Nine

At midday on Sunday, just as Constable Twitten was arriving at the Balmoral Hotel in Hove, the BBC’s Home Service made an announcement.

‘And now a change to our schedule,’ said a starchy voice.

In millions of households across the country, the person standing nearest to the wireless set held up a finger and said ‘Shhh, children’ – because this was interesting, and needed to be heard.

‘It was with sadness that the Corporation learned yesterday of the death of the much-loved entertainer Cedric Carbody …’

Listeners who were happily anticipating their weekly dance-band programme Seaside Serenade (this week from Bournemouth) would have to wait, apparently. They would be treated first to a twelve-minute talk by Carbody, previously aired in 1952.

This was the BBC’s way of marking his sudden demise, in response to the many fans who had telephoned Broadcasting House to express their shock and sorrow. A disc recording of the classic ‘A Difficult Term at St Winifred’s’ had been located in a basement and dusted off, and would now be played.

In many homes, this extra programme gave listeners pause. At his three-storey home in the Queen’s Park area of the town, Inspector Steine stopped reading The Riddle of the Sands (his favourite book) and inserted a leather bookmark; in her flat on the London Road, Sergeant Brunswick’s auntie sat down on a kitchen chair, smoothed her apron and poured a fresh cup of Ty-Phoo. At his hideaway hotel in Torquay, Gerry Edlin reached out an elegant arm to turn up the volume, smiling winningly at the other residents who were already putty in his hands. On Clifton Terrace, Mrs Thorpe settled herself on a Regency chaise longue in the bay window of her attractively decorated bedroom and took a sip of sherry. In the flat above Rodolfo’s barber’s shop in Hove, Miss Inman suspended the spring clean of her murdered brother’s old bedroom. And at the Balmoral Hotel in Hove, Pandora greeted Twitten on the doorstep by grabbing his arm and rushing him inside to listen.

‘What’s happening?’ said Twitten. ‘Am I late?’

‘Quickly, Peregrine,’ said Pandora. ‘It’s just starting.’

‘What is?’

‘You said you’d never heard one of Cedric Carbody’s talks,’ whispered Pandora, as they took their seats with the other residents. Twitten recognised Mr Henderson, sitting in the best armchair, and nodded to him.

‘Mr Henderson,’ he whispered, removing his helmet.

‘Shhh,’ said the proprietor of the hotel. He waved Twitten towards a spare seat.

‘Constable Twitten,’ mouthed Henderson in reply, carefully making no sound.

‘Shhhh!’ said everyone else.

For the management at the BBC, incidentally, the decision to repeat this talk had not been a simple one. Monkeying with the schedule required top-level authorisation. An emergency meeting of pipe-smoking men in crumpled brown three-piece suits had been called on Saturday afternoon solely to determine whether a full fee would be payable under the terms of Carbody’s original contract. Some of the pipe-smokers said yes; some said over their dead bodies. Some dared to suggest (absurdly) that the Corporation had a moral responsibility towards its loyal and feebly recompensed contributors, especially those who were murdered in the course of their work.

But when the legal director finally stated the official position, all discussion was over. This might sound harsh, he’d said, but by getting himself killed while technically representing the Corporation, Carbody had violated the terms of his contract. No fee was thus payable for this repeat. All future requests for payment from his estate would be blocked. It might even be possible to recover disbursements already made.

And so, against this caring background, ‘A Difficult Term at St Winifred’s’ began, with the late Cedric Carbody affecting the falsetto voice of his legendary headmistress Miss Pritchard. Famously, he did not dress up in female garb for these talks, but he did perform them in front of an admiring audience, whose laughter came across the airwaves in hearty gales. In places you could hear the shuffling of pages. Occasionally, the falsetto slipped. But the main thing to strike any listener was the sheer merriment in Carbody’s performance, as if every word he encountered – in his own script – came to him as a delightful, rib-tickling surprise.

‘Girls [he began], many of you will be unastonished to hear that this has been … a Difficult Term. [Huge anticipatory laugh from the audience.] Ever since the first day back from the long vac when the small campfire set by Marjorie Whitlock next to the chem lab was caught by the breeze and all but consumed Miss Hopcroft’s snuggery while sending poor Mademoiselle to the County General with first-degree burns, it is fair to say that St Winifred’s has been … how can I put this? … “on the back foot”.

‘“For, when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions”. No sooner had the embers cooled; no sooner had poor Mademoiselle’s nerves been calmed with the reliable application of Dubonnet, and Miss Hopcroft comfortably installed pro tem in the potting shed, than the peace of our little clifftop world was assailed for a second time – no less sensationally – by a fiendish foreign plot to kidnap our spirited head girl Beryl Frensham.

‘Ah, Beryl, Beryl, Beryl. [Big laugh.] Beryl, Beryl, Beryl, Beryl, Beryl. Not for the first time I say, well done, my dear, for beating off those ghastly krauts with your hockey-stick, and leaving them for dead in the boot hole. But a black mark – a very black mark indeed – for actually killing the unfortunate Miss Battersby [huge laugh] who unwisely attempted a rapprochement when your hockey-stick was, sadly, very much still in play and your indignant blood was up.

‘Rest assured, Beryl, all those miles away in Holloway, that we think of you daily, wish you the best, and will mark the hour of your execution next Friday with the customary minute’s silence.

‘And on a sunnier note, you will be pleased to hear that when I dropped a line to Bennett and Dobbs, they provided a satisfactory replacement for Miss Battersby in an absolute trice! Thus, geography studies were disturbed by this regrettable capital offence of yours by the barest minimum.’

Carbody paused, beautifully. This was a masterly performance. Then he turned a page, sighed, and carried on.

‘I shall not dwell on the débâcle that was Sports Day. [A shout of laughter from the audience.] The guilty party knows who she is. Order marks were duly given for the actual impaling of Lorna Hargreaves with a javelin, but I fear Lorna’s parents are still demanding financial restitution for the punctured lung, and this might well prove the end of St Winifred’s as we know it.

‘“How much of this was my fault?” I ask myself. “Augusta, Augusta, Augusta. What have you done to deserve this difficult, difficult term?”

‘The answer is, nothing. If pushed, I suppose I do regret lending my motorcycle and sidecar to Aileen Dunlop, who used it to abscond from justice, after masterminding a hashish-smuggling operation from her cubicle in Heliotrope Dormy. But in my defence, when she demanded the keys, she told me barefaced that she merely meant to purchase caramels in town with a five-shilling postal order sent by an aunt in Adlestrop.’

In all the sitting-rooms and kitchens where people were listening to this, there was a confusing mixture of emotions.

It felt wrong to laugh when the man was dead, but it also felt absolutely right. In the residents’ lounge at the Balmoral Hotel, one woman was in a state of bent-double convulsion, laughing and crying at the same time, and hugging her knees.

‘Last but by no means least, we must address the mystery of Diana’s clifftop plunge.’

A huge laugh at this from the audience was met by a rather different reaction from two of the people in the Balmoral lounge. ‘No!’ Pandora gasped. And Twitten – scarcely knowing what he was doing – reached over and took her hand.

‘How dear to us was Diana. A cornerstone of the Black Sheep Society of Ainsworth House, but so often – due simply to her ill-starred congenital slowness – out of step with the nimbler girls.

‘Oh, Diana, Diana, Diana. [Laugh.] Diana, Diana, Diana, Diana, Diana. [Laugh building throughout.] When your classmates boldly broke the rules to delight the local hobbledehoys by singing ‘Let’s Have a Tiddley at the Milk Bar’ in a public arena [big laugh], you were the one left stranded outside the gates on the way back. When your friend Parvati lavishly buttered the stairs in the hope of incapacitating Matron, it was you who forgot, slipped and fell, and spent six days and nights in the san. When your athletic friend June held an unauthorised archery competition on the school’s front lawn, it was you who ambled athwart the whizzing arrows, munching a Cox’s Orange Pippin, and risked at every nerve-shredding step a faithful re-enactment of the martyrdom of St Sebastian.

‘And when – oh, dear! – a thrilling midnight assignation was made on the windy clifftop by a person who shall NOT be named [big laugh], it was you, Diana, who donned your inadequately soled plimsolls [pause for laugh; laugh starts], followed at a distance, watched by gusty moonlight, slipped on the exposed chalk [laughter builds], shrieked: ‘Oh, crikey! Not again!’ [huge laugh] and took that final header into the dark.’

While everyone else roared with laughter, Twitten and Pandora looked at each other in horror.

‘Poor Diana,’ said Pandora quietly – which made everyone in the room laugh again. She fled the room, followed by Henderson, leaving Twitten torn as to what to do. He felt he should follow, but wasn’t he obliged to listen to the rest of Carbody’s sketch?

‘On a happier note, the School Play was a tremendous success. Rarely has Mr Sherriff’s Journey’s End been performed with such unfettered joie de vivre. Meanwhile you will be pleased to hear that my own small efforts in the world of crossword-setting have met with some success …’

And so it went on, with Twitten transfixed, Pandora weeping in the arms of Mr Henderson in the dining room next door, and elsewhere Mrs Thorpe dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief at the loss of such a great artiste; Gerry Edlin loudly applauding (and getting his fellow guests to stand and applaud with him); Miss Inman grunting as she resumed the scouring of a wall with a Brillo pad; and Inspector Steine shaking his head in genuine sorrow at the sort of low offerings classed as entertainment by the listening British public, before removing his bookmark and returning to his Erskine Childers.

At the Metropole Hotel, quite a few of the stir-crazy conference delegates on the sixth floor happened to catch ‘A Difficult Term at St Winifred’s’ – but only because there was sod all else for them to do until Monday.

They felt cheated. Chambers had promised them a proper Brighton weekend, with limitless alcohol, much dancing in nightclubs with scantily clothed women, narcotics aplenty, scrappy late-night violence in dark alleys, and possibly the thrills and spills of the greyhound track. Based on these expectations, most of them had left their drugs at home, and none had brought girlfriends. All had brought weapons. And as any villain will tell you, an idle knuckleduster hangs heavy in the hand.

So it is fair to say that a sense of frustration was building. And it would also be fair to say that the Carbody broadcast – with its camp, niche appeal – helped matters not one bit. Had a high-travelling crane-shot been available to pass along all the sea-view windows of the sixth floor of the hotel, it would have revealed one strung-out thug after another listening with an expression of offended disbelief, and then – enraged – jumping up and smashing the wireless set to pieces.

There were exceptions, however. In Room 615 all was quiet, and the wireless remained intact. This was because Mr Pickering (delegate for Essex and East Anglia) had died of septicaemia instantly on arrival, as a result of injuries inflicted by an enthusiastic Ipswich dominatrix the previous weekend.

(Looking back, it had been foolish of Pickering to travel. Blood poisoning is never to be taken lightly, and it was undeniable that he had felt, and looked, terrible all week. On the express from Victoria, he had presented such a corpse-like appearance that the other passengers in his compartment had opted to wedge themselves outside in the corridor.)

Meanwhile, in Room 608, occupied by Mr Shelby from the East Midlands, the wireless set was likewise spared, because a three-handed poker game had now been running, with curtains closed, for a full twenty-seven hours – and no one was ready to stop. Playing against Shelby in one of the most unevenly matched games of cards he had ever known, were Mr O’Brien from the neighbouring West Midlands, and Mr Baker (North West).

Both the Midlands boys were serious card-players and this was reflected in their winnings: they were coming out about equal. Baker, however – well, Baker was simply useless, and had already lost not only all the cash he’d brought to Brighton, but also his Bentley and the family home in the Wirral, not to mention two and a half legs of his favourite racehorse. Shelby and O’Brien could hardly believe their luck. Normally, on their home turf, these two were at daggers drawn over matters of demarcation – but a spirit of common amazement at their fantastic good fortune was bringing them closer by the hour.

What made Baker so bad at cards? It was – sadly – his ‘tell’, which his canny opponents had spotted in the first few minutes of play. It didn’t take a genius to work it out, either. When Baker received a good hand, his eyes lit up and he smartly tapped his cards on the table, exclaiming ‘Hah!’ When he got a bad one, he frowned and said ‘Oh’. At home, in his own casinos, people deliberately lost to Len (‘Bang-Bang’) Baker because – as his nickname implies – if they didn’t, he might shoot them. It was a shame he had never realised this.

Finally, in Room 601, the last person not listening to Carbody’s broadcast was, inevitably, the psychopathic Mr Hardcastle. In fact, Hardcastle made a point of never listening to the wireless, on account of having quite a few voices in his head already. So instead, he was hanging out of the window and aiming his gun at holiday-makers on the Promenade. He was in just this sniper-ish attitude – window wide open, one hip propped on the sill, cigarette clamped between his teeth, both arms extended for better control of the weapon – when, immediately after the Carbody memorial broadcast, Terence Chambers entered the room, with Palmeira Groynes at his side.

‘Hardcastle, get down,’ said Chambers, quietly.

The other man barely moved. It was too long-distance a shot with this sort of gun; he knew that. The woman he had in his sights – wearing a hot pink polka-dot dress and a yellow straw hat – might not be the person he hit when he pulled the trigger. But did it matter? Whoever copped it, the flap would be worth watching. And wouldn’t it give that bitch in the hat a scare!

‘Hardcastle,’ repeated Chambers. From the dramatic decrease in volume of his voice, you could tell he was extremely angry.

‘What now?’ said Hardcastle, not lowering the gun.

Chambers swiftly joined him at the window, took hold of his standing leg and pulled.

‘What the—?’ Hardcastle grabbed the window frame for balance. ‘Let go of me!’

Chambers leaned closer. ‘I need a word with you, Hardcastle,’ he whispered, with no trace of emotion in his voice.

Mrs Groynes, watching, gasped. When Terence Chambers dropped his voice to an uninflected whisper, you needed to start saying your prayers.

‘Tell me about Diana, Miss Holden. Tell me anything you can remember.’

Twitten and Pandora were sitting together with Mr Henderson, post-broadcast, in the small dining room. All of them were reeling from what they had just heard. Twitten in particular had a lot of questions, but he slightly despaired of asking them. Pandora’s wide streak of self-centredness was proving hard to miss. He knew that if he asked her something directly pertinent to the murder inquiry, she might very well answer, ‘So how did you feel when you found out I was the Milk Girl?’

However, currently, most of the questions pertaining to herself were pertinent to the inquiry, so he let her talk.

‘How could Mr Carbody know all that?’ Pandora was saying now, rather than answering his question about Diana. ‘He knew about me singing “Let’s Have a Tiddley at the Milk Bar” at the children’s playground! But no one knows that, Peregrine. I was so embarrassed, I never told anyone.’

‘It was you?’ said Henderson. ‘Who sang that milk-bar song in public?’

‘Yes!’ Pandora blushed at the memory.

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Twitten.

‘Really?’ said Henderson, surprised. He not only knew all the songs extolling milk bars but had written most of them.

‘It’s just a funny old song.’ Pandora shrugged. ‘We found a record of it in the junior common room. It’s not naughty or anything; it was a dare. We were always daring each other at Lady L. But it went wrong. I got the words all mixed up, and a couple of people in the audience booed, and then the man at the piano told me off for wasting everyone’s time, and I felt awful. I hate being told off. I hate it!’

‘The man at the piano was horrible to you?’ repeated Twitten. ‘That was Officer Andy, one of the murder victims.’

‘Was it? Well, he made me cry. He said it was disrespectful to treat the talent show as a joke, and that as a well-brought-up girl I should know better. Everyone was uncomfortable, and June was furious, and then a girl got up – a local girl, I suppose; about my age, we didn’t know her. She got up and told the man at the piano he ought to apologise to me for being so rude. It was really shocking, a girl talking back like that, and we were all told to leave – and because of that, someone informed Miss Stoater, the headmistress, and I got a detention with a hundred lines, and then the Stoat asked the whole school to explain the word “tiddley”, but to be honest that was very funny, and made the whole thing better again, because of the way she said “Oh, Marjorie!” in such a tragic voice – a bit like Mr Carbody just now. Oh Marjorie, Marjorie, Marjorie. That was just the way she said it. In fact, everything he said was just like the Stoat.’

‘Really?’

‘But how could he possibly know about me singing? And what he said about someone making an assignation on the cliff and Diana following – where on earth did he get all that?’

Back at the Metropole, Mr Hardcastle from the North East was not reading the situation very well. He refused to relinquish the gun.

‘You threatened a kid, Hardcastle,’ said Mrs Groynes. ‘You caused a bleeding stampede and someone died! My boy Shorty witnessed the whole thing. The bang, the thundering hooves, the screams, everything.’

‘Look, that kid was threatening us,’ said Hardcastle. ‘You should be thanking me. I grabbed those from him.’ He indicated a pile of hand-written flyers with the heading BOGOUS CONTEST on them. Mrs Groynes picked one up, scanned its contents, and then opened her handbag, as if to put it inside.

‘Italian-looking, this kid?’ she asked.

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

She put her head close to Chambers, and spoke in a low voice. ‘Barrow-Boy Cecil tells me he sold a gun last night to an Italian-looking kid at a pub near the station.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Chambers, under his breath. ‘Oh … drat.’

‘Now, I don’t know who this kid is,’ she continued, ‘but if he turns up waving a gun tomorrow, and we end up surrounded by rozzers, I tell you, it’ll be all this idiot’s doing.’

Chambers shook his head wearily, and looked down into Mrs Groynes’s open handbag, where a gun was nestling. He looked her in the eye and raised an eyebrow. She raised an eyebrow back. Years ago, when they worked as a team, they’d used this ploy a dozen times in sticky situations.

‘What’s going on?’ said Hardcastle. ‘What’s in the bag?’

‘Fancy a mint imperial, dear?’ said Mrs G, holding out the bag to Chambers. ‘It might help dissipate the tension, as it were.’

There was the slightest pause and then, ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Chambers. ‘Fancy one yourself, Pal?’ Then he reached in, grabbed the gun and shot Hardcastle in the head before the man knew what was happening. The troublesome North East delegate dropped lifeless to the floor.

‘Oh, well,’ said Chambers, shrugging.

Mrs Groynes held out her handbag for the return of the gun. ‘He certainly had that coming, Terry,’ she said. ‘Terry? You all right?’

‘Mmm,’ he said, distractedly. He was studying the position of the body. As it happened, the way people dropped to the ground when shot in the head was something Terence Chambers was particularly interested in. Sometimes, as a party-trick at home in Stepney, he would lay out ashtrays on the carpet to mark exactly where he anticipated a given person would land. ‘What you doing, boss?’ the intended murderee would ask, uneasily, as the process began.

Joining him to look down on Hardcastle, Mrs Groynes made a ‘Tsk’ noise and patted Chambers on the arm. ‘Put it back, dear?’

‘Oh. Right. Yes.’ He surrendered the gun, pulled a regretful expression. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen, Pal.’

‘You did what you had to do, dear. He was a bleeding liability.’

‘Yeah, but they’re dropping like flies, what with Pickering and all.’

Mrs Groynes made another sympathetic ‘Tsk’. ‘I’m guessing you’d rather not tell the others that numbers are down from ten to eight, and that the whole East Coast of England north of London is presently rudderless and up for grabs?’

‘You guess right, Pal.’

‘Thinking of moving in yourself?’

‘I am. I’m very fond of Southend.’

They turned to go, leaving Hardcastle where he fell.

‘Eight out of ten left,’ said Chambers, wearily, as they were leaving the room.

‘That’s still enough, Terry. But you had me worried for a minute there. I thought, He’s only forgotten the old mint imperial trick!’

Chambers laughed, and was just about to say ‘Never!’ when a volley of shots rang out, and they both dived for cover.

‘Oh, what now?’ huffed Mrs G.

‘Sounded like gunfire.’

‘It’s coming from there, Terry,’ hissed Mrs Groynes, pointing to Room 608. ‘That’s Shelby’s room.’

‘Oh – flip,’ said Chambers.

More shots followed, with the telltale sound of chairs falling over and bodies dropping to the ground. Chambers shook his head sorrowfully and sucked his teeth throughout. This was turning into a very testing day.

‘Do we go in?’ whispered Mrs G.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘No point.’

Finally, there was silence. Chambers and Mrs Groynes tentatively pushed open the door to find a darkened room featuring overturned chairs, a number of bloodied playing cards and bank notes, some IOUs with crude drawings representing parts of the equine anatomy – and three dead bodies.

‘Don’t look at me, dear; none of this is my doing,’ said Mrs Groynes, opening the curtains.

It was pretty clear what had happened in Room 608. Shelby and O’Brien had finally exploited the Baker tell to its limit, and claimed the last leg of the racehorse, with fatal consequences. Exhausted, fraught and miserably racehorse-less, the North West had jumped up and shot the East Midlands; the West Midlands retaliated by shooting the North West; then the East Midlands (overexcited and fatally wounded) shot the West Midlands – not in retaliation, but because he couldn’t resist the opportunity.

Then the sequence had been simply reversed, with the West Midlands shooting the East Midlands, and then expiring; the North West shooting the already lifeless West Midlands, just to be on the safe side; and the East Midlands shooting the North West twice before the gun dropped from his lifeless hand and he fell down.

So it was all quite neat, if otherwise far from satisfying from Chambers’s point of view, as – at a stroke – it reduced the number of still-living delegates to the great Brighton Conference of 1957 from eight to just five.

‘Oh, number twos,’ said Chambers, with a small sigh. ‘That’s done it. We’re in the doo-dah now.’

And so they were. Although nothing had been said overtly on the subject, there were definitely two classes of delegate present for this conference: the seriously big hitters with urban populations rife with villainy; and then the rest. As things now stood, of the big hitters only London and Brighton were still extant. With the East Midlands, West Midlands, North West, North East and Essex all out of the picture, the remaining fiefdoms being called upon to pool resources and resist the American mob incursions were:

the South West

the Scottish Borders

the Thames Valley

the Channel Islands

the Lake District

With the best will in the world, it was unlikely they were up to it, the main organisational demands in these five attractive regions being less concerned with protection rackets, narcotics and prostitution; more with:

cream teas

tweed manufacture

woollen carpets

tax avoidance

sublime poetic response to watery landscape.

‘Why did we do this, Pal?’ said Chambers, quietly, picking up a piece of paper marked, I promise to pay the bearer one back leg. ‘Just remind me why.’

Elsewhere in Brighton, of course, people were unaware of the momentous happenings at the Metropole. Even visitors to the hotel had no idea what was occurring on the top floor. Downstairs in the bar, Ben Oliver was making notes, having just bought a drink for the retired Argus reporter who had worked on the Diana story, and now he was awaiting the arrival of Miss Stoater – crossword-setter and former headmistress of Lady Laura Laridae.

She had chosen to meet him at the Metropole rather than entertain him at her home, which was fair enough. Flipping with satisfaction back through his notebook, Oliver realised he was in a good position in regard to this murder inquiry. If he helped solve it, he could take some of the glory. But if the case wasn’t solved quickly, he could write his proposed piece condemning Inspector Steine as hopelessly ineffectual, and acquire stardom by another route. ‘Win-win’, we would call it today, because we have more words for things.

‘Mr Oliver?’ He looked up. He expected to see a handsome but square-cut woman of middle years in a capacious tweed suit and sensible lace-up shoes, possibly with a cameo brooch at her throat. Instead, the slim and shapely Miss Stoater wore a fashionable twinset in lavender blue with a light linen skirt and court shoes. Her hair was permed; her face powdered. She was forty-five at the outside. Oliver panicked. Had he called the wrong person?

But then she spoke. ‘You wanted to talk about poor Diana, Mr Oliver,’ she said, and her voice settled any doubts. She did at least still sound like a headmistress. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but something came on the wireless and I had to listen.’

‘What was it?’

She waved the question away. ‘Immaterial,’ she said. ‘Now, what exactly did you want to know?’

At Inspector Steine’s house, there was a knock at the door. When he opened it, he saw a boy running away, and a small parcel on the doorstep.

‘Hey, you!’ he called. ‘You, stop!’

But the boy made an obscene gesture and kept running, so the inspector picked up the parcel and took it through to the scullery where he knew his housekeeper kept a pair of scissors in a drawer. He opened the parcel to find a note signed ‘From a well-wisher’, a photograph of a vaguely familiar man standing outside the Metropole, and a loaded gun.

Steine looked at it all for a very long time. He kept saying to himself, ‘I should call the police.’ But then he kept remembering that he was the police, in which case the best thing he could do was think.

Sergeant Brunswick had spent the morning looking for Carlo on Rodolfo’s behalf, questioning some of the tough street urchins who usually kept company with the boy. It was very depressing. Each of them found a more annoying way not to help. Despite being a fan of the cinema, Brunswick did sometimes regret the impact of films on kids’ behaviour. When did they all learn not to smile? This was a very nice time to be a teenager: they should be rejoicing; there was no war on. Instead of which they looked at you as if they hoped you would drop dead.

‘I understand Carlo was upset on his dad’s behalf, on account of this barbering competition,’ he told one darkly brooding lad on a butcher’s bike, who was known to be Carlo’s best friend. The boy wore his hair in a pompadour, and had a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind one ear.

‘First I’ve heard of it, you lousy woodentop,’ came the curt reply, before the boy rode off, narrowly avoiding running over Brunswick’s foot.

‘Seen Carlo today?’ he asked another.

‘What’s he done?’

‘Nothing, as yet.’

‘So why don’t you coppers leave him alone!’

By the time he’d interviewed six of these churlish kids, Brunswick had had enough. He went back to the station, sat at his desk for a few moments, discovered that Barbara Ashley’s ex-boyfriend Graham Goodyear had been and gone (he’d waited two hours), and then went to the canteen. Tonight he was on stake-out duty with Twitten at the new milk bar, so he’d better get some dinner and then a few hours’ kip.

He noticed that someone had been using the typewriter in the office, and practising the words ‘well’ and ‘wisher’ on a piece of scrap paper, both with and without the hyphen. He took a quick look at it, screwed it up and dropped it in the bin.

Back at the Balmoral Hotel, Twitten waited until Pandora had exhausted all her many ‘But how, Peregrine?’ questions, and then produced the scrapbook.

‘Miss Holden,’ he said. ‘I think I can answer the question of how Cedric Carbody knew about your tiddley-at-the-milk-bar song.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I believe he was present when you sang it.’

She took the book on to her lap. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ she gasped. ‘That’s us!’

‘Yes, but more to the point, that’s him.’

‘This man here?’

‘Yes.’

True to form, Pandora studied the picture, but rather than looking at the man indicated, ran a finger along the row of childish faces. ‘This is so strange, Peregrine. The feeling that someone was spying on us.’

‘I know, it must be.’

‘Look at us. We’re so wrapped up in ourselves, we have no idea someone’s taking the picture; we don’t know people are looking. There’s June. She was fabulous! She always wore her school hat at that angle. It was wonderful to see her again yesterday at the beauty contest, although also a bit terrifying. And of course that one’s Diana, looking the wrong way.’

‘I know. Officer Andy seems to have collected every newspaper story about her, and she’s nearly always a blur in the photographs. Officer Andy’s sister said that he knew Diana personally, but I forgot to ask how. I was wondering: did she ever get up and perform?’

Pandora didn’t answer. She was too excited. ‘There’s Gorgeous Graham!’

‘Who?’

‘Graham. That one, at the front.’ She pointed, blushing again. ‘We loved Graham. All of us. He was the local boy we had a crush on. Even Diana.’

‘Do you mean Graham Goodyear?’

‘Yes, I suppose. I mean, he was Mr Goodyear’s son, so yes, I suppose. But how do you know about Graham?’

‘He’s someone we’ve been trying—’

‘We only ever called him Gorgeous Graham, you see.’

‘So I gathered.’

‘He was a bit older than us, and he’d virtually left school already because, to be honest, he wasn’t very bright, so he used to come up to Lady L sometimes on his father’s milk-cart—’

‘His father’s milk-cart?’

‘Yes. Mr Goodyear was our milkman.’

‘Was he?’

‘Oh, don’t be a snob, Peregrine. There’s nothing wrong with being the son of a milkman. Anyway, we’d wake up early on purpose and lean out of the dorm windows just in the hopes of glimpsing Graham. What’s wrong, Peregrine? What have I said? We were only eleven; there was no harm in it.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘It was a schoolgirl thing. We were mad about the gardener’s lad as well, and he had a squint.’ Pandora laughed. ‘There was a girl in the Lower Fourth who developed a crush on the Bishop of Chichester.’

‘Of course. No, it’s nothing. Go on.’ But Twitten could hardly contain his excitement. Graham Goodyear’s father was a milkman? This was huge.

‘Well, while his father left the cart to make his deliveries to the kitchens, Graham would stay with the horse and give it a nose-bag. And Mr Goodyear was sometimes gone for quite a while, so we girls got a really good look. Graham was very, very handsome. There was something about the way the sun fell on his neck … Anyway, one day we dared Wanda to slip out of the side door and talk to him about the horse, and we didn’t think she’d do it, but she did! She talked to a boy! And when she came back up to the dorm she reported that he was ever so sweet, despite not knowing his hocks from his withers (whatever that meant), and that he’d told her about the talent contests at the children’s playground, and suggested she should come. That’s why we went, really. Just to see Graham. We absolutely idolised him.’

‘Why did he go there? It sounds like he wasn’t a child any more himself.’

‘That’s true. I suppose they stretched a point.’

‘He can’t have skated?’

‘No!’ Pandora was confused by the question. ‘No, of course he didn’t skate, Peregrine. He used to sing.’

Twitten felt a strange wave of excitement wash over him. Could the facts in this case at last be coming clear?

‘He sang songs? At the playground? Where Officer Andy played the piano?’

‘Yes. Or just one song, actually. It was the same song every week. People expected it.’

Twitten bit his lip. ‘Can you tell me …?’ he began, and stopped. He was attempting to remain calm. ‘I mean, I don’t suppose you remember which song it was, Miss Holden?’

‘Yes, absolutely. It was “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”.’

Twitten jumped up. ‘Oh, flipping flips!’ he exclaimed. ‘So it was Graham flipping Goodyear! Flipping, flipping, crikey-flips!’

‘What?’ said Pandora. ‘What have I said? Are you all right, Peregrine? I’m getting a bit worried about you.’

‘Are you sure about the song, Miss Holden? Completely sure?’

Henderson, who had been listening to all this, intervened. ‘Of course she’s sure, Constable. She’s not a liar. And I resent your attitude. Miss Holden isn’t one of your suspects. She’s helping you, and at considerable distress to herself.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry. I can explain. But I just have to check … You are sure?’ Twitten said this as gently as his agitated state would allow. ‘You are absolutely sure about the song?’

‘Of course. We all swooned, imagining he was singing it to us. He had a really good voice, and kept in tune right through to the end – when, to be honest, it went a bit flat. But you’ve got that look again, Peregrine. What’s wrong? Honestly, this was years before I met you. I was a child. You seem very agitated, Peregrine.’

‘No, I’m very well. Really. Could you give me a moment to think, please, Miss Holden?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I seriously have to think.’

Twitten closed his eyes, to concentrate. The milk bottles! The song! Graham’s direct personal contact with all three of Friday night’s victims – with the scoffing Cedric Carbody, with the piano-playing Officer Andy and with a local girl who talked back to people, who sounded a lot like Barbara Ashley, who was, anyway, later to be Graham’s girlfriend before she broke things off with him. But the clincher was the song. Why else would Officer Andy sing that song with his dying breath, if it wasn’t Graham Goodyear he meant to identify as his killer?

‘Have I said something wrong, Peregrine?’

‘Not at all. In fact, I think you’ve solved the case.’

Pandora flushed with pleasure. ‘Have I? Me?’

‘Yes. I think your Gorgeous Graham murdered three people on Friday evening.’

‘Oh, no. Not Graham!’

‘I’m bally well afraid so. He knew them all; he has a family connection to milk bottles; he has a lowly job with no influence in the world; he didn’t appear in the ice show on Friday until at least half-past nine, so he had the opportunity to commit all three murders; and although I can’t tell you how I know this, his connection to that bally song puts his guilt beyond all doubt.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Pandora. ‘I wish I’d never told you. Now it will be my fault if he’s guilty.’

Twitten decided not to argue with her, but made a mental note to look up the difference between solipsism, narcissism and infantile omnipotence once his reference books arrived from home.

‘Will it be my fault, Peregrine?’ she urged.

But Twitten refused to entertain the question. His mind was on more important things. Because if Gorgeous Graham Goodyear was guilty of these murders, there were still some serious questions to consider, such as why he had killed these people, and why he had killed them now.