The Memory of Blood

∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

29

Automata

Alma Sorrowbridge always baked industrial quantities of cake and bread before heading to her church on Haverstock Hill, and the smell of hot ginger and corn bread lured Bryant from his bedroom. He drifted into the kitchen in his patched, tasselled dressing gown and seated himself half asleep at the table like an impoverished Edwardian lord waiting to be fed.

“Oh, so you are still here,” said Alma, carrying in a tea tray of spiced pancakes and eggs. “I was beginning to think you’d moved out without telling me.”

“Why would I do that?” asked Bryant. “You feed me.”

“Not for much longer.”

“What are you talking about?”

“In case the packing crates in the hall have escaped your attention, we’re moving out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve hardly been here five minutes. I’m still cataloguing my police manuals; I’m only up to 1928.”

“We lost the court hearing. They’re tearing this place down and building an apartment complex. I keep telling you but you don’t listen. No one wants an eyesore like this in their nice upmarket neighbourhood.”

“Well, can’t they rehouse us temporarily and move us into one of the new apartments?”

“The starting price of the new flats will be £1.5 million each. Have you got that kind of money knocking around? No, I thought not. I blame Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. When they moved in around the corner, the house prices shot up. But if you have got any savings tucked away in your mattress, now would be the time to get them out.”

“I’m not sure I care for this new sarcastic side of you,” Bryant said. “Can’t we talk about it another time? I’m in the middle of a case.”

“You’re always in the middle of a case. I’ve been telling you about the court proceedings for months, but I knew you had your hearing aid turned off. I tried to get you along to the hearings, remember? It’s too late to do anything now – we have to go. The Compulsory Purchase Order was approved.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous. I can’t be expected to stop everything and move house when there’s a murderer on the loose.” He had a sudden thought. “Hang on, I haven’t anywhere to go.”

“No. That’s because you haven’t got any friends.”

“I did have some, but most of them died or went mad. Well, what are we going to do?”

Alma folded her arms across her generous bust. “We? What makes you think I want to move with you?”

“Don’t be absurd, you’d never live with your conscience if you abandoned me now. You’ve seen what I’m like without you. I nearly burned the house down drying my socks on the gas stove. When I’m left by myself, things have a tendency to explode.”

“Just as well I’ve made us some arrangements, then. You won’t like it, but I don’t see that we have any choice. I’ve found us a place.”

“Where?”

“Number seven, Albion House, Harrison Street, Bloomsbury.”

“The Gray’s Inn Road end of Bloomsbury? But that’s wonderful! Home of Dickens and Virginia Woolf and Brasenose College.”

“It’s a council flat.”

Bryant thumped the side of his head theatrically. “I’m sorry, for a moment I thought you said it was a council flat.”

“I did and it is.”

“But I’m a professional. I have a salary. I can’t throw myself on the mercy of the state – ”

“And you can’t afford to live around here any more. Neither can I. Think of the advantages. You’ll be able to walk to work. And the manager assures me that it’s a nice quiet block. There’s even a small garden. I put our names down when I first heard about the purchase order.”

Bryant looked around in alarm. “Will there be room for all my books?”

“Most of them. There’s a spare room. Some will have to go. You could keep your reference manuals at the Unit.”

“But – ”

“We have no choice, Mr Bryant. You weren’t interested in attending the meetings, and I couldn’t fight to keep this place without you.”

“I’m so sorry, Alma. I’ve failed you.”

“It’s all right, I’m used to it. The first thirty years were the hardest. Go on, have some corn bread.”

Bryant munched and thought for a minute. “You know, it might be a good thing. We’ll meet new people. Common people with ordinary lives, the ones who watch talent shows on television and take their children to football matches. I can get to know them, find out about their habits. Make a proper clinical study of them.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea. They may not like being studied,” said Alma. “Let’s see what the neighbours are like first.”

“When does all this happen?”

“The removal van is arriving on Monday. Don’t worry, everything will be taken care of. The flat has just been painted for us. I’ll write down the address for you and give you a set of keys.”

“What would I do without you, Alma?”

“You’d be thinner, for a start. It’s a bit late to get sentimental. You do your work and I’ll do mine.” She began pouring fresh tea.

“What is your work?”

“Why, looking after you, of course.” She gave a shrug. “It’s a disgusting job but somebody has to do it.”

♦

London experiences most of its foggy mornings in May and October, but on Friday morning John May stepped out onto his balcony on the fourth floor of the converted warehouse at Shad Thames to find a cool grey mist eddying over the still green surface of the river. Near the shore, a police patrol boat nosed a corridor through the vapour like an icebreaker. Seagulls dropped and wheeled from the milky sky, reminding those below that they lived on an island in a cold grey sea.

He missed Brigitte. She was hardly bothering to return his emails and phone calls. He knew that her job at the Paris Tourist Board required her to attend a great number of social events, and felt sure that she was meeting younger, more eligible men who possessed the added benefit of being born Parisians. Here he was on the wrong side of the Channel, fooling himself into thinking that a glamorous French divorcee still preferred to be with him. Men are worse than women when it comes to worrying

about their own attractiveness, he thought glumly. I’m old, it’s as simple as that, and I’m going to be alone. Other people learn to manage. I’ve always put my career before my relationships. Perhaps I’m like Robert Kramer in that respect. And I’d better learn to deal with it, because it won’t get any easier.

He ground fresh coffee beans – a breakfast ritual he had developed after seeing Michael Caine do it in The Ipcress File – then chose a new white shirt and a ribbed grey silk tie, because looking smart at least made him feel younger. He envied Arthur, because his partner had obviously not looked in a mirror since the year of the Coronation and seemed entirely happy in his own rumpled skin. Vanity is a form of self-harm, he decided, slipping into his black suit jacket. It’s time to concentrate on something more important.

Lucy Clementine’s testimony against her old boss bothered him. She had clearly meant it as a condemnation, but why? What had she to gain now, when she no longer worked for him? Ms Clementine had turned up too conveniently. It felt as if someone was pushing Kramer at them and making sure they stayed on target.

The more he thought about the detestable Robert Kramer, the more he seemed to be a victim. It was a gut instinct born from years of experience. Every investigation reveals a worm in the bud, May thought, and you often end up hating the people you’re meant to defend, and vice versa. I really should talk to Arthur about my mixed feelings.

As he came out of the building, he found Arthur Bryant sitting on a traffic bollard opposite his front door. He had his hat pulled down over his ears and was dipping a Mars Bar in a polystyrene cup of tea. “Ah, I was wondering how long it would take for you to finish your ablutions,” he said, dunking the last of his chocolate. Bryant had a habit of appearing when May was thinking about him as if he had been psychically summoned.

“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.