‘According to this, he was with his assistant, Maureen Bates,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Yes. She was with him. She was holding on to his arm. He didn’t look well.’
After one bad review? Wasn’t that a bit of an overreaction?
‘Can we get into the green room?’ Hawthorne asked.
Keith thought for a moment. ‘You can do what you like,’ he said. ‘It’s no skin off my nose. The police haven’t said anything more to me and we can’t keep it locked up for ever. It’s not as if anything happened there – and anyway, I cleared up after everyone left, so if there were any clues or whatever it is you’re looking for, I’d have got rid of them, I’m afraid.’
‘When you say you cleared up, what do you mean?’
‘Well, they’d had a cake. I put what was left of it in the fridge. I suppose it’s still there. I did the washing-up, which didn’t take a minute. Like I said, I cleared away the bottles. There was some sparkling wine, which I put on the side, and I threw away a couple of empties … whisky and vodka, I think. That was it.’
‘Did you find an ornamental knife? A dagger?’
‘You mean from the producer? They all got one … I know because when they were delivered, I had to take them in. There were five of them, stacked up in the office … first-night presents. And the answer to your question is yes. One of them was left behind in the green room. Someone had stuck it in the cake.’
That was Jordan Williams’s knife. I remembered him stabbing the cake after Sky had read the review. It was something I would never forget.
‘What did you do with it?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘I washed it and left it in the sink.’
‘Were there any other daggers in the room?’
‘There may have been. I didn’t really look.’ Keith frowned. He had suddenly remembered something. ‘And there was the broken glass!’ he exclaimed. ‘I cleaned that up too.’
‘What broken glass?’
‘I should have mentioned it to you earlier. You asked me if I’d seen anything unusual. But I didn’t see it exactly. I heard it.’ He paused. ‘It was twenty past twelve and I was just thinking of going downstairs to tell everyone it was time to get moving. They weren’t meant to be there after midnight. That was what we’d agreed and it wasn’t as if I was being paid extra to stay here. Anyway, that’s when I heard the sound of breaking glass – on the other side of those doors.’
He pointed at the double swing doors that led into the backstage corridor.
‘Did you find out what it was?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Yeah. It was really strange. It turned out that one of the light bulbs had exploded. I can’t imagine how that happened because there was nobody around. I had to get a dustpan and brush and look here … !’ He held out his hand, showing us a cut on his finger. ‘I did that picking up the pieces. I was looking for a plaster when Tirian came up and told me about the review and the party finishing. Maybe the light bulb was a bad omen!’
‘Does that happen often? Electrical appliances blowing up?’
‘Well, I haven’t been here very long so I can’t say. But a lot of the fittings in this theatre are very old. Maybe it’s haunted? I don’t know.’
Keith handed over the key to the green room – an old, prison-style key on a wooden block – and we passed through the swing doors. It seemed strange to me that he’d recognised Harriet Throsby. He’d seen a photograph of her in another theatre – and one that had been defaced. It surely wouldn’t have been easy to pick her out in a crowd, the image projected onto a blurry black-and-white TV.
I said as much to Hawthorne.
‘She had quite distinctive looks,’ he said. ‘You recognised her too.’
‘I’d seen her at the Old Vic,’ I countered, back on the defensive.
We reached the staircase. Looking around me, I noticed that both upstairs and downstairs, the backstage area was brightly lit. ‘Do you think someone broke the bulb deliberately?’ I asked.
‘It’s possible.’
‘Maybe they were trying to hide something,’ I suggested. ‘There was something they didn’t want Keith to see too clearly.’
‘That’s possible too.’
Hawthorne had nothing more to add. We continued downstairs, past the dressing rooms and back underneath the stage-door manager’s office. The green room was in front of us. Hawthorne unlocked the door and we went in.
I wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but the room was exactly as I remembered it: warm and secluded, a refuge from difficult audiences and bad reviews. It had been dark and raining when we had gathered here on the first night. Now it was early evening and the weather had improved – not that either of these things made much difference. The glass in the window was frosted and even if we’d been able to look out, the alleyway wouldn’t have allowed much light to penetrate. I thought I could smell alcohol, but that was probably the carpet. Instinctively, I ran my eyes over the various surfaces, hoping to see the dagger I had been given and which, after all, I might have forgotten and left behind. Of course it wasn’t there. The last time I’d seen it, it had been in Cara Grunshaw’s evidence bag.
It should have been obvious all along, but I’m afraid the truth of my situation only occurred to me at that moment. Somebody had taken my dagger. They had done it quite purposefully, using a towel or a plastic bag to make sure that they didn’t add their fingerprints to my own. In other words, long before Harriet Throsby was killed, they had decided to frame me. Somebody hated me. And it could only be one of seven people.
Six of them had been in the green room with me that night: Ewan, Tirian, Jordan, Sky, Ahmet and Maureen. The seventh was Keith, and although I couldn’t think of an earthly reason why the deputy stage-door manager would want to do Harriet Throsby harm, he had been the last person to enter the green room and he could easily have picked up the dagger belonging to me, so it seemed only reasonable to add him to the list. It was an unpleasant thought that one of them had been lying from the start, smiling at me and jollying me along while, all the time, they were planning to send me to jail. But the cloud had one silver lining. Seven suspects! That made it easy. Hawthorne would have solved the whole thing before breakfast.
I watched him as he went over to the dustbin and pulled out two empty bottles: Sky’s vodka and the whisky that Tirian had brought. He glanced at it and was about to put it back in again when he noticed something else. He leaned down and took out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. I saw the branding – L&M – the white letters printed sideways on a bright red background. I recognised them immediately. ‘Those are Ahmet’s,’ I said.
Hawthorne opened the packet. ‘He left three inside.’
I looked more closely. It was true. There were three cigarettes inside the package. They had been broken up when the carton was crumpled. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘What makes you think it was him?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘That’s definitely his brand. And he was smoking them after the party.’ I tried to come up with an answer. ‘Maybe he decided to give up.’
‘A bit of a strange time to make a decision like that, mate.’ He slipped the pack and the broken cigarettes into his pocket.
‘Listen, Hawthorne …’ I was excited to share what I had just worked out. ‘My knife was taken from this room. I’m sure of it. It only had my fingerprints on it. That means someone deliberately set out to frame me!’