by Lynne Truss
‘I don’t want to be rude, Mrs G, but I think the less I discuss things one-to-one with you, the better.’
‘Really? You think that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I see it differently, dear.’ She stirred her own tea, and took a sip. ‘This situation is as new for me as it is for you, dear; you must see that. I can feel your little forensic-observation eyes on me all the time, and I can’t say I’m in love with it. But it does seem to me that having this special relationship, as it were, we could help each other.’
Twitten spluttered into his tea. ‘Help each other? You want me to rob banks?’
‘Rob banks?’ she laughed. ‘Of course not! What good would you be to me banged up for robbery? No, let’s come at it another way: let’s think first of how I can help you.’
Twitten took another sip of tea, playing for time. ‘I don’t think there are any ways you can help me, Mrs G, and I’d far rather you didn’t. I suspect the quid pro quo would be bally unacceptable. And I’m sure Sergeant Brunswick will come back very soon, so I say, let’s bring this awkward discussion to a close.’
‘All right, dear. But you can’t say I didn’t offer.’
She sighed, replaced the lid on the biscuit tin and stood up. ‘I’ll just throw this away, then, shall I?’ she said, taking from her overalls pocket a familiar-looking envelope.
Twitten froze. It looked like the letter from last night.
Producing a flick knife from her overalls (she kept so many interesting items in those pockets), she slit open the envelope, pulled out the contents and began to read aloud. ‘“Dear Peter. Please forgive me for letting you down.” Aww, how sweet. Young love, you see, it never gets old.’
She raised an eyebrow at Twitten and then, shrugging, replaced the letter in the envelope.
‘How did you get that?’ he said, quietly.
‘Someone dropped it at the bus station, that’s what I heard.’
It briefly flickered through Twitten’s mind that for Mrs G to offer him this vital piece of evidence was quite similar to her offering Sergeant Brunswick a toasted teacake.
‘And I don’t like to boast, dear, but I can also show you the place downstairs where they put that suitcase they found the body in, dear. You’ll have a bleeding field day with that. It’s got more clues on it than a dog’s got fleas.’
In that moment, Twitten wrestled with the complicated ethics of the situation – but mainly, he just held out his hand.
‘May I see that letter, Mrs G?’
‘Of course, dear. You can have it. With my compliments.’
Emerging from the hospital, with the wound to his thigh freshly dressed, Sergeant Brunswick crossed the street and made his (slightly hobbling) way downhill towards the centre of town. The doctors had said that he was healing nicely, but this wasn’t news to him: he was a man who knew the score when it came to flesh wounds. While it was well known that Brunswick had been shot in the leg by the former Brighton gang boss Fat Victor (now in prison), in fact there had been three more occasions in his police career in Brighton when – close to significant arrests – something had gone wrong at the last minute, with the result of small-calibre firearms being drawn, and ‘Bang! Take that, you lousy copper!’ And it had been right in the leg, each time.
‘It’s like you’re bleeding doomed, sergeant!’ Mrs Groynes would often say, laughing, while lightly patting his latest bandaged area and handing him a plate of fig rolls.
On one occasion, it had actually been Mrs Groynes herself (bless her) who had been the innocent cause of his undoing!
Having skilfully infiltrated a gang of thieves in the Preston Park area, headed by the infamous Stanley-Knife Stanley, Brunswick had been poised to spring his trap. Going under the soubriquet Limpy Len, Brunswick was to be the driver of the getaway van. The job was fixed for midnight. The target was a furs warehouse on the London Road, full of high-ticket Russian sables. Last-minute instructions were taking place inside the van; meanwhile the warehouse was surrounded by well-briefed uniformed police awaiting an agreed signal. In short, all was going perfectly. And then, when Brunswick and the others emerged from the van, who should be strolling on the other side of the road but Mrs Groynes!
‘Evening, Sergeant Brunswick,’ she had called out. ‘See you at the station in the morning?’
Well, what a calamity. Three months’ work unravelled in a matter of a few seconds.
‘It’s a trap,’ shouted one of Stanley’s minions, drawing a weapon. ‘He’s a lousy copper!’
In the commotion, there was a lot of noise, but Brunswick thought he heard a woman shout, ‘Stan! Remember! In the leg!’ just before the bang that brought him down. But when he asked Mrs G afterwards at the station whether she’d heard this shouted instruction in a female voice, she said, mystified, no, dear; she definitely hadn’t; he must have imagined it. And then she carried on bathing the wound, and explaining how – because of the kerfuffle bringing all the police raiding party running to Brunswick’s aid – the desperado thieves had managed to get away with a van full of furs worth several thousand pounds.
Perhaps it was true, then: what Twitten had said to him. That his days of going undercover were over, for the simple reason that all the local villains now knew him by sight. But it had been a good run. As Limpy Len, he had got very close to arresting Stanley-Knife Stanley. As Eduardo the Italian ice-cream seller on the West Pier (for which disguise he had assumed an accent, worn nose-putty and messily dyed all the hair on his forearms), he had observed an operation to rob the amusement arcade, and had again arranged elaborate multiple arrests – but had once more, sadly, been shot in the leg just at the point of raising his whistle to his lips.
His last undercover job was the one he was (perversely) most proud of. Posing as a cellist (he had learned both the cello and the trumpet in his youth), he had infiltrated an amateur string quartet that he was sure was planning a bank job, on the grounds that their practice room was in a basement next door to a vault, with a large screen always suspiciously positioned against the party wall (presumably, to mask the large hole they were drilling in the evenings).
The inspector told Brunswick repeatedly that he was wasting his time, and that the plot of The Ladykillers was all well and good but should never be confused with real life.
‘Some string quartets really are string quartets, Brunswick,’ he had memorably said. ‘Some people enjoy the music of Luigi Boccherini for its own sake.’
But Brunswick was on the right track, as it happened. His mistake this time was that he didn’t have a proper plan, and that he was never taken into the confidence of the other three ‘musicians’, despite dropping broad hints about a criminal background, such as, ‘You remind me of a bloke I met in Parkhurst,’ and ‘You seen that Rififi yet, mate? Talk about thought-provoking.’
One Friday evening he turned up for practice, having learned a serene passage of Schubert for the occasion, and when he opened the door, was knocked over backwards by the other three quartet members, racing out of the building holding large, bulging sacks.
Scrambling to his feet, he shouted, ‘Halt! I am arresting you on suspicion of—’ And then there had been the inevitable bang, and that was it, he was down on the ground again.
But what about the Black Cat? Who would know him there? Was the annoying Twitten right, that here was his opportunity to get to the bottom of the torso-in-the-suitcase at last? The press had been so damning of the Brighton Constabulary’s failure to identify the body. But in general was it bad policy – even in the interests of justice – to infiltrate a set of criminals who murdered people in cold blood and afterwards cut them up and deposited bits of them in Left Luggage?
He was just thinking about this – leaning against a low wall and enjoying a cigarette – when he noticed through a café window a man gesticulating towards a woman and waving what looked like a gold brick. Brunswick dropped the cigarette, stubbed it out with his foot (the swivel of the injured leg making him
squirm) and moved closer. The man appeared to have eyes that looked in different directions! Could this be Wall-Eye Joe?
Brunswick walked back up the road a little way and waited for five minutes. He saw the man exit the café and set off on foot towards the centre of town. Brunswick followed him, quite excited. The man, who seemed to be in no hurry, wended his way through the older parts of Brighton, stopping occasionally to study a shop window, and eventually knocked on the door of a white-stuccoed mansion facing the sea – a building that Brunswick recognised as Colchester House, which had notoriously lain empty for many years. A man opened the door, and Brunswick heard him say ‘my lord’ (but not as an exclamation). And then Wall-Eye Joe went inside.
Pondering what to do, Brunswick was still standing on the corner of Ship Street when a domestic servant – she looked like a housekeeper – exited the house by a side door. He stopped her, showed her his badge and asked her some questions – the answers to which were so thrilling that he returned directly to the police station and burst into the office just as Constable Twitten was taking Peter Dupont’s letter from the hand of Mrs Groynes.
In surprise, they both turned to look at him somewhat guiltily: they’d been caught in the act of collusion! But true to form, he didn’t clock a thing.
‘Mrs G, you’ll never guess,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘I think I’ve found Wall-Eye Joe.’
Mrs Groynes let out a sound very much like a ‘YES!’ and then coughed and said, in a more measured way, ‘I mean, well done you, dear. Well done you. What’s he up to this time?’
‘You won’t believe it. He’s posing as a lord and living in Colchester House.’
‘Golly,’ said Twitten. ‘So do you think he’s the one who tried to sell gold bricks to those Brighton Belles?’
‘Yes, I do. He had some in his bag. But I don’t think flaming gold bricks are what this is about, son.’
Brunswick looked expectantly at Mrs G. But if he was hoping for a congratulatory cup of tea, he was disappointed.
‘Colchester House?’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Well, I never.’
Twitten was fascinated. It certainly was entertaining being privy to the reactions of a callous and calculating criminal gang boss operating unsuspected in a police station. Never had he seen deviant mental activity written so clearly on a person’s face.
Brunswick, undeterred by the curious lack of reaction to his news, pressed on.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He must have really pushed the boat out on this one. He’s got someone posing as his manservant; household staff of five; everything. Whatever he’s planning, it must be huge.’
On the London train, things had not warmed up much between Steine and Adelaide Vine. He was wondering if he’d done the right thing, asking her to join him. But it was too late now.
‘May I ask what’s taking you to London, Inspector?’ she said, stiffly. ‘Don’t you have a murderer to catch?’
Steine’s first opinion having been that Peter Dupont had killed himself in remorse for stealing – and then apparently losing – sensitive documents from the place of his employment, he refused to rise to the bait. He was still smarting from the verdict of the police pathologist, who had this morning firmly reported that it was indeed a murder (‘There is no doubt whatsoever, Inspector’).
‘Well, needs must, I’m afraid. I’m going to Broadcasting House to deliver my weekly talk. It’s a bagatelle of a thing, really – called “Law and the Little Man”. You might have heard of it. Often reprinted in the Listener.’
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘They announce, “And now, ‘Law and the Little Man’ with Inspector Steine of the Brighton Constabulary.” Yes, I’ve heard it several times.’
Steine gave a modest shrug, in expectation of the usual elaboration and praise – but he was disappointed. Adelaide seemed to have nothing to add, and when Steine looked up, she had turned her attention to the window. This was keenly hurtful to his pride. Unqualified congratulation was so far Inspector Steine’s favourite form of discourse that (as we have observed) when there was no one else present to offer a ‘Well done, Geoffrey’, he simply supplied it himself.
‘And what takes you to London, Miss Vine? Shouldn’t you be parading the seafront, directing people to the nearest eel and pie establishment?’ (Touché, he thought.)
‘It’s my day off, thank goodness. A legal matter, as it happens. I have to see my solicitor in Earl’s Court. It’s concerning a will.’
‘I see.’
Steine sighed and joined Adelaide in looking out of the window. He was at a loss. He’d apologised to this woman: what more did she want? The train rattled through a cutting, with tall dark trees on either side of the track.
‘Inspector?’ she said, suddenly.
‘Yes, Miss Vine.’
‘Would you mind telling me a little about your lovely officers who were so kind to Phyllis and me yesterday. We both liked them enormously.’
‘You want me to talk to you about Brunswick and Twitten?’
It was as if she knew precisely how to rub him up the wrong way.
‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘Sergeant Brunswick has such beautiful blue eyes, and I felt I could sense unhappiness in him. The young constable seemed very clever. I would love to know if my first impressions were correct.’
The train had got only as far as Wivelsfield. A long journey lay ahead, and sulking throughout the whole thing would be tiring. So, with obvious bad grace, Inspector Steine started to tell Adelaide about Brunswick, and Twitten, and even Mrs Groynes.
Meanwhile, in Brighton, the real Wall-Eye Joe – who of course hated the nickname and considered himself to be Joseph Marriott, Esquire – was hearing rumours in which his name was connected with a gold-brick scam. His feelings were mixed. Even criminals take pride in their reputation – in fact they are more touchy about the respect due from their peers than any other section of society: it’s the main cause of them so often falling out with each other.
But on the other hand, Wall-Eye had bigger schemes to think about. The current scam – hatched up, as usual, with his evil paramour Vivienne (a.k.a. The Skirt) – would set them up for the rest of their lives, and while it had already been set in motion, it couldn’t be rushed.
‘Viv!’ he called over to her now. ‘Did you hear about me trying to sell gold bricks?’
‘It’s common knowledge, darling,’ she drawled.
Vivienne carried on painting her nails. This hanging about was torture, but she had a lot of faith in the plan. It was far better than the unfinished-house scam, which had involved all the bother of dispatching and disposing of umpteen victims, and had netted the gang of five less than twenty grand between them.
This new scheme had everything: a massive payout at the end of it, and only one murder. True, the principal victim this time would be a police officer, which certainly upped the ante. But if all went to plan, it would look like a tragic accident, and they could (once again) walk away scot-free.
The inspector’s train was finally crossing the outskirts of London, and he was relieved. Suburban sprawl had started to replace verdant countryside, and he would soon be safely ensconced in his airtight studio at the BBC. What a miserable journey this had been – answering Adelaide Vine’s eager and impertinent questions about his adorable sergeant and dashing constable; or (to be accurate) consistently failing to answer her questions adequately, because he took so little interest in their lives.
For example, was Brunswick keen on cricket? According to Adelaide, he had an ‘athletic build’!
Wasn’t Constable Twitten’s father the famous criminal psychologist J. R. R. Twitten? No idea, was Steine’s somewhat sulky reply.
What made such sterling chaps as Brunswick and Twitten want to be policemen in the first place?
Steine did his best, but he realised that most of his answers sounded oddly peevish and disloyal. For example, he complained that Brunswick was forever getting shot in the leg, because of his insistence – against strong, se
nsible advice from his superior officer – on going undercover and mixing with the sort of people who carry guns.
‘How heroic of him!’ interjected Adelaide, who seemed on all occasions determined to miss the point.
Meanwhile Twitten was to all intents and purposes hopeless as a police officer, despite the immense capacity of his brain, because he’d allowed himself to be hypnotised onstage into believing the station charlady was a master criminal.
‘But poor Constable Twitten. How terrible that must be!’
And to top it all, Steine persisted, both sergeant and constable had blatantly ignored him when he said the death of Peter Dupont was suicide, and started investigating it as a murder – although, to be fair, the pathologist this morning had confirmed they were right, so in this complaint he was on fairly shaky ground.
It was only as the train was on its final approach after Clapham Junction that Steine thought to ask where all this interest in policemen came from. Subsequently, he often wondered what would have happened if he had never asked the question, because the answer changed his life. He might have remembered Adelaide Vine afterwards as just an awkward conversation on a train.
‘Oh, it’s just that my grandfather was a London bobby,’ said Adelaide, pulling a comical face. ‘I know it seems unlikely.’
It was the first time she had seemed to warm to Steine. He felt the force of it. She was dazzling when she smiled.
‘A London bobby? That’s what I used to be.’
‘Well, what a coincidence. But back to my grandfather. Mummy used to tell the story of how he had met Grandmother in the course of his duties. It was very romantic.’
‘Really?’
Steine was so relieved that they’d finally settled on a happy topic, he failed to notice at first where this story was going.
Adelaide beamed. ‘It was in 1910, in Bloomsbury. Shall I tell you about it?’
‘Go ahead,’ he said, settling back in his seat. There were only a few minutes left to go; he didn’t mind listening. If the story reflected well on the police, he might be able to use it in one of his talks.