The Memory of Blood

∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

34

Guignol

“You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” said May, watching Dan Banbury at work. The stubby crime scene manager was on his knees between the theatre seats, enthusiastically dusting the arms of the chairs with fingerprint powder.

“I don’t enjoy death, Mr May, you know that. But I do enjoy uncovering the provenance of crime. I like to know what happened. My curiosity always got me in trouble as a nipper. Whenever I saw a dead animal in the woods, I’d always try and find out what killed it. I used to go to strangers’ funerals, just to discover what they died of.”

“That’s the sort of thing serial killers do when they’re young.”

Bryant had slouched down in one of the seats, his huge overcoat riding up about him. “He came in from the back,” he said absently. “She was already sitting facing the stage. You might lift a footprint from the aisle carpet.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Banbury.

“An empty theatre is like a church for her. She feels safe here, she comes here to think. It was preying on her mind, you see.”

“You mean she knew something,” said May.

“She may even have arranged to meet him, to get the matter off her conscience,” Bryant suggested. “Come on, Dan, what happened next?”

Banbury examined the back of the seat for a minute. “OK, he came in, saw her in the seat and dropped the bridle over her head. It’s heavy – she fell back, making the scratches here.” He pointed to two fine channels dug into the top of the wooden seat by the base of the cage. “From the marks I’d say he held her there while he talked to her. Maybe he was just trying to warn her, to frighten her into silence. But she panicked. You can see where her shoes have kicked out at the base of the seat in front. She suffered from excess acidity; there’s a tube of Turns in her bag. She struggled and hyperventilated, then threw up.”

“Check the bridle for dabs,” May suggested. “If he cared about her enough to warn her away, he might have tried to get this thing off her head when he saw she was choking.”

“I already did. I think he wiped it afterwards.”

“No puppet this time.” Bryant was peering under the seats. “Because this was an unexpected development. He hadn’t allowed for it. Colin, go and arrange for Ella Maltby to be brought in, will you? Take someone with you but talk to her personally. Find out if the scold’s bridle is missing from her display. And call in Neil Crofting, the old character actor.”

“Why do you want to see him?” asked May.

“He was Mona Williams’s best friend. If anyone knows why she died, it’ll be him. Colin, get Meera to warn Mr Kramer that there’ll be no performances today. His theatre just turned into a crime scene.”

Bimsley set off for Hampstead, leaving the detectives with Banbury. Bryant beckoned to his partner. “Come and sit down for a minute. Dan doesn’t like us messing up his floor. Besides, it’s relaxing watching other people work.”

For a while they sat talking to and about each other, not always listening, scattering seeds of conversation like an old married couple. May was waiting for his partner to explain his thought processes.

“Come on then, out with it,” he said finally. “How did you know about this?”

“Well, I didn’t at first. I thought it would be the critic.”

“Explain.”

“Alex Lansdale trashed the show, but turned up at Kramer’s party. They were seen talking together. Therefore he must be a friend of Kramer’s. Kramer is under attack. Those he loves and trusts are being removed.”

“Why is he friends with a man who has spoken out against the play?”

Bryant felt in his coat pocket for a sheet of paper. Unfolding it and removing the half-sucked sherbet lemon that had become stuck to it, he handed the page to May. “Read the review again. It’s not what we first thought it was. Look at the key phrases I marked. Read them aloud.”

May read aloud. “‘iPod generation – overmiked sound – no appeal to older audiences – superb Gothic set – drenched in gore – multiplex action movie – soap stars – nudity – teens will flock.’ Kramer didn’t want the usual old-school audiences to attend because he knew they’d hate it. He wanted a younger crowd with plenty of loose money in their pockets. Ray explained that most of the marketing budget for the show has been on social networking sites. That’s what gave me the idea.”

“So he bought his critic and told him what to say.”

“Exactly. At first I thought that if somebody was just trying to stop the production, they’d go after Lansdale. If the critic had died, there’d have been no way to keep a lid on this whole thing. His paper would have told their readers.”

“How did you come to realize Mona Williams was in danger?”

“When I came to see the play, the programme seller said something odd. She said, Some of the older ladies in this cast remember the days when we had a nicer class of people in here. First of all, there’s only one older lady in the show, so she had to mean Mona Williams. Second, We had a nicer class of people in here? But the New Strand is exactly that, a new theatre – there were no days when it had nicer clientele. But of course the clue is in the name. If there’s a New Strand Theatre there might have been an old one. So I consulted my old theatre books, but failed to turn anything up. Then I realized I was looking for the wrong additional word – not the New Strand Theatre but the New Strand Theatre. I tore the pages out to show you.” Bryant handed May yet more crumpled sheets. “There was a theatre here before, right on this spot. The auditorium was boarded over and converted to offices, but I’m guessing it was still intact when Kramer bought it. He realized what it was when he had the survey done, and hit on the idea to open it up again.”

“But why hasn’t anybody else picked up on the fact that it used to be a theatre? And surely it would have been worth more as offices?”

“Not if you get the right audience for a new play. You can license it for different productions all around the world. As offices, the ground floor would have provided a nice atrium, but that’s just wasted space. This one could be packed with 450 people who would pay nightly to be here. Kramer needed the right script to launch the theatre. He wanted to get in a younger crowd, so he commissioned Ray Pryce.”

“Why Ray?”

“Why not ask him yourself?” Bryant pointed behind him just as Ray entered the stalls.

“I got your text, Mr Bryant, although I had trouble understanding it.”

“He doesn’t know how to use predictive,” May warned.

“Oh, my God, what is that?” Ray peered over the corpse’s boxed-in head and leapt back.

“Mr Bryant, can I ask you to keep the public out of this site?” said Banbury.

“I’m afraid it’s Mona Williams. Ray, explain to my partner how you convinced Mr Kramer to stage your play, would you?”

Ray had trouble drawing his eyes away from the bridled actress. “I told him it would outrage everyone. Controversy is a sure way of firing up the box office. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“Now tell him the rest. Tell him how you plagiarized someone else’s work to worm your way into Kramer’s good books.”

Ray looked shocked, and started stammering. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come off it, chum. I know you copied the play.”

“It’s not plagiarism, not in the strict sense.”

“The Two Murderers follows the script of Les Deux Meurtriers almost word for word.”

“I’m clear of the seventy-year rule.”

“You haven’t exactly gone out of your way to acknowledge the original, have you? Does Robert know?”

“No, but – ”

“The seventy-year rule,” May repeated. “An author has to have been dead for seventy years before his work comes out of copyright.”

“That’s right,” said Ray, shamefaced. “I found the script right here in the building.”

“Now perhaps you’d like to tell my partner about the Grand Guignol,” Bryant prompted.

“OK, sure.” May could see that Ray was not nervous because he was standing near a corpse, but because he had suddenly had the spotlight of suspicion turned on him. “The Grand Guignol was built in the Pigalle, in Paris, at the end of the nineteenth century, by a man called Oscar Metenier. It was a kind of vaudeville of horror. It staged a programme of one-act plays that featured murder of all kinds – matricide, infanticide, kidnap and rape. The scenes were graphically depicted on stage. They were so realistic that audience members regularly used to pass out.”

“And where did the name of the theatre come from?”

“From ‘Guignol’, the Punch and Judy puppet character from Lyons.”

“The plays were often taken from the police blotters of the times,” Bryant added. “True crimes, staged to delight and horrify Parisian audiences. Sex and violence for the chattering classes. Now explain what happened over here, if you would be so kind.”

Ray glanced back at the body and blanched. “Can we go somewhere away from – her?”

“I’m sorry. Of course.” The detectives took him out to the foyer. “Pray continue if you would,” Bryant asked.

“Well, it’s simple. The Grand Guignol of Paris was a huge success for the next twenty years. So it was brought across the Channel and staged in what was then known as the Little Theatre, later the New Strand Theatre, here in Adam Street. But right from the start there was a problem. We had a Lord Chamberlain who censored plays and he refused a licence to any play he considered dangerous to the morals of the public. So the Grand Guignol at the Little Theatre highlighted the psychological cruelty of the characters, rather than showing blood and sex.

“In a way, that was worse. In two years they staged eight series of plays, and many more were turned down. Altogether, forty-three plays were seen here. Most of them were psychological studies of damaged people. Stanislavsky created emotional memory exercises for actors – the idea was that you give a more convincing performance by inhabiting the character and making it believable from a psychological point of view. As a result, the theatre attracted famous names, even though it drew adverse critical reviews and caused a scandal. Noel Coward wrote a play for the Little Theatre called The Better Half, and Dame Sybil Thorndyke appeared in many of them. For four years, young Londoners came here to be shocked. Eventually, the Lord Chamberlain got fed up with what he considered an affront to human decency, and the theatre company had to close. The place changed its name and carried on for a while, but it was never really successful again.”

“So that’s why nobody remembers the old theatre.”

“He banned all the plays from public performance. Odd, really, when you consider that the English stage has a history of horror, from the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear to the gruesome tortures of The Revenger’s Tragedy, where the Duke’s lips are burned away with acid and his eyelids are torn off so he has to witness his wife’s adultery. The Little Theatre was low theatre in the Lord Chamberlain’s eyes and there was a danger that it might appeal to the lower orders. So he came up with a solution. He allowed plays to be performed in their original French, because he thought only the middle classes would come here then and they were less likely to be corrupted.”

“How did you find out about the play?”

“I was working in the building.”

“Doing what?”

“After I finished working for the government, I became a night watchman. One evening I was asked to clear out a load of old boxes from the basement, ready for the dustman in the morning. There was a bunch of playscripts inside. I was sitting behind the desk with nothing to do, and some nights Mr Kramer came to look at the building with his producer. I had time on my hands, so I rewrote a few of the plays and submitted them as my own work. I didn’t hurt anyone. These things are ancient history. I just modernized them and bumped up the levels of sex and violence.”

“You acted with questionable legality,” said May, “but we have bigger problems now.”

“Are you going to make an arrest?” Ray asked.

“You’ll know at the same time as everyone else,” May replied. “I’d make myself scarce if I were you. This place is now off limits.”

Mona Williams’s body was delivered to Giles Kershaw while Banbury cleared the crime scene. The detectives watched what appeared to be a second Grand Guignol play being performed in front of the proscenium arch, then returned to North London.

“I think we know what we’re dealing with now,” said Bryant, waving his walking stick at a taxi. “Robert Kramer is clearly the target, not the suspect.”

“But why?”

“Because he has a secret, something he hasn’t revealed to us in almost a week of questioning. This secret is so great that someone wants him to suffer very badly. They took his child, and that should have been the end of the matter. Then they went after his money man, his best friend, destroying his financial empire in the process. Kramer knows someone is out to get him. But here’s the interesting thing. Despite his secret being known to another individual, he doesn’t know who his own enemy is. Intriguing, no?”

“A woman,” said May suddenly.

“Hm. I was thinking about that possibility.”

“The harming of a child by throwing it about. Frightening an old lady, but not intending to kill her. It feels like a woman somehow, one who’d been angered by Kramer’s behaviour. Particularly if we say that Gregory Baine’s death was suicide.”

“I see what you mean. Kramer’s enemy finds out that Mona Williams knows something which can give the game away. But she’s an old lady, she’ll frighten easily – she can be scared into silence.”

“The plan goes wrong. And revenge is not properly dealt. Kramer’s still around and his life continues; nothing seems to touch him. He’s not as broken up over his child as he was meant to be, because he’s not the father. He’s not destroyed by Baine’s death, because for all we know there could be another offshore company designed to protect his finances from Baine. So there could still be another attempt to hurt him.”

“But why doesn’t this enemy simply kill Kramer if he wants revenge?” Bryant asked.

“Where’s the pleasure in that? Someone needs to see Kramer suffer. Merely being rid of him won’t take away that gnawing anger. The killer wants to watch the pain slowly building in the victim’s eyes. Nothing is working out as it was intended to. Hardly anything has gone right. Something else is bound to happen now.”

“Women,” repeated Bryant. “There are four in the case. Delia Fortess, the female lead; Ella Maltby, the set designer; Jolie Christchurch, the front-of-house manager; and Judith Kramer.”

“Incredible,” May marvelled. “Last week you parked your car to get a bag of boiled sweets and spent the rest of the day trying to remember where you’d left it, but you can remember the name of everyone in the investigation.”

“I have a system for finding Victor now,” Bryant replied.

“I only park in places where I upset people. That way I can always find someone who remembers my car. Hang on, I’ve left one female out. Gail Strong.”

“Ah, the disreputable Ms Strong. I’m not sure I believe a word she’s said to me so far. Maybe we should talk to her again.”

“After we’ve grilled Ella Maltby about her scold’s bridle.” Bryant made a strange sound between a sink gurgling and a cow waking up. This noise usually indicated that he’d had an idea.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve just had another thought. According to my Twentieth-Century British Theatre, when the Lord Chamberlain banned the plays he destroyed the reputation of the theatre’s owner, who died in penury. You don’t suppose someone at that party was a descendant of the original owner, looking for revenge against Kramer now?”

“Incredible as it may seem, no, I don’t,” said May.

“OK, it was just a thought.”

The taxi sloshed through gutters filled with rainwater, wending its way into the deepening northern light.