by Kim M Watt
“Anyone here?” Graham called. He sounded like he was trying for authoritative, but the words were a little shaky around the edges. Mortimer thought that maybe humans weren’t entirely immune to the sense of houses, after all. This was a sad, tired house, and something quietly tragic had just occurred here. The whole place felt unhappy and restless, and when the sergeant walked carefully along the landing, his baton in one hand, the floorboards cried plaintively.
“Damn old houses,” the sergeant grumbled, and edged into the spare room, where Mortimer had entered the house so ungracefully. The dragon took his chance and started to wriggle out from under the bed, hearing Graham pulling the window shut. He had time, if he was quick. His nose and shoulders were out, then he was pulled to a halt by a sharp, biting pain in his left wing. He gave a little whimper of alarm, swallowing it quickly, and heard the sergeant say uncertainly, “Hello?”
Mortimer thought of about a dozen highly inventive curse words he’d like to use, and backed up as rapidly as the cramped quarters would let him. Only just in time, too. Graham appeared in the doorway and flicked the unshaded overhead light on, flooding the room with over-bright light.
“Anyone here?”
There was something tickling Mortimer’s nose. The place was alive with spiderwebs and dust bunnies, and his eyes were starting to water. He wriggled his snout desperately.
The sergeant crossed to check the windows, and Mortimer heard him open the closet. Don’t look under the bed, he thought. Please, please, please. Just go out. He was concentrating on being as faint as he could, but his heart was beating so hard he was surprised the bed wasn’t shaking with it, and his wing hurt, and he wanted to scratch his nose, and this had been a really, really spectacularly bad idea. A millennium of being nothing more than myth, and it was all going to go to pot because they’d got caught up with the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute. The historians were just going to love that. He squeezed his watering eyes closed, trying to ignore the persistent tickle in his nose, and hoped ostriches were actually onto something. There was nothing else he could do.
The man’s footsteps paused at the side of the bed, and Mortimer held his breath.
“Old houses,” Graham muttered again, then walked out of the room, switching the light off as he went.
Mortimer let his breath out in a slow, shuddering sigh, sagging onto the floor, then scratched his nose wildly. Okay, so he was safe for now. But he still needed to get out without being seen. There was no question of letting Miriam in, even if the sergeant went back to his car, and he certainly wasn’t going to mess around himself trying to see what was on the computer. He’d tried using Miriam’s before, and his claws got stuck in the keys. They weren’t made for dragons.
He was distracted from his thoughts by the sight of the sergeant’s boots, stopped in the middle of the landing outside the door. They seemed terribly efficient, these police. Weren’t village policemen meant to be all relaxed and easily distracted? Maybe Alice should have tried with cake, rather than a sandwich.
The man sighed, loudly enough to startle Mortimer. “Attic,” he said. “Of course there’s an attic. Although with all the crap in that spare room, it’s either boarded up or empty. Or hoarder central.” He sighed again. “But can I not go up? No, I can’t. Because bloody Detective bloody Inspector bloody Adams …” He was still grumbling as Mortimer heard the catch on the trapdoor click, and the ladder ratchet down, apparently more easily than the sergeant had expected. The man jumped back, swearing, and said, “And I bet there’ll be spiders. Or rats. Maybe both.”
His boots vanished up the rungs, and Mortimer extricated himself from under the bed, not without some difficulty. His wing was still smarting, but he didn’t think he’d hurt it too badly. And there was no time to check, anyway, because he could hear the boards creaking in the ceiling as Graham patrolled the corners. There was a certain amount of swearing, mostly regarding spiders, drifting down too.
Mortimer was halfway to the bedroom door when a thought occurred to him, and he stopped, wriggling in anxious indecision. He couldn’t exactly grab the computer and run out with it, but maybe, there might be … No. No, he had to go! He turned toward the door, heard Graham bump his head in the attic and curse the house and all its occupants very thoroughly, then turned back again, thinking up some equally inventive curses for himself. He scampered to the bed and checked the bedside table, trying to keep his breathing shallow in case he inadvertently scorched something. That’d be just marvellous. Burn the vicarage down with a police officer inside it. He scrabbled impatiently through the small debris of the vicar’s life. Books, books, some socks and medications in the top drawer, a jumble of old bookmarks and charging cables and foreign currency in the bottom. And now there were footsteps creaking back along the attic floor, and he leapt onto the bed itself, flinging the pillows out of place. Surely, surely – there!
He threw himself off the bed without bothering to put the pillows back, and ran lopsidedly for the door, clutching his prize in one paw. He heard a foot scuff on the ladder as he shot silently past it, then he was on the stairs, hoping the man’s sounds would mask his own.
The steps were trickier than he’d thought, with only three paws to navigate them, and he was rounding the turn in the stairs when he stumbled, his tail catching the wall a solid thud.
“Who’s there?” Graham demanded behind him, and Mortimer heard a much louder thud that he knew was the man dropping off the ladder to the floor of the landing. He lunged downward with a squeak of panic, and his front paw slid on the edge of the step. His hindquarters got the message too late, and he teetered on the point of balance for one moment, his stomach sick, thinking, oh, bollocks. His wings flared to try and save him, but they were hampered by the wall on one side and the banister on the other, and there was no stopping his forward momentum. His hindquarters overtook his sliding fore paw, and he tumbled tail over head all the way to the bottom of the stairs, hearing Graham shouting behind him.
He did a full roll as he hit the floor at the bottom, fetching up against the hall table and sending a vase of flowers crashing to the carpet.
“Stop!” the sergeant bellowed, but he hadn’t reached the turn of the stairs yet, and Mortimer bolted for the front door, claws snagging on the carpet and almost tripping him again. This was it, this was how it happened, this was how the modern world was going to discover dragons. By arresting one trespassing on a crime scene. He whimpered and tried to go faster.
A shadow loomed through the frosted glass of the front door, and Mortimer was still trying to stop when it swung open in front of him.
“Hello?” Miriam called. “Anyone – ooh!” She jumped back as Mortimer accelerated past her, spines flat to his back and wings long and streamlined.
“Who’s there?” Graham bellowed. “Stop where I can see you!”
Mortimer stopped just before he ran snout-first into the low wall that surrounded the vicarage and looked back, panting with fright and effort. Miriam was standing in the doorway, smiling brightly up at the man who’d pushed past her into the garden.
“I just thought I’d pop by and see if you wanted some tea bringing down or anything, Graham. I didn’t realise you’d be in the house. I thought it was like one of those movie stake-outs, where you sit in the car all night and eat doughnuts.”
He took a few steps toward the gate, frowning as he examined the yard and the shadows beyond it with unnervingly sharp eyes. “Did you see anyone else, Ms Ellis?”
“Miriam, please. The number of times you and Colin have stopped in for tea and sandwiches!”
He looked at her finally, and sighed. “What are you doing here, Miriam?”
“I just wanted to see if I should bring you some tea.”
“No, you shouldn’t. And you shouldn’t even be here. You must realise all the W.I. are under suspicion.”
“Yes, and it’s completely ridiculous.” She sounded outraged, and Mortimer felt a rush of admiration for her. He didn’t think h
e could have faced the sergeant quite so boldly.
Graham sighed again and ran both hands over his greying hair. “Did you see anyone else?”
“Not a person,” Miriam said confidently, and Mortimer supposed that was technically correct, although he did feel that “person” was a term that could be used more broadly than humans tended to.
Graham sent Miriam away with an admonition to do herself a favour and not hang around crime scenes anymore, and to tell her friend the same thing.
“What friend?” Miriam asked brightly, but Mortimer didn’t think she lied quite so convincingly this time, and apparently the sergeant didn’t either, because he shooed her away and went back inside, locking the door firmly behind him. By the time they reached the tree where Beaufort sat waiting, his tail curled neatly over his toes, every light in the vicarage was on, and they could see Graham going from room to room. Mortimer had a feeling that he wouldn’t be skipping checking under the beds this time.
Miriam didn’t pause or glance at either dragon, just walked straight through the grave markers, grown dark and sombre as the dusk drew in, and headed for the stile that led out of the churchyard. Mortimer followed her, still hobbling on three legs, but when Beaufort caught up to him and said, “What’ve you got there, lad?” he just shook his head and clutched his prize more tightly. He didn’t want to look at it, even think about it, until they were out of sight of the house. It was taking all his concentration just to stay faint, and his wings itched as if he could feel the sergeant watching them from the vicarage windows. In the rapidly fading light it was doubtful the man would even see the way the grass stayed flattened for a little too long after Miriam passed, let along discern the two dragons trotting behind her, but still. It wasn’t worth taking the risk.
Miriam climbed over the stile and promptly collapsed on the soft grass to the side of the path, narrowly missing a nettle. Mortimer sprawled next to her, his legs feeling too shaky to hold him up very much longer and his wing still smarting. Plus it felt like he’d grazed his nose in the tumble down the stairs.
“There you are,” Alice said. “That took rather a long time, didn’t it?”
“Mortimer was stuck,” Miriam said, pushing her hair out of her face and huffing in relief. “Graham almost saw him! It was a terribly close thing!”
“So close,” Mortimer mumbled, and rubbed his cheek on the grass, barely resisting the urge to roll. It smelt an awful lot better than under the bed had, and he felt like the sad stink of the house was clinging to every scale.
“But you weren’t caught,” Alice said, her voice matter-of-fact. She was picking early bramble berries and dropping them into a bag, as if the whole breaking and entering thing was rather secondary to some evening foraging.
“And you did wonderfully, Mortimer,” Beaufort said. “Honestly, lad, you were very clever, getting out again like that.”
“I’d have been stuck if it wasn’t for Miriam,” Mortimer said, sitting up and struggling not to flush a pleased orange. “If she hadn’t opened the door right at that moment, I don’t know what would have happened.” He shuddered, imagining being trapped against the door as Graham ran toward him, his scaly form slowly coming into focus, and the sergeant suddenly realising he was chasing a dragon. Because sometimes faint isn’t enough, and sometimes even humans have to believe what they see, and he had an idea that police were probably good at that. A good thing they didn’t carry guns here. And Mortimer hadn’t seen a taser, but that didn’t mean the sergeant didn’t have one. Maybe it was hidden. His stomach rolled over in alarm, and his colour drained sadly away.
“I’m glad I helped,” Miriam said. She looked much paler than usual, and her hair was standing out at worried angles. “But I think I may have acted a little suspiciously. I can’t help it. I get nervous.”
“Nonsense! You were wonderful,” Beaufort said. “And never mind about the internet machine, Mortimer. We’ll come up with another plan.”
“About that,” Mortimer said, and finally allowed himself a small, relieved smile.
“Oh, Mortimer,” Alice said, as he held up the tablet he’d found under the pillows. “You are quite the housebreaker.”
The walk back to Miriam’s felt horribly long to Mortimer. Alice had taken the tablet and tucked it into her bag, but either he’d hurt his shoulder in the tumble down the stairs, or he was just stiff from the fright of everything, because he was still hobbling. Worst of all, he kept hearing the thunder of the sergeant’s boots on the stairs behind him, and that terrible lump of fear was still sticking in his throat. It was something physical and awful, and he couldn’t seem to budge it, even when he paused to drink from the stream that ran next to the path.
The water was cool, though, and soothing when he splashed it on his scales. And his heart seemed to have finally slowed from its panicked rhythm. He crouched for a moment on the verge of the stream, feeling the rocks beneath his paws and the softness of the night air, counting the night noises as they slowly crept up to supplant the day. The stink of the vicarage and his own panic was fading, being replaced by the quiet mossy scents of the wood, and the first of the stars were surfacing in the sky. He took a deep, careful breath, and realised that he was alright. That was a much bigger and more difficult thing than people realised, he thought. To be alright.
He stayed where he was for a little longer, until the night had stolen the sharp edges from the day and the world had settled around him, then turned to follow the path toward Miriam’s. She and Alice had gone on ahead, using Alice’s phone as a torch, but Beaufort was sitting quietly under the trees, his nose lifted to the stars. He looked like a misplaced statue, lost in the woods. He got up and fell into step with Mortimer, and they walked in quiet companionship for a little.
“Are you alright there, lad?” Beaufort asked finally, his voice low. Something in the underbrush scampered away in alarm, and somewhere else an owl called an unanswered question into the dark.
Mortimer sighed. “It was awful, Beaufort. I’m not cut out for this sort of thing.”
“You did very well.”
“I don’t feel like I did very well, but that’s not even the point. We know we need to be careful, we know it’s risky even having the W.I. aware of us. I mean, you told us all what it was like in the old days.”
“It was terrible,” Beaufort said quietly, a softness in his voice that made Mortimer feel suddenly guilty for complaining, as if he were acting like a child, making objections and fussing without understanding. “But what’s gone before does not dictate what happens now. We were hunted, yes. Many of us were slaughtered. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen again.”
“But we’re risking everything. We’re risking people we don’t trust finding out about us. Not just people, authorities. Police. They might try to capture us, want to examine us, or, or anything.”
“So you think we should just step aside? Let the police handle everything?”
“It is their job, Beaufort.”
Beaufort sighed slightly and looked up at the pale swathe of sky visible above them. “If we don’t take risks for our friends, how can we call them friends? Friendship isn’t a casual thing, Mortimer. Not true friendship. True friendship is the sort of thing that can save you. But it can also hurt you. Or get you discovered.”
Mortimer couldn’t think of a reply. He didn’t think there was one. His tail still trembled when he thought of the sergeant so close behind him, and his wing hurt, and more than anything he just wanted to find a warm spot to curl up and sleep off the whole astonishing day, but friendship was friendship. No matter what the species.
They walked in silence after that, and it wasn’t until they were wandering into the fragrant wilderness of Miriam’s garden that Beaufort said, “Never mind, lad. Not everyone’s cut out for housebreaking. You’re terribly good at what you do, you know. No one has to be good at everything.”
Mortimer opened his mouth to point out that he wasn’t worried about being good at it, just that he
’d almost been caught, then closed it again with a sigh. Because he had gone back for the tablet, hadn’t he? He’d taken that risk, because he hadn’t wanted to let the others down. He just hoped it had been worth it.
They headed toward the door, lying open on the warm, mellow light of Miriam’s kitchen, and smelling of scones and flowers and friendship.
7
DI Adams
DI Adams stared at the ceiling of the interview room that was currently serving as her office. There was a cup of very watery black coffee in front of her, and she was wondering (again) what the hell she’d done, volunteering for this assignment. What the hell she was doing in Skipton, which was actually the biggest town in the area. Biggest. Town. As far as she could tell, its claims to fame were great pork pies and the fact that you could smell sheep from pretty much anywhere. Leeds was one thing. Small, sure, but you still felt you were in a city. It might not be the melting pot that London was, but it was still easy to pass unnoted. Plus you could get a decent cup of coffee, and a fry-up at any hour of the night. Here, she harboured suspicions that even the 24-hour shop wasn’t actually open 24 hours.
She groaned and rubbed a hand over her eyes. She wasn’t even sure why she was here. They had nothing to go on, and no one had even been in when she arrived except for the desk sergeant and one startled cleaner. So here she was, drinking crappy coffee and eating a yoghurt from the aforementioned may-not-actually-be-a-24-hour shop, and rereading her notes from yesterday’s interviews. Not that they amounted to much. Bunch of gossipy women who had asked as many questions as they answered, as if her sole purpose there was to tell them what had happened. Give her Leeds any day. Or preferably London. That was proper policing. Not impromptu bloody bring-a-plate lunches and local officers not able to do anything about women wandering all over the place because it was their mum, or auntie, or whatever else.
