A Sprig of Sea Lavender Page 5
Piet slit the envelope with his pocket knife – from childhood he had disliked opening envelopes untidily with a thumb – and shook out the scrap of dried wild flower it contained. The tiny blueish-purple petals were still firm. ‘I’m not an expert on these things,’ he said, ‘but I’d say it was sea lavender. I used to sail quite a bit with my father when I was a kid, in the Thames Estuary and up the East Coast as far as Yarmouth, sometimes. I’ve often seen it growing in the marshes. Have you got a book on wild flowers handy?’
‘No, sir, I’m afraid we don’t run to that in the office. But there’s a public library only three doors down the street. I’ll slip out and see if I can borrow one for you.’
‘There’s no need for that, I can look in myself when I leave. Tell me exactly where you found it.’
‘I was looking under the seat for the young woman’s handbag. She wasn’t there, of course – the body had been taken away, so I could only know roughly whereabouts she’d been sitting. But one of the railway policemen had seen her before she was taken away and he remembered how she’d been, leaning back in the corner next the door to the corridor. I was using a torch to look for the handbag. There wasn’t any bag, but I saw this little thing in the light of the torch, just about where I reckon her feet would have been. There’s no way of knowing whether it was anything to do with her or not, but I thought it just might have fallen off her shoe or something, so I picked it up and put it in an envelope.’
‘You did very well. It may mean nothing, or it may help to give us a line on where she’d been that morning on her way to the station. I’ll give you a receipt for it and take it with me. There’s something else I’d like you to do for me. I know how pressed you are and it’s probably a pretty hopeless inquiry after all this time, but I’m surprised that no one seems to have turned up at Liverpool Street to ask about the portfolio. I’m not satisfied that there really was nobody there to meet her.’
‘The railway constable did ask on the platform at the time, sir.’
‘Yes, but I rather think that whoever was there wouldn’t want to make himself or herself known to a policeman. You’re in touch with the railway men. Could you get them to ask the ticket collectors, porters, bookstall staff and anyone else who was around when that Colchester train came in if they noticed some man or woman hanging about and looking anxious? And try to find out if anyone has been to the station since to ask where the woman’s portfolio has been taken. Nothing was said about it at the inquest. I think someone must be getting very anxious indeed to find out what’s happened to it.’
‘I can try all right, but I can’t promise any results.’
‘Our job is ninety-nine per cent routine and one per cent luck. But the luck doesn’t come unless you carry out the routine. Would you like me to have a word with your inspector?’
‘It would be the right thing, sir. I’ll do anything I can to help – in my own time if need be – but we’ve put in a lot of work on this case already without getting anywhere, and other jobs keep piling up.’
Piet knew what he was doing. He wanted Sergeant Williams to feel personally concerned in the case, but he had no intention of barging in on a divisional officer’s territory. He devoted half an hour to the station inspector and left another ally.
*
Before going to his car Piet called at the library. It had a good reference section and provided a standard work on wild flowers. This told him that there were three varieties of sea lavender, Statice limonium, which grew on muddy stretches of sea-marsh, Statice spathulata, which seemed to prefer rocks, and Statice reticulata, which was found only on some Norfolk saltmarshes. His specimen, he decided, was limonium, which would fit in with the Suffolk coast, though it was puzzling to see what connection it could have with the dead woman, for it would not occur as far inland as Sudbury. Pity it wasn’t reticulate – that really would narrow down the locality it came from, though a Norfolk saltmarsh had even less connection with the railway station at Sudbury than had the Suffolk coast. He put the specimen in its envelope carefully in his pocket book and at the back of his mind.
*
He was driving east, so his call in the City had not taken him out of his way. He went out towards Brentwood, but was able to bypass Brentwood itself and was in Chelmsford in little over an hour. From Chelmsford it was a straight run of about twenty-five miles through Braintree and Halstead to Sudbury. He got there soon after midday and drove to the station car park. It seemed a big car park for a very small station, but there were malthouses and mills in the vicinity, and doubtless the railway had seen better days. What was now a car park would originally have been the station yard, where drays, pulled by great Suffolk punches, would have carted produce to the trains before there were any motor lorries.
The station itself brought the same little shock of surprise that Keith Tomlinson had felt – that it should be there at all. For some reason he found himself thinking of Turner’s famous painting Rain, Steam and Speed. That had been painted in 1844 when railways and the power of steam seemed to offer England a future of limitless prosperity – there was a confidence about the picture that late twentieth-century man could not but envy. The disused track running on to Clare and Cambridge would also make a picture, but it would be a picture of a very different mood. Failure? Not exactly. Sadness, yes – after two world wars and savage economic slumps confidence had certainly been lost, and the Victorian social stability had fractured into what seemed endless social bickering. But was Victorian stability really so very stable? The police were needed then, as now. There was brutality and senseless suffering – only those more comfortably placed in life knew less about it. For many people, the Suffolk labourers among them, twentieth-century politics provided more than life had ever given their families before. Did life now provide too much? Perhaps – but what could be said to be too much? It was a question of what you did with what you had. People always seemed to waste things. This little branch line had seen men, taken men, going off to war, and brought some of them back, hurt, often, in body or mind. Now the line itself looked like some wizened sea-creature, stranded on a beach, taken out of its own world and put in a world where people thought it a curiosity. Yet the remnants of this railway line from Sudbury to Mark’s Tey were not quite out of the world: the line was still useful, quicker than car or bus, not hurting the countryside. And God, how beautiful it was in its forlorn way! The picture from the train window must have been about the last conscious vision of earth that the unhappy woman had had – she could not have noticed much after reaching the main line. It wasn’t a bad picture of the world to take away with you.
Piet made a conscious mental effort to halt his meditations. He was not concerned with reveries, he had a job to do. He walked along the edge of the platform contemplating how best to do it.
His mind put visual images to Tomlinson’s story. He was on the train and it had started moving when the girl flung herself at the door. The entrance from the station yard was towards one end of the platform – the end from which the train went out. Presumably, therefore, the train went past the entrance when it came in, stopping about the middle of the platform. That would give a little time for someone running from the entrance to reach a moving train before it had gone too far. The struggle at the carriage door must have taken place somewhere roughly level with the station entrance, or in a sector not more than a few yards each side of the direct line from the entrance to the edge of the platform. If the torn label had fallen on the platform there was not much hope; it would have been more or less in the fairway of coming and going feet and would almost certainly have been trodden to pieces. It might have been whisked away by the wind from the moving train, but the train had not got up speed or the girl could never have been hauled in. Piet glanced round the platform and the blocked-up stairs leading to a footbridge across the line, not needed now that only one platform was in use. There were some scraps of paper blown against the stairs, but all save one bit was distressingly familiar litt
er – old sweet wrappings, an empty crisp bag, a torn sheet of newspaper. He picked up the one piece that might have been part of a label, but it turned out to be the top of a handwritten circular advertising a village fete.
A timetable by the station entrance told him that the next train was not due for an hour, so he could hunt undisturbed along the line. Again he tried to make a visual image of what might have happened. A carriage door open, with the girl, clinging to the big portfolio, being dragged in by the hefty young rugby footballer. Tomlinson had said that he got his left arm round the girl. That implied that she was clutching at the train with her right hand – for they would be opposite each other – and had her left arm round the portfolio. The piece of label still stuck to the portfolio was off-centre on the lower half; it would have scraped against the edge of the door, probably fairly low down. It could not have fallen straight to the ground – it was moving with the train when it was torn off, would have been carried forward a little by its own momentum and have fluttered rather than dropped down. It would be on the platform side of the line, possibly beyond the end of the platform.
Piet got down onto the line from the platform, well beyond the point where he judged the struggle to board the train to have taken place. Then he walked slowly along the line in the direction of the outgoing train, scrutinising every inch. He passed what he called to himself the most hopeful sector without finding anything and was now beyond the station. He stopped to consider for how long it was worth going on. The bit of paper might have stuck to the train and have been swept up when the carriage was cleaned, or it might have fallen off anywhere between Sudbury and Mark’s Tey. Could he justify a search of the whole line? That would be ridiculous, an appalling amount of time spent on a chance probably a good deal more slender than winning a football pool. He went back to his visual image. The label was an ordinary stick-on luggage label, such as you buy in packets. It was stuck to the portfolio, so that the side which scraped against the door was not the sticky side, and even if there had been some gum left it would have been on the wrong side to stick to the train. In the struggle it might, of course, have been twisted, but still it seemed highly unlikely that it had stuck to the train, and much more likely that it had dropped off. And it was not likely to have been carried far – either it would be somewhere near where he now was, or it had been blown away and was now unfindable. It was worth looking for a little longer, but not much.
He was about to give up when he noticed something whiteish caught between a shoe of the rail and the sleeper. Yes, it was a crumpled bit of paper. Telling himself to expect disappointment he bent down to it – and knew a wonderful sense of triumph. His visual reconstruction must have been more or less exact; this was the torn half of the label on the portfolio. It must have been carried along much as he had imagined and been blown into the corner between the rail, the sleeper and the shoe. What an all-but-incredible piece of luck! Ninety-nine per cent routine, one per cent luck! Well, he’d slogged away at the routine. And the label was still legible – written with a ballpoint pen in the same hand as the ‘Suffolk’ on the portfolio. He had a vivid mental image of that ‘Suffolk’ and of the jagged edge above it. This piece of paper would have to be matched with that when he got back to his office, but although that was necessary to provide physical evidence to convince other people, his own visual memory was enough for him. The label was addressed to
Mrs Shirley Vincent
Moat Cottage Studio
Lavenham
– the ‘Suffolk’ that completed the address he already had.
He put the precious piece of torn luggage label in the envelope that contained the sprig of sea lavender and went back to his car.
Lavenham was not more than six or seven miles from Sudbury and he decided to go there straightaway. What a curious thread of John Constable’s life seemed to stretch back from the girl found dead in a train at Liverpool Street! Lavenham was where the young Constable had been to school.
*
Lavenham has come well into the twentieth century, preserving a fairy-story quality from the past without looking consciously pretty. Its overhanging timbered buildings seem to have grown there, the twisting lanes between them seeming to remain just as they were trodden by the first footsteps making from cottage door to well or cabbage patch. The wealth from wool that went into the great church and merchants’ houses seems somehow to have lasted from the Middle Ages, paying each new generation a dividend of gracious surroundings. Piet had no idea where Moat Cottage was, and as it was getting on for half-past one he thought that the best thing to do would be to call at a pub for a drink and a sandwich and ask at the bar.
He chose the wrong pub, for the place he entered was bigger than it looked from outside and was in fact a hotel, with a flourishing restaurant trade. When he asked for a sandwich the barman said, ‘Sorry, sir, don’t do sandwiches. You can get a meal in the restaurant.’
From another point of view, though, his choice turned out to be a good one, for the customers all seemed to be at lunch and the bar was empty. ‘Haven’t got time for the restaurant so I’ll have to make do with a pint,’ Piet said. ‘Perhaps you’d join me.’
‘Thank you sir, I’ll have a half,’ the barman said. ‘If you want a sandwich you can get one in that little pub across the road. Do them quite well there.’
He pulled Piet’s pint and his own glass. ‘Local beer?’ Piet asked.
‘Brewery’s at Ipswich. Time was when they brewed here on the premises – there’s an old malthouse at the back. Before my time though.’
‘Well, it’s good beer,’ Piet said. ‘I’m looking for a place called Moat Cottage Studio. Do you happen to know it?’
‘Mrs Vincent’s place – yes. It’s a bit out of the town, but you’ll find it easily enough. Go out on the Bury road, and about half a mile on you’ll came to a turning on the right, little narrow track, doesn’t look like a road, but it is. The studio’s along it. There’s a painted sign at the corner, so you can’t miss it.’
‘Thanks a lot. Do you know Mrs Vincent?’
‘Comes in here quite often with people from the studio. It’s a sort of shop as well, pictures and art stuff and antiques. And they do teas – home-made scones and things. It’s quite a big place, with a good car park. Mrs Vincent was in with a bunch of people last night. Cheerful lot they were, too.’
This was a slight shock to Piet, for he had been hoping that he had identified the woman in the train. But you couldn’t expect one strand of luck to run for ever, and at least he had a name and address to start from. ‘Is there a Mr Vincent?’ he asked.
‘Not that I know of, not to come in here. But then I wouldn’t know, you see, because I only know them from coming into the bar. Mrs Vincent’s not been here all that long. Came down from London two-three years back, did up the cottage and turned it into the studio place. At least, I’ve always thought she came from London, but I don’t really know. You in the antique trade?’
‘In a way . . . Well, I must be getting along. Thanks for a nice beer, and for giving me instructions to get to the studio.’
*
Lunchtime, Piet thought, would not be the best time to visit Moat Cottage. If they did teas, he’d do better to get there a bit after three o’clock. He could do with a sandwich and there was no reason why he shouldn’t take the barman’s advice. He did and found it excellent. A pleasant elderly woman served him with a plate of freshly-made ham sandwiches, and there was really fresh mustard on the bar counter. He did not pursue inquiries about Mrs Vincent.
Piet reckoned that it was still too early to make for Moat Cottage when he left the pub, but he could find out where it was and have a look at the country round it. He had also to make up his mind what to do. The simplest thing would be to interview Mrs Vincent officially, disclosing his police authority and asking formally for information on the portfolio that had been addressed to her and found in the possession of the dead girl at Liverpool Street. All his instincts were agains
t this. The girl had not died a natural death, and the presence of arsenic in her body in addition to the barbiturate drug which killed her strongly suggested murder. Then there were the contents of the portfolio, a strange collection of possibly very valuable pictures, or impressive forgeries. To start questioning Mrs Vincent officially would indicate a police interest which ought not yet to be disclosed. Mrs Vincent might be entirely innocent of anything connected with the girl’s death, in which case no harm would be done by keeping quiet about it. Or she might be implicated in all sorts of ways: if so a great deal of harm might be done by alerting her, and possible associates, before the police were in any position to take action. The barman had given him an idea by asking if he was in the antique trade. He would call on Mrs Vincent, he decided, as a customer with an interest in antiques, and navigate from there, as the saying goes, by guess and by God.
*
The barman’s directions were accurate. Piet drove out of Lavenham on the Bury St Edmunds road and soon came to the sign for Moat Cottage Studio. It was an elaborate, well-painted board, announcing
Moat Cottage Studio
Proprietor: Mrs S. Vincent
Antiques and Objects of Art For Sale
Art Lessons Arranged
Cream Teas With Home-Made Cakes
Good Car Park
It was still too early for the kind of visit Piet wanted to make, so he drove past the turning. The road climbed slightly and about a quarter of a mile farther on he met another side road, also leading off to the right. He took this, and after a few hundred yards pulled in under the hedge on his near side and stopped. The other side of the road was hedgeless, with a wire fence along the verge. Beyond the fence the land fell gently to a wide valley, with a thatched cottage and various outbuildings visible through the trees that lined the track leading to them. He got out of his car to have a look. That would be Moat Cottage, he thought. With the surrounding buildings it seemed a substantial establishment. He could make out a car park, and in a field opposite the cottage there were three or four caravans.