Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  “What’s actually wrong with you?” asked Longbright, nettled.

  “The doctors don’t know. I stay well away from them – they’re no bloody use at all. Anyway, I’ve got Sheena to look after me now.” I bet they told you to eat less and get some exercise, thought Longbright. You certainly didn’t waste any time replacing your daughter.

  “She seems like a good kid,” said Rose. “They don’t feed her properly at home so she’s staying here.”

  “I understand Anna had trouble with the local youths. What happened?”

  “The Hagan family, they live in the corner house, grandparents, parents, kids and their kids. None of them ever had a job in their life, all on the fiddle, all ex-cons. Ashley Hagan, he’s the oldest boy, he’s the worst. We had our car broken into and the radio nicked, had to get rid of it in the end. And Anna had her phone nicked twice, once from the counter in the kitchen – ”

  “You mean someone broke in?”

  “No, she left the back door unlocked by accident. It don’t pay to leave anything unlocked around here.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “Yes, of course, and Anna told them who did it, but they did nothing.”

  “Did she have proof that it was Ashley Hagan?”

  “She didn’t need proof, everyone knows that when someone gets robbed in this street it’s always the Hagans.”

  “The problem is that she would have needed a little more evidence to pursue the matter further,” Longbright explained. “I checked with your local constabulary and they agree the Hagans are most likely involved in much of the crime that goes on around here. But they also get blamed for everything else that happens.”

  “Seems to me the police are on the wrong bloody side.”

  “They’ve conducted raids on the house looking for stolen goods several times in the past, but haven’t found anything.”

  “That’s ‘cause the Hagans keep it in a lock-up on the estate.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?”

  “Common knowledge, isn’t it? Ashley found out that my Anna had reported him, and after that she was given a really hard time by the whole family. It was stressing her out. She couldn’t sleep from worry. Then on Monday night she came home and one of them attacked her right on the doorstep.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No, I was in here. But who else could it be? She had to go right past their house to get home. They’re always hanging around outside. She got her shopping bag back but they’d got her phone again, and her keys. I’ve had to change the locks. Anna hadn’t been feeling well for a couple of days, and this only made her worse.”

  “What happened after she was mugged?”

  “She came in, made some tea and started slicing up bread for toast. You know, for her supper. That’s when she cut herself. She showed me – it was just a little nick on her thumb, that’s all. I told her to stick a plaster on it. She went back in the kitchen, and I found her a few minutes later. The doctor said it was some form of blood poisoning, like I keep a dirty house! That knife had only just come out of the dishwasher.”

  Longbright was used to dealing with the fallout of sudden death, but was shocked by Mrs Marquand’s lack of grief. She seemed to be positively thriving on the drama of the tragedy.

  “Blood poisoning can be triggered by pre-existing damage in the body’s immune system, Mrs Marquand. Or by some kind of organism that’s already in the blood. I looked at the doctor’s notes. Anna was just very unfortunate.”

  “Why had she been to see you, anyway? Nobody has explained what she was doing talking to the police.”

  “She was working with my boss. Would it be possible to see Anna’s room? Anna was taking care of certain documents for him, and I’m supposed to return them to the office.”

  “You’ll have to take a look for yourself. I don’t do stairs.”

  Longbright made her way to the upper floor and let herself into Anna’s neat, light bedroom. Bryant had found his biographer through Dr Harold Masters, who insisted that Anna was far too good to be transcribing documents for academics at a pittance. But she was also employed by government agencies helping to prepare white papers, so she was required to keep a secure area in her office for documents of a sensitive nature.

  A cheap Ikea desk stood against the back wall, with books arranged in tidy piles. There were hardly any photographs or personal belongings on display. A small threadbare teddy bear that had probably been a childhood friend sat on colourful cushions at the head of her single bed. A window overlooked the untidy back garden. Two unlocked cupboards were filled with research folders, reference books and magazines. Apart from a flimsy wardrobe of clothes and a high-backed chair, there was nothing else.

  This was Anna Marquand’s small world, a haven away from her overbearing mother, a place of safety and comfort. Longbright felt suddenly overwhelmed by sadness.

  She took up the frayed rag rug and found it underneath, a slim steel cabinet neatly recessed into the floor, locked with a single standard Yale key. Not exactly impregnable, but it probably fulfilled the conditions of her contracts. Dan had lent Longbright his key kit and she managed to open the safe in a few seconds. Inside were around thirty CD-ROMs labelled with the names of their clients, their contents numbered according to a system that Anna probably matched up in her notes. Simple and effective, but hardly secure. Nothing from Arthur or the PCU. Then she remembered: Anna had only just returned from town and would not have had time to refile the disc. She relocked the safe with its contents intact.

  She picked the single framed photograph from the desk and studied it. Anna in happier times, with her father and mother on a bright Spanish beach. There was hope back then, and happiness. No sign of the future, of lives derailed and unfulfilled. She set it gently back down and closed the bedroom door as quietly as possible, as if Anna were sleeping inside.

  “Your daughter went outside and found the shopping bag on the step,” she reminded Rose Marquand. “Do you still have the contents?”

  “No, I unpacked it and put everything away.”

  “There was just shopping in it, nothing unusual?”

  “No. But she’d been working on her laptop and had some discs. I think I put them on the sideboard.” Rose pointed across the cluttered lounge. Longbright sifted through the stacks of TV listings magazines and gossip papers but found nothing more.

  “I don’t see them here.”

  “I don’t know where anything is any more. Look, can you put a stop to those Hagan kids? They made the last few moments of my daughter’s life a misery. She was shaking when she came in. She told me she was frightened, and I could see the fear in her eyes. It was probably why she accidentally cut herself in the first place. I should have prepared supper for her. I want you to arrest them.”

  “I promise I’ll see what I can do.” Janice searched through the sideboard and underneath it, but found nothing. Anna had taken the disc with her when she had gone to see Arthur, but didn’t seem to have returned home with it.

  “Did your daughter have another place where she kept things safe?” Longbright asked. “Somewhere outside the house?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me much about her work. It was just, you know, writing.” She made the last word sound absurd, like some kind of incomprehensible and pointless hobby.

  “Did she mention going somewhere that struck you as unusual?”

  Mrs Marquand tried to think, but looked blank. “Only the lido. Isaid, what do you want to go there for?”

  “A swimming pool? Which one?”

  “The open-air one up in Tooting Bec.”

  “Why did you think it was so odd that she would go there?”

  “She used to swim every day when she was a little girl. But that was years ago. Tooting Bee’s miles out of her way. That, and the weather.”

  “What exactly did Anna say?”

  “She called me after seeing your boss on Monday afternoon. I asked her to pick up some din
ner and she said she’d be a bit late. That she had to go to the lido on the way home to see someone.”

  “Can you remember who?”

  “A girl with a similar name. Diana or Donna. That’s it, Donna. Perhaps she can tell you more.”

  “Thank you.” Longbright paused in the doorway. “Would you say Anna was happy?”

  “I don’t know. I think she wanted a fella. We all do, don’t we? She shouldn’t have died like that. It don’t seem fair. What did she get out of life?”

  Longbright studied Anna’s mother coldly. Rose Marquand could not see how much she had contributed to her daughter’s misery. There was a bad atmosphere in the house. Sheena was watching her from the stairs.

  She took her leave, stepping between the trash-filled puddles in the alley to reach the corner house where the Hagan family lived. In the unkempt front garden were two gigantic cardboard boxes that had once contained plasma TV screens, and an empty Apple Mac carton, yet the upper windows had silver tape stuck over cracked glass and there were slates missing off the roof. Somewhere inside, a large dog barked.

  She was all too familiar with houses like this. Within it, all generations of the family would gather to bicker and get drunk, obsessing over each other’s fluctuating loyalties. It was a hellishly closed world, but if any outsiders intruded, the family would briefly unite to make them a target for harm.

  All the local beat officers could do was watch the Hagans and wait for anything that would incriminate them. Drugs, stolen goods, a fight that resulted in physical signs of abuse. Families like the Hagans survived because they knew no witnesses would ever come forward to speak out against them, and nobody would volunteer to give evidence in court. But the Hagans were also an anachronism, a dying breed; Longbright was aware that there were over 180 criminal gangs in London, speaking twenty-four languages, responsible for a third of all the capital’s murders, and their roots lay in ethnic divisions. Criminals were more likely to be bound by a common homeland now than by sharing the same house. Families like the Hagans still practised money laundering, tax evasion and handling stolen goods, but trafficking in drugs, weapons and people belonged to an insidious new order of outlaws.

  Heading back to the tube, Longbright resolved to speak with one of the sergeants at Southwark police station, but knew there was little chance of fulfilling Rose Marquand’s wish to prosecute them. She set off towards Tooting Bee lido.

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  17

  Highways

  On Wednesday evening the sky cleared so suddenly that it looked as if the clouds had been vacuumed away like dirt, leaving a rich azure sky. The buildings lightened and the pavements dried. People reappeared on the grey streets of King’s Cross and workers once more began drinking outside pubs. Smokers surrounded buildings. Cautious smiles were even spotted.

  Inside the PCU, the Turkish workmen who were refitting the electrics and repairing walls had returned and were mopping up pools of water left by the holes in the building’s roof. In Bryant and May’s shared office, the detectives pored over the spreadsheet May had created to track the movements of everyone at the Kramers’ party. Bryant was visibly bored and itching to return to his books.

  “It’s very attractive, all these nice coloured panels,” he said, “but of absolutely no use. I don’t know why you keep insisting I should study them.”

  “Look, you can see who left the room, when and why,” said May. “It saves you having to talk to anyone.”

  “I don’t need to be protected from the public, thank you.”

  “I’m protecting them from you. By studying this we can tell who was missing at the time of the murder.”

  “Ah, but this is where your reliance on technology lets you down. Your fancy chart is based on the memories of witnesses, which are nearly always faulty. It can’t show us what we need to understand most of all. We can’t know what each of them saw and heard that night. Upstairs, there was a queue outside the toilet. At the back, there were people smoking on the rear fire escape. Everyone else was either in the lounge or the kitchen. Are we agreed on that?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’ve got there.”

  “Then, at approximately ten past nine, somebody heard an odd noise from the fire escape stairs. This is in the testimony of Gail Strong, who was outside having a cigarette at that time. Strong says she passed Sigler coming in as she went out, but Sigler says he only saw Pryce coming out, and Pryce only saw Sigler, did Renfield tell you that?”

  “No. I’m getting confused.”

  Bryant tapped the chart. “Look at your time lines. At nine-ten Sigler, Strong and Pryce were absent from the room. Upstairs, a chap called Mohammad al-Nahyan, the theatre’s carpenter, and Larry Hayes, the wardrobe chap, went to use the loo. So altogether there were five people missing from the lounge, three smokers, two full bladders, all accounted for. In the corridor we have al-Nahyan, in the toilet we have Hayes, out on the fire escape we have the others. But Hayes doesn’t remember seeing al-Nahyan even though he must have passed him when he left the loo. People remember things imperfectly. If you overlap the times of the smokers, the bladders and the remaining guests, who were all within each other’s sight in the lounge, there are no other suspects left to consider apart from the staff.”

  “The one waiting to use the toilet and the other inside – they don’t remember seeing each other?”

  “One does, one doesn’t. These are mundane moments – party chatter, a loo break – we don’t give them our full attention. Several of the guests wandered back and forth from the kitchen to the main room, having a look around. And of course the host and hostess were absent to check on their baby.”

  “OK, I agree that it doesn’t seem likely they would all be able to keep tabs on each other, no matter what they told Renfield. Apart from anything else, they’d all been drinking.”

  “Which is why all the charts and time lines in the world can’t help us. So I’ve invited someone to give us a hand.” Bryant went to the door and opened it. “Mr Pryce, can you come in now?”

  The author stepped into the room with a look of apprehension on his face. He solemnly shook hands with each detective.

  “I invited Mr Pryce here because of his specialist skill,” Bryant explained. “He scripts the exits and entrances of his cast, and spends his days thinking of how they might respond in different situations.”

  “Have you gone out of your mind, Arthur?” whispered May. “Pryce is a potential suspect. He could compromise the entire investigation.”

  “And if we were working out of a Metropolitan Police unit, I’d agree with you. But we’re not. Our remit allows us to endorse experimental methods, although you seem to have forgotten that lately. Well, I’m putting the experimental thinking back in. As Mr Pryce is one of only three people whose movements we can reliably account for during the course of the entire evening, I think it’s fairly safe to involve him.”

  “Who are the other two?”

  “The carpenter, Mohammad al-Nahyan, and the front-of-house manager, Jolie Christchurch. But neither of those has the kind of specialist thinking that might help us. We need to get an inside perspective on this, John. Writers have a long tradition of helping the government. Dennis Wheatley used to be employed by the war office and worked for Winston Churchill. He was hired to come up with ideas about how the Germans might attack us, although he did say they would try to use a death ray on London, which was a bit wide of the mark. Still, we have to be similarly open-minded.” He turned to the playwright. “Mr Pryce, I explained our problem to you. Now you know almost as much as we know. Have you had any thoughts?”

  Ray Pryce sucked at his teeth, thinking for a moment. “Well, yes, I suppose I have, but it sounds ridiculous.”

  “Come on, you’re used to thinking of ridiculous situations, it’s what you do for a living.”

  The writer bristled visibly. “Have you seen the show?”

  “No, but I understand it features a murderous puppet and var
ious gruesome deaths.”

  “That’s right. Ella Maltby designed some very creepy props. In fact, one of the ones she came up with for The Two Murderers was modelled on the puppets in Robert Kramer’s Punch and Judy collection. Which makes me wonder about this whole thing. I mean, the murder site, the audience, the setting – it feels like a staged performance.”

  “Staged for the benefit of whom? And by whom?”

  Pryce looked down at his grubby trainers, fidgeting with discomfort. “There’s been trouble at the theatre. I mean, we’ve all overheard the fights. It’s kind of hard to ignore them when they’re happening in the stalls, right in front of you.”

  “You’re talking about the Kramers,” translated May.

  “Robert often attends rehearsals with notes, even though it’s not his job to do so. And he makes Judith come with him. He treats her in a way that no woman deserves to be treated. He’s always asking her where she’s been, and making her account for her time.”

  May gave his partner a knowing look. “Why do you think he does that?”

  “Apparently he did the same thing with his first wife. I guess he’s just a naturally suspicious man. Personally, I think he’s a bully. I saw him slap her once – actually hit her, although he pretended it was an accident – and I heard him threaten to have Gregory Baine thrown off the board of his company unless he sorted out a problem with the accounts. And if Robert Kramer really wanted to hurt his wife he’d take away the thing she loves most of all, wouldn’t he? My play is a revenge tragedy, and it seems to me he’s following the storyline – not in terms of actual plot, but in tone. He’s always asking me questions about the murderer’s motivation. He takes a lot of interest in that.”

  “Marcus Sigler is playing the murderer, isn’t he? Don’t some actors start identifying strongly with the characters they’re playing?”

  “If he did, that would mean Marcus was your main suspect. But actors are trained to know the difference between their roles and their own characters. It’s those who watch who become the most obsessed. Look at stalkers. Look at the history of murderers who say they’ve been influenced by fictional characters.”