Abracadaver by Peter Lovesey Read Free Book Online Page B

Murmurs of concern rose in the ranks behind—for most of the company had abandoned the dressing-rooms at Albert’s first yell of pain, and now stood about the stage in what they were wearing (or not wearing) at the moment of crisis. Constable Thackeray, seated on the basket containing the bulldog, had given all his attention to fastening the straps securely. He was dimly conscious of a group clustered near him, but not that they were ballet-girls. When he raised his face it was within a yard of a surface normally concealed by a tutu. A veritable outrage on decency! He dipped his head instantly, like a bargee just seeing a low bridge. Then by degrees, and strictly in the cause of duty, he mastered his modesty and raised his eyes.
    Then someone arrived with a crowbar. A sudden commotion, the intervention of a young woman in lilac and white crying shrilly, ‘Don’t you dare go near Albert with that!’ so alarmed the man that he dropped the implement with a clatter. The bulldog barked ferociously inside its basket and the unseeing audience exploded with laughter, ‘Watch yer-selves!’ shouted the resourceful P.C. Battree, ‘I’m watchin’ you!’
    Albert’s protector was Miss Ellen Blake, the first act that evening. She now crouched by the shattered platform in a singularly affecting manner and put her hand comfortingly through a gap in the side. She withdrew it at once with a cry of horror. ‘His arm! It’s deathly cold!’
    ‘If you’ll stand up, miss, and look through here,’ suggested Cribb, ‘you’ll see that his head’s at the other end. You’ve just put your hand on the cross-piece of Albert’s barbell. Now stand back and let’s get him out.’
    Two more planks were prised up. Cribb borrowed a lamp and peered in with the air of an Egyptologist uncovering his first mummy. ‘He’s not in bad shape. Two more boards and we can drag him out at this end.’
    Miss Blake came forward again and to everyone’s relief a pale hand rose from inside to meet hers.
    ‘He’s quite all right now!’ announced the manager, clapping his hands. ‘Back to the dressing-rooms everyone except the ten-minute calls. The show goes on as billed.’ He added in an afterthought, ‘We’d better hurry. There can’t be many songs about policemen left.’
    Cribb looked up at the gigantic prancing shadows of Salt and Battree projected through the act-drop. ‘Wouldn’t hurt those two to get the bird. Deuced poor impersonation they give of the police, anyway.’
    The manager snapped his fingers. ‘I say, you’re not . . . ? I thought you had an air of authority. How did you happen—’
    ‘Never mind,’ said Cribb. ‘Where can we take Albert?’
    ‘The property-room’s the nearest.’
    ‘Very good.’
    Still clutching Miss Blake’s hand as she walked beside him, Albert was borne off the stage and deposited on a dusty chaise-longue in the property-room. Thackeray followed, dragging after him the basket and its growling occupant.
    ‘Does that animal have to be here?’ were Albert’s first comprehensible words.
    ‘The dog is the evidence, blast it. A pukka investigator never lets the evidence out of his sight. You can’t trust a confounded soul,’ announced a new speaker from the doorway behind. He was the stage-hand in the purple waistcoat who had gone for salt: a man of slight build and soft, boyish skin, quite eclipsed by fierce blue eyes under a shock of upthrusting grey hair. ‘There’s been an uncommon demand for pies and baked potatoes in the hall tonight, and salt’s as scarce in there as upright women. So I borrowed this from the photographer’s studio next door.’ He held up a large brown bottle. ‘Iodine—the unfailing remedy for a dog-bite. It does a deuced fine job of disinfection, and if you pour it liberally over the wound it has a rare capacity for enlivening a dazed man.’
    The manager beamed his admiration. ‘Good Lord, Major Chick, you’re the right man to have in an emergency. Allow me