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.”