‘Oh, you knit.’ Dodo pounced on a ball of white wool impaled on two lethal-looking needles. ‘I love knitting and needlework and making all things pretty.’
Lavender Wicks smiled uncertainly. ‘Is something wrong?’ She had hair more platinum than Jean Harlow, flowing from a centre parting in those natural waves that only hours with a very expensive hairdresser can produce.
Dodo picked up the knitting. ‘No, it looks quite good to me.’
‘Nothing to be alarmed about,’ I said. ‘I’m Inspector Church of Sackwater Central Police Station and this is—’
‘Dodo,’ Dodo burst out, running her fingers over the embryonic scarf or pullover or sock dangling limply from a needle.
‘Constable Chivers,’ I insisted.
‘That purl could be a little tighter,’ Dodo commented.
‘It’s about your driving—’ I began.
‘Oh crikey.’ Lavender Wicks covered her mouth, giving the lie to my claim that nobody else ever used that word, and in the corner of my eye, Dodo smirked. ‘I wasn’t really speeding very much, no more than about fiftyish along Looms Lane and I was in a fearful rush for a party.’
The room stretched about thirty feet to a wall of windows looking out towards the pinewoods but had a slightly claustrophobic feel, I felt, because the ceiling had not been raised in proportion to its scale.
‘Looms Lane is a thirty-miles-per-hour area,’ I told her, ‘but that’s not why I’ve come. I am talking about your driving licence, Mrs Wicks.’
‘Blimey.’ Lavender Wicks uncovered her mouth, her beautiful bow lips pouting in a way that might have worked better on Bantony than me. He would have been like a rutting stag by now. ‘This sounds,’ her voice dropped to a melodramatic hiss, ‘serious.’
‘It is,’ I assured her.
‘Oh.’ Lavender Wicks proved that she could be sensible after all. ‘Please take a seat.’ She indicated a chaise longue facing hers over that table, the glass etched with elegantly dressed, impossibly slim boyish women. There were long wall mirrors bearing similar designs. ‘I think I might need to.’ I waited for her to sit before I did but Dodo plonked herself immediately beside her, extracting the needles from the ball. ‘Have you found it?’
‘Yes, at—’ Dodo began and shot a hand to her own mouth, nearly piercing her ear in the process.
‘Just the licence?’
‘What else should we have found?’ I asked carefully.
‘Well, everything, I hoped – my purse, the money, my chequebook, my scent bottle, gold cigarette case.’
‘Are you saying you lost your handbag?’
‘But I have already told you.’ She wrinkled her nose until it resembled a question mark.
‘Ooh,’ Dodo objected. ‘What a whopper.’
Inside I cringed. Outside I said, ‘You told us no such thing, Mrs Wicks.’
‘Well, not you personally.’ Lavender Wicks flicked her finger like she was tapping the ash off a cigarette. ‘I left my handbag in Corker’s Coffee House and reported it to Anglethorpe Police Station last Tuesday.’
I made a mental note to check that.
‘Can I show her?’ Dodo asked and, when I nodded, whipped it out of her own bag, trumpeting to-to-to-toot triumphantly before handing it to her bemused hostess.
‘Dolores Chivers,’ she read in further bemusement.
‘Give that here.’ Dodo snatched it off her and delved in for another.
Lavender Wicks flicked open the red cover. ‘That’s mine,’ she confirmed. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘Were you by yourself?’ I ploughed on.
‘With my husband, Thurston,’ Lavender Wicks confirmed. ‘Until he went to work.’
‘Oh!’ Dodo shrieked. ‘So it is Thurston Wicks. Oh I love him.’
‘So do I.’ Lavender smiled coyly.
‘Ajax Clarke, Private Eye.’ Dodo almost swooned. ‘He solves crimes.’
‘So do we,’ I reminded her.
‘He has fights without spilling his cocktail.’
‘I’ve never done that,’ I conceded.
‘Which is why nobody pays to watch you at work.’ Lavender half-winked and I was working on a clever retort that many criminals had paid as a result of my work when Dodo burst out with, ‘Oh is he making another Ajax Clarke, Private Eye film even as we speak?’
I remembered Ajax Clarke, the suave English gentleman who sported a monocle and went around the world teaching foreigners a lesson they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. I thought I had seen two of that series but found them a little dull.
Lavender shook her lovely locks. ‘Thurston got bored with that role. He wanted something that stretched him so he gave it to Crispin Staples.’
‘Crispin Staples.’ Dodo clasped her hands under her chin. ‘Oh but he is so deliciously handsome.’
Lavender Wicks tisked. ‘Thurston is doing what he can for the war effort,’ she informed us. ‘He is appearing in government information films – what to do in the event of an air raid or a gas attack – that sort of thing. He wanted to re-enlist in his old regiment but, since Thurston hurt his back filming The Dead Don’t Dance, he has been classed as unfit.’
‘Where were you on Wednesday morning before nine o’clock?’ I asked.
Lavender Wicks yawned. ‘That’s an easy one. In bed.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘It’s not an of course answer,’ Dodo told her severely. ‘Most people don’t sleep here though this is a lovely house.’ My constable clicked the needles contentedly. ‘Or could be with a bit of decorating.’
‘By yourself?’ I ploughed on.
‘With my husband,’ Lavender Wicks said, ‘until he went to work.’
‘You don’t wear a wedding ring,’ I observed.
‘Neither do you.’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Really?’ Lavender Wicks eyed me for longer than I felt she needed to. ‘I’d have thought you would have been snapped up years ago.’
I very nearly was on two occasions but I only said, ‘I didn’t want to be snapped.’
‘Anyway,’ Dodo chipped in helpfully, ‘Inspector Church does not have a hand to put a wedding ring on.’
‘Why don’t you wear a false arm?’
‘Why don’t you?’
Lavender Wicks caressed her own left arm, shivering at the sensation. ‘I don’t need to.’
‘Neither do I.’ I did sometimes but that was none of her business.
Dodo looked up from her knitting. ‘Are you keeping to the same number of rows for now?’
‘What?’ Lavender Wicks glanced at her distractedly. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘What time did your husband go to work that morning?’ I returned to the matter in hand.
‘What is this about? Six thirty as always. Wilson was here.’
‘Whom?’ Dodo asked abstractedly and this didn’t seem the time to point out that she should have said who.
‘My maid,’ Lavender Wicks explained icily. I had never thought of Pooky as having a surname and, now that I thought of it, Pooky was unlikely to be her real Christian name.
‘Do you know Skotter Heath Jackson?’ I enquired.
‘Did,’ Dodo corrected me at the risk of being run through with one or both of those needles.
‘It’s all right,’ Lavender Wicks assured me. ‘I’d have to be dead myself not to know that he is.’
‘Who’ – Dodo performed some complicated manoeuvre, twiddling one needle around the other – ‘told you, Mrs Lavender Wicks of Treetops House, Pinfold Lane?’
‘Do you send her to entertain children’s parties?’ Lavender Wicks asked me.
‘Who told you?’ I asked quietly. Quiet gets more attention than loud. Loud gives people the excuse to take umbrage, shout back and demand to see their briefs or solicitors depending on their social stratum.
‘Everyone knows.’ She reclined with her arm along the back of the sofa as if about to make a move on Dodo, who was lea
ning forward, intent on her task. ‘Beasty Butterworth rang me, if you must know.’
‘Yes we simply must,’ Dodo assured her.
‘And did you know Skotter Heath Jackson?’ I pressed.
‘No.’
‘Did you ever go to his office?’
Lavender Wicks’s periwinkle eyes met mine coolly. ‘No.’
‘Oh but why?’ Dodo protested. ‘Did I find your licence there?’
‘Did you?’ Lavender Wicks didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I have not the faintest idea.’ She pulled her arm away. ‘Are you telling me I’m a suspect?’
I regarded her carefully. ‘I have not told you anything, Mrs Wicks, but now I shall. Constable Chivers found your driving licence at the scene of a murder.’
Lavender Wicks flapped her hands. ‘Then somebody stole it without my knowing and then dropped it there.’
‘A clever but stupid thief,’ I murmured and Lavender Wicks sprang up.
‘Oh you made me slip a stitch.’ Dodo jumped.
‘I think you should go,’ Lavender Wicks said firmly. ‘If you wish to communicate with me again, please do so through Mr Ventnor, my husband’s solicitor.’
She was too posh to have a brief.
Pooky saw us out. ‘Bugger off.’ She flapped her arms. ‘Filthy pests.’ I turned in surprise and saw she was shooing a tabby cat away. ‘Belongs to that old widow opposite but it do come and do its business on our front drive, it do.’
There was a bungalow across the way at the end of a long lawned rear garden backing onto Pinfold Lane. It must have faced Featherstone Lane, I calculated. The door of the potting shed was open and I glimpsed an elderly lady putting a broom away.
The cat yawned and licked a paw.
‘Oh and give all my love to your parents,’ Pooky called as we set off.
‘She doesn’t know my parents,’ Dodo pointed out but she seemed preoccupied so I didn’t bother to explain.
We were twenty yards back up the lane, kicking sand, before Dodo, unable to contain herself any more, burst out with, ‘That is her. That is the Suffolk Vampire.’
46
THE TRAIN TO ISTANBUL
It was useless, I knew by now, to insist there was no vampire. I kept walking, Dodo Chivers darting around me like an excitable terrier.
‘Mrs Wicks or her maid?’
‘Lavender Wicks, of course.’ Dodo skipped backwards in front of me.
‘And what leads you to that conclusion, Constable Chivers?’
The sand was getting a bit annoying now, sweeping low over my shoes and sneaking inside them.
‘Five reasons,’ Dodo expounded.
‘Tell me one of them.’ I was not sure I could stomach two.
‘All that white is intended to make us think she is pure,’ Constable Chivers declared. ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’
‘Hamlet,’ I recognised the quote.
‘Daddy,’ she corrected me. ‘He used to say it when I did not want to eat my liver – I mean the liver he had put on my plate, not my own liver. That would be self-cannibalisation.’
‘What is your point…’ I struggled to remember what we were supposed to be discussing, ‘about her protesting too much?’
‘Oh yes.’ Dodo stopped to pick up a pine cone. ‘Only the impure try to appear to be pure. The pure recognise their own impurities.’
‘Your father?’
‘Dolores Davina Porthia Chivers,’ she told me with great satisfaction.
‘Pretending to be or imagining you are purer than you are doesn’t make you a murderess,’ I reasoned. ‘It makes you a hypocrite or delusional.’
‘Ah but’ – Dodo wagged a finger like a maths teacher with an innumerate child – ‘here comes my second reason.’
There was a small ditch on the left-hand side of the road and I wondered if I could accidentally tip my constable into it.
‘Go on.’ Talking to Dodo felt increasingly like using my father’s professional services – a painful experience best got over and done with.
‘Did you not see the way she looked straight at you with her lovely periwinkle eyes?’
‘What of it?’
‘That’s what guilty people do. I read it in Miss Middleton’s invigorating factual account of Murder on the Train to Istanbul. Innocent people do not try to stare you out.’
The wind whipped a sudden miniature sandstorm into my face just as I was opening my mouth. I coughed and turned away to spit into a roadside clump of marram grass.
‘Yucky-wucky.’ Dodo peered over at my expectoration.
‘It’s not an infallible law.’
‘Well, it should be.’ Dodo whirled to walk on ahead of me, rising high on her toes like the ostrich I had seen at Anglethorpe Zoo once. ‘And…’ She tucked her thumbs into her armpits in imitation wings.
‘Stop it,’ I commanded and Dodo froze.
‘Which bit?’
‘All of it – the walking, the flapping, the spinning round – all of it,’ I snapped. ‘You are embarrassing me.’
Dodo rotated very slowly. ‘But there are no witnesses to my eccentric display, boss,’ she pointed out meekly.
‘If you know it’s eccentric why do you do it?’ I brushed past her and marched on up the lane.
‘Oh but I do so love to,’ Dodo cried. ‘It is just a little weakness of mine.’
‘Indulge it at home.’
‘I shall,’ Dodo vowed, catching up with me. ‘Mother and Father do not mind in the least.’
‘Mother and…’ I was almost speechless.
‘Well, I cannot keep calling them Mr and Mrs Church.’ She was walking so normally now it looked abnormal. ‘And it would be impertinent to use their first names, which, as you probably know, are Harold and Muriel.’
‘Most people, wanting to use a courtesy title, use Uncle and Aunt,’ I objected.
‘I did suggest calling them Aunty and Uncle,’ Dodo assured me, arms swinging in a paradeground fashion, ‘but they said they preferred Father and Mother because I was like the daughter they never had.’
This was going too far, even by my parents’ standards.
‘They have got a daughter,’ I insisted icily, ‘me.’
‘Oh yes,’ Dodo agreed heartily. ‘They have got a daughter but I am like the one they have not got.’ And I was still trying to work out if that was better or worse when she came out with, ‘And – the third of my quintet of reasons – Lavender Wicks said she forgot her handbag. What woman ever ever ever forgets her handbag?’
She gazed at me triumphantly for this was the ace serve that gave her game, set and match.
‘I have,’ I admitted. ‘A few times.’
‘Oh.’ Dodo scratched under her steel helmet.
‘Have you not ever?’
‘Well, yes but that is only because I am silly.’ Dodo started to hum Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’ but had only got as far as ‘dreaming’ when she thought of a different subject. ‘Knitting is so relaxing. You should take it up, boss.’
‘And how do you suggest I hold the needles?’
‘You will work it out,’ she replied with touching faith. Dodo clasped her hands behind her back. ‘Anyway, I still think she did it.’
‘You need a bit more evidence than that.’
‘Oh good.’ Dodo spun again, realised and blushed. ‘I thought you were going to tell me I need a lot more evidence. A bit of evidence should be very easy to find— oh.’ She worked her mouth. ‘I understand why you did it now.’ And, twisting her face away, Constable Chivers spat a mouthful of sand into the side of a dune.
‘Fourthly,’ she pressed on, ‘Lavender Wicks is magically beautiful – her hair, her face, her figure, her… everything. And I have seen enough films to know that beautiful women are innocent and marry the hero in the end.’
A gust whipped the sand into my face and into my nostrils. ‘And that makes her guilty how?’ I blew my nose.
‘Because,’ Dodo wagged her finger, ‘you might not know
this but films are not true. So,’ she was in school debating-society mode, ‘if something is not true it must be untrue.’
‘Well—’
‘Ergo’ – there was no stopping her by now – ‘if films say beautiful women are always innocent, they must be always guilty. Are you pretending to be Fu Manchu?’
‘No, I’m trying to stop sand getting into my eyes.’
‘You are wise to do that,’ Dodo said approvingly, ‘because it can really stingle.’
‘What’ – it would be easier to get this over with, I decided – ‘is your last reason?’
‘Ah!’ Dodo exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Lavender Wicks has a nose that bends into a sort of upside down question mark when she turns it up,’ she recalled excitedly, ‘and I have never known an innocent person to do that in all my weeks as a woman police officer. That is what we are trained to do, is it not, Inspector Church – to use our experience?’
‘Yes, but to use it sensibly.’ I sighed.
‘Oh but they did not tell me that.’ She sighed as well. ‘Do you think Mrs Wicks was in the movies too? I am almost slightly sure I saw her in something.’
‘I didn’t recognise her.’ I watched a lizard scuttle behind a clump of marram grass.
‘Yes but you did not even really know who Thurston was.’ Dodo bent over to get rid of some more sand. She stood up with a meditative air. ‘I rather like spitting,’ my constable decided.
47
THE KING’S OAK
Dodo fell quiet as we made our way back to Sackwater Central, intent on counting her footsteps, until we reached the Soundings. This was a nice square in the middle of Old Sackwater, as the locals called the genteel Georgian part of the resort, which had later become swamped by Victorian attempts to cash in on the railway boom. Four neat, flat-roofed terraces boxed the area in, with roads leading out at each corner.
There were iron-framed wood-slatted benches around the edges of the green but the drizzle and gathering gloom were enough to deter people from using them. I had my first proper kiss on one that encircled the trunk of an elm, with Richard McLoughlin. All the girls went weak at the sight of Richard striding past in his cricket whites and were corroded with envy when he paid attention to me but I felt sick afterwards. It was a disconcertingly slurpy experience. Three years later, Richard lost both legs at Passchendaele and became a pathetic figure, pulling himself along the streets with weights on a low trolley, until he wheeled himself – whether by accident or design nobody knew – under a speeding truck.
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