by Lynne Truss
‘Go on, then, Constable. Do the honours.’
Twitten blushed. ‘May I?’ he breathed. ‘May I again?’
And so the electric kettle was switched on by the good graces of the constabular digit, and all three of them stood in silence to watch it in action.
The cause of all this unusual excitement was that Mrs Groynes had lately acquired an up-to-the-minute electric kettle that turned itself off once it had boiled. Formerly, she had made tea using water from an enormous hot-water urn that she trundled, clanking, along the corridor from the lift on a rickety steel trolley. This urn was distinctly old-fashioned: the fact that it provided the requisite hot water for tea-making was utterly dull and unremarkable. Whereas who could fail to be thrilled and transported by the sheer novelty of this shiny, futuristic kettle, with its little switch that sprang out – with a wondrous ‘tock’ noise – once the boiling process was complete? Truly, making an everyday hot beverage was now like living in the twenty-third century!
All conversation was suspended while the appliance noisily heated to a boil on its special new tin tray. Both Twitten and Brunswick were tense. Would the switch duly pop out when the time came? They listened to the sound of the water starting to rumble and bubble, and looked at each other. Would it? Would it ever? The kettle was by now boiling fiercely. Hot steam was issuing from the spout. Would it? Shouldn’t it have done it by now? But then, just when they started to think that the mechanism must have failed (and that it was time to call the fire brigade), ‘Tock!’ it went, and the boiling subsided, along with their groundless fears.
‘Gosh,’ sighed Twitten, sinking back onto his chair.
‘Blimey,’ exclaimed Brunswick, with a chuckle.
‘And about bleeding time, dears,’ muttered Mrs G, as she poured the water into the prepared teapot, and gave the contents a stir.
At Gosling’s Department Store, on the London Road, the weeks of rain had been highly beneficial. Sales of swimwear and sunglasses might have dropped abysmally, but the sales of umbrellas had soared, along with stewing steak, tapioca, warm vests, jigsaw puzzles and the new (huge) fifteen-inch television sets.
Gosling’s was one of several department stores in the town, the most prestigious and central being the mighty Hannington’s in North Street. Like its competitors, Gosling’s took what you might call a ‘gamut-running’ approach to retail lines (or ‘indiscriminate’ if you were being unkind), and dealt in everything from Dutch lard to fur coats, bedroom furniture to dog meat, surgical appliances to coach trips. Promotional signs were displayed everywhere: KEPEKOOL REFRIGERATORS! CHILPRUFE THERMAL UNDERWEAR! EASICLENE OVENS! (In the exciting consumer boom of the mid-fifties, brand names adopted an ostentatiously faux-naïf approach to spelling.)
It was a bustling, lively sort of shop, arranged over four floors. Many Brightonians preferred Gosling’s to the more sedate Hannington’s, because in the London Road store there was always something entertaining to gawp at. The original Mr Gosling (known to staff as Mister Edward) had founded the shop in 1912, and laid a foundation of good service; his forty-three-year-old son (known as Mister Harold) was more of an extrovert, and although he was a cheapskate by nature, his retail instincts were excellent.
Since Mister Harold took the helm, Gosling’s had become the place to go on a rainy day. Every morning in the kitchenware department, a high-heeled woman with a tiny waist and pencilled-on eyebrows (and an unfortunate pained expression suggestive of a headache) demonstrated how to make such fashionable dinner-party staples as crabmeat puffs and chocolate chiffon. In the record department, customers could listen to LPs of their choice in little booths lined with soundproof pegboard, thanks to the modern-day miracle of speaker-wire. And in the dairy section of the food hall, little cubes of exotic cheese (such as Edam) were offered on sticks by a blonde teenaged girl from Patcham dressed up in a rough approximation of Dutch national costume. For people who had recently endured a drab decade of post-war rationing, the invitation from Gosling’s to sample a morsel of seafood canapé, then listen to the latest Pat Boone and scoff free cheese from the Netherlands, was almost unbearably exciting.
It was in Gosling’s that Mrs Groynes had purchased the electric kettle. For reasons that will become apparent, she received a discount there. But it was Inspector Steine who had paid. In a rare access of munificence (on the day he discovered he was to receive the Silver Truncheon, which came with a cheque for a hundred pounds), he had searched his mind for ways to share his good fortune with his immediate staff. But what did they like? What were their interests? He considered each of his men in turn, trying to picture them in their leisure hours – and, interestingly, came up with nothing. In the end, he decided to consult the charlady, calling her into his office for a private conversation.
‘Well, dear,’ she said, when he had put his proposal to her, ‘I wish I could say this needs a lot of thinking about, but I’d be lying. If you ask me, the sergeant would like nothing better than a trip to one of them poncey film studios up London way.’
Sitting back in her chair, she produced cigarettes and an expensive-looking lighter from the deep pocket of her flowery (but deeply ugly) pinny, and lit up a Capstan Full Strength. Tilting her head back, she took a satisfying drag.
Steine was mystified. ‘What poncey film studios?’
‘Oh, come on, dear. You know. Pinewood, Shepperton, Merton Park; one of those. And as for Constable Clever Clogs, I can promise you he’d love you for ever, dear, if you got him a year’s membership of that bleeding London Library he’s always banging on about.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’ Steine pulled a face. Film studios and a library? Personally, he hated the sound of both of those things.
‘See this?’ From the pocket of her pinny Mrs Groynes produced a page torn from a film magazine. It featured a competition, with the words ‘WIN A TRIP TO FABULOUS PINEWOOD’ across the top in red lettering. ‘The sergeant goes in for this every bleeding month, dear.’
‘No!’
‘Yes, and it’s not free. You have to send a postal order. It’s a proper scam, of course, but he can’t see it, bless him. If you look in his desk, you’ll find he’s got several postal orders ready, and a stack of ready-addressed envelopes, so he can post off his entry the minute the competition opens.’ She shook her head knowingly. ‘As if that would make a blind bit of difference.’
‘Good heavens.’
Steine took the page and perused it, frowning. Evidently, entrants to this competition were required to study a series of studio photographs of somebody called Patricia Neal and list them in order of ‘loveliness’. He sighed. Here was proof enough that it was a bad idea to dig beneath the surface of the people you worked with. ‘And what on earth’s the London Library?’
‘Ah,’ shrugged Mrs G, ‘search me, dear. But I’m guessing on the available evidence that it’s a library up London. Constable Clever Clogs is always after some obscure book or other, and I’ve heard him on the dog-and-bone nagging his poor old mum to make him a member of it.’
‘I see.’ Steine considered what he had heard, wrinkled his nose, and came to a decision. ‘Well, thank you for those imaginative suggestions, Mrs Groynes, but I can’t think of anything I want to encourage less than Sergeant Brunswick mooning over more actresses, or Twitten with his head in more books.’
‘That’s a shame, dear. You could have made them very happy.’
‘Even so. My first instinct was new silver-plated whistles.’
She let out a laugh of surprise. ‘Oh, my good gawd. Whistles?’
‘Yes.’ He refused to be mocked by the charwoman. ‘Whistles coated in silver, and engraved. So they will be very special.’
‘They’d still be bleeding whistles, dear.’
‘Yes. But look, Twitten and Brunswick are both policemen, Mrs Groynes. The whistles will be engraved with the date of my shooting Terence Chambers. In their old age, Brunswick and Twitten will explain to their grandchildren that they were fortunate enough to be in
Brighton at the time of the momentous event, even if they didn’t actually play a part in it, and weren’t in fact present when I heroically pulled the trigger.’
‘Right, dear. Well, you know best.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But in that case, can I put in a request for one of them new electric kettles that switch theirselves off?’
‘A new what?’
‘Kettle, dear. That turns itself off. It would benefit everyone, but it would also save me wrestling with that bleeding tea-urn for the rest of my life, risking life and limb.’
Steine brightened. This was more like it. ‘It turns itself off? How?’
‘Well, I’m no thermo-bleeding-physicist, dear, am I?’
‘Well, no.’
‘But as I understand it, it’s got a bi-metallic strip in the rear of the kettle—’
‘Bi-metallic?’
‘Made of two metals.’
‘Ah.’
‘And this strip is cunningly exposed to the steam rising from the water, and due to the steam this metal expands to a point where it knocks the switch out, thus turning off the element, stopping the boiling process, and saving everyone in the area from a gruesome fiery death.’
Steine looked impressed, but also a bit thoughtful. ‘Mrs Groynes, how do you—?’ he began.
‘But don’t listen to me, dear,’ she interrupted, laughing. ‘What do I know about technological advancements in domestic appliances and whatnot? Hovercrafts, dear? Araldite? The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics? Ha, I mean to say!’
And so she had trotted along to Gosling’s to buy the recently launched Russell Hobbs K1 model, with the revolutionary automatic shut-off. As she sailed through one of the pairs of swing doors on London Road, greeting the uniformed doorman holding it open, and tucking the customary ten-shilling note into his hand, she reflected that Brunswick and Twitten would sadly never know how close they had come to gaining their hearts’ desires. If Constable Twitten ever so much as entered the stately catalogue hall of the London Library in St James’s Square (where she had herself been a member since 1945), he would set up home there for the rest of his life. If Brunswick once saw inside a film studio, it would be much the same story, but with busty actresses being the attraction, instead of dusty tomes. However, neither of them knew that she had made such wonderful suggestions on their behalf, and it was better that they didn’t. If there was ever a woman who whole-heartedly maintained that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, it was, obviously, Mrs Palmeira Groynes.
On her way through Gosling’s to buy the kettle, she had said a discreet hello to various gang members who’d been in place in the store for months, posing as everything from migraine-victim cookery demonstrator to carpenter-cum-handyman. She had come up with the plan the previous Christmas, and had been patiently slotting the pieces into place all year. In all her days in the business of crime, the upcoming Gosling’s Christmas Job was the one that had excited her most. It was masterly. It would go down in history as the cleverest and cleanest (and most lucrative) commercial robbery ever carried out in Great Britain.
As she handed over a five-pound note to the sales assistant in Domestic Appliances, she watched with particular pleasure as he took a canister from a basket behind him, unscrewed its lid, and placed inside it the handwritten note of sale and the money. He then posted it into the shop’s vacuum-activated tube system, where it was immediately sucked away. He smiled at Mrs Groynes, and she smiled back pleasantly. He then wrapped the purchase for her in paper and string, while they waited for the cashiers in the far-off basement ‘tube room’ to send the canister back.
It was quite a good idea for stores such as Gosling’s to keep no cash on the shop-floors. Less tempting for opportunistic criminals; also, of course, less tempting for light-fingered staff. Some of the shops in town used an overhead pulley-system for transporting cash that involved a very entertaining pull-down catapult mechanism and a network of overhead wires. But Gosling’s had lately taken down the untidy and obtrusive wires and opted for the more discreet vacuum tubes that ran next to (and sometimes through) the walls. It was a quieter system, and much neater. The local engineers who had installed it (on the cheap) promised it would go wrong only if a) someone accidentally posted a French baguette into it, or b) it sucked a cashier’s arm off up to the shoulder.
Most customers had no idea where the canisters went. To them, it was a delightful mystery. But Mrs Groynes knew all about the tube room, where a row of seated girls and women dealt with every sale in the store – opening the canisters, entering the purchases in ledgers, calculating the change, and sending the canisters back, with the notes of sale stamped ‘PAID’.
The thing was, one of these tube-room girls was Denise Perks, aged nineteen, orphaned older sister of Shorty the messenger boy, trainee gang member, and well on her way to becoming Mrs Groynes’s deputy. (We will be hearing much more of Denise.)
‘I see a lot of myself in you, dear,’ Mrs Groynes told the girl once, when she was only fifteen and working as part of a whizz mob at the railway station (picking pockets). ‘Just don’t fall in love with someone pretending to be a bleeding war hero, and nothing can stop you getting to the top.’
It was good advice, and the cool-headed Denise had resisted falling in love with anyone. She was far too focused on her job. Having worked at Gosling’s for only three months, she was already in charge of a team of twelve, and earning an extra seven and six a week. Right now, she was efficiently placing Mrs Groynes’s change (one shilling and fourpence) in the canister and posting it back through the appropriate tube, thankfully without getting her arm sucked off, not even up to the elbow.
Back at the office, with the kettle duly boiled, Twitten returned to his book. It was very absorbing. These had been excellent weeks for him: Inspector Steine’s absence and an unusual drop in violent criminal activity (due, as he was fully aware, to the understandable exhaustion of Mrs Groynes after all the shenanigans over the Bank Holiday weekend) meant that for several weeks Twitten had not been obliged to stand over a single bullet-riddled corpse.
But how best to take advantage of this little holiday? By reading, of course. True, under orders from the inspector, he had reluctantly started reporting for driving lessons on weekdays from a brisk police instructor, which were going far from well (‘Left foot, Constable! I said left, that’s the accelerator! Eyes on the road! Mind that pram! What the blazes is wrong with you?’), but mainly he’d embarked on a great reading spree at his desk, often with a sharpened pencil in his hand and a zealous gleam in his eye.
Lately, he had been reading a newly published book called The Hidden Persuaders, and he had rarely read anything that excited him more. It was so bally relevant to the modern world! It explained so much! He couldn’t wait to describe it to everyone, and persuade them to look at the world in a new way – which was presumably why Mrs Groynes had taken the sergeant aside and warned him, ‘Whatever you do, dear, don’t ask the constable about that book of his. He’s bleeding bursting with it.’
Brunswick, meanwhile, had also enjoyed the period of calm, by daring to turn his attentions elsewhere for a change. Very tentatively, and without much conviction, he was courting Twitten’s attractive forty-one-year-old landlady, Mrs Thorpe.
‘Please, Jim. Call me Eliza,’ she had urged him warmly, on their first date, but somehow he couldn’t do it. Any younger woman he could call by her first name automatically, but not Mrs Thorpe. She was older than him, for a start, and her late husband had been a general. She spoke beautifully, and was firmly middle class, with a nice house in one of the most desirable terraces in Brighton. Admittedly, her house had recently been the location of an upsetting and grisly murder (a playwright horribly slain with the general’s regimental sword), but it had also for years played host to eminent stars of stage and screen. By striking contrast, Brunswick had received his education at the London Road Academy for Orphans, Waifs and Foundlings, and had joined the army at thirteen
. He owned two decent suits, had never held a bank account, and he lived with his auntie in a flat above a bicycle shop.
So he couldn’t call this woman Eliza, but he did enjoy her company, and he was intrigued (or, more honestly, pleasantly disturbed) by her undisguised interest in him physically. In all Brunswick’s dealings with women up to now, the attraction had flowed emphatically in the other direction, with gum-chewing girls rejecting each romantic advance with ‘No, Jim. Not interested!’ Or ‘Mind my nylons! These cost two and eleven!’ He had experienced, in his miserable love life, a great deal of being pushed in the chest (and he had also shelled out for a lot of replacement hosiery). So he was naturally confused by Mrs Thorpe’s strange erotic attraction to him. She throbbed with it. He once took her hand to help her out of a taxi and she was so thrilled by his manly touch, she started to hyperventilate.
But things had not progressed easily. They had seen a few films together; drunk a few frothy coffees. It was only when they went to see a new stage production of a comedy called The Reluctant Debutante at the Palace Pier Theatre that things moved on slightly. They would both always remember that particular evening. As they walked back uphill from the Clock Tower towards Mrs Thorpe’s fine house on Clifton Terrace, they discussed the merits of the cast.
‘I preferred Wilfrid Hyde-White in the original production, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Thorpe.
Now, Brunswick might have been hurt by this. After all, he’d paid for the tickets. Women weren’t supposed to be critical of something a man had spent good money on. At certain levels of society, such an ungrateful remark would earn a woman a smack on the kisser. But Brunswick was deeply pleased by what Mrs Thorne had said, because he agreed with it. The chap in this production hadn’t been a patch on Wilfrid Hyde-White.
‘You saw it last year, then?’ he said. ‘At the Theatre Royal?’
