The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

When she finally came in, and flopped on the other chair, much to its creaky consternation, he taxed her with the missing notebook. She flapped a hand wearily.

‘Lawks, Joe, I don’t know where it is. My brain is all a muddle of “move stage right” and “avoid masking the other actor”. Why can’t they use plain English in the theatre?’

Malinferno knew he was being a little hard on her, and knew why too. He was resentful how Doll had become the centre of attention lately, on stage and over the cracking of the hieroglyphic code. But that didn’t stop him chiding her.

‘You had the book last. Where did you put it?’

Doll sighed, knowing that, when Joe was in this sort of mood, he would not give up. She got up and crossed the room.

‘I hid it behind the sherry bottle. I put it there for safety. That sherry-wine is so awful no one would go near it.’

She groped behind the dark brown bottle in question.

‘It’s not there.’

Malinferno groaned. ‘I know it’s not there. That was the first place I looked. It is my hidy-hole too, after all.’

Doll’s face lost the grey weariness that had spoiled her looks when she entered the room. She was now concerned, and peered sharply at the shelf where the bottle stood.

‘The bottle’s been moved. Look, you can see its original sticky ring on the shelf. The bottle is not where it was before. And I had an idea about the bird symbol I wanted to share with you.’ She looked around the room. ‘The papyrus sheets have been disturbed too. I left them stacked up at the back of the table. The one with the cartouche I copied into the notebook was on the top.’ She shuffled through the crackling sheets. ‘It’s gone. The one with the cartouche is gone.’

Malinferno held his head in his hands.

‘All my notes… and yours… gone. We shall have to start again.’ He looked up at his worried companion. ‘What was the idea you had that you wanted to tell me last night?’

‘Oh, yes. The bird symbol. I think Young was wrong, and if you substituted an “a” for the “ke”, you had-’

Suddenly, Doll held a finger to her lips. Joe looked at her quizzically, and she pointed at the door to their rooms.

‘The stairs creaked. There is someone out there,’ she whispered in his ear.

Malinferno tiptoed to the door, and with a glance at Doll, flung it open.

‘Oh, sir, sorry, is your meal finished. I’ve come to fetch the plates.’

It was the chop-house boy, come back with his vast tray, which he now held like a shield. Doll laughed, and ushered him in.

‘The meal, I am afraid, is uneaten. But you can take it away.’ She scanned his skinny frame. ‘Do you think you could find someone who could eat it up, all cold and congealed as it is?’

The boy’s eyes widened at the feast on offer, and nodded eagerly. Once he had cleared all the crockery and left the room, Malinferno turned the key in the lock of the living room door. It was too late, but he knew he would feel safer with no possibility of further intrusions. He still wanted to know Doll’s theory, though, and followed her to the bedroom. But she was already snoring by the time he entered.

The month end had come, and with August arrived, there were only three more days to go before curtain up on The Play of Adam . Rehearsals at the Royal Coburg Theatre were taking on a very serious mood. It was Friday, and the hangers-on were no longer in attendance. Even Malinferno had avoided going, but then he had other concerns. He was trying to resurrect his and Doll’s notes on the papyrus documents, especially the one with the cartouche on it that Doll had almost deciphered. He wracked his brains to recall the sequence of letters she had noted down. Was it ‘-OLT I M KE-KE’? That didn’t look right, but the letters were borrowed from the ones assumed to spell out Ptolemy. He scribbled something else down – ‘-OLE I P KE-KE’. Yes, that was it. It didn’t make sense, but then she had wanted to substitute another letter for the final two. The trouble was, he couldn’t recall what the letter was. He began to retrace his steps through other papyri, searching for other cartouches – those little clusters of hieroglyphs that were supposed to be names from the past. He reached for a damp cloth to cool his throbbing head.

One of the young stagehands hadn’t bothered turning up to the rehearsal, and Jed Lawless had sent a message to the theatre saying that he himself was sick. Will Mossop assumed it was a hangover. Lawless drank too much gin, and he had a mind to fire him again. The trouble was, Lawless knew the ropes inside out at the Royal Coburg – literally. The ropes and pulleys that raised and lowered the backcloths and the counterweighted ropes used to cause actors to seem to fly were Lawless’s private domain. No one knew them better, and besides, he was the best stage manager this side of the river. Mossop was aware that firing him would necessitate re-hiring him the following day. And that would be an exercise in humiliation for Will that he did not wish to undertake.

The rehearsal had started without Jed, and the boy with the glasses was just about coping on his own. But the next scene was ‘The Fall of Man’, and required the Garden of Eden backcloth and the hip bath. The boy scurried on stage and pushed the heavy bath roughly into position. Doll, in her thin muslin gown, stepped into it, and Morton Stanley kneeled behind it. There was a pause while everyone waited for the Garden of Eden to descend. It didn’t, and Mossop called out to the boy to set the correct backcloth. His head popped out from the wrong side of the stage, his face red, and his glasses askew. Then he rushed across stage into the opposite wing-space where all the ropes were cleated up. There was a short pause. Then a squeal of pain rang out from the wings, quickly followed by a strange whirring sound, fast and high-pitched. Doll was half-aware of something large descending from above, and she instinctively closed her eyes and flinched, throwing her arms over her head. There followed a huge thump, and the stage under the bath shook as though from an earthquake. A snake-like form draped itself suddenly over Doll’s upraised arms, and she screamed, struggling to cast it off as it wrapped itself around her. When her scream stopped, a deathly silence hung over the theatre for a long moment.

She opened her eyes to see a cloud of dust rising around her. She coughed, choking on it, and fought the snake that had entangled her. It turned out it was merely a rope, and she pushed it off her, grasping the side of the bath. Beside the bath was the humped form of a filled sack, the sort of sack used as a counterweight to a human body in the flying device. This time, though, an actor was not at the other end of the rope. It now lay on the floor, where Doll had cast it. A body, however, did lie underneath the heavy, sand-filled sack that had plummeted from the heavens. It was the body of Morton Stanley and, judging by the blood that was seeping from under the sack and being absorbed by some of the sand that burst from it, the actor was dead.

Doll heard a whimpering noise coming from the wings. She clambered out of the bath, and ran across the stage. Everyone else seemed stunned into immobility by the catastrophe. In the darkness, she could just make out a small shape – someone kneeling in front of the morass of ropes leading down to the cleats on the wall. It was the bespectacled boy – Doll was ashamed she didn’t even know his name – and he twisted round, holding out his hands to her. She could see that the skin on his palms was red and torn.

‘The rope just ran through my hands, lady,’ he blubbered. ‘It should not have been that heavy. It was only the back-cloth.’ He looked up at her with reddened eyes. ‘What happened?’