“Hit him where it hurts. Get rid of the financier and watch the empire collapse. Oh, and stick a Punch and Judy doll there, to make sure Kramer knew the two tragedies were linked. How perfect to mirror Kramer’s obsession with the Mr Punch story and exact a theatrical revenge! The ancient Greeks used something they called ‘temple magic’. They would make heavy doors open by themselves via secret systems of pulleys and ropes, and used hidden tubes and secret passages to make the Sibyl whisper through the walls. Pryce knew that the effect was as important as the act. So this time he concentrated more on the staging. He lured Baine to a melancholy, darkened spot and a lonely, awful death.”
“Baine had a lot of alcohol in his bloodstream when he died,” said Kershaw. “From the state of his liver, I’d say he’d been drinking hard for a year.”
“Do you mind?” said Bryant. “This is my story. The credit crunch had caught Baine on the hop and he’d dipped his hand in the till to try and keep things afloat. So, once again, fate undermined Pryce and produced the wrong effect. If anything, he did Kramer a favour by getting rid of Baine. Then things got even worse. Mona Williams remembered sitting on Pryce’s glasses just before he left the room – and he remembered that he’d given her the scripts.”
“What scripts?” asked Land.
“The ones he’d found from the original Grand Guignol at the New Theatre. The ones he cribbed from. And there it was in another play, The Mystery of the Locked Cell, staged in 1923 with Dame Sybil Thorndyke, written by none other than the master himself, Noel Coward. In it, the murderer seals a room by inserting a steel rod in a key and twisting it from outside.
“And Mona did what she always did. She started gossiping. So Pryce needed to frighten her into silence. He waited until she went into the theatre for her ‘thinking time’, and, in the gloom of the stalls, dropped the scold’s bridle on her. But it had the wrong effect. It terrified her and she choked to death. Has there ever been a series of crimes that have gone so horribly wrong? Meanwhile, Robert Kramer sailed through it all, untouched.
“So, in desperation, he lured Kramer away to confront him with his misdeeds. And this, too, went wrong. We don’t know what Kramer said, but presumably he shrugged off the scare tactic used on him – ”
“The dropped dummy,” May pointed out.
“That’s right, the dummy, another hopeless failure. Kramer probably laughed in his face. Which was when Pryce exploded and chucked the fork at him. Even worse, Kramer’s shoes slipped and he fell on the fork and died. Pryce wants us to believe that he achieved what he set out to do, but he failed in every possible way. His victim cheated him right until the very end.”
“I don’t understand,” Land persisted. “Why did Pryce drop a life-sized dummy on him in the barn? Who was it meant to be? Isn’t that a ridiculous thing to do? What’s the motive for all of this?”
Bryant removed his pipe from between his teeth and gave a ghastly grin. “The oldest motive in the world. Revenge. This is about the memory of blood. Blood in the sense of blood relations. Dummies are representatives of people. This particular dummy was intended to be the first Mrs Kramer. Robert Kramer didn’t know she was pregnant when she died. He would have had a real heir after all. And the significance of the first Mrs Kramer? It’s very simple. She was Ray Pryce’s mother. Pryce knew and, in his own absurdly roundabout way, was trying to tell Robert that he knew.”
“His mother?” May repeated. “How did you find out about that?”
“Remember I told you this was about the victim, not the murderer? I had a bit of a root about in Kramer’s background and her name kept coming up. Stella Kramer was a writer, too – or at least she tried to be. She wrote about the experience of giving birth for a weekly magazine. She wrote about her unhappy childhood, and anything else she thought might sell. It was hard to separate out the facts; at first I assumed she was making everything up. And after a while, thanks to a few carefully planted denials by her husband, so did everyone else. I followed the paper trail as her articles dwindled to bitter letters in the local press and the salient facts are clear. Ray was born out of wedlock and raised by foster parents, but Stella stayed in touch with him. She met him in secret and told him all about her disastrous marriage to Robert. He advised her to leave, but she couldn’t. The couple’s fights eventually made the Evening Standard, but Stella came off badly. Kramer’s bullying drove her to suicide. And Pryce sat impotently by, penniless and powerless, unable to do anything about it as Kramer grew richer and stronger. Pryce tried to make a living as a writer and failed. There was nothing he could do but watch and nurse his hatred.
“All this changed on the day he discovered the box of scripts. Suddenly, fate stepped in and gave him the power to act. He palmed off one of the plays as his own and went to see Kramer. He slowly wormed his way into the inner circle. Did he, like Hamlet, plan to stage a version that re-enacted a parental death? No, because we all remember what happened to Hamlet.
“But, like Hamlet, he bided his time and waited for an opportunity to strike. There’s a good chance it would never have happened, if it hadn’t been for Robert Kramer’s ill-chosen remarks about his first wife at the party, which Ray overheard.
“It was the last straw. He stormed upstairs and attacked the baby. I kept looking at Janice’s chart, but for ages I couldn’t see the error because everyone was accounted for. Then I realized that it was impossible. Somebody had to have made a mistake. But it took more than one person to make a lie; it took the perpetrator and the witness, and I couldn’t work out which of the corroborators was lying. Of course, I should have seen it, because now it’s obvious. And there’s an ugly little sidebar to this. Robert Kramer happened to be Jewish, and Pryce attacked him with his own puppetry. The Mr Punch model conforms to the physiological concept of the cephalic index – the mockery of Jewish facial features. Ray Pryce has a prior conviction for an anti-Semitic attack dating back to his time in foster care. I enrolled him in the case to keep him close, just as Kramer had with his enemies.”
Bryant sat back and contentedly puffed away at his pipe. Everyone, including his partner, stared at him in amazement.
Colin turned to Meera. “You have to go on a date with me now,” he said, grinning.
∨ The Memory of Blood ∧
50
The Sibyl
Raymond Land came in soon after dawn. He had woken to find there was no breakfast because Leanne had gone to Wales and he didn’t know how to use the microwave, or where she kept the eggs, or where the saucepans lived, so he caught an earlier train and breakfasted at the Ladykillers. The little café was empty at eight a.m. – most shops and offices in the area opened at nine-thirty – so he had time to sit and reflect over his morning tea.
Perhaps, he thought, just perhaps I’ve been wrong all this time, waiting to be transferred to a place where life is easy and the sun always shines. Perhaps that’s not what life is all about. Perhaps you only get a sense of yourself when everything has to be fought for. It’s less pleasurable here but more exciting. Watching the two detectives the night before, battling their way to the end of the case, he felt he was seeing them at the top of their game. He could feel the gravitational pull of London life, the magnetic energy that raced around them, the essence of awareness that sparked everything into activity.
He had felt truly alive.
But he couldn’t let Leanne down. She dreamed of holidays to Barbados. She wanted to spend days by a pool beneath an azure sky. She didn’t want to have to take an umbrella and a scarf every time she left the house. She didn’t want to be married to a man who divided his time between paperwork, pubs and putrid corpses. She needed pampering. How could he deny her dreams?