A Sprig of Sea Lavender Read online

  A SPRIG OF SEA

  LAVENDER

  J.R.L. ANDERSON

  CONTENTS

  IThe Girl with the Portfolio

  IIThe Art Dealer and the Rugby Player

  III‘A Thread of John Constable’s Life’

  IVA Bad Night for Sally

  VLost Property

  VIAt Poplar’s Fen

  VIISally at Lavenham

  VIIIMrs Vincent’s Call

  IXAt Sea

  XThe Secret of the Fen

  XIThe Skein of Tragedy

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE J.R.L. ANDERSON COLLECTION

  The Peter Blair Mysteries

  Death on the Rocks

  Death in the Thames

  Death in the North Sea

  Death in the Desert

  Death in the Caribbean

  Death in the City

  Death in the Greenhouse

  Death in a High Latitude

  The Piet Deventer Investigations

  A Sprig of Sea Lavender

  Festival

  Late Delivery

  Other J.R.L. Anderson Mysteries

  Reckoning in Ice

  The Nine-Spoked Wheel

  Redundancy Pay

  For

  Tom Matthews

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have given John Constable a few unrecorded acquaintances, and a few fictitious works. He is great enough to forgive. Poplar’s Fen is unmarked on any map and I have taken some liberties with the quays of Yarmouth, but for the rest the Suffolk landscape and the mingled land and seascape of the saltmarshes are as real as I can make them. The contemporary human characters in my tale are all imaginary.

  I

  The Girl with the Portfolio

  THAT THERE SHOULD BE a surviving railway station at the little Suffolk town of Sudbury in these days of axed branch lines seems improbable; that it should still actually have trains seems next to unbelievable. Privately, Keith Tomlinson had doubted the accuracy of his aunt’s information. Coming down from London on Friday to spend the weekend with her at Long Melford, she had met him at the main line station of Mark’s Tey, near Colchester and driven him the dozen miles or so through the pastel-coloured countryside of the Essex-Suffolk borders. On Sunday evening she had had a bad attack of migraine, and although she said that she would still be able to drive him to Mark’s Tey on Monday morning, he wouldn’t let her. She was close on seventy, and he didn’t think she was up to it. He was persuading her to let him order a taxi for Mark’s Tey when she said, ‘But you don’t need to go all that way. It will be very expensive, and you can get the morning train at Sudbury, which connects with the London train at Mark’s Tey.’

  Not wanting to argue with her he had agreed and ordered a car for Sudbury, reckoning that he could always tell the driver to go on to Mark’s Tey. Of course there had once been trains at Sudbury, but he thought that his aunt’s migraine-bemused mind had probably gone back thirty years.

  To his surprise, the taxi driver seemed to think it reasonable enough to be asked to go to Sudbury station, and when Keith got out in the yard of the Victorian country station he was encouraged to see two or three other people making for the entrance. ‘Could you please tell me which is the right platform for the Mark’s Tey train?’ he asked one man.

  The man laughed. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  Keith soon saw. The entrance to the footbridge that once crossed the lines was boarded up, and the track itself that once served the Down Platform of the little station was gone. A single track came to the Up Platform – and stopped. Beyond the station, where the track had once gone on to Clare and Cambridge, was what looked now like an overgrown country lane.

  ‘There is no booking office – you pay on the train,’ Keith’s fellow traveller explained.

  Sharp on time, a diesel rail-bus drew up at the platform. Keith, savouring what he felt as a plunge into railway history, stood at the carriage door to watch the train pull out. It had actually started moving when a girl, carrying one of those huge black portfolios that hold pictures or large-scale architect’s drawings, ran onto the platform. Keith opened the door for her, got an arm round her shoulders and hauled her in. The portfolio was a nuisance. It half-jammed in the doorway, but the girl clung to it and with a considerable wrench Keith managed to drag it in.

  ‘Thank you . . . thank you ever so much,’ the girl panted. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d missed this train.’

  *

  At Mark’s Tey passengers for the London train had to cross a bridge to get to the main line. The girl, who looked pale and far from well, was staggering with the huge portfolio, so Keith helped her with it. He himself had a return ticket from Mark’s Tey to London, but the girl had to go to the booking office, having bought a ticket only to Mark’s Tey on the Sudbury train. There were two or three people ahead of her at the booking office window, and she swayed unhappily as she stood in the queue. She looked so wretched that Keith offered to get her ticket for her. ‘Oh, if you would! You are very kind.’ She gave him a five-pound note, he got a single ticket to Liverpool Street and gave her the change. When the London train came in he found her a seat. The portfolio was too wide to go on the luggage rack, and as there were no spare seats in the compartment he stood it in the corridor just outside. The girl muttered thanks, but seemed to have lost interest in things. She sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.

  When the train got to the London terminus at Liverpool Street she was still sitting with her eyes closed. The other passengers hastening to start their week in offices and shops, left without taking any notice of her. Keith, who also wanted to get to his office, was irritated and perplexed. He knew nothing of the girl, but he couldn’t help feeling a sort of half-responsibility for her. He watched to see that her portfolio was untouched, and when there was room in the compartment he brought it inside. Then he gave the girl a little shake. ‘Wake up, we’ve got to Liverpool Street,’ he said.

  She took no notice. Deciding that she must be ill, he got out on the platform and was lucky to see a porter. ‘Can you help, please? There’s a passenger in the train who’s ill, I think,’ he said.

  The porter was helpful, got into the train with Keith, and studied the girl. ‘Don’t like the way she looks,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the First Aid man. Can you stay with her?’

  He didn’t at all want to stay, but Keith felt unhappily that he couldn’t now get out of it. He was wondering how much longer it would be before he could get to his office when the porter came back with a man wearing an ambulance corps armband. He felt the girl’s pulse and gently lifted one of her eyelids. ‘Nothing I can do,’ he said. ‘I think she’s dead.’

  *

  The next couple of hours – for Keith was kept for all of two hours – were a nightmare. Doctor, ambulance and a railway policeman arrived almost together. Keith asked if he could go but the railway policeman said, ‘If you don’t mind, sir, we’d like a statement from you. I’ll take it as soon as I can, but we must let the doctor see what he can do first.’

  The doctor examined the girl carefully, feeling her scalp, studying her eyes, lips and fingernails. Then, ‘Where is her handbag? I’d like to have a look at her handbag,’ he said.

  There was no handbag on the seat beside her. The railway policeman looked under the seat, and under the seat opposite – nothing. ‘I don’t remember seeing her with a handbag,’ Keith said. ‘She had her hands full with that big portfolio.’

  ‘How did she get her ticket?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘She bought a ticket on the train from Sudbury, but only to Mark’s Tey,’ Keith said. ‘I suppose she took some money from a pocket – I didn’t notice. She ha
d to book again at Mark’s Tey. I’d helped her with her portfolio because I thought she looked rather ill, and I got her ticket for her at Mark’s Tey – a single to Liverpool Street. She gave me a five-pound note and I gave her the change with the ticket. Again I didn’t notice where she took the money from.’

  ‘She’s wearing a coat and skirt and there are two small pockets in the coat. I expect the ticket and her money will be in one of them,’ the policeman said. They were, but she didn’t seem to have much money – only the change from buying her ticket, and a few odd pence. There was nothing else in either pocket.

  ‘Rather looks as if she was expecting to be met.’ the policeman said. ‘I wonder if there’s anyone hanging around at the barrier. I’d better go and see.’

  There was no one obviously waiting at the barrier. The policeman had a word with the ticket collector. ‘No, no one’s asked about anyone off this train,’ the ticket collector said. The policeman called out, ‘Is anyone waiting to meet a young lady off the Colchester train?’ People standing about on the concourse glanced at him, but no one came up to him. He waited a minute or so, then walked back to the compartment.

  ‘Doesn’t seem anyone meeting her, or if there was he’s given up and gone away,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I can’t do any more here,’ the doctor said. ‘There’ll have to be an autopsy, and the sooner we get her to hospital the better.’ He told the ambulance men to take her to the City Hospital, adding, ‘I’ll have a word with the pathologist on the phone.’

  The men took a stretcher from the ambulance and laid it on the platform. Then they lifted the girl gently, carried her from the compartment and laid her on the stretcher, covering her with a blanket. She seemed pathetically small. As the ambulance drove off the doctor beckoned to the policeman, took him away from where Keith was standing around unhappily and had a brief conversation in the low voice. The policeman nodded and the doctor went off.

  The policeman then went back to Keith. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting like this,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get the train away now, and I think I’d better have this carriage uncoupled and shunted off where it can be examined. Give me a few minutes to make arrangements, and then perhaps you’d be good enough to come to the police office. I’ll look after that portfolio – no point in sending it to the hospital after her. Perhaps we can identify her from it. Unless you can give us a line on who she is.’

  ‘I don’t know her from Adam – I mean Eve,’ Keith said miserably. He was thinking of all the work piling up in his office, particularly of a conveyance to be completed for a young couple buying their first house. As a solicitor, though, he was also conscious of his duty to make statements if they were required from him.

  *

  The railway police go back to the very early days of railways, when they were originally recruited as signalmen. Before fixed semaphore signals came into existence in the late 1830s, railway signalling was done by men standing on the track, controlling trains in much the same way as road traffic is controlled by a policeman on point duty. (Because of their origin as policemen you may still occasionally hear signalmen referred to in railway slang as ‘bobbies.’) As railway signalling became less rudimentary the police found plenty to keep them busy in ordinary police work on railway premises, and a smart lot they were, in the top hats and tail coats of Early Victorian police uniform, the colour of the uniform matching the liveries of the different railway companies. As the railways developed there was a growing need for police to keep an eye on goods in transit and to deal with the wants and needs and misbehaviour of the public on railway premises. Nowadays the railway police look much like ordinary policemen and do much the same sort of job wherever there are railways to be policed, but they remain a specialised force. Keith’s policeman went to a staff telephone on the platform, came back to give instructions to a guard and engine driver about the train, and then, picking up the big portfolio, asked Keith to come with him.

  ‘Bulky to carry, this thing,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s why I helped her with it,’ Keith replied.

  At intervals between bookstalls, refreshment rooms, waiting rooms and lavatories of big railway stations there are inconspicuous little doors. You seldom notice them, but they are the keys to the working life of the station, for they lead to the offices where the running of trains is controlled, freight organised and the hundred and one things done, from arranging sleeper reservations to ensuring that trains connect with boats that are required to move the public and its goods. The policeman took Keith through one of these doors, up a flight of stairs, to a room labelled ‘Police.’ Inside it was just like the entrance to an ordinary police station, with a counter and a bell with a card saying, ‘Please ring for attention’. Keith’s policeman ignored the bell, lifted a flap in the counter and walked through into a big office where a sergeant was seated at a desk. The sergeant got up politely as Keith was shown in. ‘This is the gentleman who helped the young lady who was found dead in the Colchester train,’ the policeman said.

  ‘I know nothing whatever about her,’ Keith added. ‘And I’m horribly late for work, and I really must go as soon as possible.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said the sergeant, trying to be soothing. ‘But you will understand that we have to find out all we can about how the unfortunate young lady came to be as she was. I understand that you travelled with her on the Colchester train?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Keith said, becoming more and more exasperated. ‘But it was entirely by chance. She got into the train at Sudbury just as it was pulling out, and I helped her get that portfolio thing on board. We had to change at Mark’s Tey, and I helped her because she seemed to be unwell. When we got to Liverpool Street I thought she was asleep, so I tried to wake her up. When I couldn’t, I asked a porter to get help. That’s absolutely all I know about it, and I wish I’d just got off the train like everybody else in the compartment.’

  ‘Come, come, sir. We’ve all got to help one another. You did what you could for the young lady, and I’m sure it was very good of you. Now if you’d just answer a few questions . . . May I have your name and address?’

  ‘Keith James Tomlinson, aged twenty-eight. I’m junior partner in a firm of solicitors at Twickenham, Collard and Wellspade, and I live at 53 Canopy Court, Richmond. That’s a big block of flats.’

  The sergeant wrote it down. ‘Thank you, sir. Now you say you joined the train this morning at Sudbury. May I ask what took you to Sudbury?’

  ‘I spent the weekend with my aunt, Miss Sarah Banks, at Long Melford. That’s a village about three miles from Sudbury. I got a taxi from her house to Sudbury station.’

  ‘And you met the young lady at the station?’

  ‘I didn’t meet her. I was on the train, and the train was moving. She rushed onto the platform and got on the train. I opened the door for her and helped her in. The big portfolio she was carrying made it awkward, and she nearly didn’t make it.’

  ‘Dangerous thing to do – I don’t mean you, sir. Still, she got on all right. What happened next?’

  ‘Nothing happened. I mean, we just found seats in the train.’

  ‘Were there any other passengers?’

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t say how many, but several – six or eight, perhaps.’

  ‘The young lady didn’t have a ticket?’

  ‘None of us had tickets. There’s no booking office at Sudbury – it’s a sort of half station. You pay on the train, like paying on a bus.’

  ‘And you had to change at Mark’s Tey?’

  ‘Yes. The Sudbury train only goes as far as Mark’s Tey, I think. It’s a very little train. You have to go over a footbridge to get to the main line, and you buy tickets for London, or other places, I suppose, at the booking office on the main line station. She was struggling rather as we went over the bridge, so I carried the portfolio for her. And I bought a ticket for her – I had a return ticket for myself. She gave me the money and I gave her the change.’

  ‘Did
you have luggage of your own?’

  ‘Only this.’ Keith indicated his canvas holdall.

  ‘What happened when the London train came in?’

  ‘I don’t remember anybody’s getting off. I opened a carriage door, let her get in and then followed with the portfolio. It was a fairly crowded train and at first I wondered if we’d get seats. But we walked along the corridor and came to a compartment with a couple of empty seats. I was a little way in front of her. I put my holdall on one seat and stood by the other until she came. She sat down, and I think she closed her eyes almost at once. I couldn’t get the portfolio on the rack because it was too wide. I stood it in the corridor, just outside the compartment.’

  ‘Did she talk to anyone on the train?’

  ‘On the London train I’m sure she didn’t, because she seemed to be asleep. I don’t know about the Sudbury train. It was a new line for me and I was looking out of the window most of the time.’

  ‘Didn’t you go on the Sudbury line when you went down to Long Melford?’

  ‘No. My aunt met me at Mark’s Tey with her car. I came back from Sudbury.’

  ‘Had you ever seen the young lady before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, sir, that seems about all you can tell us. Thank you very much. As a lawyer you’ll know that there may have to be an inquest and you may be called to give evidence. But you’ll hear about that from the coroner’s office. We needn’t keep you any longer now.’

  Keith was thankful to be on his way to Waterloo and Twickenham.

  *

  ‘Funny business,’ said the sergeant when Keith had gone. ‘So the doctor’s not satisfied about the cause of death?’

  ‘No. He thinks she probably died from some kind of poisoning. That’s why he wanted to look at her handbag, to see if he could find out what she’d taken. But there wasn’t any handbag – at least none that we could see. He said the carriage ought to be searched thoroughly, so I asked the foreman to get it uncoupled and put in a shed when the train was shunted out. I asked the guard to see that the carriage was locked.’