Eight
Sunday
When Twitten woke on Sunday morning, the first thing he saw – on the little dressing table in Mrs Thorpe’s top-floor room – was the scrapbook pertaining to the death of Diana.
At first, he couldn’t think what it was; then he couldn’t remember why he’d brought it home. But as his thoughts began to clear he recollected the plan he’d made with Pandora Holden after the Dairy Maid Miss contest (inevitable winner: June Jackson, who had been resolutely unhelpful regarding police inquiries) to meet her today, and show her the pictures Officer Andy had taken of the Black Sheep Society all those years ago – namely, the athletic June, the absent-minded and untidy Diana, the brilliant Parvati, the tomboyish Wanda and the beautiful Pandora.
Judging by the level of daylight visible through the crack in the drawn curtains, it was still early, and he made no immediate move to get up, or even to check the hour. The interlude between sleep and waking was usually a very productive one for Twitten’s clever-clogs brain, and he had learned to wait and let his mind wander before jumping out of bed. Lying here with his mind unfocused, he had found that puzzles tended to resolve themselves, and buried questions rise to the surface. This morning several images and memories were competing for precedence: a small golden terrier dog bolting up a staircase; a dying AA man lying on his back in some grass, feebly singing a music-hall song; a girl in a nightdress toppling backwards off a cliff edge into darkness; and a woman hitting her husband on the head with a frying pan, while Mrs Groynes stood beside her, explaining the significance of the choice of weapon. But just as these visions were happily commingling, and pressing towards an idea, he remembered that an as-yet-unidentified girl had been trampled to death by cows the previous afternoon, and he woke up properly, with a jolt.
Once dressed, he submitted to breakfast, but only to be polite. The wonderful Mrs Thorpe had insisted on getting up to supervise the making of it by Mrs Browning, the ever-reliable daily help.
‘So I expect you’re investigating these horrible murders, Constable?’ Mrs Thorpe said, pouring tea into a finely decorated bone-china cup. They were sitting at a table in the sunny bay window, with its view across rooftops to the sea. Church bells were ringing. From this elevated position, the town of Brighton looked a lot more contained and manageable than it really was. You wouldn’t imagine, for example, that young women could be trampled to death by herds of cattle down there.
‘I bally well am, yes, Mrs Thorpe. Oh, thank you, that’s lovely.’
‘And what about this poor girl killed by the cows?’
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing to go on there. Apparently a street urchin was seen running off with her handbag in the melee, and as for identifying her by sight …’ He trailed off, and pulled a face. ‘We’ll just have to wait for someone to come forward. She’s sure to be missed by someone. I expect on Monday her employer will start asking questions, if nothing else.’
Mrs Thorpe shook her head sorrowfully, then decided to stop thinking about this disagreeable subject. She picked up a napkin, flapped it and placed it on her lap.
‘But you’re making good progress with the murder investigation?’
‘Gosh, I wish I knew. With three victims, it’s quite hard to know where to start. I had an initial theory concerning beauty contests, but unfortunately it didn’t stand up to scrutiny.’
‘It’s the use of milk bottles that I don’t understand,’ she said.
Twitten made a rude scoffing noise, a bit like a snort. ‘Join the bally club!’ he exclaimed.
‘I said to Mrs Browning – milk bottles?’
‘I know. For a start, you’d have to carry them about and they’re heavy. Also, they’re very difficult to wield. They don’t even smash easily. But I’m convinced the choice of weapon is significant, Mrs Thorpe. I heard a theory at the station that made a lot of sense. The milk bottle as weapon may speak volumes about who the murderer is.’
Mrs Thorpe looked puzzled, as well she might. ‘You mean he’s a milkman?’
‘Oh. No. No, I don’t mean that.’
‘Everyone’s saying it’s a milkman, Constable.’
‘Are they really?’
‘Of course. It stands to reason.’
‘Gosh, how simple-minded of them. No, I mean that by choosing such a prosaic, everyday object, the killer is unconsciously telling us that he’s a person of negligible status. So not a criminal, or even a person – for example – in the business of rigging beauty contests for fraudulent personal gain.’
‘Well, to be honest, we hadn’t been thinking along those lines, but if the murderer does turn out just to be a bally milkman, Mrs Thorpe, we’re going to look frightfully silly for not having rounded up all the milkmen to begin with.’
Twitten drank some tea. He was rather proud of the way he had referred – in vague terms – to a theory at the station, thus sidestepping the issue of Mrs Groynes being cleverer than him in matters of ratiocination. Sadly, however, the ploy hadn’t worked.
‘Was it your lovely Sergeant Brunswick who thought of that? The low status idea? He’s so clever, isn’t he? It was fascinating watching him work when he came to the house after poor Mr Braithwaite was killed. He learned so much of value in such a short time. I was literally agog with admiration.’
Twitten wasn’t sure whether to laugh. Was she serious, saying such things about Brunswick? ‘Er, no,’ he replied cautiously. ‘No, it wasn’t the sergeant.’ He was willing to believe Brunswick had impressed Mrs Thorpe with his detective abilities, but where had ‘lovely’ come from?
‘The inspector, then?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Was it the inspector who said the clever thing about milk bottles?’
‘Oh. No. It wasn’t him either.’ Twitten wished he’d never started this. Mrs Thorpe was like a dog with a bone.
She frowned. She was mentally calculating. Because if it wasn’t the sergeant or the inspector, who else could it have been?
‘Then who—?’
‘It’s just one of those theories that seem to bubble up communally, I suppose. Who can say where it came from? I believe the great psychologist Carl Jung talked about a collective unconscious, although I don’t suppose he meant it to be applied to solving murders, but – oh, thank goodness, here’s Mrs Browning with my delicious bacon and eggs!’
While Mrs Browning delivered Twitten’s beautifully cooked breakfast to the table, Mrs Thorpe poured tea for herself and added a slice of lemon, using special tiny tongs. Twitten really had fallen on his feet, getting digs here. In terms of service, it was better than the Metropole. Mrs Browning even came in on Sundays! On the other hand, it was becoming obvious that the inquisitive Mrs Thorpe expected to be kept in the loop in some way, and refused to be fobbed off. Was he a disappointment to her? Thinking about it, he supposed that for the past few years she had sat at breakfast with such glittering theatrical gossips as John Gielgud and Hermione Gingold. Having a tight-lipped police constable as her only guest must be a terrible comedown.
‘Constable Twitten, there’s something I need to ask you. Why didn’t you mention the murders to me yesterday morning? You must already have known about them.’
Luckily, Twitten could answer this with perfect honesty. ‘I did know by then, yes, Mrs Thorpe. Perhaps I misjudged the situation, but I was hoping to save your feelings, given – well, you know, given what happened to Mr Braithwaite.’ He waved a hand at the walls of the newly repurposed breakfast room, which, just six weeks ago, had been covered in the bright arterial blood of a slaughtered playwright. ‘I thought, if there’s anyone I know who’d prefer not to think about one person slashing at another with murderous intent, and blood spurting all over the place, it’s my wonderful landlady Mrs Thorpe.’
She smiled at the epithet ‘wonderful’, and magnanimously changed the subject. ‘What’s this? May I look?’ she said, pointing to the scrapbook. ‘Who’s Diana?’
So Twitten – making a mental note never to bring evidence to breakfast again – handed the scrapbook to her, and without neglecting his excellent eggs and bacon, told her about Officer Andy and his obsessive private research into true crimes.
‘Imagine being so fascinated by murder,’ Mrs Thorpe shuddered, turning the pages. ‘But I remember this story of the schoolgirl on the cliff. I read everything I could about it.’
‘Did you? Why?’
‘It was because everyone said she was such a clueless little thing. They kept saying she might have just fallen off, you see, and not been pushed. It made me think of those jolly hockey-sticks school stories – you know, Muriel Finds Her Spunk, that kind of thing. There are bold girls who ride ponies and rescue people from wells and win at lacrosse to save the school, and then there’s always one who doesn’t quite keep up, and gets caught in the chapel after lights out. Diana was that sort.’
‘I haven’t read many girls’ school stories, I’m afraid.’
‘But you must have heard some of Cedric Carbody’s funny skits on the wireless?’
‘Not really. People keep mentioning them.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter. But when I heard what the dead girl had been like, it struck a chord with me. I was much more the Diana type than anything else.’ She lowered her voice, and raised an eyebrow. ‘I was a very late bloomer, in fact, but I made up for it!’
She drank some tea. Twitten had finished eating.
‘I’m afraid I have to go now,’ he said.
Mrs Thorpe closed the scrapbook, but then opened it again. Something had caught her eye. ‘This one’s interesting,’ she said, pointing at a glued-in photograph.
‘What’s that?’ He rose and joined her, looking at the book over her shoulder. The picture showed children sitting side by side in a row of deck-chairs, with more rows behind. It was a bit fuzzy, but Twitten could clearly see the eleven-year-old Pandora there, laughing with friends.
‘It’s the children’s playground,’ said Mrs Thorpe. ‘And look, isn’t that Cedric Carbody sitting right behind the girls? The photograph must have been taken from the stage.’
Mrs Browning came in to collect Twitten’s plate. Mrs Thorpe called her over. ‘Mrs Browning, we’re just looking at these old photographs of Brighton taken by Officer Andy, and this one caught my eye. I think it must be taken at the children’s playground. Would you know?’
Mrs Browning was startled to be addressed out of the blue. ‘Who, me, madam? You want me to …?’ she said, glancing at the door as if planning an escape.
‘Yes. Come and take a look, if you would.’
‘Ooh, well.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, madam, I could take a quick butcher’s, I suppose.’ With a show of reluctance, she joined them, wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the scrapbook. But when she held it up close to her face, her manner softened. Mrs Browning was evidently a very sentimental person, as well as short-sighted, and a bit of a cockney. (Butcher’s hook = look.)
‘Well, I call that proper lovely, madam,’ she said at last, putting it down, sniffing loudly and producing a hankie from a pocket in her apron.
‘We didn’t mean to upset you, Mrs B,’ said Twitten.
‘No, I’m all right, dear. It’s just such a lovely picture, that’s all. All them talented boys and girls waiting to go up and give their all. Proper lovely, that is. Takes me right back.’
She started to clear the dishes away; Twitten stopped her. ‘But where’s the picture taken from?’ he asked. ‘Mrs Thorpe says from the stage, but how could Officer Andy have got up there to take it?’
‘Well, Andy played the old Joanna for them, didn’t you know?’ (Old Joanna = piano.)
‘Did he?’
‘Ooh, he done it for years and years. And every boy and girl who sung a song or danced a dance, he knew them all! Not their names always; but he knew what they liked to sing. The man they called Uncle Jack stood at the side, conducting the audience with his cane, and Andy done the watchercallit … the accompany-ner-ment.’
‘Accompaniment?’ said Twitten.
Mrs Browning decided to rephrase. ‘He done the old Joanna. Sometimes he’d start playing the kiddies’ songs before they even got on the stage, he was so sure what they’d ask for!’ She got the hankie out again. ‘And now he’s gorn!’ she wailed. ‘He’s pushing up the daisies, ain’t he?’
‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Browning. Not literally yet, but certainly metaphorically. My breakfast was delicious, by the way.’
After his life-threatening ordeal outside the Pavilion on Saturday afternoon, you might suppose that young Carlo would come to his senses – at least to the extent of not putting himself in the way of dangerous criminals for the next decade or so.
Sadly, however, the incident of the gun-in-the-ribs merely strengthened his resolve. By the time he’d returned home on Saturday, he had acquired a firearm from a man in a pub near the railway station. It had cost him every penny he had. Coming home with it tucked into his waistband under his jacket, he seemed to see a policeman on every corner; and each time he spotted one, he consciously lengthened his stride, altered course, covered his face or turned his head away. It was a miracle that none of them apprehended him. Not since Richard Attenborough in the film of Brighton Rock had a young would-be felon looked so damp and bug-eyed with patent shiftiness.
‘Carlo, you’re not eating,’ said his father at breakfast on Sunday.
‘Let it go, Pa,’ Carlo warned. The gun was in a suitcase under his bed, along with the famous rejection letter signed by ‘Mrs P. Hoagland’ – the woman he intended to seek out tomorrow and shoot.
Rodolfo sighed. He remembered when Carlo was such a happy child, sweeping the floor of the shop with a broom that was too long for him, and earning tips from the customers for running errands to the bookmaker’s.
He had been such a nice boy before he learned to scowl.
At the House of Hanover Milk Bar on the seafront, the last preparations were being made for the grand opening. It was, clearly, commercially ridiculous to open a new business in August, just when the holiday season was nearing its end, but the manager Mr Shapiro had argued in vain on the subject. From the milk-marketing point of view, the grand opening in Brighton was part of a larger plan. After months of top-level debate at Dairy House in Mayfair, it had been decided that on Bank Holiday Monday the aggressive and unmelodic DRINKA PINTA MILKA DAY slogan would be unleashed on the world. So, on Monday afternoon, not only would the Milk Girl herself be present to open the new milk bar, and not only would there be a playful announcement of the winner of a Knickerbocker Glory competition, there would also be a ‘surprise’ visit from Mr Henderson’s immediate boss from London HQ to announce the end to old-fashioned apologetic milk marketing. And if there happened to be anyone present who might be upset by this PR surprise, his feelings of betrayal would be entirely his own affair.
Having opened new businesses before, on Sunday morning Mr Shapiro had every confidence that everything was on track. Hand-in-hand with his wife, he surveyed the old bathing pavilion from the outside and nodded to himself. Everything was ready. Some excellent staff had been hired for the following day; the shiny chrome refrigerators were all installed; the ice cream was chilled to perfection; the Italian coffee machine worked; the new chrome chairs and tables had been polished; the interior walls had been painted a fashionable pistachio colour; the large plate-glass window had been replaced after the regrettable vandalism incident; Inspector Steine had reportedly sampled every Knickerbocker Glory in town – twice – in advance of the grand announcement of the winner.
The only question hanging over the event was the advisability of having cows in attendance, now that they had stampeded in a public park and killed someone. This horrific incident was being played down as far as possible, of course, and no blame had been attached to either the cows or the farmer. (We should feel sorry for this man, incidentally. Bringing cows into the centre of Brighton was a stupid idea, and he had opposed it from the start.)
But back at the House of Hanover, all seemed well.
‘Well done, Dave, dear,’ Mrs Shapiro said. ‘It looks lovely, especially the green colour. I’d like that in the hall.’
‘Thank you, Jenny.’
‘I still think the name’s a bit much.’
‘What can I say, love? Out of my hands.’
‘But I’ll tell you what – I’ll be glad when tomorrow’s over.’
‘So will I!’ Shapiro produced the milk bar’s door-keys from his pocket. ‘May I treat you to coffee and a scoop, Mrs Shapiro?’
This had been their custom with other new businesses. On the day before the opening, they would go inside and ‘play at milk bars’ like children. So they went inside the House of Hanover, locking the door behind them.
‘You sit there, Dave. I’ll do it,’ said Mrs Shapiro, reaching for a fresh white apron and slipping behind the counter. She picked up a little dish and a couple of wafer biscuits. ‘Now, raspberry ripple or—?’ But then she stopped. ‘What’s this?’ she said.
‘What’s what?’
‘It says – oh, Dave! It says glass!’
Shapiro let out a cry of disbelief as he leaped up to join her behind the counter. And together they read the handwritten sign that had been left on top of the serving area:
WARNING! SOME OF THIS ICE CREAM CONTAINS BLEEDING GROUND GLASS, DEARS! DON’T EAT IT!
‘They’ve struck again, Jenny!’ Shapiro wailed. ‘But who? Who and why?’
In a small, steep street in Kemp Town, Graham Goodyear called ta-ta to his mother, quickly pulled shut the front door and set off downhill for the police station.
Since Friday he’d been aware that the police wanted to speak to him – presumably because of his connection to Barbara Ashley. He felt bad that they’d missed him: he was happy to help in any way he could. Graham was a polite, respectable and somewhat phlegmatic young man, with – surprisingly, given his talent – no burning show-business ambitions. All the rumours about his scattering peas on top steps, and burying rivals under hundredweights of starchy vegetables, were based on cynical popular supposition. Being the star of the Ice Circus for a month was something he personally could take or leave.
‘But it’s Sunday!’ his mum had protested, when he said he was reporting to the police station. She wanted to keep him at home, to tell him how brilliant he had been at replcing Buster Bond. Graham had flown around that ice rink; he had soared. If Buster Bond’s absence turned out to be permanent, Graham would have two more weeks of glory before returning to his regular job.
‘I was so proud!’ she kept saying, giving him little hugs. ‘My son, the star of the show!’
‘I know,’ he shrugged. ‘But it’s not worth getting carried away, Mum. Even if Bond’s gone for good, it’s only for a couple more weeks. Then things go back to normal.’
‘I thought being in the show was your dream, Graham? It said so in the paper.’
‘Yeah, but I told you before, Mum: I didn’t say that. What I actually told them was that skating’s harder work than portering! And the circus people are horrible! Those clowns are vile!’
‘I don’t believe it. Not the clowns?’
‘Well, they are! They kept kicking the dogs yesterday. I’ll be relieved to go back to work, Mum, I mean it. We have a really good laugh at the market.’
On his way to the police station, he tried to focus on Barbara. He wasn’t sure there was much he could say about her, except that she’d been a tough girl to spend time with. Going out with her hadn’t even been his idea. She had picked him out one day at the ice rink when they were both skating in an afternoon public session. ‘You’re brilliant, Graham Goodyear, you dark horse,’ she’d said, excited, out of breath, and falling (quasi-accidentally) into his arms. And the next thing he knew, she was calling him her boyfriend, and putting her arm through his, and suggesting trips to the pictures, and encouraging him to give up his humble day-job to seek fame and fortune on the ice.
It had certainly been a relief to split up from her. For one thing, it had seemed that nothing he did was good enough for her; for another, he hadn’t liked the way she quizzed him about his family background (‘But why did your father leave you both?’), which made him feel disloyal to his mum.
But worst of all was the way Barbara never missed an opportunity to talk back to people in authority – who were, incidentally, usually men. It was intolerable. Every time she did it – to ticket collectors, policemen, shopkeepers, beauty-contest judges – it made Graham cringe. Girls were supposed to smile and simper, weren’t they? If they felt insulted, they weren’t supposed to say.
The day ahead for Twitten looked rather busy. Before leaving Mrs Thorpe’s house, he reminded her that he would not be back that evening: he and Sergeant Brunswick would be keeping vigil at the new milk bar all night in advance of the opening.
‘Well, I’m glad you’ll have that brave and capable darling of a sergeant with you, Constable,’ she said, ‘in case anything does go wrong.’
‘Oh. Thank you,’ said Twitten, uncertainly. He had rather supposed that if anything ‘went wrong’, it was the magnet-for-bullets Sergeant Brunswick who’d be the one in need of protection. But how interesting to know that the sergeant was brave and capable now, as well as lovely and brilliant at detection and a darling. Was Mrs Thorpe actually in love with Sergeant Brunswick? Twitten genuinely hoped not, as it could not end well. Brunswick was not only younger than her, but attracted exclusively to brassy girls of nineteen.
Nevertheless, ‘I’ll definitely tell the sergeant you said so,’ Twitten promised, as he trotted down the front steps and opened the gate.
But he carried on thinking about what she’d said, because it had come as such a surprise. Truthfully, since his arrival in June, Twitten had given Sergeant Brunswick’s capabilities as a policeman very little consideration. It had been all too easy to dismiss the sergeant on a number of grounds, such as his aforementioned emotional instability, his obstinate blindness to the true nature of Mrs Groynes, his absurd over-confidence in his non-existent chameleon properties, and his consistent bad luck in getting shot in the leg.
And yet, after a day spent working closely with him, Twitten had to admit that those initial prejudices had now softened a little. Brunswick had many good qualities as a policeman. He was straightforward, and quick on the uptake, and (the best quality of all) he was driven by a proper desire to catch criminals. Also, there was something impressive about his lack of ego. Looking back, Twitten could remember several instances of the sergeant generously patting him on the shoulder and saying, ‘Well done, son.’ Where others might have taken umbrage at Twitten’s success, or tried to claim it for themselves, Brunswick had always given credit where credit was due.
So it was a shame that at this precise juncture, just as Twitten was entertaining such kind, warm thoughts about Sergeant Brunswick, he discovered the existence of the police canteen. He happened to be walking close to the anonymous building where it resided just as Sergeant Brunswick emerged from an unmarked side door, licking his lips and rubbing his hands, and chatting to a fellow police officer about the quality of the breakfast kippers.
Confused, Twitten instinctively hid in a convenient doorway, and listened.
‘You back in for lunch, Jim?’ said the other officer.
‘Roast beef day, are you kidding? Wouldn’t miss it.’
‘Might see you later, then.’
‘Yes. Cheerio.’
Twitten tried to take this in, but couldn’t. He felt oddly empty and weightless. There was a canteen? First no one told him about the pay parade, and now this?
He watched blankly as Brunswick crossed the road to the police station, where a man was waiting for him on the steps. Twitten needed to think about this, but at the same time the injury was so huge that he felt flattened by it. Looking up at the building, he realised that (faintly) he could hear plates being stacked, and cutlery being used. Faintly, he could hear men laughing and a wireless playing dance-band music. Faintly, he could smell bacon. I have been here for nearly two months and Sergeant Brunswick never thought to tell me there’s a canteen?
‘Constable Twitten?’ said a voice behind him. He turned to find Ben Oliver there – the youthful crime correspondent of the Argus. Oliver smiled and indicated the door. ‘Just off to your publicly subsidised breakfast, or on your way back?’
‘Oh.’ Twitten sighed and shook his head. ‘Neither, actually.’ He looked ruefully up at the building, but could say no more about it. Even Ben Oliver knew about this bally canteen. I suppose everyone does. ‘No, I was just standing here … thinking about something.’
‘Are you all right?’
Twitten took a deep breath. ‘Of course. Yes.’
‘Fancy a cup of tea?’
‘I’d bally love one. With five spoons of sugar, if possible.’
Oliver smiled, but didn’t press for an explanation. ‘Let’s go in there,’ he said, pointing to a tea shop. ‘It’s the only place that opens this early on a Sunday.’ Then he patted his pocket and said, ‘It’s on the Argus.’
Once they’d sat at a corner table and given their order, Twitten decided to put the canteen out of his mind, especially when Oliver produced his notebook and said, ‘So I was on my way to see you, obviously. I’ve tried to telephone half a dozen times since the events of Friday.’
This was news to Twitten. ‘Well, we were out and about all day yesterday, of course, trying to piece things together.’
‘And what have you got?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you.’
Like all reporters, Oliver barely acknowledged the rebuff. His pen was still poised over his notebook. ‘Look, Constable. I might have something for you. Are you aware that Barbara Ashley was accusing people of rigging the beauty contests?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Twitten. ‘She was obsessed, apparently. You must have talked to her parents.’
‘I have. And I’ve been doing a bit of digging, and I think she might have been on to something. There’s a man called Tony Sayle I’m trying to track down. Barbara Ashley seems to have threatened him, and there’s a link to Carbody because Sayle was his agent – what’s wrong?’
Twitten was pulling a face. This was difficult for him. He was under no obligation to help Oliver; also, strictly speaking, he ought not to share information with him. But on the other hand, he hated to see an intelligent person waste his time.
‘Look. I really don’t think the murders have anything to do with the beauty contests.’
‘Right. Can I quote you on that?’
‘Of course not!’
The tea arrived at this point, and Twitten gratefully poured it without waiting. Half of his mind was here with Oliver, being discreet about the progress of police inquiries; the other half was upstairs in that building across the road from the police station, where, in a parallel reality, he’d be waving hello to fellow officers, loading a tray with subsidised food, and being mothered, embarrassingly, by a kindly working-class woman at the till, with her hair tied up in a scarf. The works canteen was a boon to every job! It was a haven! Not knowing about it all this time had seriously impoverished his experience of working for the Brighton Police!
But the hardest part of all this was not, of course, the missed plate-loads of liver-and-onions; the missed gallons of sugary tea with little grease bubbles floating on the top. It was the stark realisation that Brunswick simply didn’t like him.
‘Twitten?’
‘Sorry. What were we saying?’
‘Look, OK, off the record, Constable, friend to friend, could you give me something? You know I can help. For example, what’s that book there?’ The reporter indicated the Diana scrapbook that Twitten had set down on the spare chair at their table.
Twitten hesitated. Was Oliver truly his friend?
‘Would you mind putting your notebook away? It makes me nervous.’
‘Of course.’ Oliver made a show of putting the notebook on the floor, while squinting sideways at the labelled scrapbook. ‘So,’ he said, eyes bright. ‘Tell me about Diana.’
Back at the station, the person who’d accosted Sergeant Brunswick outside on the steps turned out to be Rodolfo. He was in an anxious state about his son.
‘It’s this barbering contest, Sergeant.’
Brunswick moaned. ‘Oh, not that again, Rodolfo. Flaming let it go, please.’
‘I sometimes wish I’d never heard of it!’
‘Blimey, so do I, I assure you.’
‘But I’m worried about what Carlo might do!’
Brunswick didn’t have time for this. There were bigger things going on in Brighton right now. Not only were there three murders to solve, but he’d just had a message that the House of Hanover Milk Bar had been targeted yet again by saboteurs, and that Graham Goodyear was waiting inside to be interviewed. On top of which, it was pretty hard to tear one’s thoughts away from the as-yet-unknown woman who’d died yesterday by bovine misadventure. How could something like that happen? His auntie Violet had said she would never drink milk again! ‘They said her own mother wouldn’t know her after those cows had finished with her!’ she’d gasped. Against such a background, the rights and wrongs of the admissions procedure to a barbering contest at the Pavilion did not come high on Brunswick’s list of priorities.
However, he had always liked Rodolfo, and had noticed – with sadness – the recent, unmissable signs that Carlo was turning into a right little sod.
‘Rodolfo, you know what I think about this flaming contest. You lot are all taking it much too seriously.’
The barber wrinkled his nose. ‘My lot? What do you mean, my lot?’
‘You barbers! I asked around, and do you know what? There’s not a single Brighton barber who got in. Rejection letters all round.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. So you shouldn’t go taking it personally. Do you see? The whole thing is probably a flaming put-up job.’
‘Look, please. I don’t expect you to do much, Sergeant Brunswick.’
‘That’s just as well.’
‘But couldn’t you find the organisers and warn them? Isn’t that your duty?’
Brunswick sighed. Once the D-word had been invoked, he knew he couldn’t refuse.
‘All right,’ he said, grudgingly reaching for his notebook in an inside pocket. ‘Have you got a name?’
‘Yes.’ Gratefully, Rodolfo handed over the original advertisement for the competition. ‘There,’ he said, pointing. ‘Mrs P. Hoagland.’
‘Hoagland?’ Brunswick repeated. One of the men who’d been killed at the railway station in July had been called Hoagland. But that was presumably a coincidence.
‘All right, Rodolfo,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me.’
Oliver left the tea shop first, leaving Twitten to sit alone for a moment.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ the reporter had said, as he was leaving. But Twitten had bravely waved the question away, because ‘all right’ he certainly wasn’t.
There are many people who say in such circumstances that they can’t find the right words to express their feelings. However, being lost for words was rarely a predicament in which Twitten found himself. At this moment, he knew precisely the term for how terrible he was feeling: it came from the Greek, and it was anagnorisis. He was experiencing a moment of painful clarity – as when Oedipus realises in a ghastly flash that, thanks to his own arrogance, he has killed his father, married his mother, and generally pushed his luck.
‘Look, as it happens, I can get hold of the old headmistress from Lady Laura Laridae,’ Oliver had continued. It was just this youthful enthusiasm and energy that always beguiled Twitten, and won his trust. ‘She sometimes sets crosswords for us. Brenda Stoater, her name is. She sets them under the name Mustella, which is Latin for “stoat”. I think she left the school after the Diana incident.’
He waited for Twitten to say something, such as ‘That’s interesting’, or ‘Thank you’. But he didn’t say anything at all.
‘So-o-o,’ Oliver resumed, ‘if you can quiz Pandora Holden this afternoon, we could meet tonight, maybe, and compare notes? Oh, and I know the retired reporter who worked on this Diana story at the time. He might be able to help. He lives quite near here, so I’ll go and see him first.’
He paused – again, to no purpose. ‘But I notice you’re not saying anything. Look, I don’t want to intrude, Constable, but has your cat died?’
Twitten made an effort. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Oliver. It’s nothing, really. I mean, apart from being anxious that I’ve told you too much. But at the same time …’ His voice trailed off. He had lost his thread.
‘At the same time, you want to catch this murderer, Constable!’
‘Well, yes. Exactly.’ Twitten smiled, and took a deep breath. ‘If it’s the last thing I do as a bally policeman, I want that. I want that very much.’
Left alone, he poured another cup of tea from the pot, but it was stewed and disgusting, so he pushed it away and stared glumly out of the window, considering his position. Should he leave the force at once, perhaps? Walk out today and never look back?
It was awful. He wanted to weep. For most of his life, Twitten had known, deep down, that he wanted to be a policeman – so much so, that he had made the decision to defy his academic destiny. But look at him now. Sitting in a tawdry tea shop in Brighton, unable to solve a brutal trio of murders, being steamrollered by an ambitious crime reporter, and feeling sorry for himself because, basically, the other boys didn’t like him. If he’d gone in for anthropology instead, he wouldn’t be feeling like this. In academia, his clever-clogs brain would have been regarded as an asset, not a source of annoyance. But the biggest difference – which had never struck him before – was that, in academia, he’d be in the right place, and therefore he would have made friends.
While he was thus miserably sitting and thinking, Twitten finally noticed that opposite the tea shop, leaning against a wall, was a boy of secondary-school age, reading the Beezer. He looked familiar. Thinking about it, Twitten realised he had seen this boy before – many times – but always in exactly this pose: just leaning and reading, leaning and reading. This was quite suspicious, and Twitten would have gone out to question the boy about it immediately had he not noticed Ben Oliver’s notebook, still on the floor. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
‘More tea, Constable?’ asked the tea-shop proprietor. ‘Only I’ll have to start charging rent. Not that it isn’t nice having you. We don’t get many of your lot in here, on account of that famously cheap and filling and warm and welcoming police canteen of yours.’
‘Hah!’ said Twitten. ‘I can imagine.’ And he started to get up. But then something caught his eye and he paused.
‘What is it, dear?’ said the woman. ‘What are we looking at?’
On the opposite side of the street, something was happening. The boy with the comic had looked up as a woman approached him. Then he’d broken into a grin and produced a large battered envelope from down the back of his shorts. The woman took it, and put it in her handbag. Then she patted the boy on the shoulder, and handed him a paper bag containing a quarter-pound of sweets. The woman was Mrs Groynes.
‘That kid’s always round here,’ said the tea-shop proprietress, as the parties walked off in different directions while she piled teapot, cups and saucers on to a Coronation tea tray. ‘He doesn’t do any harm. Ooh, but come again, dear!’ she called after Twitten. ‘And tell all your policeman friends!’
Outside, he stood on the corner and opened Oliver’s notebook. A few days afterwards, when he asked himself why he’d done that, the honest answer was that he merely wanted to see if he could decipher the shorthand. But once he’d understood the line of inquiry that Oliver had been working on, he was so shocked that his feelings of self-pity were at last displaced.
‘Crikey,’ he said to himself. Ben Oliver was clearly planning to denounce Inspector Steine, and traduce the proud achievement of the Middle Street Massacre!
Twitten flipped through the pages in horrified silence. In this notebook Oliver had jotted down (apparently in the dark) key lines from the famous film; on other pages he’d recorded his interviews with a source at Scotland Yard – a source who was far from flattering about Inspector Steine’s famous policing coup. Twitten had never seen the word ‘flukey’ written in shorthand before, and it took him a while to work it out – which was just as well, as the source called Inspector Steine ‘flukey’ several times. Oliver had also spoken to a Fleet Street reporter working on a book about the massacre and its consequences, in which the angry offspring of murdered gang members were coming forward to claim that the whole débâcle had been engineered by the leader of a third gang, possibly with the collusion of a corrupt police force! Oliver had circled the word ‘débâcle’ and placed a tick beside it. Evidently it had struck a chord with him.
Twitten darted back into the tea shop, and replaced the notebook on the floor without being observed. Oliver was bound to come back for it. And then Twitten stood outside again, feeling lost and bereft, and a bit panicky. Should he go to the police station and confront Sergeant Brunswick with his canteen grievance, or should he run at once to Inspector Steine’s house and inform him what was brewing at the Argus? Should he follow Mrs Groynes and demand to know what she had received from the child with the Beezer? Or should he just run away to France?
He looked down at the Diana scrapbook in his hand and made up his mind. He would visit Pandora Holden at midday, as planned, but do nothing else besides wander through the town. In every other option, people would argue with him, or not want to hear what he said. Brunswick would bluster lame excuses; Steine would refuse to listen, putting his hands over his ears; Mrs Groynes would tell him to mind his own business. But Pandora would call him Peregrine, and right now that counted for a lot.