Also by M.R.C. Kasasian
THE GOWER STREET DETECTIVE
The Mangle Street Murders
The Curse of the House of Foskett
Death Descends on Saturn Villa
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane
Dark Dawn Over Steep House
BETTY CHURCH MYSTERIES
Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire
First published in the UK by Head of Zeus in 2019
Copyright © M.R.C. Kasasian, 2019
The moral right of M.R.C. Kasasian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781788546393
ISBN (XTPB): 9781788546409
ISBN (E): 9781788546386
Design and illustration by Leo Nickolls
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
For
Tiggy, always loved,
and
Betty, sadly missed.
Also by M.R.C. Kasasian
Welcome Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Coffee in the Ice Age
Chapter 2: Mrs Perkins and the Prancing Ponies
Chapter 3: The Dignity of Ostriches in the Promised Land
Chapter 4: The Great Excitement and the Spanish Lady
Chapter 5: Lisa Sand’s Foot and the Colour of Capillaries
Chapter 6: The Return of the Albatross
Chapter 7: The Leather Loaf and the Rubber Stack
Chapter 8: The Wells of Water and Darkness
Chapter 9: Referees and the Piscine Qualities of Desires
Chapter 10: The Patience of Patients and the Wounding of Stones
Chapter 11: The Twelve-Toed Cat and the Parting of Parents
Chapter 12: Stolen Property and the Man from Daffodil Lane
Chapter 13: The Wizard and the Waiter
Chapter 14: Bleak and not so Bleak House
Chapter 15: The Potter and the Turtles
Chapter 16: The Goriness of Hades
Chapter 17: Death on the Tarmac
Chapter 18: Stray Dogs and the Turkish Mosaic
Chapter 19: Blood on the Fireplace, Blood on the Sill, the Creeping Woman and the Lurking Man
Chapter 20: A Brief History of Impalement
Chapter 21: Fred and Ginger and Rex the very Brave Dog
Chapter 22: Death Wears Tweeds
Chapter 23: The Classification of Monsters
Chapter 24: The Queen of the May and Mr Capone
Chapter 25: Prestidigitation and the Provenance of Scars
Chapter 26: The Jackdaw and the Hedgehog
Chapter 27: A Cigarette and one Pipe Problem
Chapter 28: The Twenty-Nine Steps
Chapter 29: Charles Darwin and the Lightness of Lights
Chapter 30: Lyons, a Rabbit and Sheep
Chapter 31: Lot’s Wife and the Rat’s Nest
Chapter 32: The Rules of Association Football and a Flock of Eagles
Chapter 33: The Rightness and Wrongness of Rain
Chapter 34: The Pearl Fisher and Porcine Aromas
Chapter 35: The Skull of a Gull and the Sign of Simeon
Chapter 36: The Turkish Slipper and the Sealing of the Clue
Chapter 37: The Lonely Headmistress and the Ghastly Machines
Chapter 38: The Long line and the Short Drop
Chapter 39: The Foiling of the String Fairy
Chapter 40: The Tanks, the Trap and the Wrong Forceps
Chapter 41: The Need for Norway and more Than Words
Chapter 42: The Fall of Barnaby Mason
Chapter 43: The Special Services of Doris Driscow
Chapter 44: Psychic Pandora and Craven A
Chapter 45: The Surgeon of Sackwater
Chapter 46: The Teeth of Hell
Chapter 47: The Slaughterhouse of Palmer
Chapter 48: The Swarthy Men and the Strangled Skein
Chapter 49: Knitting for Victory and St John the Evangelist
Chapter 50: Dead Men Drive and Hitler Catches the Bus
Chapter 51: The Perfect Murder of Miss Prim
Chapter 52: The Rewards of Corruption and the Fraying of Hope
Chapter 53: The Corpses in the Swamp
Chapter 54: Jolly Joe Henderson and the Shoal of Piranhas
Chapter 55: The Hunt for Hitler
Chapter 56: Carnage at Tringford
Chapter 57: The Mistaking of Drunks for Drunks
Chapter 58: Today’s the Day they’re not having a Bears’ Picnic
Chapter 59: Quasimodo and the Confession
Chapter 60: The Shuttlecock Slayings and the Silver Ghost
Chapter 61: Primroses, Hedges and the Hurting of Flies
Chapter 62: The Crimson Trail and the Return of the Snail
Chapter 63: March Comes in May
Chapter 64: Wilfred Owen and the Three Coloured Threads
Chapter 65: Zulus and the Ecstasy of Onions
Chapter 66: The Raven and the Razor
Chapter 67: Lot’s Wife and the Tomb of Tutankhamun
Chapter 68: The Inexhaustible Joy of always Being Right
Chapter 69: Gin and the Uncarved Stone
Chapter 70: The Measure of a Woman
Chapter 71: Sardines and the Missing Boy
Chapter 72: A Flutter with Sister Francis
Chapter 73: Vultures, Penguins and Harridans
Chapter 74: The Rabbit and the Fire Engine
Chapter 75: Harlock and the Lost Tribes
Chapter 76: Locks, Chains and Drains
Chapter 77: The Deep, Dark Waters
Chapter 78: The Prayers of the Police and the Biting of Tongues
Chapter 79: False Hopes and the Heaviness of Gin
Chapter 80: Afternoon Tea with Simnal Cranditch
Chapter 81: The Secret Coffee and the Special Edition
Chapter 82: The Soundings, the Rout and the Mob
Chapter 83: The Man with Cerulean Eyes
Chapter 84: The Shame and the Sleepwalker
Chapter 85: The Rat and the Whippet and the Ice Cream Man
Chapter 86: Rough Justice and the Right to Bear Arms
Chapter 87: Cut Glass and Capricorn
Chapter 88: Map-Reading and Remorse
Chapter 89: The Lost Hours
Chapter 90: Al Jolson and the Threat of Invasion
Chapter 91: The Shadow in the Pines
Chapter 92: Life and Death in the Ravine
Chapter 93: The Stones of St Alvery’s
Chapter 94: The Iron Rings and the Dark Curtain
Chapter 95: Waking the Dead
Chapter 96: The Silencing of Netabery Windser
Chapter 97: Rodents and the Eleven Apostles
Chapter 98: The Haystack Man and the Damned Good Spy
Chapter 99: The Baptism of Bees
Chapter 100: The Return of the Shadows
Chapter 101: The Living and the Dead
Chapter 102: Rust and Shirt Tails
Chapter 103: The Shark in the Moonlight
Chapter 104: Lizzie and the Lizard
Chapter 105: The Dismantling of Betty Church
Chapter 106: Fishing for Freedom
Chapter 107: The Great White Hunter
Chapter 108: The Victor and the Victims
Chapter 109: Fleur and the Crocodile and the Man from Taunton
Chapter 110: The Monster and the Voice from the Grave
Chapter 111: The Wind and the Sand
Chapter 112: The Good and the bad and the Weight
Chapter 113: Dr Secret and the Gladiator
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Jimmy was reading yesterday’s Express.
‘Anything interesting?’ I was struggling with my torn-out crossword that morning, but too proud to admit it was beating me.
‘Nothing much.’ He rustled through the pages. ‘No sport.’ There was not much of anything being played those bitter days of January 1940. Apart from the government’s discouragement of crowds for – so far – unfounded fears of mass attacks by the Luftwaffe, the weather was the worst in living memory. We had had no snow yet but temperatures had dipped to 36 degrees below freezing in some areas and Suffolk certainly felt like it was one of them. Today was a little warmer, though, and with the benefit of our overcoats and a wood stove we were able to sit comfortably in the wheelhouse of Cressida and gaze over the bracken-crusted white and the river, every ripple solidified in mid-flow as if time itself had been turned off as an energy-saving measure. ‘And not much war either.’
Captain Carmelo Sultana was out collecting kindling from Treacle Woods. He had built Cressida, his permanently landlocked ship, on the tiny island of Brindle Bar in the Angle Estuary and his land had been denuded of fallen twigs and branches long ago. Jimmy and I had both volunteered to go scavenging. None of us liked doing it because the woods sloped up sharply and were overgrown with gorse and brambles but the Mad Admiral – as he was known locally – insisted on taking his turn.
Jimmy folded the paper neatly, something he was always telling me women couldn’t do. He was on a twenty-four-hour leave and, being stationed at nearby Hadling Heath aerodrome, it was an easy journey to visit us in what was now almost his home.
‘Maybe there won’t be,’ I conjectured. ‘Perhaps Hitler will be satisfied with Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland.’
Jimmy peered at me. He had grown up a lot in the few months since he had rejoined the RAF. The moustache alone had added a few years to him and the severe burning of a friend in one of their squadron’s few encounters with the enemy had chipped away at his boyish notions about the romance of aerial combat. ‘You don’t believe that.’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I think we’re allowing him to consolidate his position and build up his forces while we sit waiting for him to make the next move.’
‘It’s those poor sods at sea I feel sorry for,’ Jimmy said. ‘At least I have a sporting chance of fighting back up there. If you’re a stoker in the bowels of a merchant ship, all you can do is shovel coal and pray the next torpedo isn’t aimed at you.’
‘If four down is LEGEND, that means ICARUS must be wrong,’ I said loudly.
‘What the—’ Jimmy followed my gaze as his Great Uncle Carmelo appeared on deck.
The captain had enough to worry about with his son, Adam, being posted abroad on what we were told was hush-hush business.
‘Madonna, it is half cold.’ Carmelo shut the door smartly behind him to keep the heat in.
‘Did you get much?’ I asked.
‘A sackful, but it is all wet.’ He tugged off his gloves to warm his hands at the stove. ‘There is anything left?’
I poured him a mug of coffee from the pot we kept simmering. ‘I’d better get going.’
My heavy blue coat hung over the back of a chair, as close as it could to the heater without getting singed.
‘Want me to take you?’ Jimmy dropped the paper on to the polished floor by his chair, forgetting how the captain hated such slovenliness.
Jimmy had acquired a Norton motorcycle, which was nearly as old as him but – as he was fond of demonstrating – still capable of travelling at terrifying speeds and I was torn between the thrill of rushing air and a desire to see the day out without losing any more limbs. My left forearm bobbed sullenly in a jar of formalin in my cabin.
‘I need my bike.’ I wrapped a scarf around my neck and put my coat on over my East Suffolk Police Inspector’s uniform, struggling one-handed to tuck my blonde hair into my green woollen hat and pulling it over my ears, mortally wounding yesterday’s perm. My helmet would be slung over my shoulder until I went on duty. There isn’t much heat insulation in a metal bowl.
‘I’ll come down and feed the rabbits.’ Jimmy zipped up his flying jacket, oblivious to how envious I was of that thick sheepskin lining. ‘If they haven’t frozen solid in the night.’
‘They are warmer than we are.’ Carmelo was now defrosting his fingers on his white enamel mug.
We had raised the rabbits’ cages off the ground and given them thick straw to burrow into.
‘Bye, Carmelo.’ I kissed the man who would have been my father-in-law on the cheek.
‘Take good care,’ he warned. ‘The path is as an ice rink.’ He had never seen snow or ice until he left his native Malta as a youth but he was more than making up for the latter now.
‘I will.’ I grabbed my gas mask and followed Jimmy out, reluctantly braving the East Anglian region of the Arctic Circle.
The most difficult part of the journey was, as always, the first. The wooden steps down the side of Cressida were slippery with frost and the ground was hard as iron in that bleak midwinter, every ridge or divot now an invitation to lose my footing.
For the first time I could remember, the River Angle was solid enough to walk over. Jimmy had helped Carmelo and me break the ice away and beach the rowing boat so now I made my way towards the bank, sliding my feet like a ski-less skier on to the small crescentic bay imaginatively known as Shingle Cove.
Mrs Perkins, our biggest and blackest hen, saw me and charged, skittering after me like a terrier wanting a walk, but Jimmy caught her and put her, struggling impotently and squawking indignantly, into one of the rabbit hutches. I didn’t give their inhabitants names because – cute twitchy noses and whiskers or not – they were dinner.
‘Bye, Aunty.’ Jimmy tried to kiss me on the mouth and succeeded but I pulled away, though probably not as quickly as I could have. I had never actually married his Uncle Adam so, as long as that was as far as things went, I saw no harm in it. He was a good-looking young man, tall and athletic with fashionably tousled brown hair and sapphire eyes. If only he had had the sense to be born a decade and a half earlier, I thought as I prepared to trek out across the ice.
I glanced across the inlet and up the wide clearing towards White Lodge, Dr Edward ‘Tubby’ Gretham’s home, standing at the top of Fury Hill, grey smoke swirling out of one of the six chimney stacks. That would be coming from the kitchen range.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’
‘Who?’ Jimmy shielded his eyes.
I didn’t answer immediately because I hoped I was wrong, but the two gangling figures in blue were unmistakeable even from that distance.
‘The Grinder-Snipes,’ I breathed.
The constables were making their way down the middle of the clearing, picking through the clumps of grass that had been a lawn until Tubby decided it wasn’t worth the effort of mowing, and even from a hundred yards away I could hear them squealing as they clutched each other’s arms.
‘Are they actually policemen?’ Jimmy asked incredulously.
I had told him of the twins’ existence but very little else.
‘Just about,’ I muttered.
Algy, I think, though it was difficult enough to tell them apart even close-up, slithered over on to his back, legs flailing in the air like a demented cyclist.
‘Ohhh, Algernon,’ Sandy confirmed my identification, ‘are you oreet?’
‘Dohhh but I’m all shaken up, Lysander.’
It was embarrassingly impressive how their voices carried through the still air.
‘Oh, you poo-ah little gooze.’ Sandy dusted his brother down.
‘Why don’t you go in and have a nice hot coffee?’ I suggested to Jimmy.
‘Oh, I’m having far too much fun out here,’ he assured me.
Somehow the twins stumbled and tumbled down to the opposite bank.
‘Cooeee.’ Algy waved his left arm.
‘ ’ello.’ Sandy followed suit, though they were both right-handed.
‘ ’ello, mam.’ They waved their right hands. ‘It’s uz.’
‘I think you could have worked that out,’ Jimmy grinned.
Oh, good grief, I thought, and said quietly. ‘Go inside, Jimmy.’
‘What, and miss this?’
I could have ordered him, saying that it was official business, but he would have known as well as I that the civilian police have little authority over military personnel and, anyway, we didn’t have that kind of relationship. ‘Please.’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘OK,’ he muttered and turned back towards the boat.
‘What do you want?’ I demanded.
‘Ohh, a nice ’ot mug of tea would be luvleh.’ Sandy cupped his gloved hands in a mime of receiving one.
‘And a Chorleh cake.’ Algy rubbed his stomach in big circles.
I tried again. ‘What have you come for?’
‘For you…’ Algy began.
‘Mam,’ Sandy finished.
I was growing tired of shouting our conversation.
‘You’d better come over,’ I sighed, and the twins looked at each other and then at me and then again at each other doubtfully.
‘Over?’ they queried.
‘Here,’ I confirmed.
‘Oh.’ They came through a patch of tangled ivy, raising their legs like ponies stepping over low fences until they got to the river’s edge.
‘It’s frozen solid,’ I assured them.
‘Ohhhh,’ they tremoloed, dabbing the ice with the toes of their boots. ‘Mam.’
‘This is ever so…’ Sandy warbled.
‘Scary,’ Algy hissed.
‘Stop it,’ I scolded, all too aware that Jimmy and the captain could see them from the wheelhouse if they were looking – and they would be. ‘Police constables do not hold hands.’
‘Not even if one of them is blinded and they are escaping a burning building?’ Sandy enquired.
‘Well, then, perhaps.’
‘Onleh per’aps?’ Algy asked in astonishment. ‘What if one of them is sliding off the edge of a cliff and the other has ’old of ’im?’
‘Well, then, as well, and I suppose it would be sensible if you were worried about falling through the ice…’
‘Through…’ Sandy gasped in horror.
‘The ice?’ Algy was equally aghast. ‘Oh, we never thought…’
‘Of that.’ Sandy gulped, his Adam’s apple disappearing under his pointy dimpled chin only to drop halfway down to his collar again.
Algy’s apple bobbed like this was a Halloween party. ‘Our dad wouldn’t be ’appy.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ I said. ‘Wait there.’
The constables looked at me and Sandy took the lead.
‘For how…’
‘Long?’
‘Until I get there.’ I stepped down on to the river, staying close to the rope that the captain had fixed across the inlet so that we could pull the boat from the opposite bank when the water was flowing. Please God don’t let me… My feet shot out… slip. I snatched at the rope. It sagged and I did a high kick that would have had me in the front row at the Folies Bergère.
‘Ohhh, mam,’ they yelled as I managed to steady myself.
I said please, I scolded God; but like any man, if God is ever sorry, he will never admit it. I gave up trying to walk with dignity and went back to sliding, an inch at a time.
‘What is it?’ I demanded when I reached the other side.
‘A rope,’ they told me in unison.
‘Why are you here?’ I tried again, praying they did not think I was being philosophical. They had once gone into a duet as long as anything by Wagner in answer to my asking What’s it all about?
‘There’s a man,’ Sandy informed me.
‘Onleh there int,’ Algy pointed out.
‘Well there is,’ Sandy insisted. ‘Onleh we don’t know where ’e is.’
‘Mind you,’ Algy tugged at his chin as if it sported a goatee. ‘We didn’t know where ’e was before.’
‘I suppose that’s…’
‘So,’ I said in unison with Algy, but for a different reason.
‘She can’t do that,’ Algy muttered indignantly. ‘Complete our—’
‘Sentences,’ I broke in just to prove I could and they pulled back in shock. ‘So,’ I began again, ‘we have a missing man?’
‘Oh no, mam.’ The twins slapped their legs – their own for a change – in amusement.
I could have done that for them, and much harder.
‘We don’t ’ave ’im.’ Algy shook his head.
‘ ’cause ’e’s…’ Sandy explained because the entire concept was obviously too complicated for me, ‘…missing.’
There are many reasons why the British police are not armed, even in wartime, and one of those reasons is so that senior officers are not given the means to gun their juniors down.
I breathed slowly in and out in a way that is supposed to calm you down but never does.
‘Who…’ I began.
‘Is?’ they broke in to show me I was not the only one who could do the completion trick. ‘Mr Orchard,’ they answered my half-question.
Oh good grief. I knew Garrison Orchard. He used to sell very fine kippers before his smokehouse burned down in non-suspicious circumstances.
‘Have you looked in his allotment shed?’ I asked wearily and they pulled their lips down in as perfect unison as if they were puppets on the same string.
‘We don’t like loooking in sheds,’ Sandy confessed.
‘You never know what you might find in them,’ Algy explained.
‘Well, you might have found Mr Orchard,’ I suggested. ‘He’s always wandering off and nine times out of ten he’s pottering in there and has forgotten the time. Where did he go missing?’
The twins exchanged we’ve-got-a-right-one-’ere looks.
‘If we knew that…’ Sandy said.
‘We would know where ’e is,’ Algy told me ploddingly.
I tried again. ‘Where did he go missing from?’
‘We don’t…’ Sandy chewed that one over.
‘Know,’ Algy said.
‘Where was he last seen?’ I stamped my boots to defrost my feet and they backed away.
‘But we don’t know,’ they chorused.
‘Then how do you know he is missing?’ I stamped my feet for a different reason.
‘Because,’ Sandy said as Algy genuflected to tie his brother’s shoelace, and I was beginning to think he thought that was sufficient when he added, ‘ ’is daughter told…’
‘Uz.’ Algy wobbled in his attempts not to kneel in the snow.
This was worse than extracting teeth, and I should know because I had watched my dentist father do it often enough and even lent a hand when the patients were anaesthetised.
‘Just come with me to the station,’ I snapped.
‘Just?’ Sandy queried. ‘Is that all we ’ave to do?’
‘Then can we tekk the rest of the day off?’
‘No and no,’ I replied and shooed them up the path like you might if you were trying to round up a gaggle of geese.
‘I think she got out of bed the wrong side this morning,’ Sandy remarked, apparently under the illusion that I had been struck stone deaf.
‘ ’ammock,’ Algy corrected him.
‘I am not!’ Sandy bridled.
‘No, they sleep in ’ammocks on ships.’
‘Well, she got out the wrong side anyroad.’
‘Shush. She’ll ’ear you,’ Algy warned.
‘No, she won’t,’ his twin assured him. ‘Sound can’t go backwards down inclines.’
I left them with that illusion. I know that listeners hear no good of themselves but occasionally they hear something useful.
‘That’s sheep,’ Algy objected. ‘They can’t swim backwards in water.’
Time, I decided, to drop a gentle hint that I could hear them. ‘Stop talking drivel,’ I barked.
‘Ohhh, mam,’ Sandy wailed, ‘but we don’t know how…’
‘To talk anything else,’ Algy concluded, and I could not find it in my heart to contradict them.
*
Eventually I managed to herd the Grinder-Snipes through Treacle Woods and over the brow of Fury Hill to where the path crossed Smugglers Way, an old track running from the cliffs. Here we had a view the envy of anyone who liked views, and I did. There weren’t many of them in our part of the world.
Suffolk is not renowned for its mountains. If Great Wood Hill near Newmarket is the Everest of the county at about 400 feet, Fury Hill is its K2. On a clear day such as this I could see the great flatness of the drained fens stretching inland to the south and west. The River Angle curled lazily below me with the prosperous resort of Anglethorpe across the water to the north. To the east was Sackwater, its Victorian dreams of rivalling Felixstowe never realised. Even its greatest glory, the pier, was not much more than a stump since storms, a fire and the sappers had taken their turn in damaging it. Sackwater was my parents’ home town and, much to my chagrin, my last posting had made it mine again.
I had left my bicycle at the top of the path in an old gamekeeper’s hut, though there had been no game worth keeping this side of the Great War.
We paused to catch our breath.
‘Oh, mam,’ Sandy whinged, ‘it looks ever so…’
‘Far,’ Algy – never a man to be left out of a whinge – joined in.
‘That is only,’ I pointed towards our destination like Moses showing the Israelites the promised land, ‘because it is.’ And down we trudged, my constables first, so that they might hear but they couldn’t see me slithering about with all the dignity of an ostrich on roller skates.
The first time I saw Sergeant ‘Brigsy’ Briggs asleep behind the desk in Sackwater Central Police Station, I thought he was dead. Today, even wide awake and slurping on his brown mug, the likeness to a corpse was still striking. Brigsy’s skin was grey and blotchy and had sunken into his face as it would on a man settling comfortably into the first stages of decomposition. There was a warmth in Brigsy’s eyes, though. It came from his heart. He was more dependable than I first gave him credit for and he made a good mug of tea when we were alone on late shifts at the station.
‘Mornin’, madam,’ he greeted me and I was glad he hadn’t said good because it wasn’t especially so far. Brigsy leaned his sparsely tufted head back and yelled, ‘Tea for the inspector.’
‘Which one?’ Bantony’s voice came from the back room.
‘The one whose tea you don’t do anything nasty to,’ I called back, having witnessed the fury of my unesteemed colleague Inspector Sharkey at discovering salt as one of the more pleasant things his beverage had been laced with.
‘And for uz,’ the twins chorused.
‘Get yer own.’ Bantony came through with my white enamel mug. ‘Oy ain’t a bleedin’ nippy.’
I had to admit that Constable Bank-Anthony did not look much like a Lyons tea shop waitress. He was quite a tall man, well-built and, with his black hair Brylcreemed back and razor-parted, he was almost as good-looking as he thought he was – if you like spivs, which I don’t. The daughter of his old chief constable in Dudley clearly did. It was she who had persuaded Daddy not to sack Bantony – for how his fear of blood interfered with his duties and his love of the ladies interfered with theirs – but to have him transferred here. Policemen or women don’t usually change forces but Sackwater was so desperate for reinforcements after the exodus to Anglethorpe that it had become a sort of Botany Bay for unwanted officers, including myself.
‘Button your collar,’ I instructed, mainly to divert him from an appreciative leer at my calves. But Bantony was not so easily distracted and was quite capable of performing both tasks at once.
‘Right.’ I plonked my helmet on the desk. In peacetime inspectors don’t wear helmets but a peaked cap would offer little protection against whatever Goering’s boys were planning to deposit on us. ‘Where and when was Garrison Orchard last seen?’
‘ ’spector Sharkey take the details just before I do arrive.’ Brigsy leafed through his incident report book, though he hardly needed to bother. Since the so-called Vampire Murders in the autumn there had not been much to write in it. Even the great excitement of an attempted break-in at the vicarage through the pantry turned out to be a faulty window catch. ‘His daugh’er, Miss Georgina…’ He screwed up his eyes.
‘If she is still a Miss, I think any of you can have a guess at her surname,’ I suggested, while Brigsy struggled with his wonky wire-framed specs to read his superior’s inky scratches.
The twins looked at each other blankly.
‘Oh, I don’t think…’
‘Weh can,’ Algy concluded.
Why are you doing this to me? I turned to Bantony. ‘You tell them.’
Bank-Anthony eyed me suspiciously. ‘It’s a trick question, isn’t it? Loike those ones about moy father’s brother being moy son’s cousin’s ’usband’s uncle.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s simple.’
‘Miss Georgina Simple,’ the twins said, then alternated, ‘That’s – a – strange – name.’
‘Miss Georgina Orchard,’ Brigsy deciphered, and I was not sure if he was telling them or announcing her, for the front door swung open and it was like that scene in The Plainsman when Gary Cooper goes into the saloon – or am I thinking of John Wayne in The Big Trail? Anyway, the room fell silent to watch the stranger make her entrance.
This was no stranger to me, however. Georgie Orchard and I had been in the Girl Guides together until I was cashiered.
‘Oh Bett—’ She stifled my name. ‘Inspector. Thank goodness you’re here. I am so worried about my father. Around seven o’clock I popped out to get a loaf from Twindles’ and when I came back he was gone and he hasn’t been seen since.’
In one sentence Georgina had given me more information than half of the Sackwater police force had managed to cobble together since the Grinder-Snipes had skittered into my day the best part of an hour ago.
‘Where have you looked?’ I asked them all.
‘Can’t leave my desk.’ Brigsy smoothed the gritty smudge on his top lip that almost served as a moustache. He was right, of course. The station had to be manned at all times. You never knew, we might have a crime to cope with.
‘And we ’ad to loook for you.’ The twins quailed under my gaze. I was getting quite good at quailing men and only wished I had had that skill in my younger days.
‘Both of you?’ I challenged, uselessly I knew, because Siamese twins could not have been more inseparable than this identical pair.
‘Yes,’ they assured me fervently.
‘But if you’d checked the rota, you’d have seen I was on my way here anyway,’ I pointed out.
‘Oh,’ they said usefully.
‘And you?’ I quizzed Bantony, who looked like he would like to run more than his eyes over my friend. I am tall but Georgie was taller and more athletically built, with thick wavy black hair that Vivien Leigh might have been proud to swish around Tara. Also, Georgie was golden tanned, partly from a passion for tennis but mainly from a Portuguese grandmother, causing locals to refer to my friend, not wildly inaccurately, as ‘the Spanish Lady’.
‘Oy looked everywhere.’ He took his eyes reluctantly off the newcomer and cast them around the waiting room like he was still searching.
It was then that the door burst open.
‘Oh, hello, Boss,’ Constable ‘Dodo’ Chivers sang out. ‘I’m as tired as a typewriter. We have searched absolutely everywhere.’
‘But no joy,’ Constable Rivers hobbled in behind her, massaging his right kidney. Rivers was a martyr to his back and we were martyrs to his whinging about it. The idea of him feeling anything approaching joy was bizarre to say the least.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Miss Orchard is coming to my office now and while we are there, you will all write down exactly where you searched and not one of you will use the word everywhere even once in your account.’ I set off down the corridor. ‘Oh, and Miss Orchard would like a cup of tea.’
‘With one sugar, please,’ Georgie called over her shoulder as she followed.
‘Oy’ll do that,’ volunteered Bantony, who usually had to be treated very cruelly indeed before he would put the kettle on – always the perfect gentleman until he got the opportunity not to be.
I shut the door, settled Georgie into a chair and perched on the edge of the desk so I could take her hand.
‘What was your father wearing?’ I asked, because he had wandered off on Boxing Day in his pyjamas and slippers.
‘He took his coat and scarf and hat,’ she told me, ‘but I don’t know if he put them on.’ Georgie’s grip tightened. ‘Oh Betty, it’s so cold out there.’
‘Where have you looked?’
‘Everywhere,’ Georgie told me, ‘that I can think of,’ she added hastily. ‘He often goes to Mum’s grave or the park where they used to feed the ducks. He likes to walk the cliffs in the summer but I can’t think he’d go up there in these conditions.’
‘I’ll send a man to look,’ I promised, calculating who had annoyed me most in the last few weeks. ‘Anywhere else?’
‘He enjoys a half and a game of dominoes at the Unicorn but that’s closed until lunchtime. I went to the bowls club. I ran down the alleys. Oh Betty, it’s been three hours now.’
‘I know your father’s mind tends to wander,’ I told my friend, ‘but he’s still strong. He lifted that crate off Lisa Sand’s foot last month,’ I reminded her, omitting to mention that he had knocked it over on to her foot in the first place, ‘and not many men half his age could have done that.’ I stood up, still holding Georgie’s hand. ‘The best thing you can do is go home and wait for him. Nine times out of ten, people who wander off wander back again and he will need you there.’ I let go of her. ‘Let us know if he does and we will let you know the moment we hear anything.’
Georgie puffed out her cheeks. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’
All at once she was a child looking to her mother for comfort, but I could not bring myself to raise her hopes. I had been cold enough just getting to work so I dreaded to think how Garrison Orchard was coping.
‘We will do everything we can,’ I promised, because that was all the hope I could offer.
*
I saw Georgie out and as I went back to my office, Sharkey came out of his, fag-end wedged between yellowed fingers, eyes red-capillaried like he had been bathing them in the Scotch he stank of. I knew he had manned the station overnight but his clothes looked like he had slept in them and badly, which was probably the case.
‘Are you going to help look for Mr Orchard?’ I asked. We rarely bothered with pleasantries.
‘Have helped,’ he told me huskily. ‘I logged it.’
We all had to take our turn at nights but I knew that Old Scrapie resented doing what he regarded as menial tasks.
‘And that’s it?’
Sharkey stubbed his cigarette out on the lino with his toe.
‘That’s it,’ he agreed and ambled past me. ‘Got better things to do than rush around the county after silly old fools.’
‘Takes one to find one,’ I murmured as I went on my way.
An old man stood in the lobby. Somebody had given him a mug – Georgie’s tea, when I thought about it – and he was shivering so violently he could hardly get it to his lips. Brigsy reached across and guided his hands.
‘Hello, Mr Orchard,’ I greeted him in relief. ‘We’ve been looking for you.’
‘We?’ Rivers muttered indignantly.
‘Oh, Betty!’ Mr Orchard slopped most of his tea down his sleeves. ‘Thank the good Lord it’s you. Georgina went missing this morning and I can’t find her anywhere.’
‘I think I can help you there,’ I smiled.
‘A thin can hell pew?’ Garrison Orchard cupped his ear in puzzlement.
‘Constable Rivers will run out and fetch her,’ I shouted.
‘Fletcher?’ He shook his head confusedly.
‘Run?’ Rivers and his colleagues echoed in disbelief.
‘Walk briskly,’ I compromised foolishly, for Mr Chamberlain had taught the world the dangers of making concessions.
When I arrived the next morning, the men were doing what police officers do best – drinking tea. The twins were leaning with their elbows on the desk top and pinching their white china cup handles between thumbs and forefingers as if enjoying cocktails at the Ritz.
‘Oh, but it was ever so exciting looking for Mr Orchard,’ Dodo was telling the assembly. ‘Rivers and I had to peep into a coal bunker and I thought I saw a rat but Inspector Church told me they do not exist.’
‘I did not,’ I started to protest, but found I couldn’t humiliate us both by pointing out that I had told her there was no such creature as a ratty when she had seen an old tennis ball floating down a gutter and shrieked the word out. It would only reinforce their all-women-are-silly creed.
‘Ooohhh,’ Dodo plonked her hands on her hips.
This, I calculated, was the time to change the subject.
‘I wonder if the government will introduce food rationing,’ I speculated, to general dismay.
‘They can’t do…’ Sandy said.
‘That,’ Algy chipped in. ‘We would ’ave ter watch what we…’
‘Et.’
‘They’ll ration the air we breathe, I do believe,’ Brigsy forecast gloomily.
‘Oh dearie me!’ Dodo exclaimed. ‘But what happens if I lose my ration card and run out of puff before my new card arrives?’
‘Don’t you worry about that, Dodo,’ Bantony reassured her. ‘Oyl give yow some of moy air.’
‘Oh,’ Constable Chivers put her hands together like she was about to lead prayers, ‘but how will you do that, Constable Bank-Anthony?’
‘Come to the cells and Oyl show yow,’ he offered gallantly.
‘You will not,’ I said firmly as Constable Box came in.
‘Oh, Boxy,’ Dodo cried. ‘You look positively gelid.’
Box stamped his snow-shoe-sized boots, showering dirty slush over the dirtier floor. ‘Good job my missus int ’ere to ’ear you say tha’,’ he said.
‘But where else could she be to hear me say it?’ Dodo puzzled.
I shook my head but their nonsense still swirled around my brain. ‘You’re back early,’ I commented. Even though we were working shorter stints on the beat because of the weather, he still had another hour to go.
‘I come for urgent reinforcements,’ Box declared as he stomped towards us. ‘Any tea left, Constable Bank-Anthony?’ he asked, bringing a new definition of the word urgent into our workplace.
Bantony shook the pot. ‘No,’ he said, though we all heard the sploshing. He and Bantony had had a falling out and I had not yet troubled to find the cause. It was hardly worth it when they might be best of chums the next day and then mortal foes the day after that.
‘Then you had better make him a fresh one,’ I said.
‘Might be able to squeeze one out of this,’ Bantony muttered and stomped into the back room to get his colleague’s mug.
‘Why do you need help?’ I asked Box.
‘It’s old Mrs Young,’ he told me, shaking his cape like a matador goading a bull.
Mrs Young had been old Mrs Young since I was a child. Ancient Mrs Young might be a more accurate title now.
‘What is?’ I sipped my tea. It was hot and strong, as I like it, but the milk was on the turn.
‘She do be complainin’ ’bout her neighbours, she do,’ Box told me. ‘She say they be passing messages to the enemy.’
‘What, the Harrisons?’ I asked in surprise. Reg Harrison was as English as they come. You could hardly see his house for flags on Empire Day.
‘No, Boss, the Germans are the enemy,’ Dodo told me helpfully.
I ignored her. ‘Have you spoken to them?’
‘I hope not,’ Dodo put in. ‘Fraternising with the enemy is treason.’
‘Wellll, it do be a bit awkwish.’ Box’s parsnip complexion turned radish. ‘It do,’ he repeated.
‘One should never be embarrassed to confront traitors,’ Dodo informed her colleague. ‘It is they who should hang their heads before the executioner does it for them.’
‘Why?’ I put up my hand in a stop sign. ‘And that question was aimed at Box.’
‘Well, Mr H take agin me at the summer fair,’ Box confessed. ‘I see Mrs H coming out the tent with a rabbit pie and say I wouldn’t mind a bit of tha’ and he take it all wrong. Trouble is…’ Box coughed ‘…Mrs H think so too, ever since I see her unmentionables on the line and it be startin’ to rain and I told her she had better get them off.’
‘If they were unmentionables, why did he mention them?’ Dodo wondered to the ceiling. She had got into the habit of addressing inanimate objects.
‘Trouble is,’ Box admitted ruefully, ‘Mrs H invite me in to help her and Mr H do be at work so I be affeared to be with her alone.’
‘She couldn’t hurt you, a little thing like that,’ Brigsy reassured him.
‘No, but Mrs Box could,’ Box assured him. ‘She has a fearsome way with a rollin’ pin, she do.’
I wondered briefly if that was why my constable’s face was so misshapen. It didn’t seem so much to have lumps and bumps as to be constructed of them.
Box sniffed his beverage appreciatively. ‘Taste better sour, it do,’ he declared, and rolled it around his mouth like he might a fine wine or, in his case, a good pint of Tolly Cobbold bitter.
I went down the left-hand corridor.
Sharkey’s door was ajar and he was lounging with his feet on the desk in a fug of smoke. He stubbed out his cigarette into a pile of dog-ends.
‘Got any more doddery old fools to look for, Church?’
‘I did,’ I told him, ‘but I’ve just found him.’ And went into my office for my coat and helmet and a quick drag on a roll-up. Everyone except Dodo smoked but I never really liked doing it in front of the men.
*
Box was still savouring his tea when I went back to the foyer.
‘Come along, Constable,’ I urged and shooed him to the main door, where he stood back. I stopped. ‘Do you hold the door open for Inspector Sharkey?’ I had never seen him do so.
Box huffed. ‘More than my life’s worth.’
‘Then don’t ever do it again for me.’
‘But…’ My constable stood uncertainly.
‘I am sure you are a credit to your mother,’ I said sternly. ‘But you should know by now I will be treated the same – no better and no worse – than he is.’
‘I don’t think you want ’xactly the same, ma’am,’ Box warned, and his voice dropped confidentially. ‘It’s me wha’ put tha’ mustard powder in his tea last week. Just between ourselves,’ he ended worriedly.
The cold air hit my face like iced water.
‘Try that on me and I’ll pour it over your head.’
And Box chuckled, ‘Tha’s wha’ he do.’
‘It’s part of the inspector training,’ I said as we marched out of the forecourt on to the pavement.
‘What else do they teach you?’ He grinned uncertainly.
‘How to watch what I tread in,’ I replied and his brow wrinkled.
‘I don’t know wha’…’ He looked to where I was pointing. ‘Oh, blast it – blast those blasted dogs – excuse my language – oh sorry, ma’am. I s’pose it’s all right to curse in your presence too.’
‘No, it is not,’ I said primly, though I would hardly have noticed his expletive if he hadn’t pointed it out.
We turned down Bath Road. At one time this had been a happy place for me, visiting my friend Etterly Utter, but then she climbed into the hollow of the King’s Oak – or the Desolation Tree, as some called it – and was never seen again. There had been a bloody murder in Bath Road too, just after my return to Sackwater. But everything looked peaceful now.
A plane droned overhead but I couldn’t see it properly. The winter sun was low and shining straight in my eyes and I wished I could wear sunglasses, but regulations, always keen to make life difficult, forbade the wearing of any type of spectacles on the beat. I had known a few policemen who would have benefited from them, though.
Box made a shade with his huge hand and tipped his head back.
‘Lancaster,’ he diagnosed. ‘My boy Leonard do have a-nidentification chart with pictures.’
We had an identification chart with pictures at the station, too, but it was obviously a poor effort compared with his boy Leonard’s.
‘I wonder where it’s been?’ I squinted. It was heading inland.
‘Bombing Jerry, I hope.’ Box raised his arm. ‘And here come the others.’
There were five more smudges creeping down through the clear sky, wings outstretched like great grey albatrosses.
‘I’m just glad they’re coming back safely.’ I lowered my head.
‘We can cut through here.’ Box pointed to Armadillo Alley and I smiled. I had been born on those streets – on the top floor of a bus, to be precise, my mother having boarded it while my father rushed about uselessly for a taxi – and I had played in those roads for years, but I knew Box meant well in directing me.
We made our way down the flamboyantly named passageway and came out on Spice Lane.
Box chuckled. ‘Funny we be lookin’ for spies on Spice lane.’
‘Is it?’ I asked a little sourly, because I had wanted to make that joke and it worked better the way he pronounced spice.
The front door of number six, the middle of three houses, opened a crack and a voice piped, ‘Oh, I thoughted it was you.’ And Shirley Temple – as I had dubbed her when she came into the station to report a losted button – came trotting into the road. ‘My name is Slyvia and I is having my birfday party,’ she told me excitedly. ‘Would you like a slice of cake? It’s…’ Her big blue eyes sparkled with the magic of her next word, ‘choc-o-lit.’
‘Can I have a piece?’ Box grinned hopefully. He was a big man forever on a mission to make himself bigger, but it was astonishing how fast he could move when he flew at me.
I’ve never been hit by a train but I imagine it must feel very like this did and I was vaguely aware, as I collapsed on my back underneath him, that Box was not the only thing flying at that moment.
‘Ma’am?’ he shouted through the cotton wool in my ears and above the clanging of church bells, the untuned sort they have in Malta. ‘What’s happening?’
I tried to push him off me but it was like being under a felled tree.
‘An explosion,’ I managed to yell in his ear, which I wasn’t happy to find myself nuzzling. ‘A bomb from that plane, I think.’
‘ ’n’explosion?’ Box marvelled, and I must have made quite a comfortable mattress for he seemed settled down for the day. ‘Well I never.’
‘Get off me.’ I pushed and he half-rolled away to sit up with his back to me like we had just had a cuddle and he was now in a bit of a mood because I had stopped him going too far.
Box swivelled round. His face was blackened and his tie askew and I automatically reached up to straighten it. We had landed on the road. When I was a child I had thought it would be wonderful if we could fly and I’d just found out that it wasn’t.
‘Help me up,’ I said – it was the least he could do after we had been so intimate – and Box struggled to his feet before offering me a giant paw.
I glanced down. My skirt was filthy and I could say goodbye to my stockings. I rubbed the grit out of – that is, into – my eyes.
All three houses of the terrace had been damaged. Number four, to the left, had collapsed completely and was no more than a hill of bricks and shattered timbers. Number six, next along, had lost its adjoining and front walls and the roof was tilted down forty-five degrees sideways towards number four. Number eight didn’t look too bad except most of its slates had slipped, baring the rafters.
The windows of every house I could see on that side and across the road were smashed and curtains fluttered through some of the frames. And the road between was ripped up into a ragged tarmac rim around a crater maybe ten foot across and three times as long.
A fire engine bell was clanging.
Box helped me over two paving stones tilted up into a tent and I sagged straight down again on to a convenient empty beer crate, vaguely wondering where that had appeared from. My right knee had been gouged by something and was starting to complain bitterly.
‘Allow me, ma’am.’ Box disentangled a splinter of cream-painted wood from my hair, threw it away and handed me a filthy squashed leather loaf. It took me a moment to recognise my handbag.
Blast. That was nearly new. I put it down and took hold of his shoulder. ‘Please tell me you can hear that bell.’
‘Have to be deaf not to.’
I tried to organise my thoughts. ‘Shirley Temple!’ I cried. She had come from the middle house.
‘She’s hallucinating,’ a man’s voice said from somewhere behind me.
‘No, the little girl.’
Box rubbed the nape of his neck. ‘Can’t catch no sign of her.’
I tried to stand but my legs had had several more pints of beer than the rest of me.
Box put out an arm and between us we heaved me to my feet. ‘I could use a few aspirins.’ I tested my balance. ‘Or a shot of Johnnie Walkers. You can let go now.’
Somehow Box had his arm around my waist and was looking very embarrassed about it. He let go cautiously but took my good elbow to help me off the pile and on to the kerb.
I tried to reorganise my thoughts.
‘Have you seen the little girl?’ I found myself asking a wiry ambulance man in his brand-new uniform with nicely creased trousers already frayed around the knees.
‘Never you mind about that, miss,’ he tried to soothe me. ‘Just get yourself over there to the medics.’ He pointed to an ambulance on the junction with Montague Road and was about to signal to the two men standing beside a stretcher propped up against their vehicle when I said, ‘We must find her.’
‘All under control, miss.’
‘Inspector,’ I corrected him and stumbled over the torn-up paving slabs towards the terrace.
Two ARP wardens and half a dozen workmen were shovelling debris away from the front of number four and, in all the confusion, I was impressed by their calm and the speed with which they’d got to what must have been their first real emergency.
A nurse stepped up and took a look at my head. ‘We need to get you to hospital.’
‘Later.’
‘Now.’ She wagged her emergency kit with a green cross on the lid as a badge of unquestionable authority.
‘N’inspector Church don’t take no orders from no one,’ Box told her proudly, if ungrammatically and inaccurately, and I stumbled away.
The house was filled with rubble, broken timber jutting through clouds of thick choking dust. The men heaved a heavy beam out of what would have been the front sitting room and a shower of bricks rattled down. The front door lay across the pavement and they were about to clamber over it when I put out my arm.
‘Wait.’
‘What is it?’ Box asked, peering over my head.
‘That door moved.’
‘Course it moved,’ a workman explained in exasperation. ‘I had my foot on it.’
Box – with greater faith in me – bobbed, knees cracking, to peer under it. ‘Give me a hand,’ he said and three of them heaved at the top end, hinging the door up and cascading bricks and cement over their feet.
‘By George, she’s right,’ a warden exclaimed, as if the very idea of me being correct was astonishing. ‘Put your back into it, boys.’