Bryant & May 09; The Memory of Blood

Erudite and quick-witted but nervous and lacking in confidence, afflicted with apology, generous but broke, partnerless, the renter of a small 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 at the wrong end of a high street, where the rents 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. There was something inexplicably South London about her. 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 area – 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 realized 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.

? The Memory of Blood ?

4

Atmospherics

“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 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 uninterested 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.

“What time do you make it?”

Mona squinted at a tiny gold watch. “Eight-thirty. I shan’t be staying late. I’m voice-coaching in the morning, teaching a class of Essex girls not to use glottal stops. They hardly need elocution to work in nail salons, but the money’s good.”

The vast semicircular lounge had a sweeping curve of glass overlooking the Palladian streets below Trafalgar Square. All along the blue silk back wall were arranged dozens of theatre souvenirs: playbills, autographed head- shots, programmes and props. At any one time there were over two hundred plays booking in London, and their convoluted histories were well represented here. The Duchess, the Duke of Yorks, Wyndhams, the Garrick, the Aldwych. Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson and Bernhardt, they all smiled down at the guests. There were Indonesian silhouettes and Chinese shadow puppets, Italian harlequins and French Guignol dolls.

On one side of the lounge door stood a grotesque cast-iron minstrel that grinned and rolled its eyes when fed coins. On the other side was a Jolly Jack Tar in a wooden case. The Victorian seaside amusement was a museum piece that seemed designed for the specific purpose of giving children nightmares. Its skin was just plaster, its rictus smile mere painted wood, but it looked leathery and cancerous, like an embalmed corpse. When a ten-pence piece was inserted, it rocked back and forth squealing with laughter while a crackly organ recording of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ played. The sailor grinned and eyed the guests from the side of its moulting head, as if to say I know what you’re up to.

It was, everyone agreed, an extraordinary apartment.

But then, it belonged to an extraordinary man, the host of this evening’s event.

“I used to love the theatre,” Mona Williams said. “So many British playwrights wrote eloquently about the human condition. Griffiths, Ayckbourn, Brenton, Nichols, Barnes – they created proper parts for real women, but where are those parts now? These days I’ll settle for a play that’s got a practical meal in the first half and a sofa in the second, so long as it’s closer to the West End than Harrow-on-the-Hill.”

Always bitching, thought Neil Crofting wearily. She’s hardly been off the stage all her acting life, and still she complains about being hard done by. The West End is full of dreadful old musicals starring teenagers from TV talent shows. She should be glad she’s still working.

A dull rumble of thunder tinkled the glasses on the sideboard, like an approaching earthquake. A moment later, rain drummed against the great windows of the penthouse. The conversation lowered its volume for a moment, as if in respect to the gods above.

A knife rang out against the side of a delicate Lady Hamilton wineglass.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention for a moment.”

The host, Robert Julius Kramer, glared at the room’s inhabitants until they became more stilled by him than by the storm outside. “Thank you all so much for joining me here tonight in celebration of our first production, The Two Murderers. As you know, we took the unprecedented step of providing the critics with a special matinee today, in order to guarantee simultaneous reviews for the production. So far their advance comments have been, shall we say, unequivocal.” A ripple of uneasy laughter pulsed through the room; the reaction of the critics as they filed glumly out into a miserable afternoon on the Strand had been absolutely horrific. “However, our producer, Gregory Baine, has just handed me a spreadsheet of the advance bookings, and I can safely say that we already have a guaranteed three-month run ahead of us. A clear indication that the public has much better taste than the critics.”

Everyone turned around and stared at the critics in the room, who squirmed awkwardly. When it came to creating nervous tension, the party’s host was a master of his art.

“It matters not,” Kramer continued, “because there’s always a new Hamlet at the National for the critics to enjoy, and there’s always something in the West End to please the sensation-seekers, so everybody wins. Although I’d happily stage Shakespeare with pole dancers if I thought it would get more bums on seats. I’m a showman, not an intellectual.”