What Constable Twitten had failed to establish before arranging the interview with Mrs Eden in Upper North Street was whether or not she was blind. Somehow the question hadn’t occurred to him. When she opened the front door that afternoon, wearing bottle-green glasses and holding a white stick, Brunswick let slip a groan of annoyance – but Twitten shot him such a look of disapproval that he corrected himself.
Of course, in the next half hour this blind woman helped them establish far more about the phoney Public Opinion Poll lady than they might have got from a dozen witnesses with perfect vision. As Twitten eagerly explained to the inspector when they were back at the station, all the sighted witnesses had been so struck (or misdirected) by her improbably bright red hair that they couldn’t remember very much else about her.
Steine wasn’t interested. He was fed up with this woman. He was fed up with this Constable Twitten. His enjoyment of Luigi’s had been ruined (how could anyone not comment on how good the ice creams were?), and he now had a ticket to see a play that sounded awful, in the company of a man he’d like to throttle. What he needed this afternoon was the usual peace and silence of his office, interrupted only by the occasional rattle of bone china cup on saucer brought in by a tiptoeing charlady. But instead he was faced with two excited policemen with an annoying story to tell.
‘She was definitely casing the joint, sir,’ said Brunswick. ‘That Opinion Poll lady. Tell him, Twitten. About Mrs Eden. She was blind, sir.’
‘Then I’m sure she was a lot of help.’
‘Oh, but she was, sir,’ said Twitten. ‘It is often the case in blind people that their other senses are heightened, sir. Smell, touch, hearing, and so on.’
‘I know what the five senses are, thank you, Twitten,’ said Steine. ‘And I’d like to point out that since no one alerted me to this posting of yours, technically you might not actually work here. You might just be a clever imposter with a uniform from a theatrical costumiers.’
Twitten wondered whether he was supposed to respond to this bizarre accusation. He glanced at Sergeant Brunswick, who reassuringly pursed his lips and shook his head.
‘Mrs Eden gave us so much, sir,’ Twitten went on, undeterred. ‘About the Opinion Poll lady’s voice, her accent, her manner of speech. She remembered from shaking the lady’s hand that there were protuberances on the top knuckles of the fingers, such as pianists sometimes get. And she brought with her a strange mixture of smells, among which were –’ Twitten consulted his notebook ‘– face powder, Brylcreem, lavender, rubber adhesive and explosives.’
‘None of which necessarily makes her a criminal Opinion Poll lady,’ objected Steine, complacently. ‘Just a law-abiding Opinion Poll lady with a laudably wide variety of hobbies.’
‘But there was something else,’ said Brunswick. ‘Mrs Eden lent her a blotter to rest her papers on. Young Twitten here asked if he could rub a soft pencil over the indentations to reveal what might have been written there. And it worked, sir! They had been discussing public transport facilities in Brighton, and what do you think the Opinion Poll lady had written down, sir?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Oh, go on, sir,’ said Twitten. ‘Guess.’
‘Something about trams?’
‘No. Guess again?’
‘This isn’t a game, Twitten,’ snapped Steine.
But both his men were looking at him expectantly, so he had another go. ‘The regular late running of trains to the capital?’
Twitten read triumphantly from his notebook. ‘She had written back window – broken latch; NO DOG in capitals; and cash in bureau top drawer!’
Brunswick patted Twitten on the back. ‘Well done, son,’ he said.
‘Thank you very much, sir.’
Steine, however, was still not satisfied.
‘However,’ he said, ‘I fail to see how all this advances matters. We already knew she had red hair, didn’t we? It’s surely easier to spot someone with red hair than go around sniffing people for a mixture of lavender and gunpowder.’
‘But the hair is obviously a wig, sir!’ blurted Twitten. ‘Any fool would guess that!’
Peregrine Twitten, aged twenty-two, had been a super-brain all his life. And like many a super-brain, he found it difficult to interact diplomatically with people slower-witted than himself, especially when they were in positions of authority. There was one particular error he made again and again: expecting people to thank him for explaining things to them. It was astonishing to him how often they just took offence instead.
‘Would you care to repeat that, Constable?’ said Steine, stiffly. ‘Did you actually say, any fool would guess that?’
‘Gosh, sir. I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to imply –’
Twitten turned in confusion to Sergeant Brunswick, who chipped in, ‘But it probably is a wig, sir. When you think about it.’
Steine looked out of the window for a moment, adopting the faraway thoughtful look that had become his trademark. The others waited for him to speak. When he did so, it was with an air of finality.
‘Constable Twitten,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a decision. I expect you mean well, but I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that you will never fit in at this station, so I’d like you to make your goodbyes and gather your personal things.’
‘But sir, I only started this morning!’
‘I feel obliged to tell you that your whole approach is simply annoying, Twitten. You’re like a dog with a bone. You are an impetuous, arrogant pipsqueak. What were you going to do next in this case, I’d like to know!’
Steine had meant this as a hypothetical question, but Twitten was more than happy to answer it.
‘I was going to follow up the Hippodrome angle, sir, which I think is strong. It occurred to me that the explosives smell might be associated with a theatrical effect of some sort. And the sergeant, who’s seen the current show a couple of times, confirmed to me that one of the highlights is indeed, as I suspected, a midget being shot out of a cannon.’
‘It’s amazing, sir,’ said Brunswick. ‘Not a mark on him. There’s also a woman who tears up telephone directories with her bare hands.’
‘Apart from that,’ Twitten continued in a rush, anxious to prove himself, ‘I thought I would contact all the major wig emporiums in London and check sales of red wigs in the past year. I’ve already put in a request to the criminal records department at Scotland Yard to establish whether similar crimes have been committed in other towns and cities. Also, having realised that those tickets to the Hippodrome were complimentary ones, I was going to ask the box office for a list of the people entitled to have them.’
He lowered his voice and stood more to attention. ‘Please don’t move me on for being too clever, sir. It’s not my fault. I’ve already been transferred six times in my first three months.’
This emotional appeal, coming out of the blue, was very affecting. Brunswick looked heartbroken for him. ‘Six times?’ he repeated. ‘That’s awful, son.’
‘I know,’ sniffed Twitten.
‘Keep out of this, would you, Brunswick?’ said Steine. ‘Look, Constable. For one thing, I didn’t say you were too clever. I said you were annoying.’
‘I’m afraid other people have used the words “too clever”, sir. The words “too clever” are all over my personal file. Even Deputy Chief Inspector Peplow at Scotland Yard said I was too clever! That’s probably why you didn’t get any notification of my arrival. Until last Friday, I was working there. I had cracked the case of the Kennington Butcher, sir, which had frustrated him and his division for several years. They had unaccountably overlooked a human tooth embedded in a floorboard in the prime suspect’s scullery! When I pointed this out, my transfer was ordered almost immediately.’
This startling news put a new complexion on things for Steine. DCI Peplow was someone he loathed with a passion. Peplow had a suspiciously high clear-up rate that had three times secured for him the title ‘Policeman of the Year’, twice pipping the more high-profile Steine to the title. Twitten’s news changed things considerably. ‘The great Peplow couldn’t cope with you, you say? Because you were too clever?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘The famous Deputy Chief Inspector gave up on you? He washed his hands? He threw in the towel?’
‘He said I brought him out in hives, sir.’
‘Hives, you say?’
‘It’s a sort of aggravated rash, sir.’
‘I know what hives are, good grief.’ Steine shook his head. It was very hard to be patient with this boy. But he wouldn’t mind outdoing the great Peplow for once. He imagined shaking hands with Peplow at some all-male Top Ranks gathering (possibly in a smart bar at the Festival Hall, for some reason) and saying, smugly, ‘You found him too hot to handle, I believe? What an error! Young Twitten is a positive asset if you know how to manage him.’
‘Look, just leave this with me, Constable,’ he said.
Twitten looked relieved. ‘Thank you, sir. You’re my last hope, sir.’
‘But I’d rather you didn’t go to the Hippodrome tonight.’
Steine had made a decision that he considered would kill two birds with one stone: it would slow Twitten down a bit, and also remove the loathsome and vile-smelling Crystal from his own life.
‘I want you to take this ticket for a play called something like A Bob in the Slot at the Theatre Royal. And I want you to stay there, and not do any detecting, and watch the whole thing. Give those little grey brain cells of yours a rest.’
If this was meant to ruin Twitten’s day or put a spoke in his wheel, it failed. An excited grin appeared on his face.
‘You don’t mean A Shilling in the Meter? Oh my goodness. Thank you very much, sir.’
‘You’ve heard of it?’
‘Who hasn’t, sir?’
Steine sighed. ‘Well, don’t get too excited. You’ll be sitting next to A. S. Crystal of the Daily Clarion. Your biggest challenge will be not to murder him. Meanwhile Sergeant Brunswick can make enquiries at the Hippodrome about red-haired women with hammer-fingers, and with you two Sherlock Holmeses safely out of my hair, I can finally – finally – write my talk for the wireless on the rather thorny subject of the law on joint enterprise when applied to marauding mobs.’
Twitten had a bright idea. ‘If you ever need help with subjects for your talks, sir –’ he began, but Brunswick hustled him out of the room before he could say anything more.
‘Well done on the Kennington Butcher, son,’ Brunswick was saying, as they shut the door behind them, and Steine could hear Twitten reply, ‘There was a rug over it, sir. Can you believe that no one at Scotland Yard had ever thought to look underneath the rug?’
* * *
In advance of the first performance of A Shilling in the Meter, the cast were on edge. The technical rehearsal went well enough, though: the water dripped perfectly as directed into the tin bath (plip! – long pause – plop!); the expressionistic lighting effect for the arrival of the Man from the Gas Board at the end of Act Two looked excellent. For this grand moment, the door needed to swing open (and not swing back again), and a strong backlight cast a lengthy shadow of Alec across the raked floor of the stage, pointing to the exact spot where the hapless Ruby (Penny) lay dead. ‘I’ve come to read the meter,’ was the sonorous curtain line, as Alec shuffled in.
Braithwaite was very proud of this moment. It made him shiver. He insisted that Alec’s leather shoulder bag be filled, authentically, with heavy coin, even though the spindly Alec had nearly buckled under its weight several times in rehearsals. From the auditorium the heavy bag had clear significance: this bent old man collecting the dues was Death. And it helped the effect considerably (so Braithwaite always said to the others) that Alec looked a lot like death already.
* * *
On the shingly beach, by the bandstand, with the small murky waves dragging loose pebbles down the shore, and herring gulls dive-bombing grubby cockney tots unwisely holding unprotected ice cream cones, a diminutive, aggressive-looking Punch & Judy man was setting up his booth, muttering to himself in a Greek accent.
‘This ruddy pole go ruddy here?’ he was saying, as if he’d like to garrotte the person who designed this thing. ‘But that ruddy pole go ruddy there?’ He picked up a rock to start knocking the posts into the shingle, but was interrupted by the telltale crunch of footsteps on the shining stones.
‘Help you with the tent, Vince?’ offered Sergeant Brunswick, approaching. The sergeant walked taller than usual this afternoon, Vince thought. Vince was one of those people who don’t miss a thing.
Tent? Tent? Vince, in his old brown waistcoat worn over a slightly ragged collarless shirt – still holding the rock – gave Brunswick a withering, murderous look and spat on the ground. ‘Assa booth, mate,’ he said. ‘Not a ruddy tent!’
‘Sorry, I forgot. Help with the booth, then?’
‘Not on your ruddy life, Sergeant ratface ruddy Brunswick policeman rozzer ponce.’
It had often been noted that Ventriloquist Vince was not possessed of ideal qualities for the world of innocent seaside entertainment. Along with anger issues, it was possible he suffered from undiagnosed Tourette’s. If children gaily heckled the Punch & Judy (and they soon learned not to do this), Vince would step out from the booth, a puppet on each hand, and shout in their faces to shut the fucky-fuck up.
The police received complaints about Vince every single day of the summer, but he evidently had friends in high places. His public entertainment licence was often reviewed, and occasionally suspended, but inexplicably it had never been revoked.
He had been nicknamed ‘Ventriloquist Vince’ in the dim and distant past by underworld associates, and to be honest it had never made sense. Vince used no ventriloquism in his act; he didn’t even do much to inhabit the various characters in his show. Mr Punch, Judy, the baby, the hangman, the policeman – they all sounded the same in Vince’s rendition of the traditional story, apart from the heart-stopping screams for mercy, which he had definitely made his own.
‘Take that, you ratbag Judy bitch-face – Help! Help! You beating me a death, you ruddy psycho – I hit you on a head, you slag, I hit you smack, smack, smack on the head – Help, help! You want me to ruddy die? You go prison, mate, you hang by ruddy neck – What I fucking care, you brass, take that, smack, smack – I dying! Punch, you killing me! Stop! You killing your Judy! Stop! Stop! STOP!’
And so on, and so on, for as long as he could reasonably string it out. Sometimes he would emerge from the booth and find people holding their heads back with trauma-induced nosebleeds; sometimes he found that his audience had scattered in horror. It didn’t bother him. Punch & Judy was a great British seaside tradition, and it had never had a more dedicated or passionate practitioner than Vince.
Brunswick had not come here about the Punch & Judy, though.
‘Maisie about?’ he asked, laconically.
‘What for you want my Maisie?’
‘Got tickets to the Hippodrome later. Thought she might like to come. And she’s not your Maisie, is she, now, Vince? There’s no call to say she’s yours.’
‘You lay one ruddy ratbag finger on that girl –’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Brunswick. ‘You’ll beat my ruddy ponce policeman ratface head in?’
Brunswick was, in fact, terrified of Ventriloquist Vince, but he did a very good job of disguising it.
At that moment a girl appeared from the beach-ball stall in the arches behind the bandstand. She was sucking on a gob-stopper in a somewhat provocative manner. This was Maisie. She was nineteen years old, well developed, bottle-blonde, with buck teeth, a pink hairband, blue dress and white bobby socks worn with red kitten heels. In short, in common with most teenagers of this period, she transmitted a blizzard of teasing mixed signals, and both Vince and Brunswick would gladly admit she drove them wild with confusion and desire.
And she was more than happy about that. She also enjoyed the way that every time she uttered the name of another man (‘Jim’, for example), it made Ventriloquist Vince twitch with barely controlled homicidal jealousy. It pleased her to have such power over him. The place where she sold beach balls, buckets and spades, and little windmills on sticks, was just yards from the Punch & Judy, but for some reason hearing Vince once an hour shrieking, ‘Stop! Don’t kill me! I never do sex with that policeman bastard ratbag! I woulda do that, Punch! I good girl, Punch, I good girl!’ didn’t alert her to the obvious peril of flirting with him day after day, while reserving the right to say ‘Jim’ to other men.
‘What colour’s my tongue, Jim?’ Maisie asked Brunswick now, with hand on hip. She poked it out. It was disgusting.
‘Mauve,’ said Brunswick. They were not alone. Vince stood just inches behind. He was still holding the rock.
‘Mauve? You sure?’ She poked it out again.
‘Pretty sure. Look… fancy going to the Hippodrome with me tonight?’
‘Don’t you go with ’im, Maisie!’ said Vince, in a threatening manner.
She made a screwed-up face at him, teasingly, as if to say, ‘You can’t stop me.’
‘What time, Jim?’ she said to Brunswick. Her buck teeth dazzled in the afternoon sun. Brunswick swallowed. He didn’t dare look down at those seductive ankle-socks.
‘I could pick you up at seven.’
‘All right, then, Jim.’
‘My treat.’
‘I should think so. I like port with Tizer. Remember? Vintage port if they got it.’
‘How could I forget?’ said Brunswick, smiling. As he walked away he noticed Vince take his heavy rock to the tent pole and, using both hands, pound it violently into the stones.
At Luigi’s on the seafront, a busy afternoon was not helped by the unexplained absence from work of Geordie Harry from Nova Scotia. Luigi felt sad and exploited. You train up a friendless drifter to make Knickerbocker Glories and then he just quits? Making Knickerbocker Glories was a good job! Squirting the raspberry sauce was an art in itself! But Harry had seemed unsettled ever since he’d seen the file on the table in front of Inspector Steine. Whatever was in that file had given Geordie Harry a nasty turn.
Employing him had been a charitable act of Luigi’s, because the man was so emotionally damaged that he was virtually a basket case. What with his tics and trances, it was as if he’d just returned from the trenches of the First World War. When pressed to explain his unusual nervous condition, all he would say was that he had been ‘a miner and a playwright’, and that it was being a playwright that had done for him.
This had made no sense to Luigi. Surely writing plays was the softest of soft jobs, while being a miner was the hardest of the hard. But Harry had stuck to his guns. The threat of imminent pit collapse, shared with your mates, was as nothing compared with the lonely anxiety of dramatic composition; and at least when you emerged from the pithead cage at the end of the day, blackened and exhausted, you got the rewards of light and air, ale and birdsong; you weren’t immediately beaten to the ground in a ritual of public humiliation.
It was nearly closing time when Luigi noticed a small sealed envelope in the till with the words ‘To Luigi, I’m sorry’ written on the outside. Reading its contents, he called in panic to his sons Alfredo and Giuseppe. They hastily shut the doors, dropped the blinds and searched the building, and soon found Geordie Harry’s stiff, icy, lifeless body on the floor of the big freezer. He had taken an overdose. In the note he thanked Luigi for giving him this last chance. He explained that Crystal was the man who had destroyed his life. ‘They say a bad review never killed anyone,’ he wrote. ‘Allow me to disagree.’
* * *
While Twitten waited at the Theatre Royal for Mr Crystal to turn up on that summery evening, he reflected on his first day with the Brighton Constabulary.
Most first days of this kind were presumably less busy or momentous – you found your way to the canteen, obtained a locker key, had an introductory chat with your divisional chief, and went home early to the station house – which was where Twitten would be boarding for the time being, a couple of streets away from the police station, until he could afford independent lodgings. First days probably didn’t usually include being ordered to gather your things and leave, on account of half-solving a case that would otherwise have languished unexamined.
On the other hand, they also didn’t usually include receiving a ticket to one of the most talked-about play openings of the decade, or meeting one of the most influential broadsheet newspaper critics. So it sort of evened out, he thought. Threatened with the sack; treated to a glittering landmark theatrical experience. If Twitten still didn’t know where the police station canteen was, and hadn’t got a locker, he didn’t feel too hard done by.
Twitten knew who to look out for in the pre-theatre throng; he had a good mental picture of A. S. Crystal. He also knew Crystal’s reputation. There were stories of glamorous leading ladies in their most stylish Parisian slingbacks kicking Crystal in the kidneys in Soho doorways. Flora Robson always denied it, but during a nasty fracas in Long Acre in 1954 after a royal command performance, she did bite a lump out of Crystal’s right ear. The writer of this play tonight, the attractively spiky Jack Braithwaite, had said on the wireless that critics like Crystal ought to be physically exterminated!
Looking at the people now gathering for this famously gritty and modern play, Twitten had to admit that his sympathies were more with Braithwaite: something was very out of kilter here, sociologically speaking. The foyer was sweatily packed with people dressed up for the evening in smart suits and satin gowns and evening gloves, as if they were going to a reception at Buckingham Palace. The women’s hair was set, stiff and lacquered; the air was dense with L’Air du Temps. It was hard to marry the promised slice-of-life drama with the type of people who were gathered to see it – all self-importantly crushed together, shouting to make themselves heard, while clutching shiny theatre programmes along with their expensive drinks and dainty boxes of soft-centred chocolates.
When Crystal arrived, Twitten introduced himself and apologised on behalf of Inspector Steine. He then suffered a short, inexplicable asthma attack, but waved away all offers of help, and soon recovered his breath to carry on. As for the oblivious Crystal, he was initially outraged at Steine’s rudeness in sending a deputy, but quickly placated. The young constable was polite and knowledgeable, and seemed very keen to learn about the theatre from an expert. But what pleased Crystal most – as they pushed their way past the fragranced buffoons who had, unaccountably, paid money to witness the upcoming abomination – was Twitten’s genuine interest in the Aldersgate Stick-up. The young constable had spotted the file on the inspector’s desk, and put two and two together. It was an unsolved crime, he explained, that had fascinated him when he first studied it as a schoolboy, and he would love to hear anything that Crystal, as a highly reliable eyewitness, could add to his understanding.
Which was why, before the play started, Twitten and Crystal spoke only about a long-ago armed bank robbery in the City of London, and not about the theatre. As the seats filled up around them – and a woman in a seat behind asked Twitten (not unreasonably) to remove his helmet – Crystal took a piece of paper from his coat pocket, and produced a small fountain pen. On the paper, in tiny handwriting, was evidently a short list of points he had hoped to raise during his meeting with Steine; well, it was too late now. Having scanned it, though, he adopted a thoughtful expression and unscrewed the top of the pen, as if intending to add a new item.
‘May I ask what that is, sir?’ asked Twitten, standing up to let a fellow playgoer shimmy past. It didn’t help the flow of their conversation that Crystal’s seat was on the end of a row – position of choice of all newspaper critics from time immemorial, so that they can dash for the exits at the end of the play, under cover of the applause.
‘Well, Constable, since you ask, a few new angles on the Aldersgate Stick-up have occurred to me recently, since I’ve been working on my autobiography, A Shot in the Dark. My secretary Miss Sibert teased out some details and I was very grateful to her. You see, although I gave a splendidly thorough witness statement at the time, it should be remembered that I was suffering from shock; unsurprisingly, there were further memories that needed to be unlocked.
‘Fortunately Miss Sibert is a remarkable woman, who came to London from Vienna with Sigmund Freud back in 1938. She has helped me to remember all manner of things about my mother that are frankly staggering. Have you ever realised, for example, that for a mother to serve oxtail soup to her grown-up son is tantamount to castration? But I digress. I made these notes for Steine, but he was so pig-headed that he wouldn’t look at them.’
Naturally, Twitten was wildly excited to see the list, but merely said, politely, ‘May I see, sir?’
Crystal ignored the request. ‘But something new occurred to me today, Constable,’ he said, still gripping his list and gazing into the middle distance. He was evidently searching his memory. ‘I just can’t quite put my finger on it.’
Afterwards, Twitten wished their ensuing exchange had not been quite so explicit (or so loud), considering there were strangers around them in a position to overhear. At the time, however, there seemed no reason to be more discreet; in any case, raised voices were necessary in all the hubbub.
‘Something of importance in the case of the Aldersgate Stick-up, sir?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re saying it came to you today, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Might it provide a breakthrough, sir?’
‘Well, it might if I could remember it.’
‘Oh, sir. Do try.’
‘Well, I will attempt to visualise. Miss Sibert taught me to do that. Perhaps I should take off my coat.’
‘Oh, please don’t do that, sir,’ said Twitten in alarm. ‘I mean, I expect you were wearing the coat at the time, weren’t you?’
‘Good point. I’ll keep it on. It was after I got off the train. Between getting off the train and meeting Steine at the ice cream parlour. But what? Something took me right back to that scene in the bank! It was just a flash, but I was in the dark again, shaking with terror, with a canvas bag over my head!’
‘Gosh, sir. I wish you could remember what it was.’
‘So do I. It was momentary, but vivid.’ Crystal dropped his voice to a whisper as the lights went down. ‘Let me think. I came out of the station and I saw the posters on the wall, and then – was it a name? A voice?’
‘A smell perhaps,’ said Twitten. ‘Smells are very evocative.’
‘Shhhhh,’ someone said behind them.
‘Don’t shush me, madam,’ Crystal said, half turning. But then he realised that, sure enough, all the rows were full, and curtains had been swished across the exit doors by the ushers.
‘Tell me later, sir,’ whispered Twitten. ‘In the interval.’
And so the play began. The stage curtains opened on a dark and crazily angled set representing a dingy basement room on a Sunday afternoon in Halifax, with a tin bath in front of a glowing gas fire. It was such an ugly sight that the well-heeled audience let out a shudder of revulsion – a communal expression of ‘Ugh!’ At its centre, however, was the beautiful, luminous Penny, smoking, one arm in a knotted sling, holding an open letter in her hand. A door slammed, offstage, and she looked about, as if deciding what to do.
‘Nicky?’ she called out, hastily tucking the letter under the mattress of the unmade bed. ‘Is that you, dear?’
A door opened and a scowling youth in a donkey jacket stepped into the room. It was Todd Blair, of course. This cheered the audience up somewhat – most of them recognising him from his recent breakthrough part as the murderous juvenile delinquent in a film; even Twitten thrilled when he came on.
‘You still here?’ he said, menacingly, to the lovely Penny – and then, yelling, ‘You make me SICK!’, picked up a chair and hurled it across the stage. The audience gasped. Crystal groaned with displeasure.
‘Oh, Nicky,’ breathed Penny, with emotion. ‘I thought you’d gone and left me!’
Twitten didn’t know quite what to make of the play, and after the first five minutes or so, it was hard to concentrate anyway with so many people getting up and leaving. It was definitely something new, he thought. But was it art? He noticed that his critic companion made no notes – as was well known about Crystal, he trusted to his excellent memory, and had never been known to misquote. He groaned repeatedly, though. He made pained noises while squirming in his seat. It was pretty clear he was not revising his original prejudices about the play.
But about twenty minutes in, Crystal went rigid in his seat. ‘That’s it!’ he said out loud, and was shushed again from behind. Placing the piece of paper on the upholstered armrest, he excitedly scrawled something on it in the dark. Twitten, watching, was desperate to ask what had happened. Was it something in the play? Onstage the passionate Nick was lengthily berating his beautiful girlfriend Ruby for being the breadwinner (which seemed a bit rich to Twitten). The burden of Nick’s complaint was that it was emasculating for a man to see his woman working as a clippie on the bus. It seemed to Twitten that this speech was no more annoying and unconvincing than anything else in the play, and yet the effect on Crystal was extraordinary.
‘Sir, are you all right?’ whispered the constable, putting his head close to Crystal’s.
What happened next would always be unclear. Again, it wasn’t the sort of thing that happens to most police constables on their first day – to be showered with blood and brains in seat D2 of the stalls, an ear-bursting bang making your own head ring so painfully that you can scarcely think. Afterwards he recalled that Crystal whispered urgently to him, ‘I knew it! Tell Inspector Steine from me he’s even more of a fool –’ And then, just as a shower of ‘shushes’ was sent in his direction, and Twitten was turning to apologise, there was a shot in the dark, and Crystal fell forward, dead.
Twitten temporarily lost sight, hearing, everything, but instinct made him stand and turn to face the auditorium. The audience was still. On the stage behind him, the actors froze.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Blair Todd. ‘I didn’t mean –’
Then the curtain came down, and as the audience rose like a flock of pigeons, Twitten – acting still on pure instinct – put his whistle to his lips, and blew.
* * *
By the time help arrived, Twitten was seriously regretting he had not had the usual first day of a police constable.
Although he had appealed for calm, and had especially insisted that no one leave the auditorium, a hysterical stampede had ensued, and the theatre had emptied in half a minute, leaving just two still figures: a bloodied and stunned Constable Twitten, his police whistle still upraised, and beside him in the aisle seat, a slumped corpse with a crumpled piece of paper in its hand.
The house lights were up, and Twitten could see all the litter on the floor between the seats: the programmes dropped in the frantic exodus; the abandoned boxes of Orchard Creams; the odd high-heeled shoe; a diamond earring; a slender pistol glinting against the red-patterned carpet in the aisle. It was only as he climbed over his seat to retrieve the murder weapon, taking a hankie from his pocket, that he realised he was in tears. He took a seat at the end of Row H and sat in silence until help arrived.
The management had called for the police. In particular they had asked for Inspector Steine, who arrived quite promptly with other uniformed officers; the theatre staff who had gathered in the foyer stood aside respectfully to let the great man through. Ben Oliver of the Evening Argus flashed his press credentials and followed behind. For someone who had drawn the short straw in the office that morning, he was having an excellent, possibly career-changing day.
‘Constable Twitten!’ exclaimed Steine, entering the auditorium, and taking everything in. ‘So it’s true. Someone’s shot him. I knew you’d be trouble, Constable. I just knew it.’
Twitten, one side of his face coated with blood, stood up from his seat, wobbling, and carefully held up the pistol, using the hankie. His voice, when it came out, was small.
‘I think this is the weapon, sir.’
‘Well, it’s unlikely someone did this with a popgun, Constable. Of course it’s the weapon.’
‘May I sit down again, sir?’
‘Certainly not. There’s a lot to do. And put your helmet on.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Steine turned to the three constables who’d come with him from the station. ‘Carry on,’ he said – but they just stood there awkwardly. It wasn’t clear what they should carry on with exactly, until someone with the right qualifications had come to inspect the corpse and take it away.
‘What’s happened? Who is that?’ said a frightened voice behind them. All turned towards the stage. It was the actress from the play, Penelope Cavendish, peering through the curtains, and then stepping onto the apron. Her arm was out of its sling, but she looked no less fragile. Despite the circumstances, Twitten couldn’t help thinking what a beautiful girl she was. He also had another thought and acted on it while Steine’s attention was captured elsewhere. He swiftly removed the bloodstained Aldersgate Stick-up list from Crystal’s stiffening hand and slid it inside his tunic.
‘This man has been shot in the head, madam,’ said Steine.
‘Oh, no!’
‘The sight is not for the faint-hearted, I’m afraid. Gore and brains everywhere. Good grief, is that an eyeball down there? Don’t tread on it, Twitten.’
Penny sensibly stayed where she was. ‘Oh my God,’ she said.
‘Can you account for your movements when this incident took place?’ Steine demanded.
‘She was on the stage, sir,’ said Twitten, faintly. He felt increasingly disorientated. The auditorium appeared to be spinning. Perhaps the adrenalin was wearing off. The bang still rang in his ears; he had witnessed his first murder; flesh and chips of bone from another man’s head were in his hair under the helmet; worst of all, he had knowingly removed evidence from a crime scene, an offence so serious it was punishable by imprisonment.
But true to his nature, he carried on talking. ‘When the shot rang out, sir, she was being told off for being a bus conductress, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.’
Then he piped up for Penny’s benefit, ‘It needn’t concern you, I’m sure, madam. He was an aggravating man, admittedly, but at the same time one of the great theatre critics of our time.’
The effect of this news on the beautiful Penny was curious. ‘An aggravating theatre critic?’ she said.
‘An extremely aggravating theatre critic,’ said Steine. ‘And quite smelly, too.’
‘Not… Crystal?’ she whispered.
‘Yes, that’s the man,’ said Steine, surprised. ‘Did you know him?’
She recoiled as if she’d walked into a plate-glass door. ‘Jack! You didn’t!’ she gasped. And then she fainted onstage – just as Twitten said, ‘So sorry, sir’, and fell to the floor as well.