Chapter 11
Starling
Starling Events took up the first floor of a narrow brick building on Hanover Street, between a dentist and a shop that sold only candles. At nine on Sunday morning it was open the way a person is awake when they've been asked a hard question in their sleep.
A girl at the reception desk looked up as he came in. She was about twenty-three, with a ring in her nose and a lanyard that said GEMMA. She wore a settled, professional friendliness that drooped a little at the corners as she took in his face. Behind her, through an open door, he could see a long untidy office, desks piled with folders, a corkboard crowded with photographs of marquees and table plans. Someone was running a vacuum cleaner. Someone else was on the telephone, speaking in the low, brisk, rapid voice of a person who has said the same sentence six times.
"I wonder if I could speak to whoever is in charge," said Callum.
"Have you an appointment?"
"No."
"We're not really, it's Sunday. It's just the weekend crew." She smiled. "If it's a booking, I can take your details."
"It isn't a booking. It's about one of your hosts. A Miss Albright."
The smile stayed on her face, but something behind it pulled back, like a tenant drawing a curtain.
"Nora's freelance," said Gemma. "We don't give out contacts for freelancers. It's GDPR."
"I understand that. I only want to leave a message."
"You can leave it with me."
"I'd rather speak to a manager."
"That's," she said, and glanced over her shoulder at the open door, the telephone voice, the vacuum. "Mr. Frey isn't in. He's out of the office all week."
"Then someone else."
"There isn't—"
"Gemma." He kept his voice low and level and entirely polite, the voice he used with donors, and he saw her flinch as if it had been a shout. "I'm sorry to be a nuisance. I saw Miss Albright last night at the Ardent, and I said something to her that was extremely foolish and, I think, unkind. I'd like to apologize. That's all. If you could take a letter. If you could pass on a number."
She hesitated. He watched it cross her face, the small warm instinct to be kind fighting the stronger one, to be safe. Then the vacuum cleaner stopped, and in the new quiet a man's voice said from the inner office, pleasantly and in no hurry, "Gemma? Is that the gentleman from the Orangery?"
Gemma went white.
A man appeared in the doorway. He was in his forties, sleek and sandy, with a shaved head and rimless glasses and a beautiful gray jacket with the sleeves pushed up. He held a coffee cup in one hand like a prop. He leaned against the frame. His smile was the smile of someone who has been told a story in advance and is pleased to find it was accurate.
"Mr. Wray, I believe," he said. "Lorcan Frey. Hobbs rang me at seven. We've all been having a very interesting morning."
"I came to apologize."
"How lovely. I'm sure Nora will be touched." He took a sip of coffee. "Unfortunately Nora isn't available. She isn't available to the agency at all this week, in fact. She rang from home last night to say she'd had a bit of a turn and needed some days."
"Then perhaps you'd give me an address."
"I couldn't possibly."
"Perhaps a number."
"Mr. Wray." The pleasant voice didn't change. "You'll forgive me. I think you may be making a mistake. You're a very distinguished man. You gave, I'm told, a beautiful speech. And then you went up to one of my people in front of a hundred guests and called her by the name of a woman who'd died." The glasses glinted. "I don't know who you are to her. But she was in tears. And I have a duty to look after the people who work for me."
"I am not a danger to her."
"I'm sure you aren't."
"I have no wish to frighten anyone."
"Then it should be very simple," said Lorcan Frey, "to leave her alone."
It was said gently. It was said with the open, regretful, reasonable good humor of a man giving a verdict he doesn't personally enjoy. And Callum, standing at the reception desk in his gray coat with rain on his shoulders, felt a surge of anger so cold and so complete that for a moment his sight narrowed to a point.
He took one step forward.
"Mr. Wray," said Frey, very quietly. "I'd think about that."
He thought about it.
He stood for a second with his hand half raised. Then he lowered it, turned, and walked out of the office and down the stairs into Hanover Street, where the rain had settled into a thin, warm, hopeless drizzle. He walked the whole length of the street without seeing a single thing.
The Carrow Playhouse had a matinée at half past two.
He didn't know how he found his way back there. Tallow Lane lay at the end of a series of turnings that he seemed to have taken in his sleep, and he came out into it at noon under a sky the color of wet slate, with the pillared portico ahead and the glass cases lit. The poster was still there. THE TWO VIOLAS. He read the list of names down to the bottom. He didn't know why he read it.
Viola and Sebastian: Nora Albright. Understudy: Cleo Marsh.
He went into the box office and bought a ticket.
It was a cramped warm foyer with a worn red carpet and walls papered with a hundred years of faces. He stood among them. He was early. A woman with a cashbox and half-moon glasses was counting change behind a brass grille. She looked at him over the glasses, quickly, and away, and he realized the whole building knew.
He could see it in the angle of the usher's head. He could see it in the set of the girl behind the bar. A theater is a village. By noon on Sunday everyone in the Playhouse had heard that a man in a dark coat had grabbed Nora Albright in a hotel and called her by a dead woman's name, and that he was tall and gray and polite and had a look on his face like a man at a funeral. They moved around him with a faint, careful courtesy. They were kind. It was the kindness you show to the unwell.
He took his seat in the back row of the stalls.
The house filled slowly with old people and schoolgirls. The curtain, a great red velvet thing stiff with age, rose on a painted shore. A shipwreck, a sea of gauze, a young woman in a salt-stained doublet staggering up a beach. He watched her with his hands folded on his knee. She was about twenty-five, blonde and slight, with a trained voice and a fixed, anxious brightness. For the first ten minutes he thought, with a lurch, that it was a mistake, that Nora had come on after all, in a wig. Then the young woman spoke, and it wasn't her. The voice was too high. The walk was wrong. The hands moved like a girl's.
"Understudy," said the old man beside him, to the air, with relish. "Poor child. First night on her own. They say the lead is sick."
"Is she often?"
"Never. That's the odd thing. Never missed a show." The old man leaned in. "Terrible shame. She's the best Viola this town has seen since the war. She does the twin, too. Both parts. That's the trick of it. She comes on as the girl, goes off, and comes on again as the brother, and you'd swear there were two of her. You'd swear it on your life."
Callum sat still.
"Both parts," he said.
"Both. In the same scene, nearly. A cloak and a quick turn in the wings." The old man sighed happily. "It's the face, you see. She's one of those faces. She can be anyone. You look at her and you think, I know you, and you never quite do."
He found the stage manager at the interval.
He hadn't meant to. He had gone out to the lobby for air, and she came out of a door marked STAFF, a squat, brisk woman of sixty in black trousers and a headset round her neck, with a pencil behind her ear and a clipboard under her arm. She walked straight up to him and said, "You'd be the man from the Ardent."
"Yes."
"Sue Pettifer." She didn't offer her hand. Her small bright brown eyes went over his face, from forehead to chin, with the cool practicality of a woman looking at a flat tire. "I'll be quick. I've nine minutes. I'm going to tell you something and then you're going to go and watch the second half like a good boy."
"I only want—"
"I know what you want. I've known Nora Albright twelve years. She's not been herself since the winter." She moved a little closer. "She rang me at midnight. She was in bits. She wouldn't say what had happened. She said, there's a man, and he thinks I'm somebody else, and I think I know who he thinks I am." The pencil came out from behind her ear and tapped the clipboard. "Is that right?"
He looked at her.
"Yes," he said.
"Hm." Sue Pettifer chewed the inside of her cheek. "She's had a bad year. I'll tell you that for free. She was broke. Completely. Her brother's in a clinic, he's not well, and she'd borrowed, God knows, from everyone. And then in December, out of nowhere, it was all paid. Every penny. The clinic. The rent. She wouldn't say how." She sniffed. "I don't ask. I thought, a man. A rich uncle. A bit of luck."
"In December."
"Just after the New Year, if you want to be fussy."
"Not November."
"What?"
"Nothing." He heard his own voice from a long way off. "Did she ever mention a friend? A woman called Isabel?"
The stage manager's face didn't change. But her eyes did. For an instant they went bright and still.
"Isabel," she said.
"Isabel Marlow. Wray, later."
"No." It came out too quickly. She shut her mouth and opened it again. "No, love. I never heard that." She looked at the clock above the door. "That's the bell. You ought to take your seat."
"Where does she live?"
"I couldn't tell you."
"Please."
"Mr. Wray." Sue Pettifer lowered her voice until it was barely louder than the hum of the lights. "I'm going to say one thing. You've been told to leave this alone, by a better man than I, and I expect you'll do the opposite, because you've got the look. So I'll say this. She's got a flat round the corner. Above a shop that's shut. In the twelve years I've known her she's never had a visitor, not one, and she keeps the curtains drawn, and the night before last I walked her home from rehearsal and she went up the side stairs with her key in her fist like a woman going into a lion's cage." She stopped. "That's all. I've said nothing. If you go and hammer on her door, I'll swear I never saw you."
"Which shop?"
"You walked past it," said Sue Pettifer. "Twice. I watched you from the box office."
She turned and went through the staff door and it swung shut behind her. He stood alone on the red carpet in the cramped warm foyer, among the hundred years of faces.
The bell rang a second time.
He didn't take his seat.