‘Okay,’ said Meera, ‘but I don’t want to sit next to Colin.’
‘Why not?’ asked Bimsley.
Meera wrinkled her nose at him. ‘You smell like you fell in a vat of cheap scent.’
‘That’s Lynx.’ Bimsley sniffed his right armpit.
‘What are you, fourteen?’
‘It pulls the chicks, this stuff.’
‘I can tell you right now that it doesn’t.’
Longbright watched her teammates bickering like schoolchildren and wondered how they would ever make any headway. She hoped they would remember that at the base of the investigation was the tragedy of a child’s lost life.
Just after nine o’clock A.M. on Tuesday morning at the St Pancras mortuary, they went to work.
‘Okay,’ said Giles Kershaw. ‘Hold it steady, I’m going in.’ He raised his scalpel above the steel dissection table, sprayed the blade with a neutral oil-based lubricant and inserted it beneath the neck of the prone Mr Punch, just where his hump began.
‘Try to keep it to the stitching,’ Dan Banbury suggested. ‘This one’s worth a fortune. Most of them are in the hands of private collectors or in museums, and Mr Bryant told me this one is part of a complete set from the 1880s, which makes it very rare.’
‘I open bodies, Dan, I can do this, okay?’ Kershaw’s blade snicked the stitches apart. He reached the dummy’s legs and carefully began to remove the kapok-and-horsehair stuffing inside. A jointed brass skeleton was gradually revealed, still gleaming. ‘Amazing bit of workmanship, this. Beautifully put together. The Victorians really made things to last, even toys.’
‘It’s not a toy, Giles; it was crafted like that because it was a way of earning a living. According to Mr Bryant, the Punch and Judy men were masters of their craft and could make good money. There was one appointed to Buckingham Palace for garden parties. He was granted the royal crest—By Appointment—it’s on the back.’
Giles shone a penlight into the puppet’s cranium. ‘The head and hands are made of carved wood, hollowed out but heavy things to lift, performing with your arms raised all the time.’ Kershaw set aside another handful of brown horsehair and peered deeper inside.
‘I think there were usually two men working in the booth. The later models are papier-mâché over a wire frame. See anything?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary. No electrical wiring, no pistons, certainly nothing that could allow the thing to stand up under its own power. There would have to be some kind of support in here. The Japanese currently have a couple of robots that could do it, although I think even they would draw the line at building one that could strangle a baby. There goes the Golem theory.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the sixteenth century, the Chief Rabbi of Prague brought a huge creature made of clay to life to stop anti-Semitic attacks, but the Golem eventually turned on his creator. I get crazy thoughts while I’m working. It comes from hanging around old Bryant too much. You start to think like him, and then pretty soon no self-respecting CID officer will talk to you.’
‘Okay, what do we do now?’
‘Stitch it back up,’ Giles replied, studying Mr Punch’s angry red face. It seemed the creature was staring at him, its eyes filled with murderous intent.
The classic murder thriller used to be a staple of the West End theatre. Plays like Maria Marten or, Murder in the Red Barn; Sweeney Todd; Wait Until Dark and Sleuth proved popular with the public, but lately this genre has gone into decline, with only Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap still hanging on for grim death at the St Martin’s Lane Theatre, where the director is still required to follow the original moves laid down in the play’s first production sixty years ago, preserving the whole ghastly farrago in amber for the undemanding non-English-speaking tourists who inexplicably keep it running.
I was reminded of the play while sitting through The Two Murderers, a farcical drama in which a young woman (soap actress Della Fortess—dismal) is beaten by her husband and falls into the arms of hunky gardener Bert (former boy-band singer and model Marcus Sigler). Together the pair hatch a plot to murder the bullying captain of industry, but plans go awry and soon the stage is drenched in Kensington Gore.
Despite some brief and painfully hammy support from veteran actors Neil Crofting and Mona Williams, the show belongs to the young leads, who’ll have no appeal whatsoever to older audiences. Ella Maltby’s superbly evocative Gothic set designs and extravagant period costuming from Larry Hayes notwithstanding, the overmiked sound makes it unbearable for anyone above the iPod generation, especially when the absurd plot twists start kicking in after the intermission.