Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘And for that you concussed her?’ I yelled. ‘I assume you haven’t killed her.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Dodo grimaced. ‘Unfortunately I have…’ she checked Lavender’s pulse, ‘not.’

  I hesitated. ‘Why did you say, Watch out, she’s got a blooming gun?’

  Dodo laughed hollowly. ‘Because she had one.’

  ‘But why did you use those exact words?’ I asked carefully.

  ‘Because that’s what someone shouted at Slackwater Railway Station.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘So it must be how people warn each other.’

  I had another thought. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘Oh.’ Dodo rubbed her front teeth with the knuckle of her thumb. ‘Brigsy told me.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Did he ring Felicity House?’

  ‘Err…’ Dodo crossed her feet. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But the practice phone isn’t working.’

  Dodo tangled her fingers. ‘Oh…’ She had almost chewed her knuckle off by now. ‘They must have had it fixed.’

  ‘So how did you get here so quickly?’

  Dodo was rooting about behind Lavender.

  ‘I cut down Divine Alley like you taught me.’

  ‘But the alley was blocked.’

  ‘Not when I skipped down it.’ Dodo gave me the direct gaze that she had told me denoted guilt.

  ‘Go on.’

  Dodo cleared her throat. ‘And then I saw the gate unlocked,’ she recited in a curious monotone. ‘And then I thought I saw a light round the back and then I went in through the stage door and along a tunnel and up a ladder into here.’ Her voice rose an octave. ‘There were spiders, spiders everywhere, hundreds of them, thousands.’ She brushed her shoulders frantically. ‘But I braved them for you, boss.’ Her voice fell again and hardened. ‘Not that I suppose you will thank me for that.’

  And Dodo rose very slowly, like an overloaded lift. She had an odd disturbed look on her face and a revolver gripped in her hand.

  99

  THE FINGER ON THE TRIGGER

  I watched Dodo very carefully. I couldn’t see if her finger was on the trigger but I had no reason to suppose it wasn’t. To add to my worries, from where I was standing, it had looked like Dodo had taken that gun out of her own handbag.

  ‘I think you should give me that,’ I told Dodo and she laughed in a sarcastic way I hadn’t heard before.

  ‘But how do I do that, boss?’ she asked. ‘I am as hopeless as a holiday at throwing but, even if I manage, it could go off when it lands.’

  ‘You could take the bullets out first.’

  ‘Then it will be no use to either of us,’ she reasoned with a new coldness.

  ‘Have you ever handled a gun before?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Dodo smiled menacingly. ‘Daddy used to take me to the range. I am a crack shot with a revolver.’

  She certainly seemed to be handling it with confidence.

  I tried a new tack. ‘I met your father in Ipswich, Dodo.’

  ‘Daddy?’ Dodo’s face shone brighter than the limelights. ‘You mean my lovely daddy, not your horrid one?’

  ‘I thought you liked my father?’

  ‘Oh I do,’ she assured me. ‘We have lovely games of hide-and-seek and piggy in the middle in the evenings and sometimes old maid with crinkled playing cards but you must admit that he is especially horrid.’

  I couldn’t deny that. I was just surprised Dodo had noticed; but she was surprising me in a lot of ways tonight.

  Not for the first time it occurred to me that Dodo had been absent for every murder except the one where she had clamped her handkerchief over the victim’s throat.

  I got back on track. ‘The morning Skotter Heath Jackson, the accountant, was murdered in his office you said you had visited your father. But he told me he hadn’t seen you in ages.’

  ‘Oh, did he indeed?’ she said defiantly. ‘Well, if Daddy said that it must be true because Daddy never lies.’

  ‘But you did,’ I pointed out.

  ‘So I made up a fib.’ Dodo uncrossed her feet and stamped the left one.

  ‘He told me about your first father.’

  Another, even newer, expression appeared on Dodo’s face – a sort of cold fury.

  ‘He told you…’ She was lost for words. ‘Why would Daddy do that? You must have tricked him but you are not clever enough to do that. Perhaps you are lying. But you do not lie.’ I did sometimes but this was not a good time to tell Dodo that. ‘I am confused.’ She was scraping her right foot along the boards now like a bull about to charge the matador.

  Lavender Wicks groaned and raised her face. ‘What…’

  ‘Keep still, blast you,’ Dodo shrieked and took a swingeing blow, contacting Lavender’s occiput with a sickening thud.

  Lavender’s head thumped down again.

  ‘Christ, Dodo, you nearly decapitated her.’

  ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ she lectured me. ‘So what if Vernon Willowdale was my father? Am I to be blamed for that? I do not blame you for your odious-but-kind-to-me parents. The police never pressed any charges against me. What are you saying, boss? Do you think I am the Camden Vampire?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Possibly the Suffolk Vampire though, I thought, but this was not a good time to mention what I had read about his clamping a handkerchief over his victim’s neck. ‘I’m just a bit worried about Mrs Wicks, Dodo. I can’t see her breathing.’

  Dodo hardly glanced down. ‘Oh, she is breathing all right.’

  ‘The murderer at the Dunworthy had a limp,’ I reminded myself – in an inaudible mumble, I thought, but it’s funny how a voice will carry in poor acoustics when you don’t want it to.

  ‘That does not mean anything,’ Dodo reasoned. ‘So do I.’

  Maybe I would wait until we were in company and more evenly matched in weaponry, I decided, before I asked about the spikes I had seen in her handbag.

  ‘Put the gun down, Dodo,’ I urged but she shook her head.

  ‘I am afraid I can’t do that, boss.’

  ‘Put it down,’ I said firmly. ‘And that is an order, Constable Chivers.’ I took a step towards her. We might have been separated by the Grand Canyon for all the threat I posed, but Dodo raised the gun in both hands and pointed the barrel straight at me.

  ‘Stop right there.’

  ‘The others will be here soon!’ I shouted.

  ‘But not soon enough to save you,’ she raged.

  ‘Dodo,’ I held out my hand to show it was empty, ‘whatever you’ve done, it’s over.’

  But I could see she was not listening to me by then. ‘Stay where you are.’ There was a controlled frightening intensity I had not imagined Dodo Chivers had in her until that moment. ‘I will not warn you again.’

  ‘I can’t hurt you from here, Dodo.’

  ‘Stop!’ Dodo screamed. ‘Do not make me kill you.’

  I took a step back.

  ‘I warned you.’ She levelled the gun a fraction more, crouched slightly to brace herself. ‘I am sorry,’ she whispered and pulled the trigger.

  I thought you couldn’t feel a bullet immediately. But I did.

  100

  THE BEE-KEEPER’S SISTER

  ‘Oh God,’ I said but I could not hear it.

  There was a pain in my head and it made the pain Teddy Moulton had inflicted when he battered me seem very tame indeed. It was sharp and it burned. I felt the hot blood burst down the left-hand side of my face.

  I staggered back, clutching myself. ‘Oh God, Dodo. What have you done?’

  ‘Oh fiddlesticks, that hurts,’ somebody gasped as if I needed telling, especially in such a silly way. ‘You have killed me.’

  ‘Drop it or I shall,’ Dodo said with steeliness and something landed clattering at my feet.

  It was a walking stick.

  ‘What the hell?’ I turned and saw a woman behind me. She was grasping her right shoulder as if her life depended upon it – and pos
sibly it did to judge by the way the blood flowed steadily between her fingers. She wore a wide hat with a heavy veil that made her look like a bee-keeper. If that was the fashion, I wouldn’t be following it.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ I shouted.

  ‘Why would I?’ Dodo puzzled.

  ‘If Mrs Wicks comes round again, do not hit her.’

  ‘Not even a teensy-weensy likkley-wickley tap?’

  ‘No.’

  I had one handkerchief in my skirt pocket and I needed it for me so I used it for me, clamping it against my ear with the side of my stump.

  The woman behind me had a tawny woollen coat on. I pulled it off her left shoulder.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Helping you,’ I said. ‘Slip your arm out.’ She obeyed in a daze.

  ‘Ouchy-wouchy. It hurts.’ She was starting to look familiar in the gloom, or maybe it was her voice.

  ‘Of course it hurts – you’ve been shot.’ I adjusted my pack. ‘So have I,’ I added pointedly.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ Dodo said. ‘But your ears do stick out a bit.’

  ‘No they do not.’ I had never been told that before and I felt sure my parents would have mentioned it.

  ‘One of them still does,’ she affirmed. ‘Anyway, you moved your head.’

  ‘Was I supposed to stand still while you fired at me?’

  ‘I was aiming at her but you got in the way.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I retorted.

  ‘Apology accepted.’ Dodo smiled like a hostess pretending she doesn’t mind wine splashed on her new Axminster.

  ‘Take your coat off,’ I barked.

  The woman obeyed gingerly but without wincing. She was probably numb. I wished I was. My ear was on fire as I ripped her shirt open, buttons pinging off.

  ‘Look what you’ve done,’ she burst out. ‘That cost me twelve shillings in Jarvis’s.’

  ‘Ten shillings and eight pence.’ I had looked at the same shirts myself but they were too small for me. I pulled hers down over her right hand.

  ‘Ouch. Oh flip. Excuse my language.’

  ‘I think I may have heard worse.’ I took a look at the wound.

  ‘She has,’ Dodo called over. ‘Sergeant Briggs, who we call Brigsy, often says boogy, which is very rude indeed, apparently.’

  I bunched the free side of her shirt up. ‘Hold that over it. You’ve just got a flesh wound on the outer edge of your upper arm. The bullet has gone clean through.’

  ‘Oh but it will leave a horrid scar,’ she moaned and started to trudge off, our conversation clearly at an end.

  ‘At least you can cover it. I can’t hide mine unless I go around looking like Van Gogh.’

  ‘He had a beard,’ Dodo chipped in helpfully.

  ‘I’m still working on mine,’ I muttered and snatched the woman, swinging her back by her left arm, though from the yelps you’d have thought I had grabbed the other. ‘Right, let’s have a look at you.’

  I let go of her, took hold of the front of the veil and raised it. The woman tried to bury her head and turn away but I had seen enough to confirm my suspicions.

  ‘You,’ I said, meaninglessly to anyone except me and her when I thought about it. ‘The woman who fell down the Leg O’ Lamb cellar steps. I never did discover your name.’

  The woman raised her head to look me full in the eye.

  ‘Poppy,’ she told me. ‘Miss Poppy Castle.’ She swallowed. ‘Is Lavender all right?’ She peered round me.

  ‘And what is she to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Haven’t you guessed yet?’ Poppy Castle taunted as if it was a game we’d been playing for hours. ‘Lavender Wicks is my big sister.’

  101

  THE WEIRD SISTERS

  Perhaps it was hearing her name that roused her. Lavender Wicks began to rise groggily.

  ‘No,’ I warned Dodo, who was poised to give her a hefty backspin.

  ‘Dohhh,’ Dodo moaned in disappointment but lowered the racquet.

  ‘Are you all right, Sissy?’ Poppy called.

  ‘Oh of course I am.’ Lavender got onto all fours. ‘Never happier than when I’m crawling around filthy stages getting concussed with a sledgehammer.’

  ‘It was actually a Bancroft Super Winner,’ Dodo said. ‘I had one at school. Once, on a Thursday afternoon, I knocked out Mrs Driver, our sports mistress, but by mistake in her case.’

  ‘You got off lightly.’ Poppy briefly removed my makeshift wad to demonstrate. ‘She shot me.’

  ‘And me,’ I reminded them but nobody paid any attention to that.

  ‘Shot? How?’ Lavender got onto her haunches and patted herself. ‘That’s my husband’s gun. Give it back this instant.’

  ‘The only way you’ll get this back is one slug at a time,’ Dodo snarled in a passable imitation of Humphrey Bogart, though I didn’t recognise the quote – The Petrified Forest? I hadn’t seen that when it came to London. I was too busy chasing real, though less charismatic, tough guys.

  ‘Right.’ I tried to establish some order. ‘What exactly is going on?’

  ‘Well, I should have thought it was quite obvious,’ Dodo – who the question wasn’t aimed at – proclaimed. ‘Lavender Wicks – who I so wrongly suspected because of her direct and honest gaze and because I am jealous of her dizzly-dazzly beauty – was kidnapped by this evil-as-eggs, ugly-as-umbrage weird woman posing as her sister while—’

  ‘Weird?’ Poppy fumed.

  ‘She is my sister,’ Lavender insisted.

  ‘Then why does she need to pose as her?’ Dodo puzzled.

  ‘So why did Mrs Wicks have a gun?’ I objected. And why, I thought, am I interrogating my constable when we have two criminals in our custody?

  ‘Well.’ Dodo put her left hand on her hip for, all at once, I was the class simpleton. ‘If you were being kidnapped, would you not want to have a gun to protect you?’

  ‘Quite so.’ Lavender hauled herself up on the side of an armchair. ‘Well, thank you so much for rescuing me, Inspector Church…’

  ‘Aided by Constable Chivers,’ Dodo reminded her.

  ‘I was coming to that,’ Lavender insisted snappily and Dodo stuck out her tongue.

  ‘And your sister crept up behind me with a stick because…?’ I queried.

  ‘Because—’ Poppy began.

  ‘Because she had come to rescue me and thought you were the kidnapper,’ Lavender assured me. I had to admire how she made one of the most implausible explanations I have ever been offered sound only just implausible, but I battled on regardless.

  ‘So how’ – I held up my hand in the stop sign – ‘and this question is just for you, Miss Castle, did you know that Mrs Wicks was being held here?’

  ‘Because…’ Lavender blustered.

  ‘Don’t be greedy,’ I scolded. ‘You will have plenty of your own questions to answer soon enough.’

  ‘Because’ – Poppy looked about for an explanation – ‘I got a ransom note as well.’

  ‘As well as what?’ I jumped in.

  ‘As well as you?’

  ‘Who said I got one?’

  ‘How else would you have known where to bring the money?’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The ransom money.’

  I blinked. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, it’s perfectly simple.’ Poppy folded her arms crossly at my incomprehension. ‘The £5,000.’

  ‘Shut up, Poppy,’ Lavender called.

  ‘A bit late for that,’ I remarked. ‘Why, Mrs Wicks, did you pretend to be kidnapped?’

  ‘Because…’ Poppy began.

  ‘You must have been very annoying children,’ I speculated, ‘if you kept trying to answer each other’s questions.’

  ‘I will offer you seven to one on that,’ Dodo calculated. ‘Because you are both as annoying as artichokes now that you are adults.’

  ‘Because you were on to us,’ Lavender explained. It was news to me that I had been hot on their tr
ail. ‘I knew you knew when you said I would be handcuffed.’

  I had only meant what I said – that she would have no difficulty in finding someone willing to play her games – but, if Lavender Wicks thought I had evidence against her, I was not going to deny it.

  It occurred to me that she did not have the facial injuries I had seen in the photograph sent to Thurston – but she was probably skilled in using make-up, having been an actress.

  ‘I did think it odd that, when we returned your licence, you didn’t ask where your handbag was.’ I had realised this too late, but not too late to seem cleverer than I was.

  ‘That was stupid of me,’ Lavender admitted.

  ‘Shut up, Lavvy,’ her sister warned, too late, as most warnings, in my experience, are.

  ‘Oh what’s the point?’ Lavender slumped into the armchair.

  ‘Was that a rhetorical question, boss?’ Dodo hissed.

  ‘I think so.’ I picked up the cane. It was unusually heavy. Did it have a lead core to turn it into a cosh?

  ‘We were going to disappear,’ Lavender confessed, ‘start a new life somewhere where we couldn’t be extradited from.’

  ‘That would have to be out of England then,’ Dodo calculated. ‘And you probably couldn’t take your furniture with you – that pretty white baby grand pianoforte, for example.’

  ‘We needed money,’ Lavender continued. ‘Thurston is very generous but I couldn’t ask him for that sort of money.’

  ‘So he doesn’t know this was a charade?’ I checked.

  ‘Oh I love charades.’ Dodo clasped her hands.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Did you not feel beastly at deceiving him?’ Dodo enquired severely. ‘I know I would feel as guilty as a giraffe.’

  ‘Not in the least,’ Lavender said defiantly. ‘Husbands are made for deceiving.’

  ‘He’d have been even more upset if Lavender had gone to the gallows,’ Poppy piped up.

  ‘Not just me,’ Lavender Wicks cried indignantly.

  ‘Not that we had anything to do with those other things,’ Poppy hastened to add. ‘Nothing to do with them at all.’ She looked from me to her sister to Dodo to back at me. ‘Absolutely nothing. We don’t even know what you are talking about.’