“Murder,” the man said, and his lips flabbered over the word. “That’s what happened, Mr. Jay. Murder.”

SIX

Disaster

While he let them in at the stage-door the man—he was called Hawkins—said over and over again in a shrill whine that it wasn’t his fault if he was late getting down to the theatre. Nobody, he said, could blame him. He turned queer, as was well known, at the sight of blood. It was as much as Peregrine could do to get the victim’s name out of him. He had gone completely to pieces.

They went through the stage-door into the dark house, and up the aisle and so to the foyer. It was as if they had never left the theatre.

Peregrine said to Emily: “Wait here. By the box-office. Don’t come any further.”

“I’ll come if you want me.”

“Oh Gawd no. Oh Gawd no, Miss.”

“Stay here, Emily. Or wait in front. Yes. Just wait in front.” He opened the doors into the stalls and fastened them back. She went in. “Now, Hawkins,” Peregrine said.

“You go, Mr. Jay. Up there. I don’t ’ave to go. I can’t do nothing. I’d vomit. Honest I would.”

Peregrine ran up the graceful stairway towards the sunken landing: under the treasure where both flights emerged. It was dark up there but he had a torch and used it. The beam shot out and found an object.

There, on its back in a loud overcoat and slippers lay the shell of Jobbins. The woollen cap had not fallen from the skull but had been stove into it. Out of what had been a face, broken like a crust now, and glistening red, one eye stared at nothing.

Beside this outrage lay a bronze dolphin, grinning away for all it was worth through a wet, unspeakable mask.

Everything round Peregrine seemed to shift a little as if his vision had swivelled like a movie camera. He saw without comprehension a square of reflected light on the far wall and its source above the landing. He saw, down below him, the top of Hawkins’s head. He moved to the balustrade, held on to it and with difficulty controlled an upsurge of nausea. He fetched a voice out of himself.

“Have you rung the police?”

“I better had, didn’t I? I better report, didn’t I?” Hawkins gabbled without moving.

“Stay where you are. I’ll do it.”

There was a general purposes telephone in the downstairs foyer outside the box-office. He ran down to it and, controlling his hand, dialled the so celebrated number. How instant and how cool the response.

“No possibility of survival, sir?”

“God, no. I told you—”

“Please leave everything as it is. You will be relieved in a few minutes. Which entrance is available? Thank you.”

Peregrine hung up. “Hawkins,” he said. “Go back to the stage-door and let the police in. Go on.”

“Yes. O.K. Yes, Mr. Jay.”

“Well, go on, damn you.”

Was there an independent switch anywhere in the foyer for front-of-house lighting or was it all controlled from backstage? Surely not. He couldn’t remember. Ridiculous. Emily was out there in the darkened stalls. He went in and found her standing just inside the doors.

“Emily?”

“Yes. All right. Here I am.”

He felt her hands in his. “This is a bad thing,” he said hurriedly. “It’s a very bad thing, Emily.”

“I heard what you said on the telephone.”

“They’ll be here almost at once.”

“I see. Murder,” Emily said, trying the word.

“We can’t be sure.”

They spoke aimlessly. Peregrine heard a high-pitched whine inside his own head and felt sickeningly cold. He wondered if he was going to faint and groped for Emily. They put their arms about each other. “We must behave,” Peregrine said, “in whatever way one is expected to behave. You know? Calm? Collected? All the things people like us are meant not to be.”

“That’s right. Well, so we will.”

He stooped his head to hers. “Can this be you?” he said.

A sound crept into their silence: a breathy intermittent sound with infinitesimal interruptions that seemed to have some sort of vocal quality. They told each other to listen.

With a thick premonition of what was to come, Peregrine put Emily away from him.

He switched on his torch and followed its beam down the centre aisle. He was under the overhang of the dress-circle but moved on until its rim was above his head. It was here, in the centre aisle of the stalls and below the circle balustrade, that his torchlight came to rest on a small, breathing, faintly audible heap which, as he knelt beside it, revealed itself as an unconscious boy.

“Trevor,” Peregrine said. “Trevor.”

Emily behind him said, “Has he been killed? Is he dying?”

“I don’t know. What should we do? Ring for the ambulance? Ring the Yard again? Which?”

“Don’t move him. I’ll ring Ambulance.”

“Yes.”

“Listen. Sirens.”

“Police.”

Emily said: “I’ll ring, all the same,” and was gone.

There seemed to be no interval of time between this moment and the occupation of The Dolphin by uniformed policemen with heavy necks and shoulders and quiet voices. Peregrine met the Sergeant.

“Are you in charge? There’s something else since I telephoned. A boy. Hurt but alive. Will you look?”

The Sergeant looked. He said: “This might be serious. You haven’t touched him, sir?”

“No. Emily—Miss Dunne who is with us—Is ringing Ambulance.”

“Can we have some light?”

Peregrine, remembering at last where they were, put the houselights on. More police were coming in at the stage-door. He rejoined the Sergeant. A constable was told to stay by the boy and report any change.

“I’ll take a look at this body, if you please,” the Sergeant said.

Emily was at the telephone in the foyer saying, “It’s very urgent. It’s really urgent. Please.”

“If you don’t mind, Miss,” said the Sergeant and took the receiver. “Police here,” he said and was authoritative. “They’ll be round in five minutes,” he said to Emily.

“Thank God.”

“Now then, Mr. Jay.” He’d got Peregrine’s name as he came in.

“May I go back to the boy?” Emily asked. “In case he regains consciousness and is frightened? I know him.”

“Good idea,” said the Sergeant with a kind of routine heartiness. “You just stay there with the boy, Miss—?”

“Dunne.”

“Miss Dunne. Members of the company here, would it be?”

“Yes,” Peregrine said. “We were at the new restaurant in Wharfingers Lane and came back to shelter from the rain.”

“Is that so? I see. Well, Miss Dunne, you just stay with the boy and tell the Ambulance all you know. Now, Mr. Jay.”

A return to the sunken landing was a monstrous thing to contemplate. Peregrine said, “Yes, I’ll show you. If you don’t mind, I won’t—” and reminded himself of Hawkins. “It’s terrible,” he said. “I’m sorry to baulk. This way.”

“Up the stairs?” the Sergeant asked conversationally, as if he inquired his way to the Usual Offices. “Don’t trouble to come up again, Mr. Jay. The less traffic, you know, the better we like it.”

“Yes, of course. I forgot.”

“If you’ll just wait down here.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

The Sergeant was not long on the landing. Peregrine could not help looking up at him and saw that, like himself, the Sergeant did not go beyond the top step. He returned and went to the telephone. As he passed Peregrine he said: “Very nasty, sir, isn’t it,” in a preoccupied voice.

Peregrine couldn’t hear much of what the Sergeant said into the telephone. “Some kind of caretaker—Jobbins—and a young lad—looks like it. Very good, sir. Yes. Yes. Very good.” And then after a pause and in a mumble of words, one that came through very clearly:

“—robbery—”

Never in the wide world would Peregrine have believed it of himself that a shock, however acute, or a slight, however appalling, could have so bludgeoned his wits. There, there on the wall opposite the one in which the treasure was housed, shone the telltale square of reflected light and there above his head as he stood on the stairs had been the exposed casket—exposed and brightly lit when it should have been shut off and—