Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire Read online

  ‘Well, don’t expect to be mollycoddled because of your sex,’ Sharkey warned.

  ‘I won’t if you won’t,’ I promised and, looking into those jaundiced, capillaried eyes, I wondered which of us hated the other more.

  *

  ‘Oh Betty,’ my mother wailed when I called in on Felicity House the following week with some fresh eggs courtesy of the captain, who had been shown precious little courtesy by my parents. He had given them eggs and a pair of rabbits in the past without a word of thanks. ‘They’re horrible. Why didn’t you warn us?’

  ‘I tried.’

  ‘They leave messages,’ she told me.

  ‘How romantic.’

  ‘No, they poo-poo,’ she explained tearfully.

  ‘They act dismissively?’ I asked innocently. After all, these were the children I had been evicted for.

  ‘They spend tuppences.’

  ‘I didn’t think they had any money.’

  ‘They are not house-trained,’ my mother quivered but I had guessed that much by the aromas that had greeted me the moment I arrived. They even overpowered the olfactory treats from the surgery.

  My father, hearing voices, came into the hall.

  ‘I blame the police,’ he told me. ‘In my day, if—’

  ‘You scrumped an apple you got a clip round the ear,’ I recited to the accompaniment of sobs from the surgery. I stuck my head in and saw a lady bent over the spittoon. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course she’s all right.’ My father leaned sideways. ‘For goodness’ sake, woman,’ he called through the open door, ‘where would I be if everybody made all that fuss every time I hurt them?’

  Exactly where you are now, I thought. I had seen the empty waiting room and the almost empty appointment book many times over the last few years. ‘Have you ever thought about trying to be kind to them?’ I asked softly.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped. ‘I’m a dentist.’

  The woman seemed to be choking but my father was telling my mother that she needed to get a cleaner and my mother was telling him to find her one and I was just about to go into the surgery when a crash came from upstairs and a young voice was yelling something that sounded like cuff but probably wasn’t.

  ‘You little shits,’ my father raged. ‘I’ll have every stinking tooth out of your festering heads if I hear another peek.’

  ‘Peek,’ a small voice came back defiantly, followed by the sound of breaking glass.

  ‘Bless,’ I said tolerantly and fled before I was forced to make an arrest.

  12

  THE DIETRICH DAYS

  Everybody else had gone, most home, leaving Walker to patrol the town. We had been promised (or threatened with) reinforcements but he was all we needed really. On a normal night Sackwater was as quiet as a grave. Thursday nights were even quieter. Most people had spent their spare cash before payday and, when the pubs were peaceful, so were the streets.

  Women officers were not allowed to patrol at night. It would have been beneath my station anyway, but I missed going on the beat in the daytime. It was when I actually got to meet the public I was supposed to be protecting. So, whenever the chance arose, I would do my unofficial rounds, popping into shops and cafés to chat to their owners and customers, getting my face known, building – I hoped – some trust.

  There was nothing in the rulebook to say that I couldn’t do paperwork at night and, with the threat of war, this had multiplied dramatically. There was talk of registering every person in the kingdom and issuing them with identity cards, and we would be expected to check that people were carrying them. It appeared that, if we had to fight for our freedoms, we must be prepared to surrender them first.

  We had seen the power of the Luftwaffe in Spain and apparently our best defence would be to hide from them in the dark. Nobody knew if it was really possible to black out an entire town and so the government decided to have a test run and, if there are dud prizes to be had, Sackwater has always excelled in winning them. We had been at it a week now and were already sick of it.

  After Brigsy had gone home, I locked up, turned out the light in the lobby and went back to my office, leaving the door open so I could hear if any of the men returned or the phone rang. It was a good-sized room but before I had even investigated a crime, I was running out of working space with all the files the government had given me. I settled behind my standard metal desk with a mug of tea, plonked my feet on a pulled-out lower drawer and opened the first pamphlet. What to do in the Event of an Air Raid looked promising but the bureaucrats of Whitehall could make Armageddon as interesting as a muddy puddle. My eyes were closing and I needed a nicotine boost to help me stay awake. I was just sowing a cigarette paper with a row of Amber Leaf when the front door handle rattled and there was a knock.

  Several things bothered me: it was late – the blackout boards were in place with the Closed sign up – and also most people knock before they rattle. Not vice versa.

  This person was knocking and rattling simultaneously now and then, for good measure, shouting, ‘Hello? Is anybody there?’ It was a woman.

  ‘Hang on.’ I extracted my feet, which had managed to wedge themselves in the drawer, which had managed to half-close itself, and marched into the hall.

  ‘Is this an emergency?’ I called through the closed door. It had better be but I hoped it wasn’t. We were overstretched enough as it was.

  The letter flap hinged up. ‘Is that Superintendent Vesty?’

  People have often complimented me on my voice. They say it is quite deep and smoky. The depth is my grandfather’s fault; he had voice to spare and gave me some of his. The smokiness is my own work with the assistance of Gallagher’s rolling tobacco. A man at a bus stop in Bury St Edmunds once swore he had met Marlene Dietrich and I spoke just like a young her without the accent. Somebody else said I sounded like Greta Garbo. Nobody had ever mistaken me for a man before, though I sometimes wished they would.

  I nearly yelled No, go away but it would be more satisfying, I decided, to confront the visitor with her own stupidity. Besides, it might be urgent. ‘Hold on.’

  I should have put the chain on – I’m always telling members of the public that – but, like most of us, I am much better at dispensing wisdom than acting upon it. I pulled the top bolt back, turned the key in the lock and was about to open up when the handle clacked down and the door flew open and a dark shape hurtled into the room.

  13

  THE INTEGRITY OF MANDIBLES

  ‘BLOODY HELL!’ I stumbled backwards.

  ‘Crikey!’ The woman sprawled on the floor.

  ‘Crikey?’ I cradled my nose. ‘Nobody says crikey outside a children’s story.’

  ‘I do.’ The woman flopped about a bit and got onto one elbow like a picnicker and I made a memo to have a word with the cleaner, if she ever turned up. Perhaps she had gone to make Spits too. The caller’s mackintosh sleeve was decorated with dark-grey dust and light-grey ash.

  ‘What the hell were you doing?’

  ‘The man said to come in.’

  ‘What man?’ I wiggled my nose gingerly and thought I felt it click. ‘There is no man. Anyway, I told you to wait.’

  ‘It sounded like come in.’ She stuck out a grubby hand. ‘Give me a paw. Oh, you have only got one.’

  ‘Really?’ I checked myself.

  ‘I would have thought you would have noticed that.’ Her fiery red hair had not benefited from her tumble but it looked like it had made up its mind to be naughty a long time ago and I doubted it ever behaved whatever she did to punish it. ‘Oh but I expect that was a joke. I’m not very good at those.’ She pointed in case I had forgotten the topic of conversation. ‘How did you lose it?’

  ‘I lent it to a friend who never gave it back.’

  ‘Just like my copy of Fenula the Fluffy Kitten.’ My visitor nodded her head, her hair wobbling wildly. ‘It took me years to get it back. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, as Daddy always says.’
/>
  I touched my face. ‘You’ve broken my nose.’ I held out my hand and she scrambled up, using me for handholds like I was a crevasse she had fallen down.

  The newcomer stood on tiptoe and put her face close to mine. ‘It is not bleeding.’ She examined her coat. ‘Your floor is filthy as a feather.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to lie on it. Anyway’ – I wiggled my jaw experimentally – ‘even if you did think I said to come in, I didn’t say to break the door down.’

  ‘I thought it was stuck.’ She smeared the dirt with her hand. ‘Why are you doing that with your mandible?’

  ‘To see if it’s fractured.’

  ‘It is not. Oh, you’re a policewoman as well.’ She still had hold of my hand.

  ‘An inspector.’ I tapped my sleeve.

  ‘Lummy.’

  ‘As well as what?’

  ‘Me.’ The newly alleged WPC performed an elaborate salute. ‘Dodo Chivers, woman police constable, reporting for duty, ma’am.’

  ‘You’re not due until next week.’

  She was a very small girl, short and delicately constructed.

  ‘This is next week,’ she reasoned and reached inside her coat to show me a folded letter.

  ‘Temporary accommodation has been found for you with Mr Harold Church at Felicity House, 2 Cormorant Road, Sackwater. You are to report to Sackwater Central Police Station on the first proximo,’ I read aloud and handed the letter back. ‘This is still August.’

  ‘The twenty-fourth,’ Dodo Chivers agreed. ‘But proximo means immediately. Zorro says it in The Bold Caballero.’ She made a rapier flourish.

  ‘You’re probably thinking of pronto.’

  ‘No, his name was Zorro. I have seen the film.’

  ‘Pronto means now or quickly. Proximo means next month,’ I explained patiently. ‘You’re a week early.’

  ‘Oh.’ Housewives would be thrilled if their whites came out of the wash with Dodo Chivers’ complexion. There was not a blemish to be seen unless you counted one tiny freckle on her right cheek, which I didn’t because it only served to emphasise her purity. ‘But oh.’ Dodo had big violet eyes like prize-winning pansies and they looked like they were going to start spilling.

  ‘Have you come far?’

  ‘One hundred and twenty-eight miles.’ Dodo pointed towards the sea.

  ‘Would you like to be more specific?’

  ‘One hundred and twenty-eight and one-quarter miles according to Daddy’s Ordnance Survey map. We measured it together in his study with a little wheel on a little stick.’

  ‘Well, you can’t go back tonight.’

  ‘I was not thinking of it.’ She wrinkled her small Grecian nose.

  ‘Where’s your luggage?’

  Dodo Chivers clapped a hand over her mouth.

  ‘On the doorstep.’

  ‘Then you had better bring it in,’ I said wearily. ‘Welcome to Sackwater, Constable Chivers. I’m Inspector Church.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence,’ she mulled.

  ‘Mr Church is my father,’ I said.

  ‘Does that mean we’ll be living together and shall we be like sisters?’ Dodo jiggled about.

  ‘No and no,’ I told her and thought What the hell? My parents had no room for me but they can accommodate my constable.

  *

  ‘Well, they took our refugees away when they decided this could be an invasion area,’ my father explained.

  ‘Good ribbons to them,’ my mother said. ‘They were dirty and smelly and the language! It was worse than having you home.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ I pouted.

  How do parents do that – turn the most mature of us back into sulky teenagers?

  ‘But they were,’ my mother insisted. ‘Much much worse.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want to be a yardstick for bad behaviour.’

  ‘Then don’t behave badly,’ my mother advised so cheerfully that I would have stamped off to my room, if I had one.

  ‘Anyway, the rent will come in handy since they opened,’ my father added darkly.

  They were the two new dentists at Bradley Court who had poached many of his patients with their cut rates, shiny new anaesthetic equipment and – most damagingly of all – their pleasant chairside manners.

  ‘I would have contributed for my upkeep.’ This was worse than when they gave my tricycle to Duncan next door as a reward for his dad repairing it.

  ‘Oh but I’m sure you’ll be much more comfortable in that lovely boat.’ My mother put a hand to my hair, possibly planning to put it back in plaits, but I pulled away, feeling younger by the minute. ‘It looked so much nicer brown.’

  ‘It was never brown.’ I felt about twelve now.

  ‘Oh this is super-lovely,’ Dodo called down from my bedroom and the next thing I knew I was six, running away from home on my scooter because Mummy wouldn’t let me have poached eggs for dinner.

  14

  THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

  I cycled as far as I could but none of us had any idea how black a blackout could be until we were obliged to try it on a moonless, starless night. I had a lamp on the front forks of course but almost all the glass was taped over according to the regulations so that it would take a very alert driver to spot its glimmer as he struggled along with his masked headlights, and it did nothing at all to light my way. There had been several crashes already and a number of pedestrians mowed down, one baker’s boy fatally. So far we were killing more of each other than the Führer had shown any signs of intending to.

  It was after a truck had come straight at me on the wrong side of Pelican Road and I had had to steer into a hawthorn bush that I decided it would be wiser to dismount and walk. I was just disentangling myself when a dark shape flew out. You get quite used to that in the blackout. After all, everything is a dark shape and some of those things have to move. This thing, however, was screaming and running, weaving towards me.

  My job entitled me to carry a proper torch, so I did, but there were strict instructions about limiting its use to emergencies. On the first night of the rehearsal a verger was trying to apprehend three boys stealing lead from St John’s Church when his waving beam was taken as a signal to our prospective enemy. The next thing he knew, he was hauled off by two ARP wardens to spend a night being interrogated while the boys finished their work at their leisure. Had nobody told the wardens we were still at peace?

  I decided to risk it. If war came and the Luftwaffe could see my little torch from ten thousand feet and manage to land a bomb on me we might as well have surrendered before hostilities began. I clicked it on and, shocked by the sudden glare – the beam of a torch in the pitch-dark cuts through it like a searchlight – the shape stopped dead and shielded its eyes. I ran the beam quickly up and down, enough to ascertain that the it was a she, then up the street to check that nobody was in pursuit and clicked the light out. With impeccable timing the clouds parted just enough to let a drizzle of moonlight through.

  I leaned my bike against the bush and put out my arm in case the woman decided to run off again.

  ‘I am a police officer,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘Thank God. I have been attacked… inshulted by seep.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I guided her onto the pavement.

  ‘Abooshed.’ She waved her hands wildly.

  ‘Ambushed?’

  Her fingers plucked the word she wanted from the air but it must have been damaged in the process. ‘Abloosed.’

  ‘Do you mean abused?’ I leaned towards her and she did not smell of drink. ‘Verbally or physically?’

  There was blood trickling from under her hairline down her forehead, and she had bruising around both eyes. If she had been wearing a hat, she wasn’t now.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she wailed. ‘I musht escrape.’

  The woman swayed sideways and I just managed to stop her toppling. She had a moustache too, which Brigsy would have been consumed with envy over, if it hadn’t be
en made of blood.

  ‘You need to see a doctor, miss,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘No, no. I’m…’ But the woman never decided what she was. She put a hand to her lip and stared aghast at the result. ‘You struck me,’ she accused.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘You have been attacked by somebody else or had an accident.’

  ‘I was attacked’ – her eyes became slits – ‘and you, a policemanwoman, stood by and did nothing.’ She smeared blood up her cheek with the backs of her fingers. ‘You egged them on.’

  ‘You’re confused.’ I shepherded her back along the way she had come. ‘Have you been hit on the head?’

  At least she was letting me guide her. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘I need the po-pol-pleece. I need.’ She played statues.

  ‘What is it?’ I kept my arm round her shoulder.

  ‘Look.’ I tried to follow her stare up the road but she was squirming too much. ‘He’s coming.’ The woman struggled to break free but I twisted her about, grabbing her right wrist in an awkward embrace. ‘Save me!’

  The pressure on my stump brought involuntary tears but I managed to hold the wriggling woman long enough to look back up the hill and sure enough there was a man, huge – I could hear him panting now and his footsteps smacking on the paving stones and drawing ever closer – hurtling towards us and waving what looked, glinting in the moonlight, unnervingly like a machete.

  15

  ST JASPAR AND THE SPIES

  I had been attacked before. You couldn’t do my job in London and not be. Officers, good or bad, died heroically or stupidly – the results were the same – at the hands of thieves, murderers or drunks. But I didn’t expect it in Sackwater and I did not want to join that roll of honour.

  I unwrapped myself from the woman and pushed her towards the bush. I didn’t mean her to fall into it but she did. Women police officers didn’t carry truncheons and inspectors of either sex never have. I snatched my bike off the pavement, propped it against myself to make some sort of obstacle and grabbed the pump to at least fend off a blow.