Frozen Charlotte

by Priscilla Masters

  She simply stared at Simon. ‘All right,’ she said.

  SEVEN

  Thursday

  Roddie Hughes and his team were still working their way slowly through the house, much to the irritation of both Alice and Aaron Sedgewick. They made no secret of the fact that they hated them being there but Hughes refused to be hurried. He was a thorough man and knew his job – inside out – and the Sedgewicks could go to hell and back for all he cared. They were not going to deflect him from his job. If there was forensic evidence in this house, which might lead to the truth behind the baby’s death, he was going to find it. Once he’d left the property the opportunity would be gone. There was no returning and checking, rechecking. Forensic evidence would be lost or discredited and whatever the finding of the post-mortem, Hughes knew that the house in general and the attic in particular was a crime scene so he was leaving no stone unturned.

  It was in one of the upstairs bedrooms, a room that he’d left until almost last, and had planned for the most cursory of examinations, that he made an interesting and unexpected discovery.

  Aaron Sedgewick was hovering at the door, watching him resentfully as Hughes stepped inside. The two men looked at each other and for the first time Roddie Hughes wondered what Aaron Sedgewick’s role was in this case. As the two men sized each other up, Roddie started to believe that Sedgewick knew a little more than he’d been letting on. He was somehow involved in the baby that had turned up at the hospital on Saturday night. How, even Hughes’s mind couldn’t work out except there was something. He could read it in the man’s eyes. Some sorrow, some duplicity. Something. Guilt?

  He spoke first, after he had glanced briefly around the room. ‘This looks like a children’s room, Mr Sedgewick. Was it your children’s room?’

  ‘No,’ Aaron said shortly. ‘As you’ve probably realized my son and daughter are in their twenties. We’ve been here for five years. Ergo,’ he continued, ‘they didn’t live here as children.’ He turned on his heel and left, muttering something down the hallway about interfering busybodies and why couldn’t they just be left alone?

  Hughes glanced around the room again. OK, so why had this room, which looked as though it had been repapered in the last few years, been decorated for children?

  Puzzled, Roddie used his mobile to call Alex Randall.

  Randall listened without interrupting. When Hughes had finished he finally spoke. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘Very interesting. I’ll be round in an hour or so.’

  Alex Randall sat for a moment, thinking, then he picked up the phone and dialled the coroner’s number. Jericho answered and did his best to wheedle the information out of the detective. But Alex wasn’t playing and asked to speak directly to Martha.

  ‘She is in, inspector,’ he said disapprovingly, ‘but she’s very, very busy. The snow and all that.’

  ‘Yes, but I’d like to speak to her, please.’

  Jericho was being at his most intransigent. ‘If you’d just like to tell me what it is, inspector, I can decide whether to interrupt her work.’ While smiling at Palfreyman’s Shropshire burr Alex was losing patience.

  ‘Will you just tell her that we’ve something of interest at the Sedgewick household,’ Alex said. ‘She might like to come and take a look.’

  ‘I’ll see,’ Jericho Palfreyman said pompously.

  Two minutes later Martha’s voice came on the phone and instantly he could hear the suppressed humour. ‘Finally got past Jericho, Alex?’

  He chuckled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now what’s all this about?’

  He related Roddie Hughes’s discovery of a children’s room and instantly sensed her interest.

  ‘Do you know, Martha,’ he said, knowing he was playing right into her hands, ‘I think you should come round and take a look for yourself.’

  ‘Why?’

  He laughed. ‘You’ll think I’m soft-soaping you or sucking up but it’s more to do with a woman’s intuition.’ Martha almost groaned. After Simon’s embarrassing revelation last night women’s intuition was not something she wanted to lay claim to.

  But she couldn’t help herself. Her curiosity was overwhelming. ‘Go on, Alex.’

  ‘I just want your take on the situation. Besides -’ he was smiling as he pictured her face, eager and inquisitive – ‘it’d be a good opportunity for you to meet Alice Sedgewick yourself.’

  ‘But you believe she had nothing to do with the baby she took to the hospital?’

  ‘I know, Martha, but there’s something there. I may not be able to put my finger on it,’ Alex insisted, ‘but it’s there all right, deceit, concealment, something.’ He knew full well that her curiosity would get the better of her.

  He was proved right. After the briefest of pauses Martha responded. ‘OK. I’ll be ready in a quarter of an hour?’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll come round and pick you up.’

  She looked at the piles of notes waiting for her attention and sighed. She shouldn’t really be playing hookey. But she was very poor at simply sitting at a desk and working, hour after hour. Periodically she needed to leave it simply to maintain her concentration.

  Twenty minutes later, through the window, she saw Alex’s car slide in beside hers and didn’t wait for him to run the gauntlet of Jericho again but went downstairs to meet him.

  ‘I thought you’d be in Spain by now,’ she jibed as she climbed in beside him.

  ‘I’ve asked the Malaga Guardia Civil to see if they can find a location for the Godfreys,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d better start there otherwise it could be a wild goose chase. They might be anywhere. All Roberts got out of Huntley and Palmers was a hotel address from five years ago. Apparently they were building their own villa. At first the Spanish police weren’t too helpful but when I told them it was a case of a dead child they were full of sympathy and anxious to help. You know what the Spanish are like about children,’ he added.

  The throwaway comment brought a bitter pang to Martha. She and Martin had gone to Spain for a quiet, sunny week, early in March, years ago, when the twins had been almost one year old. She remembered the twin buggy and the scores of people who had stopped them to pore over the babies and tell them that in Spain twins were very, very lucky. Mucho mucho afortunado .

  ‘I have to say,’ she said as they drove around the ring road, ‘quite apart from anything else I’m very curious to meet Alice Sedgewick after all I’ve heard about her. She sounds so odd.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, pulling up, ‘your wish will be granted in minutes.’

  The house was as she’d imagined it, helped enormously by having seen the picture in the newspapers. Once the reporters had sniffed out every available detail they had wasted no time filling their pages with the case. A photograph of the house, looking mysterious in the snow, had taken up a quarter of the front page of the Shropshire Star .

  Number 41 was a stately, Victorian, mock-Tudor place, detached, with a short drive which led to a gravelled area right at the front. Two cars stood there and a large white forensic van.

  Alex gave her a swift glance just before he raised his hand to the knocker. ‘Don’t expect Aaron Sedgewick to give you an easy time,’ he warned.

  The door, however, was answered by Alice who looked even more wary than usual. ‘He’s upstairs,’ she said, presumably meaning the SOCO team rather than her husband. Martha decided she should introduce herself.

  ‘I’m Martha Gunn,’ she said in her precise voice. ‘I’m the coroner for this part of Shropshire. It’s my job to investigate the death of the child you brought to the hospital on Saturday night, Mrs Sedgewick. Inspector Randall thought it might be helpful if I came to the house to see where the baby was found.’

  Alice regarded her silently for a moment then nodded, a sad smile contorting her face. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve much choice,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m learning that.’

  Martha didn’t answer the obvious but smiled and shook her hand.

  Roddie Hughes was
waiting for them upstairs. He greeted Martha warmly. They’d met before and worked on more than one case together. ‘Before you go up to the loft,’ he said, ‘I just thought you might like to take a look in one of the bedrooms.’

  They followed him through the open door and immediately saw what he meant. It was a small, square room, bright and sunny but with the chill of a room which is used infrequently – if at all. It was prettily papered in pale yellow with sprigs of lilac. It was a child’s room. There was a single bed in the centre. But what drew the eye was a beautiful doll’s house standing on a painted chest of drawers. It was a fine Georgian place, almost four feet high, three-storeyed, with sash windows. Over the front door was painted its name – Poppy’s House .

  Confused, Martha glanced at Alex and saw that he was as surprised as she was.

  Roddie Hughes spoke. ‘I found a couple more baby’s blankets and other such stuff in here,’ he said, pulling open the top drawer of the chest. ‘I’d lay a bet this is where she pulled the little blanket from. There’s more stuff. Toys and things, a rattle. It’s as though she decorated the room ready for a child.’

  The three of them looked at each other. A child?

  Roddie frowned and scratched the side of his mouth. ‘Funny thing is,’ he said, ‘there’s lots of pictures of her kids, growing up around the place, but I can’t see any sign of the dolls house in them. This room was done up recently, four, five years ago, probably not long after they moved here.’

  ‘And there are no grandchildren,’ Alex said. Something twigged at the back of his mind. He had asked Aaron Sedgewick when they had moved in to number 41 whether any of the rooms had been decorated ready for a child. At the time he had been exploring whether the Godfreys had had children. Sedgewick had replied no. But this room was patently a child’s room. The Sedgewicks had only lived here for five years. So this room had been decorated by them for a child. Which child? Who was the child?

  Back came the answer, whispering into his consciousness, clear as sunlight. The child is Poppy .

  Was it possible then that Mark Sullivan had made a mistake about the age of the mummified baby? Was it after all connected with the Sedgewicks?

  Randall had to force himself to recall. Mark Sullivan might have been a year or two out on the age of the child’s body but no one could possibly be mistaken as to its sex. The child who had been found in the attic had been a little boy. Not Poppy.

  Another unbidden answer swam into his mind. Then Poppy is someone else. Somewhere else . So now there were two children. Poppy and the little boy.

  They heard a sound in the doorway. Alice Sedgewick was watching them. ‘What are you doing in here,’ she asked steadily.

  Alex spoke for them all. ‘We wondered where the blanket that you had wrapped around the child had come from. Mr Hughes here was under instruction to investigate.’

  ‘Why didn’t you simply ask me?’

  Randall swallowed. It was always the simplest of questions that tripped him up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to laugh it off. ‘For some reason I didn’t think of that.’

  Alice said nothing but eyed them warily.

  Martha broke the silence, stepping towards the doll’s house. ‘This is lovely,’ she said. ‘How old is it?’

  ‘Only a few years. It’s a hobby of mine. There’s a shop that sells doll’s houses in Shrewsbury. They also sell all the little bits and pieces to go inside. I enjoy decorating them.’ She looked up apologetically. ‘Aaron calls it “playing with dolls”. He thinks it’s incredibly childish.’ She gave a smile which was both naive and confiding at the same time.

  ‘Did you decorate this room?’

  Alice Sedgewick nodded. ‘When I was a little girl I had my grandmother’s doll’s house. It had been made out of an orange box. It wasn’t nearly as fine as this. But it had genuine Victorian pieces in it.’ Alice smiled to herself, a smile both dreamy and vague.

  ‘It had a tiny dining table and chairs, even some plaster of Paris hams and food. Bread. A dresser.’ She smiled. ‘An upright piano. In the nursery,’ she said, ‘were some dolls. They were stiff, porcelain, made of one piece, no separate limbs.’ She looked up. ‘They’re called Frozen Charlottes. Actually the name comes from a poem, I found out. An American poem about a girl who froze to death on her way to a party because she was too vain to wear a woollen shawl.’ She smiled. ‘So there you are. Frozen Charlotte. It reminded me.’ Her eyes met Martha’s. ‘The child I took into the hospital was that way. Stiff. No limbs. Lifeless. Look…’

  She slipped the catch at the side of the doll’s house and opened the door, which was actually the entire front wall. Inside was divided into six rooms. There was a staircase which led from the ground floor right to the top. It was quite exquisite. The furniture inside looked old but might easily have been reproduction. Alice Sedgewick drew a tiny porcelain doll from the cot in what looked like the nursery, rocking horse, toy bricks, a train with four carriages, an abacus. The doll was an inch long, moulded in one piece, naked, of white porcelain with painted black hair, spots of blue for her eyes, a thin red line for her mouth. She placed the doll in Martha’s palm and gave her a long hard look. ‘Frozen Charlotte,’ she said.

  There was something in that look, as though Alice was trying to tell her something. The trouble was that Martha didn’t have a clue what this rather strange woman was trying to convey. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘who is Poppy? Why did you call the house “Poppy’s House”?’

  Alice’s face changed. In the space of minutes it turned from cunning to upset to unhappy. She was at the same time Lady Macbeth and tragedy personified. Villain and victim. Tears spilled down her cheeks and then Aaron Sedgewick was standing in the doorway. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ he said furiously. ‘Just look – what – you’ve done.’ He wrapped his arms around his wife and left the room.

  The three of them looked at one another, no nearer understanding what they’d just seen.

  ‘I think I’d better speak to Mark Sullivan again,’ Martha said.

  ‘But first, shall I take a look in the attic?’

  They ascended by the ladder.

  The site was well lit by naked electric lights suspended at intervals from the joists. Roddie Hughes pointed out the planking around the hot water tank and the floorboards. ‘They don’t look as if they’ve been disturbed for years,’ he said, ‘which fits in with Dr Sullivan’s theory.’

  ‘But not with the way Alice Sedgewick is behaving,’ Martha observed. ‘She is recalling something more recent and personal.’ Neither Alex nor Hughes made a comment yet Martha felt they did not disagree with her, only that they had no comment to make.

  She looked around her for some clue, some idea. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s a bit of a flimsy story, this business of the tank being in the way of the loft conversion?’

  He glanced around. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It does sort of stick out in the centre a bit. I mean if it wasn’t there you’d have a huge clear area. Enough for a couple of bedrooms and en suites . If that was what you wanted.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she responded. ‘Anything else up here?’

  ‘Not really.’ Roddie Hughes stepped back towards the loft access and the retractable ladder.

  Apart from the signs of the SOCO team there was little else of interest on the top floor but she was glad she’d taken a look.

  It was as she was descending the ladder that ideas began to take shape. Sergeant Paul Talith had said something about Alice switching the electric light back on when he had taken her upstairs to show him where the baby’s body had been. From Talith’s statement, most of which had been relayed to her by Alex, Alice had left the house with the child’s body and not returned until the following morning, when she had been accompanied both by her friend and, more importantly, Sergeant Paul Talith.

  As she descended the ladder, Martha noticed that she was having to use both hands to cling on to the frame of it. No mean feat if she’d also been carrying a dead baby. A
nd then to be practical and lucid enough to attend to that one small detail of switching off the light? Something else struck her. When the baby had been found, it had been wrapped in a tattered woollen blanket which, according to the SOCO’s report, had been recovered from here, in the loft. So Alice had unwrapped the body which had underneath been naked. Surely she must have seen that it was a boy, not a girl? Why this insistence that the baby was a girl? Where had the name Poppy come from? Had it come from the doll’s house or had Alice put the name on the house because of some other child?

  While Alex was driving her back to her office Martha relayed all these thoughts to him.

  ‘I’ll need to speak to Mark again,’ she said, ‘check up on the age of the corpse. See how flexible he can be but I agree with Roddie. The planking Alice removed did look years old. At least five years.’ She frowned as she left the car and was still frowning as she climbed the stairs to her office.

  Jericho was ready with some coffee, having watched the police car turn around on the gravelled drive. ‘I’ll have it in my office. Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve a call to make.’

  Sullivan sounded just as jaunty as when she had last seen him and responded quickly to her questions.

  ‘Are you sure that the baby has been dead for more than five years?’

  ‘Well – yes. The condition of the child indicated this, together with the condition of the blanket, which was tattered and fragmented. Roddie Hughes brought in a piece of the planking which encased the tank. There were rust spots around some of the nail heads. No, Martha,’ he continued, ‘I stick to my guns. I think the body had been sealed up in a warm, dry atmosphere for years – maybe as many as eight years but certainly more than five.’

  ‘Is it possible,’ she asked delicately, ‘that the baby was moved in that time? Could it be that when the Sedgewicks came to live in number 41 that she or her husband brought the body with them?’

  Mark Sullivan thought for a minute or two before answering. ‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Not impossible but unlikely. They would have had to mimic the exact conditions in which the child had been held for the previous five or so years. Besides that, Roddie Hughes showed me the photographs of the planking around the child. There’s no evidence that it’s ever been removed and then replaced.’ There was a pause while Sullivan gathered his thoughts together.