The problem with informing two hundred criminal underlings that you are looking for a particular wall-eyed man in Brighton is that over the following week you will receive (taking into account a little slippage due to illness, laziness, stupidity and sudden death in suspicious circumstances) one hundred and ninety-two individual sightings, reported to you on one hundred and ninety-two different – and increasingly exasperating – occasions. At fault here was Mrs Groynes’s rudimentary chain of command: people weren’t authorised to tell others that the message had already got through. Thus, each and every minion who observed a suspicious wall-eyed man entering Colchester House on the seafront thought to himself, That must be him! I need to tell the boss! – and acted on that impulse immediately.
The first time the telephone rang at the station and the caller asked for Mrs Groynes, it was Sergeant Brunswick who answered. He was nonplussed.
‘You’d like to speak to who?’
The person at the other end of the line sounded like one of the snotty herberts who hung around the railway station, nicking Granny Smiths from the fruit stall. From the band-music noise in the background, he appeared to be speaking today from the public call-box at the entrance to the West Pier.
‘You want to speak to our charlady, sonny?’ he said. ‘On a private matter? On this telephone?’
‘That’s right, mister,’ said the supremely confident child. ‘And look sharp, won’t ya? I ain’t got much shrapnel.’
Sergeant Brunswick huffed.
‘Listen, sonny. This number is for official police business. The reporting of crime and such like. The reporting of incidents. You’re speaking to a police sergeant, not a secretary.’
‘Yeah, but go on, mister,’ urged the caller. ‘Be a toff.’
And so Brunswick had summoned Mrs Groynes to the telephone, and she had shrugged her shoulders as if mystified, and then laid down her mop and taken off her heavy-duty rubber gloves.
Once on the telephone, she said, ‘Now what’s all this, calling me at work? Sauce, I call it.’ And then, when the caller had introduced himself, she demanded in a businesslike manner, ‘All right, Shorty. What’s the lay?’
Twitten, pretending not to take an interest, listened intently to her slightly impatient ‘Ah-ha’ and ‘Mm’ responses. He noted that there was no inflection of surprise in her voice. Whatever this ‘Shorty’ person was telling her, she obviously knew it already.
‘All right, ta-ta, good boy,’ she said finally, and hung up.
She picked up her mop again and began bustling with it.
Brunswick and Twitten exchanged glances.
‘Who was that, Mrs G?’ asked Brunswick.
‘J. Sainsbury,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘They got a new consignment of Vim. That was the manager.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Well, all this standing around jawing won’t buy the baby a new bonnet, will it? How about a nice cup of tea?’
Five minutes later the telephone rang again, and this time Twitten hastened to answer it.
‘Brighton CID, Inspector Steine’s office, Constable Twitten speaking,’ he said. ‘May I ask the nature of your enquiry? Would you call it a crime or an incident?’
There was a hesitation at the other end. Then a lightly disguised, rough Greek-accented voice asked in strangled tones for Mrs Groynes. It was obviously Ventriloquist Vince.
‘Are you calling from J. Sainsbury, by any chance?’ Twitten enquired, in tones of concern. ‘You see, sir, this line needs to be kept free as far as possible, and if you’re calling about the important new shipment of Vim, I happen to know that Mrs Groynes has been told already.’
As he spoke, he watched Mrs Groynes’s reaction. She showed no emotion other than polite bafflement. Vince, on the other hand, was definitely rattled.
‘About what fucking shipment a fucking what?’ he said.
‘Vim. It’s a kind of scouring powder.’
Twitten put down the receiver. ‘He hung up,’ he said, smiling.
At the first opportunity, Mrs Groynes put out the word through Shorty that she knew already about the so-called Lord Melamine, thank you all very much, but it proved impossible to stem the flow. For a whole week, everywhere she went, men with facial scars, tattooed knuckles, low hairlines and unorthodox hygiene sidled up to her and said out of the side of their mouths, ‘I found him, boss.’ Leaving home for work in the morning, she often found a cluster of shady characters loitering outside the front door of her house; in the end she started to climb out of a back window to avoid them.
‘There’s no reward, you know,’ she said to them. ‘Tell everyone, I never offered a reward and I know already.’
But back at the station, the telephone continued to ring all day for her, and she finally informed Sergeant Brunswick that she feared she was the innocent victim of a hoax.
‘If they ask for me again, just tell them to bugger off,’ she said. And then she added, with a flash of the innate genius Twitten couldn’t help admiring her for: ‘And you’ll never guess, dears. Even that so-called Vim delivery at J. Sainsbury turned out to be a wicked lie!’
It was partly because of the annoying phone calls that Mrs Groynes decided to help with the Dupont investigation. If Sergeant Brunswick were to work different hours – say, undercover at the Black Cat night club – he wouldn’t be in the office when all these suspicious tip-offs came through. Tommy Drumsticks had already informed her of Dickie George’s sudden disappearance, and of the recruitment of a new female singer whose musical arrangements suited a larger band. Three new musicians were required, and quickly. Pondering this, Mrs Groynes came up with a creative solution that was also (of course) entirely self-serving.
The next day Brunswick discovered an anonymous note on his desk, typed on the office typewriter, and smelling slightly of bleach. It informed him that the Black Cat required a trumpet player urgently, and that he should present himself for an audition at midday.
It was not what you’d call an impersonal note. It ended with the cautionary paragraph:
Try NOT to look like a POLICEMAN. Pay attention in particular to HAIR and SHOES. These are often a DEAD GIVEAWAY. Be aware, the drummer is A FRIEND. And BLEEDING GOOD LUCK, DEAR.
‘Did you see who brought this, Mrs G?’ Brunswick asked, having read it twice. But she said no, dear, she hadn’t. It was on his desk when she arrived for work. Could have been anyone.
‘And I didn’t read it, neither,’ she added, turning her back and bustling with a duster (she was the best in the business at seeming to bustle while at the same time doing nothing). ‘What’s it say, then, dear?’
‘It’s an anonymous tip-off that they need a trumpet player at the Black Cat.’
‘Well, what are they telling you for? You play the bleeding cello.’
‘And the trumpet, Mrs G.’
‘No!’ She turned to look at him. She seemed impressed. ‘Blimey, you kept that dark.’
‘I think I did talk to you about it once, Mrs G, when I kept going to see Young Man with a Horn.’
‘Did you? Well, I never. I sometimes think I’d forget my own head, dear, if it wasn’t stuck on with Araldite.’
He took a thoughtful sip of tea. Not many people knew this, but there was actually nothing he loved more than playing the trumpet. He had played it so much as a teenager that his auntie Violet had often joked (not entirely humorously) that he shouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning with a drawing pin stuck in his windpipe.
So this offer of his dream job combined with going undercover to spy on a heavy mob – this was nothing less than manna from heaven. However, a tiny note of caution faintly tinkling at the back of his mind did give him pause. Was this offer so perfect that he ought to question its provenance? Scatty old Mrs Groynes might have forgotten their relevant conversation, but who else knew he played the trumpet? For that matter, who else knew he longed to go undercover, or that the Black Cat was a location of interest in an ongoing inquiry? Such were the pertinent questions that floated just beyond the reach of his consciousness.
He held up the note and studied it through narrowed eyes (as if that would make any difference). It was a moment of truth: passion v. rationality; id v. superego; sensibility v. sense. Sergeant James Brunswick had pondered many such quandaries in his life, and the outcome was always the same.
‘I’m doing it,’ he said.
‘Good for you, dear. Cup of tea?’
It was just too good an opportunity to miss. The stage at the Black Cat would be a perfect position from which to observe any nefarious goings-on. Up to now, his vague idea of working there undercover had involved lowly jobs such as washing up in the kitchens, or being a bouncer on the door. Now he would have the best view in the house.
‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘I’m off to buy a wig and some winkle-pickers.’
‘Good idea, lovey. Look the part for once.’
‘Tell Twitten about this development, would you?’
‘I will,’ she said. She resumed her bustling, and then broke off to say, ‘Here, I just thought. You’d better not take that note with you, dear. Best leave it safe with me.’
‘Blimey, you’re right!’ he chuckled, handing it over. Imagine if someone at the Black Cat saw it! Mrs Groynes might be just a harmless cockney charlady, but he had to admit that she was also very quick-thinking.
‘Mrs G, I must say, sometimes you do seem—’
But he didn’t get to say what Mrs Groynes sometimes seemed.
‘Lovely iced bun before you go?’ she interrupted.
And that was it. Within a couple of hours, Brunswick was posing as Kevin Mundy (a.k.a. ‘Kevin on the Valves’) in the Black Cat’s newly expanded seven-piece band, complete with false quiff and sideburns, painfully pointy shoes, red bow-tie and shiny tuxedo jacket, belting out a jazzy solo verse of ‘Melancholy Baby’. What a whirlwind. It was lucky that he was genuinely musical, and that his auntie had never followed through on that grisly drawing-pin threat, because although the anonymous note had used the word ‘audition’, it was actually a band rehearsal, and new singer Delores Dee had expected to get through at least a dozen standards along with four or five new songs, too.
There was just one awkward moment: when the double bass player (Bob) said in a spirit of welcome that he was sure he recognised Kevin from other jobs, possibly the Bora Bora Lounge in Portslade? Brunswick pretended to think about it, and agreed this was more than likely – while knowing full well that in fact they’d met when he arrested Bob three weeks ago in Church Street for drunkenly chucking a half-brick through an ironmonger’s window.
As far as the music went, Brunswick acquitted himself, and loved every minute of it. But the main thing was, he was in! From his position on the slightly raised performance area, he would be able to watch all the club’s arrivals and departures. Meanwhile, access to the back-stage dressing-room meant he had already formed an idea of the general layout of the building, and had spotted interesting unlit staircases going both up and down. The Bensons themselves he was yet to meet.
How much help he would receive from Tommy the drummer remained to be seen. Occasionally, in the sections of the orchestrations where Brunswick was not required to play – when he lightly held the trumpet on his knee, and tapped a winkle-pickered foot – he glanced across to Tommy and raised a quizzical eyebrow, but no acknowledgement came the other way, other than a flash from Tommy’s gold tooth. Tommy, it seemed, was a bit of a pro.
So things looked very promising on the Brunswick Undercover front. When he left his auntie’s flat at five that evening for his first night’s performance with the band, he walked to the nearest phone box with a pocketful of pennies and called Twitten at the station.
‘So what do you think happened to Dickie George, sir?’ Twitten asked, eagerly. ‘And have you seen Deirdre yet?’
Brunswick told him to calm down: he’d only been inside the place for a couple of hours so far.
‘It was bally good luck about your getting the job, sir. I’ve been doing a little digging and everything seems to point to the Bensons. Scotland Yard have even confirmed a connection to the notorious Terence Chambers.’
‘Really? What sort of connection?’
‘Well, do you remember the big London Airport robbery, sir?’
‘Of course. They couldn’t pin it on Chambers, but they knew he was behind it. The problem was, none of the notes ever showed up.’
‘They think the Bensons were involved. Specifically, Frank Benson, the older son, who used to be a boxer and is notoriously touchy and hot-headed. Apparently his mother keeps him in check; if she didn’t, or so my contact informs me, Frank would be murdering people all over the place.’
Brunswick was impressed. ‘Well done, Twitten.’
‘Reading between the lines, sir, I suspect at root his problem is a bit Oedipal, so do tread carefully there.’
‘A bit what?’
‘Oedipal, sir. Being sexually attracted to the mother, and so on.’
‘What?’
‘But that’s just my conjecture, sir, so feel free to ignore it. Bruce, on the other hand, has less violent tendencies, so perhaps you could befriend him. It’s wonderful, sir. Just think! From this evening you will be operating incognito in the midst of extremely dangerous criminals, some of whom literally stop at nothing!’
Brunswick swallowed. Until the last couple of minutes he had felt quite bucked up. ‘Well,’ he said, trying not to sound as unnerved as he felt, ‘that’s a good job you’ve done there, son. You know what they say: forewarned is forearmed.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Twitten could have left it there, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t have been true to himself if he had.
‘I suppose I ought to add, sir, that my contact at the Flying Squad also said he was shocked the Brighton police didn’t connect the body in the suitcase with the disappearance of Kenneth Benson, sir – especially as he was last sighted boarding a Brighton train at Victoria.’
‘Well, it’s easy to say that now, but at the time—’
‘And I’m afraid to say I have now examined the suitcase myself and it contains more clues to the victim’s identity than—’ Twitten stopped. He wanted the exact form of words, and after a pause for thought, it came to him. ‘Than a dog’s got fleas, sir.’
Brunswick huffed. He wasn’t in the mood to hear any more. When the coin box beeped to tell him it needed more money, he was briefly tempted not to feed it, but in the end he inserted the pennies and pushed Button A. When the beeps cleared, Twitten started talking again immediately.
‘Anyway, the point is, sir, the Bensons seem to have had more than one motive for killing poor Peter Dupont. I’m thinking that either they killed him because he was going to abduct Deirdre; or because he knew about Kenneth; or because of something to do with the council, because if you remember the Borough Engineer made the memorable remark “Oh, shit, they’ve killed him” before jumping into his car and heading directly for the ports. You’re definitely in the right place to learn more. But I can’t help wondering who wrote that incredibly helpful note to you, sir. Did you form any theory yourself?’
Brunswick shrugged. This was a slightly awkward question. ‘Not really, son, no. I drew a blank, if I’m honest.’
‘I’d look at it myself, but of course I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir, but I’m afraid the note has gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘I did ask to see it, sir. But apparently – and to Mrs Groynes’s credit she did say, ‘You’ll never believe it’ before she supplied the astonishing details – there was a window open and a seagull hopped inside and took the note right off your desk, sir.’
‘A seagull?’
‘Yes, sir. Herring gull would be more precise, I imagine, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t be sure.’
Brunswick was stunned. ‘A seagull?’
‘I know, sir. Or herring gull. I’m tempted to say it’s a blatant lie consistent with Mrs Groynes being a criminal mastermind operating complacently from inside the police station – ’
‘Oh, not that again, son! Not now!’
‘ – but I won’t say that, of course, because it does no good and just makes everyone annoyed.’
‘Listen, Twitten. You’ve got to get over this nonsense about the flaming charlady. It will ruin your career if you don’t.’
‘I know, sir. I do try.’
‘But a seagull … ?’
‘I know. Or herring gull. It really does sound like a lie, doesn’t it, sir? Anyway, it means I didn’t see the note and I’m sorry. But I don’t think we should enquire too deeply anyway into how you got there. You’re in, that’s what matters, sir. You’re in!’
Ordinarily, Inspector Steine would have had quite a lot to say about one of his officers going undercover, especially if the officer was Brunswick. But since his momentous encounter on the train with Adelaide Vine, he had paid almost no attention to what was going on in the station. He was utterly dejected.
Every day, he sat at his desk, staring blankly out of the window. He barely touched his little plates of assorted highland shortbread.
When Brunswick had popped in to announce that he was off to the Black Cat to play the trumpet and glean evidence against a patently dangerous heavy mob, Steine had merely advised, ‘Well, try not to get shot again, will you?’
When Twitten asked him to sign a petty cash slip to cover an unspecified trip to London, he did not demand to know why.
And when his phone rang with news that another suspicious bag – with what appeared to be human blood seeping out of it – had been found at the Left Luggage office at the railway station, he merely sighed and sent Twitten to deal with it on his own.
Twitten was the main beneficiary of this change in the inspector’s spirits, as it meant that the daily one-to-one interrogations took up much less of his time.
Knock, knock.
‘Come in.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Yes, yes. Blah di blah. Out with it, then.’
‘Thank you, sir. The thing is, I still firmly believe—’
‘Yes, yes. Out of ten?’
‘Ten, sir.’
‘All right, Twitten. You can go.’
And after that, the rest of the day was his own.
As for Steine, he just needed to think. He needed to go over the scene with Adelaide Vine again and again, trying to understand what had happened; recalling the dawning sense of joy and amazement when he realised this beautiful young woman was describing the meeting of his own parents in Gordon Square nearly fifty years ago. And then he would remember how that burgeoning joy was crushed when Adelaide, far from falling into his arms with a Shakespearean cry of ‘Mine Uncle!’, instead recoiled from him with a highly modern look of shock, horror and contempt.
The recollection made him physically shrivel at his desk.
‘What a wicked thing to say!’ she had gasped. And then she’d leaped from the train and walked briskly off, leaving Steine with his smile still frozen on his face.
Eventually, he confessed all to Mrs Groynes, which wasn’t easy. But at least it stopped her enquiring all the time why he looked like a wet weekend in Weston-super-Mare.
She was surprisingly sympathetic and helpful.
‘You see, dear,’ she explained, ‘from her point of view, you could be telling a great big porky pie. Pretending that this story of hers means anything to you.’
‘But why would I do that?’
‘I expect that’s precisely what she’s asking herself right now, dear. Why would he lie? What’s in it for him?’
‘And I knew that her mother’s name was Gillian.’
‘That’s all to the good, then. Listen, I bet you hear from her when she’s had time to calm down. Here, tell me who she is again, this Adelaide Whatever Her Name Is.’
‘Adelaide Vine.’
‘That’s the one.’
For once, Mrs Groynes was not pretending to be vague about a detail. She genuinely had hardly registered the name of Adelaide Vine. In the past few days she had been preoccupied with other matters such as getting Sergeant Brunswick out of the way, plotting her revenge on Wall-Eye Joe and eluding her own well-meaning minions for their own safety (with the way things were going, she was afraid she might lose her patience and shoot one of them). This Adelaide Vine woman had not been on the radar.
‘All I know is that she’s a Brighton Belle,’ said Steine, ‘and that she’s very nice-looking, and about twenty years old.’
‘Blimey. A Brighton Belle, of all things.’ She smiled. ‘What will they think of next, eh?’
‘Yes, apparently it was a bright idea of someone in local government. Of course, since meeting her I’ve seen the advertisements everywhere. They say, “Whatever you want to know, wherever you want to go, enquire of a Brighton Belle!” Apparently Miss Vine found out about it just as they were closing applications. She got in by the skin of her teeth.’
He let out a whimper of emotion. It was piteous. This Adelaide Vine woman had really got under his skin.
‘Aw, what is it now, dear?’
‘Nothing, nothing, it’s silly. But I just keep thinking, what if she hadn’t got that last-minute interview for the Brighton Belles?’
‘How do you mean, dear?’
He sighed. ‘I mean, I would never have known she existed. What if she hadn’t been the person on the seafront who took control at the murder scene before we arrived? What if I hadn’t bumped into her the next day at Brighton Station? What if I hadn’t asked why she was interested in policemen?’
It was evidently a kind of pleasurable torture for him to think of all the ways he might not have met Adelaide Vine.
‘You’d still be you, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes, reassuringly.
‘But I wouldn’t know I had such a lovely and accomplished niece.’
Mrs Groynes nodded thoughtfully and patted his hand. Everything she had heard had sounded alarm bells.
‘Do you know what, dear?’ she said. ‘I think she would have found you one way or another.’
‘Really?’
‘I reckon it was meant to be, dear! It was in the bleeding tea leaves! It was kismet! And I bet you anything you like she’ll be in touch very soon to hear your side of the story.’
‘Really?’
‘I’d bet fifty pounds.’
He seemed relieved.
‘Thank you, Mrs Groynes. You’ve been very helpful.’
‘My pleasure. And tell you what, dear: why don’t you go out for a nice little walk?’
‘A walk? At ten o’clock in the morning?’
‘To tell you the truth, dear, while I’ve been standing here I’ve been noticing quite a bit of nasty dust and dirt and cobwebs and whatnot adhering to your personal bits and bobs. If you could pop out for about an hour, dear – an hour should do it – I could get this place all shipshape and Bristol fashion for your return. What do you say?’
So Inspector Steine took himself off (slightly mystified) for a lovely walk on the seafront, and in his absence Mrs Groynes withdrew a set of skeleton keys from an inner pocket of her overalls, selected a small one, opened his desk drawer and carefully removed the first three chapters of Inspector Steine’s memoir, without disturbing either the memo from the BBC’s Director General in which he upbraided Inspector Steine for believing the spaghetti hoax on Panorama, or the recent letter from the Maison du Wax saying that his model would be ready in two weeks and that they planned a grand unveiling ceremony, which they sincerely hoped he would attend.
‘Now,’ she said to herself, ‘what are you up to, Miss so-called Adelaide so-called Vine? What’s he possibly got that you want? And who the bleeding hell are you, when you’re at home?’
Ted Martin was the man in charge of the Left Luggage at Brighton Station. He had worked there for ten years or more, and only recently had started to wish he’d chosen a different profession.
In the old days, Ted had loved his job. For one thing, the Left Luggage office, with its heavy swing doors keeping out the cold and its ancient paraffin heater behind the counter emitting a steady (if always rather disappointing) warmth, was a fairly cosy place to work. For another, the tips weren’t bad. And sometimes he could go home at six o’clock and regale his morose wife Iris with the daft things people had tried to leave with him that day (such as their overexcited toddlers fitted with reins), in the hope of cheering her up.
However, once the police started finding human body parts in the luggage, the shine went off the job somewhat. Sergeant Brunswick always regretted that he’d stupidly opened that suitcase in Old Ted’s presence. An elderly man who remembered terrible things from the First World War, the sight of a newly dismembered corpse sent him over the edge, and afterwards he was out of action for several weeks.
It had taken a lot of pressure from friends and colleagues to make him resume his position; even having agreed, it took persuasion still to get him out of the house after breakfast.
‘Try not to dwell on it,’ his wife would say each morning, as she handed him his Cheddar cheese sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper. ‘It’s not likely to happen again, dear, is it?’
So when he first noticed that a red stain had appeared overnight on the side of a canvas holdall, he hesitated about reporting it. For one thing, maybe the stain was only ink? (But it didn’t look like ink.) For another, he had no recollection of the person who’d left it, so he could be no help to the police with any inquiries. (But this was really no excuse.) And for another, what if this time it was the head? (This was the obvious clincher.)
But how do you ignore such a bloodstain once you have noticed it? So in the end Ted made a decision, and called not only the police station but also Ben Oliver at the Brighton Evening Argus – because although Oliver was very young, he was gaining a good reputation as a crime reporter. Also, just after he was appointed to the job, Oliver had written a human-interest story about Ted’s grisly torso experience, pointing out to the readers of the Argus that while we all enjoy reading about sensational stuff, we should never forget the real traumatic impact it can have on the normal, innocent people who work (say) in a Left Luggage office, and have to spend weeks in a rest home in Littlehampton to get over it. (‘Being in Littlehampton was worse than being dead’ was the quote that most Brightonian readers remembered from the piece, probably because it chimed so well with their own prejudices.)
Twitten was the first to arrive. He found Old Ted counting out the coppers he’d been given today – piling them into little towers on the counter. By the look of things, he’d got about two and sixpence. When he saw Twitten, he scooped the coins up and poured them back into his pocket.
‘Good morning, Mr Martin, I’m Constable Twitten. I’ve come about the holdall; may I see it?’
Ted was surprised by Twitten’s youth, but impressed by his politeness. He reached for the bag and set it gingerly on the counter.
Twitten immediately noted one key fact about the bag, which had not escaped Ted: that it was human-head-sized.
‘So this is it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Interesting size, Mr Martin.’
‘Indeed, sir.’
Twitten felt his new helmet slip forward on his forehead, which (annoyingly) it always seemed to do when professional composure was required.
‘Good. Excellent,’ he said, affecting nonchalance. He picked the bag up by the handles and tested its weight. It was heavy. A human head would surely weigh about that much.
‘Interesting weight.’
Then he spotted the stain on the canvas, and quickly put the bag down. He coughed.
‘So you’ve made no attempt to identify the contents of this bag yourself, Mr Martin?’
‘Me? No.’ Mr Martin shuddered. ‘Not on your ruddy life. Against the rules anyway, thank Christ.’
‘Is it all right if we bolt those doors for a minute or two? We don’t really want the public seeing this.’
‘Good idea, son. I’ll do it.’
But just as the old man in his shabby railway uniform reached the doors, Ben Oliver arrived. He was wearing a summer hat, and looked excited.
‘Ted!’
‘Mr Oliver.’
‘Thanks so much for calling me. Oh, no, am I too late?’ the reporter said.
And in a way, he was. Twitten, at the counter, had quickly opened the bag and was now staring down into it.
‘What is it?’ called Oliver. Then he said, ‘Ted, you stay here. Don’t move an inch.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Twitten, with a look of relief. ‘It’s bally well all right. Come on.’
The others approached, but warily.
‘No, really. There’s nothing to be scared of, aside from the blood.’ Twitten let out a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Come and look, Mr Oliver. It’s a good thing you’re here, actually. Because, look, it’s addressed to you!’
By the time Inspector Steine had come back from his walk, it’s true that no dust, dirt or cobwebs adhered to his personal bits and bobs – but only because there had been none adhering in the first place. Mrs Groynes was absent. His desk drawer, when he unlocked it, showed no sign of disturbance.
He needed to reply to the letter from the Maison du Wax, of course. But when he considered the idea of a grand unveiling ceremony, he had definite misgivings. He wanted just to feel simple pride: after all, not many people are chosen for the honour of being modelled in wax by someone with a French name easily confusable with ‘Tussaud’. But there was fear of humiliation, too. As Twitten had heartlessly pointed out, a very high percentage of the models in the Maison du Wax were not only terrible, they were also weirdly grouped. By what rationale was Henry VIII placed with Kirk Douglas in shiny boxing shorts? Why was Marie Antoinette smirking over her fan at Tommy Trinder? Where would Inspector Steine turn up? Amidst Bill Haley’s Comets? And what would the lovely Adelaide Vine think of that?
His phone rang. He answered it without enthusiasm. It was Twitten reporting that the bag at the Left Luggage office contained Peter Dupont’s bloodied missing parcel of documents, addressed to Ben Oliver of the Argus. A preliminary rummage suggested that it contained ‘bally dynamite, sir’.
‘Dynamite?’ repeated Steine in alarm. (He hadn’t really been listening.)
‘Not literally, sir,’ laughed Twitten. The boy sounded faintly hysterical for some reason. Steine heard the constable turn to someone and whisper, ‘He thought I meant real dynamite.’
‘I heard that, Twitten.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Who are you talking to?’
Twitten guessed (rightly) that he oughtn’t to mention the presence of a reporter from the Argus, so avoided the question.
‘Anyway, the main thing is, sir, it isn’t a head!’
Steine shrugged. He had no idea why Twitten would say this.
‘Well, good, good. Carry on.’
After hanging up the receiver, Steine folded his hands on the desk, swallowed and assumed his characteristic faraway expression, staring at a blank bit of wall. Aside from the occasional sigh, he was completely still. His brain emptied; his breathing slowed. This was what despair had always looked like in Geoffrey St John Steine. When he was a child, his father had once discovered him in just such a trance-like state, shaken him to his senses and exclaimed, ‘Blimey, Geoff! You scared me!’ And then, thoughtlessly betraying his origins, ‘I thought you’d stuck your spoon in the wall!’
From there, things had escalated horribly. Sister Gillian had sneakily reported her father’s cockney outburst to Mother (partly to ask what it meant), with the effect that Mother was angry with Father, and both of them were very angry with Gillian, and then – and there was no justice in this – all three ganged up together to be absolutely furious with young Geoffrey for unwittingly affecting death in the first place.
Dwelling on his childhood had become a habit over the past few days, for obvious reasons.
After fifteen minutes of staring poignantly into the middle distance, Steine realised that the telephone was ringing again, so he answered it.
‘Inspector Steine?’ said a female voice.
‘Yes?’
He held his breath. Was it she?
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘It’s Adelaide Vine. I’m so sorry I ran away the other day. I was very confused. But I spoke to my solicitor that day in London, and he said you weren’t lying to me. It seems you really might be my uncle.’
In the world of Mrs Groynes, there were usually few surprises, and even fewer mistakes. She thought ahead; she was well-informed; she was sceptical; and she was also preternaturally quick to grasp what was going on. So anyone hoping that she would carry on believing that Lord Melamine was Wall-Eye Joe and act accordingly once she had actually met him is in for a disappointment.
Prior to meeting him, of course, she had been planning a terrific sting operation, involving a faux diamond robbery that would first relieve him of everything he owned and then leave him dangling from a ceiling inside the Tower of London dressed as a Beefeater with a recently fired gun in his hand. A small gang had been put together to pull this wonderful con with her; a van had been stolen from Worthing and its number plates changed; facsimile floor plans of the Jewel House had been knocked up by Dave the Forger; a fake Koh-i-Noor had been fashioned (the idea being that the gang would leave this bit of ‘jargoon’ in the place of the real sparkler). All that remained was for Mrs Groynes to make contact with ‘the mark’.
But then she sat next to the poor man in a tea shop on the seafront, where he was ineptly trying to persuade a retired postman from Godalming to accept a gold bar in exchange for twenty-five pounds, and she quickly concluded that, whoever this so-called ‘Lord Melamine’ was, he was not the notorious and ruthless con man responsible for the deaths of multiple women at that horrific unfinished house in the country. This amateur magsman with the pot of China tea and the half-eaten custard tart evidently couldn’t con his way out of a wet paper bag.
The sense of disappointment was immense, but she also felt an overwhelming sadness. It wasn’t so much the wasted work and money (although replica Beefeater costumes don’t come cheap). No, it was that over the past week she had felt Hoagy close to her again; planning revenge for his death had made her feel so much better about herself. And now, with the wall-eyed ‘Lord Melamine’ turning out to be just a hopeless beginner, unworthy of her attention, she felt the long-lost Hoagy slip away, back into the darkness.
But there was no sense dwelling on any of this now. Back in the tea shop, she wiped a tear from her eye and asked the skivvy for the bill. She had things to do. Without looking at Melamine, she put on her gloves and brushed marzipan crumbs from her skirt, and unclasped her handbag.
It was then that she realised Lord Melamine had been trying to catch her eye.
‘Madam,’ he said, smiling. ‘I don’t suppose I could interest you in a gold brick at a bargain price? Here’s my card. I’m the Fifth Marquess of Colchester but you can call me Melamine. I’m very pleased to meet you. I was watching you in the mirror over there and I noticed you put your milk in before the tea. That’s the way I like it too!’
Mrs Groynes, who had been on the verge of tears, was so amused she laughed aloud.
‘Oh, you poor bleeder!’ she said, patting his hand. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, dear, but you are absolutely bleeding hopeless!’
‘I don’t understand. What did I say?’
And he looked so upset that – blame the Hoagy disappointment, blame the sugar rush from eating a marzipan fancy – she felt genuinely sorry for him. It just broke her heart that this man was so bad at his job, so bad at pretending to be posh; and as for choosing to flog gold bricks, that game was as old as the hills.
So she took off her gloves again, put her handbag on the floor and sighed. The least she could do was to offer him a few tips.
‘Tell me again, dear. You saw me in the what?’ she said. ‘When I was pouring my tea.’
‘Oh, I see. I saw you in the mirror.’
‘And you’re a lord, you say?’
‘Again, I don’t understand.’
‘All right, we’ll come at this another way.’ She reached out a hand in a businesslike manner. ‘Let me take a butcher’s at one of those gold bricks of yours, then. Go on.’
Melamine, confused but not unhappy at this unexpected turn of events, obediently plonked a brick on the table. ‘There’s a very interesting history attached to this gold, actually. It has passed through the hands of some notable figures.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll bet it has, dear. Now show me another one.’
He obeyed, shrugging, and produced another brick.
‘It all started with the battleship Potemkin—’
‘And a third, come on.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, but he opened the bag for her to make her own selection. ‘As you can see, they’re all very much alike.’
‘Oh, yes, I bet they are,’ she muttered, helping herself.
But he had stopped paying attention to Mrs Groynes. A man in a hat had just entered the tea shop and was looking round. Mrs Groynes looked up briefly, but wasn’t interested. She had examined all three bricks and was perplexed. They had turned out to differ significantly from her expectations. She tapped Melamine on the shoulder.
‘This gold, dear,’ she said. ‘Where did you really get it?’
But he wasn’t listening.
‘Captain Hoagland! Over here!’ he called.
Captain Hoagland?
‘All of this gold is bleeding real, dear,’ Mrs Groynes said.
‘I know it is.’ Melamine was evidently puzzled by the remark. ‘Why wouldn’t it be real? I described it as gold; I’m not a liar.’
Mrs Groynes, struggling to make sense of what she had heard, was still not fully aware of the man approaching their two tables. Had someone just said Hoagland? The name served only to make her impatient. What new imposture was this?
‘Sir. Hello,’ said a familiar voice.
She stopped breathing. Unable to look up, she concentrated instead on the gold brick she was unconsciously cradling in her arm like a kitten. None of this could be happening. Captain Hoagland? Emotion swelled within her. Her Hoagy had been callously murdered. He was dead.
But Melamine was still talking to this man, as if it were perfectly normal to meet him in a tea shop.
‘I know it’s your day off, Hoagy old chap, but perhaps you’d care to join us. Allow me to introduce you, although we’ve only just met. This is—’
He made a face at Mrs Groynes, hoping to prompt her to say her name, hoping to make her acknowledge the person standing in front of her. Finally, she did.
She looked up, and – well, let’s face it, this is not a surprise but it’s still lovely – it was the same Hoagy. An older, more careworn version of him, but still her noble, handsome man.
He beamed with pleasure to see her.
‘Palmeira!’ he said, smiling.
‘Hoagy?’ she croaked.
‘What a truly agreeable surprise! But what’s wrong, my dear? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Because – oh, my good gawd!’ There was an ominous catch in her voice. ‘Oh! Oh!’
‘Ah. Should I ask someone for a serviette?’ said Melamine.
‘Palmeira?’ said Hoagland, gently.
‘I thought you were dead, my love!’
And suddenly she was sobbing – sobbing in public, her hands to her face.
‘Wah!’ she cried, repeatedly. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! WAA–AA–AA–AAH! Hoagy, my Hoagy, WAAAAH!’
When she came to look back on the scene afterwards, Mrs Groynes was glad she had taken no backup with her, and that the shop was full of strangers. Her sobbing was lengthy, loud and uninhibited, and Melamine could only sit and watch as the gentlemanly Hoagland took the chair beside Mrs Groynes, offered her a hanky from his pocket and put his arm round her.
You would never have put these two people together, Melamine told Mrs Rogers afterwards; but here was the posh old soldier comforting this common (and somewhat offensive) little cockney woman, as if he really cared about what she was feeling.
‘My dear Palmeira, I’m so sorry,’ Hoagland was saying. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I promise, I had no idea.’