Dancers in Mourning

Chapter 1-2

“I’m sorry, Mr. Konrad.” A harassed uniformed man with weary eyes and an untidy moustache came out of the door. “Mr. Webb told me himself to see nothing of the sort come into the theatre. There’s not enough room for the artists, let alone you bringing in bicycles.”

“But Miss Bellew brings in her great Dane.” The young man gripped his machine with something approaching ferocity, but the doorkeeper spoke with the obstinacy of old authority.

“Miss Bellew is a principal,” he said heavily.

The boy with the bicycle stiffened as the colour rose slowly over his face into the roots of his curling golden hair. For an embarrassing moment it seemed as if he were about to cry.

“This bicycle was presented to me by my admirers,” he said. “Why should I let pure jealousy on the part of some people”—he shot a waspish glance back through the doorway, presumably at some third person within—“prevent me from showing it to anyone I like? You’re making a fool of yourself. I shall certainly speak to Jimmy himself about it. Why don’t you keep your eye on the important things that keep happening?”

There was defiance in the last words, as though the speaker deliberately touched on a tabooed subject. A spot of colour appeared in the doorkeeper’s grey cheeks and he glanced behind him. Seeing Campion, he started forward angrily, only to fall back reassured at the sight of Mr. Faraday, to whom he nodded. Shaken but still obdurate, he returned to the job in hand.

“Now, Mr. Konrad,” he began, laying a heavy hand on the glittering machine, “we’ll have this outside, if you please.”

The boy with the golden hair relinquished it to him with a contemptuous shrug of his graceful shoulders.

“Oh, it’s Uncle William,” he said. “Do look here and see what the Speedo Club has insisted on sending me. Isn’t it too absurd?”

Mr. Faraday coughed noisily. “Magnificent,” he said fiercely and, gripping Campion’s arm, he propelled him firmly down the corridor. “I hate those fellers,” he muttered in an all too audible undertone. “Called me Uncle William—did you hear him?—impudent little tick! Don’t mind it from my friends—rather like it. Used to it. Notice you’ve dropped it. Don’t hesitate, my dear feller. But a worm like that . . . turns my stomach over, don’t mind tellin’ you. Golden curls! . . . Come on, we’ll slip into the wings. Know my way about by this time. Want you to see Slippers. Nice girl. No damned nonsense about her. No s*x appeal off, though,” he added regretfully and coughed again, as if he feared he had betrayed himself.

The “Round the World in a Four-in-Hand” number was at its height as they approached. Over Mr. Faraday’s shoulder Campion caught a glimpse of the two figures, so familiar to the fashionable audiences of both continents. Slippers Bellew was a pale gold flame flickering over a twilit stage, while beside her moved Sutane, faithful as a shadow, and contriving by his very sympathy of movement to convey the mute adoration which the song demanded of him and which was so great a part of his appeal.

The roar of the audience at the end was tremendous. The harsh sound swept in on them like a great hot breath, and they stepped back through the crowd of girls and small-part folk coming down for the “Little White Petticoats” finale.

The excitement which is never wholly absent from the theatre, even on the three-hundredth night, forced itself upon Campion and he, too, was aware of the power of the Sutane personality which dominated the house, both before and behind the curtain. He tried to analyse it as he followed Uncle William to the dressing room. There was grace and skill personified in the man, but that alone was not sufficient to make so deep an appeal. It was the sophisticated, amused but utterly discontented intelligence which constituted the real attraction, he decided, an ease and dignity which was yet emotionally unsatisfied—the old pull of the hero in love, in fact.

His companion was still talking.

“Wait for him in here,” he remarked, tapping at a door with a One on it. “Wants to see you. Promised I’d bring you along.”

They were admitted to a large room, overlit to the point of discomfort, by a stolid young man in a white coat and spectacles with very thick pebbles.

“Come in, sir. Glad to see you,” he said, conducting the elder man to an armchair beside the dressing table.

Uncle William grunted gratefully and sat down.

“This is Henry, Campion,” he said with a wave of a pudgy hand. “Good feller, Henry.”

The young man beamed and set a chair for the other guest. He managed to convey at once that he was not at all sure if he was behaving like a first-class manservant but thought that there was a very good chance that he was.

“A nice drop of whisky, sir?” he ventured hopefully.

Uncle William looked interested. “Good idea,” he said consideringly and Henry coloured as if he had received a compliment.

While the decanter was forthcoming Campion had leisure to observe the room, which displayed three different influences in sharp contrast. There was the florid taste of the original furnisher, which ran to Turkey carpet and a day bed with gilded legs; the somewhat militaristic neatness and a feeling for gadgets as expressed by the bar concealed in an old gramophone cabinet, which was obviously Henry’s contribution; and something else, not so easy to define. Apart from a mass of papers, photographs and telegrams mostly, there were several odd indications of Jimmy Sutane’s personal interests. Two or three cheap mechanical toys lay upon the dressing table beside a box of liquorice all-sorts and a bunch of white flowers, while on a shelf in the corner sat a very nice white Hotei and a tear-off calendar, complete with an astrological forecast for each day of the year.

Uncle William sat back in his chair, the bright lights glinting on the double row of near-white curls at the nape of his plump pink neck. He looked worldly and benign, and somehow bogus, with his watery blue eyes serious and his expression unwontedly important.

“Well,” he demanded, “anythin’ new?”

Henry paused in the act of laying out a suit but did not turn round.

“It just seems funny to me, sir,” he said sulkily. “Miss Finbrough may take it seriously but I don’t.”

“Miss Finbrough, eh?” Uncle William cleared his throat. “Things have to be pretty bad for her to get the wind-up, I should think.”

“You’d say so, sir.” Henry was deliberately noncommittal and still did not turn round.

The elder man was silent for a moment or so.

“May be nothin’ in it,” he said at last.

Henry swung round, his face red and unhappy.

“Theatrical people aren’t like ordinary people, sir,” he burst out, blushing with shame at his own disloyalty. “I’m new to it and I notice it. They’re theatrical. Things mean more to them than they would to you or me—little things do. There’s not a nicer gentleman than Mr. Sutane anywhere; no one’s denying that. But he’s been in the theatre all his life and he hasn’t been about like an ordinary person. Suppose little things do happen now and again? Aren’t they always happening? Being in the theatre is like living in a little tiny village where everybody’s looking at everyone else and wondering what they’re going to be up to next. It’s small, that’s what it is. And Miss Finbrough . . .” He broke off abruptly. Someone turned the door handle with a rattle and Jimmy Sutane came in.

He stood for a moment smiling at them and Campion was aware of that odd quality of overemphasis which there is about all very strong personalities seen close to for the first time. Confronted suddenly, at a distance of a couple of yards, Sutane presented a larger-than-life edition of his stage self. The lines of his famous smile were etched more deeply into his face than seemed possible in one so thin, and the heavy-lidded eyes beneath the great dome of a forehead were desperately weary rather than merely tired.

“Hallo, Uncle,” he said. “This Mr. Campion? Awfully good of you to come along. God, I’m exhausted! Henry, give me a drink. ’Fraid it’s got to be milk, damn it.”

The pleasant boyish voice was unexpectedly resonant, and as he closed the door and came into the room the place seemed to have become smaller and the walls more solid.

While Henry brought a glass of milk from the bar cupboard and assisted him out of his clothes and into a dressing gown there was a constant stream of interruptions. Excitable dinner-jacketed figures put their heads in, apologised and disappeared. More notes and telegrams arrived and the phone bell clamoured incessantly.

Campion sat back in his chair in the corner and watched. After the urbanity of his greeting Sutane seemed to have forgotten his guests. There was a nervous tension, a suppressed excitability, about him which had not been noticeable on the stage. He looked harassed and the nervous force which exuded from him like vibrations from a dynamo was not directed at any one thing but escaped abortively, creating an atmosphere which was uneasy and disquieting.

A minor climax came when he turned on an unsuspecting newcomer who was pushing the door timidly open and sent him scuttling off with a passionate protest.

“For God’s sake, Eddie!—give me ten minutes . . .”

The explosion embarrassed him and he grimaced at Campion, his temporary audience.

“I’m going to pieces,” he said. “Henry, get on the other side of that door and put your back against it. Tell them I’m saying my prayers. Unhook the phone before you go.”

As the door closed behind the obedient dresser he turned to Campion.

“Come down tomorrow, can you? I’ve got conferences and things about this Swing Over show for the Orient, but Sunday is more of a breather than any other day. I don’t know what you’ll think of it all. Something’s going on; I know that. This fat ass here says I’ve got persecution mania . . . my hat, I wish I had!”

He laughed and, although the familiar gaiety was there, the man watching him saw suddenly that it was a trick of line and feature rather than an expression of genuine feeling. It was typical of him, Campion reflected. His very skin and bone was make-up. The man himself was within, intelligent still but different.

“It began with the ‘House Full’ boards,” Sutane said slowly. “Someone stuck ‘Last Week’ slips across them. That was irritating but it didn’t mean anything. Then, as far as I remember, there was an outburst of the bird in the gallery one night. It was a claque and the rest of the house was annoyed. That didn’t matter in itself but little paragraphs about it got into the Press. I put Sock Petrie onto it at once and he traced one or two of them to phone calls put through the same night.”

He paused.

“It’s nothing much to talk about, I know, but it’s been so continuous. We’ve had to put fresh glass over my photograph outside almost every other day. Someone smashes it regularly. Never a trace of him. There have been dozens of other trivial little things too; nothing in themselves, you know, but alarming when they mount up.”

His dark eyes grew sombre.

“It’s now that it’s spread out to our place at home that it’s getting me down. Finding strangers in the garden with silly excuses and that sort of thing.”

He broke off lamely and turned to the elder man.

“That woman Chloe Pye is going down there tonight,” he said. She says my wife asked her and she’s going. I told her I’d rather she didn’t, but she laughed at me. Can’t chuck her out, can I?”

Uncle William made a depreciatory sound and Mr. Campion retained his habitual expression of polite interest. Sutane paused and reddened suddenly under his grease paint.

“I’m damned if it’s all coincidence!” he burst out. “You come down tomorrow, Mr. Campion, and see how it strikes you. It’s getting on all our nerves, these little petty digs at me. There was a rumour all over the place last week that I’d torn a muscle in my arm. Nine different people rang me up in one morning to sympathise.”

His voice had an edge to it, and his long fingers drummed on the glass top of the dressing table.

“It doesn’t matter so far,” he said, “but where’s it going to end? A reputation like mine, which depends on good will, can get pretty seriously damaged by a campaign like this. Yes?”

The final word was addressed to the doorway, where an apologetic Henry stood hesitating.

“It’s Mr. Blest,” he ventured. “I thought . . .”

“Blest! Come in.” Sutane seemed relieved. “You know Mr. Faraday. Mr. Campion . . .”

Ex-Inspector Blest grinned and nodded to the tall figure in the corner.

“Evenin’,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Mr. Campion. It’s as serious as that, is it? Well, Mr. Sutane, it’s all quiet tonight. Nothing to report at all. There’s not a word uttered out of place in the whole theatre. Ever since you engaged me to keep an eye on things I’ve been keeping my ears open, and you can take it from me, sir, there’s nothing but friendliness towards you everywhere.”

“Is that so?” With a movement so sudden and angry that the detective stepped back involuntarily, Sutane took up a face towel from the table and wiped his cheek. “What about that?”

The four men in the room looked at him curiously. From a point just below the left eye and following the line of the nose to the upper lip was a deep ragged scratch. Sutane ran his finger down it.

“D’you know what that is, Blest? That’s the oldest, dirtiest little theatre trick in the bag. A pin in the grease-paint stick. God knows how long it’s been there. One day I was certain to work down to it. It happened to be tonight.”

Blest was astonished in spite of himself. His round heavy face was crimson and he looked at Henry suspiciously.

“D’you know anything about this?” he demanded. “Who could have had access to your master’s paint?”

“Oh, don’t be a fool.” Sutane’s tone was weary. “The show has run for three hundred performances. My dressing room isn’t always locked. Hundreds of people have been in and out of here in the last eight months. It’s a long pin, you see, and it has been stuck up through the bottom of the stick. The head was buried in the silver-paper holder.”

He began to pile cream on his face to get the rest of the paint off.

“Then there’s the bouquet,” he went on lazily, half enjoying the sensation he was creating. “There it is. A messenger boy handed it in at the stage door just before the show began.”

“Flowers?” The ex-inspector was inclined to be amused. “I can’t say I see anything funny about that, sir.”

He took up the little white bunch gingerly and eyed it.

“Not very grand, perhaps. Star of Bethlehem, aren’t they? Country flowers. You’ve got a lot of humble admirers, you know.”

Sutane did not speak and, finding himself ignored, the ex-policeman raised the flowers to his nose and sniffed them idly. His sudden change of expression was ludicrous, and he dropped the bouquet with an exclamation.

“Garlic!” he ejaculated, his small eyes round with astonishment. “Garlic! Hey, what d’you know about that! A messenger brought it, did he? Well, I think I can check up there. Excuse me.”

He retrieved the flowers and plunged out of the room with them. Sutane caught Campion’s eye in the mirror and turned round to face him.

“It’s all trivial,” he said apologetically. “Little tuppenny-ha’penny squirts of malice. They’re negligible on their own, but after a month or so they get one down.”

He broke off and smiled. When he spoke again it was to reveal the essential charm of the man, a charm which was to puzzle and finally defeat an Albert Campion who was then barely in existence.

“It’s worse for me,” he said. “I’ve been such a blasted popular sort of fellow for so long.” His grin grew lopsided and his eyes were sad and childlike and intelligent.