‘Ooh I know the answer to that one.’ Sandy raised his arm to attract the teacher’s attention.
‘She was asking me,’ Algy insisted in a rare instance of sibling rivalry and his arm shot up too. ‘None, Miss— mam.’
‘And,’ I continued, ‘if you come with me, how many hands will be available then? You can both take a stab at that one.’
‘Two,’ they cried in delight at their joint cleverness.
‘Go jointly to the top of the class,’ I murmured. ‘Right. Let’s get inside.’
61
THE HUMILITY OF HEROES
I stepped away from the hole. It was smaller than I thought and I had to squeeze through, right hand first with my torch on, but I managed without too much loss of dignity except for laddering both stockings. I had a small allowance for those, granted by men who thought that nylons could last as long as a pair of trousers did for them.
‘Damn it.’ I found myself in a mock-up of a bedroom and it took a moment to realise that the couple lying on top of the eiderdown represented Ressel and Fosalanda Phidgeton, who had been found with their skull caps sawn off and then replaced, their brains having been removed and swapped over. They were killed by their son Fossellum, who, exhausted by their constant bickering, thought it would help them see things from each other’s point of view. To the best of my knowledge he was still in Broadmoor Hospital, where he was writing an authoritative atlas of cerebral anatomy. His manikin had a moth-eaten wig and wielded a saw he could have used to fell a medium-sized oak tree.
Algy, for his own private reasons, had decided to scramble through feet first and was waving them in the air like a capsized beetle, unable to find the ground. I took a leg to guide it down and he squeaked.
‘It’s me,’ I said and left him to it. ‘Excuse me.’ I stepped over the corpse of a Red Indian sprawled on the floor in a tattered ostrich-feather headdress. He must have been dumped from another display. I didn’t recall Sitting Bull having a role in Fossellum’s deranged deeds.
‘Push please, Lysander.’
‘I am pushing, my dear Algernon.’
The next room flowed straight off the one I was in, the lathes having been ripped from the partition wall leaving the studwork frame. This was probably from when a small group of local businessmen had made a half-hearted attempt at renovation. They had done nothing to get rid of the foul smell and I wondered if rats had crawled under the floorboards to die, as I was beginning to think they must have in Felicity House.
Here was an execution chamber – more blocks with King Charles I and Sir Walter Raleigh awaiting decapitation with dignity and axes. To the left was a guillotine, Marie Antoinette waiting saint-like for her turn. To the right was a scaffold, the feet of a woman swaying in the shadows. The wind gusted through the enlarged gap and there was a click, a light went on and the screaming started again. That was getting annoying now. It was then I saw that one foot of the hanging woman was nudging a lever that must have operated everything. I glanced up at her and stepped backwards, tripping over a basket of heads and sprawling on my back, cracking my head on the lower edge of the guillotine. The frame shuddered and the headlock of the stocks fell, pinning me by the neck face upwards. The blade above me juddered and I only knew the blade was coming towards me and I was trying to shout, No!
‘No!’ I yelled and somebody else was yelling too, flinging himself on top of me and saying, ‘Ohhh bluddy ’ell that ’urt.’ And Algy was climbing off me and rubbing his back as the demonic laughter died away. ‘Are you oreet, mam?’
I suspected he had bruised my ribs but it seemed churlish to mention it.
‘Yes, thank you, Algernon.’ I got up with as much dignity as I could muster, which was almost none at all.
The blade, when I looked at it, was blunt but it was heavy and would almost certainly have killed me. Algy couldn’t have known it wasn’t razor sharp and yet he had unhesitatingly followed his brother’s example.
Algy was rebuttoning his collar, which had come open. ‘That were ever so brave of meh, weren’t it, mam?’ If he had glowed any more, Algy would have been in breach of blackout regulations.
‘Yes it was,’ I agreed.
‘But I don’t think we’ll tell Sandy or anyone else,’ he decided. ‘It would make you luke foolish and you are the least foolish person I know.’
My skirt had revolved forty-five degrees. ‘Thank you, Algy.’ I unrevolved it.
‘Besides.’ He polished his shoes on the backs of his trousers. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever been brave and ’eroes don’t boast.’ He tried to strike a manly pose but looked more like he had put his spine out. ‘But if you could maybe drop an ’int to Sandy that—’ Algy looked up at the hanging manikin. He was blocking my view and I was just about to assure Algy that I would tell Sandy his twin had been courageous when my constable let out a squeak, staggered sideways and fell in a faint over the basket of heads.
I thought I had been mistaken at first glance but, along with the pretty, flowery skirt, the two-tone blue shoes were enough to give me my suspicions… and it was the missing tooth that seemed to confirm them. The face was too alive with maggots, however, for me to be absolutely sure that this was the body of Millicent Smith.
62
MAGGOTS AND THE FINAL SLEEP
Dawn was rising as Tubby Gretham arrived and it would have been a lovely fresh morning if it wasn’t for the job he had to do.
I had unbolted the back door from the inside so at least the doctor didn’t have to try to enter through the hole in the wall. A camel would have had better luck with a needle.
‘Assuming she was alive when the noose went round her neck and he or they didn’t just hang her corpse, it has to be murder,’ I said. ‘Her hands are tied behind her back and her ankles strapped, so she couldn’t have removed the safety bolt and pulled the lever herself.’
‘Well, the quality of murder has certainly gone up since you came back,’ he said drily. ‘If I were a detective you would be high on my list of suspects.’
‘I might well bring myself in for questioning,’ I agreed as we stood viewing Millicent’s body still hanging on the scaffold. ‘Can you tell how she died yet?’
‘No.’ Tubby climbed the steps and peered closer. He didn’t seem to mind the smell but a devotion to pipe-smoking had probably taken the edge off it.
I would have appreciated a breath of fresh air but I started to follow him. The light seeping through the back door and the hole in the wall was stronger now and I could use my torch to improve it without fear of breaking the blackout.
Liquids of putrefaction had trickled down what I felt certain were Millicent Smith’s legs and pooled in a greasy stain on the floorboards beneath. The backs of her shoes were scuffed and, on closer examination, ripped.
‘Been dead a good few weeks,’ Tubby commented. ‘Read an interesting paper by Dr Simpson – heard of him?’
‘The pathologist? Yes, he helped me with a case.’
Tubby hmphed in a mix of esteem and envy. ‘You seem to have mixed with all the greats.’
It was Keith Simpson who had confirmed my suspicion that Molly Chatterton had been sliced into the sandwiches being sold to football fans at White Hart Lane.
‘What was the article about?’
‘Rates of decay in different conditions.’ Tubby strolled around the trapdoor. ‘He’s made a study of the life cycle of the blowfly. I shall reread it and maybe drop him a line.’
He got some forceps out of his battered old leather medical bag and picked a fat writhing worm-like creature out of Millicent’s gaping mouth.
‘You could give him a ring,’ I suggested. ‘I’ve still got his number at Guy’s.’
‘Oh I couldn’t do that.’ Tubby was shocked. ‘He’s famous.’
I poked my head between two cross-beams supporting the platform, praying that no maggots were going to drop and nothing was going to drip on me. The structure was so roughly made I found it difficult to believe that it really
was, as the placard proclaimed:
THE ACTUAL GALLOWS WHERE DR CRIPPEN MET HIS END
Also Pentonville Prison was not in the habit of selling the furniture of execution to showmen.
‘Seen something interesting?’ He peered over the railing.
‘Pass me those forceps,’ I growled. ‘No, the longer ones.’
‘Ever heard of please?’ Tubby grumped. ‘Oh I see – that was supposed to be me.’
He handed them down to my waiting hand and I stretched to the back of the scaffold. There was something hanging on a nail.
‘Gotcha.’ I pulled out from under there, trying but failing not to retch. March Middleton recommended drops of camphor held over the nose in a handkerchief for these occasions but I had not expected, when I got that silly phone call, to be dealing with a rotting cadaver.
‘What is it?’ Tubby had put his horn-rimmed glasses on and they definitely did not suit him.
‘A scrap of blue leather.’ I held it up. ‘And I will bet a pound to a farthing it will fit the rip in the back of her shoe.’
‘So she was kicking her legs,’ Tubby deduced, ‘and very much alive and conscious when they strung her up.’
‘She must have been strangled.’ I pictured poor Millicent, dragged terrified up those steps, trussed on that trapdoor without even the mercy of a hood, watching them stepping back and pulling the lever, the jolt of pain that failed to break her neck, choking and writhing until she eventually passed into her final sleep.
63
THE LOST ‘T’S OF SUFFOLK
I went outside.
‘Are you all right?’ Tubby came up behind me.
‘How can you be so unfeeling? I don’t mean callous. I mean… matter-of-fact?’ I exclaimed in bafflement. The Dr Gretham I knew was a kind and sensitive man.
‘I’ve seen what people do to people and I’ve seen worse.’ He took a deep breath and I saw that he was very far from tranquil. ‘I’m sure you have too.’ A muscle was ticcing in his right cheek. ‘When men are coming to you, mutilated, screaming in pain and terror, looking for you to save them when you know they have seconds to live, you learn to mask it.’ He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Greta had told me once that he came back from the Great War a changed man, that he cried out in his sleep but would never talk about it.
‘I’m sorry.’ I touched his arm.
‘You have to do the same.’ He stared out to the heaving, tossing sea. ‘With your men. You can’t cry like you did when…’ His voice trailed away and at first I thought he was being tactful, but then I realised his attention was elsewhere.
‘What is it?’ I looked at him.
‘Just a thought.’ Tubby scratched his ear. ‘If she was kicking like that, why didn’t she knock the gramophone over?’
‘I’ve met Albert Pierrepoint, the hangman, a couple of times,’ I told Tubby Gretham and he sighed enviously. ‘And he told me how they soak the rope and hang weights on it the night before an execution otherwise it’s too elastic. I don’t suppose the killers bothered doing that.’
‘So it would have stretched with her weight until her feet were close to the machine and a strong sea wind set her swinging against it,’ he realised.
Rivers was labouring up the path as if he were the first man to scale Everest.
‘Gorr,’ he gasped as he approached. ‘My back and me dint wan’ ta do that again in a hurry.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I commiserated. ‘Because you’re both going to have to.’
‘Wha’?’
One day I shall start a search for all the lost ‘t’s of Suffolk. There must be countless millions of them lying rusting in the countryside when they could be collected for the war effort.
‘Go to Hempson’s the undertakers on Cardigan Street and tell them we want a standard pine coffin and a hearse to take a body to the morgue,’ I instructed.
‘Wha’?’
‘Go to the Gazette office on Straight Street,’ I continued, ‘and ask Mr Gregson if he is willing to take some photos that he can never publish and, if so, can he come here immediately.’
‘Bu’—’
‘Now.’ I pointed down the hill like that painting by Millais of a man telling two unhappy boys to Go West.
‘Gorr.’ Rivers, seeming to have exhausted his vocabulary for the time being, groaned, turned round. ‘Oh,’ he remembered, ‘tha’ Dozy Dodo rang in. She say to tell you she do be off sick with her poorly-sorely ankle.’ And, with those glad tidings, Rivers set off back down Spectre Lane, which didn’t look remotely spectral in the daylight. Even the House of Horrors looked like what it was – a shabby timber shed in need of demolition. It was only the knowledge of what was inside that appalled me now.
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Tubby snorted. ‘And those twins of yours, with all due respect, they’re a couple of…’ He hesitated to insult my men to my face.
‘Charlies,’ I filled the pause and he half-smiled. I had sent the Grinder-Snipes home. If they were to do the night shift again they would need some sleep. ‘I don’t know what to do about them,’ I confessed.
‘Can you afford to lose them?’ Tubby brought out his pipe – an old briar, already primed with shag.
‘I’m not sure I can afford to keep them.’
‘As bad as that?’ He brought out a box of Swan Vestas.
‘Worse than Constable Chivers.’
Tubby laughed. ‘At least she had her wits about her when that seed merchant got stabbed at the station.’
‘I suppose so.’ I fell silent as the image replayed in my head – Ardom Dapper struggling as Dodo clutched him by the throat.
Tubby struck a match, cradling the flames in his hands, as only an experienced pipe smoker can, against the gusts whipping over the cliffs.
64
FRENCH MANICURES AND THE FAMOUS GRASSHOPPER
Pooky – or Wilson as she was now – came to the door of Treetops House.
‘I’ll tell her you’re here.’ She made to close it but I stuck a foot in.
‘It is an offence to impede the police in the execution of their duty,’ I warned, suddenly aware that I was paraphrasing Dodo without mentioning the war or capital punishment.
Pooky’s eyes narrowed like they did when she was deciding whether to shop me for breaking that urn in Felicity House and decided that she would, ignoring my pleas for her to back up my story of a goat rushing in and how my parents should thank me for saving the fluted white pedestal. ‘Wait there,’ she said, stomping away without bothering to tell me she would solicit any presences.
I pushed the door open to watch Pooky/Wilson clump through the whiteness in her nice claret dress and the apron and wondered how she managed to keep it all so immaculate. Even in her heyday my parents’ hall never looked anything better than not-too-bad. Pooky went past the sitting-room door this time and through the next one on the right.
There were low voices and she returned. ‘You are to come straight through.’ So – like every good girl should – I wiped my feet thoroughly before following.
Lavender Wicks reclined on a pink-cushioned high-backed sofa in a pink-walled room with pink carpet and curtains. She wore a black dress, so skimpy that no one could possibly have accused her of wasting material.
Lavender was leafing through a magazine. No knitting for victory today then.
‘Inspector Church.’ She held out her long elegant hands with pink-bodied, white-tipped French-manicured fingernails that had not seen a day’s housework in many a year. ‘When your sergeant rang, I didn’t expect you to bring my bag in person.’
Apart from an aluminium and glass table in front of her and another against the wall, there was no other furniture in the room.
‘I wanted to see you—’ I began.
‘Oh how sweet,’ Lavender Wicks cooed. ‘Do take a seat. I thought we might be cosier in my snug.’ She curled her legs up to make room for me. But I don’t get cosy with members of the public. I perched
on the open end of the sofa, skirt demurely over my knees. If Lavender was trying to embarrass me, she would have to try harder than that. There was a faint bruise on her well-toned left calf.
‘I wanted to see you,’ I began again, ‘to check that everything is there.’ I held the black bag up. ‘I take it this is yours.’
There was a large picture of Lavender above the fireplace. She was in a long fur coat and laughing in the way that women only do for photographers. Nobody except a dentist needs to see that many teeth.
‘Goodness, it looks bulging, doesn’t it?’ She giggled.
‘Not as bad as mine.’ I had my bag in my lap.
Lavender Wicks smiled. She had a very nice smile, clean and straight. It might almost be called radiant but I didn’t like it. It was like a lightbulb. She could turn it on and off at will, which is a useful trick but no less of a trick for all that.
‘Yes but I expect you have handcuffs in yours.’ She brushed the battered black leather with her forefinger and I put it on the floor.
‘Women officers don’t carry them,’ I told her, glancing at the framed photos on the tables, all of Lavender alone or with male stars I didn’t recognise except for David Niven in a dinner jacket.
‘Pity,’ she purred. ‘It would be quite an experience’ – she swallowed – ‘being manacled by a lady officer.’
‘I’m sure somebody will be happy to handcuff you.’ I pointed to her bag. ‘Would you like to check the contents?’
Was that Charles Laughton on the set of Mutiny on the Bounty? I resisted the urge to look closer.
Lavender sat up, unclipped the gold clasp and rooted. She lifted out the chequebook Brigsy had told me about and leafed through it, the famous grasshopper on the top of a shield instantly recognisable as the Martins Bank symbol. ‘No cheques missing. I’ve only used one.’ She put it down on the table in front of us, followed by a slim leather-bound diary – after quickly flicking through it – a gold lighter, a silver scent bottle with a cut-glass stopper, a gold cigarette case engraved LW and a white lace handkerchief embroidered with her initials. Soon she had the table littered with treasures including a petite silver hip flask. She ran her fingers round the lining. ‘It seems to be all there,’ she announced and tossed the empty bag onto her pile. ‘How curious.’
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