Murder at the Theatre

Book 0: A Maisie Cooper Mystery

by Greg Mosse

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Animal Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

A body in the theatre. A cast full of suspects. Can Maisie Cooper crack this case?

Maisie Cooper is looking for peace and quiet. But the arrival of a troupe of actors for a new production at the local theatre turn her best laid plans upside down.

Among them is the young French actress, Adélaïde Amour, who appeals to Maisie for help as she struggles to prepare for her new role.

As opening night approaches, a terrible crime is committed, and a body is found concealed behind the scenes in the theatre.

Can Maisie unravel a real-life plot worthy of a great play? Or will the killer strike again?

A totally addictive British cosy murder mystery, perfect to enjoy with a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Perfect for fans of The Thursday Murder Club, Janice Hallett and Midsomer Murders.

Readers are gripped by the Maisie Cooper Mysteries:

'Maisie Cooper is a brilliant main character, an everyday Miss Marple!... I love cosy crime and I loved this book!' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Fabulous, full of wit, mystery, romance and small town politics... The characters are witty, quirky... The plot is twisty and engaging with lots of red herrings' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'I loved the way that I was pulled into the mystery... I found myself constantly looking for potential clues which made it feel like a real puzzle to get stuck into. I had a lot of fun reading this book' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Mixes classic whodunnit with cozy mystery elements... Kept me guessing... I thoroughly enjoyed it' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: April 4, 2024

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

PROLOGUE

In her dream, Maisie Cooper was back at school. It was a warm summer’s day and the sixth-form boys and girls had been brought together to read a play, The Beggar’s Opera. She could smell the fresh cut grass and hear the persistent hum of the groundsman’s mower on the playing fields outside the open windows. She could hear the voice of Jack Wingard, the boy chosen to read the lead, sitting two rows ahead of her in the stuffy classroom.

Then the dream moved forward in a kind of woozy surge and she and Jack were suddenly facing one another on stage, with an intimidating audience of teachers, parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and friends. Under the lights, in full eighteenth-century costume, Jack tentatively took her face in his hands and kissed her.

The dream flipped for a second time, to a damp gravel drive and Jack, now grown up, clasping her in his strong arms, angry that he had allowed her to put herself in danger.

The confused memory lasted for only a moment before she was back on stage at Westbrook College and Jack was being led up the steps to the scaffold. Another boy, with a canvas hood over his adolescent acne, placed a noose around Jack’s neck…

Maisie spoke without waking: ‘No!’

She turned over, her face to the wall. For a time, she slept soundly, though her subconscious still roamed the world of the play: the character she was portraying, Polly Peachum, in love with Jack Wingard’s, the highwayman Macheath.

Then, cross-fading like a film, the dream found her at the end-of-term afternoon summer party on the cricket lawn, enfolded in a moment of unexpected intimacy in the shadows behind the pavilion, when Jack had kissed her in real life, not in the play. With no one watching, their teenage destinies became entwined – perhaps for all of time – only for circumstances, good and bad, to rip them apart once more.

Then, she was back in the play once more, competing with another girl, in old-fashioned dialogue, for Macheath’s affections – for Jack’s affections. Then, suddenly, they were allies, desperate to save him from hanging and—

Maisie woke in a tangle of bedclothes, her strong limbs constrained by the narrow single bed, her eyes reluctant to open. She could hear faint night-time sounds from the streets of the cathedral city outside the narrow window of her poky hotel room.

At last, she opened her eyes and sat up, wearily re­arranging her lumpy pillows, the image of a lithe and youthful Jack Wingard still vivid in her mind. She heaved an unhappy sigh.

How long ago was all that? Sixteen years? And he says he still loves me, that he has never loved anyone else.

Did she love him back?

The truth was, she didn’t know.

On the bedside table were her three birthday gifts, touchingly wrapped in identical patterned paper. In the gap between her flimsy curtains, she had a view of the backs of other buildings and a grey sky with no hint of dawn, despite the lengthening of the days as April finally drew to a close.

Maisie groped for the light switch and turned on the table lamp – a weak, forty-watt bulb beneath a fussy beaded shade.

Why do I feel so trapped in the past? Why don’t I yet feel free? It isn’t fair.

The trial arising from her brother’s murder was over, taking much longer than she had anticipated, with the defence lawyer cruelly undermining Maisie’s actions by contemptuously referring to her as an ‘interfering amateur detective’. She had found it exhausting and upsetting, though guilty verdicts were finally pronounced by the jury and appropriate sentences handed down by the judge.

The trouble was, she had yet to face the repercussions of what the local paper, the Chichester Observer, called ‘the murder at Bunting Manor’. While she wished – almost to the exclusion of everything else – to finally feel properly free to grieve her brother’s death, her heart seemed numb and unable to do so.

She got out of bed and went to stand at the north-facing window. Was there a little lightness in the sky?

No. And there was no lightness in her heart, either.

Not only was she conflicted by her longing for Jack’s embrace – while still worrying that what she felt for him was simply a reaction to the series of shocks she had endured in two successive and unexpected murder investigations – there was also her duty to the owner of Bunting Manor, Phyl Pascal, a hearty country woman, Maisie’s mother’s sister.

No, not just my mother’s sister, nor my aunt. The woman with whom my father had an affair, who carried his child.

A child who turned out to be … me.

Maisie turned back to the room. For a moment, she was tempted to open her birthday gifts. She remembered Jack and Phyl singing ‘Happy Birthday’, desperately wanting her to join in. Phyl’s sixteen-year-old ward Zoe had been there, too, her lovely clear voice raised above the others, looking up to Maisie with a kind of hero-worship.

They all want something from me that I’m not certain I can give.

She relived the scene in memory, stark and upsetting, telling them to stop, that she needed time alone. She remembered Phyl’s pained response.

‘Obviously, I think you’d be better off here with Zoe and me, but Jack’s persuaded me that you need to … to reassess. Have you thought about where you will go?’

‘I’m not sure—’

‘I thought you might say that, so I’ve booked a room at the Dolphin & Anchor in the centre of Chichester,’ Phyl had said decisively.

‘I’ll need their cheapest room,’ Maisie had harshly replied. ‘I insist on paying my own way.’

‘I’m your mother,’ Phyl had protested, aghast. ‘And I’ve brought you nothing but trouble. Please let me do this small thing.’

Maisie had felt herself weaken at the sight of Zoe on the edge of tears.

‘No,’ Jack had cut in. ‘We should all trust Maisie to know her own mind.’

Soon after, Maisie’s brief stay at Bunting Manor had ended, her small travel suitcase on the back seat of Jack’s Ford Zephyr police car as he had driven her in unhappy silence to Chichester.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t come bothering you,’ he had told her, smiling his charming smile, but looking defeated.

‘I’m sorry, Jack. I know this isn’t fair on you—’

‘Let’s leave it at that,’ he had told her quietly, refusing the offer of her outstretched hand, looking like he regretted his words but knowing that walking away was for his own good. ‘Well, goodbye.’

Back in her dismal hotel room, Maisie was unable to bear the dreams and memories any longer. She slumped down on the end of her uncomfortable single bed.

I’ve rejected poor Phyl, I’ve abandoned Zoe and I’ve pushed Jack away – so far that I’m frightened he might change his mind and never come back to me.

*

When, finally, Maisie climbed back into bed, having washed her hands and face in the unfriendly shared bathroom on the corridor outside her room, the cathedral bells were chiming half-past-two. The immemorial peal drifted over the Roman walls to a park at the northern edge of the city, where the impressive Chichester Festival Theatre sat, incongruous, like a concrete-and-glass spaceship.

Keith Sadler, a porter at the Dolphin & Anchor Hotel, had a second job at the theatre as nightwatchman. He didn’t hear the bells because – once again burning the candle at both ends – he was asleep. Neglecting his duties, his head instead lay upon his arms in the green room, the space where the cast and crew of The Beggar’s Opera went to relax and eat and drink at the management’s expense.

He ought to have been alone in the enormous 1200-seat building. The actors, creatives, technicians and management were all supposed to be in their respective accommodation; their homes, their hotel rooms or their bed-and-breakfast digs.

One of them, though, had contrived a makeshift bed out of a pile of dusty curtains in a neglected storage space, deep in the theatre basement, and lay awake, thinking bitter thoughts of avarice, unlikely prosperity and revenge.

ONE

Four days later, on Friday evening, the Dolphin & Anchor Hotel was all in a ferment, due to the arrival, fresh from the London train, just in time for a latish supper, of several more members of the Chichester Festival Theatre company. The celebrated Dutch director, Nils van Erde, and two or three of his entourage were occupying rooms on the first floor.

Miserable from her spartan week of penny-pinching solitude, Maisie ran into the famous director at the base of the stairs, as she returned from another interminable trudge around the walls of the city. She tried to slip past unnoticed, but she caught his eye. He seemed in an expansive mood, perhaps fuelled by alcohol.

‘Call me NVE. Everyone else does. “Nils-of-the-Earth” is too much of a mouthful.’

‘I thought that was what Nils van Erde might mean,’ Maisie replied, politely. ‘Are you opening the season?’

‘The Beggar’s Opera. You might know it better from the Brecht and Weill version, Die Dreigroschenoper. That’s—’

‘Yes, The Threepenny Opera,’ she interrupted. ‘It’s a big cast.’

She took off her mackintosh and his eye travelled the length of her, re-evaluating what he saw. His expression became more alert.

‘You know it?’

‘A little.’

‘Are you, perhaps, in the business? Am I being indiscreet? Are you employed at the Festival Theatre, Miss, er…?’

‘My name is Cooper and no, I am not associated with the theatre. I am glad to have met you, Mr van Erde. Good luck with your production.’

NVE seemed inclined to keep the conversation going.

‘Four weeks rehearsal in London and I have high hopes. Do you know the Drill Hall?’

Maisie had heard of it.

‘Isn’t it somewhere off Tottenham Court Road?’

‘Four weeks of long days and bitter struggle with nervous actors wrestling with John Gay’s archaic – but magnificent – text.’ He shook his head, showing her a rueful smile. ‘Now, we are in Chichester for a final week of polishing and technical run-throughs, trying to transfer what we discovered in the dusty rehearsal room onto Chichester’s enormous and intimidating thrust stage. You know it?’

‘I am local so, yes, I know it. I hope it’s a success.’

Nils van Erde still didn’t take the hint.

‘The process is simple and has existed for all of time. The incomparable Aristotle set it out in the fourth century BC, the six fundamental elements of a play.’ He counted them out on long narrow fingers. ‘Thought, Song, Plot, Character, Spectacle, Speech.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ said Maisie. ‘I didn’t know that. Now, isn’t it late…?’

NVE leaned in.

‘In some plays, plot is the key ingredient. In others, spectacle. In still others, song. But all must be present.’

Her right hand was on the banister. Surprising her, he took it in both of his, enclosing her fist as though it was something precious.

‘It’s a challenge,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ said Maisie, holding his gaze.

‘From the rehearsal room to the stage, you must bring the play, you understand, Miss Cooper, palpitating and frightened, like a small songbird that wishes only to escape. And you must hope that, after the trauma, despite the dislocation, your songbird still takes flight.’

‘It sounds like a very tricky time,’ said Maisie, politely removing her hand. ‘Good luck.’ He was standing in her way at the foot of the stairs. ‘Would you excuse me?’

He stepped aside with a flourish.

‘Good night, Miss Cooper.’

Maisie went upstairs to her room at the end of a drab corridor. She undressed and got into bed but was disturbed, several times, by the sound of footsteps and doors opening and closing until well after midnight.

*

On the following morning, the Saturday, Maisie was confronted with further direct evidence of the general ferment at the Dolphin & Anchor – the presence of the famous female lead of The Beggar’s Opera, a young French actress called, unfeasibly, Adélaïde Amour.

Maisie didn’t like gossip, but she found it hard to quash the enthusing of the young man – Keith – who served her wet poached eggs and burned toast.

‘She’s a doll. She’s gorgeous, but they say she can’t act for toffee.’

‘Who says that?’

‘My film magazine. I buy it at the railway station.’

‘I think I know who you mean. She’s a film actress first?’

‘She probably won’t be able to make herself heard. Have you been to the Festival Theatre? I saw the Royal Marines at Christmas.’ He pursed his lips judiciously, like a connoisseur. ‘That was loud.’

‘I expect it was.’ Maisie gestured to her plate. ‘These eggs aren’t quite cooked, and the toast is overdone. I expect it’s difficult to get the timings right when the kitchen is so busy. Could you ask the chef to repeat my order, please?’

‘I’ll do it myself,’ said the boy, nodding enthusiastically.

‘Thank you, Keith. That’s very kind of you.’

‘Aren’t you the one who was in the paper with the murders?’

Maisie sighed and admitted that she was.

‘But please don’t pass it on to anyone else.’

‘You were clever and brave. Will you tell me about it?’

‘Perhaps, if there’s a moment,’ said Maisie, surprising herself. Normally, thoughts of her accidental investigations made her extremely reticent, but the young man seemed innocently fascinated. ‘But not right now, Keith. I’m hungry.’

A young woman of great beauty, wearing a floaty, diaphanous creation of white silk, appeared in the doorway, glancing round the tables. Maisie was struck by the perfection of her complexion, the depth of her dark, wide-set eyes and her generous mouth.

‘What did I tell you?’ whispered Keith, a comical expression of longing on his boyish features. ‘What a doll.’

Keith bustled off to remake Maisie’s breakfast and Adélaïde Amour seemed to change her mind, turning away without ever fully entering the breakfast room. Maisie heard her nicely accented voice telling someone that she would like ‘coffee, lots of coffee, upstairs’.

After Keith’s second stab at breakfast, Maisie returned to her room and finally opened her birthday gifts. Knowing she was a big reader, Zoe had chosen a murder-mystery story by the New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh and inscribed it: Thank you for everything. Love, Zoe. It made Maisie feel like crying. Jack’s gift was equally touching – a copy of The Beggar’s Opera, bound in leather, probably from the second-hand bookshop on South Street. His dedication simply said: Yours, always. Jack.

Can that possibly be true? she wondered. And will I ever deserve it?

On a whim, Maisie went out and wandered down to the kiosk at the railway station to look at a copy of the film magazine Keith had mentioned. It had a photograph of Adélaïde Amour on the cover. Inside, she learned that Adélaïde had been twice engaged but never married, that she was born and raised in a village in Brittany, close to the western peninsula of Finisterre, loosely translated as ‘the end of the Earth’. She was a campaigner for animal rights and had once been arrested while protesting against an oil company responsible for a black tide of crude that had washed up on her native beaches.

Maisie thought she rather liked her.

‘Are you going to buy that?’ asked the vendor.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my purse,’ she lied.

The interminable Saturday became a tiresome Sunday, and Maisie found herself reduced to watching an afternoon musical in the hotel television room. At its conclusion, as dusk became night, she went out for a long walk, the sound of her sensible shoes echoing on the damp pavements. Returning to the Dolphin & Anchor, her cheeks stinging from the chilly evening air, Maisie hesitated in the lobby. The bar was busy with competing voices raised in joyous conflab, and she found she would like the opportunity to sit among strangers for an hour, letting the noise of their enthusiastic gossip help the time to pass.

She found a low table in front of a wing-back armchair, not far from the fire. Keith was on duty at the bar – though he seemed under-age to do so – and automatically brought her a small bowl of oily salted peanuts.

‘What else can I get you?’ he asked, his hungry eye flicking involuntarily towards the other side of the room.

‘Actually, just a glass of water, please.’

Keith didn’t seem to hear. Maisie followed his gaze. Adélaïde, in a voluminous patterned kimono, was in a circle of chairs, dragged together to make an audience for Nils van Erde. NVE was holding court simultaneously in several languages – his native Dutch, his willing French and his very smooth English.

‘Keith?’ said Maisie. ‘My glass of water?’

‘Oh, er, sorry.’

He slipped away.

The local paper, the Chichester Observer, was on her low table. Maisie picked it up and leaned back, shielding herself from the theatrical group. The front page carried an announcement of the Festival Theatre season and, inside, there was an interview, given by NVE, extolling the virtues of his star and noting her ‘remarkable performance’ in an avant-garde production in a small Parisian theatre that Maisie had never heard of.

It was clear that Adélaïde was NVE’s casting choice. Maisie hoped the director wasn’t selling the young woman beyond her ability to fulfil his boasts. If, as Keith suggested, she wasn’t physically ready or sufficiently well-trained to perform a stage role in a major theatre, it would be extremely damaging for NVE as well as for her.

But isn’t that his job, Maisie thought, to make sure she’s ready?

Keith brought her water. She sipped it and looked up at a large mirror in a gold-painted frame above the fireplace. In it, she could see NVE – she could still hear him as well – talking to Adélaïde, making a great effort to put her at her ease, to encourage her. Then the actress stood up and NVE switched back to English to confer with a rugged man he addressed as ‘Micky’. Adélaïde drifted away to stand in front of the fire, quite close to Maisie’s chair. The silken patterned kimono flowed with her, drawing the eye.

Maisie closed the newspaper and put it aside. Adélaïde saw her do this and gave her a glance of enquiry. Maisie felt it would be rude not to speak.

‘J’espère que tout se passera bien, que le public vous appréciera,’ Maisie said.

I hope the show goes well, that the audience enjoys your performance.

Adélaïde looked at her without replying, her dark, wide-set eyes expressing slight surprise and, Maisie thought, a worried intensity.

‘Merci,’ she said, finally.

Maisie found she no longer felt comfortable sitting among strangers. In any case, she feared NVE would try and draw her into his circle of acolytes if she stayed too long. She stood up.

‘Bonne nuit, Mademoiselle Amour.’

Maisie left the bar, climbed the stairs to the second floor and returned along the drab corridor to her rear-facing room. She read for an hour from Zoe’s gift. The murder-mystery was called Opening Night and it was set in a theatre – beautifully written but the set-up was quite long, with many pages devoted to the intriguing depiction of character and back-story, and no sign yet of a murder.

She put her book aside, got off her narrow bed and opened her window with a screech of unoiled hinges. She stood quietly, breathing in the night air. The weather had changed. A warm front had rolled in and mild drizzle was falling from a grey sky without moon or stars.

Suddenly, she heard a balcony door open and two voices, floating up from below. Maisie took a step back. She wanted to close her window and shut out the noise, but she couldn’t do so without the hinges giving away her presence.

It was Nils and Adélaïde – he, insistent and determined, she, monosyllabic and bored. He spoke in English and she replied in French. They were either unaware that they might be overheard or didn’t care. And it was, inevitably, a ‘love scene’ – though perhaps it would be better described as a ‘failed seduction’. NVE was deploying all his charm, all his authority. Adélaïde was having none of it.

‘But you cannot leave me like this?’ he protested.

Would the conversation turn nasty, Maisie wondered? If Nils became too persistent, might she feel herself obliged to go downstairs on some pretext or other and intervene?

‘You know I am devoted to you,’ said Nils. ‘Am I not better looking than my brother?’

‘Mais, non,’ Adélaïde replied.

No, you aren’t.

‘Haven’t I protected you from him?’

‘Même pas,’ she told him.

Not even.

Then, abruptly, there was the sound of a scuffle and something heavy fell to the ground. What had happened? Had Nils tripped and fallen? Maisie went quickly to the door of her room but stopped when she heard Adélaïde’s voice in English.

‘That is enough. Get up and go away.’

Not another word was exchanged. Faintly, Maisie heard a door open and close, then Adélaïde swearing copiously as she slammed shut her balcony doors.

*

Maisie slept poorly, once again, haunted by feelings of loss and betrayal – and her own resistance to confronting the demons of the past. On Monday morning, therefore, she went downstairs early, just before seven, and hesitated on the threshold of the dining room, seeing that she was alone with only Adélaïde for company. The young woman hadn’t seen her arrive and was singing a song Maisie recognised from The Beggar’s Opera, as she buttered her toast.

‘No power on Earth can e’er divide,

‘The knot that sacred love hath tied.

‘When parents draw against our mind,

‘The true-love’s knot, they faster bind.’

Adélaïde sang with such effortless charm that Maisie was unable to move until the last gentle notes had faded.

Then, as people often do, Adélaïde realised she was being observed and looked up.

Surprised into speech, Maisie told Adélaïde, in fluent French, that she was sorry to have eavesdropped but that to hear Adélaïde sing was an unexpected and incomparable pleasure.

Adélaïde promptly burst into tears and ran from the room.

TWO

A little later, Maisie once more found herself waiting for time to pass, this time under the cobwebby roof of a bus shelter.

Should she have tried to slip away from the breakfast room, before Adélaïde had noticed her, then come back in again, moments later, making a noise so as not to take the young woman by surprise? She wished she had. Over the last few weeks, she had endured enough upset and drama to last her a lifetime.

There was almost no money left in her purse. Her travellers’ cheques were cashed and spent. She had her depressing hotel room and half-board till the end of the week. That would be fine if she went without lunches. After that…

It was raining, again. February had been sleety and cold, March little better. April, when all of nature ought to be celebrating the burgeoning of spring, seemed determined only to prolong the depressing winter. Even the daffodils round the edges of the cathedral green looked bedraggled and depressed.

Maisie would still be welcome, she knew, in Bunting. Phyl had written to her, care of her solicitor, reiterating her offer. But it was too soon. The extraordinary revelation that Phyl was her birth mother, not her aunt, still made Maisie feel nervous and queasy – lied to.

She could ask for help from Jack, but would that be fair? She still felt the pull of her first love and believed she might be able to love him again, to want him, but not now, not yet. Not with the shadow of death still lying so deep and dark across their lives.

And, of course, Jack was a police officer, a well-liked and respected sergeant working out of Chichester police station. That fact alone made it difficult to pursue their relationship, what with her involvement in the Bunting Manor murder yet to be resolved in court.

Returning to Chichester from Paris, she had taken the precaution of buying an open return ticket on the boat-train. If only she were allowed, she would stride off down South Street to the railway station this instant and set off – never mind the forecast of gales in the Channel and the likelihood of an extremely unpleasant crossing on the small passenger ferry, surrounded by the oppressive rumble and stench of the diesel engines and the inevitable consequences of the choppy seas on the more fragile passengers.

But she couldn’t. It wasn’t like in a detective story where the problem posed by the locked room mystery or the deadly country house weekend party is solved by an explanation on the final pages and everyone says ‘oh, I see’ and goes on with their lives. No, in the real world, the police were obliged to follow up on all the evidence, organise the sequence of events into a convincing timeline and demand everyone’s presence in court so that the alleged facts might be presented by the prosecution and challenged by the defence.

And the truth finally and definitively established.

What a waste of time that all was. Maisie knew what had happened in Bunting – the motivations and objectives of all the damaged and unhappy protagonists. She had to accept, however, that knowing was not enough. The facts had to be proved in a court of law to the satisfaction of a jury of the peers of the accused.

From where she sat, with . . .