the guns. In spite of his police chief wig and sneer he seemed affable and well-meaning – if he was an actor acting an affable and well-meaning actor acting being a police chief, he was quite brilliant. Ben watched Major Harry as he was tied to a chair and beaten. He watched the intervention of an aged Slavic trollop – real name according to the programme Desirée Paradine. He watched the arrival of Anna, miraculously with reinforcements, and the downfall of the police chief and all he stood for. Did either of these women seem calculating enough to plan Tony Gordon’s death in this oblique and theatrical way? Theatrical . . but, of course, it would be theatrical. They were all of them theatre people.

Something occurred to him.

‘I say,’ he whispered, ‘had that chap been told he must aim to miss?’

‘The police sergeant told him. On account of the pad or wad or whatever it is in blank cartridges. The sergeant gave him quite a lecture on it.’

‘Good. I thought the police might have done.’

‘The police … Hell, I hadn’t thought of that. They’ll be round on us all right after this little do. Unless, of course, nobody tells them.’

‘You’ll tell them yourself if you’ve any sense,’ Ben said.

James shuffled in his seat and murmured something that wasn’t meant to be audible. He continued to make his notes, but he sat sideways to indicate that he wasn’t talking to Ben. Not after those words of cold common sense, he wasn’t.

Ben returned to the play, but gave up his theorizing. Without any idea at all as to motive he realized he was wasting his time. At last the affair wound to its close and the cast lined up for their bow. Four men and three women – the stage manager having decided that as an almost instant corpse he didn’t rate a curtain. They took two calls, which was good for a Monday, and the curtain was lowered for the National Anthem. Bolsover had scrambled out during the applause, but Ben stayed till the very end. He wanted a proper look at the audience. He wanted to get the feel of them, and of the part of Downshead that they represented. Next week it would be his turn – they would be his judges. He wanted to try to anticipate their reactions to him.

To his surprise two solid rows in front of him were sear and toothless, hearing-aided and hobbling. They’d enjoyed Swords against the Darkness – it was a rattling good yarn. What they’d make of his subtler tale of conflict, of power complexes and murder, he couldn’t imagine. What was more depressing was that the rest of the audience appeared to be hardly more than fifteen or sixteen years old. They filed out, embarrassed by their bare wrists and spots. When finally he was the only one left in the auditorium Ben sidled across to the man who was presumably waiting to lock up and turn out the lights. The place was silent now, apart from sounds of talking and bumping about on the other side of the curtain.

‘Funny audience,’ he said. ‘Old folks’ outing, was it?’

‘Lets the pensioners in free Mondays, Mr. Crane does. And the kids if the play’s right for them.’

Ben wondered which in fact had the stronger constitutions, the kids or the pensioners.

‘Good of Mr. Crane,’ he said.

‘Papers the house. Better to play to that lot than nobody.’

‘Business bad as that, is it?’

The man started herding Ben towards the exit.

‘Christ, no. Better and better mostly. But not Mondays. Not before the play’s settled down. Things go wrong Mondays – most people leave it till later in the week.’

The pattern of weekly repertory was strange to Ben. He was learning all the time. He wondered if one of the actors being nearly shot dead came into the category of ‘things going wrong …’ He was anxious to stop being herded and he caught at the conversational opening.

‘Nasty moment near the end,’ he said. ‘Lucky nothing more serious happened.’

‘What d’you know about that then?’ said the other, pausing to stare and champ suspiciously on five teeth that didn’t quite meet. ‘Not a reporter, are you?’

‘My name’s Anderson – you’re doing a play of mine next week. I write as Bennet Anders. I was sitting at the back with Mr. Bolsover.’

‘Thank God for that, sir. Press don’t usually come near us, but Mr. Crane said I was to look out just in case. I’m Williams. Crampy, they calls me. For reasons I’ve never rightly known.’

‘I’m very glad to meet you, Crampy.’

No doubt Crampy Williams was the power behind the throne. He was lean, and poorly shaved, with a big jaw and legs so thin that his trousers furled round them as he walked. He had watery eyes, and big naked e. . .