The Memory of Blood(8)

‘I didn’t mean to cause any trouble,’ said Anna when May had gone. Bryant looked at her anxious brown eyes and his heart softened. He could see her history laid out before him as neatly as parts in a model aircraft kit. Erudite and quick-witted but nervous and lacking in confidence, afflicted with apology, generous but broke, partnerless, the renter of a one-bedroom flat in Stepney or Bermondsey, a solitary drinker, underpaid and underappreciated, she was probably still dominated by her mother.

All this could be easily read by anyone with a vaguely Holmesian turn of mind. Anna Marquand’s plastic shopping bag was from a cheap supermarket usually situated in the wrong end of a high street, where the rental prices were lower. In the bag he could see a loaf of white processed bread and a half litre of Gordon’s gin—if she lived with a partner, she’d probably have bought a full-sized bottle. There was also a packet of menthol cigarettes in there, but Anna wasn’t a smoker. Not a man’s brand, but one popular with older women starting to worry about their health. She had recently given money to charity—there was a sticker from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children on her jacket. There was also a slim paperback of Robert Browning’s poetry collection Men and Women in the pocket. Her hair was a mess and the ballpoint pen she had laid on the table was badly chewed. Bryant wanted to clasp her hands and tell her to be as strong as she felt inside.

‘I can’t stay long, I’m afraid,’ she told him. ‘Since my father died I’ve been looking after my mother, and she doesn’t like to be left alone. Our neighbourhood—well, there’s been trouble before. You said you didn’t want to keep the original notes and documents, so once I’d inputted them I made a single copy on disc and wiped my hard drive. I usually just return the material, because I don’t like to leave potentially sensitive documents lying around on an old computer somewhere.’ She removed a clear plastic slipcase from her shopping bag and handed it to him.

‘Have you got a pen?’ Bryant asked. ‘I’ll forget what it is otherwise.’ She handed him a felt-tip and he scribbled his name across the disc’s label. ‘Mind you, I’m just as liable to leave it on the bus. I got a terrible ear-bashing for losing the cremated remains of our coroner.’

‘I keep a safe at home. My academics are paranoid about their work, so I always shred their annotated copies once I’ve retyped them and file away my version. You’d be surprised what I get sent—Ministry of Defence work, big oil companies … I feel like a spy sometimes. Except it’s mostly boring technical stuff. I enjoyed doing your book, though. A breath of fresh air for me.’

‘Then perhaps you’d better keep hold of this.’ Bryant handed the disc back. ‘Your hands are clearly safer than mine.’

Anna rose to go. ‘I must be heading home. My mother will worry.’

‘Well, I’ll see you at the launch party. I mean, it’ll just be a drink in a scruffy old pub, but—’

‘I’d like that very much.’

‘So would I,’ said Bryant, offering up such a genuine smile that his false teeth nearly fell out.

On his way back up to the office, he realised he had really taken quite a shine to Miss Marquand, and decided he would try to find a way to help her. Perhaps Raymond Land could be persuaded to employ her in some freelance capacity—provided he didn’t stumble across her exposure of his wife’s extramarital sex life first.





‘There’s nothing more exhausting than an entire roomful of people calling each other darling,’ declared Mona Williams. The veteran actress cast a jaded eye around the crowded penthouse apartment. ‘God, when I was in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the conversation was a bloody sight more enlivening than tonight’s, and I was playing a goat farmer. Is there any more red wine?’

‘They’ve probably run out. You know how cheap our host is. Oh, he’s clever, of course, but so unbearably common.’ Neil Crofting ran a hand ineffectually around the crown of his head, a habit he had lately picked up to indicate that his hair was real, although everyone knew it was not. Before curtain-up it sat on a false head in his dressing room and was carefully brushed prior to every performance. Neil and Mona had once been a successful song and dance double act, but by the eighties they were cajoling disinterested punters through lounge sets in third-rate supper clubs. They continued to audition with grim dignity, but now listed only Shakespeare and Noel Coward roles on their CVs. After her third drink, Mona would reminisce about the time Olivier coached her through ‘Gertie’ in Hamlet. After his third drink, Neil would reach for a fourth.