And it was only when I rolled Mr P onto his back that I saw two marks just under the left angle of the jaw. Could they have been pressure from somebody’s fingers?
‘Oh.’ Dodo bobbed beside me. ‘The wounds of a Vampire.’ She clutched my empty sleeve.
‘Vampires do not exist.’ I prised her fingers away.
‘I saw one at the Gaumont.’ Dodo grasped my coat belt.
‘That was just a film.’ I tried but failed to pull free.
‘But a true one,’ she insisted.
‘No.’ I loosened her grip. ‘Anyway it would have to have really blunt teeth. The skin is hardly broken.’
‘Perhaps Mr Peatrie was not delicious,’ Dodo suggested. ‘He does not look like he was.’
This was an accident, I felt certain, but the coroner would want the cause of death confirmed.
‘We’ll probably need an autopsy.’
‘But we are not dead.’ Her grip tightened again.
‘For Mr Peatrie.’
‘By someone who knows about vampires?’
‘Turn the sign to Closed and pull down the door blind,’ I snapped.
‘Oh but—’ Dodo Chivers protested but that was all she got to say because I was propelling her out, taking the key off its hook and locking the front door behind us.
*
We called in at Hempson’s the undertakers on Cardigan Street. Mr Hempson had only just taken over from his father, who he had buried at a discounted rate but the son had worked in the firm for long enough to know the procedure. He would arrange for the body to be collected and I would inform the coroner.
‘Did he have next of kin?’ Mr Hempson enquired.
He was a big man, all angular like a painting by Picasso in his cubist period. Even his eyes had an odd rectangularity to them.
‘I suppose his wife is, legally.’
‘Didn’t she elope with an Albanian?’ He breathed sorrowfully as if the loss had been mine.
‘Armenian.’
‘I knew it was something like that.’ He nodded gravely. ‘Not that I have anything against foreigners. I just can’t stand them.’
His hands were flat enough to smooth plaster on a wall.
‘I’ll put out a request to see if any other forces know where she is,’ I promised.
‘Nice old boy,’ Mr Hempson recalled. ‘Had a monkey in his shop which he couldn’t bear to part with but he let me have it for a tenner. Threw in the trumpet for another guinea.’
‘Lucky you,’ I mumbled.
‘Indeed.’ He nodded gravely again because it was the only way he knew how to nod. ‘Bought for our wedding anniversary next week.’
‘How romantic,’ I murmured and he smiled gravely.
‘I thought so too. Mrs Hempson always says I’m a big ape.’
*
‘Bit early to be plyin’ your trade,’ the desk sergeant greeted my companion. ‘Where’d’you pick her up?’ he asked me.
‘Sergeant Briggs meet Constable Chivers,’ I introduced her.
Brigsy didn’t actually guffaw but he was well on the way to it when he saw that I was not joking. ‘Bleedin’ hell,’ he managed and I waited for Dodo to correct him on his expletive when she marched up to the desk.
‘You use as much foul language as you like, Sergeant,’ she greeted him gamely. ‘That is tickety-boo-boo with me.’
‘Tickety-what?’ The Shark cruised out from his office. He had not taken kindly to the news that we were to get another woman. ‘What’s this?’ He gestured to our new recruit, who stuck out her hand. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name is Dodo and I am not afraid of spiders.’
Sharkey showed his teeth. ‘Just as well,’ he said. ‘There’s one crawling up your leg.’
There was no point in trying to reassure Dodo. Nobody could have heard me above the shrieks. Vesty rushed out to see what the fuss was and I was almost sure he was bearing an invisible pistol.
‘Thought it was Jerry.’ He slipped his imaginary gun into its imaginary holster.
‘Gerry who?’ Dodo hitched up her dress. ‘Or should that be Gerry whom?’
‘Pretty little thing.’ Our chief superintendent joined the two men in appraising Dodo’s legs.
‘It was a joke,’ I reassured her.
‘No it was not.’ Dodo patted herself down. ‘Spiders do not have a sense of humour.’
Please don’t say Daddy told you that, I prayed.
‘Daddy told me that,’ our new WPC said.
Why do you never answer my prayers? I never even got that red party dress.
‘This is Constable Chivers, sir.’ I cringed as I introduced her.
‘Ah yes.’ He nodded. ‘Fido Chivers’ girl.’
‘Indeed,’ I said feebly, for that explained quite a lot. Chief Superintendent Frederick ‘Fido’ Chivers was a legend in East Anglia and it would have been a remarkably brave officer who rejected his daughter’s application. Why on earth had I not made the connection? I chided myself but it was not that uncommon a surname, I decided, and it would have taken quite a leap of the imagination to associate Dodo with the man who broke up the Woodchip Boys of Lowestoft.
Dodo caught sight of our senior officer and clapped as many fingertips as she could over her mouth. ‘Oh, your poor head.’
‘What?’ He touched the concavity as if discovering it for the first time.
‘Is it very poorly-sorely, sir?’
‘What?’ He ran his fingers over the sunken skin. ‘Oh I hardly notice it.’ And he didn’t seem to mind in the least when Dodo Chivers blew his head a kiss.
22
THE RATCATCHER’S DAUGHTER
There were two shapes under sheets in the morgue.
‘Angie Harrison.’ Tubby Gretham indicated towards the smaller shape.
‘The little girl who was found in the village pond at Titchfold?’
‘Four years old.’ Tubby grimaced. ‘No suspicious circumstances, I’m glad to say. The abrasion on her forehead was just what her mother said, something she got two days before in a skipping accident.’
‘How sad.’ I had been fished out of the sea at a similar age after my father had left me sitting on a breakwater.
‘I wanted you to see this.’ Tubby lowered the second cover.
Hamish Peatrie’s face was waxy and blotchy from the blood draining down but, other than that, he looked peaceful enough, as if ready to be roused for his morning cup of tea. The heavy white sheet was down to just below his nipples. He had been a highly proper man and would not have liked me to be gazing on those and I felt sorry that I had to.
The marks were still visible on Mr P’s neck, one no more than a scuff, the other an indentation.
‘Here.’ Tubby – nursing for me this time – handed me a magnifying glass and I saw the indentation clearly – roughly circular, perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter and an eighth deep.
‘There’s no bruising,’ I observed.
‘So it was received at the time of or after death,’ Tubby confirmed. ‘Was there anything he could have fallen on?’
‘There was nothing on the stairs,’ I recalled, ‘and the doorknob at the bottom was rounded.’
‘Collision with a small blunt object,’ Tubby speculated.
‘Or pressure.’ I speculated too. ‘Shine your torch on it.’
‘I will if you get your head out of the way.’
‘I need to get a closer look.’ Tubby slid the torch between me and the body as I lowered my head again, holding my breath. Mr P’s corpse was not fresh and had not been embalmed. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any tracing paper?’
I waited for a sarcastic response.
‘Got some greaseproof Boadicea wrapped round my sandwich.’ Boadicea was Tubby’s pet name for his wife but entirely unmerited. Few women were less likely to go on a murderous rampage than Greta Gretham, despite her married name making her sound like a stutter.
‘I only need a couple of square inches.’
Tubby reached into his pocket for
a folded sheet. ‘Have the lot.’
‘You’ve eaten it already?’ I ripped a square off the cleanest corner.
‘Don’t want to ruin my appetite.’
‘Can’t imagine that happening.’ I laid the paper over the mark and prodded it with a pencil.
Greta was trying to get her husband to lose some weight, little suspecting that he ate her packed lunches for elevenses then still went to the Coach and Horses for his pint with a steak and kidney pie.
‘What are you doing?’
‘There’s a shape, I think it might be a symbol impressed into the concavity and I thought, if I could push the paper in and trace it… Oh, this is much too opaque.’
‘I shall complain to Boadicea when I get home.’ Tubby thrust the torch at me. ‘Hold that.’
‘You won’t be able to see through it either,’ I huffed. ‘It looks like some numbers.’
‘Not going to try.’ Tubby moulded the square over his forefinger, rotating his hand to make a little crinkled cup shape, and snatched my pencil. ‘Hold that light still.’ And in a few strokes he had copied the lines.
‘I didn’t know you were an artist.’
‘Five years of drawing what you have dissected or can see down a microscope give even a clumsy oaf like me some skills.’ Tubby was neither clumsy nor an oaf but he was not a man to fish for compliments. ‘Now, let’s see.’ He flattened the paper out and held it under the torchlight.
I squinted at the marks he had made.
5
G
27
‘5G, 27,’ I read. ‘Doesn’t mean much to me.’
Tubby shrugged. ‘Nor me.’
The door opened and a nurse popped in. ‘Dr Lincoln sends his regards but wishes to know if you want him to do the operation himself,’ she announced, then, fearing the reception her words might receive, added, ‘it’s what he told me to say, Dr Gretham.’
Tubby started guiltily.
‘Oh Lord we have a session booked.’ He liked to do minor procedures himself, rather than send patients off to Felixstowe or Ipswich. ‘Must go.’ He washed his hands in the same scratched ceramic sink I had once seen him use to flush out twenty feet of small intestine.
‘Thank you for this.’ I waved the paper as he pulled off his lab coat and threw it over a hook on the wall.
‘Bye, Bet— Inspector.’ He bundled off.
‘She inspects bets?’ I heard the nurse wondering and then there I was with just Hamish Peatrie and poor little Angie Harrison for company.
‘Oh Mr P,’ I addressed him sadly. ‘Don’t say you were murdered.’
But Mr Peatrie was saying nothing as I covered him over again, thinking how I could never have imagined, when I polished his brass as a child, that this was how I would wish him goodbye. His mouth was agape like he was about to sing. ‘The Ratcatcher’s Daughter’ was a favourite of his despite its gruesome lyrics – that and ‘Danny Boy’.
23
FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER AND THE SIGN OF T
On the first of September Constable Rivers joined us. He was a morose man with round shoulders and a strangely receding face. It wasn’t so much that his jaw jutted as that the rest of his face had got left behind. Rivers had a toothache in his spine, he told us, clutching his kidneys, arching backwards, gurning and gurgling for several minutes before exhausting his repertoire. Lord knows how he had dragged himself in, he marvelled.
This was Dodo’s first day in uniform. Her appearance was more respectable but she still managed to look like a child in fancy dress.
‘I had an aunt who had terrible backache,’ Dodo sympathised, ‘in her gardener.’
Rivers looked at her sideways, unsure if this was a joke, though I suspected it was not.
‘Told you he’d be back before payday.’ Sergeant Briggs rolled one eye up and the other down and I was about to ask how he did that when the phone rang. Brigsy preened the smudge on his upper lip. I have often wondered why people tend to their appearance for the telephone. Women will almost always check their hair and some even freshen their lipstick before they pick up a receiver. ‘Good morning, Sackwater Central Police Station.’ He would have made a better receptionist for my father than my mother ever did. ‘Oh.’ Brigsy sat straight. ‘Oh. I shall s’licit his presence, sir.’
Where on earth had he picked that phrase up from? It was difficult to imagine the sergeant as a guest at a country house party. He laid the receiver on its side and went jerkily, like an emaciated Boris Karloff in full get-up minus the bolt in his neck, to summon my beloved colleague.
Sharkey stomped out of his office, annoyed to have been disturbed. He had probably been doing something important like having a nap.
‘Senior Inspector Sharkey,’ he rapped into the mouthpiece. This was yet another bone of contention between us. We had enough now to build a skeleton that could take pride of place in the Natural History Museum. True, Old Scrapie had been an inspector four years longer than me, but there is no such rank and I was certainly not going to introduce myself as a junior. ‘Right.’ There was something in the rise in tone that made me glance over. ‘What’s the address?’ My alleged superior was stretching under his skin like a grub in a cocoon and I hoped he wasn’t about to emerge as a new Sharkey, even more horrible than the one we had already seen.
Until recently Briggs could have put the caller through to the office but the connection was faulty and the General Post Office was in no hurry to fix it. They were busy putting new lines in at the town hall so the committees could contact the subcommittees of other committees, thereby winning the war, should it ever be declared.
As I was wondering if there was any point in making a complaint, Shirley Temple crept in, all golden curls, looking about her like a babe lost in the woods. ‘I’ve losted my button,’ she piped up timorously. ‘My mum will kill me dead or worse.’ The little girl held out the lower edge of her cardigan with a trembling hand for me to see the torn thread.
‘Where did you lose it?’ I asked, briefly forgetting how annoying adults are when they do that.
‘Somewhere else,’ she told me.
I made a tea signal over Sharkey’s head to Brigsy.
‘I’ll keep an eye out for it,’ I promised.
The sergeant fiddled with the scraps on his scalp. ‘Do tha’ be a Maizonic sign you do just now, madam?’
Sharkey covered the mouthpiece. ‘Shut up, the lot of you.’
I delved into my handbag for the bag of aniseed balls and the little girl took at least three, popping them all in her mouth at once. ‘Oh thank you.’ Her big blue eyes shone with gratitude.
Brigsy peered over at the cardigan. ‘If you come in tomorrow first thing,’ he whispered, ‘my missus do have a tin of buttons. I’ll bring it in for you to look through.’
‘That’s a kind thought,’ I commented.
‘Oh yes.’ The little girl wiped her eyes. ‘Thank you very ever so much, General.’ She scurried away, her tiny voice piping through the open door. ‘She was making the sign for tea, you tosspot.’
Superintendent Vesty drifted out of his office – I hadn’t even known he was in the building – tall, slim and very vague, with his usual air of a man wandering from one cocktail party in search of another.
‘Everybody happy?’ he asked like the perfect host offering to top up our glasses. ‘Good. Good.’ This was obviously not a question that required an answer but Dodo felt obliged to do so.
‘I do not believe there has ever been a time when everyone is happy, sir,’ she philosophised.
‘Splendid.’ Vesty bowed his head, the skin over his plate sagging.
‘Oh what a clever trick.’ Dodo clapped her hands. ‘But quite repulsive,’ she decided on second thoughts.
‘What?’ Vesty looked at her blankly.
‘The little girl who just showed us how she can bend her fingers right back,’ I improvised hastily.
‘Oh I missed that,’ Dodo complained.
The super tugged his earlobe. ‘Kee
p up the good work.’ Some superior officers come from relatively humble stock and clip their accents like good cigars, a little more with every promotion. One chief inspector in Norfolk was the son of a crab fisherman raised in a shack but his diction made our royal family sound common. Our superintendent was the genuine article though. The Vestys had been landed gentry since before the Norman Conquest.
‘And thah door to cell one do be stuck it do, sir,’ Brigsy announced. ‘Not thah we do have goh anyone to put in it.’ He preened his lip-stain thoughtfully. ‘Or take out, come to think of it.’
Vesty looked at his sergeant vacantly. ‘Got another damned committee meeting,’ he muttered as he went on his way.
‘Keep your eye on the ball,’ I advised softly, for we had all seen the clubs in the back of his Rover.
Sharkey had finished his call. ‘Got any big cases on, Church?’ he enquired.
Not long ago I thought I had but the coroner had reached a verdict of accidental death for Mr P and he may well have been right. Whatever caused them, those marks on his neck were certainly not deep enough to be fatal.
‘I can give you that lost button one,’ I offered, pretending not to notice how close he was to bursting. ‘Or there’s the unidentified boy who pushed a dead lizard through the Baptist minister’s letter box.’ There was also a stolen rabbit but I was keeping that one for myself.
‘’Cause I’ve got a ripe one.’ Sharkey smirked. ‘A nasty murder by the sound of it.’
‘Do you have any nice ones in Suffolk then?’ I enquired innocently.
24
THE WASP AND OAK TREE
Bath Road was a pleasant street before the Great War – parallel terraces of four houses, each with a little front garden and a yard at the back – but, for some reason, it had gone downhill. Perhaps it was when Folders, a major employer in Sackwater, moved their bootlace manufacturing business over to Stowmarket so that the working families either became non-working families or moved out.
I knew the road very well because I used to play at my friend Etterly Utter’s. Her home had an outside toilet and the tin bath hung on a nail outside, but it was a snug clean house and I was always made welcome there – until the day Etterly climbed into the hollow of an oak tree and was never seen again.
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