Death in the Spotlight: A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery 07 (A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery, 7)

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INDEED!’ thundered Inigo. Miss Crompton blinked at him, and he coughed and said, ‘Indeed. This play will be realistic. It will be immediate. It will be GENIUS!’ Daisy sighed impatiently, but I could see she was thrilled by Aunt Lucy’s unusual lessons – particularly because they were secret. There was an unspoken agreement between the three of us that Uncle Felix need not be informed about them. He is a very interesting uncle, but an uncle all the same, and he does not really approve of our detective adventures. Aunt Lucy, we could see, understood that being detectives was not a game to us. It was simply who we were. That’s Inigo Leontes!’ hissed Daisy like a prompter in my ear. ‘He’s a terribly famous tragic actor! He’s played Othello, of course, and Macbeth and Hamlet, all at the Rue, and now he’s Miss Crompton’s director, and the principal investor too. He’s put lots of his own money into the Rue, so really it’s almost as much his as Miss Crompton’s.’ Daisy is killed when she puts herself between the bullet and Hazel, saving her best friend. But did she really die... She turned to look at us, her arms still crossed. I wondered if she was upset about being reminded that she was having to pretend to be from a different country. People sometimes ask me if I am Japanese and it makes me furious.

Even her,’ said Daisy. ‘She’s being nice to Rose because she’s the star, but Rose’s complaining is beginning to wear thin. Just you wait and see.’ Well, it is. I put them here, Martita darling,’ said Miss Crompton. ‘They’re the newest members of the company, and they need a dressing room. They also need someone to help them adjust to the theatre, and I thought you could do that.’ Rose was utterly flirtatious with Lysander, whispering and canoodling with him in dark corners, but she was smug about receiving letters from other admirers too, and this made Lysander horribly jealous. Once I heard him shout at her and shake his fist in a most threatening way. Lysander was as sharp and angry as Rose was cunning and manipulative, and I realized that their romance was as empty offstage as it was true in the play. Lysander, I had learned from reading some of the magazines Daisy lent me, was truly famous, and so it was a clever move to charm him – but not at all an honest one. Come away!’ I said at last, because she was leaning further and further down. ‘I don’t want to have to get you out!’ Theresa and Miss Crompton, I realized, managed all the guts and muscles and blood of the theatre, while Inigo only hovered beatifically out in the stalls and on the stage itself, directing rehearsals in a most godlike way. But with every day he became more and more like the Old Testament God rather than the gentle New Testament one, for rehearsals were not going particularly well.

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I am not discussing this any more,’ said Miss Crompton firmly, as though Martita was no older than us. ‘Anyway, it will help with your part. You will be a lovely Nurse, darling, and Rose will be a lovely Juliet. Inigo and I agree that making the Nurse and Juliet the same age is a very powerful class statement. Now, I’d better introduce you all. Daisy, Hazel, this is Martita Torrera.’

But, despite those words, her expression was kind – as was her offer to show us about. I wondered whether Martita might be the sort of person, like our friend Lavinia, whose bark was worse than her bite. Goodness!’ cried Daisy’s voice from somewhere above me, a few moments later. ‘Hazel, you poor thing!’ She knelt over me, her knee pressing on my hand. Of course it’s real!’ snapped Rose. ‘How dare you! I bet you’re the one behind it. You’re trying to frighten me off, all because I’m the star and you’re not.’ Then, of course, I realized why I had chosen it: I have often felt like Ruth in that poem, and I did at that very moment. I staggered on to the end, melting under the lights and frying with dreadful shame, for I had let out more of myself than I had meant. Then I stopped and there was only a ringing silence. I felt as though every empty chair was staring at me.And then, on Thursday afternoon, Theresa fainted clean away in the middle of a rehearsal, and had to be rushed off to hospital by the actor playing Tybalt. She had the flu, and she was prescribed bed rest. I sat up and blinked, and told everyone that I was feeling so much better, thank you – no, really I was. Martita paused, and then she winked at me. ‘The last part is,’ she said. ‘And some of the rest. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which. Actresses are supposed to invent their lives, aren’t they? Now, will one of you put this horrid cloak thing on me properly? I can’t seem to do it up.’

Of course I don’t! You should know perfectly well by now, Hazel, that I am acting, and, as I tell you repeatedly, you need to practise it.’ I ought to explain exactly how we came to be sitting in the dusty, greasepaint-smelling stalls of the Rue Theatre, while a large, blue-hatted policeman stamps about onstage and shouts at us all to sit tight and not go anywhere. The others helped, in their way – or rather, Simon good-naturedly fetched and carried whenever Martita asked, Lysander declaimed about cooperation in villages in Russia and then did nothing at all, and Rose only helped when people were looking at her. There on the street, staring at that horridly creepy posters, I knew that the mystery at the Rue Theatre had taken a new and darker turn. For that certain character to have been a murder target they must have been extremely arrogant. Unless, the victim is the wrong target. Maybe the substitute actor was onstage because the actual actor knew they were going to be targeted so they pretended to be ill so the substitute would go up.Nonsense!’ I said. The way Daisy spoke – the pink in her cheeks and the gleam in her eyes – gave away the lie behind what she was saying. ‘You’ve been behaving so oddly around Martita, ever since we met her. I think you—’

I glanced around and saw that everyone was staring at Rose. Miss Crompton looked amused and fond, Lysander looked – the polite word, I suppose, is romantic – Inigo looked annoyed, and both Simon and Martita looked furious. Rose, meanwhile, stared straight out into the empty auditorium, posing for them with a little smirk on her face – and I wondered then whether all was well at the Rue Theatre.Not again!’ cried Inigo from his seat in the stalls. ‘This is too distracting. Frances, I need Miss Torrera to focus on her role! She really can’t be the stage manager as well as the Nurse. Stop, stop!’ As Rose burst into angry sobs once again, it was the stagehand who spoke. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he insisted, holding his hands up. ‘Just so long as everyone knows that. I don’t want to get into any trouble for this. Just doing my job. It was her who told me to put the posters up!’ he added, pointing to Martita.