‘I fail to see—’ Land began.
‘Yes, Raymondo, you usually do, but we’re happy to cover for you. When I looked at Ray Pryce standing so close, I suddenly realised he was a non-smoker. Now, if that was the case, it changed everything. On the time line for the Kramers’ party that Janice provided, Pryce is marked down as leaving the room to smoke a cigarette. So the trip was wrong.’
‘But Marcus Sigler saw him on the back staircase,’ objected Banbury.
‘Marcus lied to cover the fact that he was on the staircase with Gail Strong. At Strong’s request he changed his timing so that nobody could place them together. So where did Ray Pryce disappear to? He went upstairs to the baby’s room.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that he was extremely angry, and very good at hiding it. Now, we know the nursery door was unlocked because Judith and Robert Kramer both expressed surprise when they got upstairs and couldn’t open it. So Pryce slipped inside and approached the cot, and the baby started to cry.’
‘Was he intending to kill the child right then?’
‘That’s hard to say. It’ll be interesting to hear him in court. I think he had murderous intentions, but maybe they failed him when he saw the child. Well, he needed to shut Noah up, but already his sense of self-preservation was working and he was worried that someone would find out that he had been in the room. He didn’t want to leave prints. And he wanted to silence the baby. So he grabbed the Mr Punch from the wall behind him and waved it about, hoping to amuse the boy.
‘And when Noah cried even harder, Pryce let Mr Punch pick up the baby. He wrapped the figure’s hands around the child and rocked him, and the rocking turned into throttling, and then Noah Kramer was silenced. So Pryce ran to the window and shoved it open, and let Mr Punch shake the baby out into the street. Downstairs, on the fire escape, Gail Strong and Marcus Sigler heard what they thought was a can of paint sliding. What they’d heard was the window going up above them. Pryce stepped back, threw the dummy on the floor, and the rain squalled in, soaking the rug. Water, incidentally, raises the nap of the rug, lifting impressions. If you want to remove chair marks from a carpet, you just put an ice cube in each dent. I got that tip from The Good Wife’s Guide to Housekeeping, 1935. Right, so Pryce was back on the door side of the empty cot. The deed was done. But what if somebody came up? He needed to buy himself some time. The Yale key was in the door, but of course there was no way of locking it from the inside. Except that there was.’
‘I really don’t see how.’ May frowned.
‘Come on. Ray Pryce is a writer. He spends his life coming up with outlandish ideas. And now he had a brainwave. A few minutes earlier, Mona Williams had sat on his glasses and broken them. The right arm had snapped off. He had put the broken glasses in his pocket.
‘It was such a simple idea. I tried it myself and it works perfectly every time. He stuck the arm of the glasses through the hole in the end of the key, closed the door and went outside. Then he simply ran his credit card down through the gap in the door. It was enough to flip the key, and now that it was no longer upright, the arm of the glasses simply fell out onto the floor. He had been gone no longer than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
‘Next, the Kramers break the door down and rush in, and the guests come up to see what’s wrong—’
‘—and Pryce retrieves the glasses arm from the floor. He had achieved exactly the effect he was hoping for. Retribution from Kramer’s own role model. Pryce must have gone to bed that night thinking he had destroyed his nemesis. But he was wrong. Because while he was here, sitting in the hallway waiting to be interviewed, Pryce accidentally overheard that Robert wasn’t the baby’s father—and of course, the thing nobody realised is that Robert already knew it. Of course he knew, he’d been to see his doctor because he and Judith had been having trouble conceiving, and the doctor had explained about his low sperm count.
‘Pryce had failed. Judith was devastated, but Robert Kramer seemed barely touched by the tragedy. Pryce had to try something else. But what? What did Kramer care about so much if it wasn’t the life of a child?’
‘Money,’ said Meera.
‘Precisely. Hit him where it hurts. Get rid of the financier and watch the empire collapse. Oh, and stick a Punch and Judy doll there, to make sure Kramer knew the two tragedies were linked. How perfect to mirror Kramer’s obsession with the Mr Punch story and exact a theatrical revenge! The ancient Greeks used something they called “temple magic.” They would make heavy doors open by themselves via secret systems of pulleys and ropes, and used hidden tubes and secret passages to make the Sibyl whisper through the walls. Pryce knew that the effect was as important as the act. So this time he concentrated more on the staging. He lured Baine to a melancholy, darkened spot and a lonely, awful death.’