Hattie Steals the Show E-Book

Patrick Gleeson

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Theatreland Mystery
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 441

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Readers love the Theatreland Whodunnits! 'I loved this book! The characters are described with warm insight and humour, and the plot twists keep you hooked. I found the book unputdownable, and also a fascinating account of a theatre production. Highly recommended!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Real reader review 'A fun, theatre filled cosy with a great cast of characters... An enjoyable start to a new series and I look forward to the next one' ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Real reader review 'Classic murder mystery which keeps you guessing. Patrick Gleeson has a sharp eye for the details of theatrical life, the egos and insecurities that inhabit it and a very good ear for dialogue. Hugely enjoyable' ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Real reader review Stage manager Hattie Cocker is looking around the West End theatre where she's about to start her new temporary gig, when she stumbles across the dead body of the current musical's composer. A week later the prime suspect in the murder is on Hattie's doorstep asking for her help in proving his innocence, and to do that she needs to find a missing musical score. And that may be found in the grand country home of producer Sir Trevor Dougray, where Hattie is stage managing a two-week workshop for his new show. As deception is layered on deception, Hattie will have to work out who she really knows, and can trust...

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Praise for Patrick Gleeson

‘A sensational romp with an engaging protagonist, a nifty plot, and a thoroughly satisfying ending’ Leigh Russell on Hattie Brings the House Down

‘This warm-hearted theatrical thriller [is] a real joy to read. It’s Simon Brett on steroids’ Alex Coombs, author of Murder on the Menu on Hattie Brings the House Down

For Iggie and Ari

THE FOLLOWING MEMORANDUM IS CONFIDENTIAL AND INTENDED SOLELY FOR THE USE OF EMPLOYEES AND DIRECTORS OF GEOFFREY DOUGRAY PRODUCTIONS (‘GDP’) LTD. IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS MEMORANDUM IN ERROR YOU MAY BE COMMITTING AN ACTIONABLE OFFENCE BY READING FURTHER.

Louise,

After everything that’s happened I think we should take stock re the workshop. Here are my current notes about attendees:

Creative:

Writer: Jala

Composer: Teri (I think she’s locked in now. She’ll need some prep, so maybe she joins a few days later than the rest.)

Repetiteur: Calvin.

Director: Hashi H (turned it down, can you believe it?!) Mel

Set and costume design: Maxine

Projection design: Gareth and Tom (I know, I know, it’s a bit premature, but I really want projection on this. And Tom is such fun.)

Cast:

Hera

Pip

James N (has a clash) Dylan

Delphine (not ideal, but she’s free, it’ll smooth things over, and we can re-cast at the next iteration)

Crew:

Tinca’s agreed to cater, so that’s all sorted at least. Meaning the last little niggle is the stage manager. (Note, for your ongoing theatrical education: Do not underestimate the importance of this seemingly inconsequential role!) Here’s what we’re up to:

Donna Stuck on The Guilty

Leah Too good to stage manage, apparently. She thinks she’s a producer now!

Louis In America

Hattie (Cocker)??? Bumped into her on the off-chance. Getting on a bit, and she’s not well known any more, but I wonder…

Let’s catch up in the morning.

Geoffrey

Prologue

The door did very little to advertise its presence. From the mouth of the alley that led unobtrusively off Shaftesbury Avenue, all you could see above the cluster of bins was the box with the frosted glass sides that housed a dim bulb and from which the black lettering that spelled out STAGE DOOR had rubbed off many years before.

But it was a door that didn’t need much signposting. If you knew what you were looking for it was precisely where you’d expect it to be, at the rear of the Revue Theatre. And if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you probably had no business with a door like that anyway.

Hattie Cocker did indeed know exactly what she was looking for, having passed through this door many times over the course of her career. She didn’t need to look for it at all; she could simply instruct her legs where to go once she got off the bus at Piccadilly Circus and allow them to make the journey on autopilot. Or at least, that was her expectation. It turned out that her legs had developed an unfortunate confusion concerning the relative placements of the Revue and the Apollo – she had a great deal of practice at walking to both – and so it was only when she was raising her hand to press the doorbell of the stage door of the latter that she realised her legs had brought her to the wrong place.

This minor situational mishap addressed, she still managed to ring the correct doorbell a full five minutes before the time she had agreed to arrive, thanks to her innate habit of building in contingency buffers to all travel plans, and after a short wait was duly admitted by a familiar face.

‘Hallo, lovely,’ Donna greeted her with a broad smile that somehow lacked warmth.

‘All right?’ replied Hattie, with as much positivity as she could muster. She liked Donna, she really did, it was just… well, never mind that now. ‘It’s nice to be back here.’

‘Which show did you do?’ enquired Donna.

‘It was an Ayckbourn… Man of the Moment, I think?’

‘That never ran here. You’re thinking of the Gielgud,’ Donna corrected her, a trifle sharply.

That was it, wasn’t it? It was almost impossible to have an interaction with her without coming away feeling like you’d been slightly told off by teacher. A manner like that was no bad thing, professionally, but it always made social chit-chat slightly strained.

‘You’re right, I’m sure. It must have been something else. It’ll come to me.’

Donna nodded. ‘Thanks for helping out,’ she offered, perhaps by way of reconciliation.

‘You know me. I never turn down paid work if I can help it,’ said Hattie as she signed in on the clipboard hanging by the door. There were only a handful of names on the sheet that weren’t marked as signed out: Donna of course, a Lel Nowak, which was a name that rang a bell, and then someone called Colin McDermot, which was a name that definitely didn’t. Lots of other people had been around at some point then left again (there had been a matinee performance earlier in the day), so the building was quiet, although Hattie could hear muffled voices from somewhere in the auditorium.

‘Well I’m very grateful. Everyone else is so busy at the moment.’

It wasn’t meant as a barbed comment. Probably. Of course Hattie was more likely to be free for a gig at short notice than other stage managers. She was in the very unusual position, thanks to her current gig tutoring at a drama school, of being a jobbing stage manager whose evenings were normally free. And of course, she only had that gig because Donna, the previous SM tutor, had missed the industry so much she’d gone back to it, leaving a vacancy. So it was only fair that Donna might call on Hattie for a favour, as Hattie was in a rare position of being able to oblige.

It was just that Hattie had only had to take the SM tutoring gig because she’d found it increasingly difficult to find regular work. In this industry it was all about who you knew, and once injury forced Hattie off the touring circuit she realised that her social-professional circle in London had mostly retired or moved away. It didn’t matter of course, as the tutoring put food on the table, but still, she didn’t like being reminded of how she’d slightly lost her footing.

‘Shall we get on with it, then?’ asked Donna.

She led Hattie along a low-ceilinged corridor that jinked left and right a few times, opening out suddenly to a much larger space, the bulk of which was walled off by some extremely makeshift-looking timber-and-canvas ‘flats’ – the tall, narrow panels that are the building blocks of theatre scenery. Hattie knew that on the other side those flats were carefully finished and painted with enough delicacy that, from a dozen yards away, under stage lighting, they looked like the solid walls of an imposing cityscape. Like everything in theatre, scenery could be as flimsy and ramshackle as you liked so long as the bit the punters saw looked the part.

There were still voices coming from somewhere. The sounds came from above, raised but distant, although Hattie could make out none of what was actually being said. Perhaps some actors were running lines in a dressing room. They worked their way along the back of the set, then ducked through a gap between two overlapping flats to emerge abruptly onto the stage, where an angled floor and some clever forced perspective tricks made a six-metre rectangle feel like an expansive swathe of London’s South Bank. Even under the harsh fluorescent working lights it was still quite something.

‘Who designed the—’ she began, but was interrupted by Donna who called out, sharply: ‘Excuse me!’

Hattie followed her gaze up to the balcony that ran round the backstage area, from which the various pulleys that ‘flew’ scenery in and out were operated. Much of it was obscured by long black drapes that hung all the way from the ceiling to the sides of the stage, and from behind one of those drapes were coming occasional metallic clonking sounds.

‘There shouldn’t be anyone on the fly floor at the moment. Come down please!’ commanded Donna sternly. The clonking stopped. They waited in silence for a few moments, listening for any further sounds, before Donna relaxed. She turned back to Hattie, rolled her eyes and muttered, ‘A couple of stage hands dragged a massage chair up there to sit in while waiting for their cues, and now the crew spend half their time fighting over getting turns in it. Honestly, you wouldn’t think they’ve all been doing this for six months with the way they go on. There’s no discipline with some of this lot.’

Hattie made a sympathetic face. Donna was a famous stickler for discipline, and while this was entirely right and reasonable, Hattie felt she could be slightly more free with the dressing-downs than she needed to be. Was being up on the fly floor between the matinee and the evening show really such a terrible sign of decadence?

‘Now, we’ve got cue lights on all the entrances except upstage left. That’s because…’

Donna launched into an extremely thorough overview of everything that Hattie would need to know the following week while Donna was away. The show, a musical called The Guilty, had opened earlier in the year. It was produced by feted impresario Sir Geoffrey Dougray, and while the reviews were positive, the general consensus was that it wasn’t quite the smash hit return to form that Geoffrey had been chasing ever since the last of his run of hits in the early 2000s. It was booked to run in the West End until November, and the rumour was that it was unlikely to be extended. Instead, it would be packaged off on a regional tour, and then either taken abroad or retired. A perfectly respectable production, in other words, and therefore a huge disappointment to Sir Geoffrey.

Donna was taking a week off mid-run, to look after her daughter after some surgery of some sort that had been unexpectedly scheduled at short notice. Hence the need for someone to step in and stage manage the show during her absence. Hattie was now here to get the full rundown from Donna, and would in a couple of hours’ time shadow her during the evening performance, so that she could be ready to take over the next day. It was quite a lot of bother for what was, from a stage manager’s perspective, a very straightforward production. But over-preparedness was the watchword of her profession, and Hattie and Donna did these things by the book.

When Donna had finished her introduction, she took her round the rest of the set to help get her familiar with everything, pointing out which exits led to where, along with the various trip hazards, props tables and other minutiae with which an SM concerns themselves. As there was one moment where an actor needed to enter through the auditorium from behind the audience, Donna twitched aside the lush stage curtain so they could poke their noses out at the rows of seats. All was quiet out there, as the ushers had long since finished sweeping up spilled snacks from the stalls and had now gone on break. In fact the auditorium was entirely empty save for—

‘Mind the plasterwork!’

A very large and jolly-looking man in a tweed suit was leaning casually against the side of the proscenium arch – the big wall dividing the auditorium from the backstage area, containing the large hole through which the audience could see the stage. It was to him that Donna had just addressed the rebuke. She was right to make a fuss, in that the ‘prosc’ was covered in ornate, gold-painted plaster twirls and swirls that were nearly a century old, and in Hattie’s experience things like that crumbled as soon as you breathed on them. The weight of a large man’s shoulders could do some very expensive damage.

But unlike Donna, Hattie would probably not have dared utter an admonition had she been first to see the leaner. Because this particular man, as it happened, was Sir Geoffrey Dougray, and he owned the whole damn theatre, plaster and all.

Well, technically his production company owned a controlling stake in the corporate group that leased and managed the venue, but the gist was the same. Hattie hadn’t seen his name on the sheet by the door, but she considered that he was probably the one person in the world who mightn’t get an additional dressing-down from Donna for not signing in.

Geoffrey, who appeared to be lost in thought, slowly rolled his head towards Donna, wearing a completely blank expression. After a second or so his eyes seemed to focus, and he heaved himself upright.

Donna, perhaps mindful that the person she had just upbraided was the person who ultimately signed off her, and everyone else’s, payslips, offered with a half-shrug, ‘You know how Colin will be if it gets damaged.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ murmured Geoffrey pleasantly. He didn’t move away, but he offered nothing more, so after a second or so Donna turned her attention back to the task in hand.

‘Now, the auditorium doors are a bit noisy, so—’ she began, but was then immediately interrupted by Geoffrey, who called out, ‘Hattie! It’s Hattie bloody Cocker! How marvellous!’

‘Hullo, Geoffrey,’ replied Hattie, genuinely astonished that he remembered her. She had worked on the Broadway transfer of one of his shows a full two decades earlier, and had had very little direct contact with him during the process. Or at least, very little contact while either of them was actually working. They’d got chatting during a couple of messy, boozy parties around the opening and closing of the run, but Hattie had assumed the parties were messy enough and boozy enough that Geoffrey wouldn’t remember the particulars.

Evidently, though, she had made more of an impression than she gave herself credit for, because here came Geoffrey, beaming from ear to ear, looking like an overgrown puppy who’d just found a playmate. For all that he was a shrewd businessman with a legendary ruthless streak, Geoffrey was immediately likeable by virtue of being so perennially enthusiastic.

‘This is the woman,’ Geoffrey proclaimed excitedly, ‘who persuaded me to revive Roses! Do you remember, Hattie?’

Hattie didn’t, and would have admitted as much had Geoffrey given her a chance to speak. He trundled on. ‘Do you know I think of you every time I drink Riesling? Where on earth have you been for the last twenty years?’

‘Oh, you know. Lots of touring. I’m tutoring at ACDA these days.’

‘A teacher! Wonderful! Moulding a whole new generation of mini Cockers and sending them out into the industry. What on earth brings you to my theatre tonight?’

‘I’m shadowing Donna, so I can cover for her next week.’

Geoffrey raised his hands skywards dramatically.

‘Fate!’ he proclaimed. ‘True serendipity. It’s the sheerest happenstance that has me in tonight myself. I was just meeting…’ here his smile faltered, just momentarily. ‘Well anyway, I may have a job for you. You’ll say yes, won’t you? Do say yes.’

‘It depends on the job,’ said Hattie cautiously.

‘My assistant is around here somewhere, I’ll get her to… oh never mind the boring details for now, I’ll have her get in touch with all of that tomorrow. It’s a fun one,’ he assured her conspiratorially. ‘Oh, this will be wonderful.’

‘Shall I give you my number, or my email, or—’ began Hattie, but he interrupted her with a wave of his hand.

‘No need, no need. I can always find people when I want them. À bientôt. Hattie Cocker? Marvellous.’

And with that he was off up the central aisle of the stalls, still muttering to himself as he went. Hattie and Donna exchanged an amused look.

‘I didn’t know you were pals with Geoffrey,’ said Donna, and Hattie thought she detected a certain something in Donna’s tone, but wasn’t sure if it was jealousy, or disapproval, or something else entirely. Either way she just nodded, and said, ‘You know how it is.’

They carried on with the tour. Donna showed her the prompt desk, the prop tables, and the dressings rooms. Then, as she was leading Hattie round the stage left scenery dock, a man in jeans and a hoodie came out of nowhere and barrelled past them in the direction of the exit, causing Donna to stumble.

‘Hey!’ she called out, but the man kept walking, his head bowed. Hattie had only caught the slightest glimpse of his face, and now she could see nothing more than his back, but there was something familiar about his gait…

‘Eoin?’ she said, noting how unfamiliar the name felt in her mouth after all these years. So was the sudden rush of guilt and shame that she had, for such a long time, so strongly associated with that name.

The man stopped and stood stock still for a moment. Then his shoulders sagged and he turned, giving Hattie a proper look at a face that, last time she had seen it, had belonged to a teenager. Now it was worn by a man of maybe fifty, who was using it to carry a pained expression, full of anxiety and stress.

‘My goodness, Eoin, it’s Hattie. Hattie Cocker.’

His expression slowly changed, and what seemed like a genuine, albeit small, smile appeared at his mouth.

‘Hattie! Wow. I’m’ – he blinked heavily, then took a deep breath – ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to barge into you. I’ve got a lot on my mind… I can’t stop… It’s really good to see you, Hattie. Maybe we can catch up another time?’

And before she could respond he was off again, striding towards the nearby stage door, through which he was already leaving before Donna could finish calling after him, ‘I didn’t see anyone called Eoin on the sign-in sheet, you know…’

‘Well that’s strange,’ said Hattie, as much to herself as anyone else. ‘I haven’t seen that boy in over thirty years. I wonder what he’s doing here?’

This time the disapproval in Donna’s face was readily apparent. Hobnobbing with producers was one thing, but fraternising with people who charge round backstage without having completed the correct paperwork was quite another.

‘We’ll need to do an inventory of valuables,’ she snapped. ‘You might know him, but I don’t, and if he’s been walking round here unsupervised then who knows what he’s been up to?’

‘Of course,’ said Hattie. ‘He’s called Eoin Norell. He’s a playwright. Or at least, he was. I don’t know if he still is. He was a techie before that. I’m sure he wasn’t up to any mischief but… well, far better to be thorough, eh?’

That last suggestion was uttered without conviction and simply to appease Donna, who agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment. The pair started retracing their steps, with Donna pointing out the various things in the theatre that were both potentially valuable enough to steal and not bolted down. Of these there were fairly few. With the exception of various bits of uniformly bulky and heavy technical kit, more or less everything you found backstage in a typical theatre was flimsy, knackered, and held together with string. But they diligently checked everything anyway.

Nothing was amiss, and Donna’s agitation gradually lessened as each new area was discovered to be as it should (it takes some skill to detect agitation in a stage manager’s face, but Hattie knew the signs). Once they had completed a full sweep of the ground level Donna said, ‘All right. I think we’re all set. Let’s just check the fly floor, then we can get in a quick bite of food before the half.’

Hattie glanced up apprehensively at the vertical ladder leading up from stage right, unsure that her duff hip would forgive her for such exertion, and was quietly relieved when Donna led her through a door stage left, where a small stairwell offered them a more sedate ascent.

There wasn’t much to the fly floor, comprising as it did a C-shaped, scaffold-railed steel walkway running along the sides and back of the stage at a height of around twenty feet. On one side was a counterweighted pulley system that allowed an operator to hoist scenery up and down between the fly tower above and the stage below. On the other were banks of connectors from which a spaghetti of cabling sprouted, leading to the lights and speakers mounted at all angles on every point that allowed a purchase. At both ends of the ‘C’ the walkway widened to form little booths nestling in the upstage shadow of the big proscenium arch. The near one of these was a storage space containing cables, spare lanterns, and several bolts of thick black cloth. Nothing here appeared to have been disturbed.

They ambled round to the far booth, which on first glance was empty save for a shelf on one side containing an assortment of cast iron blocks used as counterweights for the scenery pulleys, and an extremely large, heavily padded, black leather armchair with a set of buttons built into the armrest. It had seen better days, and was patched at various places with gaffer tape. This was evidently the massage chair Donna had mentioned. It was positioned oddly in the room, sitting a good foot forward from the wall, not leaving much room for anything else.

‘Oh God, Lel!’ said Donna abruptly, and rushed forward.

She knelt on the floor, and Hattie suddenly saw why the chair wasn’t up against the wall. Poking out from behind it on one side were two legs, and from the other was a head. Hattie felt herself assailed by a twin surge of both horror and déjà vu as her eyes made sense of the scene, and she realised that the owner of these extremities, stuffed as he was behind the chair, was completely still, twisted at a horribly unnatural angle, and covered in blood.

Act One

1

We have thus established that, dialectically speaking at least, theatre IS trauma. How do we, as practitioners, respond to this? Must we turn every rehearsal into a traumatic experience? No. Rather, we bring with us into the rehearsal room the trauma that we ourselves embody, in order that, through performance, we may release it. Thankfully it is a commodity of which there is no short supply.

– From Advanced Theatre Practice by Jala Senguel, MA

‘I wish I could tell you that you’ll all be successful. You all deserve to be. You’ve fought for this, and you’ll keep fighting. I know you will.

‘It’s easy to read the statistics, as an actor, and be downhearted. And look, I can’t promise that you’ll all make it. Of course I can’t. But what I can tell you is this: hard work does pay off. You have to throw yourself into it every single day, but it pays off.’

‘What a pile of absolute badger todgers,’ muttered Rod, and Hattie, sitting next to him, had to suppress an involuntary snort.

They were in the back row of a bank of seats temporarily installed on the stage of the main auditorium at ACDA, west London’s most prestigious drama school. (The new principal was known not to be hugely fond of this epithet and had drily noted that, west London not being famed for the quantity of its drama schools, such a geographical restriction somewhat lessened the impact of any superlative. However, RADA, squatting over central London, cast a long shadow, being older, more famous, larger, better funded, and with a richer history of turning out successful actors. So ACDA made do with whatever claims it could make that managed to avoid direct comparisons with its higher-profile neighbour, and the students and faculty consoled themselves with the thought that at least they weren’t as snobby and self-satisfied as they imagined the dreadful RADA lot to be.)

Today was a big day in the ACDA annual diary: today the final-year students were graduating. To mark the occasion the whole school, along with many tearful mums and dads, had squeezed itself into the main auditorium for a ceremony that tried to mimic the pomp of graduations at more academic institutions but couldn’t quite bring itself to submit to anything so dry as caps and gowns, certificates and scrolls, handshakes and bows. Instead, the graduating actors performed scenes from their showcase productions from earlier in the term: those with the best singing voices boomed out a couple of full-throated Sondheim renditions; the stage combat specialists got over-excited and narrowly avoided taking chunks out of the building with assorted mediaeval weaponry; and the most talented dancers among them did their best while implicitly reminding everyone that dance wasn’t really ACDA’s forte.

And the stage management and technical theatre students… sat there. No one wanted to defuse the energy of the day with a showcase of lighting techniques, or a demonstration of exotic sound effects.

But no matter. When the performances were done, at which point everyone felt in need of a breather, Principal Jolyon Jones was wheeled on to say a few encouraging words about how well the school had done in getting the students this far, and hint that they should remember ACDA should they ever be in a position to make philanthropic donations in future.

And, as was traditional, they also got a successful ACDA alum to make a speech. This year’s was a barrel-chested man with hair trimmed short, a loud shirt, and unexpectedly tight jeans. He had recently had a recurring role in a BBC police drama that had been cruelly overlooked in the latest crop of BAFTA nominations. This was the man whose confident assertion that ‘hard work pays off’ was earning him inspired smiles from the acting students and murmured derision from Rod, the senior sound tutor.

‘I dunno,’ Hattie murmured back. ‘At least badger todgers have a purpose.’

‘Two purposes,’ pointed out Rod with a chuckle that was loud enough to turn heads in front.

‘Hush, you,’ Hattie hissed. She was well aware that Rod already had a reputation for being a troublemaker, and Hattie was on her way to being tarred with the same brush. Rod deserved his reputation, Hattie thought, being a cantankerous old git who didn’t pay nearly enough mind to what other people thought of him. Hattie wasn’t a cantankerous old git, she’d simply made friends with one. Sitting at the back and leaning into their perceived roles as the two old codgers of the technical department was fun and all, but if Mark, their head of department, caught them at it, he’d give them a Look and possibly a Talking To, and Hattie had been hoping to make it to the end of term without any more of those.

Either way, Rod was right: it was a brutally unfair industry, whatever Mr Barrel-chest said. It was estimated by the number-crunchers that a full three quarters of all those actors who graduated from a drama school in the UK would never once in their lives receive a professional pay cheque for their craft. And by this point, on graduation day, several fates had already been sealed: some, by dint of their performances in the showcase productions, had managed to attract the attention of a decent agent, and had a shot at being put up for serious roles on stage and screen. The rest would have to spend the next couple of years desperately trying to find some other way of getting onto the industry’s radar, be it through fringe shows, the lottery of open casting calls, or relentless networking. And even the ones who had agents already were no shoo-in. If their looks were too distinctive there’d be very limited roles they’d be put up for. Too generic and they’d be drowned in a sea of hungry competitors for every audition.

It was cruel, Hattie thought, for one of the lucky ones who’d happened to make it to tell this lot that all it came down to was hard work. Because the majority of them, who didn’t make it, who would one day have to make the painful decision to walk away from the dream, would forever hear this pillock’s voice in their head asking them if their failure was their own fault, if really it was because they hadn’t tried hard enough.

‘Look,’ whispered Rod, gesturing with a meaty finger at one of their students. ‘I think Tina’s pissed already. Couldn’t even wait until after the ceremony. She’s almost falling off her chair!’

Hattie shushed him and pushed his hand down. ‘Stop distracting me,’ she whispered back, although she’d barely heard a word of the speech in the last five minutes, so deeply had she been distracted by her own thoughts. She looked over at the newly minted batch of acting graduates. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. And that was just the actors. Things were even worse if you wanted to be a director, or a writer, or, God help you, a composer…

Ah. That was it. That was why she was in such a black mood, and so dismissive of the speech and so down on the industry as a whole. It was because at the back of her mind she was thinking about a composer. A composer, indeed, by the name of Lel, whose career penning musicals had been beginning to take off, only to be cut short in the most tragic circumstances.

Hattie gave an involuntary shudder, masked by a very deliberate shake of the head. Now was not the time to dwell on such thoughts. She turned her gaze towards her lot: the techies. They, at least, would have an easier time of it. Not because the work was easy: far from it. But because the work was there to be had. And more importantly, because once you were in work there was no concept of ‘making it’ as a techie. A tiny paid gig in a fringe theatre counted for no less than calling the show on opening night at the National, or the O2. You weren’t constantly competing to get more prestigious roles in more prestigious shows, hoping to hit the ‘big time’, because there was no big time: the money was terrible no matter where you worked. No, professional development was about, every day, trying to do a better job than you’d done the day before. That was all. Which wasn’t to say that this latest batch would all stay the course. Some of them had already realised that they weren’t up to scratch as a techie, and were even now planning their exits from the industry. Some of them hadn’t realised it yet, but Hattie was grimly confident that they would have that realisation thrust upon them soon enough. They might get hired once, but they were unlikely to get hired twice.

Some of them would be fine, though. And anyway, no matter what the future held, today was as much about celebrating their collective survival through two intensive, arduous years of training. Hattie wouldn’t begrudge them a day of joy, even the numpties.

The speech wound to an end, gaining a standing ovation for the speaker (it was a drama school after all – you barely had to sneeze to have people leaping to their feet and shouting ‘Bravo!’). The ceremony morphed into a drinks reception, and soon enough Hattie found herself gravitating towards a cluster of her departmental colleagues: Rod, construction tutor Shane, Angharad from the lighting department, and Mark, the head of technical training. Hattie, who had spent much of the last week in a daze, found her attention kept wandering. With a frown she tried to drag it back to the conversation around her.

‘… really feel the collective energy,’ Shane was saying. ‘You know?’

‘If we could harness the collective energy of a gaggle of acting students somehow, we could power the whole building and sell the excess to the national grid. Maybe we could make a profit for once,’ observed Mark.

‘When you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll stop worrying about money,’ put in Rod. ‘It has a way of cropping up whenever it’s truly needed.’

‘At this rate I won’t get the chance to be here as long as you have: I’m not sure ACDA will survive that long,’ was Mark’s rejoinder.

Rod raised an eyebrow and exchanged a brief glance with Hattie. Everyone let their guard down a little bit on graduation day, but even so, Mark was never normally this forthcoming, or this gloomy, about ACDA’s finances. Was this a sign that things were genuinely bad?

Hattie was still trying to find the words to probe Mark more on this topic when a trio of newly graduated stage managers bustled up to them, all three of them giddy with triumph and the help of several glasses of the fizz that had been laid on to mark the occasion.

‘So,’ one of them began with a waggled eyebrow. ‘What’s the goss?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Mark.

‘The goss. The latest. The inside line. Come on, we’re not students any more, you don’t have to be all professional around us. What’s the stuff you’ve not been telling us?’

The tutors exchanged blank looks.

‘Sorry,’ said Hattie. ‘I’m afraid we’re all very boring people, really.’

‘Well that’s not actually true, is it? Hattie, you’ve got some massive gossip haven’t you?’ announced Angharad.

‘Do I? Oh… I don’t know that—’ Hattie began, but Angharad, perhaps in subtle retribution for being labelled as ‘boring’ by Hattie just now, was already away: ‘You heard about the Revue last week? The dead body? Hattie was there.’

‘What, when they found it?’ asked a student, breathlessly.

‘Not just when they found it. She was on stage while he was being murdered. And the guy who did it ran past Hattie as he was escaping!’ Angharad exclaimed. She was the member of the technical tuition team whom Hattie knew least, but what Hattie did know of her, she didn’t really like: Angharad was a shameless scandalmonger, for one thing, and while Hattie liked scandal as much as anyone, she felt there was a time and a place for such things, and a time and a place for discretion.

‘Seriously?’

All three students looked awestruck at Hattie, making her feel deeply uncomfortable.

‘Well, no… it wasn’t like that…’

It was like that, though. It hadn’t taken long for the police to join the dots: the sounds Hattie and Donna heard up on the fly floor while they were on stage; Eoin’s appearance out of nowhere and his rush to get away. When it was confirmed that the dead man was the composer Lel Nowak, the police asked no further questions. They were quite sure they knew exactly what had happened.

Which irked Hattie. It had been a long time since she had last placed her trust in a police officer, and on the whole she considered that if you were looking for the truth, a good place to start was considering the complete opposite of whatever the plods said. For example, by the time they’d arrived and rounded up everyone in the building (including large numbers of company members who had started to trickle in in advance of the evening performance), a quick audit of the sign-in sheet showed that Colin McDermot, who had signed in before Lel had died and not signed out again, was missing from the building. But once they’d heard Donna’s story about Eoin, had they even followed up with that? Not as far as Hattie could tell. In fact, they’d seemed to treat the whole thing as a tick-box exercise. Which wasn’t just lazy, it was also pretty disrespectful to the victim, in Hattie’s book.

‘That poor man,’ Hattie found herself murmuring. Although she wasn’t entirely sure, she realised guiltily, that she was thinking about Lel when she said it.

When it became clear that Hattie wasn’t going to divulge any sordid details, the over-excited graduates soon lost interest and the talk turned to other topics. Hattie allowed herself to peel away from the group and gently drift to the edge of the room, and then out into a corridor and back to the quiet of the stage management office. She wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

What it came down to, she found herself thinking, was a disconnect. On one side of it was a straightforward, if rather grim, story: Eoin Norell and Lel Nowak had, for many years, had a creative partnership, creating shows together where Eoin wrote the script and lyrics, and Lel wrote the music. Their work had received some critical acclaim but no commercial success. Then, in recent years, Lel had started to make friends in higher places in the industry and found work with other collaborators, work that led to bigger shows, more recognition, and finally a bit of genuine income. Meanwhile Eoin, left to his own devices, had languished in obscurity. They had met up backstage at the Revue, home to Lel’s latest project, The Guilty. Eoin, driven perhaps by frustration, by resentment, by a misplaced sense of betrayal, had attacked and killed Lel, clumsily shoving his body behind an armchair to try to conceal his crime before making a break for it through the stage door and disappearing into the night. He would, doubtless, soon be apprehended, charged and convicted, and justice would be served.

That was the story on one side. But on the other side… on the other side was a rather different story. A story, pulled from deep in Hattie’s memory, about an unusual young man, troubled certainly, but hugely kind and compassionate, who had escaped a life of abuse, finding solace in the theatre. A story about a friendship that had been formed, but then allowed to dwindle, until a chance meeting years later had raised the heartening possibility of rekindling it, only for that possibility to be immediately snatched away.

These stories were both, apparently, true. And both revolved around the same central character. But try as she might, Hattie couldn’t reconcile the two of them in her head. Like two magnets with matching poles pointing towards one another, they just wouldn’t stick together.

It didn’t help that the discovery of the body had also ended Hattie’s hopes for a proper theatre gig. It was selfish, she knew, but when Donna had got in touch to ask her to cover for her for a week at the Revue Hattie had jumped at the chance. She hadn’t had a proper gig since her slightly ill-fated work at the Tavistock the previous autumn, and while tutoring students was fine, it didn’t quite scratch the itch Hattie had. She’d been aching to get back out there, even if it was only for a week. Now the Revue was a crime scene, for the very worst sort of crime, and the police and the producers had agreed to suspend the show for seven days, with performances resuming on the day that Donna had intended to return to work anyway.

And then Geoffrey had said he would ring Hattie the next day, but he never did, so she got her hopes up for nothing.

She was interrupted from her thoughts by a knock on the office door. After a second it opened, and in poked the head of Abua, one of the new graduates. A quiet and cerebral young man, he had worked hard over the course of his training, performing respectably in all technical departments, but excelling at stage management and earning himself a distinction as his overall grade (not that anyone in the industry cared remotely about what kind of qualification you had, Hattie always noted, but still, it offered driven ones like Abua some well-deserved validation of their efforts). He should be as jubilant as anyone today, and no one would think the less of him for spending the afternoon getting royally plastered. Yet here he was, skulking into the SM office, a look of anxious despondence on his face.

‘Hullo, lovely,’ Hattie greeted him warmly. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I just wanted… Er hi, I mean. How are you?’

Hattie smiled. ‘I’m very well, thanks. How about you?’

‘I’m good, I’m… I just wanted to ask you something. If that’s okay?’

‘Of course! Come on in.’

Abua shuffled into the room and closed the door, then hovered nervously for a few moments, seemingly marshalling his thoughts.

‘I just wanted to ask… You’ve been so helpful to me, and I’ve learned so much from you, so… thank you. I guess that’s the main thing. I wanted to say thank you.’

‘Well, you’re welcome,’ said Hattie, flushing slightly. ‘You’ve been a pleasure to teach, and I think you have the makings of an excellent stage manager.’

‘I know, but… I mean, uh, that’s very kind of you to say so. Thank you.’

There was an awkward pause. The young man clearly had something else he wanted to say, but for now his nerve seemed to have failed him.

‘Are you happy to have graduated?’ asked Hattie, knowing it was a daft question, but unable to think of anything else to fill the silence.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Abua. ‘I mean, it’s been hard work, and it’s nice to have a qualification to show for it.’

‘Just remember, the qualification is just a piece of paper. What matters is what’s up here,’ said Hattie, tapping her temple. ‘Once you’re out in the industry, people will only care about whether you’re a safe pair of hands. It’s all about getting on. Getting on with the job and getting on with the people around you. But you’re good at both, so you’ll be fine.’

‘Um… yeah. Thanks.’

Somehow everything Hattie said seemed to be making Abua more miserable. He was now practically in tears.

Hattie frowned. ‘Abua, what’s going on? What am I missing?’

‘I just… I was just wondering… what if I didn’t go into the industry? I just don’t think I’m cut out for it. Maybe. I thought maybe I’d be better off doing something else entirely. Like recruitment, maybe.’

Hattie suppressed a snort. ‘Abua, I don’t know much about the world outside theatre, but I do know this: you’d be wasted as a recruiter.’

‘I know, but… I mean, I just…’

He tailed off, and it finally started to click for Hattie: he was terrified. He wouldn’t be the first. ACDA worked its students hard, but they were still in one sense coddled by the safety of a college environment. The ‘real world’ could seem a very scary place. Hattie felt a wash of protective feelings surge through her as she considered this poor student of hers, at the threshold of a new career and dreading it. He was so young, after all. Still just a boy really.

‘Oh Abua, don’t worry, it won’t be as bad as you think.’

‘No?’

‘No. I promise you. I know it seems scary for now, but you’ll get through it. And I’ll tell you how and all: one day at a time. Right?’

Abua nodded, uncertain. Hattie continued. ‘You’ve got something lined up over the summer, haven’t you? Was it the Donmar?’

‘The Young Vic,’ he murmured.

‘Well then. Your first day will be fine. They’re a bunch of sweethearts at the Young Vic, they’ll be sure to ease you in slow. Your second day will be fine too, but we’re not worrying about that yet. Just think about the first day first, and I promise you, the first day is nothing to worry about. Now, I’m going to give you my number. At the end of your first day, you’re going to call me and tell me how it went. And then we’ll talk about the second day. Okay?’

‘Thank you,’ he sniffed, and Hattie realised his eyes were wet with tears.

‘That’s no problem. And if at any point you need a chat, you just let me know. I’m not your tutor any more, but we look out for each other in this industry. If you need anything, you tell me about it, and I’ll see what I can do.’

It took a few more encouraging words to get him smiling again, but eventually, newly armed with her phone number, Abua left her office with the stated intention of rejoining the celebrations with his fellow graduates, and Hattie allowed herself to relax. She didn’t find that the pastoral side of stage management, and in particular of stage management tutoring, came naturally to her. But she’d never considered that a reasonable excuse not to do her best when she was called upon. Abua was perhaps a little quiet, perhaps a little shy, but all of that could be overcome. What he needed now was just a little bit of help taking the first steps, and if Hattie was in the right place at the right time to provide that help, then her duty was clear.

The noise from the drinks reception on the other side of the building, which had been steadily getting louder as the alcohol continued to flow freely, had now reached a pitch that confirmed to Hattie that she had no desire to rejoin the proceedings. So she gave the office a little tidy, picked up her bag and keys and let herself out from the ACDA back entrance.

2

There was a young woman loitering outside ACDA as Hattie stepped onto the pavement. She was short, stocky and stylishly dressed, with a broad, ruddy face and her copper hair in a high ponytail. She started slightly when she caught sight of Hattie and looked as though she was about to offer a greeting, but then, seemingly changing her mind at the last moment, shrank back.

Hattie, who didn’t recognise the girl in the slightest, considered this behaviour somewhat odd but not noteworthy and would have thought no more about it except that, at the tube station a few minutes later, waiting for her train, she looked along the platform and saw the same girl hovering awkwardly a few yards further down. Hattie smiled at her, and the girl smiled shyly back. They enjoyed no further interactions on the platform, and when the next train arrived they got on in silence and sat down at opposite ends of the same carriage.

It’s easy, in moments such as this, to let your imagination run away with you. Hattie, though she took a quiet pride in being sensible and down-to-earth, nevertheless sometimes found the anxious part of her mind indulging in bizarre paranoid fantasies. In this case, fully aware of how absurd the notion was, she found herself imagining that this girl was following her, and in her mind’s eye pictured the girl getting off at the same stop when Hattie needed to change lines, then following her onto the new train, then tailing her out of the station and all the way back home, leading to a confrontation, maybe even an altercation, outside her front door.

Even the most paranoid part of Hattie’s psyche struggled to come up with a credible motive for the girl: she didn’t look remotely like either a mugger, a terrorist or a lunatic. She mostly looked embarrassed, and a little worried. She kept looking up and briefly making eye contact with Hattie, then looking away again. Hattie thought this was a tad suspicious until she realised that the only reason the girl kept making eye contact was that she, Hattie, was now continually staring at girl. No wonder the poor thing looked worried and embarrassed.

Hattie chastened herself for her rudeness and resolved not to look in the girl’s direction for the remainder of the journey. She told herself to stop being so silly and forced herself to think of other things.

It was with a great deal of surprise, therefore, that Hattie, having changed to the District Line at Earl’s Court, discovered that the girl really had followed her off the first train and onto the second. The surprise turned to alarm when the girl alighted at Chiswick Park, just like Hattie. And when, two streets’ walk from the tube station, the girl was still shuffling along behind Hattie at a few yards’ distance, the alarm gave way, very suddenly, to anger. Hattie found herself, abruptly, stopping dead, turning on her heel and marching up to the girl.

‘Oi!’ she snapped. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but stop it. Do you understand? Just sod off. Go on!’

‘Sorry!’ cried the girl, cringing.

The sudden spike of adrenaline was already wearing off and faced with such a submissive response, Hattie found it hard to stay cross.

‘Look… what are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m really sorry it’s just that Geoffrey didn’t know your address and he told me to find out and I’ve just started and I didn’t want to let him down and ACDA wouldn’t tell me and I couldn’t think of another way so I followed you and I’m really sorry please don’t tell him!’ blurted out the girl, all in a rush, in a high-pitched Mancunian accent. Then her face crumpled up and she started to cry.

‘Oh… bother,’ said Hattie. ‘Look, I’m… well I won’t say I’m sorry, because I’m not sure I am, but I’m… my flat’s just round the corner. Come and have a cuppa.’

It took a strong cup of tea, three Hobnobs and several careful words of comfort before the girl, who turned out to be called Lorna, was ready to be coaxed into a fuller explanation of her actions. But when she was, Hattie managed to gather the basics of her story: she had secured a three-week work experience placement with Geoffrey Dougray’s production company. She considered this role, despite being entirely unpaid, to be a much vauntable position, as she was apparently chosen out of a pool of over two hundred applicants (all of them, Hattie imagined, bright young things looking to make their way in the world of theatre and hoping that some of the Dougray magic would rub off on them if they could spend enough time in his presence).

Her first day had been all about making cups of tea, stapling, tidying and so on, and as is so often the case with work experience, from her second day onwards no one could think of anything actually useful for her to do, so she mostly sat in the corner trying to look keen. But on the third day Geoffrey’s assistant, Louise, said that the big man wanted to track down Hattie’s postal address, and this assistant had decided that this was a task that could be delegated to Lorna.

Lorna had trawled through the contacts database and the old address books in the stationery cupboard but drawn a blank. Terrified of having to admit failure to Geoffrey’s assistant, certain that any chance at turning the work experience into a paid internship or even a proper job one day would evaporate the moment such an admission were made, she had decided to show her initiative and Googled Hattie. That had led her, logically and then geographically, to ACDA, outside which she had loitered for an hour before recognising Hattie as she came out from the back entrance of the main building.

‘Did you consider that you could have just asked me?’ asked Hattie, trying not to sound too reproachful.

‘I lost my nerve,’ said Lorna. ‘I thought you might say no and get angry with me.’

‘I… well, next time maybe consider it. I’d much rather be asked where my home is by a stranger than followed back to it by one.’

The girl nodded, earnestly.

‘I don’t suppose you know why Geoffrey wanted to get hold of me?’ Hattie added, a note of hopefulness entering her voice unbidden.

‘I think it has to do with the workshop for… Oh! No, sorry, I can’t say,’ yelped Lorna, her hands flying up to her face.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s… it’s confidential. Everything in the office is. They gave me a whole talk about it. I hadn’t realised just how secretive they have to be. Someone actually broke into the office at the beginning of the week, but didn’t take anything. They think it was a journalist or something, trying to sniff out what Geoffrey’s next project will be. Anyway, I’m not allowed to say anything, basically. To anyone.’