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 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?”