Yule Be Sorry--A Christmas Cozy Mystery (With Dragons)

by Kim M Watt

  “Adams? Are you alright there?” Concern spiked through his voice.

  “Yes. Yes, fine. Just some idiot speeding.”

  “Ah. Yes, we have plenty of those, too.”

  “Anyway. Left, then right.”

  “Yes. If you come to the old oak tree, you’ve gone too far.”

  “On which road?”

  “I’m joking, Adams.”

  DI Collins was still chuckling when she cut him off, peering at the road ahead of her. It might be a nice day, but that didn’t make the driving all that much easier. The low sun was right in her eyes, and it was hard to see anything stationary around here, let alone anything moving. And that car had gone by so bloody fast it was pretty much impossible to be sure what she’d seen. Actually impossible, really. And she was tired and skiving off her own work to go chasing around in the middle of nowhere on a case that wasn’t even anywhere near her jurisdiction, so it wasn’t surprising that her mind was making connections where there were none, convincing herself she was seeing things she wasn’t.

  That had to be it.

  Because the idea that she’d just seen a familiar pale green Toyota Prius tearing past her in the direction of Toot Hansell, driven by an older woman and packed with three dragons and another woman of a certain age, was impossible. Although the fact that everyone seemed to be shouting and at least two scaly paws and one human hand had been jabbing wildly at the overhead light seemed like an oddly accurate detail.

  12

  Alice

  “Let’s go,” Beaufort said, his old gold eyes luminous in the warm light of the kitchen. They were watching the green blip speed across the fields, not as fast as it had been on the roads, but faster than anyone could walk or even run. Anyone human, anyway, Alice amended.

  “We don’t know where they’re going to end up,” she said. “We need to wait.”

  “That driver could be in danger,” Beaufort replied, tapping his claws on the table.

  “So could we if we go rushing after them without knowing where they’re going.”

  Beaufort cocked his head at her. “When I said ‘let’s’, I meant let us as in let us dragons go.”

  “And can you drive my phone, clever clogs?”

  “Drive it? What, it transports you?” Beaufort looked at the phone with rather more interest than he had before.

  Alice waved her hand impatiently. “Operate it.”

  “Oh. Well, no, but—”

  “Then we go together.” She glared at him, and Beaufort opened his mouth as if he was going to argue, took another look at her, and subsided.

  “Fine. We go together. But you have to stay back and let us dragons deal with whatever we find.”

  Alice raised her eyebrows.

  Beaufort fidgeted.

  Miriam said, “It’s stopped.”

  They turned to look at the phone.

  “Car, now,” Alice said, and there was a general rush for the door.

  As it turned out, a Toyota Prius might be perfect for transporting the chair of the Women’s Institute and whatever items she has cause to lug around, and might even be suitable for a small family, but it was not built for two women and three dragons. After five minutes of pushing and arguing, while tails and wings fell out of doors and someone managed to put the hazard lights on, Alice stepped back and said, “Enough! Beaufort, get out.”

  “I’m in now,” he said, peering over the roof of the car at her. He had his head out the window and Mortimer was trying to coil his tail into the footwell. Amelia was buried somewhere beneath both of them, having claimed a spot before anyone could suggest that she should stay behind.

  “You’re not really in, though, are you?” Miriam said. “And I think you’re standing on Mortimer’s wing.”

  There was a strangled squeak of agreement from the car.

  “Oh, sorry, lad!” Beaufort changed his position, earning a yelp from Mortimer and some rather unfriendly language from Amelia. “Sorry!”

  “Beaufort, get in the front,” Alice said, marching around the car to peer over the High Lord’s shoulder. “There’s no room here.”

  “No, no. You two get in the front. We’ll be fine.”

  Amelia’s language became even less friendly, and Mortimer sounded like he was agreeing with her, but his words were too muffled for Alice to be sure.

  “You’re the biggest one here,” Miriam said. “We’ll have a better chance of fitting with me in back.”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” Beaufort began, and Alice opened the door. The big dragon’s body and tail spilled out onto the road, leaving him clinging to the window with his front paws, his chin resting on the frame. “Well, that was just uncalled for.”

  “We really do need to get going,” Alice said, getting in now that she was in no immediate danger of being hit by a flailing wing. “Beaufort, up front with me.”

  “We should have flown,” he muttered, but picked himself up and climbed in.

  Alice drove sedately enough through the village, but as soon as they were over the last stream she accelerated rapidly, ignoring a little “oooh” from Miriam in the back. They didn’t have the luxury of time that they’d had last night, and as far as she knew no one was likely to vomit on her back seat, so she took the corners tight and fast, her fingers light on the wheel, humming a half-remembered tune to herself. Beaufort had his snout almost pressed to the windscreen, his paws on the dashboard, and behind her she was vaguely aware of Miriam sliding first into Amelia, then into Mortimer, while the dragons clung to the doors. She hoped no one got carsick. She couldn’t stop if they did. Anything could be happening to the DHL driver already. Plus, she wanted to get there before the police did.

  Her phone was nestled in a cradle on the dashboard, a blue arrow showing them speeding their way toward the green dot. She was going to park as close to it as she could get, even if they didn’t see the van. She was pretty sure the parcels wouldn’t be in it any more, anyway. A DHL van was no match for the soggy fields at this time of year.

  “Is it near the same lay-by?” Beaufort asked. His nose had an excited red tinge. He was terribly fond of car trips, Alice was realising.

  “Looks like it’s close to it,” she said, braking hard as they came around a corner and met four horses plodding docilely down the road. Amelia plunged into the back of Beaufort’s seat with a squeak, and Mortimer ended up wedged so tightly in the footwell behind Alice that he gave up trying to get out after a couple of attempts. They crept past the horses, giving them a wide berth, then once they were clear Alice hit the accelerator, making Miriam squeak again. Beaufort was grinning hugely.

  The little green dot was at its closest point to any road that Alice could see, and she found a spot to park in front of a locked wooden gate with well-rusted hinges and a National Trust stile next to it. They sat there for a moment, looking out at the afternoon. The sun was fading already.

  “I don’t see a van,” Beaufort said.

  “No,” Alice agreed, and got out of the car with her phone. “But the signal’s that way.” She pointed across the stile, and Amelia scrambled out of the car and onto the top of the gate, deep red wings spread for balance.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “Then let’s go,” Alice said, with a meaningful glare at Beaufort. He gave her a toothy grin in return, then followed Amelia over the gate and into the field beyond, Mortimer shaking the cramp out of his tail as he trailed after them. Alice and Miriam climbed over the stile and set off in the dragons’ footsteps.

  They marched across the field, following the curve of the muddy National Trust footpath that led away from the wall and avoiding the sheep droppings wherever they could. Miriam was wearing pink clogs, and she kept slipping off them into the mud.

  “Miriam, do you want to wait for us?” Alice asked, the third time it happened.

  “No, no. I’m fine.” One of the clogs got stuck and she stepped straight out of it into the mud in her socks. “Oops.”

 
“Indeed. Not the best footwear, maybe.” Alice was wearing her hiking boots and a heavy jacket, and had a rain hat pulled down over her ears. She’d come prepared this time.

  “They’re very comfy,” Miriam said, then gave up and took the clogs off entirely, padding after the dragons in her stocking feet. “Is it much further?”

  “It looks like it’s in that copse,” Alice said, examining her phone. “Or just beyond it.”

  “I wonder where they left the van,” Mortimer said. “It’d be good to try and get a look at that, too, wouldn’t it?” He looked quite happy as he trotted across the field, taking on the bright winter greens of the grass.

  Beaufort took to the air briefly, keeping low. They hadn’t seen anyone around, and the last car they passed had been not long after leaving Toot Hansell, but there was no point taking any risks. He landed lightly. “No tyre tracks anywhere that I can see.”

  “They couldn’t have driven across here without getting stuck,” Alice said. “There are plenty of little lanes with passing bays around here, though. They could have moved it after they offloaded the baubles, hidden it somewhere.”

  “They didn’t move the other two,” Miriam said.

  “Maybe they’re getting more careful.”

  The ground grew stonier as they approached the trees, and Miriam started making little squeaks of distress as she stubbed her toes or stepped on rocks disguised in the mud.

  “You can wait here, you know,” Alice said again as Miriam hopped away from a thistle with a yelp.

  “No, no. I’m good.”

  Alice hoped they didn’t encounter anything that required running away from. She wasn’t going to be able to give Miriam a piggyback.

  The dragons became grey and wraithlike as they picked their way into the trees. It was a young copse, all skinny silver trunks and leafless heads, and a small breeze whispered secrets through the branches. The sun was all but gone, and under the trees the ground was close to freezing, pocked with rabbit holes that Amelia investigated with interest.

  “We’re almost there,” Alice whispered. “About a hundred metres.”

  “Right,” Beaufort said. “You—” He stopped as Alice looked at him. “—come with me,” he continued. “Everyone else stay here. It’ll be quieter with just two of us.” He padded off into the gloom, and Alice fell into step with him, the hard ground absorbing her footfalls. It was desperately silent in here without the breathing of the other dragons and Miriam’s mutterings. She glanced back to see the younger woman perched on a rock, rubbing feeling back into her toes, then checked her phone. They were almost there.

  They didn’t speak, the dragon’s footsteps silent on the hard earth, Alice treading as lightly as she could. Fifty metres, now. The phone screen was bright in the failing light, and she couldn’t see that well when she looked away from it. The after-image painted ghosts among the trees, and she wished she’d thought to bring her cane from the car. Not to help her walk – just in case of unfriendly bauble thieves. Beaufort was tipping his head this way and that, searching for scents and sounds, scanning the deepening shadows.

  “Anything?” she whispered, and he shook his head. They crept on.

  The phone was showing them that they should be right on top of the tracker, and Alice supposed it must be fairly accurate, if it was meant for tracking cheating partners. But still they’d seen no one, heard nothing. And it was rapidly getting dark now that the sun was lost behind the hills, and she hadn’t brought a torch, either. Very ill-prepared of her, just like the way she hadn’t thought about how they’d know if the van went off-route. In the end it had been very obvious, but still. It wasn’t like her. She blamed the cat. Something about his amused gaze and ragged ears was making it very hard for her to kick him out, and he’d come into her bedroom last night and purred so loudly about being on the bed that she hadn’t wanted to push him off. Which meant she’d had to sleep on the wrong side, ending up with a horrible night’s sleep. Why on earth did people have the sneaky animals around?

  She pushed the phone into her pocket and stood still, waiting for her eyes to get used to the dim light. The torch on the phone wouldn’t be good enough to help her out here, and she found that after a moment she could see reasonably well. Certainly well enough to spot parcels and missing delivery drivers.

  “I can’t smell anything at all,” Beaufort told her as she caught up to him. “Just sheep and rabbits.” His belly growled dangerously and he added, “Excuse me.”

  “Not at all.” Alice shuffled around in a half-crouch, hands on her knees as she peered owlishly at the ground, but it was movement in the corner of her eye that caught her attention. She straightened up, frowning, and spotted something fluttering in the chilly breeze. She picked her way over to it, checking where she put her feet in case she stepped on something important, and retrieved a scrap of brown paper from where it was caught in a bush, struggling to break free. She fished her phone out and switched on the light, using it to examine the paper. It was as big as her palm, scuffed by movement and tape, and there was half a postcode printed on one side in familiar, curly handwriting. She sighed.

  “Beaufort?” she called, and heard the rapid pad of feet approach her from outside the little pool of light. A scaly head loomed into view, thrown in rather alarming contrasts by the harsh light of the phone. “They’re not here.”

  He looked at the paper, then up at her. “They found the tracking thingy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the packing just tore. Maybe they took all the wrapping off. But either way, it didn’t work.” She crumpled the paper and went to throw it away, then stopped herself and put it back in her pocket. The tracker was gone. No doubt it was somewhere around, probably trodden into the dirt by their own silly feet, and their hope of finding the culprits with it.

  Beaufort looked around carefully, his pupils wide as they drank in the light. “There’s more paper.”

  “Can you smell anything?”

  He circled the area slowly, finding more scraps caught in the bushes and trapped by mud. “Not really,” he said. “Humans and cars and dragons.”

  “Dragons?”

  “It was packaging for dragon-scale baubles, and the scales came from any number of dragons. It could mean everything, or it could mean nothing.”

  Alice sighed, and rubbed her forehead. “Beaufort, we’re not doing very well. We just seem to be going in circles.”

  “I know it feels like that. But we always come through, don’t we?”

  She smiled at him. “That’s a lovely thought.”

  “And a true one. Let’s go back.” He waited as she adjusted her hat and squared her shoulders, then they walked together through the trees as the night bred quiet and secretive life around them.

  It was a subdued drive back to Toot Hansell, broken only by a momentary excitement when Amelia hit the overhead light with her tail, and neither the dragons nor Miriam seemed to be able to figure out how to switch it off again. Alice tried to ignore the commotion, squeezing past an oncoming car as she said, “It’s just a little slide button. If you’d all stop poking it at once, I’m sure one of you can switch it off.”

  As it was it went on and off several times before Mortimer managed to get it firmly off, by which time Alice had decided she’d had more than enough of them all for the evening. She dropped the dragons off in the same place as the day before, thinking wearily that unproductive car trips were becoming a habit, then took Miriam home.

  “Um, do we have a plan for tomorrow?” Miriam asked timidly as she got out of the car. She was holding both her shoes and her sodden, filthy socks, and her toes looked terribly cold.

  “Just the meeting in the morning at Jasmine’s,” Alice said. “And with any luck the counterfeit baubles will have arrived while we’ve been out today.”

  “You think the post got through?”

  “I understand it had a police escort from Skipton to here and back.”

  “But they got the poor DHL driver.”
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br />   “Baubles are dangerous things, it seems,” Alice said, and smiled at Miriam. The younger woman looked bedraggled and unhappy. “Don’t worry, Miriam. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Get some sleep.”

  Miriam waved uncertainly, and Alice waited until she’d gone inside and shut the door before she put the car back in gear and went home, checking for the silver Audi almost reflexively but not seeing it. She was tired and annoyed both by the lost tracker and the fact that she didn’t know what to do next. She should know what to do. That was who she was.

  The cat was waiting at the front door again, his tail twitching as if annoyed by her tardiness. She’d taken to calling him Thompson, because it seemed to suit him more than just plain Tom.

  “Back again, are you?” she said. “The tuna’s not going to last forever, you know.” Although she’d bought cat food yesterday, Thompson had looked at it in disgust before turning and walking away to lie down in the furthest point of the kitchen from the bowl. She’d ended up sharing the chicken from her own dinner with him, and found herself back at the shop buying tuna this morning. It was evidently mind control.

  Thompson narrowed his eyes at her, then wandered inside and pawed his way through the post lying on the mat.

  “Don’t you damage any of that.”

  He gave her a scornful look, turned over a couple of cards with a paw, then sat down again, seemingly satisfied.

  “Nothing for you?” she asked, collecting the letters and pulling the door shut behind her. “I can’t imagine why not.”

  He gave her a purring mewl and led the way into the kitchen, and she wondered if she was now, in fact, a cat person. She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that.

  Alice woke late the next day. She hadn’t slept well, between Thompson taking up half the bed again and breathing tuna on her face, and her mind shuffling through different possibilities for the bauble thieves and kidnappers. While it seemed that it could only be dragons, she couldn’t get the man at the Christmas market out of her head, or the silver Audi that had appeared on the streets so soon after. Could that be him as well? It seemed to her that he’d been too curious, too pushy. And hadn’t he looked at the dragons instead of just into the shadows of the stall? Just as if he knew to expect dragons? She wasn’t sure, but she needed to ask Beaufort about him, see if he’d smelt anything strange on the man. Although she supposed Beaufort would be busy with his own interrogations this morning.