The following morning, at ten o’clock, Inspector Steine boarded the train for London, Victoria, his radio talk safe in his briefcase. He had spent the previous afternoon polishing it in the usual manner, and was now very happy with the tone, which was, as always, authoritative and crystal clear but at the same time unintimidating, with occasional stabs at inoffensive sexist humour (because obviously the inferior legal status of wives to their husbands was universally amusing).
‘Well done, Geoffrey,’ he had said to himself after reading it aloud for the final time. He looked forward to saying on air the witty (but informative and cautionary) words, ‘With all my worldly goods, and all my criminal liability, I thee endow.’ Anyone listening to the talk would pick up no hint that in Brighton this week, the body of a seventeen-year-old boy had been found near the West Pier with its throat cut; nor that an obscure night-club singer had been reported missing by his landlady; nor that the Borough Engineer – a shady character with a giveaway Germanic name, as many people at the Town Hall were now pointing out to each other – had last been seen speedily boarding a cross-channel ferry at Newhaven, leaving no forwarding address.
Yes, no trace of these troubles could be found in Inspector Steine’s ‘Law and the Little Man’ talk. It was as if the writer – a high-ranking policeman – could somehow divorce himself from the realities of everyday criminal investigation to concentrate entirely on the subject at hand – namely, the fascinating anomalies in the law regarding married couples.
His morning had been so good that he briefly considered adding a few words to the manuscript he kept in his locked desk drawer (his memoir had reached 1922, the year of his father’s death), but in the end his sense of duty prevailed. The Testing-of-Twitten took priority. Every day needed to begin with this ritual question-and-response, which (depressingly for Steine) had so far varied in its outcome very little.
‘So, young Twitten,’ he would say, ushering him into the room and closing the door. ‘Sit down. Here we are, having a friendly private chat, just you and me, how very nice, don’t be anxious.’
‘Thank you, sir. Lovely morning, sir.’
‘Precisely. Well, let’s not beat about the bush, we both know why you’re here.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘So. How are we feeling about Mrs Groynes today?’
‘I believe she is an evil criminal mastermind, sir.’
At this point, Steine would throw up his hands in annoyance.
‘What, still?’
Sometimes this was the end of the conversation, and Twitten was dismissed with an irritated wave of the hand; on other occasions – which included this morning – Steine took a steadying breath and probed a little deeper.
‘All right,’ he said today, ‘on a scale of one to ten, please tell me how convinced you are of this preposterous notion, bearing in mind that when you say “ten” it saddens and disappoints me and ruins my day unnecessarily?’
‘Ten, sir.’
‘Ugh.’
‘I’m afraid there’s just no bally doubt about it, sir. She was responsible for the raid on the Albion Bank in North Street last week, which netted her and her gang at least thirty thousand pounds. If you take no action she will continue to get away with it. I really appreciate this opportunity to reason with you, sir.’
‘Reason with me?’ Beads of sweat appeared on Steine’s forehead. He rose slightly in his seat. Twitten, by contrast, was quite calm.
‘Twitten, for the last time, I’m the one reasoning with you!’
‘But, sir—’
‘And you really should listen to yourself! You just talked about Mrs Groynes the charlady having a gang that does bank robberies!’
‘Well, she could hardly pull a job like that on her own, sir. She’d need a driver, and a lookout man, and—’
‘Stop it! Twitten, you have to stop this. You had a ridiculous idea planted in your head by a hypnotist, and I’m trying to help you to see it for what it is.’
After a pause to let the emotion subside, Twitten spoke, carefully, ‘I understand that’s what you thought you saw, sir.’
‘A thousand people witnessed it!’
Twitten sensibly stopped arguing. He cleared his throat and stood to attention.
‘I think I have it under control, sir. Please don’t be concerned. I never mention it except at these helpful one-to-one meetings, sir. I try never to raise it with Mrs Groynes. And I am never – ever – alone with her.’
Steine shook his head wearily. ‘And yet you won’t say nine, will you? You won’t just say nine?’
Twitten said nothing.
‘Very well. We’ll continue this tomorrow. Carry on.’
At which point, after Twitten had left the inspector’s office, Steine said to himself, ‘You did your best, Geoffrey.’ And then he put the issue entirely out of his mind, and focused on how curious and interesting (and unfair) it was that while a man could go to prison for something his wife had done, the same rule ceased to apply when the case was the other way round!
Back at the railway station, the weather being warm again, the concourse was packed with day-tripping cockneys, all streaming excitedly towards Queens Road and the sea, and shedding litter like rose-petals as they went. Travel-sick children were being shepherded into the lavatories through the penny turnstiles; W. H. Smith was doing a brisk business in saucy postcards; young people laughed and screamed, and playfully shoved each other.
Few were travelling in the same direction at Steine – London-wards – but as he stepped up into a first-class compartment, he glanced back along the platform and spotted a young woman in a scarlet dress approaching; a young woman who looked familiar.
It was Adelaide Vine, the woman from the kerfuffle yesterday on the seafront; the one with (as her mother always said) the unusual concatenation of nut-like attributes.
He stepped back down on to the platform.
‘Miss Vine?’
Adelaide looked up and frowned. She was evidently surprised to see the inspector, and not particularly pleased. He had been very abrupt with her at the crime scene yesterday. Obliged to acknowledge him, she performed a minimal nod of the head, but did not slow down; if anything, she quickened her pace. There were plenty more compartments up ahead.
The inspector thought quickly.
‘Miss Vine?’ he said again, and astonished himself by reaching out his arm as if to stop her.
It injured him to be cut by anyone at all – especially when the person was as attractive as Adelaide. But there was something more at work here. Last night, back at home, he had gone over the scene several times, of Twitten asking the agitated Brighton Belle, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ – just the way, fifty years ago, Steine’s father had asked his mother. Those five simple words – those kind, respectful, quintessentially copper-ish words – seemed to churn inside him.
He decided to persevere.
‘This is a happy coincidence!’ he said. He clasped his hands together, in a show of supplication.
‘I’ve, er, look … Miss Vine. I was thinking about what happened yesterday, and I’ve been wondering how I would get the chance to apologise. To apologise for my tone.’
‘Your tone?’
With the train due to depart, the station guard had started coming up the platform, slamming the heavy doors shut, one by one. It wouldn’t be long before he reached the first-class section. Meanwhile the train was getting up steam. Steine had to raise his voice.
‘My tone, yes. I’m so sorry for it. And my words, of course. Both tone and words. In short, everything I said, and how I said it. Look, would you care to join me?’
He indicated the open door of the compartment. She pursed her lips and sighed.
‘To allow you to apologise?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
She thought about it, and seemed to relent. ‘Well, I do have a first-class ticket, as it happens,’ she said, not quite smiling.
‘Splendid.’
He held the door as she climbed up into the carriage, and then climbed up himself and closed the door just as the station guard waved his flag and blew his whistle for departure.
Twitten was growing a bit tired of the daily Mrs Groynes Litany: it reminded him too powerfully of his unique predicament, which was like something from ancient myth. He was the Cassandra of the Brighton Constabulary – all-knowing, all-seeing, and even able to predict bank robberies in North Street before they occurred, but fated always to be mocked, derided and generally disbelieved.
However, it’s only fair to say that once his grilling was over each day, he gladly put it out of his mind, much as Inspector Steine did. After all, it was unlikely Mrs Groynes had anything to do with the murder of young Peter Dupont, or the consequent guilty dash for Dieppe of the seemingly respectable Borough Engineer – investigating which mysteries was the immediate job in hand.
It was the one positive aspect to knowing Mrs Groynes’s secret: he could read her like a book. Thus he felt certain that the death of Weedy Pete was of no interest to Mrs G (she’d hardly reacted), whereas the news of Wall-Eye Joe certainly was (she had excitedly used the word ‘bleeding’ five times).
Sergeant Brunswick, by contrast, had noticed neither of these reactions, because he wasn’t looking for them. How cleverly she had won his trust! This was the hardest part for Twitten to tolerate: having to stand by and watch his closest colleague being played (as they said in the gangster films) like a cheap pianola. Why didn’t Sergeant Brunswick ever catch on? It wasn’t as if Mrs Groynes was particularly subtle. Take that very discussion of Wall-Eye Joe, when Mrs G had lapsed, unguardedly, into specialist underworld slang.
‘Last I heard,’ she’d said, ‘he was doing a tray on the cave-grinder.’
‘It means three months’ hard labour, sir,’ Twitten had translated at the time, but he’d watched Brunswick carefully. Would the sergeant start to put two and two together? Would he ask himself: Is tray-on-the-cave-grinder normal charlady talk? Perhaps – perhaps—?
But Mrs Groynes had likewise detected the first glimmerings of a dangerous train of thought, and diverted it neatly into a siding. It was her most accomplished regular manoeuvre. Recently, when the sergeant recovered a string of pearls from a sneak thief, he’d no sooner plonked them on his desk than Mrs G said, excitedly, ‘Hang on, dear,’ whipped out a high-magnification jeweller’s loupe from her overalls pocket to examine the necklace, turned the pearls intently, and then pronounced, ‘Nah, someone’s took you for a steamer, dear.’
Twitten had watched, agog. Now? he had thought. And Brunswick had certainly looked a little puzzled, and had even started to say, ‘Mrs G, why would you—?’ But then Mrs Groynes said, brightly, ‘How about a nice toasted teacake?’ and in the sergeant’s delighted surprise (‘Ooh, lovely!’), the puzzled look vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
On the morning of the inspector’s trip to London, Twitten found himself alone in the office with Mrs Groynes for the first time in three weeks – the first time since she had explained to him, in fact, that he was utterly stymied so far as exposing-the-charlady was concerned, and should graciously accept his fate. The inspector had just left to catch his train; Brunswick was at the hospital to have his bullet-wound dressings changed. Twitten – who was anxious to get out and conduct interviews (there was a list of six people he was particularly anxious to talk to) – had been quickly typing up his notes concerning the evening of Peter Dupont’s death.
At 8.45 p.m. I positioned myself at the Pool Valley coach terminus. I hoped to speak to Deirdre Benson, and question her about i) Peter Dupont’s activities prior to his death vis-à-vis the theft from the Borough Engineer’s office, and ii) her family’s generally murderous proclivities. I realised I would have to break the news to her of Dupont’s death. It seemed unlikely she would have heard of it any other way, especially if her family were responsible for cutting his throat in broad daylight as a means of warning him off.
Deirdre Benson did not come to Pool Valley.
At 8.50 p.m., however, a large man of intimidating appearance, with a cauliflower ear, arrived at the terminus and moved through the waiting crowds, asking for the London bus. He was carrying a letter. I approached him and said: ‘I am a Brighton police officer, as you can tell from my uniform and distinctive white helmet. Please tell me your name.’ He said he was Bruce Benson, out for an evening walk, and what would I like to do about it, Constable Pipsqueak? These were his precise words. I asked him about the letter. He said he was going to post it, wasn’t he, and how would I like a bunch of fives? He was still looking round at the faces in the crowd as if in expectation of seeing someone. I pointed out that the letter did not have a stamp on it. I then noticed it was addressed to Peter Dupont.
I said, ‘If you are looking for Peter Dupont, I am sorry to inform you that he is dead. We have reason to believe he was murdered.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ It seemed to be news to him. I then said, ‘I will need to take that letter as evidence.’ He said, ‘Really? I don’t think so, how will you make me?’ I said, ‘I am a Brighton police officer.’ He said, ‘Yes, but I am bigger than you.’
At this point the movement of the excited crowd boarding the bus became violent and the letter was knocked from his hand and picked up by an unknown person. I think I saw a child running off towards East Street but I cannot be certain as I was being elbowed roughly in the face by people anxious to board the bus. Mr Benson seemed to be as confused as I was.
With the letter gone and the bus departed, I said goodnight to Mr Benson.
Twitten looked up. He had heard a noise.
‘Mrs Groynes!’ he said, in shock. He had been so absorbed in typing his report, he hadn’t heard her come in and start making tea. They were alone together! He stood up. ‘Shall I go?’ he said.
She smiled at him. ‘Why do you say that, dear? No, no, you sit down. Let the chair take the weight of that gigantic brain of yours.’
Looking him directly in the eye – and deliberately prolonging the smile well past the usual dropping-point – she held the large brown office teapot in both hands, and moved it slowly in a gentle circular motion so that the tea leaves inside steeped evenly in the hot water. He had seen her perform this ceremony many times before; it had never seemed so sinister.
‘Just showing it the pictures on the wall, dear,’ she explained, still smiling.
Twitten felt extremely uncomfortable. He was suppressing an actual whimper. What did Mrs Groynes want with him?
‘The inspector’s on his way to … on his way to London,’ he said, faltering slightly. ‘And the sergeant’s at the h—’ He found that he couldn’t get the word out. He tried again. ‘He’s at the h—’
‘That’s all right, I know where he is,’ Mrs G interrupted. ‘Do take some deep breaths and calm down, dear. I’m not going to hurt you. Although I expect you think I’m mad at you for saying “ten” to the inspector every bleeding day – ’
Twitten bit his lip quite hard, and Mrs Groynes laughed.
‘ – but I’m really not, dear! Oh, no.’
Turning away, she poured their tea, but carried on speaking. ‘It’s yourself you’re hurting by sticking to your pathetic story, you see, dear, not me. One day you’ll say to the inspector that you’re a hundred per cent positive you’ve copped the right man, you see, and he’ll say, “Yes, but you’re also a hundred per cent positive that Mrs Groynes the charlady is an inveterate villainess!”’
She turned, a cup of tea in her hand. She handed it to him. ‘See what I’m getting at, dear?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, quietly. He was torn. On the one hand, it was worrying that she knew about the scale of one to ten, and even more worrying that she could so casually use the word ‘inveterate’ correctly in a sentence. But on the other, he had to admit that she did have fantastic instincts about when a nice cup of tea would hit the spot.
‘I put three sugars in.’
‘Super. Thank you.’
She sat down at the sergeant’s desk, and opened a tin of biscuits. A tempting aroma of cocoa powder was instantly detectable in the air.
‘I just thought we ought to have a little chat, dear. What with having the place to ourselves for once. We’ve got a lot of things to discuss. Bourbon cream?’
Twitten declined the biscuit (which was difficult), and sipped his tea. He was nervous. When someone with a history of killing people – and who has a pretty good reason to kill you, too – starts off by saying ‘I’m not going to hurt you’, it’s never completely reassuring.
‘I don’t want to be rude, Mrs G, but I think the less I discuss things one-to-one with you, the better.’
‘Really? You think that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I see it differently, dear.’ She stirred her own tea, and took a sip. ‘This situation is as new for me as it is for you, dear; you must see that. I can feel your little forensic-observation eyes on me all the time, and I can’t say I’m in love with it. But it does seem to me that having this special relationship, as it were, we could help each other.’
Twitten spluttered into his tea. ‘Help each other? You want me to rob banks?’
‘Rob banks?’ she laughed. ‘Of course not! What good would you be to me banged up for robbery? No, let’s come at it another way: let’s think first of how I can help you.’
Twitten took another sip of tea, playing for time. ‘I don’t think there are any ways you can help me, Mrs G, and I’d far rather you didn’t. I suspect the quid pro quo would be bally unacceptable. And I’m sure Sergeant Brunswick will come back very soon, so I say, let’s bring this awkward discussion to a close.’
‘All right, dear. But you can’t say I didn’t offer.’
She sighed, replaced the lid on the biscuit tin and stood up. ‘I’ll just throw this away, then, shall I?’ she said, taking from her overalls pocket a familiar-looking envelope.
Twitten froze. It looked like the letter from last night.
Producing a flick knife from her overalls (she kept so many interesting items in those pockets), she slit open the envelope, pulled out the contents and began to read aloud. ‘“Dear Peter. Please forgive me for letting you down.” Aww, how sweet. Young love, you see, it never gets old.’
She raised an eyebrow at Twitten and then, shrugging, replaced the letter in the envelope.
‘How did you get that?’ he said, quietly.
‘Someone dropped it at the bus station, that’s what I heard.’
It briefly flickered through Twitten’s mind that for Mrs G to offer him this vital piece of evidence was quite similar to her offering Sergeant Brunswick a toasted teacake.
‘And I don’t like to boast, dear, but I can also show you the place downstairs where they put that suitcase they found the body in, dear. You’ll have a bleeding field day with that. It’s got more clues on it than a dog’s got fleas.’
In that moment, Twitten wrestled with the complicated ethics of the situation – but mainly, he just held out his hand.
‘May I see that letter, Mrs G?’
‘Of course, dear. You can have it. With my compliments.’
Emerging from the hospital, with the wound to his thigh freshly dressed, Sergeant Brunswick crossed the street and made his (slightly hobbling) way downhill towards the centre of town. The doctors had said that he was healing nicely, but this wasn’t news to him: he was a man who knew the score when it came to flesh wounds. While it was well known that Brunswick had been shot in the leg by the former Brighton gang boss Fat Victor (now in prison), in fact there had been three more occasions in his police career in Brighton when – close to significant arrests – something had gone wrong at the last minute, with the result of small-calibre firearms being drawn, and ‘Bang! Take that, you lousy copper!’ And it had been right in the leg, each time.
‘It’s like you’re bleeding doomed, sergeant!’ Mrs Groynes would often say, laughing, while lightly patting his latest bandaged area and handing him a plate of fig rolls.
On one occasion, it had actually been Mrs Groynes herself (bless her) who had been the innocent cause of his undoing!
Having skilfully infiltrated a gang of thieves in the Preston Park area, headed by the infamous Stanley-Knife Stanley, Brunswick had been poised to spring his trap. Going under the soubriquet Limpy Len, Brunswick was to be the driver of the getaway van. The job was fixed for midnight. The target was a furs warehouse on the London Road, full of high-ticket Russian sables. Last-minute instructions were taking place inside the van; meanwhile the warehouse was surrounded by well-briefed uniformed police awaiting an agreed signal. In short, all was going perfectly. And then, when Brunswick and the others emerged from the van, who should be strolling on the other side of the road but Mrs Groynes!
‘Evening, Sergeant Brunswick,’ she had called out. ‘See you at the station in the morning?’
Well, what a calamity. Three months’ work unravelled in a matter of a few seconds.
‘It’s a trap,’ shouted one of Stanley’s minions, drawing a weapon. ‘He’s a lousy copper!’
In the commotion, there was a lot of noise, but Brunswick thought he heard a woman shout, ‘Stan! Remember! In the leg!’ just before the bang that brought him down. But when he asked Mrs G afterwards at the station whether she’d heard this shouted instruction in a female voice, she said, mystified, no, dear; she definitely hadn’t; he must have imagined it. And then she carried on bathing the wound, and explaining how – because of the kerfuffle bringing all the police raiding party running to Brunswick’s aid – the desperado thieves had managed to get away with a van full of furs worth several thousand pounds.
Perhaps it was true, then: what Twitten had said to him. That his days of going undercover were over, for the simple reason that all the local villains now knew him by sight. But it had been a good run. As Limpy Len, he had got very close to arresting Stanley-Knife Stanley. As Eduardo the Italian ice-cream seller on the West Pier (for which disguise he had assumed an accent, worn nose-putty and messily dyed all the hair on his forearms), he had observed an operation to rob the amusement arcade, and had again arranged elaborate multiple arrests – but had once more, sadly, been shot in the leg just at the point of raising his whistle to his lips.
His last undercover job was the one he was (perversely) most proud of. Posing as a cellist (he had learned both the cello and the trumpet in his youth), he had infiltrated an amateur string quartet that he was sure was planning a bank job, on the grounds that their practice room was in a basement next door to a vault, with a large screen always suspiciously positioned against the party wall (presumably, to mask the large hole they were drilling in the evenings).
The inspector told Brunswick repeatedly that he was wasting his time, and that the plot of The Ladykillers was all well and good but should never be confused with real life.
‘Some string quartets really are string quartets, Brunswick,’ he had memorably said. ‘Some people enjoy the music of Luigi Boccherini for its own sake.’
But Brunswick was on the right track, as it happened. His mistake this time was that he didn’t have a proper plan, and that he was never taken into the confidence of the other three ‘musicians’, despite dropping broad hints about a criminal background, such as, ‘You remind me of a bloke I met in Parkhurst,’ and ‘You seen that Rififi yet, mate? Talk about thought-provoking.’
One Friday evening he turned up for practice, having learned a serene passage of Schubert for the occasion, and when he opened the door, was knocked over backwards by the other three quartet members, racing out of the building holding large, bulging sacks.
Scrambling to his feet, he shouted, ‘Halt! I am arresting you on suspicion of—’ And then there had been the inevitable bang, and that was it, he was down on the ground again.
But what about the Black Cat? Who would know him there? Was the annoying Twitten right, that here was his opportunity to get to the bottom of the torso-in-the-suitcase at last? The press had been so damning of the Brighton Constabulary’s failure to identify the body. But in general was it bad policy – even in the interests of justice – to infiltrate a set of criminals who murdered people in cold blood and afterwards cut them up and deposited bits of them in Left Luggage?
He was just thinking about this – leaning against a low wall and enjoying a cigarette – when he noticed through a café window a man gesticulating towards a woman and waving what looked like a gold brick. Brunswick dropped the cigarette, stubbed it out with his foot (the swivel of the injured leg making him squirm) and moved closer. The man appeared to have eyes that looked in different directions! Could this be Wall-Eye Joe?
Brunswick walked back up the road a little way and waited for five minutes. He saw the man exit the café and set off on foot towards the centre of town. Brunswick followed him, quite excited. The man, who seemed to be in no hurry, wended his way through the older parts of Brighton, stopping occasionally to study a shop window, and eventually knocked on the door of a white-stuccoed mansion facing the sea – a building that Brunswick recognised as Colchester House, which had notoriously lain empty for many years. A man opened the door, and Brunswick heard him say ‘my lord’ (but not as an exclamation). And then Wall-Eye Joe went inside.
Pondering what to do, Brunswick was still standing on the corner of Ship Street when a domestic servant – she looked like a housekeeper – exited the house by a side door. He stopped her, showed her his badge and asked her some questions – the answers to which were so thrilling that he returned directly to the police station and burst into the office just as Constable Twitten was taking Peter Dupont’s letter from the hand of Mrs Groynes.
In surprise, they both turned to look at him somewhat guiltily: they’d been caught in the act of collusion! But true to form, he didn’t clock a thing.
‘Mrs G, you’ll never guess,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘I think I’ve found Wall-Eye Joe.’
Mrs Groynes let out a sound very much like a ‘YES!’ and then coughed and said, in a more measured way, ‘I mean, well done you, dear. Well done you. What’s he up to this time?’
‘You won’t believe it. He’s posing as a lord and living in Colchester House.’
‘Golly,’ said Twitten. ‘So do you think he’s the one who tried to sell gold bricks to those Brighton Belles?’
‘Yes, I do. He had some in his bag. But I don’t think flaming gold bricks are what this is about, son.’
Brunswick looked expectantly at Mrs G. But if he was hoping for a congratulatory cup of tea, he was disappointed.
‘Colchester House?’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Well, I never.’
Twitten was fascinated. It certainly was entertaining being privy to the reactions of a callous and calculating criminal gang boss operating unsuspected in a police station. Never had he seen deviant mental activity written so clearly on a person’s face.
Brunswick, undeterred by the curious lack of reaction to his news, pressed on.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He must have really pushed the boat out on this one. He’s got someone posing as his manservant; household staff of five; everything. Whatever he’s planning, it must be huge.’
On the London train, things had not warmed up much between Steine and Adelaide Vine. He was wondering if he’d done the right thing, asking her to join him. But it was too late now.
‘May I ask what’s taking you to London, Inspector?’ she said, stiffly. ‘Don’t you have a murderer to catch?’
Steine’s first opinion having been that Peter Dupont had killed himself in remorse for stealing – and then apparently losing – sensitive documents from the place of his employment, he refused to rise to the bait. He was still smarting from the verdict of the police pathologist, who had this morning firmly reported that it was indeed a murder (‘There is no doubt whatsoever, Inspector’).
‘Well, needs must, I’m afraid. I’m going to Broadcasting House to deliver my weekly talk. It’s a bagatelle of a thing, really – called “Law and the Little Man”. You might have heard of it. Often reprinted in the Listener.’
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘They announce, “And now, ‘Law and the Little Man’ with Inspector Steine of the Brighton Constabulary.” Yes, I’ve heard it several times.’
Steine gave a modest shrug, in expectation of the usual elaboration and praise – but he was disappointed. Adelaide seemed to have nothing to add, and when Steine looked up, she had turned her attention to the window. This was keenly hurtful to his pride. Unqualified congratulation was so far Inspector Steine’s favourite form of discourse that (as we have observed) when there was no one else present to offer a ‘Well done, Geoffrey’, he simply supplied it himself.
‘And what takes you to London, Miss Vine? Shouldn’t you be parading the seafront, directing people to the nearest eel and pie establishment?’ (Touché, he thought.)
‘It’s my day off, thank goodness. A legal matter, as it happens. I have to see my solicitor in Earl’s Court. It’s concerning a will.’
‘I see.’
Steine sighed and joined Adelaide in looking out of the window. He was at a loss. He’d apologised to this woman: what more did she want? The train rattled through a cutting, with tall dark trees on either side of the track.
‘Inspector?’ she said, suddenly.
‘Yes, Miss Vine.’
‘Would you mind telling me a little about your lovely officers who were so kind to Phyllis and me yesterday. We both liked them enormously.’
‘You want me to talk to you about Brunswick and Twitten?’
It was as if she knew precisely how to rub him up the wrong way.
‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘Sergeant Brunswick has such beautiful blue eyes, and I felt I could sense unhappiness in him. The young constable seemed very clever. I would love to know if my first impressions were correct.’
The train had got only as far as Wivelsfield. A long journey lay ahead, and sulking throughout the whole thing would be tiring. So, with obvious bad grace, Inspector Steine started to tell Adelaide about Brunswick, and Twitten, and even Mrs Groynes.
Meanwhile, in Brighton, the real Wall-Eye Joe – who of course hated the nickname and considered himself to be Joseph Marriott, Esquire – was hearing rumours in which his name was connected with a gold-brick scam. His feelings were mixed. Even criminals take pride in their reputation – in fact they are more touchy about the respect due from their peers than any other section of society: it’s the main cause of them so often falling out with each other.
But on the other hand, Wall-Eye had bigger schemes to think about. The current scam – hatched up, as usual, with his evil paramour Vivienne (a.k.a. The Skirt) – would set them up for the rest of their lives, and while it had already been set in motion, it couldn’t be rushed.
‘Viv!’ he called over to her now. ‘Did you hear about me trying to sell gold bricks?’
‘It’s common knowledge, darling,’ she drawled.
Vivienne carried on painting her nails. This hanging about was torture, but she had a lot of faith in the plan. It was far better than the unfinished-house scam, which had involved all the bother of dispatching and disposing of umpteen victims, and had netted the gang of five less than twenty grand between them.
This new scheme had everything: a massive payout at the end of it, and only one murder. True, the principal victim this time would be a police officer, which certainly upped the ante. But if all went to plan, it would look like a tragic accident, and they could (once again) walk away scot-free.
The inspector’s train was finally crossing the outskirts of London, and he was relieved. Suburban sprawl had started to replace verdant countryside, and he would soon be safely ensconced in his airtight studio at the BBC. What a miserable journey this had been – answering Adelaide Vine’s eager and impertinent questions about his adorable sergeant and dashing constable; or (to be accurate) consistently failing to answer her questions adequately, because he took so little interest in their lives.
For example, was Brunswick keen on cricket? According to Adelaide, he had an ‘athletic build’!
Wasn’t Constable Twitten’s father the famous criminal psychologist J. R. R. Twitten? No idea, was Steine’s somewhat sulky reply.
What made such sterling chaps as Brunswick and Twitten want to be policemen in the first place?
Steine did his best, but he realised that most of his answers sounded oddly peevish and disloyal. For example, he complained that Brunswick was forever getting shot in the leg, because of his insistence – against strong, sensible advice from his superior officer – on going undercover and mixing with the sort of people who carry guns.
‘How heroic of him!’ interjected Adelaide, who seemed on all occasions determined to miss the point.
Meanwhile Twitten was to all intents and purposes hopeless as a police officer, despite the immense capacity of his brain, because he’d allowed himself to be hypnotised onstage into believing the station charlady was a master criminal.
‘But poor Constable Twitten. How terrible that must be!’
And to top it all, Steine persisted, both sergeant and constable had blatantly ignored him when he said the death of Peter Dupont was suicide, and started investigating it as a murder – although, to be fair, the pathologist this morning had confirmed they were right, so in this complaint he was on fairly shaky ground.
It was only as the train was on its final approach after Clapham Junction that Steine thought to ask where all this interest in policemen came from. Subsequently, he often wondered what would have happened if he had never asked the question, because the answer changed his life. He might have remembered Adelaide Vine afterwards as just an awkward conversation on a train.
‘Oh, it’s just that my grandfather was a London bobby,’ said Adelaide, pulling a comical face. ‘I know it seems unlikely.’
It was the first time she had seemed to warm to Steine. He felt the force of it. She was dazzling when she smiled.
‘A London bobby? That’s what I used to be.’
‘Well, what a coincidence. But back to my grandfather. Mummy used to tell the story of how he had met Grandmother in the course of his duties. It was very romantic.’
‘Really?’
Steine was so relieved that they’d finally settled on a happy topic, he failed to notice at first where this story was going.
Adelaide beamed. ‘It was in 1910, in Bloomsbury. Shall I tell you about it?’
‘Go ahead,’ he said, settling back in his seat. There were only a few minutes left to go; he didn’t mind listening. If the story reflected well on the police, he might be able to use it in one of his talks.
‘Inspector Steine,’ she said, ‘did you ever hear of a silly prank involving members of the Bloomsbury Group called the Dreadnought Hoax?’
Steine gulped and leaned forward. ‘The what?’
‘No, not many people have, I think. But it seems that this group of bohemians, including Virginia Woolf, dressed up like Abyssinians and got themselves received on a warship in Weymouth Harbour. It was just a senseless prank, but they happened to spill out of their house in Gordon Square just as my rather highly strung grandmother was driving past, you see – and in their costumes and make-up, they made her scream.’
Steine had stopped breathing. ‘Go on,’ he said in a strangled tone.
‘Well, Grandfather was on his beat nearby and heard the commotion, so came running to save her, not realising that the threat came not from a gang of street criminals but a bunch of effete intellectuals wearing fancy dress. I mean, they wouldn’t have hurt anyone!’
Steine struggled to say something. He had a million questions, but at the same time he couldn’t think of one. He was so busy trying to grasp the ramifications of Adelaide’s words.
‘So that’s why I’m always curious about policemen, I suppose. It’s in the blood. Mummy loved telling that story, but otherwise I don’t know anything about the family. She actually ran away from home when she was quite young.’
‘What happened to your grandfather? The bobby? Do you know?’
‘Oh, he died a long time ago, when Mummy was little. Struck by an army lorry on a London bridge, she said.’
She looked up. The train, which had been gradually reducing speed, was now alongside the platform and travelling at a trotting pace.
‘Well, that’s it. Victoria!’ she said, and started searching for her ticket. ‘Inspector Steine, is there something wrong?’
‘Miss Vine,’ he said, solemnly. ‘I need to ask you. Where did you grow up?’
‘In Newmarket. Why?’
‘Newmarket near Cambridge?’
‘Is there another Newmarket? Inspector, why are you—?’
‘Your mother was horsey, I expect?’
‘Yes, through and through. That’s why she chose Newmarket as the place to run away to.’
‘Was her name Gillian?’
‘Well, yes. But how—?’
‘Did she ever mention having a brother?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Steine swallowed, hard. He couldn’t believe this was happening.
The train was slowing to a stop. People who had already opened their compartment doors and jumped out were streaming past the window.
She laughed. ‘What on earth is the matter? Inspector Steine, we really do need to get off, and you’re looking very peculiar.’
‘You’re my niece!’ he gushed, reaching out to grasp her hand. ‘I must inform Mother immediately! Adelaide Vine, you must be my long-lost niece!’