It was a blazing day in July. The threepenny deck-chairs on Brighton seafront were in high demand; ice cream was melting fast; the aroma of cockles in vinegar wafted on the breeze, mixed with the distinctive smell of unprotected human flesh being slowly and painfully cooked on the bone. What a day to be at the seaside! If you closed your eyes, you could faintly hear – beyond the fluttering of the overhead bunting – a romantic medley from The King and I played by the brass band of the Grenadier Guards. Holiday-making parents watched proudly from their deck-chairs on the shingle as their pasty, knobbly offspring cavorted in ill-fitting swimsuits under the scorching sun. If they considered the issue of infant catastrophic sunburn at all, it was only to make a (small) mental note to buy calamine lotion before the end of the day.
‘You look like a ruddy lobster, Charlie!’ mothers called, cheerfully. ‘I shall have to pop into Timothy White’s, the way you’re going!’
Or, ‘You mark my words, Dawn! You’ll bleeding well suffer tonight!’
This being 1957, of course, attitudes to tanning were not sophisticated. You exposed pale city skin to solar rays for the first time in twelve months; some of it went a nice colour while some of it burned; the burned stuff could ultimately be peeled off by a skilled relative, with the larger sheets preserved for a while as souvenir curiosities. As for sunstroke, the same blithe unconcern applied. A child screaming and delirious in the night was just the price you paid for a day at the seaside, like Nan breaking her last molar on a stick of rock, or having to beat your carpets outdoors for the next fortnight to get rid of all the sand.
Along the Prom, two young women immaculately dressed like flying-boat hostesses – in white high heels, buttoned blue jackets, mid-calf skirts and smart little brimless hats – smiled regally at the tourists as they walked.
‘Good morning,’ they said, in a general kind of greeting. ‘What a lovely morning! Welcome to Brighton. Good morning. Good morning. What a charming day!’
‘Cor!’ was the main response, and rightly so. These two elegant figures represented a body known as the Brighton Belles, attractive women hired by the council to make themselves useful to tourists during the summer.
‘Enquire of a Brighton Belle!’ ran the slogan on the posters on the wall outside the station, on hoardings and even on the sides of the buses. No one arriving in Brighton could miss the advertising, which depicted nicely dressed holiday-makers (small children holding multi-coloured beachballs aloft, mothers in headscarves and fathers in hats), all with happy cartoon question marks over their heads as they approached the blue-suited beauties.
Whatever you want to know,
Wherever you want to go,
Enquire of a Brighton Belle!
Incidentally, it had taken a small committee of men in suits around two hours to come up with that slogan. It was the grammar that worried them. Did you enquire of? Or enquire from? Opinion was divided equally, and there was an awkward impasse until the young clerk employed to take the minutes piped up unexpectedly that he couldn’t listen to this any longer, and that ‘enquire from’ was technically illiterate, so at last they had their answer.
But the members of the committee were not embarrassed. They were pleased to have undertaken such a lengthy deliberation in the public interest. At this time in Brighton’s iffy town-planning history, when great swathes of venerable Regency architecture were being demolished on a say-so to oblige the interests of dodgy developers, it was important that other matters municipal should appear to be above board.
Anyway, the slogan worked. Whatever they wanted to know and wherever they wanted to go, holiday-makers did enquire of a Brighton Belle. The whole scheme was a massive success. People asked the Belles everything they could think of: the quickest way to the station, how many pebbles were on the beach, which horse to back in the three-forty-five at Doncaster, where was the nearest place to spend a penny, how to tell the difference between heat rash and smallpox, and (most frequently) what time they got off work, and did they favour a Babycham, ‘the genuine champagne perry’?
It wasn’t easy to become a Brighton Belle: the prerequisites eliminated 99 per cent of the female population at a stroke. You had to be tall, shapely and fair of face, with excellent posture; also well-spoken, courteous, blind to class difference and fluent in at least three foreign languages. You must be helpful and kind – and a total pro at brushing off sexual advances without causing offence. Basically, you had to be Grace Kelly, only without the recent romantic attachment to a member of the House of Grimaldi (because you also had to be single).
And sometimes you didn’t even wait to be enquired of.
‘Good morning, madam, I see you’ve written some postcards!’ said one of the Brighton Belles now, stopping to speak to a slightly startled pensioner, seated in a blue-and-white-striped deck-chair. ‘I can post those for you if you like.’
The pensioner – a Mrs Tucker from Bow in East London, wearing a warm coat with a fur collar despite the temperature – instinctively gripped her postcards tightly. She couldn’t imagine why this uniformed glamour-puss with the cut-glass accent was bending over her with white-gloved hand outstretched.
‘Mavis?’ she said, uncertainly. ‘Woss appnin? Woss she want?’
‘She’s offering to post them, Mum,’ explained the buxom red-haired woman in yellow gingham, sitting beside her. In this woman’s hand was an open paperback book with a drawing of a Regency buck on the cover; she’d chosen it randomly from the stall beside the Palace Pier, and the edges of its pages were browned and crisp from being displayed for weeks in the sun.
‘I expect posting other people’s cards is her job, poor thing,’ she said, looking up at the two Belles. ‘Is it your job, dearie?’ she asked, sympathetically.
‘Well, yes,’ said the Belle, whose name on a little gold lapel-badge was given as Phyllis. ‘It’s part of my job, anyway. I could also direct you to the Pavilion in Italian, if you wished. My colleague Adelaide here could point you to the public library in Serbo-Croat!’
Phyllis smiled and continued to hold out her hand, but the old cockney woman refused to surrender her postcards. This was the trouble with dealing with the public, Phyllis was beginning to realise: they never quite followed the script. You imagined they would be thrilled when someone who sounded like a lady-in-waiting offered them menial services; instead, you got awkward scenes like this.
‘Let the poor girl do her job, then, Mum,’ sighed the gingham woman, wresting the postcards from her mother, and checking they had stamps on. She handed them over quite grandly.
‘There you are, dear. With our compliments. And I hope you won’t mind my saying it, but I do hope you get a proper job soon.’
Luckily for Phyllis, the woman’s attention was then caught elsewhere.
‘Charlie!’ she shrieked (with laughter) at a passing child. ‘Bloody hell, you’re so red now, you’re blue!’
On such a bright day, it was a shame to find yourself inside a gloomy, airless wax museum, but such was young Constable Twitten’s fate this morning. The great Inspector Steine, famous as a wireless personality and star of the Brighton Constabulary, had last week received an invitation from the historic ‘Maison du Wax’ in Russell Place, begging in very flowery language that he agree to the creation of an Inspector Steine mannequin. Hence the unusual visit.
All that was required of him (the letter had said) was his gracious consent, plus a short hour of his time sitting for the Maison du Wax’s legendary blind model-maker Pierre Tussard (never for legal reasons to be confused with Tussaud, the similarity of the name being a mere unfortunate coincidence); it would also be appreciated if Inspector Steine would provide without charge a spare uniform and a pair of shoes, and the standard donation of thirty-five pounds ten shillings for unavoidable expenses such as wax, human hair, rent of building, fire insurance and so on.
The generosity of this ‘invitation’ had of course caused general hilarity at the station.
Sergeant Brunswick, a down-to-earth man, chuckled, ‘Thirty-five pounds ten! That’s more than most people earn in a month! And I bet the inspector still falls for it!’
Mrs Groynes (the amusing charlady) had wholeheartedly agreed, saying that she would bet her entire – and famously comprehensive – collection of scouring powders on a positive outcome.
Only young Constable Twitten had loyally chosen to believe that vanity would not always prevail with Inspector Steine in the face of an obvious scam. Which was why, when Steine of course accepted the invitation without a second thought, Twitten had felt morally obliged to go with him to his first sitting, on this bright July day when the world outside was sizzling with life and ozone, and the world inside was airless and quiet, creepy and murky, and full of weakly spot-lit livid-coloured effigies helpfully labelled ‘Winston Churchill’ or ‘Shirley Temple’.
Directed up the echoing stairs, Steine and Twitten passed through a room of such exhibits – the constable horrified by the general tawdriness, the inspector making enthusiastic remarks such as, ‘Over here, Twitten! I had no idea Queen Mary looked like this! It turns out she’s got a face like a bun!’
This particular wax museum had been part of the Brighton entertainment landscape for many years, and for this reason alone it demanded to be admired: for the way it had managed to survive despite its sheer and utter terribleness. To be fair, it owed its continued existence mainly to factors beyond its control, such as the regularity of sudden coastal squalls driving holiday-makers indoors, the system of landladies strictly locking out their guests until half-past four, and above all, the British seaside visitor’s heroic determination to enjoy him- or herself, even when nothing remotely enjoyable was on offer.
Based loosely on the lines of the famous Madame Tussaud’s, Brighton’s Maison du Wax featured grisly execution tableaux (Mary Queen of Scots, complete with little dog under her skirts), effigies of notorious murderers (Dr Crippen, Neville Heath) and figures from modern-day entertainment (Gloria Swanson, Mr Pastry) – all bearing scant resemblance to the people concerned, although Robert Newton’s peg-leg and threadbare parrot gave the onlooker a sporting chance of identifying him as Long John Silver. When you looked round in the gloom, you saw everywhere the same illuminated staring eyes and preoccupied (somehow constipated) expressions, the same wiry hair springing at unnatural intervals out of visible pocks in the scalp.
On the plus side, however, the museum charged only tuppence for admission, which made it the cheapest attraction on the entire South Coast.
Inspector Steine and Constable Twitten were greeted at the top of the stairs by Angélique, the middle-aged daughter of Pierre Tussard – and there was no mistaking her for someone unconnected to this dusty, moribund, phoney business. She was dressed in a high wig of ribboned brown curls and a full-length, short-sleeved frilly frock of acid green, like a revolutionary Parisian at the time of the Terror.
‘Ah, Inspecteur!’ she trilled, in a laboured French accent. ‘We are honaired by your press-ance. Did you remembair ze thirty-five-pounds-ten?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘Excellent! Zut alors. Step zis way.’
Upstairs, in the special ‘measuring room’, Twitten sat in a corner, taking the whole thing in. For a keen amateur social anthropologist (and incorrigible know-all) such as he, it was all bally fascinating.
‘You will meet mon père very soon, monsieur,’ this bizarre figure twittered, encircling Steine’s cranium with her tape measure.
‘I see,’ said Steine, keeping still.
‘You have a fine as-we-say-in-ze-world-of-waxworks bonce, monsieur.’
‘Well, thank you very much.’
‘The making of the statue de cire is a combination of science and art, as you will discovair. Of measurement most precise, and of art most accompli.’ She giggled in a theatrical manner and then added, ‘It does not ’urt one beet.’
The inspector, who had seemed a little tense until now, was visibly relieved.
‘It doesn’t hurt, you say?’
‘Non, non, non.’
‘So you won’t be turning me upside down and dipping me in hot wax like a toffee apple?’
Twitten started.
The woman shrieked with laughter. ‘Non, non, non!’ she said.
This was good news for Steine. He’d been seriously wondering where they would put the stick.
‘I think someone has been to see Monsieur Vincent Price in ze film House of Wax, peut-être?’ trilled the woman.
‘Well, yes,’ Steine admitted. ‘But not me, I assure you. I rarely visit the cinema. No, it was my sergeant. He went to see House of Wax several times, and said it was terrifying. He also said that if I spotted a boiling vat in here, I should exit the premises at once, the extorted thirty-five-pounds-ten notwithstanding.’
Twitten, from his corner, watched Angélique’s reaction. Had she noticed the word ‘extorted’? Apparently not. She worked on with her pretty tape measure, unperturbed. But she did explain that whereas the Vincent Price film House of Wax had been quite a shot in the arm to the entire wax-model business (admissions had more than doubled the year of its release), it had also engendered some very misleading and unhelpful ideas about how the models were made. In the film, Vincent Price basically killed people and then coated them in wax (like, indeed, a toffee apple). Here at the Maison du Wax, by contrast, sitters could remain alive throughout. They merely had to submit to an examination by touch – a touch so light and gentle! – from Angélique’s dear blind papa.
At this point Angélique was called away to the telephone, leaving Steine and Twitten alone with a wall of hand-tinted photographs of famous people gamely posing alongside their Maison du Wax figures and looking understandably uncomfortable. Some of the figures weren’t even the right height, and the celebrities were obliged to crouch slightly, or raise themselves on the balls of their feet. If you hadn’t known the old model-maker was blind to begin with, you would certainly be able to deduce it from the results.
‘Sir,’ said Twitten, carefully. Should he mention how dreadful the wax models were here? Should he point out that ‘remembair’ and ‘discovair’ were not proper French words, and that ‘bonce’ was not a specialist term?
‘What now?’ snapped Steine.
Twitten decided against it. ‘Nothing, sir,’ he said. And, on balance, he was probably wise to do so.
Things were still uneasy between Inspector Steine and his clever new recruit. In general terms, the twenty-two-year-old Twitten’s quickness of mind combined with his inability to shut up about anything – ever – was simply irksome to the inspector, who valued a sense of ordered calm. Moreover, Twitten’s zeal for raking up old cases that had been – quite satisfactorily, in Steine’s view – filed away under ‘unsolved’ was both unnecessary and intolerable.
However, something in particular had caused a greater strain between them. Within days of joining the Brighton Constabulary, young Constable Twitten had publicly denounced Mrs Groynes the station charlady – and this bears repetition: he had denounced Mrs Groynes the charlady – as a criminal mastermind responsible for a massive network of underworld operators in Brighton as well as for cold-blooded murder!
Under pressure from all directions, Twitten had now formally retracted his absurd allegations, and pledged never to repeat them, on pain of being dismissed from the force. But seeing as Mrs Groynes had happily admitted to him in private that she was a criminal mastermind responsible for a massive network et cetera (and had been getting away with it for years), this wasn’t easy. In fact, it had brought him close to tears of frustration.
‘Don’t cry, Constable dear,’ Mrs Groynes had told him, quite kindly, when they had discussed his unusual predicament. ‘You have to accept defeat graciously, that’s what. Everyone believes your insane idea about me was planted in your brain in front of hundreds of witnesses by a hypnotist, who was then unfortunately shot dead in a bloody fracas before he could de-hypnotise you. I beat you, dear; just admit it. I’m a genius who destroyed your credibility in a single stroke.’
‘You are a bally genius, Mrs Groynes,’ he had conceded, ‘and I take my hat off to you. The hypnotism ruse was brilliant. No one will ever believe me now when I point the finger at you. They’ll say it’s all in my mind.’
‘That’s right, dear.’
‘But you forget that you’re still an enormous criminal, with a vast underworld network of ruffians, and as an officer of the law, I have to do something about you.’
‘But you don’t have to, dear!’ she had expostulated. ‘Because you’ve been stitched up like a kipper, dear! So now, in a way, you’re off the bleeding hook, do you see?’
And after a day or two to think about it, Twitten had reluctantly (and miserably) accepted her argument, because remaining a police officer was more important to him than anything else, and because plotting the eventual downfall of Mrs Groynes could be better done from inside than outside the force. And so here he was, accompanying the famous Inspector Steine in his public duties, and being careful not to say anything contentious. He was determined to fit in. Just two days ago, he had been issued with a brand-new white helmet, the traditional, exotic headgear of the Brighton policeman. Putting it on for the first time had been quite an emotional moment – until Mrs G privately pointed out that the introduction of white helmets had actually been her own idea. (‘It means we can spot a bleeding rozzer a mile off, dear!’)
‘I’ve never spent much time in a wax museum before, sir, have you?’ he said now.
‘No, none,’ said Steine.
‘Actually, my parents did take me to Madame Tussaud’s once, when I was nine, but we didn’t stay long because I started pointing out what was wrong with the exhibits.’
‘Why does that not surprise me, Twitten?’
‘Well, I believe you’ll sympathise, sir. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the famous model of a policeman on the stairs that’s supposed to be so lifelike people ask him what time it is?’
‘Yes, thank you. I have heard of that wax policeman. Everyone has.’
‘Well, sir, naturally I rushed to see him, and people were crowding round, saying, “Ooh, isn’t he lifelike?” and “I keep expecting him to speak!” and also, of course, “Up yours, you filth! Your lot stitched up our Jimmy!” And what do you think, sir? The buttons on his tunic didn’t match with the style of his helmet!’
‘What?’
‘That’s how bally un-lifelike he was, sir.’
Steine was shocked. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘In Madame Tussaud’s?’
‘Yes, sir. The buttons were Metropolitan; the helmet was City of London! What a blunder! Any schoolboy knows the difference! You would think they’d be interested, but when I pointed it out, they asked Father to take me away at once!’
At Luigi’s, the inspector’s favourite ice-cream parlour, where the jukebox was playing Perry Como’s ‘Papa Loves Mambo’, and all the top windows were open, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man in a homburg hat and light raincoat plonked a holdall on to one of the shiny brown tables, with his frothy coffee beside it.
It was a glorious day to be at the seaside, and Luigi’s was buzzing with youthful customers (quiffs, bobby socks, ponytails) ordering banana splits and Knickerbocker glories, and also respectable couples in their twenties drinking coffee from stylish Pyrex cups and saucers.
One such young couple smiled across to the man, who introduced himself with the single word ‘Melamine’, and warmly shook their hands. Fifteen minutes later, the couple left, hysterical with laughter. As they told their friends back in Palmers Green afterwards, ‘Lord Melamine’ had really taken them in to begin with. He sounded so very posh!
At the police station, they were having a quiet day. Mrs Groynes poured Sergeant Brunswick a cup of tea and offered him a slice of gala pie, complete with a segment of hard-boiled egg. He sat down to receive both at his desk.
‘Lovely, Mrs G,’ he said, appreciatively. ‘That’s lovely, that is.’
Mrs Groynes smiled. She knew how to keep her boys happy. As it happened, their needs were absurdly simple, but she had genuine affection for them anyway, especially Sergeant Brunswick. She liked to think of herself as a sort of substitute mother to the well-meaning sergeant – a substitute mother with just a bit of a dark side. On the one hand, she brought in tasty things for him to eat because she knew he liked them; on the other, she might arrange for him to be shot in the leg if it served a wider purpose.
It was a beautiful relationship, and the sergeant certainly cherished it, and never got impatient with Mrs Groynes when (say) important bits of criminal evidence, left in his desk drawer for safe-keeping, were accidentally thrown away with the tea leaves.
‘I’ve got some of those so-called London cheesecakes for later, dear,’ she said now, her eyes twinkling. ‘With that nasty shredded coconut on the top.’
‘I’d be as fat as butter if you had your way, Mrs G.’
‘You deserve it, dear,’ she said. ‘Now … how’s the leg?’
Sergeant Brunswick winced at the reminder. He had indeed recently been shot in the leg at close range, as part of a classic criminal master-plan that climaxed at the Hippodrome in Middle Street. This master-plan had, of course, been entirely conceived by the dowdy woman in a paisley overall now swabbing the lino with a mop.
‘The funny thing is, it’s quite itchy,’ he said.
‘You’re right, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes, thoughtfully. ‘That is funny.’
Brunswick sighed, and sat munching his pie and sipping his tea in contented silence for a little while, while Mrs Groynes mopped. He was such a nice-looking man, she thought, it was a shame he never had a girlfriend. The trouble was, women seemed to sense his desperation.
‘Did young Clever Clogs Twitten show you that book he’s reading, Mrs G?’ the sergeant asked at last, the gala pie now reduced to a few pastry crumbs.
Mrs Groynes stopped mopping. ‘What book’s that, then?’
‘Blimey, you’re lucky!’ said Brunswick. ‘He’s flaming obsessed with it. It’s called Noblesse Oblige, if you please.’
‘Never heard of it, dear.’
‘Well, it’s written by this la-di-da woman, and it’s about how the so-called “upper class” have got different names for things from the rest of us.’
‘Have they?’
‘Well, so this book says. So if you say a word like radio or serviette, people can tell, just like that – ’ Brunswick clicked his fingers ‘ – you’re not upper class.’
‘But everyone says radio and serviette, dear.’
‘I know!’
‘And who wants to sound upper class, anyway? That’s daft.’
‘I know. Young Twitten asked me what I’d call that, for instance.’ He indicated a mirror on the wall.
Mrs Groynes was confused. ‘What you’d call what, dear? The mirror?’
‘Exactly. I said, “What would I call that mirror? What would I call it? I’d call it a mirror, son, because it is a flaming mirror!”’
‘No flies on you, dear.’
‘But he said an upper-class person would say “looking-glass”.’
Mrs Groynes shrugged and gave an exaggerated sing-song, ‘Ooh.’
‘I know,’ agreed Brunswick. ‘Talk about pointless. But apparently everyone’s buying this book and talking about it.’
Mrs Groynes sighed heavily as if to ask what the world was coming to, lit a full-strength Capstan from a lady-like pack of ten, took a thoughtful drag and then handed the sergeant the latest Police Gazette.
‘Hot off the press, dear,’ she said, expertly exhaling at the same time.
‘Oh, good.’ He loved perusing the Police Gazette, which was just as well because it was part of his job to read it every day. It was Mrs Groynes’s usual practice to read and digest it first, of course. The information in it was invaluable if you were a vigilant master-criminal with a network of around two hundred villains. But today it had arrived later than usual and she hadn’t had the chance.
‘Here,’ Brunswick said, ‘imagine when a toff goes to buy the Daily Mirror and he can’t say it! He keeps asking for the Daily Looking-Glass!’
Mrs Groynes laughed. ‘They wouldn’t know what he meant! Poor bleeder would be there all day!’
Back at the Maison du Wax, things were less harmonious. In fact, they were quite sticky. Constable Twitten was pointing at a full-length mirror propped against the wall in the measuring-room, to the confusion of his senior officer. And he was beginning to wish he had never started it.
‘That mirror, you mean, Twitten?’
‘Yes, sir. But please let’s drop the subject, sir. I’m sorry. It’s just a book. By Nancy Mitford. Noblesse Oblige, sir. It’s been quite controversial. It’s basically about the differences between what she calls “U” and “Non-U”, and truly, sir, it’s bally fascinating, and I’m sure the whole field of socio-linguistics has practical applications for police work, you see, but people keep getting annoyed when I talk about it, so I should probably bally well belt up about it, sir.’
‘No, look, hang on. You started this, Twitten. You’re asking me what I would call that mirror?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘I’d call it a mirror, Twitten. Good grief.’
‘So, not a looking-glass, sir?’
Steine swallowed hard. ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Twitten.’
‘There’s no need to be irritated, sir.’
‘But it is a mirror, Twitten. Of course I’m irritated.’
‘Even if I tell you that “mirror” is a “Non-U” indicator, sir?’
‘Especially if you tell me that.’
At that moment, luckily for Twitten, the great blind model-maker Pierre Tussard made his entrance, wearing a crimson velvet cap-and-robe ensemble and shuffling behind his daughter, his hand dramatically on her shoulder, his head strangely angled, his eyes closed. Despite the ridiculous picture they made, Twitten couldn’t have been more pleased to see them. Would he be allowed to leave, now? To go outside in the sun and read the rest of his book?
The answer was yes and no. ‘You make yourself scarce, Constable,’ said Steine, still sounding agitated. ‘But don’t leave the building. We haven’t finished discussing this mirror business.’
‘Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I’ll wait on the landing, sir.’
Meekly, Twitten donned his shiny white helmet and left the room.
Outside, at the top of the stairs, he stood for a while, just thinking. How defensive everyone got on this issue of U and Non-U words! It made no sense to him. Why weren’t they fascinated by the revelation that upper-class people said ‘preserve’ instead of ‘jam’, or ‘wireless’ instead of ‘radio’, or ‘mad’ instead of ‘mental’? Wasn’t it worth knowing that an upper-class person would despise you for referring to your fish-knives or your cruet set, or (worst of all) your toilet? Snobbery was a living thing in modern British society! Surely it was important to know how it operated?
He was so deep in thought that at first he didn’t notice the small crowd of visitors gathering on the staircase below him, looking up with interest. And then he realised what was happening, and froze. A policeman at the top of a flight of stairs in a wax museum! Did they think he was a model? Crikey. Thank goodness his tunic buttons and helmet were stylistically complementary.
The small crowd approached, to look more closely.
‘That is bleeding lifelike,’ said a young man with a Brylcreemed quiff and prematurely blackened teeth. ‘Ere, what’s the time, mate?’
Twitten stopped breathing. Understandably, he was tempted to reply ‘Half-past nine, sir’, but worried about the accident it might cause. What if alarmed holiday-makers stepped backwards into space and then tumbled in a heap down the stairs?
The teenaged girl on the Brylcreem-boy’s arm laughed and gazed up. ‘Shall I pinch him, Roy?’ she said. ‘Shall I knock his helmet off?’
‘Go on, Em. I dare you,’ said an older woman.
Twitten mentally braced himself, but luckily the girl decided she didn’t have the nerve and the group passed on to the upper floor, giving him an opportunity to exhale. But at what point could he move? It was while he was pondering his predicament – and continuing to stand completely still with a fixed expression – that he happened to overhear a conversation between a pair of star-crossed young lovers that would – given what happened later – haunt him for the rest of his life.
Back on the seafront, Brighton Belles Phyllis and Adelaide decided to stop at Luigi’s for a refreshing glass of hot milk before continuing with their duties, and found themselves sitting beside a man in a felt hat with a heavy bag in front of him on the table.
‘May I introduce myself to you lovely ladies?’ he said. One of his eyes pointed in slightly the wrong direction, which was unsettling, but he had a beautiful voice.
‘I’m the Fifth Marquess of Colchester,’ he said, in a confiding tone. ‘But you can call me Melamine.’
They smiled at him and shook his proffered hand. He registered the names on their little lapel badges. The brunette was Phyllis; the girl with the rich brown hair was Adelaide. As it happened, Adelaide’s hair was technically chestnut, while her eyes were almond-shaped, and hazel-coloured. As her mother used to say (presumably as a compliment), Adelaide had been born with all the nuts.
‘Now,’ Melamine said, shifting the bag a little closer to them, ‘I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard the story of the gold from the battleship Potemkin?’
The two women exchanged glances. They’d been warned about con men, but they’d somehow imagined that a con man would be a little bit harder to spot.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Adelaide, amused. ‘Have you heard of the gold from the battleship Potemkin, Phyllis?’
‘Not me,’ said Phyllis.
‘Russian gold! Imperial gold!’ enthused Melamine. ‘It was thought to be lost during the uprising of 1905, sunk in the depths of the Black Sea. But in the 1920s it turned up in the possession of none other than Rudolph Valentino!’
The Belles raised their eyebrows at each other. This man was possibly the least convincing liar the world had ever seen. They now understood the comments they had overheard from a young couple they had bumped into outside Luigi’s. ‘He was hopeless, Alfie!’ the woman had said, and the man had replied, ‘Yes, but you can’t fault him for trying! Rudolph Valentino!’
‘Gosh,’ said Phyllis, now, trying to keep a straight face. ‘Rudolph Valentino. That’s very romantic.’
‘Yes, it is romantic,’ said Melamine, clearly making a note of a useful word that had previously not occurred to him. His faraway look was weirdly enhanced by the fact that his eyes pointed in different directions.
‘But the Nazis sadly got hold of it, and then – ’ He leaned closer, surreptitiously pushing the bag towards them, and quickly opening it to reveal the presence inside of several large gold-coloured bricks ‘ – General Eisenhower liberated it from Berlin. And he placed it in the safe-keeping of my father, the Fourth Marquess, not realising that the poor, sad man was seriously mental and would forget where he had left it.’
‘What a truly incredible story,’ said Adelaide, between lady-like sips of warm milk. She turned to her friend, eyes twinkling. ‘That is literally incredible, isn’t it, Phyllis?’
‘It is, yes. Literally.’
Melamine seemed pleased. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said.
‘May I ask why you’re carrying it around, sir?’ said Adelaide. ‘The gold? It’s rather careless of you. Someone might steal it.’
‘But I have to get rid of it, that’s the point! I don’t usually go around talking about my family’s Russian gold to total strangers in coffee bars. No, I’m in a fix, my dears, and I need help.’
‘Here it comes,’ murmured Adelaide.
‘Ladies,’ Melamine announced, solemnly. ‘For complicated reasons too shaming to relate, I’m willing to sell this gold of mine to you for as little as twenty-five pounds a brick! What you see before you is a desperate, desperate aristocrat.’
A less convincing story would be hard to imagine, and the kind thing would have been to stand up, plead an appointment elsewhere and go. But Adelaide had indeed been born with all the nuts, and was enjoying herself.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,’ she said, reaching over to pat his hand. ‘But I don’t understand completely. What sort of complicated reasons? And why are they shaming?’
‘Can’t you guess?’ he said.
‘Well, no.’
‘Tax!’ he said, with what sounded like genuine frustration. ‘It’s all about tax and those dreaded new-fangled death duties. “You’ve never had it so good,” the man says on the radio, but not if you inherit a country house and estate in 1957!’
‘I see.’
‘You can’t imagine how hard things are for the landed gentry. My father dealt with nothing, being too mental. He didn’t declare this hidden Russian gold, which is worth – each brick! – just under five hundred pounds! The ancestral home is on the verge of collapse. All over the country, families like mine are selling their silver cruets and serviette rings! Yes, it’s a topsy-turvy world we live in, ladies, but the long and short of it is this: if I’m still in possession of Father’s confounded gold at the end of the month, I’ll be ruined!’
So what was the momentous conversation Twitten overheard at the wax museum? It was only because he had spent five minutes standing immobile on the landing that he noticed something that would never otherwise have caught his eye: at the top of the stairs, in the wall that (he calculated) ought to comprise the back of the building, was the well-disguised outline of a jib door.
‘A secret door?’ he said aloud. He wondered what to do. Should he stop pretending to be a waxwork and investigate? There was someone approaching the stairs below – he could hear footsteps echoing through the entrance hall – so he would have to make up his mind quickly. But too late! A scratching sound came from behind the secret door, then it opened and a young woman stepped out nervously.
‘Peter?’ she whispered.
It took Twitten all his presence of mind not to look round to see who Peter was.
‘I’m here,’ said a voice, and a thin young man came running up the stairs and put his arms round her. ‘Deirdre! You came! Does this mean … ?’
‘Yes, Peter,’ she said, quietly. ‘It does. I want to go with you. I want to run away. But we have to be so careful!’
‘Oh, my love!’ he said.
Twitten was extremely uncomfortable about overhearing all this private lovey-dovey stuff, especially when it emanated from people who might be minors. But again, he was also aware that if he exhibited the slightest sign of life, he might scare them out of their wits.
‘Peter, stop. Stop!’ said young Deirdre. ‘This is serious. You know what my brothers would do if they found out. Or Mum! She calls you Weedy Pete! Weedy Pete Dupont! And the boys join in and laugh. They’re all beasts!’
Twitten was just making a mental note about the reprehensible solipsism of the young when the girl said something that truly surprised him.
‘And don’t forget what they did to Uncle Ken! The police only found one bit of him in that suitcase at the station. No one’s ever found his head!’
Staying completely immobile while this conversation was playing out was possibly the hardest thing Twitten had ever done. The urge to take out a notebook and lick the tip of a pencil was overwhelming. Uncle Ken’s head?
‘We’ll meet tonight at nine at the coach station in Pool Valley,’ said the girl, who seemed to be in charge of arrangements.
Nine, repeated Twitten to himself, silently. Pool Valley. Peter Dupont. Deirdre who? Secret door to … where? And again, Don’t forget: Uncle Ken’s HEAD??
‘Don’t say anything at work,’ she reminded her boyfriend. ‘Especially to Mr Blackmore.’
‘All right, I’m not stupid!’ laughed the weedy boy.
Mr Blackmore, Mr Blackmore.
And then the boy took Deirdre’s hand and held it tenderly. They both hung their heads. Twitten’s eyes moistened. For the first time, he realised that this scene being played out in front of him was jolly lovely, in its way; it was a privilege to witness it. He was reminded of those short-lived hopeful bits in tough modern films like On the Waterfront, where wide-eyed young love expresses itself so sweetly and poignantly (usually with a light woodwind accompaniment), against a backdrop of inevitable violence and doom.
Peter squeezed Deirdre’s hand. ‘I know what to do, don’t worry,’ he assured her, quietly. ‘It’s a good plan and you’re very brave. But if anything happens to me, remember you can trust Hoagland.’
Hoagland? Who’s Hoagland? Oh, bally hell, this is getting harder.
‘Don’t talk like that, Peter! Nothing will happen to you, so long as we get away now. I’ll get the money from the safe. Dickie said he’ll help me.’
The boy reacted with alarm. ‘You didn’t tell Dickie?’
Dickie?
‘I had to tell someone!’
Yes, but why Dickie?
It was at this point that they both happened to look round, and spotted Twitten for the first time.
‘That’s new,’ said the girl, frowning. ‘That policeman. It wasn’t there yesterday.’
Twitten felt his new helmet slip slightly on his forehead.
‘It looks a bit good for in here,’ said the boy, suspiciously.
But just as Twitten’s legs began to tremble, the door to the measuring-room burst open, signifying the end of Steine’s sitting, and the boy and girl sprang apart and scarpered with all the energy of the young – the weedy Peter boy back down the stairs, the girl with the de-boncified male relative back through her secret door.
‘Ah, there you are, Twitten,’ said Steine, beaming. He turned and waved goodbye to Angélique.
‘À bientôt, Inspector,’ she called.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Twitten, almost crying with relief that he could move at last. ‘Shall we go, sir?’
They started to walk down the stairs towards the sunshine outside.
‘Well, I don’t want to rub it in,’ said Steine, ‘but you won’t believe what you missed by being out here.’