The Disappearance Boy (8 page)

It was rather crowded that morning, because the sun was properly out now, and the woman with the daffodils reappeared and unsettled him further by speaking to him, so he didn’t stay long, spending barely half an hour on his bench. On the way home he treated himself to a saccharine-glazed bun from the Gipsy Hill Station buffet by way of compensation, but when he got back to his room he looked in his savings tin again and reminded himself that the second week of resting between bookings was never quite so much fun as the first, and that he needed to pull in his horns.

The next week passed slowly; the weather improved, but not much else. At six o’clock on the Saturday, there was a knock on his door.

He could hear Mr Brookes’s voice buzzing out of the receiver on the hall table even before he picked it up. Apparently – Reg didn’t get quite all of this, because Mr Brookes was in a pub, and having to shout – apparently something had turned up. The spot was third on the bill at the Brighton Grand, starting on Monday week – there’d been an accident – second-act only, and the management was hoping to string out the bill for three weeks, God help them. He’d have to find a new girl of course, and there was nothing much that could be done in that department on a Saturday night, but he’d keep Reg posted, and with any luck they’d be able to –

At this point, Mr Brookes was cut off by someone saying they needed to use the fucking telephone, if he didn’t fucking mind. Reg explained to his landlady as best he could what the situation was – she’d stayed to listen – then had his tea, and then went to bed early. At ten o’clock, he was woken by another knock at his door – an angry one, this time.

Mr Brookes, still shouting, said that he’d struck lucky, and wanted to know if Reg could meet him at Victoria Station in time for the five nineteen train – yes, Reg, the five nineteen on
Monday
– because they’d be rehearsing in Brighton, on bloody stage, would you bloody believe? Then he rang off, laughing and shouting that something needed taking care of straight away, and that he’d explain everything else on the train.

He’d have to forget the cemetery tomorrow morning, was Reg’s first thought – there’d be too much to do. Why did everything with Mr Brookes have to be so bloody last minute?

What with a rush-hour jam on the way to Victoria, a forgotten valise and a final limping dash to check that the skip and apparatus had been loaded safely together in the same luggage car, the phrase turned out to be literal for once. Reg barely had time to get a word in with Mr Brookes at the station, and it wasn’t until just gone eighteen minutes past five – eighteen minutes past five on the evening of Monday the thirteenth of April, to be precise – that Reggie finally hurled himself, panting, into the crowded front compartment of the five nineteen to Brighton.

I don’t know if you remember them, but the step up into those old-fashioned single-doored Southern Railway compartments was high, and there’d been a real tangle getting on; Reggie almost fell, and Mr Brookes was shouting something at someone behind them, and people were staring. Doors banged, whistles blew, and when the train jolted into life it lurched forward so violently that Reggie had to grab at his seat and concentrate for a moment on not swearing out loud. He was also trying not to stare too hard at the strikingly turned-out and well-built (if not exactly tidy or clean) young woman who’d managed to leave it even later than they had to squeeze herself onto the train. She trod on someone’s foot, and caused several male eyebrows to rise as she reached up to stuff her coat and two bulging suitcases into the overhead luggage rack. In the opposite corner, Mr Brookes was smiling at the spectacle, barely even pretending to open his
Evening Standard
. Once she’d shoehorned herself into a seat, the woman opened a large and scuffed-looking red leather handbag, tossed back her roughly cut hair and proceeded to dig around in the bag for her compact.

‘Oh dear, that was close,’ she said, smiling at herself in the mirror – as if all that rushing about had been somebody else’s fault – and checking her teeth for traces of her dark red lipstick. Then she snapped the compact shut, and extended a red-nailed hand across the space between them. The nail polish was chipped.

‘You must be Reggie,’ she said. ‘I’m Pamela. Pamela
Rose
.’

The voice was friendly, and trowelled the sound of Soho over what could have once been Kingston upon Thames – or perhaps vice versa. She accented the second part of her name as if it was a clue to something, and as Reggie took her hand and more or less shook it – what else could he do? – he became aware that it was her perfume that was adding such a strong and suggestive grace note to the warm fug of the compartment. Talcum powder, he decided; that was it, talcum powder, with sugar around the edges – and a great big bunch of roses somewhere smack in the middle, to go with her name. He liked it, and smiled. She smiled right back, keeping hold of his hand. She was wearing a boldly fitted black-and-yellow tweed two-piece that had seen slightly better days, and a black roll-neck sweater; apart from the lipstick, her face was almost bare. A crowded charm bracelet jangled softly on her left wrist, and two ropes of pearls swung above her breasts. As the five nineteen lurched with a bump over its points onto the Brighton line and began to pick up speed, she tilted her head briefly to indicate the now occupied Mr Brookes, and winked. The train slid over the Thames.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, in a conspiratorial stage whisper, and leaning forward slightly to make her point, ‘I knew he wouldn’t have told you.’

She leaned forward again, making her pearls swing.

‘I’m the new girl,’ she said.

Three

North Road

1

Everybody fancies something a bit different when they come to the seaside, don’t they? And according to that Monday’s
Brighton Evening Argus and Gazette
you would have had quite a choice. There are thirty-seven adverts on the entertainents page including all the variety houses and the roller rink as well as the cinemas and theatres – so this may take some time.

First up, you could have tried
Chloe et Cherie
at the Continental Cinema down on the seafront – not that I’m suggesting for a moment you would have picked something from that particular class of entertainment as your first choice, or that you would have been fooled by the picture in the advert, which I’m sure was more suggestive than the actual film itself – or – moving down the column a bit – you could have sampled Barbara Stanwyck in
All I Desire
at the Essoldo (highly recommended), or Jean Simmons in
The Actress
at the seafront Odeon (competent, but a bit dull). If you fancied something live by way of a change, then I could have offered you the lovely Miss Vanda Godsell in
Separate Rooms
out on the Palace Pier,
Relative Values
with Gladys Cooper at the Theatre Royal if you felt like being respectable, and the brand-new
Follies of 1953
in the Pavilion Ballroom at the Aquarium if you didn’t – the chorus down at the Aquarium was mostly local in the spring, filling in before the professionals took over for the beauty pageants and Lido shows of the summer season, and had a reputation for being rather more easily impressed at the stage door than the out-of-town girls, if you get my drift. Of course, down at the very bottom of the page, last but not least, ‘for one week only’ – as if it was ever for anything else – there was always the touring production of
Rose Marie
on ice up at the Sports Stadium, still doing the rounds after all these years – but why go for the old-fashioned, when you could have had the new? I’ll leave the choice to you, obviously, but all in all you’d have to say that there was pretty much everything that the discerning spring visitor could reasonably require by way of diversion on offer that week – and all with prices starting at just one shilling for the back balcony at the Continental, should you have decided to give that disreputable old fleapit a go after all. And if – by any chance – none of that tickled your fancy, then you could of course have just saved your money and stayed in the lounge of your hotel. There you would have had the choice of listening to the pianist – if you were paying full whack at the Bedford or the Metropole – or, if you were staying somewhere a little more modest, to the BBC Concert Orchestra on the Home Service. Playing Delius, I shouldn’t wonder. I can just picture you, sipping your gin-and-mix and taking a quiet look at the evening paper, skipping the one or two items about the troubles in Kenya like the rest of us and concentrating instead on the centre spread, the one outlining the plans for the Big Day itself, all the parades and fireworks and so on – the big day, when the beautiful Princess and her even prettier unmarried sister would be riding to the Abbey in those fabulous coaches of theirs, ready to give us the biggest and best-dressed pageant of loveliness of them all.

Or you could have just turned your back on all of that – on all that choice and chatter and well-upholstered romance – and decided to take a walk along the front as the sun went down. That was what Reggie did, when all the rush and fuss of arriving was finally over. Like him, you could have chosen to just go and lean on the rusting promenade railings for a bit and have a good quiet stare at the sea, letting that two-page centre-spread Coronation guide from yesterday’s paper blot up the grease from your bag of cooling, vinegary chips. You could have let the lights of the town all come on behind you without even turning round to have a look, deciding that what you really needed was just to be on your own with your thoughts for a bit before walking all the way back along the front and hauling yourself up the five flights of stairs to your new bed. Just to think back over the last twenty-four hours and get them in some sort of order.

Most people don’t notice it, but the steady slope of Queen’s Road as it descends from Brighton station to the promenade is quite pronounced – and especially if you’ve got a heavy case to carry. In the last-minute rush, the brown-paper parcel containing a three-week supply of flash powder had somehow ended up in Reggie’s, and as he’d lurched towards the front it was clipping his knee at every second stride. When he reached the Clock Tower a cold breeze blowing up the street slapped his face as if it had been instructed to greet this latest visitor personally, inviting him to look up and get his first proper sight of the sea, but he ignored it. Mr Brookes had booked them into a cheap hotel by the station for their first night in town, and they’d nearly got stuck there – it had taken him until nearly twelve o’clock on the Tuesday to find all three of them proper digs on the phone, and because they hadn’t booked ahead, when he did, they were all over the shop. Mr Brookes himself was right out in Hove – the posh bit – Reg down along the seafront and Miss Rose somewhere up back behind the station with a Mrs Brennan or Brown or something. It fell to Reg of course to help her with her bags, and although the room when they finally got there was all right, with a proper window and even its own sink, the place itself was rather further than they’d been told, which meant that by the time Reggie had set off back into the town to pick up his own suitcase and head off down to the seafront to find his digs it was already well past one – and Mr Brookes had said he wanted them both back at the Grand at three o’clock sharp to sign in and walk the stage. Pamela had looked surprised that they were starting work straight away, which showed just how little she knew what was in store for her, Reg reckoned.

Come on, look on the flippin’ bright side
, he thought, lugging his bag round the corner of the Queen’s Hotel.
She certainly looks like she knows how to look after herself. And let’s face it
, he told himself, shrugging off whatever point the seafront air was still trying to make as it had another go at his face,
she’ll bloody have to; six days from now she’s due to go missing fourteen times a week
. He paused, sniffing the burnt-sugar smell of candyfloss coming out through the turnstiles of the Palace Pier. The breakfast at the hotel had been shocking, and he hadn’t eaten since. Getting his breath back, he took the opportunity to look across the road and stare at the customers ensconced behind the salt-fogged windows of the Royal Albion’s dining room.

‘Murray’s Cabaret, Beak Street,’ he said, out loud this time, giving his pockets a quick rummage for anything edible he might have forgotten. ‘Sounds a proper enough place to have worked. Shame she’s never done any actual box work before, though.’

A promenader buttoned up against the breeze stared at him, obviously wondering what he was talking about. He ignored the man, picked his case up again, swung it into his other hand, and wondered how much further his digs were. All Mr Brookes had given him by way of directions was a bit of thin blue paper with the words
Seaview
,
26
and
Fitzroy
scrawled across it. Just keep going along the seafront until you see the sign, the man at the hotel had said, it’s not that far.

Fitzroy Place turned out to be a good twenty minutes away. It was a gloomy street, set back off the seafront at the end of narrow cul-de-sac; the black paint on the panelled front door of number 26 was thick and fissured, and Reg had to bang twice to get a response. However once he was up the front steps and inside the hallway looked all right – it wasn’t
too
dark, with a skylight up at the top – and he was pleased to see that the stairs had kept their grand mahogany handrail. Stairs were a challenge for Reggie when there was a suitcase involved, and his nicotine-stained landlady had taken one look at his built-up boot and asked him sharply if he realised the vacancy was on the top floor. Fortunately, Reggie had met plenty of landladies like this one before; his best tooth-concealing grin was quickly produced, and he assured her that he’d manage.

‘Oh, you’d be surprised, Mrs Steed,’ he said, quick as a knife, having read her name on the broken bell. ‘Managing’s my middle name. Has to be, in my line of work.’

She looked him up and down, and apparently made up her mind he’d do. She was used to
theatricals
, she said, leading him up the stairs.