The Memory of Blood

∨ 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.

“This is probably the grandest building I’ve ever attempted to enter legally.” Bryant looked up at the door with approval. “It makes Hampstead Golf Club look like Bethnell Green Slipper Baths.”

“I wonder why she works if she lives in a place like this?”

“I don’t know. Ray Pryce said she was very odd. Let’s find out just how very odd.” He gave the iron bellpull a tug.

“Is my tie straight?” May turned to Bryant with his chin forward.

“It’s fine. I don’t know why you feel the need to straighten a piece of silk dangling from your neck whenever you visit a woman.”

“I don’t want to look an utter scruffbag like you.” May looked down at Bryant’s knees and recoiled. Blue and white striped material was sticking out of his trouser bottoms. “Please tell me you’re not wearing pyjamas underneath your strides?”

“It was cold when I got up, so I just put another layer on. Is that so wrong?”

“I can’t believe you have to ask.”

The door was opened by Ella Maltby herself. She was clearly unhappy and unprepared to find the detectives standing on her doorstep.

“Ms Maltby, we need to talk to you about a purchase you made from Pollock’s Toy Museum six weeks ago,” said Bryant.

“You’d better come in before anyone sees you,” Maltby said, looking behind them.

She led the way into a wide, oak-panelled hall hung with cobwebbed chandeliers. When May studied them, he realized the cobwebs were stage effects that had been carefully sprayed onto the candlesticks.

“Well, they say you never can tell what’s behind an Englishman’s front door,” said Bryant in a not entirely complimentary tone.

“I am not English and I’m not a man,” Maltby pointed out. “I am German, originally from Hamburg. My father anglicized our family name after the war.”

“Ah, a Jerry, yes, well, I imagine he would. We had quite a few family friends who visited Hamburg. Didn’t stop, just flew over it and returned to base. Never mind, forgive and forget, eh?”

“Give me strength,” May muttered under his breath, but Bryant was on a roll.

“It probably explains your fascination with torture, I mean with the Hun being a notoriously cruel race, but you gave us our royal family, even though we dumped the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha surname because it was simply too embarrassing.”

Maltby froze Bryant with a cold stare. “You wanted to talk about a purchase.”

“A Hangman doll, I believe.”

“That’s correct.”

“What puzzles us is this: Robert Kramer is a collector of Punch and Judy memorabilia. Bit of a coincidence that you are, too, isn’t it?”

“I’m not,” Maltby said. “I bought the doll for Robert while I was buying the rest of the props for the play. That way it goes through the business books. They’re rare and very expensive.”

“Kramer already has a complete set of puppets.”

“Not true. There’s no single agreed set of characters. The productions varied across the centuries and the only surviving sets that match are in museums and private collections. They hardly ever come up for auction. The only way to collect them now is to buy the characters piecemeal. Mr Granville had heard of an original Hangman going, so I obtained it for Robert.” She looked from one detective to the other. “I’m assuming this has something to do with the death of Robert’s son?”

“A puppet of the Hangman was found beside Gregory Baine. Nobody’s told you?”

“I had no idea. What happened?”

“He was found hanging under Cannon Street Bridge.”

“I assume he killed himself.” She sounded curious but not surprised.

“Why would you think that?”

“Everyone knows he had money worries. He asked for a loan, but Robert turned him down.”

“Where were you on Wednesday night?”

“Here at home, by myself.”

“Where did you last see the puppet?”

“In Robert’s office at the theatre. I think he intended to keep it there. It was certainly there on Monday, before the party.”

“You’re quite close to Robert, aren’t you?”

“It pays to be. He employs me.”

“Friendly with his wife?”

“Not especially. She doesn’t talk to other women.”

“How about the mistress?”

“I didn’t know she had one.”

“Robert Kramer’s mistress.”

“I didn’t know he had one.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“You’re a policeman. Do you believe anything?”

“Sorry to hear about your girlfriend, by the way. Left you, did she?”

“It’s common knowledge.”

“Anyone else at Robert Kramer’s party you’re especially friendly with?”

“I don’t know any of the others that well. I keep my distance.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re not my kind of people.”

“I heard they don’t much care for you. They think you’re weird. Your girlfriend did, too.”

“I imagine they all do.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because of my… predilections.”

“And what are those?”

“Come and see for yourself.”

Maltby led them to the staircase at the end of the hall and started to descend. “I’m a model maker,” she explained. “That’s how I got into props and set design.” At the bottom of the staircase, Bryant and May found themselves faced with a double-width wooden door covered in square iron studs, closed with an iron ring. She grabbed the ring and twisted it. The door swung wide with a theatrical groan.

The detectives found themselves inside a dungeon, complete with perspiring grey stone walls, a full-sized rack, a gibbet, thumbscrews, a scold’s bridle, a brazier with a red-hot branding iron sitting in it and various implements of torture. But more alarming than this were the full-sized mannequins that writhed in agony in the contraptions, burned, scarred, pierced and stretched. A hooded figure with a bare chest stood beside them holding tongue pincers. Another was posed standing over a screaming naked girl with a pair of eye gougers in his hand.

But the tableau that interested Bryant most was the one that featured a corpse hanging from a perfect hangman’s noose.

“And you wonder why your girlfriend walked out,” murmured Bryant.

“I kicked her out,” Maltby replied hotly. “She told me I needed psychiatric help. I’m a model maker, not a psycho. I just make these scenes for the skill of it. I build dioramas for the London Dungeon. I wanted to work for Hammer Films, but their heyday was before my time. They employed highly skilled craftspeople. You wouldn’t have turned around and told them they needed psychiatric help, would you?”

May suddenly realized what his partner had been doing since they arrived. Knowing that Maltby had isolated herself from everyone, he had set out to goad her into providing some angry answers, and had got them.

“Missing any rope, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Ray Pryce said you believe souls live on in the models you make.”

“He would say that. He’s a writer; they all exaggerate. I guess in a sense I do put myself into my figures. After all, they’re all modelled on real people. I don’t do all this by myself. I have an assistant. We hire models and use their features in order to get exact likenesses. So you do come to think of them as being alive.”

“I imagine it’s a lucrative field. Unusual jobs often are.”

“I come from a long line of model makers. My great-grandmother worked for Madame Tussauds, and so did her mother. Madame Tussaud developed her craft by making wax death masks of aristocrats who had been executed during the French Revolution. She arrived in England at the start of the nineteenth century and put her waxworks on display at the Lyceum Theatre, just off the Strand. My skill with wax is what got me the job on The Two Murderers. I’m supplying exhibitions all over the world.”

“Well, she didn’t seem crazy to me,” observed May as they left the house. “If anything, I thought she was pretty damn smart. She’s about craft, artistry – and making money.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with you,” replied Bryant glumly. “My biggest problem is that I can’t see what she would have to gain by killing. But her fascination with the morbid fits a certain pattern.”

“I’ll do some checking into her background, look for the usual signs, but we’re going to need more than circumstantial evidence if we’re going to make anything stick to anyone. It sounds like they all had access to the Hangman puppet.”

“Did she have any unexplained absences during the party?”

“She’s another smoker. I think she slipped out for a snout a couple of times, but wasn’t gone long in either case. Sounds like we can’t prove where she was when Gregory Baine died.”

“Too many suspects, and none of them entirely fit – yet. Bloody annoying.”

They returned to the Unit and worked separately for the rest of the day. After the Unit had finally closed for the night, Bryant told his partner to put on his coat and follow him to the King Charles I pub. He appeared to be troubled by something; his brow was even more rumpled than usual. Over pints of Bombardier, he explained his problem.

“I think we can rule out Robert Kramer now,” he began, leaving a foamy moustache on his upper lip. “I’m afraid we have to assume you were fed a dud lead by the Home Office.”

“How do you work that out?”

“I realized that Kramer doesn’t fit the pattern. He might have reached the top by behaving in an immoral manner, but he certainly isn’t an anarchist. If anything, he’s an arch-conformist. He abides by the status quo. He doesn’t want to upset the ordered world, he simply wants to exist in its upper echelons. He might assume he has something in common with the myths of strong leaders, but he behaves in the prescribed manner of all rapacious businessmen.”

“Well, he’s all we have right now, even though he has no motive for killing his own partner.”

“I read the email Lucy Clementine sent you. Fond of detailing her boss’s bad behaviour, isn’t she?”

“If she’s right, we’ve got enough to hold Robert Kramer on suspicion,” said May. “We’re not subject to the rules governing the Met.”

“You won’t get a confession out of him. He’d fight every step of the way.”

“You sound as if you don’t want to make an arrest.”

“Of course I do, but we can’t afford another mistake. You’ve no concrete evidence, only hearsay. We need more proof than the word of a disgruntled former secretary. He fired her, John. Lucy Clementine sued Kramer for wrongful dismissal and settled compensation out of court, but the amount she received was the lowest that could have been awarded.”

“How did you find this out?”

“I didn’t. I got Dan Banbury to run a background check on her. What he found was that she had no background.”

“You mean someone erased it?”

“Afraid so. Their mistake was taking out the whole of the period when she worked for Kramer. It would have been more convincing if they’d left something in. Her testimony is compromised.”

“Why were you suspicious?”

“The Department of Social Resources is housed in the same Whitehall Home Office building as the Department of Internal Security – the department that’s run by Oskar Kasavian.”

“It could just be a coincidence.”

“And it might not be. All I’m saying is, you can’t trust your source.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“The same as you. I want to get to the truth before anyone else is hurt.”

“You think it will happen again if we don’t stop it?”

“I know it will.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Our murderer is winning. Nobody has been arrested. He’s getting exactly what he wants.”

“But we don’t know what he wants.”

“I have a shrewd idea now. I just don’t know which one of them it is.”

“Still going to play your cards close to your chest, then.”

“I have to. If I’m wrong, I can’t afford to drop us both in the merde. It would be better if I took the fall.”

“So what happens next?”

“We need to keep a close watch on everyone who was at that party.”

“You know we can’t do that. We don’t have enough staff.”

“If we don’t, somebody may die.”

“Then we have to decide who to prioritize. I’m assuming Judith Kramer is high risk.”

“You mean because she collapsed after the death of her son she can’t possibly be guilty.”

“Someone set out to hurt her by killing her child.”

“But she wasn’t hurt by Gregory Baine’s death.”

“Giles says he can’t entirely rule out suicide. There’s still the idea that Baine might have killed himself over his debts. If I had to choose the person most at risk right now, it would be someone involved in the love triangle. Marcus Sigler or Kramer himself.”

“Really? Interesting. That’s not who I would have picked.”

“Then who do you think is the most exposed?”

“Ray Pryce, the writer, because he’s as nervous as a cat and knows more than he’s letting on. I think he saw something at the party. What did he witness that he’s not telling us?”

“OK, anyone else?”

“Yes, that obnoxious critic, Alex Lansdale.”

“The critic?”

“Of course. We’re looking for a very unusual killer. Someone who’s a careful planner, but also capable of murderous rages. Remember what Janice said about Mrs Kramer? That she always felt stranded on the outside. Nearly everyone else there was directly connected with the play, but one man was a traitor and did his best to close it down – Lansdale. That puts him on the wrong side.”

May drank up and set his pint down. “Call me old-fashioned, but I think we should protect the women first. Everyone who attended that party is technically a suspect.”

“Not true, John. The timings have ruled at least three of them out.”

“Nevertheless, we need to keep them all close by. What do you think?”

“I think I’ll have another pint,” said Bryant, peering through the bottom of his empty glass.