by Lynne Truss
‘What about that tanner?’ said Shorty.
Tommy dug a coin out of his pocket and handed it over.
‘I can’t get enough of these,’ said Tommy, sucking the humbug wistfully. ‘Just one of the many ways that me and Deirdre Benson are soulmates!’
All this talk of Sergeant Brunswick being a spy for Terence Chambers, incidentally, needs to be set in context. If Brunswick justifiably assumed he was the only interloper in a band of professional musicians, he was wrong. Because Chambers did have a man inside the club’s band already: he was the one who played the piano.
Of course, Chambers’s pianist wasn’t aware that the drummer worked for Mrs Groynes or that the trumpeter was an undercover policeman. Oh, no. But he had his suspicions about the guitarist, who in fact worked for MI5; meanwhile the guitarist had his suspicions about the alto sax, who (rather thrillingly) reported nightly to his superiors at Interpol.
Some of these men had joined the band at the same time as Brunswick. Others had been in situ for months. And it was all quite ironic. These men (mostly) all wanted the same thing: to find out how and why Kenneth Benson had been killed, and what was going on in the basement area. They all knew a little; none of them knew much. If only they had worked together! But instead, each of them believed he was the only cuckoo in the nest.
Incidentally, there was one person who knew for sure that Brunswick was a policeman. This was Bob on double bass, who (as previously mentioned) once threw a half-brick through a window and got himself arrested. The brick-throwing incident had been a calculated act on Bob’s part, designed to throw any suspicion off him, because he was in fact a CID man reporting to Chief Inspector Jenkins at Scotland Yard. When he recognised ‘Kevin’ at the audition as his arresting officer, he loyally helped out a fellow undercover policeman by suggesting they had worked together in the invitingly named Bora Bora Lounge in Portslade.
So to sum up:
Terence Chambers was on piano
Scotland Yard was on double bass
Interpol was on alto sax
Brighton CID was on trumpet
Mrs Groynes was on drums
MI5 was on guitar
In short, only the trombonist was not living a double life. A lifelong professional musician and a member of the union, he had no suspicions whatsoever that his fellow band members were not ordinary joes like himself. Occasionally, he would come across the guitarist emerging stealthily from Ma Benson’s office (tucking a notebook into his back pocket), and he wouldn’t give it a second thought. He once found Tommy Drumsticks having an emotional argument with Deirdre Benson on the back staircase – he thought nothing of that, either.
‘It’s really boring,’ he would tell his wife in the mornings, when she asked what life was like at the club. ‘It’s the most boring job in the world. And the other guys: what a bunch of stiffs!’
On their way to the Argus office, Twitten nearly changed his mind about letting Oliver in on things. The newsman might be a useful ally when it came to solving the Dupont case, but he was also bally relentless when it came to asking awkward questions.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about, Constable Twitten,’ said Oliver, casually, as they walked side by side downhill towards the newspaper offices.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I’ve been wondering. What happened to that hilarious delusion of yours about that woman onstage with you at the Hippodrome – the one you were hypnotised into believing was a sort of female Professor Moriarty?’
Twitten stiffened. ‘What about it?’
He felt sick. He’d forgotten Oliver had been present and seen the whole thing. He didn’t know what to say.
‘It occurred to me afterwards, you see,’ said Oliver, ‘that perhaps you were in on the act.’
‘What?’
‘But on the other hand, you were so convincing! Especially when you shouted out, “But she IS a criminal mastermind, sir!”’
‘Ha ha ha,’ chuckled Twitten, weakly. He looked round in an exaggerated manner. ‘A lot of public houses in this part of the town, aren’t there? I wonder what the historical reason is for that?’
They walked along in silence. But not for long.
‘So was it all an act, then? What happened at the Hippodrome?’
‘Could we change the subject, please, Mr Oliver?’
‘It’s a simple question. I just want to know, was it all an act?’
‘Of course it was an act! In fact, “all an act” doesn’t come close to describing how much of a bally act it was! Now, could we please—’
‘No, sorry, perhaps I’m not being clear. What I want to know is, were you in on it?’
‘I was not in on it, no.’
‘I see.’
‘I certainly wasn’t.’
‘All right.’
‘The whole thing was horrible.’
‘OK. But if that hypnotist—’
‘Oh, please!’
‘No, hang on. Listen. If that hypnotist did make you believe such a preposterous thing, what happened afterwards? Did the delusion just wear off, or did you have to get more hypnosis from someone else? Or perhaps – ’ and at the thought of this Oliver started laughing ‘ – perhaps you still believe it!’
Twitten had had enough of this. Oliver was pushing him closer to telling a lie, and he refused to do it. So he took a gamble.
‘Mr Oliver,’ he said. ‘The bally truth of the matter is that I do still believe the charlady Mrs Groynes is a clever criminal. I believed it before the stunt onstage at the Hippodrome, and I continued to believe it afterwards. And I’m promising you that one day you and everyone else will believe it, too.’
Oliver let out a low whistle. Then he looked at the policeman’s earnest expression and started laughing. He held out his hand for Twitten to shake.
‘Good for you, Constable; that was very funny.’
Twitten smiled, modestly.
‘Sorry, Mr Oliver,’ he said. ‘But you did ask for it.’
Which made Oliver clap him on the back and laugh all the more.
And, thank goodness, they had at last reached Oliver’s workplace, and the interrogation would cease.
At this time of day the Brighton Evening Argus building was a vision of industry. Vans were waiting outside with engines running, while men with barrows trundled weighty bales of newsprint and shouted instructions to the drivers. Presses were running (‘First edition!’ Oliver explained above the thundering din), and the whole scene was imbued with the incomparable smell of printers’ ink. Oliver led Twitten upstairs to the newsroom, where hundreds of yards of telephone flex ran (bizarrely) in loops across the ceiling, and men (it was all men) hammered away on typewriters, or shouted into telephones, while other men in visors with pencils and sleeve-garters laboured over page proofs on outsized sheets of salmon-pink paper.
Oliver opened the door to a side office and ushered Twitten in, to a place of relative quiet, although the smell of ink came with them. Then he cleared a table and opened a desk drawer, from which he extracted a pair of leather gloves, pulling an expression that said ‘Don’t ask’, before relenting.
‘My predecessor left these,’ he explained. ‘He knew a lot of people who used them.’
‘I see,’ said Twitten. And then, as Oliver donned the gloves: ‘So tell me about your dealings with Dupont.’
‘There isn’t much. Dupont contacted me the day before he died, saying he had a story for me involving the Borough Engineer’s office. Now, I have to tell you, I didn’t think it would be much of a story, if it was just about corruption at the council.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there’d be nothing new there, Constable! It’s a story we could run every week!’
‘I see,’ said Twitten. He tried not to show how shocked he was. ‘But you still think he was killed because he was the man who bally well knew too much?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Well, no. I mean, it sounds plausible now that y
ou’ve said it. But I’ve been working on a completely different line of inquiry up to now.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Twitten gave him a hard stare. ‘Because you didn’t come forward, Mr Oliver! You bally well didn’t come forward!’
They worked quickly through the file, Oliver concentrating on the council proceedings – copies of minutes, and so on, some of them going back five years or more – while Twitten pored over Dupont’s notebooks.
He was very impressed by the level of detail. If only this boy had opted for a career in the police, he’d have made a very good detective. Even when he was just idly waiting for Deirdre in the wax museum, Dupont would note down the hilarious behaviour of the preposterous ‘Angélique’, and the noisy arguments with her father about this and that. When Twitten read the line ‘Because I’m supposed to be blind!’, he actually burst out laughing.
‘What do you know about Colchester House?’ Oliver said, after a couple of minutes’ purposeful page-turning.
‘Recently reoccupied, so far as I know,’ said Twitten. He didn’t want to mention the station gossip about Wall-Eye Joe living there like a lord. ‘It’s been empty for years, though,’ he continued. ‘There are a few pages in this notebook, actually, about Dupont’s meeting there with a Captain Hoagland, which was a name I’d been wondering how to spell, but a lot of it seems to be about whether this captain might have known Dupont’s father from a bomb-disposal unit during the war, so it might not be relevant – “Tell Auntie Maud” underlined, and so on. Why did you mention the house?’
‘Well, on the back of this picture it says, “Borrowed from Captain Hoagland at Colchester House – please return. Also read account in Historic Brighton by F. C. Grimshaw, 1937.”’
‘What does it show?’
Oliver pulled a face and held up the picture. ‘A garden with an aviary. Some birds.’
‘And what’s this?’ said Twitten, picking up a sheet with a list of dates on it.
‘Ah, now this is something. These are the dates over the past four years when people reported the smell of drains. Attached are copies of the memos from Reinhardt to Blackmore, instructing him to ignore the complaints, saying they will be dealt with by a different department. And here—’ Oliver picked up Mr Reinhardt’s half-used bank book, and opened it at a random stub. ‘Yes, you see? Here. A thousand pounds paid in. And here’s another, and another.’
‘A thousand pounds each time? That’s a bally enormous amount.’
‘I know. And see what he’s written?’
‘Yes. It says, “C House”!’
‘And here are the minutes of a planning permission meeting just a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘It was a vote not to allow development on the site of Colchester House.’
‘And that’s a prime site, I suppose?’
‘Exactly. To me, that’s the most interesting detail of all. To vote against pulling down that house! In the context of what else has been going on in this town, that’s extremely suspicious.’
‘Mr Oliver, I’d like to thank you for helping with this.’ Twitten sounded controlled but his heart was racing. Was he finally getting somewhere? Was he going to find out who had killed Peter Dupont, and why?
‘Well, it’s helping me, too,’ said Oliver. ‘Oh, and there’s this other one.’ He picked up another piece of paper. ‘Dupont’s put a star on it but it’s not clear why. It seems to be about the formation of those Brighton Belles you see parading around.’
‘That’s odd,’ said Twitten. ‘What could the Brighton Belles have to do with any of this?’
‘I don’t know, Twitten. But Dupont put it in the package so he must have wanted me to see it.’
As it happened, Mrs Groynes was a guest at Colchester House at this very moment. After her sensational breakdown in the tea shop, Lord Melamine had insisted she come home with him to recover herself. And she had not declined. So overwhelmed was she by the coincidence of seeing her darling Hoagy again that she barely noticed (although she did notice) that Lord Melamine was toting a bag around containing three thousand pounds’ worth of twenty-four-carat gold.
Melamine was clearly bemused by the whole thing. As he confided to Mrs Rogers in private later, Captain Hoagland’s love life was his own affair, of course, but this impudent little woman hardly seemed the sort of person he would consort with. But Melamine gathered that they’d met after the war, and had enjoyed a romantic liaison. And that somehow she had known about poor Hoagland’s experience at that ghastly unfinished house in the country – but not that he had survived.
‘It was a friend of yours, Hoagy,’ she explained now. ‘What was his name … Hoppy Hopkins? He told me.’
‘Old Hoppy? The Professor? That man defused more seventeens than anyone else in the entire BD, you know. How is he, the old reprobate?’
‘I couldn’t tell you, dear. All I know is that I bumped into him around Soho one night and he told me you’d got yourself involved with a woman running a dating agency in 1949, and then were never seen again. So naturally I put two and two together.’
‘I’m so sorry, Palmeira, that you were worried.’
‘I wasn’t worried, dear. I was in bleeding mourning!’
‘Oh, Palmeira.’
‘And not to put too fine a point on it, dear, I was planning to hunt down the devils who did it to you and have their guts for garters!’
‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea. But as you see, I’m well.’
They were all three sitting together in the morning room, with the tall windows looking out to the seafront. Sun streamed in.
‘Look, something’s troubling me about all this, dear,’ she said, softly.
‘What? Tell me.’
‘You survived an attempt to kill you, is that right? At that notorious ruddy unfinished house?’
‘He tunnelled out,’ said Melamine, proudly. ‘You should have seen him.’
‘So why didn’t you come forward when Joe and The Skirt went to trial for all the other murders? I’m sorry to bring it up, dear. I’m sure it’s a sore point. But they got off because of the lack of evidence, didn’t they? But at your say-so I reckon they’d have hanged.’
Hoagland seemed dumbfounded. His face drained of colour.
‘What have I said, dear?’ she said. ‘You look confused.’
‘They went to trial? There were actual murders?’
‘I can explain,’ Melamine volunteered. ‘Captain Hoagland, I—’
Hoagland held up a hand.
‘Whom did they kill, Palmeira?’
‘Probably about six women, dear.’
‘No!’
‘The bodies have never been found, that’s the trouble. A big vat of acid was discovered at the house, though.’
Hoagland looked horrified.
‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’
‘You’re saying you didn’t know?’
‘Of course I didn’t know! All I knew was that it was night-time, and Vivienne suggested I take a look at this outbuilding, and then the door was shut and someone attacked me in the dark, and I fought back, and I must have knocked him out, and when I couldn’t get out of the door, I scrambled out through some dirt. And the taste of the dirt in my mouth, and the fear, and the dark – I could smell the bloody bombs, Palmeira! It all came back: the dirt and the smell, and the blasted fear—’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’
Mrs Groynes felt helpless. She wished she could comfort him.
‘But still,’ she persisted, gently. ‘The case against Marriott was on the wireless and in all the papers. It was front-page news for weeks.’
Hoagland turned to Lord Melamine. ‘Sir?’
‘Look,’ said Melamine. ‘I’m sorry, Hoagland. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.’ He composed himself. ‘Mrs Groynes, as you’ve probably guessed, after my part in Captain Hoagland’s escape, I asked him if he would take a job as my valet. And th
en, about six months later, I heard a bulletin on the radio about the so-called murder house, and I realised it must be the place he’d escaped from. And I made a decision. I knew Hoagland was such a decent chap he would come forward if he knew about the case, and rightly or wrongly, I decided that the stress of having to relive his experience at the hands of those people would be too much for him. So I took us both off to Tristan da Cunha.’
Hoagland reacted to this news with something like a howl.
‘So that was all for my sake, my lord?’
‘Yes.’
‘We took that whole trip to keep me from knowing about this blasted trial? So everything you said about wanting to emigrate eventually and farm ostriches … ?’
‘All a ploy, I’m afraid.’
‘I bonded with those ostriches, sir!’
‘I know, and it did you no harm at all, Hoagland. The thing is, Mrs Groynes, I honestly had no idea the case would fail. I thought Captain Hoagland’s absence would make no difference to the outcome. When we returned and I discovered that the hell-hounds had walked free, I could hardly believe it. I felt terribly, terribly guilty.’
‘As you bleeding should, dear!’ said Mrs Groynes, hotly.
‘All I could do was keep the knowledge of that trial from Captain Hoagland for as long as possible. And I wish for obvious reasons I had managed it longer.’
With so much new information flying out, even Mrs Groynes couldn’t quite keep up with this. Part of her was still wondering how you bond with an ostrich. What obvious reasons was his lordship referring to?
Hoagland was confused, too. ‘What do you mean, sir?’ he said, frowning.
‘I’m sorry, Hoagland, but it’s the main reason I have kept us on the move so much. Joe Marriott and The Skirt (as your friend here calls her) are probably still looking for you, aren’t they? And if they ever find you, it stands to reason they will kill you.’
After dropping off the holdall at the forensics laboratory, Twitten called the personnel department at the council to get the name and address of Dupont’s next-of-kin: a Miss Stanford in Eastbourne (his ‘Aunt Maud’). She had already been informed of his death, of course, but Twitten wrote to her, to ask if he could visit. He also telephoned his own mother and had a consoling half-hour conversation with her, simply because it was jolly nice to hear her voice, and there was no one in the office to overhear for once (Mrs Groynes seemed not to have been in all day), so he could tell her that although the present case was shaping up well, in his darkest moments he did wonder whether being a policeman had been the best career choice, and whether it was too late to switch to studying kinship systems in the Fens.