The Memory of Blood (12 page)

However, Kramer could not be protected by any altitude of birthright. He had few friends in high places. He was an opportunist, a financier, a self-made man. His protection was based solely on money, and that made him a little more vulnerable. What’s more, he ran a new and already disreputable theatre company. Something about the play and the death resonated, and as
Bryant searched the shelves, he found what he was looking for. He pulled down a rare French volume from 1887:
The ‘Rosse’ Vignettes of Oscar Méténier
.

Laying it carefully on his desk, he began to read. Méténier’s lurid little plays had given horrified Parisiens a glimpse into the lives of desperate men and women laid low by birth and circumstance. His stage was filled with cackling whores, violent alcoholics and graphic executions. Some of his work was labelled an affront to public morality because of its shocking street jargon, and was promptly banned. In
La Casserole
, the writer even hired real criminals to play themselves. It seemed the playgoing public always loved to witness gruesome tragedy, so long as it didn’t involve people of their own class.

Artifice and reality
, he thought, examining the photographs and drawings,
they combine more easily than we realise. TV shows pretend to offer realism but they hide as much as they show. Fiction, on the other hand, can contain fundamental human truths. And sometimes it’s possible to step back and forth between these two worlds just by opening the correct door, by finding the key that will unlock mysteries. So much of London is masked; unspoken rules protect the privileged, unseen codes hide the guilty. What a crafty lot we are!

This, then, was Arthur Bryant at work, his furrowed forehead bowed beneath the yellow light of the desk lamp, a shambling Prospero residing over the desiccated pages of his literary arcana, stirring fresh knowledge into the heady stew of ideas that filled his brain.

As he sat at the chaotic centre of his office-
cum
-library, blowing the dust from one forgotten volume after another, scribbling notes and teasing out tenuous links, he began to build a structure of evidence in the case.

Bryant had no interest in the common grounds of detection. He refused to be swayed by plausibility or likelihood. Human beings, he knew, were capable of acting in extraordinary ways for
reasons that extended into the realms of the bizarre, and the best way to uncover their confidences was to match the strangeness of their thinking.

As he unfolded a series of grotesque etchings from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne and André de Lorde, he wondered if the shroud shielding London’s deepest secrets was about to lift for him once more. In the miasma of his mind, dark ideas began to swirl and take solid form.

The following guests were present at the house of Robert and Judith Kramer, 376 Northumberland Avenue, WC1, when Noah Kramer’s death was discovered, and came to the nursery to see what was wrong when they heard the door being broken down by Robert Kramer
.

Della Fortess (Actor)
Neil Crofting (Actor)
Mona Williams (Actor)
Marcus Sigler (Actor)
Russell Haddon (Director)
Gregory Baine (Producer)
Ray Pryce (Scriptwriter)
Ella Maltby (Set designer)
Larry Hayes (Wardrobe)
Alex Lansdale (Theatre critic, HardNews.com)
Gail Strong (ASM)

The list had been scrawled out by DS Janice Longbright on a whiteboard in the common room, and the staff were now adding witness statements against the names of each of the guests. The giant schematic concentrated everyone’s attention in the simplest manner possible.

Interviews were now also being entered into the PCU’s system via a new application developed by Dan Banbury called WECS (Witness Evidence Correlation Software), and the pattern of the night’s events was re-created in a single spreadsheet of insane complexity.

When Longbright stared at the list of names, the times they arrived, who they knew, when they entered and left the lounge, their relationships to their hosts and to each other, all she saw was a data grid that detailed everything and explained nothing. The problem with traditional witness statements was that they sometimes obscured important facts, but WECS just seemed to make her job harder.

She wanted to know something far more fundamental: Who among these people could kill a child? Who could act with such violence toward one so innocent, and then return moments later to make small talk at a party? Clearly, it was possible; many killers described a sense of blankness descending upon them, removing their ability to feel any kind of remorse. But she and the other members of staff had met these people and noticed nothing untoward.

‘John, do you think actors lie more easily than people in other professions?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know enough about them to judge, but I wouldn’t think so.’ May looked up from his notes. ‘Arthur’s your best bet for a question like that. You’d be better off looking for the distinct emotional characteristics common to homicides. Dissociative states of mind, stress snaps from long-gestating problems. Killers supposedly undergo something called an “aura phase.” Their
senses become heightened, skin becomes more sensitive, they experience sights and sounds more vividly. You might discreetly check our suspects for the appearance of such a state.’

‘I suppose it’s possible the perpetrator doesn’t even remember what happened.’

‘True. It could help explain the anomalies Arthur pointed up.’

‘Why would somebody strike in such a public place? It seems to be inviting extra risk.’

‘About a third of all killers strike in public. And they often become very depressed after they’ve acted, but we can’t monitor all our suspects all of the time—the system isn’t built for it.’

More confused than ever, Longbright went back to work. She was still inputting everyone’s movements when the call came in a few minutes later. She rose and left the room.

Bryant was poring over a huge old book entitled
Folk Myths & Legends of England
. On top of this were a limited edition of Calthrop’s
Punch and Judy
, published by Dulau & Co Ltd, and a slipcased original playscript,
Punch & Judy
, edited by Rose Fyleman for Methuen.

‘I’ve got some bad news for you, Arthur,’ said Longbright. ‘Do you know someone called Anna Marquand?’

‘John and I had tea with her yesterday morning,’ said Bryant without looking up. His unlit pipe was clenched between his teeth, a sure sign he was concentrating. ‘She’s the editor of my memoirs. I’m thinking of bringing her into the Unit in some capacity. Why?’

‘She’s dead.’

Bryant stopped what he was doing. ‘What do you mean? How?’

‘Her mother just called. She found the PCU’s phone number in her daughter’s jacket. Apparently Anna Marquand got home last night, was going to make herself a toasted cheese sandwich, cut up the bread and passed out in the kitchen. Her mother was in the other room with the TV up loud and didn’t hear anything.
Half an hour later she found her on the floor, blue in the face. The medics reckon it might have been some virulent form of blood poisoning, perhaps tetanus. She died in the ambulance.’

‘Blood poisoning?’

‘Bacteria in the bloodstream.’

‘For God’s sake, Janice, I know what it is. How did it get there?’

‘The mother says she nicked herself with the bread knife.’

‘Is that all? Seems very sudden. Are they sure?’

‘It’s not as uncommon as you’d think. I had a cousin who died in exactly the same way.’

‘But Anna—what a terrible waste.’ Bryant looked genuinely horrified—not a common sight.

‘That’s not all. The mother, Rose Marquand, reckons there was something odd about it. Her daughter was attacked on the way home by some local hoolies, kids from a criminal family. They snatched her mobile on the front doorstep, not for the first time, either. She’d been having a running battle with them for a couple of years. Rose says her daughter was terrified and couldn’t calm down after. She thinks maybe her heart gave out and the doctor misdiagnosed.’

‘Frightened to death? Sounds unlikely.’

‘I suppose that’s what she’s implying. She didn’t want to talk to the local constabulary, says they were aware of the problems Anna had been having but never did anything about them. Mrs Marquand didn’t know who else to call, but Anna had talked about you.’

‘Where did they take her? St Thomas’s?’

‘I believe so. Want me to talk to the doctor?’

‘Good idea. But let me ring the mother first.’

With a heavy heart, Bryant made the call. As much as Rose Marquand was upset about losing her only daughter, it seemed to him that she was more fearful for her own future. Anna had been caring for her mother since her father had died.

Bryant explained that he would be sending Longbright to visit her. Perhaps his detective sergeant would be able to help in ways that the Met had no time for. Something about Anna had penetrated his heart; clever, shy and somehow lost, she had not been able to find her place in life, and now that confused existence had ended. If she had been bullied by a local gang, he needed to see the wrong put right.

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, were prohibited from publication 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 realised 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?

P
olice 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.