The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Why am I not surprised at that part?’

  ‘—and she said the older ladies in the cast remembered the days when the theatre had a nicer class of clientele—then I remembered the book.’

  ‘Arthur, I struggle to make sense of you at the best of times, but you’ve completely lost me.’

  ‘And I thought older ladies? There’s only one older lady in the cast—Mona Williams, the one who kept flirting with me during the interviews—and the programme seller must mean her. So I was wrong, it’s not Alex Lansdale, he’s not the one.’

  ‘He’s not the one what?’

  ‘The one who’s in danger. It’s Mona.’

  ‘Why are we going to the theatre?’

  ‘Because according to Janice’s notes, that’s where she is this morning.’ The taxi got stuck in traffic halfway down Gower Street, but the driver turned off sharply and gunned his way through Holborn, coming into the other end of the Strand in record time.

  ‘That was a nifty piece of driving,’ said Bryant, throwing a note at him. ‘You’ll go far.’

  ‘Not if it involves going south of the river,’ said the cabbie with a laugh, roaring off.

  ‘Stick!’ said May. ‘You’ve forgotten your walking stick!’

  As they watched, the cab screeched to a stop, reversed, stopped and Bryant’s walking stick was thrust from the open window. The pair raced into the theatre.

  The foyer of the New Strand Theatre was unlit, and the doors to the main auditorium were locked.

  ‘There must be someone here,’ said May, ‘otherwise the front doors would have been closed. There’s probably a cleaner.’ He looked at the stairs, and realised that Bryant would have trouble getting up them quickly. ‘Stay here and keep an eye out. I’ll go up.’

  He took the stairs two at a time. Theatres, by their nature, are buildings largely contructed without windows. Moments later, May found himself in oppressive darkness. The air in the closed theatre was still and dead. All sound was muffled. He stopped to listen. In the distance, an ambulance siren seesawed along the Embankment. Nothing in here, though.

  He searched for a light switch but realised that the lighting panel would have to be housed inside a central office, where the general public could not touch it. The corridor at the rear of the dress circle curved away into velvet limbo.

  He felt his way along the wall, trying to be as quiet as possible. Somewhere above him a floorboard creaked. He froze and listened. Nothing. As he moved forward, he groped for his radio and turned it off.

  At the end of the rear corridor he found a set of doors to the upper circle, and swung one open. Small windows set into the staircase wall afforded him a little light. Reaching the floor above, he pushed carefully against the brass panel on the door.

  The steeply raked rows of seats descended below him. May knew that one mistake in the dark would send him headlong down the stairs. He wished he had brought his Valiant—the old usherette’s torch used to go everywhere with him, but they had been in a hurry to leave.

  A foot scraped, and there was a small but definite displacement of air behind him. He felt the flat of a hand on his back, pushing hard, and suddenly there was nothing beneath his feet. He fell into darkness and silence.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You bashed your head on the armrest of a chair,’ said Bryant, leaning over and studying him with interest. ‘It was padded, but still gave you a nasty bruise.’

  May tried to sit up, but it felt like someone had stuck a knife in his eye.

  ‘It’s a pity you let him get away,’ Bryant complained, holding a wet handkerchief to May’s forehead. ‘He must have been standing right behind you.’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. Ow!’

  ‘That’s good, it hurts. Your nerves are still working.’

  ‘How did he get past you?’

  ‘I heard you shout and fall, but it took me a while to get up the stairs. I imagine he came down the other side. This is Mrs Blimey, she’s the cleaner here.’ He pointed to a middle-aged woman in a fake leopard-skin head scarf, curlers and a flowered apron, standing beside a mop and bucket. She appeared to have stepped out of a British stage farce from the 1950s, a character actress like Irene Handl. ‘You all right, ducks?’ she asked solicitously, suspending an alarming ledge of bosom above his eyes and dropping fag ash on his shirt.

  May’s eyes swam. He felt sick and fell back. When he awoke again, the cleaner had transformed herself from a cheeky landlady-type into a glum, tiny Filipino with an unwavering gaze.

  ‘The skin’s not broken. I just wanted to make sure you’re not concussed.’ Bryant was helping him sit up. ‘That’s it. Lean on me.’

  ‘What did I miss?’ May winced as he pulled himself to his feet.

  ‘Quite a lot, it appears,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m afraid we were much too late to do anything for her, though. She’s in the back row of the stalls. Been there overnight, by the look of it. Giles will give us an accurate time of death.’

  ‘You’re talking about Mona Williams.’

  ‘Are you up to seeing her?’

  ‘Give me your arm.’

  With his walking stick in one hand and May’s sleeve in the other, Bryant led the way. The lights in the main auditorium were now on, and Colin Bimsley was talking into his handset by the door.

  Mona Williams had been sat upright in the final row of stalls seats. There seemed to be some kind of rusted metal contraption strapped across her face. Six brass sections were held in place with bolts. ‘It’s a branks—a scold’s bridle,’ said Bryant. ‘A muzzle. The iron curb-plate here sticks into the mouth and presses down on the tongue. The underside of it is studded with small spikes. They first turned up in Scotland, around the mid-1500s if memory serves. They’re designed to punish gossipy women who can’t keep their mouths shut. Unfortunately, Mona Williams panicked and choked to death on her own vomit.’

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ said May. ‘In one of your old books.’

  ‘You’ve seen it more recently than that,’ Bryant reminded him. ‘There was one in Ella Maltby’s waxwork dungeon.’

  ‘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. ‘Okay, 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 Tums in her bag. She struggled and hyperventilated, then threw up.’

  ‘Check the bridle for dabs,’ May sugg
ested. ‘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 old married couples. 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 realise 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 realised 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 realised 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 licence 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 surefire way of firing up the box office. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.’

  ‘Now tell him the rest. Tell him how you plagiarised 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 the 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.

  ‘Okay, sure.’ May could see that Ray was nervous not 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 Méténier. It was a kind of vaudeville of horror. It staged a program of one-act plays that featured murder of all kinds—matricide, infanticide, kidnap and rape. The scenes were graphically depicted onstage. 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, 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 had to close.’

  ‘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 horrific 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 were piles of old 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 modernised them and bumped up the levels of sex and violence.’