Bryant clambered onto his library steps and pulled down various musty volumes on the history of British theatre, hoping to find some answers to the elliptical questions that flittered about inside his head.
In a book on the lives of Gilbert and Sullivan he found a quote: ‘London’s modern skin has settled easily over its Victorian heart. Far from erasing the old and replacing it with the new, the city seems to encourage paradox, just as it always did. The highborn and the lowly, the wealthy and the poor, are kept as separate as they have always been.’
How true, he thought, recalling Lord Lucan, the missing seventh Earl of Lucan, who in 1974 allegedly murdered his nanny and fled the country, apparently protected by a coterie of wealthy friends. Bryant knew that if Robert Kramer operated in similar circles, he would never get to the truth of the boy’s death. There were areas of London society where even the law was powerless. The gap between rich and poor was not just one of wealth but of accountability.
However, Kramer could not be protected by any altitude of birthright. He had few friends in high places. He was an opportunist, a financier, a self-made man. His protection was based solely on money, and that made him a little more vulnerable. What’s more, he ran a new and already disreputable theatre company. Something about the play and the death resonated, and as Bryant searched the shelves, he found what he was looking for. He pulled down a rare French volume from 1887: The ‘Rosse’ Vignettes of Oscar Méténier.
Laying it carefully on his desk, he began to read. Méténier’s lurid little plays had given horrified Parisiens a glimpse into the lives of desperate men and women laid low by birth and circumstance. His stage was filled with cackling whores, violent alcoholics and graphic executions. Some of his work was labelled an affront to public morality because of its shocking street jargon, and was promptly banned. In La Casserole, the writer even hired real criminals to play themselves. It seemed the playgoing public always loved to witness gruesome tragedy, so long as it didn’t involve people of their own class.
Artifice and reality, he thought, examining the photographs and drawings, they combine more easily than we realise. TV shows pretend to offer realism but they hide as much as they show. Fiction, on the other hand, can contain fundamental human truths. And sometimes it’s possible to step back and forth between these two worlds just by opening the correct door, by finding the key that will unlock mysteries. So much of London is masked; unspoken rules protect the privileged, unseen codes hide the guilty. What a crafty lot we are!
This, then, was Arthur Bryant at work, his furrowed forehead bowed beneath the yellow light of the desk lamp, a shambling Prospero residing over the desiccated pages of his literary arcana, stirring fresh knowledge into the heady stew of ideas that filled his brain.
As he sat at the chaotic centre of his office-cum-library, blowing the dust from one forgotten volume after another, scribbling notes and teasing out tenuous links, he began to build a structure of evidence in the case.
Bryant had no interest in the common grounds of detection. He refused to be swayed by plausibility or likelihood. Human beings, he knew, were capable of acting in extraordinary ways for reasons that extended into the realms of the bizarre, and the best way to uncover their confidences was to match the strangeness of their thinking.
As he unfolded a series of grotesque etchings from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne and André de Lorde, he wondered if the shroud shielding London’s deepest secrets was about to lift for him once more. In the miasma of his mind, dark ideas began to swirl and take solid form.
The following guests were present at the house of Robert and Judith Kramer, 376 Northumberland Avenue, WC1, when Noah Kramer’s death was discovered, and came to the nursery to see what was wrong when they heard the door being broken down by Robert Kramer.
Della Fortess (Actor)
Neil Crofting (Actor)
Mona Williams (Actor)
Marcus Sigler (Actor)
Russell Haddon (Director)
Gregory Baine (Producer)
Ray Pryce (Scriptwriter)
Ella Maltby (Set designer)
Larry Hayes (Wardrobe)
Alex Lansdale (Theatre critic, HardNews.com)
Gail Strong (ASM)
The list had been scrawled out by DS Janice Longbright on a whiteboard in the common room, and the staff were now adding witness statements against the names of each of the guests. The giant schematic concentrated everyone’s attention in the simplest manner possible.
Interviews were now also being entered into the PCU’s system via a new application developed by Dan Banbury called WECS (Witness Evidence Correlation Software), and the pattern of the night’s events was re-created in a single spreadsheet of insane complexity.