The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Judith—’ Robert’s sudden command struck a chord of fear. He was standing at the window, looking down into the street. They were on the sixth floor.

  She could barely bring herself to walk across the room. When she finally did so and looked to where her husband was pointing, he had to catch her. He was still holding her in his arms when the other guests began to crowd into the room.

  John May parked his silver BMW behind the ambulance and alighted, opening the passenger door for his partner. Arthur was no longer allowed to take the driving seat since he had sent Victor, his Mini, straight across the roundabout on the north side of Westminster Bridge, ploughing through the flowerbeds without even noticing, because he was busy explaining the history of Dutch microscopes.

  Northumberland Avenue was dank and deserted. The tourists stayed on streets that connected restaurants and theatres. Bryant could smell the chill rush of the river from here. He clutched his hat and looked up into the rain. ‘Sixth floor? Quite a drop.’ Thumping his walking stick against the black railings, he peered down into the basement area, where a woman stood beside a small blue plastic frame that had been pegged to the ground. ‘Body found down there. Poor little bugger. At least it was quick. Who’s securing the place?’

  ‘Renfield’s already up at the crime site. Janice, Colin and Dan are in the lounge with the guests. Local chap down there. Want to go down?’

  ‘I’m not good at consoling the bereaved, but I’d better have a look. I hate this part.’

  ‘Corpses?’

  ‘No, stairs.’

  May opened the gate and led the way down.

  ‘You took your damned time getting here, didn’t you?’ Robert Kramer had been standing in the rain for almost half an hour, awaiting the senior investigators’ arrival. Judith had refused to leave the spot where her son had fallen. Their guests had been prevented from leaving the flat by an officious bullnecked sergeant. Now Kramer needed someone to vent his anger on.

  ‘Westminster isn’t our jurisdiction, sir,’ May explained. ‘Your local constabulary felt that the situation would require specialist expertise, and contacted us. I understand how terrible this is for you, and I’ll do everything within my power to make this part bearable, but you must also consider that a crime may have been committed. Perhaps you could come inside now.’

  May brought them inside the building, took the lift to the apartment and found a quiet room where they could be interviewed in comfort. Judith Kramer was in a bad state. He called in a female medic, who administered a mild sedative.

  DS Janice Longbright and Dan Banbury, the Unit’s crime scene manager, were concluding the basic formalities. ‘Take Dan up with you,’ Longbright told May. ‘Colin and I can handle the rest.’ With seamless efficiency, she took over from the detectives and outlined the next stages of the investigative process to the distraught couple.

  On the staircase to the top floor the detectives were met by Jack Renfield. ‘Some of the guests are getting restless and making noises about calling lawyers,’ he warned. ‘We’re taking standard witness statements and contact details. They’re expecting to be released as soon as they’ve talked to us.’

  ‘I don’t care what they’re expecting,’ snapped Bryant. ‘This looks like a murder investigation. Hold them here until we’ve examined the nursery.’ He headed up with May and Banbury. Renfield taped off the stairs and followed them.

  ‘You’re putting on plastics, both of you,’ said Dan, handing them gloves and shoe covers. ‘I know what you’re like.’

  ‘I’m not wearing a hairnet,’ Bryant warned. ‘You know my hair type. You’ve found enough of it scattered around past murder sites.’ Carefully skirting around the splintered door, he entered the room.

  ‘Robert Kramer says it took four hard kicks to break in,’ said May.

  ‘You can see why, too,’ Banbury replied, kneeling to study the door. ‘Quality wood, look at that.’

  A standard brass Yale key was inserted on the inside, with the lock bolt still protruding into the displaced strike plate. ‘It was definitely locked on the inside. Why would the nursery have an internal key?’

  ‘They’ve only been living here a short time,’ said Renfield. ‘According to Mr Kramer, the previous tenant had a lodger. This was the lodger’s room. He fitted the lock, and they hadn’t got around to removing it. The baby was less than a year old, so he wouldn’t have been able to accidentally lock himself in. One thing’s for sure. He didn’t throw himself out the window, even if he could have climbed from his cot and got up to the sill.’

  The window was still wide open, the curtains sodden. The cot stood at least three feet from the exterior wall. Bryant leaned out for a good look. ‘Come away from that,’ Banbury instructed. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  ‘I’m not going to touch anything, all right?’ Bryant shot him a scowl.

  ‘Mrs Kramer insists the window was down and locked when she last came up,’ said Renfield.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About half an hour earlier.’

  ‘Whoever did this didn’t come in from outside the window. The carpet’s soaking, but I can’t see any footprints.’

  ‘With all due respect, Mr Bryant, your eyesight isn’t anything to write home about. Let me do some tests.’

  Banbury dusted the lock and handle for prints, but they were completely clean—there was not so much as a single sweat whorl on the hasp. ‘At a guess I’d say someone wiped up.’

  Bryant leaned back out of the window and looked above. ‘Even assuming someone had come up with a way to enter the room from outside, he couldn’t have come from the roof. There’s a sheer wall above. That’s got to be a ten-foot gap. And there’s no way of climbing down, no handholds, nothing.’

  May came around the other side of the cot, where the shadows fell from the window. He froze in his tracks. ‘What on earth is this?’

  He knelt and examined the sprawled shape on the floor. About two and a half feet long, the hunchbacked figure had jointed limbs, and was garishly dressed in a striped red velvet suit with a great paunched belly, yellow pom-poms and a white ruff collar. It wore a pointed crimson hat topped with a bell and had the curled yellow slippers of a sultan. The scarlet parrot nose was hooked so that it almost met the chin. Its gimlet eyes stared wide and were tinged with madness.

  ‘Hello, what have we here?’ said Bryant, brightening up. ‘Mr Punch. Dan, may I?’

  ‘All right, but be careful,’ said Dan, who was tired of dealing with the problems of tainted evidence that occurred whenever Bryant tromped merrily through a crime scene.

  Bryant lifted the figure into a standing position. ‘It looks like a Victorian original. Stuffed with kapok, wooden hands and feet, papier-mâché head. There should be a little bell in his cap. What’s it doing beside the cot?’

  ‘Over here,’ called May, who was standing by the opposite wall. An entire collection of Punch & Judy puppets was arranged along it at head height. Only one was missing from its hook.

  ‘Looks like Mr Punch decided to go for a walk,’ said Bryant. ‘How did it get off the wall and over to the cot inside a locked room?’

  ‘The parents had probably been amusing their child and forgot to put it back,’ said May.

  ‘Rather a grotesque thing to wave at a baby, isn’t it? After all, it’s a very valuable antique, not a kiddies’ plaything. It would probably have made him burst into tears.’ Bryant knew a thing or two about making children cry. ‘So what’s it doing on the floor?’

  ‘Don’t read too much into this, Arthur.’

  ‘I can’t help it.’ Despite Banbury’s look of horror, Bryant raised the figure high and wiggled it. The puppet’s movements were unnervingly realistic. ‘After all, what’s one of the first things Mr Punch does in the play?’

  Renfield and May looked at each other.

  ‘He throws the baby out the window,’ replied Bryant.

  In the great glass lounge, the mood had turned to confusion and a det
ermination among the guests to be seen behaving properly in extraordinary circumstances. Coffee had been served and groups had formed in various parts of the room, seated on extra chairs supplied by the waiters. For now at least, the attitude was one of civilized calm, as if they were commuters in a stalled train.

  Unsurprisingly, Arthur Bryant and John May were greeted with curious looks. Bryant was wrapped in a seaweed-green scarf and had his ancient soaked trilby pulled down over his ears. John May was tailored with inappropriate elegance, from his white Gieves & Hawkes shirt to his Lobb Oxford shoes, but both men were of retirement age and bore no resemblance to traditional officers of the law.

  ‘May I have your attention?’ May called. ‘This is Mr Bryant, I’m Mr May. I know it’s getting late, but we hope to be able to release you just as soon as we’ve established the order of tonight’s events. First of all, let me explain why we’re here. We belong to a specialist Unit that has taken over from the Westminster Metropolitan Police, owing to certain unusual circumstances connected with this investigation.’

  ‘And what are those?’ asked Russell Haddon, the theatre’s director.

  ‘We’re not able to give you full details, but we can tell you this. It is highly unlikely that Noah Kramer’s death was an accident. He appears to have died as the result of a vicious and callous attack. However, it’s very unusual to have such a specific margin of opportunity occurring in this kind of situation.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘There’s no easy access from the outside of the building. The front door was locked and answered by a security guard who admitted only those who had been invited to the party. He checked in a total of thirty-five guests, plus waiters and a chef. It appears no-one else came in or left. Now, we know that Mrs Kramer checked on her son at around eight-forty P.M., and that the discovery of her tragic loss occurred just before nine-twenty P.M. We now need to establish whether any of you left this room in the intervening forty minutes.’

  ‘You’re saying we’re all suspects,’ said Mona Williams loudly.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ snapped Bryant, rolling his eyes. ‘We didn’t come around for cocktails, did we?’

  ‘I think that’s a very inappropriate remark to make under the circumstances.’

  ‘Let me handle this,’ May told his partner before turning to the assembled gathering. ‘Naturally the enquiry will be treated in confidence. If any of you left the room tonight for whatever reason, we need to know when, why and for how long. You can provide us with the details on these extra pages.’ He held up a sheaf of notepaper. ‘As soon as you’ve done that, you’ll be able to leave.’

  Gail Strong accepted one of the sheets as they were handed out. She glanced at Marcus Sigler, making sure that he understood she was about to lie. The actor sent the faintest of nods in her direction, and turned to providing his own alibi.

  The gabled gingerbread house behind the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church was finished in orange bricks and maroon tiles, and appeared to have been designed by the Brothers Grimm. Plane trees and rowans hung over it with branches like claws that scrabbled at the windows, leaking sap and dripping rainwater so that moss and lichen grew in abundant clumps about the eaves, gradually consuming it. A miserable-looking heron balanced forlornly at its gate, and a pair of moorhens had bundled themselves against the downpour inside a bucket by the door. This bucolic night tableau was all the more remarkable for being just two miles from Piccadilly Circus, and no more than a three-minute walk from Europe’s largest railway terminus.

  ‘I suppose Mrs Danvers is still on the door,’ muttered Bryant, checking his watch. ‘Giles should get rid of her before she goes mad and burns the building down.’

  ‘The poor woman spends her day surrounded by opened corpses,’ May reminded him.

  ‘Didn’t Giles’s predecessor die in mysterious circumstances? Maybe she killed him.’

  ‘You wish. It would make a good case for you, wouldn’t it? Let’s get inside.’

  Bryant furled his umbrella and rang the bell, then jumped back as the door swung open, revealing Rosa Lysandrou, Giles Kershaw’s housekeeper. As usual she was clad in a shapeless knee-length black dress and had pulled her thick dark hair back in a severe bun.

  ‘She must have been standing behind the door,’ whispered Bryant as they entered. ‘Hello, Rosa,’ he said loudly, ‘you’re looking particularly effervescent this evening—is that a new shroud?’

  ‘He’s in there. He’s expecting you.’ She raised a stiff arm and pointed.

  ‘It probably takes a major traffic accident to bring a smile to her face,’ groused Bryant as they passed along the dimly lit corridor.

  Giles was in the autopsy room, still dressed in the green plastic apron he was required to wear while working. Mercifully, the tiny body of Noah Kramer had been filed away. ‘Dear fellows, good to see you, although these are awful circumstances. The babies are the worst—one always wonders what lives they might have led. I’ve finished here. Let me get out of this and wash up. Rosa will make us some tea. Trust me, you’ll need it after hearing my report.’

  They entered the octagonal room beyond the chapel of rest and found refreshments neatly laid out beneath the stained-glass windows, tea and plates of warm chocolate cake. Rain cascaded from the eaves, rippling the light.

  ‘Rosa is passionate about baking; you must eat.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Bryant. ‘I remember what happened to Hansel and Gretel.’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right once you get to know her.’ Giles flicked back his mop of blond hair and dropped into a deep sofa. He always seemed to bring sunshine into the room. ‘I thought we’d have a chat away from the morgue. Rosa believes that children keep on listening after they die. She lost a child herself, you see. It changed how she saw the world.’ He helped himself to cake, then checked his notepad. ‘I’ll spare you the main list of injuries. They’re what I would expect, entirely consistent with a fall from a window of that height. However, I’m afraid that the fall doesn’t appear to have been the cause of death.’

  ‘Why, what else did you find?’ asked May.

  ‘I think we’ve got a case of SBS, except that in this case there’s evidence of external injury.’

  ‘Shaken baby syndrome? I thought it was difficult to diagnose.’

  ‘Well, it is, because there’s no single definable symptom. There can be multiple fractures in the vertebrae, retinal hemorrhages, subdural hematomas—bleeding in the brain—it’s a rotational injury generally associated with child abuse, but really I suppose it’s about the frustration of someone ill-equipped to deal with a crying baby. The real problem, of course, is that it’s hardly ever a premeditated action. This was a particularly violent example. Noah Kramer’s larynx was ruptured, and there are bruises on either side of his throat. Broken blood vessels near the surface were caused by severe restriction. He was shaken violently, then strangled. It was an act of rage, which probably means a lack of prior intention to kill.’

  ‘So, manslaughter.’

  ‘Obviously it will depend on the mens rea—criminal culpability based on the perpetrator’s state of mind.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how long before the fall this might have occurred?’

  ‘I imagine the two acts, the shaking and the defenestration, were virtually concurrent, the second happening moments after the first, but of course I have no proof.’

  ‘So whoever did this plucked Noah from his cot, attacked him, then opened the window and threw him out.’

  ‘Yes, which is problematic from a legal point of view.’

  ‘Because the perpetrator stopped and opened the window, which would indicate a level of premeditation.’

  ‘Exactly. But I’m afraid it’s a little stranger than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Dan Banbury brought me the Victorian doll you found beside the cot. I got a very bothersome feeling in my stomach the moment I examined it. Dan can’t do any DNA matches—I gather you don’t have the
budget to send samples away for such things—but you know how he gets a sense of what happened. Well, he suggested that the pressure bruises on Noah’s throat might match the dummy’s wooden hands. I’m afraid it looks like he’s right. The fingers are coarsely carved and grooved. They leave a pretty unique mark.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t say this,’ groaned May, passing a hand across his face.

  ‘I did some tests. The hands exactly fit the bruises on Noah Kramer’s neck. There was even a tiny wooden splinter stuck on the surface of the baby’s epidermis. I talked with Dan, and he says he can’t find any evidence that anything human touched the baby. What’s more, there was no forced entry to the nursery. So far he’s found no signs of anyone apart from Mrs Kramer and the nanny having been in there.’

  ‘So what you’re telling me is that after the baby was left alone, Mr Punch climbed down from his hook, turned the key in the nursery door lock, crept over to the cot, took his rage out on Noah Kramer and fulfilled his mythical destiny to become a murderer,’ said Bryant, genuinely shocked.

  The senior detectives felt it was important for the PCU staff to be able to share time together away from their desks and laptops, so they had set aside the newly designated common room. May thought it would be an area where they could form impromptu gatherings at various times of the day and night to share their ideas about ongoing cases.

  Instead, they usually found Bimsley there with his boots off, eating cheese and onion crisps while thumbing through the latest issue of Gadgets. Now it was heading toward midnight, but the lights were still ablaze in the common room, and all was far from well.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Raymond Land, studying the photographs Sergeant Jack Renfield had taken. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s who she is,’ said John May. ‘I assume that’s why we’ve been given the case.’

  ‘The daughter of the Minister for Public Buildings,’ said Land. ‘Gail Strong is working for this troupe?’