The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘How do you propose to do that?’

  ‘I thought at first we could attend Robert Kramer’s funeral, because I assumed Judith Kramer was going to invite all of his colleagues, but I hear she’s not. It’ll be a small, private family service, and she’s specifically asked for none of us to be in attendance. We can override that, of course, but we’d have to keep a low-key presence.’

  ‘I hear she’s taking her husband’s death surprisingly well.’

  ‘That’s not much of a shock, is it? He was having affairs and she was in love with someone else. In a way, his death has solved everything for her.’

  ‘You don’t suppose—?’

  ‘She killed her own child? I don’t know. Janice doesn’t think so. We know Judith was at home in bed when Gregory Baine and Mona Williams died, and that her child’s nanny was sitting with her, so unless she was working with an accomplice, like Marcus Sigler …’

  ‘This is all guesswork, Arthur. It won’t get us anywhere. Without Kramer and his producer the show will shut down and the players will all disperse. We have no powers to keep them close by.’

  ‘I know. That’s why with your help I can take action before it’s too late.’

  ‘What do you propose to do?’

  ‘We’re going to throw a little end-of-show party. The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. Killers often lack social skills, but theatre folk are social animals. Therefore we have to put them in a social situation where they feel comfortable. If we handle it correctly, no-one will dare to stay away for fear of drawing attention to themselves. If we can’t force our murderer out into the open and goad him into admission, we’ll have lost him forever.’

  May shook his head. ‘Oh, I can’t wait for Raymond to hear about this,’ he said.

  On Monday morning, Janice Longbright took time off from the investigation to visit the Marquands’ house in Bermondsey once more. She had not been able to concentrate on the Kramer case for days, knowing that someone was prepared to kill in order to keep Arthur’s memoirs hidden.

  Whoever was behind the plot knew the players well. They had followed Anna Marquand’s routine, and knew enough about Bryant to understand that even he would not be able to remember what was in his notes. All he possessed was a finished book with the most contentious details missing. Everything hinged on finding the disc that contained the missing sections of the manuscript. Rose Marquand had interrupted the helper before she finished searching the house—now it was up to Longbright.

  She arrived to find Mrs Marquand in a state of extreme nervousness. ‘I just called,’ she told Longbright, ‘but the police said they were too busy to deal with it right now.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Longbright, coming in, but she could already see. The kitchen window had been smashed and opened.

  ‘I can’t move about quickly. I heard the glass break and tried to get back here. It was that Hagan boy. I scared him off.’

  ‘How do you know it was one of the Hagans?’ Longbright asked.

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  ‘When was this? Did you see where he went?’

  ‘It was about ten minutes ago—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know where he went. He didn’t go off down the garden. I think he might still be in the house. I’ve been too frightened to move from here.’

  Janice searched the ground floor, then went to the foot of the stairs and listened. There was no sound from upstairs. The house was less than a decade old, and nothing creaked. She peered up and watched the light in the hall above, searching for shifting shadows. She rarely felt nervous when she understood the kind of person she was dealing with, but the anonymity of the intruders invading Rose Marquand’s house made her uneasy.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anyone here now.’ She looked through the rear hall window and saw the magpies hopping into the garden. Rose had been complaining about them. Suddenly Longbright realised what she was looking at; Mrs Marquand had strung CDs on her clothesline. It was a tried and tested deterrent. The glittering discs were meant to scare off the birds.

  Instead of venturing upstairs she went to the back door and out into the garden. She recognised the spidery handwriting at once. Bryant’s disc was there, strung on the line along with Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond. As she was trying to free the clothesline she looked up and saw the face in the window, watching her. A man whose outline was familiar, late twenties, heavy, well over six feet tall, cropped hair and scrub beard, hard army build. She knew in an instant that the tables were about to turn.

  Unable to free the line from the tangle of knots Mrs Marquand had made, she pulled out her penknife and sawed through the nylon, catching the CD in her hand as the back door opened and he came running for her.

  She saw his boots leave the grass, and the distance he covered was astonishing. He barrelled into her with such force that she was knocked off her feet. Before she could begin to rise, she sensed she was in serious trouble. His grip felt mechanical, his bulk unbelievably solid. He closed his hands around her wrists and forced her back. She brought her knee up between his legs but he closed his thighs, blocking her.

  Then he punched her in the side of the head.

  The disc jumped out of her hand and rolled across the wet grass. She felt herself blacking out. Without even climbing from her he was able to reach back and seize the disc. As he concentrated on slipping it into his zipped pocket, she brought up her elbow and smashed his nose.

  Turning his attention back to her, he punched her hard in the solar plexus. Longbright vomited into the lawn, the pain burning across her rib cage. He was astride her now, studying her. Wiping his bloody nose, he raised a fist over her face and brought it down.

  She shut her eyes hard, readying herself for the blow, knowing he would shatter bone.

  But nothing happened.

  There was a dull thud, and she felt his weight suddenly ease from her. When she opened her eyes, she saw Mrs Marquand standing beside them with a brightly painted concrete gnome in her hands. There was blood dripping from its pink hat.

  Longbright’s attacker was out cold. Blood oozed thickly from a cut on the back of his head. She shoved him aside with difficulty and dug her hand into his padded black nylon jacket.

  ‘That’s not one of the Hagans.’ Mrs Marquand set down the gnome. ‘I don’t know who he is.’

  Longbright found the CD, but nothing more. He was carrying no wallet, no personal belongings of any kind. She tried his outer pockets and his trousers, her fingers closing around a slender slip of paper in his back pocket. As she rose with it, the garden swam before her. The side of her head was already starting to swell and there was a searing pain in her stomach. Mrs Marquand held out her arm and helped Longbright inside. Longbright knew she had to make a call to ensure that the intruder was taken into custody, but she needed to sit down for a moment—just thirty seconds, to get her wind back.

  Helped to the lounge sofa, she fell into soft cushions and closed her eyes. She awoke nearly ten minutes later. Mrs Marquand had locked the back door and was standing behind it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Longbright, puzzled.

  ‘He just got up,’ she whispered, peering out. ‘I thought I’d killed him.’

  Longbright looked through the lounge window and saw the empty patch of grass where her attacker had lain. The garden gate hung open. She unlocked the door and ran outside, but the alley beyond the garden was already empty.

  Remembering the slip of paper she had taken from him, she pulled it from her jeans and read it. Her heart sank.

  Most modern offices in Whitehall operated on electronic swipe cards which had to be returned after you had visited the building, but a few of the older departments still used visitor slips. You signed yourself in, adding the time, date and the name of the person you were visiting, and were meant to return the slip as you left, but most people forgot to do so.

  The white slip had a government crest on it. Underneath wa
s a name: Mr T Maddox, timed in at 7:45 P.M. a week ago, at the Department of Internal Security, Home Office, 50 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1.

  Next to the box that read ‘Person Visiting,’ the receptionist had written Oskar Kasavian.

  ‘You cannot throw a cocktail party for a bunch of murder suspects and charge it to the Unit!’ Raymond Land shouted, outraged. ‘In all my time serving at this lunatic asylum, this is the stupidest idea I’ve come across, even worse than that suspect lineup you held on the Somerset House ice-skating rink.’

  ‘I was thinking we’d serve Bloody Marys,’ said Bryant, not listening. ‘And little sausages on sticks. Mini-burgers are always popular.’

  ‘Could we have some decent Indian snacks?’ asked Meera.

  ‘And chicken wings with barbecue sauce,’ Bimsley added.

  Land shut his eyes and held up his hands for silence. ‘For the last time. We are not. Having. A. Party!’

  ‘There’s a little more to it than that,’ said May. ‘We’re going to tell the invited guests that we’ve made an arrest. They’ll think the pressure is off and they’ll drop their guard.’

  ‘Who are you going to palm off as the arrestee?’

  ‘An outsider. An unfamiliar name. We’re going to make the killer think we’ve been misled. Arthur has the whole thing planned.’

  ‘I know it sounds completely crazy but just listen to him,’ Banbury suggested.

  ‘Nobody’s going to know we’re behind this,’ said Bryant. ‘If you agree, Ray Pryce will help us rig the whole thing up, script the event with exits and entrances. Nobody would dare stay away. The show closes without Robert’s company funding it, and it’s the last time they’ll all be together. After this, they’ll be going their separate ways. It’s traditional to end a run with a farewell party. The timing’s perfect.’

  ‘How are you going to arrange it?’

  ‘Tomorrow night there was going to be a charity performance of the play to raise money for the Variety Club of Great Britain. The idea is to now go ahead with the performance. The crime scene has been cleared, so the obligation can be honoured. There’ll be a dedication to Robert Kramer at the end; it’s an old theatre tradition. Marcus Sigler will say a few words, and so will Judith Kramer. Ray will send a text to everyone hinting that there’s going be some kind of revelation during the course of the after-show party. We’ll reveal that we’ve arrested someone as a potential suspect. John and I will have some carefully worded questions prepared, and we’ll be watching everyone. And we want the facts of the investigation to be subject to full disclosure—no withheld information.’

  ‘You absolutely can’t do that.’ Land was outraged. ‘It’s unethical and contravenes just about every rule in the book. Besides, what if still nothing happens?’

  ‘Then we’ll be no worse off than we are now.’

  ‘We’ll just be messing with a few people’s heads,’ said Meera. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ With a shock, Bryant realised that for the very first time, the entire team was behind him.

  ‘All right,’ said Land finally. It was worth giving in just to stop them all staring at him. ‘But we’d better have someone stationed there in case this goes wrong.’

  ‘I’ll put Fraternity DuCaine on standby,’ said Longbright.

  An hour later, Ray Pryce came by to sort out the invitation wording with May. ‘How’s this?’ he asked. ‘I’ll personalise all the texts. I’ll tell them that you and your partner wanted to thank the company and pay your last respects to Robert. I’ll mention that you’re going to be on hand to explain that you’re now ready to press charges.’

  ‘And you think everyone will accept?’ asked May.

  ‘How can they not? They all have to be here tomorrow in order to complete their contracts. We’ve even had an email from Gail Strong asking if she could come back for the final show. A bloody cheek, after walking out like that.’

  ‘What time does everyone finish work?’

  ‘The play ends at nine forty-five, so I guess the last one will be out of the theatre by ten-thirty.’

  ‘Then we start the party at eleven. My partner has come up with the perfect venue.’

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ said Ray. ‘I could take notes about this to use in my next play, except that nobody would believe me.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said May, indicating his partner. ‘Welcome to my world.’

  The weather worsened steadily through the day. Longbright had applied anti-inflammatory cream to her blue-black bruise, but the side of her face was still painful. She listened to the sound of tapping buckets as she sat in her office and ran through the contents of Bryant’s disc.

  She had decided not to worry her boss with the news that she had managed to retrieve his disc. He was locked in his room with May, planning something. She settled down and prepared to search through four hundred pages of small-point type. After five hours without a break, she was still unable to find any disclosure so contentious that someone would be prepared to kill to hide it. The answer had to lie in some footnote or sidebar to the main investigations under discussion, something seemingly innocuous. She tried to think of a way of isolating the information. What would the Ministry of Internal Security find so damning in the Unit’s old cases?

  Using a technique she had learned from Bryant, she decided to tackle the problem from an entirely different perspective. Oskar Kasavian had been transferred to the department from the Ministry of Defence a couple of years ago. She ran a search on Kasavian’s background but was shut out of the MoD’s files, so she called up his CV through a public access request. It meant that her enquiry would be logged at HOIS, but that couldn’t be helped.

  The CV contained no detailed information, just a list of dates and employment statistics. She was about to shut it down when one date jumped out—a period spent at Porton Down, the military science park in Wiltshire. Porton Down was home to the MoD’s Science & Technology Laboratory, DSTL. It was an executive agency that had been set up by the Ministry of Defence itself. It was common knowledge that the site housed Britain’s most secretive military research institute, but access was denied to journalists without written permission from a variety of senior officials.

  She scanned back through the pages of Bryant’s memoir and found what she was looking for: the suicides of eleven Asian workers, all based at a company outsourced by the DSTL. The case had made news headlines at the time, until all details of it had suddenly been pulled. Their dates fell within the period that Kasavian was employed there.

  She scanned through the disc and found what Bryant had written. He mentioned the case in reference to an entirely separate matter—a mentally ill man who had killed a number of women in London pubs. That investigation had been solved and closed, so why had he mentioned Porton Down at all?

  Then she saw it, a small reference number directing her to an addendum at the end of the chapter. She went in to see Bryant.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come in today,’ Bryant said. ‘Your poor face.’

  ‘I’m fine. It looks worse than it is. Arthur, what is Project Genesis?’

  Bryant’s aqueous blue eyes sought focus as he remembered. ‘It was a bioscience initiative. I always felt it was linked with the deaths of some technicians.’

  ‘The drownings—you think the MoD had something to do with them?’

  ‘Let me put it this way: The deaths could have been avoided. I think they were probably suicides, but they were caused by the stress of the situation. You have to remember that an awful lot of people worked there under conditions of absolute security.’

  ‘But why would they all pick the same method of death?’

  ‘I talked about that with our old pathologist Oswald Finch at the time. He reckoned many scientists see drowning as a painless, clean method of taking one’s life. The whole thing came to our attention because of a man named Peter Jukes. He was project leader for chemical and biological security at the MoD’s Wiltshire laboratory. He
was found dead in suspicious circumstances. I requested his notes from the Home Office, but the Defence Secretary refused to acknowledge that there was a case. Supposedly Jukes had been suffering from depression and had long been recognised as a security risk. It was said he drowned, but there were anomalies in the case. At the time, military contractors were desperately trying to spend out the year-ends of their budgets before the axe fell on their departments. Project Genesis was closed down.’

  ‘What were they trying to do?’

  ‘I can’t remember the details—what we heard was mostly rumour—but it was something involving gene splicing. The management had been exaggerating their progress to the MoD, and it turned out that their technology wasn’t quite as advanced as they’d led everyone to believe it was. So the unit was shut and the staff dispersed.’

  ‘Then I have some bad news for you,’ said Longbright. ‘I think someone’s opened it back up again. You mentioned the Porton Down case in your notes.’

  ‘You think that’s what they were after?’

  ‘You flagged it yourself. You showed your hand by contacting the MoD. That’s why Oskar Kasavian has been trying so hard to close us down all this time. He’s desperate to discredit you. He’s been monitoring us. And then he discovers that an outsider—a well-connected writer and editor, to boot—has the information. The situation was containable so long as it remained inside the Unit, but suddenly he discovered a leak. Anna Marquand probably ran fact-checking enquiries from her computer. I’m willing to bet that Mrs Marquand’s so-called carer copied Anna’s hard drive and then wiped it.’

  ‘You think Kasavian acted on his own initiative to kill the story?’

  ‘It looks that way. He mustn’t know that we know. We need the advantage over him.’

  Bryant ran a wrinkled hand through his side tufts. ‘Okay, let’s get through the party. I’m not a woman.’