by Lynne Truss
‘Inspector Steine,’ she said, ‘did you ever hear of a silly prank involving members of the Bloomsbury Group called the Dreadnought Hoax?’
Steine gulped and leaned forward. ‘The what?’
‘No, not many people have, I think. But it seems that this group of bohemians, including Virginia Woolf, dressed up like Abyssinians and got themselves received on a warship in Weymouth Harbour. It was just a senseless prank, but they happened to spill out of their house in Gordon Square just as my rather highly strung grandmother was driving past, you see – and in their costumes and make-up, they made her scream.’
Steine had stopped breathing. ‘Go on,’ he said in a strangled tone.
‘Well, Grandfather was on his beat nearby and heard the commotion, so came running to save her, not realising that the threat came not from a gang of street criminals but a bunch of effete intellectuals wearing fancy dress. I mean, they wouldn’t have hurt anyone!’
Steine struggled to say something. He had a million questions, but at the same time he couldn’t think of one. He was so busy trying to grasp the ramifications of Adelaide’s words.
‘So that’s why I’m always curious about policemen, I suppose. It’s in the blood. Mummy loved telling that story, but otherwise I don’t know anything about the family. She actually ran away from home when she was quite young.’
‘What happened to your grandfather? The bobby? Do you know?’
‘Oh, he died a long time ago, when Mummy was little. Struck by an army lorry on a London bridge, she said.’
She looked up. The train, which had been gradually reducing speed, was now alongside the platform and travelling at a trotting pace.
‘Well, that’s it. Victoria!’ she said, and started searching for her ticket. ‘Inspector Steine, is there something wrong?’
‘Miss Vine,’ he said, solemnly. ‘I need to ask you. Where did you grow up?’
‘In Newmarket. Why?’
‘Newmarket near Cambridge?’
‘Is there another Newmarket? Inspector, why are you—?’
‘Your mother was horsey, I expect?’
‘Yes, through and through. That’s why she chose Newmarket as the place to run away to.’
‘Was her name Gillian?’
‘Well, yes. But how—?’
‘Did she ever mention having a brother?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Steine swallowed, hard. He couldn’t believe this was happening.
The train was slowing to a stop. People who had already opened their compartment doors and jumped out were streaming past the window.
She laughed. ‘What on earth is the matter? Inspector Steine, we really do need to get off, and you’re looking very peculiar.’
‘You’re my niece!’ he gushed, reaching out to grasp her hand. ‘I must inform Mother immediately! Adelaide Vine, you must be my long-lost niece!’
Six
Young Peter Dupont wasn’t the first clerk in the office of Sewerage and Waterworks to hear complaints about the smell of the drains in the environs of Colchester House, but he was the first to put his jacket on, take a notebook, run a comb through his hair and set off to investigate it.
He nearly didn’t, though. Lillian the secretary tried to warn him off.
‘Mr Blackmore always says we’ve got better things to think about than drains, young Peter,’ Lillian had said, rather primly, looking up from her trusty Remington. (This was three weeks ago, before she found out about the discrepancies in their salaries; when she was still disposed to like him.)
‘Yes, but he’s not in today, Miss Ross,’ Dupont pointed out. ‘He’s taken his wife to a flower show.’
‘I’m only saying.’
She started typing again, and then thought of something amusing to say. ‘Don’t fall down any manholes,’ she laughed.
He laughed as well. ‘Right-oh,’ he said.
This was the standing joke amongst the staff of the Sewerage and Waterworks department – but only when Mr Blackmore was out of earshot. Mr Blackmore was forever lecturing the maintenance team on the dangers of manholes, perhaps because their existence was the only part of his job that he fully understood. His particular hobby horse was the way British black-and-white comedy films got easy laughs from showing people walking blithely down the street (lifting their bowler hats to say ‘Good morning’) and suddenly falling down them.
‘Take the new Norman Wisdom film!’ he would splutter to the burly workforce, who reluctantly congregated in the department once a week for a briefing (they had to take their boots off, and weren’t allowed to sit down). ‘Yes, all very hilarious, no doubt, but yet again I think you’ll find that audiences are invited to laugh at the tragic circumstance of someone falling down a manhole. Let me remind you that most people who fall down manholes do not climb back out again, brushing dust off their shoulders. Most of them break their necks!’
Peter had no intention of falling down any manholes – and certainly none of prising open a cover in a spirit of curiosity, either. He was aware of the potential consequences. Were a pen-and-paper clerical worker such as himself even to touch a manhole cover, it would be reported immediately to the shop steward of the Waterworks Operatives Union, and the entire works department would be called out on strike. One of Peter’s predecessors (now spoken of only in muted tones) had once unthinkingly popped his head inside one of the stripy tents set up by the works team on the coast road, and found a game of three-card stud in progress. For this prohibited infringement of incontrovertible industrial demarcations, he was forced to resign, and moreover, give up all hope of a career in local government, and now sold socks and ties in a department store in Worthing.
But Peter was not likely to make a similar mistake. He was the most intelligent and well-educated recruit they’d ever had in the department – a future star – and Mr Blackmore could not always disguise how intimidated he was by him.
‘You’ve been doing the crossword in The Times again, I see, Dupont?’ he would chuckle in a mildly disapproving way – as if to imply it was the sort of trivial pursuit that Peter would in time grow out of.
Had Peter’s home circumstances been more favourable, university would have been the next step – but sadly, Peter was an orphan with no expectations (his naturalised French father had died in the war; his mother had followed five years ago; charitable grandparents abroad could afford no further education for him), so the workplace beckoned, and to his immense credit, he felt no self-pity. He took this particular job because he liked the idea of being able to say, later in life, that he’d worked his way up from the sewers. Also, his father’s favourite novel had been Les Misérables. Being clever, Peter was sometimes invited to interesting meetings in other departments, too – such as the one that convened to discuss the advertising of the Brighton Belles. It had been Peter who’d pointed out to the grammatically stumped committee that, strictly speaking, the Belles could be enquired ‘of’, but not ‘from’.
So when he set off on his mission to investigate complaints about the drains, there was nothing vague about it. He had a good idea where to start. Having checked on a street map to see where the reports were at their most frequent, he reckoned that the epicentre was just behind the popular rock shop on the seafront – the one with the twice-daily demonstrations in the window. You could smell this shop from several streets away – the peppermint, the sugar, the aniseed. As Peter noted in his little book, any whiff from the drains had to deal with stiff olfactory competition in this particular corner of the town.
As he entered the shop, he realised he was just in time for the morning show: Mr Henry (a.k.a. ‘Humbug’) Hastings was preparing a heavy loaf of stripy molten sugar and food colourings, kneading and bending it, and – with an effortful grunt – flipping it over. It was a job that clearly took brawn as well as a lot of practice. Hastings’s thin shirt under his confectioner’s apron could not disguise the massive bulge of his neck and shoulder muscles; his biceps were like beachballs. Ha
stings had been a commando in the Special Boat Service during the war, and had afterwards maintained both his physique and his air of mental preparedness. Looking at him now, it was still quite easy to picture him in a black knitted hat, jumping out of a landing craft in Mediterranean moonlight with a pointy knife glinting between his teeth.
‘Good morning,’ Peter said.
Behind the counter were shelves packed with colourful boiled sweets and soft fudge – some of the sweets loose, in glass jars, to be sold in paper bags after weighing; some in little white boxes with garish postcards of Brighton pasted carelessly to the front. A whole wall was given over to lengths of candy-pink Brighton rock, along with novelty sugar items such as pink dummies (unnaturally large), and outsize sets of dentures. And then there were the humbugs: this shop was a veritable shrine to the humbug; they were available in every size – from the small ones you could pop in your mouth and suck, to the gargantuan ones that weighed half a pound, and needed to be held in two sticky hands and just licked (and inevitably dropped on the carpet to acquire a coating of pet hair, grit and old fluff ).
Peter was impressed and revolted at the same time. He genuinely liked the clever, honest way the issue of dental decay was addressed by those dummies and false teeth. ‘Eat here and be thou toothless!’ they seemed to declare. The sheer abundance on show, however, was a bit much for him. Growing up in wartime, food shortages had been too prominent a feature in his childhood and young life.
‘Mr Hastings,’ he said, politely. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you but I understand you’ve complained about the smell of the drains.’
The humbug man looked up quickly from his work and rolled his eyes. ‘I’ve complained eight times in two years, sonny,’ he said. ‘That smell is putrid, ruddy putrid. But that council of yours is rotten to the core, mate. You’re all the same; all … ’ And here he stopped for a moment and rubbed thumb and middle finger together, in the internationally recognised gesture for dosh, shekels, readies and general ill-gotten gain.
Peter had heard this unflattering description of council employees from more or less everyone since taking up his lowly post in the Borough Engineer’s office. He was used to it. If you cared to believe the rumours, the council was corrupt in every one of its dealings, from the way it granted planning permission down to the way it purchased Harpic for the lavs. Outrage and accusation were commonplace. But in his innocence (bless him), Peter had always assumed that the highly unsexy Sewerage and Waterworks department would be exempt from such reflex slurs.
‘Well, I certainly will be looking into it, Mr Hastings,’ he said, at the door.
And the sweet-maker, speaking with more prescience than he knew, said, as a pleasant farewell, ‘Then I don’t suppose you’ll be lasting very long.’
It was perhaps because he was goaded by these cynical words that Peter decided he would indeed dig a bit. As it happened, Mr Blackmore would be spending the next few days enjoying several more free leisure excursions with ‘the lady-wife’ (a luxury steamer trip to Beachy Head, departing from the landing stage of the Palace Pier; a jaunt by limousine to the West End to see the hit show Grab Me A Gondola, so the coast was clear. All Peter needed to do, to get started, was knock on a few doors in the vicinity of the sweet shop and then get down to the Archives department to check what had happened to Mr Humbug’s previous complaints.
It was while Peter was outside the shop, with his back to the window, making notes, that he first looked into the face of Deirdre Benson, and his fate was sealed. He had never seen such a lovely girl. And what an expression! While the other people looking up at the demonstration showed curiosity, puzzlement and even hilarity, this girl was watching through the plate glass in a kind of rapture – like Jennifer Jones gazing at a vision of the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette.
But then she caught his eye and frowned, and he didn’t know why.
‘Can I help you?’ he said.
She reached out a hand to him. ‘Come here, quickly,’ she said. ‘You’re looking the wrong way!’
So he smiled and turned, and joined her at the glass. It was a sort of omen, he felt. ‘You’re looking the wrong way’ was what his mother used to say to him when he was little; she used to warn him that looking the wrong way would be ‘the story of his life’. Time after time, he missed seeing Messerschmitts flying overhead, or peacock butterflies dancing over long grass on a meadow, or Arthur Askey in a brown double-breasted suit emerging from a jeweller’s shop in Hove. Once, when he was seven, he even missed seeing King George VI and Queen Elizabeth driving past at a walking speed, despite having stood in the rain at the roadside since the crack of dawn. Afterwards he had an impression of white-walled tyres and a little flag fluttering on the roof of a car, but that was all.
Now, outside the sweet shop, being finally orientated in the correct direction, Peter could appreciate why crowds were so frequently drawn here. Mr Hastings was a true artiste: his skilful three-dimensional manipulation of a malleable solid was almost hypnotic, like watching geometry in motion. It was also (speak it softly) slightly arousing – especially the rhythmical stretching process, in which the anatomically god-like humbug man grasped and twisted and pulled; then threw a loop over a stout hook, for stretching; then again grasped and twisted and pulled. The term Übermensch came unbidden, several times, to Peter’s mind.
Deirdre was clearly captivated. ‘I come here as often as I can,’ she said to Peter, quietly. ‘Sometimes he looks up and waves to me!’
‘I expect he’s soft on you.’
‘On me?’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course he isn’t!’
Peter wanted to say, ‘Why not you?’ – but it would have sounded like flirting, so he said nothing.
‘It’s usually about now,’ she said. And on cue, the humbug man looked up from his sweaty work, spotted her at the window and raised his hand – but the look on his face, when he saw Peter alongside her, was mainly of annoyance.
‘Oh, what a shame you saw that,’ Deirdre said, as they walked away afterwards – when the thinner humbug mix had been chopped into regular pieces and set aside to cool, and the humbug man had slipped into a back room (presumably to lie down on a stone floor). ‘He usually looks much more pleased to see me.’
Peter stopped walking and turned to her.
‘What is it?’ she said, tilting her head.
Blame the heady smell of the peppermint, perhaps; blame the sight of those astonishing Charles Atlas biceps triggering an animal instinct deep within; blame Friedrich Nietzsche. For whatever reason, Peter found himself saying, ‘I’d always be pleased to see you, Deirdre.’ And just like that, he became her boyfriend.
Over the next couple of days, Peter set his investigation in motion. It didn’t feel like detective work; just like doing his job properly. He interviewed all the neighbours, studied maps and plans of the pipes and sewers, familiarised himself with the archives – and gradually began to notice that key pieces of the story were unaccountably missing from the files.
Luckily he decided not to take Lillian into his confidence, as by now she had discovered the pay discrepancy, and would have reported him directly to Mr Blackmore (assuming she could locate him).
And while he was busy with all this sleuthing, he continued to meet Deirdre on the sly. More importantly, he also met her mother.
At first, he hadn’t understood why Deirdre was keeping him a secret from her family. How could Mrs Benson be so ‘strict’ when she was the owner of a night club? Surely broad-mindedness went with the job? ‘Just tell her,’ he pleaded, repeatedly. He liked things to be above board. He certainly wished he had a mother he could tell about meeting Deirdre.
But then he called at the Black Cat on his official business, and immediately grasped the problem.
‘Frank! Bruce!’ Ma Benson, in a scarlet padded dressing gown, had shouted in a gravelly voice, on opening to the door to him. ‘Here’s some squit from the council knocking at an ungodly hour!’
Upon which two enormo
us young men – barefoot, in dark trousers and string vests, with tufts of dark underarm hair – joined their titanic mother and stood behind her, one of them with a soapy wet flannel in his hand. Peter found it was the un-wrung flannel he kept looking at; in particular, the cascade of sudsy drips, and the puddle they were making on the floor.
‘I’ve come at a bad moment,’ he said.
The Bensons did not respond to this politeness. Frank Benson – perhaps remembering what he’d been doing when he was called to the door – decided to carry on washing the back of his neck with the flannel, so that water ran down his forearm, and dripped from his elbow.
‘As I said,’ Peter continued, with a nervous cough, ‘I wondered if you’d had any reason to complain about the drains? Our records seem to be incomplete.’
‘Drains?’ said Ma Benson, witheringly. She was at least six feet tall, this woman, and at least three feet wide. Turning to the boys, she heaved a vast sigh and said, ‘Drains, Frank?’
‘No, Mum.’
‘Drains, Bruce?’
‘No, Mum.’
And after the interview was over, and the door shut, Peter heard from outside the sound of Frank’s voice: ‘That’s the little weed that’s been sniffing round Deedee, Ma.’
After this encounter, Peter stopped saying ‘Just tell her’ and assumed a more serious attitude to the entire relationship, but it never occurred to him to end it. He liked Deirdre more and more: she was funny and nice and observant, and she needed rescuing. She hadn’t read as many books as he had, it was true. When he mentioned Les Misérables to her, she thought he’d made up the title as a joke, and had duly laughed. But she knew literally hundreds of songs – and it seemed she had an impressive ability to suit a song to any occasion.
How did she do it? Peter could quote poetry himself, but only by rote. There was never an occasion when a passage from ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore After Corunna’ came to mind because it summed up what he was feeling. But with Deirdre it was different. She would hum a melody hardly knowing she was doing it, hardly knowing that the song in question expressed precisely what was in her heart.