by Lynne Truss
‘Here, have you been tampering with my trolley?’ demanded Mr Lloyd, emerging from the Gents and finding Twitten jumping back – as if stung by a bee – from a piece of rickety old equipment stringently reserved for approved forms of postal actuation by officially authorised union members only.
‘Gosh, I would never do that, Mr Lloyd,’ Twitten assured him, thinking quickly. ‘Oh, and here’s Mrs Groynes, how lovely.’ With an effort, he turned his back on Mr Lloyd, and assumed an expression of innocent surprise.
‘Did I forget something upstairs, Mrs G?’
Behind him, Mr Lloyd bent to examine the trolley as if it might reveal the secret of what had just occurred. Then, shrugging, he started slowly pushing it towards the sanctuary of the post room. It clanked as it crossed the tiles, each interstitial bump causing Mr Lloyd to mutter. Twitten had to fight every instinct to turn and watch him go – or indeed to shout at Mr Lloyd for flip’s sake to speed up.
‘Forget something?’ Mrs Groynes repeated. ‘No, dear, nothing like that.’ She smiled at him, but with her eyes narrowed, like a cat’s. It was quite clear what she was thinking. What the bleeding hell has he done with it? ‘I just wanted to check you was all right, dear. We’ve all had a bit of a shock, and then you and the sergeant were out the door like greased lightning, leaving me on my tod with Lady Foghorn.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about that, but duty called. And I’m so sorry about your cupboard, Mrs G –’
She winced.
‘– but all things must pass, I suppose. Perhaps Miss Lennon is very pleasant once you get to know her.’
Again, he resisted the urge to look round and see what progress Mr Lloyd had made.
‘Been utilising our precious locker, have we?’ She tilted her head towards the locker room.
‘What? Oh, yes. Gosh. That’s right. I had a letter. A letter from, er, from Miss Holden—’
‘Oh, yes?’ she said, standing uncomfortably close. He knew she didn’t believe him.
‘But I really must go, Mrs G.’
And with that, he led her back upstairs, all the while listening to Mr Lloyd making his slow, shuffling, wheezing progress along the corridor, until … slam! The door to the post room had banged shut and Pandora’s envelope was safe.
Len the Photographer couldn’t remember much about the break-in. He had been hit from behind, while setting up the studio in the back room for an afternoon portrait shoot. It would have been quite dark in the shop at the front, he supposed, what with its being like blooming Judgment Day outside and all the lights switched off. The street door had been locked because it was the manager’s lunch hour. Len wouldn’t normally be there himself at dinner-time, but today the volume of precipitation had given him pause. His shoes were new and he didn’t fancy ruining them just for the sake of a half-pint of Bass and a stale ham sandwich in the pub.
‘Ow, my head,’ he groaned. ‘Someone must have broken in. Ow! Ow, my head.’
It was silly to keep him here. The ambulance men were waiting in the rain; Brunswick decided to let him go.
‘You’ll be fighting fit in a couple of days, mate,’ the sergeant called to him in the back of the ambulance. But Len pulled a face. He wasn’t in the mood for comforting words. ‘The bastards took my Hasselblad,’ he said. And then (muffled by doors slammed shut), ‘Ow! Ow! My head.’
‘I wonder what else they were looking for, sir,’ said Twitten, when the vehicle had gone. ‘All this disorder wasn’t necessary if they just wanted to steal cameras.’ It was a fair point. Box files had been pulled off shelves and chucked about, cabinets had been rifled. Short shiny strips of negatives were scattered across the floor. ‘It’s as if they were looking for something specific.’
‘You might be right, Twitten,’ said Brunswick. ‘Or you might not. It could be they were looking for something, but it might just be opportunism. Kids, you know. Or of course someone who just fancied making a flaming mess.’ Brunswick called to the manager, Mr Peters, who was standing in the doorway, smoking, his hands unsteady. He was evidently very upset.
‘Tell us what you do here, exactly, Mr Peters.’
Mr Peters turned, sniffed, and tried his best to seem normal. ‘We process people’s films, Sergeant. You brought us a roll yourself, if you recall, a few weeks ago. I don’t know what else you want me to say. We process films and make prints. I mean, Len does.’ He took a handkerchief from his pocket. ‘Oh, poor Len! When I saw him lying there, I thought for a moment he was dead!’
‘Take your time, Mr Peters. What about the studio in the back room?’
Mr Peters steadied himself. ‘Len takes the portraits – you know, for passports and so on. Family groups; engaged couples. We’ve been here ten years, and nothing like this has ever … ’
‘No. Of course.’
‘It feels so personal.’
‘But it probably looks worse than it is. Make a list of everything missing, and we’ll circulate it. You might get some of it back.’
Mr Peters took a deep breath. ‘He’ll be all right, won’t he? Len?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Brunswick. ‘And you can follow him to the hospital, if you want, once we’re finished here. We won’t be long, will we, Constable?’
‘What, sir? Oh, no. But there’s just one thing, Mr Peters, sir.’ Twitten had conspicuously taken no role in this interview: despite all his training in interview procedures, he could never see the point of asking questions when he knew the answers already. But now a significant matter had arisen.
‘You mentioned that roll of film we brought in, Mr Peters,’ he said. ‘On the Saturday before the Bank Holiday.’
‘Yes. What of it?’
‘Well, I’m just wondering what happened to the photographs.’
Brunswick frowned. He’d forgotten all about that roll of film. He and Twitten had found it in the home of an AA man whose favourite pastime was snapping pictures of known villains, including Terence Chambers. Brunswick remembered Twitten’s cheerful exclamation, ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t get himself killed!’ – a wildly insensitive thing to say to the man’s grieving sister, given that the AA man had just been found murdered.
‘I never saw the developed pictures, did you, Sergeant?’ Twitten persisted. ‘In all the excitement around the shootings, that roll of film must have slipped my mind.’
‘Are you accusing us of not delivering them, young man?’ Mr Peters sounded defensive. ‘I can’t believe you’d do that. Not at a time like this!’
‘No, sir,’ Brunswick answered hastily. ‘Of course he’s not accusing you of anything. But if you could check your records, perhaps?’
‘I certainly can!’ Mr Peters drew a large ledger out from under the shop counter and flicked back a few pages to the Saturday before the Bank Holiday.
‘Here we are, look.’
He indicated an entry, in triumph.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Brunswick. ‘And what does it say?’
‘That you brought in the film at precisely half-past twelve. Len did the prints as a priority, and our boy Nigel delivered them into the hands of your desk sergeant just before two o’clock. A Sergeant Baines.’
This was good enough for Brunswick. ‘So, they’ll still be somewhere at the station,’ he said to Twitten, with an air of having settled the matter. He reached out a hand to Mr Peters. ‘We’ll go now, sir.’
But Twitten was peering at the ledger. ‘What does this mark mean, please, sir? It says D-U-P in a little circle.’
‘Does it?’ Mr Peters followed the direction of Twitten’s pointing finger, and his face softened. ‘Well, you see, that just tells you all you need to know about Len, doesn’t it? That’s the sort of professional he is. He must have made an extra set of prints, you see, on account of this being a police matter.’
Twitten and Brunswick followed Mr Peters into the back-room studio. ‘He’d have put them in here, in his special tall green box file … ’
‘This is very good of you, Mr Peters,’ said Brunswick
, looking round. ‘Can we help?’
But Mr Peters wasn’t listening. ‘Green, green, green, green,’ he muttered to himself, as he scanned the room.
‘I can’t see a green one,’ said Twitten.
‘Nor can I,’ echoed Brunswick.
Mr Peters pulled a face. ‘Well, what do you know?’ he said, at last. ‘It’s gone.’
Unsurprisingly, young Ben Oliver of the Argus was keen to locate Constable Twitten at once and alert him to the worrying news about a violent escaped lunatic with murderous designs against Inspector Steine. Though Oliver entertained no illusions about the inspector (the happy phrase ‘unrelenting idiocy’ always came to mind when Steine’s name was mentioned), he would be disappointed in himself if he failed to prevent an episode of wanton head-boiling.
On top of this, Oliver felt a duty towards Constable Twitten, even though their relationship was hard to define. He and the constable were not friends as such: they had never spent an evening in the pub; they hadn’t roller-skated at the Ritz in West Street, flirting with gum-chewing girls in tight sweaters. But to be fair, both of them were too single-minded about their jobs to waste their leisure time on such inane activities. All Oliver knew was that over the past three months, his acquaintance with Twitten had been largely beneficial to his career, and because of that, there was a bond between them. They had sometimes shared useful information, and Twitten had generously steered him away from a few false leads.
There were just a couple of stumbling blocks to their having full trust in each other. From Twitten’s point of view, he couldn’t trust Oliver for the obvious reason that he was an ambitious journalist who would race to publish anything he was told. Oliver pursued truth, of course; but not as passionately as he pursued headlines. In the near future, Oliver would surely leave Brighton for Fleet Street, and he wouldn’t look back. Twitten quite understood the reporter’s rapaciousness, but it made him uneasy. It was just too clear that Oliver regarded other people largely as professional stepping-stones.
From Oliver’s point of view, there was a more unusual obstacle to full trust: the fact that the poor constable harboured a delusion of tragic proportions – a delusion that would surely be his ruin. He genuinely believed (or claimed to) that the person running all the organised crime in the town was the cockney charlady at the police station. Of course, having a fatal flaw was not uncommon in members of the police force, but the usual ones were dishonesty, corruptibility, alcoholism, and a taste for disproportionate violence. Alongside such commonplace police foibles, Twitten’s idiosyncratic charlady/master criminal delusion (which had been planted in his mind by a stage hypnotist in front of a thousand witnesses, including Oliver himself) stood out quite starkly. Oliver would never forget the tragic moment at the Hippodrome when Professor Mesmer suggested to Twitten that the charlady was a criminal, and Twitten replied, with vehemence, ‘But she is! She was behind the Aldersgate Stick-up, and she also shot Mr Crystal!’
But right now, Oliver had urgent news to deliver to the constable, and wasn’t entirely sure where to start. For example, was it worth trying to telephone the police station? As his thickly accented Broadmoor informant had brutally pointed out, zay neffer answered ze telephone. In Oliver’s experience, you could leave messages with the switchboard until you were blue in the face, but it made no difference (mainly because, unbeknownst to all, Mrs G intercepted the handwritten memos and tossed them out of the window).
So it was quite a surprise when the station switchboard put him straight though, and a woman efficiently answered, ‘Inspector STEINE’s office, Miss LENNON speaking, how may I HELP you?’ and then dealt quickly with his enquiry, informing him of Twitten’s precise whereabouts.
‘Thank you, Miss Lennon,’ he said. And before ringing off, ‘I assume Inspector Steine is in London at the moment?’
‘Yes, he IS. But he will RETURN in a DAY or so, and we shall REJOICE.’
‘Well, thank you. You’ve been unusually helpful. Are you new?’
‘YES,’ she said grandly. ‘I am VERY NEW. And there will be CHANGES here, I promise you. Inspector Steine is an IMPORTANT MAN and a HERO who deserves FAR, FAR BETTER. There are not only COBWEBS in this office, but this is the WORST CUP OF TEA I HAVE EVER TASTED.’
In his haste to meet Twitten, Oliver unfortunately neglected to consult his desk-diary, in which was clearly written: ‘Prof. Milhouse, 2 p.m. Gosling’s’. This oversight would have unfortunate consequences. The appointment at the London Road store was to have been his last with the visiting American sociologist, who was in the process of wrapping up his Brighton field studies.
Luckily, Professor Milhouse had no idea what sort of sarcastic, mocking and anti-intellectual piece Ben Oliver was planning to write. The young reporter had seemed genuinely interested in observing crowd behaviour alongside an expert in this burgeoning academic discipline. Over the past two weeks they had made notes together in many locations around the town, and photographs had been taken of the good professor, with his distinctively American buzz-cut hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, sheltering on the lea-side of the squally West Pier, holding out an arm to indicate the seafront beyond. The constant rain had not quelled Milhouse’s academic ardour one jot. He was determinedly upbeat. ‘Many interesting properties of crowd behaviour are merely intensified by inclement meteorological conditions,’ he had said. ‘Especially those at the anti-social end of the Goffman Scale. I refer you to the work of Riesman, Glazer and Denney. See The Lonely Crowd, page 165.’
Oliver had reported such snippets to his editor, Mr Ackerley. ‘It’s hilarious, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s like he’s swallowed a book! He keeps talking about how there are some people who are guided by “inner gyroscopes”, while other people consult their “inner radar”, and—’
‘God’s clogs, does he really?’ chuckled Ackerley. The editor was from Yorkshire originally, and maintained an abrasive manner with most of his namby-pamby southern staff, but had a soft spot for Oliver.
The young man consulted his notebook. ‘People are either inner-directed or other-directed, and society as a whole is becoming more other-directed.’
‘Is it, by gum? What’s the difference?’
‘Ah, well, I wasn’t planning to go into that too deeply, sir.’
‘Ha! You mean you don’t know?’
‘I mean it’s all patent nonsense, sir! I thought it better to take the line that even when you’re just out and about in Brighton, minding your own business and choosing washing powder, you are being watched.’
‘I see. Go on. That’s not bad.’
‘Earnest flat-headed Americans are lurking in the aisles of the supermarket. And the Argus asks: Is it for this that we won the war ?’
‘That’s good.’ Ackerley gave Oliver an appreciative nod. ‘You can never go wrong asking people if this is why they won the war.’
‘We’ve got one more outing together, to Gosling’s. He wants to show me how people’s “blink rate” slows down when they’re confronted with a choice of products.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Apparently they go into a kind of trance, sir.’
‘Do they?’ Ackerley pulled a face. ‘I have to say, I find that quite interesting. But let’s get this straight. The angle will be: Remember to blink when you’re shopping! Some nosy Yank is lurking nearby with a notebook?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
Ackerley sat back in his chair. ‘Well, lad,’ he said. ‘I’m seeing a spread.’
‘Really? Thank you, sir.’
‘Fifteen hundred words. With a byline. We could offer ten bob to the first person who spots him, how’s that?’
‘Well, he’s leaving very soon, sir.’
‘Is he? Good. Then make it five quid!’
So this was all set to be another career-enhancing assignment. But then a murderous lunatic with a hard-to-credit name escaped from a famous high-security psychiatric hospital and Oliver forgot all about blink rate and even about his fifteen hundred wo
rds. Thus it was that the mild-mannered thirty-five-year-old Professor Henry Milhouse II of the University of Nebraska – author of two authoritative books inspired by cutting-edge sociological theory – waited genially under an umbrella outside the swing doors of Gosling’s for a quarter of an hour on that fateful afternoon, and finally went inside alone, leaving a message with the doorman in the hope that Ben Oliver of the Argus would eventually show up.
Meanwhile, up in London, how was Inspector Steine faring? Was it marvellous, being feted as the heroic killer of Terence Chambers, and receiving crate-loads of free Brylcreem at his hotel?
Well, contrary to all outward perceptions, the answer was actually no. Sudden celebrity was not entirely marvellous for the person experiencing it. For one thing, Brylcreem turned out to be disgusting, but mainly the inspector was lonely, homesick and fed up. What he particularly resented was the baffling social whirlpool he’d been sucked into: being introduced, tediously, day after day to crass famous people he’d never heard of, and being constantly reminded what a privilege this was.
‘There’s Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Inspector! Isn’t that exciting?’
‘May I introduce Donald Campbell … Norman Wisdom … Bela Lugosi … Antony Armstrong-Jones?’
‘You’ve been invited for drinks by Jimmy Edwards, and to be in the audience for an episode of the popular TV programme Whack-O! ’
It was no good protesting, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of him.’ It was no good saying, ‘I have no interest whatever in this thing called Whack-O! Which by the way sounds as if it irresponsibly condones sadistic violence towards children.’ For years he had effectively put an end to any putative office chitchat about famous people (usually initiated by Brunswick) by dropping the never-heard-of-him conversational bomb. But now he had been transported to a world where such a response was simply impermissible. Being a celebrity himself meant that he was expected not only to recognise but also to admire all other celebrities – and how many of them there turned out to be! They hailed from sport, from public life, from entertainment, from the arts, from the church. His face ached from continually feigning mute delight as he shook hands with people whose names and accomplishments meant nothing to him whatsoever.