The Roar of the Crowd Read online

  I had dressed, cleaned my dresser top (one chore a day keeps the hoarder at bay), eaten a poached egg on toast, and was just beginning to pack up my backpack for my hike to the park when Iain called me back.

  “Randy? What can I do for you?” He sounded muted, as if he was speaking near people he didn’t want knowing his business. I mentally pushed myself not to whisper back at him. I, after all, could speak up just fine.

  “Hey, Iain. Thanks for returning the call. I was hoping to get together with you sometime today. Do you have any time later?”

  “I could meet for lunch, if you like.”

  “I’m going to be down in Hawrelak Park, but if you don’t mind driving there, I could meet you outside the theatre compound.”

  “Sure. Around 11:30 I’ll be driving through Timmy’s, so I’ll pick you up something, too. Head over to a table riverside, before the second turn. I’ll find you.” He hung up before I could agree, offer to pay for lunch or tweak the plans. Well, maybe that’s what it took to climb the ranks in law enforcement. Steve, I knew, was in so many ways an anomaly to the average police detective.

  Not having to pack a lunch made things a whole lot easier for me, and pretty soon I was strolling down 84 Avenue, humming “What’s New, Buenos Aires” from Evita. I sometimes rode my bike to the park, rolling it down the ridge built in the stairs for such, but the thought of pushing it back up the hill after a full day of work made me choose walking instead. There was a parking lot in the park we could use, except on the weekend when the world triathlon event took place. During the run of the plays, the city had a shuttle bus that ran from the LRT station at the Health Sciences stop to the park, but it was only a twenty-minute walk from my door, which was the best choice of all.

  Coming at the amphitheatre from the south end of the park rather than the pathway leading from the parking lot, I could see the backstage area through the chain-link fencing. Green mesh was strung along the inside to allow some privacy from the picnickers and paddleboaters, but if you squinted you could see movement and general activity. I could see a tall, angular fellow I figured must be James Kirkpatrick and a little bustling person I knew had to be Micheline. I strode across the green space and circled around to the side gate near the dummy-locked entrance. I let myself in and popped my backpack into the trailer, which was for the moment empty.

  All the top-of-the-hill tents were in place, and the set was shimmering silver in the summer morning light. I had a mad urge to do some yoga there in the quiet calm of the morning, which would have been a great idea if I’d been wearing less constrictive jeans or if I knew any yoga poses. Just then, Micheline appeared from the back of the amphitheatre. She caught sight of me and waved.

  “Randy! Good morning! Just the person I was hoping to see.” She climbed the slight rise that was the natural amphitheatre of the site and met me near the merchandise tent. “Beautiful morning, no?” She looked around brightly, as if she had created it herself. “Are you hectic busy with things for your camps this morning?”

  “I was going to write up the note to the parents and create the name-tag lanyards for the campers, all the stuff to hand out the first day, but I still have time. Why, what did you need me for?”

  “Kieran has been riding my ass to get the front-of-house storage out of the green room. Their props table this summer is more complex and he wants things spread out a bit more. So I need to cart all those boxes of programmes and the extra merchandise cartons up to the locking bin in the back of the ladies’ washroom.”

  “Sure, sounds good. Just show me what and where, and I can haul stuff.”

  “You’re a lifesaver. It’s not all that heavy, but it’s bulky and there is a lot of it. I’m thinking we’ll lock it all up in the mesh cage where they store the toilet paper, and just take out one box per show to the trailer.”

  We had been walking back to the green room beneath the stage as she spoke, and I nodded at Christian Norgaard, who was standing off to the side of the lower walk, having a cigarette. Honestly, for artists whose bodies were their palettes and instruments, actors were notoriously self-destructive. In a world where fewer and fewer people smoked, the only people I knew who maintained the habit were all actors.

  Micheline took me through the doors and pointed to the pile of cartons to the right, near the couches. They were nowhere near the props tables, as far as I could see. Micheline must have read my body language, or I was getting telepathic in my middling years, because she hurriedly pointed to the ironing board and sewing machine and said, “Kieran thinks we can move this stuff over where the boxes and bins are stored and enable one more table to go there in their place.”

  I shrugged and hefted a box of programmes. They were heavy enough to warrant carrying only one at a time, but compact enough that a short walk up the hill to the indoor washrooms set into the hillside wouldn’t be an utter hardship. I could count it as my exercise for the day. Screw yoga.

  More and more of the cast arrived for their penultimate rehearsal day as I lugged boxes up the hill. I was on a nodding acquaintance with most of them, so it didn’t feel too uncomfortable to keep wandering in and out of the green room where actors of both sexes were in various states of undress. Christian was now playing cribbage with Troy O’Donnell, and Maureen Shannon was standing in her underwear discussing a quick change into fishnet tights during the first act. Aside from the occasional nod, no one paid me any attention.

  It was nearly noon by the time I had all the cartons of programmes stacked up on one side of the chain-link cage and the five plastic tubs of touristy merchandise like tee-shirts, travel mugs, and lap blankets stacked on the other. I dusted my hands, used the toilet since I was there, and washed up as thoroughly as possible in the icy cold running water provided. While it was nice not to have to rely on porta-potties in the park, the facilities weren’t exactly extravagant.

  I walked purposefully to the trailer to retrieve my backpack before Micheline could think up another task for me. While it was true that I had four workdays before the first camp began, I was pretty sure my presence down on the site was making Micheline dream up chores. There were things I still had to prepare for the campers, their parents, and my peace of mind, and it would likely have been a whole lot easier on all of us if I had been allowed to keep working from home. Kieran was one of those micromanaging types, though, who needed to see people at work rather than just the work delivered, so I needed to be on site as much as possible. I was just as happy to print the material here on the festival’s paper budget than have to submit claims on top of my grant-fed salary. And it helped to keep my eyes open for Denise’s sake, too. Since I was satisfied that she hadn’t jealously murdered Eleanor, and I couldn’t imagine her death being an anonymous piece of jogging rage, it was likely that someone else here had been the murderer. If the police weren’t going to look in this direction, it would have to be me.

  I just hoped I didn’t look too obvious. Someone here had already killed to get whatever it was they wanted from Eleanor, most likely to get her out of the way. It would be just as easy to kill a second time, I figured. Of course, what did I know? Maybe that sort of thing got harder as the chance of being understood and forgiven got more remote with each compounded sin. Could be, but I didn’t think so. I had the sense that bad habits and evil deeds got easier and easier to justify in your mind, the more you practised them. Just like Christian Norgaard smoking outside the green room doors.

  Could you get addicted to killing people, though? I guessed that was what serial killers were, when you got right down to it. Addicts. And there was no patch or methadone for that sort of thing.

  Just thinking about it made me feel like a sitting duck. I look behind me and all around as I settled myself at one of the picnic tables at the top of the hill. There was just a fence behind me, and I could see anyone coming toward me up the hill from the audience-right seats. People might be able to skulk behind the barbecue tents to the left of me, but they’d have to appear out in the op
en for at least ten yards before reaching my table. I considered myself as safe as possible.

  Besides, the site was buzzing with activity by now. Kieran had called a run-through of all the fight sequences in both plays before a complete run-through of Much Ado. The clanging of sabres was ringing from the stage, and Janine the fight choreographer was calling out critiques from the first row of seats.

  I could see Micheline talking with Maggie, the volunteer coordinator, who was going through some last-minute changes on her roster. I made a note to speak with her later, since I figured we might need a volunteer or three to man the concession tent on the afternoons the campers would be presenting their work to their invited audience of parents and friends.

  I finished off the letter to the parents and hit print, since the site wifi could connect to the printer in the trailer. I would have to haul my laptop inside to run the name tags, though, because I had to feed the dye-cut name cards into the printer by hand. That could wait. The last thing I wanted was to get conscripted again by Micheline.

  Finally, I saw her head down toward the stage, where she joined Kieran and a couple of the actors sitting near Janine, who was now putting Dogberry and his kooky deputies through their paces with Conrad and Borachio.

  I picked up my laptop and made my way to the trailer.

  The name-card paper was in the second drawer I checked and pretty soon I had my camp’s worth of campers printed off. I counted out twenty-two lanyards with plastic casings and headed back out into the warmth of the sunny afternoon to pull apart the tags and create the name tags.

  This time I perched at the picnic table directly in front of the management trailer. I could still see Kieran speaking with the collected cast of Much Ado, who seemed to be in various elements of costume. A familiar-looking woman wearing black from head to toe, with magpie iridescent hair and a couple of tattoos peeking out from the edges of her tee-shirt neck, was setting up a tripod near the stage. Micheline had sent us all a message about Morgana Creely the photographer being hired to track the process, shoot the actors, and provide as much as possible in the way of promotional material. I wondered if she had been to any of the earlier rehearsals as part of her overview project. Maybe she would be worth talking to. Someone watching with no agenda and a wide-angle lens might be just the sort of person to observe untoward relationships occurring on set. Then I recalled Micheline saying she’d only had Eleanor’s headshot glossy for the Sterlings. Maybe Morgana was only on contract for the time we were down in the photogenic park.

  I liked the choices of costume. Coby had gone against the blacks for Don Pedro’s crew and the browns for the householders that had become so common since Kenneth Branagh’s film had solidified them in people’s minds. Instead, Beatrice and Hero and their kinswomen were all in rainbow, hippie-flowing garments, giving Antonio’s household the feel of a California commune crossed with a Renaissance fair, and Benedick and his bunch coming across as West Point–polished soldier boys. The dichotomy was there, and the eye candy of colour on the stage was intoxicating.

  Louise was wearing the headgear that Coby had designed for Eleanor, but as far as I could see, she was still wearing her original costume. I was guessing Eleanor’s doublet would need taking out a bit to fit Louise, and Coby was likely letting her stew. Coby just didn’t like anyone much, as far as I could tell, but there really was no love lost between him and Louise.

  I could see Christian and David talking on the balcony, waiting to work out their swordwork down the staircase. It would be fun to see Janine work with my students, showing them the various ways to telegraph a move in swordplay so that one’s partner could counter it easily while at the same time making it look like violent and dangerous fighting. Even capped, the sabres used were plenty dangerous. I wondered if Detective Gladue had thought to have all the swords counted and tested for blood.

  Of course, stabbing someone to death with a sword that was nearly a metre long would be a bit much. The likelier weapon would be a knife of some sort. I couldn’t imagine someone not being seen carrying a sword in the river valley, either. Mind you, Eleanor might have not been killed where she was found. I wondered if I’d manage to get that information out of Iain over lunch. Thinking about lunch, I checked my watch to see how much time I had before I needed to make my way to the other end of the park to meet him. My stomach was already gurgling a bit, signalling it had to be close to lunchtime.

  I couldn’t imagine carrying a dead Eleanor up or down the steps in order to shove her under the stairs. Surely she must have been killed on the stairs themselves, which would indicate that either she had been followed by someone intending to kill her, or she had happened upon her enemy by accident and provoked him or her to stab her with the weapon to hand.

  More and more people in Edmonton did seem to carry knives. Every couple of weeks you would read about an altercation happening after the bars had closed or in one of the dodgier areas of town. There had even been a poor young man killed on one of the other staircases to the river valley a few years back, just below the beautiful Macdonald Hotel. He had just been left there on the midway platform, though, not shoved under the stairs out of the way.

  I wondered whether or not Eleanor’s body being tidied away meant anything psychologically. Could some profiler figure out who had it in for her by how they had left her body? That got me thinking about the Val McDermid books I’d read, where the profilers tended to get so close to the killers that they were often the final target for the serial killers, no matter what sorts of people those killers had originally targeted.

  Did we have an incipient serial killer at work here in Edmonton? Maybe it was a killer targeting joggers, and the fact that Eleanor was connected to the theatre world was complete coincidence. Of course, we would have to wait to see if either another actor or another jogger was killed to determine what sort of person the serial killer was targeting. Unless it was another actor who jogged. Which would not be impossible; they were for the most part very body conscious, aside from the smoking.

  Theorizing outdoors was giving me a headache. Or maybe it was the sun. I rummaged in my satchel for my sunglasses and glanced at my watch. It was 11:40. I figured I should head over to the end of the park Iain had suggested now, since it would take a bit to walk there, and then a few more minutes to make sure he wasn’t already there, and another few to choose a table where he would see me easily from the park ring road.

  I waved to Micheline and mimed that I was heading out by walking a two-fingered stick man down my other arm and then pointing out and away. She nodded distractedly and continued her discussion with Tracey down near the lip of the stage.

  I shoved the staff gate open far enough to slide through and then slid it back into its fake-locked position. I had to circle around behind the amphitheatre area and cut across the little footbridge across the wetland at the end of the man-made lake that was the central splendour of Hawrelak Park. In the winter, the lake was shovelled off for skating, and one of the park buildings was created as a skate shack complete with a hot chocolate canteen.

  In the summer, paddleboats could be rented at one end of the lake, while fountains, ducks, and Canada geese used the rest of the glassy surface. In the past few years, they had de-icked the lake enough to host the Canadian Triathlon swim portion. The event ran toward the end of June and was the bane of the Shakespeare festival, as it ate into one of their rehearsal weekends down in the park. I had seen the crews setting up running lanes in the parking lot when I arrived in the park earlier and could understand why Kieran had been so rude about the triathlon when he talked about it earlier in the season. There really was no place for playgoers to park, and even if we attracted all bicycling patrons or pedestrians, they’d be hard pressed to make it around all the paraphernalia involved in jumping off one’s bike and running for the lake.

  The paddleboats were in full swing, mostly filled with one parent and one little kid, which tended to make them go around in circles rather than in a stra
ight-ahead trajectory. Kieran and Louise had done a deadly impression at the opening party of Hamlet’s soliloquy being punctuated with the call for “Boat Number Seven, please return to dock,” and now I could hear that same bored loudhailer voice for myself.

  I walked past the paddleboat pond and headed west across the open greensward, where young men played Frisbee with their tee-shirts tucked into the back pockets of their cutoff jeans in some sort of odd mating ritual for the amusement of young women in bikini tops and sweatpants rolled up to the knees and down to the pelvic bones. Feeling like Margaret Mead in Samoa, I trudged along, hoping desperately not to be hit in the head with a Frisbee.

  The best thing to do would be to head for the second turn, which Iain had wanted me not to pass, and work my way backward along the ring road. I was about midway along, by a picnic table devoid of trees nearby but with a great view of the river, when Iain drove up. He parked expertly alongside the site and got out, balancing two coffees stacked in a tower and carrying a brown paper bag from Tim Hortons in the other.

  I took the top coffee and hauled my leg over the bench on one side of the table. Iain sat on the other side and ceremoniously opened the bag, handing out napkins, wrapped bagels slathered with cream cheese, and two pots of soup.

  “They had Italian Wedding Soup, so I thought that would be a good idea,” he said as he handed me a soupspoon. Trust Iain to bring soup to a picnic. I smiled, but had to admit he wasn’t wrong about it being tasty. Neither of us spoke till half our soup was eaten. I was gnawing on my “everything” bagel when Iain began to speak.

  “So, tell me what you want to talk to me about.”