Before the Curtain

Chapter One: The Ambrose Players Come to Town

The motor coaches arrived in Dunhaven on a Tuesday, trailing dust and diesel fumes along the cliff road like a pair of wheezing dragons. Margery Dunlop watched them from the window of Kershaw's Tea Room, where she had been enjoying a quiet pot of Darjeeling and the crossword in the Dunhaven Gazette. She set down her pen—she always used pen, never pencil, as she considered erasure a form of cowardice—and observed the two battered vehicles grind to a halt outside the Royal Victoria Theatre.

The Royal Victoria was Dunhaven's single claim to cultural distinction. It had been built in 1879 by a shipping magnate with more money than taste, and it showed: the façade was a riot of Corinthian columns and plaster cherubs that the salt air had been slowly dissolving for half a century. But it had a proper fly tower, a raked stage, and two hundred velvet seats that still held their springs, which was more than most coastal towns could boast. Every summer, a touring company or two would book a run, and the people of Dunhaven would put on their good clothes and pretend, for an evening, that they lived somewhere grander.

Margery had retired from teaching three years earlier, at the age of sixty-two, and had since devoted herself to the twin pursuits of gardening and solving things. The gardening was modest—a cottage plot behind her house on Salter's Lane, where she grew runner beans and roses in roughly equal proportion. The solving was less modest. She had developed a local reputation for untangling problems: missing cats, disputed property lines, the identity of the person who had been leaving anonymous letters in the church collection box. The vicar had called her "our very own Miss Marple," a comparison Margery found flattering in principle but inaccurate in detail, as she had never once knitted in her life.

She watched now as figures began to emerge from the motor coaches. A tall woman in a green travelling suit stepped down first, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun. Even at a distance, there was something theatrical about her—the way she held her chin, the deliberate grace of her movements, as though she were always aware of being watched. Behind her came a stocky man in a rumpled linen jacket, barking instructions at someone still inside the coach. Then a parade of others: a thin woman carrying what appeared to be a stuffed parrot, a young man wrestling with a trunk, an older fellow in a flat cap who moved with the careful economy of someone used to heavy lifting in tight spaces.

"That'll be the theatre lot," said Mrs. Kershaw, appearing at Margery's elbow with a fresh pot of water. "The Ambrose Players, they call themselves. Doing a murder mystery, I heard. Three nights."

"How exciting," Margery said, and meant it.

"My Harold says murder mysteries are morbid," Mrs. Kershaw continued, "but I told him, Harold, it's only pretend. Nobody actually dies."

Margery smiled and returned to her crossword. Seven across: a five-letter word for duplicity. She wrote GUILE in confident ink and took a sip of tea.

She could not have known, of course, that within seventy-two hours she would be sitting in the third row of the Royal Victoria Theatre watching a man die, and that the word she had just written would prove more relevant than any crossword clue had a right to be.

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The Ambrose Players had been touring the south of England for eleven years. They were not the most celebrated company on the circuit—that honour belonged to the Whitworth Ensemble, who had once performed for the Prince of Wales—but they were reliable, professional, and generally well-reviewed in the provincial papers. Their reputation rested largely on two pillars: the directing of Montgomery Ambrose, known universally as Monty, and the acting of his wife, Vivienne Gould.

Monty Ambrose was fifty-three, barrel-chested, with a head of silver hair that he wore swept back from a broad forehead. He had the commanding presence of a man accustomed to being obeyed and the restless energy of one who could never quite sit still. He had begun his career as an actor himself, playing villains and character parts in the West End during the twenties, but had discovered that he preferred telling other people what to do rather than being told himself. He founded the Ambrose Players in 1925 with a small inheritance from an aunt in Shropshire and had been running the company with an iron hand ever since.

Vivienne Gould was forty-one and beautiful in the way that certain women are beautiful: not through perfection of feature but through the sheer force of her attention. When Vivienne looked at you, you felt seen. When she looked away, you felt bereft. She had dark hair that she wore pinned up in elaborate arrangements, grey-green eyes, and a voice that could fill a theatre without appearing to strain. She had married Monty in 1927, and the marriage had been, by all accounts, a partnership of mutual convenience: he needed a leading lady, and she needed a stage.

The rest of the company was small but capable. Peter Stanhope, thirty-six, was the leading man—handsome in a slightly faded way, with sandy hair and an easy charm that played well to matinee audiences. He had been with the company for five years and was generally considered its most versatile performer. Sylvia Crane, forty-four, served as both props manager and occasional actress; she was a thin, sharp-featured woman with clever hands and a quiet intensity that people sometimes mistook for shyness. Norbert Tull, the stage manager, was fifty and built like a docker, with a face that looked as though it had been assembled from spare parts. He spoke rarely and smiled less, but he knew his craft. There were three or four other members—a young actor named Geoffrey Phelps, a wardrobe mistress called Ada Beckett, a general assistant named Tommy Marsh—but these were the principal figures, the ones around whom the drama, both scripted and unscripted, would revolve.

They checked into Mrs. Cavanagh's boarding house on the seafront, occupying nearly all of its twelve rooms. Mrs. Cavanagh, a widow who supplemented her income by letting rooms during the summer season, was delighted. Theatre people were generous tippers and told marvellous stories at breakfast. She gave Monty and Vivienne the best room, the one with the bay window overlooking the sea, and put Peter Stanhope in the room next door, which she would later have cause to regret.

That first afternoon, Monty assembled the company on the stage of the Royal Victoria for a technical rehearsal. The play was called The Final Reckoning, and it was a murder mystery of the classic drawing-room variety. Monty had written it himself, as he wrote all their plays, and he was particularly proud of this one. It concerned a wealthy industrialist who is found dead in his study, shot through the heart, and the detective who must determine which of the household's residents pulled the trigger. The twist—and there was always a twist in a Monty Ambrose play—was that the detective himself turned out to be the killer, having committed the murder before the play began and then inserted himself into the investigation to control it.

Peter Stanhope played the detective. Vivienne played the dead man's wife. Sylvia Crane had a small role as the housekeeper. Geoffrey Phelps was the dead man, which required him to lie very still on the floor for most of Act Two. The climactic scene involved Peter's character revealing his guilt and then, in a moment of theatrical melodrama, turning the murder weapon on himself. The revolver would be fired three times in the course of the play: once during the reconstruction of the crime in Act Two, once as a warning shot in the confrontation scene, and once in the final moment when the detective takes his own life.

The revolver was a Webley Mark IV, a service revolver from the Great War. It belonged to the company's collection of props and had been modified to fire only blank cartridges—the barrel had been partially blocked and the cylinder altered so that it could not chamber live ammunition. Or so everyone believed.

Sylvia Crane was responsible for the props. She maintained them, catalogued them, and ensured they were in position before each performance. She had checked the Webley that morning, as she always did, loading it with three blank cartridges and spinning the cylinder to confirm it turned freely. She had set it on the props table in the wings, stage left, where it would remain until Peter collected it for his entrance in Act Two.

Norbert Tull oversaw the technical elements: lighting, sound effects, scene changes. He had rigged the Royal Victoria's antiquated lighting board to his satisfaction and had tested the thunder sheet that would provide atmosphere during the storm scene in Act Three. He moved through the theatre with the proprietary air of a man who considered the building, for the duration of their occupancy, to be his personal domain.

The technical rehearsal went smoothly enough, though Monty was in one of his moods. He snapped at Geoffrey for dying unconvincingly. He told Ada that the curtains in the drawing-room set were the wrong shade of burgundy. He made Vivienne repeat her entrance four times until she crossed to the fireplace at exactly the pace he wanted. Vivienne bore this with practiced patience, though Margery—had she been present—might have noticed the way Vivienne's jaw tightened each time Monty raised his voice.

After the rehearsal, Peter and Vivienne walked along the seafront together. They did not hold hands or stand too close, but there was an intimacy in the way they moved—a synchronicity of pace, a tendency to lean toward each other when speaking—that would have been obvious to any attentive observer. They stopped at the seawall and looked out at the Channel, where the evening light was turning the water to hammered bronze.

"He's getting worse," Vivienne said.

"He's always like this before an opening," Peter replied. "You know that."

"No. This is different. He's been different for weeks. Since Brighton."

Peter said nothing for a moment. A gull wheeled overhead, crying.

"I spoke to him," Peter said quietly. "About the accounts."

Vivienne turned to look at him. "You didn't."

"I had to. The numbers don't add up, Viv. They haven't for months. There's money missing—quite a lot of it. I told him I'd give him until after Dunhaven to sort it out, and then I'd have to go to the others."

"And what did he say?"

"He laughed. You know that laugh of his—the one that doesn't reach his eyes. He said I was imagining things and that I should concentrate on my performance and leave the business to him."

Vivienne pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders, though the evening was warm. "Be careful, Peter. Monty doesn't forgive people who threaten him."

"I'm not threatening him. I'm asking him to be honest."

"In Monty's mind, that's the same thing."

They stood in silence for a while, watching the light fade. Then they walked back to the boarding house, entering separately, five minutes apart, as had become their habit.

In his room on the ground floor, Monty Ambrose sat at the small writing desk by the window. Before him lay the script of The Final Reckoning, open to the climactic scene. He had a pen in his hand and was making changes—crossing out lines, adding new ones, adjusting stage directions. The original scene called for the revolver to be fired once: the single, decisive shot with which the detective ended his own life. Monty was rewriting it. Now the gun would be fired three times.

He worked methodically, his handwriting small and precise. When he was finished, he read the new scene through twice, nodded to himself, and closed the script. Then he tore the original page from his working copy—the page that showed the scene as it had been before his revisions—folded it carefully, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

He would need to dispose of it later. For now, he had other preparations to make.