Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood b&m-9

by Christopher Fowler

  He had an ulterior motive in offering his detective sergeant’s services; Longbright was to reassure Rose that she would be looked after, but he also asked her to collect the notes Anna had excised from his memoir. They were, after all, of a sensitive nature and, as Anna had indicated, their publication was banned by the Official Secrets Act. If the local service visitors came in to assess Rose, Bryant didn’t want them stumbling across incendiary material.

  He sat back in his cracked green leather chair and rubbed his red eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. The excitement of moving the Unit into new premises had worn off as soon as he realized they would face the usual uphill battle against budgets and bureaucracy to keep the place alive. An infanticide; it would probably not turn out to be much of an investigation, but it would keep them ticking over until something meatier came along. The case wouldn’t have turned up at all if it hadn’t been for Gail Strong’s ministerial connection.

  Bryant wiped his filthy computer screen and tried to understand Banbury’s WECS spreadsheet. He was annoyed with himself; it should have been obvious who was responsible for the child’s death. He felt sure that the matter would be wrapped up in a day or two. The crime was bound to have been committed by someone close to the baby or his mother – domestic investigations, even those that took place among the wealthy, were usually the easiest to solve.

  The Mr Punch element intrigued him, though.

  He could afford to indulge himself and study it from a more esoteric angle, safe in the knowledge that it would all have blown over in a day or two.

  And yet. The lurid rictus of Mr Punch grimaced out at him from its hand-coloured plate in mockery, daring him to find a darker solution, and a shadow passed across his soul. The puppet on the floor had the laughing face of someone who knew they had killed and could get away with it.

  If they were capable of taking the life of an innocent child and hiding the crime in plain sight, what else might they have the confidence to do?

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  13

  Theories

  Police officers are social drinkers. They have to be. The stresses of shifts are washed away with pints, and debriefs turn into scandalmonger sessions at the backs of boozers where the landlady can be relied upon to keep her barrels bled and her mouth shut. The alcohol is soaked up with carbohydrate-laden pub grub, but the cruelties of criminals are not so easily absorbed.

  DS Janice Longbright and Sergeant Jack Renfield had detested each other at sight, but the death of a colleague had recently drawn them into a cautionary orbit. Longbright was lonely. Statuesque and physically imposing, she scared off men who wanted their girlfriends to behave like Barbie dolls, and as her conversation frequently revolved around the tragedy of sudden death, few civilian women remained in her circle for long.

  Renfield, on the other hand, was the kind of Arsenal-supporting, beer-hammering mate who would never be alone in a North London pub. But there was something about Longbright that made him want to ditch his friends and be alone with her.

  However, as Renfield settled into a corner at the King Charles I with his pint, that thought was cut short by the arrival of Meera Mangeshkar and Colin Bimsley. Sometimes the group liked to meet and chew over the day’s events without the senior detectives. They dealt with the grim practicalities of crime, and occasionally enjoyed leaving the abstruse thinking to their bosses.

  The King Charles I was the oldest pub in King’s Cross. It had The Smiths on the jukebox, animal heads on the walls and a clientele that often ended up on the floor. It was home to a number of obscure games played by drinkers, including Mornington Crescent, the Drunk Shakespeare Club and the Nude Alpine Climbers Society of London, an inebriated challenge that involved making your way around the bar naked except for a coil of rope, a pith helmet and crampons, the loser being the first one to fall and touch the floor.

  “We just had Gail Strong’s old man on the line,” said Meera, chucking packets of pork scratchings onto the table. “He went nuts at Raymond, warned him to keep his daughter out of the tabloids or he’d personally oversee the axing of our budget. Says it’s bad enough she’s working on this play without getting mixed up with a negligence case.”

  “You think that’s what it is – negligence?” asked Longbright, taking her gin from the tray. “Giles reckons it’s murder.”

  “Even though he can’t issue a death certificate, he’s going to give us the nod tonight,” said Renfield. “It’s going to be Unlawful Killing, wait and see.” In the case of an infanticide verdict, the sergeant knew that the inquest would have to be adjourned until the conclusion of the criminal proceedings. He’d heard that the Kramers had hired a solicitor and sent him to the opening of the inquest, but they had stayed away. Mrs Kramer was apparently in a bad way.

  “It’ll be an open verdict,” said Longbright. “Not enough evidence.”

  “It’s premeditated, though. Prints wiped clean, window opened. Opportunity is everything.”

  “You reckon someone knew the only way they’d get into the house would be by invitation?”

  “Like a vampire,” said Colin.

  “Well, I don’t buy it,” said Meera, stirring her drink.

  “You don’t buy anything. You’re the most cynical person I’ve ever met.” Colin had a new plan. He figured if he argued with Meera often enough, then suddenly withdrew his attention, she would realize she missed him and finally fall in love with him. He argued with her a lot. She had been raised in the urban war zone of an Elephant and Castle council estate, where open spaces were navigated in cautious silence and family combat took place at a high decibel level.

  “Dan checked the CCTV in Northumberland Avenue this afternoon,” said Colin.

  “Where is he?” Longbright asked.

  “At his nipper’s school play, Murder in the Cathedral.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  “There’s a camera mounted on the wall of the opposite building, an insurance company, but its screen height is cut off just below the window ledge because the Kramers’ property is a private residence. Invasion of privacy policy. But Dan reckons it shows nobody could have left the building that way. Turns out there’s also CCTV coverage of the area either side of the front door to the apartment building, so we’re able to corroborate the doorman’s timings on when the guests arrived and left.”

  “I think the answer’s obvious,” Meera began. “Robert Kramer killed his own son.”

  The drinkers fell back in surprised protest. “Come off it, why would he do that?” asked Colin.

  “Maybe he didn’t want to be tied down with a kid. Someone should ask Judith Kramer if it was a planned pregnancy when she wakes up.”

  “Great, that’ll be your job, then, Meera.”

  “Look at it logically: he had the opportunity. He waited until the house was full of people, nipped upstairs for a moment – ”

  “Hang on, love.” Renfield raised his hand. “How’d he get in and out of the bedroom?”

  “Don’t call me ‘love’, Jack, OK? Has Dan really checked every inch of the room? Kramer’s a theatrical type – he could have built in some kind of mechanism to remove the door hinges or something.”

  “Dan’s had the door to pieces,” Longbright pointed out. “It’s an ordinary Yale lock and key with a regular handle and mortise and ordinary over-the-counter door hinges, no funny stuff. That just leaves the window, and we know he couldn’t have climbed outside after because the rain had soaked the rug and there were no prints. So unless he drilled a hole in the ceiling, dropped down into the room, killed his own son and then hoisted himself up, replaster-ing as he went, it looks to me like some kind of simple timing trick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe we’ve been led to believe that the kid was chucked out of the window and he wasn’t at all, did you think of that? He could have been taken from the nursery earlier and had his brains dashed out in the basement, then the room was prepared to look li
ke he’d been attacked in his cot.”

  “How do you prepare a room without setting foot inside it, Janice?” Renfield asked.

  “I don’t know. Theatrics.” She fell silent and sat back.

  “And why the hell would you?” said Meera. “I don’t see who gains from any of this.”

  Colin thought for a moment. “Someone who wants to hurt the mother very badly by destroying the thing she loves most of all.”

  “If that’s the case, Mrs Kramer could be in danger. We need to put a watch on her, or at least make sure she’s not left alone.”

  “Her husband’s looking after her,” Colin pointed out.

  “What if he’s Mr Punch?”

  “What are you talking about? Please don’t start calling him the Mr Punch Killer.”

  “The old man’s got it in his head that the Punch puppet was put beside the cot to leave some kind of warning. You know what happens in the story. After Mr Punch kills the baby, he goes after his wife and beats her to death.”

  “Someone’s been reading too many supermarket thrillers,” said Colin. “Stuff like that just doesn’t happen in real life.”

  “But it has, hasn’t it?” Meera drained her gin. “And it does happen, Colin. In Indian communities men go to incredible lengths to hide honour killings.”

  “Robert Kramer’s not Indian.”

  “No, he’s a millionaire sleazebag businessman working in the theatre.”

  “And that’s exactly what makes it unlikely,” said Colin. “When it comes to settling scores, men like Kramer have plenty of legitimate means. My dad once paid to have a boxing referee’s ankle crushed. They spend all their time on their feet. Ended his career, it did.”

  “And you seriously wanted me to go out with you before admitting that, did you?” asked Meera.

  The squabbling continued late into the rainy night.

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  14

  Relationships

  On Wednesday morning the June weather grew worse, and the pleasant, airy start to the week faded to a memory. Charcoal clouds punched down over King’s Cross and drizzle drew a shroud across the streets, staining brickwork and shining roads. The working population dragged itself to offices in the knowledge that the London summer had once again failed to materialize and would probably truncate itself to a halfhearted four-week period starting in late July.

  John May arrived early at the warehouse on Caledonian Road to face a mountain of old-fashioned glue-staples-and-scissors paperwork. In his spare evenings and weekends away from the PCU, he had been building an experimental programme based on witness responses that would work as a supplement to Banbury’s. Now, looking at the forest of forms before him, he was starting to wish he hadn’t.

  Traditional witness statements often failed to garner as much information as they could. On one side of the usual chequered MG 11 form there was a consent request about the provision of medical records, a disclosure for the purposes of civil proceedings and an agreement to allow details to be passed to the Witness Support Service. The other side simply left room for a statement made in the knowledge that falsehoods would be liable to prosecution.

  May’s new supplementary questionnaires were informal and oblique, dwelling largely on moods and feelings, but he thought they could prove useful in understanding the mind-sets of those who had been suddenly exposed to criminal activity.

  Although the new forms could not be officially recognized in a court of law, he was planning to try them out with the guests who had attended the party at 376 Northumberland Avenue. Accordingly, he arranged for everyone to visit him in the informal atmosphere of the PCU staff common room, and sorted the appointments into three main groups.

  At nine a.m. he saw the party’s waiting staff and the downstairs doorman. Immediately it was clear that the questionnaire could provoke surprising responses. One waitress, a ghostly, slender Estonian girl, remembered overhearing an urgent whispered argument in the kitchen between Mrs Kramer and the handsome young actor Marcus Sigler, but her English was not fast enough to follow the conversation. A Polish waiter recalled which of the guests were smokers and which were not. He also knew which ones were heavy drinkers, who had appeared agitated and who had left the room to use the bathroom.

  “They don’t see us,” he explained. “We’re invisible when we move among them, so we see everything.”

  The doorman remembered who treated him with politeness and who regarded him disdainfully. In May’s experience, staff usually made good witnesses because they were focused, silent and watchful.

  At ten a.m. May met with Robert Kramer and his financiers and went through the same exercise. Now, though, the recollections were about business conversations, not body language and shielded slights.

  Kramer was frank about his reasons for throwing the party. His producer had asked him to raise further finance and find new backers for the show. The company needed to be seen as a new force in the world of commercial theatre. He had discussed mergers and acquisitions, copyright and licensing issues. But there were others in attendance who spent the evening vying for his attention.

  For Kramer, hosting the party had been an important display of power, and he was convinced that someone in the room hated him enough to harm his only child. He freely admitted that he was disliked, but was reticent when it came to providing a reason. His employees were even less forthcoming. May learned the least from this group.

  Finally, at eleven-thirty, May saw the actors and production crew. At first they politely refused to discuss the other guests, but it didn’t take long for most of them to crack and start enthusiastically chipping in with scurrilous information. This group proved to be the most interesting, but a new problem emerged: May could not tell who was telling the truth and who was exaggerating for effect. The responses on the questionnaires were colourful but largely constructed from surmise and gossip.

  “Judith Kramer doesn’t love her husband,” confided Mona Williams, the older lady who was playing the handsome actor’s grandmother in The Two Murderers. She had insisted on being interviewed with Neil Crofting, her onstage partner.

  “They’ve only been married a short while,” said May. “What happened?”

  “She told me that Robert had deceived her.”

  “How?”

  “She was seeing someone else when they met, but Robert was extremely persistent in his attentions. He bombarded her with gifts, turned on the charm, flew her to India to propose. He pushed her to marry him. She says he wanted a hostess, not a partner. Look at her, she’s a classic trophy wife! After they were married he completely changed. Treated her like a servant.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Judith and I have had quite a few heart-to-hearts.”

  “Why did she go through with the marriage?”

  “She told me her parents divorced when she was seven and her mother was left penniless, and I think she was frightened that the same thing might happen to her. She did what a lot of insecure women do. She married for security and saw someone else for love.”

  “Do you know who this ‘someone else’ was?”

  Mona shot a meaningful glance at her old friend Neil Crofting.

  “You might as well tell him, seeing as you’ve gone this far,” said Neil, with a sigh.

  “So long as it goes no further,” said Mona. “It’s Marcus Sigler, our leading man.”

  “When did she stop seeing him?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t think she has. I don’t know for sure because she won’t tell me, but apparently the last ASM walked in on them in his dressing room, which we think is why she left the company. She knew too much, couldn’t face seeing them after that.”

  “And Robert Kramer really has no idea?”

  “God no, he’d never have hired Marcus for the play if he had! If he ever found out, I don’t know what he’d do. He has a terrible temper. He was married before but his first wife couldn’t take any more of his behaviour and
it all ended badly. He never talks about her.”

  What would it take, May wondered, for a man to kill his own child? Could Robert have murdered Noah to spite his wife for her infidelity? And if so, how did he do it in his own flat, surrounded by his friends?

  “There’s something else,” said Mona, always happy to be a harbinger of ill will. “Gail Strong, our so-called ASM, was giving our leading man the come-on from the moment she set eyes on him at the party. I’m RADA-trained, you know. I miss nothing.” May made another note.

  The corpulent Alex Lansdale had been a restaurant critic, a film critic, an art critic and now a theatre critic. He explained that he had been born to criticize others for a living, and made more money than any of those he lambasted. His ultimate ambition was to become a TV talent show judge. Lansdale sat back in the sofa, his tiny grey eyes lost in a basin of unhealthy flesh, and held forth to his audience.

  “You must understand, Mr May, that Robert Kramer is a terribly clever man when it comes to money, and an imbecile when it comes to art. He knows what the public wants, but he couldn’t tell Nijinsky from Stravinsky. Basically, he’s a property developer with no taste. Have you seen The Two Murderers? Oh, it’s smartly written, I suppose, but pure sensation, gore and sex for the masses. It’ll make a fortune, but in my opinion it’s meretricious trash.”

  “So it’s safe to say you don’t like Robert Kramer,” May pushed.

  “I’m not paid to have an opinion about him one way or the other,” Lansdale replied. “I’m paid to cover the show.”

  “You broke ranks to stab the play in the back. Yet you still showed up to the party. Why was that?”

  “I’m as entitled as anyone. My readers expect me to be rude, and I try not to disappoint them. Besides, I had a – ” He stopped himself.

  “You had a what?”

  “Nothing. Please go on.”