“Robert Kramer says it took four hard shoves 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 of 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 there,” 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 rug’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 door 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 so hooked 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 tramped 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-mache head. There’ll 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 and 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 of the window,” replied Bryant.
∨ The Memory of Blood ∧
9
Shaken
In the great glass lounge, the mood had turned to confusion and a determination among the guests to be seen to be 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 the 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.”
Gail Strong accepted one of the sheets as they were handed out. She glanced at Marcus Sigler, making sure that he understood she was about to lie. The actor sent the faintest of nods in her direction, and turned to providing his own alibi.
♦
The gabled gingerbread house behind the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church was finished in orange bricks and maroon tiles and appeared to have been designed by the Brothers Grimm. Plane trees and rowans hung over it with branches like claws that scrabbled at the windows, leaking sap and dripping rainwater so that moss and lichen grew in abundant clumps about the eaves, gradually consuming it. A miserable-looking heron balanced forlornly at its gate, and a pair of moorhens had bundled themselves against the downpour inside a bucket by the door. This bucolic night tableau was all the more remarkable for being just two miles from Piccadilly Circus, and no more than a three-minute walk from Europe’s largest railway terminus.