Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire (A Betty Church Mystery Book 1)

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘Do you remember when Agatha Christie went missing?’ I asked. ‘She was found safe and well claiming to have amnesia, but most people think—’

  ‘You think Lavender is doing this for publicity or to get my attention?’ Thurston Wicks demanded. ‘She has been taken, goddammit. My wife has been kidnapped and is locked in some cellar or God knows where, frightened out of her wits.’ He flung the glass, shattering it against the far wall. ‘Oh Christ, she’ll kill me when… if…’ He took a shuddering breath. ‘If I get my hands on whoever has done this, I will tear him limb from fucking limb.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Excuse my French.’

  ‘Which was the French word?’ Dodo wondered as Wicks slumped into a sofa.

  ‘Have you done anything to try to find her?’ I asked. ‘Apart from calling us?’

  Wicks suddenly looked Malt tired. ‘I’ve rung every friend who has a phone that I know of.’

  ‘I shall need their names plus all the friends and relatives she has without phones.’

  The door burst open and Pooky hurtled in, my mother’s attempts to teach her deportment all in tatters. ‘Just come through the door.’ She was holding out a photograph to her employer. I took one glance, barged her aside, ignoring her ‘Oy’, disregarding her ‘cheeky madam’, and raced into the hall. Dodo jumped up.

  ‘Are you running away because you’re frightened?’ she called as I flung open the front door.

  There was nobody in sight. I glanced down at the sandy path. My helmet was on the hall table. I whipped it up and plonked it on the ground.

  ‘Leave my helmet alone,’ I yelled.

  ‘I never touched it,’ Dodo retorted indignantly.

  She was hard on my heels as we raced across the front garden and onto the road. A figure was disappearing round the corner. If we had had our bikes, we might have caught up with it, but we didn’t and it had too big a start for us to outrun it.

  ‘Haqq,’ I swore.

  ‘Was that French?’ Dodo fiddled with her helmet strap.

  ‘Maltese.’

  ‘Is that worse?’

  ‘Can be.’ I squinted into the distance.

  ‘Did he look familiar to you, boss?’

  ‘Yes.’ I peered over on the off-chance that whoever it was would double back but it was a slim and forlorn hope.

  Tall in a floppy-brimmed hat and a long dark coat, the figure looked all too familiar to me.

  82

  SNAP AND THE BOX

  We watched the road for a while.

  ‘So we are both agreed that was definitely the Suffolk Vampire,’ Dodo told me, though I had done no such thing. ‘Although,’ she twirled her forefingers round each other, ‘we must say nothing to Mr Wicks – and what a grave disappointment he is but there is a lesson in that for you, boss. Never meet your heroes.’

  ‘I don’t have any.’ I pushed Gary Cooper to the back of my mind, where he had a tussle with Clark Gable.

  ‘Also we must keep this info – which is an informal abbreviation for information – from Pooky because they will both panic because members of the public are not as brave as we are, are they, boss, also—’

  ‘Shut up,’ I snapped, then, seeing the wounds appear on her face, added, not even slightly convincingly, ‘as they might say because they are not as patient as me.’

  A breeze whipped the light sand into a miniature storm.

  ‘Owwey-wowwey,’ Dodo cried. ‘I have a piece of sand dune on the front surface of my eyeball.’

  ‘Don’t rub it,’ I said, rubbing the grit out of or into mine. I found a fairly clean handkerchief, twisted the corner and performed my Rufus Verdigris I’m-a-doctor routine without the romantic intent but just as efficiently. I had practised on patients when I helped my father and he got chips of enamel in their eyes from his electric drill.

  ‘Oh bless you, boss.’ Dodo blinked. ‘You’re better than an accountant.’

  We went back up the path to where I had left my helmet and I crouched beside it.

  ‘I am going to lift my helmet and I want you to pay very close attention to what is underneath,’ I told Dodo Chivers and she shrank back.

  ‘What is it? Is it a frog or a toad? – I don’t mind them – or a rat or a serpent? – I do mind them, especially if they’re alive – a ssss ssss’ – she steeled herself to hiss it out – ‘sssspider?’ as if she was playing some demonic game of snap.

  ‘None of those.’ I took hold of the rim. ‘Watch it very carefully.’

  Dodo bobbed down beside me.

  I whipped the helmet up and there it was in the sand – a small flat round-toed shoe with parallel cleats in the sole. I tried to shelter it with my hand but the breeze blew the insole out and the outsole in so that soon there was just a faint blur on the path.

  ‘Well, that was not very scary.’ Dodo sighed.

  ‘Did the shape remind you of anything?’ I asked.

  Dodo had a think. ‘Well, one ant looks much the same as another to me,’ she decided.

  ‘The footprint,’ I insisted.

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ Dodo jumped up like she was in a skipping game. ‘It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe when he found Man Friday’s footprint in the sand and rescued him from…’ she clapped a hand over her mouth so that her next word was mercifully muffled but not quite enough, ‘cannibals.’

  ‘Well, she’s a fine piece of work.’ Thurston Wicks came up behind us sounding suddenly Hibernian and I scrambled to my feet. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘The ant or the footprint?’ Dodo enquired. ‘We saw both.’

  ‘This.’ He thrust out the photo.

  ‘Oh my awful Aunty Angela’s ankles,’ Dodo cried. ‘She looks like she’s been hit.’

  ‘She has been hit,’ Wicks insisted. ‘My beautiful Lavender has been given a fucking pasting.’ He didn’t sound so suave now, though I could not blame him.

  I took the photo from his outstretched hand, trying to hold it just by the corners but stop it blowing away. Lavender Wicks did not look good. Her pure complexion was bruised and bleeding. Her immaculately set Jean Harlow hair was now a strewn mess, as if she had been thrown around by it.

  Pooky wandered out. ‘Oh Miss Betty, you’ve got all sand on your skirt, what will your vile mother say?’

  ‘Did you see this come through the letter box?’ I held up the photo.

  ‘Well, of course it came through the letter box,’ she said. ‘I picked it up off the mat and I couldn’t have done that if it hadn’t, could I?’

  ‘Yes but—’

  ‘It’s not yes but it’s no but.’

  ‘Did you see this being delivered?’

  ‘Well, of course it’s been delivered!’ Pooky threw up her hands in exasperation at having to deal with such a stupid girl.

  ‘You were in the hall when the letter box clattered,’ Dodo told her. ‘I heard your clean white starchy apron brush against your pretty port-wine dress.’

  What was it about dresses? March Middleton could hear them rustling in hallways; so could Dodo Chivers. Why the hell couldn’t I?

  ‘If anything else comes through the door can you both try not to touch it?’ I requested. ‘Use tweezers or wear gloves. Then we might be able to get a fingerprint of the kidnapper.’

  ‘Except yourselves,’ Dodo put in helpfully. ‘If you come in through the door, you do not need to use tweezers or gloves. Or if we return—’

  ‘They know what I mean.’ I shook the sand out of my helmet. Dodo hadn’t got hers on yet.

  ‘I don’t,’ Pooky said, out of cussedness, I suspected.

  I turned the photo over and on the back in the same measured block capitals was printed:

  HAVE THE MONEY READY FOR MY NEXT INSTRUCTIONS OR SHE COMES BACK IN A BOX, NAPOLEON SPARTA THE SUFFOLK VAMPIRE

  ‘I think the bit about a box means a coffin,’ Dodo explained for my benefit, then, for everyone’s benefit, declared, ‘It is probably not the real Napoleon Sparta, you know. In fact’ – she put her feet into that oddly overlapped facing-
opposite-directions way that I think is the fifth position in ballet – ‘I do not know why a vampire would have to give himself a made-up name anyway.’

  ‘So that we would know him from anybody else sending messages claiming to be from the vampire,’ I suggested, wishing I was that flexible but not quite sure why.

  ‘An impersonator?’ Dodo shuddered with alternating shoulders. ‘What a terrible insult to the real Suffolk Vampire.’ She sniffed. ‘Small wonder he behaves so badly.’

  83

  THE FOLDER

  I sorted through the tea chests. Carmelo had been very patient and let me keep them in the hold but space is always precious on a boat, even a landlocked one, and, though I hadn’t – thank God – seen a rat yet, Cressida was home to at least one family of mice. A favourite old sweater of mine had provided them with nesting material and I didn’t want my godmother’s archives to provide more. One of the boxes was crammed full of newspapers as far as I could feel without emptying it out. In the second box I only had to lift the protective top layer of brown paper to see it lying on top – a file dyed in distinctive Grice’s Lilac with a rectangular stamp diagonally over the cover:

  MARCH MIDDLETON, 125 GOWER ST, LONDON

  I wondered why she never used any of the titles she had been awarded before her name or any of the letters after it. If I had half her accolades I would have them filling my headed notepaper, but Aunty M was a modest lady. She had given her life to investigating crimes to help people, not to cover herself in glory.

  The pot on the range was two-thirds full and still hot. I filled an enamelled mug and sat at the table in the wheelhouse. The natural light was much better there and, when I glanced up, I could watch a family of moorhens – or skitty coots, as I had heard them called – tocking along the side of the bank in search of food.

  Sidney Grice would never have thrown a seemingly irrelevant ant’s egg away once he had put it in a test tube and he had built vast vaults in London and Dorset to store his collection. His goddaughter was more selective, in her opinion – or slapdash, in his – about what she thought worth retaining. Her four boxes might have been thirty in his day and she only kept those in case a verdict was ever questioned years later.

  I opened the folder. It was encouragingly thin – no more than thirty or forty pages – and I had years of practice at skimming paperwork to extract what I needed to know. The notes were handwritten in March Middleton’s small, unfussy, highly legible hand and I settled down with a cigarette to read them.

  *

  Vernon Willowdale was an impoverished parson’s son raised in Whitechapel. Against his father’s wishes, he married, but his wife died giving birth to their daughter, Drusilla. He began training for the clergy but, after his father’s death, Vernon discovered that, if three other men died prematurely and in the right order, he would inherit Lord Blockett of Coniston’s title with a sizeable fortune. With this in mind, Vernon Willowdale quit the clergy and set his mind to murder. The first victim, Snitchel Roewader, was an easy task. An elderly man, his life’s work after retiring as a marmalade manufacturer was compiling the seven-volume Roewader’s Encyclopaedia of British Canals. It was an easy matter to brain him with a cudgel and make it look like he had slipped and hit his head, falling into the locks at Rufford and drowning. The coroner had no hesitation in declaring death by misadventure and releasing the body for burial.

  *

  I lit another cigarette, one of the five I kept pre-rolled in a tobacco tin with my Zippo lighter. Willowdale sounded an interesting character but I couldn’t see why my godmother had thought he was relevant to my enquiries. I read on.

  *

  Vernon Willowdale’s triumph shrivelled into disappointment. There is little point, he thought, in being clever if nobody knows that you are. So he decided to perform a more public murder for his next victim. Pagan Gatherpole was a garden pest exterminator, who employed so many men that it was his proud boast that he had made a mountain out of a molehill.

  Gatherpole had an office on Tottenham Court Road. As he arrived at Euston Square tube station in the rush hour on Monday 16 March 1925, he fell to the platform, clutching his neck. He had two deep wounds in his throat and the best efforts of two nurses, who had been fellow passengers, could not staunch the haemorrhaging. By the time a doctor was summoned from UCH, all she could do was declare Pagan Gatherpole dead, confirming the public’s belief that the few women in the medical profession were a few too many.

  Witnesses spoke of a man running up the stairs and turning left towards Gower Street. He wore a long cloak and a broad-brimmed hat. There were two wounds about an inch deep and half an inch apart in Mr Gatherpole’s neck. They were not made with a knife but with two spikes or – as the press had it – fangs. And so the legend of the Camden Vampire was born.

  Despite there being so many witnesses, or perhaps because of so many conflicting accounts, the police were at a loss as to the identity of the killer. March Middleton, living 300 yards away, took a keen interest in the case. She was able to demonstrate that the killer had stood behind the man and was taller than him and that the wounds had been inflicted simultaneously or in very quick succession, but despite speaking to eighteen witnesses at length, she could find no other information about him.

  *

  I drank my coffee, reread that section in detail and turned the page.

  *

  The only man standing between Vernon Willowdale and his inheritance now was Fradigor Strynge. Strynge was a not-very-successful portrait painter. While his paintings were pleasing, his manner was not. He browbeat small children and sweet old couples into holding uncomfortable poses until they seized up so that he could depict them at his leisure. Like Willowdale, Strynge was acutely aware of the wealth and position tantalisingly just out of his reach. So, when he learned of Snitchel Roewader’s demise, he was elated. When he was informed that Pagan Gatherpole had also been removed from the list of heirs, he was ecstatic. He only had to wait for the elderly Lord Blockett of Coniston to fade away and all would be his.

  But then Strynge found out that Gatherpole had been murdered. His immediate concern was that this made him the primary suspect. Had he taken his customary Monday trip to London, he realised, he might have had difficulty in clearing his name, especially as he had abnormally long canine teeth. Fortunately for Fradigor Strynge he was able to prove that at the time of the murder he had been bullying a terrified five-year-old Lady Veronica Hyde into sitting for him with a peevish vulture on her arm at the family seat in Stranraer.

  It did not seem to occur to Strynge that he might be the next victim, nor that it would have been simple to determine who had most to gain by killing him. He went about his business as usual, accepting, without question apparently, an invitation to meet a stranger on Hampstead Heath to discuss a commission. It was while he was sitting on a bench ignoring the view that a little girl turned up and started chatting to him. Strynge tried to shoo her away but she was very persistent.

  Vernon Willowdale had devised his own weapon, adapted from a knuckleduster with two long spikes on the palm side. This could be folded back until required, then hinged out so that he only had to clamp his hand over a victim’s neck to pierce the throat. While Strynge was distracted by the little girl, Willowdale struck, but missed his target so that the spikes went painfully though not deeply into the side of Strynge’s head.

  Strynge was not an especially powerful man but he was desperate and he fought back. As the two men engaged in their life-and-death struggle, Hickory Brawn, a passing cowboy from Wyoming, lassoed and tied them both back to back to a beech tree before moseying off in search of a sheriff.

  Vernon Willowdale claimed that it was he who had been attacked by Fradigor Strynge and, given Strynge’s reputation, he might have been believed, especially as Strynge had ripped the device from Willowdale’s fingers and put it onto his own. But March Middleton was not so easily fooled. By examining the crushed stalks of acidic grasses and moss in the area, she de
monstrated that Willowdale had crept up upon and lunged at Strynge. Willowdale confessed and went into great detail about the crimes but he clammed up when asked about the little girl, leading to suspicions that it might have been his daughter, Drusilla. She was such a delightful child, however, that enquiries about her were not vigorously pursued.

  Vernon Willowdale was hanged but Fradigor Strynge did not live to inherit his birthright. His head wounds became infected and he died four minutes before Lord Blockett, leaving all his estates to Commissaire Sampson Perroquet, a retired policeman from Luxembourg.

  *

  ‘Oh shit,’ I said.

  The captain was coming out on deck. He had been in the saloon listening to his radio and he did not look well. His face was grey and his body bowed. I closed the file, put my mug on top to stop anything blowing away and hurried out.

  ‘Are you all right, Carmelo?’

  ‘Madonna Mater Dei.’ He crossed himself. ‘I have just heard.’

  Oh please God not Jimmy. ‘What is it?’ I took his arm.

  Captain Sultana could not look at me.

  Oh dear God it is Jimmy, isn’t it?

  ‘The Royal Oak.’ He leaned on the side, staring out towards the ocean we could not see.

  ‘The battleship?’ He had told me about her, how she had fought in the Battle of Jutland.

  ‘Sunk,’ he said, ‘safely moored, or so they thought, in Scapa Flow. A German submarine sneaked in… torpedo.’

  ‘Was anyone killed?’ I asked stupidly. He would not have been that way over an empty old ship.

  ‘Eight—’ He choked over the number and I nearly told him it could have been much worse, but he was forcing the next words out, ‘hundred men and boys.’

  I took his right hand off the rail, slipped myself in between it and him and put my arm round him, hugging hopelessly at his misery. But there was nothing I could do to help Carmelo or to stifle my own despair at all those cruel killings in Sackwater and a wider world hell-bent on slaughter so soon after the war to end all wars.