A Shot in the Dark Page 3

  Inspector Steine was masterly when it came to explaining law to people who hadn’t studied it; in the years since the Middle Street Massacre, such entertaining explication had become his main career. For example, did you know it was illegal to take a billiard cue on a bus? Do you know about the origins of ‘legal tender’? If the young Queen’s playboy husband hypothetically requested you to pay his gambling debts, would it be treason to refuse?

  Well, you would be well informed in such fascinating areas if you had listened to Law and the Little Man, which over the past five years had confirmed Inspector Geoffrey Steine as a household name, and had familiarised the public with such arcane legal statutes as the Public Service Vehicles (Conduct of Drivers, Conductors and Passengers) Regulations, 1936. Honestly, if it weren’t for Sergeant Brunswick constantly trying to expose criminality in Brighton, Steine would be more than happy with his lot.

  Because the point was this: Steine loved the law, but he found the entire concept of criminals morally repugnant. When he adopted the famous faraway expression, he was not (as all supposed) thinking deeply: he was strenuously attempting to place himself in a calm green place beside a tinkling stream, with kingfishers flashing overhead and a snatch of Elgar on the breeze. It suited him perfectly to believe that, in a single afternoon, all the serious criminals in Brighton had killed each other, leaving the town crime-free for ever. Policing for him was about upholding the law and protecting the public, not dealing with unprincipled louts who would shoot you as soon as look at you.

  ‘All the Brighton criminals are dead, Brunswick,’ Steine had said to him a thousand times. ‘You saw them dead with your own eyes. And may I remind you, they even made a film about it!’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not quite correct, sir,’ Brunswick would reply. ‘Two gangs were wiped out, sir, I grant you. But there are still dozens of villains, sir. Dozens!’ And then he would start tiresomely reeling off names like Stanley-knife Stanley and Diamond Tony, Fiveways Potter and Ronnie the Nerk. ‘It’s my belief they’re all controlled by Terence Chambers in London, sir. Working through a trusted deputy, as yet unidentified.’

  It had been hard work suppressing Sergeant Brunswick’s policing zeal for all these years. Of late, Steine had resorted to a regular, meaningful reply to all of Brunswick’s reports of robberies and assaults: ‘I fear this case will baffle all our efforts to solve it.’ It had become a kind of mantra. No wonder Steine looked at this young Twitten now with a certain dread – especially when Brunswick handed Twitten the file concerning the break-ins.

  Steine tried to object. ‘Brunswick! We don’t even know who he is!’

  But Brunswick defied him. To Steine’s annoyance, he asked the young man, ‘Would you study this for me, son, and tell me what you make of it?’

  To which Twitten, anxious to impress, replied, ‘I already have, sir. And it’s surely obvious that the flame-haired female is the key.’

  * * *

  A. S. Crystal of the Daily Clarion alighted neatly from the train at 11 a.m., and adjusted his spectacles. He was happy because he had already composed a large part of his review. Technically, any critical assessment of the play need not be written until the week after next, when it had officially opened in London. It was also unfair (and deeply frowned on) to review a production before it was ready. But Crystal had decided to dispense with the usual protocol. His intention was to kill off A Shilling in the Meter before it was even born.

  As he left the station amid a herd of shrieking holidaymakers, he felt the cool punch of sea air in his face and stomach, and recoiled. There was nothing about Brighton that wasn’t tawdry and second-rate, he thought. Stuck badly on an old wall opposite the station entrance were garish, tattered posters advertising the delights on offer in the town beyond: the Palace Pier, the Hippodrome. At the Hippodrome the current star act was evidently ‘Professor Mesmer, the Last Living Phrenologist’ – which just about said it all. A fake, outmoded science exercised in a fake, outmoded place. ‘Come and have your bumps felt by the Great Professor Mesmer!’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Crystal, closing his eyes in disgust. Thank goodness the Clarion never required him to cover acts like that. He would rather (in that memorable image) cut both his hands off – except that, unlike Braithwaite, he appreciated what logistical difficulties that bloody job would present, if you actually tried to do it.

  * * *

  At the Theatre Royal, Braithwaite had finished with the reporter, and reluctantly met with his cast onstage in the darkened auditorium, on a set built to represent a grimy basement room lit by an upper, barred window and two naked light bulbs. On behalf of the others, who perched on the tea crates that comprised the major furnishings, Penny begged him to reconsider about the National Anthem.

  What he wanted this morning was to run a dress rehearsal of Act One. After that, he intended to take Penny to a boozy lunch in the Queen Adelaide with a chum of his from drama-school days, who happened to be in town. He was in no mood for protests and naysayers; in no mood for these irksome actors. He had embarked on his theatrical journey believing that he liked everything about it, but now he realised there was one small part that didn’t suit him at all: this disagreeable requirement of working with other people.

  He surveyed his cast now with genuine dislike. The young leading man Todd Blair was a vain little insect, of course – but since he played the part of Nick (and therefore delivered three-quarters of the dialogue), Braithwaite had been obliged not to express this opinion too openly. Sporting a fashionable quiff, Blair had recently appeared as a hopped-up juvenile delinquent in a Dirk Bogarde film, and was, truthfully, the main reason people were buying tickets, so if he wanted to address Braithwaite as ‘Daddy-o’ occasionally in rehearsals, that was clearly his prerogative.

  Where Braithwaite’s patience had not stood the test was when Blair challenged any single detail of Nick’s behaviour (‘I’m just wondering if even Nick would say something so mean, you know?’). Such impertinent questions were off-limits, and had resulted in a few nasty scenes, with Jack telling Todd that until he was Marlon Brando he could keep his ruddy trap shut.

  Penny, of course, playing the girlfriend Ruby had been a delight to work with, mostly because she loved him and thought (rightly) that he was not only masterly in bed, but a genius in an active relationship with the zeitgeist. Being a classy girl, she also knew when to keep quiet.

  But the others! The couple playing Nick’s stick-in-the-mud parents were obstinate time-server types who never expended a pound of effort if half an ounce would do; as for old Alec Forrester, who played the unnamed Man from the Gas Board, he’d been a thorn in Jack’s side from the start. Casting a former matinée idol in such a demeaning role had appealed to his iconoclastic nature, but any malicious pleasure had soon evaporated once rehearsals had begun. The man with the smallest part was the biggest irritant – forever campaigning to change his lines; making suggestions for improvements to the script; reminiscing at length about playing one of the Lost Boys in the original production of Peter Pan; making odious comparisons between this play and great works by Priestley, Rattigan and Maugham.

  It was true that this was Jack Braithwaite’s first mainstream production, and that a bit of humility might not have gone amiss. It was true that Jack Braithwaite knew pitifully little about the history of the British stage. But he was a rising star whose picture had appeared in magazines, and he wasn’t going to be humiliated by the actor playing Man from the Bloody Gas Board, however many anecdotes the tedious old stager could tell about what ‘Larry’ said to ‘Vivien’, and what ‘Johnnie’ had said to them both.

  Things came to a head between Alec and Jack at this meeting. It was hardly good for cast morale that a violent spat should break out between writer and Gas Board Man with a first performance looming later in the day. It was unfortunate for Braithwaite, too, that young Argus reporter Ben Oliver was sitting quietly at the back of the stalls in the dark, and witnessed the whole thing.

  But resentme
nts had been building between the two of them ever since Alec had first tactlessly pointed out that Man from the Gas Board was a ‘colourless cipher’ and needed (at the very least) a Scottish accent. Today, under the spotlights, as tempers flared between them, and Penny tried to intervene, Jack accused Alec of being a ‘pathetic toupéed has-been’, while Alec called Jack ‘jumped-up’ ‘talentless’, ‘derivative’ and (worst of all) ‘totally cloth-eared’.

  The two men behaved very differently during their argument. Jack became restive and loud, and started pacing the stage – from tin bath to ironing board, and back to tin bath – while Alec sat upright on his tea chest, hands on his knees. Todd Blair and the others started to quite enjoy it. The exchange might be acrimonious, but it was packed with home truths. For example, Alec Forrester actually was a has-been, and he did wear a toupée, and he was pathetic.

  And then Alec dropped his bombshell. ‘Well, we’ll see what Algernon makes of it, shall we?’

  For a moment confusion reigned. Algernon who?

  ‘You know him as A. S. Crystal, I suppose. Of the Clarion. I’ve invited him to see the play tonight, and asked him to pay particular attention to the under-written part of Man from the Gas Board. If I know Algernon – and I do know Algernon – his review will appear tomorrow.’

  Braithwaite was so shocked that he stopped pacing the stage, coming to rest near the ironing board. The others held their breath. ‘He can’t do that,’ he said. ‘It’s the first bloody performance!’

  ‘He shouldn’t, but he can,’ laughed Alec, nastily. ‘As you would know if you knew anything about the theatre.’

  And then Braithwaite did something that shocked everyone. He grabbed the iron from the ironing board and threw it full force at Alec Forrester. Penny screamed; Todd Blair shouted ‘My face!’; and all took cover, including Alec, whose ginger hairpiece fell off in the mêlée.

  Fortunately, the iron didn’t travel far, being heavier than it looked. It dropped like a stone without hitting anybody, just as the house manager yelled from the wings, ‘What’s happening here?’ and switched on the house lights to reveal a tableau of disarray on the stage, and at the back of the stalls a cub reporter from the Brighton Evening Argus nestled into his seat, making notes in an excited manner.

  ‘You!’ shouted the house manager. ‘Out!’

  ‘Just going,’ Ben Oliver called back, preparing to leave. ‘But bravo, everyone. Bravo!’

  * * *

  Back at the police station, Twitten explained how he had come to read the file on the break-ins.

  ‘It was while I was waiting for everyone to arrive in the office this morning,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Perhaps I should have waited?’

  ‘You most certainly should,’ said Steine.

  ‘But I found the statements so interesting I couldn’t put them down, sir. The fact that several of the victims received a visit from the same red-headed Opinion Poll lady – well, what a lead! She was obviously casing the joint for the burglar who came along later in the evening.’

  Steine harrumphed. ‘There’s no “obviously” about it.’

  ‘The inspector’s right,’ said Brunswick, loyally. ‘This is the real world, son. You’re not in Hendon now. It was only a couple of the victims who reported this woman, isn’t that right, sir?’

  ‘Just one or two, as I recall,’ said Steine.

  ‘It was four, sir! And I hope you won’t be cross, but I decided to telephone all the other victims to see if they’d had a visit from the Opinion Poll lady themselves –’

  ‘You did what?’ said Steine.

  ‘It seemed like the obvious next step, to establish the pattern. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable when it comes to mentioning details they think the police won’t consider relevant. At Hendon we were taught about it as “FOWPT”, or Fear of Wasting Police Time, sir. I can show you the relevant section in the latest training handbook if you like.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Steine.

  ‘Anyway, my hunch paid off, sir. All of them had received an identical visit!’

  ‘What?’ said Brunswick, a half-smile of astonishment on his face. This surely couldn’t be happening. Who was this boy?

  ‘I know, sir. All of them including the woman who lost the antique coins. She lives quite nearby in Upper North Street, so I’ve made an appointment to go and interview her this afternoon at half-past two.’

  Twitten paused. From the way everyone was looking at him, he sensed something was wrong, but he had no idea what it was. So he pressed on.

  ‘There’s just one more thing?’ He looked to his superior officers for a signal to continue, but they were too stunned to give it. There was an awkward pause. Spotting the problem, the charlady spoke up.

  ‘Go on, dear,’ she said, kindly.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Groynes. The thing is, the Opinion Poll lady always gave her respondents tickets to the Hippodrome for that evening, as a way of thanking them for their time, and no one had mentioned that in their statements, had they? To my mind, this omission was a classic example of witness “FOSTMAOS”, Fear of Saying Too Much About One’s Self, which is a recognised sub-division of FOWPT, Fear of Wasting Police Time. So if she’s handing out tickets to the Hippodrome, she might have some connection to that establishment, which I believe is in Middle Street, sir.’

  ‘I know where the Hippodrome is, thank you, Twitten,’ said Steine, feeling himself on firm ground at last.

  ‘There’s an old phrenologist topping the bill at the moment, sir,’ added Twitten. ‘But that might not be relevant.’

  He stopped and looked round expectantly. Oddly, there was no round of applause.

  Brunswick put his hands to his face.

  Mrs Groynes turned away, saying, ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I, dears?’

  Steine looked out of the window. His expression was suggestive of deep thought. (He saw two kingfishers, and heard the sound of distant panpipes.)

  ‘You can come with me this afternoon to Upper North Street if you’d like to, Sergeant Brunswick,’ Twitten added, excitedly. ‘After all, it is your case.’

  Two

  Sergeant James Brunswick – known to his family as Jim – was thirty-eight years old, a tall man with regular features and a slight limp from being shot in the leg by the villain Fat Victor on the one occasion the police managed to arrest him.

  He lived in a second-floor flat above a bicycle shop on the London Road with his auntie Violet, not far from where he’d been educated at the London Road Academy for Orphans, Waifs and Foundlings. His parents, who were now dead, had (interestingly) still been alive when little Jim was accepted as a pupil, aged five, by the foundling school, but they had managed to use some influence. In the years between the wars, you see, the London Road Academy had been one of the best of its kind in the country, financed by a generous bequest, and known as ‘the Eton of the Poor’. Alumni were now in parliament and in many branches of entertainment.

  ‘I was at school with him!’ was Brunswick’s regular cry, when listening to variety shows on the wireless with his auntie Vi on Saturday nights. He would often surprise people with the unlikely fact that the popular band leader Edmundo Ros was originally from Brighton, not Trinidad. No one believed him. (He was, in fact, mistaken.)

  Having joined the so-called ‘Boys’ Army’ straight from school in the 1930s, Jim Brunswick was twenty when hostilities broke out, and in the war had been a paratrooper dropped into various theatres of action, most notably Italy. While Inspector Steine had spent the period 1939–45 on the Home Front in the City of London, successfully guarding the Bank of England, and Constable Twitten had spent the war years as a precocious child begging to be allowed to solve enemy codes and thereby put paid to the protracted Battle of the Atlantic, Sergeant Brunswick had been jumping out of aeroplanes shouting ‘Geronimo!’, landing – alive, against the odds – behind enemy lines and engaging in mortal hand-to-hand combat.

  He never talked about the war. In Italy, there had b
een a woman – but Brunswick never spoke about her, either. He carried her picture in his wallet, though, as he carried her memory in his heart. Brunswick was still handsome in a certain light; he had a delicate mouth and good cheekbones; he had a full head of neatly cut brown hair; but he looked older than his age, and had an aura of despair that was, sadly, very off-putting to women.

  Much of his anguished state could be traced back to the Middle Street Massacre. From his point of view, that apocalyptic shoot-out had been a mixed blessing. Of all the lines in the film that people remembered, the outburst, ‘Eating flaming ice cream at a time like this!’ (which tended to raise a laugh), was the only one that had not been invented by the writer of the screenplay. Brunswick had in fact exclaimed, ‘Eating flaming ice cream at a time like this’ four times in Luigi’s that day, and if the circumstances ever repeated themselves, he would say it again. Forty-five criminals could have been charged with arms offences! What a policing bonanza! So, on the one hand, yes, it was like a miracle to Brunswick that the town’s worst and most notorious villains were wiped out at a single stroke, as if by an atomic bomb. The Giovedi family in particular had been a blight on the reputation of Brighton, operating so blatantly that police corruption was not so much suspected as assumed.

  But when the Giovedis and the Casino Gang were wiped out, Brunswick was painfully aware – as Inspector Steine was not – that it created no power vacuum in Brighton’s criminal underworld. ‘It’s just more nebulous now,’ he would sometimes complain to Mrs Groynes, the charlady, with a sigh. And she would say, ‘Nebulous, you say? That’s a bit vague, dear, how do you mean?’, while making him a nice cup of tea to take his mind off it.

  Oh, that nebulousness! It was so indistinct and hazy, so vague and unclear! Villainy still abounded in this town, but its source was obscure. The great Terence Chambers, safe all those miles away in the East End of London, was obviously the man in charge, but how? Who acted as his deputy in Brighton? Who were his men, even? In the old days, Brunswick at least knew the chain of command in each of the gangs. He also had informers in both camps – Dodgy Pierre (not actually French but affecting a French accent) worked as a waiter in the saloon bar at the Queen Adelaide and helped him with the Casino Boys; Barrow-boy Cecil (who sold wind-up toys from a tray outside the Regent Kinema) was his inside man with the Giovedis. But since the Massacre, Dodgy Pierre seemed to know rien and Cecil had slowly unwound, like one of his plastic toys. They were both still worth a few bob a month for keeping their eyes open, but that was it. The Massacre had been a massive setback to Brighton crime, but it had been a massive setback to detecting it, too.