Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire Read online

  ‘More than one,’ I admitted wryly.

  March Middleton lifted her head, the effort seeming to tire her, but those brown eyes were as quick and sharp as ever.

  ‘But you did not come to me.’

  ‘I did not want to trouble you,’ I began hesitatingly and, seeing my godmother so elderly and ailing, I thought it would be unfair to do so now.

  March Middleton coughed quietly, almost as if it comforted her to do so. ‘I was trapped in that room with Mr G blinded and that creature bent on slaughtering us all when—’ My godmother chewed her lips and coughed again.

  ‘Please don’t,’ I whispered, for – though she could not bring herself to publish an account of that terrible day in Grosvenor Square – I had read all the police reports of the events.

  ‘Do you think that whatever you have to tell me can trouble me more than that?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I lowered my head. ‘But I don’t want to add to your worries.’

  ‘Look at me.’ For such a little woman March Middleton carried a great air of authority. I did as I was told and she nodded. ‘Tell me,’ she said just as her maid arrived with tea.

  I lifted the cushion aside for Jenny to put her tray on the table before she sidled round to poke the fire, adding a generous shovel of coal.

  ‘Have you not heard that there may be a war coming?’ March Middleton grumbled at her extravagance with the fuel.

  ‘Indeed I have, Miss,’ Jenny hissed. ‘I have also heard of catching your death of cold.’

  ‘I am warm enough as it is,’ her employer protested. ‘If anything, I am too hot.’

  ‘Probably not.’ March Middleton still clothed herself in the old Victorian style – though she had long abandoned her bustle – with a dress admittedly a very vibrant pink but long enough to cover the ankles, a glimpse of which would have shocked or aroused the men of her generation. I reminded myself that she would have been sixty in the Roaring Twenties – a bit too old to be a flapper.

  ‘Is she?’ The maid fixed me with such a questioning glare that I began to think she was considering swallowing me after all.

  ‘You do feel quite cool,’ I told my godmother.

  ‘Young people are never satisfied unless they are steaming,’ she retorted without any real crabbiness. She peered over. ‘There are no biscuits, not even a digestive. Even you could not have eaten that case the duke sent me yesterday.’

  ‘Doctor’s orders.’ Jenny slid back round the table.

  ‘Does Dr Picaday pay your wages?’ Aunty M enquired tetchily.

  ‘No.’ Jenny straightened peristaltically up. ‘But are you going to come to your inquest to explain that you made me let you die of a chill or eat all the wrong things?’

  ‘Possibly not.’ My godmother coughed and Jenny undulated away, closing the door very quietly, like she was afraid of waking us up. ‘Mr G always said I was too soft-hearted. He would have dismissed her on the spot.’

  ‘I’m not sure she would go even if you did,’ I said.

  Aunty M smiled.

  ‘She frightens me,’ I confessed.

  ‘And all the reporters and sensation-seekers who come to my house.’ Aunty M toyed with the ring on her finger. ‘That is her greatest asset.’

  I stirred the tea. ‘Doesn’t she scare you?’

  I waited to be told of how she had faced homicidal maniacs in dark East End alleys but March Middleton laughed. ‘A little,’ she said.

  ‘Shall I pour?’

  ‘You will but do not dare to try to forbid me the sugar.’ My godmother watched me carry out a task she must have performed – though, no doubt, more expertly – at that same table many thousands of times. ‘Now.’ She took her cup and saucer more steadily than I had expected. ‘Tell me.’

  I took a breath. ‘I know it sounds mad.’

  The surface of her tea trembled into concentric rings and my godmother looked at me sharply. ‘The best ideas often do.’

  ‘But I want to stay on – in the police, I mean, but…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Not a desk job.’

  March Middleton touched her hair. It was grey now but still thick and neatly tied back. ‘I was hoping you would say that.’

  ‘They won’t listen to me. Is there anything you can do?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ My godmother rubbed her thumb and first two fingers together as if she was rolling a cigarette.

  The doorbell rang and I heard footsteps coming along the hallway.

  ‘Jenny must have been listening in,’ Aunty M observed, then, seeing my puzzlement, explained, ‘I heard her dress brush against the bannister, then her footsteps started too loudly as she came back and brushed against it again.’

  ‘We could do with you in the force,’ I said but my godmother shrugged.

  ‘It is just a little trick Mr G taught me’ – she half-smiled – ‘by years of cruelty.’

  I heard the front door open, low voices and it closing. Five more footsteps before Jenny reappeared. ‘Dr Picaday,’ she announced.

  March Middleton grimaced. ‘I hope he is not going to try to inject me again. His needles are like blunt carpentry nails and I bruise so easily these days.’

  ‘I must go.’ I put my chair back in its place. ‘I am tiring you.’

  ‘Life tires me now,’ Aunty M admitted. ‘But you, Betty Church, are a tonic.’

  ‘Thank you, Jenny,’ I said. ‘I’ll be out in a moment.’

  Then when we were alone, my godmother said, ‘Leave it with me, darling. There are still men of influence who have reason to be grateful to me or fear my knowledge and there is no point in having strings if you do not tug them occasionally.’

  I kissed her goodbye.

  ‘Be strong,’ she told me with a hug that nearly had me in her lap. ‘And be brave. There are wolves out there but even wolves fear fire.’

  I kissed her again, this little woman who didn’t seem so little any more.

  *

  A short flabby man with legs that emerged from the folds of his body somewhere around his knees stood in the hall beside the coat hooks, black leather bag in his little pink hand.

  ‘Miss Middleton is very tired,’ I told him.

  ‘She is old,’ he informed me through flaccid lips that reminded me of an edible bivalve. ‘There is no cure for that.’

  I stopped myself from adding except death as I slipped what there was of my arms into my blue gabardine coat. The doctor had a supercilious manner that I didn’t like.

  ‘It’s wonderful what they teach you in medical school.’ I took my hat off the long side table and tried to let myself out, but Jenny had slithered to the door before me and had it open before I had even tilted my hat a little to the left as was the fashion in that damp anxious summer of 1939.

  4

  POISONED CAKE AND THE PUBLIC ENEMY

  March Middleton wrote to me. She had made an appointment with Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary, and, such was the reputation of this woman who had come to London as a penniless orphan from Lancashire, he had called upon her. Hoare promised nothing – he was too seasoned a politician to do that – but he passed my case down to Commander Jack Bond with instructions to give me a fair hearing.

  ‘Play rough and play dirty,’ March Middleton had advised me. So I did. As Bond glowered over a desk the size of a billiard table I mentioned that a certain journalist was very interested in writing a piece about how I had been dismissed for an injury received in the course of my duty.

  ‘Are you trying to blackmail me, Churrch?’ He had an odd accent, top crust with a faintly Scottish tinge.

  ‘Oh no, sir.’ I tried to exude innocent indignation but I’ve never been very good at exuding. ‘If I were trying to blackmail you I would threaten to tell them about you taking me off the Poisoned Raisin Case when I was about to arrest Sally Spinster. How many people died at that wedding?’

  Bond eyed me coolly unaware, I think, that he had snapped the pencil he was toying with.

  ‘Y
ou hail frrom East Angliar.’

  ‘I’ve never denied it.’

  ‘I knew there was something wrong with you.’ He looked at his pencil in surprise, then at me accusingly. ‘Slackwater, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Sackwater.’

  Commander Bond threw the pencil clattering into his wastepaper bin, one half bouncing off the rim onto his nice marble hearth. He picked up his pen. ‘They’ve been whingeing about being understaffed in Suffolk for years – always asking for help from Scorrtland Yard.’

  He scribbled scratchily on a fresh sheet of headed notepaper.

  ‘A tiny problem there, sir,’ I informed him. ‘The East Suffolk Constabulary won’t accept women.’ And I was very glad of that. Sackwater had something in common with Wormwood Scrubs – it was somewhere you tried to escape from and spent the rest of your life hoping never to return to.

  ‘Oh they’ll take any old rrubbish these days.’ Bond signed his note and blotted it. ‘Who knows? You might do some good. They could do with someone to stirr things up a bit, show them which end of a strraw to suck.’

  I didn’t know the answer to that one myself but I had one more bullet left. I took careful aim and fired. ‘Surely that requires somebody senior to a sergeant?’

  ‘I was coming to that,’ the commander assured me smoothly, though it was obvious this was one lump of sugar he’d been hoping to keep in his pocket. ‘There’s prromotion in it forr you, Churrch’ – his voice could have cut through steel – ‘if you go quietly.’ The commander put more feeling into those last four words than James Cagney had into eighty-three minutes of being The Public Enemy.

  ‘Promotion.’ I rolled the word around in my mouth and rather liked the taste of it. There were only three women inspectors in the whole Met that I knew of and one of those was rumoured to be quitting to get married. Also it was better to be a good-sized fish in a stagnant pond than a dead one in the ocean that was our capital city.

  There was nothing to think about so that’s exactly what I did. I cleared my throat. ‘When shall I leave, sir?’

  Commander Bond blotted his letter. ‘Oh no hurrry, no hurrry.’ He folded it. ‘Finish yourr shift.’ He addressed an envelope and glanced up. ‘Goodbye.’ I got up. ‘Just out of interrest,’ he asked as I pushed back my chair, ‘are you left or right handed?’

  I regarded him and then my half-empty sleeve. ‘Do I look like I have a choice?’

  He slid the letter into an envelope without taking his eyes off me. ‘Do I look like I give a damn?’ Bond waved the backs of his fingers to demonstrate that he still had ten to shoo me away with.

  I went back into the ante-office.

  ‘Loveable, isn’t he?’ Mary, Bond’s secretary, swung the return arm on her typewriter.

  ‘Could you do me a favour?’ I asked and, before she could decline, hurried on with, ‘His blotting paper needs changing. Do you think you could do that now?’

  Mary considered the request and smiled – I hadn’t even needed to remind her who got her boyfriend off a petty larceny charge – but then she put a finger to her lips and whispered. ‘It’s not shut properly – faulty catch.’

  I pressed on the handle to open it a little bit more and, very, very carefully, slammed the door.

  ‘Oh.’ Mary jammed two keys on her typewriter. ‘You startled me.’

  ‘Hope I had the same effect on him.’

  But Mary smiled. ‘It would take more than that to leave Commander Bond shaken or stirred.’

  *

  There was no farewell present like Constable Graves had been given and no farewell drink like everybody got, but Sergeant Dover could never let an occasion pass without making a speech.

  ‘I want you to know, Church – and I fink I speak for all of us wivou’ esseption – when I say we never ’ated you’ – he slowed as he searched for the bon mot – ‘personly. In fact,’ – he gathered speed like a rickety cart going over the top of a hill – ‘you’d have been a good bloke, if you hadn’t have been a lady.’

  There was a chorus of ’ear-’ears.

  ‘I’ve tried very hard,’ I assured him, ‘not to be.’

  5

  TEA, TENNIS AND CYANIDE, FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING NAMES

  And so I went back. Nothing much had changed but nothing ever did in the slow death that passed for life in Sackwater.

  Old Mr Bell was still in the left luggage office when I deposited my suitcases. He was old Mr Bell when he used to let me help in there as a child. ‘You’ve done and gone and missed all the excitement, you have.’ He handed me a ticket. ‘Mrs Freeman’s dog go and attack Mrs Darwin’s cat it do and it need three stitches, the dog I mean.’

  That was it? That was all the excitement? That was what I had missed?

  ‘Blimey,’ I breathed. ‘Pass me the smelling salts.’

  Old Mr Bell rootled in a pigeonhole. ‘Hang on,’ he said and handed me a bottle.

  *

  I had time to spare so I ambled about. At least the sun hadn’t forgotten how to shine. High Road East still sloped down towards the sea. Green and Green’s still offered swimming costumes, fishing rods and postcards that made the North Sea look like the Mediterranean in August. The souvenir shop still stocked painted ashtrays made in Stoke, shells from the South Seas and coral from Australia – all the things you need to remind you of your holiday on the Suffolk coast. Mrs Grundy’s rock shop still sold nothing else but that – white spearmint-flavoured sticks painted bright red and run through with letters, the first A so badly printed it looked like Sickwater. The jokes in Joe’s Joke Shop were still coated in dust and still not funny and Howland’s Café still said Open when it was Closed, as it almost always was.

  But those shop windows looked like mock Tudor now, criss-crossed in black tape to stop, it was hoped, shards shattering inwards. There were sandbags stacked outside the council offices as they had been for the flood of 1912, but these were against a different type of deluge. All this for a war Mr Chamberlain was still telling us was not going to happen.

  I nipped into Sammy’s Sweets. It had been going since I was a child and I had spent many an hour with nose pressed to the window, assessing the merits of winter mix or humbugs before breaking into my sixpence pocket money.

  Sammy Sterne still stood behind the counter in his brown apron, short and bald apart from a few dandelion clock wisps floating on top. Behind him was shelf upon shelf of big screw-topped glass jars filled with every shape, colour and flavour of boiled sugar imaginable – enough to keep my father in business for life.

  ‘Betty,’ Sammy greeted me. I had gone in more to say hello to him than buy the produce, but his welcoming grin dropped immediately. ‘I am so sorry, I should call you Sergeant, I think.’ His accent was as heavy as the day he had stepped off the ferry from Hamburg.

  ‘Actually it’s Inspector now,’ I told him, ‘but I’m still Betty in private.’

  The broad smile returned. ‘Are you here on leave?’

  ‘I’m being stationed here,’ I explained and Sammy shook his fingers, blowing on them as if they were burned.

  ‘That will waken them up a bit,’ he chuckled, already weighing out a quarter of aniseed balls and pouring them from the scales bowl into a cone of white paper. I brought out my purse but he refused my coins. ‘A welcome home present.’ He screwed up the end and handed the little parcel over.

  *

  Flags still flew hopefully on poles in front of the Grand Hotel – so many nations, so few of which had ever provided visitors – but the German imperial tricolour had already been removed.

  For a country still at peace there were a lot of military men about, mainly RAF crew from Hadling Heath Aerodrome, nattily dressed in grey-blue – a big step up from the gaggles of fishermen smelling of mackerel. There was a sprinkling of merchant seamen too for Anglethorpe, north of the estuary, still had a small concrete harbour, though rumours had it the navy was going to block the entrance with mines. Clusters of men in army green trudged with dwindling hopes
of finding a pub serving out of hours, especially since the revival of SLAG – originally the Suffolk League Against Gin but now less picky about what they condemned.

  I was greatly encouraged to see the first WAAFs making their way up the street. Perhaps the sight of a woman in a military uniform – other than the Salvation Army, which doesn’t really count – would not be such a curiosity soon.

  The terraced gardens sloped as always down to the promenade, a salty breeze blowing as it must have before the dawn of man. The waves had not stopped stretching and contracting in their pointless labour to scoop and drag the shingle and drop it back in place like the labour of that Greek man who annoyed the gods, whatever his name was. Much of the sand had been washed away and deposited in rival Anglethorpe by a freak storm in 1929 and none of the many storms since then had had the courtesy to return it.

  A delivery boy whizzed past, the basket on the front of his bike overfilled with brown paper parcels tied in white string.

  The burned-out Pier Pavilion still stood but the actual pier was hardly a half of its former self after being struck by lightning in that same wonderful year. Everyone agreed it was a great shame but nobody agreed to pay for its restoration. Now there was talk of demolishing the whole thing in case Hitler wanted a ride on the narrow-gauge railway.

  I had lunch in the Lyons’ Tea House at Mafeking Gardens. The little round tables with starched white cloths had not altered. The ancient waitresses still hovered and hobbled, but so tremulously now that I almost felt I should be waiting on them myself. They were affectionately called nippies but it had been a long time since they had done anything resembling nipping. The wireless was on in the kitchen: Reginald Foort playing ‘Keep Smiling’ on a Wurlitzer.

  I had cod and chips – what else at the seaside? – then walked back up the hill, the long way by Tennyson Road.

  A young man in a light suit that might have been considered snappy in London five years ago was haranguing a girl as I approached. It was none of my business so I listened in.

  ‘Stupid cow,’ he was hissing at her from under his wide-brimmed trilby. ‘What the hell d’you want to go and do something like that for?’