by Lynne Truss
‘No, he was never an officer,’ she said. ‘I checked, dear. All that stuff about his “men” calling him Hoagy. I bet it was his own captain who called him that.’
She sighed. ‘Look, all you really need to know is, I thought he was a ruddy hero, dear, and I was sure he was a toff. That’s what I can’t get over: I believed he was above me in every way; that he was noble and selfless and not like me. He had it all down pat: the modesty, the selflessness, all the after-you-Claude-after-you-Cecil. He never said he loved me, you know. That was clever. Made me say I loved him, and then didn’t say it back. And you wouldn’t believe the show he put on, when I was begging him to let me supply the extortion money, about how when a man has seen death so many times, he greets it like an old friend – I was in bleeding tears, dear! Me! And of course Wall-Eye Joe was sobbing away too. How they stitched me up, dear – how the pair of them stitched me up. I can hardly stand to think about it. I even believed in the ostriches.’
‘Ostriches?’
‘Yes, dear! Bleeding ostriches!’ she said, thumping the desk – and it was clear that the shame of this particular aspect of the grand deception was so very great that she could bear to elaborate no further.
‘And so, just to be clear, you killed them both?’
‘Well, yes.’ She smiled. ‘The gun’s in that cupboard, as it happens. What am I like, eh? You don’t get many of me for ninepence.’
‘I ought to arrest you, of course.’
‘I know, dear.’ She reached and patted his hand. ‘That’s your burden.’
‘You must have been very angry with them both, then?’
‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me, dear. I didn’t kill them for the con they pulled on me.’
‘No?’
‘No! I would never kill just for money, dear! Or even out of wounded pride. No, once I’d realised Hoagy was the one who killed that boy, and why he’d done it, because he was a bleeding great fraud, dear; and once I knew for sure that his lordship was Wall-Eye Joe after all, and they were therefore in cahoots when they told their fantastical story about Hoagy escaping from that unfinished house, I knew what I had to do.
‘I left that copy of the Argus in their car and then went directly to the station to see if they turned up. Because I’d decided: if they did turn up, I would kill them. If they didn’t turn up, I would – for the time being, anyway – chalk it up to experience. They were welcome to a trunk full of torn-up Police Gazettes. I would have loved to see their faces when they opened it, but sadly it never came to that.’
‘Because they did turn up at the station.’
‘Yes, they did.’
‘It was you who came up with that “missing dossier” plan, Mrs G. Is it hard for you to think of that? That if you hadn’t come up with the scheme, Captain Hoagland would still be alive?’
‘Well, that’s very sensitive of you to ask, dear. Because, on the one hand, it was a good plan. But on the other, I thought it would catch some brutal, unstable idiot who was soppy about Deirdre Benson. I hardly expected it to catch the only man I ever bleeding loved.’
Twitten had never had such a grown-up conversation before. Hearing of Mrs Groynes’s heartache, it was as if he had waded a small way into the sea and then suddenly found the water was up to his chest and sploshing up his nose, while his feet had lifted off the bottom. He was also, to be honest, finding the Dundee cake completely unpalatable, but sensed that this was not the right moment to mention it. But mostly, he couldn’t get out of his mind the fact that, in order for Mrs Groynes to open the wardrobe in Captain Hoagland’s bedroom in the morning, she must have spent the night there.
But still, his zeal for clarification drove him on.
‘Dupont’s aunt said that the main thing about this Hoagy in the war – she said he was a secret looter, Mrs G.’
‘I know, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes, sorrowfully. ‘She told me that, too.’
‘I’m sorry. She said he’d been seen stealing from evacuated buildings. He even took jewellery from bodies.’
‘Yes. Well, people just had to clear out, didn’t they, when there was an unexploded bomb? Abandon all their worldlies. There’s a lot of scope for opportunism in wartime, dear; making hay out of other people’s distress. Looting wasn’t uncommon, exactly, but it still makes me sick to think of my Hoagy doing it.’
‘But the main thing was, he might have engineered Peter’s father’s death,’ said Twitten.
Mrs Groynes closed her eyes. ‘That’s right.’
‘Peter didn’t know any of this, of course – but Hoagland couldn’t risk exposure just when he was engaged on such a huge job with Mr Marriott and all the others. Back in 1941, Peter’s father confronted Hoagland about the looting and recorded their argument in his diary. Dupont Senior said he was going to report Hoagland; Hoagland, in turn, threatened him. And it was the last entry in the diary, because the next day Peter’s father was conveniently killed in the blast at Borough High Street, while Captain Hoagland – I mean Private Hoagland, presumably – was injured but survived.
‘The family asked for an inquiry, because onlookers at the end of the street behind the sandbags said they saw the bomb being hoisted, and Hoagland starting to run for cover a full five seconds before the explosion. But at the court martial, he came up with a convincing story for the whole thing, swore blind there was no ticking when he’d listened to the bomb, played up the extent of his own injuries – and got away with it. It was only afterwards that the diary was found, and the family suspected Hoagland of actually orchestrating an explosion that killed three people.’
Mrs Groynes listened to all this with a look of utter misery on her face. All the time she had loved Hoagland, he had been this callous fraud. He had never cared about her: to him she represented unfinished business, nothing more. She couldn’t even take comfort from the lengths he had gone to in conning her. Clearly, the main (double) purpose of Wall-Eye’s Brighton operation had been to purloin the Penrose inheritance from Inspector Steine and nick the gold from the safe in Colchester House, where the 4th Marquess (‘Lord Loopy’) had indeed left it twelve years ago and forgotten it. It was quite likely that relieving Palmeira Groynes of a few thousand while conveniently operating in the area was a mere afterthought.
‘And to think I laughed at the inspector falling for that harmless spaghetti hoax,’ she said.
‘Oh, Mrs Groynes. I’m very sorry.’
‘Well, that’s good of you, dear,’ she said, wiping a tear from her face and sniffing. ‘It doesn’t help, but it’s good of you.’
In hospital, they had given Sergeant Brunswick his usual bed. When Twitten visited, he was surprised and gratified to find his superior officer reading Noblesse Oblige by Nancy Mitford.
‘This is fascinating, son,’ said Brunswick, proudly indicating the book. ‘You ought to read it.’
‘I have already, sir,’ said Twitten.
‘It turns out that posh people have a flaming code for recognising each other.’
‘I know, sir. Do you remember we talked about mirrors the other day, and you got quite upset?’
‘Mirrors? Was that because of this book? Well, I never. You should have explained it better, Twitten. I didn’t understand.’
‘No, sir. I rather guessed that you didn’t.’
Brunswick put down the book.
‘You’ve heard that the Bensons have scarpered, son, and that there was nothing in that underground room by the time our boys broke in? It had all been cleared out.’
‘I went to look myself, actually, sir.’
‘Did you? Knowing there was nothing there?’
‘Well, I have to confess, I was interested just to see the room itself. Dupont’s dossier led me to an account of the garden of Colchester House in the old days, you see, and I liked the description of the polygonal underground chamber, curtained in red and white and carpeted with golden sheepskins. It turned out to be just a small and oddly shaped room – but dry and well insulated, a good place for
a bunker, or an archive. You could see marks on the floor where a number of items of furniture had stood, and there was an interesting smell that I found quite nostalgic.’
‘What sort of smell?’
‘I’m still trying to put my finger on it, but it reminded me of dark Saturday afternoons in front of the fire – Father reading a learned journal, Mother knitting, and me with my little magnifying glass and tweezers, carefully sorting my latest acquisitions from Stanley Gibbons, while the man on the wireless announced the football results. I wonder if I’ll ever get to the bottom of that powerful association.’
‘So you called it a wireless in your house?’
‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid we did.’
Brunswick pursed his lips. He had suspected as much.
‘The inspector sends his regards, by the way, sir.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘He’s still reeling a bit, as you can imagine, from Miss Vine turning out to be just pretending, as he puts it. He has periods when he looks very confused, but then he says, “So it was Captain Hoagland who killed young Dupont, and then someone shot him in the head, so we don’t need to prosecute?” And I say, “Yes, sir. It’s jolly convenient, sir.” And that seems to reassure him. I think the worst aspect of the whole thing for the inspector is that there won’t be a waxwork model of him at the museum. He had really set his heart on that.’
As he walked back to the station from the hospital, it occurred to Twitten that he wasn’t angry with Mrs Groynes. This was both interesting and surprising. It was like realising that a chronic pain had gone.
Standing at the clifftop railings overlooking the sea, he pondered. Had Mrs Groynes tricked him in some way? Was that why he felt differently about her? Not so long ago, he had been determined never to be alone with her in the same room, whereas nowadays, he had to confess, a tête-à-tête with Mrs G was something he positively looked forward to. The thing was, it was only in her company that he could expect a friendly and professional interest in the matters that interested him. And hadn’t she, in turn, confided in him about Captain Hoagland, almost as if she regarded him as a friend?
So, while part of him wanted to scream, ‘She shot two people in the head! She uses everyday baked products as a smokescreen! She’s bally despicable!’, another part simply didn’t, and he genuinely detested the horrible con practised on her by Hoagland and Marriott. From what she had reluctantly told him, they had not only targeted her, but played a very sophisticated hand. The way Marriott had drawn attention to himself with that inept con-man business! It had been masterly. And from whom had the police first heard about the terrible con man? From Adelaide Vine, of course.
Although it pained him, Twitten was obliged to acknowledge that it was Mrs Groynes who had explained to him every single puzzling aspect of the case. Were the two scams connected, then? Yes, of course they were, dear. Five people in total were involved: Hoagland, Marriott, plus the third, unknown male who impersonated both Monsieur Tussard and the so-called London solicitor; then Vivienne (‘Angélique’) and her daughter Adelaide Vine. They had all worked together on the unfinished-house scam; all were responsible for disgusting murders in cold blood. All but one were now disposed of. What did they hope to gain from these cons? Mainly, an enormous amount of money. Thirty thousand in notes from Mrs Groynes; then at least a million from the Penrose estate, on the tragic ‘accidental’ death of Inspector Steine; plus at least fifty thousand in gold. But the Mrs Groynes ploy had presumably contained a personal element, too: Hoagland having been furious when she dumped him (mid-con) all those years before. Did the others in the gang know about Hoagland murdering Peter Dupont to protect himself? Probably not. He no doubt realised quite quickly that he’d made a big mistake opening up to the seemingly harmless Peter. If Adelaide Vine had known about the murder, she would hardly have encouraged Phyllis to come forward to the police with her memory of the doorman with his parcel.
But how had Adelaide known the story of Inspector Steine’s parents? Because, as a juvenile accomplice in the unfinished-house scam, she had travelled in the car with the victims, chit-chatting with them to set any doubts to rest. And one of the victims was Gillian, Inspector Steine’s sister. Oh, no. That’s horrible. Yes, it is bleeding horrible. Gillian must have told the eager little girl the story of that romantic meeting in Bloomsbury; and also told her that because old Penrose would never forgive his daughter for what she’d done, one day the estate would be left to the grandchildren – meaning herself and the inspector, who as yet knew nothing about it, because of the grandfather’s irrational loathing for the police. Are you absolutely sure, Mrs G, that the inspector’s sister was one of the victims? Well, yes, dear. I checked and she went missing at just this time. She withdrew her life savings. She told friends she had found a wonderful man through a dating agency. She even mentioned the unfinished house. And when Vivienne was arrested, she was wearing a brooch with the Penrose coat of arms on it – you could see it in the news pictures of her. But, of course, no one at the time put two and two together.
Twitten sighed. Would he (or could he) have worked out everything on his own? Perhaps he could, given time. But he was beginning to think that, quick as he was, his own imagination had limits – too many of the crimes in the background to this story were virtually unimaginable to him. While Mrs G saw the world of crime in all its venal reality, his own mind rebelled at the idea of people like Joseph Marriott and Captain Hoagland, who would scheme and lie like this – and actually murder fellow human beings – just for pecuniary ends. And as for the beautiful Adelaide (who had got away in the fog), she was almost the worst of the bunch. To think of that little girl riding in a car with Inspector Steine’s sister, sweetly begging for more family stories – while knowing full well that when the car arrived at its destination, the nice lady would be instantly killed and her body disposed of. He couldn’t get it out of his head. It made him want to cry.
Best not to explain this to Inspector Steine, Mrs G? That his sister was murdered? Absolutely. He must never know.
‘And looking on the bright side, dear,’ she had added, ‘we can safely assume he’ll never work it out for himself. He would never work it out in a million bleeding years.’
On Brunswick’s first day back at the office, Inspector Steine burst out of his room, carrying a letter and beaming.
‘Great news,’ he said. ‘According to this, I have inherited an estate in the West Country!’
‘Blimey,’ marvelled Mrs Groynes, convincingly. ‘Good for you, dear.’
Brunswick and Twitten offered their congratulations.
‘What a bally surprise, sir,’ said Twitten – which gained a nod of approval from Mrs Groynes.
‘And I don’t know how this happened,’ Steine continued, ‘but there were some papers I signed concerning Miss Vine, and I’ve been a bit worried about what had happened to them, but here they are!’
He held up some legal-looking documents.
‘They turned up on my desk this morning, along with my original will, which I’d lent to her solicitor. I suppose he returned them all to me.’
Twitten raised an eyebrow at Mrs Groynes. He would never dare to ask what had been done with ‘Angélique’ and ‘Monsieur Tussard’ at the wax museum by the terrifying-sounding Diamond Tony, but presumably Mrs G had retrieved these documents before their bodies were dumped off the West Pier. He didn’t ask what had happened to the missing gold, either – but he felt sure he could guess the answer to that one. (Incidentally, with her excellent instinct for tying up loose ends, Mrs Groynes would also intercept the return letter from Steine’s mother in Africa when it turned up a few days later. ‘Whatever it says, it will only confuse him, poor thing,’ she said to herself, as she dropped it in the bin.)
‘Oh, my goodness, it’s just occurred to me,’ said Steine. ‘What if that man was just pretending, too, and wasn’t a real solicitor?’
‘Oh, I’m sure he was,’ said Mrs G, laughing. ‘You’ve got a suspicious
mind, Inspector.’
‘Well, I suppose I do, that’s true. It comes with the job, unfortunately!’
‘But about the estate, sir?’ said Twitten.
‘Well, I now discover that my grandfather died around a year ago. To be honest, I hadn’t expected anyone to tell me when he died, as I assumed I’d never inherit anything. He wasn’t at all happy at the match my mother made, you see; and he particularly hated the fact she’d married into the police. They’ve been looking for my sister, because she was the first-named sole beneficiary.’
‘I didn’t even know you had a sister, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes, straight-faced.
‘Oh, I suppose not. I hadn’t seen her since I was fourteen, I’m afraid. It was a great sadness to Mother when Gillian cut herself off from us all. Now that I think about it, someone did ask me last year whether I knew her whereabouts, and they mentioned something about her having lived in Newmarket, but they didn’t say why they were looking.’
‘And they found her?’
‘No. Sadly, they drew a blank. That awful Miss Vine woman told me Gillian had died, of course, and now I must accept that it’s probably true.’
Steine’s face clouded over. Mrs Groynes and Twitten were both careful not to look at each other.
‘But it seems that after such a search proves fruitless,’ said Steine, brightening, ‘the law allows them to turn to the next option. So they did, and the second option was me! Apparently they have a small test for me (set by Grandfather) but, assuming I pass it, I will acquire a large country house and at least a million pounds!’
Colchester House had been boarded up. The real Lord Melamine (at home in Herefordshire, as he had always been throughout these weeks, if anyone had bothered to check) had been contacted by the new planning committee of the council in Brighton, to check his wishes concerning its future, and he told them they had his blessing to knock it down. Lord Loopy’s famous dislike for Brighton had been passed on to his eccentric son, and when he was informed that the whole site belonged to him, including the (former, now evacuated) wax museum and the (former, now evacuated) Black Cat, he said he’d be happy for them to raze the whole lot and build either a nice modern car park or a box-like conference centre, whichever was the less aesthetically in tune with the surrounding architecture.