Psycho by the Sea

by Lynne Truss

‘This is my story, Palmeira,’ said Cecil. ‘This is about how I brought you down. I started thinking about all the people you’d pissed off by killing Chambers – and guess what? Once I told them it was you who set the whole thing up, I was spoiled for choice.

  ‘I got that Lennon woman involved – here, you never sussed she was his sister, did you? And she put me onto the Austrian bint who was in love with Chambers, and the Austrian suggested roping in the loony cop-killer, and then Adelaide Vine came to me and there we were! What a team!’ He laughed. ‘It seemed right, you know, doing all this with a bunch of women. You think you’re unique, Palmeira! Well, you’re not. And I’ve got a brain too, you see. It’s a shame you never knew what an asset you had standing at the Clock Tower like a lemon.’

  Jenkins pulled a face, and held out an arm, as if to repeat ‘May we take this indoors now, please?’ But both Cecil and Mrs Groynes had passed the point of caution.

  ‘I never underestimated you, Cecil,’ she said, with passion.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ he said bitterly. ‘And then what about your precious Gosling’s Christmas Job I wasn’t part of? Why did you just assume you could leave me out?’

  ‘Because—’

  ‘I’d have loved to play a part in that! But I had to stand there all day telling everyone else how much money they were going to get – even that chit of a Denise girl. Bloody hell, even this idiot Stanley was standing to make a fortune.’

  She gasped and looked at Stanley. This was her moment to show defiance; to get the show started. ‘Are you going to stand for that, Stan?’ she said. ‘Cecil just called you an idiot.’ At which the enraged Cecil – to a shocked response from onlookers – struck her face and knocked her down.

  ‘Boss!’ said Stanley reflexively. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Don’t call her boss!’ said Cecil, angrily swinging round.

  ‘Move along, please, there’s absolutely nothing to—Oh, my God,’ said Jenkins feebly, as he caught sight of Chaucer advancing swiftly with his axe.

  ‘Help!’ shouted Mrs Groynes from her position on the wet pavement, holding her face. ‘Somebody help! He hit me!’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Palmeira,’ commanded Cecil, with his fist raised. But then he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  ‘What now?’ said Cecil. And then he absorbed the sight of a man with an axe raised.

  Mrs Thorpe turned out to be almost as bad at untying ropes as she was at absorbing new information in a crisis.

  ‘That ghastly blancmange was entirely for you, James. No one else even liked it!’

  ‘If you would start with the hands, Mrs T, then I can help with the rest.’

  She positioned the torch so that it shone on his tied-up hands, and attempted to pull on the knots.

  ‘And that sweet Pandora was there, and I felt her pitying me all evening. It was intolerable. Intolerable, James. I am very, very annoyed.’

  ‘I said I was sorry, Mrs Thorpe,’ he said grumpily. ‘Ow, my head.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You said, I’m tied up. It’s not the same.’

  Brunswick puzzled over this, and came up with nothing. He had a vague memory of a previous conversation with a woman that had gone just like this one, but he hadn’t learned from it, so it didn’t help. ‘I don’t see the difference,’ he insisted.

  ‘You didn’t apologise!’

  ‘I think I did. I said it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t there. Which it patently wasn’t! Ow, my head!’

  ‘Aagh!’ she screamed. ‘For goodness’ sake, James, just say you are sorry!’

  ‘All right. I’m sorry, Mrs Thorpe, for being attacked and tied up! It was very, very rude of me to be in fear of my life when I should have been at your house eating a pudding!’

  ‘Thank you!’

  She went back to tackling the knots. His head had hurt quite a lot before the argument, but now it was exploding with pain.

  ‘How did you find me, anyway?’

  ‘A child came to the house this morning and told me that you came in here last night with a beautiful young woman! He said I should come here at once, but I didn’t because – well, if you must know, I had to clear up a lot of shattered glass and pink blancmange from the scullery floor. He said he was intending to locate Constable Twitten and tell him the same thing, and I gave him sixpence for his trouble. He was carrying a box with a cake in it.’

  ‘Well, if you want, I can explain about the beautiful young woman.’

  She stiffened. ‘Oh, please don’t on my account.’

  ‘I said I can explain, Mrs Thorpe. Her name is Adelaide—’

  ‘So it’s true!’ she wailed, sitting back on her heels.

  ‘Look, Mrs Thorpe. I promise we can talk about this later. But right now I am very worried a woman called Adelaide Vine will arrive here with a gun and kill us both. So, please, please, keep trying with the knots.’

  She started fiddling again, but angrily. ‘Oh, this is hopeless,’ she said, standing up. She marched to the bag she’d brought with her and opened it. ‘I’ll have to use this,’ she said, producing her late husband’s regimental sword.

  ‘Argh!’ screamed Brunswick, at the sight of its sharp edge flashing in the light from the torch. ‘No, don’t use that.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I grew up in India with four brothers.’

  ‘What? How does that—’

  ‘James. It will be one blow. One clean blow.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Really, James. Don’t be a baby. I’ve done this countless times playing at Ali Baba. You just have to hold still.’

  ‘Please, no!’

  They had both failed to hear the sound of the door opening again upstairs, but as Brunswick’s cry of ‘Please, no!’ echoed around the waxwork gallery, a third figure could be heard reaching the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Aaargh!’ screamed Brunswick (again). ‘Don’t kill us! Miss Vine, please don’t!’

  ‘Police!’ this third figure cried, bursting in. ‘Police with bally truncheons!’

  Inspector Steine got the call to the incident in Upper North Street. He wasn’t in the mood to see two headless corpses and a maniac full of bullet-holes, but it seemed he had no choice. At least these ones weren’t innocent visitors to our shores.

  ‘Very well,’ Steine said flatly, when he received the news from Sergeant Baines. But Baines was so worried by the traumatised state of the inspector that he decided to accompany him. It was just as well. Most of the way there, Baines was required to hold the inspector’s arm and keep him upright, while also holding an umbrella over his head.

  When they arrived, the bodies were sheltered beneath a makeshift tent, erected by the pathology team. Steine hesitated before going in. ‘So what do we think happened here?’ he said weakly, to no one in particular.

  A young constable, white in the face, stood to attention but merely bit his lip. It wasn’t an easy thing to describe.

  Baines took control. ‘Come on, son. The inspector asked a question.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said the constable. ‘Perhaps you’d better see for yourself?’ He lifted a flap in the tent for Steine to enter.

  ‘No,’ said Steine. ‘That’s not what I asked. You tell me. I might not choose … ’

  ‘Might not choose what, sir?’

  ‘Look, it’s none of your business what the inspector might not choose, Constable,’ snapped Baines. ‘Just tell him what happened.’

  ‘Right, sir.’ The constable took a deep breath. ‘Well, first things first, there are no witnesses at all.’

  ‘Oh, come on, lad!’ scoffed Baines. He looked around and found the inspector leaning against a low wall, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

  ‘Go on, Constable,’ Steine said, realising he ought to speak. ‘I’m listening. You said there were no witnesses.’

  ‘I think anyone in the vicinity just ran off when they saw a man with an axe, sir. You can’t blame them. But as I see it, judging by the wounds, what happens first is that the axeman
assaults the big man, hitting him on the neck. Then the axeman is shot several times by Constable Jenkins at very close range—’

  ‘Jenkins?’ said Baines. ‘What was Jenkins doing here?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, sir. I don’t know. But it seems Jenkins stepped in quite bravely, shooting at the axeman.’

  ‘He shot him?’ said Baines. ‘With what?’

  ‘He seems to have had a gun with him, sir, but no one can explain why. And it’s not at all like a police weapon: it’s very small calibre, a gun a woman would use. Anyway, Constable Jenkins shoots at the axeman, who then pauses in his hacking away at the prone big man, and takes a massive swing at Jenkins as well and takes his head clean off.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Baines, shocked. He turned again to the inspector. ‘Are you hearing all this, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant Baines. Yes, thank you. Loud and clear. Poor Jenkins is dead,’ he said, trying not to sound too happy about it.

  ‘Once the heads are completely severed, the axeman takes the gun from Jenkins and shoots himself in the head, sir. We can’t be sure why he does that, but presumably because he has realised the magnitude of what he’s done.’

  Steine swallowed, and closed his eyes. The wall seemed not to be solid behind him.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the constable. ‘I suppose it’s quite a lot to take in. Would you like me to run through it again?’

  ‘Absolutely not, Constable,’ said the inspector. ‘That was admirably clear and I think I’ll just lean against this wall for a moment because it’s so convenient.’

  It was while he was leaning weakly against a low garden wall in the rain that Inspector Steine experienced what he took at first to be a supernatural visitation.

  ‘Inspector?’ said a disembodied voice beside him. ‘I thought it was you, dear. Need a cup of tea?’

  His eyes were closed, and he was almost afraid to open them. But finally he looked, and there she was: the real and earthly Mrs Groynes, under a colourful umbrella, with a fresh cup of tea on a tray, and a plate of bourbon biscuits. In all this gloom, and amid all this aftermath of shocking violence, she seemed to shine like an angel.

  ‘You can come indoors with me if you like,’ she said, offering him an arm. ‘My house is just two doors along. Evidently there was some sort of hoo-hah out here, but I was swabbing the floors when it happened, and I didn’t hear a bleeding thing! What am I like, eh? You don’t get many of me as a free gift with Robertson’s Golden Shred.’

  ‘Mrs Groynes?’ he said, bursting into tears. ‘With a cup of tea? And wittering?’ It was all too much for him. ‘Oh, my goodness, have I died?’

  Twelve

  By nine o’clock that evening, it would be fair to say that a sense of anti-climax was pervasive. Extreme levels of excitement tend to have that effect. ‘The day after the Lord Mayor’s Show’ is the way Londoners colourfully describe such a sense of let-down, with all the connotations of traipsing through horse dung and chip-paper.

  Take Constable Twitten. On bursting into the wax museum with his ‘bally truncheons’ line, he had felt very pleased with himself, especially when he realised his arrival had perhaps prevented the sergeant from having his hands lopped off by a theatrical landlady boasting of implausible knife-skills acquired colonially. But an hour or so later, once he was back in the office, the feeling of elation simply wore off, leaving behind only fatigue and a few nagging doubts.

  The fact was, Brunswick was safe and sound (and very subdued). So was the inspector. The danger to both of them had been intensely real this morning, but now that it was over, it seemed to belong to a different reality, along with the extremely violent deaths of the psychopathic Geoffrey Chaucer, the treacherous Barrow-Boy Cecil and the venal Constable Jenkins.

  ‘Adelaide Vine and her dastardly female co-conspirators are nowhere to be found, sir,’ Twitten reported to Inspector Steine, after answering the phone on Miss Lennon’s desk. Normally, he would have trotted to the inspector’s door and delivered this news while standing to attention. Normally, he’d also have sounded interested. This afternoon he delivered the news less conventionally, by sitting down and yelling it.

  There was no reply from Steine’s office.

  ‘Sir?’ called Twitten. ‘Did you hear me, sir?’ He prayed he wouldn’t have to get up.

  ‘Yes,’ came a faint voice. ‘Thank you, Twitten.’

  At his own desk, the inspector was staring out of the window. There was nothing in his mind. He saw, but took no interest in, bedraggled seagulls gathering on neighbouring rooftops. He would have preferred to close his eyes, but every time he tried it, he saw a clock plummeting earthwards off a building, or a car careering towards him, or a discarded and bloody executioner’s axe with human flesh and hair adhering to its blade.

  For his own part, Brunswick was making no attempt to be normal. He sat, unmoving, for over an hour, moaning ‘Ow, my head! Ow my head!’ until the inspector, shouting from his office, ordered him to stop. At first Brunswick had taken a proper interest in the related events on the zebra crossing, especially (‘Blimey!’) the unfortunate part played by those flattened French onion-sellers – but since then he had been simply leached of emotion, aware only of little waves of residual terror, which were gradually lessening in intensity. Did he care that Adelaide Vine could not be found? Well, a bit, yes. But was he prepared to do anything about it? Not if it involved rising from this chair.

  When Sergeant Baines popped his head around the door mid-afternoon, he burst out laughing.

  ‘You lot should blooming see yourselves!’ he chuckled. ‘You ought all to go home, if you ask me.’

  Mr Lloyd the scurfy postman shuffled in and dropped an envelope on Twitten’s desk. ‘Lady gave me this,’ he said. ‘Say thank you, son, or I’ll take it away again.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Lloyd,’ Twitten managed to say. Looking at it, he was struck by the similarity of this envelope to one he had seen before. ‘Mr Lloyd!’ he called out hastily. ‘Could you describe the lady?’ But whether Mr Lloyd heard him or not, he left without answering. The standing orders of Mr Lloyd’s postal union demanded that once a member has engaged in his egress protocol (i.e. has turned to go), he does not deviate, diverge, revolve, or swerve off.

  Twitten, with effort, opened the envelope and absorbed its contents. Then he sighed and slipped it into his desk drawer.

  A few minutes later, the inspector decided to address his men. He emerged from his office, clutched the door jamb for stability, and then launched himself in the direction of Miss Lennon’s outsized desk, where he sank gratefully onto her vacant chair.

  ‘Men,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about you, but I feel peculiar.’

  Brunswick put a hand up. ‘Permission to say “Ow, my head!”, sir?’

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Ow, my—’

  ‘But only once.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, all right. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Because if you keep saying it, I will have to insist you go to hospital.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Are you not going to say “Ow, my head”, Brunswick?’

  ‘I thought I’d save it up, sir. For when I can’t help it.’

  ‘I see.’ Steine took a deep breath. ‘Look, men, we have all been through our own ordeals, and ordinarily—’ He stopped. Had he said that correctly? Ord-in-ar-i-ly? Ordinarily? He frowned. Was ‘ordinarily’ even a word?

  ‘Can we go home, please, sir?’ said Twitten.

  ‘Yes!’ burst out Brunswick.

  ‘That’s just what I was going to suggest, Twitten. If you hadn’t interrupted. In many ways, this should be a joyous time, and ordinary—’ He frowned again, and decided to paraphrase. ‘And in the normal way of things, we would rejoice that we all survived this day. Did you just say that Adelaide Vine has been successfully apprehended, Twitten?’

  ‘No, sir. The opposite. She seems to have bally well got away again. As have the others, namel
y, Miss Sibert and Miss Lennon. Combined, these three females make a formidable group. They are all highly devious, but with strikingly different approaches and vocal styles.’

  The inspector huffed. ‘Still, many good things have happened. The annoying Constable Jenkins was revealed in his true colours, and paid the price. And I meant to tell you both earlier, I spoke to Mrs Groynes – ’

  ‘Gosh, did you, sir?’

  ‘ – and she has indicated that she will return to work next week.’

  ‘Oh, that’s spiffing news, sir,’ said Twitten delightedly looking at Brunswick and seeing him burst into tears. ‘Oh, don’t cry, Sergeant!’

  ‘I’m not!’ snuffled Brunswick, from behind a handkerchief.

  ‘I think the sergeant is a little bit overwhelmed by the news of Mrs Groynes’s return, sir. Which I suppose is understandable since they’ve always had a special bond, what with all the disgusting Battenberg and so on, and given that his maternal abandonment issues run so deep.’

  ‘She didn’t say it in so many words,’ the inspector continued, raising his voice a little to be heard over the sounds of unmanly emotion emanating from his sergeant, ‘but I got the distinct impression that Mrs Groynes had been twiddling her thumbs, and missing us all dreadfully. She said the hours had dragged and that she had never stopped thinking about us for a second! Anyway, I can see you’re moved by this, Brunswick, but contain yourself if you can.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Brunswick took a deep breath and wiped his eyes. ‘Better now, sir.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m just happy, sir.’

  ‘Yes, well. Good man. Now, we will all go home, take a rest, take stock, and reconvene on Monday.’

  ‘May I just ask, sir?’ said Twitten, who was finally dredging up some energy. ‘Before we go our separate ways. Does anyone else feel that at no point this week did they really have autonomy? I think that’s why I’m so depressed. I feel as if I never had a choice about how to act, as if my unconscious—’

  ‘Oh, not now, Twitten!’ interrupted Brunswick, with sudden vehemence. ‘Ow, my head!’

  But this was all a few hours earlier, and now it was nine o’clock and Twitten was retiring to bed, having rested in his room for most of the afternoon and then joined Mrs Thorpe to eat supper and watch television for half an hour, with General Thorpe’s fabulous sword hanging (safely) back above the fireplace.