The Memory of Blood

∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

49

Temple Magic

“Why on earth did he run?” Longbright wondered. “Why didn’t he simply shrug off your accusation? He’s a master liar. He makes stuff up for a living.”

“The handcuffs,” said May simply. “I’ve seen Arthur use that trick before. He only does it when he’s desperate. To some people it’s something tangible, like holding a gun. Maybe a part of him wanted the final chapter in place. It could only truly be over with his arrest.”

“A poetic idea,” said Bryant, “but he still saw an escape route and took it. He realized that the pipe was rusted through, stuck his foot against the wall and pulled hard, then ran.” He sauntered to the centre of the room and looked about. “Well, go on then, I know you’re all dying to ask.” He loved an audience, especially when he knew things they didn’t.

“Talk about leaving it to the last minute – no, the last second,” said Banbury.

“I just couldn’t be sure,” Bryant admitted. “Would anyone begrudge me a pipe on this occasion?”

He didn’t bother to wait for a reply. Wind and rain buffeted the windows of the common room. The storm was so violent that they could hear the roof creaking. It was nearly two in the morning but nobody wanted to go home. Instead, Dan Banbury, Colin Bimsley, Meera Mangeshkar, Fraternity DuCaine, Janice Longbright, John May, Raymond Land and Giles Kershaw were gathered together on the threadbare sofas with a few beers, waiting to piece together the thinking that had resulted in Ray Pryce occupying an Islington police cell.

“Go on then, stop milking the suspense, what caught him?” asked Meera.

“The annoying thing was that I suppose I knew from Wednesday morning – subconsciously, I mean. I told you your time lines weren’t going to help, but they did. The answer was right there in front of me all the time, pinned to the wall. Marcus Sigler, Ray Pryce and Gail Strong were the three on the fire escape. But Sigler’s and Strong’s times didn’t match. Strong reckoned she was there a few minutes after Sigler – she said she saw him coming in, but according to the guests in the lounge she and Sigler left the room at the same time. If Sigler wasn’t in or outside the toilet, he was on the fire escape smoking, so how could he and Gail Strong not have seen each other?”

“We know that one of them was lying, we already established that,” said May.

“Yes, but I wanted to know why. And the answer lay in Janice’s suspicions, which led me back to the testimony of the actress Mona Williams, who said that despite the fact that Marcus Sigler was conducting a passionate long-term affair with Mrs Kramer, Gail Strong had been giving him the come-on that night, right from the moment she set eyes on him, and they left the room together. They made out on the fire escape and lied to protect themselves. Sigler and Strong came back in, and Sigler saw Ray Pryce passing them in the corridor, so he asked the writer to back up his new story. What he didn’t know was that Pryce had just committed murder.”

“What gave him away?”

“Arrogance,” answered Bryant, sucking hard on his pipe and filling the room with the scent of burning hay. “He had to rub my nose in his success. He should have simply kept out of my way.”

“I don’t understand. What did he do?”

“He asked to borrow a light, and then smoked in front of me.”

“Is that all?” Land was horrified. “Please tell me you have something that will stand up in court.”

“Don’t worry about that, old sausage. The cigarette was just the final tip-off. Everyone knows Ray Pryce is a smoker. He’s talked incessantly about his nicotine patches and trying to give up. He barged in while I was talking to Ella Maltby and stood right in front of me, with his cigarette – herbal, incidentally – like this.” He indicated the method with his pipe, holding it a few inches below his chin. “But nobody smokes like that. I talked to actors who don’t smoke, and one of the first things they have to learn is how to smoke convincingly. Actors always need to do something with their hands, so they like smoking roles. Smokers know they annoy non-smokers and become wary around them, so they always hold their cigarettes away to one side.”

“I fail to see – ” Land began.

“Yes, Raymondo, you usually do, but we’re happy to cover for you. When I looked at Ray Pryce standing so close, I suddenly realized he was a non-smoker. Now, if that was the case, it changed everything. On the time line for the Kramers’ party that Janice provided, Pryce is marked down as leaving the room to smoke a cigarette. So the trip was wrong.”

“But Marcus Sigler saw him on the back staircase,” objected Banbury.

“Marcus lied to cover the fact that he was on the staircase with Gail Strong. At Strong’s request he changed his timing so that nobody could place them together. So where did Ray Pryce disappear to? He went upstairs to the baby’s room.”

“Why?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that he was extremely angry, and very good at hiding it. Now, we know the nursery door was unlocked because Judith and Robert Kramer both expressed surprise when they got upstairs and couldn’t open it. So Pryce slipped inside and approached the cot, and the baby started to cry.”

“Was he intending to kill the child right then?”

“That’s hard to say. It’ll be interesting to hear him in court. I think he had murderous intentions, but maybe they failed him when he saw the child. Well, he needed to shut Noah up, but already his sense of self-preservation was working and he was worried that someone would find out that he had been in the room. He didn’t want to leave prints. And he wanted to silence the baby. So he grabbed the Mr Punch from the wall behind him and waved it about, hoping to amuse the boy.

“And when Noah cried even harder, Pryce let Mr Punch pick up the baby. He wrapped the figure’s hands around the child and rocked him, and the rocking turned into throttling, and then Noah Kramer was silenced. So he ran to the window and shoved it open, and let Mr Punch shake the baby out into the street. Downstairs, on the fire escape, Marcus Sigler heard what he thought was a can of paint sliding. What he’d heard was the window going up above him. Pryce stepped back, threw the dummy on the floor, and the rain squalled in, soaking the rug. The water raised the nap of the rug, lifting impressions. If you want to remove chair marks from a carpet, you just put an ice cube in each dent. I got that tip from The Good Wife’s Guide to Housekeeping, 1935. Right, so Pryce was back on the door side of the empty cot. The deed was done. But what if somebody came up? He needed to buy himself some time. The Yale key was in the door, but of course there was no way of locking it from the inside without remaining in the room. Except that there was.”

“I really don’t see how.” May frowned.

“Come on. Ray Pryce is a writer. He spends his life coming up with outlandish ideas. And now he had a brainwave. A few minutes earlier, Mona Williams had sat on his glasses and broken them. The right arm had snapped off. He had put the broken glasses in his pocket.

“It was such a simple idea. I tried it myself and it works perfectly every time. He stuck the arm of the glasses through the hole in the end of the key, closed the door and went outside. Then he simply ran his credit card down through the gap in the door. It was enough to flip the key, and now that it was no longer upright, the arm of the glasses simply fell out onto the floor. He had been gone no longer than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

“Next, the Kramers break the door down and rush in, and the guests come up to see what’s wrong – ”

“– and Pryce retrieves the glasses’ arm from the floor,” said May.

“Precisely. He had achieved exactly the effect he was hoping for. Retribution from Kramer’s own role model. Pryce must have gone to bed that night thinking he had destroyed his nemesis. But he was wrong. Because while he was here, sitting in the hallway waiting to be interviewed, Pryce accidentally overheard that Robert wasn’t the baby’s father – and of course, the thing nobody realized is that Robert already knew it. Of course he knew: he’d been to see his doctor because he and Judith had been having trouble conceiving, and the doctor had explained about his low sperm count.

“Pryce had failed. Judith was devastated, but Robert Kramer seemed barely touched by the tragedy. Pryce had to try something else. But what? What did Kramer care about so much if it wasn’t the life of a child?”

“Money,” said Meera.

“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.