by Kim M Watt
“Ladies and – ladies,” the DI said, noting a distinct dearth of testosterone in the civilian audience. “Thank you for your very generous donations to the, ah, dean. I’m sure he appreciates you coming here to pay your respects. And since you are here, I’d like to impose on your time a little more. It would be very helpful to me, even if you have spoken to the officers earlier, if you would permit me to ask you a few questions and get some details from each of you before you go.”
An uneasy shiver went through the room, a few whispered remarks, then it was silent again, except for a small fluffy dog whining on the lap of the bleeding lasagne woman. Jasmine, Alice had called her. The DI thought the dog might be a Pomeranian. One of those things that yap a lot and tend to get festooned with bows, anyway.
“Please let me make two things clear,” she continued. “No one is under suspicion here. However, this is an active investigation. The cause of death is yet to be determined, but at this point we are treating it as suspicious.”
Jasmine started to cry, and the dog wriggled and whined in her lap, trying to lick her face. The witness, Miriam Ellis, was sat next to her, and tried to put an arm around the younger woman. The dog snapped at her, making her jerk backward. Jasmine cried harder, squeezing the dog until it yelped. DI Adams cleared her throat, aware of Alice watching her impassively and suddenly feeling like she was in an exam room at school again.
“Ah, yes. I – I can see that this is terribly upsetting, of course, and I don’t mean to make it difficult for anyone, but, ah—” Between the dog and the crying, the detective inspector was having to raise her voice, and was coming far too close to shouting for her comfort. She gave the dean a pleading look, thinking that this must fall under pastoral care, but he retreated into the kitchen. Crying was apparently not his thing. Not that it was DI Adams’ thing, either. She rubbed her eyes. She seemed to be having some trouble focusing, particularly on the second row of chairs.
“Right, so I do need to talk to you all individually, if not now, then later. Let me stress again that no one is being accused of anything—”
Jasmine broke into a wail of horror, and the dog started barking hysterically. Miriam tried to intervene again, but the dog snapped at her so wildly that she jumped back, sending her chair pitching over backward. She sprawled to the floor with a yelp of alarm and a swirl of glittery, pale green skirts, catching her neighbour’s arm. Her neighbour, a slight woman with long dark hair, flailed for a moment then went down as well, and the dog tore free of Jasmine and leapt on top of them as teacups and plates and fragments of cake spun across the floor. The other two dogs in the hall burst into a chorus of sympathetic barking, and a babble of cries broke out, varying from “shut up, you lot!” to “oh, the poor vicar!” One of the dogs was a Great Dane, and it dragged its alarmingly small owner down the aisle as she bellowed at it to sit, the pair of them sending empty chairs spinning to the floor in their wake. A large woman with a fading tattoo of a mermaid on one arm jumped up and scooped Jasmine’s dog into her arms before dropping it again with a howl of outrage.
“It bit me! Little mutt—”
“Primrose!” Jasmine wailed, and her husband started forward from his post then stopped, looking anxiously at the DI.
“It’s something that starts with P, alright,” Miriam said, sitting up. “You alright, Gert?”
The tattooed woman waved a bleeding finger. “It bit me!”
DI Adams pinched the bridge of her nose and pointed at the PC who’d called himself Jasmine’s husband, still hovering at the back of the hall as if afraid to come any closer. She didn’t blame him. “Get the damn dog, would you? And someone get a first aid kit.”
“May I suggest more tea?” Alice said, appearing next to DI Adams and making her jump. “You can get your men to stand by, make sure no one leaves without giving you their details. Although I can also supply addresses and phone numbers, if it comes to that.”
“Tea?” the DI said. She was starting to feel like she’d stepped into some alternate universe. This should have been easy. Interview a few ladies of a certain age, collect some details, back to Leeds to follow up. Not this. Whatever this was. She allowed herself a moment to wonder if the DCI had known.
“Tea,” Alice agreed. “It gives everyone something to do, and I find people are much less panicky with a nice cup of tea on hand.”
DI Adams stared at the older woman for a moment, mystified, then nodded. The chair of the W.I. seemed to have a knack for these things, so she’d just go with it. “Dean,” she called, and he peeked cautiously around the kitchen door. “Get some tea on, please. And James?” He was examining Gert’s injured hand while one of the local officers pulled on the gloves from the first aid kit. Jasmine’s husband had chased the dog into a corner and was brandishing a leash at it. It was growling.
“Detective Inspector?” the detective constable said, straightening up.
“Make sure you get everyone’s details before they leave. I’d rather no one left before I talk to them, but let’s not be too harsh about it. Everyone’s a bit upset.” Including her. Well, upset wasn’t the right word. Discombobulated. That was the one. She was discombobulated.
“Got it.” James went back to the main door, looking relieved to get away from the blood.
“God damn it, Primrose!” Jasmine’s husband bellowed, and went sprinting out the door after the dog, waving the leash like a lasso as James jumped out of the way. The Great Dane gave an enormous woof of delight and lunged after the Pomeranian, sending his mistress to the floor and dragging her halfway across the hall before she let go. The other dog, a Labrador, ignored them entirely. It was using the distraction to hoover up the contents of any abandoned plates.
DI Adams took a deep breath, and wished she had time to count to ten. Even five. “You,” she said to the officer with the first aid kit. “Leave that. And you, Sergeant. Catch those bloody dogs!”
They left the hall at a jog, and she looked at Alice again. “Is it always like this?”
“Sometimes it’s worse,” Alice said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Oh, I’m not sure even He can sort this lot out,” Alice replied, and picked up the abandoned first aid kit. “Come here, Gert. Let’s get this done properly.”
The DI sat on the edge of the stage and rubbed her eyes again. They seemed to be okay now, which was good. She’d been worried she was getting a migraine. She looked at the women, all talking to each other and gesticulating rather excitedly, and wondered if transferring up here from London was going to be quite the low-stress choice she had imagined.
3
Mortimer
Mortimer, hunkered down behind the second row of chairs with his wings folded down tightly, hissed to Beaufort, “What do we do?”
“It’ll be fine,” Beaufort whispered back. “We just have to wait for the right moment.”
Which was all very well, but the right moment didn’t seem to be coming. They should have left earlier, but it had seemed risky, what with the police coming in and out. So they’d waited, and now there was a rather tall police officer guarding the front door, and the detective inspector with the suit jacket and severe hair was standing at the front of the hall watching everyone, and they were stuck hiding as well as they could behind the second row of chairs. Mortimer had tried to squeeze under one, and had knocked it over instead, making Teresa jump up and fuss, pretending it had been her. Now she glared at them and put a warning finger to her lips.
Mortimer sighed. Dragons aren’t invisible exactly, although they are faint. Some people can’t see them at all, can’t even hear them, while to more receptive individuals they may be a shimmer in the corner of the eye, seen and not. But they are certainly hard for anyone to spot if they aren’t expecting dragons – and very few people do expect dragons, sadly. Which is helpful when trying to go unseen, but still not foolproof. All they needed was for one of the police to be sensitive enough to see them, and it’d all go wrong. There’d be shouting a
nd panic and quite possibly tasing. Mortimer had seen tasing on Miriam’s TV, and didn’t like the look of it at all. At least the police here didn’t carry guns.
“Beaufort,” he whispered again, with a sideways glance at Teresa. She was listening to whatever the detective inspector was saying, and either ignored him or didn’t hear him.
“Shh,” Beaufort said. He was up on his hindquarters, his snout between two chairs, old gold eyes on the inspector. He looked very interested. Mortimer didn’t like that look. That look suggested that Beaufort was about to Get Involved.
“Beaufort, we can’t stay here!” This time both Teresa and Beaufort shushed him, as well as Pearl, who was sat next to Teresa with her old Labrador at her feet. Mortimer eyed it nervously, but the dog only had eyes for Teresa’s fairy cake. Mortimer sympathised, although he wasn’t sure even he could eat one right now.
They’d only come into town to see Miriam. Mortimer made beautiful, magical things from dragon scales and copper wire and gentle snippets of magic, and Miriam was his human business partner. She sold the trinkets and baubles for him, and bought human things that dragons coveted, which meant mostly barbecues these days. They were much more comfortable for sleeping on than fires, and Miriam buying them saved any more incidents with stolen gas bottles and opportunistic scone theft. She also tested out his new inventions, to make sure they worked in human hands, and always ooh-ed and ahh-ed in the best possible way. And that had been all they were doing today. Mortimer had only agreed to follow Miriam’s scent to the village hall on the promise of cake.
Now here they were. Not only trapped in the hall, with sharp-eyed police everywhere (he’d already seen the inspector rubbing her eyes, suggesting she knew something wasn’t quite right), but also cake-less and tea-less. He sighed again and wondered if Teresa was going to eat her fairy cake. He’d even share it with the dog.
A sudden rush of alarmed chatter pulled Mortimer out of his contemplation of the fairy cake.
“They’re going to question us!” Pearl whispered. “How can they think we had anything to do with it?”
“They can’t!” Teresa said, and clutched Pearl’s hand. “Can they?” They stared at each other, then looked back at the inspector, and the Labrador took advantage of the distraction to steal the cake. Mortimer glared at the dog, and caught the inspector saying something about treating the death as suspicious. A collective gasp rose over the Women’s Institute, and someone started crying. Beaufort was still watching, motionless between the chairs.
“Let me stress again that no one is being accused of anything—” the detective inspector said from the front of the room, and there was a wail that sounded very much like Jasmine. This was immediately followed by an awful lot of commotion, and Mortimer saw Miriam go spilling to the floor, taking Priya with her.
“This is terrible!” Teresa exclaimed, but she was drowned out by the Labrador sitting up and joining in the chorus of barking that was really much too loud for a small hall. Mortimer flinched backward and saw a completely enormous dog rushing straight for him. He gave a shriek that was luckily lost in the commotion, and dived between the two rows of chairs as Teresa and Pearl jumped up and someone started shouting about being bitten. Rose was being dragged helplessly after the huge dog, but the other two women blocked its way and together they wrestled it to a grudging halt. Mortimer tucked his tail as close to him as he could and tried not to look at the thing’s teeth. It was drooling.
“Come on, lad,” Beaufort whispered. “This is our chance.”
Mortimer peered around him. The door to the garden was empty, but the floor between here and it seemed terribly bare. “Are you sure?” he whispered back.
“Unless you want to wait in here.”
Mortimer took a deep breath and gathered his legs under him. They couldn’t stay. It was far too risky, with the dogs and all. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They bolted for the door shoulder to shoulder, hoping the barking of the dogs would cover the rattle of their talons on the wooden floor, and collided rather painfully at the threshold. Mortimer sprawled sideways and bumped his nose on the doorframe, then recovered himself and shot into the garden with an aching shoulder. Beaufort was old, but he was solid, and large for a Cloverly dragon. He was at least the size of a Newfoundland dog.
The barking escalated behind them, but there were no shouts of stop, dragon. Mortimer figured that was a good start. He threw himself into the nearest flowerbed and froze.
Primrose sprinted stiff-legged into the pretty, flower-studded garden that surrounded the village hall and came to a halt, yapping hysterically at the top of her little doggy lungs. Jasmine’s husband Ben was right behind her, swearing all kinds of bodily damage as he tried to catch her. She kept skipping out of reach, her bright eyes watching the garden.
“Beaufort,” Mortimer hissed.
“Stay still, lad. It’ll be fine.”
Mortimer stayed where he was, feeling hideously exposed in the bright afternoon sun, and watched the fluffy dog racing toward them with his eight-chambered heart pounding far too fast and loud for comfort. The puffball seemed to have an awful lot of teeth for such a small thing.
“Primrose, you little—” Ben lunged and missed, sprawling to his knees but managing to snag her pink harness as he went down. Primrose’s yapping went up an octave or two, making Mortimer wince, and she writhed desperately, snapping at her owner’s wrist. “Bloody dog,” Ben announced, trapping her under one hand and clipping the leash to the harness. “Should have got a cat. Cats don’t do this. You hear that, Primrose? I wish you were a cat.”
Beaufort gave a very quiet snort of disapproval, although Mortimer wasn’t sure why. The High Lord was allergic to dogs, after all. And it was true that cats never bothered much with dragons.
Rose’s enormous dog appeared around the corner of the hall, his head low and ears eager, towing a tall man in uniform behind him. The man had dropped into a crouch, clinging to the leash like a water-skier as the monster dragged him across the garden. His boots were digging neat rolls of turf out of the lawn, and Mortimer gave a very small squeak. The dog seemed even bigger out here, if that was possible.
“Kev!” the man being dragged by the dog bellowed. “Get over here!”
Another man, a little round and red-looking, strolled casually around the corner of the hall with an enormous grin plastered to his face. “Alright there, Ben?” he said. “Apprehended the escapee, have you?”
“Oh, ha,” Ben said, standing up with the leash wrapped firmly around his hand and brushing grass off his knees. “Good to see you putting the work in there.”
“You two seem to have it all under control,” the officer replied, although that was a dubious statement. Primrose wasn’t going anywhere, despite the fact that she was yapping and twisting breathlessly around the leash, dancing in agitation. The Great Dane, however, was steadily dragging his captor closer and closer to the flower bed. Mortimer tried to get his trembling under control.
“Goddamn it, Kev,” the tall man complained. “Give us a hand before the silly beast has me over!”
“K9 never on your list of career options, then, Sergeant?”
“So help me, Kev—”
“Okay, okay.” Kev grabbed the leash, and the two men brought the enormous dog to a halt in the middle of the lawn. The beast was staring right at the dragons where they huddled in the flowerbed beneath the hall windows, and, realising he couldn’t move any more, he started to bark, great shuddering woofs that set the birds chattering in alarm and echoed off the stone walls of the hall. Mortimer tried to become one with the dirt beneath him.
Ben looked from Primrose to the Great Dane, frowning. Both dogs were agitated, straining toward the flowerbeds and their pretty, neatly trimmed rosebushes. Mortimer resisted the urge to close his eyes, and held his breath instead. There was no wind. They mustn’t move.
“You two ever thought much about that whole thing where animals see things we don’t?” Ben
asked.
“Nah,” Kev said, tucking his fingers through the Great Dane’s collar and pulling him away. “All rubbish, that stuff.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, starting to pet Primrose then thinking better of it when she bared her teeth at him. “You’re probably right.”
He gave the flowerbeds one last dubious glance and headed back inside, towing the dog behind him.
There was a pause, and the birds exchanged a few pithy observations regarding dogs and men and nice sunny days, then forgot about it. The garden, heavy with spring blooms and busy with growing things, set itself back to dozing, and for a moment all was quiet. Then a bee landed on one of the rose bushes, and the bush gave a yelp of alarm, shook its head, and resolved itself into a small, rose bush-coloured dragon, wings folded tightly against his sides.
“Are you alright, Mortimer? It’s only a bee,” the larger rose bush said, and now it was suddenly quite clear (to someone disposed to see it) that this was also a dragon, dappled with the variegated colours of the undergrowth.
“I always worry they’re going to fly into my ear. And what if I’m allergic?”
“Why on earth would you be allergic? Who’s ever heard of a dragon that’s allergic to bees?”
“It would be just my luck, is all,” Mortimer said, and waved his paws at a bumblebee that had drifted too close. “Shoo!”
“It would be a very strong bee to sting through your scales.”
“That’s why I worry about them going into my ears. I don’t have scales in my ears.”
Beaufort nodded thoughtfully. “I have never once heard of that happening.”
Mortimer thought that there were many things that had happened since he had begun spending time with Beaufort that he had never heard of happening before, but he kept that to himself. “That was terribly close. That dog was a monster!”
