‘Beautiful job,’ Major Chick told Cribb. ‘You could make a living as an army-surgeon, you know. Dammit man, you’re wasting your time at Scotland Yard.’
Cribb surveyed his patient. ‘You’ll find it smarts a bit at first. Wounds need cleaning, though. Any other injuries?’ He held the iodine bottle in readiness.
Albert shook his head decisively. ‘Just the merest grazing where I fell through the platform. I’m sure the iodine won’t be necessary. It’s my ankle that hurts. I twisted it when I fell.’
‘You’ll be out of work for a week or two then,’ said the manager, without much sympathy. ‘And you can thank your dog for the lost wages. If you’ll take my advice you’ll have nothing to do with animals in the future. Just listen to the snarling brute! If you were mine, you ugly hound, I’d know what to do with you.’
Albert sat up. ‘But that isn’t my dog! That one’s white with brown patches. Beaconsfield is strictly black and white. Surely someone noticed—I’ve been doing the act for three weeks or more. Some blackguard put that vicious animal into Beaconsfield’s basket, knowing it would attack me as soon as it was released.’
‘Do I understand you right?’ asked the manager. ‘Are you sure that the bulldog in that basket isn’t yours?’
‘Beaconsfield wouldn’t attack me,’ said Albert, shocked by the suggestion. ‘He hasn’t got the energy. It’s all he can do to stand up on his four legs while I’m holding up the barbell, and then he sometimes needs prodding. I tell you he’s black and white, anyway.’
‘Shall I lift him out for you to have a closer look, Sarge?’ suggested Thackeray.
‘That isn’t necessary, Sergeant,’ Miss Blake interposed. ‘I know Beaconsfield and that is not him. If you look through the basket you can see a large brown patch where the Union Jack has ridden up on this dog’s back.’
‘A substitution, by Jove!’ exclaimed Major Chick. ‘Ingenious! Ah, the vagaries of the criminal mind! We’re on to a cunning enemy here, Sergeant.’
Cribb ignored the assumption that the Major was now a party to the investigation. ‘If that ain’t Beaconsfield, Albert, then where is his Lordship? When did you last see him?’
‘During the overture, when I brought him down here and put him in the wings in his basket. I like to watch Ellen’s— Miss Blake’s—act from the promenade, so I prepare everything for my own act first.’
‘Then the dogs could have been exchanged at any time during the first three acts?’
‘The first two, to be precise. I’m waiting with Mother in the wings from the beginning of the policemen’s act.’
‘It was done while Miss Blake or the Red Indians were performing then. Who would have been in the wings at that time, Mr Goodly?’
The manager smiled. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Sergeant. Music hall isn’t like the legitimate theatre, where everyone’s movements are planned and known. I’m managing a three and a half hour show with twenty-seven acts including dancers. I often have to change the order at very short notice to fit in with the commitments of the star billings. Tonight, for example, I’ve got Miss Jenny Hill on at eight o’clock. Nothing must alter that, because she’s appearing at the Royal Aquarium at nine and the London Pavilion at a quarter past ten. So I shall change the order of the acts to ensure that she goes on in time to make a cab journey across to Tothill Street. No two nights in the music hall are the same, you see.’
‘But you must have some notion who was in the wings at that time,’ insisted Cribb.
‘Very well,’ said the manager acidly. ‘Let’s make an inventory, if that’s the way Scotland Yard would like it. There would be the Red Indians, Henry and Cissie Greenbaum, waiting while Miss Blake was on, and the singing policemen, the Dalton brothers, and their assistant Vicky. Then there are up to nine stage-hands and scene-shifters dispersed on either side of the stage, two female dressers and one male, three fly-men looking after the curtain and the act-drops, two lime-boys on their perches in the flies, two callboys, the gasman at the index-plate, my assistant, myself and any one of the other twenty-four acts who cared to look in. I would say almost a hundred people had a right to be there, Sergeant.’
‘In that case someone must surely have seen the dogs being changed over.’
‘I doubt it. Most of us are far too occupied with our own duties to notice anything like that. Moreover, the wings are in semi-darkness for the whole of the Red Indian act, to achieve the special lighting effect onstage. That’s when the basket was opened, in my opinion.’
A murmur of assent on Cribb’s left provided him with a sudden thought. ‘Where were you positioned, Major?’
Major Chick coloured noticeably. ‘Why—er—in the gallery on the side-wall above the stage, where the ropes and so forth are controlled.’
‘The flies,’ explained the manager.
‘Didn’t you see anything?’
The Major pulled at his moustache. ‘I was observing the stage, dammit.’
‘But of course.’ Cribb placed a reassuring hand on Chick’s shoulder. ‘Well now, Major, I’m really uncommon fortunate having you here to advise me—a professional investigator on the scene of the crime a full week before it was committed. That’s a gift from Providence, wouldn’t you say?’
The Major nodded guardedly. He was plainly not used to being thought of in that way.
‘You’ve had time to meet the staff and performers and form an estimate of ’em,’ continued Cribb, ‘and you’ll have noted down anything irregular that happened this last week.’
It was plain from the Major’s expression that he had not. ‘Fact of the matter is, Sergeant, that there’s nothing regular at all in the music hall life, so far as I can see. You can’t even count on seeing the same faces from day to day. There are stage-hands being hired and sacked in the same week, stage-door Johnnies by the dozen wandering about backstage, out-of-work performers arriving for auditions—’
An unexpected outburst of barking from the picnic-basket halted the Major’s flow. To everyone’s amazement it was answered by a submissive whining from the doorway. Albert’s mother, still dressed in her white robe and ostrich feathers, filled the lower three-quarters of the door-frame. Cradled in her arms was a black and white bulldog that from its generally lethargic attitude had to be Beaconsfield.
‘Keep your animal quiet, Thackeray!’ ordered Cribb. ‘Push it behind the piano, for Heaven’s sake!’
‘He was shut away in the dark, weren’t you, my poor busy little Dizzie?’ crooned Albert’s mother, planting herself heavily on the chaise-longue, perilously close to her son’s injury. Beaconsfield slumped over her knees with lolling tongue, accepting the banalities impassively. ‘Shut in that horrid quick-change room without even a saucer of water. If Miss Charity Finch-Hatton hadn’t needed to repair her garter we might not have found you for hours and hours. Why the silly little baggage made such a scene when you jumped up to be rescued I cannot understand.’
‘Perhaps like the rest of us she thought Beaconsfield was a savage animal,’ suggested Cribb. ‘I’m a police officer, Ma’am, and I should like to take the liberty of asking you two questions.’
‘We shall answer them if we can,’ she said, caressing Beaconsfield’s dewlap with her fingertip.
‘Thank you. Could you tell me, then, why you didn’t notice before the act that the dog in the basket wasn’t Beaconsfield?’
She did not look up. ‘I never venture near the basket until the moment comes to release Dizzie. I wouldn’t want him to suppose me a traitor. It pains me to see him imprisoned there night after night. All that I noticed tonight was that a dog—and I presumed that it was my Beaconsfield—was in the basket and wearing the flag.’