Now, Alec actually screwed his face up, so little did he think of my brilliant leap of reasoning.
‘I shall come to the police station with you and wait outside,’ he said, ‘but if you want to march into Hardy’s office and shout “Ta-dah!” it will have to be a solo act, I’m afraid.’
‘What a shame it’s Sunday,’ I said. ‘I could have telephoned to the stage-door of the Swansea Alhambra or the Leicester Whatever and asked if anyone remembered him. Ernest Faulds the Forger. It even sounds like a music-hall turn.’
‘Well,’ said Alec, ‘I really don’t think this is going to go anywhere, Dandy, but if you’re determined, you should know that Sunday is the busiest day backstage, all hands on deck for the departure of the outgoing artistes and the arrival of the next lot for the week to come. And also, if Fabulous Faulds the Forger played Leicester and Swansea then he would surely have played the Edinburgh Empire too.’
‘Will you come too?’ I said. ‘I’ve never knocked on a stage-door before.’
‘Nor have I!’ said Alec, just too emphatically to be quite plausible, and I smirked, wondering which curled and powdered little songbird had tempted him into hanging around with red roses and invitations to supper. ‘But I’ll happily tag along.’
There was indeed a great deal of activity in the lane behind the Empire Theatre, with trunks and hampers being carried out to carts waiting at the roadside, and stagehands trotting up and down between the backstage proper and the workshop which lay at the farthest end of the lane. There was even the inevitable argument going on out front on Nicholson Square, between the men in the carts and the men in the armbands.
‘I’m nowt to do wi’ no carters’ union,’ said a pugnacious-looking little man who was holding one end of an enormous trunk whose other end already rested on the flat bed of his cart. The horse in the shafts was looking back at the commotion with eyes which had seen it all. ‘I work for Moss’s Empires and I’m already having enough trouble today trying to get this show over to Glasgow with no bloody trains and no bloody buses and not even a barge on the canal. And so help me if you don’t get your neb out you’ll not recognise it next time you look in a glass, I can tell you.’
Alec and I sidled past as casually as we could and just as casually mounted the stage-door steps and entered the theatre. I sniffed deeply, expecting some romantic aroma from all I had heard and read on the matter, but there was just must and paint and lamp oil and I concluded that one would need to be devoted already to all things theatrical for such a smell to quicken one’s blood.
‘Name?’ said a voice at our side, making both Alec and me jump. We turned to see an elderly man wearing a velvet blanket around his shoulders like a shawl, clutching a tattered sheet of paper and looking at us over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles.
‘Mrs Gilver,’ I said, ‘and this is Mr Osborne. Are you the stage-manager?’
‘No, no, no,’ said the little man. ‘I’m the door-keeper. What name’ll we have you down by? Here – you’re not amateurs, are you? We haven’t come to that?’
‘Oh, no – you misunderstand,’ I said, ignoring Alec’s quiet chuckle. ‘We’re not an act. Goodness me, no! We’ve come to talk to… well, you, I suppose. How fortunate that we came upon you right away.’
‘You’re not an act?’ said the man, looking between the two of us and the two dogs. ‘Pity. I’d have liked to see it. And God knows what we’ll end up with Tuesday night, because half our next week’s show was coming up from Bradford and the other half was coming down from Dundee and now Mr Moss is having to scrape up what he can from round-about. But no amateurs so far, I’m glad to say.’ He turned away in the middle of this and shuffled back towards a small office, more of a cubby-hole really, set to one side of the door. His shawl, at the back, trailed almost to the floor and ended in a tassel. At second glance it might have been a curtain; certainly one edge showed puckered fading as though it had been gathered onto tape in an earlier incarnation. This, I thought, boded very well, for surely toddling about draped in old curtains was the sort of thing one would come to after long years. If he had taken this job the month before and was just settling into it, such behaviour would not have occurred to him.
He let himself down into a battered armchair inside his little kingdom with a rheumatic groan and puffed in and out a bit until he had recovered from his excursion.
‘So what can I do for you?’ he said. ‘Autographs, is it? Who’re you after?’ He gestured around himself at the walls where photographs, half-covered with fading endearments in looped handwriting, were tacked up six deep almost to the ceiling. Right behind his head in pride of place was a garishly tinted portrait of Marie Lloyd blowing a kiss.
‘We’re after someone in a manner of speaking,’ I said, ‘but not an autograph. We’re trying to find someone, or find out if he ever appeared here.’
‘Well, you’ve come to the right place,’ said the man. He stuck out his hand and gripped first mine, then Alec’s, then a paw each of Bunty and Millie. ‘Joe Crow,’ he said. ‘Fifty years and counting. I was here the night the old Empire burned down and I was first back in after the painters left when they finished the new one. There hasn’t been an act through here since 1876 that I don’t remember.’ He tapped his head (a remarkable red colour for anyone, let alone someone who was seventy if a day). ‘It’s all up here. Ask away.’
‘You are a godsend,’ said Alec, wringing his hand again and this time passing a folded banknote as he did so. This is the kind of thing one is always very glad to have Alec around for; I could never manage it without fumbles and blushes. I didn’t see what denomination of note it was but it caused old Joe to turn up the gas ring under a tea kettle and to gather three cups, wiping them out with a corner of his velvet curtain.
‘It’s a man by the name of Ernest Faulds?’ Joe shook his head. ‘Or perhaps he used a stage-name. But we do know what the act was. It was forgery of some kind. Copy-cat handwriting. Off-the-cuff, perhaps taking members of the audience and mimicking their hands?’ Joe was shaking his head again, very determinedly.
‘And this act said he did a turn at the Empire?’ he said. ‘Someone’s been having you on, missus. I’ve never seen it. I’m not saying you couldn’t work it up to an act if you put your mind to it – that would all depend on the patter – but I’ve never seen such a thing. Not here.’
He sounded horribly sure and I looked at Alec only to find him gazing back at me.
‘Ernest Faulds,’ I said again, slowly, hoping that something would jog a memory out of the old fellow. ‘A Cornishman. Very pleasant-looking chap, turned-up nose, red lips, twinkling eyes, wavy black hair.’
‘Sounds like a comic,’ said Joe.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I know he’s not a comic or a song-and-dance man. I only wish I had a picture of him to show you.’
The kettle was boiling and Joe was spooning great heaps of tea into a battered pot.
‘Coals to Newcastle, that would be,’ he said, ‘I’ve a picture of every act that’s ever trod the Empire stage. I put the cream of the crop up on my walls, like Miss Lloyd here.’ He paused in the act of pouring in the water on top of the tea and shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe she’s gone,’ he said. ‘Can’t believe I won’t ever see that little face looking up at me and hear that little voice, always with a chuckle in it. “What do you know – it’s Joe Crow!” she used to sing out whenever she stepped inside the door there and saw me.’
Alec and I murmured in sympathy and after a respectful pause, I led him back to the point again.
‘The cream of the crop are on your walls as you said, Mr Crow, but what of the others? Where are they?’
‘In my albums here,’ he said, patting the table where the teapot, caddy, milk bottle and packet of sugar lay. ‘Well, scrapbooks really. I’ve saved every one. Even managed to get them out the night of the great fire.’