“Talk about leaving it to the last minute – no, the last second,” said Banbury.
“I just couldn’t be sure,” Bryant admitted. “Would anyone begrudge me a pipe on this occasion?”
He didn’t bother to wait for a reply. Wind and rain buffeted the windows of the common room. The storm was so violent that they could hear the roof creaking. It was nearly two in the morning but nobody wanted to go home. Instead, Dan Banbury, Colin Bimsley, Meera Mangeshkar, Fraternity DuCaine, Janice Longbright, John May, Raymond Land and Giles Kershaw were gathered together on the threadbare sofas with a few beers, waiting to piece together the thinking that had resulted in Ray Pryce occupying an Islington police cell.
“Go on then, stop milking the suspense, what caught him?” asked Meera.
“The annoying thing was that I suppose I knew from Wednesday morning – subconsciously, I mean. I told you your time lines weren’t going to help, but they did. The answer was right there in front of me all the time, pinned to the wall. Marcus Sigler, Ray Pryce and Gail Strong were the three on the fire escape. But Sigler’s and Strong’s times didn’t match. Strong reckoned she was there a few minutes after Sigler – she said she saw him coming in, but according to the guests in the lounge she and Sigler left the room at the same time. If Sigler wasn’t in or outside the toilet, he was on the fire escape smoking, so how could he and Gail Strong not have seen each other?”
“We know that one of them was lying, we already established that,” said May.
“Yes, but I wanted to know why. And the answer lay in Janice’s suspicions, which led me back to the testimony of the actress Mona Williams, who said that despite the fact that Marcus Sigler was conducting a passionate long-term affair with Mrs Kramer, Gail Strong had been giving him the come-on that night, right from the moment she set eyes on him, and they left the room together. They made out on the fire escape and lied to protect themselves. Sigler and Strong came back in, and Sigler saw Ray Pryce passing them in the corridor, so he asked the writer to back up his new story. What he didn’t know was that Pryce had just committed murder.”
“What gave him away?”
“Arrogance,” answered Bryant, sucking hard on his pipe and filling the room with the scent of burning hay. “He had to rub my nose in his success. He should have simply kept out of my way.”
“I don’t understand. What did he do?”
“He asked to borrow a light, and then smoked in front of me.”
“Is that all?” Land was horrified. “Please tell me you have something that will stand up in court.”
“Don’t worry about that, old sausage. The cigarette was just the final tip-off. Everyone knows Ray Pryce is a smoker. He’s talked incessantly about his nicotine patches and trying to give up. He barged in while I was talking to Ella Maltby and stood right in front of me, with his cigarette – herbal, incidentally – like this.” He indicated the method with his pipe, holding it a few inches below his chin. “But nobody smokes like that. I talked to actors who don’t smoke, and one of the first things they have to learn is how to smoke convincingly. Actors always need to do something with their hands, so they like smoking roles. Smokers know they annoy non-smokers and become wary around them, so they always hold their cigarettes away to one side.”
“I fail to see – ” Land began.
“Yes, Raymondo, you usually do, but we’re happy to cover for you. When I looked at Ray Pryce standing so close, I suddenly realized he was a non-smoker. Now, if that was the case, it changed everything. On the time line for the Kramers’ party that Janice provided, Pryce is marked down as leaving the room to smoke a cigarette. So the trip was wrong.”
“But Marcus Sigler saw him on the back staircase,” objected Banbury.
“Marcus lied to cover the fact that he was on the staircase with Gail Strong. At Strong’s request he changed his timing so that nobody could place them together. So where did Ray Pryce disappear to? He went upstairs to the baby’s room.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that he was extremely angry, and very good at hiding it. Now, we know the nursery door was unlocked because Judith and Robert Kramer both expressed surprise when they got upstairs and couldn’t open it. So Pryce slipped inside and approached the cot, and the baby started to cry.”
“Was he intending to kill the child right then?”
“That’s hard to say. It’ll be interesting to hear him in court. I think he had murderous intentions, but maybe they failed him when he saw the child. Well, he needed to shut Noah up, but already his sense of self-preservation was working and he was worried that someone would find out that he had been in the room. He didn’t want to leave prints. And he wanted to silence the baby. So he grabbed the Mr Punch from the wall behind him and waved it about, hoping to amuse the boy.
“And when Noah cried even harder, Pryce let Mr Punch pick up the baby. He wrapped the figure’s hands around the child and rocked him, and the rocking turned into throttling, and then Noah Kramer was silenced. So he ran to the window and shoved it open, and let Mr Punch shake the baby out into the street. Downstairs, on the fire escape, Marcus Sigler heard what he thought was a can of paint sliding. What he’d heard was the window going up above him. Pryce stepped back, threw the dummy on the floor, and the rain squalled in, soaking the rug. The water raised the nap of the rug, lifting impressions. If you want to remove chair marks from a carpet, you just put an ice cube in each dent. I got that tip from The Good Wife’s Guide to Housekeeping, 1935. Right, so Pryce was back on the door side of the empty cot. The deed was done. But what if somebody came up? He needed to buy himself some time. The Yale key was in the door, but of course there was no way of locking it from the inside without remaining in the room. Except that there was.”
“I really don’t see how.” May frowned.
“Come on. Ray Pryce is a writer. He spends his life coming up with outlandish ideas. And now he had a brainwave. A few minutes earlier, Mona Williams had sat on his glasses and broken them. The right arm had snapped off. He had put the broken glasses in his pocket.
“It was such a simple idea. I tried it myself and it works perfectly every time. He stuck the arm of the glasses through the hole in the end of the key, closed the door and went outside. Then he simply ran his credit card down through the gap in the door. It was enough to flip the key, and now that it was no longer upright, the arm of the glasses simply fell out onto the floor. He had been gone no longer than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
“Next, the Kramers break the door down and rush in, and the guests come up to see what’s wrong – ”
“– and Pryce retrieves the glasses’ arm from the floor,” said May.
“Precisely. He had achieved exactly the effect he was hoping for. Retribution from Kramer’s own role model. Pryce must have gone to bed that night thinking he had destroyed his nemesis. But he was wrong. Because while he was here, sitting in the hallway waiting to be interviewed, Pryce accidentally overheard that Robert wasn’t the baby’s father – and of course, the thing nobody realized is that Robert already knew it. Of course he knew: he’d been to see his doctor because he and Judith had been having trouble conceiving, and the doctor had explained about his low sperm count.
“Pryce had failed. Judith was devastated, but Robert Kramer seemed barely touched by the tragedy. Pryce had to try something else. But what? What did Kramer care about so much if it wasn’t the life of a child?”
“Money,” said Meera.