“Is that all it takes to make you unfaithful, Marcus? God, at least I’m unattached. Poor Judith. Do you really think her husband knows something?”
“Probably not. I don’t see how he can. He’d kill me if he did. At the very least he’d make sure I never worked again.”
“I suppose it’s struck you how similar your situation is to the character you play in The Two Murderers. It sounds like you’re living the part.”
“I’ve been feeling uneasy about that for a while, but lately the sensation’s been getting worse. It’s like some kind of shadow play.”
“God, if it follows the play we’re all in trouble.”
“You don’t know Robert Kramer. He’s a dangerous man. He manipulates everyone.”
Gail removed her dark glasses. She was wearing no eye makeup and suddenly looked like a child. She rubbed at her nose with a tissue. “I joined this company because my father thought it would keep me out of trouble. If the press finds out I was there when a baby died, they’ll ruin everything for me. I’ve had a few problems in the past. And they’ll start digging around. Who knows what they’ll turn up about the rest of the cast?”
“Sometimes productions take years to gestate, and all kinds of things happen to the casts in that time. Actors get promoted or replaced, they marry, divorce and die, kids get born. People always look for parallels between the plays they’re in and the lives they lead…”
Something in his manner made her pause and stare at him. Without her sunglasses she could see that Marcus had purple shadows beneath his eyes. “What else do you know?” she asked.
“Look, there’s some stuff you shouldn’t get involved in. In fact, I think we should try to avoid each other’s company. It wouldn’t be healthy to be seen together. I’m trying to protect you.”
Gail did not feel protected. Either Marcus was simply trying to brush her off after an ill-advised liaison or he was genuinely terrified, and for once she decided not to ask any more questions.
♦
For Arthur Bryant, the case was starting to evoke a different parallel. London has nearly fifty major theatres and countless fringe venues employing hundreds of people, so it was hardly surprising that occasionally crimes occurred within these very public spaces. The Unit’s first investigation had involved the gruesome death of a dancer in the Palace Theatre, and still fascinated the elderly detective. The theatre was where a great many of Bryant’s obsessions intersected. The heady combination of artifice, obsession, esoterica and intrigue fired his synapses. As a child he had sneaked into theatres via their open scenery docks and would be allowed to watch performances. He watched in open-mouthed awe while Hamlet goaded Claudius and Richard III schemed. Walton’s masque from The Tempest and the sprites of Arden seduced him into an impossible world, taking him away from the poverty and bitterness of his childhood home. He still visited theatres whenever he could, but had become disenchanted with the Disneyfication of the West End, which had lured audiences away from thoughtful plays to witless family extravaganzas.
Bryant clambered onto his library steps and pulled down various musty volumes on the history of British theatre, hoping to find some answers to the elliptical questions that flittered about inside his head.
In a book on the lives of Gilbert and Sullivan he found a quote: “London’s modern skin has settled easily over its Victorian heart. Far from erasing the old and replacing it with the new, the city seems to encourage paradox, just as it always did. The high-born and the lowly, the wealthy and the poor, are kept as separate as they have always been.”
How true, he thought, recalling Lord Lucan, the missing seventh earl of Lucan who in 1974 allegedly murdered his nanny and fled the country, apparently protected by a coterie of wealthy friends. Bryant knew that if Robert Kramer operated in similar circles, he would never get to the truth of the boy’s death. There were areas of London society where even the law was powerless. The gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability.
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 Metenier.
Laying it carefully on his desk, he began to read. Metenier’s lurid little plays had given horrified Parisians 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 play-going 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 realize. 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 presiding 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 Andre 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 Memory of Blood ∧
12
Rictus
The following guests were present in the lounge 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.
Delia 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.