Five
The opening of the House of Hanover Milk Bar being just two days away, its manager and staff were anxious and confused.
This much-discussed public hostility towards the new venture – what could they do about it, and how had it arisen? For the past two weeks, the opening had been the subject of warm debate in the letters columns of the local press. Paint had indeed been daubed on its walls; a brick had indeed been lobbed through its window; moreover, the mild-mannered manager had been roughly jostled one day on his way along the seafront.
But why? Received opinion was that well-established local traders objected to this new, unfair competition: they demanded to know – in the strongest possible terms – why they should be undercut by a business subject to public subsidy. But when the manager, Mr Shapiro, bravely canvassed the existing tea-stall holders and ice-cream vendors in the area, asking how he could accommodate their objections, they all happily shook his hand and said – bafflingly – that they bore no ill will towards the House of Hanover Milk Bar; if anything, they expected it to draw more trade to their particular stretch of the seafront – and by the way, poor you, what an awful name you’ve been lumbered with.
It wasn’t as if ugly new premises were being plonked down beside the West Pier, either: the milk bar occupied an existing building on the Lower Esplanade – a low, wide single-storey edifice that had recently stood empty but had started life in the 1930s as a ‘bathing pavilion’, where modestly inclined swimmers could – theoretically – pay a small fee to change their clothes in private. Needless to say, it never caught on, thanks to the peculiar dual nature of Brighton’s holiday-makers: shrewdly tight-fisted, and at the same time brazenly exhibitionist. They spurned the offer of such facilities and continued to change out of their wet costumes on the beach, flashing bits of intimate flesh at each other in the wriggling, squealing process, and doing it for free.
So the House of Hanover Milk Bar was not, it seems, causing legitimate resentment from competitors, nor was it an eyesore. Its only mistake was to choose the afternoon of the August Bank Holiday Monday for its grand opening. This fact alone was the cause of all the paint-daubing and brick-throwing, and strongest-possible-terms correspondences. Because as we already know, something else was planned for Brighton on that Bank Holiday: a historic summit of out-of-town villains at the Royal Pavilion, which needed to take place below the radar. How convenient it would be for those villains if all police and press attention were focused on a different part of the town – for example, on the new (blameless) milk bar on the seafront. All it required to achieve this massive feat of cozening was a bold local criminal organiser capable of:
initiating baseless rumours;
writing strongly worded letters to the press under assumed names;
committing reprehensible criminal damage without turning a hair; and
personally misdirecting a key member of the police force with a drip-feed of gossip at the station.
‘’Ere, have you read about all these ever-so-credible threats to that new milk bar on the seafront, dear?’ Mrs Groynes had said in the office one day a couple of weeks ago, while delivering tea and biscuits to the inspector and Sergeant Brunswick. ‘Outrageous, I call it, and I’m not the only one.’
‘Milk bar?’ Steine had responded. His newly adopted policy towards Mrs Groynes’s constant wittering was to focus on just one fragment of it.
‘Mrs Groynes means the House of Hanover Milk Bar, sir,’ Brunswick explained. ‘Due to open on Bank Holiday Monday. They’ve got that lovely Milk Girl coming to cut the ribbon, or that’s what it says on the posters. Oh, thank you, Mrs G.’ He reached for his tea.
‘I put four sugars in.’
‘Ooh, lovely.’
‘Oh, yes. I know the one.’ Steine sighed and put down the draft of the radio talk he’d been perusing. It seemed they were discussing this tedious subject whether he liked it or not. ‘It used to be a glorified bathing hut that no one patronised. But what’s the problem, Mrs Groynes?’
‘Well, the opposition, dear! The hoo-hah! They’re saying there’s that much genuine and not-at-all-bogus-or-trumped-up opposition, they might not dare open it at all!’
‘Really? Why is anyone opposed to it?’
‘Oh, search me, dear.’ Mrs Groynes started vigorously polishing Twitten’s desk. ‘Something about a commercially divisive, publicly subsidised business destabilising an otherwise competitive free market. But it’s much too complicated for my old loaf of bread, that’s all I know!’
She laughed; they laughed as well. ‘Loaf of bread’ was (presumably) cockney rhyming slang for ‘head’, and it was true that an empty-headed charlady could hardly be expected to grasp something as complex as this.
‘All I do know is, they’re in a right two and eight! Vandalism and I don’t know what all. Jostling is what I heard. Can you believe that? Jostling! But hark at me, wittering on. The sergeant here knows as much as I do about it, don’t you, dear? Weren’t you our very own man-on-the-spot the other day?’
Steine turned to Brunswick with a questioning expression.
‘Well, sir. That’s right.’
‘You tell him, love,’ urged Mrs G.
‘Tell me what?’
‘I saw it for myself, sir. When the brick went through the window a few days ago. I was only thirty yards away.’
‘Were you? At what time was this?’
‘Around dawn, sir. Of course, when I heard the smashing glass, I ran to find out what was going on and found a brick –’
‘An actual house-brick, dear!’ exclaimed Mrs G, shocked.
‘– wrapped in a piece of paper with “YOU HAVE BEEN BLEEDING WARNED” written on it.’
‘You have been bleeding warned,’ repeated Steine. ‘Ugh. No signature, I suppose?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But how on earth did you happen to be on the seafront at that ungodly hour, Brunswick? You’re sometimes not at your desk until half-past ten.’
‘Anonymous tip-off, sir.’
‘What, informing you of the precise time and place the incident would occur?’
Mrs Groynes concentrated on a particularly energetic bit of polishing.
‘And yet you didn’t apprehend the culprit, Sergeant?’
‘He just vanished, sir. I’m sorry.’ Then Brunswick brightened. ‘But do you remember, Mrs G, how I bumped into you as I was coming away? That was such a nice surprise.’
She laughed and patted his hand. ‘It was nice to see you too, dear. I’d only got up to watch the sun rise, and suddenly there’s poor Sergeant Brunswick, all shook up and in need of a reassuring cuddle from good old Mrs Groynes.’
‘Do you know, sir,’ said Brunswick, leaning back in his chair, ‘it’s amazing how many times I’ve bumped right smack into Mrs G just when I was in pursuit of some villain who then got away.’
Mrs Groynes frowned, as if needing to consider the truth of this remark. And then she smiled. ‘Blimey, you’re right, dear. It is amazing.’ She laughed. ‘The number of times I’ve heard you yelling, “He’s getting away! He’s getting away!” Here, do you remember when you were chasing one of those villains of yours and I nearly ran you over in that car that turned out to have brakes after all, when I thought it bleeding didn’t?’
Brunswick burst out laughing. ‘I was just about to arrest Stanley-Knife Stanley, sir. And suddenly there’s a parp-parp-parp and people are shouting, “Look out!” Blimey, Mrs G, you nearly flaming finished me off that time!’
‘Ah,’ said Steine, starting to gather his things. ‘The laws of probability in action, you see. I’ve been thinking about writing a talk on this very subject, as it relates to police work.’
‘Probability!’ scoffed Mrs G. ‘Pull the other one, dear, it’s got bells on. No, it’s nothing to do with any of that with this lovely sergeant and me.’ She put her arm affectionately round Brunswick’s shoulders. ‘It’s fate with us two, dear. It’s kismet!’
At which they all laughed and sipped their tea, and Mrs Groynes opened the biscuit tin, and at the smell of fig rolls Brunswick quickly banished from his mind the hilarious memory of how – accidentally, of course – he had once nearly been killed in the course of his duties by the comical station charlady at the wheel of an ostensibly brakeless vehicle.
It was at this moment that Constable Twitten had returned to the office from one of his secret rounds and found the conversation concerning the new milk bar in full flow.
‘So, anyway,’ said Mrs G, pouring Twitten a nice cup of tea, and casually resuming her theme, ‘what on earth can be done for those poor people, that’s what I’m wondering? What with all that nasty opposition hoo-hah and hullabaloo; and what with the grand opening on Bank Holiday Monday.’ She picked up a feather duster. ‘I mean, you’re the police, not me. I wouldn’t stick my oar in; I’ve got enough to do, thank you very much, keeping up with all my mopping and polishing and swabbing, and fretting about the future of the monarchy since that awful Lord Altrincham wrote that article about our poor defenceless young Queen the other day. I mean how does he sleep at night, dears, that’s what I keep asking myself? But I can’t help thinking there must be something …?’
‘Police protection, perhaps?’ said Brunswick, as if the idea had come to him entirely unprompted.
‘What’s that, Brunswick?’
‘It just came to me, sir. Could we offer police protection, perhaps? At least for the grand opening?’
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ conceded Steine.
‘Thank you, sir.’
Twitten, quickly grasping what they were talking about, put down his cup and saucer and said, ‘Ooh, sir? Sir?’
Steine stiffened. The others watched with interest. The inspector had a very short fuse where Twitten’s clever-cloggery was concerned.
‘Sir? Sir?’
‘Yes, Twitten?’
‘May I say something pertinent, sir?’
Steine huffed. ‘Well, that rather depends.’
‘On what, sir? I’ve already said it’s pertinent.’
‘On whether it concerns, as usual, how you know more about everything in the world than anyone else.’
Brunswick and Mrs Groynes exchanged glances.
‘Oh.’ Twitten considered this. ‘I’m afraid it might do, sir.’
‘Well, in that case—’
‘But it’s about the famous hoo-hah and hullabaloo, as Mrs Groynes called it, surrounding the new milk bar. You see, according to Mr Shapiro’s own inquiries, the hoo-hah and hullabaloo in question are in fact strangely baseless—’
But he got no further.
‘Thank you, Twitten,’ interrupted Steine, ‘but I’ve heard quite enough about milk bars and hullabaloos for one day.’ And then, with a curt ‘Excuse me’, the inspector gathered his tea and biscuits and retreated to the privacy of his own office, where he worked for the rest of the morning on his tricky radio talk about a fictional Everyman who – amusingly – keeps violating arcane laws such as the Registration of Business Names Act (1916). In his own opinion, the piece was the best he’d ever written. It both informed and entertained. No wonder it immediately put thoughts of offering police protection to a troublesome beachside milk establishment out of his mind, and in consequence he did nothing about it.
A few days later, however, his attention was properly caught. He was informed that the Knickerbocker Glory contest winner would be announced as part of the grand opening at the milk bar – thus placing himself at the scene. It was at this point that he had arranged, grudgingly, for a minimal police presence on the day.
But ever since Twitten had planted the absurd idea in his mind that judging the Knickerbocker Glory competition was a job that came with associated dangers of reprisal (namely, arson), he had wondered if he should do more. As he sat at his desk now, on the Saturday before the Bank Holiday, he tried to dismiss the notion as ridiculous: this was ice cream, he assured himself. But then he made a decision, picked up his peaked cap and left the building in search of the Punch & Judy man.
He found Vince on the seafront, talking to young Maisie, the buck-toothed stall-girl who had until recently been the entire focus of Sergeant Brunswick’s pitiful and self-defeating romantic ambitions. Regrettably, he seemed to be a sucker for any girl in bobby socks.
‘Mr Vince?’ Steine said. ‘May I have a word?’
Vince looked around and made a face. ‘Oh, iss you, Isspector. Look, Maisie. Ratbag policeman rozzer ponce come to see us.’
Maisie looked the inspector up and down, but said nothing, which was a bit rude. Though to be fair, she was already fully occupied, resting a hand on her hip and chewing gum.
‘It’s about the Knickerbocker Glory competition,’ said Steine, quietly.
‘Oh, that.’ Vince hitched his thumbs in his braces, made a rough sound in his throat and then spat on the ground. ‘Blimey Riley,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘you tooka time, mate.’
‘Mr Vince,’ Steine said, as calmly as he could (and avoiding looking down at the spittle), ‘my constable tells me—’
‘Looka, mate, iss up to you what you do, right?’ The Punch & Judy man paused for an answer. ‘Right?’
‘Yes.’
‘But your Constable Twit-face, he says you doing the Knick-bocky Gloria competish – ass right?’
‘That’s right. And that’s why I—’
‘Hah!’ Vince clapped Steine hard on the shoulder, making him stagger slightly. ‘Well, it was nice knowing you, mate! Thass all.’
‘But—’
‘Nice to fucking know you. I s’pose you don’t know ’bout last bloke what done it?’
Steine gulped. ‘That’s why I’ve come to see you. Something happened to his … house?’
‘Nah, thass the one afore last.’
‘The one before last? So what happened—?’
‘Last one? Last one dark alley, mate.’
‘What?’
‘Forget setting fire to poncey house, this one dark alley, fucking cosh, mate, fucking blackjack.’
‘No. But surely—’
‘What for should I lie? Fucking cosh.’ Vince mimed the action of repeatedly striking a person prone on the ground. ‘Whack, whack, whack! Tell you what, he screams like a girl, mate!’ He laughed. And then, adopting a playful, high-pitched Punch & Judy voice, added: ‘Stop! Stop! What I do? At least tell me what I done!’
‘Well, I—’
Vince leaned closer. ‘Bloke got twitch now, mate,’ he whispered. ‘Yeah. Everyone call ’im Twitchy Pete.’
Steine considered this. ‘Well, thank you. Perhaps I should talk to him.’
Vince laughed. ‘Ha! Good luck! Twitchy Pete don’t say much nowaday. Don’t say raspberry ripple, don’t say cherry-on-a-top. Show him tin Del Monte fruit salad and he fall down, curl up, like dead.’
Steine bit his lip. ‘And all because …?’
‘Ass right. All for giving fucking second prize Knick-bocky Gloria a Metropole Mike.’
‘Metropole Mike? But I’ve never even heard of—’
‘Ice-cream people no soft, Isspector. You think they soft coz ice cream all nice a sweet a creamy? No!’ Vince spat again, and this time Steine made the mistake of following the trajectory. ‘They like animals, mate.’ He laughed. ‘Animals!’
‘Well, thank you, Mr Vince. That’s been … um, very helpful.’
Steine was about to leave when Vince remembered something else, and stuck out an arm to stop him.
‘You know scoop?’ Vince said, meaningfully.
‘You mean … the ice-cream scoop?’
‘Yeah, scoop. You know why iss that size? That essact size an’ shape an’ ’andle an’ evyfing?’
‘No,’ said Steine.
Vince laughed again. ‘Scoop your fucking eye out, mate!’ he said.
And that very afternoon Inspector Steine ordered that the House of Hanover Milk Bar on the seafront should receive extra protection from the Brighton Police on Bank Holiday Monday, even if it meant removing men from their usual posts around the town.
Young Susan Turner of the BBC was as good as her word. On Saturday morning, at eleven-thirty, just as Brunswick and Twitten were setting off to the Sports Stadium to interview Buster Bond (who was, of course, already dead), she rang from Broadcasting House in London. Twitten took the call, and expressed polite surprise that she had managed the journey from Brighton so quickly. He had interviewed her this morning at about half-past eight.
‘I was lucky with the trains,’ she said, modestly. ‘And after all, it’s a very urgent matter. Whoever killed Mr Carbody needs to be caught.’
Twitten visualised her: a fresh-faced young woman with a ponytail and an air of being highly organised. The sort of person whose pride in her own sheer competence might actually hold her back in her future career. She would doubtless remain an invaluable assistant producer for the next forty years. ‘Miss Turner is our lynchpin! Where would we be without her?’ they would say, while more ambitious people leapfrogged her easily on their way up the BBC pay grades.
‘That’s exactly right. Thank you, Miss Turner, for your helpfulness and efficiency.’
Susan, who was using the telephone at her desk in the deserted and oddly gloomy What’s Your Game? production office (there was bright sunshine outside), glowed with pleasure. Being called helpful and efficient was fundamentally what she lived for. Being called those things by the attractive young constable in a sensational murder case made them all the sweeter.
‘So …’ she resumed, glad that he couldn’t see her blush. She donned a pair of reading glasses and opened a dog-eared manila folder. ‘So, I’ve got the file here of the letters I mentioned. And there are plenty from people who had been emotionally scarred by Mr Carbody, and there are some that are frankly obscene, and there’s one we probably should have contacted the police about, as it’s a direct death threat. But there’s also one that – well, it leaped out at me for a different reason.’ She sounded excited.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because it’s from Brighton, and it’s from a disgruntled beauty-contest entrant called Miss B. Ashley!’
‘What?’
‘Isn’t Miss B. Ashley one of the other milk-bottle victims from last night?’
‘Yes, she bally well is!’
‘Oh, goody-gumdrops. That’s what I thought.’
Brunswick, who had been loitering by the door, came to join Twitten at his desk.
‘Oh, good work, Miss Turner,’ Twitten said, with genuine warmth. ‘What does the letter say? And when did she write it?’
‘The letter isn’t dated, unfortunately, but its arrival was date-stamped by someone – probably me – in August last year. She accuses Mr Carbody of being in cahoots with the rigging of the contests, and claims that professional models are taking part.’ Susan paused. ‘Isn’t that allowed, then?’
‘I think it probably is, actually; but Miss Ashley thought it wasn’t fair.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘I don’t quite understand it myself, but she felt very strongly, and from what I’m hearing, some of these women’s eyebrows alone—’
‘But there’s no such thing as fair competition. Everyone knows that.’ Susan’s voice had changed, grown harder; the subject had clearly touched a nerve. ‘Feeling hard done by is the most tiresome emotion there is, in my opinion.’
‘I tend to agree,’ said Twitten.
‘Anyway,’ said Susan, glancing down at the letter she was still holding, ‘you’re right that Miss Ashley was quite passionate about all this. In particular she seems to cast blame on Tony Sayle, Carbody’s agent. She says she will be writing to him, too, in the same vein.’
‘Tony Sayle.’ Remembering the name, Twitten flipped open his notebook to where he had written, ‘Tony Sayle, Dean Street’. He remembered the suave Gerry Edlin saying, in a knowing tone, When Tony puts his foot down, that’s it.
‘Didn’t Tony Sayle ban Carbody from judging bally beauty contests at around this time?’
‘That’s right. He did. Mr Carbody wasn’t happy, but he did what he was told. Mr Sayle tends to get his own way. He represents quite a few BBC performers, and between you and me, we all loathe him. He’s a pig.’
‘And she implies it’s Sayle who’s rigging the contests?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Gosh.’ Twitten made some rapid notes. ‘Miss Turner, I hate to ask you to do more for us, but is there any way you could get that letter down to me today? Right now, we need to conduct more interviews, or I’d come up on the train and collect it myself.’
Susan didn’t hesitate. ‘I could bring it down, if you like.’
‘But you just got back to London.’
‘It’s all right. I could bring the whole file. After all, I might have missed something. If I leave now, I can be with you again in a couple of hours.’
‘Oh, Miss Turner, you’re a bally saint. Thank you.’
‘Well, my pleasure.’
Twitten hung up, and pulled a face at Brunswick.
‘Do you think it’s a lead, son?’
Twitten stood up. ‘I think it might be, sir. It’s a connection, anyway. We definitely need to find out more about this agent Tony Sayle.’
He looked at his list. ‘But first we should go to the Sports Stadium and see Buster Bond and that local skater who was Miss Ashley’s old boyfriend – that should be pretty straightforward, I think – then on to Hove for Officer Andy’s sister. We know so little about him, but if there’s any link to beauty contests …’ He stopped talking. Brunswick was giving him a funny look. ‘What is it, sir?’
‘That BBC girl. Miss Turner, is it?’
‘What about her?’
‘You do realise she fancies you, son?’
‘What? No.’
‘Tearing up and down on the train like that. She’s not doing all that for the sake of flaming justice, is she?’
Twitten shook his head; he refused to listen to such soppy stuff. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong, sir,’ he laughed. ‘I think in Miss Turner’s case it’s nothing to do with being attracted to anyone; it’s more about a classic female desire for approval.’
‘That’s baloney, Twitten.’
‘And without wanting to be cruel, she just said “goody-gumdrops”.’
‘So?’
‘Please, sir. We need to get on.’
Brunswick looked at him in wonder and amusement. ‘You really don’t ever notice it, do you, lad?’ he sighed.
As it happens, the visit to the Sports Stadium was not as straightforward as Twitten had imagined. On arrival they learned from Stage Door Ernie that Buster Bond had arrived quite early for a spot of rehearsal, and had not left. But when they went in search of him, his dressing-room was empty, and the rink was busy with other acts rehearsing. Buster Bond had vanished. To make things worse, Barbara Ashley’s old boyfriend Graham had not yet arrived. His main part in the show being a sensational high-speed obstacle race against Bond (which he was contractually obliged to lose), he tended to skip rehearsals. With Bond missing and Graham absent, there was really no reason to stay.
But Twitten needed a moment to take it all in. He’d never seen inside the stadium before, and the sheer scale of it took his breath away. Also, the skill of the skaters whooshing past – so fast that they created a perceptible vacuum – was astonishing. The cold was bracing, the talent outstanding; it was like a bolt of ozone to the brain and the body. Why had he never been to see the ice show? He’d lived in Brighton since June! And the weather had been so hot!
‘You were planning to bring Miss Ashley here last night, weren’t you, sir?’
They were standing at the edge of the rink. Brunswick pulled his light raincoat tighter, to quell the shivering.
‘Yes, well. Don’t remind me.’
‘Was it her idea to come, or yours?’
‘It was all me. She wasn’t too keen, as I recall. Probably because of her old boyfriend Graham. Of course, I didn’t know about him when I suggested it.’
On the far side of the ice, a female skater attempted a complex jump and stumbled on landing, making Twitten scream slightly. But she got up and carried on, no harm done.
‘Do you know who any of these skaters are?’
‘Of course I do. The same ones tend to be in lots of the shows. Aside from Graham, of course, they go all over the world. We should pick up a programme; that’ll tell us.’
Brunswick surveyed the scene: skaters weaving across the ice, turning to skate backwards; launching into jumps and spins; stopping on a sixpence, with a spray of ice, then accelerating off again. In one corner of the rink, a troupe of ice-clowns practised pratfalls around a miniature fire engine, while blowing whistles and honking horns held in their armpits; in another, a woman worked with a set of trained poodles.
‘The dog lady’s Russian, I think,’ said Brunswick, pointing. ‘And the clowns are Italian, all one family – three generations. Grandfather, three grown-up sons, three boys plus another kid not old enough to perform yet. When they’re on the Continent they can use the little kid as well: apparently the audiences love him. They complain like mad that they have to leave him out when they’re here. Actually, we were called in once because someone reported them for bringing the kid on. They denied it, of course.’
Twitten had forgotten that show business was the sergeant’s pet subject. In his desk were umpteen copies of ABC Film Review and Picturegoer. He often borrowed Mrs Groynes’s Tit-Bits as well, and was unashamedly agog for news from Hollywood. It was an unwise person who said ‘I wonder what Debbie Reynolds is up to at the moment’ in Jim Brunswick’s presence if they didn’t really want to know the answer.
‘Is Buster Bond always the star?’
‘Yes, when they can get him.’
‘And why did you say Graham doesn’t have an international career like the others?’
‘Because he’s just the local boy who steps in. It’s a lovely story – heart-warming. A couple of years ago, one of the skaters broke his leg just before the opening, so they advertised for a last-minute replacement and got Graham. He normally works as a porter at the veg market but he’s a good-looking boy and goes like a bomb on the ice. When that show was over, and everyone packed up and left for the next place, Graham went back to the market. They’d kept his job open.’
‘Gosh.’ Twitten surveyed the buzz of the rink, and thought about poor Graham trading his spangly costume for drab porter’s overalls; swapping his skates for wellingtons; trundling sacks of muddy spuds about while his co-stars decamped to Vienna, or Paris, or Rome. ‘That must have been hard for him.’
‘Well, I suppose.’ Brunswick had never thought about it. ‘But this year, you see, he was in luck again.’
‘You mean, someone else had a convenient accident?’
‘Exactly. And yet again our local boy came to the rescue!’ Brunswick sounded quite moved. He was a sucker for a Cinderella story. Being dramatically plucked from obscurity (‘Who, me? To play the lead?’) was something he quite often secretly dreamed of for himself.
As the two men made their way to Hove along the busy Western Road, both were rightly focused on the job at hand. Images of the three bodies covered in blood, glass and milk were still fresh in their minds; and Twitten could hardly forget the dread words of Mrs Groynes: Perhaps he’ll kill again. So it was understandable that neither of them had yet cared to acknowledge how unusual this morning was – it being the first occasion since Twitten’s arrival in Brighton that they had actually worked a case together.
They were friendly enough at work, of course: Twitten had loyally visited Brunswick in hospital when he was shot in the leg (both times); Brunswick had occasionally patted him on the shoulder and said ‘Well done, son.’ But after two months as close colleagues, they scarcely knew each other. Brunswick’s auntie Violet had encouraged him to invite Twitten home for supper one evening, but although he had agreed, he’d never intended to go through with it. In the end, his auntie stopped asking. A woman who spoke her mind, she upbraided her nephew for not extending a bit of hospitality to a friendless young man on his first posting away from home. ‘People were kind to you when you started out, weren’t they, Jimmy?’ she said, reprovingly. ‘You should do the same.’
There was irony in this. Brunswick had, in the past, often fondly pictured having a fresh young constable under his wing. In this fantasy, he and the grateful young shaver would go out after work for a pint of Watneys, and stay late, flirting with women. Perhaps they’d go and watch Brighton and Hove Albion on Saturday afternoons. The younger man would be of similar working-class background to Brunswick (perhaps also, like him, an orphan) and be intelligent but, crucially, not too intelligent. He’d have done his National Service. His name would be something simple, like Bob.
Sometimes, at his desk, Sergeant Brunswick still dreamed of this companionable fledgling PC – and then Peregrine Wilberforce Twitten would bounce into the office announcing that he’d uncovered something bally significant; something that had been under their noses all along – and the dream of Bob the Perfect Constable would crumble and drop to the floor, like ash.
‘We’ve never done this before, sir, have we?’ said Twitten, now, as they proceeded smartly in a westerly direction. ‘I mean, we’ve never been ordered to work together on an investigation. We’ve never pooled our brains, as it were.’
Brunswick shrugged. ‘Let’s hope it pays off.’
‘Between you and me, sir,’ Twitten lowered his voice, ‘I think the real reason the inspector suggested it was because he wanted to prevent your going pointlessly undercover again and wasting a lot of valuable time when you could be helping solve the crimes.’
‘Did you just say pointlessly, Twitten?’
‘Well, yes, sir.’ He was puzzled. Didn’t Brunswick know that his undercover exploits had never led to an arrest? ‘Ooh, and to prevent your getting pointlessly shot again, of course! Going undercover and getting shot, both to no good purpose – it seems to really annoy the inspector when you do either of those things.’
It hardly needs saying that PC Bob would never have said anything remotely as cutting as this.
‘Well, what I think, son,’ replied Brunswick, sharply, ‘is that the inspector didn’t want you jumping into the investigation feet-first as usual, involving the flaming press and resulting in people getting shot in the head in broad daylight.’
Twitten accepted the rebuke. People had indeed been publicly shot in the head the last time he tried to handle a case alone. In his defence, though, he’d involved the crime reporter from the Brighton Evening Argus precisely because Brunswick was nowhere to be seen, too busy posing as a trumpet player in a nightclub.
In an ideal world, Twitten would have liked to form a closer connection with Sergeant Brunswick, but – sad to say – he could never imagine them becoming friends. For one thing, Brunswick was simply far too emotional to be a good policeman; his moods flapped about between euphoria and despair. You never knew which version of him you would discover each morning – the one who avidly scanned the Police Gazette while humming to himself, or the one who sat mournfully at his desk with his head in his hands. Just last week, Mrs Groynes had offered the sergeant a piece of his favourite gala pie, and he’d asked, pathetically, ‘With a bit of hard-boiled egg in it?’ and she’d said, ‘Ooh, sorry, dear; but look, you can see the hole here where the bit of egg formerly was’ – at which he had nearly burst into tears. ‘That’s my life, Mrs G!’ Brunswick had exploded. ‘A hole where the bit of egg formerly was!’
Twitten suspected these extreme emotional states directly reflected the sergeant’s up-and-down success with women, but he didn’t inquire. Brunswick’s untamed libido was another obvious personality flaw, making him fall in love with everyone from the unattainable Maisie the buck-toothed beach-ball seller on the seafront to the equally unattainable (but for different reasons) Debbie Reynolds. Twitten didn’t object to the sergeant’s romantic inclinations per se, but he firmly believed that a policeman should be equable by nature. He should be calm and unflappable, like a flat lake. Sergeant Brunswick was, by contrast, a boiling tide with treacherous undercurrents.
However, the main stumbling block between them was that Brunswick was such an idiot in regard to Mrs Groynes. True, Twitten’s own position vis-à-vis Mrs G had become less of a torture to him as the weeks had passed. It was amazing what the human mind could get used to – on the one hand, knowing for a certainty that the charlady was a master criminal; on the other, accepting she had brilliantly stitched him up like a kipper so that no one would believe him.
Luckily, the whole issue had now died down. The inspector no longer tested him every morning on a scale of one-to-ten over the strength of his ‘delusion’ – and Twitten was glad. Mrs G had been right to warn him that the more he insisted ‘But the charlady is behind all the crimes, sir!’, the more it undermined his own credibility and made people cross.
Better to appear to let it go. In the long run, he would find a way to expose her, but at the moment she most certainly had the upper hand. She also had eyes and ears everywhere, not to mention loyal henchmen who – as she had memorably described it – would slit your gizzard as soon as look at you.
And yet, despite the highly mature way Twitten was coping with his predicament, there was one thing that still drove him to despair, which was observing how easily Brunswick was manipulated. How could any policeman be so blind?
‘Tell me about these rounds of yours, then, son. Who was this Mr Shapiro you mentioned to the inspector?’
Twitten was surprised by the question, but happy to answer it. They had quite a long walk ahead.
‘Mr Shapiro is the manager of the new milk bar, sir. He previously worked in Hastings at a similar establishment. He brought his wife and daughter here to help, uprooting them from friends and family, and they’re all fearfully upset by the unwanted attention.’
‘And you learned all this on your rounds?’
‘Yes, sir. I know you don’t approve, but you see, people do tell you such useful things if you ask them. All this so-called opposition to the new business – Mr Shapiro is baffled by it. He hasn’t been able to identify a single person who feels strongly. Ooh, we’re here, sir.’
They stopped. Evidently Miss Inman lived above a barber’s shop – and not just any barber’s, either. It was Rodolfo’s. Realising this, Brunswick tapped on the window and gave the barber a friendly wave. Rodolfo signalled at him with scissors to come in for a trim; Brunswick mimed – pointing to Twitten – that he couldn’t, he was out on business. It was true the sergeant liked to have his hair cut as often as possible – but in all honesty, he was sick of hearing Rodolfo complaining about being snubbed by that Barber of the Year competition. Also (could this really be the case?) he’d last had it cut less than twenty-four hours ago, before setting off to the stadium to meet Barbara.
What Twitten and Brunswick saw when they walked into Officer Andy’s room was a game-changer, to say the least.
Up to this point, Twitten would gladly have averred that Officer Andy was by far the least interesting of the three milk-bottle murder victims. Compared with a paranoid would-be beauty queen writing wild letters to the BBC and a waspish celebrity with thousands of enemies, this humble, well-liked AA patrolman was a pretty thin proposition.
But that was before Miss Inman said, sadly, ‘I suppose you ought to see this,’ and opened the door. ‘It began properly with the Middle Street Massacre,’ she said. ‘And then … it got worse.’
It had been a normal bedroom once. Now it was dark and musty and full of paper: the walls were hung with overlapping charts and pictures, all annotated by a frenzied hand; the bed, with its tired, threadbare candlewick bedspread, was stacked with thick scrapbooks, bursting with yellowing newsprint.
Miss Inman switched the light on. Large format black-and-white photographs were piled on the cluttered dressing table alongside an open diary covered in spidery handwriting. On every surface were rusting pairs of scissors and hardening pots of glue, plus binoculars, cameras and notebooks. The person who had lived in this room was obsessional, clearly – obsessional to the point of madness. And the subject didn’t take a genius to discover.
‘That’s Terence Chambers, sir,’ said Twitten, pointing at one of the walls.
‘Those photographs are all of Chambers and his gang,’ said Miss Inman. By her tone, you could tell only that she’d become inured to her brother’s unsavoury hobby. ‘Chambers was his special interest. On his days off Andy used to go up to London and follow him about, taking photographs.’
‘Really?’ said Brunswick. ‘That’s insane.’
‘My brother had his camera taken away from him and smashed against a wall more than once. He found it exciting.’
‘Crikey,’ exclaimed Twitten. ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself killed!’ And then he realised that, since Andy had got himself killed, this wasn’t perhaps the most intelligent remark he could have made.
‘Look at this, Twitten,’ said Brunswick. With an effort, he was sorting through the heavy scrapbooks. ‘He seems to have filled three of these on the flaming Middle Street Massacre alone.’ He made a stack, and reached for more. ‘Here’s one on that Kennington Butcher of yours; this one’s the Brighton Trunk Murders.’ He put his hands to his face; it was all a bit overwhelming. There were fifteen more scrapbooks, at least.
‘What’s this one?’ Twitten asked Miss Inman. It was marked merely ‘Diana’. Opening it at random, he found pictures of schoolgirls – judging by the uniform, they were pupils at the famous Lady Laura Laridae on the cliffs. He was unfamiliar with the story. The cuttings – all from seven years ago – referred to a death plummet.
‘Andy knew that schoolgirl Diana who died,’ Miss Inman explained. ‘He was furious that you police never got to the bottom of it.’
‘This all happened before my time, I’m afraid,’ said Twitten.
‘That’s no excuse,’ she snapped back, with feeling. Her older-sister attitude to Officer Andy’s appalling true-crime fixation was evidently not clear-cut. Now that he was dead, it was her instinct to defend it.
‘Look,’ she said, as if reading Twitten’s mind. ‘Of course I wished he would take up a nicer hobby like birdwatching. He was a lovely pianist years ago, you know – he could have done more with that. But I did think he was right to be upset about that girl.’ She opened the scrapbook and showed Twitten a picture. ‘These were her little friends. Andy always believed one of them had done it, had pushed her.’ She flipped some pages. ‘He’s been keeping tabs on them all ever since. He told me he’d been planning to talk to one of them this weekend, but now …’ For the first time, Miss Inman sounded emotional.
Twitten gently took the scrapbook from her, opening it at random, and turning the pages. Pictures showed a girl whose name was given as Parvati Kapoor transform, over time, from gawky schoolgirl in school uniform and spectacles to a smart young woman photographed at home with society friends in Bombay. There was also a girl called Wanda Grey, now married to a Conservative MP with a West Country constituency. Twitten was certainly impressed by Officer Andy’s thoroughness (where did he find this stuff?), but otherwise not particularly interested in the girls themselves. Until he opened the page for Pandora Holden.
‘Crikey, sir, I think I know this girl,’ he said. ‘I met a Pandora Holden in Norfolk four years ago.’
‘Let me look,’ said Brunswick, mildly curious. Then he turned a page, and looked at Twitten in disbelief. ‘This is the flaming Milk Girl, Twitten! Are you saying you know her?’
He showed Twitten a double-page spread of glued-in milk advertisements, all featuring the fresh-faced Pandora smiling next to a glass of milk, or taking milk from the refrigerator, or pouring a foot-long stream of milk from a bottle into a blue-and-white striped jug.
Twitten was astounded. ‘It is her. She looked very different when I knew her, sir. Her hair was in plaits. I’ve seen pictures of this girl everywhere, and it never occurred to me that she was Miss Holden.’
Brunswick was about to put the scrapbook down, but something made him turn a few more pages. And then a shiver of excitement went through him.
‘Twitten, look.’ He indicated a picture of a stunning, shapely woman in an expensive French swimsuit. She had luxuriant black arched eyebrows. ‘That’s June Jackson, the girl who wins all the beauty contests.’
‘What? The one who was always being accused by Barbara Ashley?’
‘The very one. And this picture was taken outside the Regent Ballroom by Officer Andy just last week, look.’
‘How do you know it was last week, sir?’
Brunswick shrugged and pointed. ‘You can tell by the film poster.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Look. That’s The Sweet Smell of Success.’
‘But how …?’
‘That was only on for a week. Blimey, don’t tell me you didn’t go to see it?’
Twitten grimaced. ‘Of course I didn’t, sir.’
‘Well, you missed a good one,’ said Brunswick. ‘It’s a flaming masterpiece. Burt Lancaster as you’ve never seen him before! But the point is: this week they’ve got Beau James. So this was definitely taken last week.’
‘Gosh, that’s very clever, sir. So what this picture proves is that Andy Inman did have a connection to the beauty contests and their possible rigging!’
‘It looks like it, yes.’
Twitten turned to Andy’s sister. ‘Miss Inman, do you know which of these girls Officer Andy was hoping to talk to this weekend?’
‘I’m sorry, no. But I suppose if the beauty queen one has been here a few days already, it must have been the Milk one.’
‘She’s appearing later at that final, Twitten. She might be in danger!’
The look of joint excitement that passed between Twitten and Brunswick made this a special moment indeed, which was only enhanced when Twitten took a proper look at the picture and said, ‘Those eyebrows really are a travesty of nature, sir; Miss Ashley might have been on to something.’ And Brunswick, clapping the constable on the back, said, ‘Thank you. I agree.’