The Man That Got Away

by Lynne Truss

  At the railway station, Old Ted in the Left Luggage office was informed he would receive a small medal for bravery from the Evening Argus, which was the paper’s way of acknowledging it had put him through yet another nightmare experience (and please don’t sue). The ruse worked: he was thrilled to bits. A medal was really something, and the ceremony was recorded on the front page of the paper. His wife cheered up for the first time since 1939.

  Meanwhile Ben Oliver (who had been anxious about his future, given how badly the operation at the station turned out) was surprised to find himself lauded as a hero by the editor, and given a pay rise. His grisly first-hand accounts of the two Mafia-style executions at the station sent circulation figures through the roof. It transpired that the more Oliver warned the people of Brighton that cold-blooded killers stalked their streets, the more they lapped it up. It was decided not to credit Inspector Steine with the whole idea of the ‘missing dossier’ story, however. Given the way things had gone, he would not have been pleased with this honour. Instead, Oliver gave the impression it had mostly been his own idea. For this, Twitten was very grateful, and a kind of friendship was forged.

  ‘So who do you think was responsible for those shootings, Constable?’ Oliver asked him one day.

  ‘Oh, you know what I think, Mr Oliver. Mrs Groynes is usually responsible for everything.’

  At which Oliver had pulled an amusing face and said, ‘Ah. And one day I and everyone else will think it too?’

  And Twitten said, ‘You will, Mr Oliver. You will.’

  Meanwhile, what else had happened? Henry Hastings gave himself up for the accidental killing of Dickie George, but luckily for him, no one was remotely interested, so he went back to the sweet shop to clear up the mess left by molten humbug (it involved using a pneumatic drill). A small crowd watched him do it. It turns out that people will gather to watch anything whatsoever when they’re on holiday, especially when it’s free.

  Tommy Drumsticks, finding himself without a band to play for – and guessing correctly that Mrs Groynes was not particularly impressed by his record at the Black Cat – sensibly skipped town and got a job (briefly) backing the eminent skiffle star Lonnie Donegan.

  Mr Reinhardt, in France, gave way to regrets of various kinds: for his career, for his good name, for the way he’d allowed wicked criminals to corrupt him. He also regretted that there were uncashed cheques to the value of seven thousand pounds in his safe when it was cleared out by Peter Dupont.

  At the council offices, Lillian the disillusioned secretary applied for the job left open by Dupont’s death. But at the interview she was told that, even if she got it, she would be paid nothing like as much as the teenaged Peter had been. She resigned.

  Phyllis, disenchanted with the Brighton Belles, began the process for enrolment with the police.

  Mrs Rogers received a confusingly businesslike letter from the real Lord Melamine, informing her that Colchester House was to be emptied of its contents and then demolished, and that she should vacate as soon as convenient. She never discussed those short, happy weeks at Colchester House with anyone. Thus, she never found out that the two posh men who had shared such thrilling confidences with her were actually unscrupulous villains and liars, who had met violent deaths within minutes of leaving the house. Years later, she still regarded Captain Hoagland as the nicest and most decent man she had ever met.

  As for young Shorty, he was finally able to catch up with his reading. In fact, it was rather lovely. He arrived at his usual leaning-spot one morning to find a string bag tied to the lamp-post stuffed with fresh copies of the Dandy, Beano, Topper, Wizard, Beezer and Chips (which featured a dog detective). He couldn’t believe it. ‘Well done, love. I couldn’t have managed without you,’ said an accompanying note from Mrs Groynes. He felt so proud, he thought he would burst.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Mrs Groynes,’ said Twitten, one day when they were alone.

  ‘About what, dear?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking that I don’t seem to be as angry with you as I was before.’

  ‘Really, dear?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got used to it – that you are what you are, and that the others don’t have a bally clue. I used to find it hard to grasp, for some reason, but I don’t any more. I even quite enjoy it.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘I mean, this morning, when Sergeant Brunswick came in and said that on the Palace Pier last night a large hole had been sawn in the planks just below the accounts office and their safe had gone through it, I didn’t even have to look at you. I knew you’d done it. I just said, “Oh, who would do such a bally thing? I expect we’ll never know”, and got on with eating my lovely sugary Dundee cake.’

  ‘I saw you, dear. Cool as a cucumber.’

  ‘And I expect you’d been planning it for weeks, Mrs G?’

  ‘Try years, dear.’

  ‘Really? Well, in that case, jolly well done.’

  ‘Thank you, dear. It means a lot. I’d thought about postponing it, but in the end I told the boys to go ahead. They’d been learning underwater safe-cracking techniques and what not; hired all the equipment. The trick, as you can imagine, was to deal with the obvious problem of the safe dropping straight to the seabed, on account of being so heavy. But you don’t want to hear about my problems with anti-gravitational magnetic pull, now do you, dear?’

  ‘No, indeed. Although a huge electromagnet was stolen not long ago from the Royal Observatory, I believe. But I expect that was a coincidence.’

  She came and sat beside him.

  ‘What I said to the lads, dear, was that I needed something to cheer me up right now. I know I don’t show it, but I do have feelings, you know.’

  Twitten bit his lip. He wasn’t sure what he was expected to say.

  ‘Are you perhaps still upset about Captain Hoagland, Mrs G?’

  ‘Of course I’m still bleeding upset about Captain Hoagland!’

  Twitten hesitated.

  ‘Look, this might not be the right time to mention it, but about the Dundee cake, which is absolutely super—’

  But Mrs Groynes signalled to him to stop talking. To his alarm, she went to the door and locked it. She evidently wanted another serious talk.

  ‘Look, it’s nice what you said just now, dear. About not being angry any more. But it’s not enough. What I’m wondering is, have you reconsidered my offer, dear? Because I’m serious. We really could help each other out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I had reconsidered it, exactly.’

  ‘I mean, I did help you, didn’t I, with your Dupont thing? I don’t like to blow my own trumpet, but it was me that had the idea about the “missing dossier” story that flushed out the murderer – even if I wasn’t ecstatic with who it flushed out. It was me that explained to you that people like the Bensons don’t go around slicing people’s throats in broad daylight, and helped you get off the wrong track. The thing is, dear, I’m very interested in helping you; I almost can’t stop myself. Crime is my life, you see, and it always has been. So what do you say?’

  ‘What I mainly say is, could you unlock the door, please, Mrs Groynes?’

  ‘Oh. All right.’

  She did so.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘And what do you say now, dear?’

  ‘I’m thinking, Mrs Groynes. I’m thinking.’

  The following day, a strange, hushed atmosphere greeted Sergeant Brunswick as he limped into the station with his walking stick. Beyond the door to Inspector Steine’s room could be heard odd noises of furniture being moved about and moaning noises that sounded animal – rather than human – in origin.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he hissed.

  ‘We don’t know,’ whispered Twitten. ‘But we’re guessing it’s bad news about the money.’

  Mrs Groynes knocked softly on the door.

  There was no answer. She knocked again.

  ‘What is it?’ came a small voice.

  ‘Bit of lovely Dund
ee cake, dear?’

  The door opened, and Steine stood before them all. He looked bug-eyed and distraught. While arguably the other people in the room had been through more than he had recently – getting shot, for example, or having their hearts broken by the only man they ever bleeding loved – this had been a terrible period for him. It had been up and down, up and down. First he had a lovely niece, but then he didn’t have a lovely niece. Then he had a fortune, but then he didn’t have a fortune. And to top it all, a heavy safe on the Palace Pier had apparently fallen through the boards into the sea, and the pier’s owners were insisting it was a police matter, when it might equally be a case of woodworm.

  Distractedly, he sat in Twitten’s chair and started to drink Twitten’s cup of tea. The others discreetly looked away.

  ‘What happened, sir?’ asked the sergeant, politely. ‘You look flaming fed up, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  Steine steadied himself.

  ‘Look, Brunswick, I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a book called Noblesse Oblige?’

  ‘But I have, sir.’

  Steine looked outraged. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes. I read it the other day. I found it very interesting.’

  This was not the answer Steine had hoped for.

  ‘I’ve read it, too, dear,’ volunteered Mrs Groynes. ‘In fact, I got everyone down the Princess Alice to read it, too, and blow me, we’ve talked of little else in the evenings these past weeks. Phone for the fish-knives, Norman! It was a real eye-opener, that’s what we all thought. Looking-glass, indeed!’

  Steine groaned. ‘And Twitten? Need I ask?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to say, sir. Noblesse Oblige was the book I was telling you about when we first visited the Maison du Wax. When I asked you about mirrors and so on, and you got so upset.’

  Steine narrowed his eyes. ‘So you’re telling me you’ve all read this blasted book?’

  ‘Seems like we have,’ said Mrs Groynes. ‘But as Miss Mitford would probably never find herself saying, dear, what’s that got to do with the price of fish?’

  ‘Well, everything, unfortunately. As you may remember, my grandfather had left one small stipulation in his will.’

  ‘The test you mentioned?’ said Twitten.

  ‘Yes, the test I mentioned. Having read this blasted book when it was published last year, just before he died, my grandfather saw a perfect way of determining whether his socially contaminated descendants were up to snuff – by testing their vocabulary!’

  ‘But we can all help you with that, sir,’ said Twitten, delighted. ‘If he wanted to check that you knew the U words and not the Non-U words, we could all help. Because, as we’ve already established, we’ve all read the book.’

  ‘Too late, I’m afraid, Twitten. There was just one question, and it was this: did I own a cruet set?’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Brunswick.

  ‘Oh, no!’ gasped Mrs G.

  ‘And what did you say, sir?’ asked Twitten, anxiously.

  ‘Naturally, I answered yes, thank you, I owned two cruet sets, as it happened. I had a very nice home.’

  The others recoiled in horror.

  ‘Oh, sir. I’m so sorry,’ said Twitten.

  ‘And as a consequence, I will continue to live in my nice home with my two cruet sets, and not own Penrose House with its legendary knot garden, grotto, polo ponies and extensive private beach!’

  He looked so sorry for himself that they all felt sorry for him, too – but only up to a point.

  ‘The constable did keep telling you to read that bleeding book, dear,’ said Mrs Groynes. She turned to Twitten, who was trying to remonstrate with her. ‘Well, you did!’

  They all sat in silence for a moment – Brunswick in pain from multiple injuries; Twitten experiencing the mixed delights of being proved right; Mrs Groynes enjoying the discomfort of everyone else; and Inspector Steine wishing he had never heard of the Maison du Wax, or Adelaide Vine, or Penrose House, or (come to that) the Brighton Constabulary.

  ‘Can anyone say anything to cheer me up?’ he said, at last.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ volunteered Twitten. ‘I believe I can.’

  They all looked at him.

  ‘How?’ said Steine.

  ‘Ask me about Mrs Groynes, sir. Do the question-and-response thing.’

  Steine narrowed his eyes. ‘This isn’t a trap?’ he said.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Should I ask her to leave the room?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘All right.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Constable Twitten, tell me your thoughts concerning Mrs Groynes, our lovable cockney charlady.’

  ‘I believe she is a wicked criminal capable of cold-blooded murder, sir.’

  There was a general ‘tsk’ and groan of disappointment from the other three, but Steine continued.

  ‘And on a scale of one to ten, how convinced are you of this?’

  Twitten took a deep breath. It was his big moment.

  ‘Nine,’ he said.

  And while the others said, ‘Well done, Twitten’ and ‘Good lad’, Mrs Groynes came over and hugged him, and actually burst into tears.

  Acknowledgements

  Huge thanks are due again to my editor Alison Hennessey at Raven Books, and to my agent Anthony Goff at David Higham Associates. I have never felt less alone in the enterprise of writing books. Thanks also to Marigold Atkey for her eagle eye.

  As with the previous book in this series, I am indebted to my own radio comedy Inspector Steine – but have been far from constrained by it. However, the voices of the regular radio cast who helped me create these characters will never desert me, and I will thank those clever actors for ever.

  In The Man That Got Away, the immediate inspiration for the terrible wax museum came from a 1951 film Penny Points to Paradise (starring members of The Goons, before they were famous). It is a rightly obscure film, but it contains excellent location shots of Brighton’s traffic-free seafront (the museum interior scenes are clearly done in a studio). It is possible that I visited Brighton’s own Louis Tussaud’s on King’s Road in the 1970s (I definitely remember a prone Sleeping Beauty with the chest wheezily going up and down) but by the time I came to live on the coast the wax museum had long gone (it closed in 1981). The grand regency abode Colchester House is a complete invention, as are the streets to either side, but Brighton aficionados are welcome to imagine it roughly on the site of the present-day Brighton Centre.

  The highly unpleasant ‘unfinished house’ scam I did not invent. It was a ‘true’ crime from the early 1950s that I found dramatically recreated in the B-feature series Scotland Yard (presented by Edgar Lustgarten). In the real case of the unfinished house, the perpetrators disposed of the body parts in barrels of tar, and sent postcards from the victims ostensibly on holiday in Switzerland. Thinking about this now, I have to admit I didn’t check whether ‘The Unfinished House’ was a true-life case or not. The less heinous ‘gold-brick scam’ was certainly a reality, however: I found it described in Sir Harold Scott’s very readable Penguin original about Scotland Yard first published in 1954. (He also mentions the Black Museum containing the enormous socks worn by the super-quiet burglar christened ‘Flannelfoot’ by the Metropolitan Police.)

  Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige was very much a talking-point of 1956–7, and I felt it was a book that any clever policeman would lap up. After writing The Man That Got Away, however, I watched the US series Manhunt (about the search for the Unabomber) and discovered that even as late as the 1980s the FBI had little faith in linguistic analysis as a means of identifying criminals. Yet again, I’m pleased to say, Constable Clever-Clogs Twitten was brilliantly ahead of his time.

  A Note on the Author

  Lynne Truss is a columnist, writer and broadcaster whose book on punctuation Eats, Shoots & Leaves was an international bestseller. She has written extensively for radio, and is the author of six previous novels, as well as a non-fiction account (Get Her Off the Pi
tch!) of her four years as a novice sportswriter for The Times. On radio, she is currently engaged in writing a continuing sequence of short stories for Radio 4 entitled Life at Absolute Zero. Her columns have appeared in the Listener, The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and Saga. She lives in Sussex and London with two dogs.

  Also available by Lynne Truss

  A Shot in the Dark

  A Constable Twitten Mystery

  ‘More Marx Brothers than Agatha Christie, this is crime fiction turned on its head – a giddy spell of sheer delight’ Daily Mail

  The charming first novel in a new comic crime series, from one of Britain's most-loved writers, the incomparable Lynne Truss.

  Brighton, 1957. Inspector Steine rather enjoys his life as a policeman by the sea. No criminals, no crime, no stress.

  So it’s really rather annoying when an ambitious – not to mention irritating – new constable shows up to work and starts investigating a series of burglaries. And it’s even more annoying when, after Constable Twitten is despatched to the theatre for the night, he sits next to a vicious theatre critic who is promptly shot dead part way through the opening night of a new play.

  It seems Brighton may be in need of a police force after all…

  ‘[An] entertaining new crime series … Truss’s affection for a rollicking, twisty caper has transferred to the page with ease … There’s some fine storytelling on display here’ Observer