Curtain Call at the Lantern

The foyer was a stage of its own. Ushers in maroon jackets. Guests in evening dress herded into pens by the police. You read the room the way you'd read a set of stage directions: who stood where, who spoke to whom, who kept their backs to the wall.

You noticed, and noted: Imogen Fairweather, thirty-four, the dead man's daughter and a director of his Foundation, standing very straight in a black dress with her phone clenched in both hands. Rex Halloran, editor of the Saltmarsh Sentinel, his pen already moving. Sir Hugo Blackwood, shipping and property, at the bar, holding his glass like a sceptre. Reverend Tobias Lund, praying quietly near the cloakroom, or pretending to. Alaric Pryce, headmaster of St Aldhelm's Academy, checking his watch as if the evening owed him an apology. Anisa Rahman, who ran the Club Kaleidoscope on Dockside and wore a jacket that made the rest of the room look like it had dressed by committee.

Outside, under the lamp by the stage door alley, a knot of young men in matching tracksuits, hoods up, phones out. The police kept looking at them. Nobody had asked them anything yet.

And at the foot of the staircase, an older woman with silver hair and a spine like a steel ruler, umbrella planted in front of her like a staff of office. She rose as you approached.

"Miss Voss. Dr Helena Crane. I've known the Fairweathers forever. Poor Edwin." Her voice was pure, polished, faintly old-fashioned, the voice of a wireless announcer in a better century. "Some men are simply born to command a room. It was in the blood."

Jonah wrote it down. You didn't.