The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes by Wilkes Roger

Author:Wilkes, Roger [Wilkes, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2011-07-19T22:00:00+00:00

Even before Spilsbury’s arrival, Robert Donaldson—depressed that he now had two trunk-crimes to deal with, though “Brighton Trunk-Crime No. 2” seemed to be virtually solved—broadcast a message to all police forces, giving a description of Toni Mancini and asking that he be apprehended.

At about eleven o’clock on the night of Thursday, 18 July, Police Constables William Triplow and Leonard Gourd were sitting in a patrol-car near the Yorkshire Grey pub in Lewisham, South London, close to Mancini’s birthplace. All at once, Triplow nudged his partner and pointed through the windshield in the direction of a well-lighted roundabout. A man was walking towards an all-night café. “So what?” Gourd muttered. “Look at his walk,” Triplow said. Gourd looked. Yes, there was something odd about it: it was more of a prance than a walk; the feet merely dabbed the ground, making one think of a liberty-horse—a tired liberty-horse. “I reckon it’s the Brighton-trunk bloke, the ‘dancing waiter’,” Triplow said. With that, he left the car and ran towards the man.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but do you happen to be Mr Marconi?”

“Mancini,” he was corrected. “I couldn’t half go a cup of tea and a sandwich or something.”

Triplow and Gourd took Mancini to the local police station. A phone call was made to Scotland Yard, and from there a message was sent to Brighton police headquarters, saying that Mancini would be arriving under escort in the town in the early hours of the morning.

The arrest was front-page news on papers that reached Brighton at about the same time as did Mancini. The reports heaped praise on William Triplow, one going so far as to call him “the sharpest-eyed policeman in the Metropolis”. (When I met him at his home in Lewisham in 1970, he had been blind for several years.)

Presently, a queue began to form outside the magistrates’ court. Most of the queuers were young women, some of whom bragged of having partnered Toni on the dance-floor, others of whom went farther in boasting of their knowledge of him. Soon there were more than fifty people in the queue. As there were only fifty seats in the gallery of the court, the thousand or so latecomers disorganized themselves into a cheering, singing, waving-to-press-photographers mob. Mounted policemen were needed to bisect it when Mancini, flanked by detectives, made his first public appearance as a celebrity. He looked as if he had been allowed to shave, but his clothes—dark blue jacket, grey shirt, white tie, flannel trousers—were crumpled. He smiled in response to the shouts and screams of “Hello, Toni,” “Keep your pecker up,” “Don’t worry, love, all will be well,” and frowned concernedly when a woman in beach-pyjamas fainted, either from sheer emotion or from absence of underwear on a rather chilly morning. The girl he had treated to fish and chips at the Aqua Café stood apart from the mob; she was again wearing the dress he had given her.

Similar scenes were enacted when he left the court, having been remanded

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