Mad Hatter's Holiday by Peter Lovesey

lucky that only his face had been revealed; the doctor had no idea what height he was or what clothes he wore. Thank Heavens for a bowler and flannels!
    By standing on the seat inside his cubicle he was able to watch the locked door across the pool for the sure indication that it was about to be unbolted—the sight of the crown of a silk hat above it. When it appeared, he ducked out of sight, counted up to twenty and set off after the doctor. In the steam-filled corridor outside, he almost caught him up, but had the resource to stop at a mangle and put his wet costume through it. In the foyer he paused again to return it to the attendant. By then his quarry was outside and crossing East Street. He followed him warily, down to the front, turning right into the King’s Road. The cannon on the West Pier fired. The doctor did what scores of other men were doing at that moment: checked his watch. Then he moved on to the eastern corner of West Street and marched through a dark green painted doorway and out of sight. Moscrop hurried towards it to read the legend over the door, Real Turtle Soup Always Ready. Dr. Prothero was dining at Mutton’s.
    The aroma issuing from the double glass door all but seduced Moscrop inside. Turtle soup exerted a strong pull on a stomach subsisting on a Brighton landlady’s cold beef and bread puddings. Moreover, he already had it in mind to patronise Mutton’s; wasn’t it one of Brighton’s institutions, the logical place to visit after a bathe? Not while Dr. Prothero was inside, he decided with admirable self-control. His bowl of real turtle soup was the sacrifice he had to make to preserve what was left of his incognito. So he made a purchase at Streeter’s, the old bun-shop in Pool Valley, and dined surreptitiously from a paper bag, endeavouring to watch the entrance to Mutton’s from a position on the promenade where he could appear to be feeding seagulls.
    Prothero must have had a second bowl and perhaps a third, for it was almost two o’clock when he appeared again. He set off along the front on the shop side of the street, retracing his steps towards Brill’s, past the Old Ship and the pungent hop-smells of Black Lion Street. At East Street, Brighton’s most fashionable row of shops, he turned left. Window-displays of wigs, china and antiques, artfully arranged to catch the seasonable visitor’s eye, left him unmoved; he walked with the resolute step of a man with somewhere to go. This proved to be the French chocolate shop halfway up the hill. He marched straight in and presently came out carrying a box tied with a ribbon.
    Chocolates. He had bought some chocolates for his wife.
    Moscrop, watching discreetly through festoons of lace in the window of Chillmaid and Tinkler, felt something sinister stirring in the recesses of his mind. A macabre association. Chocolates . . . and Brighton. What on earth was it? Something to do with Punch, or one of the humorous journals. Three or four years ago, it must have been. Chocolate . . . ah! Chocolate creams! The case of Christiana Edmunds, that wrong-headed young woman who had injected chocolate-creams with strychnine. She had returned them to a Brighton shop vainly expecting that the man she secretly loved would buy them for his wife. A child of four had consumed one and died. The press—he remembered clearly now—joked after the conviction that it was now easier to sell ice-creams to Esquimaux than chocolate-creams in Brighton. Appalling case. Good gracious, how one’s mind wandered!
    Prothero re-passed the shop, heading towards the King’s Road again. The benevolent look in his eye struck deep into Moscrop’s conscience. Dammit, the man was taking chocolates to his wife. To connect that laudable action with the sordid circumstances of a murder case was unforgivable. Outrageous.
    When Prothero reached the front he crossed the road and approached one of the penny-a-peep men at the promenade railing. What could he want with a telescope?