‘Baine had a lot of alcohol in his bloodstream when he died,’ said Kershaw. ‘From the state of his liver, I’d say he’d been drinking hard for a year.’
‘Do you mind?’ said Bryant. ‘This is my story. The credit crunch had caught Baine on the hop, and he’d dipped his hand in the till to try and keep things afloat. So, once again, fate undermined Pryce and produced the wrong effect. If anything, he did Kramer a favour by getting rid of Baine. Then things got even worse. Mona Williams remembered sitting on Pryce’s glasses just before he left the room—and he remembered that he’d given her the scripts.’
‘What scripts?’ asked Land.
‘The ones he’d found from the original Grand Guignol at the New Theatre. The ones he cribbed from. And there it was in another play, The Mystery of the Locked Cell, staged in 1923 with Dame Sybil Thorndyke, written by none other than the master himself, Noel Coward. In it, the murderer seals a room by inserting a steel rod in a key and twisting it from outside.
‘And Mona did what she always did. She started gossiping. So Pryce needed to frighten her into silence. He waited until she went into the theatre for her “thinking time,” and, in the gloom of the stalls, dropped the scold’s bridle on her. But it had the wrong effect. It terrified her and she choked to death. Has there ever been a series of crimes that have gone so horribly wrong? Meanwhile, Robert Kramer sailed through it all, untouched.
‘So, in desperation, Pryce lured Kramer away to confront him with his misdeeds. And this, too, went wrong. We don’t know what Kramer said but presumably he shrugged off the scare tactic used on him—’
‘The dropped dummy,’ May pointed out.
‘That’s right, the dummy, another hopeless failure. Kramer probably laughed in his face. Which was when Pryce exploded, and chucked the fork at him. Even worse, Kramer’s shoes slipped and he fell on the fork, and died. Pryce wants us to believe that he achieved what he set out to do but he failed in every possible way. His victim cheated him right until the very end.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Land persisted. ‘Why did Pryce drop a life-sized dummy on him in the barn? Who was it meant to be? Isn’t that a ridiculous thing to do? What’s the motive for all of this?’
Bryant removed his pipe from between his teeth and gave a ghastly grin. ‘The oldest motive in the world. Revenge. This is about the memory of blood. Blood in the sense of blood relations. Dummies are representatives of people. This particular dummy was intended to be the first Mrs Kramer. Robert Kramer didn’t know she was pregnant when she died. He would have had a real heir after all. And the significance of the first Mrs Kramer? It’s very simple. She was Ray Pryce’s mother. Pryce knew and, in his own absurdly roundabout way, was trying to tell Robert that he knew.’
‘His mother?’ May repeated. ‘How did you find out about that?’
‘Remember I told you this was about the victim, not the murderer? I had a bit of a root about in Kramer’s background, and her name kept coming up. Stella Kramer was a writer, too—or at least she tried to be. She wrote about the experience of giving birth for a weekly magazine. She wrote about her unhappy childhood, and anything else that she thought might sell. It was hard to separate out the facts; at first I assumed she was making everything up. And after a while, thanks to a few carefully planted denials by her husband, so did everyone else. I followed the paper trail as her articles dwindled to bitter letters in the local press, and the salient facts are clear. Ray was born out of wedlock and raised by foster parents, but Stella stayed in touch with him. She met him in secret, and told him all about her disastrous marriage to Robert. He advised her to leave, but she couldn’t. The couple’s fights eventually made the Evening Standard, but Stella came off badly. Kramer’s bullying drove her to suicide. And Pryce sat impotently by, penniless and powerless, unable to do anything about it as Kramer grew richer and stronger. Pryce tried to make a living as a writer and failed. There was nothing he could do but watch, and nurse his hatred.
‘All this changed on the day he discovered the box of scripts. Suddenly, fate stepped in and gave him the power to act. He palmed off one of the plays as his own and went to see Kramer. He slowly wormed his way into the inner circle. Did he, like Hamlet, plan to stage a version that reenacted a parental death? No, because we all remember what happened to Hamlet.
‘But like Hamlet, he bided his time and waited for an opportunity to strike. There’s a good chance that it would never have happened, if it hadn’t been for Robert Kramer’s ill-chosen remarks about his first wife at the party, which Ray overheard.