They heard a sound in the doorway. Alice Sedgewick was watching them. ‘What are you doing in here,’ she asked steadily.
Alex spoke for them all. ‘We wondered where the blanket that you had wrapped around the child had come from. Mr Hughes here was under instruction to investigate.’
‘Why didn’t you simply ask me?’
Randall swallowed. It was always the simplest of questions that tripped him up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to laugh it off. ‘For some reason I didn’t think of that.’
Alice said nothing but eyed them warily.
Martha broke the silence, stepping towards the doll’s house. ‘This is lovely,’ she said. ‘How old is it?’
‘Only a few years. It’s a hobby of mine. There’s a shop that sells doll’s houses in Shrewsbury. They also sell all the little bits and pieces to go inside. I enjoy decorating them.’ She looked up apologetically. ‘Aaron calls it “playing with dolls”. He thinks it’s incredibly childish.’ She gave a smile which was both naive and confiding at the same time.
‘Did you decorate this room?’
Alice Sedgewick nodded. ‘When I was a little girl I had my grandmother’s doll’s house. It had been made out of an orange box. It wasn’t nearly as fine as this. But it had genuine Victorian pieces in it.’ Alice smiled to herself, a smile both dreamy and vague.
‘It had a tiny dining table and chairs, even some plaster of Paris hams and food. Bread. A dresser.’ She smiled. ‘An upright piano. In the nursery,’ she said, ‘were some dolls. They were stiff, porcelain, made of one piece, no separate limbs.’ She looked up. ‘They’re called Frozen Charlottes. Actually the name comes from a poem, I found out. An American poem about a girl who froze to death on her way to a party because she was too vain to wear a woollen shawl.’ She smiled. ‘So there you are. Frozen Charlotte. It reminded me.’ Her eyes met Martha’s. ‘The child I took into the hospital was that way. Stiff. No limbs. Lifeless. Look…’
She slipped the catch at the side of the doll’s house and opened the door, which was actually the entire front wall. Inside was divided into six rooms. There was a staircase which led from the ground floor right to the top. It was quite exquisite. The furniture inside looked old but might easily have been reproduction. Alice Sedgewick drew a tiny porcelain doll from the cot in what looked like the nursery, rocking horse, toy bricks, a train with four carriages, an abacus. The doll was an inch long, moulded in one piece, naked, of white porcelain with painted black hair, spots of blue for her eyes, a thin red line for her mouth. She placed the doll in Martha’s palm and gave her a long hard look. ‘Frozen Charlotte,’ she said.
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
‘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
