Frozen Charlotte (13 page)

There was something in that look, as though Alice was trying to tell her something. The trouble was that Martha didn’t have a clue what this rather strange woman was trying to convey. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘who is Poppy? Why did you call the house “Poppy’s House”?’

Alice’s face changed. In the space of minutes it turned from cunning to upset to unhappy. She was at the same time Lady Macbeth and tragedy personified. Villain and victim. Tears spilled down her cheeks and then Aaron Sedgewick was standing in the doorway. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ he said furiously. ‘Just look – what – you’ve done.’ He wrapped his arms around his wife and left the room.

The three of them looked at one another, no nearer understanding what they’d just seen.

‘I think I’d better speak to Mark Sullivan again,’ Martha said.

‘But first, shall I take a look in the attic?’

They ascended by the ladder.

The site was well lit by naked electric lights suspended at intervals from the joists. Roddie Hughes pointed out the planking around the hot water tank and the floorboards. ‘They don’t look as if they’ve been disturbed for years,’ he said, ‘which fits in with Dr Sullivan’s theory.’

‘But not with the way Alice Sedgewick is behaving,’ Martha observed. ‘She is recalling something more recent and personal.’ Neither Alex nor Hughes made a comment yet Martha felt they did not disagree with her, only that they had no comment to make.

She looked around her for some clue, some idea. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s a bit of a flimsy story, this business of the tank being in the way of the loft conversion?’

He glanced around. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It does sort of stick out in the centre a bit. I mean if it wasn’t there you’d have a huge clear area. Enough for a couple of bedrooms and
en suites
. If that was what you wanted.’

‘Mmm,’ she responded. ‘Anything else up here?’

‘Not really.’ Roddie Hughes stepped back towards the loft access and the retractable ladder.

Apart from the signs of the SOCO team there was little else of interest on the top floor but she was glad she’d taken a look.

It was as she was descending the ladder that ideas began to take shape. Sergeant Paul Talith had said something about Alice switching the electric light back on when he had taken her upstairs to show him where the baby’s body had been. From Talith’s statement, most of which had been relayed to her by Alex, Alice had left the house with the child’s body and not returned until the following morning, when she had been accompanied both by her friend and, more importantly, Sergeant Paul Talith.

As she descended the ladder, Martha noticed that she was having to use both hands to cling on to the frame of it. No mean feat if she’d also been carrying a dead baby. And then to be practical and lucid enough to attend to that one small detail of switching off the light? Something else struck her. When the baby had been found, it had been wrapped in a tattered woollen blanket which, according to the SOCO’s report, had been recovered from here, in the loft. So Alice had unwrapped the body which had underneath been naked. Surely she must have seen that it was a boy, not a girl? Why this insistence that the baby was a girl? Where had the name Poppy come from? Had it come from the doll’s house or had Alice put the name on the house because of some other child?

While Alex was driving her back to her office Martha relayed all these thoughts to him.

‘I’ll need to speak to Mark again,’ she said, ‘check up on the age of the corpse. See how flexible he can be but I agree with Roddie. The planking Alice removed did look years old. At least five years.’ She frowned as she left the car and was still frowning as she climbed the stairs to her office.

Jericho was ready with some coffee, having watched the police car turn around on the gravelled drive. ‘I’ll have it in my office. Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve a call to make.’

Sullivan sounded just as jaunty as when she had last seen him and responded quickly to her questions.

‘Are you sure that the baby has been dead for more than five years?’

‘Well – yes. The condition of the child indicated this, together with the condition of the blanket, which was tattered and fragmented. Roddie Hughes brought in a piece of the planking which encased the tank. There were rust spots around some of the nail heads. No, Martha,’ he continued, ‘I stick to my guns. I think the body had been sealed up in a warm, dry atmosphere for years – maybe as many as eight years but certainly more than five.’

‘Is it possible,’ she asked delicately, ‘that the baby was moved in that time? Could it be that when the Sedgewicks came to live in number 41 that she or her husband brought the body with them?’

Mark Sullivan thought for a minute or two before answering. ‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Not impossible but unlikely. They would have had to mimic the exact conditions in which the child had been held for the previous five or so years. Besides that, Roddie Hughes showed me the photographs of the planking around the child. There’s no evidence that it’s ever been removed and then replaced.’ There was a pause while Sullivan gathered his thoughts together.

‘As I see it,’ he said firmly, ‘the most likely scenario is that the baby died almost at the point of birth, whether from natural causes or not is too difficult to tell as the state of decomposition is far too advanced to ascertain. If you want,’ he said slowly, ‘I could come over but it’s getting late and . . .’

‘No thanks, Mark,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. I’ve got someone coming round to the house at six so I can’t be late. I’m having the study decorated. He’s calling in to give me a quote.’

‘OK, I’ll be in touch. Just get back to me if you have any more questions.’

She put the phone down and fiddled with her pen. This case was proving quite a puzzle. But Sullivan appeared adamant that the child’s body was more than five years old and hadn’t been moved from the time when it was initially sealed up by the water tank in the loft of number 41. That let the Sedgewicks right off the hook. Had this happened a year or two ago when Sullivan had been drinking heavily she might have suspected he had made a mistake in his conclusion, but this new, sober Mark, was a different person. She didn’t think he was likely to make errors at all.

She pulled up outside the White House at ten to six. Just a few minutes later Agnetha was showing in a man in his forties wearing low slung jeans. He had a mop of curly brown hair and an impish grin and was no more than five feet four inches tall. He held out a gnarled hand. ‘Tony Pye,’ he said. ‘You must be Mrs Gunn. I’ve heard a lot about you from Jericho. We’re friends. Drink at the same pub.’

‘Right.’ Martha swallowed a smile at the thought of Jericho Palfreyman and Tony sharing a couple of pints down at the local. She could just imagine Jericho leaking the latest drama that he was supposed to keep secret.

Incorrigible.

‘Shall we look at the room?’

Tony took a long, critical look at the half-painted walls, the thick layer of gloss paint on the skirting board, the moulded ceiling, the French windows, the splashes of paint on the floor where she and Sam had finally given up the effort. He gave his verdict: ‘Lovely room. What exactly did you have in mind?’ Like Jericho he was another one with a pleasant Shropshire burr. Shrewsbury born and bred.

‘Plain emulsioned walls, the skirting board and ceiling stripped and repainted.’

‘Did you want to get the paint yourself?’

‘I know the colour I have in mind. A sort of jersey cream with sage walls.’

‘I can get you a couple of shade cards,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop them off. Much cheaper if I get the paint.’ He grinned. ‘I get it trade price.’

‘Well that’s that then,’ she said. ‘How much?’

She’d already decided that he was going to do it.

He gave her a price roughly what she’d had in mind.

‘And when can you start?’

‘Next week.’

EIGHT

Friday

A
lex wanted to put some questions to Alice Sedgewick alone. He didn’t want her husband aggressively taking over the entire interview, threatening and generally being obstructive. He wanted to get to the bottom of the entire affair and quickly but, like most experienced detectives, Alex Randall knew that investigations could and would not be hurried. The facts would tease themselves out bit by bit.

He had a think about how best to solve this problem and finally decided to ring Acantha Palk and request that she bring her client down to the station.

‘We’ll only keep her an hour or so,’ he said. ‘I just want to ask her a few questions. Clarify a couple of points. That’s all.’ He kept his voice deliberately casual.

She agreed readily and Alex gained the impression that she was as curious as he was to get to the bottom of this very odd affair, which involved her friend.

They arrived at ten and Alex quickly realized something else. Right in front of his eyes Alice Sedgewick was changing. Morphing into something else. Today she was wearing a very smart tweed woollen suit with high-heeled boots and looked more confident than he had seen her before. It was as though she was plucking some inner strength from deep within her own resources.

‘Inspector,’ she said with a warm smile, holding out her hand.

Acantha Palk too greeted him with smiling confidence.

The two women had patently come to some sort of agreement, an impasse, he decided.

He addressed Alice. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Mrs Sedgewick, but I’d like to clear up one or two things that are puzzling me.’

She appeared quite composed. She leaned forward. ‘But you do acknowledge, inspector, that I can have had nothing to do with the death of that little baby?’

Randall was prepared. ‘It would seem so,’ he said cautiously.

Alice Sedgewick leaned back in her chair. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I very much wanted to clear that up.’

‘Quite,’ Alex said. ‘But nevertheless the discovery made you do certain things.’

Instantly Alice looked wary. She gave a swift glance at her friend. Alex continued smoothly. ‘You undressed the baby.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Alice insisted. ‘The baby was wrapped in a shawl. It was in tatters. As I pulled it out the shawl simply fell away.’

Acantha Palk gave him a triumphant look.

‘You didn’t notice what sex the child was?’

Alice shook her head slowly. ‘I can tell you, inspector, that was the last thing on my mind.’

It was a reasonable answer.

Acantha’s fine eyes were fixed on his face. She was trying to read whether the detective believed her client or not.

Alex kept his face impassive. ‘Mrs Sedgewick,’ he said. ‘Who is Poppy?’

She didn’t even hesitate. ‘My grandmother. Didn’t I tell you that? I meant to. My grandmother was named Poppy Eastley.’

Acantha gave her a friend a startled look.

Alex ploughed on. ‘Why did you call the
child
Poppy?’

The evasive look was back. Alice Sedgewick’s mouth opened a little. Her eyes dropped to the floor, flickering from side to side. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said uncertainly. Then, from somewhere, she found an answer. ‘The baby, so stiff and still, limbs stuck together,’ she said, ‘reminded me of the dolls in the doll’s houses. The Frozen Charlottes. Poppy’s House.’

She didn’t even expect to be believed, Alex thought with a shock.

‘Is there anything else, inspector?’ Acantha Palk asked with icy politeness.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking not at the solicitor but at Alice. ‘I wonder if you’d mind,’ he said, with formal politeness, ‘going through the events of last Saturday night?’

She looked startled. ‘Again? Why?’

Alex leaned forward. ‘It’s surprising,’ he said, in a friendly manner, ‘how often one forgets a small detail, the sort of detail which appears insignificant. Unimportant. Sometimes, just sometimes –’ he gave her a pleasant, bland smile – ‘that little detail –’ he held up his forefinger and thumb in a pincer movement – ‘can be the very one which cracks the case.’

Acantha Palk looked guarded and suspicious. ‘Is this really necessary, inspector? Isn’t it simply going to cause Mrs Sedgewick further suffering?’

Alex held up his hand. ‘Humour me, Mrs Palk.’

Acantha Palk folded her arms and raised no more objections.

‘Take it from about – say – six o’clock?’

‘Well – I had some tea.’

Randall didn’t interrupt.

‘Just one of those nasty supermarket takeaways,’ she continued, speaking very quickly now. ‘I was going to watch the TV but it was all celebrity dancing and stuff like that. The films were rubbish. I’d seen them all before – the ones I wanted to, anyway. I got fidgety. So I poured myself a glass of wine and tried to settle down to a book.’ She looked straight at him and continued in the quick, breathless voice. ‘It was a thriller but I couldn’t get into that either. So I started drawing plans for the loft conversion.’ She met his eyes, challenging him. ‘The trouble was that however I tried to draw the plans the hot water tank kept getting in the way and I couldn’t see where else it could go in the house. I didn’t want to move it down to the bathroom and the place is too big for one of those Combi-boilers. I wanted the extra guest rooms to have their own bathrooms and I wondered if I could have a sewing room up there too.’ She looked at him carefully and pressed on with her story. Because Alex felt that it was that – a story. ‘Just for curtains and cushion covers and things. I also wondered exactly how the staircase would fit in so I thought I’d go up and measure etcetera.’ Again she smiled. ‘I hate going up that metallic extending ladder. I hate the noise, you know, and never quite feel safe on it.’

Particularly clutching a dead infant, Alex thought.

‘But I managed it with a tape measure and stuff and I started writing down the measurements but the wretched tank was always in the way and I couldn’t understand why it had been boarded in like that. I mean it wasn’t as though I could use it as an airing cupboard. Tanks these days are really well insulated. It seemed unnecessary, so I started pulling the planking off. Then I found what I thought was wadding and pulled at that too. It all seemed pretty old to me. Then I felt something hard, papery, dry and then I pulled it out.’ Her hands flew up to her face. ‘I didn’t know what it was, at first, inspector. I thought it might be a dead cat or something. Then I realized.’ She gave a convulsive shudder. ‘I felt little legs. A head. It was horrible, inspector, horrible. The blanket fell away. Then I could see it was a baby. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I brought it down the ladder.’

For the first time, Alex interrupted. ‘You switched the light off?’

She hadn’t expected this. ‘Sorry?’ she said politely.

‘Did you switch the light off or was there somebody else in the house that night or the following morning?’

She frowned. ‘I was on my own,’ she said.

‘So the light?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t a clue whether I switched the light off. I was just holding this . . .’ She gave another shudder. ‘Thing in my arms and . . .’

Alex waited.

‘I went into . . .’ She stopped herself. ‘I went into one of the bedrooms and found a little blanket to wrap the baby in. And then I drove.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I drove and drove and then I saw the sign to the hospital A&E in red. I just went in there. I thought they would know what to do.’

‘OK,’ Alex said, ‘but once there?’

‘I just sat.’

Alex thought quickly. ‘Where did you live before you moved to The Mount?’

‘Bayston Hill.’

It was a suburb off the A49 to the south of Shrewsbury, just outside the ring road. ‘The address, please?’

Acantha Palk looked as though she was about to raise another objection but she settled back in her seat without interrupting.

Alice gave the address and Alex thanked her.

‘You haven’t really explained,’ he said, scratching the top of his head, ‘why you named the child apparently after your grandmother.’

Alice Sedgewick shrugged and gave him an endearing smile, offering him no further explanation at all. She met his eyes with sharp intelligence and he knew that she was aware of this too.

‘Are there any more questions,’ Acantha Palk asked crisply.

‘Only one.’

Both women waited. ‘You don’t have any grandchildren, Mrs Sedgewick, do you?’

‘No. My daughter is a career woman and Gregory . . . Well – Gregory’s gay, so it’s pretty unlikely.’

‘Do any children come and stay with you? Nephews, nieces, children or friends’ children?’

She stared at him. She knew exactly what he was asking.

What is the secret of Poppy’s room?

And she wasn’t going to answer. So Alex Randall smiled and stood up. ‘That’s all for now, thank you.’

Acantha Palk turned as she left the room after her client. ‘And how are your investigations going, inspector?’

He didn’t even attempt to answer the question. She would have seen right through him and know they were not really getting anywhere. He was on the point of dropping the enquiry. But . . .

When the two women had left Alex sat back and remembered talking to a junior officer about interrogating a suspect. He had analogized the answer to each question to waves moving on the shore, some crashing down with drama and noise, a huge visual experience, which seemed to flood the beach. Others simply slid over the sand, insignificant and quiet. But whatever the size or depth or volume of a wave the tide still came in relentlessly, crawling, creeping, moving up the beach. Investigations moved forward at varying rates and with varying drama, but move forward they did in
almost
every single case.

The talk had been a few years ago and the junior detective he had been teaching had been Sergeant Paul Talith.

So what had he learned by this interview?

Most importantly of all he had shared Alice’s state of mind when she had discovered the corpse. She had not, however, confided in him the secret of the child’s room. And there was a secret, Alex Randall was certain of it. She was hiding something and he wasn’t absolutely certain that even her friend and solicitor knew what it was. He had read the same doubts and confusion that he felt mirrored in Acantha’s face.

An hour later he had a further unpleasant experience. It began with a phone call from the desk sergeant who sounded grim and pessimistic. ‘Got someone here called Sedgewick,’ he said. ‘Rosie Sedgewick. Says she’s . . .’

‘I know who she is,’ Alex said wearily. He was heartily sick of the Sedgewick clan. ‘Send her in.’

Rosie Sedgewick was one of those very thin women who appear to have been born with angular features and a sharp, disapproving expression. She’d also been cursed with her father’s hooked nose. The effect was not beautiful.

In addition she had a harsh rasping voice that probably stood her in good stead in the courtroom but grated on the detective. ‘Are you Detective Inspector Randall?’

He winced.

‘I’m Rosie Sedgewick,’ she announced. ‘I’d better warn you that I am a barrister. Now this –’ she sat down – ‘is an informal talk. I want to know why you are continually hounding my mother over this affair.’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘I know the facts,’ Rosie said, ‘but my mother was simply the person who stumbled on the body. Why are you still questioning her?’

‘There were a few anomalies in her statement.’

Rosie drew in a deep, sighing breath. ‘Come on, inspector.’ It was a failed attempt at pallyness ‘I’m a lawyer, for goodness sake. Give me one statement that doesn’t have the odd anomaly in it. My mother was very shocked by the discovery and has been very upset at your continued intrusion. I understand you still have your team of bloodhounds at the house and questioned her
again
only this morning.’

‘That’s correct,’ Alex said. ‘And she appeared well and in full control of herself. The interview did not distress her in any way.’

‘As I understand it,’ Rosie continued, ‘you’re going to be pursuing another line of investigation – the people who lived in number 41
before
my parents moved there.’

‘Certainly – that’s correct,’ Alex said.

‘Well, please leave my mother out of this,’ Rosie said. ‘She can be quite vulnerable. It could have a very bad effect on her.’

Randall was surprised at Rosie Sedgewick. If she was a lawyer she couldn’t possibly think that this appeal would cut any ice. It was positively naive. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said carefully, ‘that I can’t promise that.’

‘She has been under a psychiatrist, you know, for depression.’

‘Oh?’ It was news to him and Acantha had not mentioned this.

‘Oh, well.’ Rosie Sedgewick shrugged. ‘Don’t say I haven’t warned you.’

‘Thank you for that.’

They stood up, shook hands and the woman left, leaving Randall staring at the closed door. After a minute he sat back down, calmer. The girl was only trying to protect her mother whom she saw as vulnerable. He must excuse her on those grounds.