The Disappearance Boy (29 page)

You might have expected Mr Brookes to find it difficult to compose himself, seeing that his prey was almost within reach, but in fact, true professional that he was, it only took him a minute. Telling Mr English to inform Mr Clements and his London guest that he would be up with them shortly, and that he was sure he’d be able to explain everything to their satisfaction, he took a deep breath, shuddered, and turned round to check his appearance in the mirror over the washbasin against which he had been bracing himself. He was still panting from his exertions, and a little white round the gills –
white with fury
is, I believe, the proper technical term for a man in Mr Brookes’s condition, no matter how much make-up he is wearing. Patting his face briefly with his handkerchief, he restored his disarranged hair by repeating the first produce from the act; flicking the comb neatly from his cuff, he smoothed the fallen locks back into place with two smart, decisive sweeps. A brief adjustment of his bow tie, a licked finger across each eyebrow, and he was ready to do business. He shot his cuffs, breathed out into a cupped hand to check his breath, and flicked a speck of something off his right shoulder.
First impressions count
. A quick cough to clear his throat, a quick final wipe of his hands, and Mr Brookes left the Ladies without even looking back over his shoulder. All the time he was checking his appearance in the mirror, he had been able to hear Pam on the other side of the half-splintered cubicle door, trying not to cry, holding her breath, the silly, swollen-ankled, silk-stockinged, scarlet-shod bitch. He’d deal with her later.

The rest of the show went down a storm. The Devere Girls in their Coronation-night regalia and spangles were a triumph – the final blackout as all was revealed brought the house down – and after the headliner had turned the air blue for twenty minutes with some more than usually near-the-knuckle material the National Anthem was sung so raucously that the sound shook flakes of gilt down from the ceiling. The first-house audience spilled out into the crowds on North Road laughing and happy.

The rest of their evening was no disappointment, either. The fireworks were better than expected, the piers were mobbed, the community singing was lusty and the five hundred sailors from HMS
Eagle
wreaked various kinds of handsomely uniformed havoc as they made their way through the crowds – one party involving some of their admirers, out on the western edge of Hove, was still going strong when the police were called to interrupt the music three days later. Some people, however, did not have such a good night. Mr J. Clements Sole Prop, waiting in the wings, was furious. As soon as he saw him, he told Mr ‘Teddy’ Brookes Esq. – straight to his flaming face, and right out in front of the booking agent from London, would you mind – that as far as he could see it was just the same bloody act as before – his lady wife had been most disappointed – and if Brookes thought any self-respecting management in the country was going to book a piece of second-hand tat like that, never mind the Grand keeping it on as the number-three spot in a bill which looked like topping the box-office records for the entire year, well then he’d got another bloody think coming, because not on Mr Clements’s watch it bloody wasn’t, contract or no contract. After one or two useless attempts to interrupt, Mr Brookes heard him out in silence, wiping and rewiping his hands, carrying on doing it even after the two men had turned and gone and left him to stand there alone in his dress shirt and tails, clutching his handkerchief and listening to the laughter for the headliner as it rose and fell; rose, and fell, like the waves of a slowly and inexorably retreating tide.

And that was that. Apart from the last Brighton appearance of the legendary Phyllis Dixey, who headlined there six weeks later, the Coronation Special of June 1953 was probably the last really popular show that the Grand ever put on. It was downhill all the way, after Mr Brookes.

So, here’s how it was done:

14

The mechanics were simple. It was Reggie who was carried off the stage hidden in the steps; Reggie’s feet that Mr Brookes saw wedged into Pam’s shoes under the toilet cubicle door with one ankle swollen from that near-disaster on the stairs; Reggie he could smell, and Reggie whose stifled attacks of hysterical laughter he mistook for crying coming through the woodwork. Meanwhile, upstairs, it was Pam who was still curled under the trapdoor of the apparatus when it was wheeled offstage to create space for the Devere Girls; Pam who was then free to uncurl herself when it reached the wings, Pam who grabbed a suitcase and her handbag from their prearranged hiding places and then ran barefoot to alert Mr English to the emergency downstairs. Mr English met the outraged Mr Clements as he and the booking agent were coming backstage through the pass door to see what the hell had happened – and the rest of that chain of events you know.

Substitution
; it’s one of the oldest and most basic tricks in the book. All it took for Mr Brookes to believe what he was seeing was for Reggie to jam on Pam’s shoes – though I must say that the 12-denier stockings (already on under Reggie’s trousers from the top of the act) and the spray of perfume from a bottle already hidden in the cubicle were nice additional touches, and certainly made the deception more sure-fire.

What was really clever about the routine was the way Pam and Reg had misdirected Mr Brookes away from what they were up to all through that last week of rehearsals. They controlled his attention, making him congratulate himself on how little he had to worry about from his colleagues at precisely the point when he should have been worrying most about what they were up to. All week, Reggie had done his crafty best to be always on Mr Brookes’s side, ever-ready to keep things running smoothly. Most cleverly of all, by crying when her employer expected her to – and then suddenly smiling bravely, just when he didn’t – Pam had persuaded Teddy that she was exactly the kind of scared, compliant fool he thought all of the women who slept with him were; the kind of fool, for instance, who’d let him arrange an illegal and dangerous abortion for her before her body gave her the cast-iron proof that she actually needed one. The kind of fool who would then be happy to go back to work less than thirty-six hours after her supposed procedure – and then suddenly change her mind and need a day in bed. Under that cover, she and Reggie had stolen almost the whole of the last weekend to work on their moves, and even some of the Tuesday, and Mr Brookes never once suspected the real reason why they were spending so much time together.

The riskiest – and cleverest – part of the whole deception was the force; the strategy whereby they made Mr Brookes’s rattled mind assume it was Pam who had been wheeled offstage in the treads, and not Reggie. They both knew that the minute the curtain came down the obvious thing for Mr Brookes to do would be to lift the trapdoor in the cabinet to see who was under it, but to make sure he didn’t, they had carefully coached him to see her – not Reggie – as the bolter. All of those tearful runs down to the Ladies of hers had in fact been carefully staged. On the night, the ruse worked; faced with the sight of those empty mirrors, Mr Brookes’s mind dutifully jumped to exactly the wrong conclusion, forgetting completely that the routine allowed no time for Pam to cram herself into the stairs before they were removed. The sight of the pieces of cut rope on the floor of the cabinet momentarily baffled him, creating a space in which the familiar image of her tottering downstairs in tears and high heels could drop unbidden into place behind his misled eyes. His rage did the rest – and that they knew they could rely on.

Of course, they hadn’t been able to think through or plan everything. After she’d made it out into the alley, breathless and shoeless, clutching at her bag and case and with the scarlet-and-black dress from the act still hanging half off her, Pamela was on her own.

The Queen’s Road was mayhem, full of grabbing hands and leering faces; now that she’d made it into the station, however, the noise retreated, and she found herself marooned in quiet. The announcement board was blank – everything was haywire, tonight – and she looked desperately around for somebody she could ask about the next train to London. One coming in had just disgorged its passengers, and the stragglers brushed past her as she searched, laughing and staring at her scarlet dress and bare feet, but then leaving her once more alone. A firework boomed somewhere over the great glass roof, more cheers went up outside – and then a whistle blew somewhere behind her, making her spin and panic, and decide to run. She had no idea if this was the right train, but she knew she couldn’t afford to wait. She ducked through a gate, and swore her way across the platforms – there was broken glass from a beer bottle splintered between her and the train – all the time cursing her too-heavy case for holding her back. Somebody swinging a flag shouted the magic word
London
, and the whistle went again. She wrenched a door open just as the train started to move, and threw her case and herself aboard. The door swung shut like a gunshot, and she instinctively closed her eyes and pressed herself back into a corner, holding her breath, willing the next sound not to be that of a man shouting and running and pulling the door open again, willing the train to jolt and gather speed and take her away.

It did.

As the train began to sway and steady itself for the journey, she let herself begin to breathe, but didn’t open her eyes. There was something crumpled between her fingers – someone on the Queen’s Road had pressed a little paper Union Jack on a stick into her hand, and she must have taken it just to get away. She couldn’t properly remember. Uncurling her hand, she let the pennant drop to the floor. Something torn was catching at the backs of her calves and tickling her, and when she finally did open her eyes she discovered that one of the quick-change fasteners on her dress had given way; the wrecked nylon underskirts and lace of the wedding gown were foaming out around her thighs and ankles, making her half scarlet woman, half runaway bride. The thought made her want to laugh, but she couldn’t quite manage it – not yet. She pushed herself up on the seat. A reflection in a dark window showed her the ruin of her carefully arranged face and hair, and as the lights of the northern edge of Brighton slid away behind that picture she slumped back against the seat again and watched the dark pane of glass, waiting for the full blackness that would tell her that the town was now safely falling away behind her, and that she could begin the work of forgetting it. She tried to smile, but failed. Then she sat up, found her bag, rummaged, lit herself a cigarette, took three deep drags, grabbed her bag again and tipped its contents into her lap.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, that last-minute dash upstairs by Reggie to get Mr Brookes’s missing handkerchief just before the curtain went up was all part of the deception. The handkerchief was in his pocket all the time, next to the key to Mr Brookes’s dressing room. Once inside the dressing room, it had taken him only seconds to scoop up everything he needed from the dressing table – the signet ring, the watch, the cigarette case, the lighter and the well-stuffed wallet – and head back downstairs. The near-desperate effort involved in hauling himself up and then throwing himself back down those four flights of concrete stairs at the necessary speed meant that his breathlessness as he limped back into the wings after stuffing his hoard into Pam’s hidden handbag was genuine; like the adrenalin in his eyes, and the limp from where he’d nearly come a cropper on the last turn of the stairs, it only served to make the fraud look more convincing.

It’s all in the presentation, you see; Mr Brookes had taught him that, if nothing else.

Pam stared at the jumbled mess, and ran her fingers through it. Pearls, bracelet, powder; comb, scent bottle, hairspray. Her Dutch cap in its case, her fags, matches, two dirty lipsticks and three stained handkerchiefs knotted together. Everything a girl needed – and everything Reggie had lifted from Mr Brookes for her too, including his signet ring and watch. Her purse.

His wallet.

She knew exactly how much was in the purse: the money for the abortion, the extra two pounds for the late appointment, the ten-bob note he’d given her for the taxi, and her own savings of eighteen pounds in notes and nine shillings and sixpence in change. Brookes’s wallet looked heavy, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it just yet. She looked down at it sitting in her lap amidst the rest of her loot, and wondered how much time the heap would buy her. It was just going to have to be enough, wasn’t it? She didn’t have the strength to actually count or calculate anything just now – she’d do that later, she told herself, when she was feeling a bit calmer. However, looking at the wallet, and seeing its owner’s face in her mind – hearing his voice, standing in the toilet doorway – she knew that there was one thing she needed to get done straight away.

Opening her purse, Pam pulled out a small piece of tightly folded blue paper. She stared at this, too. There had been several times in the past week when she’d got it out of her purse and looked at it for other reasons – something, by the way, that she’d never told Reggie – but now she knew exactly how she felt. The time for choosing had already passed. Scooping up everything that was heaped in her lap and carefully placing it on the seat opposite, she pulled down the window, tore the paper into pieces and released them – and the now-fragmented address that had been scrawled across them – into the darkness. Then she sat down again, leaving the window open for some air, and looked again at Mr Brookes’s pigskin wallet, now lying nestled against her bracelet. She pulled it out of the pile, making the charms shift and ring, took a nice deep breath and made herself snap it open.

The leather felt like skin, she thought, but old. Unfeeling. There were four more carefully folded fivers inside, and several singles, and they came out and were added to the hoard on the seat beside her – moving, slightly, in the air coming in through the window. As well as the money she could see the protruding edges of some cards and bills, some more bits of blue paper that looked like they would have addresses and telephone numbers on them if she were to open them up and look, and even the chipped edge of one worn, folded photograph. Her fingers hesitated, and then decided; she walked over to the window and flipped the wallet through it before she had time to reconsider, staring after it at the rectangle of rushing darkness that had taken it away. It was gone, and so was he.