‘My father came out of his oak-lined study where he was writing a paper on the perils of transmitting radio waves through the ether, to discover that his fine collection of Yorkshire glass and the fine Yorkshire cabinet in which it was stored had been shattered beyond repair. My brother had tied the other end of the thread to the top of that fine Yorkshire cabinet in which his fine collection of Yorkshire glass was stored.
‘“Who capsized that fine Yorkshire cabinet in which my fine collection of Yorkshire glass was stored?”
‘I was unable to perpetrate a deceit and responded, “I did, Father.”
‘“Why did you capsize that fine Yorkshire cabinet in which my fine collection of Yorkshire glass was stored?”
‘“My brother Bernard told me to,” I explained, certain that the righteousness of my statement would remove the cloak of guilt from my shoulders and place it upon my brother Bernard’s, but my father sent me to fetch his hazel switch and thrashed me until I bled.’ Vesty’s voice trembled and his secateurs-free hand rose to point shakily at the ghost of Easter Past. ‘The incident has played upon my mind every minute of every waking day since. Filthy business. It broke my heart.’ He swept that hand back over his head as if he still had more than a dandelion clock-head floating upon it. ‘But it did not break me.’
There was a long silence.
‘How awful,’ I broke it and the superintendent seemed to notice me for the first time.
‘Jolly nice to see a couple of pretty faces around the place. Keep up the good work,’ he told us and returned to his office.
‘What the hell was that about?’ Sharkey huffed and for once he spoke for almost all of us.
‘Oh, did you not understand, Inspector Sharkey?’ Dodo enquired. ‘It was about Easter Sunday when Superintendent Vesty was six years old.’
‘What happened?’ I asked Old Scrapie again.
‘Superintendent Vesty’s brother—’ Dodo began again.
‘Shut up!’ Sharkey shouted and Dodo opened her mouth but thought better of it.
‘I was talking to Inspector Sharkey,’ I explained.
‘But how was I to know that?’ she quivered.
‘Because I was facing him with my back to you,’ I told her. ‘Now be quiet.’
‘There was an arrest yesterday in Paris.’
‘Vraiment?’ I asked, to his bafflement. ‘Just the one?’
‘Of a man answering to the description of the Sackwater Station killer.’
‘What?’ Brigsy’s cadaverous face gaped. ‘With a cloak and bloodshot eyes and long bat teeth?’
‘I’m talking about proper witnesses,’ Sharkey snarled.
‘Well, I was one of those and the description I gave wasn’t exactly detailed,’ I objected.
The Shark waved a fin. ‘Other people saw a man hobbling down Hamilton Road with blood around his mouth.’
‘I think that was probably Mr Amery from Martins Bank,’ I suggested. ‘He hit his nose on the kerb when he was detained by a member of the public in error.’ I omitted to mention who had rugby-tackled his probably-ex-by-now manager and that I knew him – but the Shark had the scent of a suspect and was not to be deterred.
‘He says he can reveal details of how it was done but he will only do so to the officer in charge of the case.’
It was actually my case but I knew Sharkey was about to flex his seniority muscles and that I had two choices. I could put in a protest with our superintendent and, having a better figure than Old Scrapie, could probably win my plea – or I could let him go on another wild goose chase and make an even bigger idiot of himself.
‘That would be you, Inspector Sharkey,’ I said generously and the creature beneath his skin moved.
‘Never been to Paris,’ he admitted. ‘Never been abroad.’
‘Not even in the last war?’ Rivers asked. ‘That’s what did do my back in fer me and I’ve been—’
‘—a martyr to it ever since.’ Brigsy completed the phrase we all knew so well. If Rivers had been playing a record the needle would have cut through it by now.
Sharkey stiffened. ‘I was doing important war work here but I can’t talk about it – Official Secrets Act.’
The rest of us exchanged unofficial secret glances.
‘Take a mosquito net,’ I advised, ‘and you’ll need a pith helmet.’
‘Very funny.’ Starkey eyed me contemptuously. ‘Think I don’t know that nets will be provided?’
‘They speak French in Paris,’ Dodo informed him helpfully. ‘Gooten morgan – that means hello and—’
‘I don’t think—’ I began but Sharkey shushed me.
‘I’d better write some of these down.’
‘Sprekensee English, swinehunt?’ Dodo continued. ‘Do you speak English, please.’ Her face was deadly serious and Sharkey was scribbling furiously.
‘A lot of words are just stolen from English with en added on to them like come is comen and go is goen,’ Dodo recalled. ‘Oh yes and Give me a coffee, waitress is Gibbon me eye-nun fickin, smutzig hundin.’
‘Where did you learn French, Dodo?’ I asked.
‘From a man I met on a train when I was sixteen and a bit,’ she told me. ‘He was very kind and said I could sit on his knee but I explained that in England we sit on the empty seats – though they are not empty once you have sat upon them.’
‘Oy ’ad an uncle who goo for Paris,’ Bantony declared, ‘but ’e never arrived.’
‘What happened?’ Starkey asked with a tinge of unease.
‘’E changed ’is moind,’ Bantony explained, ‘and went ter Blackpool instead.’
Vesty wandered back out, carrying a trug this time with rose cuttings on it, and I hoped he wasn’t going to serenade us all.
‘That story I told you all a moment ago.’ He shuffled his feet. ‘Just between ourselves, what?’
‘Of course, sir,’ I assured him. ‘In fact, with that Hurricane flying over, we didn’t really hear much of it.’
‘Hurricane?’ He wrinkled his brow.
‘It is a type of aeroplane, Superintendent Vesty, sir,’ Dodo explained, ‘but I don’t remember hearing—’
‘Then try to,’ I butted in and turned back to our chief. ‘Inspector Sharkey is leaving us for…’
Vesty clapped like a child at panto, no mean feat with the flower basket over his left arm. ‘Excellent, excellent.’ He stuck out his hand, striking the Shark in his midline bulge. ‘Well, good luck, Scrapie, as I believe you are affectionately known. I can’t pretend I’ve ever liked you but I wish you all the best.’
‘A few days,’ I ended weakly.
55
GREEN STRAWBERRIES AND THE WAY TO ROTTERDAM
Dodo sat in the back room with an enormous mug of tea in one hand and a book in the other.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, checking the kettle to find she had drained it.
‘A mug of tea, boss.’
‘The book.’ I put the kettle under the tap.
‘Oh it’s my very favourite.’ Dodo Chivers radiated happiness. ‘Fenula the Fluffy Kitten. Have you read it?’
‘No.’
‘Do not worry,’ Dodo reassured me. ‘I shall lend it to you when I have finished though I must warn you, it is very sad in the middle.’
‘I don’t think you should read it here,’ I advised, putting the kettle on the stove and lighting the gas ring.
‘Oh but I have got past the bit that makes my nose tickle,’ she assured me.
‘If the men see you reading it they will make fun,’ I warned, looking in vain for a clean mug. Somebody had used mine and left a stained ring halfway down.
‘But they would not make fun of how Fenula got lost in the Fairy Forest but was rescued by a golden butterfly,’ she protested.
‘I’m afraid they would.’ I washed out my mug – not as easy as it sounds when one of your hands is in a jar of formalin in your cabin.
‘But surely-to-Sudbury not when Fenula ate too many green strawberries and got tum
bly-ache?’
‘Even then.’
Walker ambled in.
‘You heartless beast,’ Dodo scolded him.
‘What?’ He showed his open hands in a gesture of guiltlessness. ‘You can’t have found that spider I put in your locker yet. Oh…’ Walker looked for a verbal escape route. ‘Not that I have.’ He scrambled through it unconvincingly.
‘Good,’ Dodo said. ‘Then I will not have to tell Inspector Church what you used her mug for.’
Walker cleared his throat. ‘I’ll just go and make sure nobody else put one in.’
I sniffed my tea. ‘What did he use it for?’
‘Catching the spider,’ she told me, but I had seen people panic less than Walker when they were being arrested for murder.
I poured my tea away and resolved to bring a fresh mug in the next day.
Dodo slid her book into her handbag and I glimpsed two spikes sticking out from under her handkerchief. They were much too thick to be knitting needles.
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing.’ Dodo Chivers snapped her bag shut without even glancing to see what I had meant.
*
The important thing I forgot that night was to loop the rope but it was late and I was tired, wet, grumpy and still feeling feverish. We had had heavy rain for the best part of a week now and, while Cressida was waterproof, my clothing when I was walking and cycling to and from work was not and the water had a clever knack of finding a way inside it.
In the half-moon’s light I could see the water was up a good few inches, and hear it racing, but I was not alarmed. I pointed my boat upstream to the west as Carmelo had shown me and set off. The boat wobbled as it always did for the first couple of strokes – but it didn’t stop wobbling. It started to spin and I found I had very little control over it. I was drifting downstream and all my efforts could do nothing to correct my course. The current was too strong.
I passed the easterly tip of the bar but if I could just steer landwards a bit, I would hit the last horn of the bay. If not, there was nothing much between me and the estuary flowing into the open sea, with the first stop being Rotterdam a couple of hundred miles of the North Sea away. I dipped the oar deeper to use it as a rudder, turning the nose of the boat inwards, but I couldn’t turn it far enough fast enough. I was almost parallel and about to be swept outwards into the middle of the estuary. I heaved on the oar but it was useless. Twice I slipped, clattering onto my back over the bench. The second time I caught my stump and screamed in pain and rage at my stupidity and clumsiness and in frustration at my powerlessness. Short of suicide, few of us can choose the time and manner of our deaths, but all I knew was I did not want to end up capsized in the freezing waves of the Atlantic Ocean, another dogfish-chewed bloated corpse to be washed up wherever the tides might take me.
For some reason, I thought of Sharkey and how he would gloat. Takes a man to handle a boat, he would say, and the fury that this thought aroused in me gave greater strength to my arm than any amount of terror could have done. I dipped the oar back into the water and leaned, my foot on the side of the boat, straining with all my might until the tip of the boat turned. It was too late to hit land. Even with an outboard motor I doubt I could have done that. But there was a fallen tree jutting from that horn. In the summer, Jimmy, Carmelo and I had sat fishing on it with our feet in the water. They had been most annoyed when, after their patient – but unnecessary – tutorials I caught the first fish, a fat whiting that they never managed to equal.
I could just make out the shadow of the trunk, I thought, remembering Carmelo telling me to watch how the ripples in the water broke over low obstructions in order to avoid them, but I would do everything in my power not to avoid this one. I sculled literally for my life and felt the underside of the boat scrape over some submerged branches. It was only then that I knew I could save myself. If the current started to push me out again I would leap into those branches and cling onto them all night if I had to. But I managed to turn the boat a fraction more and bump the port side of it into the body of the tree. Hooking the rope loosely round my ankle, I scrambled out onto the trunk, determined not to lose the captain’s boat with numb fingers. I tied the rope to a broken limb in nothing a nautical man would recognise as a knot but what I felt confident would do the same job, then crawled up the trunk until I hit the roots. The ground was just about visible as I slithered down, face towards the tree, skirt rising, stockings shredded, but at least I was on solid, if muddy, ground and able to use the roots to haul myself up the bank and feel my way through the low shrubs back to Shingle Bay.
Carmelo heard my shouts.
‘Madonna.’ I couldn’t see but I knew he would be crossing himself when he heard my account of what had happened.
‘Go to the house. Stay the night with Tubby,’ he shouted from the prow. ‘He will help rescue Genevieve in the morning.’
I had forgotten the rowing boat had a name and hoped I had secured her properly. Nothing with a name like that deserved to bump into one of the mines both sides were sowing like grain over the oceans to reap their grim harvests.
The rain started up again but more heavily as I trudged up the open vista that led past the summer house and across the lawn to White Lodge, the welcome of true friends, dry towels, a thick, itchy dressing gown, a welcome mug of hot sweet coffee and a very welcome very large tot of brandy.
‘Now tell her off,’ Greta urged, not for the first time, and Tubby proceeded to do so. He was a forceful man but, worse than that, he made sense.
‘I will get it seen to,’ I promised and I meant it – just as soon as I could – but it felt a bit better after they had bathed it and dressed it and he had given me a draught of something that I shouldn’t really have had after alcohol. The tree trunk was only mildly less comfortable than the bed they gave me and I knew I would toss and turn all night, but the next thing I saw was sunlight coming into the room with Greta bringing me a mug of tea and telling me I was to stay in bed, and it was only after I had marched across the lawn in Tubby’s dressing gown with no shoes on that she could be persuaded to give me back my uniform.
March Middleton once told me she would retire the day all the criminals did. I would have my operation as soon as I caught the so-called Suffolk Vampire.
56
THE LAZINESS OF EDDIES
It was a lovely clear morning. The water was still and steaming lightly. Two white swans sailed snootily by, five cygnets in their wake, grey-brown and fluffy, already as big as their parents. A water rat splashed in from the bank. Carmelo used to trap them, convinced that they ate eggs and chicks, until I found a book to confirm they were voles and vegetarian.
The captain had taken a walk into town – a rare excursion for him but he had to collect his identity card – and I was setting up my easel, something I hadn’t done for a long time, to do my Suffolk’s-answer-to-Monet routine when the launch came. It was not often the coastguard came this far up the estuary unless they were checking a report of suspicious activity. The boat edged carefully along – there were a few submerged sandbanks in the area of Brindle Bar – a watcher pushing the prow away from an obstruction with a quant pole.
‘Morning, ma’am,’ the coastguardsman called from behind the wheel. He was well protected against the elements in his yellow oilskin coat with matching sou’wester. ‘Lookin’ for an Inspector Church.’
‘You have found her,’ I told him and he nodded his shaggy head.
‘Thought so.’ He flapped his left sleeve, which was fuller than mine. ‘Bu’ I’ve be told to put you a question to make doubly sure.’ He rooted and tapped around inside his outer clothing like he was searching for a flea before bringing out a twice-folded sheet of paper. ‘Here it is. I’ve been told to read it exact.’ He unfolded the paper. ‘Dunno wha’ ih do mean though.’ He cleared his throat. ‘What did Molly say when she told you about the’ – he brought the message closer to his eyes – ‘in-vis-ual elephant?… whatever tha’ mean. You have
to say ih exact.’
‘Oh, Miss Betsy, if I hadntn’t not seen it with my own eyes I wouldntn’t not have disbelieved it,’ I yelled, much to the surprise of an otter taking an early dip.
The coastguardsman was mouthing the written words as I said them. ‘Is thah some secret code?’
‘No, it’s just Miss Middleton’s old maid.’
‘Is that safe to tie up on?’ He pointed to the small wooden jetty Stanislaw Stanislavski, the previous occupant of our island, had constructed forty years ago, driving oak beams into the river bed.
‘I only know it’s strong enough to stand on,’ I replied, which was as helpful as I could be. Nothing bigger than a rowing boat had moored on Brindle Bar in my time there. ‘But you’re welcome to try.’
I walked to the end, the water waking up in lazy eddies around the piles, and the bowhook (I think he was called) threw me a rope (or was it a cable or a line?). The captain would be disappointed in me, I thought, as I looped whatever it was over the mooring post, hurrying back before they put the structure to the test. The boat edged in, the reeds bending and snapping under it, and I felt a non-proprietorial pride in seeing our pier stand firm.
‘Dint think this place was lived in, I dint.’ The coastguardsman heaved himself up. There were three others on deck now.
‘The owner tends to keep himself to himself.’ I stepped aside to allow him onto land. ‘How can I help?’
‘We’ve goh some records for you, we do.’ He looked over my shoulder at Cressida, who made his boat look very insignificant even if she couldn’t float. ‘Ih was the only way Miss Middleton could think of getting them to you. Lord knows we owe her a favour or two from over the years.’
‘We usually get deliveries sent to the local pub,’ I told him, feeling a bit guilty at his wasted journey.
He guffawed like I was a very good music hall turn. ‘Not like this you don’t.’ He called back over his shoulder. ‘OK men, this do be ih.’
One of the men lifted a hatch and climbed down and a minute later a tea chest rose through the opening. His companions heaved it out.
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire Page 21
