by Lynne Truss
‘Peter?’ she whispered.
It took Twitten all his presence of mind not to look round to see who Peter was.
‘I’m here,’ said a voice, and a thin young man came running up the stairs and put his arms round her. ‘Deirdre! You came! Does this mean … ?’
‘Yes, Peter,’ she said, quietly. ‘It does. I want to go with you. I want to run away. But we have to be so careful!’
‘Oh, my love!’ he said.
Twitten was extremely uncomfortable about overhearing all this private lovey-dovey stuff, especially when it emanated from people who might be minors. But again, he was also aware that if he exhibited the slightest sign of life, he might scare them out of their wits.
‘Peter, stop. Stop!’ said young Deirdre. ‘This is serious. You know what my brothers would do if they found out. Or Mum! She calls you Weedy Pete! Weedy Pete Dupont! And the boys join in and laugh. They’re all beasts!’
Twitten was just making a mental note about the reprehensible solipsism of the young when the girl said something that truly surprised him.
‘And don’t forget what they did to Uncle Ken! The police only found one bit of him in that suitcase at the station. No one’s ever found his head!’
Staying completely immobile while this conversation was playing out was possibly the hardest thing Twitten had ever done. The urge to take out a notebook and lick the tip of a pencil was overwhelming. Uncle Ken’s head?
‘We’ll meet tonight at nine at the coach station in Pool Valley,’ said the girl, who seemed to be in charge of arrangements.
Nine, repeated Twitten to himself, silently. Pool Valley. Peter Dupont. Deirdre who? Secret door to … where? And again, Don’t forget: Uncle Ken’s HEAD??
‘Don’t say anything at work,’ she reminded her boyfriend. ‘Especially to Mr Blackmore.’
‘All right, I’m not stupid!’ laughed the weedy boy.
Mr Blackmore, Mr Blackmore.
And then the boy took Deirdre’s hand and held it tenderly. They both hung their heads. Twitten’s eyes moistened. For the first time, he realised that this scene being played out in front of him was jolly lovely, in its way; it was a privilege to witness it. He was reminded of those short-lived hopeful bits in tough modern films like On the Waterfront, where wide-eyed young love expresses itself so sweetly and poignantly (usually with a light woodwind accompaniment), against a backdrop of inevitable violence and doom.
Peter squeezed Deirdre’s hand. ‘I know what to do, don’t worry,’ he assured her, quietly. ‘It’s a good plan and you’re very brave. But if anything happens to me, remember you can trust Hoagland.’
Hoagland? Who’s Hoagland? Oh, bally hell, this is getting harder.
‘Don’t talk like that, Peter! Nothing will happen to you, so long as we get away now. I’ll get the money from the safe. Dickie said he’ll help me.’
The boy reacted with alarm. ‘You didn’t tell Dickie?’
Dickie?
‘I had to tell someone!’
Yes, but why Dickie?
It was at this point that they both happened to look round, and spotted Twitten for the first time.
‘That’s new,’ said the girl, frowning. ‘That policeman. It wasn’t there yesterday.’
Twitten felt his new helmet slip slightly on his forehead.
‘It looks a bit good for in here,’ said the boy, suspiciously.
But just as Twitten’s legs began to tremble, the door to the measuring-room burst open, signifying the end of Steine’s sitting, and the boy and girl sprang apart and scarpered with all the energy of the young – the weedy Peter boy back down the stairs, the girl with the de-boncified male relative back through her secret door.
‘Ah, there you are, Twitten,’ said Steine, beaming. He turned and waved goodbye to Angélique.
‘À bientôt, Inspector,’ she called.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Twitten, almost crying with relief that he could move at last. ‘Shall we go, sir?’
They started to walk down the stairs towards the sunshine outside.
‘Well, I don’t want to rub it in,’ said Steine, ‘but you won’t believe what you missed by being out here.’
Two
Although Sergeant Brunswick and Inspector Steine had been working together for several years, they knew very little about each other’s personal circumstances. All the inspector knew about Brunswick was that he lived with an aunt in a flat on the London Road (name of aunt forgotten); that his first name was something like Jim or possibly Algernon (immaterial); and that he was a perennial sad case where women were concerned.
This the inspector knew not because he was at all curious about such matters, but because he had been unlucky enough to observe Brunswick’s love-life at first hand. Even the nineteen-year-old rabbit-toothed Maisie, who sold colourful buckets and spades from a little hatch near the bandstand, could wind the thirty-eight-year-old sergeant round her provocative little finger.
James Brunswick (the name was indeed Jim) was also a war hero, of course. Having joined the so-called ‘Boys’ Army’ at the age of fourteen, he served as a paratrooper in the Italian campaigns; but if the inspector didn’t know the specifics of his sergeant’s wartime career, he wasn’t alone in this; like many a decorated soldier, Brunswick was silent about his own particular role in the defeat of the Third Reich. In 1957, the war had been over for only a brief dozen years, but it was rare for people to hark back to it – the subject was officially closed. Many children of the 1950’s grew up knowing nothing of their fathers’ part in the conflict; and being too cocky and self-centred, they never got around to asking.
As far as Brunswick understood it, there were many good reasons not to talk about the war: for one thing, the real heroes were the dead ones; for another, young people loathed being reminded of what their elders had been through (and no man of thirty-eight wanted to be called ‘Daddy-o’ if he could prevent it); on top of which, very few people chose what they did in the war, in any case; and finally, war heroes were not exactly few and far between. So plentiful were they in Brighton alone that you couldn’t toss a humbug without hitting a veteran of Monte Cassino. Every hotel commissionaire or doorman along the seafront sported either an unmissable limp or a jangling row of tarnished medals on his chest (usually both).
Brunswick would have been disappointed to learn that Inspector Steine thought his name was possibly Algernon. However, he would in turn have to admit that he knew little about Inspector Steine’s life beyond the station, other than that he was about forty-five years old, lived in the Queens Park area of the town, had grown up in London, drove a very nice car, was childless and long-divorced, had served in the City of London police during the Blitz, and that his given names were ‘Geoffrey’ and ‘St John’ (the latter pronounced, for some unfathomable reason, ‘Sin-jern’). There was a rumour that in the evenings the inspector was writing a memoir, but that he kept it securely locked away in his desk.
Of course, Inspector Steine famously wrote and delivered a broadcast every week on the Home Service (entitled ‘Law and the Little Man’), which often utilised anecdotes from his life, and sometimes shed an oblique light on his childhood, but he was careful not to give too much away about his origins, partly because – in terms of class, at least – these origins were so unusual and difficult to categorise. His stern and judgmental mother Honoria, now living in Kenya (pronounced Keen-ya), was originally from a snobbish and very wealthy upper-class family in Dorset, while his father Wilfred had been a humble career policeman from West London, who was unfortunately struck and killed by an army transport lorry on Chiswick Bridge in 1922, when little Geoffrey was only ten.
It had been an unlikely alliance, this marriage between Honoria and ‘The Bobby’ (as the family back in Dorset always termed him, refusing to learn his name). The strains of it had helped turn his mother into the bitter, gin-sodden battle-axe she now was. But nowadays, whenever she looked back on that ill-advised marriage, she had to be honest: she coul
d blame no one for her misfortune but herself.
And how short the distance, really; how short the years. Living with a mauve-and-golden view of the far-off Ngong Hills – the baobab trees alive with birds and monkeys, the equatorial sun scorching the tall grass, the sound of lion (not ‘lions’) roaring on the perimeter of the compound – Steine’s mother could close her eyes and instantly revisit the dingy, noisy, choking London of her youth. Sipping her second pre-prandial Tom Collins, she could bring to mind the very aroma of sooty smog on that fateful day when she fell into the arms of her unexpected hero, Constable Wilfred Steine.
The story (as children Gillian and Geoffrey heard it so many times) was a pretty good one. In the spring of 1910, the eighteen-year-old Honoria Penrose was up in London for a society wedding, and had been carefully steering the unwieldy family car – a Clifton F model 1905 Motor Cradle – through a sedate Bloomsbury square. Visibility was poor; the Cradle was so difficult to manoeuvre that it had been christened by her father ‘The Utter Bastard’ (or ‘UB’ for short); Honoria was also a little bit lost, and her favourite hat had blown off on the Marylebone Road (to be snatched up instantly by gleeful street urchins). And then a bizarre thing happened. As she drove down the side of Gordon Square, a group of rowdy young bohemians dressed in exotic Eastern costumes emerged from one of the houses and, before she knew it, had placed themselves in front of the vehicle!
It was terrifying. In their colourful turbans and robes, they looked like wild things. She tooted her horn at them, but it didn’t help. They surrounded the Motor Cradle and deliberately blocked her way, making guttural animal noises and exchanging the nonsensical phrase ‘Bunga Bunga’. (Upper-class young people at this period often breached the peace in such comical ways, wrecking the interior of the Café Royal, and so on. This bohemian bunch – led by the irrepressible prankster Horace de Vere Cole – had conceived the idea of impersonating Abyssinian royalty in order to board a warship at Weymouth, in one of the unfunniest hoaxes ever recorded.)
Having lived quite a sheltered life in Swanage, poor Honoria had never been exposed to bohemians at all before, let alone ones tastelessly blacked-up like American minstrels. Feeling threatened, she begged them to leave her alone, but they refused. They were too excited about the effect they were having. Her panic made them surge and Bunga Bunga all the more.
It was at this point that the handsome Constable Wilfred, who had been proceeding in an easterly direction along Torrington Place, heard the piercing female scream that was to change his life. Instantly, he diverted from his beat and raced towards the source of the rumpus, blowing his whistle and waving his truncheon.
The bohemians scattered like startled exotic birds, and disappeared through various well-appointed front doors, uttering expressions rather less exotic than ‘Bunga Bunga’, such as ‘Botheration, Horace! It’s a fucking constable!’ and ‘Where’s the key, Adrian? Where’s the bloody key?’
Wilfred did manage to land a truncheon blow on the slowest of the group, which was a source of pride ever after – although the pride was slightly diminished when the desperado in question was later identified as Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), the mentally frail lady novelist.
At first, Honoria wasn’t quite sure what had happened – those ghastly people had come and gone so quickly! But then she saw Wilfred’s dear honest face in a sepia halo of London air pollution, and her heart swelled within her. The breathless young Constable Steine had only to utter the fateful words, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ and that was it: the world tipped on its axis. She looked into the blue eyes of her brave rescuer and decided on the spot that she had never felt more all right in her life, and that she must marry this paragon as quickly as possible.
The marriage was a terrible failure, of course, especially when Honoria’s family disinherited her and never spoke to her again – and also took back the car. Honoria soon found that she hated being a policeman’s wife. But Wilfred was a decent man, and an intelligent one, and the marriage did produce two children in quick succession, a girl and then a boy, the latter of whom grew up to be Inspector Steine of the Brighton Constabulary.
Honoria begged her only son not to follow in Wilfred’s footsteps by becoming a policeman; but if ever a man idolised his father, it was Geoffrey St John Steine. His ideal of the police officer was set forever by the kind of public servant his father had been: a man who would, regardless of his own safety, rescue a clueless posh woman from out-of-control modernists intent on a racist prank.
It is a shame that Sergeant Brunswick knew none of this, when the adult character of Inspector Steine was so clearly influenced by his background. So much was explained by his unique beginnings: his intense, abiding loyalty to the law and all its officers; his touchiness about class distinctions; his loathing of the term ‘bobby’; his interest in vintage cars, especially the (very rare, now) Clifton F model 1905 Motor Cradle. Even his quickness to classify any mystery as ‘unsolvable’ could perhaps be traced to his feelings of impotent schoolboy anguish when his unhappy sister Gillian ran away from home at the age of sixteen and was never heard of again.
On a lighter note, the family background also explained why he loathed fancy dress. As for the Bloomsbury Group, Steine abominated them one and all, once describing them in a live radio talk – to the surprise of both his listeners and his producer (it wasn’t in the script) – as ‘degenerate human scum’.
Their mission at the Maison du Wax successfully accomplished, Steine and his constable returned to the station, Steine regaling Twitten along the way with the various compliments paid to him in private by Tussard père – for example, about the spacing of his eyes being precisely the same not only as Napoleon’s but also Dr Crippen’s and Lady Jane Grey’s.
‘Something jolly interesting happened outside too, sir,’ Twitten said, but he never got the chance to elaborate, what with Steine’s eyebrows having reminded the blind French model-maker of Benjamin Disraeli and his ears of Teddy Roosevelt (although possibly it was the other way round).
After greeting Sergeant Brunswick, who was still engrossed in his Police Gazette, Steine retired to his own office to tinker happily with this week’s instalment of ‘Law and the Little Man’, which would interestingly skewer the popular fallacy that a wife is barred from testifying in the trial of her husband.
If there was one type of subject that he loved to tackle, it was the common misconception in regard to the legal system. Why did the general public insist on believing things about the law that weren’t true? Why did they not check their facts? Were there no public libraries? In this wonderful new information age, with encyclopaedias and reference sections and index-card systems in special wooden cabinets situated in public buildings in every town, it was well established that checking any fact would rarely take the average person (with the help of a trained librarian) more than a few hours; two days at the very most.
Meanwhile Twitten – almost too excited to say hello after what he had overheard between the two star-crossed lovers at the wax museum – quickly borrowed the heavy office typewriter, transferring it to his desk with a grunt of effort. He needed to type up the notes in his head before he forgot them.
Naturally, Mrs Groynes noticed his fervid, single-minded paper-feeding, so immediately set about trying to derail his concentration. Twitten might have capitulated to the charwoman’s terms: he and she might now operate according to a secret truce; superficially, all might seem cordial, but there was no love lost between the keen young constable and the ostensibly motherly charlady. Young Twitten regarded Mrs Groynes as his own personal enemy, whom he must avoid as much as possible and eventually vanquish. Less respectfully, Mrs Groynes regarded Twitten as an endearing source of harmless entertainment.
‘Cup of tea, dear?’ she called, as he adjusted the carriage of the machine and began to type.
Without looking up, he shook his head. ‘No, thank you, Mrs G. I’m a bit busy, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, go on, dear, you must be pro
per parched. Stop that silly typing for a minute and have a nice chat, why don’t you?’
There was no response except typing.
‘Here, I’ve been meaning to talk to you for the longest while about this dismal epidemic of myxomatosis. Are we for it, dear? Or are we against it?’
But Twitten, pausing in his work, merely bit his lip and scanned what he had written so far.
Door leads where?
What building is behind the wax museum?
Deirdre who? Who mother? ‘All beasts!’
Dickie – who he? She said she trusted him but Weedy Pete not so sure.
‘It’s just that I’m taking a vote, dear,’ continued Mrs Groynes. ‘And the results so far have been a bit of a revelation.’
But Twitten (who was actually keenly interested in the topical issue of myxomatosis, as Mrs Groynes well knew) was not so easily put off. He needed to imagine himself back at the top of those stairs, listening to that conversation. What else had those young people said? What else?
‘I’ll have another cup, Mrs G,’ Brunswick volunteered. ‘That last one was lovely.’
‘Good for you, dear. Keep your strength up. Here, fancy a nice fig roll, and all?’
Twitten closed his eyes, willing this witless chit-chat to stop. He mustn’t forget Peter Dupont, Uncle Ken, the head …
‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any Garibaldis?’ said Brunswick. (He was joking. He loved Garibaldis, but Mrs Groynes disapproved of them so strongly that she had been known to dismiss them as ‘little sods’.)
Mrs G laughed. ‘Now you know how I feel about Garibaldis, Sergeant.’
And they chuckled together at this mysterious joke, while Twitten closed his eyes and took a deep breath.