Harry made a show of surveying our surroundings but I could see his mind was elsewhere.
‘The curtains,’ he decided. ‘All of those things were burned after the police unsealed the room.’
‘The furniture’s the same?’ I double-checked.
‘Even the bed,’ Harry replied peevishly, ‘with a new-old mattress.’
‘Show me how the victim was lying on it.’
‘Not likely.’ Harry backed off.
‘All right.’ I sat on the bed. ‘Tell me.’ I lay back, making sure my skirt came over my knees.
Harry rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Are you sure you’re not a copper?’
‘Do I look like one?’ I tried to remember what an uncopperly expression was and settled for an uneasy smirk.
The porter gave me the once-over. ‘More like what’s-her-face,’ he decided.
‘People often mistake me for her.’ I put my arms over my head. ‘His hands were tied to the brass rails?’
‘You’re not going to ask me to do it, are you?’
‘No.’ Because you might. ‘How about his legs?’
‘By the ankles to the frame.’
I spread-eagled. ‘Like this?’
Harry surveyed me critically. ‘A bit more loosely.’
‘So he had enough slack to writhe about?’
The porter winced. ‘If you put it like that, I suppose so.’
‘And he was gagged.’
‘Yes, with blood everywhere.’ It was obvious that he didn’t want to play any more.
‘The sink and taps? Were they bloodstained too?’
‘Yes.’
I sat up, swung my feet onto the floor and went to look out of the window. It was starting to get dark. The clouds had considerately parted and I could make out a long garden with an area of what I guessed was uncut lawn, with a few scattered trees – apple, I thought – and a path straight down the middle, sheathed in a long tumbledown rose arbour.
‘I heard there were footprints in the garden.’
‘A man and a woman’s, judging by the heels.’ Harry Bright stood close behind me. ‘The ground was boggy. Inspector Clements said the man had a limp in his left foot because the right print was deeper than the left. He showed me in case I recognised them.’
‘And did you?’
The porter stuck his thumbs in his faded scarlet waistcoat. ‘What do you think?’
‘What kind of a limp?’ I asked in forlorn hope.
Harry pulled a face. ‘How many kinds of limp are there?’
‘Four. An ankle injury shows shallow dips; a knee is slightly deeper with a bit of a drag; a hip is a long deep drag; a combination of any two or all tends to be a long scuff.’
Aunty M would be proud. It was her who taught me that.
Harry ruminated. ‘I’d say ankle but I wouldn’t put my wages on it.’
‘I believe a ladder was found.’
‘The glazier left it.’ Harry’s voice was getting huskier all the time. ‘We’d had some windows broken – kids with an air rifle on the back lane. It had been thrown to the side but there were dents in the lawn just below here.’
‘What’s that structure?’ A cat was sitting on the roof.
Harry looked over my shoulder. ‘Mrs V J calls it a summer house but it’s just a shed really.’ He hesitated. ‘Know what I think?’
‘I’d rather you told me.’ I tried the lower sash. It didn’t want to go up on one handle but I forced it.
‘About a month later I went in there. We stored deckchairs so people could sit out and have a drink when it was warm enough.’
‘Go on.’ I leaned out, keeping a hold of the sill. I had not forgotten how Dexter ‘Crazy Dog’ Devlin had tried to tip me out of a window and nearly succeeded. I let go for long enough to reach for the old iron drainpipe. It was well beyond my reach or anybody else’s.
‘When I carried the table out there was blood on the floor underneath it. I think the murderer hid in there after he escaped through the window.’
‘So while Noble Jones, the ARP warden, was searching the garden the kidnapper was only a few feet away with his victim,’ I mused. Dear God, what must that woman have gone through, hearing all the commotion? Did he hold a knife to her throat to silence her? The cat was washing its back leg. ‘Did you tell the police?’
‘Mrs V J said not to and she made the cleaners scrub it all out – said a fox had killed a rabbit in there. She was hoping the story would blow over.’
I came back in. ‘Is that why she told me you weren’t here?’
‘That and she’s put it about that all the staff who were here on the night have gone.’
‘So why does she keep you on?’
‘They call me the night porter but I’m the night-and-day porter now ’cause the other one quit.’ Harry found a stain on his lapel and rubbed at it with his handkerchief. ‘I don’t make a fuss when she doesn’t pay me. It’s a roof over my head and three square meals.’
He gave up rubbing and I wasn’t sure why he had bothered. It didn’t look any worse than the other stains to me.
‘She’s not exactly welcoming.’ I shut the window.
Harry plucked at his moustache. ‘She got an inheritance and didn’t want to put it into this place but Mr V J twisted her arm. Two months later he realised she was right and buggered off with a waitress. Excuse my French.’
‘I think the French have a different word for that,’ I murmured, resolving to ask Jimmy. He had had a girlfriend from Marseilles once. ‘Tell me about the woman.’
‘Small, well dressed, dark glasses, headscarf, like a film actress that doesn’t want to be recognised.’ It was obvious he was reciting what he had said countless times and that I was not going to get anything fresh.
‘I must be keeping you up.’
Harry fished out an old pocket watch from his waistcoat. ‘She’ll have locked up and gone to bed now, so I will when you’re done.’
‘Mind if I use your office?’ It was warmer than this room and I had a horrible suspicion that something from the bed was feeding on me.
‘So long as you don’t put any more coal on.’
‘I won’t do that,’ I promised as we went back into the corridor. ‘So the woman didn’t speak?’
‘Not a word.’ Harry accepted without a comment or glance the coins I dropped into his hand. ‘Except when she banged her funny bone on the bannister and said “Ouchy-wouchy” like a little girl.’
I was just about to close the door when there was a loud sharp scream behind me. I spun round.
‘Fox,’ Harry said.
‘I know.’ And I did but it had still startled me.
I liked to think I wasn’t superstitious but then I liked to think all sorts of things – that I was still eighteen, for example, and that I wasn’t half the things Adam had called me.
This was not so much a copycat crime, I pondered, as a carbon copy of events at the Royal George. Why then did it deviate into abduction? I shivered. What had the kidnapper done with his victim? Had she been killed or was he still doing it now?
My phantom limb was still so convincing that, although the stump had hardly troubled me since my operation, my hand – forgetting it had been pickled – had terrible cramps and I had an absurd desire to massage the thin air where it should be. I crooked my imaginary fingers.
Ouchy-wouchy, I mused as I fell into a troubled sleep.
79
THE SUFFOLK UMPIRE
There was a corpse in Brigsy’s chair, only I had got used to that now. One day, I reflected, Sergeant Briggs would actually be dead and wouldn’t jump out of his skin when I lifted the report book over my head to let it crash down on the desk just in front of him.
‘Bwuff.’ Brigsy jolted awake with his now-traditional cry and obligatory addenda of, ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘Can’t you see we’re closed?’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Oh, hello, madam. I wasn’t asleep.’
‘I know you weren’t,’ I said gently.
&nbs
p; ‘Oh.’ The gears of his brain crashed into first. ‘You’ve done and bin away, you have.’ He struggled to his feet.
‘I know.’ I smiled.
‘And you’re done and come back, you are.’
‘I am,’ I agreed.
Police sergeants don’t offer their hands to police inspectors and the inspectors don’t take them but Brigsy did and I did. ‘Welcome back, madam.’
‘It’s good to be back,’ I told him.
Brigsy screwed his cadaverous face into a died-of-shock expression. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said as much to my surprise as his and I suddenly realised it wasn’t just the job I’d missed, it was all the incompetent idiots who I did it with – or some of them. Or perhaps just Brigsy.
My sergeant let go of my hand and appraised me. ‘They didn’t go and graft a new arm on you then?’
‘Not yet,’ I told him. ‘They trimmed a bit more off and made it comfortable though. I hope to have a new false one fitted soon.’
‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed. ‘Don’t know how the men will take to tha’. They’ve gone and got used to calling you—’ He stopped in embarrassed confusion.
‘Old Stumpy,’ I finished his sentence for him.
‘How d’you know tha’?’
‘Have to be deaf and stupid not to.’
Brigsy chewed my statement over. ‘Well, you int deaf,’ he decided.
‘Is anybody else here?’
‘Apart from me?’ He considered the question.
‘Yes.’
‘And you?’
‘Yes.’ I was feeling a little less glad to be back already.
‘Wellll, Nippy Walker he do be on the East Sackwater beat, I do believe.’ He rubbed his moustache so hard I was worried he might erase it. ‘Annnd the Snipe Twins they do be off duty ’til eight of the clock, they do. Annnd—’
‘I don’t need to hear about everyone who isn’t here.’ I put my helmet on the desktop.
‘Oh?’ Brigsy had obviously decided I had got that wrong. ‘Then you won’t want to know about Old Scrapie.’
I had told them all off many times for calling a superior officer that in my presence but now I let it go.
‘Chivers told me he was detained by the French authorities. Is he back then?’
‘No.’ Brigsy folded his arms in great satisfaction. ‘And you won’t want to know why not, I take it.’
This could take longer to play than the average game of Monopoly. ‘Yes I do.’ I surrendered before he had even passed the Old Kent Road.
‘Wellll, there was another bit of bother on the way back.’ He stopped.
‘Nothing serious?’ I forced myself to add, ‘I hope.’
‘Wellll,’ Brigsy ruminated, ‘rumour do have it, when the British authorities goo an’ check the Shark’s papers to try to get him released, they found out his father was Austrian but Old Scrapie do goo and change it to Australian on his birth certificate when he applied for a passport.’
‘So now he’s an enemy alien, a spy and a forger.’ I shook my head. There was a certain poetic justice in the first charge but I found it difficult to rejoice in his troubles.
‘I always thought there’s something funny in the way he walk,’ the man who lumbered like a zombie observed shrewdly because, as every Englishman knows, foreigners all mince about – except Germans, who strut out of uniform and goose-step in it.
‘Who, if anyone else, is here?’ I leafed through the charge sheets. We did not seem to have made many arrests lately, except a man calling himself Old Trafford who confessed to being the Suffolk Umpire. He was kept overnight for being drunk and disorderly.
‘Wellll, Supernintendent Vesty is sort of here’ – Brigsy nibbled his lower lip – ‘but he don’t be the same since he heard tha’ explosion.’
‘Wha’ explosion?’ Oh Lord I’m turning Suffolk.
‘Blew up the end of the pier, they did, the army.’
‘Put the kettle on.’ I went down the corridor and knocked on the end door.
‘Who goes there?’ came faintly through the door.
‘Inspector Church, sir.’
‘Friend or foe?’
This was the second game in two minutes I didn’t want to play. I went in. Superintendent Vesty was crouched behind his desk, head tilted to the right, his war-issue police helmet on. His elbow rested on the desktop, his left hand cupped like he was begging for alms, and it was only when I noticed the right hand below his shoulder, first finger crooked, that I realised he was sighting me with an invisible rifle.
‘Halt or I fire,’ he yelled.
‘It’s me, sir.’ I took a step forward and closed the door behind me.
‘Password,’ he rapped, training the rifle on me as I widely skirted the desk.
‘Mustard,’ I chose at random and he swung his weapon back towards the entrance.
‘Come quickly, man.’ He jerked his neck. ‘And keep your head down, for God’s sake. There’s a sniper over the—’ He stopped, unable to connect his memory with what he was actually seeing, and I crouched beside him.
‘That war is over, sir.’
‘They’ve surrendered?’ he asked incredulously.
‘There was an armistice but there is another war now and you are a policeman.’
Major Ian Vesty DSO touched his sunken skull with trembling fingertips. ‘It still hurts, you know.’
‘I know, sir.’
‘What about your arm?’ He lowered his fingers to an inch above my sleeve.
‘That hurts too.’ I got up and held out my hand and, after a nervous glance over his shoulder, the superintendent took it.
‘The Somme?’ Vesty struggled to his feet.
‘No, sir. I wasn’t in the war. I’m Inspector Church and you are unwell.’
He looked about. ‘Don’t let the men know. Frightfully bad for morale and we have a big push coming up tomorrow.’ He stroked his brow. ‘No we don’t, do we?’
‘No, sir.’ We were still holding hands as we went back down the corridor.
Brigsy looked up. Please don’t say anything stupid, I thought.
‘Can you call Dr Jackson, please, Sergeant Briggs? Superintendent Vesty is unwell.’ Please don’t say anything stupid, I prayed.
‘Certainly, madam.’ Brigsy picked up the phone.
*
Vesty sat quietly in the back room sipping the mug of tea Brigsy had made him.
‘Ypres,’ the superintendent muttered. ‘Filthy business. It broke my heart but it did not break me.’ He swept his hand back over his head.
‘Wipers.’ Brigsy nodded. ‘I missed that, thank the good Lord, but I got a bellyfull of the Somme.’
‘I suffered a head injury, you know,’ Vesty told him.
‘So I do believe.’ Brigsy nodded sagely. ‘But I heard you got four men out.’
‘Four?’ Vesty cried out. ‘Only four?’
‘Four who would have died if you hadn’t carried them one by one.’
‘Good lads.’ Vesty lowered his head. ‘Only four. It broke my heart.’
We sat in silence for a long time, Vesty ducking twice as something went overhead.
Dr Jackson came. He would drive Vesty home to collect some things before they went to the hospital.
‘He’s been like this before,’ he whispered. ‘He’ll be all right.’ He raised his voice. ‘Fancy a walk, Ian?’
‘Wouldn’t say no to a round of golf.’ Vesty perked up.
‘When you’re better.’ The doctor slipped an arm through his patient’s and, as Brigsy stepped aside, I saw that he was saluting – not his usual sloppy wave but in a proper military manner.
‘Carry on, Sergeant.’ Major Vesty returned the salute with an unseen swagger stick and strolled out into the sun.
‘I’m glad Inspector Sharkey wasn’t here,’ I said as the door closed.
‘I’m not,’ Brigsy muttered. ‘Might have given me the perfec’ excuse to break his jaw, he might.’
I wasn’t sure Br
igsy could best Old Scrapie in a fistfight but I would have loved to see him throw the first punch before I broke it up and I was failing to reprimand him when the phone rang.
‘I shall s’licit Inspector Church’s presence,’ Brigsy said after a brief conversation and handed it over.
I held the mouthpiece to my jacket. ‘Who is it?’
‘Mr Wicks,’ Brigsy told me as if it could not possibly have been anybody else. ‘Won’t say what it’s about.’
‘Hello, Mr Wicks, this is Inspector Church.’
‘Is this a joke?’ the caller demanded. ‘You’re that bloody woman who pestered my wife.’
‘I’m that bloody policewoman who helped your wife,’ I told him, ‘and I am also the senior officer on duty.’
‘Where’s Sharkey? I want to deal with him.’
‘Away on police business so it’s me or nobody.’ My fingers were crossed he would take the second option.
‘Oh great,’ he growled. ‘Well, you’ll have to do then. Come to my house immediately. You know where it is.’
He had a nice baritone voice but that seemed to be where the niceness started and ended.
‘Can you give me some idea of what—’ but I was talking to a click and then silence.
80
THE REASON FOR EVERYTHING
I could have ignored the call. I could have rung back to insist that he explained himself. I went to Cormorant Road and knocked on the door of Felicity House.
‘We don’t need any dusters and we have enough lucky heather,’ my mother called through the coloured glass door.
Enough for what? Starting a grouse moor?
‘It’s me, Mum.’
‘Why don’t you use your key?’
‘You took it off me.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ she said and sighed in exasperation. ‘I suppose I’ll have to let you in.’
The door clicked and swung open.
‘I hope you haven’t come to upset poor Dodie.’
‘Hello, Betty, how lovely to see you. How did you get on in hospital? Is your arm better? Sorry we didn’t visit or ring or send a card,’ I raged.
‘Well, that’s a nice greeting, I must say,’ my mother fumed because, of course, she had welcomed me with tears, hugs and kisses.
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire Page 30