Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire (A Betty Church Mystery Book 1) Page 3

  ‘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?’

  ‘I didn’t do it by myself,’ she protested. It was obvious she had been crying.

  She was a petite strawberry blonde in a pretty, flowery skirt, which made my more demure light-brown dress look positively dowdy.

  The man pushed her back against the wall with a hand to her throat. ‘Just get rid of it.’

  ‘I can’t.’ She struggled for breath. ‘I don’t want to.’

  There was something rattish in his face, pointed with long front teeth over a receded chin, but presumably she had seen something in him – possibly his easy charm.

  ‘Do it.’ He was almost lifting her off her feet in their new two-tone blue shoes and it quickly became my business. ‘Why do my bitches always get in the club?’

  The girl started to choke.

  ‘All?’ she managed but I didn’t like the colour of her at all.

  I hurried over. ‘Please let go of her, sir.’

  ‘Sod off.’ He didn’t take his eyes off the girl and I could see her neck blanching under the pressure. He had a black death’s head signet ring on his left little finger. I took hold of that finger and prised it back.

  ‘What the fuck?’ He let go and the girl gulped for air.

  ‘You can attack me when I let go.’ I bent the finger back some more and he doubled up with a gasp. ‘But, if you do, the pain you are experiencing now will be nothing compared to what I am capable of inflicting.’ I was not sure this was true. He was skinny and I was taller than him. But I knew from experience that little men fight harder and dirtier – they have had to learn to – and I didn’t have the authority of my uniform to protect me. ‘Are you going to be good?’ I applied a little more pressure.

  ‘OK. OK.’ He was almost squealing now.

  I pushed him before I let go and he stumbled backwards, cradling his hand. His hat fell backwards onto the pavement at his feet and I was half-tempted to toss a penny into it.

  ‘Bitch,’ he spat – which was probably his opinion of all women – then added, rather philosophically, I thought, ‘There should be some kind of a tablet to stop stupid tarts getting up the duff.’

  ‘There is,’ I told him. ‘It’s called cyanide and you give it to the man. Come on.’ I put an arm round the girl’s shoulder, steeling myself to turn my back. After six paces I took out my make-up compact to look in the mirror. The man was turning away.

  ‘I only wanted him to do the right thing,’ the girl wailed.

  ‘The right thing for him to do would be to take that tablet,’ I told her. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Freddy Smart. You’re lucky he didn’t razor you.’

  ‘From the Smart Gang?’

  I knew them of old. Freddy’s father ran what amounted to a protection racket, amongst other activities, after the Great War but I thought they had been driven away.

  ‘I always knew he was violent’ – the girl massaged her neck – ‘but it seemed exciting until he turned on me.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Millicent.’

  I had suffered greatly at the hands of a Sister Millicent but I could hardly blame this girl for that.

  ‘Millicent who?’

  ‘Smith. Why?’

  We reached the end of the road.

  ‘Stay away from him, Millicent. If he gives you any trouble, contact the police and ask for Inspector Church.’

  She rubbed her throat. ‘Will he help?’

  ‘Yes I will,’ I promised and continued on my way towards Highroad West.

  That Greek man, I remembered as I passed a house where the next Benny Goodman was practising scales on his clarinet, was Sisyphus.

  6

  THE BUTTERFLY, THE BAR AND THE BODY

  Sackwater Central Police Station was its only police station but they liked to sound like they were in the hub of things. It was a nice old red-brick two-storey building when I first knew it, but now the long once-white sash windows were so far off-white that they might have been smeared with butter, while the central blue-painted door looked like it had withstood a raid by its own officers but only just. The whole building was set back behind a paved area that was turning into a rather fine bowling green.

  I took a deep breath, tidied my hair under my brown tilt hat and went in.

  The lobby was dark, with all the solid wood shutters closed, except a small frosted rectangular pane of glass at the side, and with no lights on, it took a minute for my eyes to make out anything much. The place was deserted – not an officer to be seen at the desk nor a suspect fidgeting on one of the three benches arranged in rows facing it like backless pews before a pulpit.

  The walls – as far as I could judge with the sun streaming in from behind me – were daubed in something like curdled coffee and the floor covered in worn umber lino, coming to a peak in the middle where the edges of two rolls met.

  A butterfly escaped over my shoulder.

  ‘Hello,’ I called quietly. It seemed disrespectful to disturb the stillness and I still remembered the first time I had gone in there to be given a ticking-off for stealing a helmet, although I was only trying it on for size.

  The butterfly flew back in.

  I went to the desk. It was one of those tall public bar-type structures fronting a lower work surface. There was a door ajar behind and a passageway either side of the desk leading to the back of the building.

  I leaned over to check the register and it was then and there that I saw the corpse.

  7

  SCARECROWS AND THE HURDY-GURDY MAN

  Before me was the body of a man, well into his sixties I judged, slumped in the spindle-backed chair. By the look of him and the smell of decomposition, he had died some days ago. His skin was grey and had sunk beneath his cheekbones. His head had fallen back, with his jaw hanging down to reveal the stumps of what must have been lower teeth.

  He had been dressed – in a hurry it appeared – in an old police sergeant’s uniform but it was obviously not his: it hung so loosely on that wasted frame, and no real effort had been made to get the shirt on properly or do up the tie.

  March Middleton once told me that one should be more afraid of the living than the dead but I think I would have preferred to be with the living at that particular moment.

  There was a green coolie shade hanging on a brown plaited wire from the ceiling above the dead man. I reached over and, brushing the butterfly aside, pulled the short cord. The light clicked on.

  ‘Bwuff.’ The dead man opened his eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ He struggled to sit almost upright, screwed and unscrewed his eyes and regarded me blearily. ‘Can’t you see we’re closed?’

  ‘I can’t because you aren’t,’ I replied, trying to pretend that my heart hadn’t almost exploded out of my ribcage.

  ‘Eh?’ He decoked his throat.

  ‘Inspector Church,’ I announced.

  The not-as-dead-as-I-thought dead man set about evacuating his chest, a long but productive process.

  ‘He int come yet,’ he rasped at last, still looking like he should have been given a decent burial.

  ‘Inspector Church is here,’ I assured him, ‘only he is a she and that she is me.’

  He spat something into a balled-up handkerchief. ‘Eh?’

  I dealt out my warrant card like a poker player showing the winning ace and the undead man wheezed. He scooped the card up in a poorly preserved hand and held it through the murk to the light over his head.

  The sergeant – I was coming to accept that was what he was – scratched the remnants of what was probably a good head of hair when he was alive, but now looked like the undertaker had gummed on some sweepings in a hurry. The flattened tufts pointed in random directions with quite large gaps between them and ranged from old straw to dirty old straw in colour. ‘Looks real,’ he conceded.

  ‘It is,’ I assured him, with feeling, for no man coul
d ever know how hard I had earned it.

  The sergeant leaned back and I was not sure if it was him or his chair that creaked so noisily.

  ‘Well, booger me,’ he breathed wonderingly.

  ‘Watch your tongue,’ I scolded, though I had heard and often spoken worse myself.

  ‘No wha’ I mean.’ The sergeant stretched his scrawny neck in an oversized collar like a tortoise trying to get out of its shell. ‘I int never espied a woman policeman ’fore now.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ I told him. ‘Not in Suffolk anyway. I’m the first… of many, I hope.’

  ‘Lor’.’ He ran four fingers under his oversized collar. ‘Give us a chance to get over you first.’

  ‘Oh you’ll never do that,’ I assured him, hoping I didn’t sound suggestive.

  ‘And you a n’inspector also,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Whatever will they come up with next?’

  ‘The twentieth century could be arriving any day now,’ I warned, adding, before he got too cosy with the idea of me, ‘Is that how you greet a superior officer here?’

  The sergeant closed his mouth as if the hinges were rusty, scrambled to his feet – it seemed a miracle that he could – and saluted. I had had a sloppier salute once but that was from a hurdy-gurdy man’s monkey. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ I corrected him and raised my voice. ‘Tuck your shirt in, sergeant, and straighten that tie. You look ragged enough to scare a scarecrow.’ My one-time intended father-in-law had told me how his first mate spoke to ratings and it was coming in handy now.

  ‘Yes, madam.’ I let that one pass while he made a hurried attempt to plug more shirt into his loose-fitting trousers, but the more he tamped in one side, the more it spilled out of the other.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Frank Briggs, madam.’ The sergeant started another salute but changed his mind. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘It’s pronounced mam not marm,’ I told him with a growing suspicion that I was wasting my breath. ‘And you would be wise to remember that the next time you meet the queen.’

  ‘Mam,’ he mouthed sceptically. ‘But she be better not comin’ tonight. I do have got a darts match on at the Unicorn.’

  ‘What do the others call you?’ I asked. ‘To your face, I mean.’

  ‘Waaal’ – he chewed his cheek – ‘the boys do call me Dusty.’

  I knew from being raised there that in Suffolk a boy is anything from one day to one hundred years old and not necessarily male.

  ‘Shouldn’t it be Dusty Miller?’ I asked.

  The sergeant looked wounded. ‘Can’t help my surname,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I just thought something like Brigsy would be more normal.’

  ‘I never though’ o’ tha’.’ Briggs chewed the word over. ‘But I do believe I like it.’ He scratched his ear. ‘Brigsy.’ He swallowed and digested the name. ‘Clever.’ He licked his pale-grey lips.

  There was a sooty smudge on Briggs’s lip and I was about to tell him to wipe it off when I realised it was supposed to be a moustache. There are two kinds of police regulations – the ones that are written down and the ones that everyone obeys. In the second category is the rule that every sergeant shall have a moustache, the bigger and bristlier the better. It is not a rule that I ever adhered to but I have known a couple of women sergeants make more valiant attempts than Sergeant Brigsy Briggs had.

  ‘I am to report to a Superintendent Vesty.’ I broke our reveries.

  ‘The supernintendent? Oh he don’t be coming in much these day.’

  ‘Why not?’ I eyed this shambles of a Lazarus in despair.

  Sergeant Briggs shrugged. ‘Not much call to, I s’pose, since they do move most on us all up to Ainnnglethorpe. They go and goh a new station there.’

  ‘Is anybody else here?’ I looked about. Were they all going to jump out shouting Surprise? Unlikely since I wasn’t expected yet and the average constable wasn’t mature enough to behave like a three-year-old.

  ‘Wellll,’ Brigsy drawled. ‘Inspector Sharkey was but he int now.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  The sergeant wrinkled his nose. ‘Like his name, I suppose.’

  Not to be left out, I wrinkled my nose too. ‘Why is there a smell of rotting meat in here?’

  Brigsy snuffled like an old bloodhound trying to track itself. ‘Tha’ll be Constable Walker’s beef-paste sandwich. He do drop it down the back of the filin’ cabinet one week or two back.’

  There was a jemmy hanging on the wall above that cabinet.

  ‘Tell him to undrop it,’ I ordered. ‘I want to see that sandwich on my desk first thing in the morning.’ I wished I hadn’t said that last bit but it was too late. Superior officers can say a lot of things but they can’t unsay any of them. It looks weak, and you may be weak, but you must never look it. ‘Where is my office anyway?’

  Briggs motioned over his shoulder. ‘Tha’ room at the back there behind me, tha’ do be the back room.’ He pointed down a whitewashed corridor to his left. ‘The cells and interview rooms do be down there. Tha’ corridor’ – his right arm swung out, finger crooked like an Old Testament prophet – ‘do lead to four pair plus one offices. The end one belong to Supernintendent Vesty for it overlook the garden it do. He do like to tend his roses but only when he do be here.’

  ‘Well, he can’t when he isn’t,’ I reasoned and the sergeant put on some horn-rimmed spectacles, big and square, like the sort of things small boys buy in Joe’s Joke Shop to pretend they have X-ray eyes.

  ‘I dunno ’bout tha’,’ Brigsy decided at last, wiping his glasses on his shirt pocket to look at me again. ‘What happened to your arm?’ Then, remembering his place, tacked on, ‘If I might ask.’

  He might and he had and I was used to it by now. ‘A crocodile got it,’ I told him, ‘in Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘Well, I’m blowed,’ Brigsy blowed. ‘Do they have them in the foun’ains?’

  ‘Not now.’ I repinned the sleeve to tidy it up. ‘I shot it.’

  ‘Well, booger me.’

  ‘I shall not be doing that.’

  ‘Oh, no, I dint mean…’ Sergeant Briggs straightened himself up. He still didn’t look good but he didn’t look nearly so bad as when he was dead. ‘Like a cup of tea, madam?’ he asked with a course-you-would crinkling round the eyes and it was then I knew that he and I might possibly jog along.

  8

  POOKY AND THE SPITFIRES

  ‘Oh Betty,’ my mother greeted me as I deposited my cases. ‘When you told us you were coming home, I hoped it meant you were going to get a proper job.’

  My mother was nearly as tall as me – or would be, if she wasn’t always hunched. Perhaps she was weighed down by her overly ample bosom or by living with her husband. Her hair was wiry in texture and colour and forced back in an Alice band like a prematurely aged head girl.

  The door opened and a groggy man staggered across the hall, blood dripping down his chin.

  ‘Bettyboo,’ my father greeted me as always, though I wished, as always, that he wouldn’t. He glanced at the man. ‘Just take a seat back in the waiting room, Mr Freeman. Keep biting on that pack.’

  My father was several inches shorter than both of us but made up for it in girth. He claimed to be five feet seven but I would have given him five five plus a bit at most. His features always reminded me of an unfinished clay model: not clearly defined, still dented by the artist’s thumb in places.

  ‘Oh he has dribbled on my nice clean floor,’ my mother wailed. It was a nice floor – a chessboard of Victorian tiles that I could remember roller-skating on – but it was a long time since it had been clean. Cleaning, after all, was our maid Pooky’s job, but Pooky had gone off to make Spitfires. We could be needing them soon.

  The cocktail of aromas permeating from the surgery was as unmistakeable as it was unpleasant – nitrous oxide, drill-burned dentine and antiseptic – but these were the smells I would always associate with my childhood home.

  I g
lanced at the empty chairs in the waiting room. ‘Having a quiet day?’ I asked. He had been having a lot of those lately.

  ‘Hamish Peatrie hasn’t turned up,’ he grumbled. ‘That’s twice in a row now.’

  ‘That’s not like him,’ I commented, for I had known him all my life. He owned a junk shop in town.

  ‘Nobody is like anything these days,’ my mother mused sagely. ‘Oh’ – the purpose of my luggage occurred to her. ‘Are you expecting to stay?’

  ‘Well, of course I am.’

  ‘You’ll have to share,’ my father warned. He did like his little joke – even if nobody else did – every time I visited. ‘No really, I mean it this time. We’ve got a dozen evacuees from London arriving on the ferry tomorrow.’

  ‘But evacuations haven’t started yet,’ I objected, trying not to look at the fluted white pedestal, empty since I had broken the matching urn twenty-eight years ago. It had been left to serve no purpose other than to remind me of my guilt. ‘Unless war has been declared while I walked up the road.’

  ‘We’ve been chosen for a rehearsal,’ my mother declared as proudly as if they had been invited to a royal garden party.

  ‘Have you any idea what twelve East End kids will be like?’ I asked because I had a very good idea indeed.

  ‘Oh I expect they’ll be a bit rough around the edges.’ My father waved airily. ‘Probably have to teach them how to hold a knife and fork properly.’

  ‘Believe me,’ I warned, ‘they will know exactly how to hold their knives.’

  ‘Also we get seven shillings and sixpence each.’ My mother almost skipped. ‘That’s seven pounds six shillings a week.’

  ‘Eight pounds five shillings,’ my father corrected her.

  ‘Four pounds ten shillings,’ I corrected them both.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ my mother assured me. ‘Daddy worked it out with a pencil on his headed notepaper.’ Silly me. You can’t get anything wrong on Daddy’s headed notepaper. I picked up my cases. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to meet the superintendent.’