Bryant removed his pipe from between his teeth and gave a ghastly grin. ‘The oldest motive in the world. Revenge. This is about the memory of blood. Blood in the sense of blood relations. Dummies are representatives of people. This particular dummy was intended to be the first Mrs Kramer. Robert Kramer didn’t know she was pregnant when she died. He would have had a real heir after all. And the significance of the first Mrs Kramer? It’s very simple. She was Ray Pryce’s mother. Pryce knew and, in his own absurdly roundabout way, was trying to tell Robert that he knew.’
‘His mother?’ May repeated. ‘How did you find out about that?’
‘Remember I told you this was about the victim, not the murderer? I had a bit of a root about in Kramer’s background, and her name kept coming up. Stella Kramer was a writer, too—or at least she tried to be. She wrote about the experience of giving birth for a weekly magazine. She wrote about her unhappy childhood, and anything else that she thought might sell. It was hard to separate out the facts; at first I assumed she was making everything up. And after a while, thanks to a few carefully planted denials by her husband, so did everyone else. I followed the paper trail as her articles dwindled to bitter letters in the local press, and the salient facts are clear. Ray was born out of wedlock and raised by foster parents, but Stella stayed in touch with him. She met him in secret, and told him all about her disastrous marriage to Robert. He advised her to leave, but she couldn’t. The couple’s fights eventually made the Evening Standard, but Stella came off badly. Kramer’s bullying drove her to suicide. And Pryce sat impotently by, penniless and powerless, unable to do anything about it as Kramer grew richer and stronger. Pryce tried to make a living as a writer and failed. There was nothing he could do but watch, and nurse his hatred.
‘All this changed on the day he discovered the box of scripts. Suddenly, fate stepped in and gave him the power to act. He palmed off one of the plays as his own and went to see Kramer. He slowly wormed his way into the inner circle. Did he, like Hamlet, plan to stage a version that reenacted a parental death? No, because we all remember what happened to Hamlet.
‘But like Hamlet, he bided his time and waited for an opportunity to strike. There’s a good chance that it would never have happened, if it hadn’t been for Robert Kramer’s ill-chosen remarks about his first wife at the party, which Ray overheard.
‘It was the last straw. He stormed upstairs and attacked the baby. I kept looking at Janice’s chart, but for ages I couldn’t see the error because everyone was accounted for. Then I realised that it was impossible. Somebody had to have made a mistake. But it took more than one person to make a lie; it took the perpetrator and the witness, and I couldn’t work out which of the corroborators was lying. Of course, I should have seen it, because now it’s obvious. And there’s an ugly little sidebar to this. Robert Kramer happened to be Jewish, and Pryce attacked him with his own puppetry. The Mr Punch model conforms to the physiological concept of the cephalic index—the mockery of Jewish facial features. Ray Pryce has a prior conviction for an anti-Semitic attack dating back to his time in foster care. I enrolled him in the case to keep him close, just as Kramer had with his enemies.’
Bryant sat back and contentedly puffed away at his pipe. Everyone, including his partner, stared at him in amazement.
Colin turned to Meera. ‘You have to go on a date with me now,’ he said, grinning.
Raymond Land came in on the earliest train. He had woken to find there was no breakfast, because Leanne had gone to Wales and he didn’t know how to use the microwave, or where she kept the eggs, or where the saucepans lived, so he caught an earlier train and breakfasted at The Ladykillers. The little café was empty at eight A.M.—most shops and offices in the area opened at nine-thirty—so he had time to sit and reflect over his morning tea.
Perhaps, he thought, just perhaps I’ve been wrong all this time, waiting to be transferred to a place where life is easy and the sun always shines. Perhaps that’s not what life is all about. Perhaps you only get a sense of yourself when everything has to be fought for. It’s less pleasurable here but more exciting. Watching the two detectives the night before, battling their way to the end of the case, he felt he was seeing them at the top of their game. He could feel the gravitational pull of London life, the magnetic energy that raced around them, the essence of awareness that sparked everything into activity.
He had felt truly alive.
But he couldn’t let Leanne down. She dreamed of holidays to Barbados. She wanted to spend days by a pool beneath an azure sky. She didn’t want to have to take an umbrella and a scarf every time she left the house. She didn’t want to be married to a man who divided his time between paperwork, pubs and putrid corpses. She needed pampering. How could he deny her dreams?
With a heavy heart, he dug out his keys and let himself into 231 Caledonian Road. He absentmindedly stroked Crippen, who was waiting on the stairs. The glossy black cat rubbed its back against his legs and followed him along the labyrinthine corridors to his office. Land disconsolately noted the newly painted walls in an odd variety of mismatched colours—the nice plain white had turned out to be undercoat. He stepped over the lethally warped floorboards, and breathed the smell of beer and stale pipe smoke that hung in the air. Nobody else was in yet.
He went into the office that Bryant and May had commandeered. May’s desk was obsessively neat, the electronic gadgets arranged in rows, recharging, a few piles of paperwork squared off to the corners of his workspace.
Bryant’s half of the room was the opposite. A black candle had dripped rank wax over his chased-silver Tibetan skull, making it smell even worse. A piece of mouldering tannis root dangled from a carapace over his filthy, barely used computer. Wavering stacks of esoteric books threatened to fall. A stuffed weasel with only one eye leered from a bowed bookcase. Two dozen minor Indian gods carved from coloured chalks were randomly scattered over his ink-stained papers. The receiver of his telephone had somehow been burned and had become fused with its base. An odiferous lime and purple chemical compound was sprouting in a Tupperware dish. The power point under his desk had been held open with the blade of a kitchen knife so that he could leave a light burning over his hydroponic marijuana plant. A hardback book lay open by his keyboard. Land idly examined the chapter Bryant had been reading; Knife Wounds 6: Identifying Weapons from Entry Stabs Section B: Cuts to the Face & Eyes. He sighed wearily.
His eye fell upon Madame Blavatsky. She seemed to be perfectly at home in here. He wandered over to it, checked the coin slot and dug out an old penny. Dropping it in, he watched as the seer rummaged awkwardly for a card and dropped it into the delivery tray. He reached in and picked it up.
It read:
YOUR WIFE IS HAVING AFFAIRS BEHIND YOUR BACK
Startled, he shoved the card back in the tray.
He looked back at Madame Blavatsky. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ he said aloud.
The clairvoyant winked at him grotesquely. One of her eyes was shorting out, causing her hand to tremble. Suddenly she spoke. ‘Your wife, Leanne, is not in Wales, Raymond, she’s at the Regent Palace Hotel with her Spanish flamenco instructor. You will find them checked in under the name of Cheryl and Roger Boothby.’ Blavatsky’s voice was low and ominous, and seemed to come from a place far within the cold earth.
‘How do you know this?’ Land asked.
‘Don’t be stupid, I’m a clairvoyant. I see all.’
‘What should I do?’
‘I tell you nothing you have not suspected before. You must face your demons.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Go there at once, before they leave the room. Confront her. Take back control of your life. The power is in your hands.’
‘You’re right,’ said Land, suddenly filled with conviction. ‘By God, you’re right. I should have done this a long time ago.’ He turned on his heel and quickly left the room.
Arthur Bryant emerged from his place inside the old armchair that he had turned to f
ace the wall. He yawned and stretched.
‘I say, I say, I say,’ said Madame Blavatsky. ‘Did you hear about my clairvoyant friend Madame Raya? She won the lottery. I said to her, “Well done, Medium Raya.” ’
‘What on earth’s going on?’ asked John May, coming in and throwing his newspaper onto his desk.
‘Oh, years ago Dudley Salterton taught me ventriloquism,’ Bryant replied. ‘I went to see Maggie Armitage to get my memory back, and her treatment made me remember his lessons. I got bored sticking little hints on Madame Blavatsky’s cards—Raymondo’s so hopeless I knew he’d never get the message—so I made the old dear tell him about Leanne. He’s gone off to sort her out. He completely fell for it.’
May made a sound of disapproval but was not really surprised. ‘Arthur, you are completely incorrigible.’
‘I should hope so. It’s one of the few benefits of my age. Anyway, I’ve nothing better to do. Ray Pryce is behind bars. My desk is clear once more. Except—’
‘I know,’ said May. ‘But you’re not going to be able to sort this one out. It’s far too big.’
‘I know, but I have to find a way, John. I can’t leave her murder on my conscience.’
‘You wouldn’t be fighting an individual over Anna Marquand’s death. You’d be taking on the entire British government. You’re not a political animal, Arthur. You’d be beaten.’
‘I wouldn’t do it alone,’ said Bryant.
‘No,’ May agreed. ‘I wouldn’t let you do it alone. We’re a team. But whatever the outcome, you know it would be our final investigation. It would be the end of us.’
‘Yes, I know that. But still, I think I have to do it.’
‘Then I’ll do it with you,’ said May. ‘We’ll find a way to put things right somehow.’
‘There’s always another fight, isn’t there?’ said Bryant. ‘You strip away one mask and find another beneath it.’
‘That’s this city for you. It’s filled with infinite impossibilities, but it has survived for more than two thousand years, and it’ll still be here long after we’ve gone. There’s one small consolation.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It will remember your name, Arthur. You did something with your life. London remembers all those who make a difference.’
‘So you think we should go out with a bang?’ Bryant asked. He raised one dangerously mischievous eyebrow.
‘Why not?’ said May, unable to contain a rueful smile. ‘That was the way we came in, wasn’t it?’
This book is a small wedding gift for Martin Butterworth,
wishing you a universe of merriment and joy.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Old (and new) readers will notice that Bryant & May books aren’t like other detective series—they can be read out of sequence (in fact, they sometimes benefit from it), and I cheekily incorporate suggestions from readers. I have a feeling that if I tipped Bryant & May over the Reichenbach Falls they’d find a way to climb back up. Every time I prepare to send them to their deaths, they win a reprieve and fight on.
This time I owe their survival to my marvelous editor, Kate Miciak, who always believed in the characters and willed them back into existence. I also love the way she writes ‘Yowza!’ in a green starburst when she comes across a chapter she enjoys. Writers crave this kind of encouragement. I’d like to thank my US agent, Howard Morhaim, for his unflagging enthusiasm, and my UK agent, Mandy Little, for always remaining, without question, a true believer. These are interesting times for publishing, and authors need all the help they can get. On that score I’d like to thank the book clubs of America for championing the series and providing a lifeline for authors like me. A big shout out to Jennifer Siegel and Michele Slung, for their New York support group.
As always, the least likely-sounding facts in this novel are, in fact, true.
For further information, visit:
www.peculiarcrimesunit.com
www.christopherfowler.co.uk
PECULIAR CRIMES UNIT MYSTERIES
BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Full Dark House
The Water Room
Seventy-Seven Clocks
Ten Second Staircase
White Corridor
The Victoria Vanishes
Bryant & May on the Loose
Bryant & May off the Rails
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER is the acclaimed author of nine novels in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series, including Bryant & May on the Loose and Bryant & May off the Rails. He has been nominated by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for the Dilys Winn Award, given to the book that booksellers most enjoyed selling. The Victoria Vanishes was also nominated for best novel by the British Fantasy Society and won Crimefest’s Last Laugh award for funniest mystery novel. Fowler lives and writes in London.
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