‘Don’t you see?’ said Bryant, attempting to pull himself up from the couch, scrabbling for his hat and coat. ‘It means they knew where she kept her files. They knew she had a stomach ulcer. They knew how to get to her, and to her mother. They planted the girl in the house to look after Mrs Marquand. But they still haven’t found what they need. I wish I hadn’t come to you, Maggie. You’ve made me realise something terrible.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I killed her. It’s my fault Anna Marquand is dead. Defence of the Realm.’
And with that, he was gone.
The hunt for Gail Strong was in full swing. Renfield and Longbright were working as a team, dividing the search into quadrants. ‘Every home of everyone who was at the party,’ Jack told the others, handing out their assignments. ‘Every garage, vehicle, lock-up and attic. Every private place they don’t want us to know about.’
‘How are we going to get them to tell us things like that?’ asked Mangeshkar.
‘You’ll just have to use your charm, won’t you?’ Renfield snapped. ‘Any sensible questions?’
‘It might be worth trying offices, anyplace they’ve got keys to,’ said Bimsley.
‘Good thinking. Where’s Dan?’
‘He’s over at Gail Strong’s apartment.’
‘Okay, Janice is going to cover the theatre. Meera, you’re always complaining about getting the crap jobs. I’m taking you off the property searches and putting you on something trickier. Go through Gail Strong’s social network sites, Twitter, Facebook, anything else she’s on, and talk to her closest friends. She might not be very likeable but she’s a smart girl; she might try to leave us a clue as to her whereabouts. See if there’s anything she’s particularly associated with apart from shopping and partying. Nicknames, passwords, emergency contacts, anything we should be watching out for.’
‘But she’s got millions of online friends,’ Meera complained. ‘It’ll take forever.’
‘That’s okay,’ Renfield replied, ‘nobody’s going home until it’s done. We may be able to save her life.’
‘It’s better than house searches,’ Colin suggested cheerfully. Meera shot him a poisoned glance.
May left the briefing session and went back to the office he shared with his partner. ‘Why aren’t you sitting in on this?’ he asked, leaning against the doorjamb.
Bryant was slumped at his desk surrounded by his beloved books. ‘I can’t—not while there’s this mess with Anna Marquand to sort out.’
‘There’s nothing you can do right now,’ said May. ‘I sent a beat constable from Bermondsey to keep watch on Mrs Marquand.’
‘I must find that disc.’
‘You don’t know where it is, and besides, even if you did, you still wouldn’t know exactly who was behind her death. MoD outsourcing transfers a multitude of sins away from its centre of operations, you know that. Whoever it was will have covered their tracks by now.’
‘Not if I can find the disc and let them know I have it,’ said Bryant doggedly.
‘I honestly don’t know how you’re going to do that, Arthur, but if I think of anything I’ll tell you. I’m going back to help them look for Gail Strong. She could still be alive. Anna’s gone. We have to prioritise.’
Gail Strong’s father hit the stratosphere when the PCU was forced to inform him that his daughter was missing, presumed kidnapped. Raymond Land locked himself in his office to field the endless unhelpful calls from various officials. Gail Strong’s father had appointed various senior officers with the Met and the City of London to take immediate action and do something, anything, but nobody could tell them exactly how they might help. Whitehall was able to dam up press interest, but nobody knew how long that would last. Once the paparazzi regulars who stalked her street realised that she had disappeared, it would only be a matter of minutes before the story hit the Internet.
Bryant sat at his desk and told himself to snap out of it. John was right; sometimes his partner shamed him. Arthur knew that the living took precedence over the dead. Anna could not be brought back, but perhaps Gail Strong could. He was convinced that the answer was right before him; there was something he had seen and missed, something right in front of his tired blue eyes.
His attention drifted to The Dreadful & Remarkable History of Mr Punch, which lay open at the page of Punch beating the Devil himself. He had been focusing on the wrong thing; Punch & Judy were only involved because of Robert Kramer’s obsession with the puppet play.
This was about the Grand Guignol. The Little Theatre. The New Strand. It had begun with Punch, but was really about the staging of lurid set pieces. The murder of a child. The hanging of a banker. The terrorizing of an old woman. There was another term for the Grand Guignol.
The Theatre of Cruelty.
Which was why Robert Kramer had not been killed—he was being tortured, made to suffer by someone who hated him so deeply that his death would come as an anticlimax, and that moment had to be delayed for as long as possible. His child’s life had been taken, his livelihood threatened and now his girlfriend stolen away, but nothing had had the desired effect. It was a question that must be going through the killer’s mind: What was there left for Kramer to really care about? What other ways were there to hurt him?
Dan Banbury rocked back on his heels and tried to think. It didn’t make sense. He had covered all the entry and exit points, all of the heavily trafficked areas in the bedroom, kitchen and hall, and had found nothing but Gail Strong’s own prints. A few stray fibres had turned up, but nothing male, and it had to be a man if the girl had been rendered unconscious and carried out down a steep, narrow fire escape. The majority of fibres that passed his way were suggestive of gender.
He rose and took another look around the room. This time he searched every drawer, labeling and numbering the items as he went. Then he called Bryant.
‘She wasn’t kidnapped,’ he said bleakly. ‘I can’t find any trace of a secondary presence here. She’s got an awful lot of clothes and it’s impossible to tell what’s missing, so I had a word with her cleaning lady, who put everything in specific places. Sure enough, there’s a set of clothes missing.’
‘It could mean her kidnapper took spare clothes for her,’ said Bryant.
‘No. Her passport’s still here—smart move—and so are things like her handbag, makeup and toothbrush, but she could replace those. The most telling thing that’s missing is her MP3 player. “I live for my music. Life deserves to have a beat,” says Mayfair socialite Gail Strong, headline from one of her press cuttings—she actually collected them, more insecure than we thought. There’s no music anywhere here. She’s somewhere in the British Isles. Think about it. She has a history of getting into scrapes and running away.’
‘This makes things worse,’ muttered Bryant.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If the killer hasn’t taken her, it can only be because he knows she means nothing to Kramer. He’s playing us all. Look at us, running around with no idea what to do next. He’s extending his theatre of cruelty to all the players, and he’s loving it.’
‘Wait—this girl who came forward with information about Kramer’s cruelty, you said she was a plant?’
‘That’s what we think.’
‘Has it occurred to you that Gail Strong might have been sent away by her father? He’s politically well connected. He could easily have arranged it.’
‘That’s the problem, Dan. Every step we take just reveals more duplicity. I don’t know who or what to trust anymore.’
Bryant replaced the receiver and sat back, massaging his brow, forcing himself to think. His mind refused to function. Perhaps he was losing it. There was simply no way forward now. It was up to the others to turn up something. Unless he fully understood the method of destroying Kramer, he had no solution.
What is important to a man like Robert Kramer? he thought. Love? Money? Fame? What can you take away from him that he values above all else? What could I lo
se that would destroy me? That’s easy, the Unit. But what would it take to devastate a man like Kramer?
Punch was an unrepentant sinner who took the world by the throat and shook it. Some fleeting fear brushed the back of Bryant’s heart and was gone. He had a terrible feeling that the final act was yet to be played out, and that he was powerless to stop it.
Bryant reached home in a state of mental exhaustion. Dropping his keys into the bowl on the hall table surprised him, because the bowl wasn’t there, and neither was the hall table. Alma had succeeded in clearing the house in his absence.
All of the rooms had been emptied except for one part of the lounge, which now looked like the stage set for a Fringe production of Death of a Salesman. Seating himself in the only remaining armchair, he watched in silence as Alma trotted in and placed a tray of haddock and poached eggs before him.
‘You’re a very strange woman, you know,’ he told her. ‘So self-sufficient. What do you get out of it?’
‘I’m a good Christian, Mr Bryant. I believe if you help people in this life, it will do you good in the next.’
‘Apart from the fact that that’s Buddhism, you’re telling me you’re just paying in good deeds, like having a bank account, so that you can make a withdrawal in the future.’
She folded her arms and regarded him with an assessing gaze. ‘You don’t understand and never did. People go to work and come home and think that’s it, that’s all the good they can do, but it’s just the start. There are real sins in the world, Mr Bryant—you know enough about those. I try to make up for some of them, in my own small way. I have my church work, and I know you do good even though you have a funny way of going about it, so I look after you.’
‘Then let me ask you something,’ said Bryant. ‘What do you consider to be man’s greatest sin?’
‘That’s easy. The sin of pride. It’s the tricky one, it keeps on changing form. But if you took your nose out of your books for a minute and looked at what’s happening to the country, you’d see all these silly kids around you, thinking they’re going to become celebrities when they have nothing to offer the world. When I was a little girl me and my sisters wanted to be doctors and nurses, explorers, teachers. We wanted to give something, to do our duty, not to be idolized for doing nothing.’
‘Surely that’s just overconfidence,’ said Bryant.
‘It’s another name for pride. It’s when a man thinks he’s greater than God. Like this man Robert Kramer.’
‘What do you know about him?’ asked Bryant in surprise.
‘I read the papers. I’ve heard you talk. Not even showing remorse for his dead son. That’s what a man like him needs to lose, his pride. But it’s the one thing he’ll never give up.’
Bryant’s blue eyes widened at her. ‘Alma, you never cease to amaze me,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve just helped me to understand our killer.’
‘Well, thank the Lord for that,’ she said. ‘Eat your haddock. And give me that scarf for the wash, it’s filthy.’
John May had given up trying to get hold of Brigitte in Paris, and was just about to go to bed when Bryant rang.
‘I think we’ve got it around the wrong way,’ Bryant told him without any preamble. ‘We should have been studying the victim, not the perpetrator. We need to catch him by surprise, tear him apart and look inside, understand what makes him tick. I asked myself: What must Kramer be made to lose? What does the killer most want to take away from him? And Alma came up with the answer. His pride. That’s what he’s after. Mr Punch, the ruler of his own world, needs to be taken down from his pedestal and made to beg for mercy. Nothing the killer has done so far has worked. So what will he do next?’
‘Go after Kramer himself,’ said May, completing the thought.
‘Exactly. I should have thought of it earlier but I got distracted by Gail Strong’s so-called disappearance. I’m sending Colin and Meera over to Northumberland Avenue right now. By the way, Dan was right about Ms Strong. She checked into a boutique hotel in Devon using a credit card to secure her room. She didn’t think they were taking a payment, but they ran a check and it flagged. Not a smart move. Devon police are going to keep an eye on her.’
‘So what do you and I do?’
‘Get a few hours’ sleep,’ said Bryant. ‘We’re going to need it.’
Meera parked her Kawasaki under the bridge at the Embankment and walked to Northumberland Avenue with Colin. Rain was just starting to gloss the road ahead and speckle the roofs of passing taxis. Many of the streets around Trafalgar Square were now awash with neon, but this road had retained its dark, deserted look. ‘Where do you want to locate?’ she asked. ‘I’m not sitting in a shop doorway watching you eat pad Thai from a box.’
‘I don’t see we have much choice,’ Bimsley replied. ‘The offices opposite Kramer’s gaff are closed for the night and the nearest café is down there under Charing Cross Bridge. We won’t be able to keep an eye on the apartment from that far away.’
‘Then why don’t we just park ourselves in the foyer of his building?’
‘John doesn’t want us to show our hand.’
‘I can’t see why not. If you ask me, I don’t think our bosses know what they’re doing. We’ve turned up nothing. Why is that? Maybe Kramer chucked his own kid out the window and frightened the old dear, and his banker just saw how things were going and took his own life.’
‘Why do you always think they’re not on the ball?’ Colin asked. ‘You’re always having a go at them—too old, too slow, don’t know what they’re doing. We’ve still got a higher success rate than the Met.’
‘Everyone’s got a higher success rate than the Met. My old mum could solve crimes quicker than them. It’s the way they operate, keeping us in the dark, going off without explaining, it makes me so angry—’
Colin laid a calming hand on Meera’s arm. ‘Meera, everything makes you angry. Have you not noticed what an angry person you are?’
‘I’m under stress, my parents hate me being in this job, my sister’s a walking disaster and I can’t get a bloody date because I’m always at work.’
‘Look, it’s raining, it’s miserable, come here and give me a cuddle, just a friendly hug.’
‘No, Colin, that’s not a good idea.’
‘Why not, we’re mates, aren’t we? What would it take to get a hug from you?’
Meera thought for a second. ‘Well, you know how we’re all technically in line for the throne? Like, if fifty-four million people died, you’d be Queen?’
‘Y-e-es,’ said Bimsley uncertainly.
‘It would be like that.’
Colin looked down at his rain-splashed boots. ‘Are you telling me that you’d only give me a hug if every other eligible man in the country was dead? That’s really, really hurtful.’
‘Why do you always have to show your feelings? People don’t want to see them all the time. Why can’t you be a bit more like me?’
‘I can’t help it, Meera.’ Colin looked crestfallen. ‘I can’t change, even for you. I don’t have any other face but this one.’
She looked at the rain dripping through his spiked fair hair and her heart started to melt. He looked like a Disney dog someone had decided to drown instead of rewarding. She reached out a hand to touch his shoulder.
‘Colin—’
Suddenly the ground floor door of the building opposite opened, and Robert Kramer came out. Colin checked his watch. It was 11:42 P.M. ‘He’s leaving, look.’
‘Where does he keep his car?’
‘He has a space in the NCP at the next corner.’
‘Back to my bike.’
They ran across the road, heading to Meera’s Kawasaki just as Kramer disappeared beneath the yellow neon of the car park entrance. A minute later Kramer’s black 500 Series Mercedes pulled up at the barrier and he fed it a ticket. Meera moved out behind him with Colin riding pillion. She stayed two cars back, hoping that the night and the rain would reduce their noticeability.
The Mercedes dropped to Victoria Embankment and headed along Upper Thames Street to the City of London. It clipped the lights on the one-way system at Tower Bridge, leaving Meera stranded.
‘He’s over there in the far left lane,’ shouted Colin. ‘Get closer or we’ll lose him.’ Meera accelerated and skirted around the shining wall of oncoming traffic, catching him up.
She tailed Kramer over the bridge and left toward Rotherhithe Tunnel. The Mercedes picked up speed. ‘I think he’s spotted us,’ she called back, roaring ahead. Behind them, a police car siren sounded, and lights flashed in Meera’s wing mirror. An officer was waving the Kawasaki off the road.
Meera had no choice but to slow down and park while the Mercedes sped off. The officer behind them strolled over. ‘Turn the bike off. You’re in a bit of a rush, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, and you’ve just ruined our night’s work.’ She sullenly threw open her badge and waved it at the cop. The patrol officer peered at it but did not seem convinced. ‘Peculiar Crimes Unit? Is that a made-up name? Off the bike, both of you.’
‘It’s a specialist investigation unit,’ said Colin.
‘Oi,’ the patrolman called back to his co-driver, ‘ever heard of the Peculiar Crimes Unit?’
‘Yeah,’ called his mate, ‘they’re the bunch that put the mockers on one of our cases this week, the girl in Hadley Street. They screwed us over.’
The patrolman returned the badge. ‘In that case, I’m glad to return the favour,’ he said with a grin, swaggering back to his patrol car.
Robert Kramer saw that he had lost the motorbike, and doubled back. He turned the sat nav back on and followed its instructions, coming off the M25 somewhere near Dunton Green. He headed south into the Kent countryside. The roads grew narrower, the overhead branches grew denser and soon there was only an intermittent signal on his mobile phone.
The Memory of Blood Page 24