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Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
Copyright © Amanda Valentine 2021
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images. Background © Shutterstock.com
Amanda Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008219123
Ebook Edition © June 2021 ISBN: 9780008219130
Version: 2021-01-29
Dedication
In memory of John Webster
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Empress Theatre
Eleven Months Later
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
The Empress Theatre
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Amanda Brooke
About the Publisher
The Empress Theatre
Sedgefield, Cheshire
Onstage, the white rabbit performed the perfect pirouette and imagined her dance teacher, Mrs Clarke, urging her on. ‘Well done! Now keep those arms moving and remember, one continuous flow.’ The little girl lifted an arm and extended her fingers gracefully.
The music stopped.
An ear-splitting alarm cut through the shocked silence and, as it reverberated around the theatre, the white rabbit’s supple limbs turned to stone. Only her pink nose twitched as the lights came up. There were six hundred faces staring back at her and they had frozen too, all except her mum, who had stopped recording her nine-year-old daughter’s performance and lowered her phone.
‘The theatre is being evacuated,’ came a tinny announcement. ‘Please remain calm and follow the signs to your nearest exit. Staff will be available to assist and direct you.’ The disembodied voice didn’t sound concerned. If anything, there was a hint of annoyance.
With whiskers quivering, the white rabbit sniffed the air. There was no telltale whiff of smoke, no sign of flickering flames. There had been no bang, no tremor to shake the ancient boards of the stage, nothing to suggest anything was amiss. It was a false alarm, or maybe a fire drill. It happened at school all the time.
The white rabbit turned to the only other figure onstage. The principal dancer was five years older and wore a blue satin tutu with a white apron and matching Alice band; another protégé from the Hilary Clarke School of Dance. She reached out a hand and the white rabbit grasped it. The curtain closed.
‘Well, that was short and sweet,’ muttered Hilary Clarke.
She shared a look with Rose Peagrave who was positioned at the end of the row with eight young charges between them. Rose was Hilary’s most senior dance instructor and most likely candidate to take over the school when Hilary hung up her dance shoes the following year. At seventy-one, her retirement was well overdue, but still, it would be a wrench.
‘Come on, people. Gather up your belongings,’ Rose shouted above the alarm.
Hilary took a deep breath and swallowed her disappointment. This was their first show in the newly renovated Empress Theatre, and it was only a three-day run. She prayed the alarm could be reset quickly so they could resume rather than abandon their opening night. She had allowed herself the indulgence of being part of the audience for this evening only, leaving another of her teachers in charge backstage. Slowly but surely, she was loosening the reins.
Picking up her bag and coat, Hilary was slow to surrender her seat. The tiny theatre had just one tier above the stalls, and these were not the cheap seats by any means. The circle had been transformed into an exclusive VIP area, with plush upholstery, generous leg room, and waiting service no less. The series of function rooms to the rear were still under renovation, but would eventually provide a high dining experience to theatregoers with deep pockets. Hilary would be happy enough with the nip of whisky she had promised herself in the second half, but the night wasn’t turning out as she had anticipated. At least for the half hour she had been able to watch her dancers onstage, they hadn’t put a foot wrong.
Although the circle was full, it had less than a hundred seats and wouldn’t take long to clear. There were two stairwells, one that led to the foyer at the front of the Empress, the other to an exit at the side, according to the usher. Rose led the way and opted for the latter, which was generally being ignored. The theatre was at the end of a row of buildings and everyone knew that the alleyway at the side was dark and dank, but fewer people meant less chance of misplacing a student. Good choice, thought Hilary. She would be leaving her school in good hands.
‘Miss, miss!’ cried a student just as Hilary was leaving the circle. It was seven-year-old Jack. It was always Jack. The child had exceptional promise, but he was too easily distracted. ‘I left my coat.’
Hilary looked over her shoulder. There was no one behind them and it would take no time to go back. ‘Fine, show me where you left it. Quickly now,’ she added sternly.
For theatregoers in the cramped stalls below, the evacuation wasn’t as smooth as it was for their privileged counterparts. The venue had been open for less than a month and was crammed with curious locals eager for their first glimpse inside the art deco building. It had taken two years to return the Empress to its original purpose, but nine-year-old Amelia Parker had no interest in the sympathetic restoration of gilded plasterwork and polished veneers. She had come to see her best friend perform. Evie was the white rabbit.
Amelia’s mum had been looking forward to it too, but twenty-five minutes into the performance, Kathryn Parker had been jiggling in her seat.
‘Sorry, love, I need to nip to the loo,’ she had whispered. She had been drinking cranberry juice all day, but it hadn’t helped. ‘Do you want to come with me?’
Amelia had been mortified. What if Evie spotted them getting up from their seats? ‘No way,’ she had said.
And so it was that when the alarm had sounded and the curtain came down, Amelia was on her own. Her mum had instructed her to seek out Evie’s mum if there was a problem, but she was a few rows in front and had hurried off in the direction of the stage as soon as the evacuation started. Amelia checked behind her, hoping to find her mum in as much of a rush to retrieve her daughter. The aisle was filled with people she didn’t recognise.
‘We need to leave, sweetie,’ a woman said. She was struggling to squeeze past Amelia, who had gripped the arms of her seat. ‘Come with us.’
‘I have to wait for my mum.’
The wrinkles crisscrossing the woman’s brow deepened as she looked from Amelia to the young girl whose hand she was holding, her granddaughter presumably. Her husband was bringing up the rear and muttered under his breath as someone shoved him from behind, almost knocking the box of popcorn out of his hand. People were getting impatient.
‘Leave her be, love,’ the man said. ‘Her mum will know where to find her if she stays where she is, isn’t that right?’
Amelia nodded and, although she retreated into the aisle to let people pass, she stayed close to where her mum would expect to find her.
At the rear of the stalls where the growing mass of theatregoers was deepest, Lois Granger caught her boyfriend smirking. Ballet wasn’t Joe’s kind of thing, especially when performed by a bunch of school kids, and she knew that once they were outside, he would drag her to the sports bar further down the high street. She wouldn’t put up much resistance. The idea of a ballet production of Alice in Wonderland had sounded so much better in theory.
‘You can use the side exits to the left and right of the stage!’ a staff member called out, but the crowd swarming around Lois was impenetrable. They would have to stay put, but that was fine. Leaving through the foyer meant a shorter walk to the bar.
Hilary found Jack’s coat shoved under his seat and, as she helped him shrug into it, she felt a shower of grit rain down onto her head. Her nose wrinkled as she looked up. The ceiling was rippling. Hilary blinked hard, thinking her cataract operation couldn’t come soon enough, but with a single thump of her heart she realised the problem wasn’t her eyesight. There was a roiling layer of dense smoke spreading like an ocean across the ornate ceiling.
‘Sweet lord,’ she said, grabbing Jack by the hood of his padded coat.
‘Miss! That’s hurt—’
Hearing the crack and splinter of rafters above her head, Hilary gave Jack an almighty shove. ‘Run!’ she screamed.
The boy pitched forward, arms flailing, and Hilary couldn’t help but notice how the child kept his fingers beautifully extended. ‘Good boy,’ she wanted to say, but never had the chance.
Almost directly below Hilary Clarke, Amelia had held her ground and refused to join the dense crowd forming at the back of the auditorium despite several attempts to encourage her to leave. She wouldn’t move, but she had put on her coat in readiness. As she pressed her cheek to the stiff wool of her mum’s jacket, something made her look up. It felt as if someone had dropped a tiny stone on her head.
Amelia’s seat was a few rows in front of the overhanging circle, giving her an uninterrupted view of the theatre’s high ceiling. There was a pair of long-limbed figures moulded into the ornate plasterwork, and they appeared to have come to life. Beautiful alabaster faces offered trembling smiles. ‘Wow,’ Amelia whispered, moments before the world turned black.
Scorched beams and lethal chunks of masonry smashed into one section of the circle and rained down onto the stalls with a bone-shattering crash. The lights went out, and a wave of panic hit the previously ambivalent audience like a tsunami.
Lois felt rather than saw the ceiling collapse. She and Joe had just made it through the exit at the back of the stalls and were in the centre of a narrow conduit that led left and right. The long corridor had a set of double doors at each end that opened onto the foyer, but the light from these exit points was beyond Lois’s reach. For every person who escaped through those doors, she could feel the pressure of ten more behind her. People flowed left and right, but Lois was part of a small group that was forced into a smaller and smaller space at the epicentre of what had quickly become a crush.
Lois’s arms were trapped by her side and her fingers began to tingle. She had made the mistake of screaming as the crowd surged, and there was no room left to re-inflate her lungs. She fought with all her strength to escape, but her efforts were countered by others with equal force. There were parents determined to save their children, adult children determined to save their elderly parents, friends and strangers trying to save themselves.
The emergency lighting illuminated arrows to the exits, but these faded to a dull glow as a cloud of dust filled the void. Lois ought to be relieved it wasn’t smoke, but her eyes remained wide with terror as she searched out Joe’s face in the gloom. They had become separated and she couldn’t get to him, nor he to her.
‘I can’t breathe,’ she mouthed.
Joe was taller, his chest inching above the critical mass of bodies. ‘It’s OK. We can make it.’
Lois shook her head and a tear slid down her cheek. Fear was replaced by an overwhelming sense of sadness that took the form of black specks across her vision. She was going to die and she didn’t understand why. There was so much more living she had to do, but she would settle for just five more minutes so she could tell her parents how much she loved them, and insist her best friend go on without her and live her best life. She was thankful that they weren’t there and hoped they wouldn’t feel guilty. She prayed Joe would make it out so he could help ease their pain, as they would ease his, but she couldn’t be sure. Be brave, she wanted to tell them, and it was advice that she took for herself. She could no longer see the exits. The light was fading. Be brave, Lois.
Rose was standing at the bottom of the stairwell. When she had seen Hilary turn back with Jack, she had intended to wait upstairs, but a couple of the kids had gone ahead of her and she was forced to keep going. She was in the stairwell when the building shook and the lights went out. Her students’ wails had echoed off the walls and it was a small miracle that they reached the ground floor without mishap. The corridor was crowded and the emergency lighting provided an eerie glow, but the waft of fresh air coming from the exit offered hope, and their route to safety was unfettered by panic.
‘Get everyone outside,’ Rose instructed the twelve-year-old girl, who, by virtue of being the eldest, was charged with the safety of her fellow students. Rose held back to count them as they filed past. ‘Five, six, seven.’ She raised her gaze, hoping to see the missing student and his teacher, but the stairwell was empty.
Rose told herself it was fine. Hilary would look after their stray lamb, but what if they were injured? She could only imagine what had caused the whole theatre to shake, and she was still deciding what to do next when she heard a clatter of feet from above. ‘Thank God,’ Rose said, as Jack appeared.
The little boy was covered in dust, and coughed between sobs.
‘Where’s Mrs Clarke?’
‘She pushed me,’ he mewled. ‘And when I looked back, I couldn’t … I couldn’t see her. I think stuff fell on her, miss. She’s trapped! There’s fire in the sky and everything!’
Rose placed her foot back on the stairs, but it was a tentative move.
‘Please, miss, don’t leave me!’
They could hear the wail of sirens approaching. ‘OK, OK,’ Rose agreed, telling herself it was the sensible decision. It wasn’t about being brave, or otherwise. ‘We’ll get help.’
Claudia Rothwell had been sipping coffee further up the high street when the fire alarm had sounded. She had been killing time, waiting for the show to finish so she could slip home without anyone realising she hadn’t gone to what she suspected was an intensely boring amateur ballet. The alarm, however, had been the first warning that the night would prove to be far from dull, and her heart had been in her throat as she raced towards the red glow in the sky.
She had pushed through the crowd gathering outside the Empress with a sense of determination matched only by those fleeing danger. A stitch cut into her side, and her legs threatened to buckle as she circled the building. The people coming out of the fire doors at the side were covered in dust and grime, and some of that grime was blood.
Claudia had been planning to post a comment on Instagram about how great the show was, along with a photo of the programme to prove she was where she claimed to be. Thank God she hadn’t. The night was turning into all kinds of wrong, and she had to put things right. But how?
Inside the theatre, the dust was settling, revealing small fires and debris strewn across the left-hand side of the auditorium. Buried beneath one pile of rubble was Amelia. She had been fortunate in that the largest chunks of falling masonry had broken up as they ricocheted off the balcony, but they had struck with enough force to break bones.
It was the pain that roused her from her troubled sleep, and she let out a bleating cry when she realised it was no dream. She was lying on her stomach with her head pressed against a rough and tattered piece of cloth that was damp and sticky. It was too dark to see, but Amelia caught the faintest whiff of her mum’s perfume, and something else, something metallic. Her mum’s jacket was soaked in blood. She tried to move, but couldn’t.
‘Mum!’ she cried out tentatively before choking on a mixture of dust and tears. She tried again, fear and adrenalin giving her a voice that rose above the distant wail of the alarm and another sound – people screaming. ‘Please! Help me! Please!’ she sobbed. ‘I want my mummy!’
When no response came, Amelia closed her eyes. She must have fallen asleep because confusion returned when she sensed a flickering light cross her closed eyelids. She remained trapped, but she was no longer alone.
Hilary Clarke emerged from a similar dark place, but her rise into consciousness was laboured. Her legs were crushed beneath a large piece of timber and, mercifully, her spinal cord had severed its connection with the excruciating pain in her lower body. Hilary extended her one free arm and marvelled at how the thick layer of dust gave it the appearance of marble. She retched as she attempted to call for help. It was no good. There was no one to hear her cries, and nothing left to do except reflect on the life she had lived. She hoped people would think fondly of her.
Outside, the little white rabbit had lost her whiskers, but gained a foil blanket as she stood with her mum and the swelling crowd that had spilled out of the theatre, along the high street, and into Victoria Park. Despite the cold, Evie held her body with poise, her placement perfectly centred. Mrs Clarke would be proud.
The Night Sedgefield Will Never Forget
By Leanne Pitman, Cheshire Courier
If I had been asked to describe Sedgefield when I moved to the town several years ago, I might have waxed lyrical about its Roman heritage and historic cotton mills, the beauty of the surrounding Cheshire countryside, and the tranquillity of the canals that had once been the town’s life blood. Without doubt, I would have extolled the virtues of its cosy pubs and trendy eateries, but I would never have mentioned the Empress Theatre. I gave no thought to the abandoned art deco building that lurked behind the modern façade of a typical English high street. I didn’t know it was there. The whole country knows where it is now.
The Empress Theatre was a hidden gem and might have stayed that way if a pair of beady eyes hadn’t noticed its glittering potential. It reopened its doors amongst much pomp and ceremony a year ago, and the restoration was heralded as a cultural turning point for the town. Sadly, the real turning point came four short weeks later, when Sedgefield suffered its greatest tragedy.
As we prepare for that painful anniversary, it’s time to look back and ask how we got to this point. Was it a freak accident, or was it an inevitable consequence of snobbery and greed? Do we blame the fire for taking the lives of our loved ones, or should we turn our attention to those who saw more value in bricks and mortar than the safety of our townspeople? Is it time to name names?
Prior to the theatre’s restoration, Sedgefield’s main thoroughfare was a mix of historic architecture overlaid with new-age branding, but unlike many high streets in this day and age, ours thrived. Unfortunately, this wasn’t good enough for the upper echelons of our society. They found the discount stores and betting shops a juxtaposition to the artisan bakeries, boutiques and bistros. A Greggs’ sausage roll might fill the gap if you’re on a tight budget, but God forbid the smell of flaky pastry should overpower the delicate aroma of bruised basil and hand-picked coffee beans. Something had to give, and it was no surprise that middle-aged socialite Phillipa Montgomery would be the one to grasp an opportunity.
When Phillipa tabled her proposal to restore the Empress Theatre, she claimed it would make the town a magnet for investment. Reading between the lines, she meant it would increase the headcount of millionaires and local celebrities to rival that of Alderley Edge, and the best the rest of us could hope for was that they would be good tippers.