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

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  And with that it was as if I had thrown a jigsaw puzzle into the air and all the pieces had fallen the right way up and slotted together.

  ‘Murder,’ I murmured, ‘or rather murders, at least eight of them.’

  Was it really possible that, at last, I was confronting the Suffolk Vampire?

  102

  THE EDGE OF THE BLADE

  Dodo opened her mouth. ‘Sorry? What was that, boss?’

  ‘All those murders,’ I said wonderingly.

  ‘But’ – Dodo stamped her foot again – ‘you told me, the first time we went to her nice interiorly monochrome – that is a big word for a little constable to use, is it not? – Treetops House in Pinfold Lane, that she was not guilty.’

  ‘It’s very rude to talk about me as if I wasn’t here.’ Lavender sniffed.

  ‘As if I were not here,’ Dodo corrected.

  ‘No I did not,’ I reminded her. ‘I said that you needed more proof than saying that Mrs Wicks looked straight at you with her lovely periwinkle eyes.’

  ‘Did you really say that, Constable Chivers?’ Lavender simpered.

  ‘Yes I did.’

  ‘Oh thank you.’ She turned them on Dodo.

  ‘Although they look more forget-me-not in this light,’ Dodo decided.

  ‘Mr Wicks says that.’ Lavender clicked on a smile that any Luftwaffe pilot could have seen from five thousand feet.

  ‘And she said I was jealous of your dizzle-dazzle beauty,’ Dodo misremembered.

  ‘I think you said that yourself,’ Lavender corrected her mildly.

  ‘So I did,’ Dodo brayed. ‘But that was only because I was.’

  My stump was competing with my ear and contending with my skull as to which hurt the most. Though it was a close-run thing, the ear was fractionally in the lead.

  I left them to it and turned to Poppy. ‘Do you have anything to say?’

  ‘In bright sunlight they are more like bluebells,’ she contributed.

  I lowered my left arm and the handkerchief stuck, dangling from the side of my head.

  ‘About the murders,’ I prompted.

  ‘Oh those.’ Poppy threw up her arms like I was a boring parent telling her to tidy up her room. ‘They all deserved to die.’

  ‘Except that first man, Freddy Smart,’ Lavender chipped in.

  ‘Well, he did sort of,’ Poppy argued. ‘He was an absolute beast.’

  ‘Yes but we didn’t know that,’ Lavender said.

  ‘You mistook him for Ian Henshaw,’ I realised.

  ‘Oh, are we speaking to Little Miss Disapproving?’ Lavender mocked. ‘I suppose you’ve never made a mistake?’

  ‘Murder is murder,’ I pointed out and Poppy stuck her tongue out to prove that Dodo wasn’t the only one who could do that and to make it clear how priggish I was being about it all.

  ‘Only if you call it that.’

  ‘Not just me. The law does as well.’ I bent to pick up the stick.

  ‘Then the law and you will have to prove it.’

  ‘Actually,’ Dodo put in thoughtfully, ‘the law does not prove anything. You prove things in law, not with it.’

  ‘Why were you carrying this?’ I waggled the stick in Poppy’s direction and she winced.

  ‘Because—’ Lavender began yet again.

  ‘Shut up,’ Dodo snapped, ‘or I’ll show you the rest of my tennis strokes.’

  ‘Because I injured my ankle when I fell into that stupid cellar.’

  A cellar is an inanimate structure and no more capable of being stupid than you are of being intelligent, I recalled Mr Grice telling his maid, Molly, to her confused delight.

  ‘You didn’t limp at the time.’

  ‘It didn’t hurt until the next day.’

  ‘It’s not a very ladylike stick.’ It was a Victorian gentleman’s ebony cane and the style of its silver ball handle was very familiar.

  ‘It’s my father’s. I borrowed it.’

  I peered closer and found what I was looking for – the intertwined letters S and G etched on the top. I turned the handle. There was a click and a blade about an inch long slid smoothly out of the ferule.

  ‘My godmother’s godfather had these manufactured,’ I told her.

  ‘Well, I never knew it did that before.’ She threw out her arms like she was going to serenade the performers on stage.

  ‘But they didn’t sell very well because people kept having accidents – stabbing themselves or their companions in the legs. The manufacturers had cut costs by using a flimsier safety catch than he had specified.’

  ‘Well, thank heavens I never had a mishap with it.’ Poppy laughed in that annoying way sopranos do in schoolgirl productions of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  ‘Oh but somebody did,’ I told her. ‘Someone accidentally stabbed Mr Ardom Dapper with it from the train at Angleford Railway Station – twice.’

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ Lavender raged.

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘It was your sister.’

  ‘How dare you?’ Poppy threw up her arms, every inch the affronted maiden.

  ‘My inspector dares all sorts of things.’ Dodo tossed her hair – vermilion in the glare of the footlights – proudly. ‘She is not even afraid of…’ my constable paused dramatically, ‘spiders.’

  I was a bit but I could never admit it, especially not now.

  I dabbed the edge of the blade. It was still razor sharp but chipped.

  ‘I don’t know which of you stabbed Freddy Smart, but whoever did it, the tip snapped off. We have a very thorough pathologist here and he discovered it buried in Mr Smart’s brain. I will bet you a pound to a penny that the two pieces will fit exactly.’

  ‘Those are very good odds,’ Dodo advised. ‘I for one would be inclined to take them. Even if you only risk a shilling you could get twelve pounds back.’

  ‘This is the first time I have ever used this cane,’ Poppy said airily.

  ‘Plus your stake,’ Dodo added.

  ‘So are you putting the blame on your father?’

  ‘Free of tax,’ Dodo remembered.

  ‘My father is dead,’ Poppy snapped, ‘and so is my mother. I live all alone in Straw House.’

  ‘Oh, that’s the horrible house we looked at on my first morning,’ Dodo recalled.

  ‘It is not horrible. It is beautiful and crammed with memories…’

  ‘And dry rot,’ Lavender added.

  ‘Only a bit,’ Poppy retorted.

  ‘The bits that don’t have wet rot,’ Lavender jeered.

  ‘You never liked that house.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. It’s a dump.’

  ‘We can’t all be married to millionaires.’

  ‘Girls, girls.’ I did my schoolmarm act. ‘Can we actually stick to the subject?’ They clammed up and I continued. ‘You, Mrs Wicks, were at the station as well, dressed in a hat and cloak. When you were far enough away to be mistaken for a man, because of your clothing and having the height to carry it off, Poppy drew attention to you and away from herself by shouting, He’s on the bridge. Watch out, he’s got a blooming gun. You fired a shot in the air. You obviously didn’t aim at anyone because the bullet was never found and there was no damage at the station. When everybody looked towards you, Poppy leaned out of the train. Her first stab didn’t go very deep. You were either too tentative or he was slightly beyond your reach. The second stab was more than deep enough though. It penetrated his carotid artery.’

  Poppy greeted my news without the slightest concern. ‘I remember now,’ she told me. ‘I found that stick on the way here this evening.’

  ‘All Grice Patent Swordsticks—’ I began.

  ‘It looks more like a spike stick from here, boss.’ Dodo leaned forward, screwing up her eyes.

  ‘The shaft is telescopic,’ I explained. ‘If I had two hands I could demonstrate that it will slide into itself to bare a blade about two-thirds of the stick in length.’

  ‘A bit like a telescope with a sword inside it,’ Dodo
explained to Lavender in case Mrs Wicks had been unaware of that.

  ‘All Grice Patent Swordsticks,’ I began again, ‘have a serial code. The suppliers will easily be able to tell us who purchased that particular cane so, unless it was resold privately…’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Lavender said with just enough smirk to let me know that this was not a concern.

  How stupid of me. The pattern on the imprint on Mr Peatrie’s neck didn’t say 5G, 27. It was SG, 27 I realised.

  ‘In this case, however, the stick was stolen. Do I have to tell you where from?’

  ‘Yes please.’ Dodo nodded keenly.

  ‘From Mr Peatrie’s antique shop,’ I said.

  ‘You will have trouble proving that,’ Dodo told me, rather unhelpfully.

  ‘Actually’ – I tried to fix her with a stare but you can’t do it across a chasm and an orchestra pit, especially when the lights are in your subject’s eyes – ‘I can. Mr P—’

  ‘That’s what she calls Mr Peatrie,’ Dodo explained.

  ‘—kept very detailed records. This stick along with its serial number will be recorded in his ledgers, plus the fact that it had not been sold.’

  I didn’t point out that proving the stick was stolen didn’t prove that they had stolen it, nor that they had murdered him with it, but neither of them seemed to realise that and, if Dodo did, she was keeping her thoughts to herself for a change.

  ‘Darn.’ Poppy chewed her lower lip.

  ‘We didn’t plan to kill him,’ Lavender claimed.

  ‘You, Mrs Wicks, grabbed the stick to steal it and ran out of what you thought was the back door,’ I surmised. ‘Only it was the door at the bottom of the stairs and Mr P chased after you. He grabbed your leg – hence the faint bruise on your left calf that I noticed when I visited you alone. You jabbed twice back at him with the stick, so hard that it left an imprint in his throat. He fell back and broke his neck and you left him propped inside the door.’

  Lavender applauded in slow sarcasm. ‘You should do this for a living.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just buy the stick?’ Dodo asked. ‘You must have had enough pocket money between you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t sell it to us,’ Poppy complained.

  ‘Mr P was a pacifist,’ I explained. ‘He would only sell weapons to people he knew were genuine collectors and would not use them.’

  ‘Well,’ Poppy sighed. ‘That’s got us bang to rights.’

  ‘Looks like we might have to execute our first backup plan,’ Lavender called back.

  ‘What is your first backup plan?’ I asked warily for I didn’t like the way Lavender had said that. I would worry about any subsequent plans if and when they entered the conversation.

  ‘In that case,’ Poppy replied as if I hadn’t spoken. This is worse than being with my parents. ‘We might as well come clean.’

  103

  THE CLASSIFICATION OF FLAMINGOS

  Dodo flopped onto the sofa. ‘If this is going to be a long story, I need to rest,’ she declared. ‘My fetlocks are as frazzled as a fossilated flamingo.’

  I didn’t think there was such as word as fossilated and resolved to check in the dictionary Jimmy had left behind. He had taken his little rhyming one with him.

  ‘What plan?’ I asked with mounting unease. Murderers’ plans rarely involved being kind to the police.

  ‘We are coming clean first.’ Lavender brushed me aside like an irritating fly.

  ‘Then why don’t we start with Freddy Smart?’ I suggested and Dodo put up her hand.

  ‘Can I just explain something?’ she asked and, seeing no dissent, continued, ‘When Inspector Church asks why don’t we do something, she is often suggesting that we do it – rather than inviting a debate on the advisability of doing so – and I think that this is one of those occasions.’

  ‘She must be a very confusing person to work with,’ Poppy mused and I was not sure if she was sympathising with me or my constable.

  ‘Smart wasn’t,’ Lavender declared, pausing for the laughter that never came.

  ‘He was easy.’ Poppy plugged the gap.

  ‘We just knelt on his doorstep and called Cooee through the letter box and hello big boy until he came to the door. The instant he crouched to look out, I thrust. The first jab went into his face.’ Lavender beamed.

  ‘You burst his eye,’ I told her.

  Poppy jiggled about. ‘Oh, I hoped you had.’

  ‘And then he fell backwards,’ Lavender recalled.

  ‘He grasped the blade to stop himself.’ I remembered the gashes in Freddy Smart’s hands.

  ‘I thought he did.’ Lavender nodded thoughtfully. ‘But I couldn’t see very well. Anyway, it cost him his worthless life because it stopped him falling out of range and, when I stabbed again, I saw the metal go into his throat and out the other side.’

  ‘I couldn’t see very well at all.’ Poppy pouted but instantly brightened as she recalled, ‘But I heard him gasp and gurgle.’

  The two sisters smiled at this special memory.

  ‘But you got the wrong man,’ I pointed out. ‘Not very smart of you either.’

  ‘It was an easy mistake,’ Poppy protested. ‘Henshaw lived in Bath Avenue. How was I supposed to know it wasn’t the same as Bath Road?’

  ‘I did say it didn’t look like the right sort of house for a well-to-do businessman,’ Lavender reminded her little sister.

  ‘I should have listened,’ Poppy conceded. ‘But it was all right. He was a horrid man anyway.’

  ‘But you didn’t know that,’ I pointed out.

  ‘God knew,’ Lavender told me piously and I knew better than to argue about God. I had tried that before but, in some matters, apparently, he had confided exclusively in Sister Millicent and, in others, in Adam.

  104

  THE SILENCE OF THE SEA

  Dodo wiggled a little finger in her ear. ‘Who has known the mind of God?’ she quoted and, as if in response, the wind whooshed upwards, spraying us all with water from the crashing sea.

  ‘Skotter Heath Jackson,’ I shouted above the sudden roar and was gratified to hear it die down like a class of naughty children being reprimanded.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Poppy recalled dreamily, ‘the chartered accountant. He was great fun.’

  ‘You went to kill him a week earlier,’ I calculated, ‘but he was off ill with a heavy cold.’

  ‘Men are such fussy-fusspots,’ Dodo complained. ‘Why, Mr Church made an awful commotion when I spilled a pan of scalding water over his bare foot – just because it hurt a big lot and came up in an enormous blistery blister that he had to burst with an old scalpel.’

  ‘You went to his office to kill him only to find he wasn’t there. That was when you dropped your driving licence,’ I postulated.

  ‘It must have been when I got my lipstick out of my handbag,’ Lavender agreed. ‘A girl likes to look her best.’

  ‘For murder?’ I protested.

  ‘For everything,’ she told me. ‘But I don’t know why it took so long to find it.’

  ‘Can I do that one?’ Dodo kicked her feet like an excited child in soft sand, knocking into and rocking an occasional table. My mother would have told me off for the rest of my life for behaviour like that, but Dodo, apparently, could do what she liked. ‘Mrs Daphne Milligan, Mr Skotter Heath Jackson’s plain and sharp-tongued ex-secretary, told us,’ Dodo continued, ‘that Mr Heath Jackson’s cleaner had gone to make Spitfires just like Lavender’s maid Wilson alias Pooky had pretended she was going to do.’

  ‘Pooky?’ Lavender wrinkled her nose.

  ‘I think I made the name up when I was learning to speak,’ I admitted shamefacedly.

  ‘Well, you should have learned to speak better,’ Poppy huffed, for my crime was incalculably worse than any of theirs.

  ‘And she had not been replaced – as you could have guessed by the state of his floor, which is worse than Slackwater Central Police Station and nearly as bad as Felicity House, 2 Cormorant Road, Slackw
ater, where I currently lodge with Mr Harold and Mrs Muriel Church—’

  ‘Is that the dentist’s?’ Poppy asked. ‘I went there once. It was ghastly. He had smelly fingers and smelly breath and he hurt me.’

  ‘He can make sweet animal shapes out of napkins,’ Dodo said.

  Could he? The only thing I had ever seen my father make of a napkin was a crumpled mess.

  ‘You reported the licence missing because you didn’t know where you had lost it,’ I continued.

  ‘Why are you telling her that, boss?’ Dodo lay back like Cleopatra on her barge. ‘I think she knows.’

  ‘I am letting her know that I know.’ I sighed. ‘One of you went back to Corker’s Coffee House and left the handbag in the ladies’ cloakroom.’

  ‘That was me,’ Poppy boasted. ‘I felt like Mata Hari.’

  ‘You do not look like her,’ Dodo chipped in.

  ‘Then you returned the next week to commit the murder—’ I continued.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Poppy butted in indignantly. ‘These were not murders. They were executions.’

  I digested that statement. ‘We will come to the motives later.’

  ‘You bet we will.’ Dodo toyed with the tennis racquet as if it was a ukulele, and I was only relieved she didn’t burst into a George Formby song.

  ‘So you went upstairs—’ I conjectured.

  ‘Whose story is this?’ Lavender pouted. ‘I went first in case he recognised Poppy.’

  ‘So he knew her?’ I clarified.

  ‘How else could he recognise me?’ Poppy asked, logically if tetchily.

  ‘He was easy,’ Lavender told us. ‘I told him I was a new client but first he must humour me by closing his eyes and – can you believe it? – he did. I had a shopping bag with two knives and a sack.’

  ‘Also a bottle of lemonade in case we got thirsty,’ Poppy reminded her sister. ‘But we didn’t,’ she reassured me, because that had been my greatest fear.

  ‘I took out the bag and slipped it over his head,’ Lavender recalled wistfully. ‘And he made a silly noise like people do when you creep up and put your hands over their eyes.’