by Lynne Truss
‘What’s that?’ he’d say.
‘What’s what, dear?’
‘That tune.’
‘Oh.’ Then she’d hum it a bit more and think about it, and smile, and say, ‘It’s about how I’m bewitched, bothered and bewildered.’ And then she would sing him an entire song.
Deirdre’s voice was far more mature than everything else about her: it was both true and expressive. To have her singing to him like someone on a stage was pretty romantic for a boy who’d never had a girlfriend before. One day, at the end of the West Pier, she sang – perfectly – both verses of ‘You’re My Everything’, and he thought his heart would burst.
While Peter was out and about in Brighton, he was naturally oblivious (as we all are) to the people he didn’t know. If, for example, he one day asked a keen young police constable what the time was, or on another day bought a newspaper at the same time as the wall-eyed man living in Colchester House, these people meant nothing to him, and the sad thing is, they never would. Older people quite often find themselves chatting to a new acquaintance and marvelling (after a bit of mental calculation), ‘But hang on! Our younger selves must have both been staying at the Railway Arms in Stoke-on-Trent on Christmas Eve 1993!’ It is oddly comforting to discover such coincidences. More and more, as we get older, we wish we could just travel back to reinhabit our younger selves, and in a room full of people, see who’s there.
But the fact is, although he died without meeting nearly all of them, Peter Dupont had brief contact with everyone in this story at some point or another during those last couple of weeks of his life. Sergeant Brunswick, for example, on his way to work one morning, saw him knock on the door of the Black Cat at nine in the morning, and remarked, ‘Ooh, they won’t appreciate that, sonny.’
Mrs Groynes, rushing back to the police station after a meeting with some of her Kemp Town boys, brushed past Peter outside Hannington’s department store, dropping a string bag ostensibly full of oranges. When Peter stooped to help her, he realised that one of the things he had picked up was not an orange: it was a roll of banknotes. He handed it back to her with the merest quizzical look.
‘Ooh, well done, love; I wondered where that was!’ she bluffed, stuffing the loot in her pocket. ‘Honest, I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t tied on with ric-rac!’
Meanwhile, Constable Twitten did indeed provide Peter with the correct time one day – which was perhaps why he was all the more perplexed when, on the final morning of his life, he spotted the unusually lifelike wax model policeman at the top of the stairs at the wax museum.
The wax museum had become so much his regular haunt in the mornings (he usually had to wait for Deirdre to appear through her secret door) that he became almost invisible there. The friendly elderly lady who collected the tuppenny admissions just waved him through every day when she opened the shutters; the frilly Angélique would barely notice him as she bustled through the galleries, grumbling to herself and carrying an oil can. It was her daily job to climb into the window, duck down behind the Sleeping Beauty exhibit and oil the bellows mechanism that made its chest go creepily up and down.
‘Why can’t you do it for once?’ Peter heard Angélique shouting at her father one day (with no trace of a French accent, incidentally).
They argued a great deal behind closed doors, it seemed.
‘Why can’t I do it? Because I’m supposed to be blind!’ was the reply.
Once, after another such loud argument, Peter saw Angélique come out of her father’s workroom in such a state of frustration that she marched straight into the Tudor Gallery and kicked Anne Boleyn in the stomach.
Who else had glancing contact with Peter Dupont in those weeks? Everyone, to a greater or lesser degree.
Dickie George came out of the Cricketers one lunchtime (shielding his eyes against the sunshine) and bumped into him. All Peter noticed was that he reeked of beer.
Inspector Steine was eating an ice cream in Luigi’s – in a booth next to Ventriloquist Vince and a safe-blower called Birthmark Potter, as it happens – one day when Peter walked past the window. Steine, with an Ovaltine to hand, was engrossed in The Riddle of the Sands, which he had read before but happily couldn’t remember in its entirety; Birthmark and Vince were poring over the floor plans of the Post Office in Ship Street and discussing the pros and cons of entering through a dodgy roof-light. For no reason in particular, at the moment that Peter walked past, they all looked up.
Mr Reinhardt, the Borough Engineer, drove past him on his way to an expensive dinner.
Adelaide Vine and Phyllis were helpfully applying a sticking plaster to a child’s knee – and giving directions to the First Aid caravan – just as Peter was arriving at the humbug shop one morning, so he said hello. And, in fact, he unknowingly passed Adelaide on other occasions, too – usually when she was out of uniform. Once, quite early in the morning, he saw her chatting to the old lady at the wax museum entrance – apparently coming out of the building, just as he was going in.
Meanwhile, Shorty (Mrs Groynes’s reliable messenger boy whose chosen form of camouflage was the Dandy) tailed Peter around town for a day or two, just for a bit of practice.
Drumsticks Tommy from the Black Cat Quartet stood next to him in a urinal on the pier.
And Vivienne (a.k.a. The Skirt) got him to buy her a port and lemon in the lounge of the Windsor Hotel, while he was waiting to interview the manager about a backed-up sewer report from 1955. She didn’t introduce herself, but she appeared to be a hotel resident, and he got the impression that she never paid for a drink if she could get someone else to do it.
Last but not least, there was Captain Hoagland, who had come down to Brighton a couple of weeks ahead of his master, to open the house. This encounter – unlike all the others – was not a glancing or unwitting one, and arguably had a deep effect on them both.
When Peter knocked on the door and enquired about the drains, Hoagland had been in residence just a day or two, and was simply glad to have some company other than Mrs Rogers. He invited the boy in, and they sat in the elevated morning room together, looking out at the sea and making small talk. Just as the housekeeper had done, Peter found the captain instantly fascinating; his posh and very British reticence was reminiscent of the quietly agonised teacher in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version, the film of which Peter had seen twice with his mother in the year before she died.
But for all his inbred stiffness, Captain Hoagland was a fund of useful information. He knew a lot about the house and its environs, and explained to Peter about Lord Loopy and the great Regency garden that had been lost, with its aviary and famous parrot. He said it was a shame Lord Melamine hadn’t arrived in Brighton yet; the new marquess had heard so much about the garden from his eccentric, obsessional father.
‘A garden?’ Peter marvelled. It was hard to believe that this area, crowded now with dismal buildings and tattered hoardings, could once have been attractively landscaped. Imagine if you could ever have looked out of a window in central Brighton and seen a living tree!
Hoagland suddenly remembered something and – standing up with an effort – reached with his left hand for a leather-bound book in one of the ornate walnut cases under the windows.
‘There’s an account in here,’ he said, sitting back down and one-handedly riffling through it until he came to the correct page.
What he handed to Peter was an illustrated Brighton gazetteer from the 1840s, with a short description of the garden. Peter read it with interest and then politely copied it into his notebook.
‘I can see you’re wondering about my arm, by the way,’ said Hoagland. ‘And my leg, probably, and my face.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Peter, blushing.
‘Please don’t be embarrassed. It was a long time ago now: just one of Jerry’s unexploded bombs that went off at the wrong moment when we were defusing it. Three of my chaps copped it, so when you think about it, I got off lightly.’
‘S
o you were in the Royal Engineers?’
‘Yes. I’m proud to say I was.’
‘But so was my father!’
‘Really? That’s wonderful. Did he … ? I mean, is he … ?’
Peter shook his head. ‘He died in an explosion. I was eighteen months old.’
Hoagland sighed. ‘So many did, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘They told us when I joined the BD that the average life expectancy was twelve weeks.’
Dupont opened his wallet and proudly showed Hoagland a group photograph of four smiling men, their faces filthy from digging, standing next to a defused bomb.
‘He’s that one,’ he said, pointing.
How did they get on to the subject of Deirdre Benson? Afterwards Hoagland could never remember, but he was glad that they had. From the back windows of Colchester House, he had already spotted her sitting at her sad little window; he had also been aware of the eye-watering stuff going on in the alley at all times of day. He thought it a splendid idea for the young, idealistic Peter to take her away from all this.
‘Shall I tell you what I’m most afraid of, Captain Hoagland?’ Peter said. ‘It’s not that something will happen to me because of Deirdre; it’s that Deirdre will end it with me, to keep me safe from harm. She might dump me to protect me, do you see?’
And Hoagland shook his head and said, ‘Well, I pray that doesn’t happen to you, Peter. That exact thing happened to me once, and I can truly say that I never really got over it.’
Running away together wasn’t the plan from the beginning. But they both knew this was no trifling summer romance. They could meet outside the sweet shop, where the crowd would shield them from view a little bit; they could be together in the early morning in the wax museum, because of the secret door. And on one glorious Saturday when Mrs Benson and both the boys travelled to London to meet with someone they always referred to just as ‘Terence’, Deirdre was able to spend most of the day with Peter – riding the roundabouts on the Palace Pier, and eating chips from newspaper.
It was on this special day that Deirdre first confessed to him that her family had killed and sawn up her uncle Kenneth. It seemed that in all the excitement of burgeoning young love, the perfect moment to mention this morsel of information had somehow failed to come up. But the way things were going, she felt that he had a right to know.
And then he was gripping on to the railings of the pier with his eyes closed, rocking back and forth, and she was wondering whether she’d done the right thing in telling him, after all.
‘Does this change anything, Peter?’ she asked, fearfully.
He swallowed a few times before answering. When he finally opened his eyes and spoke, he did it very quietly.
‘Well, yes, I think it does, Deirdre,’ he admitted. ‘It does a little bit. Can you – can you – can you give me a while to let it sink in?’
‘Did I do the right thing telling you?’
‘Of course. I just … ’ He trailed off. He felt sick.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. But I just have to … ’ Faltering, he looked round for somewhere to think quietly for a moment and by bad luck spotted the old ‘Voice-o-Graph’ machine – the booth where for the cost of sixpence you could record your voice on to vinyl as a keepsake.
‘Deirdre, would you like a record of my voice?’ he said. And before she could answer, he was thankfully inside with the door shut, trying to suppress his feelings of terror and panic.
In some ways, luck was on his side when he stepped into the booth. For, despite his wide interest in comparative literature, he was unfamiliar with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, so had no idea that this particular type of gift had been permanently tainted in terms of romantic gesture.
But in other ways, this was the very worst time to make a recording. He had never felt more scared in his life. He stared at the Bakelite speaking tube and quailed. What should he say? Deirdre was looking at him pleadingly through the glass; she obviously needed reassurance and comfort right now, but he was simply too traumatised to give it to her. They sawed up Uncle Kenneth? With his sixpence poised over the slot, Peter looked out at the general scene on the pier, and realised that standing a few feet behind Deirdre was a man in dark glasses who had surely been following them around all day. And now that he thought about it, behind the man in dark glasses there was a child who – well, was it possible that this urchin with the rolled-up comic in his hand had been following Peter around as well?
He made a last attempt to marshal his thoughts, took a deep breath and inserted the money. He told himself that all he needed to say was ‘I love you, Deirdre’.
But there was too much vinyl to be filled. And after he had said, ‘Deirdre, I love you’, he rushed on, talking, spilling out feelings he scarcely knew he had – his fears that perhaps he was a bit young for all this grown-up stuff of criminal conspiracy at the council, and wishing he had gone to university after all, instead of dating the treasured daughter of a gigantic scary night-club owner who smelled like a tobacconist’s and apparently thought nothing of murdering her own kith and kin.
Why was he blurting out this stuff? This must be what it’s like in a confessional, he thought – as he found himself talking about what Mr Reinhardt might be up to, and how his landlady had received a brick through a window. On his way to work this morning, someone had deliberately driven a car up on to the payment and nearly knocked him over. This was stuff he’d been determined not to worry Deirdre with – yet now in his weakness he had recorded it! And the man in the dark glasses was pretending to take an interest in the helter-skelter, but was still watching Deirdre; and Peter, who had now completely lost control, started rambling about him as well.
By the time the little red light flashed in the booth to say he had just ten seconds left, Peter was more than grateful to stop. He was so ashamed of how badly he’d done this special thing; but in his defence, he had done it under extremely trying circumstances.
He came out of the booth with the disc in its paper sleeve, holding it tight.
‘Is that for me, Peter?’ Deirdre said, quietly. Her little chin wobbled. She was on the verge of tears. ‘I shouldn’t have told you, should I?’
‘No, I’m glad you did,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
The man in the dark glasses had come closer, but was pretending to be part of the noisy crowd taking an interest in the coconut shy.
Peter pulled Deirdre towards him. It was the first time he had pressed his body against hers, and when he realised that her clothes reeked of the night club (tobacco, booze, sweat, perfume), it made his heart go out to her all the more. This girl ought to smell like a spring meadow.
‘Deirdre,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’ve messed up the record, I’m sorry. But I’m afraid to throw it away where people might see me do it.’
She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t mind at all.’
‘I suppose when it boils down to it, I’m quite scared, Deirdre.’
‘Oh, Peter.’
She took the record from him, and slipped it into her handbag.
‘We’ll get away, Peter. We’ll make a plan.’
And so to Peter’s last couple of days. First he contacted Ben Oliver at the Brighton Evening Argus, and then he started to compile a dossier of material: his notebooks, containing records of his interviews; the various incomplete council records; some maps and historical material; and a fine print of a nineteenth-century watercolour supplied by Captain Hoagland. The missing parts of the puzzle (he calculated) would be found inside Reinhardt’s safe. He also wrote to his auntie in Eastbourne, telling her about the joy of meeting a bomb-disposal officer who might have been known to his father.
On the morning of his death, after meeting Deirdre at the Maison du Wax to make final arrangements for their escape (unaware that a real policeman was overhearing every word), Peter clocked in at the office, took the clanking, self-operated lift to the third floor and waited in the
corridor outside Mr Reinhardt’s door for the sound of him unlocking his safe. Then he created a diversion.
‘Mr Reinhardt, sir! Quick! Outside in the car park! Mr Blackmore has collapsed!’
‘What?’ said Reinhardt. ‘What? Cathy, come with me. This is serious. Blackmore owes me money.’
Once Reinhardt and his secretary had both left the room, Peter took the entire contents of the safe – including several uncashed cheques – and added them to his existing parcel. There wasn’t time to sort through it all. He pushed through a heavy door marked ‘No Entry’ and took the tight, echoing back stairs, which on the ground floor (as he knew) opened on to a small locked yard surrounded by a high fence.
He was remarkably calm, but that was because he was prepared. He had everything worked out. With no one to see him (or, more importantly, to down tools on account of it), he opened a fairly large manhole cover and shifted it to one side. Holding the parcel carefully to his chest with one hand, he climbed down the iron ladder into a disused sewerage tunnel, at one end of which (just a hundred yards away) he knew he would re-emerge into daylight quite near the West Pier for his meeting with Ben Oliver.
‘I’ll be in a deck-chair,’ he had told the reporter. ‘I’ll look out for you.’
Safely arrived at the seafront, he had paid his threepence, and taken his seat. And for a while, in the sun, he had closed his eyes and listened to the shingle dragged down by the waves, and the shouts of the children on the beach. He dared not think too much about the future, but yesterday Deirdre had sung to him, in her best jazz voice, that they had the world on a string. It was a memory to treasure – and he was treasuring it now.
But if looking the wrong way had been, as his mother used to say, ‘the story of his life’, it turned out to be the story of his death, as well.
‘Hello, Peter Dupont,’ said a voice from behind – and that was all he knew.