A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(51)
Despite the incredible leeway DI Sadiq had been allowing me, my status as an official informant didn’t let me into crime scenes, and I found myself increasingly in no mood to bluff my way into places I shouldn’t be. Still, I checked my watch. I had the time. I tucked my bag under my arm and moved with purpose, past the constable on the steps, along the brick path that wound around the theater.
The other day, as I’d explored the basement, I had heard wisps of sound coming from the street. There had been another way in; surely Sadiq’s team had found it as they’d locked down the building. As I walked, I traced the foundation of the theater with my eyes. As I’d suspected, it had been built on a hill, and the lower level was exposed around the back, covered in trailing vines.
There was a pair of high windows covered in intricate grating, too small for anything but a squirrel to sneak through; there was a metal folding chair and an ashtray heaped with cigarette ends from whatever uniform had been out here last night. There were no doors, at least not that I could see, but there was also no one around. It was a matter of a minute’s search with my hands to find the utility door, hidden under the ivy like something from a children’s story. I made short work of the lock, but the door was surprisingly heavy. I had to brace my feet and power through it with my shoulder, and behind me the ivy swung out like the hem of a long, strange skirt.
I thought again of Anwen and her strange collection of clothing, piled in her wardrobe like outfits pulled off a paper doll.
With a growing sense of disquiet, I pressed my hands against the door until I felt it latch.
Then I turned, only to rear back directly into the door.
A forest?
I had stumbled into a forest, somehow, the trees all hung with lanterns, the branches bending down like the longest fingerbones. Before me, a fir tree, another, a stone house in the distance. I reached out carefully, and as my fingers brushed against cloth, I pieced together what I was seeing.
Canvas. It was a set. I was at the end of an unlit hallway that had been used to store the backdrops from productions past. Shaking my head at myself, I hefted my cloth bag over my shoulder and picked my way through the landscapes before me.
A desert, lovingly rendered by someone who had never seen a desert, festooned with the required glimmering oasis in its distance. A Romanesque colonnade, the long rows of columns stretching out to disappear in a fountain. I ran my hand over its smooth surface. Wooden benches; a gilded throne on casters, paint chipping around the lions’ heads that made up its armrests; a streetlamp, patinated as though it had come straight out of Victorian London, leaning against a wall.
This maze of places and props was so dense as to block out any light that might have leaked in around the door. But the path I was taking . . . I wasn’t the first one to do it. Someone had picked their way through here before.
I took out my phone and switched on its flashlight, training it on the floor. Scuffed linoleum. No way to check for prints. But there—and there—and there. Petals. Dried up on the ground.
Fallen from an orchid handled too roughly in the dark.
Quickly, I stooped to take photographs, but I left the petals where they were. Tomorrow, if I was feeling particularly invincible, I would pass the photos on to Sadiq for her own purposes.
With my phone out, I checked the time again. Half past five, and nothing frozen in my shopping bag. Since I’d made my way into the building, I decided to satisfy my curiosity about the lighting rig. I crept out slowly from behind the final backdrop (a confectioner’s shop, painted kindergarten-bright) and to the bottom of the stairs that led up to the stage.
Voices up above. Quiet ones. Assured. A team from the Thames Valley Police, perhaps, collecting evidence. But as I turned to go, I heard a man’s frustrated exclamation, a foot slammed hollowly against the stage’s sprung floor. I eased my bag onto the floor, then slipped up the dark stairs and backstage, taking care to keep out of the light.
A blond boy, tall and broad-shouldered, his arms crossed as though he was hugging himself. Theo, his face a mask for all it showed, and across from him, a man with his back to me. Graying hair, expensive shoes, trousers tailored far more fashionably than I’d have expected for a man of his age.
When he spoke, he spoke the queen’s English. An accent native to nowhere. It had to be bred into you. “I’ve been waiting,” he said. “In your position, it’s poor form to keep someone waiting, especially when you demanded to meet them.”
“You didn’t say you’d be getting in so early,” Theo protested, and something—the note of fear, his half step backward—urged me to take out my phone to film the rest of what I saw. “Besides, I had to talk my way past the officer out front, and that took forever.”
“What did you tell him?”
Theo lifted his chin. “That I’m directing the production of Hamlet that’s going up next month, and that I had to meet my costume designer inside. What did you tell him?”
“Does it matter?” The man scoffed. “The school won’t allow you to run this production.”
They were speaking very quietly, but the acoustics caught their words and carried them into the corners of the building. Beyond them, in the auditorium, the seats unrolled up and out into the shadows.
“I talked to Quigley today. They canceled the production this morning. But I told him I’d do it myself. Without their help. And he told me—and I quote—‘Do what you want, it’s your funeral,’” Theo said. “Mature of him, huh? And I can’t get anyone else to answer my emails. They’re all too concerned with saving their own necks to lift a finger for us. But I can’t waste this summer. I can’t.”