A Shot in the Dark Page 5

  Brunswick pondered this outrageous suggestion.

  ‘No, thank you, son,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you what. I’ll do the questioning and you can draw a diagram of it afterwards, how’s that?’

  * * *

  Inspector Steine left a message for Crystal at the station, telling him to rendezvous at Luigi’s on the seafront. It was far too nice a day to spend entirely indoors: along the promenade the bunting strung between the lamp posts was dancing and rattling in the breeze, and from the modest bandstand between the piers came distant comforting oom-pah-pahs.

  But it wasn’t just that Steine wanted to be out and about for its own sake. He preferred to meet Crystal in a public place. The tone of that letter had not been friendly; it seemed to imply that Steine should have ‘solved’ the Aldersgate Stick-up – as if such a thing had been possible in the absence of information! Demanding for crimes to be ‘solved’ was an ignorant and unreasonable position to take, in Steine’s view. It was simplistic. Many crimes went unsolved in this world; it was very common for a crime to go unsolved. In many ways, Steine felt that an unsolved crime was more satisfying – in philosophical terms – than a solved one. Complete in itself, it had more integrity as a concept. Once you started trying to solve it, it came apart in unattractive ways.

  But you couldn’t expect a mere layman to grasp such a high-minded abstract argument. Not many people knew this, but Steine had at one time hoped to become a professional philosopher. The nearest he’d got, however, was years ago in Bloomsbury, helping Bertrand Russell onto a number 14 bus, while at the same time informing him that he couldn’t carry his billiard cue.

  So Steine had chosen Luigi’s partly because it was a public place, but also out of instinct. He was uncomfortable about seeing Crystal, and it was his usual practice, when he felt uncomfortable, to eat ice cream. Later, when the day’s events had unfolded in their unexpectedly grisly way, Steine was glad that at least Crystal had experienced a superlative chocolate sundae at Luigi’s before meeting his spectacular end.

  ‘Speaking personally, I think if I were going to be assassinated later in the day, I’d certainly want one of Luigi’s ice creams to be my last meal,’ he announced to the gentlemen of the press – and for many years afterwards Luigi’s adopted this dubious endorsement in their advertising.

  Old Luigi himself served Inspector Steine, as he always endeavoured to do. It was a busy and bright ice cream parlour, with high swivelling stools at a chrome-edged counter, and eight booths, each with red leatherette upholstery, and shiny-topped tables the colour of HP sauce. In the next booth, sitting alone facing Steine, was a delinquent-type youth with rolled-up sleeves, flicking through the pages of an ABC Film Review with a picture of James Dean on the cover. On the walls were black-and-white photographs of Luigi’s on the day of the Middle Street Massacre: the place packed with members of the Brighton Constabulary all intently eating Knickerbocker Glories with special long-handled spoons.

  In reality, no one had brought a camera to Luigi’s on that famous day; the shots had been staged afterwards, which explained why Sergeant Brunswick was absent. He had refused to take part in the reconstruction. Partly, he thought it undignified; partly he disapproved of fabricated evidence of any sort. But mainly he could never square it with his conscience that while he had indeed fumed about eating flaming ice cream, he had, in the end, been persuaded by Inspector Steine to consume a delicious rum-baba.

  The man who brought Inspector Steine’s tutti-frutti and Ovaltine to his table was a rugged-looking individual Steine had never seen before, but the inspector took little notice of him as he approached, having brought along an ancient file concerning the Aldersgate Stick-up, to refresh his memory. Consulting the contents, he was reminded that Crystal had been the assistant manager of the bank, and had been an outstandingly helpful witness. He had also recklessly antagonised the armed robbers while they were about their nefarious business, virtually asking to be shot.

  A police photo of Crystal was attached to the file, and Steine was studying it in his booth when the man carrying the tutti-frutti arrived and let out a cry of surprise. Luigi was there in a moment. ‘Harry!’ he beseeched. ‘Wassa wrong with you?’

  Luigi took the bowl of ice cream and mug of Ovaltine from Harry’s shaking hands, and placed them on the table. ‘Isspector, I so sorry,’ he said. ‘I get you wafer, yes?’

  And Steine – somewhat baffled, but latching on to the word ‘wafer’ – instantly cheered up and put the whole incident behind him.

  Crystal arrived at Luigi’s soon after. He was evidently cross about finding Steine absent from the police station; he had been redirected by a wittering charwoman.

  ‘Steine,’ he said, as he reached the table.

  ‘Crystal,’ Steine responded, standing up – not noticing how the boy with the movie magazine in the next booth reacted as if electrocuted at the name (it was Todd Blair, of course). The two men shook hands. Steine sniffed the air, bothered by something. A tiny whiff of Crystal’s body odour had reached his nose. He sniffed again, and shrugged. ‘So what brings you to Brighton?’

  ‘Some ghastly play,’ said Crystal, unbuckling the belt of his raincoat, and removing it. As he did so, a pungent gale was released, which made the inspector gape in shock and sit down involuntarily. Crystal sat down opposite.

  ‘A play, you say?’ said Steine in a strangled voice, coughing.

  Crystal opened his briefcase and withdrew a sheet with the bare details typed on it. He handed it to Steine and then studied the menu with his glasses off.

  ‘A Shilling in the Meter – thrilling new play by enfant terrible Jack Braithwaite’ the announcement said. Below was a plot outline and a list of cast members. It might have been in Sanskrit for all the sense it made to Steine. He hardly ever went to the theatre; he was more of a Home Service and Slippers man himself.

  ‘Alec Forrester’s name rings a bell,’ he said, at last. ‘If it’s the same man, I’m surprised he’s still alive. My mother saw him in Ivor Novello musicals in the 1920s.’

  The youth in the next booth was now taking such an obvious interest in the conversation that he had quite forgotten his magazine and was narrowing his eyes, while running a practised hand through his quiff. He was quite handsome, Steine noted. A bit like an actor.

  ‘Terrible ham nowadays,’ said Crystal, referring to Alec Forrester. His thin voice somehow made every utterance sound mean. ‘Deluded, too. Thinks he’s a theatrical Olympian, when in fact he’s just a has-been.’

  ‘Poor chap,’ said Steine.

  ‘Oh, don’t waste your sympathy there, Steine. Oh, no, no, no. But the things he’s been telling me about this play! He loathes it! He’s hoping I’ll say he’s the best thing in it, but there’s no chance of that.’

  Crystal lowered his voice. ‘He’s playing the part of Man from the Gas Board! And he wears a toupée!’

  * * *

  After saying goodbye to Jack and Penny, Bobby took himself down to the Palace Pier. He often went to noisy places when he needed to think. So he positioned himself between the ghost train and the helter skelter, where the train rattled loudly on its narrow track and bells jangled, and ghoulish ‘Whoooo!’ noises resulted in demented female screams, and hooters hooted, and bodies thundered down the spiralling slide on thick prickly mats – and there he stood and lit a Senior Service and thought about Penny.

  He thought she was the most beautiful person he had ever met. He thought that Jack was a vain brute who didn’t deserve her. He also thought, regretfully, that she was a moral sort of girl to whom he could never confess the sorts of things he did under cover of being Professor Mesmer. Even Jack would be shocked if he knew about those.

  Was Jack’s behaviour getting out of hand, though? When he had briefly popped to the Gents, Penny had told Bobby about the incident with the iron that morning; she had defended Jack’s actions on the grounds that emotions were running high, and that Alec had committed a very disloyal act by inviting that critic d
own from London. She also said Jack had been wonderfully contrite. But she was obviously worried.

  Bobby thought she was right to be so. He didn’t tell her the story, but once, at drama school, Jack had deliberately wounded another student during a fencing class. At the time everyone believed it to be an accident, but Bobby knew better: it had been coldly premeditated. Jack had harboured a grudge for eighteen months, just biding his time for a shot at revenge. And when the chance came, he took it.

  ‘I think he’s quite vengeful,’ he had said to Penny, leaving it at that. And it was true. He was. Although Jack had indeed been born in Portsmouth, he had absorbed much from his Yorkshire-born mother. ‘Keep a stone in thy pocket for seven year,’ she had told him, in his cot, like something out of a Brontë novel. ‘Turn it and keep it seven year longer, that it might be ever ready to thine hand when thine enemy draws near.’

  ‘Bobby! Is that you?’ He turned and saw with pleasure his favourite person in Brighton (‘Brighton Auntie’ he used to call her), waving from the crowd, conspicuous by her neat, wasp-waisted figure and her striking auburn hair.

  * * *

  From that convenient booth in the ice cream parlour (luckily upwind from Crystal), Todd Blair heard quite a lot to amuse him over the next half hour. What Crystal had said about Alec Forrester was hilarious; he could hardly wait to get back to the Theatre Royal and tell stuck-up Alec what his old chum Algernon really thought of him. ‘You’re toast in tomorrow’s paper, granddad,’ he would inform the proud old-timer. ‘He’s clocked the rug, and all.’

  But there was even more to listen to. Blair sipped his second frothy coffee and eavesdropped with delight. After giving Steine his spare ticket to A Shilling in the Meter, and finishing his complimentary sundae without once commenting on its outstanding quality, Crystal had become quite heated over some long-ago robbery in London. The page in Blair’s magazine concerning Marlon Brando in Tea House of the August Moon started to swim before his eyes.

  ‘On the contrary, you had a LOT to go on!’ Crystal was saying, his high voice almost shrieky.

  ‘I keep telling you, I appealed for information.’

  ‘Your appeal said, and I quote, Does anyone know who did this?’

  ‘Of course it did! What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Don’t you have underworld connections?’

  ‘I most certainly don’t!’ The inspector sounded shocked. ‘Do you?’

  Crystal stood up and gathered his things.

  ‘You’re an idiot, Steine. And I think it’s time people knew.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Crystal put on his raincoat and buckled the belt.

  ‘Law and the Little Man? You’re the little man, Steine. Pretending to be the policing genius. Living on the legend of the Middle Street Massacre. Lecturing the public on the Rights of Way Act 1935!’

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s 1932,’ corrected Steine, hotly.

  Crystal turned to go. He saw the smirking Todd Blair for the first time, and a look of vague recognition flickered on his face. But he hadn’t finished with Steine. At the door he called back, ‘I could have been shot that day at the Albion Bank, and you did nothing!’

  ‘Well, I wish you had been shot, you odious man!’ Steine called after him, for all to hear. ‘Right now I wouldn’t mind shooting you myself!’ And as the door slammed, he added, ‘And get yourself a bar of Lifebuoy, for pity’s sake.’

  Three

  What Constable Twitten had failed to establish before arranging the interview with Mrs Eden in Upper North Street was whether or not she was blind. Somehow the question hadn’t occurred to him. When she opened the front door that afternoon, wearing bottle-green glasses and holding a white stick, Brunswick let slip a groan of annoyance – but Twitten shot him such a look of disapproval that he corrected himself.

  Of course, in the next half hour this blind woman helped them establish far more about the phoney Public Opinion Poll lady than they might have got from a dozen witnesses with perfect vision. As Twitten eagerly explained to the inspector when they were back at the station, all the sighted witnesses had been so struck (or misdirected) by her improbably bright red hair that they couldn’t remember very much else about her.

  Steine wasn’t interested. He was fed up with this woman. He was fed up with this Constable Twitten. His enjoyment of Luigi’s had been ruined (how could anyone not comment on how good the ice creams were?), and he now had a ticket to see a play that sounded awful, in the company of a man he’d like to throttle. What he needed this afternoon was the usual peace and silence of his office, interrupted only by the occasional rattle of bone china cup on saucer brought in by a tiptoeing charlady. But instead he was faced with two excited policemen with an annoying story to tell.

  ‘She was definitely casing the joint, sir,’ said Brunswick. ‘That Opinion Poll lady. Tell him, Twitten. About Mrs Eden. She was blind, sir.’

  ‘Then I’m sure she was a lot of help.’

  ‘Oh, but she was, sir,’ said Twitten. ‘It is often the case in blind people that their other senses are heightened, sir. Smell, touch, hearing, and so on.’

  ‘I know what the five senses are, thank you, Twitten,’ said Steine. ‘And I’d like to point out that since no one alerted me to this posting of yours, technically you might not actually work here. You might just be a clever imposter with a uniform from a theatrical costumiers.’

  Twitten wondered whether he was supposed to respond to this bizarre accusation. He glanced at Sergeant Brunswick, who reassuringly pursed his lips and shook his head.

  ‘Mrs Eden gave us so much, sir,’ Twitten went on, undeterred. ‘About the Opinion Poll lady’s voice, her accent, her manner of speech. She remembered from shaking the lady’s hand that there were protuberances on the top knuckles of the fingers, such as pianists sometimes get. And she brought with her a strange mixture of smells, among which were –’ Twitten consulted his notebook ‘– face powder, Brylcreem, lavender, rubber adhesive and explosives.’

  ‘None of which necessarily makes her a criminal Opinion Poll lady,’ objected Steine, complacently. ‘Just a law-abiding Opinion Poll lady with a laudably wide variety of hobbies.’

  ‘But there was something else,’ said Brunswick. ‘Mrs Eden lent her a blotter to rest her papers on. Young Twitten here asked if he could rub a soft pencil over the indentations to reveal what might have been written there. And it worked, sir! They had been discussing public transport facilities in Brighton, and what do you think the Opinion Poll lady had written down, sir?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Oh, go on, sir,’ said Twitten. ‘Guess.’

  ‘Something about trams?’

  ‘No. Guess again?’

  ‘This isn’t a game, Twitten,’ snapped Steine.

  But both his men were looking at him expectantly, so he had another go. ‘The regular late running of trains to the capital?’

  Twitten read triumphantly from his notebook. ‘She had written back window – broken latch; NO DOG in capitals; and cash in bureau top drawer!’

  Brunswick patted Twitten on the back. ‘Well done, son,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you very much, sir.’

  Steine, however, was still not satisfied.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘I fail to see how all this advances matters. We already knew she had red hair, didn’t we? It’s surely easier to spot someone with red hair than go around sniffing people for a mixture of lavender and gunpowder.’

  ‘But the hair is obviously a wig, sir!’ blurted Twitten. ‘Any fool would guess that!’

  Peregrine Twitten, aged twenty-two, had been a super-brain all his life. And like many a super-brain, he found it difficult to interact diplomatically with people slower-witted than himself, especially when they were in positions of authority. There was one particular error he made again and again: expecting people to thank him for explaining things to them. It was astonishing to him how often they just took offence instead.

&nb
sp; ‘Would you care to repeat that, Constable?’ said Steine, stiffly. ‘Did you actually say, any fool would guess that?’

  ‘Gosh, sir. I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to imply –’

  Twitten turned in confusion to Sergeant Brunswick, who chipped in, ‘But it probably is a wig, sir. When you think about it.’

  Steine looked out of the window for a moment, adopting the faraway thoughtful look that had become his trademark. The others waited for him to speak. When he did so, it was with an air of finality.

  ‘Constable Twitten,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a decision. I expect you mean well, but I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that you will never fit in at this station, so I’d like you to make your goodbyes and gather your personal things.’

  ‘But sir, I only started this morning!’

  ‘I feel obliged to tell you that your whole approach is simply annoying, Twitten. You’re like a dog with a bone. You are an impetuous, arrogant pipsqueak. What were you going to do next in this case, I’d like to know!’

  Steine had meant this as a hypothetical question, but Twitten was more than happy to answer it.

  ‘I was going to follow up the Hippodrome angle, sir, which I think is strong. It occurred to me that the explosives smell might be associated with a theatrical effect of some sort. And the sergeant, who’s seen the current show a couple of times, confirmed to me that one of the highlights is indeed, as I suspected, a midget being shot out of a cannon.’

  ‘It’s amazing, sir,’ said Brunswick. ‘Not a mark on him. There’s also a woman who tears up telephone directories with her bare hands.’

  ‘Apart from that,’ Twitten continued in a rush, anxious to prove himself, ‘I thought I would contact all the major wig emporiums in London and check sales of red wigs in the past year. I’ve already put in a request to the criminal records department at Scotland Yard to establish whether similar crimes have been committed in other towns and cities. Also, having realised that those tickets to the Hippodrome were complimentary ones, I was going to ask the box office for a list of the people entitled to have them.’