The Custard Corpses: A delicious 1940s mystery (The Erdington Mysteries)

by M J Porter

  “Sam, I know you’re closely tied to this case. But equally, it was over two decades ago. If you don’t want to follow up, I’ll understand, I really will, but I can’t give it to Jones. He couldn’t find a grain of sand on a beach at low tide.”

  Sam grunted. Smythe wasn’t one to share confidences such as this.

  “I appreciate that, but yes, I want to do this. I owe it to the old Chief Inspector.”

  “Good, that’s settled then, and try and keep Jones away from it all. Daft old git will only try and interfere, and he’s lethal enough with a pencil and the sugar jar without him trying to catch a murderer. It would be good if we could catch the bastard and bring some closure for the family. With all that’s going on now, even something as old as this being solved would cheer people. No one should get away with murder. No one.”

  “I’ll let you know how I get on,” Sam assured before opening the door and returning to his desk.

  Not that he immediately contacted the police station in Weston. No, Jones seemed to have realised that something was amiss. He kept casting narrow-eyed glances towards Sam all morning, even as he got on with the tedium of filing and signing reports on anything from petty theft of milk bottles to the more heinous crime of counterfeiting ration books. Sam shook his head. Didn’t these people realise there was a war on and that they should all be acting as one for the greater good? Evidently not.

  Eventually, Jones was called away or went out for his lunch. Sam put down his pencil and made his way to the single telephone at the front desk.

  O’Rourke was on duty, a bright young woman, with her hair tightly braided close to her head, visible beneath the smart hat she wore, whenever anyone walked into the police station. The rest of the time, she kept it close but didn’t wear it. Sam didn’t blame her. With such a hair design, he’d have wanted to show it off as well. He smiled at her as she moved out of his way quickly, her brown eyes intelligent in a chestnut face. He liked what he’d seen of O’Rourke. She was undoubtedly far more sensible than Williams.

  “The Chief Inspector knows about this call, but no one else. I know I can trust you,” Sam commented, and she nodded, her cheeks darkening at the compliment. It was no secret that Jones meddled in everything. It was in everyone’s best interests to keep as much from him as possible. When he’d drunk more than his fill in the local public house, Jones was likely to regale any unfortunate soul with even the most secret details obtained during police work. He’d been hauled over the coals more than once about it, and yet, Jones would never learn, and the complaints would routinely arrive when he said too much and upset the locals.

  “Weston Police, please,” he spoke into the receiver, and in no time at all, he heard the elongated ring of the call being placed. It always surprised him, the telephone. It was so quick and also so impersonal. He much preferred being able to watch the facial expressions of the person with whom he was talking.

  “Weston,” the accent rolled, and Sam almost repeated the word, just to confirm, but he didn’t.

  “This is Chief Inspector Mason, from Erdington Police Station. Do you still have a Chief Inspector Allan there? I’d like to speak to them about an old case.”

  “Allan?” The voice sounded perplexed for a moment.

  “Ah, you mean old Bill. Sorry, he retired seven years ago. He’s living in the countryside now, milking cows or growing grapes. I can’t quite remember.”

  “Is there anyone else who could help me? It’s about the McGovern murder.”

  “McGovern?” The man seemed unaware of the case.

  “Hang on, I’ll get Superintendent Hatly. He might know what you’re talking about.” The receiver's sound being placed down on the desk jolted Sam, and he held the telephone away from his ear, listening to the distant tread of footsteps and people speaking, the words indecipherable over the crackling handset. It seemed to take at least five minutes, but then the receiver was gathered together again.

  “Hatly here. Who is this?”

  “I’m Chief Inspector Mason, from Erdington. I have a few questions about the McGovern case.”

  “Gods man, that’s nearly two decades old. Why would you be asking now?”

  “We have an older case. There might be a connection. Another young boy murdered. Possibly in similar circumstances, but I only have a newspaper cutting from the Weston Mercury to go on.”

  “What, after all this time? Why didn’t you ask before?” The flicker of temper brought a tight smile to Sam’s face. He recognised the feeling all too well.

  “Well.” Couldn’t the Superintendent decipher it for himself? “Your case happened three years after ours. It should really have been the other way round.” A resounding silence greeted his words, and he could hear the other man breathing heavily. Not the most pleasant of sounds, even with the crackling line.

  “I think you should probably come down, take a look at our case notes, bring your own as well. There’s no one left in the department who worked that case, but we’ve lived with the legacy of it. Can you come tomorrow?” There was a flicker of hope, mingled with resignation in the request.

  Sam wasn’t entirely sure if he could make it the following day but then realised that O’Rourke was sliding a train timetable along the chest-high workstation. He noted the details on the cover, smiling at her in thanks because it was the correct timetable for the trains that ran from Birmingham to Weston. He hadn’t even realised they had such information to hand. It was even in date. Quickly, he ran his eyes over the list of times, nodding as he did so.

  “Yes, yes, I think I can do that. I’ll arrive at about 12 pm. Will that be okay with you?”

  “Yes, we’ll send a car to meet the train. It can be a bit of a trek if you don’t know where you’re going.”

  “Until tomorrow then,” Sam agreed and replaced the handset when Hatly said his farewells.

  “Thank you,” he said to O’Rourke, his mind busy mulling over everything he’d learned.

  “Sounds like you’re off on a nice trip,” O’Rourke offered, her words lyrical, no doubt because tomorrow would find her doing what she always did, taking reports of missing items, consoling mothers who’d lost their small children and small children who’d lost their mothers. It wasn’t as though there was a great deal going on in the sleepy settlement.

  The terrible reports of air raids were few and far between now—a welcome change, but one that made the day to day tasks even more tedious. But, better tedium than the horrors of broken homes, businesses, and worst of all, bodies.

  “Maybe. But I’ve never really enjoyed a train ride. It makes me feel a bit ill.”

  “Sit facing forwards,” O’Rourke offered eagerly. “It helps me. My brother can only travel backwards, but I prefer forwards. Not that you can see where you’re going, but watching the scenery slip by in front of you is better than watching it after you’ve gone through it, all mingled with the smoke from the train.” Her words rolled with her accent, the hint of warmth oozing from them. It almost made him shiver, especially when the door whipped open, caught by a stray gust of wind that brought a small trail of wrinkled and brown leaves inside the door.

  “Thanks for the advice. Now, I need to find those case notes.”

  O’Rourke nodded. “Leave it with me. I’ll cross-reference them and bring them to you, discreetly,” she assured. The front door opened again, and Jones walked inside jauntily. His small eyes flickered between O’Rourke and Sam, but he said nothing, even though he must have been curious. He was always inquisitive. And still, he was remarkably ineffective. Sam laughed softly to himself at the thought.

  “Thank you. Now, do you want your lunch, and I’ll stay out here for the next half an hour. It’ll give Jones long enough to forget his questions.”

  “Right you are,” O’Rourke eagerly agreed, a rumbling stomach assuring Sam that he’d done the right thing. He could ponder what he might find tomorrow just as easily on front desk duty as he could sitting at his desk.

  Chapter 4
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  The landscape flashed before his eyes quickly, stray puffs of smoke occasionally obscuring his view, and he felt the familiar unease in his stomach. Still, he had to confess, O’Rourke was right; just changing his position in the carriage was making it less severe than expected.

  He was settled in a carriage. There could have been another three people with him, but he was alone, and he relished the quiet, and the mechanical clanking of the wheels over the train line, the scent of smoke and coal in the air. There was an order in the sound that he could appreciate, like the ticking of a clock.

  In his hand, he held not his old notebook, or indeed his current one, but rather Chief Inspector Fullerton’s notebook. He’d found it in the case files for Robert McFarlane, and rather than bring the bulky file; he carried just the notebook. It contained all the information he felt was relevant. Fullerton had been a fastidious man.

  Not that it was easy reading, or at least, it wasn’t, unless you held the notebook, with its stained and yellowing pages, at a slight angle. Only then did the spiralling scrawl of Fullerton become legible. The man hadn’t so much written, as disgorged all relevant pieces of information in a system that started orderly and quickly became a myriad assortment of random facts and even stranger observations.

  But the information was extremely valuable, and it reminded Sam of just how much he was missing without the steadying presence of Fullerton at his side. The man had been old and tired, a chief inspector for decades, not just years, and yet he’d known his stuff. He’d never failed before, not until the case of young Robert.

  Now, Sam concentrated on the pen drawing that Fullerton had made of the boy’s body. He’d flicked through the black and white crime photographs, the yellow edges speaking of their age, the starkness of those staring eyes seeming to reach out to him over the years since the boy’s death. It had been unsettling. It was easier to look at the drawing to distance himself from the extinguished life. After everything he’d seen and endured in the trenches, still, the splayed body of that boy haunted him.

  While some still woke to hear the guns and the sound of bombs falling, it was the white, marbled face of Robert that had plagued Sam’s dreams for nearly a decade until he’d managed to banish it. But, he was sure that Robert would be back, soon, if this new but old case proved to be at all relevant.

  Sam focused on the drawing of the body Fullerton had sketched in the notebook. It had always felt unnatural, even more so than just any dead body. In death, Robert’s eyes had remained open, his clothes apparently undisturbed, his school uniform seemingly as clean as when he’d first donned it, three days before he’d been found, his cap still on his head.

  Even his long, white sock had been devoid of all stains and had stayed up firmly, close to his knee, his polished shoes showing not so much as a scuff mark. The only mystery had been where his other sock had gone because he wore both shoes. For all that, Sam had thought the corpse looked as though it moved. It was still, and yet not still. It had always perplexed him, and Fullerton had shared his concerns.

  It was the single-most horrific murder scene he’d ever been forced to visit, and not because Robert had been so young. It wasn’t as though he’d not solved other child murders, unfortunately. He’d never understood the desire to kill the coming generation.

  Sam closed his eyes, focused on the memories he had, which didn’t involve looking. The smell of the undergrowth, the richness of the soil on which the body had been placed. The use of the word forced his eyes open. Placed. He didn’t think he’d ever managed to find a name for what he’d seen, but now he felt that was it. His murderer had arranged Robert. Whoever had killed the boy, ostensibly without touching him, although the doctor asserted that he’d been drowned, had been making a statement. The corpse hadn’t been left like that by chance.

  Sam flicked through the notebook again. Had Fullerton realised but never done anything about it?

  Pages and pages of scrawl greeted his eyes. There were names, addresses, some telephone numbers, details of where people had been during the period Robert had been missing, even little maps showing the road layouts of the surrounding area, the school, and the church hall where the body had been found, separated by a quiet road, an expanse of fields stretching out behind it, the idea of space impossible to ignore.

  What had always perplexed Fullerton was the lack of evidence found on or near to the body. They’d searched those fields stretching out behind the church hall; they’d searched the church hall, even closing the road and checking the thick undergrowth on hands and knees, finding all sorts of objects that didn’t need mentioning. People would cast off all kinds of rubbish while walking along. There had been some sweet wrappers, but they’d proven to be nothing more than one of the local children, notorious for discarding his wrappers when he walked to and from school.

  They’d hoped to find some sort of tire tread, or even horses hooves, anything that might have shown where the body had come from because it had quickly become evident that Robert had been murdered somewhere other than beneath the reaching branches of the oak tree. The place had been far too clean for a child to have died there, even without the problem of the lack of water in which a child could drown.

  Surely Robert would have fought? But if so, where was the evidence for it? Even his nails had been clean, a fact that had upset his mother, for she’d been adamant that he’d not cleaned his hands the last morning she’d seen him. She’d sobbed at the news, wondering why Robert had cleaned his nails when he’d never done so for her before.

  The train rumbled to a stop in a shriek of brakes and wheels, distracting Sam from his reverie as it pulled into Bristol. He gathered his things together and changed from the Bristol train to the one heading for Weston. It all went surprisingly well. He’d been concerned there might be a problem, after the delay in Birmingham first thing, when they’d been forced to wait for a freight train to rumble through; of course, it was the priority, not where police inspectors needed to go to solve decades-old cases.

  Sam settled into yet another empty carriage, still thinking of the old case. So much of what had happened to Robert didn’t make sense. Was it possible that he might finally be able to answer the questions? He both hoped it would, even while guilt made him wish that they’d done more to solve the case when it had happened. Perhaps then the other child would have lived.

  Sam found his head dropping back; the early morning started having an effect, so he folded the notebook and placed it in his inner pocket. The number 64 tram had left Erdington High Street while it had still been dark, taking him to Steelhouse Lane, where he’d had to walk to New Street Station. He’d shivered into his thick coat, a slither of worry for the coming harshness of winter—another winter, and who knew what it might bring. Yes, there seemed to have been a let-up in the night raids, no bombs had fallen since April of that year, but he knew better than to think it was all over. Still, he felt he could risk a nap now.

  When he woke, the train was pulling into another station, and blearily, he realised it had arrived at Weston.

  He stepped from the carriage, patting his coat pockets to make sure he had everything he needed, and then slammed the heavy door closed as the station master moved up and down the quiet platform while the engine groaned and huffed. The station master tipped his hat as he ensured all the doors had been correctly closed. Sam joined the small trickle of people making their way towards the exit signs. It was a bright day, with a sharp sea scent in the air, and it invigorated him after the long journey.

  He could have driven, but even the police didn’t have enough petrol to make such a long journey worthy of squandering it all.

  “Chief Inspector?” A young sergeant stepped in front of him, fresh-faced, and with keen eyes, uniform gleaming, skirt reaching well beyond her knees, shoes shiny enough to please even the most pedantic of superintendents.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Sergeant Pat Higham. They sent me to pick you up.” She struck out her hand, and Sam t
ook it, surprised by the wiry strength there, for she was much shorter than him, hair neatly tied back beneath her plain, peaked cap.

  “Thank you.”

  “Not a problem. Come on; the car’s over here.” She directed him to the side of the railway station, where a thin line of cars waited, the black Wolseley prominent at the front, with the white letter proclaiming who owned it. He could feel curious eyes on him, but Higham didn’t seem to notice.

  As she settled behind the huge steering wheel, she grinned at him.

  “They don’t often let me drive this, but I assure you, I know what I’m doing.”

  Sam was yet to be convinced, but he perched in the car easily enough, pleased that the window was open and he was free from the confines of the train carriage and the unsettling motion.

  Abruptly, he was thrust back against his seat, and he gripped for the door handle as the car sprang to life and rushed from the car park. He didn’t need to look at Higham to know a huge smile covered her face. Sam suppressed a grimace. He remembered how much he’d enjoyed being allowed to drive the big old car that had served Erdington when he’d been newly qualified. Back then, it had felt like one of the best perks of his job.

  Now he rarely drove but gave the job to one of his subordinates. Not that he couldn’t have driven if he’d wanted.

  “It’s not far, but it’s tricky to find,” Higham trilled, her eyes flashing from side to side, busy in the mirrors, as she manoeuvred through the slight congestion close to the railway station.

  Sam found himself watching the people on the street as they passed the butcher’s, the baker’s and then the general grocers. It seemed similar to Erdington, although his eyes alighted on the boards proclaiming the news of the day. It was never good. Not anymore.