The Fourth Reel

It was past midnight, and the lane behind the theatre was the coldest place in the town. Rattray Street runs steeply down to the harbour here, and the lane cuts across the slope behind the houses, a gutter of wet flagstones between a brick wall and the blind side of a warehouse. One gas lamp stood at the corner and did what it could with the rest of it. The back of the theatre went up sixty feet into the dark without a window in it — nine hundred seats in there, and from the lane you would have taken the whole building for a coal store. Halfway along, a lamp burned over a door, and under the lamp a constable stamped his feet.

The door stood open a hand's breadth. Inside it, on a stool set against the wall where the draught could not reach him, sat a man past sixty in a peaked cap and a coat too heavy for indoors, with a ruled notebook shut on his knee and his thumb still holding the place. Tom Bree, night fireman to the house, forty years in theatres and eleven in this one. It was he who had gone round at five to twelve on the second of his fire rounds, found what he found at the end of the front passage, and run out to the police box at the corner in his shirtsleeves.

Every man who comes through this door goes into the book, he said, and every man who goes out, with the hour against him; and I should have the book and welcome, but I had better see the office first while it was as he left it. He took a hurricane lantern down off its nail and went ahead of me.

Behind the stage the air had the particular cold of a place that has been full of people and is empty. We came down a short flight into the pit, where the music stands stood folded under a dust sheet and a kettledrum wore a cover like a tea cosy, and up again past the orchestra rail into the stalls. The house smelt of dust and orange peel. Nine hundred seats stood up in the dark on either side of us in rows, and every one of them was empty, and the lantern ran along the backs of them as we went. Through the doors at the top, across the front lobby, and down a passage behind it; and at the end of the passage one door stood open with gas burning inside. It was the only lit room in the building.

Hugh Tarrant lay face down beside his own desk, a big man of sixty-four in his shirtsleeves with his coat still on the back of the chair, and the back of his head had been opened twice. The poker from the grate lay on the hearthrug a yard from his hand, and the police surgeon knelt over him with his bag open on the boards. Beyond them the door of the safe in the corner stood wide, and the safe was not empty. Four canvas bags sat on the shelf of it with the week's takings in them, banked on Mondays, three hundred and forty pounds, and the seals on them had not been touched.

On the blotter, squared up to the edge of the desk, lay a long ruled sheet headed for Saturday, with the day's houses set out on it line by line and a column of figures down the right-hand edge. It was written throughout in one hand, a small upright clerk's hand, and at the fourth line that hand simply stopped, short of the figure, with the ink no heavier at the end than it was anywhere else. Down the right-hand column ran a row of tick marks in blue pencil, one against each figure, and the ticks came down to the line where the writing stopped and no further. The blue pencil itself lay under the desk against the skirting, where a foot might have sent it.

The visitor's chair had been drawn up close to the desk and left there, square to it, not pushed back. On the floor beside it lay an india-rubber and a bundle of ticket slips with a band round them. The window was shut and its catch was over, and the catch was stiff with old paint. There is no other way into that office. It has one door, and the door gives on the passage behind the front lobby, and the front doors of the lobby are barred from the inside when the house is clear.

I asked Bree whose hand the sheet was in. Miss Slane's, he said, out of the box office; the constable had fetched her from her lodgings an hour ago and she was sitting in the front lobby now with her coat on. Beside the desk, under the edge of it, stood a leather document case with two straps buckled over the flap. I left it buckled. Nothing on that desk was to be moved, I told the constable, until they had taken Tarrant out of the room.