A Shot in the Dark

by Lynne Truss

  Getting no reaction to any of this important news, Twitten then added, to Steine’s evident relief, that Mrs Groynes had just made a fresh pot of tea and was waiting for him with a nice half-pound of coconut ice.

  ‘Well, carry on,’ said Steine, which was apparently the right thing to say, because Twitten raced off in the direction of the Theatre Royal.

  Steine noticed Brunswick’s disappointed expression.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but he took me by surprise,’ he said, helplessly. ‘It’s a bit like having a dog. All that energy. Twenty-five shillings sounds like a lot, to me. And what’s all this nonsense about Crystal’s death being linked to the Aldersgate Stick-up?’

  ‘I did warn you, sir. Not to listen.’

  ‘Quite right, Brunswick. By the way, did you hear him say that the strong lady has escaped?’

  * * *

  The hilarious news that Joanne Carver had effortlessly absconded from the police cells was all over town in no time. At the Queen Adelaide, where Bobby had arranged to meet his Brighton auntie, jolly toasts were raised at opening time at 11 a.m. to the stupid woodentop in Brighton nick who’d put a famous strong lady in custody behind a bunch of bendable bars.

  Bobby laughed along with everyone else, but in truth he had mixed feelings about Jo’s being on the loose. On the one hand, he liked Jo and admired her; but on the other, he had very good reason to be scared of what she might do. After all, it was his fault the police had arrested her! If he hadn’t mentioned seeing her in a red wig, she wouldn’t even have been a suspect. He kept remembering, with a groan, Sergeant Brunswick holding up the wig in Jo’s dressing room and saying, ‘Thank you for the tip-off, sir. It’s very much appreciated.’

  Thank goodness there were only a few more nights at the Hippodrome. Next week Professor Mesmer was on the bill at the London Palladium! This stint in Brighton had been memorable in many respects – for meeting Penny, principally. But he would be more than happy now to pack up his trunks and boxes and move on. He just needed to retrieve that comb from Penny, ask her to be with him in London, and also to marry him (the order still required a bit of thought).

  Bobby took a sip of his drink and continued to watch the door for the arrival of his Aunt Palmeira. He was confident that she’d understand why he was glad to go. She hadn’t always lived here herself. True, she’d been his Brighton auntie for a few years now, but he had fond memories of former times in London. It was this Aunt Palmeira who had come up with the idea of the phrenology act. He had always been so good with his hands – he’d been brilliant at the piano as a child. But there were thousands of other pianists in the world, Aunt Palmeira said; thousands of card sharps; thousands of illusionists and magicians. And then she remembered how, as a child herself, she’d been taken to have a reading from the great Jessie Fowler (a legend amongst phrenologists), and it had changed her life.

  ‘It was uncanny,’ she told the young Bobby. ‘She’d been feeling heads for decades. She’d read the heads of Queen Victoria and Teddy Roosevelt, and Oscar Wilde and Rasputin, and she still said I had the largest organ of Deceit she’d ever come across!’

  Aunt Palmeira had bought Bobby some books and charts, and he had never looked back. He discovered that phrenology was not just an act, it was an art. Once he had placed his hands on a person’s head, he felt he was playing them, like a great sonata, but one that had never been heard before. There was something mystical about it: at the same time as he drew out his sitter’s essential character, he kneaded it back in, wise to its strengths and weaknesses. He could even open their minds and close them again without his sitters’ conscious knowledge.

  And when, aged twenty, he tested his new-found skills on his Aunt Palmeira, he found that the great Jessie Fowler had not been exaggerating. The organ of Deceit on his auntie’s head was, truly, staggeringly enlarged.

  * * *

  While Sergeant Brunswick checked up on poor Alec Forrester in his cell, Inspector Steine returned to his office with a nice cup of tea (and a slice of lovely shiny pink-and-white coconut ice) to polish the talk he’d be recording later in the day at Broadcasting House in London. It was his regular compositional habit to set his manuscript aside for a day or two and then return to it on the day of the recording, embellishing it with a few fresh turns of phrase. Mainly, however, he would read it aloud, timing it for length with a stopwatch, as the talk needed to be nineteen and a half minutes precisely.

  This week’s subject – the case of the Battle of Fulham Road – was perhaps not the strongest theme he’d ever chosen, but he looked forward to explaining to the clueless populace the legal principle of a mob (consisting of many people all capable of exercising individual free will and moral responsibility) together committing a single criminal act.

  Had he been feeling remotely charitable towards young Constable Twitten before he sat down, he certainly wasn’t afterwards. On top of his script was a note from Twitten, evidently written (typed!) during the early hours of the morning, offering the insight that while joint enterprise was a fascinating area for legal scrutiny, surely the most interesting aspect of the Battle of Fulham Road was whether the stampede came within the words of the Riot (Damage) Act of 1886?

  ‘This is intolerable,’ said Steine, turning to the second page of Twitten’s missive.

  If memory serves, sir, [Twitten continued] there was much debate after this famously well-attended football match about whether the police should compensate the people whose properties were invaded – and also whether the Riot Act of 1714 had been publicly read or not. But it’s a brilliant piece anyway, sir! Well done! I just feel it would be incomplete without some mention of the 1886 legislation, which I’m sure you are familiar with. Also, the Russian team was called the Moscow Dynamos, sir, not Dominoes, a classic schoolboy error that would leave you open to derision!

  * * *

  At the railway station, Twitten watched Miss Sibert’s train arrive. She wasn’t on it. While energetic groups of day-trippers streamed across the concourse dressed in their most colourful, scanty and sexually alluring attire, there was no one who looked remotely like she had arrived from Vienna with Sigmund Freud in 1938.

  This was worrying. He had spoken to her once this morning at her own home, and she had promised to take the 8.32 from Victoria, bringing the manuscript of Crystal’s memoirs. Their conversation had been very clear, especially when she had voiced her reaction to the news of Crystal’s death.

  ‘I’m so frightfully sorry about what happened last night to Mr Crystal,’ Twitten had said.

  And she had replied, in a Mittel-European accent, ‘Don’t vorry, it was bound to happen sooner or later. He voz a horrible man. Ein schweinhund. I often haff fantasy of shooting him myself.’

  Once he was sure Miss Sibert had not been on the train, Twitten raced to the public telephone outside the station, beside the taxi rank – narrowly beating an elderly working-class woman in an unseasonal fur coat, who exclaimed, ‘Ruddy nerve!’ as he slipped into the telephone box ahead of her, removing his helmet and resting it on the floor.

  Realising he had no penny coins, he dialled the operator. ‘I am a police constable,’ he announced, ‘and I need to be connected at once to a flat in London’s Great Russell Street, telephone number Museum 0488.’

  After several demoralising rings, during which Twitten became guiltily aware that a short queue was now waiting for the telephone behind the original outraged fur-coat lady, the call was finally answered.

  ‘Miss Sibert, it’s me. Constable Twitten.’

  ‘Ach, I am glad it iss you, Mr Twitten,’ said Miss Sibert, evidently relieved. She sounded flustered, a little breathless. ‘It will sound ridiculous, but I was unsure vether to pick up.’

  ‘Has something happened, Miss Sibert? I was worried when you weren’t on the train.’

  ‘I’m afraid it has, yes.’ There was a catch in her voice. ‘I’m afraid the manuscript of Mr Crystal’s memoir is no more!’

  Someone knocked on the
glass and Twitten spun round. It was the fur-coat lady. He opened the door. ‘’Ow much longer you gonna be?’ she demanded.

  Twitten, in agitation, ignored her and shut the door again. He had a lot to take in. If Crystal’s memoir had been stolen, it was jolly bad luck, but at the same time proved his investigation was on precisely the right lines.

  ‘Did you hear vot I said, Mr Twitten?’ Miss Sibert asked, shrilly, down the line. ‘It is gone. Even the carbon copy! When I arrive this morning, the door is open; Herr Crystal’s book is gone!’

  ‘Crikey,’ said Twitten, with feeling.

  ‘Months of verk, Mr Twitten!’ She sounded very upset. ‘It was all in there! We verk for months on the trauma –’ (she pronounced it trow-ma) ‘– of the Aldersgate Stick-up. We veep together; we howl like wolves; we place bags over our heads and fire loaded pistols in the air. Loaded pistols! In this very flat in Great Russell Strasse!’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Twitten. ‘Was that regression?’

  ‘Of course it was regression!’

  Twitten made a decision. ‘Perhaps we don’t need the manuscript. You can just tell me what you discovered. Would you wait there at the flat for me? I can catch the next train, I’ve got twenty-five shillings. I took it from petty cash this morning, which was jolly prescient of me, I now realise.’

  She took a deep breath. She was evidently pulling herself together. Outside the telephone box in Brighton, a man in a flat cap (third in the queue) was alternately indicating the station clock and shaking his fist at Twitten.

  ‘Ach so,’ Miss Sibert said, ‘I suppose I could stay here. It is true there vill be much secretarial work for me for a little vile.’

  ‘People writing with condolences, I suppose.’

  ‘Jah, and also people writing to say how much they hated and detested Mr Crystal and are so glad that he is dead. But for now, auf Wiedersehen.’

  ‘Before you go! Just one thing!’ Twitten said. To a groan of annoyance from the small crowd now watching him, he pulled the script of A Shilling in the Meter from his pocket, opened it and quickly found the relevant passage.

  ‘At the play last night, you see, just before he was shot, Mr Crystal got very excited when Nick, the passionate young protagonist, berates his girlfriend for working as a clippie on a bus.’

  ‘Jah? What is clippie?’

  ‘Ooh, sorry. Bus conductress.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Now. Nick particularly hates hearing her say, as a bus conductress, “Any more for any more?” And I’m pretty sure it was at exactly this juncture that Mr Crystal got very excited. Can you explain that?’

  Miss Sibert gasped. ‘The breakthrough!’ she said. ‘Mein Gott.’

  Twitten waited for more, but evidently ‘The breakthrough! Mein Gott’ was all she was going to say.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, at last. ‘Why are those words important?’

  ‘Because they must have been the exact verds of the woman in the bank robbery! We verked for veeks to retrieve zem and they would not come!’ she said, and in her excitement hung up the phone.

  Twitten stared at the receiver briefly, then out at the eight or nine people now waiting restively in the queue. He put his helmet back on his head, composed himself, then opened the door, and strode past his disgruntled audience in a purposeful manner, taking no notice of the jeering and swearing as he headed for the Brighton Station ticket office.

  Six

  Harry Jupiter, author of such bestselling publications as The Art and Craft of Murder and Heroes of the Yard, had never set foot in Brighton before. His work for the Daily Clarion generally kept him in London, and his special relationship with the elite of the Metropolitan Police – in particular, his well-established and mutually beneficial alliance with that famous London policeman Deputy Chief Inspector Philip Peplow – meant that he was perfectly well occupied from day to day without the bother of taking steam trains from the capital.

  He would have denied living in Peplow’s pocket exactly, but when the call had gone out last night from the news desk, ‘Get Jupiter here right now!’, the Clarion’s minions had wasted no time scouring the local taverns of Fleet Street, or checking with the long-suffering Mrs Jupiter at home in High Barnet; they had known to take a cab straight to Peplow’s private gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall, where Jupiter was reliably to be found proudly hobnobbing with senior Yard detectives, and ostentatiously addressing them by their first names.

  It was certainly a cosy arrangement. DCI Peplow ensured that Jupiter got first dibs on anything juicy the Yard was investigating, while Jupiter ensured that the Metropolitan Police’s CID came out of all investigations brilliantly, even when its officers failed to nail the culprit, or mishandled the evidence, or were otherwise lazy, stupid, incompetent or corrupt. As a result of this simple reciprocation, public trust in both Jupiter and Peplow was sky high; meanwhile both were equally revered by their peers. When Jupiter attended a crime scene with other reporters, he literally led the pack (they trotted in his wake in an elongated arrow formation), wearing an expensive camel coat draped over his broad shoulders, in the style of Edward G. Robinson – with whose unimpressive physique the small, rotund Jupiter had quite a lot in common.

  Jupiter was, therefore, the universally acknowledged sun in the sky of crime reporting, and there was no doubt that he enjoyed his power. It would be an exaggeration to say that men had been hanged on his say-so, although he sometimes made this claim privately. But he was a great supporter of the rope, and the readers of the Clarion adored him for it, even when, awkwardly, the hanged men were discovered afterwards to be innocent.

  Detail was Jupiter’s great interest when it came to all crime stories. His way of introducing himself had, over the years, perfected itself to, ‘Jupiter of the Clarion, now just tell me what’s going on here and don’t spare the particulars!’ In the case that first brought him to prominence – concerning the sparse, gruesome remains of a murdered woman found in a sludgy acid bath – he had made brilliant use of the ghastly details: the half-set of dentures that had not dissolved; the bit of handbag; the pair of National Health specs with the broken lenses.

  This famous half-set of dentures was a particular that Jupiter had audaciously made up, having asked a forensic scientist to suggest the sort of materials that would not have melted in the acid. But Peplow was so pleased with the impact of Jupiter’s lurid story on the general public (‘Those dentures!’ they thrilled) that he not only never contradicted the detail but decided to go along with it. Indeed, he borrowed an upper set from his own old mother to show as Court Exhibit G (luckily his mother was happy to live on custard, soup and macaroni pudding for the duration of the trial).

  But the acid-bath murder was in the past, and now the great crime correspondent was in Brighton Police Station, and the place was naturally abuzz. Passing through the ground floor, Sergeant Brunswick spotted Jupiter in an outer office and recognised him at once from his famous byline picture. Jupiter was a short but feisty-looking man, snazzily dressed, with a full head of hair, who looked like he could take care of himself in a fight – all of which fitted with his punchy, Hemingway-esque style of writing.

  Night. Light glinting on policemen’s helmets. Good men. Great men. Heroic men. Men without fear. A half-set of dentures. Whose? Not theirs.

  (At the Clarion offices, incidentally, it was understood that if anyone dared to insert a verb in a Harry Jupiter story, they were automatically dismissed. Likewise anyone who attempted to soften his emphatic punctuation. In a cupboard on the home-news floor was proudly preserved a heap of old, unusable Jupiter ex-typewriters whose full-stop keys were missing, having snapped off from persistent overuse.)

  Brunswick was a huge fan of Jupiter’s, full stops and all. The idea of being written about made him feel faint with excitement.

  ‘Does he need anything?’ he asked the desk sergeant, jerking his head towards Jupiter’s door.

  The sergeant replied that he shouldn’t think so. Jupiter
had arrived half an hour ago with the words, ‘I’ll need a Remington in good repair, some foolscap paper with new carbons, a large ashtray, an up-to-date street map of Brighton, a half bottle of Bell’s, a green visor, some functional sleeve garters, and a place to hang my mac where I can see it.’

  Right now he was finishing a piece for tomorrow’s paper about an astonishing new discovery in the old ‘Kennington Butcher’ case (the name had been his own idea; Peplow had long ago made him Case-Namer-in-Chief at Scotland Yard). The public needed to know that just last week, the great and tireless Peplow had found an incriminating human eye-tooth embedded in a scullery floorboard! After all these years! What a great example of sheer, honourable diligence and application. What a great example of how a tiny detail makes all the difference.

  When he had finished this piece, he must of course turn his attention to the death of Crystal, in which the Clarion naturally took an interest, since he was one of their own. But so far he had only come up with the name for the case: ‘The Blood on the Plush’. He had telephoned Peplow and asked him what he thought of it, and Peplow had wholeheartedly given him the double-thumbs-up.

  * * *

  It was one of the lovelier things about Inspector Steine that he not only didn’t care about the great ‘Policeman’s Friend’ Harry Jupiter, he hadn’t even heard of him.