“I didn’t know you were outside. You could have come up.”
“No, I was having a plate of pork sausages over the road at your transport caff. I wanted to get an early start but something’s gone wrong with Victor’s carburettor. I thought we’d take your BMW.”
“Fine by me. Where are we going?”
“I need you with me, but I don’t want you to get annoyed again.”
“Why do you think it will annoy me?”
“Trust me, it will. We’re going to play with dolls. I’ve arranged an appointment at Pollock’s Toy Museum in Whitfield Street.”
“So long as it brings us nearer to catching a killer, I’m all yours,” May said magnanimously, digging out his car keys.
♦
“How did you get on with your contact?” asked Bryant as they turned into Charlotte Street.
“Interesting. Lucy Clementine worked for Kramer and hates him enough to suggest that he killed his wife’s child.”
“Yes, I rather thought she might,” said Bryant, burying himself deeper into his coat.
“What do you mean?”
“Take no notice of me. I shall keep my mouth zipped until I have further evidence. Let’s talk to Mr Granville. Pull in here.”
“It’s a double-red zone, Arthur.”
“You really have to stop worrying about these minor legal details. Don’t you get it? We’re old, we can do whatever we like. Come along. We’re late.”
Pollock’s Toy Museum was named after Benjamin Pollock, the last of the Victorian toy theatre printers. When it moved from the teeming streets of Covent Garden in 1969, it was relocated in an old corner house in a shaded back street behind Tottenham Court Road.
The museum on the corner of Whitfield Street was built over a working shop that specialized in Victorian puppets and theatres. Bryant peered in at the nicotine-coloured window display, which had not changed in decades. Bright red and yellow proscenium arches, trimmed from cardboard, reflected a world long vanished. In the narrow winding staircases and corridors above the shop, glass-eyed dolls and balding teddy bears stared out from corners. The existence of such a place in the modern world was a testament to the determination of its owners, who were resolved to keep the gateway of childish imagination open.
Nimrod Granville was one of the few men working in London who made Arthur Bryant appear healthful. Tussocks of snowy hair were clumped about the freckled, corrugated flesh of his paté, and a pair of ridiculous half-moon glasses were perched upon his spectacularly hooked hooter, lending him the appearance of Mr Punch himself. These days he remained seated on a high wooden stool behind the counter, and the shop’s dimly lit interior played havoc with his ability to read the boxes that contained the shop’s toy theatres, but Dudley Salterton had recommended him to Bryant as the capital’s last working expert on Victorian theatrical toys. Granville asserted that his longevity was due to a regular intake of Guinness and a sixty-a-day cigarette habit that had begun when he was twelve years old. Consequently his breathing sounded like a gale blowing through a fence and he was required to stop every thirty seconds to get his wind back.
“I hear you’ve found the Madame Blavatsky,” he said. “Dudley called me, very excited. We thought she had been lost in the Blitz.”
“I didn’t realize she had a reputation,” Bryant replied. “She still works.”
“Those things were precision-engineered to last, and the oil doesn’t dry out in them because the cogs are sealed within vacuum glass. She’s worth a bob or two.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t sell her.”
“Good man. She’s a creepy old thing, isn’t she? Of course, I’ve only seen pictures. I’d love to come and try her out. I’ve always been fascinated by automata, ever since I heard about the Turk.”
“What’s the Turk?” May asked.
“It was a mechanical chess player constructed in 1770 to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, a turbaned man on a wooden box filled with brass machinery. The Turk could beat human opponents at chess, and also performed something called the Knight’s Tour, which was a puzzle requiring the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard just once. The Turk was a sham, of course, but a rather beautiful one. The machinery appeared to go all the way to the back of the cabinet, but this was optical trickery. The last third of the cabinet housed a tiny man who was a chess master. But the illusion was a complex one involving deceptive sounds, magnets and levers that worked brilliantly. It eventually ended up in America and was destroyed in a fire. There have been reconstructions, but the Turk was the first and best of the automata. The French made brothel automata in the late nineteenth century that simulated lovemaking. And these days I hear the Japanese have developed life-sized robotic dolls that respond to the human voice, powered by tiny microchips.”
“Have you ever heard of a Mr Punch puppet that could operate in this manner?” asked Bryant.
“You’d think he would be an obvious choice, wouldn’t you? But no, there’s not been one to my knowledge. Punch is out of favour these days. Not politically correct. But then he was never intended to be. Most people don’t really get what he was about.”
“What do you think he was about?”
“Anarchy,” answered Granville. “Chaos, pure and simple. It is a mad world, and the only way to survive in it is by behaving more madly than anyone else. Punch exists beyond good and evil, right and wrong. I suppose you could say he’s a god. He remakes the universe in his own image.”
“You must meet people who love this sort of thing,” said Bryant. “Collectors, academics. You wouldn’t happen to have a list of them, would you?”
“I can make you up one. We keep a file of regular visitors. I won’t be a minute.” Granville eased himself from the stool with some difficulty and tottered over to a gigantic ledger, which he proceeded to pull down from the shelf.
“Do you want me to give you a hand with that?” asked May.
“Thank you, I can manage,” said Granville, looking as if he was about to be flattened. Clutching the immense tome, he staggered over to a corner of the counter and slammed it down.
“This isn’t going to help us,” May whispered to Bryant. “So far I’ve learned about mechanical dolls, robots, puppets and wax dummies, and absolutely nothing about the case at hand.”
“Not so.” Bryant shook his head. “We’re much closer to understanding what we’re up against.”
“Would you care to enlighten me?”
“Not really.”
“Here we are,” Granville exclaimed, thrusting a piece of paper at Bryant. “If I can be of any further help, do pop in.”
“Well, that was a waste of time,” said May as they left the museum shop. “Let’s get back to some proper policing.”
“I think we have one more stop to make,” said Bryant, showing his partner the slip of paper. “Look who’s a regular visitor to Pollock’s.”
Ella Maltby, the New Strand Theatre’s set designer and props manager, was listed at the top of the page as a collector of dolls and automata. “According to Mr Granville’s records, the last item Maltby purchased from the museum shop was this.” He unfolded a sheet of photocopied paper and showed May the picture on it.
May found himself looking at a puppet of the Hangman.
∨ The Memory of Blood ∧
30
Morbidity
Ella Maltby lived in a redbrick Jacobean-style house overlooking the north end of Hampstead Heath. It rose in magnificent isolation on the brow of the hill, rendered almost invisible by the profusion of damp greenery that surrounded it. Here kestrels, tawny owls and woodpeckers made their homes in the trees, and London, blue and misted, was spread out below, its glass financial towers placed to one side, like condiments at a picnic feast.