The Custard Corpses: A delicious 1940s mystery (The Erdington Mysteries)

by M J Porter

  “I was wary but also upset that I’d been abandoned. I don’t think the coach even realised how badly I’d hurt myself. I did turn him down, though, and told him I would be alright on my own. It was June, the day was bright, but not too hot, and even if I had to limp the whole two miles, I knew I’d get there before darkness fell.”

  “But, he must have followed me. I was so tired, I stopped under a tree for a rest, and I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up, I wasn’t under the tree anymore, and my head hurt, and I couldn’t work out where I was or anything, and then Mr Middlewick spoke. He was wearing a brown apron, and we seemed to be in a bathroom because his voice echoed as though from tiles. He was sitting on a chair, a sketchbook open before him, and he kept looking at me appraisingly and then adding to his drawing.”

  “I was frightened and scared and tried to stand up and run away. Mr Middlewick laughed and told me not to worry. Everything would be alright. Once he’d finished his drawing, he’d see me home. He sounded so worried, so filled with concern. Yet I didn’t believe a single word he said. I noticed then that there was a wooden tub in the corner, gently steaming with hot water and a pile of white towels. It was terrifying.” Here she paused, a sob escaping her mouth as she relieved those memories. Sam’s stomach had turned hard at her words. He couldn’t quite believe that there was someone still alive who might be able to describe the experience the other children had endured.

  “I’d been lying on a rug on the floor, all of my sporting clothes still on, including my muddy lacrosse boots, but the bath gave me pause for thought, as did the strange taste in my mouth. It felt like I’d been to the dentist.”

  “Mr Middlewick asked me to talk about myself, to stay in the position I’d woken up in, all splayed out, arms and legs to either side of my body, but I couldn’t do it. I clutched my legs tight to my body and refused to look at him. He carried on as though it wasn’t important at all. Eventually, I conquered my terror and tried to speak to him, asking him what he was doing, but he didn’t answer any of my questions. I grew cross. I turned aside, only for a moment, and next thing, he’d moved so quickly and put something over my mouth and nose. I must have fallen asleep again.”

  “When I woke up next time, I was being lowered into the steaming water, and all my clothes were off. I was horrified, and I fought him. I kicked him and thrust my elbows into his face, into his eyes and then his nose. Although he held me tight, he had to let go eventually because his blood was everywhere from where I’d hit his nose. He hadn’t tied me up, so I could keep attacking him. He couldn’t keep hold of both of my arms and legs at the same time. He screamed at me, and I reached for the bubble bath bottle and squirted into his eyes. Then I grabbed for my clothes and rushed to the door while I tried to pull on my clothes. I was torn between being seen naked and getting away, stupid, I know.”

  “I caught sight of him. He writhed on the floor in agony, clawing at his eyes where I’d squirted the bubble bath into them. I stopped and watched him, trying to decide what I could do to him, but I just wanted to escape. Still, before I ran out of the door, I grabbed his sketchbook where he’d left it to the side.”

  “Here, I’ve kept it all these years,” and Mrs Warburton pulled a familiar-looking black book from her large handbag.

  “Please, don’t look at it here. Please. And I never want to see it again, either. I don’t know why I’ve kept it all these years, hidden away. Perhaps I hoped it might come in handy.” She half-sobbed as she spoke, only to finally look at him.

  “And you know, no one at my home even noticed I was late or that I was covered in bruises, my clothes all in disarray.”

  “And so you kept quiet about it?” He could understand why she’d been so concerned.

  “I did, yes. Even with the sketchbook, I was worried people would say it was my fault.”

  “But it was never your fault,” Sam offered softly.

  “Thank you. I know that now. But it’s taken me a long time to forgive myself.”

  “I, I wish I’d told someone, then all these other children would have lived.”

  “There’s no guarantee of that. Even now, it’s taken all this time for people to realise the connections.”

  “You’re kind to say so, but I know that I should have persisted.”

  “That way lies madness,” Sam offered, wanting to reach out and lay his hand on her arm, but knowing better, after her reaction to him holding the door open earlier. “My old Chief Inspector was bedevilled by the local case. It ruined his life. I think you’ve suffered enough,” Sam stated flatly. He couldn’t imagine her guilt but knew he needed to do something to make her forget about it.

  “It has certainly affected many decisions I’ve made in my life, but at least I’ve had that life to live.”

  “Did he speak to you about why he was doing it?”

  She shook her head.

  “He wouldn’t answer my questions, so no, he didn’t. But there’s a picture in there that I think might answer your questions. It’s even more disturbing than the drawings he did of me, but please, don’t look at it here.”

  “I won’t,” Sam assured, although he could feel curiosity gnawing at him. “Tell me, how can I get in touch with you if I had the need.”

  A flicker of unease on her face, but she straightened her shoulders firmly.

  “I live in Tamworth now, so not far from here, Castle View, you can find me there, and now, I really must go. I’ve left my husband, but I must return to him. He’s been invalided out of the navy.”

  “Thank you,” Sam called to her retreating back, but she gave no indication that his words had been heard, her shoulders rigid, her steps sharp.

  He stumbled to a bench beside the pond, checking to make sure no one could see what he was doing, and then he opened the sketchbook.

  It was identical to the ones they’d uncovered at Sotheby’s; only the first page didn’t have the face of a smiling child on it, but rather the face of a child with staring eyes and no hint of movement. He swallowed thickly and turned to the next page.

  This image contained three children, all of them prone and clearly placed in such a way. Their unseeing eyes seemed to mock him. It was evident the children were dead, all of them.

  He tried to determine their ages, perhaps ranging from a seven-year-old up to a seventeen-year-old. They wore similar clothes, a rugby jersey perhaps, the striped colours picked out in two red and yellow shades.

  They were one next to another, but there were spaces between them, as though they played different positions in the rugby match. The older child was posed so that he might have been throwing the rugby ball that hovered on the ground beneath him. The youngest child had legs splayed as though running hard, one arm behind their body, the other across it, arched at the elbow as though running. And the final child, aged in the middle of the other two, had arms outstretched as though to catch the ball in the air.

  Sam swallowed thickly, immediately thinking that this was another crime scene they’d yet to find or one that hadn’t yet made it into their investigation.

  Only then, he looked down, noting the date on the picture: 1912 and a name. And the name horrified him and made sense of so much else.

  He slammed the sketchbook shut, not looking any further, and hastened back to the police station as fast as his old injury would allow.

  The horror of the Fitzpatrick murders had rocked British society for the whole of the year in 1912. And this whole sequence of murders could be traced back to that eventful year. Sam felt sickened even as the realisation that he finally had all of his answers started to percolate his thinking.

  Lord Fitzpatrick had killed his children, pretended they’d died of natural causes and created ructions by having a portrait of the dead children produced. It had been hung in the dining room of his house, where all could see and where he could gloat over the crime he’d gotten away with, even while accepting the sympathy of those who’d seen the drawing.

  Or at least, he’d tho
ught himself above suspicion. Fitzpatrick hadn’t factored in the quizzical nature of the local chief inspector who’d risked his job and his life to bring the lord to justice, the painting of the dead children arousing his suspicions.

  Lord Fitzpatrick had swung for his crimes when the coroner had been asked to re-examine the bodies. Great Britain had believed that had been the end of it, but all this time, Mr Middlewick had been re-enacting the very same crime, only with the added atrocity of drawing those children both while they were alive and when he’d murdered them as well.

  The answers, now Sam had them, were even more unsettling.

  Chapter 19

  Sam took himself back to the station. He needed to show Smythe what more he’d discovered. He huddled deep inside his coat, not meeting the eyes of anyone he met. The day had turned chilly, a sharp wind threatening to drag his cap from his head, and he no longer welcomed the glances people shot his way. His desire for answers had brought him this terrible truth.

  He felt both burdened and also free.

  All these years, he’d felt the weight of Fullerton’s grief at the unsolved case, but, while it had been theirs to solve, it had never been theirs to prevent. The knowledge that such an outrage had occurred under their stewardship had been painful. Sam now realised that he’d carried it with him. Everything, no matter what it was, had been tempered with the feeling of failure.

  Now all that was gone.

  “Mason?”

  Smythe had been in jovial form ever since the story had been plastered across the newspapers and even reported on the radio. He’d taken telephone calls from more than just the police commissioner, but the local minister for parliament, and some even suggested they might receive congratulations from the king.

  While Smythe took pains to admit he’d not solved the crimes, Sam knew that wasn’t how the rest of his fellow superintendents saw it. To them, it had been solved under his auspices, and that was what mattered. He could revel in concluding something that any of them could have done had they been proactive enough.

  “I had a visitor,” Sam began when being told to enter Smythe’s office with a cheery ‘come in’. “I think we’ve found our first case and also some answers about the killer’s motivation.”

  “I don’t believe I truly care about the motivation, just that the case is solved.”

  “All the same,” and Sam slid the sketchbook onto the desk in front of Smythe.

  “What’s this?”

  “Just look,” Sam offered, taking a seat and settling to watch his superior’s response.

  He wasn’t to be disappointed.

  What began as a desultory skim through yet another sketchbook, head shaking from side to side, quickly became a slow and deliberate examination of the images.

  “This just can’t be?” Smythe questioned, but Sam heard the resignation and acceptance in his voice, all the same.

  Sam remained silent. He knew the impact the knowledge would have on Smythe. After all, it had been Smythe who’d told Sam all about the case when he’d not long become their superintendent. All those years ago, just before the beginning of the Great War, when the country had still been recovering from the shock of the sinking of the Titanic, there’d been another scandal to draw everyone’s attention, threatening to force an even larger rift between the different levels of society.

  Smythe, a young man at the time, had cut his teeth on the case. He’d been insistent that Lord Fitzpatrick wasn’t to be trusted, that there was something else going on, that nothing had been as it had been presented.

  Smythe had earned his first promotion from his tenacious resolve to bring Lord Fitzpatrick to justice. The case had made Smythe’s career. But Lord Fitzpatrick had murdered only his three children, and in not even considering who the artist had been, who’d brought those dead children to life, Smythe had allowed, alongside his superiors, an even greater menace to go free. In fact, Sam believed the painting had been dismissed as no doubt executed by the disgraced lord, anyway.

  Smythe sighed heavily, closing the sketchbook tightly, hands resting on the cover.

  “I would never have even considered,” he admitted.

  “Me neither,” Sam agreed, but it left them with a problem, a huge problem that needed solving.

  “I’ll take this to the Commissioner,” Smythe expelled. “It’s for me to take responsibility.”

  “No,” Sam stated flatly. “No, I don’t think it is. We solved these cases together. That’s all that matters.”

  Smythe’s anguished eyes flashed to meet Sam’s.

  “Why?”

  “You didn’t make a killer. None of the investigating officers did.”

  “Perhaps,” Smythe stated, but the flicker of hope gave away his need to hear those words.

  “The perpetrator of the Middlewick Killings, the Custard Corpses as the papers have taken to calling them, has been identified. The man is dead. The families will, at last, have peace. I won’t have that taken from them, not now.” So speaking, Sam stood, leaving the sketchbook on the desk. Smythe glanced at it and then at Sam.

  “Put it with the archive,” he stated flatly. “One day, it might be needed, but that day isn’t today.”

  Sam inclined his head, scooping up the sketchbook as he went. Quickly, he strode to the back room, empty now, apart from an extensive collection of brown boxes, just waiting to go into storage.

  Removing the lid from the first box, dated 1919, he slid the sketchbook between the back cover and the sketchbook that was already there. Resolutely, he replaced the lid and allowed his eyes to travel over the remaining boxes. O’Rourke hadn’t yet added them all to the archive in the basement, but by tomorrow the room would be devoid of them all, the case solved, and then there’d be nothing else for it.

  A new case would beckon, and Sam found the idea appealing. He’d spent enough of his life trying to solve the riddle of Robert’s murder. Now, he could finally move on to something else.

  On his way home, Sam stopped beside the graveyard and then decided to walk inside. Fullerton’s gravestone was plain and unremarkable, and yet bright flowers graced it. Sam smiled. He knew who brought the flowers, his wife.

  Sam settled a hand on the gravestone, feeling the cool of the stone.

  “We did it, sir,” he found himself saying. “We solved the case of Robert McFarlane. The boy can rest in peace now, and so can you.”

  He heard gentle laughter then and turned to meet Rebecca's eyes from the other side of the metal fence that enclosed the graveyard.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” she called softly. “I hope you told the old boy not to worry anymore.”

  “I have,” Sam called, striding closer to the low fence so that he didn’t need to shout across the silent place; so that the dead could rest in peace.

  “Thank you,” Rebecca offered.

  “For what, doing my job?”

  “For never giving up. That meant a great deal to me through all the years of not knowing.”

  “A pity it took so long,” Sam offered sadly.

  “I don’t know. I think it might make it easier for me. Robert’s killer is dead. I can’t hate him or anguish about whether I want him to hang or not. It brings me a sense of well-being. I can get on with my life without ever having to worry that his killer might strike again. Every day, for as long as I can remember, I’ve scoured the newspaper pages and listened to the news on the radio. Not for the horrors of war, or what Hitler might be up to now, or the Japanese, but rather for the story that he’d taken another life, stolen the future from another family.”

  Sam nodded. He understood what she was saying.

  “Now, he’s gone, dead these last eight years, and welcome to it. Hopefully, he’s been burning in Hell all that time.” Rebecca softly laughed as she spoke, her eyes distant, as though seeing the very sight she mentioned before her. “And at the same time, my mother, and my father, have long been reunited with Robert, and wherever they are, they’re happy, together.” />
  Sam found his lips quivering at her words, remorse driving at his resolve never to show his emotion.

  “And now, what does the future hold for you?” Rebecca asked Sam, her eyes back on the here and now.

  “Back to the usual grime of being a police inspector during a war.”

  “And your son? He’s well?”

  “Yes,” Sam admitted. “He’s healing from his wounds and should be able to return home soon, and then, no more war for him. Not with such an injury. But, men can live with his wounds. It could have been much worse. I count it as a blessing.”

  “And will he be following in your footsteps?”

  “Oh, never that. He has his ambitions set on a far more exciting career than just being a police inspector.”

  “Then he has my warm wishes,” Rebecca insisted. “We all deserve some peace.”

  “That we do,” Sam muttered, but she was turning aside, and Sam watched her wave to a man, further down the road.

  “I must go,” Rebecca trilled, excitement warbling through her voice.

  “Good luck,” Sam offered.

  “We make our own luck,” Rebecca replied. “Remember that,” and she was gone.

  Sam turned once more to Fullerton’s grave, unsurprised to find his wife waiting for him, a glimmer in her eyes, and someone else he wasn’t expecting to see. Not yet.

  His son stared at him, a hint of defiance on his face, which quickly softened. Sam stared at the handsome man, noting his navy uniform, the long, dark coat that fell beyond his knees, and the hint of metal that glimmered beneath it. He’d fought in a war. He was no longer a child, although he would always be Sam’s son.

  “Come here,” Sam found he could hardly speak, as he rushed to throw his arms around John, mindful of the reddened patches of skin and his half-missing ear on the right side of his face.

  For a second, John was rigid under such a sign of affection, and then he melted into Sam. Sam laughed and found tears in his eyes.