Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

By M.R.C. Kasasian

A man is murdered in broad daylight by a stealthy killer in this pitch-perfect WWII crime mystery.

September 1939. Inspector Betty Church – one of the few female officers on the force – has arrived from London to fill a vacancy at Sackwater police station. But Betty isn't new here. This is the place she grew up. The place she thought she'd left for good.

After a slow start, Betty's called to the train station to investigate a stolen bench. But though there's no bench, there is a body. A smartly dressed man, murdered in broad daylight, with two distinctive puncture wounds in his throat.

While the locals gossip about the Suffolk Vampire, Betty Church steels herself to hunt a dangerous killer.

Reviews for BETTY CHURCH AND THE SUFFOLK VAMPIRE:
'Betty Church is a wonderful creation... Had me laughing out loud' GOODREADS.

'I loved this... A cast of crazy characters, with a gruesome murder or two thrown in for good measure' GOODREADS.

'Loved Betty Church! No nonsense, in control with quirky crazy cast makes this a new series I can't wait to read more of' GOODREADS.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781784978129

M.R.C. Kasasian

M.R.C. Kasasian was raised in Lancashire. He has had careers as varied as factory hand, wine waiter, veterinary assistant, fairground worker and dentist. He lives with his wife in Suffolk in the summer and in a village in Malta in the winter. He is the author of two previous historical mystery series, published by Head of Zeus, including the bestselling Gower Street Detective series.

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BETTY CHURCH AND THE SUFFOLK VAMPIRE

M.R.C. Kasasian

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Table of Contents

www.headofzeus.com

About Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

SEPTEMBER 1939

a new day dawns in sackwater, not that this sleepy seaside town is taking much notice...

Inspector Betty Church – one of the few female officers on the force – has arrived from London to fill a vacancy at Sackwater police station. But Betty isn’t new here. This is the place she grew up. The place she thought she’d left behind for good.

Time ticks slowly in Sackwater, and crime is of a decidedly lighter shade. Having solved the case of the missing buttons, Betty’s called to the train station to investigate a stolen bench. But though there’s no bench, there is a body. A smartly dressed man, murdered in broad daylight, with two distinctive puncture wounds in his neck.

While the locals gossip about the Suffolk Vampire, Betty Church steels herself to hunt a dangerous killer.

Contents

Welcome Page

About Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

Dedication

Chapter 1: The Fitting 0f the Peg

Chapter 2: The Lions and the Flamestick

Chapter 3: The Phantom and the Wolves

Chapter 4: Poisoned Cake and the Public Enemy

Chapter 5: Tea, Tennis and Cyanide, Forgetting and Remembering Names

Chapter 6: The Butterfly, the Bar and the Body

Chapter 7: Scarecrows and the Hurdy-Gurdy Man

Chapter 8: Pooky and the Spitfires

Chapter 9: The Bubble on the Brain

Chapter 10: The Mad Admiral

Chapter 11: The Circling of the Shark

Chapter 12: The Dietrich Days

Chapter 13: The Integrity of Mandibles

Chapter 14: The Shape of Things to Come

Chapter 15: St Jaspar and the Spies

Chapter 16: Boneshakers and the Tennis Ball Diet

Chapter 17: Nettles and the Princess

Chapter 18: Starch and the Girdle and Horrible House

Chapter 19: The Price of Primates

Chapter 20: The Last Armenian

Chapter 21: The Diamond Slipper

Chapter 22: The Ratcatcher’s Daughter

Chapter 23: Frankenstein’s Monster and the Sign Of T

Chapter 24: The Wasp and Oak Tree

Chapter 25: The Narrow House

Chapter 26: The Sackwater Martyr

Chapter 27: The Sirens of Sackwater

Chapter 28: The Bear and the Socket

Chapter 29: The Mysterious Mystery of the Mysterious Miss Prim

Chapter 30: The Rat-Man Cometh

Chapter 31: Desperadoes of the Black Range

Chapter 32: The Suffolk Vampire

Chapter 33: The Vermin of Fleet Street

Chapter 34: Shapes Across the Moon

Chapter 35: The Sackwater Slayings, Al Jolson and the Kaiser

Chapter 36: Breakfast with Pooky

Chapter 37: Death on Dogeye Lane

Chapter 38: Snorkelling in Gozo

Chapter 39: The Man in a Pinstripe Suit

Chapter 40: The Fate of the Eel

Chapter 41: The Bone-Handled Knife

Chapter 42: The Staking of Careers

Chapter 43: The Dragon’s Teeth

Chapter 44: The Mangled Sheep Murder

Chapter 45: The Dance of the Dead

Chapter 46: The Train to Istanbul

Chapter 47: The King’s Oak

Chapter 48: The Prisoners

Chapter 49: The Clever Dog Prize

Chapter 50: The Other Side of Fury Hill

Chapter 51: The Crown of Thorns

Chapter 52: Manicure Murders and the Idle Bunch

Chapter 53: The Miracle of Mesopotamia

Chapter 54: Waves Through the Ether

Chapter 55: Green Strawberries and the way to Rotterdam

Chapter 56: The Laziness of Eddies

Chapter 57: The Destruction of Linings

Chapter 58: The Hurting of the Hat

Chapter 59: Mayhem on Spectre Lane and Jimmy in Wonderland

Chapter 60: The House of Horrors

Chapter 61: The Humility of Heroes

Chapter 62: Maggots and the Final Sleep

Chapter 63: The Lost ‘T’s of Suffolk

Chapter 64: French Manicures and the Famous Grasshopper

Chapter 65: The Sackwater Pirate

Chapter 66: The Tenant and the Crone

Chapter 67: The Innocence of Felons

Chapter 68: Spikes and the Extinguishing of Hope

Chapter 69: The Slicing of the Night

Chapter 70: The Slaughter and the Sorrow

Chapter 71: The Creeping of Necrosis

Chapter 72: The Difference

Chapter 73: The Visitors

Chapter 74: The Prevalence of Unicorns

Chapter 75: Death at the Dunworthy

Chapter 76: The Socks and the Psalms

Chapter 77: The Dunworthy Ghoul

Chapter 78: The Night-And-Day Porter

Chapter 79: The Suffolk Umpire

Chapter 80: The Reason for Everything

Chapter 81: The Film Star and the Few

Chapter 82: Snap and the Box

Chapter 83: The Folder

Chapter 84: Sheep

Chapter 85: Against the Driving Rain

Chapter 86: The Rams of Suffolk

Chapter 87: Swimming with Piranhas

Chapter 88: The Cat and the Canary

Chapter 89: The Alligator and the Chain

Chapter 90: The Tractor, the Cat and the Rat

Chapter 91: Thistles and the Teardrop Coupé

Chapter 92: Dancing with the Marquis

Chapter 93: The Haunting

Chapter 94: Foxes and Fascists

Chapter 95: The Whisperer

Chapter 96: The Slaughterhouse

Chapter 97: The Invisible Man

Chapter 98: The Laying out of Lavender Wicks

Chapter 99: The Finger on the Trigger

Chapter 100: The Bee-Keeper’s Sister

Chapter 101: The Weird Sisters

Chapter 102: The Edge of the Blade

Chapter 103: The Classification of Flamingos

Chapter 104: The Silence of the Sea

Chapter 105: The Etiquette of Murder

Chapter 106: The Justice of Just

Chapter 107: The Last Resort

Chapter 108: The Absence of Listeners

Chapter 109: The Watcher in the Shadows

Chapter 110: The Corpse in Brown Paper

About M.R.C. Kasasian

The Betty Church Mysteries

About the Gower Street Detective Series

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

For my darling Tiggy

1

THE FITTING OF THE PEG

All my life I wanted to be a policeman. It wasn’t a family tradition. My father was a dentist, as his father was too; my maternal grandfather a publisher of what was then modern poetry; and the women of the family were just that – the women.

It wasn’t the uniform either. The Horse Guards looked far more dashing, I thought, and like every quite nice girl, I loved a sailor. But a young policeman gave me a piggyback over a flooded street when I was tiny. He got soaked up to his knees and didn’t seem to mind. At that moment I knew that I wanted to be like him, helping people.

It did not occur to me until a teacher ridiculed these hopes that nature had thwarted my ambition. Neither of the Suffolk forces would even consider applications from my sex – the very idea was absurd – but I was not so easily discouraged. I moved to London and became what was, even there, still an oddity – some said an abomination – a policewoman.

I started well enough in the Metropolitan Constabulary, considering I was a curvaceous peg in a square hole. Police officers were supposed to be tall, and I was, but they were not supposed to have long blonde hair, and I did. I passed the training course with distinction and was stationed in Marylebone. This was the posting I had dreamed of, having spent many a childhood hour on my godmother March Middleton’s knee in 125 Gower Street thrilled by tales of Aunty M’s adventures with her guardian, the irascible personal detective Sidney Grice. It was nearly sixty years since she had gone to live with him and almost as many since she had started publishing her accounts of their investigations.

It was after I caught Hay, the Alkaline Shower Murderer, that my name was put forward for a vacancy and, to my surprise and my colleagues’ outrage, at the age of twenty-eight I was made a sergeant – only the ninth woman in the country to reach that rank. And that should have been that but then I foolishly arrested the ringleaders of the Paper Chain Gang – a big mistake because it was hailed in the press as a triumph after it had been Chief Inspector Heartsease’s case for the previous five years.

I never wanted to make enemies – I only wanted to be a good copper – but being a successful woman is the best way to make enemies that I know of.

I was thirty-eight when I had my mishap, which meant, of course, that I would have to be invalided out. It was only after leaving hospital that I realised I had a choice: I could feel sorry for myself and do nothing, or feel sorry for myself and go to the one person in the world who might be able to help.

2

THE LIONS AND THE FLAMESTICK

March Middleton gave her impressions of her first visit to Gower Street in her journal of 1882 and surprisingly little had changed in that time. The hexagonal red-brick hospital still sprouted its turrets to the right. The University College, white and colonnaded like a Greek temple, stood set back on the opposite side of the road, still paved with wooden blocks for quietness though the traffic was more rubber-wheeled than iron-shoed by now. There was, however, still a good sprinkling of horse-drawn carts. The milkman and the coal merchant had no reason to invest in the internal combustion engine.

The people were dressed differently – not a man in spats nor a top hat to be seen and the women showing enough leg to have made Sidney Grice apoplectic.

Gower Street was already all too familiar to me. It had formed part of my Bloomsbury beat when I was a constable and I had made my first arrest on the corner with Cable Street – an unemployed cooper for beating his wife with a cudgel. He had pleaded guilty but, much to my disgust, after hearing what a sharp tongue the woman had, the magistrate had merely bound him over to keep the peace while his wife with a broken jaw and nose was admonished to show more restraint in her language.

Number 125 stood four storeys high near the end of a Georgian terrace and I saw, as I went up four of the six steps to pull on the bell, that the heavy curtains to the right of the black front door were drawn. I once asked March Middleton why she had never mentioned the lions’ heads on the doorposts and she had explained that she had not noticed them the first time she visited but, if she had mentioned them in later journals, it would have only drawn attention to her poor skills of observation, something Mr Grice was overly fond of doing already.

The first time I had been there after getting my helmet with its famous Brunswick star, Mr Grice’s old maid had met me with, ‘I’m supposed to tell visingtors to wipe their feet but I ’spect yours is clean so you can just wipe your boots, Constabell.’ At which she clapped her hand over her mouth and came out with a muffled, ‘Oh my gawd you’re a woman – but I suppositate you know that.’

‘It’s me, Molly.’

‘Everyone is me to themself,’ she had declared wisely, ‘expect me. I’m just Molly.’

This time I waited a good two minutes and was just about to tug on the round brass handle again when I heard three bolts being drawn back and was greeted by a woman, about my age I guessed, in a plain black dress with a crisp white apron.

‘Oh come in,’ she said resignedly, as if I had been pestering her all week for admission. ‘I recognise you from your photograph. I’m Jenny.’ She ushered me in, shut the door and took my coat.

‘Hello, Jenny.’ I didn’t tell her that Mr G would have blown a gasket at the familiarity of a servant introducing herself.

Jenny was tall. I am well above average at five feet nine and she had a good couple of inches on me; but I was inclined to think she was cheating. Her neck alone gave her an unfair advantage. It rose from her collar like the middle section of a boa constrictor.

‘I thought you might be in uniform.’ There was something disapproving in the way she told me that. Her nostrils were upturned and her lips thin and I half-expected to see a forked tongue flicking out.

Jenny hung my coat next to the great personal detective’s old Ulster coat, which was still on its end hook near a stand of his famous walking canes. Sidney Grice had temporarily blinded himself when his gun stick backfired once, and he had stabbed an aristocrat in the foot with his spike stick in Kew one afternoon. I had often wondered which was his swordstick and which one played confusing tunes for they all looked identical to me. But, after nearly starting a blaze with his flame stick, I had been forbidden to touch any of them again and it did not seem right to do so now. I placed my hat on the table alongside seven of March Middleton’s laid out, like a milliner’s display, in a row.

‘I’m off duty.’ I was certainly not going to tell her that I might never be on it again.

‘Oh.’ This didn’t seem to be a satisfactory explanation until I raised my sleeve. The maid’s head snaked down to inspect this discovery but, finding nothing worth swallowing, reluctantly coiled back.

‘How did you do that?’

‘I didn’t. Is Miss Middlet—’

‘Through there,’ Jenny broke in with a tip of her head, though that was not going to be my question.

Through there was a site almost sacred in the annals of criminology – Sidney Grice’s legendary study and consulting room. Jenny opened the door and I stepped quietly in.

The room was quite dark, for it was still lit by gas, and the mantles were turned low, so it was a while before my eyes adjusted enough to make out the form of my godmother.

‘Hello, Betty,’ March Middleton greeted me from her armchair to the left of a flickering coal fire.

3

THE PHANTOM AND THE WOLVES

My godmother had her feet up on a cushion on a low rectangular table and started to slide them off when she saw me enter.

‘Please don’t get up, Aunty.’ I went over to kiss her, shocked at how frail she had become. My godmother was always short and slender but today, in that dim glow, she looked tiny and the hands that took mine were bony and tremulous.

Aunty M put her feet on the spottily charred Persian rug. ‘Turn the light up, darling. Let me see you.’

I fiddled with the gas taps, wishing she would get electricity installed. The light those lamps gave out was feeble – hardly enough to read by – and the fumes irritated my throat and eyes almost immediately. Mr G had thought it dangerous to propel electrons into his home but I didn’t think his goddaughter agreed.

‘You look lovely,’ March Middleton said, ‘so tall and elegant and that hair – I would give a thousand guineas to have your golden crown and still have a bargain. Show me your arm.’

I rolled up my sleeve for her to inspect the stump of my left forearm with all the appreciation of a connoisseur. ‘It is quite slow healing. Does it still hurt?’

‘When it’s not itching.’

‘And you have a phantom limb,’ she said sympathetically.

‘How did you know that?’

‘You put it out to support yourself on the back of the chair when you leaned over before you remembered.’

‘I still try to pick things up with my hand sometimes,’ I admitted.

‘I know it was a much smaller injury but a mesmerist helped me when I lost my toe.’ March Middleton laughed softly. ‘What a crowd we make, you and I plus Mr G without his eye.’

‘Is the mesmerist still working?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, dear.’ Aunty M’s eyes twinkled. ‘He treated me when I went to visit him in the condemned cell.’

‘The last man I visited in jail tried to throttle me,’ I told her. ‘He very nearly succeeded.’ I put my hand to my throat. ‘But how are you feeling?’ In her guardian’s lifetime the chair she was in belonged to him exclusively but when he died she took it over, rather – she had explained – than have strangers sitting in it. I must have been one of the very few children ever to have climbed onto the great man’s lap and almost certainly the only one with the temerity to call him Uncle G. I took a wooden chair from the round circular table so that I could sit closer to her.

‘I am well.’ March waved my concerns away. ‘Everybody fusses around me but I wish they would not.’

I hope people fuss around me when I’m coming up to eighty, I thought but said, ‘You don’t look especially well. Have you seen a doctor?’

‘The worthy Dr Picaday comes every day.’ March coughed chestily. ‘He tries to confiscate my cigarettes. He even tells Jenny to pour away my gin but I know too many horrible ways of murdering people for her to obey that instruction.’

I laughed. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘I was thinking the same myself until Picaday ordered me to it.’

March Middleton had never been a one for obeying commands, and I doubt she would have survived long if she had in what was even more of a man’s world than I had ever known.

‘Perhaps you could have a little rest later.’ I put a hand on her thin arm.

‘Perhaps.’ My godmother wrinkled her brow. ‘I am a little out of touch but only a little. Inspector Franklin still visits most weeks. You have had a difficult time, Betty.’

‘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.

‘You 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?’

‘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

Reviews for Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire

[vesper1931 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Betty Church in 1939 has been sent to Sackwater in Suffolk with a promotion to Inspector. Where she meets her motley crew of police officers but this is also the place where she grew up. It doesn't take long before she discovers her first body.
Unfortunately I just didn't get the humour of the book, I expect it would be enjoyed by most people but humour is subjectivec and I just found it tedious and trying.
So overall this new series is not for me.
A NetGalley Book

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the second M. R. C. Kasasian book and I'm pretty much done.This is everything I dislike in "comedy" shows and nothing I enjoy. If you're a fan of unpleasant people being obnoxious and showing up other people who are more obnoxious then this is for you. Betty herself is not a bad character and some of the people she holds close are interesting, however the twins and Dodo are unpleasant at best and I held a hope that they were either (minor spoiler)the Murderers or going to be murdered, but alas, noThis is set just as World War II is breaking out and I'm also not sure how long the events were going on for and by the end I really didn't care.I'm not going to yuck on someone elses yum but this isn't my thing, not my yum and I'm going to leave this author for others.

[ablachly_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Inspector Betty Church is one of the first female police officers, who returns to work in her small hometown after losing an arm while working in London. Now she's investigating a series of murders, while dealing with a crazy cast of characters--sexist coworkers, unappreciative parents, and an ex-boyfriend's family who seems more like family than her own.The book is delightful and quirky (in a Jasper Fforde kind of way--which is to say, good).

[kevincannon-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the first title I've read by this author and is the first novel in a spin off series from their Gower Street Detective Series.Betty Church is invalided out to the sleepy village of Sackwater where she grew up following an incident in which she lost her hand whilst on a case with the Metropolitan police.The village is populated with a collection of eccentric and comical characters which includes the various members of the Suffolk constabulary.The book reminds me of the style used in the Lestrade novels by M.J.Trow which I read many years ago and compares very favourably.If you like quirky characters and puns then this is the ideal book to keep you entertained. The whodunit keeps you guessing right to the very end and it is written in a flowing style that allows you to lose yourself in the storyAll in all this was a very entertaining humorous murder mystery