Psycho by the Sea

by Lynne Truss

  If she were to ask herself the question directly, she would be forced to admit she is quite afraid of being cooped up with a known maniac in such a macabre setting, which is why she never does ask herself that question. Instead she keeps cheerful by remembering that tomorrow at noon, a policeman will stand on a new zebra crossing in front of hundreds of onlookers. Then Miss Lennon will suddenly exclaim, in a horrified manner, ‘Take your hands off me, Inspector!’ and at that precise moment a clock will chime, and Geoffrey Chaucer will emerge unstoppably from the crowd, to screams and panic, and the man who killed Terence Chambers will be struck down in cold blood just as her liebling Terry was.

  ‘Terry,’ she sighs, lost in the happy thought. ‘Liebling.’

  ‘Boo!’ says Chaucer. He has crept up on her, dressed in a musty, moth-eaten robe that for untold decades adorned the effigy of Cardinal Wolsey.

  She barely flinches. He has done something similar every day. ‘I think I see Inspector Steine while I am out,’ she says offhandedly. ‘You are acquainted with him, perhips, Mr Chow-tza?’

  Chaucer gives her a look of total, blank sincerity. ‘No, but I hate him,’ he says. ‘I can’t explain it, but if I ever saw this Inspector Steine, I think I’d want to kill him.’

  Nine

  For the third time that morning, Sergeant Baines left his desk in the entrance hall of the police station. He’d had enough of this. He flipped open the hinged flap of the counter and let it fall with a bang. And he didn’t care who heard it. Since seven o’clock a wasp of a reporter had been conspicuously waiting outside the door, lounging against a pillar. Dressed in a distinctive white raincoat and a brown trilby hat, this man was, of course, Clive Hoskisson of the Daily Mirror.

  ‘You!’ said Sergeant Baines from the doorway, wagging an admonitory finger.

  ‘Sergeant Baines,’ said Hoskisson politely, but without standing straight. If anything, he leaned more heavily.

  Baines harrumphed. ‘Look, you,’ he said, irritated. ‘I’ve told you before. Hop it.’

  ‘Oh, that again,’ said Hoskisson.

  ‘Yes, that again. Have I not asked you not to lean against that pillar? I believe I have.’

  ‘You have indeed.’

  ‘I have said, in plain terms, do not lean against that pillar. I have also politely asked you to sling your hook. Now, for the last time, sonny, buzz off.’

  ‘And I have replied, Sergeant, that I have every right to lean here if I choose,’ said the reporter. ‘I refer you to the Highways Act of 1950, which clearly states in Paragraph Sixteen … ’ But the desk sergeant had turned on his heel and returned indoors, so there was no need for Hoskisson to quote the exact wording of the Act in question, which was just as well, since it had no bearing at all on the current situation (it covered, in exhaustive detail, the laws concerning cattle grids).

  It was typical of Hoskisson to stand his ground robustly. For one thing, he had every right, as a member of the press, to loiter outside the station, in hopes of confronting Inspector Steine. For another, refusal to budge was his defining characteristic: in fact, he was known in certain Fleet Street circles as the Human Limpet. ‘Oh, give it up, Hoskisson!’ was the regular cry of his colleagues and counterparts alike. ‘Let it go!’ But he was proud of his adhesive qualities, especially where stories were concerned. As for popularity, he didn’t care what people thought of him at all.

  This was just as well, since he was universally disliked. Even his editor at the Mirror had serious reservations. For preference, such a high-circulation paper would employ a crime correspondent of some personal flamboyance who would not only mix with criminals but boast in print of his connections; who would run up a vast expense account entertaining the bigwigs at Scotland Yard; who would appear on television drunkenly waving a cigarette, giving outrageous, headline-grabbing opinions of Old Bailey verdicts. For such a self-publicist, the editor would bump up the salary and gladly print a regular picture byline. But Hoskisson had no desire to play the fame game, and the Mirror just had to make do with a conscientious and incorruptible crime reporter whose main talent was stickability and whose current unbending goal was to expose a genuinely shocking story of police incompetence shored up by a bent establishment.

  ‘It’s a very big story, sir,’ Hoskisson would explain. ‘Inspector Steine is a complete fraud and also a coward, and I am working on collecting the evidence that he killed Terence Chambers in cold blood.’ Hoskisson kept his cards close to his chest, for fear the newsroom boys would jump the gun and print too soon. But he had tracked down two witnesses willing to state that at the time of the celebrated milk-bar incident, Steine had shot Chambers before the news of the bodies at the Metropole had been delivered.

  In the pocket of his raincoat Hoskisson had a list of all the people present when the shooting occurred – a list that included the name Pandora Holden, better known to the dairy-aware British public as the Milk Girl. She had appeared on a thousand billboards sucking milk through a straw; she had opened fêtes and jamborees; she was a human embodiment of health, vitamins and (above all) an opaque fatty bovine mammary secretion available quite cheaply for daily delivery to your doorstep. He quite understood why the Mirror would love her to go on record. Imagine the picture on the front page. Imagine ‘STEINE IS LIAR, SAYS MILK GIRL’. But according to the Milk Marketing office in London, Miss Holden had recently quit the post and they refused to help him locate her. Their paths, alas, were very unlikely to cross by chance.

  Sergeant Baines appeared at the door of the police station again.

  ‘Off! Pillar! You!’ he barked.

  ‘Tell Inspector Steine I want to see him,’ Hoskisson called to the desk sergeant’s retreating back. ‘He can’t avoid me for ever.’

  And then, as he leaned his shoulder more heavily into the pillar, it happened. The miracle.

  ‘Did you say Inspector Steine?’ said a female voice behind him. ‘So this is the police station? Thank goodness!’

  He turned around, and was about to snappily point out the telltale blue lamp suspended above the doorway (with the word ‘POLICE’ written on it) when he saw that the speaker was a charismatic young woman with cropped dark hair, clutching an envelope. A small golden dog sat at her feet, with a tatty piece of string attached to its collar. The dog looked up at him with an expectant expression and wagged its tail.

  ‘Sorry about the dog,’ said the girl, blushing. ‘It’s a long story, but he insisted on coming.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Hoskisson. ‘I like dogs. Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  At long last, the reporter relinquished his leaning position and stood upright. He held out his hand to introduce himself.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ came (faintly) the voice of Sergeant Baines.

  It was the answer to Hoskisson’s prayers: it was the Milk Girl.

  At Inspector Steine’s house in the Queen’s Park area, Twitten let himself in with the door key, feeling like a burglar. He was never comfortable in such situations: being alone in someone else’s house. At his lodgings in Clifton Terrace Mrs Thorpe was always urging him, ‘Use the wireless when I’m not here, Constable. Watch the television! Boil an egg! You are a paying guest!’ But he wouldn’t dream of doing any of that.

  Softly shutting the inspector’s front door behind him, he surveyed the rather elegant hallway with surprise. Although he had never tried to picture Inspector Steine’s dwelling arrangements, this house was still somehow far more tasteful than he’d expected.

  ‘Gosh,’ he said aloud. In his days as a dedicated reader of educational I-Spy books, he had very much enjoyed I-Spy Antique Furniture, and the knowledge gained from this excellent booklet had stood him in good stead. It took him no time at all to recognise the inspector’s pristine walnut console table as genuine Hepplewhite, and his cherry-wood grandfather clock as late Georgian, and he was just standing back to admire both of these splendid pieces when he was startled to hear a faint ‘Thump!’ followed by a ‘Shhh!’

&
nbsp; He froze. Oh, flipping hedgehogs, was Geoffrey Chaucer in the house? The man who beheaded policemen? The muffled thump noise had sounded like a cat jumping down onto a rug. But the ‘Shhh!’ could only have been human in origin. Was the rich patina on this beautiful grandfather clock about to be spattered with his own arterial blood as he was hacked down in this well-appointed vestibule? Was this attractive Hepplewhite console table the last thing he would see in this life? Would his head be later discovered in a large pan on the range in the scullery?

  ‘Hello?’ he called, in a low tone. ‘Hello, kitty? Hello, puss, puss, puss?’

  Stealthily, he opened the door to the front room. Light from a tall bay window illuminated a charmingly decorated parlour containing a piano and an expensive radiogram, but no cat. Shutting the door again quietly, he moved to the door to the dining room, and it was just as he began to turn the polished doorknob that he heard a further human noise, this one a bit like a gasp.

  There was nothing for it. For the first time in his career as a policeman, he drew his truncheon. The resulting paperwork would be onerous, but he had no choice. If only he could remember the training for situations like this! But the form of words seemed to have vanished from his memory. ‘Crikey,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Good luck, Peregrine.’ Then he turned the handle and thrust open the door with such force that it banged against some rather desirable oak panelling within.

  ‘Police!’ he yelled. ‘Police with bally truncheons!’

  ‘Stay back!’ yelled a woman’s voice. ‘It’s only us!’

  ‘Police!’ he cried again, excitedly looking around and perceiving only one figure in the room, near the fireplace: a figure that was holding a cat in its arms and was self-evidently not the madman Geoffrey Chaucer because it was the beautiful Adelaide Vine.

  ‘Drop the cat!’ he commanded wildly.

  ‘Constable Twitten?’ she said, with a little sigh of relief. ‘Oh, thank goodness. You really scared me.’

  ‘I said, drop the cat!’ he said. ‘You didn’t drop the cat, Miss Vine, and I told you to.’ Twitten was trying – without success – to assume authority over the scene.

  She tilted her head, as if in thought. She was extremely calm. ‘Why would you want me to drop Johann Sebastian?’

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t bally know!’

  ‘Miaow?’ said the cat musically, looking up at Adelaide.

  ‘Shhh!’ said Adelaide, again, and placed him gently on the floor. ‘There you are,’ she said. Then she smiled at Twitten. ‘You really did scare me just then, Constable. I thought the intruder had come back.’

  He scanned the room. What had she been doing here? Why had this wily woman broken into Inspector Steine’s house? Well, the answer to this question was all too apparent. On the dining table stood a half-empty box labelled ‘PROPERTY OF BROADMOOR’, alongside a bottle of lighter fluid and an ashtray containing a half-dozen blackened matches. In the fireplace behind her, telltale embers shrivelled and glowed.

  ‘What intruder?’ he said.

  ‘Whoever was here when I arrived, Constable. I must have interrupted him burning these files.’ She pointed at the ashes in the grate. ‘Look. Still warm!’

  The truncheon in Twitten’s hand stayed raised. Flaming hedgehogs, this woman was such a brazen liar! He had caught her virtually in the act of destroying evidence and she had instantly invented a cock-and-bull story to cover it.

  ‘Miss Vine, please tell me why you’re here.’

  ‘I was hoping to see my uncle, of course. He gave me a key a couple of months ago.’

  ‘You’ve been burning the contents of that box.’

  She seemed puzzled, but then she laughed. She really was a tip-top fibber. Having observed the masterly Mrs Groynes at close quarters for three months, Twitten could recognise true quality when he saw it.

  ‘No, no,’ Adelaide said, smiling. ‘That wasn’t me. I just explained. About the intruder. He might still come back, so it’s wonderful that you’re here with your terrifying truncheon to protect me.’

  Looking him steadily in the eye, she drew out a dining chair and sat down. ‘So,’ she said sweetly. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, I’m afraid.’

  Twitten sat down opposite, instinctively snatching the box away from her as he did so. Glancing inside, he saw it was still about half-full, and on the top was a file labelled ‘Doris Fuller’ – a name that rang no bells.

  Rather childishly, he dropped the box to the floor beside him – but with great maturity managed not to stick out his tongue or chant ‘Nah-nah-na-nah-nah! ’ as he did so.

  Back at the station, Miss Lennon bustled into Inspector’s Steine’s office with a clipboard. She found him staring out of the window, feeling sorry for himself. He felt he had very good cause. Good grief, a man puts his life on the line to rid the country of a dangerous criminal and this is how he is treated? Thrown about in the back of a van, jostled by his own officers, and subjected to gross impertinence? Meanwhile, in the world beyond he is painted not as a heroic champion of justice but as a man of violence, and on top of everything a reporter in a white coat dogs his every step like a confounded nemesis.

  ‘INSPECTOR?’

  He turned to face Miss Lennon. Yesterday, he might have assumed a more cheerful expression for her benefit, but he felt they had now passed beyond the need for such pretence. (He had known her roughly twenty-four hours.)

  ‘Not now, Miss Lennon,’ he said sadly. ‘Perhaps later. I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘I’m afraid it can’t WAIT, sir. I need to update you on the arrangements for TOMORROW. Perhaps they will CHEER YOU UP.’

  She gave him an encouraging smile and patted her clipboard. ‘I think, considering the unusually tight time constraints, we have much to CELEBRATE, Inspector, but I will begin with the BAD NEWS. I have drawn a BLANK with the NUNS.’

  He folded his hands. If she was determined to talk about these arrangements, the sooner he paid attention, the sooner it would be over.

  ‘Nuns,’ he repeated. ‘So we have no nuns, you say?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, that’s a shame. But to be honest, Miss Lennon, I wasn’t convinced nuns were necessary, and it was the penguins I was most looking forward to.’

  Pulling a face, she looked down at her clipboard. Apparently there was more bad news.

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, that the PENGUINS TOO were impossible to procure at such short notice.’

  ‘Ugh!’ The inspector threw up his hands. ‘I can’t even have penguins?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I ask you, Miss Lennon, why did I bother to shoot Terence Chambers? Why? Why did I bother, if this is the thanks I get?’

  ‘I sympathise, sir. But the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park were quite SHORT WITH ME when I put my request to them. I apologise for raising the prospect of penguins without checking beforehand, it’s really all MY FAULT. But they did once supply an ELEPHANT for a party I organised in LONDON for the COMMISSIONER so I suppose I took too much for granted.’

  ‘So you did explain to them the penguins were for me? For Inspector Steine, milk-bar hero?’

  ‘I did.’

  Tears of self-pity pricked the inspector’s eyes. ‘Well, in that case I give up,’ he said sulkily. ‘I really do.’

  ‘However, in all other respects I have been SUCCESSFUL. The Belisha BEACONS are already in place and generating interest. ORANGE, I’m afraid,’ she added hastily, before he could ask the inevitable question. ‘They said orange was NON-NEGOTIABLE. The council will arrange for the ROAD-PAINTING to be done this evening, taking advantage of the break in the rain. The shop Gosling’s is by coincidence installing today a new chiming CLOCK on its broad London Road elevation which will STRIKE THE HOUR for the first time tomorrow when you set foot on the new crossing. Additionally, I have secured the SERVICES of four heavily accented French ONION-SELLERS in traditional garb, and have also acquired a very large number of black-and-white chequered flags that can
be distributed to the CHILDREN.’ She lowered the clipboard. ‘I promise it will be a day that Brighton will NEVER FORGET, Inspector.’

  He pulled a face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m beginning to think … ’

  ‘Think WHAT, Inspector?’

  ‘Well, is it really worth the risk of appearing in public?’

  Miss Lennon gasped, as if shocked to hear such lily-livered qualms from him of all people.

  ‘I mean, no one’s caught that Chaucer man yet. It would be a perfect opportunity for him to get to me.’

  She sat down and took a deep breath. ‘Inspector,’ she said quietly. ‘I completely understand your misgivings, of course I do.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But our madman is HARDLY going to make an appearance THERE, is he, sir?’

  ‘Well, he might. And if he does … ?’

  If the inspector was hoping for absolution, it didn’t come. He could see from her fallen face how appalled she was by both his cowardice and his ingratitude.

  ‘Of course,’ she said briskly, ‘if it’s your genuine wish I will immediately CANCEL EVERYTHING. I can explain to everyone that you are, after all, afraid to SHOW YOUR FACE.’

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘It truly doesn’t matter to me that I have worked SO HARD to put this together. My job is merely to SERVE.’

  ‘Oh, Miss Lennon. I’m sorry.’

  ‘But I was SO hoping you would do this for the sake of your PUBLIC IMAGE, Inspector. It infuriates me that the public sees you – you gentle, honourable, caring man – as a man of violence. I RESENT and DETEST it!’

  ‘You really think that if I do this, they’ll start seeing me as a man of sensible road safety enforcement instead?’

  ‘They will. Trust me.’ She took his hand and held it, looking him directly in the face. ‘Sir, I promise the people of Brighton will link the name of Inspector Steine with the words “zebra crossing” FOR EVER.’

  The inspector extricated his hand. He still looked glum. ‘I’m not sure people’s attitudes are so easily manipulated, Miss Lennon. They have minds of their own.’