‘No. Until Monday at least, I thought he couldn’t know about us.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘He’s not the kind of man who can bottle up his emotions. You should hear him in the theatre sometimes. When he gets angry everyone knows about it.’
‘Okay, let me run another situation past you. You killed Noah Kramer to hurt the man who has been mistreating his wife—your lover.’
‘No!’
‘Why not?’
Another silence extended into discomfort. ‘I could never harm a child. Any child.’
‘Give me a reason, Mr Sigler. Eliminate yourself from the enquiry, or we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of each other.’
‘You mean I’ll remain under suspicion if I don’t tell you.’
‘It’s looking that way.’
Sigler glanced around, then leaned closer. ‘How can I be sure that what I say in this room remains in the strictest confidence?’
‘You can’t. It will stay within the confines of the investigation, but I’m not a priest.’
Sigler took a deep breath. ‘The boy was mine.’
‘Noah Kramer was your son?’
‘Yes. Judith told me that she and Robert had had trouble conceiving. They went to get advice, and Robert found out he has an abnormally low sperm count. He thinks he got lucky with Noah, but the hospital told Judith it was unlikely he would ever be able to give her a child. So I did. Okay, it was an accident, but that’s what happened.’
‘How did Judith feel when she discovered she was pregnant?’
‘She was happy about it. She wanted to keep the baby—for Robert’s sake.’
‘And Mr Kramer has no inkling about this, either?’
‘No, of course not. And now Noah’s dead, so you need to look for someone who wants to hurt me, not him. You wouldn’t have to look very far.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I would have thought it was obvious. Something happened at the party. Somebody must have told Robert about us, and he put two and two together. He took his revenge by killing our child. I don’t know how he covered his tracks, but I’m sure it was him.’
This idea crystallised an uncomfortable sensation that May had felt since the start of the investigation; everything turned on the conversation at the party. It made the investigation trickier, because Bryant was chronically unable to empathise with the victims and witnesses of crime. This was a problem only May would be able to solve.
He released Marcus Sigler. As they walked out into the corridor, May collected Ray Pryce from the bench that had been set there. ‘I just have a few questions for you,’ he explained, ushering the playwright into the common room.
Pryce flattened his hair in an attempt to smarten himself as he sheepishly entered, clearly uncomfortable with being in a police office, even one that looked like a cross between a student bedsit and a junkyard.
‘I need to get certain facts clear in my head,’ began May. ‘You went to Robert Kramer with a play you’d written. I can’t find any previous CV for you. Have you always been a playwright?’
Pryce looked embarrassed. ‘No, before this I was working for the government.’
‘As a playwright?’
‘No, I was in the parks and gardens department. I’d excelled in English at school. But I didn’t think I had any talent. I wrote for my own amusement, at evenings and weekends. I finished this play, The Two Murderers, and didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t have an agent, so I sent it direct to Robert Kramer. He forwarded it to Russell Haddon, and the director hired me.’
‘How did you know who to send it to?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘If you didn’t have an agent.’
‘I read in The Stage that Kramer was opening the New Strand Theatre. It’s a hard field to break into.’ Pryce seemed unsettled in his skin, the kind of man who transmitted his discomfort to others. ‘I thought because he was new to the business himself he might have more of an open mind about hiring someone with no previous experience.’
‘I haven’t seen the play but I hear it’s incredibly gruesome. Like that kind of stuff, do you?’
‘The audiences do. And actually, yes, I do, too. I’ve always been a big fan of horror films. Theatrical styles come and go, but a good scary plot never goes out of fashion.’
‘People keep telling me that there are parallels between the events of the play and the performers—I mean, in terms of jealousies, rivalries and so on. That true?’
‘I hate to disillusion you, Mr May, but I understand that actors say this about virtually every production. The truth is, I wrote the play before I’d ever met any of the performers, and I didn’t have a say in the casting. That was down to Russell Haddon.’