by Lynne Truss
But if Mrs Groynes was willing to tolerate such outsider activity, it was important that she always knew what was going on. Currently in Brighton, she was aware of several housebreakers operating around Fiveways; some minor rackets at the race course; money changing hands over a proposed ugly new convention centre in the grounds of the Brighton Pavilion; and of course the continuing reprehensible thuggishness of the Benson clan (mother and sons, not the girl) operating from the Black Cat night club at the seaward end of Grenville Street.
Actually, the Bensons had been suspiciously quiet recently – in fact, ever since the so-called ‘trunk murder’ of 1955. Having a discreet and well-remunerated informant working for her at the club (he played percussion in the quartet and kept his nose clean), Mrs Groynes was well aware of whose torso had been found in that famous suitcase at the railway station. According to Tommy Drumsticks, Ma Benson’s younger brother Kenneth had disappeared at precisely the time the body was deposited in Left Luggage. Drumsticks had admired Kenneth, who was a musical director on some of the big shows up in London. He had possessed sheet music signed ‘With thanks’ by the legendary Richard Rodgers! Kenneth had given Dickie and the band a few excellent tips on phrasing. But then, one day, he had disappeared – just after angry words had been exchanged between him and Ma Benson.
And although the press had had a field day with the trunk murder, and called for the police to make our left-luggage system safe from deposits of grisly human remains, no formal identification of Kenneth’s torso had ever been made. Inspector Steine had personally lost interest in the case very quickly.
‘Too little to go on until the head turns up,’ he had decided, and Mrs Groynes had whole-heartedly supported this decision, because it would give her leverage with the Bensons in the future if she needed it.
‘And look at it this way, dear,’ she had said, while pouring the inspector a nice cup of tea. ‘What’s the rush? Without legs, he’s not going anywhere.’
And so the torso’s original owner went untraced. Poor Sergeant Brunswick couldn’t help thinking that there had been a few useful clues, such as the fingerprints on the locks; the lingering smell of sweet pipe tobacco when you opened the case; the initials ‘KB’ in the leather; the small fragments of coloured glass found embedded in the skin of the shoulders (as from the footlights you might find in a night club). But unluckily, he was over-ruled.
So far as the Bensons were concerned, then, Mrs Groynes was biding her time, with an ace up her sleeve. So far as the boys at the race track were concerned, she could – up to a point – live and let live. But Wall-Eye Joe Marriott was another kettle of fish altogether. Twitten had been right to detect an unusual personal animus in her on this subject.
On her way to the seafront, Mrs Groynes approached a boy dressed like a shoe-polisher’s lad, leaning against a wall, perusing a copy of the Dandy. As it happened, the lad lurked there every day, from nine to six, in precisely this spot, retained by Mrs Groynes. He looked up when she drew near.
‘Morning, madam,’ he said, smiling. ‘What can I do you for?’
‘Shorty,’ she said, ‘tell Vince to leave the Punch and Judy and meet me in Luigi’s in fifteen minutes. Then get Diamond Tony from the Metropole.’
And even though she said no more than that, the boy frowned all the way as he raced off to deliver the messages. It wasn’t every day that she required the special services of Diamond Tony.
‘Something’s up, Vince,’ he reported to the Punch & Judy man, when he arrived. ‘She looks proper cross,’ he told the spiv having his nails clipped in his top-floor suite at the posh seafront hotel.
So what was it about Wall-Eye Joe’s unfinished-house scam of 1949 that so agitated Mrs Groynes? Had she perhaps been a friend or relative of one of the female victims? Had the unfinished-house scam perhaps been her own idea, nicked from her by Wall-Eye? What reason had she to feel so aggrieved?
What no one knew about the unfinished-house scam was that it wasn’t just women who fell for it. There were male victims too. Marriott’s young woman accomplice (The Skirt, as Brunswick called her) had herself courted lonely, gullible, big-hearted male clients, and spun them the identical story about the house in the country. And one of those men had been very dear to Mrs Groynes. He had been the love of her life. She carried in her handbag his last letter to her. She had treasured it for years.
As she sat now in Luigi’s, waiting for Vince, she felt a scream well within her when she thought of what must have happened to her darling man. During the war he’d been a captain in the bomb-disposal unit of the Royal Engineers; he had risked his life dozens of times for the sake of other people; he had lost members of his team; he had himself suffered both psychological trauma and bodily injury. To be murdered after all that … murdered and then dissolved in acid, perhaps! His name was Philip Hoagland, but at his invitation she had called him by his nickname ‘Hoagy’, the way his men had done.
Their time together was just after the war. They had met on VE Day, in fact, in the jubilant crowds of Trafalgar Square, when she accidentally elbowed him in the eye. He bought her a gin to show there were no hard feelings, and the attraction (which was powerful) grew from there. In the few short weeks they were together, she had been thrilled by Hoagy’s attentions: she had never expected to consort with a man who was either so selfless or so posh. But their closeness also caused her anguish: she felt like a fraud. Surely she and Hoagy had nothing in common? Wasn’t he just too good for her, in every way? Look at their contrasting histories: while Captain Philip Hoagland had been crawling in muddy East End craters to disarm German explosives, she had been hijacking GPO vans on the Holloway Road, learning her trade from the young, up-and-coming London gang-boss Terence Chambers. Hoagy was also, socially speaking, from quite another world: a true toff. If ever there was a man who said ‘looking-glass’ instead of ‘mirror’, it was he.
But what tipped the balance was when Chambers started making unmistakable romantic advances towards her, and asking if she had a boyfriend already. She refused to expose her dear Hoagy to the danger of being Terence Chambers’s rival: she simply had to forsake him. He had been hurt and confused. The scene in the bustling Lyons Corner House on the Strand, during which the stricken Hoagy openly wept huge manly tears on to his uneaten egg on toast, she would never forget. She kept telling herself, I’m doing this for your sake, my darling; I’m doing this for you – but it did not assuage the guilt. And later, when she learned that the unfinished-house scam had brutally torn the good and guileless Philip Hoagland from this world, she felt deeply (though irrationally) that she herself was to blame, for not protecting him.
She hadn’t known till much later what his fate had been. After years of silence, she had assumed he’d forgotten her. But then in London a year ago, she had bumped into his best friend Hoppy coming out of a bistro in Dean Street (all Hoagy’s army captain friends had nicknames like Aspers, or Hoppy, or Dicko).
‘Not seen Hoagy for yonks,’ said Hoppy, sadly. ‘Last I heard he was in the pink, though, so don’t you go worrying about him. Word is, he visited one of those agencies in Regent Street, and fell in love with the handsome woman who ran it!’
At the council offices in Marlborough House, Mr Blackmore was beginning to get annoyed. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and there was still no sign of his junior clerk.
He slid open the little wooden hatch beside his desk.
‘Still not in?’ he asked his secretary Lillian. ‘Where is the boy?’
Lillian, who had been giving her full attention to the pleasurable smoking of a full-length Bristol Tipped, pulled a face and shrugged.
‘Why are you asking me?’ she said, stiffly, brushing ash off her desk and not looking at Mr Blackmore. ‘I’m not his mum.’
A stranger to the office would have spotted at once that this particular department of Town Planning (Sewerage and Waterworks) was not, as they say, a nest of singing birds.
Blackmore sighed. Sometimes he felt very hard don
e by, having Lillian as his secretary. Mr Statham down the hall had the beauteous Nancy; Mr Phillips in the treasury had the virginal Iris—but Blackmore mustn’t let himself think about Iris.
‘Lillian, have you typed up the minutes of Friday’s meeting?’
‘Not yet, no. They only just came in.’
He knew this to be a lie, but let it pass.
‘Well, we need to get them signed off by the Borough Engineer this afternoon, so please could you do it as soon as possible?’
‘All right, all right,’ she muttered. ‘Keep your hair on.’
With the half-finished cigarette clamped between her lips, and eyes half-closed against the smoke, Lillian mutteringly fed new paper (two sheets, with carbon paper between) on to the heavy Remington carriage and then aggressively commenced the clattering high-decibel bang-rattle-bang-rattle-rattle-bang-rattle-rattle-ping that was the soundtrack to busy office life everywhere in the world in the age of the manual typewriter.
Mr Blackmore slid his little hatch back again, muttering under his breath. He had no idea what Lillian’s problem was, and he refused to enquire. In his defence, had he known that her main grievance concerned gender differentials in pay, he wouldn’t have understood anyway.
But that was exactly what she was fed up about. Two weeks ago, an unfortunate mix-up with pay packets meant she had found out that junior clerk Peter Dupont (seventeen years old; first job) was paid twice as much as she was. Lillian was thirty-two years old, and could type seventy words per minute. She’d worked in local government for fifteen years and had a mother to support. Unsurprisingly, since her discovery, she’d been smoking considerably more at her desk, and speaking considerably less. She had also stopped wearing make-up and deodorant. As for clothes, she was opting increasingly for ugly skirts and shapeless cardigans.
It was odd that Dupont was so late, though. Pausing in her work, she looked over to his empty chair and orderly desk, and decided she had never liked him; and she hoped he got in serious trouble. What a pipsqueak! And so nakedly ambitious, too: always volunteering to run things along to the various planning departments down the corridor, and helping the women in Archives with their unwieldy Gestetner machine. He probably thought Lillian didn’t know about those Archives visits, but several times recently he had come back to the office smelling to high heaven of the distinctive purple ink that was used in those machines.
Needing a fresh box of matches, she opened her desk drawer, and inside it found something peculiar. It was a Manilla envelope with ‘Miss Ross’ written on the front in Dupont’s handwriting. She looked at it in confusion, and was just about to get up and rap on Mr Blackmore’s hatch when she heard the telephone ring on his desk and noticed that, in any case, the boy had written ‘For Your Eyes Only’ under her name.
‘Blackmore speaking,’ she heard her boss say (a bit muffled), next door. Using her favourite paper knife, she slit open the envelope and found inside a handwritten note.
Dear Miss Ross,
This is just to say goodbye, and also to say I was shocked to see how little you are paid. It is an outrage.
By the time you read this, you will know what I have done. Please do not think less of me. I know what I am doing. I could not just stand by and do nothing.
People will say I have abducted Deirdre, but I assure you she is coming of her own free will.
Keep cheerful and please remember me with affection,
Peter
The hatch slid open.
‘Lillian, that was Mr Reinhardt upstairs,’ said Blackmore. He looked pale and anxious. He was wondering whether the hatch was really the most fitting conduit for news of this magnitude, but it was too late now to change his mind.
‘What’s that you’re holding?’ he said.
‘It’s nothing.’ Lillian slid the note into the pocket of her cardigan.
‘Look, there’s no easy way to say this. It seems that the entire contents of Mr Reinhardt’s safe have been taken. And he thinks it was our young Mr Dupont who did it! He’s going to call the police!’
Dickie had not had a change of heart, as Ma Benson had told her daughter; but he had certainly had a change of location. As he regained consciousness, all he knew was that he was on the floor – on a cold concrete floor, somewhere indoors, in the dark. His various aches and pains had not been improved by being dumped there. His head was sore; worst of all, his bottom set of dentures was not in his mouth. The only good news in all this was that he seemed to be alone.
Did he have matches in his pockets? With an effort, he sat up. If he had some light, he could find the door and perhaps get out.
‘Yes!’ he said, with relief. It was his habit to keep a Black Cat match-book in one of his trouser pockets, for lighting the cigarettes of attractive female customers between songs. This practice had done him no good for as long as he could remember, but it was certainly a godsend now.
‘All right, where am I?’ he said quietly to himself, striking the first match – which gloomily revealed a sort of store room, with shelves. Dark shadows danced on the walls. The shelves held rows of indistinct grey objects, each the size and shape (roughly) of a beachball. He narrowed his eyes and scrambled up to take a look – but as he reached his feet, the match went out.
Had he paused for thought before striking the second match, he might not have emitted the scream that echoed round the room. But what a fright, on first seeing the glassy eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte staring right back at you: a ghoulishly severed head, complete with imperial kiss curl, stacked on a shelf amid dozens of others, all wild-haired and florid. Next to Napoleon was (judging from the thickness of its hair and the dyspeptic expression) Ludwig van Beethoven. Next to Beethoven was (judging by the helpful yellowed label stuck to his cheek) Charlie Chaplin.
‘Waxworks!’ Dickie spluttered, in relief. ‘Oh my God!’
And then, just as his second match blew out, he said, puzzled, ‘Kenneth?’
Brunswick and Twitten, under instructions from Inspector Steine, were accompanying the stricken Brighton Belles back to their accommodation in the centre of town. It was honestly one of the best orders Brunswick had ever received: to escort beautiful women through the most populous streets of Brighton, to the envy of the entire male population. Twitten noticed that there was an unprecedented lightness to the sergeant’s gait.
Twitten was less enamoured of their mission, however, having several pressing questions on his mind concerning the murder (not suicide) of Peter Dupont. Surely there wasn’t a moment to lose, so why was he having to trail through the streets with a pair of stunningly pretty young women when he could be researching the inadequate investigation of Uncle Ken’s murder in 1955, or finding out which building backed on to the Maison du Wax? To make this pointless peregrination even more annoying, the sergeant kept stopping, as if he were a tour guide, to regale the Belles with incidental facts about the town (‘And there’s the famous Maison du Wax, founded in 1924’), all of which information they already knew better than he did.
It was because the sergeant was so inclined to dawdle and stretch things out that from outside Luigi’s (‘This is Brighton’s most famous ice-cream parlour’), he spotted Mrs Groynes on the other side of the glass having an intense tête-à-tête with the aggressive Punch & Judy man, Ventriloquist Vince, and another man, with a scar on his cheek, who was stirring sugar into his frothy coffee with what looked like a foot-long stiletto.
‘Oh, look, there’s Mrs Groynes, the station charlady,’ said Brunswick. ‘She’s with some friends. Is that tutti-frutti they’re having? I’ve got to say hello.’
The sergeant tapped on the window, making every customer look up in alarm at the sight of two policemen outside. A couple of Teddy Boys guiltily knocked over their milkshakes, while another athletically dived for cover behind the jukebox. But Mrs Groynes just waved back, cheerily, and with her mimed encouragement her two hard-looking companions waved half-cheerily too, indicating in dumb-show that the tutti-frutti was excellent. Twi
tten felt a twinge of weary sadness. Here was a villain having a blatant top-level meeting with two other villains, observed by two policemen on duty, and it was going to be the story of his life that he alone could see past their not-so-fascinating choice of ice-cream flavour.
‘Sir,’ Twitten said, when they were all walking along again, north this time, away from the sea, and Brunswick’s travelogue commentary had temporarily run dry. ‘Mrs Groynes was bally upset about that famous con man you saw mentioned in the Police Gazette, wasn’t she?’
Brunswick, shocked that Twitten would raise such a subject when they were in the company of civilians, shot him a look as if to say ‘not now’, and pointedly changed the subject. ‘We are entering the area known as The Lanes,’ he said.
But Adelaide and Phyllis knew all there was to know about The Lanes, thank you very much; they could also tell you the quickest way to the station in most Indo-European languages; they were far more interested by this tantalising mention of a con man. Also, given what they had just been through, they were desperate for something to take their minds properly off the subject of slaughtered youths and bloodstained deck-chairs on the seafront. They both brightened.
‘A con man, did you say, Constable Twitten?’ said Phyllis.
Twitten bit his lip. ‘I did, yes. Sorry, miss, I probably shouldn’t have.’
‘But don’t be sorry! It’s just such a happy coincidence! Because we met a real-live con man today, didn’t we, Addy?’
‘You what?’ said Brunswick.
‘Oh, don’t worry, we saw straight through him, so there was no harm done. It was in that very ice-cream place where we just saw your friend. He had a bag of Russian gold!’
At which Phyllis burst out laughing, and Adelaide joined in.
‘He was hopeless!’ she explained. ‘He tried to sell us each a gold brick!’
‘He did!’ spluttered Phyllis.