The room of the dead, p.1
The Room of the Dead, page 1
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
THE ROOM OF THE DEAD
A Betty Church Mystery
M. R. C. Kasasian
www.headofzeus.com
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.
Contents
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
1
COFFEE IN THE ICE AGE
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 Sultan a 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.
2
MRS PERKINS AND THE PRANCING PONIES
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.
