A Shot in the Dark Page 4

  And so Brunswick had grown demoralised. As far as the world was concerned, he belonged to the most successful police constabulary in the country. But from the inside, if you told Inspector Steine that you had suspicions about a thug called Stanley-knife Stanley, he would merely joke, ‘I’d look out for him, if I were you, Brunswick. I hear he’s quite sharp!’ Ask, ‘Permission to go undercover, sir!’, and permission would be denied. Come up with a promising case, and Steine would say, ‘I fear this case will baffle all our efforts to solve it.’ Sometimes Brunswick seriously considered joining the Foreign Legion.

  ‘It’s his pride, Auntie!’ he would say sometimes at Sunday breakfast-time, when she served him his fried rashers and special black pudding. ‘If he’s forced to accept there’s still crime in Brighton, it will hurt his flaming pride!’

  His one consolation over these years had been the silver screen. Brunswick adored the pictures – and Brighton had a plethora of picture-houses. Police films were his favourite: The Blue Lamp, The Long Arm. He also loved the B-features with Edgar Lustgarten outlining successful investigations from the files in Scotland Yard. He attended the theatre quite frequently too, but he was less comfortable there because of the sheer envy that overwhelmed him in his seat in the royal circle: he yearned to join the actors on the stage; he felt (deludedly) that, at heart, he was one of them.

  Brunswick had actually stopped reading his favourite newspaper, the Daily Clarion – which covered crime stories especially well – just because its theatre critic A. S. Crystal was sometimes so vile and destructive where defenceless thespians were concerned. It was morally wrong to bully actors, in Brunswick’s view; like punching kittens.

  But more than the legitimate stage, Brunswick was drawn to variety, and that was why he relished Brighton. He visited the Hippodrome at every opportunity – ostensibly to pump old Stage Door Albert (another of his useless informants) for titbits, but mainly to slip inside and experience the buzz, the glitter, the cymbals, the ‘Ooh!’s and ‘Ah!’s. To adopt the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it seemed to Brunswick that there was no smell in the world like that of the hot oil in the footlights and the oranges in the pit.

  This past month, with Professor Mesmer at the top of the bill, Brunswick had been in the audience three times already. It was unusual for a novelty act to be the star turn: you’d expect a big-name comedian, or a pop star in blue jeans for the kiddies. But Mesmer was hugely popular. A terrific and genial showman with a bushy beard and Victorian top hat, he was a hypnotist who practised not only on the volunteers from the audience, but on the audience as a whole. Brunswick adored him. He could read a person’s character by touch alone! He could stimulate areas of the skull and induce laughter, tears, grandiosity.

  Of course, the audience expected the usual hypnotist-act items, such as making people squawk like chickens, bawl like babies and turn cartwheels, flashing their underwear. But what Professor Mesmer did was more impressive than that. Somehow, he entertained you whether you wanted him to or not. At the end of Professor Mesmer’s forty-five-minute spot, you felt that you sort of woke up, snapped out of it and, with a pleasant shudder, thought, ‘Where am I?’ And then, of course, you started applauding him to the rafters.

  * * *

  After the upsetting altercation with the Man from the Gas Board, Jack Braithwaite had preferred not to take his dress rehearsal after all, and had gone straight to the pub with Penny. He did not apologise about the iron. He did not explain to the house manager. But on the plus side, he didn’t stride over to Alec Forrester and kick his head in, either. He just said, angrily, ‘Penny, come with me,’ and exited, stage left.

  She caught up with him in the street, outside the stage door in Bond Street, where the brightness of the day, and the colour and noise of the milling holiday crowd, added to the unreality of what had happened inside. Jack was moving at speed through the throng on the pavement, but she ran and caught his arm.

  ‘Jack!’ she said. ‘Come back. You have to apologise.’

  She was scared at this moment; scared he would turn his anger on her. But when she saw the expression on his face – a look of shame and panic; a look of boyish mute appeal – she thought, ‘This is why I love you,’ and took him in her arms. He didn’t hug her back, but nor did he wriggle or push her away. It was about as tender as Jack Braithwaite knew how to be.

  ‘I don’t know why I did that,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘He provoked you,’ she said, supportively.

  ‘That kid from the paper saw it all!’

  ‘I know.’

  She gave him a steady look. ‘I need a drink,’ she said, with a laugh.

  ‘You’re on.’

  And she felt, as they walked wordlessly to the Queen Adelaide together, that maybe a deeper intimacy had been created between them by this unpleasant affair – which is the sort of thing that nice women like Penny sometimes sweetly delude themselves with, when involved with irredeemable egomaniacs like Jack.

  What preoccupied Penny as they walked along was that the trigger point for Jack’s violence had been the idea of a (slightly) premature review of A Shilling in the Meter. That’s what made it so hard to understand. She could appreciate why he was angered by Alec’s taunts, and by Alec’s entire pompous personality, and indeed by everything that Alec stood for. Where she lost sympathy was over this reviewing business.

  Jack’s hatred for critics in general, and Crystal in particular, was ridiculously exaggerated. Plays had to exist in the real world. They had to be seen, and judged. What was the point of performing them in a void? Personally, she was keen to land a part in a film quite soon, possibly alongside the dangerous-looking Todd Blair (they looked dreamy together on the poster for the play). There was no chance of a film part if the critics weren’t allowed to come and see her as the lovely, battered Ruby, whose Act One curtain-line (‘Nicky, please don’t! I was only stitching some nets!’), was guaranteed to break even the stoniest heart.

  Bobby Melba happened to look up just as Penny and Jack arrived in the saloon bar. He would never forget that first glorious sight of Penny at the side of his old drama-school acquaintance. He always remembered Jack’s demeanour with Penny – regarding her on his arm as if she were the lucky one: the little actress girlfriend of the charismatic theatrical genius. Whereas what Bobby saw immediately was the truth: Penny was a star.

  As it happens, Penny would never forget her first sight of Bobby, either: a slender young man in his twenties, wearing a fashionable suit and Italian leather shoes. In later life, when she was indeed a colossal star of stage and screen (and had been married five times), she often thought back to this first encounter with the man she so quickly loved and lost.

  He was so right for her. It was like meeting her other half, and she never got over him. She measured all the subsequent husbands against the feeling of intense attraction that she had on first seeing Bobby, and none of them came close. When she and Bobby locked eyes in that saloon bar, he stood up and simply smiled at her with his arms wide as if to say, in astonishment, ‘Now I am complete!’

  ‘Jack!’ said Bobby. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘Bobby Melba,’ chuckled Braithwaite. ‘Well, look at you. Like a peach!’

  While an oddly French-accented waiter was dispatched to get drinks, and Jack went to buy cigarettes, Penny and Bobby sat down. Bobby smiled at her conspiratorially, and she smiled back.

  ‘I’m Penny,’ she said, quickly shaking his hand – glad that Jack, occupied with feeding coins into the cigarette machine, couldn’t see. She knew from past experience that Jack could react badly when his bad manners were drawn attention to. Interestingly, however, this never taught him to have better manners in the first place.

  Bobby was soft-spoken without being quiet. ‘I wish I could come and see the play, Penny,’ he was saying, as Jack returned with his pack of Woodbines. ‘I’m sure you’re sensational.’

  As Jack sat down, and the drinks arrived, Bobby repeated what he had said to
Penny – or part of it, anyway.

  ‘I was just saying, Jack, I wish I could come and see your play.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘But I go on myself at half-past nine.’ He turned to Penny to explain. ‘I’m the so-called Last of the Phrenologists,’ he said, with an air of self-deprecation. He lifted his glass. ‘Professor Mesmer, at your service! At the Hippodrome for a month – a whole month, Jack! It’s unheard of.’

  Penny’s eyes lit up. ‘Is that feeling people’s heads for bumps?’ she asked.

  Jack gave her a mocking push. ‘Don’t pretend to be interested, you phoney cow!’ he barked, laughing, and lit a cigarette. Bobby winced, but Penny didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘You’re very young to be a professor,’ she said. Her eyes were green, he noticed.

  ‘It’s more of an honorary title.’ Bobby smiled. ‘Self-conferred.’

  ‘Do you wear a self-conferred beard?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And a hat. I am a master of disguise.’

  He turned to Jack. ‘So are your cast behaving themselves?’ he asked. At which point Penny felt she should dive in and change the subject, and ask how they had met at drama school.

  It turned out that Bobby had been a very promising actor, getting good parts in student productions, but then something had happened (‘beyond my control, I’m afraid’), and he’d decided not to go into the profession, after all. He had dropped out in the final year, swapping Hamlet for head bumps, apparently without a qualm. ‘A thousand people a year play the Dane; no one else can do what I do,’ he had told the affronted school principal on the day he officially hung up his tights.

  The last time Bobby and Jack had met, they were both in shows in Leeds – Bobby as Professor Mesmer at the famous City Varieties, Jack upstairs in a pub playing an activist Geordie miner in an outstanding little play called Clogs on the Batty Stones – a play that had received such a crushing and vindictive twelve-word review from A. S. Crystal when it reached London that the mortified writer had left the business altogether and gone to live in Nova Scotia.

  ‘I thought I saw him the other day,’ Bobby said, conversationally. ‘He must have come back.’

  ‘Who?’ said Jack, confused. ‘Not Crystal?’

  Penny reached out a restraining hand.

  ‘No, no. I meant your friend Harry Perks. The man who wrote Clogs on the Batty Stones.’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘Yes. Here in Brighton.’

  ‘But he went to Canada.’

  ‘Well, he must have come back. He’s working in an ice cream place on the seafront. I suppose he felt he couldn’t face going back up north.’

  ‘Oh, poor Harry!’ said Jack.

  ‘He hasn’t forgotten or forgiven, either. He says if he ever sees A. S. Crystal, he’ll kill him.’

  ‘Not if I do it first!’ said Jack.

  Bobby laughed, but he noticed that no one else did.

  So Penny explained how Crystal was possibly planning to review Jack’s play ahead of the opening. ‘We’re all quite cross about it,’ she said, brightly. And then, heroically changing the subject, ‘But tell me about the time when you were both in Leeds. What was it like?’

  Jack gratefully went along with Penny.

  ‘Leeds, well, yes.’ He racked his brain for an anecdote – sensibly avoiding anything that involved mentioning previous beautiful girlfriends (all actresses). Amazingly, one came up. ‘Well, here’s a thing, Bobby,’ he said. ‘You remember that stuck-up landlady I was staying with?’

  ‘The one who fancied you?’

  Jack ignored this. For a start, all his landladies fancied him. ‘I told you she had those nice bits of Lalique glass, do you remember that?’

  Bobby pulled a funny face. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  Penny laughed. Why would he remember?

  ‘Well,’ Jack continued, ‘silly mare. A day or two after you and I met, she got this posh bint calling round in the afternoon pretending to be doing an opinion poll of some sort, and she fell for it. And that same bloody evening she was robbed!’

  * * *

  Brunswick and Twitten were on their way to interview the lady in Upper North Street, whose antique coins had been taken in a break-in. It was a beautiful summer day, warm but with a brisk sea breeze, and Brunswick was lighter of step than he had been for years.

  He raised his hat to say ‘Good day’ to holidaymakers; gallantly offered help to a woman with a little dog; gave directions to the Pavilion; he even held up the traffic to let a party of French children cross the road. He was out on proper detective business and it felt good, even if he had to suffer this precocious young Twitten at his side, explaining the latest thinking (at Hendon) on using cross-checking of criminal records to detect crimes. (‘I could draw you the basic diagram, sir.’)

  Normally Brunswick spent his days begging the inspector to let him go undercover, with the inspector refusing to let him on the grounds that a) he never learned anything of importance by doing it, and b) the one time he’d gone undercover before, he’d been shot in the leg by Fat Victor. Being out and about in the sea air, on a legitimate police investigation, accompanied by a fresh-faced young copper, made for a very agreeable change.

  ‘I hope you won’t mind my asking this, sir,’ said Twitten, hesitantly, as they walked uphill on North Street. ‘But is it true that the inspector won’t even countenance the idea that crime takes place in Brighton?’

  Brunswick didn’t know how to answer. ‘Where on earth did you hear that, son?’ he asked.

  ‘Mrs Groynes the charlady, sir. She seems to have taken me under her wing. Is it true, sir?’

  This was awkward. ‘Well, yes and no,’ said Brunswick, tactfully. ‘But mainly yes. I suppose it’s better that you know about it straight away. It’s a flaming nuisance, son, but it’s true.’

  ‘But if that’s true, it would be a scandalous dereliction of duty, sir. I have to say, I can’t quite believe it.’

  Brunswick shrugged. He didn’t really care whether Twitten believed it or not. As they passed the Regent Kinema on the hill, he gave a secret wink to Barrow-boy Cecil, who was attempting to flog small wind-up rabbits from the top of a box covered in a green velour tablecloth, calling out, ‘See the bunny run! See the bunny jump! Only half a crown!’

  ‘Who was that, sir?’ said Twitten, eagerly, when they were safely past.

  Brunswick looked shifty. ‘Who was who?’

  ‘The man you signalled to, sir. With the bunnies. Is he a grass, sir?’

  ‘I didn’t signal to anyone.’

  ‘You did, sir, I saw you.’

  But Brunswick refused to answer, and as they crossed by the Clock Tower, there was a brief, welcome lull in the conversation. He never seemed to stop talking, this boy.

  Sadly, the lull was soon over.

  ‘Well, I must say, I think we’re jolly lucky we caught on to the Opinion Poll scam before some innocent householder was murdered,’ Twitten said, brightly.

  ‘Murdered? Why should anyone get murdered?’

  ‘I fear it’s inevitable, sir.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. This sort of crime, involving disguise, is commonly associated with narcissism, you see. And a cornered narcissist is highly dangerous. It’s pure bally luck that so far none of his victims has come home at an inconvenient moment and been struck down. Yes, it doesn’t do to underrate the latent turbulence of the narcissist personality, sir.’

  Brunswick didn’t like the sound of any of this, especially as it seemed to be mostly in a foreign language. He decided to say nothing.

  ‘Psychology is a bit of an interest of mine, sir,’ Twitten explained. ‘But to be honest, I was brought up with it. My father is the pre-eminent criminal psychologist in Britain. He’s the author of Inside the Head of the Law Breaker, which was a best-selling book about ten years ago. He followed it up with Behind the Eyes of a Killer and Under the Lid of a Psycho. It was a very lucrative line of work for a while. I think that’s
why he hoped I’d turn to anthropology instead. He knows too bally much about the dark side of human nature, sir.’

  They had reached the Clock Tower, and Brunswick stopped walking. Together they looked down West Street to the sea.

  ‘Look,’ said Brunswick. ‘About the inspector. About what you said just now. The hard part is, he thinks I see villainy just to spite him.’

  ‘But why would you do that? I don’t understand.’

  ‘He says I want to disprove the success of the Middle Street Massacre out of some sort of envy, or revenge, just because I was portrayed as an idiot in the film.’

  They moved on again, uphill.

  ‘Well, I hate to speak out of turn, sir,’ said Twitten, at last, ‘but I do think that’s a very unfair analysis on his part. You are clearly a very dedicated, if unimaginative, policeman. Although he does have a point: they did make you seem quite stupid in the film.’

  Brunswick groaned. ‘I know, son.’

  ‘It was terribly funny, sir!’

  ‘I know. But the result is, every cocky kid in Brighton knows he can get a rise out of me, doesn’t he, just by talking about eating flaming ice cream. Eating flaming ice cream at a time like this, Sergeant Brunswick? I hear it every day of my life, son. It’s even more annoying when I’m actually eating flaming ice cream.’

  They had arrived at Upper North Street.

  ‘This is the house, sir!’ exclaimed Twitten, unlatching the painted garden gate. ‘Would you like me to take the lead in the questioning?’