Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  “I fail to see – ” Land began.

  “Yes, Raymondo, you usually do, but we’re happy to cover for you. When I looked at Ray Pryce standing so close, I suddenly realized he was a non-smoker. Now, if that was the case, it changed everything. On the time line for the Kramers’ party that Janice provided, Pryce is marked down as leaving the room to smoke a cigarette. So the trip was wrong.”

  “But Marcus Sigler saw him on the back staircase,” objected Banbury.

  “Marcus lied to cover the fact that he was on the staircase with Gail Strong. At Strong’s request he changed his timing so that nobody could place them together. So where did Ray Pryce disappear to? He went upstairs to the baby’s room.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that he was extremely angry, and very good at hiding it. Now, we know the nursery door was unlocked because Judith and Robert Kramer both expressed surprise when they got upstairs and couldn’t open it. So Pryce slipped inside and approached the cot, and the baby started to cry.”

  “Was he intending to kill the child right then?”

  “That’s hard to say. It’ll be interesting to hear him in court. I think he had murderous intentions, but maybe they failed him when he saw the child. Well, he needed to shut Noah up, but already his sense of self-preservation was working and he was worried that someone would find out that he had been in the room. He didn’t want to leave prints. And he wanted to silence the baby. So he grabbed the Mr Punch from the wall behind him and waved it about, hoping to amuse the boy.

  “And when Noah cried even harder, Pryce let Mr Punch pick up the baby. He wrapped the figure’s hands around the child and rocked him, and the rocking turned into throttling, and then Noah Kramer was silenced. So he ran to the window and shoved it open, and let Mr Punch shake the baby out into the street. Downstairs, on the fire escape, Marcus Sigler heard what he thought was a can of paint sliding. What he’d heard was the window going up above him. Pryce stepped back, threw the dummy on the floor, and the rain squalled in, soaking the rug. The water raised the nap of the rug, lifting impressions. If you want to remove chair marks from a carpet, you just put an ice cube in each dent. I got that tip from The Good Wife’s Guide to Housekeeping, 1935. Right, so Pryce was back on the door side of the empty cot. The deed was done. But what if somebody came up? He needed to buy himself some time. The Yale key was in the door, but of course there was no way of locking it from the inside without remaining in the room. Except that there was.”

  “I really don’t see how.” May frowned.

  “Come on. Ray Pryce is a writer. He spends his life coming up with outlandish ideas. And now he had a brainwave. A few minutes earlier, Mona Williams had sat on his glasses and broken them. The right arm had snapped off. He had put the broken glasses in his pocket.

  “It was such a simple idea. I tried it myself and it works perfectly every time. He stuck the arm of the glasses through the hole in the end of the key, closed the door and went outside. Then he simply ran his credit card down through the gap in the door. It was enough to flip the key, and now that it was no longer upright, the arm of the glasses simply fell out onto the floor. He had been gone no longer than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

  “Next, the Kramers break the door down and rush in, and the guests come up to see what’s wrong – ”

  “– and Pryce retrieves the glasses’ arm from the floor,” said May.

  “Precisely. He had achieved exactly the effect he was hoping for. Retribution from Kramer’s own role model. Pryce must have gone to bed that night thinking he had destroyed his nemesis. But he was wrong. Because while he was here, sitting in the hallway waiting to be interviewed, Pryce accidentally overheard that Robert wasn’t the baby’s father – and of course, the thing nobody realized is that Robert already knew it. Of course he knew: he’d been to see his doctor because he and Judith had been having trouble conceiving, and the doctor had explained about his low sperm count.

  “Pryce had failed. Judith was devastated, but Robert Kramer seemed barely touched by the tragedy. Pryce had to try something else. But what? What did Kramer care about so much if it wasn’t the life of a child?”

  “Money,” said Meera.

  “Hit him where it hurts. Get rid of the financier and watch the empire collapse. Oh, and stick a Punch and Judy doll there, to make sure Kramer knew the two tragedies were linked. How perfect to mirror Kramer’s obsession with the Mr Punch story and exact a theatrical revenge! The ancient Greeks used something they called ‘temple magic’. They would make heavy doors open by themselves via secret systems of pulleys and ropes, and used hidden tubes and secret passages to make the Sibyl whisper through the walls. Pryce knew that the effect was as important as the act. So this time he concentrated more on the staging. He lured Baine to a melancholy, darkened spot and a lonely, awful death.”

  “Baine had a lot of alcohol in his bloodstream when he died,” said Kershaw. “From the state of his liver, I’d say he’d been drinking hard for a year.”

  “Do you mind?” said Bryant. “This is my story. The credit crunch had caught Baine on the hop and he’d dipped his hand in the till to try and keep things afloat. So, once again, fate undermined Pryce and produced the wrong effect. If anything, he did Kramer a favour by getting rid of Baine. Then things got even worse. Mona Williams remembered sitting on Pryce’s glasses just before he left the room – and he remembered that he’d given her the scripts.”

  “What scripts?” asked Land.

  “The ones he’d found from the original Grand Guignol at the New Theatre. The ones he cribbed from. And there it was in another play, The Mystery of the Locked Cell, staged in 1923 with Dame Sybil Thorndyke, written by none other than the master himself, Noel Coward. In it, the murderer seals a room by inserting a steel rod in a key and twisting it from outside.

  “And Mona did what she always did. She started gossiping. So Pryce needed to frighten her into silence. He waited until she went into the theatre for her ‘thinking time’, and, in the gloom of the stalls, dropped the scold’s bridle on her. But it had the wrong effect. It terrified her and she choked to death. Has there ever been a series of crimes that have gone so horribly wrong? Meanwhile, Robert Kramer sailed through it all, untouched.

  “So, in desperation, he lured Kramer away to confront him with his misdeeds. And this, too, went wrong. We don’t know what Kramer said, but presumably he shrugged off the scare tactic used on him – ”

  “The dropped dummy,” May pointed out.

  “That’s right, the dummy, another hopeless failure. Kramer probably laughed in his face. Which was when Pryce exploded and chucked the fork at him. Even worse, Kramer’s shoes slipped and he fell on the fork and died. Pryce wants us to believe that he achieved what he set out to do, but he failed in every possible way. His victim cheated him right until the very end.”

  “I don’t understand,” Land persisted. “Why did Pryce drop a life-sized dummy on him in the barn? Who was it meant to be? Isn’t that a ridiculous thing to do? What’s the motive for all of this?”

  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 he
r unhappy childhood, and anything else 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 re-enacted 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 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 realized 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.

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  50

  The Sibyl

  Raymond Land came in soon after dawn. 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. Who on earth had chosen heliotrope? 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 odoriferous 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 face 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, y
ou 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?”