Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  We could easily have walked but Sharkey explained that good policing was all about style and dignity.

  ‘I thought it was all about good policing,’ I said sweetly as I mounted the running board.

  Sackwater Central had a black Wolseley Wasp with a blue and white police sign on the roof and a bell in front of the chrome radiator grille. My colleague drove, of course. Even if I had wanted to argue about it, I couldn’t have changed gear without letting go of the steering wheel and twisting round.

  Constable Rivers lounged in the back, his arms over the top of the seat like a gentleman being chauffeured, and Sharkey must have felt that too, for he snarled, ‘You’re blocking the rear view.’ So, with great displays of agony, Rivers shuffled over to sit behind me.

  ‘This is my case,’ Sharkey reminded me for the third time and pulled over. The engine had hardly had time to warm up.

  ‘And I hope you’ll be very happy together.’ I hinged the door back and clambered out.

  A telegram boy cycled past, hands linked with exaggerated carelessness behind his head, whistling ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ very loudly and hastily grabbing the handlebar when a wiry mongrel dashed out, snapping at his foot.

  Like most of the houses, the front garden of number 15 was just a patch of weeds around a dustbin. It was bordered by what had been a privet hedge but was now a clump of bushes. The brown paint on the woodwork was flaking and the glass in one of the upstairs windows had been replaced with the side of a tea chest giving free advertising space to Tate & Lyle.

  Constable Box stood in front of the doorway. He was a giant of a man but his head still looked too large for his body. How he had managed to find a helmet to fit beat me. His face was oddly misshapen, with an earthy texture like some kind of root vegetable grown in the fens to feed cattle. He straightened up as we approached.

  ‘Body’s in here, sir,’ he announced.

  ‘You’d be a bloody fool standing there if it wasn’t,’ Sharkey told him pleasantly. ‘Door locked?’

  ‘Not now, sir.’ Box blinked his sheep-like eyes.

  ‘Then open it, man.’

  The constable rotated clockwise – a drawn-out process that reminded me of watching a liner being manoeuvred into dock.

  ‘Was it locked when you arrived?’ I tried to peer round at the stained-glass panel. There was a jagged hole in it about the size of a dinner plate.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I broke the glass with my truncheon. The key was in the keyhole. It’s a deadlock.’

  ‘So the glass wasn’t already broken?’

  ‘He’s just said so,’ Sharkey snapped.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ Box confirmed.

  Box fiddled with the handle, seemingly unused to such complicated devices, and the door swung almost all the way before it hit a shoe.

  25

  THE NARROW HOUSE

  You can’t mistake the smell of blood. It hangs thick and sickly and clings to you. After a morning of extractions my father would have to scrub his hands with Lysol to get rid of the stench on his fingers. It seeps into your nose and stays there. The air was heavy with it.

  I paused to take in the scene. Most people rush to the body but it’s not going anywhere, whereas its surroundings change the minute anyone intrudes on them. The gaslight was still on in the long narrow hall – by no means every house had electricity yet; some still relied on oil lamps – and the floral wallpaper couldn’t have been replaced for decades. It would have to be now. It was splattered with clots.

  There was a narrow staircase with a worn brown paisley runner going to a half-corridor before turning back on itself. There were two closed cream-painted doors to the left. The right hand would have been a party wall with number 17, the last of that group of houses.

  The shoe was on the foot of a young man. He lay on his back on the blue lino in a glistening black pool. If it hadn’t been for the same not-quite-sharp suit and the death’s head signet ring, it might have taken a while longer to recognise Freddy Smart. As well as his hair having flopped over it, the face was masked in gore. There was a gaping wound just above his Adam’s apple and another near the back of his neck below the left ear.

  ‘Somebody’s a bit tasty with a knife.’ Sharkey whistled as I ran an eye over the door and its frame.

  Sharkey had gone through the pool and I followed as closely in his steps as possible.

  ‘Have to be a big one.’ I went down on my haunches beside the body, tucking my skirt under my thighs so it didn’t trail. ‘I’ll give you good odds that those two wounds connect. He’s been run right through.’

  Sharkey caught his breath angrily. ‘I didn’t say it was a penknife,’ he insisted and I saw no point in arguing.

  Old Scrapie squatted on the other side. ‘Nasty.’ He lifted Freddy’s left arm by the sleeve of his once-sharp suit and let go. It fell like it would through treacle. ‘Rigor’s setting in so he’s been dead at least four hours.’

  ‘Probably not much longer.’ I got a pencil from my handbag. ‘If it was in the night, somebody would have been on to him for showing a light. Who discovered him?’

  ‘Neighbour, Mrs Shunter, came round to complain about rats coming under the fence. She saw the body through the glass. You can,’ he insisted though I had never denied it. ‘Saw it myself through the yellow flower before Box opened up.’

  I slid a pencil under Freddy Smart’s fringe to lift the caked hair aside.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ I breathed. His left eye had been gouged into a pulp.

  Sharkey shrugged to show he was made of sterner and therefore better stuff. ‘Whoever did this will be covered in blood,’ my colleague speculated. ‘Somebody must have seen him going down the street like that.’

  The hair itself was a clotting mass of sticky strands. I walked my fingers through it. The skull felt intact.

  I had a thought. ‘What if the murderer was never here?’

  Sharkey sniffed. ‘What then? He was murdered by a ghost? Is that what they teach you in London these days?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone else was in this hallway,’ I theorised. ‘Those footprints in the blood. I’ll bet a pound to a penny every one of them is his or ours. There are no bloody prints going towards the back of the hall or on the stairs and there were none on the front step or path when we arrived. If you stabbed this man close up you’d be wading through it.’

  ‘He wasn’t stabbed elsewhere and brought here,’ Sharkey sneered.

  ‘The door wasn’t forced because the lock and woodwork are intact,’ I reasoned. Sharkey had got blood on his chin somehow. ‘But how could you get out through the front door anyway? The key was in the lock so you couldn’t reach it to lock it from outside.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘This might sound foolish,’ I began and he snorted more than loudly enough to let me know that it would be. ‘But what if he was stabbed through the letter box?’

  Sharkey considered the proposition for just as long as it took him to say, ‘Bollocks.’ He got to his feet but I stayed down.

  ‘There is blood on the flap,’ I argued.

  ‘There’s bloody blood every-bloody-where.’

  Freddy Smart’s hands were clawed and bloodied, with long cuts on the palms and fingers.

  I tried a new tack. ‘He must have had lots of enemies.’

  Sharkey trampled back towards the door, not even glancing to check my observation. ‘So how do you deduce that, Miss Marple?’

  ‘Because I know who he is.’ I put my pencil into a bag. March Middleton had taught me to carry them and I had thought of her guardian when I saw that gaping socket. ‘Freddy Smart.’

  ‘Freddy?’ At least I had his attention now. ‘He went with his dad, Crake, to America ten years or more ago.’

  ‘Well, he’s back now,’ I assured my colleague, ‘though hardly in the first division, if this is all he can afford. I came across him threatening a young woman the first day I came and I saw her after he beat her up.’

  ‘And I bet you blood
y interfered.’ Inspector Sharkey wiped his hands on a white-spotted red handkerchief.

  ‘I tried to protect her,’ I admitted and Sharkey snorted.

  ‘Nice try, Church.’ He pointed to the body. ‘I’d love to say that’s the result of your meddling but no spurned bitch did that. It’d take a man to kill a Smart. Probably a fight over territory.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘This is my case, Church,’ Sharkey interrupted, ‘and I decide how to handle it.’

  I got to my feet. ‘Very well,’ I conceded. ‘But the assault of Millicent Smith is mine.’

  Sharkey stuffed his handkerchief into his jacket pocket and I glimpsed the top of a hip flask poking up.

  ‘Take her.’ He flung out an arm mockingly. ‘But the culprit of that crime, by your own reckoning, is lying dead at our feet.’

  ‘I need some air,’ I said. ‘It stinks in here.’

  26

  THE SACKWATER MARTYR

  I went to the door.

  A round-shouldered woman, hair in rollers under a net, was loitering on the pavement, trussed in a paisley apron, her legs sheathed in the sort of stockings I had been happy to abandon, wrinkled down to her brown carpet slippers.

  ‘That’s the neighbour,’ Box told me through the corner of his mouth, like it was a secret that had to be kept from the woman herself.

  I walked up the path. ‘Mrs Shunter?’

  ‘Might be.’ Her top denture flopped up and down, semaphoring each word.

  ‘I believe you found the body.’

  She folded her arms under her pendant breasts. ‘Why d’you believe tha’ then?’

  ‘Because I was told you did.’

  ‘And you do believe everything you’re told, do you?’ She shuffled her arms from side to side as if trying to rock her bosom to sleep. ‘Can’t be much of a copper, can you?’

  ‘Did you find the body?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So I was right to believe it.’

  ‘I could be lyin’.’ Her false teeth tried to escape – and who could blame them? – but her lips caught them and returned them to the living hell of Mrs Shunter’s mouth. ‘I might not even be Mrs Shunter.’

  Oh good grief. ‘I have been given to believe that you claim to have found the body and you have confirmed that. Assuming, for a moment, that is true—’

  ‘Thah’s behher. Now you’re thinking logically – like a man would.’

  I am thinking of decking you – like a man would. ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘Dead.’

  I gave up. ‘You will go to the police station today and make a full statement.’

  ‘Oh you believe thah, do you?’

  ‘In two words, yes.’

  ‘Thah’s one word.’

  ‘The second word is one I can only whisper in my head,’ I told her and she blanched.

  ‘I int never been sworn at like thah afore,’ she told me, ‘except by my kids.’ She lowered her bosom. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Who lives here normally?’ I didn’t know much about Freddy Smart but I knew it wasn’t his kind of place.

  ‘Why, the dead woman, of course,’ the alleged Mrs Shunter replied. ‘Millicent Smith.’

  I saw no reason to correct her mistake just yet. ‘Alone?’

  ‘Apart from her fancy man who int half as fancy as he make out.’

  ‘Freddy Smart?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ The woman who tacitly admitted to being Mrs Shunter twisted a roller that was coming undone.

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Five past eight, through the glass in the door.’ She wrapped a rust-coloured lock of hair round the spikes.

  ‘And when did you last see her alive?’

  ‘Just after she lost her tooth. I ask if she gone and been to thah dentist in F’licity House. He’s a butcher, if ever I saw one – and I did.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothin’.’ She pulled her hairnet down but the roller unrolled with it. ‘She do be runnin’ for the bus with a suitcase, she do.’

  ‘Do you know where the bus went?’

  Mrs Shunter gave up and pulled the roller out. ‘Up the road and away.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You have been almost helpful.’

  I went back to the open door, where Rivers was sharing one of Box’s roll-ups. Sharkey was cadging a light.

  ‘What purpose do you serve, Constable Rivers?’ I demanded and he remembered to rub a kidney.

  ‘It’s my back, ma’am. It do be dere.’

  Dere, I knew, meant dire. ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I’m a martyr to it.’

  ‘Nor that. Get it fixed or get another job,’ I barked. ‘If you want to wear that uniform, do something useful in it for once.’

  ‘Got a bit of a temper, hasn’t she?’ Sharkey commented from behind as if he was honey personified.

  I turned my attention to Box, who quailed a little under my gimlet eye. ‘When did you last have a cup of tea?’ I asked.

  ‘I do believe it be around about five o’ the clock, ma’am,’ he replied warily, ‘before I start my shift.’

  ‘Then go back to the station. Tell them what’s happened and send for Dr Gretham.’

  ‘He’s struck off,’ Sharkey objected, ‘and anyway—’ but I was in no mood to be told again whose case it was.

  ‘He knows a corpse when he sees one,’ I insisted. We had all heard how Dr Hedges certified Mrs Goodlock as dead on three separate occasions. ‘And, anyway, he has been struck on again.’ I had a suspicion that wasn’t the right term but I was not going to be the one to correct it. ‘And you’ – I turned back to Constable Box – ‘will not stop drinking tea until I get back to the station.’

  Box grinned. ‘I’ll do my level best, ma’am.’

  ‘And you, Rivers’ – I re-gimleted my eye – ‘will stand and guard this door with your worthless spinal column until you are relieved, if it takes the rest of your miserable so-called career.’

  *

  We did not exchange a word until Inspector Sharkey had parked on the forecourt.

  ‘Don’t you ever humiliate me in front of the men like that again,’ he said icily as I put my hand to the handle to get out.

  ‘Do you know what you are?’ I asked quietly, deciding to skip the part about him being an arrogant, booze-breathed, poxy bastard. ‘A crap copper.’

  I braced myself for the onslaught, determined that he was not going to intimidate me. Sharkey’s fingers gripped the steering wheel as if it was my throat.

  ‘Know what you are, Church?’ he spat out venomously. ‘Like all jumped-up women who think they can compete with men, a dried-up frustrated old spinster.’

  I never understood why spinster is an insult while bachelor sounds rather fun but I decided to debate that with him at a time when we were old and reminiscing fondly by the fireside.

  ‘The difference being that I may not always be a spinster,’ I told my colleague. ‘But you will always be crap.’

  If Sharkey could have squeezed juice out of that steering wheel, he’d have filled a bucket by now. ‘Know what you need, Church?’ He seethed. ‘A fuck.’

  I twisted away to open the door.

  ‘But I already work with one,’ I told him and swung my feet demurely out onto the running board.

  27

  THE SIRENS OF SACKWATER

  We had had eggs for breakfast for the third time that week. Hetty and Jenny were laying well on the scraps we fed them. If Mrs Perkins didn’t buck up soon she would end up in the pot, Captain Sultana threatened.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ I said automatically from my torn-out crossword, for she was always the first to charge out of the shed to greet me and I didn’t like the idea of eating family.

  ‘Looks like the Poles are massing for a counter-attack,’ Jimmy crowed. ‘So maybe the Bolshies will think twice about joining in.’

  It had been his turn to collect our mail from the Anchor Inn. The
re was none that morning, being Sunday, but he got yesterday’s paper so he bagged the right to read it first, apart from the front page, which was Captain’s because this was his boat after all.

  ‘You’ve changed your tune.’ I pencilled Icarus into 1 across.

  ‘I only joined because I fancied Emily Butter.’ Jimmy’s ears reddened as they often did when he told a fib. He had been an enthusiastic, if somewhat naïve, member of the British Communist Party until Joe Stalin signed a pact with his new friend Adolf.

  ‘Where are my glasses?’ Captain patted his pockets.

  ‘On your head, Captain,’ I told him.

  Jimmy flicked through to the sports pages. He was welcome to those. I had yet to find a game that interested me even though I had enjoyed playing them at school.

  I looked out of the porthole. It had been a damp summer and the bracken grew thick and tall between the white-barked birch trees. Jimmy had promised to do some scything later. A silver carp, enormous, fat and sluggish, floated on in the late morning sunshine, not fighting on the long steel cable that moored it to a barge downstream.

  I leaned back to finish my cigarette.

  ‘I can never do that,’ Jimmy admitted enviously. ‘Blow smoke rings.’ He puckered his lips and puffed like a child blowing out his birthday candles.

  ‘You have the wrong-shaped lips,’ I told him, fully aware that many a local girl would disagree with me about that.

  Captain checked his huge fob watch. ‘It should be on soon.’ He struggled out of his rocking chair.

  Jimmy was closest but nobody other than Captain was allowed to touch that precious wireless set.

  ‘Get the bottle,’ I bossed my courtesy nephew.

  ‘Yes ma’am.’ Jimmy sprang up with a mock salute and clutched his head. ‘Oh shit-shit-shit. Who put that bloody beam there?’ He rubbed his hair furiously. ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘It is a bit.’ I’d done the same myself many times when I first moved into Cressida but, unlike Jimmy, I had learned my lesson. Then I remembered how much it hurt. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ll survive.’ People who bang their heads always look crossly at everybody else.