The Man That Got Away

by Lynne Truss

  Twitten was the main beneficiary of this change in the inspector’s spirits, as it meant that the daily one-to-one interrogations took up much less of his time.

  Knock, knock.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Blah di blah. Out with it, then.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. The thing is, I still firmly believe—’

  ‘Yes, yes. Out of ten?’

  ‘Ten, sir.’

  ‘All right, Twitten. You can go.’

  And after that, the rest of the day was his own.

  As for Steine, he just needed to think. He needed to go over the scene with Adelaide Vine again and again, trying to understand what had happened; recalling the dawning sense of joy and amazement when he realised this beautiful young woman was describing the meeting of his own parents in Gordon Square nearly fifty years ago. And then he would remember how that burgeoning joy was crushed when Adelaide, far from falling into his arms with a Shakespearean cry of ‘Mine Uncle!’, instead recoiled from him with a highly modern look of shock, horror and contempt.

  The recollection made him physically shrivel at his desk.

  ‘What a wicked thing to say!’ she had gasped. And then she’d leaped from the train and walked briskly off, leaving Steine with his smile still frozen on his face.

  Eventually, he confessed all to Mrs Groynes, which wasn’t easy. But at least it stopped her enquiring all the time why he looked like a wet weekend in Weston-super-Mare.

  She was surprisingly sympathetic and helpful.

  ‘You see, dear,’ she explained, ‘from her point of view, you could be telling a great big porky pie. Pretending that this story of hers means anything to you.’

  ‘But why would I do that?’

  ‘I expect that’s precisely what she’s asking herself right now, dear. Why would he lie? What’s in it for him?’

  ‘And I knew that her mother’s name was Gillian.’

  ‘That’s all to the good, then. Listen, I bet you hear from her when she’s had time to calm down. Here, tell me who she is again, this Adelaide Whatever Her Name Is.’

  ‘Adelaide Vine.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  For once, Mrs Groynes was not pretending to be vague about a detail. She genuinely had hardly registered the name of Adelaide Vine. In the past few days she had been preoccupied with other matters such as getting Sergeant Brunswick out of the way, plotting her revenge on Wall-Eye Joe and eluding her own well-meaning minions for their own safety (with the way things were going, she was afraid she might lose her patience and shoot one of them). This Adelaide Vine woman had not been on the radar.

  ‘All I know is that she’s a Brighton Belle,’ said Steine, ‘and that she’s very nice-looking, and about twenty years old.’

  ‘Blimey. A Brighton Belle, of all things.’ She smiled. ‘What will they think of next, eh?’

  ‘Yes, apparently it was a bright idea of someone in local government. Of course, since meeting her I’ve seen the advertisements everywhere. They say, “Whatever you want to know, wherever you want to go, enquire of a Brighton Belle!” Apparently Miss Vine found out about it just as they were closing applications. She got in by the skin of her teeth.’

  He let out a whimper of emotion. It was piteous. This Adelaide Vine woman had really got under his skin.

  ‘Aw, what is it now, dear?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing, it’s silly. But I just keep thinking, what if she hadn’t got that last-minute interview for the Brighton Belles?’

  ‘How do you mean, dear?’

  He sighed. ‘I mean, I would never have known she existed. What if she hadn’t been the person on the seafront who took control at the murder scene before we arrived? What if I hadn’t bumped into her the next day at Brighton Station? What if I hadn’t asked why she was interested in policemen?’

  It was evidently a kind of pleasurable torture for him to think of all the ways he might not have met Adelaide Vine.

  ‘You’d still be you, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes, reassuringly.

  ‘But I wouldn’t know I had such a lovely and accomplished niece.’

  Mrs Groynes nodded thoughtfully and patted his hand. Everything she had heard had sounded alarm bells.

  ‘Do you know what, dear?’ she said. ‘I think she would have found you one way or another.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I reckon it was meant to be, dear! It was in the bleeding tea leaves! It was kismet! And I bet you anything you like she’ll be in touch very soon to hear your side of the story.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’d bet fifty pounds.’

  He seemed relieved.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Groynes. You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘My pleasure. And tell you what, dear: why don’t you go out for a nice little walk?’

  ‘A walk? At ten o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, dear, while I’ve been standing here I’ve been noticing quite a bit of nasty dust and dirt and cobwebs and whatnot adhering to your personal bits and bobs. If you could pop out for about an hour, dear – an hour should do it – I could get this place all shipshape and Bristol fashion for your return. What do you say?’

  So Inspector Steine took himself off (slightly mystified) for a lovely walk on the seafront, and in his absence Mrs Groynes withdrew a set of skeleton keys from an inner pocket of her overalls, selected a small one, opened his desk drawer and carefully removed the first three chapters of Inspector Steine’s memoir, without disturbing either the memo from the BBC’s Director General in which he upbraided Inspector Steine for believing the spaghetti hoax on Panorama, or the recent letter from the Maison du Wax saying that his model would be ready in two weeks and that they planned a grand unveiling ceremony, which they sincerely hoped he would attend.

  ‘Now,’ she said to herself, ‘what are you up to, Miss so-called Adelaide so-called Vine? What’s he possibly got that you want? And who the bleeding hell are you, when you’re at home?’

  Ted Martin was the man in charge of the Left Luggage at Brighton Station. He had worked there for ten years or more, and only recently had started to wish he’d chosen a different profession.

  In the old days, Ted had loved his job. For one thing, the Left Luggage office, with its heavy swing doors keeping out the cold and its ancient paraffin heater behind the counter emitting a steady (if always rather disappointing) warmth, was a fairly cosy place to work. For another, the tips weren’t bad. And sometimes he could go home at six o’clock and regale his morose wife Iris with the daft things people had tried to leave with him that day (such as their overexcited toddlers fitted with reins), in the hope of cheering her up.

  However, once the police started finding human body parts in the luggage, the shine went off the job somewhat. Sergeant Brunswick always regretted that he’d stupidly opened that suitcase in Old Ted’s presence. An elderly man who remembered terrible things from the First World War, the sight of a newly dismembered corpse sent him over the edge, and afterwards he was out of action for several weeks.

  It had taken a lot of pressure from friends and colleagues to make him resume his position; even having agreed, it took persuasion still to get him out of the house after breakfast.

  ‘Try not to dwell on it,’ his wife would say each morning, as she handed him his Cheddar cheese sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper. ‘It’s not likely to happen again, dear, is it?’

  So when he first noticed that a red stain had appeared overnight on the side of a canvas holdall, he hesitated about reporting it. For one thing, maybe the stain was only ink? (But it didn’t look like ink.) For another, he had no recollection of the person who’d left it, so he could be no help to the police with any inquiries. (But this was really no excuse.) And for another, what if this time it was the head? (This was the obvious clincher.)

  But how do you ignore such a bloodstain once you have noticed it? So in the end Ted made a decision, and called not
only the police station but also Ben Oliver at the Brighton Evening Argus – because although Oliver was very young, he was gaining a good reputation as a crime reporter. Also, just after he was appointed to the job, Oliver had written a human-interest story about Ted’s grisly torso experience, pointing out to the readers of the Argus that while we all enjoy reading about sensational stuff, we should never forget the real traumatic impact it can have on the normal, innocent people who work (say) in a Left Luggage office, and have to spend weeks in a rest home in Littlehampton to get over it. (‘Being in Littlehampton was worse than being dead’ was the quote that most Brightonian readers remembered from the piece, probably because it chimed so well with their own prejudices.)

  Twitten was the first to arrive. He found Old Ted counting out the coppers he’d been given today – piling them into little towers on the counter. By the look of things, he’d got about two and sixpence. When he saw Twitten, he scooped the coins up and poured them back into his pocket.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Martin, I’m Constable Twitten. I’ve come about the holdall; may I see it?’

  Ted was surprised by Twitten’s youth, but impressed by his politeness. He reached for the bag and set it gingerly on the counter.

  Twitten immediately noted one key fact about the bag, which had not escaped Ted: that it was human-head-sized.

  ‘So this is it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Interesting size, Mr Martin.’

  ‘Indeed, sir.’

  Twitten felt his new helmet slip forward on his forehead, which (annoyingly) it always seemed to do when professional composure was required.

  ‘Good. Excellent,’ he said, affecting nonchalance. He picked the bag up by the handles and tested its weight. It was heavy. A human head would surely weigh about that much.

  ‘Interesting weight.’

  Then he spotted the stain on the canvas, and quickly put the bag down. He coughed.

  ‘So you’ve made no attempt to identify the contents of this bag yourself, Mr Martin?’

  ‘Me? No.’ Mr Martin shuddered. ‘Not on your ruddy life. Against the rules anyway, thank Christ.’

  ‘Is it all right if we bolt those doors for a minute or two? We don’t really want the public seeing this.’

  ‘Good idea, son. I’ll do it.’

  But just as the old man in his shabby railway uniform reached the doors, Ben Oliver arrived. He was wearing a summer hat, and looked excited.

  ‘Ted!’

  ‘Mr Oliver.’

  ‘Thanks so much for calling me. Oh, no, am I too late?’ the reporter said.

  And in a way, he was. Twitten, at the counter, had quickly opened the bag and was now staring down into it.

  ‘What is it?’ called Oliver. Then he said, ‘Ted, you stay here. Don’t move an inch.’

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ said Twitten, with a look of relief. ‘It’s bally well all right. Come on.’

  The others approached, but warily.

  ‘No, really. There’s nothing to be scared of, aside from the blood.’ Twitten let out a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Come and look, Mr Oliver. It’s a good thing you’re here, actually. Because, look, it’s addressed to you!’

  By the time Inspector Steine had come back from his walk, it’s true that no dust, dirt or cobwebs adhered to his personal bits and bobs – but only because there had been none adhering in the first place. Mrs Groynes was absent. His desk drawer, when he unlocked it, showed no sign of disturbance.

  He needed to reply to the letter from the Maison du Wax, of course. But when he considered the idea of a grand unveiling ceremony, he had definite misgivings. He wanted just to feel simple pride: after all, not many people are chosen for the honour of being modelled in wax by someone with a French name easily confusable with ‘Tussaud’. But there was fear of humiliation, too. As Twitten had heartlessly pointed out, a very high percentage of the models in the Maison du Wax were not only terrible, they were also weirdly grouped. By what rationale was Henry VIII placed with Kirk Douglas in shiny boxing shorts? Why was Marie Antoinette smirking over her fan at Tommy Trinder? Where would Inspector Steine turn up? Amidst Bill Haley’s Comets? And what would the lovely Adelaide Vine think of that?

  His phone rang. He answered it without enthusiasm. It was Twitten reporting that the bag at the Left Luggage office contained Peter Dupont’s bloodied missing parcel of documents, addressed to Ben Oliver of the Argus. A preliminary rummage suggested that it contained ‘bally dynamite, sir’.

  ‘Dynamite?’ repeated Steine in alarm. (He hadn’t really been listening.)

  ‘Not literally, sir,’ laughed Twitten. The boy sounded faintly hysterical for some reason. Steine heard the constable turn to someone and whisper, ‘He thought I meant real dynamite.’

  ‘I heard that, Twitten.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  Twitten guessed (rightly) that he oughtn’t to mention the presence of a reporter from the Argus, so avoided the question.

  ‘Anyway, the main thing is, sir, it isn’t a head!’

  Steine shrugged. He had no idea why Twitten would say this.

  ‘Well, good, good. Carry on.’

  After hanging up the receiver, Steine folded his hands on the desk, swallowed and assumed his characteristic faraway expression, staring at a blank bit of wall. Aside from the occasional sigh, he was completely still. His brain emptied; his breathing slowed. This was what despair had always looked like in Geoffrey St John Steine. When he was a child, his father had once discovered him in just such a trance-like state, shaken him to his senses and exclaimed, ‘Blimey, Geoff! You scared me!’ And then, thoughtlessly betraying his origins, ‘I thought you’d stuck your spoon in the wall!’

  From there, things had escalated horribly. Sister Gillian had sneakily reported her father’s cockney outburst to Mother (partly to ask what it meant), with the effect that Mother was angry with Father, and both of them were very angry with Gillian, and then – and there was no justice in this – all three ganged up together to be absolutely furious with young Geoffrey for unwittingly affecting death in the first place.

  Dwelling on his childhood had become a habit over the past few days, for obvious reasons.

  After fifteen minutes of staring poignantly into the middle distance, Steine realised that the telephone was ringing again, so he answered it.

  ‘Inspector Steine?’ said a female voice.

  ‘Yes?’

  He held his breath. Was it she?

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘It’s Adelaide Vine. I’m so sorry I ran away the other day. I was very confused. But I spoke to my solicitor that day in London, and he said you weren’t lying to me. It seems you really might be my uncle.’

  In the world of Mrs Groynes, there were usually few surprises, and even fewer mistakes. She thought ahead; she was well-informed; she was sceptical; and she was also preternaturally quick to grasp what was going on. So anyone hoping that she would carry on believing that Lord Melamine was Wall-Eye Joe and act accordingly once she had actually met him is in for a disappointment.

  Prior to meeting him, of course, she had been planning a terrific sting operation, involving a faux diamond robbery that would first relieve him of everything he owned and then leave him dangling from a ceiling inside the Tower of London dressed as a Beefeater with a recently fired gun in his hand. A small gang had been put together to pull this wonderful con with her; a van had been stolen from Worthing and its number plates changed; facsimile floor plans of the Jewel House had been knocked up by Dave the Forger; a fake Koh-i-Noor had been fashioned (the idea being that the gang would leave this bit of ‘jargoon’ in the place of the real sparkler). All that remained was for Mrs Groynes to make contact with ‘the mark’.

  But then she sat next to the poor man in a tea shop on the seafront, where he was ineptly trying to persuade a retired postman from Godalming to accept a gold bar in exchange for twenty-five pounds, and she quickly concluded that,
whoever this so-called ‘Lord Melamine’ was, he was not the notorious and ruthless con man responsible for the deaths of multiple women at that horrific unfinished house in the country. This amateur magsman with the pot of China tea and the half-eaten custard tart evidently couldn’t con his way out of a wet paper bag.

  The sense of disappointment was immense, but she also felt an overwhelming sadness. It wasn’t so much the wasted work and money (although replica Beefeater costumes don’t come cheap). No, it was that over the past week she had felt Hoagy close to her again; planning revenge for his death had made her feel so much better about herself. And now, with the wall-eyed ‘Lord Melamine’ turning out to be just a hopeless beginner, unworthy of her attention, she felt the long-lost Hoagy slip away, back into the darkness.

  But there was no sense dwelling on any of this now. Back in the tea shop, she wiped a tear from her eye and asked the skivvy for the bill. She had things to do. Without looking at Melamine, she put on her gloves and brushed marzipan crumbs from her skirt, and unclasped her handbag.

  It was then that she realised Lord Melamine had been trying to catch her eye.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, smiling. ‘I don’t suppose I could interest you in a gold brick at a bargain price? Here’s my card. I’m the Fifth Marquess of Colchester but you can call me Melamine. I’m very pleased to meet you. I was watching you in the mirror over there and I noticed you put your milk in before the tea. That’s the way I like it too!’

  Mrs Groynes, who had been on the verge of tears, was so amused she laughed aloud.

  ‘Oh, you poor bleeder!’ she said, patting his hand. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, dear, but you are absolutely bleeding hopeless!’

  ‘I don’t understand. What did I say?’

  And he looked so upset that – blame the Hoagy disappointment, blame the sugar rush from eating a marzipan fancy – she felt genuinely sorry for him. It just broke her heart that this man was so bad at his job, so bad at pretending to be posh; and as for choosing to flog gold bricks, that game was as old as the hills.