Psycho by the Sea

by Lynne Truss

  ‘No, no, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes. ‘Don’t say something you don’t mean.’

  Twitten pulled himself together. ‘I’ll help you, Mrs G. I mean it.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be right, dear. You seem to forget that half an hour ago I was threatening to shoot you.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Gosh.’ Since there was no getting away from this discouraging fact, it would just have to be set aside. ‘But you’ve helped me lots of times, haven’t you? With cases? When I was stuck? And time and again you’ve proposed a quid pro quo and I’ve refused. We could consider this the quid pro quo, if you like? For example, I can tell you that a certain Miss Sibert from Vienna was involved in the escape of that madman.’

  ‘Miss Sibert?’ Mrs Groynes pulled a face. ‘Who’s Miss Sibert when she’s at home?

  ‘Oh, that’s disappointing, I was sure you would remember. I put two and two together at once! It’s probably because my brain is younger and therefore less worn out than yours. She was the psychiatrist who was working with Mr Crystal, the theatre critic, to recover his memories.’

  She brightened, interested. ‘And didn’t it turn out she worked for Terry?’

  ‘It did! You see, I can help. Between us we can solve this.’ He leaned back on his pillow. ‘I just keep thinking of Mister Cecil’s bunnies hopping about on that tray, though, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ She sounded confused. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know! See the bunny run! See the bunny jump!’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose it’s on my mind so much because of the book I’ve been reading. How easily manipulated we all are! People just have to wind us up and off we hop, buying the soap powder and cigarettes they want us to buy; helping pretty girls simply because they cry. You’ve got your own “hidden persuaders”, Mrs G! They’ve wound you up and set you running! Otherwise why would you have come here, to my bedroom, with a bally gun?’

  Unable to sleep, Inspector Steine padded downstairs in his slippers, switching on lights as he went. At the front door – which rattled in the wind – he paused and knocked.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ responded Jenkins miserably. His voice was that of a sodden man who’d been standing in one spot – soaked with rain and blasted by a gale – for several hours now.

  ‘No cause for alarm, Constable!’ called the inspector. ‘I just wanted to inform you I’ve come downstairs.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  ‘I thought I’d make myself a nice hot cup of Ovaltine.’

  ‘Good for you, sir.’

  ‘I found that I couldn’t sleep,’ he called, as cheerfully as he could. ‘It was nothing to do with what you said about this madman boiling heads and so on. I knew all about that already, of course! Your mention of grotesque head-boiling wasn’t any sort of news to me, not at all!’

  At the dining table, the inspector drew the box of files towards him, and bravely dug in. Boiling heads? Why hadn’t this been mentioned to him before? Didn’t he have a right to know? Must he do everything himself? But at the sight of the very first photograph – of the mutilated Constable Fry on the chequered floor of a Lyons’ Corner House – all his courage dissolved, and he pushed the box away with such force that it slid right across the table and fell off the other side.

  He shook his head, exasperated with himself for looking at such a horrible image. Knowing more about this psychopath wasn’t going to help, was it? This was an argument he so often had at the office, of course, with young Twitten. ‘Why do you always want to know how criminals think?’ he would say. ‘It merely sullies you, and conveys on them far more attention than they merit. You’re always talking about inner this and inner that! How many more times must I say this? Our job is to catch criminals, not to understand them!’

  With relief, he opened instead the file of suggestions compiled for him by Miss Lennon, concerning the opening of the zebra crossing, which was being mooted for Friday (i.e. the day after tomorrow). He was glad to have this road safety project to divert him. As Miss Lennon had assured him, there was little chance the madman would still be at large by then. But even if he were, why would a madman risk appearing at a ceremony where there would be hundreds of witnesses?

  ‘Let’s not think about that SILLY MAN, Inspector,’ she had said. ‘Put him completely out of YOUR MIND.’

  ‘IDEAS’ was the typed heading on the first page, and beneath it was a suggestion that really caught his imagination.

  To celebrate the bold black-and-white nature of the zebra crossing, why not make the event a black-and-white bonanza, Inspector? Just off the top of my head, we could arrange:

  Black-and-white chequered flags

  Real zebras

  Giant chessboards

  Giant panda

  Harlequins

  Dalmatians

  Packets of liquorice all-sorts, with the coloured ones removed

  Men in French onion-seller costumes

  Penguins

  Nuns

  ‘Oh, Miss Lennon,’ breathed Inspector Steine gratefully, sitting back. He felt so much better after reading this. ‘What an absolute lifesaver you are turning out to be.’

  Seven

  The plan for the robbery of Gosling’s Department Store had been conceived during the previous year’s pre-Christmas rush, when Mrs Groynes experienced a Eureka moment while shopping.

  Genius is hard to pin down, but in Mrs Groynes’s case, this particular Eureka demonstrates how the creative mind of a seriously gifted opportunistic criminal never truly nods. When it happened, she was dressed as a respectable housewife in a blue swing-coat and a scarlet beret, and was toting home a string bag holding a humble half-pound of sprats wrapped in newspaper (for Raffles, the cat). As she barged her way through excited family groups on the second floor of Gosling’s, she was thinking of nothing at all. And then, when she least expected it, a tiny incident snagged her attention.

  She stopped barging with such abruptness that several people bumped into her.

  ‘Sorry!’ she said, clasping the string bag to her chest. ‘Just remembered something. Honest, I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t glued on with epoxy resin!’ People laughed politely and passed on, and she retreated to stand beside a pillar, out of their way.

  What had she noticed? It took her a while to be sure of this herself, but she knew it had involved the nearby fur-coat department, where – ah, yes! There it was! She darted a look towards the counter where a cheerful young assistant in a smart calf-length black dress with a little white collar was busily cramming big white five-pound notes into a canister. It was this unusual movement – elbow sharply up, pushing down with effort – that had caught Mrs Groynes’s eye. ‘I’ve never tried to get this much cash in one before!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t get stuck in the tube!’ Then she turned, opened a little flap in the wall and said, ‘All right, then. Off it goes!’ and with a satisfying Foop! the canister was sucked away.

  Why was this everyday proceeding of special interest to a super criminal always unconsciously on the look-out for new and attractive ways of committing grand larceny? Mrs Groynes wasn’t yet sure. Rumours had reached her in the autumn of the younger Mr Gosling choosing to commission a second-rate cash-carrying system for the store (this was, apparently, typical of the man: to have big ideas and then baulk at the cost), but she had not previously seen any potential benefit in this for herself. But as she stood in the centre of the shop-floor watching busy Christmas-week sales assistants in every corner expertly posting those little canisters into those tubes – Foop! Foop! Foop! – it was as if she could hear criminal opportunity calling to her from within the very walls.

  All that cash! Moreover, all that cash being sucked away ostensibly out of the reach of criminals! Eureka, indeed. Bag of sprats notwithstanding, she felt like dancing on the spot. Gosling’s in the week before Christmas must turn over a fortune. True, at one end of the scale, they sold cheap packets of fresh fish to doting cat-owners,
but at the other end, they sold fur coats at ninety quid a go! From fashion to bedroom suites, from jewellery to televisions, the high-ticket items abounded; and the good news was, transactions were nearly all conducted in lovely, untraceable cash, because the sort of person who shopped here (as opposed to the more spiffy Hannington’s) did not possess a bank account. As all these interesting facts came together in her fevered mind, she was obliged to lean her face against the pillar to cool down.

  ‘Are you in need of assistance, madam?’ a man had said, holding out a hand for her to shake. It was Mister Harold, on his rounds of the shop-floor. ‘Can we help you with anything? Are you perhaps looking for a gift? We have some lovely bath pearls in Christmas packaging.’

  Mrs Groynes could only look at him. Looking for a gift was such an apt choice of words. A gift was what Mrs Groynes was always on the look-out for, it seemed. And thank you very much, Mister Harold, she felt she had found one right here.

  The very next day, Mrs Groynes began to form her plan. Barrow-Boy Cecil typically played an essential role. The first thing was to find out who had installed the tubes and in this she was lucky: it was a local firm of wide-boy engineers, brazenly imitating the system patented by the Lamson company. The architectural plans would still be on file at their offices near the railway station. What she needed to know next was precisely how the tube room worked, the identity and personality of the chief cashier, where the money was stored, and precisely how it was transported to the bank.

  Thirdly, she needed to establish a timescale for gradually introducing specialist gang members onto the staff.

  And after all that, she needed a cup of tea and a brief lie-down.

  Denise Perks was the first recruit to the Gosling’s Job. Young, pretty and impressively numerate for someone who left school at fourteen, she was the perfect person to act as inside coordinator, especially after a couple of years of having Mrs G as her mentor.

  ‘Do people tend to underestimate you, dear?’ Mrs Groynes had said, kindly, at their first interview, back in 1954.

  ‘Yes! All the bloody time!’ the sixteen-year-old had angrily replied. She was rough-looking, and a bit dirty.

  ‘Well, that’s good enough for me,’ Mrs Groynes had said. ‘You’re in.’

  ‘What, just like that?’

  ‘Yes, dear. Being underestimated is tough, I know. But in our particular line of business, I promise you, it’s a gift.’

  Denise made it plain that her little brother Shorty came as part of the package, and Mrs G had never regretted the deal. Both new recruits were priceless additions to the organisation. Orphaned when Shorty was five, they had survived on their wits; and it was much to young Denise Perks’s credit that when the time came to apply for the job at Gosling’s, she was fully capable of suppressing her natural delinquency, dressing herself appropriately (although she hated the ugly shoes), and buckling down to it, never once missing a day.

  ‘I know you’ll be tempted to lapse, dear,’ Mrs Groynes said sympathetically, at the beginning. ‘It’s a long haul, this job. You’ll ask yourself, “Who’d notice a bit of pinching? Might as well keep my hand in!” But if this job goes to plan, Denise, you and Shorty walk away with enough money to buy your own billet. Whereas if you get nabbed for nicking half a dollar, that’s it. The main thing to remember is this: don’t ever let them adjust the power of that vacuum, dear. Always insist that it’s hunky bleeding dory.’

  And so Denise suffered the tedium, learned not to cry when she looked at her pretty young feet encased in horrible lace-ups, and bided her time. ‘Underestimate me at your peril’ was her daily mental mantra, and it kept her on the straight and narrow. She noted everything from the start: in particular, the routines surrounding the chief cashier, Mr Frost, whose well-secured office adjoined the tube room. The other girls talked in their spare moments about boys, clothes, and going dancing at Sherry’s. Denise tried to join in, but it would be fair to say that all her attention was fastened on Mr Frost, who all day long received and processed bag-loads of cash and sales records through a special grille.

  And, of course, there were the canisters to watch, too. Thanks to the unadjusted vacuum pressure, they came rattling and whistling at high speed down the tubes, then shot out of the single ‘IN’ tube, flew across the room, and landed in an angled basket eight feet away – and woe betide anyone who got in the way.

  ‘Shouldn’t we ask someone to come back and adjust that, Miss Perks?’ one of the girls might ask.

  ‘No, I don’t see why,’ Denise would reply sweetly.

  ‘My friend works at the tube room in the Co-op, and she says their Lamson canisters just flop out nicely, they don’t shoot across the room, making everyone duck for cover. Have you seen the bruise on Ginnie’s face?’

  But the youthful Miss Perks was immovable on the subject of the system’s pressure setting, and so the canisters continued to arrive in the entertaining ballistic manner described. The person most affected by the decision not to turn the power down was a sweet girl called Mabel (just fifteen years old, and fresh from school) whose job it was to dart along a long line of tubes labelled from 1 to 48, posting the canisters back to the various departments. She was proud of the technique she’d developed of offering the canisters up: a fraction-of-a-second open-palm method, like feeding sugar lumps to a bad-tempered horse.

  Only once so far had Mabel lost concentration at a key moment, and she’d been genuinely touched by how quickly the other girls sprang to their feet and responded to her cry of: ‘Help! Help! Stuck!’

  ‘Blimey, it’s like you was all sitting there expecting that to happen!’ she exclaimed cheerfully, when they had dragged her to safety.

  Most members of Mrs Groynes’s gang (because it was a gang, whatever she claimed to the contrary) were at some point involved in the evolution of their leader’s brilliant, epic plan to rob Gosling’s. However, certain key players were bound to emerge, and from the beginning she focused on recruiting individuals with particular skills. As she explained to Denise and Cecil at one of their early committee meetings, ‘I’m going to need a dropper, a whizz man, some general grifters and a flop artist.’ Luckily, everyone present understood what these underworld terms signified, because if they hadn’t, it would have been a really pointless thing to say.

  The first was easy. Stanley-Knife Stanley was the best dropper in the business. He had dropped through skylights since he was a teenager. Dispatched to the offices of Trend & Co. (cut-price engineers), he let himself in one night, and removed the all-important plans of the Gosling building without disturbing anything.

  Historically, the profession of dropper had always been tinged with a certain hidden peril: to wit, it was all very well dropping down, but what if you couldn’t climb back out again? Sad to say, many novice droppers failed to consider this eventuality until it was too late. But Stanley-Knife Stanley was an old hand; moreover, he had just received from Mrs Groynes a new-fangled telescopic ladder that could be folded up to the dimensions of a briefcase. A specialist criminal-enterprise supplier in Belgium had sent her one of these collapsible ladders as a free sample, and she had immediately ordered six more, despite the exorbitant cost.

  As for the whizz man, the candidate was obvious: Jimmy the Gimp was the best pickpocket in town. Not a fan of the hurtful ‘gimp’ soubriquet, he had once or twice tried to adopt the brighter name Jimmy Lightning instead – on account of the speed of his fingers – but the result was only to confuse people (they started thinking there must be two pickpockets called Jimmy), so he gave it up. He demurred at the Gosling’s Job at first, arguing that he wouldn’t be free until after the summer bonanza of visitors, but this reservation was easily accommodated: they agreed he would begin his duties only once the weather had turned.

  Jimmy’s role in the job was very specific and not at all onerous: to lift a particular key from the pocket of the chief cashier, and also to stall the lift for about fifteen minutes. But even if a lesser whizz man could have accomplish
ed such simple stuff, Mrs G wanted the best and she always got it.

  For the general-duty grifters (to pose as humble sales assistants), Mrs G was a little stumped. Ideally, they should be presentable teenaged girls. It was Denise who came up with the solution: ‘What about Joan and Dorothy from the Palace Pier?’ she said.

  New to the Brighton scene, Joan and Dorothy were attractive identical twin sisters of seventeen who had always dreamed of a career in show business while growing up in the sleepy nearby village of Hassocks. Over the summer, they had defied their worried mother by dropping out of secretarial training at Mr Box’s Academy in Brighton (a very respectable school), and taking a job on the Palace Pier assisting an escape artist of legendary uselessness named Alfred the Great. They had enjoyed themselves immensely, and decided never to return to the classroom. Twice a day they were cheered by crowds just for levering open a sealed coffin at the last minute (or cutting a rope) and saving a tragically deluded man from imminent suffocation.

  Crowds always flocked to Alfred the Great’s shows, and not because of any sort of gimmick. This wasn’t like the hilarious magician Tommy Cooper doing tricks badly on purpose. The forty-five-year-old Alfred Gubbins really didn’t know how to escape: he had never acquired the requisite skills. Yet he was always introducing new levels of peril into the act, such as big tanks of water and ferrets down the trousers, making the audience squeal and laugh in nervous anticipation. Denise and Shorty had been in the audience on several occasions over the summer, and Denise had been impressed by the clever way Joan and Dorothy coped with it all: untrained as they were, they somehow succeeded in making Alfred’s desperate flailings and strainings (and even his screamings) seem like part of the act.

  ‘Hear Alfred the Great start to shriek like a baby!’ Dorothy would say, with a broad, distracting smile, parading in a frilly-edged short skirt in front of George’s desperately writhing body, while Joan discreetly knelt down behind and unlocked a padlock or two. As a start in show business for two talented girls, it wasn’t great, but they were young and pretty and not cut out to be secretaries, and after Alfred rolled off the pier in chains one August afternoon and sank like a stone, the world was basically their oyster.