by Lynne Truss
It felt so good to laugh after what they’d seen on the seafront that both Belles were, for a while, unable to elaborate further, despite Brunswick demanding (unheard) to know why they hadn’t reported this encounter directly to the police.
‘He said he was a lord!’ exclaimed Adelaide, literally holding her sides. ‘But, you see, virtually every word out of his mouth was Non-U! Do you know what I mean by that?’
‘I do, yes,’ said Twitten, triumphantly shooting a glance at Brunswick. ‘I happen to know exactly what you mean by that.’
‘You’ve read the book, Constable?’
‘Yes, I’ve read the book.’
‘He actually said the reason he had the gold was that his father was “mental”!’
‘No!’
‘He talked about cruet sets and serviette rings. He mentioned the “radio” as well. He was obviously a fraud.’
Twitten felt the urge to hug this young woman. How many times in the past few days had he insisted on the value of learning about U and Non-U? And how many times had he been dismissed with a flea in his ear, on the grounds that new-fangled socio-linguistics had no practical application in detective work?
‘He actually said “mental” and “serviette”?’ marvelled Twitten. ‘Did he say “toilet” and “mirror” as well?’
‘No, but I’m sure he would have. Such a posh voice, but the vocabulary – all wrong!’
Adelaide was breathing more calmly now, but still enjoying the story. ‘But the whole thing was preposterous, not just the words he used. The story about how he got the gold, the reason for selling it, Rudolph Valentino’s role in its history – just everything.’
Phyllis took some deep breaths. They were both growing calmer now. They were finally aware that their police escort, while interested, were still not finding their story remotely amusing. If there was one thing Brunswick was never light-hearted about, it was criminals.
‘It was just hilarious,’ said Phyllis, by way of summing up, ‘but perhaps you needed to be there.’
‘Well,’ said Brunswick, sternly, ‘perhaps when we get back to your accommodation and you’ve had a chance to collect yourselves, you can make a proper statement.’
‘We would love to,’ said Adelaide. She put a hand on his arm.
And then, despite herself, she burst out laughing again.
‘You didn’t mention the funny eyes, Phyl!’ she cried. ‘He had one eye pointing one way, and the other eye pointing somewhere else!’
Four
The so-called ‘gold-brick scam’ was pretty widely recognised in the world of crime detection at this time.
‘Watch out for anyone offering gold bricks!’ was a well-worn joke from one bobby handing over to another. Or, ‘Don’t buy any gold bricks that I wouldn’t buy!’
The regular procedure was for a stranger to offer for sale gold bricks at a bargain price, using some far-fetched story about why he needed to get rid of them (he would sometimes affect an Australian or a South African accent). The brick he handed over for examination would indeed be twenty-four-carat (and he might even persuade people to take it away for tests), but the rest would be made of brass, with phials of mercury inside to bring the weight to the right level. One such brass-and-mercury brick was on permanent display in Scotland Yard’s ghoulish Black Museum, alongside such other unsavoury items as the enormous, thick socks worn over his shoes by an infamously quiet cat-burglar known to the police as ‘Flannelfoot’. Recently, the star exhibit was a floorboard with a human incisor tooth gruesomely embedded in it, from the scullery of the so-called ‘Kennington Butcher’.
But even if the gold-brick scam hadn’t been well known to the police, not many innocent civilians were likely to fall for it. Something had happened to the populace since the war: they had wised up. Perhaps they’d just been fleeced too many times by spivs. Perhaps they’d seen too many world-weary Hollywood movies. Either way, now that rationing was finally over, and they could walk away when a deal looked too good to be true, walking away (and laughing) was what they mainly chose to do.
A true con man such as the infamous Wall-Eye Joe, therefore, would not have bothered with this particular scam in Brighton in 1957. Which is why an important deduction can be made: that the man doffing his hat and calling himself ‘Lord Melamine’ was not a con man, as previously supposed. Despite his unfortunate optic misalignment, he was not Wall-Eye Joe. We simply have to accept that this man was exactly what his embossed card said he was: the newly encumbered 5th Marquess of Colchester, son of a mental father. And by extension this means that the gold in his bag was all real, and that he genuinely wanted total strangers to take it off his hands.
In the years to come, the instructive story of Lord Melamine would become common knowledge, but in 1957 it was not well known. He had spent most of his life up to this point in Herefordshire – it being the first rule with aristocratic families that if you’re called the Marquess of Colchester, your ancestral seat is at least two hundred miles away, and reached diagonally. He had never before visited Brighton. The splendid Colchester House on the seafront was but one of five major establishments owned by the family, and the least regarded by the 4th Marquess (the current Marquess’s late father, known and often mocked for his ‘funny ideas’), who had refused to visit for many years, because Brighton tended to annoy him.
It is worth noting here that the many funny ideas of the 4th Marquess were so pronounced that they earned him the nickname ‘Lord Loopy’ in the Rothermere press. Among his particular hobby-horses were the rigidity of the class system and the nature-versus-nurture debate, which led him – in the spirit of experiment – to deny his only son the usual education of an aristocrat. Thus, instead of being sent away to prep school (to mix with his own kind), young Melamine had lodged from the age of six with a lowly family on the estate. Instead of following his father and uncles to Eton, he had attended a normal grammar. Lord Loopy had no qualms about using his son and heir as a sociological test case, especially after the convenient early death of his wife, who’d been a bit of a stickler for convention.
And it had worked! The current Lord Melamine – raised, as it were, by wolves – gave almost no thought to matters of rank. Where the difference between U and Non-U indicators was concerned, he was innocent as Sergeant Brunswick. In fact, it was remarked by several onlookers that when Lord Loopy lay on his death-bed, it was the wording of his son’s pledge to dispose of all the worldly goods – ‘every home, every fish-knife, every serviette!’ – that had precipitated his final seizure. His heart had been simply unable to contain such joy. ‘My son! My greatest achievement!’ he had rejoiced. It was in particular his son’s unaffected use of the word ‘serviette’ – as if it were an acceptable word – that had (all agreed) sent the 4th Marquess of Colchester out of this life a happy man.
And now the 5th Marquess was in Brighton, and becoming desperate. He confided in everyone who would listen, ‘My father told me to get rid of it all. And not the easy way, giving it to charities: give it directly to the people. That was his message to me, from the cradle. You have to help.’ At first, he had tried giving people the gold bricks as gifts; then he had hit on the idea (more face-saving for them, surely) of offering the gold for sale ludicrously cheaply. Nothing worked. One afternoon, running out of patience, he had tried simply leaving a gold brick in one of the shelters on the seafront, in the hope that an impoverished pensioner would totter along and find it. But he’d walked only thirty yards when just such an impoverished pensioner tapped him on the shoulder and handed it back to him. ‘Nice try!’ the old man panted, breathless from the effort of chasing him.
Luckily for him, the Brighton house was a beautiful one. Built in 1818 by one of the former marquesses, under the guidance of John Nash, it was a large, imposing Regency mansion on the seafront. So, why had Lord Loopy always eschewed it? Two reasons. First, he had discovered that, in the context of Brighton, he just wasn’t halfway eccentric or free-thinking enough to make his presen
ce felt (many self-styled non-conformists before and since have been similarly miffed). Second, he hated what had been allowed to happen to the back of his house.
No one knew how it had come about. But somehow, during the First World War, the valuable land immediately to the rear of Colchester House had been acquired by a rapacious builder in league with the local authority. What once had been a wide and stately walled orchard (with a famous aviary containing exotic birds, collected on foreign travels) was now the location of a pair of drab, flat-roofed commercial establishments: on one side (with its entrance in Russell Place), a squat, pathetic wax museum; on the other (entered from Grenville Street), a noisy neon-lit night club. The two buildings met back-to-back so that not an inch of space was wasted. No vestige of garden remained. The back of Colchester House was separated from the new buildings by a mere alleyway – an alley so narrow that the fire brigade was forever being summoned to release wedged-in couples stupid enough to attempt sexual congress in it.
The loss of the garden was a tragedy. The parakeets and cockatiels disappeared. Enquiries at the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park confirmed that the birds had not been offered there: presumably, they’d been released into the air, only to be instantly pecked to death by gulls. Certainly, some very pretty feathers turned up in the hats of Brighton’s domestic servants around this time. For Lord Loopy, the loss of the birds was a shock from which he never recovered. Whenever he spoke of a particularly long-lived parrot named Billy, a tear would form in his eye. Billy had been a much-loved bird, the pride of the collection, a brilliant mimic of street hawker calls such as ‘Muffins, hot muffins!’ It was said that Billy was old enough to have been present with the 2nd Marquess at the Siege of Sebastopol – but that, like many another brave war veteran, he could never be persuaded to talk about it.
With the garden and aviary long gone (and the natives of Brighton easily outstripping Lord Loopy in the eccentricity department), the 4th Marquess had therefore forsaken Colchester House, retaining a succession of live-in housekeepers to maintain it, and more or less forgetting it existed.
‘Hoagy, it’s hopeless!’
Such were the words heard every day by the trusty valet at Colchester House, upon opening the door to his master and revealing him silhouetted in a halo of sunlight on the top step. Today was no exception.
‘Your lordship, I’m sorry. Allow me to take the bag.’
Captain Hoagland gently helped Lord Melamine off with his raincoat, and handed it to Mrs Rivers, the current housekeeper, who had lived comfortably alone in the house for the past ten years, and was still slightly reeling from the shock of having other people to attend to. Not that she minded the intrusion of Captain Hoagland: quite the contrary. A distinguished man of middle age, the valet was tall, handsome and well-made, but with an intriguing (and attractive) inward curl to the right side of his body, as if (possibly) he’d been injured by an explosion while heroically defusing bombs during the Second World War.
‘No takers again today, my lord?’ she asked, politely. Like Hoagland, Mrs Rivers knew all about Lord Melamine’s doomed mission to distribute gold to the deserving poor.
Melamine threw up his hands. ‘Not one!’
‘I’m very sorry, your lordship,’ said Hoagland.
‘They assume I’m making it all up, Hoagy!’
‘Oh, sir.’
‘About the battleship, and Rudolph Valentino, even about Father being mental. Who would make up the story of a mental father? But I can see in their eyes that they think I’m lying!’
He looked as if he might burst into tears. Mrs Rivers turned to Hoagland – who had known Lord Melamine far longer than she – for guidance on the right words of comfort.
‘Perhaps your offer just seems too good to be true, sir,’ said the valet. ‘There aren’t many people genuinely giving away a fortune in this world. Allow me to put the bricks with the others in the safe downstairs, then I’ll bring tea to the morning room. It will all seem better after a refreshing cup of Earl Grey, sir.’
Hoagland, carpet-bag in hand, took the stairs down to the kitchen, with Mrs Rivers watching after him.
‘He’s such a good man,’ she said quietly to Lord Melamine. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like him.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said his lordship, with a sigh. ‘Now, what’s been happening while I was out, Mrs Rivers?’
She smiled. She had potential good news for him.
‘There’s a letter on your desk from the council, sir.’
His lordship’s eyes lit up. ‘Do you think it’s regarding the compulsory purchase of Colchester House?’
‘I don’t know, sir. But I do hope for your sake that they’re going to knock this old place down to make way for a shiny new conference centre, or useful bus garage, or something.’
‘Oh, so do I!’
As Hoagland reappeared, carrying a tray of preliminary tea-things, Mrs Rivers noticed he was wincing. Not for the first time, her heart went out to him.
‘Not your shoulder playing you up again, Captain Hoagland?’ she asked, gently.
‘Well, a little, Mrs Rivers.’
‘Let me take the tray, go on.’
‘No, no. But damn those damn’ Jerries, Mrs R, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
He deposited the tray in the morning room and went back downstairs, with Mrs Rivers watching, unsure whether to follow. It had been such a whirlwind, having Lord Melamine and Captain Hoagland descend on the house like this, that she still didn’t know how to fit in. But what an interesting pair these two were: Lord M with his unconventional upbringing, Hoagland with his war wounds. And how generous they were with their confidences. In cosy chats below stairs Hoagland had told her everything – even sharing with her his concerns about the human cost of the late Lord Loopy’s sociological tamperings in regard to his son’s education. ‘He’s a good, kind man, Mrs Rivers. He turned out very well. But he’s also deeply lonely. Although how could he be otherwise, when he fits in nowhere?’
What Hoagland had also told her – and it was by far the most interesting story she had ever heard – was that he literally owed Lord Melamine his life. Wicked people had lured Captain Hoagland to an unfinished house in the country, and then tried to murder him! Lord Melamine had happened to be driving along a country lane and had found Captain Hoagland crawling along in the dark, terrified for his life.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she gasped. ‘You mean to say those fiends had wanted to kill you?’
‘They had. And when I saw the headlights coming, I thought it was them! I thought, This is it!’
‘No!’
‘And then the car stopped and I heard his lordship say, “My dear fellow, what’s happened to you? Let me help you! We need to get you to a doctor!”’
‘Oh, my goodness gracious.’
‘It was a miracle. Two minutes later, and those fiends (as you so rightly call them) would have caught up with me – the woman from the dating agency and her male accomplice who’d tried to strangle me in that cellar. Two minutes later, I would have been dead!’
Downstairs now, in the basement of Colchester House, Captain Hoagland opened the safe and stacked the five unclaimed gold bars alongside the one hundred and ninety-five others (it was a large safe) that had been sitting there since the Fall of Berlin. Then he went to make tea in the kitchen.
Upstairs in the morning room, the letter from the council was waiting for Lord Melamine. It contained more disappointment. He called Mrs Rivers in and told her the news. Evidently, the free offer of Colchester House had been considered by the Borough Engineer’s office; there had been a vote last week and the offer had been rejected. The decision was final and not open to appeal. In no circumstances would the town accept the site for redevelopment.
‘Oh, sir,’ she said, sympathetically. Things did seem a bit topsy-turvy where Lord Melamine was concerned. He couldn’t give away gold bars! Brighton Council, notorious from time immemorial for dodgy planning deals,
didn’t want a valuable prime site on the seafront at a knock-down rate?
Snatching up the telephone, Lord Melamine wasted no time however.
‘This is Lord Melamine, put me through to the Borough Engineer,’ he said.
But there was no answer from Reinhardt’s extension, and when Melamine finally spoke to someone in the office of Sewerage and Waterworks, he was told by a rather hysterical secretary that the entire department was in such disarray this morning that she simply couldn’t help with his enquiry.
‘What has caused such disarray, Miss Ross?’ he asked, politely. (He felt she wanted him to.)
So she told him. She couldn’t help herself. There had been a mysterious theft by one of the junior employees!
‘Oh, dear,’ he said.
‘And that’s not the worst,’ she said. ‘He’s not just done a robbery, taking everything from Mr Reinhardt’s safe – ’ her voice was shaky ‘ – he’s only gone and killed himself as well.’
‘No!’
‘And he was only seventeen. And I wasn’t very nice to him. It’s awful.’
‘Well, I’m so sorry to have phoned at such a distressing time,’ he said. The idea of a seventeen-year-old boy killing himself was indeed almost too awful to contemplate. He tried to bring the conversation to a close, but it didn’t work.
‘In that case—’ he began.
‘And there’s more!’ said the excited secretary, who – now she had started – seemed to want to get it all off her chest. ‘When the news came about young Mr Dupont being dead, and the stolen material from the safe all vanished, everyone just went nutty!’
‘Nutty? Oh, dear.’
‘Mr Blackmore fainted – dropped straight down as if someone had struck him. Someone’s trying to revive him now, wafting him with his Daily Sketch. But Mr Reinhardt upstairs … you won’t credit it!’
‘Oh, yes? I mean, oh, no?’
‘No! When he heard the news, he said, “Oh, shit, they killed him?” Pardon my French, but that’s what he said! He said, “OH, SHIT, THEY KILLED HIM?” Then he runs down the stairs like the wind, streaks across the Town Hall car park, jumps in his car and drives off!’