Mad Hatter

parasols and toy balloons all the way to the Chain Pier. There he ordered the cab to halt. He had seen a rack with some half-dozen bicycles against the wall of a building adjoining the pier entrance. One machine was being pushed into position there by a boy no taller than the front wheel. There was a basket attached to the saddle. Moscrop gave the cabman his shilling and cut across the road.

‘This bicycle,’ he demanded of the boy. ‘Who returned it to you?’

‘It’s from up the West Pier, guv. This ‘ere’s as far as you can go for a tanner. Gent ‘ired it up there and brought it in ‘ere. I just collect ’em and stable ’em. Quite a few geezers ride up ‘ere regular for lunch at Mutton’s or the Aquarium. Some of ’em try riding back after. Rare sight that is, if they’ve had a jug or two of four-ale.’

‘The person who hired it,’ persisted Moscrop. ‘Would you recall whether he was a young man not much older than yourself and wearing a red blazer?’

The boy scratched his chin. ‘Can’t say as I can recall anything.’

Moscrop put his hand in his pocket.

‘Now that I put me mind to it,’ said the boy resourcefully, ‘‘e was wearing a blazer. And it were red all right.’

Moscrop thrust a sixpence between their faces. It flashed in the sunlight. ‘Which way did this young man go?’

‘Up there, guv. The Aquarium, I reckon. Ah, much obliged to you.’

The Aquarium! He was more accustomed to studying life beside the sea than in it, but he did not hesitate. He was across the road, past the terrace garden and up to the turnstile under the Aquarium clocktower before the bicycle boy had put the sixpence in his pocket.

CHAPTER 3

Admission to the aquarium was a shilling. Half a crown spent in two minutes! Indulging one’s curiosity was an expensive pastime. He hoped the information he had bought at the bicycle-stand was reliable. Even if it were, the finding of the youth would not be easy. The forecourt at the foot of the granite steps he was descending was like an hotel foyer, thick with visitors noisily debating whether they would first take lunch, see the exhibits or listen to the conservatory orchestra. He paused midway down, scrutinising the shaded areas under the red-brick arches and behind the terracotta columns. The only red coats in view belonged to members of the militia. He moved on and down and crossed the pavement to the entrance-hall.

This too was crowded, but less noisy. It was furnished as a reading-room, with long tables. Visitors had come there in dozens and gone to the London newspapers like men overboard to lifebelts. However well a landlady prepared breakfast, it was not the same without The Morning Post.

The current editions of Brighton’s seventeen daily and weekly papers, liberally arranged along the eighty-foot length of the hall, were not much in demand. The single exception was The Fashionable Visitors’ List. For every one studying that journal, three or four waited to replace him. Suitably, it was mounted under glass on an elongated lectern. At another table, the latest telegrams were dissected by a small colony of holiday-makers from the London Stock Exchange.

Moscrop stood in uncertainty, trying to make the same decision that provoked such discussion outside. Should he turn left and enter the restaurant or go forward into the main aquarium? He was already satisfied that the boy was not in the reading-room. It was fair to presume that if he was in the building at all he had come there to meet someone. Perhaps he had already met them outside and gone into the restaurant. If he had, he should be there for a considerable while; long enough to make it safe to search the corridors housing the tanks. He stepped forward decisively.

He was unprepared for the next experience. After the babble outside, the clublike concentration in the reading-room had presented a contrast, but it was at least recognisable as another aspect of modern life. The aquarium was not. It was other-worldly. Dimly-lit aisles extended before him like cloisters in a Fra Angelico fresco. Pillars of deeply coloured serpentine marble, Bath stone and red Edinburgh granite supported a groined roof stretching ahead for more than two hundred feet. It was formed of variegated bricks, crossed by finely moulded Gothic vaulting. The impression on Moscrop was profound; he would not have blinked an eye if an organ had started to play and a clerical procession walked past. He was ready to accept that a patch of light on the pavement to his left was filtered through a stained-glass window. It seemed sacreligious to discover that it came from a gas-lit tank of lobsters.

He paced the corridor uneasily, peering ahead for a glimpse of the boy, but feeling obliged to simulate some interest in the tanks, rather as one casts an eye over tombstones on a cathedral tour. A skate came close to the glass of one and hovered there, a grotesque parody of a human face, with wicked twinkling eyes and mocking mouth. Mackerel and herrings played among the rising bubbles. Bass dived repeatedly into the fine grit at the bottom of their tank, rolling themselves in it with evident relish. In the main tank, over a hundred feet long, porpoises darted easily from end to end. A line of visitors watched in hushed amazement at such quicksilver velocity contained within a foot of their faces.

Halfway along the corridor there was still no glimpse of red in the line of shuffling visitors. He kept towards the centre, near the small tanks of tropical fish mounted on pedestals. He smiled wryly at one labelled Shanghai Telescope Fish. Newtonian or Cassegrainian? Whichever they were, they would find it a challenge to produce any image at all in this dim underworld. No telescope he knew could retain sufficient light to be of any use here.

To his right he noticed a passage leading to a separate exhibit. The New Alligator and Crocodile Cavern is now completed and Open to the Public announced a board beside it. He hesitated. Might such a curiosity interest a boy of fifteen? He supposed it would. As a meeting-place, however, it was a singularly unlikely choice. She of the fluttering white hat was impossible to imagine making a rendezvous in a reptile- house.

He reviewed the line of visitors filing past the tanks. Several straw boaters were prominent. Not a single red blazer. There was nothing for it but to try the Crocodile Cavern.

The interior was darker than the main aquarium. Hissing gas-jets situated at floor-level threw a yellowish light over indeterminate areas of mud and vegetation. He waited at the entrance, accustoming his eyes to the conditions. Reassured that there was actually a four-foot barrier of iron and glass between the human and reptilian occupants of the cavern, he stepped forward. It was as crowded as the bar in a music hall. Instead of shouting for drinks, the customers passed the time peering downwards, telling crocodiles from logs of wood. Saturday afternoon zoologists. He had no desire to join in, but to see anything at all he needed to gain a place at the glass. And getting there was certainly harder than ordering drinks at the Alhambra. Those at the front refused to move on before observing some sign of life in the tank, and the reptiles were not disposed to co-operate.

At length he wedged himself between a clergyman and a large woman in a plush hat. To establish his interest in crocodiles, he tossed a penny over the glass on to the back of an unblinking twelve-footer. Then he looked along the barrier at the line of human faces to his right. The light directed upwards from the tank caught the undersides of their features. Chins, lips, noses and eyebrows were illuminated in the manner of murderers’ effigies in Madame Tussaud’s. He sighed. In these conditions you would be hard put to it to recognise your own mother.

There was a small stir at the far end of the barrier. A child was being held up for a better view, a boy of two or three in a white cotton sailor-suit. Tiny, fat fingers gripped the edge of the glass above the heads of the onlookers. A shock of flaxen curls appeared behind them and was helped above the glass, to project over the top, giving the child a bird’s-eye view of the crocodiles. He was supported at the ankles. From where Moscrop was, it looked an uncomfortable vantage point. And so it appeared to someone else, for a young woman was protesting actively, trying to haul the child down to a safer height. ‘No, Master Guy, he don’t like it. He don’t like it at all. Can’t you see he don’t like it? Put him down, for pity’s sake.’ From her dress and manner, she was the child’s nursemaid, quite properly demonstrating her concern for its safety. Master Guy was unimpressed, though. He edged the ankles higher, beyond her reach. The weight of the child’s head began to draw it downwards. One of the reptiles in the tank moved. The girl screamed. Several sets of hands at once combined to pull the child to safety. It seemed quite unharmed. Probably it had never been at risk. There is nothing like a scream in a reptile-house to lead people to