A Sprig of Sea Lavender Read online

  ‘Good work. The doctor had a word with me before you came in with Mr Tomlinson. I don’t see that it’s our case, though; she just happened to die on a train, but it’s not a railway matter. I’ll get in touch with the City police and I daresay they’ll want to send someone to have a look at the carriage. But I suppose we ought to try to identify her if we can. Nuisance that she didn’t seem to have a handbag. Let’s have a look at that portfolio.’

  The portfolio was a huge cardboard folder about a yard square, covered with thin black plastic sheeting and done up with tapes. There was an address label on it, but half the label had been torn off and all that remained was the last line of the address, saying ‘Suffolk’. The sergeant undid the tapes. Inside were four oil paintings, with sheets of tissue paper between them. The paintings were of different sizes. The biggest, almost as big as the portfolio, was a landscape. One of the others, rather dark in colouring, was also a landscape. Of the remaining two one showed some boats drawn up on a beach, and the other was a full-length portrait of a small boy in eighteenth-century costume. ‘Pretty country in the big one,’ observed the sergeant, ‘and the boats aren’t bad. Don’t know why they put kids in fancy dress when they want to paint them – but then painting’s not my cup of tea. Not this sort of painting – I can paint a house all right.’

  There was nothing else in the portfolio and nothing was written on the backs of any of the pictures.

  *

  The pathologist was puzzled. The body was that of a young woman, aged between twenty and twenty-four, and the immediate cause of death was clear enough – a substantial overdose of one of the barbiturate drugs. But there was also evidence of arsenical poisoning, not, he thought, in lethal quantity, but enough to have made her feel off-colour, and, added to the toxic effect of the barbiturate, enough to have contributed to, and probably to have hastened, death. The barbiturate suggested suicide – an overdose of barbiturates prescribed as sleeping pills is a fairly common means of suicide. But such deaths usually take place in bed, when some unhappy, emotionally disturbed individual empties his or her bottle of pills to sleep without awakening. Where had this girl taken her lethal dose of pills? The brief report that had been given to him said that she had been found dead on a train, on which she had travelled up to London from Suffolk. The railway staff doctor who had been called to examine her on the train had telephoned him to say that he suspected poisoning, that he had looked for a handbag which might have contained whatever she had taken, but had been unable to find one. That also was puzzling – few women travelling up to London from the country would come without a handbag. And what of the traces of arsenical poisoning? Arsenic is not a poison often used for suicide – death by arsenic is more commonly the result either of accident, such as the careless putting of some arsenical weed killer in a lemonade bottle, or of murder, when arsenic is deliberately administered in food. This girl’s death seemed to present two conflicting theories, one suggesting suicide, though the place was oddly chosen, the other a deliberate, though incomplete, attempt on her life. Arsenic is a cumulative poison, and the textbook example of murder by arsenic is the administration by a jealous wife or husband of small doses over a prolonged period. Whether the dead girl had a conceivably jealous husband he did not know. She wore no wedding ring, but that in itself meant little nowadays, and a potential murderer might as readily be a jealous lover as a jealous husband. And she had not been killed by arsenic – the traces of arsenical poisoning were significant of something, but of what he could not possibly say. Well, these were all matters for the police. His job was to determine the cause of death and he was reasonably confident that he had done so.

  The task of making preliminary inquiries into the girl’s death fell to Detective-Sergeant Williams of the City of London police. Having been given such facts as there were by the railway police sergeant, he decided to call first on the Medical Officer at Liverpool Street station. The doctor could not tell him much. He had not yet had the pathologist’s report and all he could say was that he thought it possible that she had died from some form of poisoning. ‘I didn’t attempt a detailed examination – the girl was dead, and it was better to get her away to the pathologist,’ he said. ‘There was no obvious sign of injury and from the general appearance of the body I should say that she died from the effects of some narcotic drug. She hadn’t been dead long, half an hour, perhaps. There’s some evidence from another passenger that she seemed unwell on getting into the London train at Mark’s Tey. The train journey is only about an hour’s run, and she must have died soon after settling down in her seat. The passenger whose evidence I have just mentioned thought that she had gone to sleep – a reasonable enough conclusion. When I saw her life was definitely extinct. Her heart had stopped beating for an appreciable time – I estimate it at about half an hour – and there would be irreversible damage to the brain. I considered attempting resuscitation, of course, but it would have been futile. She was clearly dead.’

  ‘The autopsy may reveal some long-standing illness, heart disease or something, which may have killed her.’

  ‘Of course. All I can say is that superficial examination did not indicate any chronic illness, and did suggest poisoning. Naturally I looked for her handbag to see if it contained a bottle of tablets which she might have taken, but she didn’t appear to have a handbag. That struck me as a curious feature of the case and I asked the railway police to have the carriage locked and uncoupled when the train was shunted out, so that it could be thoroughly examined if you think it necessary.’

  ‘That was a good move, doctor. Thank you very much. When do you expect the pathologist will be able to report his findings?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’ll act as quickly as he can. I telephoned him to give my reasons for suspecting poison, and I don’t need to enlarge on the possibilities in cases where poisoning is suspected. Doubtless he’ll be in touch with the Coroner’s office, and I should think you’ll have a report soon. It may be only a provisional report, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Well, doctor, I must thank you again for all you’ve done. I think I’ll go and have at look at that carriage.’

  Accompanied by the two railway policemen, Detective-Sergeant Williams got a lift on a shunting engine to the marshalling yard to which the carriage had been taken. He was glad to have the railwaymen with him, for they had to leave the engine and walk across the yard to the siding where the carriage had been shunted to be out of the way, and a big marshalling yard is an unnerving place to anyone unfamiliar with it. There are railway lines everywhere, and engineless trains – groups of carriages or trucks given a skilful shove by the shunter – seem to appear out of nowhere and to move almost noiselessly. Actually, the work is highly organised and beautifully timed – long experience has taught the shunters, sheepdogs among the sheep-like rolling stock, precisely where to give a push that will send carriages just where they are wanted to be made up into trains. The gangers seem to have eyes in the back of their heads, and lookout-men ensure that those working on a line are warned of approaching trains, or bits of trains. Piloted by the railway policemen, Williams made the passage to the layby siding safely. ‘Wouldn’t like to do it on my own,’ he said. The railway sergeant laughed. ‘Wouldn’t let you. It’s part of our job to keep unauthorised public out of railway property.’

  *

  Accustomed to boarding trains from the raised platforms traditional to British Railways – most other countries have ground level platforms and steps at the doors of coaches – Williams was surprised by the height of the carriage in the siding. The railwaymen swung themselves up easily, and the sergeant unlocked the door. Williams followed somewhat awkwardly and made no bones about taking the helping hand held out to him. They entered at one end of the corridor and went to a compartment three doors along. ‘This is where she was found,’ said the railway constable. ‘She was sitting back to the engine in this corner on the corridor side of the compartment.’

  ‘So she could scarcel
y have thrown a handbag out of the window,’ Williams said.

  ‘No. And she didn’t drop it on the floor, either. I had a look under both seats. Better have another look to make sure.’

  The railway sergeant had a torch. All three men got down and looked under the seats, but there certainly wasn’t any handbag to be found. Williams was about to get up when something on the floor caught his eye. ‘Can I have the torch a minute?’ he asked.

  In the beam of the torch he saw what it was, a green stalk a couple of inches long with a cluster of small blue, or blueish-purple, flowers growing from it. It was an inconspicuous little thing, fallen from someone’s buttonhole, perhaps, or from a child’s nosegay of wild flowers being taken back to London from the country. But it was more or less directly under where the girl had been sitting, and he picked it up. The flowers seemed quite fresh and when he looked at the stalk closely he saw that it had been broken, not cut. ‘Know what it is?’ he asked the railwaymen.

  Neither was an expert on wild flowers. ‘Pretty little thing,’ said the sergeant, ‘but search me for a name to it.’

  ‘I don’t know, either,’ Williams said. ‘May have nothing to do with her, of course, but she was sitting about here and it doesn’t look as if it’s been picked long. Could have been brushed from her dress, or caught in her shoe, or something. Might just help to identify her, or at least suggest where she came from. So I think we’ll keep it for the moment.’ He took a small brown envelope from his briefcase, put in the sprig of blossom and labelled the envelope.

  There seemed nothing more to be got from the compartment. ‘The missing handbag – if it is missing, that is, if she ever had one – is distinctly odd,’ Williams said. ‘Since we’re here we’d better have a look in the corridor and the other compartments. She might have dropped it, though, and someone else picked it up.’

  They could have made a good haul of crumpled newspapers, sweet wrappings and empty cigarette packets, but there was no handbag. The railway sergeant explained the messy state of the carriage. ‘The public’s just awful about litter. Always staggers me that you can go into people’s houses and find rooms kept neat and tidy, yet if you put the same people on a train they’ll leave muck everywhere. The railways get blamed, of course – any newspaper will print a letter about dirty trains. But really we do our best. Normally when a train’s shunted out of the terminus the cleaners go on board and it’s tidied up before going into service again. The other carriages on this train will have been cleaned, but this was left as it was.’

  ‘Quite right, too,’ Williams said. ‘Well, I don’t think the carriage can tell us any more – you can unlock it and let the cleaners get at it. If she did have a handbag, it’s been pinched by one of the other passengers – likely enough nowadays. I’ll be getting back to the office to see whether there’s any news from the hospital. Many thanks for all you’ve done.’

  *

  When Williams got back to the police station he was told that the Inspector wanted to see him. ‘The Coroner’s Office has been on about that woman found dead at Liverpool Street,’ the Inspector said. ‘They’ve had a report from the pathologist – she died from barbiturate poisoning. Traces of arsenic in her, too, but apparently not enough to cause death. Seems a queer business. They want to know if she’s been identified.’

  Williams described what he’d done. ‘Nothing to identify her so far,’ he said. ‘She had this big portfolio of pictures with her – the railway police handed it over to me. There’s nothing inside but these four paintings. Maybe an art expert can tell us something about them, but I haven’t had time to go into them yet. The railway police also got a statement from a passenger, a Mr Keith Tomlinson, who’s a solicitor. He travelled up in the same train and apparently helped the woman because he thought she was ill. But you can see what he says – here’s a copy of his statement.’

  The Inspector read it. ‘So she got on the train at Sudbury – maybe she comes from there. You’d better get on to the Sudbury police. Oh, and you’d better go along to the mortuary first and get a description of her and of the clothes she was wearing.’

  Williams did all this and the Sudbury police promised to ring back after they’d made inquiries. They did, but it was an unsatisfactory call. No young woman of the age and description of the girl with the portfolio was known to any of the obvious people who could be asked about her – shopkeepers, the public library, the schools in case she was a schoolteacher. There were two cars left in the station yard at Sudbury, but both were accounted for as belonging to commuters from neighbouring villages who used the station. ‘Of course she may not come from here at all,’ the Sudbury station sergeant said. ‘Since they closed almost all the branch lines people come from all over the place to get the train at Sudbury – she might come from a dozen or more villages. Or she might just be a visitor, going home after the weekend. She doesn’t seem to have come to the station in her own car or it would be there now – she’ll have been driven there by someone else, or she may have come in by bus. We’ll do what we can, but inquiries are going to take some time. If any young woman is reported missing, of course we’ll get in touch with you at once.’

  No one was reported missing from Sudbury. There was that constant sad community of missing women reported by anxious husbands and parents from all over the country, but those reported missing before this girl’s death seemed irrelevant, and no reports of anyone answering to her description came to the police in the following days. An inquest had to be held, but all the Coroner could do was to return an open verdict – that she had died from barbiturate poisoning with no evidence to show how the poison had come to be administered. The proceedings were brief and formal. The traces of arsenic also found in the girl’s body were not mentioned, nor was anything said about the portfolio of pictures. Her portfolio, however, turned out to be of considerable interest to the police.

  II

  The Art Dealer and the Rugby Player

  CHIEF INSPECTOR PIET Deventer was on the young side for the rank, but his promotion had genuinely pleased his colleagues. ‘Really listens to anything you’ve got to say; I’d sooner go to him with a problem than to anyone else in the Force,’ was the comment of an elderly sergeant. ‘High flier all right, but he’ll never take off from anyone else’s back to gain height,’ was the opinion of one of his seniors.

  The spelling of ‘Piet’ was a family tradition. The first Piet Deventer of whom there is any record was a Dutch clockmaker who had come to England in the train of William of Orange, and although the family had lived in England ever since, they kept Dutch forms for their Christian names. Deventer clocks are collectors’ pieces, not only because they are exceptionally beautiful but also because there are not many of them, for the family did not stay in clockmaking. The first Piet Deventer’s son went to sea and there followed several generations of Deventers who were master mariners in the service of the East India Company. None of them made a fortune but they were comfortably off, acquiring a pleasant house at Greenwich which still belonged to Piet’s mother, although it was now divided into flats. The clockmaker’s skill with his hands and his artistic sense stayed in the family, and the house at Greenwich held a fine collection of sketches and watercolours done by various Deventers on their voyages. Piet’s grandfather did not go to sea but became an engraver of some distinction. His father had gone back to the sea and was in command of a merchantman which fought a gallant action with a German submarine in 1943. The merchantman, however, could not win, and went down. Piet’s father and a handful of survivors were adrift for three days on a raft and suffering badly from exposure when they were lucky enough to be picked up by a British destroyer.

  Piet was the only child. He had a pencil or a paintbrush in his hands from infancy and his parents encouraged him to paint. He had just gone to an art school when his father, who had never really recovered from his shipwreck, died. As he was only in his fifties when he died, his widow did not get much of a pension, and although turning the Gr
eenwich house into flats helped, it was an old building and a good deal of the rent from the flats went on maintenance and repairs. Piet’s mother was ready enough to pinch and scrape for herself in order to help Piet, but Piet was not prepared to let her. Quite suddenly he left the art school and joined the police. Thinking back, he often wondered what had really prompted the decision. His mother, of course – his wish to help his mother by getting a job for himself was certainly a real motive. But it was not as simple as that. ‘If I’d really been a great artist I’d have let my mother starve rather than give up painting,’ he thought sometimes. But that couldn’t be wholly true, either. He’d not given up painting, and he was confident that at least some of his work was good. Good enough? At this stage he’d stop thinking about it. And why the police? Directly because he had seen an advertisement for police recruiting and fancied the life more than trying to get the kind of office job for which his school examinations fitted him. Indirectly there was much more to it –the concepts of service, of protecting others, of adventure, too – ideals which, for all the cynicism of a materialistic age, can still motivate young people.

  From the start, Piet was an excellent policeman. He accepted discipline and had a natural sense of fairness, which helped both in his dealings with the public and in his relations with his mates. His artist’s eye gave him an acute sense of observation, which made him outstandingly useful when he was transferred to the CID. His chance came when he was sent to investigate the theft of an important picture from an art gallery – within twenty-four hours he recovered the picture undamaged, and arrested a man who seemed a highly unlikely thief. Piet’s evidence and reconstruction of the theft were so damning that the man, who had pleaded not guilty and seemed to have every chance of acquittal, changed his plea to guilty during the trial.