The house was as she’d imagined it, helped enormously by having seen the picture in the newspapers. Once the reporters had sniffed out every available detail they had wasted no time filling their pages with the case. A photograph of the house, looking mysterious in the snow, had taken up a quarter of the front page of the Shropshire Star .
Number 41 was a stately, Victorian, mock-Tudor place, detached, with a short drive which led to a gravelled area right at the front. Two cars stood there and a large white forensic van.
Alex gave her a swift glance just before he raised his hand to the knocker. ‘Don’t expect Aaron Sedgewick to give you an easy time,’ he warned.
The door, however, was answered by Alice who looked even more wary than usual. ‘He’s upstairs,’ she said, presumably meaning the SOCO team rather than her husband. Martha decided she should introduce herself.
‘I’m Martha Gunn,’ she said in her precise voice. ‘I’m the coroner for this part of Shropshire. It’s my job to investigate the death of the child you brought to the hospital on Saturday night, Mrs Sedgewick. Inspector Randall thought it might be helpful if I came to the house to see where the baby was found.’
Alice regarded her silently for a moment then nodded, a sad smile contorting her face. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve much choice,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m learning that.’
Martha didn’t answer the obvious but smiled and shook her hand.
Roddie Hughes was waiting for them upstairs. He greeted Martha warmly. They’d met before and worked on more than one case together. ‘Before you go up to the loft,’ he said, ‘I just thought you might like to take a look in one of the bedrooms.’
They followed him through the open door and immediately saw what he meant. It was a small, square room, bright and sunny but with the chill of a room which is used infrequently – if at all. It was prettily papered in pale yellow with sprigs of lilac. It was a child’s room. There was a single bed in the centre. But what drew the eye was a beautiful doll’s house standing on a painted chest of drawers. It was a fine Georgian place, almost four feet high, three-storeyed, with sash windows. Over the front door was painted its name – Poppy’s House .
Confused, Martha glanced at Alex and saw that he was as surprised as she was.
Roddie Hughes spoke. ‘I found a couple more baby’s blankets and other such stuff in here,’ he said, pulling open the top drawer of the chest. ‘I’d lay a bet this is where she pulled the little blanket from. There’s more stuff. Toys and things, a rattle. It’s as though she decorated the room ready for a child.’
The three of them looked at each other. A child?
Roddie frowned and scratched the side of his mouth. ‘Funny thing is,’ he said, ‘there’s lots of pictures of her kids, growing up around the place, but I can’t see any sign of the dolls house in them. This room was done up recently, four, five years ago, probably not long after they moved here.’
‘And there are no grandchildren,’ Alex said. Something twigged at the back of his mind. He had asked Aaron Sedgewick when they had moved in to number 41 whether any of the rooms had been decorated ready for a child. At the time he had been exploring whether the Godfreys had had children. Sedgewick had replied no. But this room was patently a child’s room. The Sedgewicks had only lived here for five years. So this room had been decorated by them for a child. Which child? Who was the child?
Back came the answer, whispering into his consciousness, clear as sunlight. The child is Poppy .
Was it possible then that Mark Sullivan had made a mistake about the age of the mummified baby? Was it after all connected with the Sedgewicks?
Randall had to force himself to recall. Mark Sullivan might have been a year or two out on the age of the child’s body but no one could possibly be mistaken as to its sex. The child who had been found in the attic had been a little boy. Not Poppy.
Another unbidden answer swam into his mind. Then Poppy is someone else. Somewhere else . So now there were two children. Poppy and the little boy.
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.