Ghost Song Read online

  ‘So did I. Won’t this be part of the trap’s mechanism? The floor—the bit the actor actually lay on before being sent down to the depths?’

  ‘I think it must be,’ said Robert, still frowning at the thing. ‘Yes, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? Like a long platform. They’d leave it up here in place.’

  ‘Is there any means of operating it?’ said Hilary hopefully. ‘Winding it down? You said there was a pulley or something?’

  ‘Yes, but…’ Robert took one of the torches and shone it onto the sides of the steel oblong.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘If you look closely you can see where an L-shaped bolt has been put on each side, and then hammered into place.’

  ‘Yes, I do see it,’ said Hilary, having peered more closely. ‘We can’t get that out, can we?’

  ‘Not without an oxyacetylene welder, or smashing up half the stage.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘At some time in its history somebody was very determined indeed to seal up every possible access to the vault below the stage.’

  At once there was the sensation that the ghosts had crept nearer and were peering over the shoulders of the two intruders, and were nodding their heads wisely to one another, saying, ‘Yes, that’s what happened all those years ago. The stage vault was sealed and never meant to be reopened. We saw it all, we know why it was done…’

  Hilary shivered. ‘Have we seen enough, d’you think?’

  ‘Yes. Wait while I hammer this back into place.’ He did this with new nails from the haversack, gathering up the original ones and putting them into a side pocket. It was not difficult to realign the splintered sections of wood: a close inspection would show the new nails and the slight damage, but anyone examining the trap would probably assume it was a small repair recently found necessary.

  They went back down the creaking old steps to the back of the auditorium. Robert had just reached for the handle on the foyer door when Hilary looked back. ‘Listen.’

  But Robert had already heard it. Footsteps. Somewhere in the empty theatre someone was walking about. The sounds were soft but unmistakable.

  Keeping his voice low, he said, ‘It’s coming from the dress circle.’ He opened the foyer door and they stepped out of the auditorium. The old mechanism of the door sounded shockingly loud.

  ‘Do we make a run for it or stand our ground?’ said Hilary softly.

  ‘It might be someone with a perfectly lawful reason for being here,’ said Robert, knowing they were both remembering the half-glimpsed figure in the box. ‘Are you sure there isn’t a night watchman?’

  ‘Positive. And anyway a night watchman would have challenged us by now. We’ve made enough noise for an army.’

  ‘True. Then I think discretion is the better part of valour on this occasion. But there’s no need for stealth, he already knows we’re here.’

  They crossed the foyer and opened the door leading to the stone corridors. As they went towards the stage door they heard the footsteps coming down from the dress circle. Keeping his voice very low, Robert said, ‘I’ll let you out and lock the door after you. He should hear that and he’ll assume we’ve both left. But I’m staying to see who he is. We’ll meet up at Linkman’s Wine Bar.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Hilary at once.

  ‘No. Wait for me at Linkman’s. He might be drunk or on drugs. Even violent.’

  ‘All the more reason for me to stay. There isn’t time to argue. We can hide in the doorman’s room. Where are the keys?’

  Robert produced the keys from his jacket pocket. He unlocked the stage door and made a play of opening it and then banging it shut quite loudly and relocking it. Then he pocketed the keys and took Hilary’s hand, pulling her with him into the doorman’s room, leaving the door slightly ajar.

  The room was musty and there were no windows, but after a moment Robert’s eyes adjusted to the dimness and he made out the shape of a large desk in one corner and of an old-fashioned pigeon-hole rack for letters still nailed to the wall. He imagined the performers coming in here each evening, calling out to the doorman to know if there were any messages for them.

  The chink in the door gave a rather narrow view of the passage, but Robert thought he could see enough. His heart was pounding and he was aware of Hilary trying not to shiver. And then, as the footsteps came nearer, he became aware of another sound. A soft humming, was it? Singing? It is singing, thought Robert incredulously. He’s singing to himself. He glanced at Hilary and saw her eyes were wide with horror and he knew they were both remembering the words of the old doorkeeper again. ‘I heard him humming quietly as he went—almost as if he was using a snatch of music to keep himself company…’

  He thought he had never heard anything quite so eerie as this soft wordless singing. No torchlight showed anywhere and the footsteps were not hesitant or fumbling. Whoever this was, he knew the way without needing lights—he was walking surely and firmly. Robert tried to work out what they would do if the door was pushed open and the figure described in the old memoirs really was standing there.

  There was the impression of movement in the unlit passageway, and the footsteps paused. Robert was annoyed to find that all he could make out was a cluster of shadows. Had the figure stopped? No, it was going back down the passage. There was the sound of the foyer door closing and the footsteps fading. The soft singing was no longer audible.

  Robert realized he had been holding his breath and let it out in a gasp of relief.

  ‘He’s gone?’ said Hilary softly, only making it half a question.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know where, but I don’t feel inclined to play hide and seek with him. It looked—and sounded—as if he knows this place inside out. I’m not sure if he realized we were here or not, are you?’

  ‘No. But let’s beat that retreat now.’

  They stepped into Platt’s Alley and Robert relocked the stage door.

  ‘You’re locking him in?’ said Hilary.

  ‘I want to see what he does, and if he comes out,’ said Robert. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Perfectly. You do know how to give a girl an unusual evening.’

  They reached the end of Platt’s Alley, and walked a little way along the street, stopping in the semi-shelter of a shop doorway, where they could see the opening of the alley. It was still raining and people with umbrellas hurried along, collars turned up.

  ‘It’s difficult to see who’s who and what’s what in this,’ said Robert after a moment. ‘I don’t think anyone’s come out of the alley though, do you?’

  ‘No. It looks as if we really have locked him in.’

  ‘Unless he went out through the main street doors. Damn, yes, he might have done that, and I don’t think we’d have heard that from the doorman’s room. Not through those stone passages. And the street doors are one-way arrangements—a horizontal bar you lift and push, and then it locks itself after you.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Hilary suddenly, ‘isn’t that someone now?’

  Robert peered through the rain. ‘I can’t tell,’ he said.

  ‘Neither can I. The trouble is everyone’s wrapped up against the rain tonight—almost any of them could be our man. No, I think it was someone coming out of the wine bar on the other side of Platt’s. Or is it? Should we follow him to find out?’

  But the figure they had both seen had already melted into the crowds.

  ‘No point,’ said Robert. ‘And we aren’t even sure if it was the right man.’ As they walked back to Linkman’s, he said, ‘Hilary, I think one of us will have to find a reason to go back tomorrow. I mean an official reason. To make sure we haven’t shut anyone in. What was that he was singing? Did you recognize the tune?’

  ‘No,’ said Hilary. ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. But I’d know it again if I heard it.’

  ‘So would I.’

  Linkman’s was blessedly warm, noisy and normal, and drinking coffee gratefully, Hilary said, ‘You know, Robert, anyone listening to some of the things we’
ve said tonight might almost believe we really do think the Tarleton’s haunted. I don’t mean just enjoying the atmosphere and the echoes—I mean really haunted.’

  ‘I do think it’s haunted,’ said Robert. ‘So do you. All old buildings are haunted, to some extent anyway. I don’t know what we encountered tonight, but whatever it was, I don’t think that what’s sealed beneath that stage is a ghost.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  May 1914

  AFTER ALL IT HAD not been a ghost Toby had heard in the Tarleton when he came in early to rehearse his song, and it had not even been the rain. It had been Alicia Darke, she of the crimson silk gloves and questing hands.

  She had walked down the central aisle of the stalls, her skirts swishing over the ground, and Toby, who was still on stage, thought: damn, another three minutes and I’d have been in the green room and she wouldn’t have seen me. And now I’ve lost that beautiful hour being here on my own.

  ‘I’m truly not here to disturb you, Toby,’ said Alicia, mounting the steps to the stage. ‘This is your time before the performance—I do understand that’s important to you.’ She had the knack of saying what people wanted to hear, and once or twice it had occurred to Toby that born into a slightly different social stratum she might have become a very successful, very high-class courtesan.

  He murmured something about needing an extra rehearsal before the evening.

  ‘Yes, of course. Your new song. I shall be watching from my box,’ she said, and a different, less attractive image came uppermost: that of the female counterpart of the stage-door Johnnie. Is she just slumming? thought Toby. Is that what this is?

  ‘But,’ said Alicia, ‘I have an invitation for you, and I wanted to issue it before the performance.’

  It would be supper at her house most likely, and the meal would start in the small elegant dining room and finish in the perfumed bedroom looking out over the park. Toby had twice been invited into Alicia’s bedroom and both times had found it a remarkable experience, visually as well as sexually. In her own way Alicia was something of an actress: she liked to set branched candlesticks in front of the mirrors to create the impression of an amber-lit cave, and to offer her guest a sensual meal in which dainty morsels of chicken, petits buerres, or grapes dipped in chocolate could be erotically shared. Toby had no objection to any of this, but at the moment he could not really think any further than eight o’clock this evening, with the Tarleton packed full of people. (Would Frank get that second set of chords right so that it suggested the butler being so drunk he tripped over his own feet? Would Toby himself make a sufficiently descriptive gesture to indicate tipping the bottle into the mixing bowl in the first verse? Would an audience even turn up to listen?)

  But it was not supper at Alicia’s house she had in mind at all.

  ‘I wondered,’ she said, ‘if, after the show, you would care to come to a meeting of a small society I occasionally patronize. All rather secret, you know, which is why I didn’t want to ask you in front of anyone else. But I think you might find it interesting. A small group of friends who have similar tastes and aims in life. It will began at half past eleven this evening.’

  ‘Secret society? Half past eleven?’ Half past eleven was not particularly late for Toby’s theatre friends, but it was rather late for most other people.

  ‘Do come, Toby. They’re all longing to meet you.’

  They’re all longing to meet you…

  For some reason the words sent a faint chill through Toby’s mind, but he murmured a vague acceptance—it did not seem as if Alicia was going to brook a refusal anyway—and then escorted her to the stage door. It was raining in earnest now, and the thunder was unmistakably closer. Toby asked Shilling, the stage doorman, to get a cab for her, then went back to his preparations for the evening.

  But her words stayed with him. They’re all longing to meet you…

  Who were they, these unknown people who were longing to meet him at this secret-sounding meeting? Wild visions of devil worship and bacchanalian orgies nudged at his consciousness, which was irritating when he wanted to concentrate on ‘Tipsy Cake’.

  By now the other performers had arrived, grumbling about the heavy rain which had turned Platt’s Alley into a river of mud, ruining people’s shoes and coiffures. The musicians were in a bad temper—the flute player had dropped his music in the gutter and would have to dry it over the gas ring in this flippin’ heat. The Rose Romain dancers had all had their hair dressed by Monsieur that very day and said it was a bleedin’ nuisance, pardon their language, dear, it was a shocking inconvenience when you had paid two and sixpence a go, and then had to walk along a rain-sodden alley with no umbrella. You would have thought the Tarleton might have had a better approach to the stage door, wouldn’t you?

  They wandered round the stage, criticizing the placement of curtains and properties, picking up the threads of long-running quarrels with one another and getting in the way of Rinaldi, the stage manager, who had been at the Tarleton since he was eight, learning his trade from his father who had been call-boy and pot-boy combined and had lived in a sliver of a room in Candle Street along with six others, and been grateful for the pork pie given him each evening as part of his wages. The present Rinaldi lived in the same house, but now owned it, and his wages were considerably more than a pork pie. He was the mainstay and prop of the theatre; Toby held him in considerable affection and could not imagine life without him.

  It was one of the theatre’s gentler legends that Rinaldi had been devotedly and blamelessly in love with Toby’s mother since he was eighteen when she was a famous music-hall dancer, performing to London audiences wearing a few feathers and sequins and plying the enormous fan that had been her trademark. It was a good twenty years since Flora’s marriage to Sir Hal Chance had sent tremors of shock through the Foreign Office, but people still occasionally told how Mr Gladstone himself had sent for Hal, and said, ‘Now look here, Chance, you can’t possibly marry a music-hall performer who calls herself the Flowered Fan.’ Toby had no idea if this had actually happened and he had never been able to ask either of his parents about it, but he always hoped the story was true.

  Tonight’s dancers were complaining vociferously about the dressing room allotted to them, and reminded Toby, solo and in concert, that they had been headliners on several of the halls. Elise Le Brun, who had been born plain Elsie Brown but did not believe in letting one’s origins get in the way and was the leading Romain dancer, said it was not good enough, it reely was not. They had played Holborn Empire last winter and Collins’s Music Hall in the spring. They had been called the new Gaiety Girls more than once, which just went to show.

  The lugubrious comedian was drunk, and the sharp-witted Cockney, whose name was Bunstable, was cheerfully toasting kippers over the gas ring in the green room. The smell would probably reach the first six rows of the stalls. Remonstrated with, Bunstable said, peaceably, that he could never do a show on an empty stomach, and added that he was partial to a kipper for his tea and was in fact developing a whole new comic routine in which the kippers assumed a significant part. He offered Toby and the flute player a share in the repast by way of appeasement. The flute player, who was trying to dry his music over the gas ring, accepted, but Toby refused and told Bunstable to open all the windows.

  After this, he asked Bob Shilling, who had been leering at the Rose Romains, to make black coffee for the drunken comedian. He told Le Brun that the Tarleton was so old it was impossible to have the dressing rooms made any larger and offered to release her from the evening’s engagement, although it was a pity if she and the other girls did not stay, said Toby artfully, what with the agent for Drury Lane coming in tonight, touting for possible acts for pantomime. Le Brun’s eager cat-like face sharpened, and she said, Oh well, if that was the case, she had not perfectly understood, and they might squeeze in one of their extras as a favour.

  May God forgive me for lying! thought Toby and went up into the flies to make sure the backcl
oth for his song was in place. He and Rinaldi had explored the under-stage storage rooms the previous day: he had asked Rinaldi to come with him, partly because Rinaldi would know what was to be found down there, but also because Toby always found the underground rooms uncomfortably sinister. He knew, logically, that it was simply that the rooms were dark and dismal and had shadowy corners and odd echoes, but he could never rid himself of the feeling that something menacing stood unseen in the shadows, watching him.

  He had been an inquisitive five year old when he first came down here, wanting to explore everywhere about this marvellous place where his mamma somehow belonged and where nothing was quite what it seemed—where people changed themselves into all kinds of exciting beings purely by painting their faces, or playing music, or by standing in a coloured ray of light like the snipped-off piece of a rainbow. In those days he thought the Tarleton was filled with magic—he still thought it now he was grown up, but it was a different kind of magic. But he clearly remembered how he had found the heavy old door at the head of the steps and had gone down them without anyone realizing. At first it had been spookily dark, but Mr Shilling who watched the door for people coming in and out and gave out letters to them, had lit a box lantern inside his own room on account of it being a dark January day. Toby was not really supposed to touch anything to do with burning candles and he was probably not supposed to borrow Mr Shilling’s lantern either, but Mr Shilling was not in his room to ask permission, and Toby thought if he was very careful and very quick…

  Going down the steps was like going down into a magic cave. He had been taken to see Aladdin at Drury Lane at Christmas so he knew about caves that were filled with treasure and it was all very exciting. But the flickering lantern light, instead of making it exciting, made it frightening. Toby began not to like the huddled outlines of scenery and furniture, and he began to wish he had not come down here.

  He was found some immeasurable time later, huddled in a corner, his fists crammed into his eyes to stop himself crying, shaking and white-faced. It was a bad old place, he said sobbingly when he was back upstairs and starting to feel safe again. A bad bad old place and he had not liked it one bit.