‘Used to be a patient of mine,’ my father said but he could have said that about a great many people.
‘I shall stay with Captain Sultana,’ I volunteered since it seemed unlikely they would ask.
‘With that horrid man on that horrid boat?’ My mother rubbed a bit of saliva in with her shoe.
I had thought Adam’s surname was hilarious when I first met him until he explained that Sultana was a common name in Malta and I had better get used to it if we were to be man and wife. We weren’t. Policewomen were not allowed to get married and, with him being away so much on some hush-hush official business, I would have had little to compensate me. Captain Carmelo Sultana would have been my father-in-law and he still treated me like a daughter long after I had separated from his son – nearly a year ago now, I realised.
‘For now.’ I looked at my parents, realising with shock how little they were and how much older they were looking than they should have. ‘If you have any trouble you can always ring Dr Gretham.’
He was Tubby to me – but my parents thought it disrespectful to a medical man, even if he had been struck off – and he was the nearest person to the boat with a phone.
‘Oh we’ll be all right,’ my father breezed. ‘After all we brought you up, didn’t we?’
‘If you say so.’ I kissed my mother goodbye and was about to kiss my father when he dashed into the waiting room, which was also our sitting room out of hours since it had the only gas fire.
‘Put that pack back in, you old fool,’ he shouted, ‘and stop spitting.’ And, when the bills came and the income didn’t, he wondered why he was losing patients.
9
THE BUBBLE ON THE BRAIN
Superintendent Vesty was a tall man – well over six feet – with a faded debonair look about him. His uniform, with its gold crown on his epaulettes, was well cut but well worn. His shoes were highly polished, as were his silver buttons. His face was aquiline with a sharply hooked nose, hooded eyes and lean downturned lips and he had an unusually deep tan for Suffolk, contrasting with a bleached wrist visible when he raised his arm to tug his earlobe. Most strikingly, the superintendent had a rectangular indentation occupying most of his forehead where – Brigsy had told me – a steel plate had been put in after an injury received in what we still hoped would be the last ever war. It was difficult to keep myself from staring at it.
He stuck out a hand. ‘Welcome to Sackwater, Inspector.’ He had a firm grasp but his gaze wandered.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘All settled in?’ When he bowed his head, the skin sagged forward like a huge blister and I had a horrible thought that, if Brigsy was wrong about the plate, there was little to stop anyone prodding the super in the brain.
I forced myself to look away. ‘I’m starting to.’
‘Good good. Briggs treating you well?’
‘After he got over the shock.’
‘Not used to having a woman around the place,’ he sympathised, then ruined it by adding, ‘especially one so glamorous as yourself.’
‘I don’t think my looks should enter into it, sir.’
‘Quite, quite.’ Vesty tugged his right earlobe again. Presumably he did a lot of that because it looked longer than the left. ‘Can’t blame a chap for admiring a nicely turned calf, though.’
‘Actually, I can.’
My superior officer cocked his head like he was listening for something else.
‘Pity about the arm, what?’ The superintendent touched his head. ‘Still hurts you know.’ He stroked his fingertips over the depression. ‘Well, I’d better have a rest now.’
My superior officer lowered himself into his chair cautiously, like he was expecting it to collapse under his weight, and closed his eyes.
‘Will that be all, sir?’ I asked uncertainly, but Superintendent Vesty was fast asleep.
I left him to slumber and found Brigsy trying to balance a pencil on its point on his finger.
‘Is Joe Paradise still running his taxi?’ I asked.
It was only five o’clock but it had been a long day and I had to go two miles with a suitcase.
‘Old Joe he do be gooin’ strong,’ my sergeant assured me.
‘Oh good.’
‘Only his taxi int,’ Brigsy said as mournfully as he might have announced a bereavement. ‘It’s the sea air gone and got to his suspendsion. Get in everywhere, it do.’
‘Is there another service?’
‘Of course’ – Brigsy brightened – ‘there int.’ He scratched his chin. ‘But if you don’t fancy gooin’ by foot,’ he pondered, ‘I’ve an idea…’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I’ve an idea you’ll have to,’ he finished his sentence.
So I walked. I had only just turned into Gordon Road when I saw what was already a familiar figure in her summery skirt and blue two-tone shoes. She was standing at the bus stop.
‘Millicent?’ I did not like the way she was bent over.
Millicent Smith turned in response to my call. She had a big bloodstained handkerchief clutched under her nose.
‘Go away.’ Her left eye was bloodshot and her cheek blackened.
‘Did he…?’ I began stupidly.
‘Yes he did.’ She whipped the handkerchief away and I saw that her upper lip was split and swollen and her front left tooth was missing. ‘Happy?’
I put my cases down.
‘If you make a statement, we can—’
‘You can what?’ she bawled. ‘Arrest the whole family? Will you lock them away for ever? ’Cause you’d have to if I snitched on one of them.’ Millicent shook violently. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’
‘I can help you,’ I tried again. ‘There must be a shelter in the county for women in danger.’
‘You think the Smarts don’t know where it is?’ Millicent covered her mouth. Her words were muffled. ‘I know you mean well,’ I heard, ‘now fuck off.’
10
THE MAD ADMIRAL
Cressida watched my approach through the undergrowth with bright green eyes. It was a Maltese tradition to paint them on the bows of boats. She stood nearly thirty feet to the top of her wheelhouse, supported by railway sleepers sloping in a cradle around her, in the middle of Brindle Bar, which, except at low estuary tides, was really a tiny island off Shingle Cove.
In the winter she was visible from the riverbank but in the height of summer she could hardly be seen. There was a spinney of silver birches at the downstream end of the bar with clumps of rhododendron to give some shelter from the easterly winds. But her main camouflage came from the reeds that grew high in the summer, only dying down slowly as the dark nights closed in.
Nobody knew why he had constructed a houseboat there, for he could never hope to drag such a massive structure into the water. Perhaps he thought the high tide would enable him to float it off – but I suspected he just wanted somewhere he could feel at home and it seemed intrusive to interrogate him.
The captain had set up two speaking tubes: one to the summer house of White Lodge, Tubby Gretham’s family seat up the hill, the other on a post nearby on the bank, but I had no need to use either.
‘Ahoy,’ Captain Sultana bellowed as I waved from the opposite bank, then he was scurrying down the wooden stairs that ran along the starboard side, scattering a dozen hens as he hurried to untie his boat and row steadily across the forty feet or so of slow water between us. ‘Qalbi.’ He leaped onto the short jetty to embrace me. ‘My heart.’ He hadn’t needed to translate the word. Adam had taught it to me in happier times.
Carmelo lugged my suitcase to balance on the seat and I scrambled in beside it.
‘Madonna – Mother of God.’ Although he knew about my mishap, this was the first time the captain had seen me since it happened. ‘I shall teach you to scull one-handed. It can be done. You are strong.’
In all the time I knew him Captain Sultana had never cut his hair but kept it tied back to hang in a pigtail behind his old naval cap.
The locals had made the captain welcome enough, for he knew the sea. They respected that but to them he was always – though never to his face – the Mad Admiral.
We were soon moored up again and standing on his kingdom. Even as smallholdings go, Brindle Bar was small but, as well as the chickens, he kept rabbits – a favourite food in his native Malta – in pens and stacked cages and grew some vegetables on the gravelly, sandy soil.
‘You are staying?’
‘If you’ll have me.’ I dragged my soles over the iron scraper.
‘You are staying.’ It was a statement this time and I was just about to follow him up the steps when a tousled head of brown hair leaned over the side.
‘Hello, Aunty.’ It was Adam’s nephew not mine, Jimmy. He had started calling me that to annoy me years ago but I was used to it by now.
Oh bloody hell, I thought for I was fond of Jimmy but things had been awkward and I said, even more ungraciously than I intended, ‘What are you doing here?’
Jimmy blushed. He was twenty-two but he looked fifteen when he did that. ‘Got thrown out of my lodgings,’ he mumbled bashfully. ‘Sort of set fire to the bed.’
Following Captain Sultana’s example, I wiped my shoes repeatedly on the coconut mat at the top, for I knew how lovingly he laboured to keep that main deck polished.
‘How?’ I looked about me. Everything was spotless, the brass rails gleaming, the glass in the windows of the wheelhouse glittering, the beautifully crafted wheel itself standing uselessly splendid. The old Knights of Malta red flag with a white cross hardly ruffled on the mast high over our heads, a radio aerial poking out at the top.
Captain rolled his eyes and went downstairs – or down below, as he insisted we called it – with my cases.
‘Fell asleep with a fag,’ Jimmy confessed but immediately rallied with, ‘anyway, it’s all your fault. You gave me my first cigarette.’
‘You told me you were already smoking.’
Jimmy was holding a black-bound book that he had been writing in.
‘I thought the police were supposed to be able to tell if people were lying,’ he taunted.
‘We’re not mind readers,’ I retorted, ‘especially if there isn’t much of a mind to read.’
‘Just don’t do it here.’ The captain reappeared. ‘Or I’ll be using you for bait.’
‘Yes, Grandad.’ Jimmy found Great-Uncle too much of a mouthful.
‘He’d make a good worm,’ I commented and ducked as the book flew over my head, skimming through the air to land in the undergrowth.
‘Oh your poems,’ I cried, relieved they had not gone in the water.
‘Good riddance.’ Jimmy flopped into a canvas chair. ‘They were rubbish anyway.’
He had shyly shown me some once. I thought they were rather good and if I hadn’t glanced out of a porthole in my cabin a few minutes later and spied him beating a path through the nettles on his way to retrieve it, I would have done the job myself.
11
THE CIRCLING OF THE SHARK
The sun was already hot by the time I arrived at Sackwater Central next day. I am proud of my uniform but it was not designed to keep the wearer cool. I was only glad that woollen stockings had recently been abandoned – at least they had as far as I was concerned.
‘I int managed to get that san’witch out yet, ma’am,’ a constable, introduced by Brigsy as ‘Nippy’ Walker, greeted me with such a grin you’d have thought not managing was a great achievement.
Nippy had the look of a sparring partner about him – solidly but leanly constructed with a face that looked like he had taken a few knocks, with his right cheekbone flattened and his nose deviated to the left with the bridge dented – but Brigsy had told me over our first cup of tea that Walker had been like that since birth, thanks to a newly trained midwife who was overenthusiastic with her forceps. His hair reminded me of a dune – grittily short at the sides with a clump of trimmed marram grass on the summit.
‘How hard did you try?’ I took off my peaked cap.
‘Not very,’ he admitted blithely. ‘But Serg dint say you said try hard.’
‘In future when I give an order you will carry it out,’ I told him as evenly as I could, for I knew from experience that it’s fine for a man to shout but a woman who raises her voice is a hysterical banshee.
Nippy chewed that information over. ‘Most likely,’ he agreed, eyes narrowed to puzzle over the stripes on my epaulettes.
I took a breath. The first door down the left-hand corridor opened and a man stepped out – tall and quite well built, though with a nicely developing paunch. His skin was pale – did none of them ever venture into daylight? – and pocked. His hair was soot-black and slicked back. About a decade older than me, I judged.
‘Shark,’ Briggs warned through the side of his mouth.
‘Sergeant Church,’ the newcomer called.
‘Well, actually—’
‘Shut up,’ Inspector Sharkey snapped, so I didn’t tell him it was just that I hadn’t received my new jacket yet. ‘Come into my office.’
So I did, if only to see if he had a bigger desk. He didn’t, but he did have a heap of rubbish on it to rival any council tip.
I followed him into a thick, stale fug of cigarette smoke. Like most people I smoke but, like most people in a small room, unless there is a storm or a plague of locusts outside, I generally open the window.
‘I think—’ I tried again.
‘No you don’t.’ Sharkey circumnavigated me, scrutinising me from every angle. I would be the first to agree that a police officer should always be presentable but I objected to being viewed like a bad sculpture. ‘I do the thinking. You obey my orders. Understand?’
‘I understand perfectly, Inspector,’ I told him. ‘But—’
‘No buts. Just understand,’ he broke in again. He had a touch of cockney in his accent that he was trying to cover up but I didn’t think he had quite decided what to cover it with so it kept poking through. ‘I deal with the buts.’ I wished he would deal with the cigarette butts; the ashtray overflowed with them directly onto his green metal desktop. ‘You’re a bit la-di-da,’ he continued. ‘What happened to your arm?’
‘I come in a kit form,’ I told him. ‘It’s on its way.’
‘A wit,’ Sharkey remarked as if I was a dog dropping. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said from behind me. For a second I thought he meant the seam on my stockings, which might well have twisted when I cycled through Treacle Woods to get to work. ‘I don’t like women in uniform.’
‘I hope you are not asking me to turn up without one, Inspector.’ I stared straight ahead.
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ Sharkey spoke over my shoulder. ‘It’s unnatural.’ The inspector spoke moistly into my ear and I refrained from asking if he meant his Brylcreemed hair. Nature at her most bounteous could not have stained it that black but who was I to judge? If truth be told, some of my blondness came out of a bottle.
‘What? Like bus conductresses?’ I challenged and, while he thought of a response to that, ploughed on with, ‘People used to say the same about flying but I like to think it’s progress.’
Sharkey withdrew to reappear in front of me, his nose an inch from mine. ‘And I like women who think they’re clever even less.’ His breath was heavy with stale tobacco and booze not quite as stale as it should have been for a working day. I had dealt with whisky coppers before and had hoped not to deal with any more.
‘You would prefer me to be stupid?’
Sharkey smirked. His teeth were straight. They would have been nice if he hadn’t set about staining them. ‘I don’t doubt you’ll manage to be that without any encouragement from me.’
I gave up trying to hold my breath and said, ‘I hope you will treat me with the same respect as you would any other officer, Inspector.’
Sharkey grinned and, mercifully, stepped back.
‘Keep hoping, Chapel.’ And he had accused me of trying to be f
unny.
‘Church,’ I corrected. ‘I am at least entitled to be addressed by my correct name.’
The inspector leaned forward and I steeled myself not to wince. He would have taken that as a sign of fear, not nausea.
‘While you are under my command, you will be whatever pigging kind of pigging place of worship I decide. You’ll be a pigging Greek temple if I say so.’ His words sprayed into my face. ‘Understood?’
‘Quite, Inspector.’ I cleared my throat. ‘So long as you understand that I shall not be under your command at all.’
‘Moving on?’ He brightened.
‘Moving up,’ I told him. ‘In fact I already have. When you were first informed that I was being seconded here, I was indeed a sergeant – a bloody good one – but if you had read through some of the mail in your in tray, you would probably find that for the last…’ I checked my watch, ‘two days and twenty-four minutes, I have been Inspector Church.’
Sharkey’s jaw dropped. I didn’t think anyone’s did outside of a cartoon but Sharkey’s fell like the bottom out of a rusty dustbin.
‘Which makes us equals, Sharkey. I don’t think I’ll call you Paul.’
I wondered if he knew the men also called him Old Scrapie, a disease of sheep that leads to insanity – though how you can tell if a sheep is mad beats me. It’s not going to insist it’s Alexander the Great.
‘Fuck me.’ He could not have been more disbelieving if I had told him that he had a father.
‘I shan’t be doing that – ever.’
I looked around me – the overfilled wastepaper bin, the stinking ashtray on the rubbish-strewn desk, the bricked-up but unplastered fireplace, the three-quarters-drunk bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label, the untouched mug of curdled tea. There was a leaning stack of letters on his desk. I shuffled through it to find the only one with a London postmark.
‘I think that’s probably it.’ I thrust the letter into his chest. ‘Being an inspector, I believe I’m entitled to think.’
Starkey folded his arms, unfolded them and put his hands on his hips. ‘What the hell do we need another inspector for? There’s sweet FA to do here already.’
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire (A Betty Church Mystery Book 1) Page 4
