A Sprig of Sea Lavender Read online

  *

  ‘Saw a bit of stuff like that old George Wright was wearing not long ago. Wouldn’t have known it was called sea lavender, though,’ the railway policeman said. ‘Detective-Sergeant Williams picked it up when we were searching the carriage after the girl’s death. There’s a sort of link with your case, anyway, sir. If you can make anything of it, that is.’

  *

  Piet had to arrange for his own department’s work to be carried on while he was away in Suffolk, and one of the things that bothered him was the problem of communications. Isolated at Poplar’s Fen two or three miles from a telephone he felt that he might be dangerously cut off. He had a long talk with his own Superintendent about this. In any real emergency a police motorcyclist could deliver a message to him, but the last thing Piet wanted was the appearance of policemen at Poplar’s Fen. His Superintendent agreed. ‘I think I’d better let the East Region police know that you are down there in plain clothes, in case you need assistance from them,’ he said. ‘I’ll get that arranged and I’ll ask the local force to take no notice of you unless you ask. For the rest, the only thing will be for you to telephone us.’ Piet said he’d try to ring up twice a day, but until he knew more about the set-up at Poplar’s Fen he couldn’t guarantee any particular times. He would have a police walkie-talkie radio with him, but he wouldn’t use it unless it seemed imperative.

  *

  Now he was on his way with Sally to Poplar’s Fen. There wasn’t as much room in the Riley as the Saab, but Sally only had her rucksack and he didn’t need much kit. He could get all he wanted in his own rucksack, and he took an easel and his painting bag, a canvas holdall in which he carried paints, palette knife and brushes, sketching pads and a few sheets of canvas. He put the walkie-talkie radio in the painting bag. For clothes he settled on old sailing trousers in the colour called Breton red, a thick navy blue pullover in fisherman’s knit and a canvas sailing smock, a useful garment providing good deep pockets and protection against light rain. Sally approved. ‘Our well-dressed detectives really are quite handsome,’ she said.

  He changed his name slightly. He had initials – P.D. – on both his rucksack and his painting bag. There seemed no point in altering these, but he asked Sally to make sure to call him Peter Devonshire instead of Pieter Deventer. The ‘Piet’ didn’t matter – it sounded just the same spelt in his own Dutch fashion as the common English Pete.

  As far as Chelmsford his route was the same as that he had taken from London to Sudbury, but instead of going north to Braintree and Halstead he branched north-east to Colchester and Ipswich. The old Riley was beautifully tuned and had the performance of a sports car. The sergeant was right – she was fun to drive. But, Piet soon discovered, she could be quite hazardous to stop: brakes of her vintage were not as good as modern brakes, however she might excel the mass-produced car in other ways.

  He had told Sally about the attempt to enter the Lost Property office at Liverpool Street, and as the housing estates and suburbs of Outer London fell away they discussed it again. ‘There’s nothing to link it with Sandra’s death except the scrap of sea lavender,’ he said. ‘There must be thousands of people coming to Liverpool Street from the Essex and Suffolk coasts who could have brought a bunch of sea lavender with them, or caught some in a shoe or something. But coincidence becomes less likely every time it occurs. A sprig of sea lavender was found near Sandra’s body and now we have it cropping up again. I mustn’t let myself get obsessed by it, though.’

  ‘There’s masses of it growing round Poplar’s Fen,’ Sally said. ‘To get to the road for Walberswick you pass great clumps of it and I think there’s some actually growing in the path. There’s quite a lot at Moat Cottage, too – not growing, but around the studio. I use it for my flower-arranging classes. I must have brought nearly a rucksack full of it.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, and it could be important. I’ve been thinking that it must have come to Liverpool Street from the coast. It could have come from Moat Cottage.’

  ‘Yes. Some of the students put it in buttonholes, or pin little bunches of it to their dresses. It could fall off anywhere and be picked up by someone else.’

  ‘So there are dozens of potential bringers of sea lavender. Let’s rule out the students and casual visitors to Moat Cottage – we don’t know enough to exclude them altogether, but let’s exclude them for the moment. Who does that leave?’

  ‘Do you mean everybody at Poplar’s Fen and on the staff at Moat Cottage?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  Sally shivered slightly. ‘It’s dreadful to think that someone I know may have murdered Sandra. But I mustn’t think like that. Well, then, here goes. At Moat Cottage there’s Shirley Vincent and her assistant in the business who’s a man called Jeff. I think his other name may be Wilson, but I’m not sure – it’s all Christian names, you see. Shirley will say, “Ask Jeff”, or “Tell Jeff about it”. But I think I’ve heard one of the students call him Mr Wilson. Then there are two girls who come in part-time from Lavenham to help with the teas – they’re Anita and Vi. In the studio there’s Bill Wild who teaches painting, Vera Smith who does pots, and me. Bill and Vera live locally, Vera in Lavenham itself, I think, and Bill in Sudbury. There’s an old man called Arthur who cuts the lawns and looks after the flowerbeds – I’ve never heard him called anything else. And a woman called Mrs Marshall, who’s also local and who comes in to help with the cleaning. That’s about the lot.’

  ‘And at Poplar’s Fen?’

  ‘That’s more difficult, because people come and go. Of the people who have been there more or less as long as I have, there’s Roger and Trudi, the girl on his boat. Trudi came after Sandra but before me. I think it was because Trudi turned up that Sandra got me to go down, Sandra being bothered about Trudi and Roger. Then there’s a smaller boat with a couple called Trish – I suppose that means Patricia, but she’s always called Trish – and Malcolm. There’s a sort of dormitory at the mill with about half a dozen people – Jim, Eddie, Brian and Simon, and a couple of girls, Poppy and Clare. There’s another girl, Jackie, but she’s not there all the time – I think she’s a schoolteacher somewhere and she seems to come mostly at weekends. There have been other people coming for a week or so and then going off – I don’t know them all.’

  ‘If we assume that whoever was mixed up in Sandra’s death was also involved in the break-in at Finsbury Park and the attempted break-in at Liverpool Street, then he or she or they will have been away on those nights. Can we find out if anybody was away then?’

  ‘We can try. Oh, Piet, I’m not sure that I like being a detective. It seems so mean, somehow.’

  ‘Not as mean as poisoning Sandra.’

  ‘No . . . Don’t worry. I’m not going back on what I said.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would. And Sally, I do understand. There’s rather a special problem at Moat Cottage – they’ve seen me.’

  ‘Not dressed as you are now, and not in this car.’

  ‘That’s some protection, perhaps. All the same, when I take you from Poplar’s Fen to Lavenham tomorrow, I think it would be better if I took you to the bus-stop in Lavenham and you walked from there. And I can meet you again at the bus-stop. I’m afraid you’ll have to do most of the detective work at Moat Cottage, finding out who, if anyone, has been away. You needn’t bother with the gardener, or the cleaning woman, or the local girls for the moment.’

  ‘All right. It’s not going to be all that easy, but I’ll do my best.’

  ‘How many of the people at Poplar’s Fen have cars?’

  Sally considered. ‘There are some cars, but I’m not sure who they all belong to,’ she said. ‘Roger has a car, and Trish and Malcolm have a car. The mill lot seem to have two cars, but I think one of them must belong to the schoolteacher, because it’s not there all the time. One of the girls, Poppy, I think, has a motorbike, and so does one of the men, but they all borrow it. It’s the same with the cars, when they’re there. But I don’t unde
rstand the system, because although I quite often had meals at the mill, I didn’t live there. I lived on Roger’s boat.’

  ‘If there’s a sort of transport cooperative, why did you have to get all those buses on the days you had to go to Lavenham?’

  ‘Well, I can’t ride a motorbike. Roger took me to Lavenham a couple of times – I told you that he introduced me to Shirley, and I think he has some business dealings with her. I wanted the job with the flower-arranging class, mainly to try to build up something for next summer, and because Shirley would buy my flower pictures. So although the bus journey takes ages I thought it was well worth it and I don’t much like asking other people for things. Sometimes I’d get a lift to the bus-stop in Walberswick, but it didn’t worry me if I didn’t. I don’t mind walking – in fact, I enjoy walking over the marshes.’

  *

  They stopped at Woodbridge for lunch and to do some shopping, for Sally said that it would help Piet to get accepted if they brought some food with them and some bottles of plonk. So they bought bacon, eggs, butter and bread, and half a dozen litre-bottles of Spanish red wine. Piet quoted Hilaire Belloc

  Do you remember an inn, Miranda,

  Do you remember an inn . . .

  And the fleas that tease

  In the high Pyrenees

  And the wine that tasted of tar?

  ‘I hope this isn’t too tarry,’ Sally said practically.

  *

  Just beyond Saxmundham they turned right for Middleton, where they crossed the Minsmere River, Westleton and Dunwich on the coast. Here they met true sea-marsh country, a strange world that is neither land nor water. Dunwich is a little village now, but it is easy to imagine the legendary city, once the capital of East Anglia, swallowed by the sea, the bells of whose churches, they say, can still be heard sometimes from below the waves.

  The road, following a ridge of firm ground, piled, perhaps, on faggots of brushwood by some long-forgotten people, ran a little inland. To the right the flats of Dingle Marshes through which the River Dunwich wanders to the sea reached to the coast. The whole landscape, broken by innumerable streams and drainage ditches, seemed to be turning into seascape, but the land, fortified by tough marram grass, would not quite let go. The land had other allies, too, Piet stopped the car suddenly. ‘Look!’ he said.

  The grey-green of the marram grass had changed to grey-blue, where a covering of sea lavender came right up to the road. The plant was actually growing in clumps or tufts, but from a little distance it looked like a carpet of tiny flowers. Across the marshes they could see the sea, but there was no clear division where land ended and sea began. There were no sharp colours anywhere. The sky was overcast with a slight haze and the grey-green of the coarse grass merged with the grey-blue of the sea lavender – a purplish blue if you looked at individual florets closely – to give a sort of wash over everything, colour and absence of colour at the same time, that spread unbroken over the formless grey sea. There was no horizon – land, sea and sky were a single entity. It was indescribably lovely, Piet thought, but it was a loveliness you felt rather than saw.

  ‘God, it would be hard to paint,’ he said.

  ‘Why not try?’ Sally asked.

  ‘One day, perhaps.’

  *

  He studied the map. ‘We can’t have much more than a mile to go,’ he said. ‘Poplar’s Fen seems to be before we get to Westwood Marshes.’

  ‘They’re all mixed up,’ Sally said. ‘This road becomes a track, though you can still drive along it for a bit. We go to the end, and that is Poplar’s Fen. About a quarter of a mile before the end of our track a rather better road goes off to the left, to join the road to Walberswick. That’s the one we use to go shopping, and that I use to get my bus.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’d better be getting on. I can’t say that I really want to.’

  ‘I don’t, either.’

  *

  The road ended dramatically, with a five-foot drop into a channel known as Poplar’s Sluice. Piet was unprepared for this, and so were the Riley’s brakes. Quick thinking, however, swung the car round in the nick of time, and it came to rest with the nearside front wheel on the very edge of the ditch. Gingerly Piet manoeuvred into a safer position, hoping that nobody but he knew what a narrow shave it had been. Sally said nothing, but she patted his knee – she was tactful but not unobservant.

  The sluice or drain was about ten feet wide and crossed by a plank footbridge, built on old railway sleepers. Beyond the sluice was a stretch of marsh, enclosed by the sluice on one flank and by a wider watercourse on the other. The marsh here was an island of more or less firm ground, supporting an old windmill, its broken sails forlorn and stark against the sky. It was not a mill for grinding corn, but the remains of an early nineteenth-century attempt to drain the marsh, when it had worked a wind-powered pumping engine. On the watercourse – actually the River Walber – two boats were moored. One was a Dutch botter, old and squat, but freshly painted and still looking seaworthy. About fifty yards astern of her was a motor-cruiser, a good deal smaller than the rather stately botter.

  ‘Roger’s boat is the big one, the old sailing boat,’ Sally said. ‘I think it would be best if you wait here, while I go across and explain things.’ She went over the footbridge and Piet walked along the bank of the sluice, taking in the surroundings.

  The road by which they had come was an unmetalled track and for most of the last mile it was wide enough for only one vehicle at a time. Fifty yards or so before it met the sluice it broadened into a fairly substantial area of dried mud, and here were parked the vehicles belonging to the colony. There were the three cars of which Sally had spoken, two presumably belonging to the people on the boats, one to the mill contingent. That assumed that the schoolteacher’s car was not there, and since she came at weekends and today was Monday, the assumption seemed reasonable. There was one motorcycle. The other was presumably being used somewhere.

  Not far beyond the track the sluice met the River Walber and the marsh changed to shingle. The river, augmented by water from the sluice, widened and broke the shingle beach to reach the sea. Two decaying posts marked its mouth. Broken water to seaward suggested a considerable bar, but at high tide, Piet thought, the entrance would be navigable. It looked peaceful enough that summer afternoon, but in an onshore wind it would be a horrible place.

  He would have enjoyed pottering round the river, but he did not know yet whether he would be able to stay at Poplar’s Fen and he felt restless and on edge. He did not want to keep Sally waiting, so after a few minutes he walked back to the road. He saw her crossing the marsh towards the footbridge as he came up. She waved to him and ran the last few yards to the bridge. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Roger says you’re welcome to stay on the boat. Only . . . Trudi seems to have moved in with Roger, and we shall have to share a cabin. I hope you don’t mind.’

  VI

  At Poplar’s Fen

  THE BOTTER IS a Dutch fishing boat whose design has changed little since the eighteenth century. Smaller than the old Thames sailing barge and designed for fishing rather than carrying cargo, she shares with the Thames barge the ability to be equally at home in the North Sea and in the creeks and estuaries of the Low Countries of the continent and of the east coast of England. Her rounded shoulders, immensely strong, can take the punishing blows of the vicious short seas characteristic of the waters she was built to live in, and with lee-boards instead of a deep keel she can go wherever there is a pocket-handkerchief of water to float her. Piet’s ancestral Dutch blood stirred as he walked up to the botter moored in the River Walber. He had seen her many times in Dutch marine paintings.

  As a fishing boat designed for hauling nets the botter is built low aft, and the stern of the boat he was invited to board was roughly level with the river bank. In her working youth this boat would have had a fish-well amidships, but it had been taken out and the space once occupied by the well incorporated in the saloon extended from the foredeck.


  Roger met Piet and Sally on the bank. He was rather older than Piet had expected, at least in his middle forties, and with greying hair. But he seemed vigorous and fit, with no sign of going to seed. ‘Roger Leplan,’ he said. ‘Glad to meet any friend of Sally’s.’

  ‘Peter Devonshire. It’s very good of you to let me join your boat,’ Piet replied.

  ‘Sally says you paint.’

  ‘Yes. Not in the Old Master class, but I get by.’

  Roger laughed. ‘Well, that’s something these days. I’m just going over to the mill. Trudi’s working there. You’ll meet her later. Sally will show you where to put your stuff.’

  He went off. Piet got the rucksacks and the shopping bags on board and followed Sally into the saloon. It was furnished as a sitting room, with a coal-burning stove in one corner, a chimney-pipe led through the deck beams of the foredeck overhead. A door at the forward end of the saloon led to a narrow companionway with cabins opening to each side. ‘That’s Roger’s room on the right,’ Sally said. ‘Ours is here.’

  ‘Quite proper. The skipper always berths to starboard,’ Piet said.

  He was relieved to find that there were two bunks in the cabin he was to share with Sally. ‘Any preference?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Well, you’re taller than me, so you can have the top one.’

  *

  Piet wanted to go into Walberswick to make his telephone call. ‘Can I come with you?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m not frightened exactly, but I don’t like being here.’