the world and selfish, as all men are. He’ll remove all obstacles in his way. This is what makes him so unique. He’s not seeking revenge, he’s not righting wrongs – he kills because he can, because others annoy him or block his path, and as he climbs the scale of adversaries, he finds himself unstoppable. He’s a working-class man made good. Although he can be whoever you want him to be – a Quaker, a Republican, a Conformist, a Warrior, a Rake, Jupiter, Fate itself. In France he has a cat, in China he has a dragon. Sometimes in England he rode a white horse. But he must always triumph.”
“Like St George,” said May.
“Exactly. It’s about sex, too. The length of the nose signifies lechery, as does the stick.”
“All this sounds rather cerebral. I mean, our killer wouldn’t know about this stuff, would he?”
“Oh, Mr Punch is not an intellectual,” Bryant pointed out. “He’s pure unthinking energy. In his Italian origin he was a notorious coward and boaster, but in England he becomes a hero.”
“That’s right,” Salterton agreed. “Punch hates to be dog-bitten, henpecked, opposed, imprisoned, bedevilled, so he strikes out. He has no hypocrisy. He only deals in blood. He kills the Baby because it cries. He kills Judy because she hits him, he takes out the Doctor’s eyes, he tricks the Hangman into hanging himself and roasts the Devil to death on a turning fork. In one version he survives all the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. He’s been described as a cross between Sir John Falstaff and Richard III. Merriment and cruelty. Fear and amusement. It’s a very English notion. Punch’s confidence and presence of mind never desert him. And it’s important that Mr Punch wins. There’s a historical account of a pious showman who was pelted with mud for refusing Punch a victory over the Devil. I say Punch can be anything but really, at root, he’s a Pagan.”
“I was terrified of him as a child,” May admitted. “That creepy voice of his.”
“Here.” Salterton held out a serrated circle of pressed tin. “It’s called a swozzle, or a call. Put it on the back of your tongue and speak.”
May wasn’t too happy about this, but gingerly inserted it in his mouth. He tried to talk but a peculiarly high rasping sound came out, and he nearly choked. He quickly spat the swozzle into his hand. “God, I nearly swallowed it.”
“If you do swallow it, it doesn’t hurt you,” said Salterton. “That one was owned by my great-grandfather. He swallowed it hundreds of times.”
May turned pale. Bryant and Salterton laughed.
“There are all kinds of traditions surrounding Punch. The puppet must be made from birch or poplar. If there’s a dog it must be a real one, wearing a flat hat and a ruff, and it must dance on its hind legs. The script is not written down, but passed orally from one generation to the next. And it usually contains words of a mystical nature. Dickens mentions the Punch cry of ‘Shallabalah’ in
“You’re not just a seaside entertainer, are you?” said May. “Who are you?”
“Tell him,” said Bryant. “It’s all right.”
Salterton smiled sadly. “I was an academic employed in investigating the provenance of Victorian artefacts at the British Museum. I used to work with Arthur’s old friend Harold Masters. But I left the museum under a cloud. After my wife died, I fell to drink and got myself in debt. I stole some small articles to pay my bills, and went to jail for my sins.” He returned the puppet to its case and carefully relocked it. “But now fate has had the last laugh on me. I’m the penniless guardian of a priceless collection that I can never allow myself to sell. If I did, it would be broken up. I sit here in the damp and darkness, listening to the rain fall through the roof, and know that once again Mr Punch has come out on top.”
? The Memory of Blood ?
23
Operations
“Forget this rubbish about Punch and bloody Judy,” Raymond Land warned the PCU staff. “Let Bryant and May wander around the country looking at puppet theatres while we concentrate on the basics of criminal investigation, before the whole of the bloody Met starts laughing at us again.” Bryant had ill-advisedly left a message apprising Land of his whereabouts. Perhaps his note should not have read:
“Bring in the usual suspects from around Blackfriars and Cannon Street. Run a check on the hostels, see if they’ve had any trouble. Any offices that were working late, bus drivers, cabbies, street sweepers, tube workers, anyone who might have seen him. I want some answers today. Who were Gregory Baine’s enemies? Close friends? Work colleagues? Talk to the girlfriend. Who’s his family? What were his movements last night? Come on, you all know the routine. How the bloody hell did he end up underneath Cannon Street Bridge? Was he killed before being strung up? If so, how did the killer get his body there? Where did he park? And the doll of the hangman, where was that bought?”
“We’re already getting answers to some of those questions,” said Janice, checking her notes. “Baine’s girlfriend had dinner with him last night at the Square, which is a restaurant in Mayfair. He left very abruptly after getting a message from the maitre d’ at around nine-fifteen. We’ve questioned the waiter who took the call. Baine told his girlfriend he had to meet someone for a quick drink – didn’t say who or why, but said he was heading over to Cannon Street. She reckons he was in a very odd mood when he left – preoccupied. His PA doesn’t know about any privately arranged appointments, suggested I talk to Robert Kramer or the show’s director.”
“Has Kershaw already ruled out suicide, then?” asked Renfield.
“No, but he thinks it unlikely that someone like Baine would have known about the drop from the bridge scaffolding. The street doesn’t lead anywhere and gets hardly any traffic.”
“Were there other prints at the site?”
“Yeah, loads,” said Banbury. “Workmen had been treading mud over it all day and it had been raining, so there was nothing salvageable. Suicides tend to go out in familiar surroundings. And if he’d chosen the bridge, why not just jump off? The tides are pretty lethal.”
“He might not have known that,” Renfield persisted.
“Giles found chemical residue on his face and reckons he may have been sprayed with pepper spray – like the ones you can buy for a handbag,” said Longbright. “He’s had water from the bridge dripping on him, so that’s not conclusive.”
“Don’t you have one in your bag?” asked Land.
“No, Raymond, I have a house brick. More effective. Baine had a fresh bruise on the side of his head, like he’d been slapped or punched, or he might just have walked into the scaffolding, blinded. He’d been led or walked along the planks and stepped off the end. Then he choked to death on the rope. He was a small bloke, but it would still have required a certain amount of strength to get him in place, so Giles is ruling out a woman unless it was someone with specialist training, like Meera here.” Mangeshkar had studied tae kwon do. “Of course, a lot of actors keep very fit.”
“Meera, you were supposed to be keeping an eye on Judith Kramer,” said Land. “Why are you here?”
“She wouldn’t let me,” Mangeshkar replied. “Her call.”
“Baine had been hammering the booze,” Renfield added. “The girlfriend says he’d sunk a bottle and a half of Rioja.”
“Baine’s neck was badly bruised when he dropped, but his shirt collar probably prevented it from snapping. Giles banged on for a while about the strength of the human spine but didn’t add anything significant to his initial findings. It’s unlikely that Baine walked any great distance – his girlfriend says he hated exercise. He didn’t have an Oyster card on him and wasn’t the public transport type, so we’re checking taxis now.”
“Good. Anyone else?”
Meera tapped her notepad. “The Hangman puppet – it doesn’t belong to Robert Kramer. He says he still has his full set, minus the Punch, of course, which Giles has returned to our evidence room. I haven’t yet found anyone who sells them. There’s a Goth internet site that does something similar but they say they haven’t received any special orders. Which probably means the puppet was either homemade or in someone else’s private
