The Memory of Blood

∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

28

Performance

The New Strand Theatre stood at the corner of Adam Street and York Buildings, just off the Strand itself. The white stone edifice had been constructed in 1920 along clean, elegant lines and peaked with inspirational statuary. It was now entirely filled with offices. The double-height ground floor had belonged to a travel company that had gone bankrupt in the credit crunch, and the building’s landlord had decided to put the entire six-floor property on the market. Robert Kramer had seized his chance and purchased it, transforming the atrium into a gold and crimson mock-Edwardian theatre seating an audience of 450.

Arthur Bryant settled himself in the middle of the second row with a bag of cheese and onion crisps and watched the theatre fill up. The audience for The Two Murderers was unusually young and mixed. While the middle classes went to the National to see plays about politics and society, a more raucous crowd yearning for sex and sensation headed for West End shows that delivered value for money.

Ray Pryce’s script was unashamedly populist. The play began in a grand Victorian Gothic mansion filled with suits of armour and stags’ heads, where angled shadows strafed the floor in expressionistic patterns. In the first act, the ageing lord of the manor caught his wife in a clinch with the handsome gardener and imprisoned her inside the wall of his ancestor’s torture dungeon before the illicit lovers turned the tables on him.

Soon the convoluted plot called for a wax dummy of the lord to come to life, and for the wife’s lover to break it open and reveal the real lord imprisoned within. The twists compounded themselves in a satisfying Golden Age fashion, and soon the titular murderers were being placed in torture devices and bodies were returning to life, all part of some grand plan to trick the lord into handing over his estate.

It was neo-Jacobean tosh, of course, but well constructed and packed with stylish jolts. Bryant could see why the snobbish critic Alex Lansdale had taken against it so strongly.

“Excuse me, can you put those things down?” said the woman in front of Bryant, turning round to point to his bag of crisps. “You’re spoiling my enjoyment of the play.”

“Madam, your fox fur collar is having the same effect on me, but I restrain myself from complaint.” He bit into a crisp as noisily as he could and raised his knees against the back of her seat, giving her a good thump. Someone was being strangled onstage. Delia Fortess screamed and clutched her breast before falling to her knees. Bryant grinned. At the blood-spattered close of the play, as everyone else sat in stunned silence, Bryant applauded loudly and bellowed “Bravo!” until everyone turned round to stare at him.

“So I hear you enjoyed our little melodrama,” said Ray Pryce, stopping Bryant in the foyer as the sickly-faced audience fled to tell their friends how awful the play had been, and how they should definitely go and see it. The writer had been watching the performance from backstage.

“You heard me?”

“We could hardly avoid hearing you. You were laughing when everyone else had their hands over their eyes.”

“Well, I enjoy a good murder. Marcus Sigler is very good, isn’t he? That part where he flew into a murderous rage – how does he manage to achieve that level of fury night after night?”

“He reckons he harnesses his inner anger – thinks about something that torments him. Stanislavsky and all that.”

“Tell me, how did you do the bit where the dummy came to life? I thought that was very realistic.”

“I only came up with the idea on paper,” Ray admitted. “It’s Ella Maltby’s job to make it work. She built the props.”

“She knows her Victoriana.”

“It’s a passion of hers. An obsession, almost. Ella has some very strange ideas. That’s why our director picked her for the team.”

“What kind of strange ideas?”

“You should see her house. She’s a real-life vamp. She has a collection of African juju dolls, and some ancient Sumerian figurines that are supposed to have the souls of the dead inside them. She used to be a doll maker. Ella told me she genuinely believes that inanimate objects can become human.”

“Makes a change. In my job I usually encounter the reverse. Sounds right up my street, in fact.”

“Yours, perhaps, but not Ella’s girlfriend’s. She walked out on her, couldn’t bear to be in the place a minute longer. Said it gave her the creeps. Ella’s been behaving very strangely ever since. She’s stopped socializing with the cast and stays away from the theatre unless she’s absolutely needed.”

“That’s odd. When did this start?”

“Let’s see, her girlfriend left last Sunday night.”

“The night before Noah Kramer was murdered.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, nothing, I’m just thinking aloud. Perhaps I should pay a visit to Ms Maltby.”

“She won’t like it,” Ray warned. “Ella won’t let you in without a very good reason.”

“I’m a police officer, I can do whatever I want,” replied Bryant. “It’s fabulous being me. Look, I’ll show you.”

On his way out, he stopped by the concession stand. “Can I take one of these?” he asked, indicating the programmes. “I’m a pensioner.”

“I’m afraid senior citizens have to pay just like everybody else,” said the old lady behind the counter.

“Well, I’m also a police officer, so I’m taking one of those as evidence. Chuck it over, Gran.”

“Charming.” She reluctantly withdrew a copy and passed it to him. “Some of the older ladies in this cast remember the days when we had a nicer class of people in here.”

“I’m sure you did, back in Victorian times.” He turned to Ray. “See? With your unpleasant turn of mind, you should think of enlisting in the force. The perks are great.” Bryant opened the programme and began reading it. There were monochrome photographs of the cast members and, on the next page, the production team. “Every single one of these people was in attendance at Robert Kramer’s party,” he told Ray, “and most seem to be hiding some kind of secret. But which of them is a murderer?”

“It’s like a whodunit,” Ray said, sounding amazed. “I thought that sort of thing only happens on TV.”

“Most investigations are whodunits,” said Bryant, buttoning his coat, “but most are solved before they’ve barely begun. This one is different.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, the murderer is keeping pace with us. It’s not an investigation now. It’s a race.”