Murder At The Music Hall

by Amy Myers

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Mystery

Synopsis

The eighth Auguste Didier mystery. It's 1902 and Auguste Didier finds himself reluctantly recruited for a week's work at the Old King Cole music hall in the East End. Ostensibly there as chef of its greasy run-down eating house, Auguste has another role: to prevent a possible foul murder by being constant bodyguard to famous comedian Will Lamb. At first Will's fears of being the victim of someone's murderous intentions seem unfounded. After all, he's only had a portentous dream and he's really rather popular. But when other more sinister omens occur, Auguste begins to sense real danger - and Will Lamb dies on stage in front of his eyes. The search is on for a killer - and it has to be someone who's had access to the props. Auguste's job is made more complicated by the fact that a national treasure has also been reported missing from Windsor Castle. And there are enough tenuous threads to indicate that the crimes must somehow be linked...

Release date: October 24, 2013

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Rain plopped down the collar of Chief Inspector Egbert Rose’s ulster, despite the umbrella. Changing its tactics with the gusting wind through the dock, it assaulted his face and mocked his eyes. He was far from happy.

‘We’ve missed the boat, sir.’ There was no glimmer of a smile on Inspector Grey’s face, whether he was conscious of his pun or not. Rose regarded Grey without enthusiasm.

The boat’s missed you, Grey,’ he retorted grimly. ‘Six o’clock you told me the Lisboa was due to leave. It’s six now, and she sailed two hours ago.’ The North Quay of London Docks was no place to spend a Saturday, even a wet dismal September afternoon. He thought of Edith cosily taking toasted crumpets and seed cake at Highbury, and compared her lot to his.

‘To catch the tide, sir.’ Grey’s reply had the desperation of the cornered rat. ‘She’ll dock again in two weeks.’

‘Think she’ll come steaming back with the loot still tucked under the captain’s arm? Any chance of the river boats catching her?’

Grey shook his head. ‘She’ll be outside territorial waters. It would be piracy. Unless you think we’d be justified . . .’ He broke off, as his companion’s umbrella jerked irritably.

‘Much as I’d like to don eye patch and broadsword, it ain’t precisely going to soothe Portuguese prickles, is it? There’s been enough fuss over this cross; there’ll be more when it comes out it’s been nicked from Windsor Castle. What’s His Majesty going to say if the Stepney police and Scotland Yard start dancing around like the pirates of Penzance, eh?’

‘In Stepney,’ Grey replied stolidly, ‘we have more to think about than His Majesty’s embarrassment.’

Rose envied him. It was no joke to be summoned to Buckingham Palace at Saturday luncheon time by an irate monarch ordering him to track down a missing relic of incalculable value, before it left the country for good; an event, His Majesty informed him, that would ensure not only the severing of diplomatic relations with England’s oldest ally, but probably his own enforced abdication, a mere month or so after his coronation. Every coastal and dockyard police force from Harwich to Plymouth had been alerted with descriptions of the two villains. In the Thames, the most obvious departure point, the dockyard police had orders to detain every piece of shipping with any connection with Portugal till cleared. Then at three-thirty, surprisingly, Special Branch had come up with a name, the Lisboa. Unfortunately the Lisboa was now in mid-ocean, ploughing its way home, in all likelihood taking Prince Henry the Navigator’s cross with it. And what the press would do with that, Rose preferred not to imagine. Half of them delicately, and sometimes not so delicately, had been suggesting that Portugal ought to have the cross back anyway, and the other half had foretold the end of the monarchy if it did. Now he had to report failure to His Britannic Majesty King Edward VII, and very little imagination was required to foresee the results of that conversation. Crumpets retreated to the same odds as a castle in Spain – or Portugal.

Around them loomed the tall forbidding rain-swept warehouses of the London Docks, their cranes idle now, but stretching out threatening dark arms towards their prey; before them were moored steamers from unknown ports, their crews hurrying in the twilight towards the excitement of Saturday night in the pubs, gin palaces and less savoury institutions eagerly awaiting them. At least it was no longer Rose’s job to mop up the resulting mess. As a raw newcomer to the force, his beat had taken in the docks, not to mention the nearby St George’s Street; the latter might be more salubrious than he remembered it, but off it still lay some of the poorest slums in London.

‘Sir.’ A wet Dock Police constable materialised from the gloom at Grey’s side. From underneath his helmet, two scared eyes peered out, torn between relief at the presence of two superior-ranking officers, and anxiety since neither belonged to his own force.

‘What is it, Constable?’ Grey barked irritably.

‘A body, sir. In Nightingale Lane. Been there an hour or two, I reckon. Sucking the monkey, I reckon.’

‘What monkey?’

‘Dock talk, sir. Siphoning port wine with a tube through the bung-hole of the cask. Strong stuff.’

‘Then most likely he’s drunk, you fool,’ Grey snarled.

The constable held firm. ‘Dead, sir.’

‘Nightingale Lane, you say?’ Rose’s attention was suddenly diverted from the absent Lisboa, as he was mentally catapulted back from the autumn of 1902 to the 1870s. So Nightingale Lane hadn’t changed. Hardly surprising, he supposed. You’d have to burn it down and plant a rose garden before you could make Nightingale Lane respectable – and even then the roses would smell of sewers. ‘Show me.’

‘There’s no need—’ Grey began.

‘Let’s go.’ His tone of voice made it clear Rose was going anyway, if only to make Grey squirm.

They squelched in the constable’s wake through the labyrinth of warehouses on the western boundary of the docks, through a locked and barred gateway into the narrow winding lane that had probably seen more murders than any other London thoroughfare. There was no sign to Rose’s eyes that anything had changed. Here the rain made no difference, for the sun was shy of the high wall of St Katherine’s Dock on the one side and the tall warehouses of London Docks facing it. The bends and twists of the lane made it an admirable place for the disposal of grudges. The police torch shone in the puddles, as the constable flashed it in a narrow entrance between two of the dock buildings. There, half-hidden behind a pile of rotting rubbish, overflowing and burying the zinc pail it was aimed at, was the body, its shape indistinct in the gloom. For a moment the only sound was the pelting rain.

‘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 motor-car 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?’

‘The Old King Cole serves food in its bar – quite a famous local eating-house it’s become,’ Nettie said airily. ‘They need a cook, and Will needs someone to protect him.’

Auguste looked at her suspiciously. ‘But how can I do both?’

‘There’ll be staff there, of course, Percy says. I’ll see Will to the theatre, then you nip backstage and keep an eye on him. You can watch the acts if you like. Rubbish, most of it. The regular turns Percy can afford to put on don’t keep him in bangers and mash.’

Will looked anxious. ‘Harry?’ he murmured.

‘Oh yes.’ Nettie roared. ‘Harry Pickles. He’s my husband, not that you’d notice. We don’t see much of each other. Fancy your remembering, Will. Husband number three,’ she explained to Auguste. ‘I told him if he don’t keep his name clean, he’ll be out and Will here can be number four.’

‘That will be nice, Nettie,’ Will said valiantly.

‘Don’t worry, old cock. I’m too fond of you to wish that on you.’

For a moment Auguste glimpsed the pain behind the bravado. It was common knowledge. None of Nettie’s marriages had given her happiness. ‘Mr Lamb, why do you think someone wishes to murder you?’ Auguste asked firmly, getting back to the heart of the matter.

Will looked anxious. ‘Dreamed it,’ he told Auguste apologetically.

‘Dreams are not real.’ Auguste said with relief.

‘Will’s are,’ Nettie remarked glumly.

It was then he remembered that Will Lamb had had several breakdowns and was always in fragile health. Yet after all, there could be nothing to a mere dream, so the job of protecting Will would not be onerous, and the temporary job of cook would be an adventure. He was not sure Tatiana would approve of either task, let alone His Majesty, but after all, neither, he told himself, would ever know.

‘He dreamed of Bill Terriss. He was a friend of his,’ Nettie explained sombrely.

Auguste understood immediately. The murder of the famous actor William Terriss a few years ago, at the stage door of the Adelphi, committed by a crazy super who imagined his path from crowd scenes to leading man had been blighted by Terriss, had shocked the theatre world and public alike. Who in their right mind would want to murder Terriss – or Will Lamb?

As if following his thoughts, Nettie said robustly, ‘I’ve told him it’s ridiculous – isn’t it, Will?’

‘No.’ Will Lamb’s large eyes looked dolefully at them. ‘On the morning of the day Bill died, his understudy told me he’d had a dream the previous night of dear old Bill lying on the stairs with a group of people round him, one of whom was his leading lady. He died. And that evening his dream was re-enacted in real life. So you see, dreams can be warnings.’

Perhaps, Auguste thought to himself, but even if recognised, how can they be acted upon? But aloud he spoke briskly. ‘Then please do not go to Wapping, Mr Lamb. Let Miss Turner go alone.’

Will Lamb stared at him blankly. ‘Oh no, I must go. I must. Don’t you see?’

‘No, I don’t, Will,’ Nettie said forthrightly. ‘If it’s just because of that woman, then arrange to meet her somewhere else, for cripes’ sake.’

‘No, Nettie,’ Will said gently. ‘I have promised, you see. You don’t understand. We—’ He broke off, but his face was as excited as a child’s watching the curtain rise on a pantomime.

‘These dreams are your only evidence?’ Auguste asked gently, curiosity aroused by that sudden excitement. A child – but a child with a secret.

Will shook his head sadly. ‘No.’

‘And what else has happened?’ Auguste’s spirits sank.

‘Communications.’ Will fished in the pocket of his overcoat, and produced a crumpled piece of paper with letters cut out from some form of print and stuck on. Its message was stark.

‘Keep away from the Old King Cole.’ And it was signed, ‘The Raven.’

‘I’ve had one every day this week,’ Will told him dolefully.

‘And when did you have your dream?’Auguste asked carefully.

‘Tuesday, or perhaps it was Wednesday. Yes, it must have been Wednesday because of the pickled egg. Tuesday’s my night for caviar, or is it oysters, at any rate my cook won’t give me pickled egg and oysters, so it must have been Wednesday,’ Will informed him brightly.

‘I see.’ Auguste was quite sure he did. ‘So the dream could have been sparked off by the letters.’

‘You mean Bill wrote the letters?’ Will was puzzled.

‘No, you associated Bill’s murder with the threat to murder you.’

‘But he was here tonight.’

‘Who was?’

‘Bill.’

Auguste glanced at Nettie, who came to his aid.

‘Will, old chum, you’ve been on the beer.’

‘No, no, he was here. You heard him, you must have done.’ Will looked appealingly from one to the other. ‘I heard him calling out, “Horrible, terrible,” that’s what he said. That’s what poor Bill said to his wife a few days before he was killed, he said it about being killed with a knife. And he was.’

‘But, Mr Lamb, that is mere coincidence,’ Auguste soothed.

‘And the letters?’ Will asked anxiously, eager to be convinced.

‘Warning from a friend,’ Gwendolen said heartily. ‘Reminding you that Percy’s an old rogue. Or someone jealous of you.’

‘Signed “The Raven”?’ Auguste asked. If there was cause for concern, then Will should be on his guard, not lu. . .