Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘And then he said,’ Lavender giggled, ‘Did the others put you up to this?’

  ‘And I said,’ Poppy chortled. ‘No, the others will die just as you are going to.’

  ‘I expect you alarmed him when you said that,’ Dodo speculated.

  ‘Not as much as when we got out the knives and started stabbing him,’ Lavender replied. ‘We took turns. He became very distressed then – shouting at first, when he thought we were punching him, then, when he realised he was being punctured, screaming and begging.’

  ‘Begging for mercy,’ Poppy confirmed. ‘But I said, What mercy did you show me? And he said, I don’t know who you are so I lifted the sack and said, Remember me now?’

  ‘And he,’ Lavender took the anecdote over, ‘said, No, I don’t think I do. Can you believe it? The nerve of the man.’

  ‘We had made our own knuckleduster thing with metal teeth,’ Poppy declared like a child telling a parent about her schoolwork, ‘from one of Thurston’s leather belts and a couple of old farrier’s nails.’

  ‘Lavvy pulled the sack down,’ Poppy galloped on. ‘And I drove the spikes deep into his throat. That soon shut him up.’

  ‘Well, he did shout Oh no! and gurgle quite a lot,’ Lavender chipped in.

  ‘Yes.’ Poppy thumped her brow. ‘I didn’t say he shut up immediately.’

  ‘She said, That soon shut him up,’ Dodo recited like a court stenographer.

  ‘And then’ – Poppy extruded her lower lip – ‘he died.’

  ‘We stabbed him a few times more,’ Lavender concluded, ‘but ours hearts weren’t in it when he didn’t react.’

  ‘We took our sack off him and looked at him for a while until we got bored and went home,’ Poppy concluded sadly.

  ‘His receptionist was coming in as we went out.’ Lavender sank into her chair.

  ‘But she couldn’t see us because we had our veils on.’

  ‘And Lavender said, We know where you live and showed her the knives.’ Poppy laughed.

  ‘And Poppy said,’ Lavender choked with mirth, ‘And we know you stole the money. And the receptionist said…’

  ‘I was going to pay it back,’ they chorused with precision that would have done credit to the Grinder-Snipe twins.

  I thought her attitude was strange, I said to myself before asking, ‘What about Millicent Smith?’ But their blank expressions were enough to convince me they knew nothing about her. I had known in my heart that Crake Smart, Freddy’s father, had found Millicent before we did.

  Dodo strummed the tennis racquet. ‘When I’m cleaning windows,’ she began but, catching three disapproving tuts, gave up and threw the racquet over her head to bounce off the stage, slither and disappear down the trapdoor from which she had made her dramatic entrance.

  105

  THE ETIQUETTE OF MURDER

  I took the opportunity of the distraction to have a think. Why were these two women confessing so readily? Were they just attention-seekers? So far they had told me nothing that they couldn’t have read in the papers, possibly supplemented by taking one of my constables for a drink. Bantony would not be averse to impressing a couple of pretty young women, I speculated.

  ‘Let’s talk about the Royal George,’ I suggested and Dodo clapped her hands.

  ‘Oh yes, do let us, please.’

  ‘The Royal George,’ Lavender ruminated. ‘We were after Ian Henshaw again. He had already eluded us when we got Freddy Smart. Probably not our finest hour.’

  ‘It actually took two hours to finish him off,’ Poppy corrected her. ‘But you can’t really blame us for that one.’

  ‘I feel confident that we can,’ I assured her.

  ‘It was another case of mistaken identity,’ Lavender admitted.

  ‘What a couple of sillies you must think we are.’ Poppy simpered.

  ‘But we did make sure we had the right man this time,’ Lavender explained. ‘Only we got the wrong room.’

  ‘So Ian Henshaw had two lucky escapes,’ I observed.

  ‘The devil looks after his own,’ Lavender quoted.

  ‘We tried very hard,’ Poppy protested. ‘We followed him for ages hoping to catch him alone.’

  ‘We didn’t want to go to his home because we were sure Mrs Henshaw was innocent and we heard they had a child.’

  ‘A little girl,’ I said. ‘My sergeant and Constable Chivers had to go and tell them while I was in hospital.’

  ‘They cried.’ Dodo’s lower lip quivered at the memory. ‘A big lot.’

  I scrutinised the two sisters but neither showed any remorse at that news.

  ‘They are better off without such an iniquitous husband and daddy,’ Poppy decreed before returning to her narrative. ‘Lavender watched the front of the hotel as he went in and I watched the back. I saw the porter go and close the blackout curtains and I counted which window it was ever so carefully.’

  ‘Poppy waited over an hour to make sure nobody else came along,’ Lavender defended her sister, ‘but we weren’t to know that that couple, the Herrings, had gone into the hotel just before Mr Henshaw and that he didn’t go to his room immediately.’

  ‘He didn’t go to his room at all,’ I remembered. ‘He walked straight out. The receptionist thought it was because he didn’t like the place. More likely he was afraid of being recognised and lost his nerve, leaving the woman he intended to meet to nurse a port and lemon by herself at the bar.’

  ‘But he would have had to go out of the front door,’ Poppy objected, ‘so Lavender would be sure to have seen him.’

  ‘Well…’ For the first time since I had met her, Lavender Wicks looked embarrassed. ‘I did pop round the side of the building to get out of the wind so I could light a cigarette. But I was only gone a minute at most.’

  I waited for an outburst from Poppy but she tinkled a light laugh. ‘Oh well,’ she giggled. ‘Worse things happen at sea.’

  ‘Not to Grant Herring and Timothea Cutter, they don’t,’ I pointed out. ‘You went to the room…’ I prompted.

  ‘I knocked, saying I had brought them champagne, courtesy of the management,’ Lavender declared.

  ‘He answered and I had run him through his arm before I realised it was the wrong man and that he had the wrong woman with him,’ Poppy recalled.

  ‘But you still went ahead and killed them both,’ I objected.

  ‘What were we supposed to do?’ Poppy protested like I was an unreasonable parent. ‘They had seen us.’

  ‘Luckily she fainted,’ Lavender recollected. ‘So we were able to make him lie on the bed and tie his wrists to the bedstead before she came round, when we did the same to her.’

  ‘They thought we had come to burgle them,’ Poppy said. ‘And we told them if they didn’t struggle we wouldn’t hurt them – which was a big porky admittedly – so they let us tie their ankles and put their stockings as gags in their mouths.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dodo shuddered. ‘How unhygienic.’

  ‘And then you killed them,’ I said, sickened by my own words. ‘Did you take one each and kill them both at the same time?’

  ‘What kind of monsters do you think we are?’ Lavender rounded on me. ‘Even in murder manners matter.’

  ‘Ladies first?’ Dodo guessed.

  ‘Exactly,’ Poppy called up to her approvingly.

  ‘So was it good manners to torture them?’ I rounded on Lavender furiously.

  ‘It was good practice,’ Lavender replied coolly, ‘for when we got the real Mr Henshaw.’

  ‘But they were innocent people,’ I objected, not sure yet why the rest of their victims weren’t.

  ‘Innocent?’ Poppy scorned. ‘Pah. They were married,’ she paused to let the full horror of her next words sink in, ‘but not to each other.’

  ‘We have very strong views on the sanctity of marriage,’ Lavender explained.

  ‘Also she had a silly name.’ Poppy sneered. ‘Timothea – that’s just a man’s name with an “a” on the end.’

  �
�And for that she deserved to die?’ Dodo asked incredulously.

  ‘I knew you would see it our way,’ Poppy told her.

  ‘You went to see Mrs Wicks while I was in hospital, didn’t you?’ I accused Dodo.

  ‘Might have.’ She sniffed. ‘Well, all right, I did. I wanted to trick her into telling me something but I did not and she did not.’

  ‘But she tricked you,’ I pointed out. ‘You told her my name was Betty, didn’t you?’

  Dodo shuffled her whole body. ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And you told her about the oak tree.’

  Dodo crossed her ankles. ‘Might have.’ She twined her fingers. ‘She said you despised me. I said you didn’t but she said yes you did because you would never confide in me about anything personal so I said well you had told me about your friend Utterly Etterly but that was all. I didn’t tell her about how you broke the vase or your teddy bear Mr Fluffly or those love letters from Roger Ackroyd you hid under that loose floorboard.’

  ‘Roger Arkwright.’ I had forgotten about his letters.

  ‘Especially the one about that night when—’

  ‘Let’s concentrate on another night,’ I broke in. ‘The one in the Dunworthy Hotel.’

  106

  THE JUSTICE OF JUST

  Lavender Wicks lounged sideways on the arm of the chair like a Roman noblewoman waiting to be fed grapes.

  ‘We had been lucky with our mix-ups over Bath Road and Bath Avenue and the wrong rooms in the Royal George,’ Poppy told us, ‘because the people we killed deserved to die anyway but we decided to make sure with the man in Bocking.’

  ‘Ian Henshaw in the Dunworthy Hotel,’ I said.

  ‘What is there to say?’ Lavender shrugged. ‘Henshaw was a fool. He believed all the stories about a vampire so he didn’t think twice about trusting me. I mean to say, do I look like a vampire?’ She walked her fingers down her thighs to the hem of her dress.

  ‘More like a vamp,’ I commented and she radiated charming malice.

  ‘If you mean to say it you should say it,’ Dodo instructed and Lavender tinkled with laughter.

  ‘Henshaw was easy,’ Lavender scoffed. ‘I invited him for a drink on the pretence that it was business and made it clear there was only one kind of business I was really interested in. Give a man a few compliments and he thinks he’s Rudolph Valentino.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Dodo declared so accusingly you might have thought the sisters had finished him off thirteen years ago.

  ‘No!’ Poppy tottered two steps sideways and one step back. ‘I wondered why he hadn’t made any films recently.’

  Lavender threw back her head. ‘Henshaw wasn’t known in Essex,’ she continued. ‘He lived in Sackwater and so he felt quite safe when I suggested going to that hotel. We had never actually done anything but the promise of doing it was enough to lure him. I told him I had a special game. He had to get undressed as quickly as he could and lie on the bed. He let me tie him up without a murmur. Mrs Henshaw would never join in anything like that – he bleated. And when I told him I had a sister who would very much like to meet him, he almost burst with anticipation.’

  ‘We arranged for a ladder to be there by smashing all those top windows with our catapults so the glazier would need to bring it and we did it too late for him to be able to repair them all in one evening, with the blackout in operation, and we hoped he would leave his big ladder overnight,’ Poppy told us breathlessly, ‘and he did!’

  ‘Hoo-rah.’ I clapped sarcastically.

  ‘Poppy came over the wall,’ Lavender related.

  ‘The ladder was ever so heavy,’ her sister complained.

  ‘You carried it under your right arm,’ I realised.

  ‘How could you possibly know that?’ Poppy asked sharply.

  ‘Because you were leaning that way with the weight of it. The right footprint was deeper than the left.’

  ‘Oh well done, boss.’ Dodo bounced on her perch. ‘That was like being a proper detective, better than Miss Prim.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Is that why you were so interested in my limp?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I lied and she nodded vigorously.

  ‘I did not think it could be.’

  ‘He was ever so thrilled to see me come in through the window,’ Poppy said, ‘but he still didn’t recognise me, though he asked if we had met before as I looked familiar.’

  ‘And had you?’ I watched her.

  ‘Oh don’t spoil the story,’ Lavender protested.

  ‘He asked if I had ever been a typist at Jackson-Ruperts, his family firm.’

  ‘And had you?’ Dodo joined in.

  ‘Do I look like a typist?’ Poppy yelled.

  ‘Well, you have ten fingers if you include thumbs,’ Dodo pondered.

  ‘You tortured and killed him.’ I steered the conversation back before we got too far off the topic.

  ‘I tried drinking his blood,’ Poppy made worms of her lips, ‘but it was all salty and sticky and disgusting so I had to spit it out.’ Her lip trembled. ‘It made me feel quite poorly.’

  Oh you poor little mite, I thought.

  ‘That decrepit porter nearly did for us,’ Lavender recalled. ‘With all the excitement I forgot to leave the key in the lock. It was just as well we’d pulled the wardrobe across. We hardly had time to do our speeches and escape before he forced his way in.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Poppy reprised her lines with a giggle. ‘No. Don’t hang me… please.’

  ‘Come on or I’ll snap your pretty neck.’ Lavender put on a gruff baritone voice so well that, even watching her, it was difficult to believe a man had not spoken.

  Both sisters did little bows.

  ‘I am glad you find it so amusing.’ I turned from one to the other.

  ‘Inspector Church is probably being sarcastic when she says she is glad,’ my constable clarified. ‘She is almost certainly appalled.’

  ‘Why should Mr Henshaw have recognised you, Miss Castle?’ I asked.

  Poppy turned purple. ‘Because’ – she clenched her fists – ‘he was one of them.’

  ‘The Suffolk Rams?’

  ‘You knew about them?’ Lavender asked incredulously. ‘And you did nothing?’

  ‘As far as I know they are just a bunch of rowdy Round Table rejects,’ I replied.

  ‘Just?’ Poppy shrieked, then, deciding that it hadn’t had the right effect, did it again but louder and in my face. ‘Just? That’s what he said when we tortured him. Just a bit of fun, he said. Oh yes indeed, he tried to apologise when we set to work on his arms but sorry doesn’t cover it. Anyone can be sorry when they are paying the price.’

  ‘So these men assaulted you?’ I clarified.

  ‘Assaulted?’ She swept an arm just past my nose. ‘They insulted my womanhood. They…’ she almost vomited the next word, ‘abused me. Every one of them. Henshaw was the ringleader. That’s why we left him to last and made him suffer the most.’

  ‘How did you know who they were?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I do secretarial work part-time,’ Poppy announced.

  ‘A typist,’ Dodo insisted.

  ‘I deal with their accounts and membership letters and keep minutes at their meetings,’ Poppy told her fiercely.

  ‘Some secret organisation.’ I shook my head in wonder.

  ‘I disagree, boss.’ Dodo rooted about her hair like she was looking for something dropped in a field. ‘I do not think that was very secret of them at all.’

  ‘I took a vow of silence,’ Poppy protested, suddenly loyal to the men she had slain.

  ‘Then it was very naughty of you to break your oath,’ Dodo lectured. ‘God will be very cross when you meet him.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Poppy chewed her lower lip. ‘I didn’t think of that.’

  I clasped my head, avoiding my ear and forced myself to concentrate.

  ‘But why this kidnapping charade?’ I wondered. ‘You must have known it would attract all the attention to you.’

&
nbsp; ‘Because, as Lavender has already explained,’ Poppy told me with frayed patience, ‘she knew that you were on to her.’

  ‘Actually I wasn’t,’ I confessed.

  ‘I was,’ Dodo announced but both our statements were greeted with indifference.

  ‘And you wanted to escape your marriage,’ I calculated.

  ‘Escape from Thurston Wicks?’ Dodo chortled. ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

  ‘Rumour has it he is not interested in women,’ I told her delicately.

  ‘Well, of course he is not. He is a married man.’ Dodo hesitated. ‘Oh, you do not mean… Oh, you do.’

  ‘I was fully aware of that when the studio paired us up.’ Lavender stretched lazily. ‘And it rather suited me.’ She yawned. ‘He had his boys. I had my girls.’

  ‘But you do not have any children,’ Dodo objected.

  ‘What then?’ I asked.

  ‘Because he was such a bore,’ Lavender said, ‘always whingeing about Crispin Staples getting his part by sleeping with the director.’

  ‘But that is silly.’ Dodo tossed her head scornfully. ‘If I were a director I should want my actors to stay awake.’

  ‘I was on the brink of stardom,’ Lavender declaimed, arms akimbo like this was the cue for a song, but then they fell into her lap. ‘And I thought a little of his fame would rub off on me but, when Thurston was seen dancing with that Kraut from the embassy, I was forced to drink from the same poisoned chalice and my career was ruined.’

  ‘He tried to poison you?’ Dodo exclaimed. ‘Good for him.’

  ‘I don’t think Mrs Wicks meant it literally,’ I informed her.

  ‘He might as well have,’ Lavender rejoined bitterly. ‘You can’t get much deader than Sackwater.’

  A squall rattled the roof tiles and the whole building creaked.

  ‘But it is lovely here,’ Poppy argued indignantly. ‘And you told me you were coming back to help look after Daddy.’

  ‘Fortunately, he died within a week of our return.’ Lavender sniffed.

  ‘Fortunately?’ Poppy shrieked, adopting a pugilistic pose with her little fists clenched. ‘Or did I mishear you?’