The Memory of Blood (8 page)

She tried it again. Nothing. She called to the child, but there was no sound inside the room. Total silence. What to do?

She knew she should use her initiative, but her ability to make her own decisions had been excised when she agreed to marry Robert. So she turned and ran back downstairs.

‘It’s not possible,’ said Robert flatly. ‘That door is never locked.’ His disbelief felt accusing.

‘Then try it for yourself.’ She grabbed his hand and led him away from the horde of investors.

They returned to the baby’s room and Robert tried the door. He pressed his ear to the wood and listened, hushing Judith. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he grumbled finally, straightening. ‘You left it unlocked?’

‘You know I did, Robert. There’s no way of locking it without removing the key from the other side. I kept telling you to sort the door out.’

‘Maybe Noah—’

‘For God’s sake, he’s not even able to get out of the cot!’

‘Then I’ll have to break the door open. I don’t know what the guests will think.’

‘I can’t believe you’re even thinking about them at a time like this—just do it.’

Robert placed his shoulder against the wood and pushed, but the door barely moved. ‘All right, stand back.’ He raised his shoe and kicked as hard as he could against the lock. The wood cracked a little but held. His third kick split the frame, and at his fourth the door popped open, swinging wide.

The first thing they saw was the window. It had been raised. The white net curtains were apart and billowing, and the rain was soaking the carpet.

‘No,’ said Judith, softly. She ran to the cot and saw the covers thrown back. ‘He’s gone. How could he—’ She turned and searched the floor, panic blinding her.

‘Judith—’ Robert’s sudden command struck a chord of fear. He was standing at the window, looking down into the street. They were on the sixth floor.

She could barely bring herself to walk across the room. When she finally did so and looked to where her husband was pointing, he had to catch her. He was still holding her in his arms when the other guests began to crowd into the room.

J
ohn May parked his silver BMW behind the ambulance and alighted, opening the passenger door for his partner. Arthur was no longer allowed to take the driving seat since he had sent Victor, his Mini, straight across the roundabout on the north side of Westminster Bridge, ploughing through the flowerbeds without even noticing, because he was busy explaining the history of Dutch microscopes.

Northumberland Avenue was dank and deserted. The tourists stayed on streets that connected restaurants and theatres. Bryant could smell the chill rush of the river from here. He clutched his hat and looked up into the rain. ‘Sixth floor? Quite a drop.’ Thumping his walking stick against the black railings, he peered down into the basement area, where a woman stood beside a small blue plastic frame that had been pegged to the ground. ‘Body found down there. Poor little bugger. At least it was quick. Who’s securing the place?’

‘Renfield’s already up at the crime site. Janice, Colin and Dan are in the lounge with the guests. Local chap down there. Want to go down?’

‘I’m not good at consoling the bereaved, but I’d better have a look. I hate this part.’

‘Corpses?’

‘No, stairs.’

May opened the gate and led the way down.

‘You took your damned time getting here, didn’t you?’ Robert Kramer had been standing in the rain for almost half an hour, awaiting the senior investigators’ arrival. Judith had refused to leave the spot where her son had fallen. Their guests had been prevented from leaving the flat by an officious bullnecked sergeant. Now Kramer needed someone to vent his anger on.

‘Westminster isn’t our jurisdiction, sir,’ May explained. ‘Your local constabulary felt that the situation would require specialist expertise, and contacted us. I understand how terrible this is for you, and I’ll do everything within my power to make this part bearable, but you must also consider that a crime may have been committed. Perhaps you could come inside now.’

May brought them inside the building, took the lift to the apartment and found a quiet room where they could be interviewed in comfort. Judith Kramer was in a bad state. He called in a female medic, who administered a mild sedative.

DS Janice Longbright and Dan Banbury, the Unit’s crime scene manager, were concluding the basic formalities. ‘Take Dan up with you,’ Longbright told May. ‘Colin and I can handle the rest.’ With seamless efficiency, she took over from the detectives and outlined the next stages of the investigative process to the distraught couple.

On the staircase to the top floor the detectives were met by Jack Renfield. ‘Some of the guests are getting restless and making
noises about calling lawyers,’ he warned. ‘We’re taking standard witness statements and contact details. They’re expecting to be released as soon as they’ve talked to us.’

‘I don’t care what they’re expecting,’ snapped Bryant. ‘This looks like a murder investigation. Hold them here until we’ve examined the nursery.’ He headed up with May and Banbury. Renfield taped off the stairs and followed them.

‘You’re putting on plastics, both of you,’ said Dan, handing them gloves and shoe covers. ‘I know what you’re like.’

‘I’m not wearing a hairnet,’ Bryant warned. ‘You know my hair type. You’ve found enough of it scattered around past murder sites.’ Carefully skirting around the splintered door, he entered the room.

‘Robert Kramer says it took four hard kicks to break in,’ said May.

‘You can see why, too,’ Banbury replied, kneeling to study the door. ‘Quality wood, look at that.’

A standard brass Yale key was inserted on the inside, with the lock bolt still protruding into the displaced strike plate. ‘It was definitely locked on the inside. Why would the nursery have an internal key?’

‘They’ve only been living here a short time,’ said Renfield. ‘According to Mr Kramer, the previous tenant had a lodger. This was the lodger’s room. He fitted the lock, and they hadn’t got around to removing it. The baby was less than a year old, so he wouldn’t have been able to accidentally lock himself in. One thing’s for sure. He didn’t throw himself out the window, even if he could have climbed from his cot and got up to the sill.’

The window was still wide open, the curtains sodden. The cot stood at least three feet from the exterior wall. Bryant leaned out for a good look. ‘Come away from that,’ Banbury instructed. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

‘I’m not going to touch anything, all right?’ Bryant shot him a scowl.

‘Mrs Kramer insists the window was down and locked when she last came up,’ said Renfield.

‘When was that?’

‘About half an hour earlier.’

‘Whoever did this didn’t come in from outside the window. The carpet’s soaking, but I can’t see any footprints.’

‘With all due respect, Mr Bryant, your eyesight isn’t anything to write home about. Let me do some tests.’

Banbury dusted the lock and handle for prints, but they were completely clean—there was not so much as a single sweat whorl on the hasp. ‘At a guess I’d say someone wiped up.’

Bryant leaned back out of the window and looked above. ‘Even assuming someone had come up with a way to enter the room from outside, he couldn’t have come from the roof. There’s a sheer wall above. That’s got to be a ten-foot gap. And there’s no way of climbing down, no handholds, nothing.’

May came around the other side of the cot, where the shadows fell from the window. He froze in his tracks. ‘What on earth is this?’

He knelt and examined the sprawled shape on the floor. About two and a half feet long, the hunchbacked figure had jointed limbs, and was garishly dressed in a striped red velvet suit with a great paunched belly, yellow pom-poms and a white ruff collar. It wore a pointed crimson hat topped with a bell and had the curled yellow slippers of a sultan. The scarlet parrot nose was hooked so that it almost met the chin. Its gimlet eyes stared wide and were tinged with madness.

‘Hello, what have we here?’ said Bryant, brightening up. ‘Mr Punch. Dan, may I?’

‘All right, but be careful,’ said Dan, who was tired of dealing
with the problems of tainted evidence that occurred whenever Bryant tromped merrily through a crime scene.

Bryant lifted the figure into a standing position. ‘It looks like a Victorian original. Stuffed with kapok, wooden hands and feet, papier-mâché head. There should be a little bell in his cap. What’s it doing beside the cot?’

‘Over here,’ called May, who was standing by the opposite wall. An entire collection of Punch & Judy puppets was arranged along it at head height. Only one was missing from its hook.

‘Looks like Mr Punch decided to go for a walk,’ said Bryant. ‘How did it get off the wall and over to the cot inside a locked room?’

‘The parents had probably been amusing their child and forgot to put it back,’ said May.

‘Rather a grotesque thing to wave at a baby, isn’t it? After all, it’s a very valuable antique, not a kiddies’ plaything. It would probably have made him burst into tears.’ Bryant knew a thing or two about making children cry. ‘So what’s it doing on the floor?’

‘Don’t read too much into this, Arthur.’

‘I can’t help it.’ Despite Banbury’s look of horror, Bryant raised the figure high and wiggled it. The puppet’s movements were unnervingly realistic. ‘After all, what’s one of the first things Mr Punch does in the play?’

Renfield and May looked at each other.

‘He throws the baby out the window,’ replied Bryant.

I
n the great glass lounge, the mood had turned to confusion and a determination among the guests to be seen behaving properly in extraordinary circumstances. Coffee had been served and groups had formed in various parts of the room, seated on extra chairs supplied by the waiters. For now at least, the attitude was one of civilized calm, as if they were commuters in a stalled train.

Unsurprisingly, Arthur Bryant and John May were greeted with curious looks. Bryant was wrapped in a seaweed-green scarf and had his ancient soaked trilby pulled down over his ears. John May was tailored with inappropriate elegance, from his white Gieves & Hawkes shirt to his Lobb Oxford shoes, but both men were of retirement age and bore no resemblance to traditional officers of the law.

‘May I have your attention?’ May called. ‘This is Mr Bryant, I’m Mr May. I know it’s getting late, but we hope to be able to release you just as soon as we’ve established the order of tonight’s events. First of all, let me explain why we’re here. We belong to a specialist
Unit that has taken over from the Westminster Metropolitan Police, owing to certain unusual circumstances connected with this investigation.’

‘And what are those?’ asked Russell Haddon, the theatre’s director.

‘We’re not able to give you full details, but we can tell you this. It is highly unlikely that Noah Kramer’s death was an accident. He appears to have died as the result of a vicious and callous attack. However, it’s very unusual to have such a specific margin of opportunity occurring in this kind of situation.’

‘Meaning?’

‘There’s no easy access from the outside of the building. The front door was locked and answered by a security guard who admitted only those who had been invited to the party. He checked in a total of thirty-five guests, plus waiters and a chef. It appears no-one else came in or left. Now, we know that Mrs Kramer checked on her son at around eight-forty
P.M.
, and that the discovery of her tragic loss occurred just before nine-twenty
P.M.
We now need to establish whether any of you left this room in the intervening forty minutes.’

‘You’re saying we’re all suspects,’ said Mona Williams loudly.

‘Well, obviously,’ snapped Bryant, rolling his eyes. ‘We didn’t come around for cocktails, did we?’

‘I think that’s a very inappropriate remark to make under the circumstances.’

‘Let me handle this,’ May told his partner before turning to the assembled gathering. ‘Naturally the enquiry will be treated in confidence. If any of you left the room tonight for whatever reason, we need to know when, why and for how long. You can provide us with the details on these extra pages.’ He held up a sheaf of notepaper. ‘As soon as you’ve done that, you’ll be able to leave.’