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.’