‘Anyway, you’re supposed to be finding somewhere else to live,’ I told him firmly.
‘Look at that.’ Jimmy abruptly changed the subject. ‘They always remind me of carp.’
‘Do they?’ I reached for the bottle. ‘It looks like a barrage balloon to me.’
We had been playing pontoon for dried peas while we waited for the rabbit to cook in the haybox. Jimmy had chosen which was to be eaten on the simple basis that it had bitten his finger when he’d stopped it escaping, but we had left it to Captain to perform the execution.
I poured us all a glass of Captain Sultana’s home-made nettle wine. Fermented weeds, Jimmy called it derisively, but it had a good taste once you acquired it and a good kick on an empty stomach. In our hearts we knew we would be needing it soon.
The Bush radio was slow in warming up, valves humming and smelling of singed dust.
‘Any progress on that murder?’ Jimmy swirled his drink around.
‘You’ll have to ask my esteemed colleague about that,’ I replied automatically, transfixed by what we knew but dreading what was to come.
‘Oh come on.’ The captain twiddled with the tuning dial, the speaker whistling and whining, now a brass band, now some inarticulate gabble, the sounds ebbing and flowing as they battled for our attention. Even with the aerial on the mast we had poor reception down in the estuary.
‘Be finished at this rate.’ Jimmy paced about but his great-uncle slapped away the hand that was reaching for the tuning knob.
‘The British ambassador in Berlin,’ surged into the saloon.
‘That’s him,’ Jimmy cried in exasperation. ‘You’ve just gone past it.’
‘Haqq,’ Captain Sultana swore under his breath, tweaking the dial back a fraction for a burst of classical music.
‘You can imagine what a bitter blow this is to me,’ Mr Chamberlain said, suddenly clear, ‘that all my long struggle to win peace has failed.’ He sounded like a peeved teacher.
‘Oh you poor thing,’ Jimmy scoffed.
‘What?’ Captain Sultana cupped a hand to his ear.
The sound was drifting again but we got the gist. The Germans were wicked, our elected headmaster told us sadly, but he knew we would all play our part with calmness and courage.
I tried to roll a cigarette but the paper split, spilling tobacco all over me.
‘Is it…?’ the captain asked.
‘War,’ I confirmed. ‘We’re at war with Germany.’
Captain Sultana bowed his head and Jimmy stared out of another porthole as Mr Chamberlain ended his lament by calling God’s blessing upon us with the certainty that right would prevail.
Class dismissed with permission to die.
It was hardly a surprise but I’d been hoping against hope that Hitler would realise his bluff had been called.
‘Yes!’ Jimmy clenched his fist. ‘And about time too.’ He almost danced with excitement.
‘We have to do something to stop him, I suppose,’ Carmelo conceded sadly.
The last war was still fresh in our memories but his were far more awful than mine, too strong and too numerous to drown in the topped-up glasses of wine he so shakily poured.
‘We should have done something sooner,’ I said. ‘We betrayed the Czechs and let him grow stronger and more confident because we were frightened.’
‘What sane man wouldn’t be?’ Captain pondered. ‘Oh those poor boys.’ Captain Sultana shuddered. We both knew he meant the ones he had commanded and the ones who would follow suit. He snatched up his glass, draining it in one, but I couldn’t face mine. What was I drinking to? I put it down and refilled Carmelo’s.
Jimmy shook his head. ‘It’ll be different this time, Grandad. I’ve seen a film of the Maginot Line. The French have learned their lesson. It’s impregnable. We won’t be fighting in the trenches and our ships know how to deal with submarines now. This will be a war of the air – men in machines jousting like knights of old.’ Jimmy’s eyes shone with zeal for something he could not imagine as he raised his glass in a toast, ‘To victory.’
‘To Adam,’ I countered and we clinked our glasses as the men repeated my words, Jimmy adding ‘Uncle’. Wherever you are, I mused. Rumour had it that my ex-fiancé was travelling through Italy but Adam’s military exploits were always shrouded in mystery.
‘I still—’ I began to tell his father but his hand passed through my invisible arm.
‘Naf,’ he said, which meant I know.
There would be more announcements later, we were told. In the meantime we had Reginald Foort playing the organ from Langham Place, ‘Keep Smiling’. Carmelo turned the set off.
It was then we heard it for the first time, a ghostly wail coming across the water, rising and falling eerily. It was a sound I had prayed so hard not to hear. It came from Anglethorpe and it was joined almost immediately by the sirens of Sackwater.
They were sounding more faintly from Hadling Heath Aerodrome. We could only imagine the frantic activity there but within minutes we saw them, five Hurricanes in a V formation, flying low along the estuary out to sea. Not one of those pilots would have ever fired a shot in anger before and now, on that sunny Sunday afternoon, they were setting out to kill or be killed.
Jimmy was out on the deck waving frantically. ‘Go get ’em, boys. Go get ’em.’
‘And they call me mad,’ the Mad Admiral said sadly.
28
THE BEAR AND THE SOCKET
If you were looking for somebody to play the part of a grizzly bear in your theatrical production, Dr Edward ‘Tubby’ Gretham was the man for you. He was a huge figure in all three dimensions and all four limbs, his head made all the more massive by a stack of dark-brown hair.
Until recently his face had been almost hidden behind a matching beard but Greta, his wife, persuaded him to shave it off for his second General Medical Council hearing. She had watched him do it, he told me afterwards, stood back and said, ‘I don’t think I’d have married you if I’d known what you looked like.’ So now he was in the process of re-camouflaging himself.
Tubby had the sort of hands you might think were better suited to crushing rocks than being a doctor but, when I had gashed my knee in my teens, he had sutured it for me with delicate stitches that any seamstress would have been proud of and, when he played the piano – which he often did, whether you wanted him to or not – his fingers could flit over the keyboard with astonishing agility, going from a thunderous crash to the lightest of touches in an instant.
The mortuary was in a square red-brick single-storey building round the back of the Royal Albert Sackwater Infirmary, labelled STORES to avoid prying eyes, though Tubby loved to entertain friends with tales of delivery men who had blundered into the middle of autopsies – including one who had been thought to be the cadaver on the table.
‘Betty,’ he greeted me with a grin, because he was just putting down his bone saw and it was not often he got the chance to use it.
Freddy Smart lay naked on his back, even scrawnier than I had imagined. His chest was concave, with the skin sunk between his ribs. His hip bones jutted like miniature ploughs and his bony legs were bowed. He had already been unzipped all down the middle.
‘Looks malnourished,’ I said in puzzlement, for the Smarts were already re-establishing their empire.
‘Had steak and chips for dinner.’ Tubby pointed to a wide-topped glass jar labelled Stomach contents.
‘I met his grandfather once,’ I recalled, ‘and he was a similar build.’
‘The runts of the litter then.’ Tubby levered a spatula into his saw-line and the top of the skull came away with a faint ripping sound.
‘That’s what makes them so dangerous,’ I speculated. ‘To survive in their world, you have to be tougher than the rest so, if you’re weedier, you have to be meaner.’
‘Looks like he had a few fights in his time.’ Tubby tapped the chest. ‘Five ribs broken and mended and an old cranial fracture.’ Tubby ran a gloved finger around
an oval bulge. ‘But I suppose that’s an occupational hazard with these chaps. Few healed knife scars as well.’ He laid the skull cap aside. ‘I’ve cleaned up the left eye socket. The eyeball had burst from the force of impact with a sharp implement. Most of the vitreous humour burst over his cheek. Messy’ – Tubby picked up a pair of surgical scissors to snip through the membranous meninges that wrap all our thoughts – ‘and very painful.’
‘So he was alive?’
‘I should say so.’ He was working his spatula around inside the skull like you do when you’re trying to get the ham out of a tin in one piece. ‘You can see where the blade broke through the bone.’ He indicated a letter-box-shaped hole smashed through the back of the socket.
‘Would that have gone into his brain?’
‘Probably.’ He tossed the spatula into a kidney dish. ‘We’ll see in a minute.’
I stood at his shoulder, trying to keep out of his light, fascinated by the walnut-shaped, wormy grey meat he was handling.
‘Strange to think that’s all we are,’ I commented.
‘It may be all you are.’ Tubby bent his knees. ‘Some of us have immortal souls.’ He peered into the top of the skull, pressing the brain down with the flat of his left hand to shine a torch into the space with his right. I saw the beam glow through the shattered back of the socket.
‘I thought I saw a glitter. Pass me those forceps… No, the longer ones.’ He thrust the torch at me. ‘Hold that.’ I seemed to have been demoted to mortuary assistant but it was difficult to take offence. When Tubby was involved in fixing an oil leak in his Rudge motorbike once, he had roped the Duke of Kent, who was passing by, into helping and snapped at him for selecting the wrong spanner. ‘Keep that torch still.’ He was fishing about in the space he had created between the underside of the skull and what I think were the frontal lobes. ‘Aha.’
‘Have you found something?’
‘If I can just…’ Tubby’s nose was almost buried in Freddy Smart’s brain by then as he squinted at whatever he was after. ‘Gotcha!’ Tubby stood up so suddenly, I had to leap back to avoid being headed in the face and crashed into a trolley of instruments. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, woman…’ Tubby whipped round, ‘Oh…’ suddenly realising what was going on and who had been trying to help him, ‘oh I’m so sorry.’
I laughed. ‘What have you found?’
‘This.’ In the teeth of his forceps, I saw it glinting, a thin triangle of steel no more than a quarter of an inch at its broken edge and going to a sharp point.
‘The tip of the blade?’
Tubby nodded happily. ‘Find the rest of this and you have your murder weapon.’
‘Can I take it?’
Tubby’s face fell. I knew he wanted it for his collection. ‘I’ll put it in a bottle,’ he grumped and rooted about for an empty one.
‘I’ll try to get it back to you when we’re finished,’ I promised and Tubby perked up immediately.
‘Those incisions on his hands must be from grasping the blade to try to pull it out.’
‘Can I have a look?’
‘Be my guest.’
I pulled on a pair of thick rubber gloves – much too big for me but they served their purpose – and had a quick look at those hands, still half-closed in their empty grasps. I prised them open just enough to see inside. There were deep cuts running along the palms and inside those hooked fingers.
‘What about the neck wound?’
Tubby glanced over. ‘Why the singular?’
‘I’ll let you judge that.’ He selected a long narrow spatula and inserted it into the wound above Freddy Smart’s Adam’s apple. The rounded end slipped in easily and Tubby pressed it gently along. ‘The trouble is the track will be filled with hardened clots and the sides of the wound may have collapsed and adhered, so…’ he worked the instrument carefully, holding it between thumb and forefinger, ‘one must be careful not to create a fresh channel.’ He wiggled the spatula daintily, pressing again, and there it was, the rounded end peeking out just below the left ear. ‘Well,’ he slid it a little further, ‘you were right not to say wounds.’
I almost punched the air but there is something about the dead that commands more respect than the living.
‘Can you tell which direction it entered and exited?’
Tubby picked a broad scalpel similar to the one Julius ‘The Surgeon’ Carrapticus had threatened me with the day I earned my stripes. ‘Possibly.’ He started to dissect around the front wound. ‘The soft tissues have collapsed inwards at both ends.’ He sliced delicately through the skin and muscle beneath. ‘Lord, I wish all my patients would be so considerate as not to bleed.’ He parted the tissues. ‘See that little flap there? That’s the epiglottis – the thing that stops your food going down the wrong way.’
I knew that much from reading my grandfather’s anatomy book, which was on my father’s shelf, but Tubby was never happier than when explaining his craft and I enjoyed him teaching me.
‘Most of the time,’ I said but he wasn’t listening. ‘Thought as much.’ He scraped the top edge of a white ring of bone. ‘See that? It should have a spur sticking out – the greater horn, which attaches to the thyrohyoid ligament.’
‘And that does what?’
‘Attaches to the thyrohyoid membrane.’
‘Of course,’ I murmured.
‘Now let’s see if I can find that horn.’
‘So, if it has been broken inwards, the blade must have gone front to back,’ I deduced.
‘No doubt about it.’ Tubby dug deeper into Freddy Smart’s throat.
‘Would the neck wound have killed him instantly?’
‘As near as dammit. Oh, and he had a horizontal contusion here.’ Tubby pointed to a faint line about an inch above the eyebrows.
‘Perfect,’ I breathed.
Tubby paused from his work. ‘Why so?’
‘It fits in with how I think he died,’ I said as he started poking with some tweezers.
‘Go on. No, hang on. There it is.’ He produced a spicule of bone triumphantly. ‘Go on.’
‘Tell me if any of this doesn’t fit in with what you’ve found,’ I began.
‘Don’t worry, I shall,’ Tubby assured me.
‘Freddy…’
‘You were on first-name terms?’
‘We are now. He is lured to the door. He’s too wary to open it to an unexpected visitor so maybe he crouches to peer through the letter box. Perhaps he doesn’t realise how clearly he can be seen through the coloured glass. His killer plunges a long-bladed knife or a sword—’
‘Sword would fit the bill better.’
‘—into Freddy’s eye. The tip snaps off and the blade jams. Freddy instinctively grabs it—’
‘And cuts his hands.’
‘—while the killer wrenches it back, banging Freddy’s head on the edge of the letter box—’
‘The bruise.’
‘—then thrusts straight back and delivers the fatal wound.’
‘Bravo.’ Tubby clapped, his gloved hands sounding like a performing seal.
‘Are you being sarcastic?’ I asked warily.
‘Not in the least,’ he protested. ‘That would fit the bill precisely.’
An unworthy thought struck me. ‘When you write up your report…’
‘To Inspector Sharkey?’
I nodded. ‘Do you think you could append that theory to it as your own suggestion?’
Tubby puzzled. ‘Surely you deserve the credit for it?’
‘Oh, I’ve already proposed something similar,’ I told him and Tubby grinned broadly from deep inside his facial shrubbery.
‘I shall lay it on thick,’ he assured me.
29
THE MYSTERIOUS MYSTERY OF THE MYSTERIOUS MISS PRIM
Meanwhile Sharkey still refused to discuss the progress of his murder investigation but, from the men, I gathered that was only because there was none to talk about. I was still determined to interview Millicent Smith but
she was nowhere to be seen, so I decided to list her as a missing person. Millicent was young and pretty and we had managed to get a photograph of her from her younger brother, who worked collecting uncharged and delivering recharged wireless batteries in Ipswich. So I had managed to drum up quite a lot of publicity over the case – probably too much, because it fell to me to sift through the mounds of reported sightings of Millicent coming in from all over the country. Two witnesses had definitely seen Millicent Smith in Oxford. Maybe they had but it was two days before I first met her. I pencilled a diagonal cross over the front cover and decided I needed a cup of tea.
Nippy Walker was on the desk and a little old lady sat in the corner when I went to the lobby in search of a brew. She was knitting something startlingly red, far too long to be a scarf but far too stringy to be anything else. It snaked from her rapidly clicking needles onto the floor, curling rather menacingly around her flat little shoes.
‘Inspector Church?’ she warbled. She had pale mauve hair, coordinating with her paisley mauve dress.
‘Yes?’ I admitted warily. She looked like the sort of woman who would have the entire force looking for her lost budgerigar.
She put her knitting into her lap. ‘I am Miss Prim.’
I stifled a laugh. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Oh no.’ The lady smiled quite sweetly. ‘It is I who am here in my humble capacity to help you.’
‘In what way?’ I pulled the chair next to hers away and around to view her profile. She had not been very carefully constructed, I decided. Her nose dipped at the bridge before rising again to hook round into something you could open tins with. Her lips were caved in, with red cracks radiating at the corners like stained cat’s whiskers.
‘The murder of Frederick Smart.’ She rolled the loose yarn, bringing back horrid memories of hours spent holding out loops of wool for my grandmother to wind into a ball.
‘Do you have some information about the case?’ I watched her eyes behind her round wire spectacles. They were slow and dull and didn’t seem to focus on anything.
‘I have better than that.’ She slid both needles into the ball. If Miss Prim was trying to tantalise me, she was failing miserably. I was more interested in the sound of a kettle coming to the boil in the back room.
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire Page 10
