though. Any other injuries?’ He held the iodine bottle in readiness.
Albert shook his head decisively. ‘Just the merest grazing where I fell through the platform. I’m sure the iodine won’t be necessary. It’s my ankle that hurts. I twisted it when I fell.’
‘You’ll be out of work for a week or two then,’ said the manager, without much sympathy. ‘And you can thank your dog for the lost wages. If you’ll take my advice you’ll have nothing to do with animals in the future. Just listen to the snarling brute! If you were mine, you ugly hound, I’d know what to do with you.’
Albert sat up. ‘But that isn’t my dog! That one’s white with brown patches. Beaconsfield is strictly black and white. Surely someone noticed—I’ve been doing the act for three weeks or more. Some blackguard put that vicious animal into Beaconsfield’s basket, knowing it would attack me as soon as it was released.’
‘Do I understand you right?’ asked the manager. ‘Are you sure that the bulldog in that basket isn’t yours?’
‘Beaconsfield wouldn’t attack me,’ said Albert, shocked by the suggestion. ‘He hasn’t got the energy. It’s all he can do to stand up on his four legs while I’m holding up the barbell, and then he sometimes needs prodding. I tell you he’s black and white, anyway.’
‘Shall I lift him out for you to have a closer look, Sarge?’ suggested Thackeray.
‘That isn’t necessary, Sergeant,’ Miss Blake interposed. ‘I know Beaconsfield and that is not him. If you look through the basket you can see a large brown patch where the Union Jack has ridden up on this dog’s back.’
‘A substitution, by Jove!’ exclaimed Major Chick. ‘Ingenious! Ah, the vagaries of the criminal mind! We’re on to a cunning enemy here, Sergeant.’
Cribb ignored the assumption that the Major was now a party to the investigation. ‘If that ain’t Beaconsfield, Albert, then where is his Lordship? When did you last see him?’
‘During the overture, when I brought him down here and put him in the wings in his basket. I like to watch Ellen’s— Miss Blake’s—act from the promenade, so I prepare everything for my own act first.’
‘Then the dogs could have been exchanged at any time during the first three acts?’
‘The first two, to be precise. I’m waiting with Mother in the wings from the beginning of the policemen’s act.’
‘It was done while Miss Blake or the Red Indians were performing then. Who would have been in the wings at that time, Mr Goodly?’
The manager smiled. ‘It’s not as simple as that, Sergeant. Music hall isn’t like the legitimate theatre, where everyone’s movements are planned and known. I’m managing a three and a half hour show with twenty-seven acts including dancers. I often have to change the order at very short notice to fit in with the commitments of the star billings. Tonight, for example, I’ve got Miss Jenny Hill on at eight o’clock. Nothing must alter that, because she’s appearing at the Royal Aquarium at nine and the London Pavilion at a quarter past ten. So I shall change the order of the acts to ensure that she goes on in time to make a cab journey across to Tothill Street. No two nights in the music hall are the same, you see.’
‘But you must have some notion who was in the wings at that time,’ insisted Cribb.
‘Very well,’ said the manager acidly. ‘Let’s make an inventory, if that’s the way Scotland Yard would like it. There would be the Red Indians, Henry and Cissie Greenbaum, waiting while Miss Blake was on, and the singing policemen, the Dalton brothers, and their assistant Vicky. Then there are up to nine stage-hands and scene-shifters dispersed on either side of the stage, two female dressers and one male, three fly-men looking after the curtain and the act-drops, two lime-boys on their perches in the flies, two callboys, the gasman at the index-plate, my assistant, myself and any one of the other twenty-four
Michele Bardsley
William W. Johnstone
Karen Docter
Lisa Swallow
J. Lynn
C. P. Snow
Jane Sanderson
Jackie Ivie
J. Gates
Renee N. Meland