Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  “Oh, that’s easy enough. Didn’t I regress you to your past lives once?”

  “Yes. You went back too far. I couldn’t speak, remember?”

  “Oh that’s right, I think I turned you into protoplasm. It’s not my fault you’re so susceptible. Go and make yourself comfortable on the chaise longue, I’ll brew us some seaweed tea. What exactly do you need to remember?”

  “I gave all my file notes to the girl who was helping me with my memoirs. I told her I remembered everything, but I don’t. Now she’s dead and I need to find out what it was in those notes that killed her.”

  “Well, that’s as clear as mud. You weren’t there when her soul departed, were you?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I can’t be dealing with a case of possession tonight, I haven’t got enough salt. You need to recover what you wrote, yes? So let’s go back through the process. Hang on a minute.”

  She returned with bowls of tea the colour of a rough sea and a covered plate. “Take a couple of these first. They’ll help you relax.”

  “What are they?” Bryant peeked under a tea towel.

  “Custard creams. They always work for me. Now, you need to find yourself in a comfortable place.”

  “I can’t, I’m in your house.”

  “I mean, imagine you’re on a beach.”

  Bryant closed his eyes, laced his fingers and lay back. “All right, Hastings.”

  “Not Hastings. Not somewhere with a burnt-down pier and a juvenile delinquency problem. Pick somewhere warm, safe and relaxing.”

  “All right, I’m at home with Alma, sitting in front of the fire, reading my copy of London’s Disused Underground Stations 1920-1959 Volume 3, the annotated version.”

  “You don’t have to tell me everything, just imagine it. It’s warm and you’re feeling sleepy. Your heartbeat is slowing down – ”

  Bryant opened one eye. “Is that a good idea?”

  “It’s fine. You’re relaxed. You’re starting to fall asleep.”

  Bryant promptly fell asleep.

  “No, you’re not supposed to actually fall asleep. Wake up.”

  Bryant released a snore. His head lolled. Maggie slapped his face gently. Then harder.

  “Ow. What’s happening? Did you do it?”

  “You fell asleep.”

  “You told me to.”

  “Let’s try again. I’m going to count back from ten to one, and you will feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a state of relaxation.”

  Maggie counted back and Bryant slipped into a light hypnotic state. In fact, he relaxed so much that he almost vanished into the sofa. Bryant had always been open to new ideas and beliefs. He was highly susceptible and in many ways naive, but she loved him for his refusal to become regimented in his habits and thoughts.

  “You are in your office, assembling your notes and thinking about your memoirs. They are laid out in front of you on your desk. What cases are you considering for inclusion in the first volume?”

  “The Palace Phantom, the Deptford Demon, the Belles of Westminster, the Battersea Cat Batterer, the Flying Dragons of Soho, the Blood Thrower of Belsize Park, the Butterfly Killer, and that strange business in the Elephant and Castle Odeon that led to the building being demolished. We called it the Fall of the House of Usherettes – ”

  “Apart from the criminal cases, was there anything that would have breached the Official Secrets Act or any freedom of information rulings? Try to see yourself typing up the pages, and wondering, Should I be putting this down on paper?”

  “Oh, I never think that. Put it all down, I say.”

  “Didn’t you have a problem with the Ministry of Defence?”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I don’t know. You came round here and told me about it.”

  “When was this?”

  “About seven years ago.”

  “Oh, that’s right. The researchers.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “They were working on a secret project down in Wiltshire. Some kind of weapon. The work had been outsourced to a private company jointly owned by US and UK executive bodies. There had been a high number of suicides over the year, research scientists, all males in their twenties, mostly Asian. None of them had shown suicidal tendencies before, and all were working on the same project.”

  “What was your involvement?”

  “We’d been called in by an independent think tank to look at the situation. I handled the assignment personally, as a favour. I didn’t involve John. I delivered a report, but no action was ever taken. My findings were ignored.”

  “What did you find out?”

  For the first time, Bryant hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he said slowly.

  “How much of this did you put in your notes to Anna?”

  “I’m not sure. I never include the boring bits. I probably edited it a little. Oh.”

  “What?”

  “I gave her the file of background material, just for fact-checking. I meant to go through it, just to make sure there wasn’t anything sensitive. But then we got involved with the Highwayman case and I didn’t get round to it.”

  “How would an outsider find out what she’d read?”

  “John explained it to me. If she’d grown curious enough to run searches online they would have been flagged up in the Cyber-Defence Security Department of the MoD. They could have traced the requests right back to her.”

  “You think they would do that?”

  “Of course. Defence of the realm. Oh, what have I done?”

  “All right, you are rising back to the surface now as I count down to zero, and you will remember everything we discussed. When I reach zero you will be awake.” She brought Bryant back to full alertness.

  “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 realize 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 Memory of Blood ∧

  39

  Cruelty

  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, any place they’ve got keys to,” said Bimsley.

  “Good thinking. Where’s Dan?”

  “He’s over at Gail Strong’s apartment.”

  “OK, 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 for ever.”

  “That’s OK,” Renfield replied, “nobody’s going home until it’s done. We may be able to save her life.”

  “It’s better than house sear
ches,” 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 door jamb.

  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 prioritize.”

  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 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 realized 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 and 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. Kramer’s legacy was being removed piece by piece. 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 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, labelling 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 May fair 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 any more.”

  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 lose 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.

  ∨ The Memory of Blood ∧

  40

  Pride

  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 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 a
t 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.”