The Memory of Blood (35 page)

‘Exactly. I should have thought of it earlier but I got distracted by Gail Strong’s so-called disappearance. I’m sending Colin and Meera over to Northumberland Avenue right now. By the way, Dan was right about Ms Strong. She checked into a boutique hotel in Devon using a credit card to secure her room. She didn’t think they were taking a payment, but they ran a check and it flagged. Not a smart move. Devon police are going to keep an eye on her.’

‘So what do you and I do?’

‘Get a few hours’ sleep,’ said Bryant. ‘We’re going to need it.’

Meera parked her Kawasaki under the bridge at the Embankment and walked to Northumberland Avenue with Colin. Rain was just starting to gloss the road ahead and speckle the roofs of passing taxis. Many of the streets around Trafalgar Square were now awash with neon, but this road had retained its dark, deserted look. ‘Where do you want to locate?’ she asked. ‘I’m not sitting in a shop doorway watching you eat pad Thai from a box.’

‘I don’t see we have much choice,’ Bimsley replied. ‘The offices opposite Kramer’s gaff are closed for the night and the nearest
café is down there under Charing Cross Bridge. We won’t be able to keep an eye on the apartment from that far away.’

‘Then why don’t we just park ourselves in the foyer of his building?’

‘John doesn’t want us to show our hand.’

‘I can’t see why not. If you ask me, I don’t think our bosses know what they’re doing. We’ve turned up nothing. Why is that? Maybe Kramer chucked his own kid out the window and frightened the old dear, and his banker just saw how things were going and took his own life.’

‘Why do you always think they’re not on the ball?’ Colin asked. ‘You’re always having a go at them—too old, too slow, don’t know what they’re doing. We’ve still got a higher success rate than the Met.’

‘Everyone’s got a higher success rate than the Met. My old mum could solve crimes quicker than them. It’s the way they operate, keeping us in the dark, going off without explaining, it makes me so angry—’

Colin laid a calming hand on Meera’s arm. ‘Meera,
everything
makes you angry. Have you not noticed what an angry person you are?’

‘I’m under stress, my parents hate me being in this job, my sister’s a walking disaster and I can’t get a bloody date because I’m always at work.’

‘Look, it’s raining, it’s miserable, come here and give me a cuddle, just a friendly hug.’

‘No, Colin, that’s not a good idea.’

‘Why not, we’re mates, aren’t we? What would it take to get a hug from you?’

Meera thought for a second. ‘Well, you know how we’re all technically in line for the throne? Like, if fifty-four million people died, you’d be Queen?’

‘Y-e-es,’ said Bimsley uncertainly.

‘It would be like that.’

Colin looked down at his rain-splashed boots. ‘Are you telling me that you’d only give me a hug if every other eligible man in the country was dead? That’s really, really hurtful.’

‘Why do you always have to show your feelings? People don’t want to see them all the time. Why can’t you be a bit more like me?’

‘I can’t help it, Meera.’ Colin looked crestfallen. ‘I can’t change, even for you. I don’t have any other face but this one.’

She looked at the rain dripping through his spiked fair hair and her heart started to melt. He looked like a Disney dog someone had decided to drown instead of rewarding. She reached out a hand to touch his shoulder.

‘Colin—’

Suddenly the ground floor door of the building opposite opened, and Robert Kramer came out. Colin checked his watch. It was 11:42
P.M
. ‘He’s leaving, look.’

‘Where does he keep his car?’

‘He has a space in the NCP at the next corner.’

‘Back to my bike.’

They ran across the road, heading to Meera’s Kawasaki just as Kramer disappeared beneath the yellow neon of the car park entrance. A minute later Kramer’s black 500 Series Mercedes pulled up at the barrier and he fed it a ticket. Meera moved out behind him with Colin riding pillion. She stayed two cars back, hoping that the night and the rain would reduce their noticeability.

The Mercedes dropped to Victoria Embankment and headed along Upper Thames Street to the City of London. It clipped the lights on the one-way system at Tower Bridge, leaving Meera stranded.

‘He’s over there in the far left lane,’ shouted Colin. ‘Get closer or we’ll lose him.’ Meera accelerated and skirted around the shining wall of oncoming traffic, catching him up.

She tailed Kramer over the bridge and left toward Rotherhithe Tunnel. The Mercedes picked up speed. ‘I think he’s spotted us,’ she called back, roaring ahead. Behind them, a police car siren sounded, and lights flashed in Meera’s wing mirror. An officer was waving the Kawasaki off the road.

Meera had no choice but to slow down and park while the Mercedes sped off. The officer behind them strolled over. ‘Turn the bike off. You’re in a bit of a rush, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, and you’ve just ruined our night’s work.’ She sullenly threw open her badge and waved it at the cop. The patrol officer peered at it but did not seem convinced. ‘Peculiar Crimes Unit? Is that a made-up name? Off the bike, both of you.’

‘It’s a specialist investigation unit,’ said Colin.

‘Oi,’ the patrolman called back to his co-driver, ‘ever heard of the Peculiar Crimes Unit?’

‘Yeah,’ called his mate, ‘they’re the bunch that put the mockers on one of our cases this week, the girl in Hadley Street. They screwed us over.’

The patrolman returned the badge. ‘In that case, I’m glad to return the favour,’ he said with a grin, swaggering back to his patrol car.

R
obert Kramer saw that he had lost the motorbike, and doubled back. He turned the sat nav back on and followed its instructions, coming off the M25 somewhere near Dunton Green. He headed south into the Kent countryside. The roads grew narrower, the overhead branches grew denser and soon there was only an intermittent signal on his mobile phone.

His headlights picked up the distant homes of the rich, buried behind hedges, beyond fields. He passed an ancient granite church, a dead pub, a handful of dark houses, then nothing but black and green country roads for miles.

The sat nav told him he had almost reached his destination, but there was nothing to be seen outside: no turnoff, no signpost, only spattering rain and the dark treeline at the horizon. He slowed down, searching the hedgerows, and found a car-width space with a twin tyre track running through it. Nosing the wide-bodied Mercedes along the lane, jouncing over the tufts of
grass, the branches snatching at his wing mirrors, he saw some kind of farm building ahead.

He pulled up in front of it and opened the window slightly. He felt the spit of rain, and smelled pig dung. It was several degrees colder here than in town. He rarely made trips into the countryside and would not have come tonight, but for the message left at the theatre.

He was wearing light brown handmade shoes, and did not wish to get them stained. Collecting a torch and treading carefully, he made his way to the barn door and tried the handle. It opened easily. Inside were machine-rolled bales of hay; some kind of farm machinery, all red metal and spikes; and what appeared to be a stage area, surrounded by lit candles in curved glass pots, the ones you could buy in cheap hardware stores.

‘Well, you got me here,’ he said aloud, looking up. ‘Now what?’

Somewhere from the rear of the barn he heard piano music start playing—tinny and unreal, presumably an iPod hooked up to a portable system. He walked forward onto the makeshift stage and squinted into the musty darkness. ‘Is this supposed to frighten me?’ he called. ‘If the music is meant to tell me something, you’re wasting your time. How did you know I would come here?’

‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away,’ sang a strange, distorted voice.

‘What is that—Auto-Tune? Or are you meant to be Mr Punch? Dear God, tell me you’re not using a swozzle. There can’t be two of us, you know. Anyway, I think you’ve misunderstood me. It’s not an obsession, just—a role model. I could have picked Flash-man or Moriarty or Julien Sorel from
The Red and the Black
. Patrick Bateman. Hannibal Lecter. They all rise above mere morality to make something more of themselves.’

There was no reply.

‘Yes, that’s right, I read books. You didn’t know that, did you?
That’s what we have to do these days, find a role model. It’s not easy making a success of yourself anymore. You can’t just sit around waiting for a war.’

He walked while he spoke, trying to work out where his adversary was hiding. He stopped to listen, but there was no sound other than the warped piano music and the patter of rain on the barn’s corrugated iron roof. The candles guttered, extending shadows. He paced in a slow circle around the lights, carefully placing one polished shoe in front of the other, his hands linked behind his back, like Prince Philip attending the opening of a new factory.

‘But a funny thing happened when I was a little boy. I grew up in Brighton, and every Sunday afternoon I used to go to the beach to watch the Punch and Judy show. Not because I liked the show—it was always exactly the same—but there was a girl there I cared for. Her father was the Punch and Judy man, so she had to sit there and wait for him. She had a kind of—what do you call them? A pageboy cut, like French girls have, shiny black hair that came to points below her ears. I used to sit behind her and study that soft white neck. I wanted to reach forward and touch it with my tongue. I suppose she was two or three years older than me. I was ten.

‘Well, one day I was sitting behind her, and it had just started to spit with rain, and Mr Punch had come on and was beating the hell out of his wife with a stick, and everyone was laughing, and I reached forward, closer, and—very lightly—touched her neck with my tongue. And she turned around and slapped my face. And all the kids started laughing at me. Well, they probably weren’t, but you know how sensitive you are at that age.

‘I followed her around for weeks, and she never knew I was there. One day I waited while she bought an ice cream, and watched as she walked down the alley back to her horrible little pebble-dashed council house with seashells set into the garden
walls, and I kicked her legs from under her and pelted her with stones I had brought from the beach. I broke her teeth and blacked her eyes with them, and then—well, let’s just say I enjoyed my first sexual experience.

‘Next Sunday the Punch and Judy man was gone. He never came back. Well, somebody had to become Mr Punch. Life kicks you in the teeth and the only way you can win is by kicking it back. There, I’ve only told one other person that story in my entire life.’

He stopped and looked up into the rafters. It sounded like a pigeon scuffling. Something was moving about among the beams. Dust sifted down, glittering in the candlelight.

‘Now I think you’d better tell me what you want. Before you’re arrested, I mean. The detectives who interviewed us after the party, they seem to have put a tracker on my car. I bought this little device at the spy shop in Park Lane that tells you whether there are any abnormal electromagnetic pulses near you, quite useful. They should be here very shortly.’

‘Why did you come?’ sang the voice.

‘Why? I would have thought it was obvious. I want to know why you would go to so much trouble as you have, but not try to hurt me.’

‘I want you to admit your guilt.’

‘For what?’

The sound above Kramer grew suddenly louder. Wood cracked. A fresh flurry of dust and cobwebs fell. Something heavy dropped down, a large dark shape that barely missed his head.

It slammed onto the plywood sheets at his feet.

He found himself looking at the body of a woman. For a moment his breath froze inside him, but he took a step closer and the brief spasm of fear melted. The dummy had cracked open, spilling a mixture of what appeared to be dried red beans and sawdust. The effect was unnerving, like an eviscerated corpse.

‘Do you understand now?’ asked the voice.

Kramer laughed. ‘Is that was this is about? You drag me all the way out from bloody London to stage
this
? Christ, it’s a good job you never tried for a career in the theatre—sorry, I forgot—you did, didn’t you? I think I’m going to have to fire you now, though. I don’t think our working relationship will be able to survive this.’