CHAPTER 6
Disaster
While he let them in at the stage-door the man – he was called Hawkins – said over and over again in a shrill whine that it wasn’t his fault if he was late getting down to the theatre. Nobody, he said, could blame him. He turned queer, as was well-known, at the sight of blood. It was as much as Peregrine could do to get the victim’s name out of him. He had gone completely to pieces.
They went through the stage-door into the dark house, and up the aisle and so to the foyer. It was as if they had never left the theatre.
Peregrine said to Emily: ‘Wait here. By the box-office. Don’t come any farther.’
‘I’ll come if you want me.’
‘O Gawd no. O Gawd no, Miss.’
‘Stay here, Emily. Or wait in front. Yes. Just wait in front.’ He opened the doors into the stalls and fastened them back. She went in. ‘Now, Hawkins,’ Peregrine said.
‘You go, Mr Jay. Up there. I don’t ’ave to go. I can’t do nothing. I’d vomit. Honest I would.’
Peregrine ran up the graceful stairway towards the sunken landing: under the treasure where both flights emerged. It was dark up there but he had a torch and used it. The beam shot out and found an object.
There, on its back in a loud overcoat and slippers lay the shell of Jobbins. The woollen cap had not fallen from the skull but had been stove into it. Out of what had been a face, broken like a crust now, and glistening red, one eye stared at nothing.
Beside this outrage lay a bronze dolphin, grinning away for all it was worth through a wet, unspeakable mask.
Everything round Peregrine seemed to shift a little as if his vision had swivelled like a movie camera. He saw, without comprehension, a square of reflected light on the far wall and its source above the landing. He saw, down below him, the top of Hawkins’s head. He moved to the balustrade, held on to it and with difficulty controlled an upsurge of nausea. He fetched a voice out of himself.
‘Have you rung the police?’
‘I better had, didn’t I? I better report, didn’t I?’ Hawkins gabbled without moving.
‘Stay where you are. I’ll do it.’
There was a general purposes telephone in the downstairs foyer outside the box-office. He ran down to it and, controlling his hand, dialled the so celebrated number. How instant and how cool the response.
‘No possibility of survival, sir?’
‘God, no. I told you –’
‘Please leave everything as it is. You will be relieved in a few minutes. Which entrance is available? Thank you.’
Peregrine hung up. ‘Hawkins,’ he said. ‘Go back to the stage-door and let the police in. Go on.’
‘Yes. OK. Yes, Mr Jay.’
‘Well, go on, damn you.’
Was there an independent switch anywhere in the foyer for front-of-house lighting or was it all controlled from backstage? Surely not. He couldn’t remember. Ridiculous. Emily was out there in the darkened stalls. He went in and found her standing just inside the doors.
‘Emily?’
‘Yes. All right. Here I am.’
He felt her hands in his. ‘This is a bad thing,’ he said hurriedly. ‘It’s a very bad thing, Emily.’
‘I heard what you said on the telephone.’
‘They’ll be here almost at once.’
‘I see. Murder,’ Emily said, trying the word.
‘We can’t be sure.’
They spoke aimlessly. Peregrine heard a high-pitched whine inside his own head and felt sickeningly cold. He wondered if he was going to faint and groped for Emily. They put their arms about each other. ‘We must behave,’ Peregrine said, ‘in whatever way one is expected to behave. You know? Calm? Collected? All the things people like us are meant not to be.’
‘That’s right. Well, so we will.’ He stooped his head to hers. ‘Can this be you?’ he said.
A sound crept into their silence: a breathy intermittent sound with infinitesimal interruptions that seemed to have some sort of vocal quality. They told each other to listen.
With a thick premonition of what was to come, Peregrine put Emily away from him.
He switched on his torch and followed its beam down the centre aisle. He was under the overhang of the dress-circle but moved on until its rim was above his head. It was here, in the centre aisle of the stalls and below the circle balustrade, that his torchlight came to rest on a small, breathing, faintly audible heap which as he knelt beside it, revealed itself as an unconscious boy.
‘Trevor,’ Peregrine said. ‘Trevor.’
Emily behind him said, ‘Has he been killed? Is he dying?’
‘I don’t know. What should we do? Ring for the ambulance? Ring the Yard again? Which?’
‘Don’t move him. I’ll ring Ambulance.’
‘Yes.’
‘Listen. Sirens.’
‘Police.’
Emily said: ‘I’ll ring, all the same,’ and was gone.
There seemed to be no interval of time between this moment and the occupation of The Dolphin by uniformed policemen with heavy necks and shoulders and quiet voices. Peregrine met the sergeant.
‘Are you in charge? There’s something else since I telephoned. A boy. Hurt but alive. Will you look?’
The sergeant looked. He said: ‘This might be serious. You haven’t touched him, sir?’
‘No. Emily – Miss Dunne who is with me – is ringing the ambulance.’
‘Can we have some light?’
Peregrine, remembering at last where they were, put the houselights on. More police were coming in at the stage-door. He rejoined the sergeant. A constable was told to stay by the boy and report any change.
‘I’ll take a look at this body, if you please,’ the sergeant said.
Emily was at the telephone in the foyer saying: ‘It’s very urgent. It’s really urgent. Please.’
‘If you don’t mind, Miss,’ said the sergeant and took the receiver. ‘Police here,’ he said and was authoritative. ‘They’ll be round in five minutes,’ he said to Emily.
‘Thank God.’
‘Now then, Mr Jay.’ He’d got Peregrine’s name as he came in.
‘May I go back to the boy?’ Emily asked. ‘In case he regains consciousness and is frightened? I know him.’
‘Good idea,’ said the sergeant with a kind of routine heartiness. ‘You just stay there with the boy, Miss – ?’
‘Dunne.’
‘Miss Dunne. Members of the company here, would it be?’
‘Yes,’ Peregrine said. ‘We were at the new restaurant in Wharfingers Lane and came back to shelter from the rain.’
‘Is that so? I see. Well, Miss Dunne, you just stay with the boy and tell the ambulance all you know. Now, Mr Jay.’
A return to the sunken landing was a monstrous thing to contemplate. Peregrine said: ‘Yes. I’ll show you. If you don’t mind I won’t – ’ and reminded himself of Hawkins. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to balk. This way.’
‘Up the stairs?’ The sergeant asked conversationally, as if he inquired his way to the Usual Offices. ‘Don’t trouble to come up again, Mr Jay. The less traffic, you know, the better we like it.’
‘Yes. Of course. I forgot.’
‘If you’ll just wait down here.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
The sergeant was not long on the landing. Peregrine could not help looking up at him and saw that, like himself, the sergeant did not go beyond the top step. He returned and went to the telephone. As he passed Peregrine he said: ‘Very nasty, sir, isn’t it,’ in a preoccupied voice.
Peregrine couldn’t hear much of what the sergeant said into the telephone. ‘Some kind of caretaker – Jobbins – and a young lad – looks like it. Very good, sir. Yes. Yes. Very good’: and then after a pause and in a mumble of words, one that came through very clearly.
‘ – robbery – ’
Never in the wide world would Peregrine have believed it of himself that a shock, however acute o
r a sight however appalling, could have so bludgeoned his wits. There, there on the wall opposite the one in which the treasure was housed, shone the tell-tale square of reflected light and there above his head as he stood on the stairs had been the exposed casket – exposed and brightly lit when it should have been shut off and –
He gave a kind of stifled cry and started up the stairs.
‘Just a moment, sir. If you please.’
‘The glove,’ Peregrine said. ‘The letters and the glove. I must see. I must look.’
The sergeant was beside him. A great hand closed without undue force round his upper arm.
‘All right, sir. All right. But you can’t go up there yet, you know. You join your young lady and the sick kiddy. And if you’re referring to the contents of that glassed-in cabinet up there, I can tell you right away. It’s been opened from the back and they seem to have gone.’
Peregrine let out an incoherent cry and blundered into the stalls to tell Emily.
For him and for Emily the next half hour was one of frustration, confusion and despair. They had to collect themselves and give statements to the sergeant who entered them at an even pace in his notebook. Peregrine talked about hours and duties and who ought to be informed and Mr Greenslade and Mr Conducis, and he stared at the sergeant’s enormous forefinger, flattened across the image of a crown on a blue cover. Peregrine didn’t know who Jobbins’s next-of-kin might be. He said, as if that would help: ‘He was a nice chap. He was a bit of a character. A nice chap.’
The theatre continually acquired more police: plainclothes, unhurried men, the most authoritative of whom was referred to by the sergeant as the Div-Super and addressed as Mr Gibson. Peregrine and Emily heard him taking a statement from Hawkins who cried very much and said it wasn’t a fair go.
The ambulance came. Peregrine and Emily stood by while Trevor, the whites of his eyes showing under his heavy lashes and his breathing very heavy, was gently examined. A doctor appeared: the divisional surgeon, Peregrine heard someone say. Mr Gibson asked him if there was any chance of a return to consciousness and he said something about Trevor being deeply concussed.
‘He’s got broken ribs and a broken right leg,’ he said, ‘and an unbroken bruise on his jaw. It’s a wonder he’s alive. We won’t know about the extent of internal injuries until we’ve had a look-see,’ said the divisional surgeon. ‘Get him into St Terence’s at once.’ He turned to Peregrine. ‘Would you know of the next-of-kin?’
Peregrine was about to say: ‘Only too well’ but checked himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘his mother.’
‘Would you have the address?’ asked Mr Gibson. ‘And the telephone number.’
‘In the office. Upstairs. No, wait a moment. I’ve a cast list in my pocket-book. Here it is: Mrs Blewitt.’
‘Perhaps you’d be so kind as to ring her, Mr Jay. She ought to be told at once. What’s the matter, Mr Jay?’
‘She meets him, usually. At the top of the lane. I – Oh god, poor Jobbins told me that. I wonder what she did when Trevor didn’t turn up. You’d have thought she’d have come to the theatre.’
‘Can we get this boy away?’ asked the divisional surgeon crisply.
‘OK, Doc. You better go with them,’ Mr Gibson said to the constable who had stayed by Trevor. ‘Keep your ears open. Anything. Whisper. Anything. Don’t let some starched battle-axe push you about. We want to know what hit him. Don’t leave him, now.’
Mr Gibson had a piece of chalk in his hand. He ran it round Trevor’s little heap of a body, grinding it into the carpet. ‘OK,’ he said and Trevor was taken away.
The divisional surgeon said he’d take a look-see at the body and went off with the sergeant. Superintendent Gibson was about to accompany them when Peregrine and Emily, who had been in consultation, said: ‘Er – ’ and he turned back.
‘Yes, Mr Jay? Miss Dunne? Was there something?’
‘It’s just,’ Emily said, ‘– we wondered if you knew that Mr Roderick Alleyn – I mean Superintendent Alleyn – supervised the installation of the things that were in the wall-safe. The things that have been stolen.’
‘Rory Alleyn!’ the superintendent ejaculated. ‘Is that so? Now, why was that, I wonder?’
Peregrine explained. ‘I think,’ he said finally, ‘that Mr Vassily Conducis, who owns the things –’
‘So I understand.’
‘ – asked Mr Alleyn to do it as a special favour. Mr Alleyn was very much interested in the things.’
‘He would be. Well, thank you,’ said Mr Gibson rather heavily. ‘And now, if you’d phone this Mrs Blewitt. Lives in my division, I see. Close to our headquarters. If she can’t get transport to the hospital tell her, if you please, that we’ll lay something on. No, wait. On second thoughts, I’ll send a policewoman round from the station if one’s available. Less of a shock.’
‘Shouldn’t we ring her up – just to warn her someone’s coming?’ Emily asked. ‘Should I offer to go?’
Mr Gibson stared at her and said that he thought on the whole it would be better if Peregrine and Emily remained in the theatre a little longer but, yes, they could telephone to Mrs Blewitt after he himself had made one or two little calls. He padded off – not fast, not slow – towards the foyer. Peregrine and Emily talked disjointedly. After some minutes they heard sounds of new arrivals by the main entrance and of Superintendent Gibson greeting them.
‘None of this is real,’ Emily said presently.
‘Are you exhausted?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I ought to tell Greenslade,’ Peregrine ejaculated. ‘He ought to be told, good God!’
‘And Mr Conducis? After all it’s his affair.’
‘Greenslade can tackle that one. Emily, are you in a muddle like me? I can’t get on top of this. Jobbins. That appalling kid? Shakespeare’s note and the glove. All broken and destroyed or stolen. Isn’t it beastly, all of it? What are human beings? What’s the thing that makes monsters of us all?’
‘It’s out of our country. We’ll have to play it by ear.’
‘No, but we act it. It’s our raw material – Murder. Violence. Theft. Sexual greed. They’re commonplace to us. We do our Stanislavsky over them. We search out motives and associated experiences. We try to think our way into Macbeth or Othello or a witch-hunt or an Inquisitor or a killer-doctor at Auschwitz and sometimes we think we’ve succeeded. But confront us with the thing itself! It’s as if a tractor had rolled over us. We’re nothing. Superintendent Gibson is there instead to put it all on a sensible, factual basis.’
‘Good luck to him,’ said Emily rather desperately.
‘Good luck? You think? All right, if you say so.’
‘Perhaps I can now ring up Mrs Blewitt.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
The foyer was brilliantly lit and there were voices and movement upstairs where Jobbins lay. Cameramen’s lamps flashed and grotesquely reminded Peregrine of the opening night of his play. Superintendent Gibson’s voice and that of the divisional surgeon were clearly distinguishable. There was also a new rather comfortable voice. Downstairs, a constable stood in front of the main doors. Peregrine told him that Mr Gibson had said they might use the telephone and the constable replied pleasantly that it would be quite all right he was sure.
Peregrine watched Emily dial the number and wait with the receiver to her ear. How pale she was. Her hair was the kind that goes into a mist after it has been out in the rain and her wide mouth drooped at the corners like a child’s. He could hear the buzzer ringing, on and on. Emily had just shaken her head at him when the telephone quacked angrily. She spoke for some time, evidently to no avail, and at last hung up.
‘A man,’ she said. ‘A landlord, I should think. He was livid. He says Mrs Blewitt went to a party after her show and didn’t meet Trevor tonight. He says she’s “flat out to it” and nothing would rouse her. So he hung up.’
‘The policewoman will have to cope. I’d better rouse Greenslade, I suppose.
He lives at some godawful place in the stockbrokers’ belt. Here goes.’
Evidently Mr and Mrs Greenslade had a bedside telephone. She could be heard, querulous and half-asleep, in the background. Mr Greenslade said: ‘Shut up, darling. Very well, Jay, I’ll come down. Does Alleyn know?’
‘I – I don’t suppose so. I told the superintendent that Alleyn would be concerned.’
‘He should have been told. Find out, will you? I’ll come at once.’
‘Find out,’ Peregrine angrily repeated to Emily. ‘I can’t go telling the police who they ought to call in, blast it. How can I find out if Alleyn’s been told?’
‘Easily,’ Emily rejoined with a flicker of a smile. ‘Because, look.’
The constable had opened the pass-door in the main entrance and now admitted Superintendent Alleyn in the nearest he ever got to a filthy temper.
II
Alleyn had worked late and unfruitfully at the Yard in company with Inspector Fox. As he let himself into his own house he heard the telephone ring, swore loudly and got to it just as his wife, Troy, took the receiver off in their bedroom.
It was the Chief Commander who was his immediate senior at the Yard. Alleyn listened with disgust to his story. ‘– and so Fred Gibson thought that as you know Conducis and had a hand in the installation, he’d better call us. He just missed you at the Yard. All things considered I think you’d better take over, Rory. It’s a big one. Murder. Double, if the boy dies. And robbery of these bloody, fabulous museum pieces.’
‘Very good,’ Alleyn said. ‘All right. Yes.’
‘Got your car out or garaged?’
‘Thank you. Out.’
It was nothing new to turn round in his tracks after one gruelling day and work through till the next. He took five minutes to have a word with Troy and a rapid shave and was back in the car and heading for the Borough within half an hour of leaving the Yard. The rain had lifted but the empty streets glistened under their lamps.
He could have kicked himself from Whitehall to Bankside. Why, why, why hadn’t he put his foot down about the safe and its silly window and bloody futile combination lock? Why hadn’t he said that he would on no account recommend it? He reminded himself that he had given sundry warnings but snapped back at himself that he should have gone further. He should have telephoned Conducis and advised him not to go on with the public display of the Shakespeare treasures. He should have insisted on that ass of a business manager scrapping his imbecile code-word, penetrable in five minutes by a certified moron, and should have demanded a new combination. The fact that he had been given no authority to do so and had nevertheless urged precisely this action upon Mr Winter Morris made no difference. He should have thrown his weight about.