by Lynne Truss
‘So picture the scene, dears,’ Mrs Groynes continued, her voice still low. ‘There it was, April the first. You’d think the date would be a bit of a clue, wouldn’t you?’
Twitten laughed, despite himself.
‘So the inspector’s in his slippers with a cup of cocoa, and there’s that nice Richard Dimbleby on the television reporting how the pasta crop was early this year on the Swiss–Italian border.’
‘I saw it with my parents,’ said Twitten. ‘“The last two weeks of March are always an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer”! It was priceless. But how could anyone believe it was real? They’d just draped strands of spaghetti over bushes. They said what a miracle of nature it was that all the strands were the same length!’
‘Well, it turns out that the inspector got so worked up about the dangers of the so-called spaghetti weevil that he only went and wrote one of his talks on the subject.’
‘No!’ said Twitten, while Brunswick (no less shocked) merely put his head in his hands.
‘Apparently he wrote this impassioned plea, see, saying that this weevil needed to be stamped out completely or the people of Italy might starve, and many respectable restaurants in Brighton be put out of business!’
‘But someone stopped him? They must have stopped him?’ said Twitten, worried.
‘Oh, yes, dear. His producer at the BBC.’
‘Thank goodness.’
‘But it was touch and go, dear. He had to dash off a completely new script in about half an hour once they realised what he’d done. And then he got this shaming memo from the Director General – the one I found in his desk – saying it had better not happen again.’
Down on the seafront, Adelaide and Phyllis peered along the row of hastily vacated deck-chairs to where a dark lone figure remained, unmoving. The crowd of holiday-makers helpfully shuffled into position behind them, leaving their way clear to go and investigate.
‘There, miss!’ said the child, pointing. ‘Where he’s not moving.’
‘Yes,’ said Adelaide. ‘Yes. Thank you. I can see.’
This was a far cry from popping people’s postcards into a pillar-box, or reciting the timetable of Volk’s Electric Railway. But she was wearing a uniform, and that seemed to put her in charge.
‘Phyllis,’ she said, firmly, ‘you go and find a policeman.’
‘My Bert’s already gone to do that,’ a woman volunteered. ‘He went as soon as he saw the blood.’
‘Ah,’ said Phyllis, in a quivering voice. ‘There’s blood?’
‘I should say so!’ the woman scoffed.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Adelaide.
She and Phyllis took a few brave steps towards the figure, which appeared to be that of a man – a long, thin man slumped back in his deck-chair, dressed in the dark clothes and shiny laced shoes of an office worker, his hair uplifted by the wind, arms hanging lifeless at his sides. They both saw something liquid was dripping from the bottom of the chair and accumulating in a small, dark puddle underneath.
Adelaide, feeling it was now or never, took control. ‘Look, he might still be alive, Phyllis,’ she said, quietly. ‘You wait here.’ Then she turned to the little crowd and said, in a reassuring tone, ‘I’m sure the police will soon be here, so please don’t be alarmed. But if you did want to find amusement elsewhere, may I recommend the Hall of Mirrors on the Palace Pier? Children get in for a penny!’
Then, with all the composure she could muster, she approached the body, while the crowd made a collective sucking-of-teeth noise.
And there, still bleeding from the deep knife-wound across his throat, sat the body of a somewhat weedy young man, his eyes open, his mouth forming a horrible ‘O’ and his life-blood accumulating – drip by drip – in a crimson puddle beneath his chair. Next to his right hand lay a knife.
‘Is he dead, miss?’ people called (from a safe distance).
‘What did he die of?’
‘Who is he?’
‘Which pier has the Hall of Mirrors again?’
‘What’s his name?’
‘How much is it for grown-ups?’
‘What time do you get off work, miss?’
‘Do you recognise him?’
‘How many pebbles on this beach, do you think? More than a thousand?’
But for once, enquiring of a Brighton Belle was fruitless, as Adelaide stood frozen in front of the ghastly scene, fighting the urge to scream.
Three
It didn’t take long for Inspector Steine to reach a considered view on the body in the deck-chair.
‘Dead,’ he called.
Brunswick and Twitten were holding back the crowd, but in truth there was little danger of anyone surging forward. Having already stood there for forty-five minutes, they were mostly quite bored – but, at the same time, refusing to disperse. Most of them didn’t want to miss anything; others had paid good money for their deck-chairs, and were determined to reclaim them the moment the coast was clear.
The inspector’s verdict of ‘dead’ was scant reward for their long forbearance. On hearing it, they let out a jeer of contempt.
Steine, unaware of the cynical mood of his audience, summoned Sergeant Brunswick to join him.
‘Suicide, of course,’ he confided, privately.
Together they looked at the body, with its open eyes, expression of horror and gaping scarlet throat.
Brunswick coughed politely. ‘You think so, sir?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Steine said, in a tone of regret. ‘You can see where he dropped the knife. Even more tragically, an unknown suicide. We may never know what drove this young man to commit such a horrid deed. We may never know even who he was. Look, Brunswick, can you and Twitten get those people to go away?’
‘What if someone saw something, sir? Shouldn’t we interview them?’
Muttering to himself something that sounded like ‘Oh, give me strength’, Steine turned and called out, ‘My sergeant thinks some of you might have seen something, although I personally have my doubts. Is it possible that any of you can help?’
Most people shook their heads, but then Adelaide emerged from the throng, to a general gasp. She stepped forward, gripping the arm of the skinny, sunburned child in the knitted swimming trunks. (These had now thankfully dried out; their former droopiness had been a tad obscene.)
From the way he needed to be dragged towards Steine, the boy’s presence was not entirely voluntary.
‘Nigel, come on!’ she urged him.
Adelaide was, by her own standards, horribly dishevelled: one long, beautiful strand of chestnut hair had escaped from her little hat and was dangling near a hazel eye that happened to be shaped like an almond. And on the hem of her perfectly pressed and laundered skirt, Brunswick noticed, there was a smear of blood.
‘Tell the nice man what you saw, Nigel,’ she said, gently. ‘It might be important.’
The boy shook his head vigorously. He was desperate to get away. Everyone was looking at him. Everyone was looking in particular at the sky-blue trunks specially made for him in fancy cable stitch by his block-of-flats nanny in Bethnal Green. Years later, when he was grown up, he would successfully manage a sports equipment emporium in Romford, and would make it a firm policy never to stock knitted swimwear of any sort.
Inspector Steine wasn’t going to wait for some street urchin to favour them with his testimony, and was about to tell Adelaide just to go away when she announced, ‘Nigel saw something, Inspector!’
She crouched down in front of the boy, so she could look him in the eye. ‘Now, come on. You cared enough to come and fetch me. Tell the nice man.’
But the boy refused. ‘Grass to a ruddy copper?’ he said. And making an exceedingly rude hand-gesture at the inspector, he wriggled free from her grip and darted off towards the sea, with Sergeant Brunswick in limping, futile pursuit.
Steine rolled his eyes. ‘All right. You tell me,’ he said. ‘What did the little lad see? But tell me first who you are and why you’re dresse
d in that ridiculous uniform.’
‘Well, sir,’ she said, looking down at herself. She saw the blood on the hem of her skirt, and quailed. ‘I’m just—’
She was reaching the limit of her courage. Steine’s peremptory tone was the last thing she could cope with right now.
‘My name is Adelaide Vine and – and I’m a Brighton Belle, and no one warned us that this sort of thing might happen.’ Steine hardly noticed the catch in her voice. He was too busy puzzling over the name ‘Brighton Belle’.
‘A Brighton what?’
Looking round, he saw another young woman in identical uniform. This was Phyllis, sitting on a bench, sobbing. It seemed that Twitten (without authority) had brought this other Belle a mug of tea from one of the rougher places along the seafront where they barked; ‘With or without?’ when they took your order; and when you asked, confused, ‘With or without what?’ they said, ‘Handles’.
Adelaide took a deep breath. ‘What Nigel told me,’ she said, ‘was that he saw this young man arrive and sit down in that chair. He seemed edgy.’
‘Well, he would. He was about to kill himself. You’d be edgy too.’
‘He was holding a package, wrapped in brown paper.’
Steine waved an arm towards the body. ‘So where’s the package now?’ he said.
It was at this point that Constable Twitten came forward. He had been looking at the corpse for the first time, and was excited.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I believe I know who the dead man is, sir.’
‘Oh, shut up, Twitten. Of course you don’t. You’ve only been in Brighton three weeks.’
‘But I do, sir. I even know quite a bit about him. His name is Peter Dupont; cruel people called him “Weedy Pete”. His girlfriend Deirdre has access to the wax museum through a secret door and they were planning to run away together tonight. Look how weedy he is, if you don’t believe me, sir.’
‘This nonsense can wait, Constable. It’s not every day we get a suicide in a public place.’
‘But this can’t be suicide, sir. He was planning to run away.’
‘Look,’ said Steine, firmly, ‘when I said shut up, Twitten, perhaps I wasn’t clear. I meant shut up, Twitten. Now, where was I?’
He turned back to Adelaide, who was unsure what to do. Should she go on?
‘Oh, ignore the constable,’ said Steine. ‘He’s always like this. You were telling us what else that loathsome little street child told you.’
‘Well, he thought that the old ladies sitting either side of the young man were dozing.’
‘Convenient,’ muttered Steine.
‘Meanwhile the young man appeared to be waiting for someone, and kept looking at his wristwatch. Obviously, this being low tide, Nigel had his sandcastles to think about; he was working with his dad on an ambitious scale model of Wormwood Scrubs – to show the rooftop route his dad’s friend Chalky had used to escape – and they were busy with the watchtower.
‘But he was aware of a sudden, violent movement – the young man’s long leg kicked up very high, he said – and when he turned to look, there was a figure running off towards the bandstand, and the package had gone, and the young man wasn’t moving, and a knife – a knife – ’ She took a deep breath ‘ – fell to the ground.’
She staggered, and Twitten instinctively offered her his arm. ‘Are you all right, miss?’ he asked her, earnestly.
It was just then – as the constable offered this kindness to a beautiful young woman in distress – that something mysterious stirred deep in Inspector Steine, something like a memory.
Are you all right, miss? Why did this simple question move him so powerfully?
Brunswick came back, panting from his fruitless chase after the boy.
‘He got away, sir,’ he explained, unnecessarily.
But Steine said nothing. He had adopted his trademark thoughtful, faraway look, as if searching the universe for the meaning of life. Usually, this expression was actually quite vacuous – just a means of mental escape from an unpleasant situation. But this time it was genuine: Think, he urged himself. Think, Inspector Geoffrey St John Steine of the Brighton Constabulary, twice winner of Policeman of the Year! Think! Think!
‘Excuse me, miss,’ Twitten continued. ‘But why don’t you come and sit down with your friend? Then the sergeant and I could escort you home. You’ve had a bally enormous shock. May I get you a cup of tea? I think I’ll be able to obtain one with a handle this time. They took me by surprise before.’
‘Tea?’ she wailed. ‘Oh, yes, please!’
And it was at this moment, to Inspector Steine’s extreme surprise, that his heart went out to this young woman – this beautiful, helpless woman with all the nuts.
Deirdre Benson was confused when she came back into the sparsely lit bar of the Black Cat Club (bearing two cups of disgusting chicory coffee), and found that Dickie had disappeared. Hadn’t she heard him picking out the notes to his songs at the piano only a few seconds before?
‘Dickie?’ she called, quietly. ‘Are you there?’
She was a pale girl, and thin. You might say that their common weediness had been the thing that attracted her to young Peter. However, while the boy’s etiolated look was genetic (he came from umpteen generations of unhealthy stock, some of his ancestors scarcely living long enough to reproduce), her own was more the effect of nurture: she’d been brought up virtually in the dark.
‘I expect he had to pop out,’ said her mother, from the gloom.
Deirdre swung round, peering into the shadows. She put a hand up to shield her eyes.
‘Oh, Mum, you haven’t? Not Dickie?’
Ma Benson laughed, and emerged into the light.
She was wearing an electric-blue nylon housecoat; her hair was in tight curlers; she was accompanied by a smell of setting lotion, fresh nail varnish, eau de cologne and (her favourite indulgence) sweet pipe tobacco. She was quite a sight, Ma Benson: a broad-shouldered woman, she was six feet tall, with big legs and thick wrists, and to top it all she smoked (bizarre choice) a long churchwarden pipe. Her unusual stature and exotic smoking preference served her well in the very masculine world of night-club entrepreneurship. Most men, when dealing with her, were automatically thrown off kilter: when a woman can look down on your bald spot (and can also blow smoke in your eyes), you somehow don’t know quite how to go about patronising her.
‘’Course not, Deedee,’ she said, not entirely convincingly. ‘Dickie’s one of us!’
But when she approached her daughter, the girl backed away.
‘Look, darling, I expect he had a bit of a headache, that’s all. Or a change of heart. And who could blame him? I mean, you’ve hardly done that man a good turn, darling, involving him in your stupid schemes to run off with that kid from the council.’
Deirdre sat down at the piano, where the seat was (a bit gruesomely) still warm from Dickie’s bottom. She sighed. It wasn’t a sigh of thwarted grand passion; more of resignation. It had been a long shot with Weedy Pete. But in her defence, she never met anyone.
‘I’ll be sealing up that door to the wax place, by the way,’ Ma Benson said. ‘It’s long-since served its purpose.’
Deirdre’s chin quivered. When she had discovered the door behind a fake wall upstairs in an unvisited stockroom, she’d assumed it was her own little secret. But here was her mum talking about it having had a ‘purpose’. What possible purpose could it ever have served? To save the tuppenny entry fee to the Maison du Wax?
‘You promise you won’t hurt Peter, Mum?’
‘Me? Of course not. You just let him know you changed your mind, and we’ll say no more about it. One of the boys can deliver the note.’
The girl, accepting defeat, placed her hands on the keys, and played the first few bars of ‘Stardust’. She was a good pianist. Her musical uncle Kenneth had taught her the basics in the old days (before he was sawn into pieces).
She pictured Peter boarding the cream-and-green Southdown coach at nine
p.m., and laying his raincoat along the back seat; begging the driver to wait another minute; checking his wristwatch; scanning the faces of the surging, anonymous seaside crowd. And then, when the coach driver insisted on setting off, he would meekly take his seat, and vanish from her life forever.
It made her want to sing Judy Garland’s ‘The Man That Got Away’. She started to pick out the notes to the opening line, but Ma Benson snapped, ‘Don’t do that, Deedee! You’re always doing that!’ and the girl obediently stopped.
Having a song for all occasions was young Deirdre’s special curse. It’s what happens when you grow up in a night club: the Great American Songbook gets into your blood. It drove the rest of the family mad, but she couldn’t stop herself. Weedy Pete wouldn’t have minded it. He loved the way she could sum up (with lyrics) the feeling that he was the one, ‘night and day’; or that when he touched her fingertips, her heart was aglow.
Back at the police station, Mrs Groynes had bustled through her chores and then bolted down the back stairs. There were people she needed to talk to around the town. If Wall-Eye Joe Marriott was already at large, and possibly heading for Brighton, she intended to be ready for him.
Normally, she would tolerate a certain amount of unauthorised villainy on her turf. The odd freelance con man getting himself arrested in the town was actually helpful to her: such small fry could be fed into the justice system to keep it happy, with no danger to herself or her many vassals and associates.
Just last month, for example, a teenage ‘whiz gang’ (pickpockets) working on the London platform at the railway station had been successfully brought to book by Sergeant Brunswick, with benefits to everyone. If truth be told, it was Mrs Groynes the charlady’s innocent prattling on the subject that had set him on their trail in the first place, but he’d done a good job catching the kids in the act. He had felt very pleased with himself; the inspector had been pleased with him too. Meanwhile Mrs Groynes had been the most pleased of all, because while police attention had been focused on the petty pilfering of insignificant junior villains, her top team in the Kemp Town area had stripped all the lead off the roof of St Michael and All Angels.