by JP Wright
For the following I have had to rely on Kitty's notes, as some of the time I was sleeping or studying – the grasshopper is usually up and bounding about at an indecent hour, and is always to be found getting in the way right in the middle of things, so she sees some things I do not; and what she does not see, she will happily invent. I have corrected her spelling and the worst of her idiosyncratic punctuation; for her lunacy, I can take neither responsibility nor credit. VT.
The Great Detective Tabitha Tickham (ie. me!) had woken early, but stayed in bed – as always – for a period of silent meditation, allowing the flavour of the day to drift in through her nostrils and its sense to settle in her mind. And, more importantly with autumn's misty fingers getting a grip, waiting until the chill had eased in the bathroom. From my bed I could hear the sleeping beast next door, and from downstairs the crash and clatter of Mummy cooking. Snatches of songs wandered up the stairs, broken by the cracking of eggs and the whizzing of the beater. I deduced that there was cooking going on. The mixing machine ground more slowly as whatever it was chewing grew thicker. There was a whiff of chocolate in the air: I concluded that there was chocolate cake cooking afoot. To the kitchen!
“Good morning Mummy,” I said brightly. Mummy was wearing the dreaded dungarees again, under an apron wild with flowers, and sheepskin slippers, but at least her head-scarf was not paint-spattered. It was dusted with flour though, which made her hair look more grey than it really is where odd curls escaped around the edges of her scarf. It is a kind of uniform, the headscarf. The helmet of the regiment of county ladies, which apparently through strength of belief alone is able to repel rain, hail, spiders, death-duties, falling pheasants and whatever else might assail them. In fact, Mummy never wears one outside the house. She is more dressy-up about her head-gear. Floppy straw hats in picnic season, a gent's cap for an autumn stride out, a silly little pill-box or a feather for town. Perhaps she should have a proper chef's hat – but cooking is too serious a business for dressing-up.
“Good morning, dear,” she said, licking chocolate cake mixture off her fingers with what looked to my trained eye like guilty haste. “And how is my favourite daughter?”
“Any left?” I meant the mixture. The cake was in the oven, being transformed into a less tasty, dryer version of the original mix. Lucky for me, there was a good layer to be scraped out of the bowl. By the time I had finished that, breakfast was on the table. Just toast, hardly any jam, an egg. Bacon. Some cereal. Milky tea.
Whilst Mummy cleared up her cooking mess, and then made some more making icing, covering the layer of flour with a finer layer of sugar-dust, I quizzed her about the day ahead:
“When shall we be having lunch? What are we having for dinner? If you are having guests, shall we have to eat in here? I shan't have to eat V's cooking, shall I?” Which tends to be from a tin, half cold but with burning hot spots and with not enough sausages swimming dejectedly about in a bath of too many beans. “Is there any more jam? This is all gone.”
To which mother answered, “When the guests arrive; the caterers are organising dinner – terrine, lamb shank, lemon tartlets; Yes; No, I expect there will be some spare. I really do not know.”
“Where's all the other food? When will the cake be ready, when are we eating that?”
It would be ready when it was ready, apparently, and all the quicker if I did not pester. I cannot see how the cake would know or care about my interest, but Mummy insisted that peeking would ruin it. She proudly showed me the shiny new fridge and its full shelves: that eased my worries about starving. Then, in an obvious attempt to divert my attention from the cake, she showed me her fat folder of murder mystery stuff, and tugged out a list of clues.
“Does it say there who the murderer is?” I asked, adding “No, no, don't tell me,” as she tugged out another sheet.
“Very well, Detective. At least if you don't know you can't let it slip to the guests.”
“How about the victim? What happens to him? Does one of the guests have to lie about the place all weekend? Have you some blood? Penelope Finsbury-Parke had some blood at school, in a capsule, and she meant to use it to get out of P.E. but it broke in her bag and Miss Gymslip made her wear some grey baggy shorts from the box she keeps of old clothes from girls who have drowned in the pool or gone missing on cross-country runs. They must have been there for years.”
“That's nice, dear. Now, use this ribbon to tie these slips of paper in rolls. First, write out a clue on each one.”
“Perhaps they were yours, Mummy.”
“Mine?”
“Your shorts. They were awfully old and baggy.”
“Then they must have been mine,” she admitted, “Now: paper, pen, ribbon, scissors. There.”
The clues were very odd. The Cook was in the kitchen all morning; The Reverend and the Choirboy walked by the Lake (I suppose that means the pond) before breakfast; The Colonel was seen cleaning his blunderbust; The Maid ran out of the kitchen looking flushed after cocktails. The clockwork mind of Detective Tickham began ticking and tocking and turning them over, examining each piece of the puzzle, iterating every it, dotting every dot, never to stop until all the pieces clicked into place. Everyone was a suspect. Reverend, Colonel, Maid – all of them looked like they were up to no good.
“I want you to hide them around the house,” Mummy told me, interrupting the whirring of the Great Detective's brain, “Only in the public parts – dining room, drawing room, and maybe some in the rose garden – it does look as though it will be a fine day. Don't hide them too well, mind. Let a little ribbon show.”
Whilst I finished the clues, Mummy took out her cake and iced it. Then she galloped off up the stairs, and I gathered up the little rolls or scrolls and set about my work. First in the house, then outside. It was a dewy start, a steamy-breath morning, but the sun was celebrating the genius of the spiders by lighting up their webs with a million tiny jewels – Mummy was right, it was going to be a fine day. The kind that mocks kids who have just returned to school after a summer of showers and sulky grey skies. Too chilly to go about in pyjamas though. I got dressed according to The System and took my bundle of clues and a piece of toast out into the mist. The shaggy beast upstairs was still sleeping but Marcus, who had been lying all this time in the kitchen doorway, helping block the draft, woke as I stepped over him and came with me through the kitchen garden. He snuffled around the roses while I tucked the little scrolls in amongst them, then he moved up onto the terrace, where apparently there were some interesting smells, and I laid more clues in the maze. The Doctor received a mystery phone call in the study at tea-time and The Butler had been sent a threatening note from his 'accountant'.
Marcus had wandered off by the time I had finished considering these new pieces of information. I found him back in the kitchen garden again. In the parsley bed. With cake, still warm, scattered about him. With V looking on, a look of shock on her face. Shock at discovering Marcus with the mangled cake? Or shock at being discovered at the scene of her crime?
She could not have been more shocked than I – the Great Detective. Scarred though I am by years of shocking sites, including Violet's haircuts, I was shaken by the horror with which (grammar) I was presented. I had tasted the cake, in its raw form, but I had not prepared myself for the sight of its heart, torn and scattered about, still moist and warm from the oven. Mummy had waited – as impatient as I – a few minutes for it to cool, shuffling lunch-ey things between her fridges meanwhile, then had turned it out and decorated it. As I had worked away at the incriminating little documents (An owl was heard to cry at midnight; The Doctor received an urgent telegram shortly after arriving) she had iced it with some passion, explaining that she had hidden more clues inside it. I had said she should rather have invited a dentist than a Doctor. (Pauses for laughter – not a sausage.) And she had slid it onto a shiny board and put it on the surface under the window. Then she had whizzed off upstairs to divert herself climbing in and out of cupboards and beds. I was the
last one to see the cake alive. Intact anyway.
However, despite the horror of the scene, the brain of the Great Detective was icy. Straight away, she established the facts, to wit:
1. The cake had fallen or had been pushed
2. It had looked stable enough to me when Mummy had left it - so pushed
3. Mummy was upstairs at the time of the crime; Marcus had been out of my sight; V was looking odd, even for her – in fact, she even laughed
4. Crazy people laugh in these situations, and criminals, oddly relieved to be found out. It was more of a crazy-person laugh than an evil criminal genius laugh. Nb: be wary of her
5. Marcus's motivation was the most obvious, and he had a record of offending; but then, so did V – no pie was safe with her.
6. You might think it was me, but it jolly well was not.
I paced to and fro, the detached professional, but all the while observing V's reactions to my probing questions. Her immediate, unprovoked defensiveness was telling, and the way she shuffled her feet. I made notes with Mummy's pen, and was pleased to make early use of the magnifying glass that I had borrowed for the weekend from the Wet in the east wing. There were clues to be found: cake on Marcus's feet, but parsley too, so it could be after the fact. Still, could it have been him? His hips are not what they were, but his appetite is endless. He is very like my sister.
She – the chief witness, lead suspect and likely perp – was showing signs of beginning to crack under pressure, but Marcus remained dumb. The cat too, took the fifth. It was all very frustrating. Having rescued Mummy's clues and worn out the crime scene and resolving to question V further later, I pursued the cat. One never knows how long it will stay around.
After that, I continued watching V all morning. She needed help with the lunch: the poor dope did not even know about the new fridge. I made sure she knew that I had ruled out the cat as a suspect. In fact, it had told me exactly nothing, but we had sat for a while in a sunny spot together while I ate an apple and she licked herself a different sort of unclean, and my keen nose for guilt did not twitch once. Soon, the picture was to be complicated by the arrival of Mummy's guests – suspicious characters all, from the information I had received – but for the time being, I was not letting my fat worm off the hook. How, where, when and who were simple enough. What I was not sure of was why. What was her motive? If she had been driven mad by insatiable hunger, surely I would have found her face down in the cake on the kitchen floor. Her relationship with food is all one way. She had spent the morning, while I investigated, listening to plastic pop music, and when she came down for lunch she had the glazed look American geeks must get just before they take Paw's gun down from its place on the shelf next to the bible and slaughter their classmates.
She (la gorda) reckoned the two women who arrived together were Together. Perhaps she has some teen angst thing going on. (Note: must quiz V re reasons for her repressed anger); perhaps it is just that the whole of her form at school is gay – everyone says so. They (the two women – though one was dressed as a man, and one as a boy in a dress) seemed nice enough. 'Roger' was a little shy and not quite comfortable in his gown, but the 'Reverend' looked the part. She/he had on a dark suit with a white collar and beamed about like a real Vicar after a good cup of tea and slice of cake. Her face was scrubbed, glowing pink and earnest-looking; the Choirboy had two red cheeks drawn on with lipstick, and little rosebud lips. Her/his hair was greased down from a centre parting. Neither seemed like a cake-killer, but I determined not to be put off by anyone's seeming innocence.
I questioned the guests as a formality, but I am not daft: none of them was anywhere near the house when the cake went down. They had not yet arrived. But then ... none of them seemed too surprised when I told them a crime had occurred, so I should keep them in mind as accessories. Mrs Rooting-Compound seemed quite excited about the idea of a gruesome murder; her husband seemed more keen on getting smashed, sozzled and pickled.
Note: watch both sharply.
The 'doctors' who were really I.T. geeks were too dull for words. Altogether a poor lot. Very inhibited, very old. I rather hoped that Mummy's late guest would be more glamorous. But for the time being, it was Violet I was really watching. While I checked the alibis of the guests, she pestered Mummy about food: she had it on her mind, even more than usual, which I supposed to be a natural consequence of her guilty conscience.
Chapter 6
