A claustrophobe's bedroom

"Speaking of SOCO," said Miss Flava.  "Isn't it about time we passed this over to them?  This house is getting weirder with every room we go through.  We should let them look over it and find all its little secrets out before we accidentally lose any of them."
"If there are any left," said Playfair.  "Don't forget that we've no idea what Ronald and his belle were up to in the house before we arrived."
"The door was locked," said Miss Flava.  Playfair had started up the stairs, not bothering to check to see if she was following.
"But when?" said Playfair.  He vanished onto the landing at the top of the stairs, leaving Miss Flava stood there wondering to herself if he was right.  If Ronald had had a key then locking the door behind him when he came into the house would be only natural.  They only had his word for how long he'd been there, after all.  Grimacing slightly she hurried after Playfair, telling herself that she had to keep and eye on him and make sure he wasn't adjusting the evidence to suit himself.
At the top the landing had three doors, all of which were ajar, and a second staircase led up again, over the staircase she'd just come up.  Playfair was just coming out of the left-most room.  He shrugged when he saw her.
"Bathroom," he said.  "Small, mean, looks like it might be for guests.  Toilet paper is shiny."  He poked his head round the next door, but didn't bother going in.  "Bedroom, small, mean, single bed, cover looks dusty," he said.  "Ever get the feeling we're on the guest floor?"
"For what guests?" said Miss Flava.  "As I said downstairs when you weren't listening to me–"
"Bedroom, small, meaner, single bed with a bare mattress and a broken lightbulb," said Playfair from the doorway of the third room.  "What was that?"
"I said, when you weren't listening to me I already asked you what guests our magician could have had?"
"Good question.  Single people, I should think.  There's not a double bed in sight."
"This is stupid, Playfair.  The man never had guests!"
"So why does he have guest rooms?"  Playfair started up the second flight of stairs.
"For show?"  Miss Flava knew she was guessing wildly, but she hated Playfair's persistent questions that always seemed to last longer than anyone could keep answering for.
"How very Edwardian," said Playfair, his voice echoing oddly.  "Now, this is interesting."  Miss Flava followed him up the stairs, cursing softly under her breath.  As she ascended she got a sensation of space, and couldn't see any walls through the balusters, so assumed that the landing was abnormally large.  It was only as she reached Playfair that she saw that there were no intervening walls, just a wide open space with concrete supporting pillars.  The floor was carpeted in beige, but otherwise there was almost nothing else up there.
"That's a sleeping bag," she said, pointing to the crumpled pile of satiny-looking fabric in the middle of the floor.  "That's probably a pillow caught up in it."
"Best to check," said Playfair.  He kicked the sleeping bag aside, and a sad, lumpy pillow fell over with a soft, slack sound.
"First attempt at a theatre?" She looked around some more, but found nothing else, not even cupboards or shelves.  The windows had blinds, but they were all drawn up.
"Or a claustrophobe's bedroom," said Playfair.  "I wonder if he ever did any magician-in-a-cabinet tricks."

The cupboard under the stairs

"Don't you think the room's a bit odd?" said Miss Flava, not moving as Playfair started off towards the other door.
"No," he said.  "Come along."
"No, really, Playfair," she said.  "Look at it, it's like it's two rooms in one, a study and a lounge.  But the house is huge, so why would he need to use one room twice like this?"
"Perhaps that little theatre we just came through takes up more space that you think.  Let's look through the rooms, that'll probably tell us how he liked his house laid out."
Miss Flava looked around again, half-convinced that she was missing something about the room.  She thought that the dead magician would be hard put to entertain anyone in here, and even if he did spend his romantic liaisons elsewhere, as Ronald and his sister-in-law had suggested, surely he had to have the occasional visitor.  Even if they were all business?
"Come on!" shouted Playfair from beyond the door.  "I've found the hall!"
She knew that he was being sarcastically enthusiastic, but she found herself hurrying up just a little anyway.  For all he was obnoxious and hard to work with most of the time, she did respect both her boss's incredible ability to annoy everybody and still solve the crime, and she found herself admiring his boundless self-confidence.
The hall was carpeted in beige, had a flight of stairs leading upwards, a door below the stairs, and several doors leading off to either side.  There were no windows, and all the light came from a single, energy-saving lightbulb hanging barely from a frayed cord near the foot of the stairs.  Playfair was stood by the door beneath the stairs.
"Do you believe in witches and wizards, Miss Flava?" said Playfair.  He never called her by her first name, preferring to retain a certain level of formality that she'd long since given up with.
"No," she said.  "Why?"
"Well then, if we open this door and find a nine-year-old boy sitting in here crying and looking lost, we'll be in agreement that it probably isn't Harry Potter."
"Really?  You think the magician is keeping children in the cupboard under the stairs?"
"Keeping an open mind," said Playfair airily.  "Never expect anything."
He opened the door, which stuck a little at first and then pulled free.  No-one came out, so Playfair leaned in and shouted, "Harry Potter?  It's Voldemort, come to get you!"
"Really, Playfair," said Miss Flava, her hands on her hips as she stared at him.  "We're supposed to be investigating a crime scene."
"Yes," said Playfair.  "Which makes this a little interesting, don't you think?"  He stood aside, inviting Miss Flava to come and look inside the cupboard.  There was nothing to see directly through the door, but when she leaned in and looked to the side her eyes widened.  Hanging from a hook in the ceiling, suspended by a rope tied around its neck, was a fully-dressed body.
"It's not real," said Playfair, seeing her reaction.  "The hands are plastic, and the neck is far too thin for a human being, but why would Stormy have this hanging in the cupboard under the stairs?  We know he's got space for props over in his theatre."
Miss Flava swallowed, a slight acid taste in her mouth from her stomach's contraction at the side of a hanged body.  "That's a good question, Playfair," she managed, backing out of the cupboard and away from it.  She stood, catching her breath and relaxing.  "It does look like this wasn't part of any act."
"Right," said Playfair.  "Got a sticker for SOCO?  I think they should pay special attention to this."
"In the car," said Miss Flava.  "I can go and get–"
"No need," said Playfair.  "Just remember it and phone it in before we leave.  Now, where next?"
Miss Flava swallowed again and found her notebook to write down a reminder.  Playfair seemed to have more energy than a battery-operated bunny.

The rest of the house

"What are you expecting to find here?" asked Miss Flava.  She turned her head sideways to look at her boss, but he was concentrating on the corridor ahead.  It was mundane, carpeted in a light green, hard-wearing carpet, and the walls were painted cream where there weren't scrapes and scuffs from things having been carried along it.  At the end they'd come through was the door that Playfair claimed had just popped open of its own accord, and at the other end was a glass-paned door with a white frame.
"Nothing much," said Playfair.  "Judging from the forensics report Stormy was killed too many times to have died here and been taken elsewhere.  It's just about possible, I suppose, that he wasn't killed where he was found, but you'd have to ask yourself why someone would try and kill him again somewhere else."
"Yes," said Miss Flava, wondering not for the first time just how oddly her boss's mind worked.  "That would be a strange thing to think.  Which kind of explains why it's you thinking it, I suspect."
Playfair huffed a little.  "What I'm looking for here is something to tell us what kind of a man Stormy was.  Something so that when we start talking to people we've got things to talk to them about."
He turned the handle on the glass-panelled door, and Miss Flava found herself hoping for a moment that it was locked, but it turned and opened, admitting them to a living room.  It was spacious; there was a wide-screen television on the wall next to where they'd come in, and a leather suite set in a horseshoe shape around it.  Behind that was a table with a stack of papers, some pens, and a steel ruler on it, and behind that was a low bookcase.  As Miss Flava looked around, she found more and more things to look at, as though the room were actually two rooms, each used at different times and unaware of the other's existence.
"Hmm," said Playfair, sitting down on the couch.  "This is a bit close to that screen for comfort."
"For you, maybe," said Miss Flava.  "For all we know, Stormy is short-sighted."
"Was short-sighted," corrected Playfair.  "Well he enjoyed watching television anyway, look at this."  He leaned forward and indicated the slim boxes below the television that provided cable, satellite, and free-to-view television, along with PVR facilities.  "There's games consoles here, too," he said, pointing at another three boxes set a little way off.  "There must be a sea of cables hidden behind all this."
"You think he put them all in himself?"
"No," said Playfair almost immediately.  "It's all too tidy really; I think it was done by a professional so that it's hard to get them all out and mess them up again."
Miss Flava left Playfair to inspect the DVD cupboard and wandered over to the table and bookcase.  On the wall above the bookcase were glass-fronted pictures of men, and the occasional woman, in evening-wear.  Most of the women had the look of 'glamorous assistant' about them, but one or two looked as though they might be the star performer in their own right.  She was about to turn away when one of them caught her eye.
"Playfair!" she called, leaning in a little closer to look at the picture in more detail.  "Come and look at this."
"I hope it's better than these DVDs," said Playfair sounding grumpy.  "I don't think there's anything here that isn't a recording of some show that he's done.  The SOCO boys are going to be really disappointed."
"Look at this," said Miss Flava, tapping the picture with her finger.  "Does she look familiar to you?"
Playfair peered at her, his eyes narrowing slightly as he considered the picture.
"It's the woman with Ronald," he said.  "Bit more meat on her bones in that picture, but it suits her."
"Right," said Miss Flava.  "And look at what's written below it: Angelique Demaître, summer '84.  Looks like there might have been a reason for her thinking that there might be something between herself and Stormy."
"I hope not," said Playfair instantly.  "Otherwise everyone else on this wall becomes a suspect, and some of them look pretty dead."
"You can't tell if someone's died just by looking at a picture of them, Playfair."
"Some of them look dead in their pictures."
"Anyway, if you were her and you knew that you were up on the wall like this, wouldn't you think there was a chance?"
"No," said Playfair. "Not when it's with all these others.  Could just be professional courtesy."
Miss Flava considered pointing out that they both thought that the woman was already slightly delusional but decided not to when she remembered that Playfair seemed almost as disinterested in her as her brother-in-law had been.
"Anything in the papers?" asked Playfair, looking at the books on the bookcase with a look of disgust.  "The books all seem to be magic books."
"Makes sense," said Miss Flava.  "These all seem to be blueprints for something."
"Right," said Playfair.  "I think we can leave this room then.  Where next?"

A little off the top

"A guillotine!" said Miss Flava.  "I wasn't expecting that."
"What were you expecting?" asked Playfair, looking at her as though she were stupid.  "How you could have been expecting anything?"
"Oh leave it be, Playfair," said Miss Flava.  "You know what I meant."
"Sloppy speaking engenders slopping thinking," said Playfair.
"Oh, very Sapir-Whorf," muttered Miss Flava, making sure it wasn't loud enough for Playfair to catch.  "Let's go look at the guillotine then."
The guillotine was a spotlit blade mounted on two tall columns of wood with a thin bar stretched across the top of the two columns.  A rope stretched from the blade of the guillotine to a tying off point on the floor of the stage, around which it was wound in a figure-of-eight.  Beneath the blade was a black padded bench with a floral pillow a little after where the blade would fall.  A piece of shaped wood propped up against the bench looked as though it was intended to fit around the victim's neck, holding their head in place so that the blade could slice cleanly through without being blunted or turned by vertebrae.  On the floor next to the bench, behind it from where Playfair and Miss Flava had been stood in the wings, was a body.  Playfair saw it first, and sped up, while Miss Flava, seeing what her boss had spotted, stopped where she was and pulled her notebook out.
"Anyone we know?" she asked, holding her pen tightly over the pad.
"Not exactly," said Playfair, bent over the body.  "But I think we encountered his head just a little earlier."  He lifted up the chest of the body to reveal that it was headless.  The stump of the neck had little metal contact points and socket junctions instead of veins and bands of muscle.  Miss Flava put her pen away.
"He?" she asked.
"Very definitely male," said Playfair, looking further along the body, which was now clearly just a very lifelike mannequin.  "Either he's needed for some other part of the act, or the Great Stormy has some insecurities."
Miss Flava thought about that for a moment, and decided that she wouldn't like to have to guess.  "OK," she said. "So we have a guillotine on a stage, so it looks like we know what the rehearsal was going to be.  Head's in a cupboard, so perhaps it's not needed for the main trick?"
"We should probably ask Ronald and his dreadful sister," said Playfair. "They were supposed to be here helping with this rehearsal."
"Sister-in-law," said Miss Flava, patiently.  "Right, well, we can do that later unless you think this is important?"
"Everything is important," said Playfair.  "I've told you that, and I keep telling you that."
"Yes," said Miss Flava.  "But at the end it always turns out that some things were much more important than others, and what I really want to know if how to spot them."
"Start off by understanding that everything's important!"
"Shall we carry on looking around?"
They went off the stage the way they'd come, walking back through the prop-room in the corridor and through the sticking door.  They looked at the door that seemed to lead into the rest of the house; it was still locked.
"Do you think Ronald will have a key?"  Playfair was eyeing the door up.
"Possibly," said Miss Flava.  "Why don't you go and see if he's still here?"
"You go," said Playfair.  "You're better at negotiating than I am."
Miss Flava sighed and walked back out to the auditorium.  Calamity was still underneath the table, curled up now and making little doggy dreaming noises, the empty trays next her showing that she'd eaten all of the sandwiches.  Miss Flava shuddered a little, still worried that they might yet have a dead police dog on their hands.  She looked around, and realised that Ronald had managed to leave most of the stuff they'd thought he'd brought with him behind, taking apparently only his sister-in-law and their bags.  She went to the French doors to see if he was still in the carpark, but a thud back where she'd left Playfair had her running back to see what had happened.
Playfair was stood where she'd left him, but the locked door was now swinging open and the lock looked a little bent.
"It opened," said Playfair, smiling as though stunned.  "I was just standing here, and it... well, it opened."
Miss Flava didn't believe him for an instant, but gestured at the open door anyway.
"After you, Sir," she said.

Nosing around

Miss Flava and Playfair left Ronald tugging at his sister-in-law's leg and walked to the stage at the back of the room.  The curtains were drawn, and Calamity was still sitting beneath the trestle tables and had nearly finished a whole tray of sandwiches.  They looked at each other and decided silently that they'd leave her where she was for now.  Then they looked at the apron, which was about three feet high.
"Climb, or find stairs?" asked Miss Flava, sure that she could get up on the apron without trouble.
"Stairs," said Playfair after a moment's hesitation.  "Technically, moving the curtains counts as interfering with the scene of the crime."
"Do you think SOCO's been here yet?" asked Miss Flava as they both turned to the left, where the shadows suggested that there might be doors.
"Hah!  I don't think anybody but us has been here yet," said Playfair.  "Except maybe to ring the front doorbell and then write down in a little notebook that no-one appeared to be in at the dead man's residence."
"You're not giving the police in Little Haversham much credit, are you?" said Miss Flava.  They located two doors in the gloom at the side of the room, one appearing to lead out into the rest of the house, and being locked; the other was smaller, flimsier, and looked as though it might lead to the back of the stage.  Playfair gripped the handle firmly and opened the door with a shove.  It scraped along the floor for a few inches then moved freely, so he ended up slamming it back against the wall.  Calamity barked once, and then presumably went back to eating the sandwiches.
"They've not given me any reason to," said Playfair looking through the doorway.  "It's been three days at least, and they've not checked the house out.  That's given this upper-class twit a chance to get in with his simple sister and do god-knows-what in here.  We could be missing valuable clues because he's been tidying up or putting them in the sandwiches when his sister's not looking."
The doorway opened onto a small ante-chamber that was essentially a wide, short corridor with lots of shelves on both sides.  The shelves were lined with props for tricks, and some parts had been fitted with doors to turn them into cupboards.  Playfair opened the first and found several stacks of playing cards; the next was contained stacks of oversized playing cards.  A third cupboard contained a realistic severed head that seemed to eye Playfair back as he stared at it.
"Sister-in-law, not sister," said Miss Flava.  She was looking at the shelves on the other sides with their little machines, linkages, and boxes of nuts, bolts and washers.  "And... damn, does that mean we should have been treating the sandwiches as evidence?  You did say they looked like ham, and we've pretty much believed Ronnie when he said they were mackerel mayonnaise."
Playfair took the severed head out of the cupboard, a little carefully as it proved to be heavier than he was expecting.  Miss Flava turned to see why he hadn't answered, and took a step back, her hands coming up protectively in front of her.
"My God, Playfair, what is that?"
"Latex skin," said Playfair examining it, "over a metal frame I think.  There's a switch here...."
He pressed it and the head seemed to come to life, a soft interior glow making the flesh seem warmer and more human and the eyes blinking a couple of times.  The lips moved, and a hint of a pink tongue seemed to lick them.
"That's creepy!  Put it back, Playfair.  It's not evidence."
"We don't know what is and isn't evidence yet," said Playfair, but he pressed the switch again and put the head back in the cupboard anyway.  He closed the door on it.
"You might be right about the sandwiches," he said.  "But we've got a lot of them in Calamity now, so there's probably no call for worry."
Miss Flava considered that a potentially dead police dog was certainly cause for worry, but couldn't be bothered arguing with Playfair over it at the moment.  They carried on, walking through the corridor into the wings of the stage.  Towering curtains of black cloth now created entrances onto the stage that prevented the audience from seeing through to the wings or the prop room, and allowed the performers to move on and off stage as though vanishing from the world.  There was enough room for about four people to stand in the wings before it started getting crowded, and there was a small prompter's desk with a blue-shaded light-bulb tucked into the corner.
What they could see of the stage through the curtains was much more interesting though.

Rehearsal

"Look, Inspector," said Ronald, his accent thickening to the point where single vowels seemed to take entire second to pronounce, and wobbled around the inside of his mouth like they'd been partially stunned before being spat out.  "Look, it was a simplistic slip of the tongue, a lapsus lingue, if you like."
"I don't like," said Playfair.  "And what has a slip of the tongue got to do with lingerie?  Are you suggesting that I'm just some thick clod plod?"
"Oh no!"  Ronald waved his hands frantically, reminding Miss Flava of the last traffic warden she'd seen from a car when Playfair was driving.  "Oh not at all, Sergeant Inspector!  I just wanted–"
"Detective Inspector," said Playfair.  "I'm sure you just wanted, Mr. Ronald.  And I'm equally sure you just took, didn't you?"
"I don't know what you're saying!"  Ronald wailed, his eyes now bright with tears and his hands trembling.  He still held them out before him, silently imploring Playfair to take pity on him, and much of his previous arrogance now seemed well held in check.
"I really want to know why you're here," said Playfair.  "Metaphorically, metaphysically, and cinéma verité.  The man who owns this house is dead several times over and has been for days, so what the bloody hell are you doing here?  Why are you in here?  Why are you insulting my Detective Sergeant?  Why are getting in the way of my police dog?  And why don't you care, in the slightest, about your sister-in-law?"
"It's a rehearsal," said Ronald, his voice high-pitched and wobbly.  His accent had receded a little and he was much easier to understand now.  "Melissa and I are Tricksters, we work with Iain to get his shows right and make sure the illusions work.  Melissa is the set-dresser and I'm an Illusionist.  I work out how to make the tricks work in ways that the audience won't be able to spot.  We have a rehearsal today, and Iain wasn't here when we arrived.  That's nothing new, so we let ourselves in and started setting up anyway.  We were expecting him back around lunchtime."
"What do you mean, that's not unusual?" said Miss Flava, not looking up from her notebook.  She was writing quickly, using shorthand.
"Iain often spends the night elsewhere," said Ronald a little hesitantly.  "He has a lot of fans."
"Hah," said Playfair, a smile playing around his eyes.  "And he always gets back at lunchtime, does he?"
"Well no," said Ronald.  "He gets back when he gets back, and usually he'll be back quite early for a rehearsal.  There's always a lot to go through, and Iain's quite demanding on the technical side of his tricks."
"So why lunchtime this time?" asked Miss Flava.
"There was no breakfast laid on," said Ronald.  "Iain normally has someone in preparing breakfast, or sometimes gets an outside caterer for the day, but when we arrived this morning the house was quiet and there was only a little food in the fridge.  We thought that he knew he'd be late."
"Hah!" said Playfair again, but this time with a little bit of an edge to it.  "Indeed he was."
Miss Flava frowned, and pointed at the drying and curling sandwiches.  "So where did they come from then?"
"Melissa usually makes a couple of trays of sandwiches to bring with her," said Ronald.  "She's just sad really, she fancies Iain and is trying to get him to notice her.  She brings these trays of horrible sandwiches hoping that he'll have forgotten to get food, and then she'll be able to impress him.  She was delighted when we couldn't find any sign of breakfast this morning."
"Did you eat any of the sandwiches?" asked Playfair.
"No," said Ronald, looking pained.  He rubbed his stomach absently with one thin, bony hand.  "I don't much care for cucumber and chutney, egg and mackerel mayonnaise or pureed broccoli and riced chicken sandwiches.  Melissa ate a couple.  The cucumber ones I think.  Is this important?"
Miss Flava, who hadn't written anything down about the sandwiches, shook her head, but Playfair nodded at the same time.
"You never know what details are important," he said, "Until you need them.  After all, it might turn out that the thought of these miserable sandwiches deepened the Great CumuloNimbus's depression to the point where he decided to kill himself rather than face any more of them."
"Really?  Iain was depressed?  He never said anything!"  Ronald's mouth dropped open, and his hands started shaking even more.
Miss Flava sighed and noted the sandwich fillings down with bad grace.  "We don't know if Stormy the magician was depressed or not, yet," she said.  "Do you have any reason to believe he might have been?"
"No! Of course not!  He was very successful!" said Ronald, almost hiccoughing with each exclamation.  "Look around you, you can see how successful he was!"
"Thank-you, I will," said Playfair immediately, and Miss Flava had to hide her smile quickly.  It wasn't quite permission to search the house, but Playfair would rework it until it certainly sounded like permission had been granted.
"Where do you live?" she asked.  There was a crunch from somewhere nearby, and they all turned to look, a little guiltily, at where Melissa was still lying on the floor.  Thankfully Calamity was nowhere to be seen, so they all looked around the room, trying to locate the crunch.  The crunch sounded again, and they found Calamity sitting under one of the trestle tables in front of the apron, eating sandwiches from one of the trays.  The sandwich crunched in Calamity's jaws.  Playfair looked at Ronald.
"Probably the pureed broccoli and riced chicken," he said gloomily.  "I've needed dental work when I've not been able to avoid the sandwiches."
"Where do you live?" repeated Miss Flava, already dreading the next drive with Calamity.  "We'll need to come and talk to you some more about all of this, but for now you and Melissa will need to leave while we determine if this house should be treated as part of the crime scene."
"Oh.  Oh right," said Ronald, and gave her his address, also located in Little Haversham.
"Hmm," said Playfair, examining the sandwiches, but not, Miss Flava noted, doing anything to stop Calamity from eating them.  "This looks like ham in this one."
"Egg and mackerel mayonnaise," said Ronald.  "Trust me on this, Inspector."

Dim Tart

"Dead?"  Melissa gasped dramatically, and one wrist was flung upwards to land against her forehead like some nineteen-forties movie starlet's idea of shock.  Sadly Melissa misjudged it badly and her bony wrist rapped against her forehead like a hob-nailed boot striking the boot-scraper, and her eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed on the floor in a heap for real.  Miss Flava looked at her pityingly, Playfair barely spared her a glance, and Ronald Verges acted as though she wasn't there.  Only Calamity paid her any attention, sneaking out from behind Playfair's legs with her head lowered as though hoping that if she couldn't see Miss Flava then Miss Flava couldn't see her, until she reached Melissa.  Then her long pink tongue lolled out of her mouth, and she started licking the woman's eyes.
"Why do dogs like the taste of eyeballs?" asked Miss Flava, watching Ronald Verges.  He still didn't look down at the fallen woman.
"I don't know," said Playfair, with a hint of exasperation.  He sighed heavily.  "Easier to chew, maybe?"
"Surely they'd just pop?"  Still no reaction from Ronald Verges.
"Hah, yes.  Maybe that's what they like about them.  Grapes for dogs!"
"The Great CumuloNimbus is dead, Sergeant?" asked Ronald, his foot tapping slightly as her spoke.  He held his arms tightly across his body, and his face was drawn, his mouth pinched.
"Detective Inspector, actually," said Playfair.  "I have a card here somewhere...."  He produced nearly a dozen cards of various shapes and sizes from an inside pocket and dropped them on the floor.  They clattered, causing Miss Flava to raise an eyebrow.
"No, don't help me," said Playfair turning round and bending down and somehow managing to stand on Ronald's tapping foot in the process.  "I've got them all!"
There was a noise like a steam-kettle starting to boil in the next room, and Miss Flava noted that it was coming from Ronald as he tried not to let Playfair know that he was standing on his foot.  His pale face was going a putrid pink, and his teeth were gritted to the point where they were nearly grinding together.
"There, got them all," said Playfair standing up and finally shifting his weight off Ronald's foot.  He put them away in his pocket again.  "Now Mr. Ronald, you were saying that the great CumuloNimbus is dead."
"No!  No, you were saying that, Inspector.  I was only repeating it."
"How do you know that the Great CumuloNimbus is dead then?"
"I just said, Inspector, you told me."
"Hearsay, then.  You're spreading malicious rumours about the demise of a local celebrity without checking if they're true or not first?  Is there a reason for this.  I mean, a particular reason, other than the obvious?"
"Wha–"  Ronald stared at Playfair with his mouth open.  Then he realised what he was doing and it snapped closed again like a striking venus fly-trap.  Miss Flava pulled Calamity away from Melissa, noticing with a little bit of concern that Melissa's nose now appeared a little nibbled.
"No, I'm not spreading rumours," said Ronald, getting his thoughts together.  His accent, already rather Home Counties, became plummier still.  "One doesn't do that kind of thing.  You told me, mere moments ago, my dear chap, that the Great CumuloNimbus was dead, and I'm now trying to find out why you are telling me that.  One that."
"Because he is," said Playfair.  "And you are in his house, which is suspicious, with a woman, who looks suspicious, doing suspicious things in a suspicious manner.  And this, you see, makes me suspicious."
"That's a lot of suspicion," said Miss Flava, sounding helpful.
"Oh do shut up, you dim tart," said Ronald.  It sounded reflexive, as though this was a standard come back for the women in his life.  The silence in the room was thick enough to cut with a bread-knife, and when he realised why, his still-ruddy face finally started to pale.  "I was talking to my sister-in-law," he said.  He pointed at the unconscious woman on the floor, lying in a pool of dog-drool.  "She's a daft tart and a dim bint."
"I really hope you know more Arabic than that one word," said Playfair, producing a notebook from a pocket Miss Flava was sure he'd shown to be empty at least twice today.  "Or that's language likely to cause disorder.  And possibly a hate crime."
"A hate crime?" said Ronald, over-enunciating his aitche.
"Well, I hate you," said Playfair.  "And causing me to do that is definitely a crime."

Ronald and Melissa

The walk from the carpark to the house was short and leafy.  Miss Flava lifted some of the leaves up – glossy, broad deep green leaves that reminded her of those of a rubber plant, only smaller – and checked.  The plant was growing over a red-brick wall that defined the passage.  Ahead of her, Playfair was unconcerned about the route, and seemed intent on getting to the house.  Behind her (she checked when she didn't hear the click of claws on the paving stones) Calamity had decided to wee on the wall and the plant.  Given that Calamity's bladder apparently held enough to flood small rooms (and Miss Flava was sure that Playfair had been teaching her tricks about holding it in as well) she was relieved that the dog was relieving herself outside.
She came to the end of the passage and turned a corner.  The wall stopped and a short lawn spread out before her, leading to white-painted, glass-panelled French-doors.  A very shallow flight of steps led up to the doors, where Playfair was rapping impatiently on the glass.  As the doors opened, Calamity came galloping up behind her, brushed past her at full speed, and charged towards Playfair.  Miss Flava said nothing, knowing that her boss would somehow be expecting this.
"Who are y–" said a man in an angry voice.  He cut off as Playfair stepped neatly aside and Calamity leapt at him, her paws landing heavily on the shoulders of his suit and bowling him over.  He fell backwards, letting go of the door, which Playfair caught and held.
"That's my dog," he said in his best outdoors voice.  "Please stop molesting her.  Now!"
The man on the floor, who was being frantically licked by Calamity, stopped trying to push her off him and submitted to her cleaning.  A thin woman in an uncomfortable-looking blue and mauve dress hurried over from a table against the far wall of the room.  She was still holding a china cup of tea, and its matching saucer.
"Oh, dear!  What...?  What...?  Ronald?  Are you under that dog?"
"Don't start!" snarled the man on the floor, turning his head to the side to try and escape Calamity's tongue.
"Well, I'm only asking!"
Playfair gestured, and Miss Flava walked in.  The room appeared to be a function room of some kind: it was large, with a wooden floor that seemed highly polished.  Seats were stacked against both end walls, and a few large, simple tables were pushed up against the front of a small stage.  The stage curtains were drawn across, so that only the apron could be seen.  When she looked up, she could see lighting gantries across the ceiling, and tracing them across with her eyes she found a black-painted ladder in the shadows of one corner, obviously the way up there.  Underneath the tables were large packing cases and trunks, and on top of the tables were a tea-urn, some china cups and saucers, a plastic half-litre carton of milk with a blue top, and a couple of foil trays of rather dry-looking sandwiches with the cling-film pulled half-back.
"No-one seems to have come to your party," said Playfair, who'd come in silently behind her.  "Calamity, dear, please leave the man alone.  He's stopped attacking you now."
"Are you Calamity?" said the thin woman, turning to Miss Flava with a terrifying smile.  Her teeth were varying shades of yellow and brown and looked badly decayed.
"No," said Miss Flava coldly.  "That's Calamity."  She pointed at the dog, who had started to get off the man on the floor and then found something interesting to sniff.  "Calamity!"  The dog lifted her head, saw the expression on Miss Flava's face and quickly retreated behind Playfair.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," said the woman.  "I assumed, with that name, that Calamity must be human.  Calamity Jane, I'm sure?"
If you're so sure, thought Miss Flava, why are you making it a question?  But she held her temper in check.  "Yes, Calamity Jane."
"My favourite Crimean nurse," said Playfair, as he always did when someone asked about Calamity's name.  The thin woman nodded and smiled, not seeing anything wrong with this statement, which made Miss Flava hate her even more.
"Who are you?" she said pointedly, realising that the woman wasn't going to offer her name.
"She's Melissa," said the suited man, finally up off the floor.  "She's my sister-in-law.  I'm Ronald Verges."  He emphasized the last syllable of his surname.  "And who the hell are you two?  You'd better not be part of the act."
"What act?" said Playfair quickly.  Miss Flava pulled her warrant card out anyway.
"If you don't know that, you'd better be quick at explaining why you're here," said Ronald, his face hardening and his eyes tightening into a squint.
"I was rather thinking the same myself," said Playfair, sounding cheerful.  "You see, we're the police, and the Great CumuloNimbus is dead.  So: who let you in, and why the hell are you here?"

Stormclouds

"We all learn something new every day," said Playfair, his words gravid with irony.  He half-smiled, showing more teeth than was perhaps necessary.  "Now, tell me what we know about this magician."
"Not much, so far," admitted Alf looking down at the table.  "I've got Jamie trying to track his parents down, 'cos like you says, everybody has them, but we've not had much luck so far."
"Well, who did he know in Little Haversham?" asked Playfair.  "Did he live in Little Haversham, or did he have more sense?  Wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, goat he was unnaturally attracted to?"
"Here!"  Alf got a little agitated again.  "There's no need to be talking like no-one would want to live here!  He did live in the village, he's got the big house at the end of Beechwood Drive.  Lived there pretty much by himself, didn't have that many visitors.  Didn't keep any goats."  There was a touch of emphasis on the last sentence that Playfair was oblivious to.
"Have you sent anyone out there to look round the place yet?  This Jamie, perhaps?"
"Not yet," said Alf.  "He wasn't killed there and he lived alone, so I didn't see that there was much point breaking into his house before we'd found any relatives."
"Pets?"  Playfair leaned back on two legs of his chair again.  "Visitors?  There's always a reason to investigate, even if it's only thinking that you can smell gas."
"That might be how you do things up in the City," said Alf, "but we're a little more civilised down here."  Miss Flava had to suppress a snigger at the look of blameless innocence that crossed Playfair's face.  "No-one's been round to his house.  When we track down his parents, or his next of kin, we'll take it to the next stage."
"Too slow!"  Playfair's chair slammed back down to the floor and he leapt from it as though he'd been launched.  Alf flinched away from him, and Miss Flava straightened up and looked alert, ready to stop whatever her boss had in mind.  "This is a murder investigation, not a run-of-the-mill death!  The killer isn't going to be hindered by niceties like this.  If he's after something that Stormy owned he's probably already broken into the place, if there's any clues left in there that might tell us who he is then he could be pouring petrol all over the curtains right now and giggling to himself over a box of matches.  You're not thinking like a murderer, you're thinking like a police officer!"
"That would be because I am a police officer," said Alf slowly.  "When did you decide that the killer was a man, Sir?"
"Probabilities favour it being a man," said Playfair.  "And you've not told me that he exclusively associated with women, or was surrounded by nurses and protectors who were all women.  In fact, ignoring the indirect reference to his mother, I don't think you've mentioned any women in his life at all."
"So you think it was probably his father what did him in then?"
"Statistically that would be a good place to start," said Playfair.  "But you can't find his parents, so unless he killed them first and their bodies are rotting in his house, which you won't search until you've found his parents, we're probably looking at someone else.  What did he do?  What did he do when he wasn't being Stormy the Spellcaster?  Where did he drink?  Who did he talk to?  Why can't you answer any of these questions?"
"Why won't you just shut up?" said Alf, and in the silence that followed he looked a little sheepish.  "Well, perhaps just give me a chance to answer," he said.  "We're working on it, Sir, we were going to ask his parents when we found them."
"Right," said Playfair.  "If you find them.  Ok, enough.  Miss Flava, come on.  Let's go look at this house, maybe that'll provide me with some answers to my questions."
"Er Sir, I can't condone you breaking and entering–" started Alf, but was cut off by Playfair walking past him.
"Then don't," he said.  "But it won't be breaking and entering because it's police business, and I'm on the case."
As he opened the door and walked out Miss Flava stood up and laid a little white business card down in front of Alf.
"The list on the front are the people who are expecting you to complain about him," she said.  "The address for all of them is on the back."

The Great CumuloNimbus

Playfair's chair clattered back to the floor on all four legs, and he leaned diagonally forward across the table towards the office.
"A magician?" he said, his voice raising slightly.  "As in, a stage magician?  Someone who does card tricks, or someone who does grand illusions? Grand Guignol, even?"
"Isn't that a type of sausage?"  When Playfair refused to answer, or even to remove his gaze from the officer's face, he continued after swallowing hard.  "He calls himself the Great CumuloNimbus and he does a lot of illusions and disappearances.  He made the town-hall disappear last year, and the year before that he made the Mountgarden's garden bloom in winter.  Just for the one night, mind you.  He's very good."
"Did he bring the town-hall back again?"  It was impossible to tell if Playfair was being sarcastic or not, and the officer decided not to chance it.
"Yes, it came right back, right after the show.  Just like it had never been away," he said.
"At least he keeps the place tidy then," said Playfair sitting back at last.  "How many of his shows have you seen?"
"Uh, well, I don't know," said the officer.  "I mean, he usually does one every Christmas, and there's often a summer one, unless he's travelling of course, but then he'll usually do a Spring one before he goes then... and of course, he's a local boy, so you try and show a bit of support, don't you?"
"Do you?" said Playfair.  "You certainly sound like a fan.  Are you bothered that he's dead, then?"
"Now look here," said the officer, his voice getting gruff.  "Anyone dying round here is a cause of bother.  You can come here with all the attitude you want, and think that we have pigs living round the back and no internet connections, but we still do the job, and we do it right."  He rose to his feet while he was talking.
"I'm sure Playfair didn't mean–" said Miss Flava trying to step tactfully in before Playfair could speak again, but the officer cut her off.
"I'm sure he did mean it."
"I still mean it," said Playfair.  "And I'm glad that you're bothered that he's dead, as it means you'll have looked all the harder into who might have killed him.  So what you need now is someone who didn't know the victim, who can stand back with a little bit of objectivism and help sift the wheat from the chaff.  Or the pigs from the sheep, or the shit from the sherbert, or whatever else you might sift out here beyond the barricades."
"...Ayn Rand?" asked Miss Flava.  The officer sat down, looking a little calmer, although also a little puzzled as people tended to be after one of Playfair's monologues.
"Yes," said Playfair.  "Very odd woman.  I recommend you study her."
Now it was Miss Flava's turn to get annoyed.  "What, so I can be a very odd woman too?"
"No.  So that you don't end up like her."  Ignoring the look of fury on Miss Flava's face he faced the officer again.  "Look,... er... whatever you name is, from the report I've read, and I know that it's incomplete, you have a murdered magician and so far no suspects.  That can't possibly be right; if nothing else he must have had parents, and most murders are family affairs.  You've done a lot of digging, you've turned up a lot of evidence–"
"Tortoise shells," muttered Miss Flava, still fuming, but Playfair ignored her.
"–and now it's time to find out what that evidence is telling us.  I've been sent to help out, and that's what I'm going to do.  Now, tell me all about Stormy the Magician."
"Who? And my name's Alf, Sir."  The Sir was delivered meaningfully, with a strong intimation that it could be taken away again just as quickly.
"The Great CumuloNimbus," said Playfair not quite patiently.  "CumuloNimbuses are stormclouds."
"I never knew that!" said Alf.