by Kim M Watt
“Oh, hardly a monster, Mortimer.”
The smaller dragon glared at the High Lord. “Even you aren’t as big as that thing!”
“I am heavier, though. And I have wings. And a better tail.”
Beaufort looked rather pleased with himself, and Mortimer sighed. “Do you think they’re going to be alright in there?”
The High Lord’s smile vanished. “I hope so. I wish we could have stayed, but the dogs were a bit of a problem.”
“We should go,” Mortimer said. “We can wait at Miriam’s. She’ll tell us everything that happened. We don’t need to be here. It’s too risky.” And there are too many bees, he added to himself, shaking his head to scare off another one that was a little too taken with his rosebush disguise.
Beaufort gave him a grave look. “Lad, the vicar’s been murdered. We can’t just walk away without seeing if the ladies need our help.”
“But how can we help, really?” It wasn’t as if they had meant to come investigating this morning. Mortimer had no intentions of ever investigating, in fact. And yet here they were, hiding from the police and monstrous dogs twice as tall as he was, and Beaufort was talking about murder. He wished they’d stayed home.
“You heard it, Mortimer. That inspector is saying she wants to question everyone. She thinks they’re suspects! We can’t have that.”
Mortimer sighed heavily. “Shouldn’t we let the police handle it? They know how to do all this stuff.”
“These are our friends. We don’t leave our friends to the whims of law enforcement. Next you’ll be telling me we should have just let the knights get on with it when they started killing us off for our scales and teeth, and calling it heroism.”
“That’s a bit extreme,” Mortimer protested. Beaufort was still fairly sore about so-called Saint George slaughtering High Lord Catherine when she was snoozing in her favourite bramble patch. She had been a Cloverly dragon, and Beaufort’s predecessor, from the days when Cloverly dragons were as large as they got. Which meant a bit smaller than a Great Dane, and put rather a different slant on Saint George’s legendary courage.
“These things start small. We need to look after our friends.”
Mortimer scratched his chest, noticing a loose scale, and nodded glumly. “Okay. You’re right, we can’t just leave them. But what can we do?”
“We need to find out more,” Beaufort said. “Let’s just keep our ears open, see what we can learn. In fact, you head for the kitchen window – see if there’s anything going on at that end.”
Mortimer swallowed another sigh and picked his way out of the flowerbed, taking on the paler green of the lawn as he scuttled around the corner of the hall. He’d better get a scone after this, he thought. Preferably several. With cream.
Mortimer tucked himself into a very small shape next to the lavender bush, and concentrated on making himself very lavender-y, while watching the bees that buzzed around the actual bush suspiciously. The kitchen door was open, which left him feeling rather uncomfortable, but the good thing was that he could hear very clearly. The detective inspector was speaking, her words calm and exact.
“I’m sorry, what was your name again, constable?”
“Shaw, ma’am. Ben Shaw.”
“PC Shaw, look. I’m sorry about this, but the sooner I can interview your wife, the sooner I can let her go home, okay? I realise she’s upset, and I’m really not considering her as a suspect, but I can’t exactly interview everyone else and not her, can I?”
“It’s just – look, Jasmine isn’t a great cook, okay? I know that. I don’t even eat her packed lunches, to be honest. I go to a local shop. Or Gregg’s, if I’m in town.”
“Okay,” the DI said, sounding cautious.
“But, like, if the vicar was poisoned by that cupcake—”
“PC Shaw, we’re not speculating here.”
Ben sighed. “I went to school with Lucas, from the morgue. We still play five a side together here and there.” There was a pause, then Ben said, “Okay, not so much five a side as Dungeons and Dragons. Anyhow – he told me it looks like poison.”
“PC Shaw—”
“I’m just saying, Jas would never deliberately hurt someone. But her cooking isn’t – well, I mean, someone would have to eat it, which does take a brave soul, but it’s been known to happen. And if it was the cooking, well, it wouldn’t be deliberate, is what I mean.”
“I would really rather not have to take you off this case, constable.”
Mortimer didn’t listen to the rest. The conversation seemed to be mostly over, just the DI giving directions, and there was a lot of shuffling going on in the kitchen. He took the opportunity to sneak out of hiding and run back around the hall, keeping close to the building and under the windows. Beaufort was sat with his back against the stone wall, eyes half-closed in the sun.
“Poison!” Mortimer hissed. “The vicar was poisoned, and the inspector seems to think it could be the W.I.!”
Beaufort opened his eyes properly and regarded the younger dragon with interest. “There, you see?” he said. “I told you we couldn’t just leave them to sort it out. She’s looking in entirely the wrong place if she’s looking for a killer.”
“Yes, but she’ll realise that, won’t she? She can’t really think they did it!”
“She’ll go where the evidence points. And if she spends too long thinking it was the W.I., she might miss the real killer entirely.”
“But what do we do? We can’t interfere. And she sounds quite, um, serious.” Scary had been what he wanted to say, but he didn’t want Beaufort turning those old eyes on him, the gold crackled with age and heat until they were like polished amber. You couldn’t call a detective inspector scary with those eyes on you. Even though she was, in a very non-dragonish way.
“We investigate,” Beaufort said, giving a toothsome grin before setting off across the lawn at a pace that had Mortimer scurrying to keep up.
“Beaufort! Beaufort, wait!” Mortimer had a not-very-good feeling about this.
Close up, the vicarage looked a little sad and neglected, the white paint on the window frames stained and peeling, the flowerbeds rather less well-kept than the gardens at the hall. It smelt of dust and age and silence, and Mortimer shivered as they paused under a spindly bay tree near the front door. The vicarage had its own little yard, separated from the church by a low stone wall, but it felt as if the graveyard had crept in anyway. The grass was lush and green and a little over-long, and there was the sense of a waiting that had no need for endings. The birds were subdued in the shadows of the trees, the bees off looking for brighter gardens. It was quiet, and there was POLICE DO NOT ENTER tape strung across the door, but no one around.
“What are we looking for?” Mortimer asked.
“Clues.” There was a sparkle in the old dragon’s eyes that Mortimer didn’t like any more than the interested look from earlier. The sparkle seemed very enthusiastic, and that tended to end in the sort of situations that caused Mortimer to stress-shed.
“But the police have already been. Surely they’ll have found any clues that were here.”
“They’re not dragons, though, lad. They can’t feel a place the way we can. They can’t sniff out emotional traces.”
Mortimer sighed. “There will have been so many people through there. Even if we find a scent that seems off, how do we know who it belongs to?”
“Can’t tell until we try.”
“It’ll probably be locked, anyway,” Mortimer said hopefully.
“Doesn’t hurt to check,” Beaufort padded across the short stretch of lawn to try the door. The handle turned under his paw, but the door didn’t open, and Mortimer let out his breath softly.
“We’ll try the back,” the old dragon announced, and headed off around the house, Mortimer trailing after him and trying to decide whether he should be hoping the back door was locked, or hoping no one was around, or that someone was around, or—
“There we go,” Beaufort said, sounding altoget
her too cheerful for Mortimer’s comfort. “Someone left a window open.”
Mortimer followed his gaze to the upstairs window, resting ajar on its latch. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, do you think?”
“Up you go, lad. No time to waste. Never know when they’ll come back.”
Mortimer looked around anxiously. “But if someone sees …”
“Nonsense. You’ll be up and in before anyone catches the smallest glimpse of you. Off you go, now.”
Mortimer mumbled something under his breath that suggested he was less than happy with the situation, then gathered his hindquarters under himself and leapt at the wall. He could have flown, but the closer he stayed to the wall the easier it was to take on its mottled greys and tans, and the old stone was easy to find purchase on with his talons. He scampered up the wall with his wings out for balance and investigated the window. It was old-fashioned, nothing holding it closed but a metal arm hooked over a stop on the frame, and he flicked it off, took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure the coast was still clear, then slipped over the sill and in.
He paused on the dark green carpet below the window, wings shivering as he sniffed the stale air. It was still, full of a fusty silence. No one home. The house felt long-abandoned already, as if the vicar, with all his books and his thoughts and his quiet life, hadn’t been enough to fill up any of these empty rooms. It was a house that had fallen into quiet, slow decay over the years, turning in on itself even while new furniture was brought in, and TVs mounted to walls, and closets filled with the bric-a-brac of a slow succession of gentle lives. It felt sad, and he wondered if the vicar had been happy here. It seemed like a hard place to be happy, but the man’s scent was layered about the house, too, and it wasn’t unhappy. It was just quiet and small and self-contained.
He put his paws on the sill and peered down at Beaufort. “Well? Are you coming?”
Beaufort shook his head. “Open the door. That window’s too small for me.”
Mortimer dropped back to the floor and padded quietly out of the room. He supposed that Beaufort was right, and they needed to help, but this didn’t seem to be a good way to go about it. They’d barely escaped the hall unnoticed. Couldn’t they just offer moral support? That seemed much more sensible, and far less likely to result in local newspapers running dragon stories on the front page. But then, everything Beaufort did seemed likely to result in dragon stories on the front page. Pure luck, and the fact that cameras couldn’t capture dragons, were what had saved them so far. That and some rather careful manoeuvring on the part of the W.I., Alice in particular. He slipped down the stairs and into the kitchen, then unlatched the door to let the High Lord in with a sigh.
“Well done, lad,” Beaufort said cheerfully, and pattered past him, nose high as he sniffed the air. “Let’s see what we can find.”
Mortimer followed him, scuffing the old dragon’s damp footprints as he went. They’d dry soon enough, but no one needed to find dragon prints on the kitchen floor. That was just asking for trouble. More than they already were, anyway.
4
Alice
Alice was conducting her own enquiries. It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in DI Adams, who seemed like an intelligent woman with a lot of potential, but Alice did rather have the upper hand here. In this particular situation, an intimate knowledge of small village life could be as much of an advantage as formal training, if not more. And while she assumed the inspector had expected most of the women would be as shaken as poor Jasmine, and therefore not in any condition to be doing anything but wait docilely, she’d underestimated both the Women’s Institute and the interest such a dramatic event would create. No one was feeling particularly docile, and the room was full of nervous energy and whispered conversations.
A large quantity of cakes and sandwiches had re-emerged from the kitchen, and Carlotta and Gert had directed the two constables to set up some of the folding tables. The women were currently playing a rather heated game of blackjack with Rose and Teresa, piles of coins stacked on the table in front of them. Rosemary had her knitting out and had set her phone up to watch something that seemed to have a lot of explosions in it, while Pearl crocheted furiously next to her. Priya was explaining to the dean that he wasn’t letting the tea steep long enough, and that if he was to be the only one allowed in the kitchen then he needed to either take more time over it, or to bring it out in the big teapots from the cupboard over the fridge. The dean looked alarmed, to say the least.
Alice sat very straight in her chair, watching the dust motes drifting in the sunlight that spilled through the door. Jasmine had already gone into the kitchen to be interviewed by the DI. She’d still been crying, and cuddling Primrose so hard that Alice felt a reluctant sort of sympathy for the creature. She turned her attention back to Miriam.
“So, you see,” Miriam said, her voice low, “that woman could have been anyone! Maybe he had a secret family!”
“You do realise that vicars are allowed to marry?”
“Yes, but, well – maybe he divorced?”
“Also allowed.”
“Huh.” Miriam sipped her tea and made a face. “The dean really does make awful tea. Alright. Maybe the vicar abandoned her with three small children when he was much younger, changed his name and joined the church, and she’s just found him.”
“And so she poisoned him why?”
“Because … Because she was angry at him for leaving?” Miriam shook her head and put her mug on the floor. “I know, it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s the only thing out of the ordinary that I’ve seen. Ever, I mean. He was a very boring man.”
Alice permitted herself a small smile. “I do guess he was, at that. But appearances can be deceiving. I heard that his past was rather colourful.”
“Ooh, so you think she was from his past?”
Alice shrugged, a small, eloquent gesture. “Maybe. But she hardly sounds dangerous.”
“I suppose.” Miriam sighed, then looked up as the tall detective constable from Away stopped in front of her chair. His hair was short-cropped and dark, and his trousers were very skinny. Too skinny, Alice thought. They made him look gangly, like a teenager just getting into a growth spurt.
“Mrs Ellis?” he said to Miriam.
“Um, Ms.”
“Ms Ellis, sorry. Can you come through, please?”
“Oh dear,” Miriam said, getting up so suddenly that her skirts slopped into her mug. “Oh dear.”
“Purely routine, ma’am,” the officer said, looking even more alarmed than Miriam.
“Oh dear,” she said again, and Alice gave her a reassuring pat on the arm before she padded off toward the kitchen, trailing tea droplets behind her. The Labrador followed, cleaning up enthusiastically, and Alice looked around for Jasmine. There was no sign of her. Ben must have taken her out the back door and home. That was a shame, but Alice doubted she’d have learned much from the younger woman, anyway. It had taken her a year to remember what day the weekly market was on. She wasn’t the most observant person Alice had ever encountered.
With Miriam gone, Alice moved to a spare seat next to Rose, avoiding the large puddle of drool the Great Dane was leaving on the floor. Gert and Carlotta were still playing cards, but the other two had rather wisely retreated.
“What do you think?” Rose asked, and Priya, Teresa and Pearl leaned in eagerly. Rosemary kept knitting, but she was listening.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Alice said.
“Of course,” Rose said, somewhat impatiently, and pushed her glasses up her small nose. “But who could have done it?”
Alice spread her fingers on the table. “I don’t know. We don’t even know how he died yet.”
“She said it was suspicious,” Priya said. “And she’s questioning us. That doesn’t seem right.”
“Miriam was the last to see him alive,” Rose pointed out, and everyone looked at her. “I don’t mean anything by that. Just that maybe that’s why she’s questioning us.”<
br />
“It does seem strange to question us all,” Alice said. “But she obviously has her reasons.”
“I don’t like it.” Pearl was tracing circles in a puddle of cooled tea with one finger. “It’s not right.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Alice said. “After all, none of us has done anything wrong, have we?” The women exchanged doubtful glances, and she sighed. “I mean, none of us murdered the vicar.”
A rush of excitable agreement greeted that statement, and she wondered just what secrets everyone was sitting on. Everyone has them, after all, those secrets that raise anxious faces to the light, whether they’re worth the guilt or not.
“But who did?” Teresa asked. “And how have we been implicated?”
“Maybe it was that awful gastropub man,” Rose said. “Offended by our lack of appreciation for his caviar-custard tarts.”
There was a moment’s silence as everyone considered it. “He was very upset when we didn’t let him come to the fete last year,” Pearl said, sounding doubtful.
“That seems rather slim evidence,” Alice said.
“Unless it was the tarts that actually killed the poor vicar,” Priya said.
“Oh, those went straight in the bin after the meeting,” Teresa replied. “No one touched them.”
“I imagine a posh gastropub owner has more to worry about than a village fete, anyway,” Rosemary said, frowning at her knitting.
“True,” Rose said. “And we’re always banning people. We banned that frog collector just last winter.”
Pearl shuddered. “I did not expect him to be wearing a frog-skin hat and dissecting things all over the place. Now he really could be a murderer.”
The conversation drifted for a moment as Rose and Pearl argued over whether dissection could really be considered a healthy hobby, then Priya said, “What if the murderer’s not finished?”
All eyes turned to Alice, and she smiled, hoping it looked genuine. “I’m sure the inspector will clear us all by the end of this meeting,” she said. “And I have no doubt they’ll find the murderer very swiftly.”
