Ghost Song Read online

  Ghost Song

  Sarah Rayne

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Present

  THE TARLETON MUSIC Hall was the ugliest building Robert Fallon had ever seen, and he fell instantly and overwhelmingly in love with it.

  ‘Since you’re the enthusiast when it comes to the old stuff, you’d better deal with this one,’ the senior partner of his firm had said, three days earlier. ‘It’s a disused theatre in Bankside and it’s just come under this new government directive about stricter monitoring of old buildings, so a full survey’s wanted. Nobody seems to know when it was built, but apparently it closed down in 1914 and never reopened. It’s regarded as a bit of a mystery locally, I think.’

  ‘However mysterious it is, if it’s been empty since 1914 it’ll probably be in a disgusting condition,’ said Robert. But he was pleased at the prospect of carrying out a survey in that part of London; he liked Bankside and Southwark with their echoes of Elizabethan theatre, and he liked seeing the newly renovated Globe and the Rose.

  He collected the keys from the managing agents who were called the Harlequin Society and who provided him with helpful directions, managed to park his car near Burbage Street where the Tarleton was and, with the sounds of the river on his left, walked along the street. Halfway along there it was: the exuberantly ugly Tarleton Music Hall.

  It was surrounded by buildings whose original purposes had long since become blurred or lost altogether, but Robert hardly saw them and he barely heard the roar of the traffic which thrummed along streets built by people who had never envisaged the internal combustion engine. He stared up at the peeling facade and the chipped stonework and was vividly aware of two emotions, both wildly different. The first was dismay at the enormity of the task ahead of him. The interior of this building would probably be divided and sub-divided, and rooms would be partitioned haphazardly with no regard to proportion or logic, let alone building regulations. There would be several kinds of dry and wet rot, rampant timber infestation and miles of ancient lead pipework. The walls would be festooned with rusting gas mantles, which meant Robert would have to track down defunct gas inlets and outlets, and if there did happen to be any electrical wiring it would date back to the coronation of George V, if not Edward VII. Once he got inside, he would have to test each step he took because the floor joists would be powdery with wood-worm and likely to collapse under him.

  But none of this mattered because the second emotion was an instant and unreasoning passion for this tattered old music hall.

  He resolutely quelled both sentiments and went along the little alleyway at the side, which was called Platt’s Alley. It had begun to rain and the cobblestones were shiny and slippery. The old stage door was at the very end. Robert reached for the keys in his jacket pocket, then paused to read the inscription carved into the stone lintel over the door. It was worn, but still legible: ‘Please one and please all, be they great, be they small’. He did not recognize the quote, but it was so completely appropriate for a theatre that he smiled and stopped minding about the complexity of the work ahead of him. Unlocking the stage door, he stepped inside, and the scents of dust, old timber and sheer age closed about him.

  The electricity had not been switched on, but he had brought strong torches and battery-powered lamps on stands which he set up at strategic points. This took quite a while, and several times he found himself looking over his shoulder because he had a definite feeling of being watched. He didn’t think it was a living person who watched; just the lingering memories of the people who had stood on this stage and told jokes, sung songs, juggled, danced or recited monologues. After the first few moments he did not mind; it was not a threatening feeling, in fact it was rather friendly.

  He set the last of his lights in place, then began to work systematically through the building, making careful notes as he went. It was a remarkable old building. There was some surface dilapidation—several patches of damp suggested gutters needed attention, there was wet rot in the supper-room floor, and the electrical wiring was certainly dangerous—but other than this, the building was amazingly sound. It was almost as if the whole place had been trapped in its own little pocket of time, or as if a glaze of amber had been spread over it. Robert had checked several old maps of the area: the Tarleton was shown on one dated 1850, and he was inclined to think it had been built around 1830. His partner regarded this kind of research as unnecessary—too much attention to detail, he always said—but Robert liked detail and he thought a property’s history could provide valuable clues.

  Whatever the theatre’s true age, by the end of that first day he had identified several building styles and materials from different eras. In most cases these could be explained: a buttress shoring up a dubious section of the ceiling of the upper circle—probably put there towards the end of the nineteenth century—and a false floor in what he thought was the old green room, most likely meant to strengthen sagging joists. But when he began his examination of the subterranean levels he came across something for which he could find no logical explanation.

  Near the old doorkeeper’s room on the Platt’s Alley side was a small passage leading off at right angles, and at the end of this passage was a thick oak door, black with age. Robert opened it warily, wincing as the hinges shrieked in rusty protest, and pushed it back against the wall. Immediately inside was a flight of stone steps. He shone his torch cautiously, then went down them. The walls were of old London brick, crusted with grime, and Robert, who did not normally mind cellars which were an inevitable part of his work, was uncomfortably aware of the tons of brick and timber above him. The smell of dirt was almost overpowering.

  At the foot of the steps was a very large room. The tape showed it to be thirty feet long and Robert thought it was directly beneath the front of the auditorium and part of the stage. He moved the torch round, picking out shadowy outlines of old canvas flats and odds and ends of furniture: broken-backed chairs and tables. Against one wall were three wicker skips containing lengths of brocade and velvet, probably once stage costumes or curtains. They were faded to an indeterminate grey and smelt dreadful. Robert thought them rather sad, because it was as if the real costumes and curtains had gone and left these ghosts in their place.

  Mingling with the stench of dirt was an ominous dank aura. Sewage spillage? Robert frowned, trying to fix the Tarleton’s position in relation to the Thames and the old sluice gates. He would check the maps when he got back to his office, but he thought there was a disused pumping station in Candle Square.

  But whether or not there had been seepage coming in from London’s old drainage system, at some time in the Tarleton’s history—sometime long after its original construction—someone had built an extra brick wall, spanning the entire width of the cellars. Robert brushed the cobwebs away and shone the torch over the wall’s surface, frowning because it was so obviously of a later construction than the rest of the building: the bricks were machine-made, and the wall was so crazily out of true it had the effect of distorting the whole room. Whoever had built it had either been very unskilled or—

  Or what?

  Or had built it in a very great hurry.

  Robert considered the wall. Surely this was not going to be the classic scenario of a crumbling body behind a hastily built wall? Some ancient murder discovered a century after it had been committed? It was unlikely. But why would such a wall be built down here? Clearly it was not intended to shore up what was overhead. If the foundations had needed strengthening, steel struts would have been put in or, in an extreme case, cement pumped in to fill up these rooms. No one in his right mind would have built this amateurish wall.

  But perhaps it was someone who was not in his right mind, said a voice insi
de Robert’s head. Have you thought of that?

  He pushed this unpleasant idea away and shone the torch onto the upper sections. The wall bisected several ceiling joists which confirmed it had originally been one long room and this wall had partitioned it. So what was in the other part? What was on the other side? Robert spread out the ground plan he had made. As far as he could tell, there was quite a large space on the other side of this odd wall, including the under-stage void. That definitely ruled out any strengthening of the foundations. And if the under-stage area really was on the other side, there would have to be another means of access somewhere in the theatre.

  He went back up the stairs, closing the oak door, and crossed the foyer into the auditorium, his footsteps echoing in the emptiness. The stage had shallow steps on one side. Robert went up these, and began to search for access to the under-stage area. But although he checked and re-checked every nook and cranny, he could not find one: there were no doors, no flaps or hatches, no extra passageways or tucked-away stairs. But there must be a way down there, because the stage had the outlines of what looked like an old trap. He had researched this as well. Most theatres had apparently had at least one of these contrivances, mostly used for melodrama and pantomime. Victims of Sweeney Todd’s chair would have plunged down into the pie-making factory by this route. Demon kings and genii of the lamp would have used it as well. Robert smiled at his own childhood memories of wildly fantastical figures projected abruptly upwards, bathed in fiendish crimson or poisonous green light. Mechanical magic by the light of the limes. Taken to theatres as a child, he had exasperated his parents, who had not bargained for a son who came home from a pantomime and requested drawing paper and sharp pencils to work out how Captain Hook sailed across Never-Never Land.

  The Tarleton’s stage trap was rectangular: roughly six feet in length and three feet across, and Robert thought it was what was called a grave trap. According to the sources he had consulted, it owed its name to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. Had they been foolproof, these devices, or had it been a case of ‘Hamlet, I am thy father’s ghost doomed to walk the earth— Hell’s teeth, the stage manager’s forgotten to oil the hinges and I’m stuck…’

  The traps had worked on the principle of a frame of four uprights, with a floor inside which could be moved up and down, rather like a lift shaft. When in place, the floor of the trap was flush with the stage; when it was winched down, with the actor standing or lying on it, it would leave a deep opening—presumably the actors had to avoid the hole until the floor was brought back up.

  A section of wood had been hammered down over the trap and Robert knelt down to examine it. The wood was an irregular shape and the whole thing was clumsily done. The nails were ill-matched, several of the heads were broken off and Robert had the impression that whoever had done it either had not been used to this kind of job or had had to do it in a hurry. He remembered again the amateurish brickwork in the underground room.

  In an empty theatre it was probably a sound safety measure to seal up the trap, but Robert found himself thinking that at some time, someone in this theatre had wanted to be very sure that the under-stage was completely sealed off. Why? Would the Harlequin Society be able to tell him? How comprehensive was their brief in regard to this place? He wondered who the owner was, and why he—or she—had let the theatre stand empty for so long. Bit of a mystery, Robert’s partner had said about the Tarleton: closed down in 1914 and never reopened. Robert had supposed the outbreak of the first world war was the reason for the original closure, but it was still odd that it had stayed closed for so long.

  He came back to the stage. The lights he had rigged up cast sharp bluish circles, giving the impression of old spotlights trained on the stage, and Robert stood for a moment, looking into the dark well of the auditorium. Most of the seats were still in place, and he could see the shadowy outline of the dress circle and of the four boxes, two on each side of the stage. Wisps of almost colourless curtains still hung over the tarnished giltwork of one of the boxes.

  How would the Tarleton have looked in its heyday? On a Saturday night, with performers on this stage and a full house, how would it have looked and sounded and smelt? Hot and raucous, said Robert to himself. It’d have been crowded with people, and it would have smelt greasily of jellied eels, oysters and cigars. You’d have hated it.

  He looked about him again, trying to brighten the faded colours, trying to see what might lie beneath that thick layer of amber. This auditorium would have had the florid decor of its era—crimson and gilt paintwork and thick flock wallpaper, with glossy mahogany the colour of black treacle. I wouldn’t have hated it in the least, thought Robert, rolling up the tape measure. I’d have loved it.

  May 1914

  Toby Chance always found the Tarleton’s crimson flock wallpaper and dark molasses-coloured mahogany a bit overpowering in hot weather. He liked the theatre better in winter, when the stoves were lit and roaring out their heat, and the street sellers brought in bags of roasted chestnuts, and the hot-codling sellers handed round their roast apples, juicy and spiked with cinnamon.

  Crossing the foyer, he made a face at the fleur-de-lys and a rude gesture to the nearest of the blow-cheeked cherubs. He was early for the evening’s performance, but there were two reasons for this. The first was simply that he loved walking through the theatre when it was empty: it seemed to become his theatre more than at any other time. He liked, as well, the feeling of anticipation, as if the ghosts of audiences lingered, perhaps hoping for another show, perhaps another chance to see Marie Lloyd—getting a bit past her best now, of course, the great old girl, but still able to light up a theatre.

  She had certainly lit up the Tarleton a couple of weeks previously. Toby grinned, remembering he had lit up a few things himself that night. Alicia Darke was the name of the lady who had been with him, and she and Toby had been in the stage box for Marie’s act—the stage box was regarded as Toby’s own particular province and it was hardly ever opened for anyone else. Alicia had worn a dark red evening gown with a demure neckline and long silk gloves covering her arms. But as Marie embarked on ‘A Little of What You Fancy’ Alicia’s hand, still gloved, strayed to Toby’s lap. It was erotic to near explosion point to sit in full view of a Tarleton audience, with Alicia’s fingers exploring and caressing with such insistent intimacy. Her hand was just—but only just—out of the audience’s sight-line, below the box’s parapet. On stage, Marie reached the line about, ‘I don’t mind nice boys staring hard…’ The irony of the timing of this was not lost on Toby.

  It would have afforded more privacy to draw the curtains across the front of the box, but half the audience would have noticed this, so they retreated to the back of the box. At this point Alicia removed the gloves, then she removed several other garments as well, and by the time Marie was reaching the climax of her act, Toby was reaching a climax of his own. They managed to be back in their seats by the time the lights came up, and had eaten a very decorous supper with the performers afterwards. Then they had a second, very indecorous, supper at Alicia’s house in Chelsea. Remembering all this, Toby winked at the framed photograph of Marie in the foyer as he went past.

  His other reason for arriving early was a practical one. He wanted to run through the new song, which was called ‘All Because of Too Much Tipsy Cake’. His pianist and music partner, Frank Douglas, had said they would put Marie Lloyd to rout with it, but Frank thought every new song would put somebody to rout. He was a happy-go-lucky Irishman from Galway, and he could play the piano by ear more skilfully than anyone Toby had ever known. He shaped his tunes to Toby’s lyrics, producing melodies the audiences loved—somebody had said quite recently that if you walked down any of the streets around the Tarleton you would hear at least one errand boy whistling a Chance and Douglas song.

  Toby was hoping ‘Tipsy Cake’ would be whistled tomorrow and also that the chorus would be sung by the audience tonight. He thought it would; most of them would pick up the sly bawdine
ss of the lyrics—the cook tippling the cooking sherry while making tipsy cake for the mistress’s grand dinner party upstairs.

  She’d just tipped up the bottle for the smallest taster

  When the butler said, ‘Let’s have another glass.’

  They would like that—they would like the implied suggestion that the butler and the cook had become so drunk on the cooking sherry that they had ended up in bed together. Toby thought he had managed to suggest this without actually saying it, which should keep him on the right side of the Lord Chamberlain.

  It was to be hoped it would keep Toby on the right side of his father as well. Toby had recently written a song, describing how the Kaiser had vainly tried to drill Prussian troops preparatory to taking over the world, and had flown into a temper over a hapless new recruit who was pigeon-toed and made the entire army look untidy. His father had found the lyrics and broken an almost unbreakable rule between them by asking Toby not to perform it.

  ‘But he’s such a silly posturing creature,’ Toby said. ‘You can’t help making fun of him.’

  ‘He might be a poseur, but he’s a very dangerous poseur,’ said Toby’s father. ‘Hardly anyone in Europe trusts him. For God’s sake don’t ridicule him publicly, Toby, you might come to grief in a way you don’t expect. If you don’t care about your own reputation, you might care about mine. I might come to grief as well.’

  It was not often his father referred to his position within the Foreign Office in quite this way and Toby had wavered, but in the end he had gone ahead and performed his song on the Tarleton’s stage. He had been horrified when quarrels broke out in the stalls where three Germans, deeply injured at the insult to their emperor, were sitting. One of them challenged Toby to a duel and in the end the police had had to be called to break things up. The next day four people were charged at Cannon Street with disturbing the peace. Toby had regretted the disturbance, but he had regretted even more the fact that his father had been proved right.