Peter Lovesey - Stagestruck

The lock on the door was a bigger challenge. There wasn’t enough light to make out the numbers. In the days of cigarette lighters, he’d have known what to do. After sinking to his knees for a closer look, he still couldn’t see enough.

Smash the door down? He might have to. But he didn’t want to announce his arrival in such an obvious way.

Resourceful as always in an emergency, he felt in his pocket for his mobile, opened it fully and the light was enough to see by. He stabbed in the code, pushed the door inwards and closed it behind him without a sound.

Total darkness. Good thing he knew he was in the corridor to the left of the auditorium. He’d be acting on memory from this point on. Maybe as his eyes adjusted he’d be able to make out a little more. Two tentative steps forward and he reached out and felt his palms against a cold, glassy surface that moved. He’d almost knocked a picture off the wall. He turned away and took a step left, a longer one than he intended. The floor was raked, like the auditorium.

By a series of shuffling steps he progressed down the slope as far as the door he remembered going through to enter the stall seating area. On reaching out, he found it was already ajar. Either the young officers or the killer must have come this way. The advantage was that he could pass through silently.

Dawn Reed had said on the phone that she was crouching between rows of seats, but where? He groped his way forward until he felt the padded arm of a seat and then grasped it while he listened for some sign of life.

Absolute silence.

He made a throat-clearing sound that wouldn’t carry far at all. If she was close and heard him she might respond.

Nothing.

He looked around him. His eyes were adapting because he could make out the nearest row of seat backs, the vertical pillar of the proscenium structure and the curve of the royal circle. Yet he was getting a sense he was alone in this theatre, and with it came the suspicion that he was too late.

He could see enough now to move along the gangway to check whether Dawn Reed was still hiding between the rows of seats as he’d ordered. He would surely make out the dark form of someone crouching. She’d said the front stalls. He checked them all, going way past the front section, under the overhang of the royal circle and then across and down the other side.

She wasn’t there.

Failure overwhelmed him. He’d obviously got here too late. Those hours in his office dissecting the statements had taken too long. Twenty minutes earlier and he’d have saved her.

Then he heard a small sound. Something had fallen and hit the floor not far away. In an old building like this it could have been boards contracting, or a fragment of plaster dropping off a damaged section of ceiling. A mouse could have dislodged something.

The sound had come from up on the stage. Up to now he’d avoided looking there. He turned.

His nightmare. The huge velvet curtains presented by the Chaplin family hung across the proscenium, thirty feet in length, crimson and gold when the lights were up, black as sin right now and he knew for certain that Paloma had been right about the fear he’d had since childhood. He was terrorised by curtains, drawn curtains hiding something unimaginably bad.

Pull them aside, Peter Diamond, and see what you get.

The shakes began. They started in his hands and spread rapidly through his entire body. Exceptional conditions, the dark, the solitude, the cold surroundings, his closeness to the curtains and the absolute necessity of seeing behind them, combined to make this experience more alarming than any of his previous panic attacks.

Get a grip, Diamond. This is your trauma. Engage with it. Analyse. Understand.

He stared at the place where the curtains met. His heart thumped against his ribcage. An image was forming in his brain.

As an eight-year-old he was back in the farmhouse his family had rented for their Welsh holiday. Night-time: his sleep disturbed by a strange sound between a bellow and a howl of pain, repeated several times over. Driven to discover more, he’d got out of bed and crept downstairs. The sound was close by, outside the house.

In the living room, a modern feature had been added, most likely as a selling point to visitors who rented the place, a floor-to-ceiling picture window that looked out across a field towards Snowdonia. A stunning view by day. By night long curtains were drawn across.

He had crossed the room and pulled the curtains aside.

He pictured what he’d suppressed all these years: the massive head of a beast with gaping, blood-red jaws and hairy lips drooling saliva in long threads. A huge pink lolling tongue. Manic staring white-edged eyes. And devilish horns.

He’d seen it as a child and never wanted a sight of it again.

Stay with it, Diamond.

He clung to the memory, hideous as it was. Part of his brain resisted, wanting to cut the scene. He refused. He had to know the truth. By force of will he succeeded. Out of the horror came an explanation. After all the years, he recognised the monster for what it was: a cow. His sister had told him on the phone about the distressed cow parted from its calf and keeping the family awake with its heart-rending sounds of distress. The poor beast was in the field behind the farmhouse. It had come close to the house, right up to the window, to make its protest. Man had taken away its calf. Man lived in the house. Man should hear its calls.

To a young boy unused to the country, the sudden close-up of the cow’s head at a level with his own had been horrific, enough to traumatise him. From that night on, drawn curtains would induce this petrified reaction while the censor in his brain would dumb down the real cause, refusing to revisit the image. He’d experienced the first such crisis the same week in the theatre at Llandudno. He’d panicked. He’d been incapable of explaining why. The effect had repeated itself each time he saw long curtains. Even the prospect of going into a theatre became an ordeal because of what was inside.

Was the fear conquered? Knowledge is strength. To understand is to overcome, he told himself.

Dawn Reed wasn’t where she’d said she would be. She was in danger of being murdered. It was essential to look behind those curtains.

He reached up to the stage. The level was higher than he expected and he was no athlete, but the strength returned to his limbs.

He hauled himself up, thrust his arms between the heavy drapes and parted them.

Some lights were on, not powerful, but dazzling to Diamond’s eyes. The set of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin flat was still in place as he’d instructed, the three walls lined with the solid-looking furniture dominated by the stove. On the sofa at centre stage lay PC George Pidgeon, bound hand and foot with duct tape. A strip of it was across his mouth. His eyes were open, but not moving.

Dead?

Diamond pushed the curtain aside and crossed the stage.

The eyes slid to the right and fixed on him. George Pidgeon was alive. He braced his body and struggled.

Diamond leaned over the young man and started easing the gag from his cheek, but Pidgeon jerked his face away, the tape ripped from his skin and he yelled, ‘Behind you!’

In the microsecond before the shout, Diamond had seen Pidgeon’s eyes widen in alarm. He flung himself across the constable’s body and the blow intended for his skull caught his shoulder instead. It was a glancing hit rather than full impact because it slid down his ribs, but it still felt as if it had splintered his shoulder blade. All he could do for protection from another blow was make a piston movement with his arm. His elbow struck something solid. There was a grunt from behind.