Three

It didn’t take long for Inspector Steine to reach a considered view on the body in the deck-chair.

‘Dead,’ he called.

Brunswick and Twitten were holding back the crowd, but in truth there was little danger of anyone surging forward. Having already stood there for forty-five minutes, they were mostly quite bored – but, at the same time, refusing to disperse. Most of them didn’t want to miss anything; others had paid good money for their deck-chairs, and were determined to reclaim them the moment the coast was clear.

The inspector’s verdict of ‘dead’ was scant reward for their long forbearance. On hearing it, they let out a jeer of contempt.

Steine, unaware of the cynical mood of his audience, summoned Sergeant Brunswick to join him.

‘Suicide, of course,’ he confided, privately.

Together they looked at the body, with its open eyes, expression of horror and gaping scarlet throat.

Brunswick coughed politely. ‘You think so, sir?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Steine said, in a tone of regret. ‘You can see where he dropped the knife. Even more tragically, an unknown suicide. We may never know what drove this young man to commit such a horrid deed. We may never know even who he was. Look, Brunswick, can you and Twitten get those people to go away?’

‘What if someone saw something, sir? Shouldn’t we interview them?’

Muttering to himself something that sounded like ‘Oh, give me strength’, Steine turned and called out, ‘My sergeant thinks some of you might have seen something, although I personally have my doubts. Is it possible that any of you can help?’

Most people shook their heads, but then Adelaide emerged from the throng, to a general gasp. She stepped forward, gripping the arm of the skinny, sunburned child in the knitted swimming trunks. (These had now thankfully dried out; their former droopiness had been a tad obscene.)

From the way he needed to be dragged towards Steine, the boy’s presence was not entirely voluntary.

‘Nigel, come on!’ she urged him.

Adelaide was, by her own standards, horribly dishevelled: one long, beautiful strand of chestnut hair had escaped from her little hat and was dangling near a hazel eye that happened to be shaped like an almond. And on the hem of her perfectly pressed and laundered skirt, Brunswick noticed, there was a smear of blood.

‘Tell the nice man what you saw, Nigel,’ she said, gently. ‘It might be important.’

The boy shook his head vigorously. He was desperate to get away. Everyone was looking at him. Everyone was looking in particular at the sky-blue trunks specially made for him in fancy cable stitch by his block-of-flats nanny in Bethnal Green. Years later, when he was grown up, he would successfully manage a sports equipment emporium in Romford, and would make it a firm policy never to stock knitted swimwear of any sort.

Inspector Steine wasn’t going to wait for some street urchin to favour them with his testimony, and was about to tell Adelaide just to go away when she announced, ‘Nigel saw something, Inspector!’

She crouched down in front of the boy, so she could look him in the eye. ‘Now, come on. You cared enough to come and fetch me. Tell the nice man.’

But the boy refused. ‘Grass to a ruddy copper?’ he said. And making an exceedingly rude hand-gesture at the inspector, he wriggled free from her grip and darted off towards the sea, with Sergeant Brunswick in limping, futile pursuit.

Steine rolled his eyes. ‘All right. You tell me,’ he said. ‘What did the little lad see? But tell me first who you are and why you’re dressed in that ridiculous uniform.’

‘Well, sir,’ she said, looking down at herself. She saw the blood on the hem of her skirt, and quailed. ‘I’m just—’

She was reaching the limit of her courage. Steine’s peremptory tone was the last thing she could cope with right now.

‘My name is Adelaide Vine and – and I’m a Brighton Belle, and no one warned us that this sort of thing might happen.’ Steine hardly noticed the catch in her voice. He was too busy puzzling over the name ‘Brighton Belle’.

‘A Brighton what?’

Looking round, he saw another young woman in identical uniform. This was Phyllis, sitting on a bench, sobbing. It seemed that Twitten (without authority) had brought this other Belle a mug of tea from one of the rougher places along the seafront where they barked; ‘With or without?’ when they took your order; and when you asked, confused, ‘With or without what?’ they said, ‘Handles’.

Adelaide took a deep breath. ‘What Nigel told me,’ she said, ‘was that he saw this young man arrive and sit down in that chair. He seemed edgy.’

‘Well, he would. He was about to kill himself. You’d be edgy too.’

‘He was holding a package, wrapped in brown paper.’

Steine waved an arm towards the body. ‘So where’s the package now?’ he said.

It was at this point that Constable Twitten came forward. He had been looking at the corpse for the first time, and was excited.

‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I believe I know who the dead man is, sir.’

‘Oh, shut up, Twitten. Of course you don’t. You’ve only been in Brighton three weeks.’

‘But I do, sir. I even know quite a bit about him. His name is Peter Dupont; cruel people called him “Weedy Pete”. His girlfriend Deirdre has access to the wax museum through a secret door and they were planning to run away together tonight. Look how weedy he is, if you don’t believe me, sir.’

‘This nonsense can wait, Constable. It’s not every day we get a suicide in a public place.’

‘But this can’t be suicide, sir. He was planning to run away.’

‘Look,’ said Steine, firmly, ‘when I said shut up, Twitten, perhaps I wasn’t clear. I meant shut up, Twitten. Now, where was I?’

He turned back to Adelaide, who was unsure what to do. Should she go on?

‘Oh, ignore the constable,’ said Steine. ‘He’s always like this. You were telling us what else that loathsome little street child told you.’

‘Well, he thought that the old ladies sitting either side of the young man were dozing.’

‘Convenient,’ muttered Steine.

‘Meanwhile the young man appeared to be waiting for someone, and kept looking at his wristwatch. Obviously, this being low tide, Nigel had his sandcastles to think about; he was working with his dad on an ambitious scale model of Wormwood Scrubs – to show the rooftop route his dad’s friend Chalky had used to escape – and they were busy with the watchtower.

‘But he was aware of a sudden, violent movement – the young man’s long leg kicked up very high, he said – and when he turned to look, there was a figure running off towards the bandstand, and the package had gone, and the young man wasn’t moving, and a knife – a knife – ’ She took a deep breath ‘ – fell to the ground.’

She staggered, and Twitten instinctively offered her his arm. ‘Are you all right, miss?’ he asked her, earnestly.

It was just then – as the constable offered this kindness to a beautiful young woman in distress – that something mysterious stirred deep in Inspector Steine, something like a memory.

Are you all right, miss? Why did this simple question move him so powerfully?

Brunswick came back, panting from his fruitless chase after the boy.

‘He got away, sir,’ he explained, unnecessarily.

But Steine said nothing. He had adopted his trademark thoughtful, faraway look, as if searching the universe for the meaning of life. Usually, this expression was actually quite vacuous – just a means of mental escape from an unpleasant situation. But this time it was genuine: Think, he urged himself. Think, Inspector Geoffrey St John Steine of the Brighton Constabulary, twice winner of Policeman of the Year! Think! Think!

‘Excuse me, miss,’ Twitten continued. ‘But why don’t you come and sit down with your friend? Then the sergeant and I could escort you home. You’ve had a bally enormous shock. May I get you a cup of tea? I think I’ll be able to obtain one with a handle this time. They took me by surprise before.’

‘Tea?’ she wailed. ‘Oh, yes, please!’

And it was at this moment, to Inspector Steine’s extreme surprise, that his heart went out to this young woman – this beautiful, helpless woman with all the nuts.

Deirdre Benson was confused when she came back into the sparsely lit bar of the Black Cat Club (bearing two cups of disgusting chicory coffee), and found that Dickie had disappeared. Hadn’t she heard him picking out the notes to his songs at the piano only a few seconds before?

‘Dickie?’ she called, quietly. ‘Are you there?’

She was a pale girl, and thin. You might say that their common weediness had been the thing that attracted her to young Peter. However, while the boy’s etiolated look was genetic (he came from umpteen generations of unhealthy stock, some of his ancestors scarcely living long enough to reproduce), her own was more the effect of nurture: she’d been brought up virtually in the dark.

‘I expect he had to pop out,’ said her mother, from the gloom.

Deirdre swung round, peering into the shadows. She put a hand up to shield her eyes.

‘Oh, Mum, you haven’t? Not Dickie?’

Ma Benson laughed, and emerged into the light.

She was wearing an electric-blue nylon housecoat; her hair was in tight curlers; she was accompanied by a smell of setting lotion, fresh nail varnish, eau de cologne and (her favourite indulgence) sweet pipe tobacco. She was quite a sight, Ma Benson: a broad-shouldered woman, she was six feet tall, with big legs and thick wrists, and to top it all she smoked (bizarre choice) a long churchwarden pipe. Her unusual stature and exotic smoking preference served her well in the very masculine world of night-club entrepreneurship. Most men, when dealing with her, were automatically thrown off kilter: when a woman can look down on your bald spot (and can also blow smoke in your eyes), you somehow don’t know quite how to go about patronising her.

‘’Course not, Deedee,’ she said, not entirely convincingly. ‘Dickie’s one of us!’

But when she approached her daughter, the girl backed away.

‘Look, darling, I expect he had a bit of a headache, that’s all. Or a change of heart. And who could blame him? I mean, you’ve hardly done that man a good turn, darling, involving him in your stupid schemes to run off with that kid from the council.’

Deirdre sat down at the piano, where the seat was (a bit gruesomely) still warm from Dickie’s bottom. She sighed. It wasn’t a sigh of thwarted grand passion; more of resignation. It had been a long shot with Weedy Pete. But in her defence, she never met anyone.

‘I’ll be sealing up that door to the wax place, by the way,’ Ma Benson said. ‘It’s long-since served its purpose.’

Deirdre’s chin quivered. When she had discovered the door behind a fake wall upstairs in an unvisited stockroom, she’d assumed it was her own little secret. But here was her mum talking about it having had a ‘purpose’. What possible purpose could it ever have served? To save the tuppenny entry fee to the Maison du Wax?

‘You promise you won’t hurt Peter, Mum?’

‘Me? Of course not. You just let him know you changed your mind, and we’ll say no more about it. One of the boys can deliver the note.’

The girl, accepting defeat, placed her hands on the keys, and played the first few bars of ‘Stardust’. She was a good pianist. Her musical uncle Kenneth had taught her the basics in the old days (before he was sawn into pieces).

She pictured Peter boarding the cream-and-green Southdown coach at nine p.m., and laying his raincoat along the back seat; begging the driver to wait another minute; checking his wristwatch; scanning the faces of the surging, anonymous seaside crowd. And then, when the coach driver insisted on setting off, he would meekly take his seat, and vanish from her life forever.

It made her want to sing Judy Garland’s ‘The Man That Got Away’. She started to pick out the notes to the opening line, but Ma Benson snapped, ‘Don’t do that, Deedee! You’re always doing that!’ and the girl obediently stopped.

Having a song for all occasions was young Deirdre’s special curse. It’s what happens when you grow up in a night club: the Great American Songbook gets into your blood. It drove the rest of the family mad, but she couldn’t stop herself. Weedy Pete wouldn’t have minded it. He loved the way she could sum up (with lyrics) the feeling that he was the one, ‘night and day’; or that when he touched her fingertips, her heart was aglow.

Back at the police station, Mrs Groynes had bustled through her chores and then bolted down the back stairs. There were people she needed to talk to around the town. If Wall-Eye Joe Marriott was already at large, and possibly heading for Brighton, she intended to be ready for him.

Normally, she would tolerate a certain amount of unauthorised villainy on her turf. The odd freelance con man getting himself arrested in the town was actually helpful to her: such small fry could be fed into the justice system to keep it happy, with no danger to herself or her many vassals and associates.

Just last month, for example, a teenage ‘whiz gang’ (pickpockets) working on the London platform at the railway station had been successfully brought to book by Sergeant Brunswick, with benefits to everyone. If truth be told, it was Mrs Groynes the charlady’s innocent prattling on the subject that had set him on their trail in the first place, but he’d done a good job catching the kids in the act. He had felt very pleased with himself; the inspector had been pleased with him too. Meanwhile Mrs Groynes had been the most pleased of all, because while police attention had been focused on the petty pilfering of insignificant junior villains, her top team in the Kemp Town area had stripped all the lead off the roof of St Michael and All Angels.

But if Mrs Groynes was willing to tolerate such outsider activity, it was important that she always knew what was going on. Currently in Brighton, she was aware of several housebreakers operating around Fiveways; some minor rackets at the race course; money changing hands over a proposed ugly new convention centre in the grounds of the Brighton Pavilion; and of course the continuing reprehensible thuggishness of the Benson clan (mother and sons, not the girl) operating from the Black Cat night club at the seaward end of Grenville Street.

Actually, the Bensons had been suspiciously quiet recently – in fact, ever since the so-called ‘trunk murder’ of 1955. Having a discreet and well-remunerated informant working for her at the club (he played percussion in the quartet and kept his nose clean), Mrs Groynes was well aware of whose torso had been found in that famous suitcase at the railway station. According to Tommy Drumsticks, Ma Benson’s younger brother Kenneth had disappeared at precisely the time the body was deposited in Left Luggage. Drumsticks had admired Kenneth, who was a musical director on some of the big shows up in London. He had possessed sheet music signed ‘With thanks’ by the legendary Richard Rodgers! Kenneth had given Dickie and the band a few excellent tips on phrasing. But then, one day, he had disappeared – just after angry words had been exchanged between him and Ma Benson.

And although the press had had a field day with the trunk murder, and called for the police to make our left-luggage system safe from deposits of grisly human remains, no formal identification of Kenneth’s torso had ever been made. Inspector Steine had personally lost interest in the case very quickly.

‘Too little to go on until the head turns up,’ he had decided, and Mrs Groynes had whole-heartedly supported this decision, because it would give her leverage with the Bensons in the future if she needed it.

‘And look at it this way, dear,’ she had said, while pouring the inspector a nice cup of tea. ‘What’s the rush? Without legs, he’s not going anywhere.’

And so the torso’s original owner went untraced. Poor Sergeant Brunswick couldn’t help thinking that there had been a few useful clues, such as the fingerprints on the locks; the lingering smell of sweet pipe tobacco when you opened the case; the initials ‘KB’ in the leather; the small fragments of coloured glass found embedded in the skin of the shoulders (as from the footlights you might find in a night club). But unluckily, he was over-ruled.

So far as the Bensons were concerned, then, Mrs Groynes was biding her time, with an ace up her sleeve. So far as the boys at the race track were concerned, she could – up to a point – live and let live. But Wall-Eye Joe Marriott was another kettle of fish altogether. Twitten had been right to detect an unusual personal animus in her on this subject.

On her way to the seafront, Mrs Groynes approached a boy dressed like a shoe-polisher’s lad, leaning against a wall, perusing a copy of the Dandy. As it happened, the lad lurked there every day, from nine to six, in precisely this spot, retained by Mrs Groynes. He looked up when she drew near.

‘Morning, madam,’ he said, smiling. ‘What can I do you for?’

‘Shorty,’ she said, ‘tell Vince to leave the Punch and Judy and meet me in Luigi’s in fifteen minutes. Then get Diamond Tony from the Metropole.’

And even though she said no more than that, the boy frowned all the way as he raced off to deliver the messages. It wasn’t every day that she required the special services of Diamond Tony.

‘Something’s up, Vince,’ he reported to the Punch & Judy man, when he arrived. ‘She looks proper cross,’ he told the spiv having his nails clipped in his top-floor suite at the posh seafront hotel.

So what was it about Wall-Eye Joe’s unfinished-house scam of 1949 that so agitated Mrs Groynes? Had she perhaps been a friend or relative of one of the female victims? Had the unfinished-house scam perhaps been her own idea, nicked from her by Wall-Eye? What reason had she to feel so aggrieved?

What no one knew about the unfinished-house scam was that it wasn’t just women who fell for it. There were male victims too. Marriott’s young woman accomplice (The Skirt, as Brunswick called her) had herself courted lonely, gullible, big-hearted male clients, and spun them the identical story about the house in the country. And one of those men had been very dear to Mrs Groynes. He had been the love of her life. She carried in her handbag his last letter to her. She had treasured it for years.

As she sat now in Luigi’s, waiting for Vince, she felt a scream well within her when she thought of what must have happened to her darling man. During the war he’d been a captain in the bomb-disposal unit of the Royal Engineers; he had risked his life dozens of times for the sake of other people; he had lost members of his team; he had himself suffered both psychological trauma and bodily injury. To be murdered after all that … murdered and then dissolved in acid, perhaps! His name was Philip Hoagland, but at his invitation she had called him by his nickname ‘Hoagy’, the way his men had done.

Their time together was just after the war. They had met on VE Day, in fact, in the jubilant crowds of Trafalgar Square, when she accidentally elbowed him in the eye. He bought her a gin to show there were no hard feelings, and the attraction (which was powerful) grew from there. In the few short weeks they were together, she had been thrilled by Hoagy’s attentions: she had never expected to consort with a man who was either so selfless or so posh. But their closeness also caused her anguish: she felt like a fraud. Surely she and Hoagy had nothing in common? Wasn’t he just too good for her, in every way? Look at their contrasting histories: while Captain Philip Hoagland had been crawling in muddy East End craters to disarm German explosives, she had been hijacking GPO vans on the Holloway Road, learning her trade from the young, up-and-coming London gang-boss Terence Chambers. Hoagy was also, socially speaking, from quite another world: a true toff. If ever there was a man who said ‘looking-glass’ instead of ‘mirror’, it was he.

But what tipped the balance was when Chambers started making unmistakable romantic advances towards her, and asking if she had a boyfriend already. She refused to expose her dear Hoagy to the danger of being Terence Chambers’s rival: she simply had to forsake him. He had been hurt and confused. The scene in the bustling Lyons Corner House on the Strand, during which the stricken Hoagy openly wept huge manly tears on to his uneaten egg on toast, she would never forget. She kept telling herself, I’m doing this for your sake, my darling; I’m doing this for you – but it did not assuage the guilt. And later, when she learned that the unfinished-house scam had brutally torn the good and guileless Philip Hoagland from this world, she felt deeply (though irrationally) that she herself was to blame, for not protecting him.

She hadn’t known till much later what his fate had been. After years of silence, she had assumed he’d forgotten her. But then in London a year ago, she had bumped into his best friend Hoppy coming out of a bistro in Dean Street (all Hoagy’s army captain friends had nicknames like Aspers, or Hoppy, or Dicko).

‘Not seen Hoagy for yonks,’ said Hoppy, sadly. ‘Last I heard he was in the pink, though, so don’t you go worrying about him. Word is, he visited one of those agencies in Regent Street, and fell in love with the handsome woman who ran it!’

At the council offices in Marlborough House, Mr Blackmore was beginning to get annoyed. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and there was still no sign of his junior clerk.

He slid open the little wooden hatch beside his desk.

‘Still not in?’ he asked his secretary Lillian. ‘Where is the boy?’

Lillian, who had been giving her full attention to the pleasurable smoking of a full-length Bristol Tipped, pulled a face and shrugged.

‘Why are you asking me?’ she said, stiffly, brushing ash off her desk and not looking at Mr Blackmore. ‘I’m not his mum.’

A stranger to the office would have spotted at once that this particular department of Town Planning (Sewerage and Waterworks) was not, as they say, a nest of singing birds.

Blackmore sighed. Sometimes he felt very hard done by, having Lillian as his secretary. Mr Statham down the hall had the beauteous Nancy; Mr Phillips in the treasury had the virginal Iris—but Blackmore mustn’t let himself think about Iris.

‘Lillian, have you typed up the minutes of Friday’s meeting?’

‘Not yet, no. They only just came in.’

He knew this to be a lie, but let it pass.

‘Well, we need to get them signed off by the Borough Engineer this afternoon, so please could you do it as soon as possible?’

‘All right, all right,’ she muttered. ‘Keep your hair on.’

With the half-finished cigarette clamped between her lips, and eyes half-closed against the smoke, Lillian mutteringly fed new paper (two sheets, with carbon paper between) on to the heavy Remington carriage and then aggressively commenced the clattering high-decibel bang-rattle-bang-rattle-rattle-bang-rattle-rattle-ping that was the soundtrack to busy office life everywhere in the world in the age of the manual typewriter.

Mr Blackmore slid his little hatch back again, muttering under his breath. He had no idea what Lillian’s problem was, and he refused to enquire. In his defence, had he known that her main grievance concerned gender differentials in pay, he wouldn’t have understood anyway.

But that was exactly what she was fed up about. Two weeks ago, an unfortunate mix-up with pay packets meant she had found out that junior clerk Peter Dupont (seventeen years old; first job) was paid twice as much as she was. Lillian was thirty-two years old, and could type seventy words per minute. She’d worked in local government for fifteen years and had a mother to support. Unsurprisingly, since her discovery, she’d been smoking considerably more at her desk, and speaking considerably less. She had also stopped wearing make-up and deodorant. As for clothes, she was opting increasingly for ugly skirts and shapeless cardigans.

It was odd that Dupont was so late, though. Pausing in her work, she looked over to his empty chair and orderly desk, and decided she had never liked him; and she hoped he got in serious trouble. What a pipsqueak! And so nakedly ambitious, too: always volunteering to run things along to the various planning departments down the corridor, and helping the women in Archives with their unwieldy Gestetner machine. He probably thought Lillian didn’t know about those Archives visits, but several times recently he had come back to the office smelling to high heaven of the distinctive purple ink that was used in those machines.

Needing a fresh box of matches, she opened her desk drawer, and inside it found something peculiar. It was a Manilla envelope with ‘Miss Ross’ written on the front in Dupont’s handwriting. She looked at it in confusion, and was just about to get up and rap on Mr Blackmore’s hatch when she heard the telephone ring on his desk and noticed that, in any case, the boy had written ‘For Your Eyes Only’ under her name.

‘Blackmore speaking,’ she heard her boss say (a bit muffled), next door. Using her favourite paper knife, she slit open the envelope and found inside a handwritten note.

Dear Miss Ross,

This is just to say goodbye, and also to say I was shocked to see how little you are paid. It is an outrage.

By the time you read this, you will know what I have done. Please do not think less of me. I know what I am doing. I could not just stand by and do nothing.

People will say I have abducted Deirdre, but I assure you she is coming of her own free will.

Keep cheerful and please remember me with affection,

Peter

The hatch slid open.

‘Lillian, that was Mr Reinhardt upstairs,’ said Blackmore. He looked pale and anxious. He was wondering whether the hatch was really the most fitting conduit for news of this magnitude, but it was too late now to change his mind.

‘What’s that you’re holding?’ he said.

‘It’s nothing.’ Lillian slid the note into the pocket of her cardigan.

‘Look, there’s no easy way to say this. It seems that the entire contents of Mr Reinhardt’s safe have been taken. And he thinks it was our young Mr Dupont who did it! He’s going to call the police!’

Dickie had not had a change of heart, as Ma Benson had told her daughter; but he had certainly had a change of location. As he regained consciousness, all he knew was that he was on the floor – on a cold concrete floor, somewhere indoors, in the dark. His various aches and pains had not been improved by being dumped there. His head was sore; worst of all, his bottom set of dentures was not in his mouth. The only good news in all this was that he seemed to be alone.

Did he have matches in his pockets? With an effort, he sat up. If he had some light, he could find the door and perhaps get out.

‘Yes!’ he said, with relief. It was his habit to keep a Black Cat match-book in one of his trouser pockets, for lighting the cigarettes of attractive female customers between songs. This practice had done him no good for as long as he could remember, but it was certainly a godsend now.

‘All right, where am I?’ he said quietly to himself, striking the first match – which gloomily revealed a sort of store room, with shelves. Dark shadows danced on the walls. The shelves held rows of indistinct grey objects, each the size and shape (roughly) of a beachball. He narrowed his eyes and scrambled up to take a look – but as he reached his feet, the match went out.

Had he paused for thought before striking the second match, he might not have emitted the scream that echoed round the room. But what a fright, on first seeing the glassy eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte staring right back at you: a ghoulishly severed head, complete with imperial kiss curl, stacked on a shelf amid dozens of others, all wild-haired and florid. Next to Napoleon was (judging from the thickness of its hair and the dyspeptic expression) Ludwig van Beethoven. Next to Beethoven was (judging by the helpful yellowed label stuck to his cheek) Charlie Chaplin.

‘Waxworks!’ Dickie spluttered, in relief. ‘Oh my God!’

And then, just as his second match blew out, he said, puzzled, ‘Kenneth?’

Brunswick and Twitten, under instructions from Inspector Steine, were accompanying the stricken Brighton Belles back to their accommodation in the centre of town. It was honestly one of the best orders Brunswick had ever received: to escort beautiful women through the most populous streets of Brighton, to the envy of the entire male population. Twitten noticed that there was an unprecedented lightness to the sergeant’s gait.

Twitten was less enamoured of their mission, however, having several pressing questions on his mind concerning the murder (not suicide) of Peter Dupont. Surely there wasn’t a moment to lose, so why was he having to trail through the streets with a pair of stunningly pretty young women when he could be researching the inadequate investigation of Uncle Ken’s murder in 1955, or finding out which building backed on to the Maison du Wax? To make this pointless peregrination even more annoying, the sergeant kept stopping, as if he were a tour guide, to regale the Belles with incidental facts about the town (‘And there’s the famous Maison du Wax, founded in 1924’), all of which information they already knew better than he did.

It was because the sergeant was so inclined to dawdle and stretch things out that from outside Luigi’s (‘This is Brighton’s most famous ice-cream parlour’), he spotted Mrs Groynes on the other side of the glass having an intense tête-à-tête with the aggressive Punch & Judy man, Ventriloquist Vince, and another man, with a scar on his cheek, who was stirring sugar into his frothy coffee with what looked like a foot-long stiletto.

‘Oh, look, there’s Mrs Groynes, the station charlady,’ said Brunswick. ‘She’s with some friends. Is that tutti-frutti they’re having? I’ve got to say hello.’

The sergeant tapped on the window, making every customer look up in alarm at the sight of two policemen outside. A couple of Teddy Boys guiltily knocked over their milkshakes, while another athletically dived for cover behind the jukebox. But Mrs Groynes just waved back, cheerily, and with her mimed encouragement her two hard-looking companions waved half-cheerily too, indicating in dumb-show that the tutti-frutti was excellent. Twitten felt a twinge of weary sadness. Here was a villain having a blatant top-level meeting with two other villains, observed by two policemen on duty, and it was going to be the story of his life that he alone could see past their not-so-fascinating choice of ice-cream flavour.

‘Sir,’ Twitten said, when they were all walking along again, north this time, away from the sea, and Brunswick’s travelogue commentary had temporarily run dry. ‘Mrs Groynes was bally upset about that famous con man you saw mentioned in the Police Gazette, wasn’t she?’

Brunswick, shocked that Twitten would raise such a subject when they were in the company of civilians, shot him a look as if to say ‘not now’, and pointedly changed the subject. ‘We are entering the area known as The Lanes,’ he said.

But Adelaide and Phyllis knew all there was to know about The Lanes, thank you very much; they could also tell you the quickest way to the station in most Indo-European languages; they were far more interested by this tantalising mention of a con man. Also, given what they had just been through, they were desperate for something to take their minds properly off the subject of slaughtered youths and bloodstained deck-chairs on the seafront. They both brightened.

‘A con man, did you say, Constable Twitten?’ said Phyllis.

Twitten bit his lip. ‘I did, yes. Sorry, miss, I probably shouldn’t have.’

‘But don’t be sorry! It’s just such a happy coincidence! Because we met a real-live con man today, didn’t we, Addy?’

‘You what?’ said Brunswick.

‘Oh, don’t worry, we saw straight through him, so there was no harm done. It was in that very ice-cream place where we just saw your friend. He had a bag of Russian gold!’

At which Phyllis burst out laughing, and Adelaide joined in.

‘He was hopeless!’ she explained. ‘He tried to sell us each a gold brick!’

‘He did!’ spluttered Phyllis.

It felt so good to laugh after what they’d seen on the seafront that both Belles were, for a while, unable to elaborate further, despite Brunswick demanding (unheard) to know why they hadn’t reported this encounter directly to the police.

‘He said he was a lord!’ exclaimed Adelaide, literally holding her sides. ‘But, you see, virtually every word out of his mouth was Non-U! Do you know what I mean by that?’

‘I do, yes,’ said Twitten, triumphantly shooting a glance at Brunswick. ‘I happen to know exactly what you mean by that.’

‘You’ve read the book, Constable?’

‘Yes, I’ve read the book.’

‘He actually said the reason he had the gold was that his father was “mental”!’

‘No!’

‘He talked about cruet sets and serviette rings. He mentioned the “radio” as well. He was obviously a fraud.’

Twitten felt the urge to hug this young woman. How many times in the past few days had he insisted on the value of learning about U and Non-U? And how many times had he been dismissed with a flea in his ear, on the grounds that new-fangled socio-linguistics had no practical application in detective work?

‘He actually said “mental” and “serviette”?’ marvelled Twitten. ‘Did he say “toilet” and “mirror” as well?’

‘No, but I’m sure he would have. Such a posh voice, but the vocabulary – all wrong!’

Adelaide was breathing more calmly now, but still enjoying the story. ‘But the whole thing was preposterous, not just the words he used. The story about how he got the gold, the reason for selling it, Rudolph Valentino’s role in its history – just everything.’

Phyllis took some deep breaths. They were both growing calmer now. They were finally aware that their police escort, while interested, were still not finding their story remotely amusing. If there was one thing Brunswick was never light-hearted about, it was criminals.

‘It was just hilarious,’ said Phyllis, by way of summing up, ‘but perhaps you needed to be there.’

‘Well,’ said Brunswick, sternly, ‘perhaps when we get back to your accommodation and you’ve had a chance to collect yourselves, you can make a proper statement.’

‘We would love to,’ said Adelaide. She put a hand on his arm.

And then, despite herself, she burst out laughing again.

‘You didn’t mention the funny eyes, Phyl!’ she cried. ‘He had one eye pointing one way, and the other eye pointing somewhere else!’