The Man That Got Away by Lynne Truss

Author:Lynne Truss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408890561
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-06-27T14:13:24+00:00

Ordinarily, Inspector Steine would have had quite a lot to say about one of his officers going undercover, especially if the officer was Brunswick. But since his momentous encounter on the train with Adelaide Vine, he had paid almost no attention to what was going on in the station. He was utterly dejected.

Every day, he sat at his desk, staring blankly out of the window. He barely touched his little plates of assorted highland shortbread.

When Brunswick had popped in to announce that he was off to the Black Cat to play the trumpet and glean evidence against a patently dangerous heavy mob, Steine had merely advised, ‘Well, try not to get shot again, will you?’

When Twitten asked him to sign a petty cash slip to cover an unspecified trip to London, he did not demand to know why.

And when his phone rang with news that another suspicious bag – with what appeared to be human blood seeping out of it – had been found at the Left Luggage office at the railway station, he merely sighed and sent Twitten to deal with it on his own.

Twitten was the main beneficiary of this change in the inspector’s spirits, as it meant that the daily one-to-one interrogations took up much less of his time.

Knock, knock.

‘Come in.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

‘Yes, yes. Blah di blah. Out with it, then.’

‘Thank you, sir. The thing is, I still firmly believe—’

‘Yes, yes. Out of ten?’

‘Ten, sir.’

‘All right, Twitten. You can go.’

And after that, the rest of the day was his own.

As for Steine, he just needed to think. He needed to go over the scene with Adelaide Vine again and again, trying to understand what had happened; recalling the dawning sense of joy and amazement when he realised this beautiful young woman was describing the meeting of his own parents in Gordon Square nearly fifty years ago. And then he would remember how that burgeoning joy was crushed when Adelaide, far from falling into his arms with a Shakespearean cry of ‘Mine Uncle!’, instead recoiled from him with a highly modern look of shock, horror and contempt.

The recollection made him physically shrivel at his desk.

‘What a wicked thing to say!’ she had gasped. And then she’d leaped from the train and walked briskly off, leaving Steine with his smile still frozen on his face.

Eventually, he confessed all to Mrs Groynes, which wasn’t easy. But at least it stopped her enquiring all the time why he looked like a wet weekend in Weston-super-Mare.

She was surprisingly sympathetic and helpful.

‘You see, dear,’ she explained, ‘from her point of view, you could be telling a great big porky pie. Pretending that this story of hers means anything to you.’

‘But why would I do that?’

‘I expect that’s precisely what she’s asking herself right now, dear. Why would he lie? What’s in it for him?’

‘And I knew that her mother’s name was Gillian.’

‘That’s all to the good, then. Listen, I bet you hear from her when she’s had time to calm down. Here, tell me who she is again, this Adelaide Whatever Her Name Is.

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