Blackstone and the Stage of Death (The Blackstone Detective series Book 5) Read online

  Blackstone and the Stage of Death

  Sally Spencer

  Copyright © Sally Spencer 2006

  The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by Severn House Publishers Limited as Blackstone and the Balloon of Death.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Barry and Brenda

  Wonderful friends and dog-sitters extraordinaires

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Extract from Blackstone and the House of Secrets by Sally Spencer

  Chapter One

  Lady Eustacia Wilton looked down at the letter she was holding in her trembling hands, and read through it once more.

  There had been no mistake, the expression on her face said, when she raised her head: the news that the letter contained was truly as dreadful as she’d first taken it to be.

  ‘We are completely ruined,’ she moaned, looking out from the centre stage into the darkened auditorium.

  ‘Ruined?’ asked a voice at her side.

  ‘Completely!’ Lady Wilton answered.

  She turned to face the other woman, but it was only a calculated half-turn, so that the audience did not lose sight of her handsome profile.

  ‘Thanks to the ruthless machinations of Mr Septimus Pittstock,’ she continued, ‘the family estate will have to be sold —’

  ‘But that is so terrible!’

  ‘— your poor father will be imprisoned for the rest of his natural life, our faithful servants must be turned out on to the street, and you, my dear, darling Elizabeth — my pretty little angel of a daughter — will now never be able to marry the man of your dreams.’

  ‘Oh, Mamma!’ the girl sobbed. ‘Is there nothing we can do to prevent this horrible disaster?’

  Lady Wilton laid her hand gently on her daughter’s shoulder. ‘Nothing,’ she said mournfully.

  ‘Then I will kill myself,’ the daughter said.

  ‘You will do no such thing,’ her mother told her severely. ‘Our family has worn the name of Wilton as a badge of honour for five hundred years, and whatever the loathsome, lowly-born Pittstock may do to us, he will never crush our pride or our spirit.’

  ‘You are right,’ the girl replied. ‘I forgot, for a moment, who I was, and I apologize for it.’

  But Lady Wilton was no longer listening. Instead, she was gazing into the audience again, with a look of sudden inspiration on her face.

  ‘There may yet be a way,’ she said.

  ‘A way, Mamma?’

  ‘If I could reach Paris, and lay all the evidence in front of the Count de Balzac, then I am sure he would be able to devise a means of defeating this evil scheme which has been designed to destroy us.’

  ‘But you can’t get to Paris!’ Elizabeth Wilton wailed, raising her hands to her face in despair. ‘You know as well as I do that the vile Pittstock has his evil henchmen watching every railway station and every port in the land. They will be bound to stop you.’

  ‘No, they will not,’ the older woman said. ‘Because I will use neither train nor ship for my journey.’

  ‘Then how will you reach Paris?’

  Lady Wilton threw back her head and laughed. ‘I will travel by hot air balloon!’ she said triumphantly.

  * * *

  The curtain descended. There was loud applause, but none of it came from Detective Inspector Sam Blackstone, who was seated in the gallery at the very back of the theatre. It was not that he refused to clap, merely that both his hands were busily engaged in loosening the maddeningly uncomfortable bow-tie which — along with the rest of his evening clothes — would need to be returned to the tailor he had rented it from some time the following morning.

  Blackstone turned to speak to his companion for the evening, but she had already engaged herself in conversation with the woman who was sitting at the other side of her.

  ‘Cor blimey, ‘ooever would have fort that Mr Pittstock could be such a rum un?’ Ellie Carr was asking.

  The other woman, who — judging by her dress — was probably the wife of a moderately successful city clerk, looked distinctly unimpressed by Ellie’s familiar and unwelcome approach.

  ‘I’m afraid I simply couldn’t comment on that,’ she replied, in what was obviously an acquired drawl.

  ‘Couldn’t comment?’ Ellie repeated, amazed. ‘Could not comment? Well, I could comment, all right. It quite set me ‘eart aflutter, the way ‘e was carryin’ on — an’ if I wasn’t spittin’ fevvers, I don’t know where I’d find the strenf to get meself to the bar.’

  ‘Do please excuse me,’ the other woman said, standing up and hurriedly edging her way towards the aisle.

  ‘You really shouldn’t do that kind of thing, you know,’ Blackstone told his companion.

  ‘What kind of thing?’ Ellie Carr asked innocently.

  ‘Come over all cockney, just because you know that it will embarrass a certain kind of person.’

  ‘But I am a cockney, Sam, born and bred,’ Ellie argued. ‘And if women like her judge other people solely by the way they speak, then they deserve to be embarrassed.’

  A faint smile appeared on Blackstone’s lips. ‘So that whole pantomime had no other purpose than to teach the woman a lesson in humility and tolerance?’ he asked.

  ‘Exactly. Clever of you to have spotted that.’

  Blackstone’s smiled broadened. ‘And you got no personal pleasure out of it at all?’

  Ellie grinned. ‘Give me a break, guv, for Gawd’s sake,’ she said, reverting to her cockney persona. ‘When a girl’s been cuttin’ up dead bodies all the livelong day, like wot I ‘aye, she’s entitled to ‘ave her bit of fun of an evenin’. An’ I was bein’ honest about one fing to that corseted harridan.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘I really am spittin’ fevvers!’

  ‘Well, if that’s the case, I suppose I’d better buy you a drink, hadn’t I, Dr Carr?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘That’s right, guv,’ Ellie agreed. ‘You better ‘ad.’

  * * *

  The bar of the George Theatre was large enough to accommodate the great mass of people who habitually flooded into it during the interval, but not quite so vast that it was in any danger of being confused with a bar that might be found in one of the much less reputable music halls. Blackstone found it a pleasant enough place to be in, but couldn’t help wishing that, like the music halls, it served its beer in man-sized glasses, instead of in thimbles which would scarcely get a leprechaun drunk.

  ‘This is your first visit to the theatre, isn’t it?’
Ellie Carr asked, when they’d found a table and sat down.

  ‘That’s right,’ Blackstone agreed.

  But it was far from being her first visit, he reminded himself. Ellie, when she chose to do so, could move in circles as far above his own as his own was above those of a costermonger.

  ‘And what do you think of the play?’ she asked.

  He didn’t know what to answer her, especially since the whole expedition had been her treat.

  ‘I like it well enough,’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘You’re being evasive, Sam!’ Ellie said, with a warning note in her voice. ‘Now tell me what you really think.’

  ‘It’s not very much like real life, is it?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Not like the real life you’ll see on the streets of the East End, no,’ Ellie admitted.

  ‘Not like the real life you’ll see in the homes of the aristocracy, either.’

  ‘Oh, the homes of the aristocracy!’ Ellie repeated. ‘Pardon me for missing that point, Sam.’

  ‘You’re pardoned,’ Blackstone told her.

  ‘But, you see, I never realized you rubbed shoulders with the cream of society,’ Ellie added mischievously.

  ‘I don’t,’ Blackstone said. ‘I’m not the sort of bloke they’d ever invite to go riding in St James’s Park with them — but I have investigated a few of the buggers in my time.’

  And once or twice, when they’ve been really important people I’ve investigated, it’s almost cost me my job, he added mentally.

  ‘Was there anything else about the play, apart from its unreality, that you don’t like?’ Ellie wondered.

  ‘The sensationalist effects,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Are you referring to the train crash?’

  ‘For a start.’

  The crash in question had occurred in the second act. The train had not been a full-sized steam engine, of course, but it had been large enough to fill the very large stage and had come off its rails convincingly enough to make the audience shrink back in its seats.

  ‘What was wrong with the crash?’ Ellie asked. ‘Didn’t you think it was well done?’

  ‘I think it was very well done — but I don’t see the need for it to have been done at all.’

  Ellie gave him a searching glance, as if she were suddenly seeing a new side of him. ‘Explain yourself,’ she said.

  ‘It was very dramatic, but it didn’t do much to help the story along. I think the only reason they staged it was just because they could — because it was technically possible.’

  Ellie laughed. ‘You’re quite right, of course.’

  ‘I am?’ Blackstone asked, surprised.

  ‘You most certainly are. They were just showing off with that train crash. And it’s a terrible play — all fur coat and no bloomers. Even those critics who normally have their noses so far up Sebastian George’s backside that they haven’t seen the light of day for years have been pushed to say anything good about it. And word’s getting around. There’s nearly a full house tonight, but I’ve heard that advanced bookings for next month are very slow.’

  ‘So why did you bring me to see the play if it’s so terrible?’ Blackstone asked suspiciously. ‘Was it some kind of test?’

  ‘A test?’ Ellie repeated, innocently.

  ‘To see what I’m made of.’

  ‘What you’re made of?’ Ellie said, and now there was no doubt that she was stalling.

  ‘Were you trying to discover whether or not my fairly rough exterior was no more than a disguise to mask my very rough interior?’ Blackstone asked.

  Ellie laughed. ‘That’s rather good, you know,’ she said. ‘Almost epigrammatic.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But is it true?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Well, perhaps a little.’

  ‘And what conclusion have you reached?’

  ‘That I’ll never be able to turn you into a gentleman —’

  ‘I don’t want —’

  ‘— which is something of a relief, because there are far too many so-called “gentlemen” in the world already. On the other hand, there are indications that if I work hard at it — and you don’t resist me too much — I just might be able to broaden your horizons.’

  He wasn’t sure that he wanted his horizons broadened. More importantly, he wasn’t sure that — even if they had both dragged themselves up by their own bootstraps from the slums of the East End — there was any future in this relationship between a Scotland Yard Inspector who owned little more than two second-hand suits, and a medical researcher at University College Hospital who had published her findings in learned journals.

  ‘I’m nobody’s case study… ’ he began.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Ellie interrupted him. ‘We’re all somebody’s case study, whether we like it or not.’

  She disconcerted him, he thought. She had a way of making him feel like a boxer who had just been knocked to the canvas — a way of jabbing at him with apparently outrageous ideas which, once they hit home, were near enough to the truth to make him groggy.

  He was still mentally climbing to his feet — and searching for a knockout punch of his own — when a ringing sound announced that the next act was about to start.

  Well, he consoled himself, he wouldn’t be the first fighter who had been saved by the bell.

  * * *

  The curtain rose for the first scene of the final act. The previous backcloth — of Lady Wilton’s drawing room in Park Lane — had been replaced by one which depicted Hampstead Heath on a dark and stormy morning.

  A clump of bushes had been placed at one end of the stage, and a circus tent — miniaturized to make it seem as if it were much further in the background than it actually was — at the other. The centre stage was dominated by a large hot air balloon, and in its basket stood Lady Wilton.

  ‘I wonder how she managed to get a license for that balloon without the evil and ubiquitous Pittstock finding out about it,’ Blackstone thought fancifully. ‘I wonder how she intends to launch the balloon on her own, and if she’s checked the wind direction.’

  And he wondered whether, if he repeated these comments to Ellie, she would find him incredibly witty — or merely incredibly dull.

  Pittstock appeared from behind the fake bushes at the edge of the stage. Lady Wilton saw him, and threw the anchor out of the basket. And almost immediately — and certainly improbably — the hot air balloon began to rise.

  The villain sprinted across the stage. By the time he reached the balloon, it had already risen several feet above the ground. Pittstock took a flying leap, and just managed to gain a hold on the top edge of the basket.

  The audience gasped!

  The balloon continued its ascent, and — to further gasps from the audience — carried the dangling Pittstock with it.

  Blackstone, as bored by the faked action as only a man who has seen real action can be, switched his attention to the other parts of the stage. The tent and bushes both looked smaller now — not because they had actually shrunk in size, but because they were no longer quite as elevated as they had been.

  Or to put it another way, Blackstone thought, they were being slowly lowered down below stage level, to create the illusion that the balloon had climbed even higher than it had.

  Which was clever — but ultimately pointless.

  The bottom of the basket was at least twelve feet from the stage floor now, but still the villainous Pittstock was hanging on

  ‘You thought you could escape me, Lady Wilton,’ he roared, ‘but you will never escape! In a moment, I will join you in that basket’

  No, you won’t — not if you keep wasting the energy that you’ll need to pull yourself up on making threats, Blackstone thought.

  ‘— and then your fate will be sealed!’

  ‘I am not the feeble woman you take me to be!’ Lady Wilton told the dangling man. ‘And though I am loath to take the life of another, yet I must do what I can to prote
ct my own life, and the lives of my family, friends and servants.’

  And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, Blackstone added silently.

  Lady Wilton reached into her handbag and took out a leather sheath. She allowed the audience a second to ponder on what it might contain, then produced a large and menacing dagger.

  ‘With this knife, I will have my revenge for the evil you have visited on me!’ she announced.

  She swung the dagger in a wide, dramatic arc, and struck Pittstock in the neck. The villain slowly released his grip on the basket, and plummeted down to the stage.

  The people in the audience gasped yet again. They all knew it was faked, of course, but the fakery had been carried out with a flair and magnificence which had quite taken their breaths away.

  It was only when Lady Wilton looked down at the body of her fallen foe, and began to scream uncontrollably, that they even started to suspect that perhaps it hadn’t been faked at all.

  Chapter Two

  Even without the screams coming from the woman in the basket, the stage hands and actors who were watching the production would have known that something had gone seriously wrong the moment that William Kirkpatrick — ‘the great William Kirkpatrick’, as the theatre posters rashly proclaimed him — fell.

  At every other performance of the play, he had milked the moments preceding the fall for all they were worth, never relinquishing his grip until he had first squirmed for some time like an electrified tadpole and wailed as a banshee might in the middle of a nervous collapse. This time, however, he hadn’t put on much of a show at all. This time, he’d simply let go.

  He’d landed badly, too, missing the cushioned matting completely, and hitting the hard wooden stage with a sickening thud.

  It was at this point that Sebastian George — who always liked to watch the special effects which it had cost him so much money to create — signalled that the curtain should be lowered immediately.

  Dominic Smedley, the stage manager, appeared from the wings, and bent over the fallen man. As if this were their cue, several other members of the company began to gather around, too.