by Lynne Truss
‘Well, I’ve discovered that it’s quite common for men to be horrified by the idea of a woman wanting any sort of influence in the world,’ continued Adelaide, as she put her arm through his. ‘Between you and me, Phyllis told her father last week that she wants to join the police, and he shouted at her that she could do so over his dead body. She was very upset.’
‘Oh, dear,’ Steine said, supportively. But then – he couldn’t help himself – he started smiling at the idea of the lovely Phyllis joining the police, and broke into hearty laughter. Adelaide was shocked.
‘It’s not funny, Uncle Geoffrey. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t—’
‘But it is funny, my dear. It’s hilarious. Oh, my goodness, imagine Phyllis hitting someone over the head with a truncheon; imagine her being able to repeat the relevant clause of the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861! Oh, Adelaide, my dear, be reasonable. How can she ever be a policeman? Phyllis is a woman!’
Anyone who has seen the film House of Wax starring Vincent Price will remember its outstanding fire scene. On its release in 1953, the impressionable Sergeant Brunswick had gone back to the Savoy in East Street to watch the whole programme through again several times, just to re-experience that fire – even though the famous three-dimensional effects elsewhere in the film started to make him feel a bit sick on repeated exposure. The images of those wax figures melting in a Technicolor inferno were so sensational that Brunswick had even tried to persuade Inspector Steine that he ‘hadn’t lived’ until he had seen them. But Steine had counter-argued, reasonably enough, that here he was: living proof that the reverse of this cliché was true.
In the film, wax-artiste Price tries to save his ‘children’, as he whimsically calls them: he wrestles with his dastardly (and strictly one-dimensional) business partner as the flames spread, while bits of the building crash ominously down. But his unhurried efforts with shallow pans of water are predictably ineffectual, given the abysmal flammability of the dry old building and everything it contains. As the fire builds quickly to a roar, Price’s treasured mannequins – his Joan of Arc, his Marie Antoinette, all his historic tableaux – catch flame, scorch, blacken and melt. Faces dissolve and drip to the floor; eyeballs tumble out; heads fall off; Joan of Arc’s body curls forward pathetically as she collapses into ash. And in the end, overcome by the heat and fumes, Price himself drops to the floor, and is left for dead (except that he survives, and is next seen a few years later as an embittered wraith with disfiguring scars, who purloins dead bodies and coats them in wax to achieve suspiciously lifelike results).
At the Maison du Wax in Russell Place, a similarly gruesome scene had been due to take place. Old ‘Monsieur Tussard’ and his daughter ‘Angélique’ had spent the morning of the great day liberally slopping paraffin over Max Miller, Tinkerbell and William Ewart Gladstone. And while this was technically an act of vandalism, it’s fair to say that it was also an act of mercy. Adelaide herself had arranged the heap of oily rags in the modelling room, before heading out to complete the last phase of the oh-so-perfect plan.
So it was a considerable surprise for Adelaide Vine when the door to the Maison du Wax was opened, not by a silly, wittering, faux-French Angélique in a frilly gown, begging her guests to ‘On-tray! On-tray!’, but by the more solid figure of the charwoman from the police station, holding a mop and with her hair tied up in a turban. She was looking a tiny bit tired (which was understandable in the circumstances). In every direction, the floor was wet.
‘Mrs Groynes, what on earth are you doing here?’ asked Steine, delightedly.
‘What am I doing here?’ she laughed. ‘What does it look like? I’m mopping, dear! What are you doing here, that’s what I’d like to know!’
Steine and Adelaide stepped into the museum. And if Mrs Groynes savoured the moment, no one could blame her. It was beautiful to observe the confusion on Adelaide’s face. What had gone wrong? Where were her confederates? What had happened to the foolproof plan?
‘We’ve, um – we’ve come to see the inspector’s wax model,’ Adelaide said, carefully. ‘But perhaps we came at the wrong time.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, dear. All I know is, it seems they had a bit of a spillage with some paraffin, and I happen to know the regular cleaner here and she cried out: “Palmeira, we need you! This place could go up like a box of Brock’s Fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, and we don’t want that!” So I’ve been here for the past little while, dear, haven’t I – cleaning things up a bit.’
As she said the last five words, she looked straight at Adelaide and smiled, just as a tall, smartly dressed man with shiny shoes came upstairs from the area of the ‘Dungeon of Horror’ exhibits. He was wiping his hands on a large handkerchief, cleaning an antique gold ring before placing it on his little finger and admiring the effect. Adelaide blenched. She knew that ring. It was her mother’s.
‘That’ll be Tony,’ said Mrs Groynes cheerfully, looking round at him. ‘He came to help. All done down there, love? That was fast work. You’re a diamond.’
‘My pleasure, Mrs G,’ he said, tipping his hat to the others. ‘Is this the lovely young lady you told me about?’
‘It is, yes. By lucky chance.’
‘I should take a good look,’ he said. ‘For future reference.’
Steine swelled with pride to hear his niece referred to as a lovely young lady, although he wasn’t entirely happy about the intense way Tony stared at her, as if committing her face to memory.
‘This is Miss Adelaide Vine,’ Steine said. ‘And you are … ?’
‘Tony. Just Tony.’
‘Well, it’s always nice to meet a friend of Mrs Groynes.’
‘Ta,’ said Tony, then leaned over to her and said in a low, conspiratorial tone – but loud enough to be heard by the others – ‘I’ll be off now, Mrs G. And I hope you’re happy with the job. I tried to be artistic-like.’
‘Cheers, Tony!’ Mrs Groynes called after him, as he let himself out.
‘Yes, goodbye, Tony,’ added Steine, because he felt it was called for.
He grinned at Adelaide and shrugged. He had no idea what all this charmingly incomprehensible gorblimey chit-chat was about, but he knew he enjoyed being part of it. Oddly, Adelaide didn’t grin back.
Mrs Groynes leaned on her mop. ‘Look, I don’t know about you two, but I could murder a cup of tea. Ooh, but speaking of murder—’ She laughed at the little unintentional joke. ‘Speaking of murder, who wants to see the fantastic new tableau downstairs in the Dungeon of Whatsits?’
Steine wrinkled his nose. ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘I’d rather have the cup of tea you mentioned. What about you, my dear?’
Adelaide said nothing. She was behaving very strangely, he thought. He wondered if she was uncomfortable in the company of this honest-to-goodness cockney woman. In which case, this was something they would need to talk about. Snobbery was something he couldn’t abide.
‘What’s the tableau meant to be?’ Adelaide asked, in a small voice.
Mrs Groynes rubbed her hands in relish. ‘Well, it’s only a double hanging, dear. Man and a woman. A pair of criminal lovebirds.’
‘Oh, my God.’
‘Let’s say it’s Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett, dear, freshly executed for all them murders they done. That’s it. Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett. Ooh, it’ll make your flesh creep, dear. They look so real, it’s as if they were alive just an hour ago.’
‘Well, we certainly don’t want to see that,’ shuddered Steine. ‘My niece and I came here for one reason only—’
But when he put out his hand to take Adelaide’s arm, he found she was backing away from him, in an unaccountable state of alarm, and (suddenly) flourishing a small gun.
It was just then that Brunswick and Twitten burst through the door, having come directly from the police station.
‘Sir, I got your note, sir,’ said Twitten, all in one breath. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got rather a lot to tell you about two men
shot dead at the railway station which might be all my fault but crikey is that Mrs Groynes what on earth are you doing here Mrs G and where’s Angélique and why is Miss Vine pointing a pearl-handled revolver at Inspector Steine?’
It was indeed a confusing scene, especially for the inspector. He’d been expecting such a placid – one might almost say static – afternoon.
‘Adelaide?’ he demanded. ‘Now, this strange behaviour of yours has gone far enough. Where did that gun come from? Is this a joke?’
Adelaide gave him a steely look he had never seen on her face before. It left him more bewildered than ever.
‘I don’t want to shoot you, Inspector,’ she said. ‘But, believe me, I won’t hesitate for a second if anyone tries to stop me leaving.’
Twitten and Brunswick exchanged glances, both knowing that they had no plan whatsoever for dealing with such a delicate situation. Should one of them attempt to snatch the gun? Steine made a small whimpering noise. It was terribly unsettling to have a gun pointed directly at you. What if it went off by mistake?
Luckily, Mrs Groynes knew what to do.
‘Oh, sod this for a game of soldiers,’ she huffed, and struck out at Adelaide’s wrist with the handle of the mop so smartly that she dropped the gun, which fired on impact with the ground.
‘Ow!’ yelped Adelaide.
‘Ow!’ said Brunswick, falling to the floor.
‘Go after her, men!’ the inspector yelled, as the disarmed Adelaide fled into the open air, and disappeared into the convenient fog. Twitten, his heart pumping, obediently raced outside, saying, ‘You go that way, sir!’ But then he realised not only that he could hardly see the hand in front of his face, but that he was, worryingly, alone.
‘Sir?’ he said, anxious. ‘Sergeant Brunswick, sir?’
He heard a call from the inspector. ‘Come back, Twitten. It’s pointless. She’s gone.’ And then he heard Steine add, ‘And stop groaning, Brunswick, there’s a good man. It’s not as if it’s never happened to you before.’
When Twitten re-entered the Maison du Wax, he discovered an interesting tableau. One male figure lay prone on the marble tiles, a woman beside him leaned exhausted on a mop, and another man (in uniform) was standing with his head in his hands. This last figure looked up at him.
‘Would you believe it, Twitten? Sergeant Brunswick has allowed himself to be shot in the leg – again.’
Twelve
It was a week later, and all the violent deaths were safely in the past tense. The eventual body count didn’t bear thinking about, but only two of the dead deserved to be grieved over: Peter Dupont and Dickie George. Peter had indeed been killed for being the man who bally well knew too much (but not in the way anyone had suspected); Dickie George had been a victim of sheer bad luck. If Dickie’s death illustrated anything, it was the general principle that you should never sneak up on a pumped-up former member of the Special Boat Service, especially when he has easy access to heavy, pointy lumps of peppermint-flavoured confectionery.
No one will ever know precisely what Dickie George suffered during the days he was missing. All that is clear is that Tommy Drumsticks – madly possessive of Deirdre and angry because she had asked Dickie for help in getting away – coshed him and dragged him next door to the wax museum, leaving him in a basement room containing gruesome (but waxen) spare body parts. Drumsticks had gone back later to collect him and found him mysteriously missing. Why had he gone? Because in this room Dickie unfortunately spotted the real severed head of Uncle Kenneth, secretly stashed there previously by the frightened Bensons after a henchman of Terence Chambers delivered it to them. (Its miraculous state of preservation, two years after death, was thanks to a typical Chambers flourish – he’d given orders to have it specially embalmed, to make it a proper Benson family memento.)
Understandably scared for his life, Dickie must have opened a random door and found himself lost in the network of tunnels that were formerly part of the delights of the Colchester House garden – and then somehow, by awful chance, he found his way into the actual (unmaintained) sewers and up into the sweet shop. His last, croaked words were indeed, ‘Help me.’
Had he been able to report for crooner duty at the Black Cat this week, however, he would have found it dark and deserted. The very day of Deirdre’s reappearance, the building was closed up and the entire family left town. What Deirdre had found in the underground room (as Uncle Kenneth had found it before her, and paid the fateful price) was indeed shocking: knowledge of it marked the family as enemies of Terence Chambers in perpetuity. For years, Ma and the boys had managed not to know the secret they were protecting, and their ignorance had, in turn, protected them. So what was down there? Well, it was not – as previously supposed by everyone – a bloody torture chamber, a gothic ossuary or even a sparkling Aladdin’s cave. The fact that Dave the Forger was the sole person authorised to come and go was a bit of a clue. In the underground room of the Black Cat was housed Terence Chambers’s extensive and beautifully curated stamp collection.
Thus, when Deirdre had talked brokenly of ‘hundreds and hundreds of heads’, she had spoken truly while at the same time giving a seriously misleading impression. But, as Ma Benson reflected afterwards (while Frank, grim-faced, drove the northwards-speeding car past the small and – until recently – relatively unknown village of Gatwick), the reality of the stamp collection represented a far greater danger to them than anything they had imagined. Given how Chambers traded on his reputation for madness and violence, the sort of secret he would kill for was precisely what they had uncovered: that he was actually an ardent and lifelong philatelist specialising in stamps from Commonwealth dominions.
And was his secret safe, now? Well, the Bensons certainly weren’t going to tell anyone – and, oddly, nor was John Bamford, the only member of a law-enforcement organisation present when the secret was unearthed. He wasn’t going to tell anyone because he was, simply, excruciatingly embarrassed. From the law-and-order point of view, this was a tragic missed opportunity. Tell the world about (say) the entire album (in a glass-topped display case) devoted to ninepenny Australian stamps from 1910 to 1914, and Chambers would become a laughing-stock throughout the criminal fraternity. But Bamford was vain and young, and concerned far more with his own reputation; he was guided purely by the fear of becoming a laughing-stock himself. And so he returned to Interpol in Paris and he lied. He said there had been nothing in the infamous subterranean room after all, and that he resented being sent on a fool’s errand, and that in future he’d prefer the desk-job option, please, with additional extradition duties, if possible.
Mrs Groynes sat with her feet up on Twitten’s desk, and blew a thoughtful smoke ring. Beside her was the copy of Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige that she had picked up at Colchester House the last time she was there – the one from which Wall-Eye Joe had evidently learned how to sound so perfectly Non-U. Many parts of it were underlined. Looking back, she remembered how ‘Lord Melamine’ was forever turning the subject to lounges and radios and cruets and mirrors, and exclaiming ‘Lovely to meet you!’ He had evidently got it all from this annoyingly useful book.
Blimey, he’d been a clever operator, that man; she had believed in him until (almost) the very end. Whenever she happened nowadays to glance at her secret weapons-and-loot-stashing cupboard, she felt her heart stop as she remembered actually starting to remove the cash. Because, yes, she had been prepared to stump up thirty thousand pounds to secure Captain Hoagland’s safety – until, in the nick of time, Dupont’s aunt in Eastbourne had called to speak to Twitten, and blown the entire scam wide open. It wasn’t going to be easy for the next few weeks, having to admit to two hundred individual informants, ‘I’m sorry, you were right, he was Wall-Eye Joe. Yes, I know I told you he wasn’t. Yes, I know I threatened to shoot the next person who told me that he was.’
By now, Twitten had called on Miss Stanford in Eastbourne himself, and was beginning to grasp what had compelled Captain Hoagland �
� of all people – to murder Peter Dupont. In Peter’s notebooks, it merely said that when they met, they talked easily about a number of things, including the fact that Peter’s father had likewise served in the Bomb Disposal service and had been killed in a blast in 1941. Peter also noted that he had shown Captain Hoagland a blurry black-and-white close-up snapshot of his father, with three other lowly sappers, taken a week or so before he died.
On his return to the office, Twitten had compared notes with Mrs G. He felt she had a right to know what he had learned. To accompany their cups of tea, they had Dundee cake, which Twitten had recently (after too little consideration) nominated as his favourite, forgetting how dry it could be. He was wondering if it was now too late to change.
‘So, what Peter’s aunt said, Mrs G,’ he began, carefully, with his notebook open on his knee, and a slight obstruction in his throat from a sugary Dundee crumb, ‘was that when Peter met Captain Hoagland, he was thrilled to meet a bomb-disposal man because his own father had been in the Engineers, and had been killed by a UXB.’
‘Right, dear.’
‘And he showed Captain Hoagland the picture of his father that he kept in his wallet – a group photo of four fellow sappers, all smiling. And of course Hoagland recognised everyone in the picture: one of them was actually him, and the other three had been killed in that explosion. And I suppose he was very worried, because the picture showed he was just a sapper in the Engineers, not a captain at all.’
Twitten paused, then added, ‘I’m sorry. I know Hoagland was your friend. I wish you would tell me, Mrs G, about how you knew him and why you trusted him.’
So she had told him as much as she could bear to disclose – about giving him up years before because she wanted to protect him; about feeling she didn’t deserve someone so good; about believing later that he’d been killed at the unfinished house. What she most hated to admit, however, was that she had spotted Hoagland’s doorman uniform hanging in the wardrobe in his room, and had not thought anything about it. For a man of Hoagland’s age, dressing as a hotel doorman in Brighton was a brilliant disguise for someone up to no good. No one looked at you. They saw the limp, perhaps, and the medals on the chest. You were just another injured veteran washed up by the war.