Murder on Stage by Cora Harrison

the actors but they don’t give much light on high.’ The man who had come in was dressed in overalls and carried a candle. He
raised it up high so that the top of the cupboard was illuminated. ‘There, is that better?’ he asked.
    It was a beautiful voice, deep, musical, as smooth as hot chocolate. A voice for ladies to dream about!
    But the face that Sarah saw by the light of the candle was a nightmare, slashed from side to side, puckered and with lumpy white scar tissue.
    Sarah stared at him and then hurriedly looked away. This must be John Osborne, the man whose face had been slashed by Harry Booth. She caught her breath in sympathy. What must it be like to see
a face like that in the looking glass, to see the horror in the eyes of everyone who met him, to know that he could never again play the part of a hero at the theatre?
    And it was Harry Booth who had done that to him.
    Had John Osborne taken a terrible revenge on the man who had mutilated him for life? Especially if he considered that Harry Booth had done it on purpose . . .
    Was she looking into the face of Harry Booth’s murderer?

CHAPTER 12
B ETRAYED

    As he left the cellar, Tom felt furious. He walked along the foggy street, kicking at lamp-posts and muttering to himself. That Sarah was just too bossy! What right had she to
order him about? Come to that, what right had Alfie to order him to do things? Why should he do what any of them told him? He was fed up. Fed up with being hungry, fed up with being the one who was
given all the worst jobs to do. Things hadn’t been too bad when his friend Charlie had lived with the gang, but now Charlie had gone back to the countryside where he had been born.
    Tom stopped at a shop and gazed longingly in. It was a dairy shop, full of huge round cheeses, tempting slices of each of them lying on wooden platters, great brick-sized lumps of fresh butter,
salted butter – every kind of butter, with small cubes for housewives and cooks to taste and choose. There were custard pies on tin plates and milk jellies wobbling on others.
    But the shop was empty of customers and the shopkeeper, a large man with ginger whiskers, was standing there towering over his cheeses and glaring at Tom as he peeped in. There was no hope of
stealing anything.
    It was the same at Covent Garden market. The freezing fog had made everyone head for home quickly. There was no press of people, no crowds where a boy who had just stolen an apple pie from a
stall could hide himself. Shopping was almost over for the day. Many of the stallholders had begun to put away their goods. And every one of them was on the alert when they saw a ragged, barefoot
boy approach.
    Perhaps Sammy had been luckier, thought Tom. He stopped for a moment. He had determined that he wasn’t going to do what he was told, but now he was inclined to search for his cousin. He
wasn’t obeying Sarah, he told himself. It just made sense to find Sammy. The combination of being blind and having a good singing voice often worked when nothing else did; there might be a
capful of money by the time that he found Sammy. He would tell Sammy that Alfie had ordered him to bring home some sausages. At the thought of them, Tom’s mouth watered.
    There was still no sign of Sammy outside either of the two usual churches, St Martin-in the Fields and St Mary-le-Strand, so Tom began to ask passers-by. There were a few more people around
– clerks finishing a day’s work, shopkeepers taking in boards from the wet pavements, but no one had noticed a blind boy and a hairy dog. Tom stood and thought. The chances were that no
one on the Strand had stopped to listen to Sammy. So what would Sammy do? He hadn’t gone home, so where had he gone?
    Tom wandered along Fleet Street. No sign of Sammy there. He tried asking a few of the newspapermen dashing in and out of their offices, but they brushed him away – like I was a bluebottle,
he thought to himself indignantly. Next he went up through