Free Death Comes to the Ballets Russes by David Dickinson

thing?’
    ‘I’m afraid not, my friend, I’m afraid not. Would that such entertainments were within my gift. Alas, that is not the fate I have in mind for you. But it could be worse.’
    ‘What do you mean worse?’ said Johnny darkly. ‘Tell me the truth now.’
    ‘There is a rich City businessman involved in the affair, Johnny. Name of Gilbert, Richard Wagstaff Gilbert. He lives in a big house in Barnes near the pond. He’s very rich. He also happens to be a relation of the dead dancer Alexander Taneyev. He’s his uncle. I want to know all about him.’
    ‘Why? Are you looking for some hot investment tips, Francis? Buy Latin American copper, that sort of thing?’
    ‘Well, you never know when that might come in useful. The first major problem in this case is this: who wasmeant to be the victim? The boy Alexander was the understudy. A much more famous fellow was meant to be dancing the part of the Prince, but he cried off. I know you’re going to ask me why and when he vanished from the stage, as it were, and I can only say that I don’t know yet. I haven’t been able to talk to him. Relations with Diaghilev are a bit frosty at the moment, so that may have to wait even longer. Our friend in Barnes appears to have no children. We know Alexander was his nephew. How many more nephews, cousins, brothers or sisters does our man have? That would be interesting.’
    ‘Francis,’ said Johnny, looking sadly at his friend, ‘you’re getting too devious for your own good. It must be these Russians. I think you suspect that Alexander whatever he’s called might have been Gilbert’s heir. If that is the case, who might the new heir be? He would, certainly, have a strong motive for lurking round the bowels of the opera house with a nasty dagger in his hand. Is that what you want me to find out?’
    ‘It is.’
    ‘Why didn’t you say so at the beginning? I’ll get started right away.’

    Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had recruited a couple of English assistants among the younger members of staff at the Royal Opera House. The elder boy, Jamie, had just started work when the Ballets Russes first appeared in London the year before. He was employed because his father was chief electrician. Jamie could even remember some of the ballet dancers’ names, something the Sergeant thought might be beyond his powers. He, the Sergeant, had bought himself alittle book that claimed to teach you how to speak Russian. The Sergeant realized very quickly that this would be hard work. French, as he used to say to his mother, had always been Greek to him at school. Why did the Russians have to have a different alphabet? Furthermore, why did they have to have so many letters – six more, by the Sergeant’s arithmetic, than the English version? Why did ‘Cc’ sound like ‘s’ in see and ‘Pp’ sound like a rolled ‘r’, for heaven’s sake? It was enough to make a man despair.
    Sergeant Jenkins’ other recruit worked as a stagehand and scene shifter and general dogsbody. Nicholas wanted to be an actor and this was the only job he could find that took him into a theatre. And it was Nicholas who provided the first burst of news from the world of the Ballets Russes, over a pint of bitter at the Lamb and Flag in Rose Street, known as the Bucket of Blood in an earlier century. Jenkins didn’t want the Russians to see the connection between himself and his in-house spies, as he mentally referred to them.
    ‘It was a fight, Sergeant, right in the middle of the stage, must have been about eleven o’clock this morning.’
    ‘Not so fast, my friend. Who was on stage? What were they rehearsing? Who was fighting?’
    ‘Well, from what I heard, I think they were running through a new routine for
Les Sylphides
.’
    Nicholas had a pair of aunts who lived in Brittany, so he had picked up some idiomatic French, including a number of swear words, the precise meanings of which he was unsure.
    ‘That choreographer who shouts at them all the time,