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While I was mooching around the building where Machany Fordun lived, Campsie arrived at the Stalactite Saloon to start her new role as second assistant to the wardrobe master. I wasn't there, of course, but she told me all about it later on. Campsie's job, as it turned out, was to be a general gopher - you know, "go fer this, go fer that"", as the old joke has it - for Rhynd Deuchny. The old Goblin was a little absent-minded, apparently, as well as not being as strong as he once was, and he really needed a strong young pair of legs to hurry to fetch what was forgotten or missing. This gave Campsie just the excuse she needed to go everywhere in the Stalactite Saloon - at least, backstage and the quieter areas front-of-house - and to stop and chat to anybody who might have something interesting to say. Of course, people being what they are, almost everybody had something to say that they thought interesting. Being female, Campsie was immediately included in the sisterhood of dressing room gossip in a fashion that I would never have been; indeed, any male - even one as effeminate as Deuchny - would not have been so automatically welcomed into this exclusive circle. I would probably have considered the chorus line and the dancers to be a lot of giggly girls, which might have had a little truth to it, but the dancing girls worked really hard in rehearsals and on stage, ate and drank next to nothing, and had lots of time on their hands in between their performances. So they talked, incessantly, and they watched and listened, often at the same time. So, there were no secrets backstage at the Stalactite Saloon, or so I might have expected. Interestingly, Campsie reported otherwise. According to what she had heard, there were really several factions, none of which seemed to talk to each other. A large group - what Rhynd Deuchny reportedly described as "proper old-fashioned theatrical types" - basically ran the performances. The classy show on the stage was put on by a tightly-knit cohort of individuals, many of whom had spent their lives devising and presenting entertainments of all kinds, with a great sense of responsibility and even pride, and who were bent on inculcating the youngsters with much the same attitude. All this was quite separate from the money sieve which operated front-of-house. The bar staff and the bouncers and the waitresses and all the rest conspired to filter the ready cash from the punters' wallets and keep it in the building after the punters themselves were long gone. Sure, it might have been a less prestigious operation than the artistic endeavours and aspirations of the first group, but it was essential. It was, after all, the function for which the Stalactite Saloon had been set up in the first place, and the one that allowed Broxden to furnish his office, entertain his mistresses - or at least his fiancé - and maybe even pay the salaries of those in his employ. Maybe this separation would be desirable, even inevitable, given the differences in personality and preferences of those involved. Even so, there seemed to be such huge barriers here, at a cultural and even emotional level, which appeared to be dysfunctional which verged on the paranoid. Or maybe I not; maybe I was just imagining it all, mentally exaggerating my feeble philosophical and sociological insights. Why would you want to hear any of this from a jobbing Private Dick anyway? Campsie had been doing a good job, I judged. She also managed, even on her first day, to pull together a plausible profile of Miss Machany Fordun, without actually meeting here face-to-face, of course. Even more curiously, Fordun didn't seem to engage with either the theatricals or the front-of-house cohort despite her leading role in the theatrical production, on the one hand, and her engagement to Broxden on the other. Instead, she associated with a small group of individuals, including her dresser, a couple of obviously obsequious personal assistants and servants and, curiously, with Arditty Pickston who appeared to be her confident in many things. I had hung around outside the Stage Door again and intercepted Campsie on her way out to perform some minor errand on behalf of Rhynd Deuchny. I had whistled and gesticulated; she had joined me for ten furtive minutes in an alleyway and conveyed her intelligence before I let her carry on with her mission.
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Part 50