Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood

“How did you come to realize Mona Williams was in danger?”

“When I came to see the play, the programme seller said something odd. She said, Some of the older ladies in this cast remember the days when we had a nicer class of people in here. First of all, there’s only one older lady in the show, so she had to mean Mona Williams. Second, We had a nicer class of people in here? But the New Strand is exactly that, a new theatre – there were no days when it had nicer clientele. But of course the clue is in the name. If there’s a New Strand Theatre there might have been an old one. So I consulted my old theatre books, but failed to turn anything up. Then I realized I was looking for the wrong additional word – not the New Strand Theatre but the New Strand Theatre. I tore the pages out to show you.” Bryant handed May yet more crumpled sheets. “There was a theatre here before, right on this spot. The auditorium was boarded over and converted to offices, but I’m guessing it was still intact when Kramer bought it. He realized what it was when he had the survey done, and hit on the idea to open it up again.”

“But why hasn’t anybody else picked up on the fact that it used to be a theatre? And surely it would have been worth more as offices?”

“Not if you get the right audience for a new play. You can license it for different productions all around the world. As offices, the ground floor would have provided a nice atrium, but that’s just wasted space. This one could be packed with 450 people who would pay nightly to be here. Kramer needed the right script to launch the theatre. He wanted to get in a younger crowd, so he commissioned Ray Pryce.”

“Why Ray?”

“Why not ask him yourself?” Bryant pointed behind him just as Ray entered the stalls.

“I got your text, Mr Bryant, although I had trouble understanding it.”

“He doesn’t know how to use predictive,” May warned.

“Oh, my God, what is that?” Ray peered over the corpse’s boxed-in head and leapt back.

“Mr Bryant, can I ask you to keep the public out of this site?” said Banbury.

“I’m afraid it’s Mona Williams. Ray, explain to my partner how you convinced Mr Kramer to stage your play, would you?”

Ray had trouble drawing his eyes away from the bridled actress. “I told him it would outrage everyone. Controversy is a sure way of firing up the box office. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“Now tell him the rest. Tell him how you plagiarized someone else’s work to worm your way into Kramer’s good books.”

Ray looked shocked, and started stammering. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come off it, chum. I know you copied the play.”

“It’s not plagiarism, not in the strict sense.”

“The Two Murderers follows the script of Les Deux Meurtriers almost word for word.”

“I’m clear of the seventy-year rule.”

“You haven’t exactly gone out of your way to acknowledge the original, have you? Does Robert know?”

“No, but – ”

“The seventy-year rule,” May repeated. “An author has to have been dead for seventy years before his work comes out of copyright.”

“That’s right,” said Ray, shamefaced. “I found the script right here in the building.”

“Now perhaps you’d like to tell my partner about the Grand Guignol,” Bryant prompted.

“OK, sure.” May could see that Ray was not nervous because he was standing near a corpse, but because he had suddenly had the spotlight of suspicion turned on him. “The Grand Guignol was built in the Pigalle, in Paris, at the end of the nineteenth century, by a man called Oscar Metenier. It was a kind of vaudeville of horror. It staged a programme of one-act plays that featured murder of all kinds – matricide, infanticide, kidnap and rape. The scenes were graphically depicted on stage. They were so realistic that audience members regularly used to pass out.”

“And where did the name of the theatre come from?”

“From ‘Guignol’, the Punch and Judy puppet character from Lyons.”

“The plays were often taken from the police blotters of the times,” Bryant added. “True crimes, staged to delight and horrify Parisian audiences. Sex and violence for the chattering classes. Now explain what happened over here, if you would be so kind.”

Ray glanced back at the body and blanched. “Can we go somewhere away from – her?”

“I’m sorry. Of course.” The detectives took him out to the foyer. “Pray continue if you would,” Bryant asked.

“Well, it’s simple. The Grand Guignol of Paris was a huge success for the next twenty years. So it was brought across the Channel and staged in what was then known as the Little Theatre, later the New Strand Theatre, here in Adam Street. But right from the start there was a problem. We had a Lord Chamberlain who censored plays and he refused a licence to any play he considered dangerous to the morals of the public. So the Grand Guignol at the Little Theatre highlighted the psychological cruelty of the characters, rather than showing blood and sex.

“In a way, that was worse. In two years they staged eight series of plays, and many more were turned down. Altogether, forty-three plays were seen here. Most of them were psychological studies of damaged people. Stanislavsky created emotional memory exercises for actors – the idea was that you give a more convincing performance by inhabiting the character and making it believable from a psychological point of view. As a result, the theatre attracted famous names, even though it drew adverse critical reviews and caused a scandal. Noel Coward wrote a play for the Little Theatre called The Better Half, and Dame Sybil Thorndyke appeared in many of them. For four years, young Londoners came here to be shocked. Eventually, the Lord Chamberlain got fed up with what he considered an affront to human decency, and the theatre company had to close. The place changed its name and carried on for a while, but it was never really successful again.”

“So that’s why nobody remembers the old theatre.”

“He banned all the plays from public performance. Odd, really, when you consider that the English stage has a history of horror, from the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear to the gruesome tortures of The Revenger’s Tragedy, where the Duke’s lips are burned away with acid and his eyelids are torn off so he has to witness his wife’s adultery. The Little Theatre was low theatre in the Lord Chamberlain’s eyes and there was a danger that it might appeal to the lower orders. So he came up with a solution. He allowed plays to be performed in their original French, because he thought only the middle classes would come here then and they were less likely to be corrupted.”

“How did you find out about the play?”

“I was working in the building.”

“Doing what?”

“After I finished working for the government, I became a night watchman. One evening I was asked to clear out a load of old boxes from the basement, ready for the dustman in the morning. There was a bunch of playscripts inside. I was sitting behind the desk with nothing to do, and some nights Mr Kramer came to look at the building with his producer. I had time on my hands, so I rewrote a few of the plays and submitted them as my own work. I didn’t hurt anyone. These things are ancient history. I just modernized them and bumped up the levels of sex and violence.”

“You acted with questionable legality,” said May, “but we have bigger problems now.”

“Are you going to make an arrest?” Ray asked.

“You’ll know at the same time as everyone else,” May replied. “I’d make myself scarce if I were you. This place is now off limits.”

Mona Williams’s body was delivered to Giles Kershaw while Banbury cleared the crime scene. The detectives watched what appeared to be a second Grand Guignol play being performed in front of the proscenium arch, then returned to North London.

“I think we know what we’re dealing with now,” said Bryant, waving his walking stick at a taxi. “Robert Kramer is clearly the target, not the suspect.”

“But why?”

“Because he has a secret, something he hasn’t revealed to us in almost a week of questioning. This secret is so great that someone wants him to suffer very badly. They took his child, and that should have been the end of the