Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘A confession?’ I asked with forlorn hope. It would have to be a detailed one to convince me.

  ‘Oh no.’ Her thinner lip quivered. ‘I have a theory.’ I made no attempt to smother my groan but Miss Prim had wound up the gramophone and she was going to play the record. ‘You see, I am a student of human nature,’ she began with no visible means of turning her off. ‘It comes from years of living alone reading detective novels aloud to my cats.’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to talk to Inspector Sharkey,’ I suggested. ‘He is in charge of the case.’

  The lady made a mewling noise that she had probably learned from one of her tabbies. ‘Inspector Sharkey? Oh he is hopeless.’ At least she was talking sense now. ‘He gave me no credit at all for solving,’ her voice sank dramatically, ‘the Mystery of the Gardener’s Boy’s Stolen Bicycle.’ She folded her arms with great satisfaction.

  ‘Tha’s true enough,’ Nippy chipped in. ‘He do go and take all the credit for tha’ one. Miss Prim told him young Billy Lime gone and stole ih.’

  Our visitor unfolded her arms modestly.

  ‘And had he?’ I got up.

  ‘No.’ Nippy smiled wisely. ‘Buh young Billy Thatcher goh-ih-into his head we’re searchin’ the houses of everyone called Billy and he go and run ow on the street with ih and Inspector Sharkey do catch him bike-handed.’

  ‘All thanks to me.’ Miss Prim refolded her arms with even greater satisfaction.

  ‘She do be a marvel, she do,’ Nippy endorsed our visitor warmly.

  ‘Then there was the Mystery of the Sabotaged Prize Marrow,’ she reminded my constable.

  ‘Oh yes.’ He leaned back comfortably, all the better to relate that one. ‘Ih—’

  ‘One moment.’ I jumped up and marched to the desk. There was only one mystery I was interested in solving – how to get her out of the station. ‘Get rid of her,’ I whispered.

  ‘Wha’?’ He cupped his ear. ‘Sorry, I dint catch thah, ma’am.’

  I leaned over, snatched up a pencil and wrote in block capitals across a blank charge sheet:

  GET RID OF HER.

  ‘Get rid of her,’ he read more loudly, I imagined, than Miss Prim narrated to her cats. ‘Wha’? You mean murder her?’

  ‘If needs be,’ I confirmed and turned back to our incredible old lady. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Prim, but we talk in coded messages. You can’t be too careful these days.’

  ‘You certainly cannot,’ she agreed. ‘Did you know that that sweet shop is run by a German spy?’

  ‘We have him under close surveillance,’ I assured her.

  Our new constable, Anthony Bank-Anthony, wandered through apparently from nowhere and apparently going nowhere. He had joined us from Dudley in the Black Country but insisted he had never acquired the accent. There were various rumours about why he had been offered a transfer, the most popular of which was that he had not so much an eye for the ladies as two hands for them, including his chief constable’s daughter.

  Bank-Anthony cast his eyes over our visitor.

  ‘Nice ankles,’ he purred and I pondered how many more strips I could tear off my men without them disintegrating.

  ‘Oh dear, the phone is ringing in my office.’

  Nippy Walker cocked his head in confusion. ‘Buh ih int work…’

  ‘I had better answer it,’ I said firmly. ‘Though it’s probably some mad old bat with stupid theories about a murder.’

  ‘There’s plenty of those around,’ Miss Prim sympathised. ‘It’s a cross we female detectives have to bear.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Your men couldn’t manage without me,’ she prattled on. ‘Why, last time I left I distinctly heard Sergeant Briggs talking about somebody losing their Marples.’

  ‘Excuse me. I must take that call.’ Before I have one of us certified. I hurried down the corridor.

  Superintendent Vesty materialised, running his fingers agitatedly over his face.

  ‘Have a care,’ he warned. ‘The Kaiser is up to his old tricks. We must not let him break us.’ He patted the air at shoulder height. ‘Hold the line, boys. Steady. Hold your fire.’

  30

  THE RAT-MAN COMETH

  There was a letter – amongst the many on my desk – that caught my attention. It was signed Millycent Smith and started off with the statement that she had fled to Meksigo, but a staggering number of errors about how she knew me – allegedly we had met in a public house called The Feathers – plus the fact that it was postmarked Woking gave me reasonable grounds for dismissing it as the work of yet another crank. I finished reading the letter and tried to summon up the enthusiasm to peruse a government directive about lost ration books – a feeble joke since, apart from petrol, nothing was actually being rationed or ever would be if Lord Beaverbrook had his way – ‘Government Control Gone Mad’, his Daily Express was raging.

  I yawned. There was no reason to stifle it because I was all alone until the door burst open and a small man in a too-long beige trench coat stormed in.

  ‘Here.’ Brigsy was close on his heels. ‘You can’t go marchin’ in there.’

  ‘Just have,’ the stranger sneered. I had seen that rodential profile – the pointed upper face with long incisors – first when its owner had been throttling Millicent Smith and then when it had been making a mess on the lino in 15 Bath Road. ‘Where’s Sharkey?’

  I leaned forward. ‘Get out.’

  Old Scrapie was chasing shadows in Stovebury, just the other side of Tringford.

  The rat-man walked in. ‘Do you know who I am?’ He had a you’ll-be-sorry-when-you-find-out tone but I had already guessed and remained unrepentant.

  ‘Yes.’ I looked into his little pink eyes. ‘You are the man who is leaving my office.’

  He marched to my desk and I have to say he did a menacing manner very well. If I had been a little girl up an alley at night, I might have been terrified but, when I was a not-very-humble constable, I had been alone in Bridge Street Snooker Hall with Walter Wallis, the Watford Worm Man, when I was not the one wielding a flanged mace. He had refined menacing to such perfection he probably frightened himself. My visitor had a lot of work to do on his act yet.

  ‘Nobody throws me out.’ He slammed the heels of his hands onto the papers strewn over my desktop.

  ‘If you do not get out of here I shall arrest you for trespass, threatening behaviour and interfering with the police in the course of their duty,’ I warned. ‘If you resist arrest, I shall charge you with that too. If you so much as brush against my sergeant on the way out, I shall charge you with assault and, if you do not take your hands off the documents on my desk, I shall charge you with interfering with evidence.’

  ‘I’ve got something to say to you and you need to listen,’ the rat-man blustered but I knew that he knew I wasn’t bluffing.

  ‘Go to the desk and make an appointment,’ I said steadily.

  ‘You’ll regret this.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ I enquired. Please say yes.

  ‘It’s a prognostication.’ He drew back his upper lip.

  That’s a big word for a little man, I wanted to say and then tell him he had got it wrong – it would have been childish but satisfying. ‘Leave.’ I leaned back. ‘Now.’

  ‘All right,’ he sneered, ‘keep your arm on.’

  I’d heard that one before but he delivered it with great effect and I was just wondering which charge to smash his sneaky, pointy smirk in with first when he spun on his heel.

  ‘Stand firm,’ I told Briggs, who was just inside the door, and my sergeant straightened to attention so that our visitor had to squeeze very gingerly past. ‘Let me know if he brushes you.’

  ‘Handcuffs at the ready, madam,’ Brigsy assured me in his best sergeant manner.

  The stranger went into the hall and turned his head towards me.

  ‘Goodbye Mr Smart,’ I called.

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘She knows who I am?’

  ‘She knows all sorts of thin
gs about you, sir,’ Brigsy told him proudly but without justification as he closed the door.

  Two minutes later there was a knock.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘A Mr Crake Smart to see you, madam.’

  ‘Tell him to wait.’ I put my pen down. ‘You and I have urgent police business with two cigarettes and a large pot of tea.’

  31

  DESPERADOES OF THE BLACK RANGE

  I waited fifteen minutes to make my point before I had Brigsy send Mr Smart back in.

  ‘I want to know what you are doing about my son’s murder,’ he began.

  ‘I am sorry for your loss, Mr Smart,’ I began and I meant it. No matter how horrible Crake was and how vile Freddy, a father had lost his son.

  ‘Sorry?’ He snorted. ‘Have you any idea what this has done to the family reputation if we can’t even protect our own from a little Suffolk slag?’

  And, if there was a faint gurgle, it was my sympathy going down the drain.

  ‘Please take a seat.’

  Crake Smart pulled his upper lip over his teeth, whipped the light wooden chair back and plonked down to face me. I was pleased to note I had a good head-height advantage without even cheating by using a cushion. ‘Well?’

  ‘We are making enquiries,’ I told him but, to my astonishment, he did not jump up, say Thank you very much, pump my hand and walk off whistling a happy tune.

  ‘What enquiries?’ He put his hands out.

  ‘Don’t touch the paperwork,’ I warned. ‘I’m afraid I am unable to discuss the details of our investigation with—’

  ‘I’m his father, for Chrissake.’

  ‘Any potential suspects,’ I finished.

  Crake Smart lost control over that lip. It sprang up, the teeth sprang forward and he sprang out of his chair. ‘Suspect?’ he yelled. He had a high voice, rising to referee-whistle shrillness. ‘He was my son, for Chrissake!’

  ‘Potential,’ I repeated. ‘As is everyone until he or she is eliminated.’

  ‘Everyone?’ He banged the desk. ‘Is your fucking walking-dead sergeant a suspect?’

  ‘If I hadn’t been with him at the time of the murder, he could be.’ I stood up. No scrawny smalltime smalltown thug was going to think he could dominate me. ‘Do you have any information regarding your son’s death, Mr Smart?’

  ‘I know that bitch Smith killed him.’ Smart leaned towards me. ‘And that’s all I need to know except where she is.’

  ‘I’d like to know that myself, Mr Smart.’ I picked up my wooden ruler. It could make a useful weapon if I needed it. ‘What makes you think it was Millicent Smith who killed your son?’

  ‘When a girl tries to trap a man into marrying her,’ Crake Smart viewed me with the contempt that all women deserve, ‘threatens him when he won’t fall for it and runs off the minute he pegs it, it don’t take much working out. But let me tell you one thing, copper, she’d better pray you get her first and so had you.’

  ‘I can understand the first part of your threat.’ I watched my visitor carefully. There was an iciness in his manner that was more worrying than his temper had been. ‘But are you threatening me as well, Mr Smart?’

  Smart’s mouth twisted. ‘Let me tell you something, Inspector Church. There are people in this station who owe me and I may decide to call in that debt.’

  I walked round the table to stop within a foot of him to stare down into those dry beady eyes.

  ‘Let me tell you something, Mr Crake Rutter Smart. I’ve been a big-game fisher in a big rough ocean. I’ve caught marlins and great white sharks, creatures that could swallow the likes of you whole and not even spoil their appetites. You think you’re in that league? You’re not even a big fish in a small pond. You’re a tadpole in a puddle and you’d better be careful I don’t stamp you out.’

  Crake Smart’s hands twitched like a cowboy nervously waiting to draw. He seemed to be fighting an urge to attack me and I rather hoped he would. I wouldn’t let him off as lightly as I had his son.

  ‘You just wait and see,’ he spat.

  I strode to the door. ‘Get out.’

  Smart clenched his fists at his side. He forced his lips together and stormed off. I hoped he had been impressed by my speech and never found its source. It came, as best I could remember, from Desperadoes of the Black Range, a book Jimmy had lent me when he was an adolescent. He had joined Adam and me in Birżebbuġa to fish for lampuki in the moonlight from a luzzu boat with its painted eyes and, later, to grill our catch on the beach when I gave Jimmy his first bottle of Cisk beer and, as I found out later, his first cigarette.

  32

  THE SUFFOLK VAMPIRE

  The branch line up from Felixstowe was always busy in the summer in peacetime with thousands of trippers, though the majority were going on to Anglethorpe at the end of the line.

  I stopped at the red and cream stone-arched entrance.

  ‘Don’t you dare call them puff-puffs,’ I warned my constable.

  ‘As if I would.’ Dodo reddened in indignation and I was about to apologise when she added, ‘They are choo-choos.’

  We were down at the railway station to investigate the theft of a bench. This was about as thrilling as it got on our side of the River Angle estuary apart from the Freddy Smart murder, which my esteemed colleague Sharkey was keeping jealously to himself. Funny how we all longed for big cases. While we claimed to be trying to prevent crime, we were constantly haunted by the fear that we might be successful – just as my father, I supposed, in his battle against tooth decay would not have wanted all his patients to have perfect dentitions, leaving him to twiddle his thumbs even more than he did now.

  The 10:28 for Felixstowe was ready to depart, its engine straining and wheels shifting restlessly. Doors were slamming and windows dropping for ratings in second class and officers in first to bid their loved ones farewell. Rumour had it they were off to reinforce the naval blockade but rumours tend to invent themselves. Last week the Germans had definitely parachuted into Norfolk disguised as nuns until they were identified as pilgrims walking to Walsingham. Having gone to a convent school, I could think of a few teachers it would be quite easy to mistake for enemy soldiers. Sister Millicent would probably pass for a Nazi stormtrooper far more easily than she did for a Sister of Chastity.

  The heavy chain links clanked and stretched straight and the first puff of smoke threw a mote of soot into the eye of a well-dressed middle-aged lady who had just bade a lukewarm farewell to a corpulent purser. The lady squeaked and did what she was not supposed to but we all do – she rubbed it.

  The train shuddered and strained.

  ‘May I be of assistance?’ A handsome man of about the same age approached with a clean white handkerchief. ‘I’m a doctor.’

  The lady was looking up as directed while the handsome man fished behind her lower lid with a starched corner. I saw her lips part and thought he saw it too. He stroked her cheek with his thumb as if that was an essential part of the procedure.

  ‘Oh thank you,’ she was quavering.

  ‘How very kind.’ Dodo folded her hands over her left breast.

  ‘Except that he’s Rufus Verdigris, an accountant,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh but oh.’ Dodo interlocked her fingers.

  ‘He used to have an office on Hambleton Road,’ I told her. ‘Until he was committed to St Audry’s Hospital for Mental Diseases in Woodbridge but he’s harmless enough.’

  ‘How can he be harmless?’ Dodo bawled but they were too wrapped up in each other to bother with her. ‘If he has a disease it might be contagious, like…’ she cast her eyes around for an example, ‘toothache or… communism.’

  Mr Trime, the stationmaster, marched over to greet us, chest puffed out, his arms pumping like the pistons of one of his locomotives.

  ‘And not before Trime,’ Dodo whispered just loud enough for him to glance at her sharply. I blamed Tommy Handley. If he could get away with appalling puns in his ITMA Home Service show, everybody else though
t they could too.

  Mr Trime was a short portly man with a deluxe moustache and wire-framed spectacles who wore his three-piece uniform suit with pride. His manner could be officious and fussy but I liked him. When I was a child he used to let me stand and help Mr Lanter, the porter, collect tickets. Mr Lanter was a sweet man and the railway was his life. Nobody knew how much so until the day he retired, when he lay in his uniform with his head on the track.

  ‘This is a serious business,’ Mr Trime assured me seriously and, by Sackwater standards, it was. The previous case I had dealt with for him was a crude – in every sense of the word – drawing somebody had done in the gents just after I had returned. The culprit was still at large and I trembled to think when and where he might strike again. ‘It wasn’t just any old bench you know. It commemorated something.’ The stationmaster’s voice rose indignantly. ‘But nobody can remember what since the plaque was stolen in 1934.’

  ‘I believe Inspector Sharkey is on that case.’ I peered at the empty space where the object of our enquiries had stood and tried to look like I had uncovered an important clue. No doubt Mr G or Aunty March would have the thief behind bars by now just from scrutinising the four clean squares on the paving slab created by the legs.

  ‘Let us hope he does not solve it first,’ Dodo pondered. ‘A label with nothing to stick it on is like a roar with no lion.’ Thank the gods Daddy didn’t say that. ‘Daddy said that,’ she concluded.

  ‘It’ll probably turn up in somebody’s back garden,’ I predicted as an engine approached.

  Like many edifices in Sackwater the station had been built in expectation of more prosperous times. There was a platform either side of the two tracks, joined by a high cast-iron footbridge. The southbound line from Anglethorpe to Felixstowe had a long brick single-storey slate-roofed building with separate mixed and women-only waiting rooms. It was large enough to house a few families if they didn’t mind sharing the public conveniences, though plenty of Suffolk houses would have been glad to have anything better than an unlit, draughty outside privy. The northbound line platform was a much grander affair, with something vaguely Ottoman in the design of the building – two storeys high with a covered walkway supported by pointed arches, echoed in the shapes of the windows and by lighter bricks set into the walls. It had the same facilities plus a ticket office, left luggage, the canteen and the stationmaster’s office from which Mr Trime had emerged, pulling on his shiny-peaked, gold-badged cap and dusting himself down.