Candied Crime
DJ´s Daim Stories
Volume 1
Published by Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen
My crime fiction blog: DJ´s Krimiblog
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
1.The Knitting Club
2.Grammy
3.Mushrooms and Toadstools
4.The Princess on the Pea
5.A Nightly Burger
6.End of Christmas
7.Spring Cleaning
8.Shots
9.Trick or Treat
10.Tea for Ten
11.Toffee´s Christmas
12.Casualty
13.The Red Shoes
1. The Knitting Club
”Oh, poor you! Not again!” Olivia´s low-cut neckline hovers dangerously close to Mildred´s nose while she flings several lumps of sugar into her teacup. She makes good use of this opportunity to take a closer look at the swollen eye.
“You really must do something about it! You´ll have to leave him. Women´s refuge!” Martha´s knitting needles clink indignantly in close competition with her busy tongue.
“But he was so sorry this time. He promised…” chirps Mildred. She all but loses the thread of the complicated pattern she has devised. Another nice and warm winter sweater for Arnold.
“He promised … well, they always do, don´t they, Mildred? But when have you heard about a man who kept his promise?” Olivia is the hostess of their club today and expertly she regains their full attention.
Mildred sips at the sickly-sweet tea. How kind they all are. And when she remembers how close she was to giving up the knitting club a few months ago. Olivia had had a divorce with such a to-do, and Pauline´s lover had invited her to Malaga for an illicit weekend. Martha got her breast cancer, and Amy suspected that her husband pranced around in her clothes when she was away from home.
And in the meantime Mildred had just knitted her intricate sweaters while she tried to insert a few words about Arnold´s mushroom excursions.
But then she had tripped over a basket of mushrooms in the kitchen and broken her arm. Somehow the words had just rolled off her tongue when she told the others that Arnold had hit her. Now Mildred was looking forward to the knitting club every Thursday again.
2. Grammy
During most of fourth form Martha Gramstrup was our German teacher. Grammy was the thin and nervy type, a walking skeleton with rattling necklaces and bracelets. And her four weekly German lessons in fourth form hardly made things better.
Grammy´s hair had been coloured red once in a distant past. She was the cardigan type, mousy grey and crap brown in any odd combination.
“Grammy is the incarnation of German grammar,” Tommy claimed. Tommy had red freckles and jutting ears so he had learned early that attack is the best form of defence.
I am sure Grammy was well prepared, but more often than not she lost the thread. The boys would draw talentless caricatures of her on the blackboard, they sent letters to each other and peeled apples with their pocket knives right in the middle of her efforts at stuffing an irregular verb or two into our hormone-ridden brains. We girls were mostly knitting or doodling; we were far too old to participate in the boys´ pranks, but we couldn´t be bothered to learn German.
“Where were we?” she would ask from her desk while the bracelets whisked around the thin arms in a panic.
“Wir sollen schrauben wollen,” Joe suggested helpfully. Stifled titter from pupils who were still awake.
Her cheeks turned pink, but usually she didn´t seem to realize that the whole class was mocking her.
********************
”Martha´s husband is dead!” Lisa whispered her message as loudly as she dared while she rushed into the classroom three seconds ahead of Grammy.
“Martha who?” Bewildered, we stared at her until the penny dropped.
A subdued Grammy, dressed in black, came in with the worn satchel under her arm. She sat down on the chair, and in an atmosphere of embarrassing silence we crammed verbs and vocabulary for once.
“I heard it was heart failure,” Betty informed us during the break.
“Small wonder, he must´ve been in his late forties.” Lisa´s parents used to play bridge with Grammy and her husband so she made short thrift with Betty´s know-all attitude.
For a couple of days we remembered to be kind to Grammy. Jane left red apples for her on the desk, and our compassion lasted until the winter holiday began a week later.
*******************
”Grammy has had a haircut. Look!”
Yes, indeed. The wisps had turned into a smart, reddish-brown hairdo.
The transformation did not take place overnight, but during the spring a new Grammy appeared. She put on a few kilos and changed her style. One day she appeared in jeans, and she gave Tommy a regular bollocking for sending a paper plane through the classroom.
We watched in amazement, not quite certain how to react to our new German teacher. Unfortunately the change lasted for three months only; then the police came into our class and picked her up just when we were conjugating the verb “sterben”.
3. Mushrooms and Toadstools
He bought it for an old song in the cosy little antiquarian bookshop in Whitechapel. A gorgeous old book about British mushrooms and toadstools. A few of the pages looked the worse for wear, but it was still a really fine book. Such a treasure for a few pounds.
Back home in his study he let his hands slide down glossy plates in four-colour print and was fascinated by this new world of all the various fungi in their natural habitats. He read about gill and boletes mushrooms. He learned about mycelium, spawn, spores and fruiting bodies. The foreign words appealed to him. Like the former owner he dwelled on certain pages and learned the detailed descriptions by heart.
Sometimes he even ventured into the woods accompanied by his book. Tricholoma pardinum, Chlorophyllum molybdites, Inocybe erubescens and Amanita phalloides. Those marvellous names nearly made him drool.
Now and then his wife would interrupt his absorbing studies. “Arnold, dinner is on the table.” “Arnold, your tea is getting cold.” But most of the time Mildred left him to his book. He even considered buying a camera so he could immortalize particularly beautiful specimen from his perambulations.
He went out to put on his galoshes; the wood could be damp and chilly even on a sunny afternoon. Mildred stood in the doorway with her shopping list. “Arnold, I thought perhaps we should try a mushroom stew tonight.”
That was when he threw his book out.
4. The Princess on the Pea
Finally! I raise my crystal glass and nod to my parents-in-law. Neither too little nor too much.
Frederick gives me an encouraging squeeze behind the veil. We have only had the first course so I´d better keep my cool. I sip at a glass of water.
Some cousin raises his glass, and I drink with all the buffoons again. Broad smiles from almost everyone.
As I didn´t bring any parents, my in-law gets up to give the obligatory speech. That doesn´t worry me, he is of the old school and would never crap in his own nest. Well-known platitudes you can just smile at. He and I will get along; at least he appreciates my good points.
The secon
d course is brought in. A few tufts of some green stuff sprinkled on a strip of fish and a morsel of toast which could not satisfy a sparrow. I presume that is how you recognize haute cuisine and tell my stomach to stop rumbling.
Now it is Frederick´s turn. On the whole I loathe speeches, but I have been looking forward to this one. Frederick is so besotted that he wouldn´t notice if I ate my pudding with a shoe. He towers above me while he sends me a radiant smile. He rustles a sheet of handmade paper while he clears his throat; despite his age and experience he is slightly nervous. How sweet!
“Your Majesty...” a servant approaches my mother-in-law with a cordless phone in his hand. She sends him a look that could pierce an iceberg. He stutters, but holds his own. At length she motions Frederick to sit down, her eyes promising that someone will have to pay for this breach of etiquette.
She fires a couple of fiery questions into the mouthpiece. “Oh, is that so?”
My goodness, now she pricks up her ears. What´s up?
She steps over to me and hands me the phone while her lips curl in the sweetest smile.
“I have some Australian here who would love to speak to you. He says he is your husband.”
5. A Nightly Burger
”Are you a burger?”
My head nearly hit the roof beams. A little boy in pyjamas, holding a threadbare, one-eyed teddy in his arms, materialized right behind me. Where on earth did he come from? And why hadn´t I heard him?
“Am I a what?”
“A burger! I thought p´raps you were burgering the house. Then I would have to wake up my daddy, wouldn´t I, and he would be so cross!”
“Course I´m not a burglar. I´m … Well, I am working here.”
“Doing what?” He cocked his head and scrutinized me from head to foot while searching for something up his nose. Multitasking I think they call it.
“Eh, that´s not so easy to explain.” I fiddled with the silverware in front of me and picked a few promising items which I put into my bag. If only that boy had had a proper mother she would surely see to it that he went to bed at night and stayed there!
Apparently he didn´t know when his company was unwanted. He climbed onto a chair so he could stick his nose into whatever was going on in the top drawer of his parents´ antique bureau. “What are you going to do with those?”
“Oh, won´t you just shut up?” I clenched my hand around a large soupspoon.
”Why?” He didn´t look the least offended, just genuinely curious.
”Oh, because … well, because you´ll wake up your daddy, and he will be cross, won´t he?” A brilliant answer if I may say so. As you have probably guessed, children are not my thing. What did one do with them? Should I tie and gag him, or could I bump him on the head? Run off? Give up the whole blasted business for tonight?
He was quiet for a few moments, then he began a whispered conference with his teddy. “Teddy says he thinks you´re a teorist.”
“Of course I´m not a terrorist, silly. What on earth makes you say that?” A drop of nervous sweat trickled all the way down my spine.
“Teddy says! Teddy says terrarists wear gloves and those tight things over their heads.” He held Teddy up in front of him as if trying to hide behind the ugly creature.
“Oh come off it. Where´s my bomb if I´m a terrorist?” I was quite impressed by my own resourcefulness in a tight spot. Perhaps I could still worm my way out of this fix.
********************
“Teddy says we can´t see what you have in that satchel, can we? Under my mummy´s old forks. If you want forks, why don´t you take some of the new ones from the kitchen? Those old things taste funny when you put them in your mouth.”
“I´m taking them away cause your mother asked me to polish them.” Again I was quite pleased with my quick repartee.
Annabella had babysat in this particular house a few nights ago. She had assured me there was no alarm and plenty of old silver. What she had forgotten to tell me about was this ticking bomb. If ever there was a terrorist… Kids. How does one handle them? Theft and burglary is one thing, but strangling a horrid little monster no matter how much he has provoked you! They´d lock me up for so long I´d have forgotten what money was for anyway.
He stuck his fist down into the drawer and stirred the remaining silverware around, laughing like a maniac at the loud, metallic clangs.
In my increasing panic I continued stashing away this and that without paying the least attention to the hallmarks. If only Annabella had been here. I was the one who planned, she was the one who improvised when things were going wrong.
“Tommy? Tommy, is that you down there?” A high, querulous voice penetrated the air from upstairs.
The grating RP accent gave me gooseflesh. Well, that settled it. Now I would have to clear out. I picked up my rattling bag, ready to run for dear life.
“Hey, mister, that is the wrong …” They boy listened intensely for a second. “Teddy, I think he has figgered out it´s the basement door.”
6. End of Christmas – a tragic tale in approximately four parts
I Very early in the morning of December 24th, Constable Archibald Primrose found a red-and-grey-clad old man in a huge snowdrift right outside Knavesborough (though the village seems to have been mislaid somewhere in Scandinavia in this story).
Dead? Primrose pulled off one of his woollen gloves and prodded and probed cautiously, fearing a local alky would jump up and accuse him of harassment. Well, one could not be as cold and stiff as this old geezer and be alive, could one? Primrose looked around him, wondering what to do. Thieves, rogues and drunkards could be put in detention overnight to keep them off the streets, but an ice-cold, thickset corpse? No one had quite prepared him for a situation like this. And right now, with Christmas looming up and all his superiors gallivanting in Copenhagen to guard top politicians and arrest hotheaded demonstrators during the climate conference.
First of all, Primrose put his glove back on as it was really disagreeably cold. He looked around him again, but everybody else in the little village seemed to be sound asleep. Second, he pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and took a few photos of the crime scene. That was what the CSI guys always did.
What next? Fingerprints? Primrose had never heard of anyone lifting fingerprints off cold and wet snow, so maybe this was his chance of fame and a medal (promotion had been phased out years ago). Looking around him, he could not see any signs of fingerprints. Yet there were several traces of hoofs. Again, Primrose secured the evidence as best he could. Not horses, surely, more like roe or deer. Wasn´t that a bit odd, really? Well, not the missing fingerprints, as anybody would wear gloves or mittens tonight, like the old guy in the heap of snow, but odd that he could not see any footprints apart from his own? Ill at ease he looked around him, certain that now he would have to take himself into custody.
“But I can´t even remember the caution,” he muttered.
II Arnold Kickinbottom let the living room curtain fall back. What was the local hillbilly trampling around in the snow for? A mysterious death right outside his windows was not good for his indigestion. Mildred would babble about too many samples of the schnapps and sweets, but Arnold knew his tummy was easily upset when something unpleasant and dramatic happened right under his nose.
“Mildred, where is my porridge?” He checked his watch. Already five minutes past seven. His wife was getting so slovenly, and it wasn´t even Christmas yet. He drummed his fingers on the table. The oilcloth had lost most of its vivid colours in front of him though it could hardly be more than ten or fifteen years old.
“Mildred!” He enjoyed seeing her scuttle in with his bowl and glass, but his heart was not really in it. Why wouldn´t the old fuddy-duddy listen? Arnold had told him to stay away from them so many times. This was a respectable home, and Christmas with Mildred´s catty old aunts around the house was already more than most human beings could bear. You couldn´t fart without their smelling it. He shuddered at the idea of sever
al days with this petticoat regime. But Arnold Kickinbottom refused to surrender to their pins and needles.
He raised his spoon and his weak chin like a shrivelled Churchill, until he remembered another of Mildred´s insane relatives. Trying to enter a modern house via the chimney. Talk about embarrassment. A fat, middle-aged man trying to get into a house with central heating through the chimney! So he was Mildred´s half-demented old uncle, but why couldn´t he ring the bell like any decent visitor? Arnold had had to take the whole system to pieces before they could tug him out of a heating pipe in the boiler room together with his huge sack of silly presents. Arnold´s spoon trembled when he thought of those presents. How could anyone…?
“Arnold, dear, are you okay? It seems as if your eyes are bulging.”
III In spite of all the trouble he had caused, Arnold Kickinbottom had generously let Uncle into the house for a short break and a glass of water, smudged and unkempt as he was. But what was intended as a flying visit in the kitchen had escalated into a ridiculous charade with Uncle Nick and Aunt Augusta playing dominoes and drinking Arnold´s best sherry while Aunt Beryl swallowed pills in various sizes and colours and sang naughty Carols. No one knew what was in her arsenal of bottles, but some of them certainly had a stimulating effect on the ancient hag who used to sit quietly in a corner, crocheting pink doilies. When Aunt Augusta had tried to lure Uncle Nick under the mistletoe to encourage improper behaviour, Arnold had had enough. Not in his house!
Candied Crime Page 1
