“I didn’t know you were outside. You could have come up.”
“No, I was having a plate of pork sausages over the road at your transport caff. I wanted to get an early start but something’s gone wrong with Victor’s carburettor. I thought we’d take your BMW.”
“Fine by me. Where are we going?”
“I need you with me, but I don’t want you to get annoyed again.”
“Why do you think it will annoy me?”
“Trust me, it will. We’re going to play with dolls. I’ve arranged an appointment at Pollock’s Toy Museum in Whitfield Street.”
“So long as it brings us nearer to catching a killer, I’m all yours,” May said magnanimously, digging out his car keys.
♦
“How did you get on with your contact?” asked Bryant as they turned into Charlotte Street.
“Interesting. Lucy Clementine worked for Kramer and hates him enough to suggest that he killed his wife’s child.”
“Yes, I rather thought she might,” said Bryant, burying himself deeper into his coat.
“What do you mean?”
“Take no notice of me. I shall keep my mouth zipped until I have further evidence. Let’s talk to Mr Granville. Pull in here.”
“It’s a double-red zone, Arthur.”
“You really have to stop worrying about these minor legal details. Don’t you get it? We’re old, we can do whatever we like. Come along. We’re late.”
Pollock’s Toy Museum was named after Benjamin Pollock, the last of the Victorian toy theatre printers. When it moved from the teeming streets of Covent Garden in 1969, it was relocated in an old corner house in a shaded back street behind Tottenham Court Road.
The museum on the corner of Whitfield Street was built over a working shop that specialized in Victorian puppets and theatres. Bryant peered in at the nicotine-coloured window display, which had not changed in decades. Bright red and yellow proscenium arches, trimmed from cardboard, reflected a world long vanished. In the narrow winding staircases and corridors above the shop, glass-eyed dolls and balding teddy bears stared out from corners. The existence of such a place in the modern world was a testament to the determination of its owners, who were resolved to keep the gateway of childish imagination open.
Nimrod Granville was one of the few men working in London who made Arthur Bryant appear healthful. Tussocks of snowy hair were clumped about the freckled, corrugated flesh of his paté, and a pair of ridiculous half-moon glasses were perched upon his spectacularly hooked hooter, lending him the appearance of Mr Punch himself. These days he remained seated on a high wooden stool behind the counter, and the shop’s dimly lit interior played havoc with his ability to read the boxes that contained the shop’s toy theatres, but Dudley Salterton had recommended him to Bryant as the capital’s last working expert on Victorian theatrical toys. Granville asserted that his longevity was due to a regular intake of Guinness and a sixty-a-day cigarette habit that had begun when he was twelve years old. Consequently his breathing sounded like a gale blowing through a fence and he was required to stop every thirty seconds to get his wind back.
“I hear you’ve found the Madame Blavatsky,” he said. “Dudley called me, very excited. We thought she had been lost in the Blitz.”
“I didn’t realize she had a reputation,” Bryant replied. “She still works.”
“Those things were precision-engineered to last, and the oil doesn’t dry out in them because the cogs are sealed within vacuum glass. She’s worth a bob or two.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t sell her.”
“Good man. She’s a creepy old thing, isn’t she? Of course, I’ve only seen pictures. I’d love to come and try her out. I’ve always been fascinated by automata, ever since I heard about the Turk.”
“What’s the Turk?” May asked.
“It was a mechanical chess player constructed in 1770 to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, a turbaned man on a wooden box filled with brass machinery. The Turk could beat human opponents at chess, and also performed something called the Knight’s Tour, which was a puzzle requiring the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard just once. The Turk was a sham, of course, but a rather beautiful one. The machinery appeared to go all the way to the back of the cabinet, but this was optical trickery. The last third of the cabinet housed a tiny man who was a chess master. But the illusion was a complex one involving deceptive sounds, magnets and levers that worked brilliantly. It eventually ended up in America and was destroyed in a fire. There have been reconstructions, but the Turk was the first and best of the automata. The French made brothel automata in the late nineteenth century that simulated lovemaking. And these days I hear the Japanese have developed life-sized robotic dolls that respond to the human voice, powered by tiny microchips.”
“Have you ever heard of a Mr Punch puppet that could operate in this manner?” asked Bryant.
“You’d think he would be an obvious choice, wouldn’t you? But no, there’s not been one to my knowledge. Punch is out of favour these days. Not politically correct. But then he was never intended to be. Most people don’t really get what he was about.”
“What do you think he was about?”
“Anarchy,” answered Granville. “Chaos, pure and simple. It is a mad world, and the only way to survive in it is by behaving more madly than anyone else. Punch exists beyond good and evil, right and wrong. I suppose you could say he’s a god. He remakes the universe in his own image.”
“You must meet people who love this sort of thing,” said Bryant. “Collectors, academics. You wouldn’t happen to have a list of them, would you?”
“I can make you up one. We keep a file of regular visitors. I won’t be a minute.” Granville eased himself from the stool with some difficulty and tottered over to a gigantic ledger, which he proceeded to pull down from the shelf.
“Do you want me to give you a hand with that?” asked May.
“Thank you, I can manage,” said Granville, looking as if he was about to be flattened. Clutching the immense tome, he staggered over to a corner of the counter and slammed it down.
“This isn’t going to help us,” May whispered to Bryant. “So far I’ve learned about mechanical dolls, robots, puppets and wax dummies, and absolutely nothing about the case at hand.”
“Not so.” Bryant shook his head. “We’re much closer to understanding what we’re up against.”
“Would you care to enlighten me?”
“Not really.”
“Here we are,” Granville exclaimed, thrusting a piece of paper at Bryant. “If I can be of any further help, do pop in.”
“Well, that was a waste of time,” said May as they left the museum shop. “Let’s get back to some proper policing.”
“I think we have one more stop to make,” said Bryant, showing his partner the slip of paper. “Look who’s a regular visitor to Pollock’s.”
Ella Maltby, the New Strand Theatre’s set designer and props manager, was listed at the top of the page as a collector of dolls and automata. “According to Mr Granville’s records, the last item Maltby purchased from the museum shop was this.” He unfolded a sheet of photocopied paper and showed May the picture on it.
May found himself looking at a puppet of the Hangman.
∨ The Memory of Blood ∧
30
Morbidity
Ella Maltby lived in a redbrick Jacobean-style house overlooking the north end of Hampstead Heath. It rose in magnificent isolation on the brow of the hill, rendered almost invisible by the profusion of damp greenery that surrounded it. Here kestrels, tawny owls and woodpeckers made their homes in the trees, and London, blue and misted, was spread out below, its glass financial towers placed to one side, like condiments at a picnic feast.
“This is probably the grandest building I’ve ever attempted to enter legally.” Bryant looked up at the door with approval. “It makes Hampstead Golf Club look like Bethnell Green Slipper Baths.”
“I
wonder why she works if she lives in a place like this?”
“I don’t know. Ray Pryce said she was very odd. Let’s find out just how very odd.” He gave the iron bellpull a tug.
“Is my tie straight?” May turned to Bryant with his chin forward.
“It’s fine. I don’t know why you feel the need to straighten a piece of silk dangling from your neck whenever you visit a woman.”
“I don’t want to look an utter scruffbag like you.” May looked down at Bryant’s knees and recoiled. Blue and white striped material was sticking out of his trouser bottoms. “Please tell me you’re not wearing pyjamas underneath your strides?”
“It was cold when I got up, so I just put another layer on. Is that so wrong?”
“I can’t believe you have to ask.”
The door was opened by Ella Maltby herself. She was clearly unhappy and unprepared to find the detectives standing on her doorstep.
“Ms Maltby, we need to talk to you about a purchase you made from Pollock’s Toy Museum six weeks ago,” said Bryant.
“You’d better come in before anyone sees you,” Maltby said, looking behind them.
She led the way into a wide, oak-panelled hall hung with cobwebbed chandeliers. When May studied them, he realized the cobwebs were stage effects that had been carefully sprayed onto the candlesticks.
“Well, they say you never can tell what’s behind an Englishman’s front door,” said Bryant in a not entirely complimentary tone.
“I am not English and I’m not a man,” Maltby pointed out. “I am German, originally from Hamburg. My father anglicized our family name after the war.”
“Ah, a Jerry, yes, well, I imagine he would. We had quite a few family friends who visited Hamburg. Didn’t stop, just flew over it and returned to base. Never mind, forgive and forget, eh?”
“Give me strength,” May muttered under his breath, but Bryant was on a roll.
“It probably explains your fascination with torture, I mean with the Hun being a notoriously cruel race, but you gave us our royal family, even though we dumped the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha surname because it was simply too embarrassing.”
Maltby froze Bryant with a cold stare. “You wanted to talk about a purchase.”
“A Hangman doll, I believe.”
“That’s correct.”
“What puzzles us is this: Robert Kramer is a collector of Punch and Judy memorabilia. Bit of a coincidence that you are, too, isn’t it?”
“I’m not,” Maltby said. “I bought the doll for Robert while I was buying the rest of the props for the play. That way it goes through the business books. They’re rare and very expensive.”
“Kramer already has a complete set of puppets.”
“Not true. There’s no single agreed set of characters. The productions varied across the centuries and the only surviving sets that match are in museums and private collections. They hardly ever come up for auction. The only way to collect them now is to buy the characters piecemeal. Mr Granville had heard of an original Hangman going, so I obtained it for Robert.” She looked from one detective to the other. “I’m assuming this has something to do with the death of Robert’s son?”
“A puppet of the Hangman was found beside Gregory Baine. Nobody’s told you?”
“I had no idea. What happened?”
“He was found hanging under Cannon Street Bridge.”
“I assume he killed himself.” She sounded curious but not surprised.
“Why would you think that?”
“Everyone knows he had money worries. He asked for a loan, but Robert turned him down.”
“Where were you on Wednesday night?”
“Here at home, by myself.”
“Where did you last see the puppet?”
“In Robert’s office at the theatre. I think he intended to keep it there. It was certainly there on Monday, before the party.”
“You’re quite close to Robert, aren’t you?”
“It pays to be. He employs me.”
“Friendly with his wife?”
“Not especially. She doesn’t talk to other women.”
“How about the mistress?”
“I didn’t know she had one.”
“Robert Kramer’s mistress.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“You’re a policeman. Do you believe anything?”
“Sorry to hear about your girlfriend, by the way. Left you, did she?”
“It’s common knowledge.”
“Anyone else at Robert Kramer’s party you’re especially friendly with?”
“I don’t know any of the others that well. I keep my distance.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re not my kind of people.”
“I heard they don’t much care for you. They think you’re weird. Your girlfriend did, too.”
“I imagine they all do.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because of my… predilections.”
“And what are those?”
“Come and see for yourself.”
Maltby led them to the staircase at the end of the hall and started to descend. “I’m a model maker,” she explained. “That’s how I got into props and set design.” At the bottom of the staircase, Bryant and May found themselves faced with a double-width wooden door covered in square iron studs, closed with an iron ring. She grabbed the ring and twisted it. The door swung wide with a theatrical groan.
The detectives found themselves inside a dungeon, complete with perspiring grey stone walls, a full-sized rack, a gibbet, thumbscrews, a scold’s bridle, a brazier with a red-hot branding iron sitting in it and various implements of torture. But more alarming than this were the full-sized mannequins that writhed in agony in the contraptions, burned, scarred, pierced and stretched. A hooded figure with a bare chest stood beside them holding tongue pincers. Another was posed standing over a screaming naked girl with a pair of eye gougers in his hand.
But the tableau that interested Bryant most was the one that featured a corpse hanging from a perfect hangman’s noose.
“And you wonder why your girlfriend walked out,” murmured Bryant.
“I kicked her out,” Maltby replied hotly. “She told me I needed psychiatric help. I’m a model maker, not a psycho. I just make these scenes for the skill of it. I build dioramas for the London Dungeon. I wanted to work for Hammer Films, but their heyday was before my time. They employed highly skilled craftspeople. You wouldn’t have turned around and told them they needed psychiatric help, would you?”
May suddenly realized what his partner had been doing since they arrived. Knowing that Maltby had isolated herself from everyone, he had set out to goad her into providing some angry answers, and had got them.
“Missing any rope, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Ray Pryce said you believe souls live on in the models you make.”
“He would say that. He’s a writer; they all exaggerate. I guess in a sense I do put myself into my figures. After all, they’re all modelled on real people. I don’t do all this by myself. I have an assistant. We hire models and use their features in order to get exact likenesses. So you do come to think of them as being alive.”
“I imagine it’s a lucrative field. Unusual jobs often are.”
“I come from a long line of model makers. My great-grandmother worked for Madame Tussauds, and so did her mother. Madame Tussaud developed her craft by making wax death masks of aristocrats who had been executed during the French Revolution. She arrived in England at the start of the nineteenth century and put her waxworks on display at the Lyceum Theatre, just off the Strand. My skill with wax is what got me the job on The Two Murderers. I’m supplying exhibitions all over the world.”
“Well, she didn’t seem crazy to me,” observed May as they left the house. “If anything, I thought she was pretty damn smart. She’s about craft, artistry
– and making money.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree with you,” replied Bryant glumly. “My biggest problem is that I can’t see what she would have to gain by killing. But her fascination with the morbid fits a certain pattern.”
“I’ll do some checking into her background, look for the usual signs, but we’re going to need more than circumstantial evidence if we’re going to make anything stick to anyone. It sounds like they all had access to the Hangman puppet.”
“Did she have any unexplained absences during the party?”
“She’s another smoker. I think she slipped out for a snout a couple of times, but wasn’t gone long in either case. Sounds like we can’t prove where she was when Gregory Baine died.”
“Too many suspects, and none of them entirely fit – yet. Bloody annoying.”
They returned to the Unit and worked separately for the rest of the day. After the Unit had finally closed for the night, Bryant told his partner to put on his coat and follow him to the King Charles I pub. He appeared to be troubled by something; his brow was even more rumpled than usual. Over pints of Bombardier, he explained his problem.
“I think we can rule out Robert Kramer now,” he began, leaving a foamy moustache on his upper lip. “I’m afraid we have to assume you were fed a dud lead by the Home Office.”
“How do you work that out?”
“I realized that Kramer doesn’t fit the pattern. He might have reached the top by behaving in an immoral manner, but he certainly isn’t an anarchist. If anything, he’s an arch-conformist. He abides by the status quo. He doesn’t want to upset the ordered world, he simply wants to exist in its upper echelons. He might assume he has something in common with the myths of strong leaders, but he behaves in the prescribed manner of all rapacious businessmen.”
“Well, he’s all we have right now, even though he has no motive for killing his own partner.”
“I read the email Lucy Clementine sent you. Fond of detailing her boss’s bad behaviour, isn’t she?”
Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood Page 19
