“I kicked her out,” Maltby replied hotly. “She told me I needed psychiatric help. I’m a model maker, not a psycho. I just make these scenes for the skill of it. I build dioramas for the London Dungeon. I wanted to work for Hammer Films, but their heyday was before my time. They employed highly skilled craftspeople. You wouldn’t have turned around and told them they needed psychiatric help, would you?”
May suddenly realized what his partner had been doing since they arrived. Knowing that Maltby had isolated herself from everyone, he had set out to goad her into providing some angry answers, and had got them.
“Missing any rope, are you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Ray Pryce said you believe souls live on in the models you make.”
“He would say that. He’s a writer; they all exaggerate. I guess in a sense I do put myself into my figures. After all, they’re all modelled on real people. I don’t do all this by myself. I have an assistant. We hire models and use their features in order to get exact likenesses. So you do come to think of them as being alive.”
“I imagine it’s a lucrative field. Unusual jobs often are.”
“I come from a long line of model makers. My great-grandmother worked for Madame Tussauds, and so did her mother. Madame Tussaud developed her craft by making wax death masks of aristocrats who had been executed during the French Revolution. She arrived in England at the start of the nineteenth century and put her waxworks on display at the Lyceum Theatre, just off the Strand. My skill with wax is what got me the job on
“Well, she didn’t seem crazy to me,” observed May as they left the house. “If anything, I thought she was pretty damn smart. She’s about craft, artistry – and making money.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree with you,” replied Bryant glumly. “My biggest problem is that I can’t see what she would have to gain by killing. But her fascination with the morbid fits a certain pattern.”
“I’ll do some checking into her background, look for the usual signs, but we’re going to need more than circumstantial evidence if we’re going to make anything stick to anyone. It sounds like they all had access to the Hangman puppet.”
“Did she have any unexplained absences during the party?”
“She’s another smoker. I think she slipped out for a snout a couple of times, but wasn’t gone long in either case. Sounds like we can’t prove where she was when Gregory Baine died.”
“Too many suspects, and none of them entirely fit – yet. Bloody annoying.”
They returned to the Unit and worked separately for the rest of the day. After the Unit had finally closed for the night, Bryant told his partner to put on his coat and follow him to the King Charles I pub. He appeared to be troubled by something; his brow was even more rumpled than usual. Over pints of Bombardier, he explained his problem.
“I think we can rule out Robert Kramer now,” he began, leaving a foamy moustache on his upper lip. “I’m afraid we have to assume you were fed a dud lead by the Home Office.”
“How do you work that out?”
“I realized that Kramer doesn’t fit the pattern. He might have reached the top by behaving in an immoral manner, but he certainly isn’t an anarchist. If anything, he’s an arch-conformist. He abides by the status quo. He doesn’t want to upset the ordered world, he simply wants to exist in its upper echelons. He might assume he has something in common with the myths of strong leaders, but he behaves in the prescribed manner of all rapacious businessmen.”
“Well, he’s all we have right now, even though he has no motive for killing his own partner.”
“I read the email Lucy Clementine sent you. Fond of detailing her boss’s bad behaviour, isn’t she?”
“If she’s right, we’ve got enough to hold Robert Kramer on suspicion,” said May. “We’re not subject to the rules governing the Met.”
“You won’t get a confession out of him. He’d fight every step of the way.”
“You sound as if you don’t want to make an arrest.”
“Of course I do, but we can’t afford another mistake. You’ve no concrete evidence, only hearsay. We need more proof than the word of a disgruntled former secretary. He fired her, John. Lucy Clementine sued Kramer for wrongful dismissal and settled compensation out of court, but the amount she received was the lowest that could have been awarded.”
“How did you find this out?”
“I didn’t. I got Dan Banbury to run a background check on her. What he found was that she had no background.”
“You mean someone erased it?”
“Afraid so. Their mistake was taking out the whole of the period when she worked for Kramer. It would have been more convincing if they’d left something in. Her testimony is compromised.”
“Why were you suspicious?”
“The Department of Social Resources is housed in the same Whitehall Home Office building as the Department of Internal Security – the department that’s run by Oskar Kasavian.”
“It could just be a coincidence.”
“And it might not be. All I’m saying is, you can’t trust your source.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
“The same as you. I want to get to the truth before anyone else is hurt.”
“You think it will happen again if we don’t stop it?”
“I know it will.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Our murderer is winning. Nobody has been arrested. He’s getting exactly what he wants.”
“But we don’t know what he wants.”
“I have a shrewd idea now. I just don’t know which one of them it is.”
“Still going to play your cards close to your chest, then.”
“I have to. If I’m wrong, I can’t afford to drop us both in the
“So what happens next?”
“We need to keep a close watch on everyone who was at that party.”
“You know we can’t do that. We don’t have enough staff.”
“If we don’t, somebody may die.”
“Then we have to decide who to prioritize. I’m assuming Judith Kramer is high risk.”
“You mean because she collapsed after the death of her son she can’t possibly be guilty.”
“Someone set out to hurt her by killing her child.”
“But she wasn’t hurt by Gregory Baine’s death.”
“Giles says he can’t entirely rule out suicide. There’s still the idea that Baine might have killed himself over his debts. If I had to choose the person most at risk right now, it would be someone involved in the love triangle. Marcus Sigler or Kramer himself.”
“Really? Interesting. That’s not who I would have picked.”
“Then who do you think is the most exposed?”
“Ray Pryce, the writer, because he’s as nervous as a cat and knows more than he’s letting on. I think he saw something at the party. What did he witness that he’s not telling us?”
“OK, anyone else?”
“Yes, that obnoxious critic, Alex Lansdale.”
“The
“Of course. We’re looking for a very unusual killer. Someone who’s a careful planner, but also capable of murderous rages. Remember what Janice said about Mrs Kramer? That she always felt stranded on the outside. Nearly everyone else there was directly connected with the play, but one man was a traitor and did his best to close it down – Lansdale. That puts him on the wrong side.”
May drank up and set his pint down. “Call me old-fashioned, but I think we should protect the women first. Everyone who attended that party is technically a suspect.”
“Not true, John. The timings have ruled at least three of them out.”
“Nevertheless, we need to keep them all close by. What do you think?”
