The Memory of Blood(62)

‘I worked for Mr Kramer at his property company, Cruikshank Holdings. It wasn’t an easy job. He was nice most of the time, but had—well, let’s say anger management issues. He used to be extremely unreasonable with his wife.’

‘Did you ever see or hear him lose his temper?’

‘Yes, several times. The worst was just after Judith—I mean, Mrs Kramer—told him she was pregnant. She came to the office one evening—they were going out to dinner—and they had such a terrible argument that she went home in tears. After she’d gone, he told me he didn’t want to become a father, that it would interfere with his career. He used to keep these creepy dolls in his office, Punch and Judy puppets, and I remember something he said that really bothered me.’

‘What was that?’

Lucy looked up at May with sadness in her eyes. ‘He said that Punch had the right idea when he beat the baby to death.’

‘You clearly recall hearing him say those exact words?’

‘Yes, I do. But I don’t know whether he meant half the things he said. I think he liked to shock people.’

‘What was he like to work for?’

‘Very charismatic but a bit frightening—his energy amazed me. He could go out to a fund-raising night until two in the morning and be at work the next day at six A.M. I was in awe of him. He told me he was superstitious. That was why he owned the puppets.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He believed in what they represented. Some evenings, if we were working late, he would open a bottle of wine in the office. He would invite me to sit and have a glass with him.’

‘And did you?’

‘No, I don’t drink. But I would listen to his stories. I think he felt lonely, even though he was married. He once explained the whole Punch story, how it was a metaphor about the making of the modern world. He called Punch “the unpalatable face of heroism,” and said that this was the way all successful businessmen would have to behave one day.’

If May was surprised by the luscious Ms Clementine’s rehearsed glibness, he didn’t show it. ‘It sounds as if believing in such things was very important to him,’ he remarked.

‘I think he was always looking for ways to understand his life. I heard he became rich at a very early age, something to do with creating a website for students. When you make so much money at that age, it’s bound to affect your behaviour, isn’t it?’

As May took his leave, he thought about the Hangman figure found by Gregory Baine’s body. Somebody who had attended Robert Kramer’s party knew about his fascination with the story of Punch, or believed it themselves. And now they were using it to show him how little power he really had over his own life.

Which meant that Robert Kramer might not be the main suspect at all, but the main target.

Arthur had said he was developing two theories. If one involved the investigation of Robert Kramer, what, May wondered, was the other?





The New Strand Theatre stood at the corner of Adam Street and York Buildings, just off the Strand itself. The white stone edifice had been constructed in 1920 along clean, elegant lines and peaked with inspirational statuary. It was now mainly filled with offices. The double-height ground floor had belonged to a travel company that had gone bankrupt in the credit crunch, and the building’s landlord had decided to put the entire six-floor property on the market. Robert Kramer had seized his chance and purchased it, transforming the atrium into a gold and crimson mock-Edwardian theatre, seating an audience of 450.

Arthur Bryant settled himself in the middle of the second row with a bag of cheese and onion crisps, and watched the theatre fill up. The audience for The Two Murderers was unusually young and mixed. While the middle classes went to the National to see plays about politics and society, a more raucous crowd yearning for sex and sensation headed for West End shows that delivered value for money.

Ray Pryce’s script was unashamedly populist. The play began in a grand Victorian Gothic mansion filled with suits of armour and stags’ heads, where angled shadows strafed the floor in expressionistic patterns. In the first act, the ageing lord of the manor caught his wife in a clinch with the handsome gardener, and imprisoned her inside the wall of his ancestor’s torture dungeon before the illicit lovers turned the tables on him.

Soon the convoluted plot called for a wax dummy of the lord to come to life, and for the wife’s lover to break it open and reveal the real lord imprisoned within. The twists compounded themselves in a satisfying Golden Age fashion, and soon the titular murderers were being placed in torture devices and bodies were returning to life, all part of some grand plan to trick the lord into handing over his estate.