by Lynne Truss
‘Nearly.’
‘Good. Bruce can deliver it to him at the bus station. Bring it down when you’ve finished. I’ll be in the club. I’m auditioning for a new singer.’
Ma Benson was about to go when she noticed two things: the tears of misery rolling down her daughter’s cheeks, and the fact that for the first time since the family had moved into the Black Cat, it was possible to see into the back of Colchester House. Which of these two things was decisive in her opting to stay a while and comfort her child is not for others to speculate.
‘Deedee,’ she said in a kindly tone, peering past her, and sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘You do understand that we’re only trying to protect you?’
‘I suppose,’ sniffed Deirdre.
‘The thing is, Peter just wasn’t the right one for you. You’re too young for boyfriends.’
‘I know.’
‘And someone from Sewerage and Waterworks!’
Deirdre couldn’t answer. She had been very impressed at Peter having such a responsible job.
‘Look, why don’t you tell me all about it?’ Ma Benson patted the bed as an invitation for Deirdre to join her.
And then, when they were settled side by side, and Deirdre was weeping with her head resting on her mother’s shoulder, she said, as gently as she could, ‘So how long has the house next door been occupied, Deedee? And why didn’t you think to bloody mention it?’
Five
The following morning, at ten o’clock, Inspector Steine boarded the train for London, Victoria, his radio talk safe in his briefcase. He had spent the previous afternoon polishing it in the usual manner, and was now very happy with the tone, which was, as always, authoritative and crystal clear but at the same time unintimidating, with occasional stabs at inoffensive sexist humour (because obviously the inferior legal status of wives to their husbands was universally amusing).
‘Well done, Geoffrey,’ he had said to himself after reading it aloud for the final time. He looked forward to saying on air the witty (but informative and cautionary) words, ‘With all my worldly goods, and all my criminal liability, I thee endow.’ Anyone listening to the talk would pick up no hint that in Brighton this week, the body of a seventeen-year-old boy had been found near the West Pier with its throat cut; nor that an obscure night-club singer had been reported missing by his landlady; nor that the Borough Engineer – a shady character with a giveaway Germanic name, as many people at the Town Hall were now pointing out to each other – had last been seen speedily boarding a cross-channel ferry at Newhaven, leaving no forwarding address.
Yes, no trace of these troubles could be found in Inspector Steine’s ‘Law and the Little Man’ talk. It was as if the writer – a high-ranking policeman – could somehow divorce himself from the realities of everyday criminal investigation to concentrate entirely on the subject at hand – namely, the fascinating anomalies in the law regarding married couples.
His morning had been so good that he briefly considered adding a few words to the manuscript he kept in his locked desk drawer (his memoir had reached 1922, the year of his father’s death), but in the end his sense of duty prevailed. The Testing-of-Twitten took priority. Every day needed to begin with this ritual question-and-response, which (depressingly for Steine) had so far varied in its outcome very little.
‘So, young Twitten,’ he would say, ushering him into the room and closing the door. ‘Sit down. Here we are, having a friendly private chat, just you and me, how very nice, don’t be anxious.’
‘Thank you, sir. Lovely morning, sir.’
‘Precisely. Well, let’s not beat about the bush, we both know why you’re here.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘So. How are we feeling about Mrs Groynes today?’
‘I believe she is an evil criminal mastermind, sir.’
At this point, Steine would throw up his hands in annoyance.
‘What, still?’
Sometimes this was the end of the conversation, and Twitten was dismissed with an irritated wave of the hand; on other occasions – which included this morning – Steine took a steadying breath and probed a little deeper.
‘All right,’ he said today, ‘on a scale of one to ten, please tell me how convinced you are of this preposterous notion, bearing in mind that when you say “ten” it saddens and disappoints me and ruins my day unnecessarily?’
‘Ten, sir.’
‘Ugh.’
‘I’m afraid there’s just no bally doubt about it, sir. She was responsible for the raid on the Albion Bank in North Street last week, which netted her and her gang at least thirty thousand pounds. If you take no action she will continue to get away with it. I really appreciate this opportunity to reason with you, sir.’
‘Reason with me?’ Beads of sweat appeared on Steine’s forehead. He rose slightly in his seat. Twitten, by contrast, was quite calm.
‘Twitten, for the last time, I’m the one reasoning with you!’
‘But, sir—’
‘And you really should listen to yourself! You just talked about Mrs Groynes the charlady having a gang that does bank robberies!’
‘Well, she could hardly pull a job like that on her own, sir. She’d need a driver, and a lookout man, and—’
‘Stop it! Twitten, you have to stop this. You had a ridiculous idea planted in your head by a hypnotist, and I’m trying to help you to see it for what it is.’
After a pause to let the emotion subside, Twitten spoke, carefully, ‘I understand that’s what you thought you saw, sir.’
‘A thousand people witnessed it!’
Twitten sensibly stopped arguing. He cleared his throat and stood to attention.
‘I think I have it under control, sir. Please don’t be concerned. I never mention it except at these helpful one-to-one meetings, sir. I try never to raise it with Mrs Groynes. And I am never – ever – alone with her.’
Steine shook his head wearily. ‘And yet you won’t say nine, will you? You won’t just say nine?’
Twitten said nothing.
‘Very well. We’ll continue this tomorrow. Carry on.’
At which point, after Twitten had left the inspector’s office, Steine said to himself, ‘You did your best, Geoffrey.’ And then he put the issue entirely out of his mind, and focused on how curious and interesting (and unfair) it was that while a man could go to prison for something his wife had done, the same rule ceased to apply when the case was the other way round!
Back at the railway station, the weather being warm again, the concourse was packed with day-tripping cockneys, all streaming excitedly towards Queens Road and the sea, and shedding litter like rose-petals as they went. Travel-sick children were being shepherded into the lavatories through the penny turnstiles; W. H. Smith was doing a brisk business in saucy postcards; young people laughed and screamed, and playfully shoved each other.
Few were travelling in the same direction at Steine – London-wards – but as he stepped up into a first-class compartment, he glanced back along the platform and spotted a young woman in a scarlet dress approaching; a young woman who looked familiar.
It was Adelaide Vine, the woman from the kerfuffle yesterday on the seafront; the one with (as her mother always said) the unusual concatenation of nut-like attributes.
He stepped back down on to the platform.
‘Miss Vine?’
Adelaide looked up and frowned. She was evidently surprised to see the inspector, and not particularly pleased. He had been very abrupt with her at the crime scene yesterday. Obliged to acknowledge him, she performed a minimal nod of the head, but did not slow down; if anything, she quickened her pace. There were plenty more compartments up ahead.
The inspector thought quickly.
‘Miss Vine?’ he said again, and astonished himself by reaching out his arm as if to stop her.
It injured him to be cut by anyone at all – especially when the person was as attractive as Adelaide. But there was something more at wo
rk here. Last night, back at home, he had gone over the scene several times, of Twitten asking the agitated Brighton Belle, ‘Are you all right, miss?’ – just the way, fifty years ago, Steine’s father had asked his mother. Those five simple words – those kind, respectful, quintessentially copper-ish words – seemed to churn inside him.
He decided to persevere.
‘This is a happy coincidence!’ he said. He clasped his hands together, in a show of supplication.
‘I’ve, er, look … Miss Vine. I was thinking about what happened yesterday, and I’ve been wondering how I would get the chance to apologise. To apologise for my tone.’
‘Your tone?’
With the train due to depart, the station guard had started coming up the platform, slamming the heavy doors shut, one by one. It wouldn’t be long before he reached the first-class section. Meanwhile the train was getting up steam. Steine had to raise his voice.
‘My tone, yes. I’m so sorry for it. And my words, of course. Both tone and words. In short, everything I said, and how I said it. Look, would you care to join me?’
He indicated the open door of the compartment. She pursed her lips and sighed.
‘To allow you to apologise?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
She thought about it, and seemed to relent. ‘Well, I do have a first-class ticket, as it happens,’ she said, not quite smiling.
‘Splendid.’
He held the door as she climbed up into the carriage, and then climbed up himself and closed the door just as the station guard waved his flag and blew his whistle for departure.
Twitten was growing a bit tired of the daily Mrs Groynes Litany: it reminded him too powerfully of his unique predicament, which was like something from ancient myth. He was the Cassandra of the Brighton Constabulary – all-knowing, all-seeing, and even able to predict bank robberies in North Street before they occurred, but fated always to be mocked, derided and generally disbelieved.
However, it’s only fair to say that once his grilling was over each day, he gladly put it out of his mind, much as Inspector Steine did. After all, it was unlikely Mrs Groynes had anything to do with the murder of young Peter Dupont, or the consequent guilty dash for Dieppe of the seemingly respectable Borough Engineer – investigating which mysteries was the immediate job in hand.
It was the one positive aspect to knowing Mrs Groynes’s secret: he could read her like a book. Thus he felt certain that the death of Weedy Pete was of no interest to Mrs G (she’d hardly reacted), whereas the news of Wall-Eye Joe certainly was (she had excitedly used the word ‘bleeding’ five times).
Sergeant Brunswick, by contrast, had noticed neither of these reactions, because he wasn’t looking for them. How cleverly she had won his trust! This was the hardest part for Twitten to tolerate: having to stand by and watch his closest colleague being played (as they said in the gangster films) like a cheap pianola. Why didn’t Sergeant Brunswick ever catch on? It wasn’t as if Mrs Groynes was particularly subtle. Take that very discussion of Wall-Eye Joe, when Mrs G had lapsed, unguardedly, into specialist underworld slang.
‘Last I heard,’ she’d said, ‘he was doing a tray on the cave-grinder.’
‘It means three months’ hard labour, sir,’ Twitten had translated at the time, but he’d watched Brunswick carefully. Would the sergeant start to put two and two together? Would he ask himself: Is tray-on-the-cave-grinder normal charlady talk? Perhaps – perhaps—?
But Mrs Groynes had likewise detected the first glimmerings of a dangerous train of thought, and diverted it neatly into a siding. It was her most accomplished regular manoeuvre. Recently, when the sergeant recovered a string of pearls from a sneak thief, he’d no sooner plonked them on his desk than Mrs G said, excitedly, ‘Hang on, dear,’ whipped out a high-magnification jeweller’s loupe from her overalls pocket to examine the necklace, turned the pearls intently, and then pronounced, ‘Nah, someone’s took you for a steamer, dear.’
Twitten had watched, agog. Now? he had thought. And Brunswick had certainly looked a little puzzled, and had even started to say, ‘Mrs G, why would you—?’ But then Mrs Groynes said, brightly, ‘How about a nice toasted teacake?’ and in the sergeant’s delighted surprise (‘Ooh, lovely!’), the puzzled look vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
On the morning of the inspector’s trip to London, Twitten found himself alone in the office with Mrs Groynes for the first time in three weeks – the first time since she had explained to him, in fact, that he was utterly stymied so far as exposing-the-charlady was concerned, and should graciously accept his fate. The inspector had just left to catch his train; Brunswick was at the hospital to have his bullet-wound dressings changed. Twitten – who was anxious to get out and conduct interviews (there was a list of six people he was particularly anxious to talk to) – had been quickly typing up his notes concerning the evening of Peter Dupont’s death.
At 8.45 p.m. I positioned myself at the Pool Valley coach terminus. I hoped to speak to Deirdre Benson, and question her about i) Peter Dupont’s activities prior to his death vis-à-vis the theft from the Borough Engineer’s office, and ii) her family’s generally murderous proclivities. I realised I would have to break the news to her of Dupont’s death. It seemed unlikely she would have heard of it any other way, especially if her family were responsible for cutting his throat in broad daylight as a means of warning him off.
Deirdre Benson did not come to Pool Valley.
At 8.50 p.m., however, a large man of intimidating appearance, with a cauliflower ear, arrived at the terminus and moved through the waiting crowds, asking for the London bus. He was carrying a letter. I approached him and said: ‘I am a Brighton police officer, as you can tell from my uniform and distinctive white helmet. Please tell me your name.’ He said he was Bruce Benson, out for an evening walk, and what would I like to do about it, Constable Pipsqueak? These were his precise words. I asked him about the letter. He said he was going to post it, wasn’t he, and how would I like a bunch of fives? He was still looking round at the faces in the crowd as if in expectation of seeing someone. I pointed out that the letter did not have a stamp on it. I then noticed it was addressed to Peter Dupont.
I said, ‘If you are looking for Peter Dupont, I am sorry to inform you that he is dead. We have reason to believe he was murdered.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ It seemed to be news to him. I then said, ‘I will need to take that letter as evidence.’ He said, ‘Really? I don’t think so, how will you make me?’ I said, ‘I am a Brighton police officer.’ He said, ‘Yes, but I am bigger than you.’
At this point the movement of the excited crowd boarding the bus became violent and the letter was knocked from his hand and picked up by an unknown person. I think I saw a child running off towards East Street but I cannot be certain as I was being elbowed roughly in the face by people anxious to board the bus. Mr Benson seemed to be as confused as I was.
With the letter gone and the bus departed, I said goodnight to Mr Benson.
Twitten looked up. He had heard a noise.
‘Mrs Groynes!’ he said, in shock. He had been so absorbed in typing his report, he hadn’t heard her come in and start making tea. They were alone together! He stood up. ‘Shall I go?’ he said.
She smiled at him. ‘Why do you say that, dear? No, no, you sit down. Let the chair take the weight of that gigantic brain of yours.’
Looking him directly in the eye – and deliberately prolonging the smile well past the usual dropping-point – she held the large brown office teapot in both hands, and moved it slowly in a gentle circular motion so that the tea leaves inside steeped evenly in the hot water. He had seen her perform this ceremony many times before; it had never seemed so sinister.
‘Just showing it the pictures on the wall, dear,’ she explained, still smiling.
Twitten felt extremely uncomfortable. He was suppressing an actual whimper. What did Mrs Groynes want with him?
‘The inspector’s on his way to … on his way to
London,’ he said, faltering slightly. ‘And the sergeant’s at the h—’ He found that he couldn’t get the word out. He tried again. ‘He’s at the h—’
‘That’s all right, I know where he is,’ Mrs G interrupted. ‘Do take some deep breaths and calm down, dear. I’m not going to hurt you. Although I expect you think I’m mad at you for saying “ten” to the inspector every bleeding day – ’
Twitten bit his lip quite hard, and Mrs Groynes laughed.
‘ – but I’m really not, dear! Oh, no.’
Turning away, she poured their tea, but carried on speaking. ‘It’s yourself you’re hurting by sticking to your pathetic story, you see, dear, not me. One day you’ll say to the inspector that you’re a hundred per cent positive you’ve copped the right man, you see, and he’ll say, “Yes, but you’re also a hundred per cent positive that Mrs Groynes the charlady is an inveterate villainess!”’
She turned, a cup of tea in her hand. She handed it to him. ‘See what I’m getting at, dear?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, quietly. He was torn. On the one hand, it was worrying that she knew about the scale of one to ten, and even more worrying that she could so casually use the word ‘inveterate’ correctly in a sentence. But on the other, he had to admit that she did have fantastic instincts about when a nice cup of tea would hit the spot.
‘I put three sugars in.’
‘Super. Thank you.’
She sat down at the sergeant’s desk, and opened a tin of biscuits. A tempting aroma of cocoa powder was instantly detectable in the air.
‘I just thought we ought to have a little chat, dear. What with having the place to ourselves for once. We’ve got a lot of things to discuss. Bourbon cream?’
Twitten declined the biscuit (which was difficult), and sipped his tea. He was nervous. When someone with a history of killing people – and who has a pretty good reason to kill you, too – starts off by saying ‘I’m not going to hurt you’, it’s never completely reassuring.