Bimsley eyed the contents of the bag with suspicion. He recognized the figure from his childhood. On Sunday treats at the seaside, the silent figure had bothered him so much that his mother had stopped letting him attend the Punch and Judy show on the pier.
It was the figure of Mr Punch’s hangman, Jack Ketch.
∨ The Memory of Blood ∧
21
Victoriana
Arthur Bryant was sitting on the beach with the trouser legs of his frayed suit rolled up, watching a recalcitrant donkey attempting to tug free from its owner. The smelly, haggard beast kept its legs straight, its head down and pulled, showing the kind of mean determination for which the seaside town’s residents were famous.
“Really, though, what on earth are we doing here?” asked John May in exasperation.
“Sun, sea, sand, summer,” Bryant pronounced slowly and carefully. “Gruesome, isn’t it? France has St Tropez, Italy has Portofino. England has Broadstairs.”
In front of him, a small boy had lost the ice cream from his cone and was attempting to pick it out of the wet ochre sand. His mother bent over him, ready with a slap. A handful of hardy visitors were wading knee-deep in the bristling grey sea. The watery sunshine had a suspicious chill in it, as if at any moment the clouds might cover the sky and revel in the disappointment they caused.
“I can’t believe you insisted on coming here in the middle of an investigation,” said May. “Charles Dickens stayed there in Bleak House. It won’t just be work, it’ll be fun. One minute you’re measuring my nose, the next we’re heading for the coast. If this is the onset of Alzheimer’s, can you at least remember enough to let me know?”
Bryant had resisted all attempts to engage him in conversation on the train down. “This is part of the investigation,” he muttered.
“You said we’re supposed to be meeting someone. I think it’s about time you explained, Arthur. I mean, we’re here now, so even if I get angry with you, I can’t do much about it.”
Bryant checked his ancient Timex. “Come on, he should be waiting for us.” He stuck out his hand and his partner grudgingly pulled him to his feet. Surveying the maritime scene before him, he waited with arms outstretched while May dusted him down. A seagull stumped past them with a ketchup-covered chip in its mouth. Several of its friends flew down to take a closer look at the detectives and decided they probably weren’t worth landing on.
“Look at them,” Bryant complained. “Virtually the only birds you can’t eat. Why aren’t there shooting ranges on the beach? You could make a fortune. Look over there.” He pointed to a dingy doorway with the word Willy’s Waxworks picked out in gold against black. Next to it was a rock shop, selling hard-candy false teeth, giant baby pacifiers and plates of fake bacon and eggs. “What would aliens think if they found themselves in the average British seaside town? All this gruesome Victoriana on display, death masks in wax and body parts made from sugar. Rickety rides and penny slot machines. Ghost trains. Clairvoyants. This is where the past truly survives.”
“That’s why you like it so much,” May told him. “You’re still a Victorian at heart, aren’t you? You’d like to see the return of fog and cobbled streets and tuberculosis, and sticking kids up chimneys.”
“It’s all still here. Look at the grotesques wandering around us – instead of the healthy bodies and chiselled features you see in London, we’re surrounded by fat people with terrifying red faces. The seaside is full of people who look like they’ve been carved out of Spam.” A woman in front of Bryant turned around and glared at him. After many decades of working together, May was used to his partner’s rudeness, but forgot that it still came as a shock to others.
“You’re saying it’s a class issue.”
“Well, of course,” Bryant retorted impatiently. “These days only the rich are thin. And they holiday in Tuscany and the Riviera. The working classes always headed for the English seaside, and were never content just to sit and look at the view. They wanted to eat and drink and be entertained. What a selection the Victorians had to choose from! Shell grottoes, sand artists and seaweed gardens, Pierrot troupes, concert parties, champion pier divers, phrenologists, burnt-cork minstrels, goat carriages, bathing machines, sword swallowers, pugilists, fortunetellers. Come on, let’s get some cockles and whelks and cover them in white pepper and vinegar.”
Neither of the detectives had enjoyed a proper holiday in years, and this little Thursday-morning mystery jaunt was the closest they were going to get to one. Their last abortive trip to the seaside had left them trapped in the winter’s worst traffic jam, investigating a murder. As both were born Londoners, the strange sense of discomfort they felt upon leaving the capital mitigated any real desire to travel.
Most of the lightbulbs edging the Las Vegas Amusement Arcade were broken and corroded by the salt air. A less Vegas-y venue was hard to imagine. The illuminated machines in its cavernous interior blinked and shook in the gloom, tawdry treasures awaiting discovery by some third-rate Aladdin. The sharp scent of brine mingled with the pungent reek of stale doughnut fat and candy floss.
They passed a battered bandstand with an octagonal roof of oxidized green tiles and a row of blue and white public deckchairs awaiting the arrival of summer’s senior citizens, who would turn to follow the path of the sun like ripening tomatoes before folding up at five for tea. A large red sea mine had been converted into a charity box for guide dogs and had been draped with a plastic banner that read Ho-Lee-Fook! The Best Chinese Restaurant In Broadstairs! A sign above the serving hatch of a tea hut read: Half Price Cream Teas For Pensioners – No Seconds.
“Pensioner is such an ugly word,” said Bryant vehemently. “How quick we are to give everyone labels. In London I like to think I’m regarded as an expert, an authority, a man with experience to impart. Down here I’d be treated as a child or ignored as a pensioner.”
“Don’t worry, Arthur, no one’s expecting you to retire,” May replied, reading his thoughts. “We all know you’ll die in harness.”
“True. Hopefully I’ll be gazing down at a body with a knife in its back and just drop in my tracks, whereupon Banbury will draw a chalk outline around me and I’ll join my own cases.”
“Arthur, there you are! I thought we were supposed to meet in front of the clock tower? I gave up waiting.” A very odd-looking man was squinting at them from behind the Hook-a-Duck stall.
“Dudley Salterton!” Bryant exclaimed. “Sorry, Dudley, I lost track of the time. John, this is a very old friend of mine. We went to school together in Whitechapel.” He hadn’t seen the elderly seaside entertainer in years, and it was hard to tell if he’d got the right man. People described Salterton as ageless in a way that wasn’t intended as a compliment. He seemed to exist somewhere between post-menopause and post-mortem. He dyed his hair and eyebrows a weird shade of gingery-brown and never shaved properly, leaving a patina of stubble around which a crust of stage makeup could be discerned, so that he looked as if he’d been inexpertly embalmed. He was wearing a too-short school tie and what appeared to be a red flannel dressing gown over a very old mismatched suit.
“I thought you only knew strange people in London,” May said from the side of his mouth as the trio walked away together.