A Shot in the Dark

by Lynne Truss

  But instead of being called up to take part in the act himself, he’d had to watch while Inspector flaming Steine’s great qualities as a policeman were announced to the world – and then, to top things off perfectly, Brunswick had been shot.

  Lurking behind his sense of outrage were, however, deeper stirrings of doubt and self-blame. It was hard for him to visit one particular suspicion – but it wouldn’t go away. Had Melba/Mesmer played him for a fool?

  He kept remembering with anguish his visit to Mesmer’s dressing room, just minutes after he’d seen the Opinion Poll lady enter through the stage door. Mesmer had been so calm, so helpful, showing such kindness to a fan, offering to feel his head. And then – well, twenty minutes had mysteriously disappeared.

  ‘You were gone half an hour!’ Maisie had insisted, repeatedly, the next day. And he’d accused her of exaggerating. But what if he had been gone half an hour? Could it explain why he never put two and two together, that Bobby was the professor?

  ‘He hypnotised you, Jim, that’s what,’ said Maisie, when he talked to her about it at morning visiting time. ‘What a bastard.’ She was chewing gum, and it made beautiful dimples dance in her cheeks. She also bumped up and down on her chair, so that her bust jiggled.

  ‘But possibly I just missed everything,’ he said, gloomily. ‘I can be a bit star-struck, Maisie. For one thing, I took him to be a much older man. I didn’t even look at his fingers. I missed the biggest giveaway of them all: the fact that the Opinion Poll lady’s hands smelled of Brylcreem.’

  ‘You were looking for a woman, Jim.’

  ‘Good point, Maisie, thank you.’

  She laughed. ‘And now they’ve got that suicide note it turns out you were barking up the wrong tree anyway.’

  Brunswick rolled his eyes in misery, and Maisie gave him a mock-stern look. ‘Listen. You’re a very good policeman, Jim. Blimey, you keep getting shot, for one thing!’

  He attempted a smile.

  ‘Here,’ she said, pulling out her gum until it formed a thin string, and then gobbling it back again. ‘Now don’t get jealous, darling –’

  Brunswick glowed when she called him ‘darling’.

  ‘– but Vince wanted to take me up London, and I said yes. I mean, what with you laid up here for months, I need a bit of fun. And it’s Frank Sinatra. At the Albert Hall. I couldn’t say no, now could I?’

  Brunswick felt helpless. How could he compete with Frank Sinatra? He’d looked into it once, and the tickets cost more than his auntie’s monthly rent.

  ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t, Maisie.’

  ‘I know you do!’ she laughed. ‘I told him you’d be jealous. But you know what? It made him all the more determined. Here, I should play you two off against each other a bit more, shouldn’t I? I wouldn’t mind seeing that Mario Lanza some time, would you? What d’you say to that, Jim? You can take me to see Mario Lanza!’

  * * *

  Back at the station, Twitten realised – somewhat belatedly – that there was something wrong in the way Mrs Groynes had told him all these stories.

  ‘Mrs Groynes, I might be missing something, but didn’t you indicate that you loved Bobby and Jo?’

  ‘I did love Bobby very much, dear, yes. Jo slightly less, on account of all the random violence, and also on account of being terrified of her personally.’

  ‘So why aren’t you weeping or upset?’

  ‘No need, dear. We made a plan and it went like a dream. Apart from a certain Clever Dick Constable shouting, “It’s a trick! It’s a trick!” that is. But luckily you’re so discredited, dear, that no one took any notice, did they?’

  ‘So the shooting was a trick!’

  ‘Course it was.’

  Twitten groaned. This day was getting worse and worse. ‘You mean even Penny Cavendish was in on it? It was her reaction that convinced me it was all real.’

  ‘No. I’ll admit she was the icing on the cake, dear. She wasn’t supposed to be there. But everything else was planned: the gun having one live shot in the barrel – for wounding the sergeant. As for the rolling and wrestling and the double-dying, dear – Jo and Bobby have practised that little charade for years, and they’ve never done it better. There was only one thing I wasn’t happy with: the St John’s Ambulance men got there suspiciously quickly, didn’t you think? Almost as if they were waiting in the wings. I had to have a little word with Vince about that.’

  She rummaged in the pocket of her housecoat and produced a postcard. It had been sent from Dover.

  ‘Bobby says he and Jo are on their way to France. He wants to tell Penny the truth but he can’t, can he? He’ll always have to look after his sister. But he says he’s very glad never to have to ask anyone again to list the different ways they cook potatoes, so there you are, something good’s come out of it.

  ‘He’s a good boy, you see. A very good brother. As for Penny, it’s best for her to move on. But I tell you what, dear, she’ll make a fantastic Gertrude one day, you mark my words.’

  Mrs Groynes folded the card and put it back in her pocket.

  ‘Poor Miss Cavendish,’ said Twitten, solemnly.

  ‘You’re right. They really fell for each other, those two. But when you think about it, they only knew each other for less than three days, so I expect she’ll recover in time.’

  * * *

  And so we will leave them, with Constable Twitten still officially undecided about his future. What he has to ask himself is whether catching criminals is for him a purely moral issue, or whether he’s actually much more interested in establishing facts to his own satisfaction.

  Sergeant Brunswick, on the other hand, feels more strongly than ever that bad people should be caught and punished. Lying in his hospital bed, he is thinking of new ways to convince Inspector Steine that undercover work is the way forward – even for a man with a giveaway limp. He sees himself posing as a limping fisherman, or a limping seaside photographer, or perhaps a limping gardener tending a Hove Lawns floral clock.

  The fact that every criminal in Brighton knows what he looks like – and can quote back to him the hilarious ‘Of course it’s flaming loaded!’ – never occurs to Sergeant Brunswick. It thrills him to imagine the moment of truth when he throws off his disguise and says, ‘All right, Chalkie. The game’s up. I’m a policeman and you’re nicked.’

  And Inspector Steine? Nothing has changed. He still wishes, more than anything, for Brighton to be a quiet and well-ordered society; for criminals to take their business elsewhere. As he eats his Knickerbocker Glory in Luigi’s, he is glad that last week is over. First there was the critic killed, then the playwright, then Jupiter and Peplow, then Professor Mesmer and the strong lady – the final body count doesn’t bear thinking about. Two, four – no, he can’t go on.

  On whom should this horrible sequence of events ultimately be blamed? he wonders. There must be someone who can be held responsible. Braithwaite must take his share of culpability, having two of the deaths firmly attributed to him. But as he spoons the glacé cherry from the glass (he’s kept it specially for the final mouthful), Inspector Steine decides that the person he blames most for all this is actually Graham Greene.

  Meanwhile, in the world of the theatre, the myth of the tragic-heroic Jack Braithwaite is already beginning to bubble into life, conferring on A Shilling in the Meter something of the literary status of the odes of John Keats. That a young and magnetic writer should feel so strongly about the death of his friend that he would commit murder and suicide stirs the imagination of disaffected youth. When an important playwriting prize is later established in Braithwaite’s memory, there is no hesitation in naming it the Bang Bang Ta Ta Prize. There is good reason for thinking that Braithwaite, had he lived, would never have achieved comparable status, although that doesn’t really justify his murderer getting away with it.

  Back at the station, Mrs Groynes makes another cup of tea for the constable, and finds a nice piece of left-over coconut ice in a tin with a picture o
f the Coronation on it. The coconut ice is a bit brown and crusty round the edges, but still sweet and sticky within. Twitten takes it from her, uncertainly.

  ‘Go on, dear. You need your strength if you’re staying. Or if you’re buggering off elsewhere, for that matter.’

  He finds that tears have come to his eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ she asks. ‘Need a huggie?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Mrs Groynes.’ It comes out as a wail.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About being a policeman, now that I know what I know.’

  She sits beside him again, and says, gently, ‘Then I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple. Don’t cry, dear. You have to accept defeat graciously, that’s what.’

  ‘But you’re a criminal. A major criminal. And people here tell you anything, all the time! You were able to write that confession – and have everyone believe it – because you knew things no one outside the police station knew. I have to do something about you.’

  ‘But you don’t, because you can’t. Think of it as a kind of freedom. Look at it that way. You did your best and you lost, dear; there’s no shame. And now you’re off the hook. So when the inspector comes in today, you just say that you’ll never accuse me again because you understand it’s a totally mad idea that was planted in your brain by a naughty hypnotist in front of a thousand witnesses.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ he snivels.

  ‘Yes, you can. The alternative would be to have Inspector Steine saying “Einstein” at you all the time, which would actually be worse.’

  Twitten half-smiles, but he isn’t ready to agree with her. Not yet.

  ‘Come on. That would be maddening, wouldn’t it, dear? Him

  jumping out of cupboards saying “Einstein”?’

  He hangs his head, while she waits.

  She looks at the ceiling. He continues to look at the floor.

  Finally, he takes a deep breath. ‘So, say I do all that,’ he says. ‘Say I promise Inspector Steine I’ll never accuse you again of being a master criminal, or say you shot Mr Crystal. Where will we stand, then, you and me?’

  ‘You and me? Blimey, haven’t you guessed? You and me will be ever the best of friends!’

  She moves closer, so that their knees are touching.

  ‘So what I have to ask you is this, and don’t look so scared, dear. You’ve got to answer me this one thing honestly or not at all.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s your favourite cake, dear? And don’t say cherry Genoa because that’s gone.’

  Acknowledgements

  Since the characters in this novel have a pre-history on radio, I have a large cast of people to thank for helping me form them, not least my producer Karen Rose, who managed to persuade the commissioners at Radio 4 to give me not only four series of Inspector Steine, but also a final Christmas special. Our wonderful cast of regulars comprised Michael Fenton Stevens, John Ramm, Matt Green and Samantha Spiro (replacing Jan Ravens after the first series). Writing scripts for such talented comic actors was throughout a real privilege.

  But that was radio, and it was not the same. When it came to adapting and expanding (while at the same time firmly reining in) the scripted material in order to create A Shot in the Dark, I have fewer people to thank, but I thank them wholeheartedly: Alexandra Pringle and Alison Hennessey at Bloomsbury, and Anthony Goff at David Higham Associates. First Alexandra backed me to write a bona fide crime novel, and then Alison patiently showed me how. Meanwhile my wonderful agent Anthony loyally cheered the book along, which meant a lot to me.

  I’ve never written acknowledgements for a novel before, but now that I’ve got the hang of it I am going to carry on, and thank my gorgeous doggy companions, Hoagy and Django, for all their support while I was writing (cleverly disguised as either begging noisily for treats or pawing at doors to be let out). Finally, I would also like to take this opportunity to say that, obviously, if anyone should shoulder the blame for all this, it’s not me, it’s Graham Greene.

  A Note on the Author

  Lynne Truss is a columnist, writer and broadcaster whose book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves was an international bestseller. She has written extensively for radio, and is the author of five previous novels, as well as a non-fiction account (Get Her Off the Pitch!) of her four years as a novice sportswriter for The Times. On radio, she is currently engaged in writing a continuing sequence of short stories for Radio 4 entitled Life at Absolute Zero. Her columns have appeared in the Listener, The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and Saga. She lives in Sussex and London with two dogs.

  RAVEN BOOKS

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, wc1b 3dp, uk

  BLOOMSBURY, RAVEN BOOKS and the Raven Books logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in Great Britain 2018

  Copyright © Lynne Truss, 2018

  Lynne Truss has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9051-6; TPB: 978-1-4088-9052-3; EBOOK: 978-1-4088-9049-3

  To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.