Deirdre had gone missing. She had left no note. Ma Benson was so angry when she found Deirdre’s bed hadn’t been slept in that she kicked a hole in the wall.
‘Frank! Bruce!’ she shouted.
It had been a tense time for the Bensons. A week ago, the singer Dickie George had disappeared without trace; Deirdre’s little boyfriend Peter Dupont had been murdered by a person or persons unknown; to cap it all, Terence Chambers had apparently sent a trumpet player called Kevin to breathe down their necks. It wasn’t hard to identify Kevin as an imposter, first, because his shoes and hair were wrong, and second, because he clearly enjoyed making music much more than was remotely normal for a world-weary, cheesed-off professional.
But the most difficult thing had been protecting Deirdre from the knowledge of Dupont’s death, after Bruce came back from the coach stop with the unexpected news.
‘This meddling copper at Pool Valley said Weedy Pete was dead, Ma. Someone only went and cut his throat.’
‘Good God,’ she said, in genuine bafflement, puffing on her pipe. ‘Who’d want to murder Weedy Pete?’
‘I know, Ma. It don’t make sense.’
The entire Benson clan (minus Deirdre) was nonplussed. For people who were usually in control of things, this state of nonplussedness was a novel experience, and they didn’t like it.
‘And then someone only nicked Deedee’s letter, and all,’ Bruce added.
‘Who?’ said Frank and Ma together.
‘Search me,’ said Bruce, unhelpfully.
At first, Ma Benson had been in favour of telling Deirdre what had happened, but the boys had dissuaded her. Bruce said that Deirdre was too delicate to cope with the shock. Not to mention, given her tiny circle of acquaintance, she might never find out – because who would tell her?
‘But the main thing is, Ma, if we tell her he’s dead, she’s going to think we did it, ain’t she?’ said Frank. ‘She’ll never believe we didn’t. Not after – you know, Kenneth.’
Ma Benson scowled. ‘Ruddy Kenneth!’ she said, bitterly.
‘That stupid fucker,’ agreed Frank. Normally his mother demanded an apology for this type of language, but this time she let it go. That Uncle Kenneth was indeed a stupid fucker was absolutely fair comment.
But that was a week ago, and now? Well, Deirdre had gone, and what turmoil! Where was she? How had she physically got out? And why? Had she perhaps found out about Peter Dupont’s death after all, and left in despair? Or, not knowing about his death, had she run away to join him? And there was a further, much more worrying possibility: what if she had been kidnapped (possibly on behalf of Terence Chambers)?
The only thing they knew was that Deirdre had taken nothing with her. Not even her little Lilley & Skinner shoebox of childish treasures, which was still beneath her bed.
‘We’ve got to think,’ Ma Benson said. ‘Bruce, go and ask at the wax museum if they’ve seen her. And make sure you speak to the woman in the stupid frock; she seems to be in charge. Don’t use Deirdre’s bloody trysting door: they might not know it’s there. Frank, you go and talk to Hastings at the rock shop. Deirdre was always coming back with free humbugs. He must have been soft on her. And then one of you ask at the bus stop.’
‘Are you gonna tell Terence?’
‘No. Not yet. So make sure that trumpet bloke don’t hear of it.’
‘But maybe Terence could help, Ma.’
‘No, Bruce. No heavy mob, do you hear me?’ A chilling thought struck her. ‘Has anyone checked downstairs? She couldn’t have … ?’
Bruce nodded reassuringly. ‘It’s all fine, Ma. It’s safe. No one goes in and out but Dave. Deirdre’s never set foot down there.’
Frank put an arm round his mum. ‘Deirdre might be weak and all that, Ma, but she’s not stupid. She’ll be safe, I bet you. And if anyone’s harmed her, they’ll bleeding well wish they’d never been born.’
For Twitten, it had been a trying week since Dupont was murdered. He had interviewed everyone present at the scene: he’d even been up to London’s East End to coax a story out of the little boy Nigel, who had rewarded his journey by kicking him in the shins and running away; he had spoken to Dupont’s council colleagues; he’d been shown the very manhole cover by which the murdered man had made his clever underground escape from the Marlborough House council offices (but had not been allowed to touch it). The only people so far to elude him were the two Brighton Belles, Phyllis and Adelaide, who had both been allowed a week off work to recover. Whenever he called at their lodgings, they were out.
Although Deirdre ought to have been on his list of witnesses, he had held back from calling at the Black Cat to speak to her. This was a tad unprofessional of him, but he was torn: it was unlikely she could help him, and he was genuinely concerned about the unnecessary distress his questions might cause. And now that Brunswick was undercover, wasn’t that enough? But both these reasons were masking the real one: he was just reacting to Deirdre’s dreamy, faraway helplessness the way everyone else did, by feeling it was his job to protect her.
What an extraordinary effect this girl had. Everyone from the Bensons themselves, through Dickie George and all the boys in the band, through the Humbug Man, through Weedy Pete, through Constable Peregrine Twitten – somehow she put them all in touch with their inner Sir Galahad. Even as a baby, people had cooed into her pram, ‘Hello, baby, come home with me, I’ll look after you.’ Captain Hoagland had spotted her just once from across the back alley at Colchester House (she was sitting like Rapunzel at her window), and he had instantly thought, I ought to rescue that young lady.
So to sum up, Twitten had done his best with the information available, but as he described it to himself, it was like trying to build a sandcastle with three parts water to one part sand. With the discovery of Peter Dupont’s mysterious missing parcel at Brighton railway station’s Left Luggage office, however, the sand-to-water ratio was suddenly drastically improved. Because what had looked at first glance like just the bloodstained stolen contents of a Borough Engineer’s safe was in fact a bloodstained dossier intended for the press.
Which raised an important question in Twitten’s mind.
‘Tell me why this package is addressed to you, Mr Oliver. Did you know about it?’
Oliver bit his lip. ‘I did, yes.’
‘You did?’
Twitten was shocked.
‘The thing is,’ Oliver continued, ‘I had an appointment to meet Dupont on the seafront that day.’
‘Then why don’t the police know this? Why didn’t you come forward?’
Oliver shrugged and pulled a face.
‘Well, to be fair,’ he said, ‘I did think about it. But look, Constable, Dupont meant nothing to me. He said he had a story, but he wouldn’t tell me much on the telephone. He said he would bring the proof. And then he got murdered!’
‘So?’
‘Well, it suggests the story is quite big.’
‘Which is all the more reason to come forward.’
Never having dealt with a reporter before, Twitten was at sea about Oliver’s reasoning.
‘Mr Oliver, can’t you see this changes the official investigation completely? I could actually arrest you for choosing to keep this to yourself.’
Oliver put his hands up as if to apologise, and smiled for support at Old Ted – but Ted wasn’t really listening. His main thought at this moment was that the doors to the Left Luggage office were still locked, and he could hear the telltale hubbub of disgruntled people gathering outside. So much for his tips. It was the universal law of the Left Luggage office: the longer the queue, the more meagre the haul.
Twitten was still far from satisfied with what Oliver had told him. He thought back to his training at Hendon, where he had repeatedly come top in tests for never accepting the first explanation from a witness. ‘Look, Mr Oliver. The reason you didn’t come forward … I know this might sound an ungenerous assessment of your character, so please forgive me if I’m wrong, but were you perhaps just scared that you’d be murdered too?’
‘Of course I was scared I’d be murdered too!’
‘Ha! I thought so!’
‘They cut his throat, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Exactly. Ha!’
Twitten folded his arms and rocked back on his heels. He felt jolly pleased with himself. He had the package Dupont had been carrying; he now knew it to be a dossier, bound to contain important clues; he also knew why Dupont had been carrying it; he had remembered to put gloves on, so as not to leave his own fingerprints on the bag or its contents; and he had guessed correctly that even a crime reporter will risk breaking the law when apprehensive about being slit from ear to ear. All this represented a terrific breakthrough. If only Ted could remember the person who had left the bag.
‘Will you try to remember, sir? And call me at the station if anything comes to you?’
Ted said he would apply himself, but couldn’t promise anything.
‘And may I use your telephone for a moment, sir?’
Ted sighed. Restive customers were actually knocking on the doors now, and the hubbub was growing louder. He could almost hear the snap and jingle of purses as the pennies and threepenny bits went back into them. But like a good citizen, he passed the instrument to Twitten.
This was the conversation with Inspector Steine, of course, in which an excited Twitten managed to alarm Steine by mentioning dynamite, but not to interest him in the Peter Dupont case in any other way. And it would be fair to say that Steine’s total lack of enthusiasm for uncovering the murderer of Peter Dupont not only annoyed and shocked Twitten, but caused him to make an uncharacteristic decision.
‘Something wrong, Constable?’ said Oliver, when they were outside on the busy concourse, and the hordes of frustrated customers had finally flooded into Ted’s domain.
‘I’m just thinking about what to do next.’
‘Look. You know I really want to see what’s in that dossier?’
Twitten’s gloved hand gripped the handles of the holdall more tightly as he said, ‘I’m sure you do.’
‘Is there any way you could … ?’
‘Of course not, Mr Oliver. It has to go directly to forensics.’
‘Right.’
‘They’ll photograph everything, and dust for fingerprints, and test the blood against Dupont’s. This material was taken by the murderer from the scene of the crime.’
‘Of course. Of course. Forget I asked.’
But Twitten kept on thinking. He looked at the bag and he looked at Oliver, and then back at the bag, and then back at Oliver. This young reporter seemed to be the only person apart from himself actually interested in finding out what had happened to Dupont. He was also the sort of person who would understand that a reference to ‘dynamite’ could be metaphorical as well as literal.
So, as they were leaving the station, Twitten said, ‘Look, Mr Oliver. Perhaps we could take a brief look at this dossier together at your office.’
Oliver, excited, said nothing. But he raised a questioning eyebrow.
‘The way I see it,’ Twitten carried on, ‘much as I cannot condone your attitude to public duty, you are now an official witness in this inquiry, and this is a good opportunity to interview you accordingly. Moreover, I’ve only been working in Brighton for the past three weeks, and you live here and know lots of things I don’t. Mr Oliver, would this perhaps be a good time to conduct the interview?’
And Ben Oliver said, ‘Constable Twitten, I’m sure I can fit you in.’
Young Shorty was having a busy week. There had been very little slouching-against-walls time. He was seriously slipping behind with the adventures of Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat. Every day saw another message to be run around town. Today (the same day Mrs Groynes and Captain Hoagland were so dramatically reunited) the general alert was, ‘The job’s off. Everyone stand down. The mark is NOT Wall-Eye Joe, repeat NOT Wall-Eye Joe.’
As he dashed about, dodging between the shoppers and holiday-makers on the busy main streets, he sometimes felt like a character from one of his comics. The words ‘DART!’ and ‘ZOOM!’ ought to be visible in a little dark cloud trailing behind his heels.
‘Hey, Shorty, got a minute?’ he heard, as he was passing the rock shop on the corner of Grenville Street. He skidded to a halt. (‘SKID-D-D!’)
Looking round, he saw a familiar face. It was that bloke who played drums at the night club along here. He was standing in a patch of shadow, but his gold tooth glinted in the dark.
‘Tommy?’
‘Shorty, come here.’
‘I’m on a job, Tom.’
‘Look, it’s important. It’s worth a tanner. Tell the boss, there’s things afoot at the Black Cat. That dodgy trumpeter Mrs G got me to vouch for – the Bensons tumbled to him right away, but they’ve got it in their heads he works for Chambers.’
‘Oh, blimey.’ (Shorty liked to pretend he understood what was going on.)
‘And now the girl Deirdre has disappeared.’
Shorty closed his eyes and repeated the list: ‘Dodgy trumpeter. Works for Chambers. Missing girl.’
‘But the girl’s the main thing, right? She needs protecting, and I can’t protect her if I don’t know where she is, can I? And I don’t know where she is!’
‘OK, OK. I’ll tell the boss. But I gotta get on, Tommy.’
‘All right. Good boy. Here.’ Tommy pulled a bag of sweets out of his pocket. ‘Humbug?’
‘Oh, ta.’
Tommy helped the boy prise the sweet from the paper, then took one for himself.
‘What about that tanner?’ said Shorty.
Tommy dug a coin out of his pocket and handed it over.
‘I can’t get enough of these,’ said Tommy, sucking the humbug wistfully. ‘Just one of the many ways that me and Deirdre Benson are soulmates!’
All this talk of Sergeant Brunswick being a spy for Terence Chambers, incidentally, needs to be set in context. If Brunswick justifiably assumed he was the only interloper in a band of professional musicians, he was wrong. Because Chambers did have a man inside the club’s band already: he was the one who played the piano.
Of course, Chambers’s pianist wasn’t aware that the drummer worked for Mrs Groynes or that the trumpeter was an undercover policeman. Oh, no. But he had his suspicions about the guitarist, who in fact worked for MI5; meanwhile the guitarist had his suspicions about the alto sax, who (rather thrillingly) reported nightly to his superiors at Interpol.
Some of these men had joined the band at the same time as Brunswick. Others had been in situ for months. And it was all quite ironic. These men (mostly) all wanted the same thing: to find out how and why Kenneth Benson had been killed, and what was going on in the basement area. They all knew a little; none of them knew much. If only they had worked together! But instead, each of them believed he was the only cuckoo in the nest.
Incidentally, there was one person who knew for sure that Brunswick was a policeman. This was Bob on double bass, who (as previously mentioned) once threw a half-brick through a window and got himself arrested. The brick-throwing incident had been a calculated act on Bob’s part, designed to throw any suspicion off him, because he was in fact a CID man reporting to Chief Inspector Jenkins at Scotland Yard. When he recognised ‘Kevin’ at the audition as his arresting officer, he loyally helped out a fellow undercover policeman by suggesting they had worked together in the invitingly named Bora Bora Lounge in Portslade.
So to sum up:
Terence Chambers was on piano
Scotland Yard was on double bass
Interpol was on alto sax
Brighton CID was on trumpet
Mrs Groynes was on drums
MI5 was on guitar
In short, only the trombonist was not living a double life. A lifelong professional musician and a member of the union, he had no suspicions whatsoever that his fellow band members were not ordinary joes like himself. Occasionally, he would come across the guitarist emerging stealthily from Ma Benson’s office (tucking a notebook into his back pocket), and he wouldn’t give it a second thought. He once found Tommy Drumsticks having an emotional argument with Deirdre Benson on the back staircase – he thought nothing of that, either.
‘It’s really boring,’ he would tell his wife in the mornings, when she asked what life was like at the club. ‘It’s the most boring job in the world. And the other guys: what a bunch of stiffs!’
On their way to the Argus office, Twitten nearly changed his mind about letting Oliver in on things. The newsman might be a useful ally when it came to solving the Dupont case, but he was also bally relentless when it came to asking awkward questions.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about, Constable Twitten,’ said Oliver, casually, as they walked side by side downhill towards the newspaper offices.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I’ve been wondering. What happened to that hilarious delusion of yours about that woman onstage with you at the Hippodrome – the one you were hypnotised into believing was a sort of female Professor Moriarty?’
Twitten stiffened. ‘What about it?’
He felt sick. He’d forgotten Oliver had been present and seen the whole thing. He didn’t know what to say.
‘It occurred to me afterwards, you see,’ said Oliver, ‘that perhaps you were in on the act.’
‘What?’
‘But on the other hand, you were so convincing! Especially when you shouted out, “But she IS a criminal mastermind, sir!”’
‘Ha ha ha,’ chuckled Twitten, weakly. He looked round in an exaggerated manner. ‘A lot of public houses in this part of the town, aren’t there? I wonder what the historical reason is for that?’
They walked along in silence. But not for long.
‘So was it all an act, then? What happened at the Hippodrome?’
‘Could we change the subject, please, Mr Oliver?’
‘It’s a simple question. I just want to know, was it all an act?’
‘Of course it was an act! In fact, “all an act” doesn’t come close to describing how much of a bally act it was! Now, could we please—’
‘No, sorry, perhaps I’m not being clear. What I want to know is, were you in on it?’
‘I was not in on it, no.’
‘I see.’
‘I certainly wasn’t.’
‘All right.’
‘The whole thing was horrible.’
‘OK. But if that hypnotist—’
‘Oh, please!’
‘No, hang on. Listen. If that hypnotist did make you believe such a preposterous thing, what happened afterwards? Did the delusion just wear off, or did you have to get more hypnosis from someone else? Or perhaps – ’ and at the thought of this Oliver started laughing ‘ – perhaps you still believe it!’
Twitten had had enough of this. Oliver was pushing him closer to telling a lie, and he refused to do it. So he took a gamble.
‘Mr Oliver,’ he said. ‘The bally truth of the matter is that I do still believe the charlady Mrs Groynes is a clever criminal. I believed it before the stunt onstage at the Hippodrome, and I continued to believe it afterwards. And I’m promising you that one day you and everyone else will believe it, too.’
Oliver let out a low whistle. Then he looked at the policeman’s earnest expression and started laughing. He held out his hand for Twitten to shake.
‘Good for you, Constable; that was very funny.’
Twitten smiled, modestly.
‘Sorry, Mr Oliver,’ he said. ‘But you did ask for it.’
Which made Oliver clap him on the back and laugh all the more.
And, thank goodness, they had at last reached Oliver’s workplace, and the interrogation would cease.
At this time of day the Brighton Evening Argus building was a vision of industry. Vans were waiting outside with engines running, while men with barrows trundled weighty bales of newsprint and shouted instructions to the drivers. Presses were running (‘First edition!’ Oliver explained above the thundering din), and the whole scene was imbued with the incomparable smell of printers’ ink. Oliver led Twitten upstairs to the newsroom, where hundreds of yards of telephone flex ran (bizarrely) in loops across the ceiling, and men (it was all men) hammered away on typewriters, or shouted into telephones, while other men in visors with pencils and sleeve-garters laboured over page proofs on outsized sheets of salmon-pink paper.
Oliver opened the door to a side office and ushered Twitten in, to a place of relative quiet, although the smell of ink came with them. Then he cleared a table and opened a desk drawer, from which he extracted a pair of leather gloves, pulling an expression that said ‘Don’t ask’, before relenting.
‘My predecessor left these,’ he explained. ‘He knew a lot of people who used them.’
‘I see,’ said Twitten. And then, as Oliver donned the gloves: ‘So tell me about your dealings with Dupont.’
‘There isn’t much. Dupont contacted me the day before he died, saying he had a story for me involving the Borough Engineer’s office. Now, I have to tell you, I didn’t think it would be much of a story, if it was just about corruption at the council.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’d be nothing new there, Constable! It’s a story we could run every week!’
‘I see,’ said Twitten. He tried not to show how shocked he was. ‘But you still think he was killed because he was the man who bally well knew too much?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Well, no. I mean, it sounds plausible now that you’ve said it. But I’ve been working on a completely different line of inquiry up to now.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Twitten gave him a hard stare. ‘Because you didn’t come forward, Mr Oliver! You bally well didn’t come forward!’
They worked quickly through the file, Oliver concentrating on the council proceedings – copies of minutes, and so on, some of them going back five years or more – while Twitten pored over Dupont’s notebooks.
He was very impressed by the level of detail. If only this boy had opted for a career in the police, he’d have made a very good detective. Even when he was just idly waiting for Deirdre in the wax museum, Dupont would note down the hilarious behaviour of the preposterous ‘Angélique’, and the noisy arguments with her father about this and that. When Twitten read the line ‘Because I’m supposed to be blind!’, he actually burst out laughing.
‘What do you know about Colchester House?’ Oliver said, after a couple of minutes’ purposeful page-turning.
‘Recently reoccupied, so far as I know,’ said Twitten. He didn’t want to mention the station gossip about Wall-Eye Joe living there like a lord. ‘It’s been empty for years, though,’ he continued. ‘There are a few pages in this notebook, actually, about Dupont’s meeting there with a Captain Hoagland, which was a name I’d been wondering how to spell, but a lot of it seems to be about whether this captain might have known Dupont’s father from a bomb-disposal unit during the war, so it might not be relevant – “Tell Auntie Maud” underlined, and so on. Why did you mention the house?’
‘Well, on the back of this picture it says, “Borrowed from Captain Hoagland at Colchester House – please return. Also read account in Historic Brighton by F. C. Grimshaw, 1937.”’
‘What does it show?’
Oliver pulled a face and held up the picture. ‘A garden with an aviary. Some birds.’
‘And what’s this?’ said Twitten, picking up a sheet with a list of dates on it.
‘Ah, now this is something. These are the dates over the past four years when people reported the smell of drains. Attached are copies of the memos from Reinhardt to Blackmore, instructing him to ignore the complaints, saying they will be dealt with by a different department. And here—’ Oliver picked up Mr Reinhardt’s half-used bank book, and opened it at a random stub. ‘Yes, you see? Here. A thousand pounds paid in. And here’s another, and another.’
‘A thousand pounds each time? That’s a bally enormous amount.’
‘I know. And see what he’s written?’
‘Yes. It says, “C House”!’
‘And here are the minutes of a planning permission meeting just a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘It was a vote not to allow development on the site of Colchester House.’
‘And that’s a prime site, I suppose?’
‘Exactly. To me, that’s the most interesting detail of all. To vote against pulling down that house! In the context of what else has been going on in this town, that’s extremely suspicious.’
‘Mr Oliver, I’d like to thank you for helping with this.’ Twitten sounded controlled but his heart was racing. Was he finally getting somewhere? Was he going to find out who had killed Peter Dupont, and why?
‘Well, it’s helping me, too,’ said Oliver. ‘Oh, and there’s this other one.’ He picked up another piece of paper. ‘Dupont’s put a star on it but it’s not clear why. It seems to be about the formation of those Brighton Belles you see parading around.’
‘That’s odd,’ said Twitten. ‘What could the Brighton Belles have to do with any of this?’
‘I don’t know, Twitten. But Dupont put it in the package so he must have wanted me to see it.’
As it happened, Mrs Groynes was a guest at Colchester House at this very moment. After her sensational breakdown in the tea shop, Lord Melamine had insisted she come home with him to recover herself. And she had not declined. So overwhelmed was she by the coincidence of seeing her darling Hoagy again that she barely noticed (although she did notice) that Lord Melamine was toting a bag around containing three thousand pounds’ worth of twenty-four-carat gold.
Melamine was clearly bemused by the whole thing. As he confided to Mrs Rogers in private later, Captain Hoagland’s love life was his own affair, of course, but this impudent little woman hardly seemed the sort of person he would consort with. But Melamine gathered that they’d met after the war, and had enjoyed a romantic liaison. And that somehow she had known about poor Hoagland’s experience at that ghastly unfinished house in the country – but not that he had survived.
‘It was a friend of yours, Hoagy,’ she explained now. ‘What was his name … Hoppy Hopkins? He told me.’
‘Old Hoppy? The Professor? That man defused more seventeens than anyone else in the entire BD, you know. How is he, the old reprobate?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, dear. All I know is that I bumped into him around Soho one night and he told me you’d got yourself involved with a woman running a dating agency in 1949, and then were never seen again. So naturally I put two and two together.’
‘I’m so sorry, Palmeira, that you were worried.’
‘I wasn’t worried, dear. I was in bleeding mourning!’
‘Oh, Palmeira.’
‘And not to put too fine a point on it, dear, I was planning to hunt down the devils who did it to you and have their guts for garters!’
‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea. But as you see, I’m well.’
They were all three sitting together in the morning room, with the tall windows looking out to the seafront. Sun streamed in.
‘Look, something’s troubling me about all this, dear,’ she said, softly.
‘What? Tell me.’
‘You survived an attempt to kill you, is that right? At that notorious ruddy unfinished house?’
‘He tunnelled out,’ said Melamine, proudly. ‘You should have seen him.’
‘So why didn’t you come forward when Joe and The Skirt went to trial for all the other murders? I’m sorry to bring it up, dear. I’m sure it’s a sore point. But they got off because of the lack of evidence, didn’t they? But at your say-so I reckon they’d have hanged.’
Hoagland seemed dumbfounded. His face drained of colour.
‘What have I said, dear?’ she said. ‘You look confused.’
‘They went to trial? There were actual murders?’
‘I can explain,’ Melamine volunteered. ‘Captain Hoagland, I—’
Hoagland held up a hand.
‘Whom did they kill, Palmeira?’
‘Probably about six women, dear.’
‘No!’
‘The bodies have never been found, that’s the trouble. A big vat of acid was discovered at the house, though.’
Hoagland looked horrified.
‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’
‘You’re saying you didn’t know?’
‘Of course I didn’t know! All I knew was that it was night-time, and Vivienne suggested I take a look at this outbuilding, and then the door was shut and someone attacked me in the dark, and I fought back, and I must have knocked him out, and when I couldn’t get out of the door, I scrambled out through some dirt. And the taste of the dirt in my mouth, and the fear, and the dark – I could smell the bloody bombs, Palmeira! It all came back: the dirt and the smell, and the blasted fear—’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’
Mrs Groynes felt helpless. She wished she could comfort him.
‘But still,’ she persisted, gently. ‘The case against Marriott was on the wireless and in all the papers. It was front-page news for weeks.’
Hoagland turned to Lord Melamine. ‘Sir?’
‘Look,’ said Melamine. ‘I’m sorry, Hoagland. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.’ He composed himself. ‘Mrs Groynes, as you’ve probably guessed, after my part in Captain Hoagland’s escape, I asked him if he would take a job as my valet. And then, about six months later, I heard a bulletin on the radio about the so-called murder house, and I realised it must be the place he’d escaped from. And I made a decision. I knew Hoagland was such a decent chap he would come forward if he knew about the case, and rightly or wrongly, I decided that the stress of having to relive his experience at the hands of those people would be too much for him. So I took us both off to Tristan da Cunha.’
Hoagland reacted to this news with something like a howl.
‘So that was all for my sake, my lord?’
‘Yes.’
‘We took that whole trip to keep me from knowing about this blasted trial? So everything you said about wanting to emigrate eventually and farm ostriches … ?’
‘All a ploy, I’m afraid.’
‘I bonded with those ostriches, sir!’
‘I know, and it did you no harm at all, Hoagland. The thing is, Mrs Groynes, I honestly had no idea the case would fail. I thought Captain Hoagland’s absence would make no difference to the outcome. When we returned and I discovered that the hell-hounds had walked free, I could hardly believe it. I felt terribly, terribly guilty.’
‘As you bleeding should, dear!’ said Mrs Groynes, hotly.
‘All I could do was keep the knowledge of that trial from Captain Hoagland for as long as possible. And I wish for obvious reasons I had managed it longer.’
With so much new information flying out, even Mrs Groynes couldn’t quite keep up with this. Part of her was still wondering how you bond with an ostrich. What obvious reasons was his lordship referring to?
Hoagland was confused, too. ‘What do you mean, sir?’ he said, frowning.
‘I’m sorry, Hoagland, but it’s the main reason I have kept us on the move so much. Joe Marriott and The Skirt (as your friend here calls her) are probably still looking for you, aren’t they? And if they ever find you, it stands to reason they will kill you.’
After dropping off the holdall at the forensics laboratory, Twitten called the personnel department at the council to get the name and address of Dupont’s next-of-kin: a Miss Stanford in Eastbourne (his ‘Aunt Maud’). She had already been informed of his death, of course, but Twitten wrote to her, to ask if he could visit. He also telephoned his own mother and had a consoling half-hour conversation with her, simply because it was jolly nice to hear her voice, and there was no one in the office to overhear for once (Mrs Groynes seemed not to have been in all day), so he could tell her that although the present case was shaping up well, in his darkest moments he did wonder whether being a policeman had been the best career choice, and whether it was too late to switch to studying kinship systems in the Fens.
Feeling bucked up by her encouragement (‘I’m sure you’re doing a super job, Peregrine darling’), he pulled himself together and said, aloud, ‘To Colchester House, then.’ And five minutes later, he was standing on the opposite side of the road, taking it all in. From the front façade, it looked well maintained and very handsome. From the side, however (from both sides, in fact), it was less impressive, with that narrow alleyway immediately to the rear of the house, and then the night club reached via Grenville Street and the wax museum in Russell Place.
He remembered the picture of the garden in Dupont’s dossier. A Regency house as grand as this would have had such a garden, surely?
Which was why, ten minutes later, he was at the public library, looking at a copy of Historic Brighton by F. C. Grimshaw (1937). Colchester House was allotted two whole pages – the role of Nash; the Colchester lineage; a visit from the Regent in 1822, when the guests drank ‘bumpers’ of champagne. But the passage that caught Twitten’s eye related to an account, written in 1835, of the garden:
A very curious place … full of little hills and mounds, covered with trees, shrubs and flowers, all set a dozen feet or more below the level of the street beyond the wall. Here and there are arbours shaded by ivy and clematis; in some places are little hollows surrounded by artificial rocks; in others are subterranean paths, besides railing, hedges, ponds, white tents and a magnificent enclosure for birds. Over the whole are scattered white statues and painted lamps, some on stands, others hanging from lofty arches which join the mounts. What I liked best was the ‘subterrane’. We entered a subterraneous passage, at the end of which is a little polygonal chamber, curtained all round with red and white, and carpeted with yellow-coloured sheepskin.
Twitten copied the entry word-for-word into his notebook. It made him rather wistful. This area was now occupied by a club run by gangsters who sawed up their relations and a tawdry museum run by charlatans, one of whom was pretending to be blind, and both of whom were pretending to be French. Whereas it used to be an elegant place of statues and birds and painted lamps, not to mention an underground polygonal chamber lined with a golden fleece!
With all these dramatic developments to think about – the Bensons frantic to find Deirdre; Mrs Groynes coping with the shock of Captain Hoagland’s miraculous return from the dead; Brunswick unwittingly working alongside representatives of internationally renowned law-enforcement agencies; Inspector Steine steadily bonding with his long-lost niece; and Constable Twitten finally getting his teeth into the Dupont case – it might seem strange to focus our attentions on the rock shop on the corner of Grenville Street. After all, it was the same scene every morning and afternoon: the little crowd standing outside the window, making admiring ‘Cor!’ and ‘Blimey!’ noises as they watched while one enormous formless humbug was expertly stretched and twisted by Henry Hastings to make hundreds of small, stripy (and completely uniform) suckable humbugs in that somehow mind-confounding three-dimensional geometric form: the regular tetrahedron.
But today there was one small difference to the demonstration. Because about halfway through it, Hastings happened to look up from his muscular labours and see the surprising expressions on the faces looking back at him. It was bizarre. Instead of smiling like idiots, as they usually did, they all had their mouths open, and looked variously bewildered, appalled and horrified.
He didn’t know what to make of it. The procedure was precisely the same as usual. Had he forgotten to put clothes on? A quick glance down confirmed that he had not. Had someone written a rude word on his window?
But when he looked again at his audience, there was no mistake about it. They appeared to be witnessing a highly disturbing sight. One woman actually screamed. And now that he thought about it, he could smell those drains again. The drain smell was in the very room!
Was there someone behind him? He suddenly felt sure that there was, not least because the people outside were pointing past him, over his left shoulder. Showing no alarm (but quickly calculating his next move), he squinted into the plate-glass window and saw in the reflection a pale figure to his left, not moving, but with one hand outstretched, as if possibly holding a weapon.
A feeble croak reached his ears. Afterwards he thought about it often. Had the ghastly figure tried to say ‘Help me’?
But he would never be able to answer that question, because all of Hastings’s commando training came back to him in this time of imagined threat. In a single move, he spun on the spot, grabbed a half-pound humbug from a shelf and used it to strike the side of the head of the ghastly, spectral and deeply smelly figure that had appeared behind him. To screams from the people outside, the man fell straight to the ground, dead.
It was Dickie George. The poor man had survived a week in the sewers only to be killed by a humbug. As the papers were to report over the coming months, this was the first case of manslaughter-by-humbug ever to be recorded anywhere in the world.