Although Sergeant Brunswick and Inspector Steine had been working together for several years, they knew very little about each other’s personal circumstances. All the inspector knew about Brunswick was that he lived with an aunt in a flat on the London Road (name of aunt forgotten); that his first name was something like Jim or possibly Algernon (immaterial); and that he was a perennial sad case where women were concerned.
This the inspector knew not because he was at all curious about such matters, but because he had been unlucky enough to observe Brunswick’s love-life at first hand. Even the nineteen-year-old rabbit-toothed Maisie, who sold colourful buckets and spades from a little hatch near the bandstand, could wind the thirty-eight-year-old sergeant round her provocative little finger.
James Brunswick (the name was indeed Jim) was also a war hero, of course. Having joined the so-called ‘Boys’ Army’ at the age of fourteen, he served as a paratrooper in the Italian campaigns; but if the inspector didn’t know the specifics of his sergeant’s wartime career, he wasn’t alone in this; like many a decorated soldier, Brunswick was silent about his own particular role in the defeat of the Third Reich. In 1957, the war had been over for only a brief dozen years, but it was rare for people to hark back to it – the subject was officially closed. Many children of the 1950’s grew up knowing nothing of their fathers’ part in the conflict; and being too cocky and self-centred, they never got around to asking.
As far as Brunswick understood it, there were many good reasons not to talk about the war: for one thing, the real heroes were the dead ones; for another, young people loathed being reminded of what their elders had been through (and no man of thirty-eight wanted to be called ‘Daddy-o’ if he could prevent it); on top of which, very few people chose what they did in the war, in any case; and finally, war heroes were not exactly few and far between. So plentiful were they in Brighton alone that you couldn’t toss a humbug without hitting a veteran of Monte Cassino. Every hotel commissionaire or doorman along the seafront sported either an unmissable limp or a jangling row of tarnished medals on his chest (usually both).
Brunswick would have been disappointed to learn that Inspector Steine thought his name was possibly Algernon. However, he would in turn have to admit that he knew little about Inspector Steine’s life beyond the station, other than that he was about forty-five years old, lived in the Queens Park area of the town, had grown up in London, drove a very nice car, was childless and long-divorced, had served in the City of London police during the Blitz, and that his given names were ‘Geoffrey’ and ‘St John’ (the latter pronounced, for some unfathomable reason, ‘Sin-jern’). There was a rumour that in the evenings the inspector was writing a memoir, but that he kept it securely locked away in his desk.
Of course, Inspector Steine famously wrote and delivered a broadcast every week on the Home Service (entitled ‘Law and the Little Man’), which often utilised anecdotes from his life, and sometimes shed an oblique light on his childhood, but he was careful not to give too much away about his origins, partly because – in terms of class, at least – these origins were so unusual and difficult to categorise. His stern and judgmental mother Honoria, now living in Kenya (pronounced Keen-ya), was originally from a snobbish and very wealthy upper-class family in Dorset, while his father Wilfred had been a humble career policeman from West London, who was unfortunately struck and killed by an army transport lorry on Chiswick Bridge in 1922, when little Geoffrey was only ten.
It had been an unlikely alliance, this marriage between Honoria and ‘The Bobby’ (as the family back in Dorset always termed him, refusing to learn his name). The strains of it had helped turn his mother into the bitter, gin-sodden battle-axe she now was. But nowadays, whenever she looked back on that ill-advised marriage, she had to be honest: she could blame no one for her misfortune but herself.
And how short the distance, really; how short the years. Living with a mauve-and-golden view of the far-off Ngong Hills – the baobab trees alive with birds and monkeys, the equatorial sun scorching the tall grass, the sound of lion (not ‘lions’) roaring on the perimeter of the compound – Steine’s mother could close her eyes and instantly revisit the dingy, noisy, choking London of her youth. Sipping her second pre-prandial Tom Collins, she could bring to mind the very aroma of sooty smog on that fateful day when she fell into the arms of her unexpected hero, Constable Wilfred Steine.
The story (as children Gillian and Geoffrey heard it so many times) was a pretty good one. In the spring of 1910, the eighteen-year-old Honoria Penrose was up in London for a society wedding, and had been carefully steering the unwieldy family car – a Clifton F model 1905 Motor Cradle – through a sedate Bloomsbury square. Visibility was poor; the Cradle was so difficult to manoeuvre that it had been christened by her father ‘The Utter Bastard’ (or ‘UB’ for short); Honoria was also a little bit lost, and her favourite hat had blown off on the Marylebone Road (to be snatched up instantly by gleeful street urchins). And then a bizarre thing happened. As she drove down the side of Gordon Square, a group of rowdy young bohemians dressed in exotic Eastern costumes emerged from one of the houses and, before she knew it, had placed themselves in front of the vehicle!
It was terrifying. In their colourful turbans and robes, they looked like wild things. She tooted her horn at them, but it didn’t help. They surrounded the Motor Cradle and deliberately blocked her way, making guttural animal noises and exchanging the nonsensical phrase ‘Bunga Bunga’. (Upper-class young people at this period often breached the peace in such comical ways, wrecking the interior of the Café Royal, and so on. This bohemian bunch – led by the irrepressible prankster Horace de Vere Cole – had conceived the idea of impersonating Abyssinian royalty in order to board a warship at Weymouth, in one of the unfunniest hoaxes ever recorded.)
Having lived quite a sheltered life in Swanage, poor Honoria had never been exposed to bohemians at all before, let alone ones tastelessly blacked-up like American minstrels. Feeling threatened, she begged them to leave her alone, but they refused. They were too excited about the effect they were having. Her panic made them surge and Bunga Bunga all the more.
It was at this point that the handsome Constable Wilfred, who had been proceeding in an easterly direction along Torrington Place, heard the piercing female scream that was to change his life. Instantly, he diverted from his beat and raced towards the source of the rumpus, blowing his whistle and waving his truncheon.
The bohemians scattered like startled exotic birds, and disappeared through various well-appointed front doors, uttering expressions rather less exotic than ‘Bunga Bunga’, such as ‘Botheration, Horace! It’s a fucking constable!’ and ‘Where’s the key, Adrian? Where’s the bloody key?’
Wilfred did manage to land a truncheon blow on the slowest of the group, which was a source of pride ever after – although the pride was slightly diminished when the desperado in question was later identified as Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), the mentally frail lady novelist.
At first, Honoria wasn’t quite sure what had happened – those ghastly people had come and gone so quickly! But then she saw Wilfred’s dear honest face in a sepia halo of London air pollution, and her heart swelled within her. The breathless young Constable Steine had only to utter the fateful words, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ and that was it: the world tipped on its axis. She looked into the blue eyes of her brave rescuer and decided on the spot that she had never felt more all right in her life, and that she must marry this paragon as quickly as possible.
The marriage was a terrible failure, of course, especially when Honoria’s family disinherited her and never spoke to her again – and also took back the car. Honoria soon found that she hated being a policeman’s wife. But Wilfred was a decent man, and an intelligent one, and the marriage did produce two children in quick succession, a girl and then a boy, the latter of whom grew up to be Inspector Steine of the Brighton Constabulary.
Honoria begged her only son not to follow in Wilfred’s footsteps by becoming a policeman; but if ever a man idolised his father, it was Geoffrey St John Steine. His ideal of the police officer was set forever by the kind of public servant his father had been: a man who would, regardless of his own safety, rescue a clueless posh woman from out-of-control modernists intent on a racist prank.
It is a shame that Sergeant Brunswick knew none of this, when the adult character of Inspector Steine was so clearly influenced by his background. So much was explained by his unique beginnings: his intense, abiding loyalty to the law and all its officers; his touchiness about class distinctions; his loathing of the term ‘bobby’; his interest in vintage cars, especially the (very rare, now) Clifton F model 1905 Motor Cradle. Even his quickness to classify any mystery as ‘unsolvable’ could perhaps be traced to his feelings of impotent schoolboy anguish when his unhappy sister Gillian ran away from home at the age of sixteen and was never heard of again.
On a lighter note, the family background also explained why he loathed fancy dress. As for the Bloomsbury Group, Steine abominated them one and all, once describing them in a live radio talk – to the surprise of both his listeners and his producer (it wasn’t in the script) – as ‘degenerate human scum’.
Their mission at the Maison du Wax successfully accomplished, Steine and his constable returned to the station, Steine regaling Twitten along the way with the various compliments paid to him in private by Tussard père – for example, about the spacing of his eyes being precisely the same not only as Napoleon’s but also Dr Crippen’s and Lady Jane Grey’s.
‘Something jolly interesting happened outside too, sir,’ Twitten said, but he never got the chance to elaborate, what with Steine’s eyebrows having reminded the blind French model-maker of Benjamin Disraeli and his ears of Teddy Roosevelt (although possibly it was the other way round).
After greeting Sergeant Brunswick, who was still engrossed in his Police Gazette, Steine retired to his own office to tinker happily with this week’s instalment of ‘Law and the Little Man’, which would interestingly skewer the popular fallacy that a wife is barred from testifying in the trial of her husband.
If there was one type of subject that he loved to tackle, it was the common misconception in regard to the legal system. Why did the general public insist on believing things about the law that weren’t true? Why did they not check their facts? Were there no public libraries? In this wonderful new information age, with encyclopaedias and reference sections and index-card systems in special wooden cabinets situated in public buildings in every town, it was well established that checking any fact would rarely take the average person (with the help of a trained librarian) more than a few hours; two days at the very most.
Meanwhile Twitten – almost too excited to say hello after what he had overheard between the two star-crossed lovers at the wax museum – quickly borrowed the heavy office typewriter, transferring it to his desk with a grunt of effort. He needed to type up the notes in his head before he forgot them.
Naturally, Mrs Groynes noticed his fervid, single-minded paper-feeding, so immediately set about trying to derail his concentration. Twitten might have capitulated to the charwoman’s terms: he and she might now operate according to a secret truce; superficially, all might seem cordial, but there was no love lost between the keen young constable and the ostensibly motherly charlady. Young Twitten regarded Mrs Groynes as his own personal enemy, whom he must avoid as much as possible and eventually vanquish. Less respectfully, Mrs Groynes regarded Twitten as an endearing source of harmless entertainment.
‘Cup of tea, dear?’ she called, as he adjusted the carriage of the machine and began to type.
Without looking up, he shook his head. ‘No, thank you, Mrs G. I’m a bit busy, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, go on, dear, you must be proper parched. Stop that silly typing for a minute and have a nice chat, why don’t you?’
There was no response except typing.
‘Here, I’ve been meaning to talk to you for the longest while about this dismal epidemic of myxomatosis. Are we for it, dear? Or are we against it?’
But Twitten, pausing in his work, merely bit his lip and scanned what he had written so far.
Door leads where?
What building is behind the wax museum?
Deirdre who? Who mother? ‘All beasts!’
Dickie – who he? She said she trusted him but Weedy Pete not so sure.
‘It’s just that I’m taking a vote, dear,’ continued Mrs Groynes. ‘And the results so far have been a bit of a revelation.’
But Twitten (who was actually keenly interested in the topical issue of myxomatosis, as Mrs Groynes well knew) was not so easily put off. He needed to imagine himself back at the top of those stairs, listening to that conversation. What else had those young people said? What else?
‘I’ll have another cup, Mrs G,’ Brunswick volunteered. ‘That last one was lovely.’
‘Good for you, dear. Keep your strength up. Here, fancy a nice fig roll, and all?’
Twitten closed his eyes, willing this witless chit-chat to stop. He mustn’t forget Peter Dupont, Uncle Ken, the head …
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any Garibaldis?’ said Brunswick. (He was joking. He loved Garibaldis, but Mrs Groynes disapproved of them so strongly that she had been known to dismiss them as ‘little sods’.)
Mrs G laughed. ‘Now you know how I feel about Garibaldis, Sergeant.’
And they chuckled together at this mysterious joke, while Twitten closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
Peter Dupont.
Who he? Where does he work? Is he weedy? If so, why?
Uncle Ken’s headless torso in suitcase!
This last he underlined emphatically (skilfully employing the shift key) and tapped the number six so hard – and so many times – that even Sergeant Brunswick took notice.
‘Oh, come on, son,’ he said. ‘What’s so important you can’t stop for a cup of tea?’
Twitten took a deep breath. ‘Just a second, sir!’ he said. ‘Please, sir!’ His train of thought had almost vanished, but he rescued it.
Weedy Pete said Deirdre could trust Hogeland/Hoagland? Who he?
Blacksmith? Blackgang? Blackmore!
Mrs Groynes plonked a cup of tea on his desk. ‘I brought you one anyway, dear,’ she said, peering over his shoulder. He took a deep breath. He had one last thing to set down:
DON’T FORGET: 9 o’clock at coach station in Pool Valley.
And then he ripped the sheet from the typewriter and folded it before she could see too much of it.
He smiled up at her in a kind of triumph. ‘Lovely day, Mrs G,’ he said. ‘Did you say something about a fig roll?’
Out on the seafront, the two Brighton Belles who had so easily resisted the sales pitch of Lord Melamine, 5th Marquess of Colchester, paraded past the entrance to the West Pier, then took the steps down to the beach.
Their daily briefing had instructed them today to encourage the public, in the gentlest possible fashion, to partake of fairground activities and other entertainments, because in fine conditions such as these, visitors tended to frolic in the sea, sunbathe on the shingly beach and build sandcastles (when the tide was sufficiently far out to uncover the necessary raw material) – all of which pastimes profited the grasping town of Brighton precisely nothing.
‘Good morning!’ Phyllis and Adelaide called from the steps, generally, to the holiday-makers below in their deck-chairs. ‘Have you heard about the new roller-coaster on the Palace Pier?’ The Belles had been trained to wave and smile in the style of the young monarch; the man from Brighton Council had looked very funny when he demonstrated it the first time, but it seemed to work. ‘Hello! Good morning! Can we help you with anything?’
Reaching the level of the beach, they paused and absorbed the scene. Families had erected colourful stripy wind-breaks to nestle behind and eat their home-made shrimp-paste sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and drink their flasks of tea; a Punch & Judy man was setting up his booth, whacking wooden posts into the shingle with a large rock and muttering a number of unrepeatable swear-words to himself in a Greek accent; a limping man in a doorman’s uniform, with a row of shiny medals on his chest, clutched a parcel and headed for the steps; donkeys with names like ‘Flora’ and ‘Ermintrude’ poker-worked on to their bridles stood patiently while frightened toddlers were placed on their backs (and sometimes smartly lifted off again); and under one of the arches, a buck-toothed teenaged girl in dazzling white ankle-socks arranged brightly coloured plastic windmills in a red metal pail.
The Belles looked so sophisticated, it was hard to believe they weren’t much older than the buck-toothed girl. But they were scarcely out of their teens. When they talked amongst themselves, the subject was likely to be make-up, or boys, or the price of nylons, or their plans for dancing the night away with a friend of Daddy’s who’d invited them to dinner at the tennis club.
Of the six girls, Adelaide was the one who seemed most worldly, and she was also the funny one: she was apt to reduce her regular partner Phyllis to unstoppable giggles. And in fact they were just laughing at something Adelaide had said (about the self-styled Marquess of Colchester taking his name from a famous pub) when a small sunburned boy in sky-blue knitted swimming trunks ran up to them and pulled at Adelaide’s sleeve.
He seemed distressed, and it wasn’t just from the way his damp woollen costume was bagging to his knobbly knees, or from the painful scorching of his bony shoulders.
‘Miss!’ he said. ‘You’ve got to come, miss! There’s a man!’
‘What sort of man?’ said Adelaide, with a ready-for-anything smile. She was always having to put up with little japes on the beach – daddies buried in sand; being offered seaweed sandwiches; small translucent crabs being dropped down her neck.
The boy pulled a face. ‘Well, miss. He looks to me like a dead one.’
‘What?’ she blurted. She tried to recover, but failed. ‘I mean, what?’
Adelaide and Phyllis looked around, and saw that – alarmingly – they were surrounded by a crowd of people in dark glasses and colourful straw sombreros, who had jumped up from their deck-chairs and were now grasping each other by the arm, or holding their hands to their faces in shock.
Back at the station, there was now a bit of an atmosphere between himself and Mrs Groynes, but Twitten refused to feel bad about it. Keeping police intelligence from this wicked woman was a highly reasonable precaution. He had no intention of ever again speaking in front of her about the details of a case. He had no intention, either, of letting her see anything. He put the folded piece of paper in his tunic pocket and pointedly buttoned it.
Part of Twitten’s daily torment, however, was that he could not prevent other people from unwittingly sharing the most delicate information with this most brazen of criminals in their midst. Just last week Brunswick had come in and announced, delightedly, ‘Guess what I heard, son! The Albion Bank in North Street is taking delivery of its new safe next Wednesday, but they’ve already removed the old one, so for the time being all the deposits will be kept in flaming sacks in the basement! And their back gate in the alley’s a disgrace!’
Twitten had been fascinated by the way Mrs Groynes received this news. She seemed not to react at all. But then, having made everyone a quick cup of tea, she reached for her coat and headscarf.
‘Just popping out, dears. We’re in need of some Handy Andy.’
‘Okey-dokey, Mrs Groynes,’ said Brunswick, distractedly, still chuckling at the shocking security arrangements of a bank known to deal in unusually large sums on summer weekdays.
Pausing at the door, she said, ‘Did you say the Albion Bank, dear?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Did you say the Albion Bank just now? The one in North Street?’
‘That’s right,’ he laughed. ‘But don’t tell anyone!’
When she came back later, she seemed to have forgotten the Handy Andy, but brought festive coconut ice wrapped in greaseproof paper, to the joy of all. And that very night, the Albion Bank in North Street was cleared out by a professional gang, gaining entry by means of the disgraceful back gate in the alley.
But now Mrs Groynes was about to hear some news that, to Twitten’s surprise, unsettled her so badly that he almost felt sorry for her.
Brunswick looked up from his Police Gazette. ‘It says here,’ he said, ‘that Wall-Eye Joe is back to his tricks, and that they’re expecting him to turn up on the South Coast.’
‘What?’ she said, sharply, almost dropping the tray she was holding. The return of Wall-Eye Joe to business (which meant nothing to Twitten) was evidently a massive headline so far as she was concerned.
‘Who are you talking about, sir?’ said Twitten.
‘Proper name Joseph Marriott,’ said Brunswick.
‘But known to all as Wall-Eye,’ chipped in Mrs Groynes – this humble, uneducated charwoman with her miraculously exhaustive knowledge of crime and criminals. ‘He’s a hardened con man, dear,’ she said. ‘One of the hardest. And bleeding notorious.’
There was an edge to her voice that Twitten recognised but at first couldn’t place. When had he heard that flinty tone before? With a shudder, he remembered. He’d last heard it when they were alone together in London, when he had first denounced her as a villain, and she had threatened to kill him.
Turning to Brunswick, she said, as lightly as she could, ‘But I thought Wall-Eye had gone away, dear. Last I heard he was doing a tray on the cave-grinder.’
Brunswick looked blank.
‘She means three months’ hard labour, sir,’ Twitten explained.
‘Oh.’
Twitten watched as a ghost of a question crossed Brunswick’s mind, but (as usual) didn’t settle.
‘Well, that’s right, Mrs G,’ he said. ‘But he’s been out for a month or more.’
Twitten was still on the back foot, information-wise. ‘What does he do, though, sir?’ he asked. ‘Don’t con men just swindle people?’
‘Well, you might say this one goes a little bit further than that,’ said Mrs Groynes, furiously picking up a bit of knitting and sitting down with it. She gestured to Brunswick to tell the story, and then, before he could begin: ‘This one’s like Neville bleeding Heath crossed with George Joseph bleeding Smith!’
‘Oh, steady on, Mrs G.’ Brunswick turned to Twitten. ‘As far as I know, the worst one was when he and a female confederate set up a phoney dating-agency business, and targeted women with a bit of money. Is that the case you’re thinking of, Mrs G?’
‘Yes, it bleeding is!’ she said with passion. ‘And they didn’t just target them, they murdered them, Sergeant. They both should have swung. It was a travesty.’
‘No bodies were ever found, Mrs G. So you can’t even say it was murder.’
‘Pah!’ she said, angrily.
‘They probably used acid,’ explained Brunswick, grimly.
Although the name had meant nothing to him, Twitten remembered the story. There had been a lot of coverage in the papers. Luckily, friends of the various missing women had come forward with details of how the con was managed, and as a consequence this Joseph Marriott and the female partner had been arrested and charged.
And as Twitten recalled, the basic ‘trick’ had been quite clever. It involved an unfinished house in the country, near London. The phoney dating-agency partner – an attractive woman ostensibly working from a second-floor office in Regent Street – would interview well-to-do lonely women (known in the trade as ‘marks’) and fix them up with a widower – always the same widower, of course, with a distinctive squint, but a plausible manner.
‘I miss my wife so badly,’ he would tell each mark, pathetically. ‘Perhaps I’m not ready. But you seem so lovely, my dear. I have but one request. Please don’t mention my existence to anyone, I’m so shy!’
Having thus engaged the woman’s interest (but luckily not succeeded in stopping her confiding in her closest friends), he would court her expensively, until her head was completely turned. Then he would make his move. He would allow her to glimpse a photograph of an unfinished house, and reluctantly, he would tell her about it.
‘But that house is my problem, my dear, not yours!’ he would say, explaining (but only reluctantly, when pressed) that he needed several thousand pounds to complete the building work. Within a couple of weeks, the mark would usually stump up the money, and then vanish from the face of the earth.
Friends might get a postcard from Aviemore, or Oban, but then the trail would go cold.
‘How many women fell for it?’ Twitten asked.
‘They reckon at least half a dozen,’ said Brunswick. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about. Wall-Eye Joe and the skirt were tried for it at the Old Bailey, but there was no physical evidence of foul play, you see, only of obtaining money under false pretences. Without the bodies there wasn’t enough to convict on the murder charge, so they got off scot-free. It wasn’t the legal system’s finest hour.’
‘But didn’t you just say that he was recently in prison, sir?’
Brunswick shrugged. ‘That’s right. But that was for something else. He doesn’t always get away with it, but nothing will stop him trying again – new place, new MO, new mugs. He’s a regular menace, that man.’
Mrs Groynes, still knitting, shook her head. ‘The thing is, dear,’ she said, bitterly, ‘there are just so many gullible people in the world. To someone like Wall-Eye Joe, do you know what the world looks like? Full of mugs, dear. Full of bleeding stupid mugs.’
Brunswick pulled a face in regretful agreement, while Twitten looked at Mrs Groynes with a mixture of astonishment, curiosity, hatred, mortal fear and sincere admiration. What gall to be angry about a man seeing the world as full of mugs, when it was precisely how she saw the world herself. But why was she so worked up about this? Why was she so adamant that Wall-Eye Joe and his accomplice should have hanged for their crimes?
Mid-morning in Grenville Street, and lounge singer Dickie George was sitting at the piano of the Black Cat night club, idly picking out the tune to ‘Melancholy Baby’.
Dickie was not a cheery soul at the best of times. Finding himself up and about at half-past ten in the morning made him no happier. His ulcer burned; his hips ached; his bottom set of teeth wouldn’t quite settle on his gums. On top of which, he could hardly keep his eyes open. Last night the Black Cat had stayed open (illegally) until around three-thirty a.m., and he had crooned ballads until the bitter end – ‘For All We Know’, ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, ‘It Had to Be You’ – until the last, hateful, inebriated couple stumbling round the dance-floor realised they were seeing double and finally admitted it was time to call it a night.
Dickie always had mixed feelings when the night was officially over and the cocky Frank Benson hopped on to the stage to announce to a virtually empty room, ‘That’s all, folks. Let’s hear it for Dickie George and the Black Cat Quartet!’
True, it was a relief that it was over, but at the same time, it was a source of sadness that yet again the evening had passed without igniting in any way; yet again, he’d had only the merest glimpse of the teenaged girl who had captured his tired old heart. He and the band were expected to wait onstage, manfully stifling yawns, while those last dishevelled punters drunkenly searched for lost ear-rings and tried to cram high heels back on, before they handed over fistfuls of cash without counting it properly, and finally left the premises.
At that point, Ma Benson would usually appear from her office and turn on the house lights (the worst moment of all), saying in a bored voice, ‘Good job, Dickie.’ Then, while her large sons Frank and Bruce started stacking chairs on tables, she would accompany Dickie and the musicians to the side door, let them out into the dingy alley, and then lock and bolt the door again from the inside.
None of the guys ever wanted a nightcap, for reasons Dickie respected: like him, they’d been in the business too long to think of this lousy job as a lifestyle choice. Across the road, at his modest digs on the top floor, he would open the sash-window to the night air, take a few calming breaths and then quickly undress – shiny tail-coat, bow-tie, braces, shirt and corset – and furiously apply a novelty long-handled back-scratcher to his itching skin, groaning aloud as he did so. Such was his unlovely bedtime routine. After popping his dentures in a glass of water and gargling with TCP (to preserve the pipes), he would sink gratefully into his creaky single cot, with the idea of not rising again until at least two o’clock in the afternoon.
But last night had been different. When he got back to his room, he’d found a note pushed under the door. And as a result, here he was, virtually at the crack of dawn, after just five hours’ uneven sleep. Young Deirdre Benson – a girl to whom a jaded, overweight band-singer such as himself could aspire to be only a friend and confidant – was excitedly asking for his help in a romantic matter, and had thoughtlessly named this ungodly hour for the meeting. But he could not deny her. He would do anything for Deirdre. She was the light in his darkness, and when he sang ‘Embraceable You’ each night with genuine tears of longing in his eyes, it was Deirdre he was thinking of.
It wasn’t wise to meet like this inside the club – when Deirdre’s thuggish older brothers might be awake and listening in the shadows; when her thuggish mother might appear at any moment with a blackjack. Ma Benson was a terrifying woman, all right: this was his third decade as a singer, and he’d never worked in a joint as tainted as this before, where there were whispers of uncle-murdering and dismemberment. But on the other hand, he was too tired to care; too out of love with life, especially now that young Deirdre seemed to be planning to run away.
Sitting at the piano, while the girl made him a wake-up cup of Camp Coffee (which would be disgusting), he picked out more notes to his favourite song from the musical Pal Joey. Could he write a book about Deirdre, if they asked him? He was just beginning to think that he could, actually, when he felt a crack on the back of his head, and everything went dark.
‘Here, talking of mugs,’ Mrs Groynes carried on, in a hushed voice, ‘did you know the inspector fell for that spaghetti-crop hoax on that BBC Panorama?’
She was evidently hoping to turn the conversation away from Wall-Eye Joe, aware that she might have given too much away about her feelings. And like most of her ruses, it worked. Even Twitten was momentarily diverted from the scent. Inspector Steine had fallen for the April Fool’s Day spaghetti-crop hoax on Panorama? What on earth could be more interesting than that?
‘What? No!’ said a delighted Twitten, his voice lowered. ‘But it was so obviously a joke, Mrs G!’
Mrs Groynes pulled a face and leaned forward. ‘I only just found out the other day when I was sorting through his bits in that precious locked drawer of his, where he keeps his memoir and whatnot, and the letters to his horrible old mum that he isn’t brave enough to send. Yes, he only went and got a personal ticking-off from the Director General of the BBC himself!’
Brunswick squirmed. ‘If it was in a locked drawer, Mrs G … ?’ he said, gently.
‘Oh, pooh, dear,’ Mrs Groynes rushed to reassure him. ‘That drawer was wide open when I looked in it!’ (Which was technically true, but only because she had opened it with the aid of specialist tools.)
They all looked at Inspector Steine’s closed door, on the other side of which he was being very quiet. Matrimonial law as applied to criminal prosecution was predictably turning out to be a bit of an unwieldy subject: he might remain in there for hours.
‘So picture the scene, dears,’ Mrs Groynes continued, her voice still low. ‘There it was, April the first. You’d think the date would be a bit of a clue, wouldn’t you?’
Twitten laughed, despite himself.
‘So the inspector’s in his slippers with a cup of cocoa, and there’s that nice Richard Dimbleby on the television reporting how the pasta crop was early this year on the Swiss–Italian border.’
‘I saw it with my parents,’ said Twitten. ‘“The last two weeks of March are always an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer”! It was priceless. But how could anyone believe it was real? They’d just draped strands of spaghetti over bushes. They said what a miracle of nature it was that all the strands were the same length!’
‘Well, it turns out that the inspector got so worked up about the dangers of the so-called spaghetti weevil that he only went and wrote one of his talks on the subject.’
‘No!’ said Twitten, while Brunswick (no less shocked) merely put his head in his hands.
‘Apparently he wrote this impassioned plea, see, saying that this weevil needed to be stamped out completely or the people of Italy might starve, and many respectable restaurants in Brighton be put out of business!’
‘But someone stopped him? They must have stopped him?’ said Twitten, worried.
‘Oh, yes, dear. His producer at the BBC.’
‘Thank goodness.’
‘But it was touch and go, dear. He had to dash off a completely new script in about half an hour once they realised what he’d done. And then he got this shaming memo from the Director General – the one I found in his desk – saying it had better not happen again.’
Down on the seafront, Adelaide and Phyllis peered along the row of hastily vacated deck-chairs to where a dark lone figure remained, unmoving. The crowd of holiday-makers helpfully shuffled into position behind them, leaving their way clear to go and investigate.
‘There, miss!’ said the child, pointing. ‘Where he’s not moving.’
‘Yes,’ said Adelaide. ‘Yes. Thank you. I can see.’
This was a far cry from popping people’s postcards into a pillar-box, or reciting the timetable of Volk’s Electric Railway. But she was wearing a uniform, and that seemed to put her in charge.
‘Phyllis,’ she said, firmly, ‘you go and find a policeman.’
‘My Bert’s already gone to do that,’ a woman volunteered. ‘He went as soon as he saw the blood.’
‘Ah,’ said Phyllis, in a quivering voice. ‘There’s blood?’
‘I should say so!’ the woman scoffed.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Adelaide.
She and Phyllis took a few brave steps towards the figure, which appeared to be that of a man – a long, thin man slumped back in his deck-chair, dressed in the dark clothes and shiny laced shoes of an office worker, his hair uplifted by the wind, arms hanging lifeless at his sides. They both saw something liquid was dripping from the bottom of the chair and accumulating in a small, dark puddle underneath.
Adelaide, feeling it was now or never, took control. ‘Look, he might still be alive, Phyllis,’ she said, quietly. ‘You wait here.’ Then she turned to the little crowd and said, in a reassuring tone, ‘I’m sure the police will soon be here, so please don’t be alarmed. But if you did want to find amusement elsewhere, may I recommend the Hall of Mirrors on the Palace Pier? Children get in for a penny!’
Then, with all the composure she could muster, she approached the body, while the crowd made a collective sucking-of-teeth noise.
And there, still bleeding from the deep knife-wound across his throat, sat the body of a somewhat weedy young man, his eyes open, his mouth forming a horrible ‘O’ and his life-blood accumulating – drip by drip – in a crimson puddle beneath his chair. Next to his right hand lay a knife.
‘Is he dead, miss?’ people called (from a safe distance).
‘What did he die of?’
‘Who is he?’
‘Which pier has the Hall of Mirrors again?’
‘What’s his name?’
‘How much is it for grown-ups?’
‘What time do you get off work, miss?’
‘Do you recognise him?’
‘How many pebbles on this beach, do you think? More than a thousand?’
But for once, enquiring of a Brighton Belle was fruitless, as Adelaide stood frozen in front of the ghastly scene, fighting the urge to scream.