“Is that a euphemism for something I don’t want to know about?” Ezra asked without breaking a smile, but his eyes wrinkled in amusement. Detectives tend to have a weird sense of humour.
“No-oooo,” I said. “I really do. It’s been playing up.”
“Is that so?” He scratched his chin and looked around, as though he could see through the walls into every room in the inn. “I might be able to help you with that.”
“Really? Are you a central heating engineer?”
He shook his head. “Not me. But my brother-in-law is.”
“Local to us?”
“Based in London.”
I pulled a face. “Not much use down here, really.”
“Well, if you need someone who’s a specialist in certain makes of boilers, just give me a shout.”
Ezra obviously thought I lacked the capacity to Google my own plumbers and engineers. I smiled my thanks, trying not to look too patronising.
“Can we come through?” A woman dressed in blue plastic coveralls bobbed into view, wheeling a trolley.
“Yes, come on in.” George shepherded us out of the way. We lingered outside The Snug, awkwardly standing around, while inside Delia was covered in a body bag and loaded onto the gurney. We didn’t have long to wait; the process was relatively quick. We bowed our heads as she was wheeled past us and taken down the hall and through the kitchen.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. I hadn’t known her long at all, and she’d been a challenging person, but I felt so sorry for her.
And her mother.
Where on earth could Mrs Cuthbert be?
“We’ll see you in the morning, Alf,” George said as he prepared to follow the ambulance to the hospital. “In the meantime, don’t let anyone in that room.”
“I won’t.” I followed the detectives to the back door and closed it after them. Frost had already started to coat the grass outside and the back lawn sparkled in the moonlight. I shivered, reminded of the boiler, and quickly ducked inside.
As I’d expected, it had turned itself off again. I prodded the exposed wires with the tip of my wand. Something crackled and fizzed and a spark leapt out at me. But not an electrical spark. I would have expected an electrical spark to have been yellow or white, something in that colour range, but this had been noticeably green.
Interesting. What sort of wire emits green sparks? I hesitated because, having burned wire in a fire before, I’d seen the different colours it could give off. But I’d never seen a green spark from an active electrical device before.
I tapped my wand against my chin. Ezra’s words resonated with me. He’d suggested I might need a specialist boiler engineer.
What if the specialist I needed was some kind of magician? What if the boiler for my wonky inn was a magick boiler?
“Ned?” I called, knowing wherever he was either he’d hear me, or one of the other ghosts would and tell him he was needed.
He appeared a few seconds later.
“Do you know if we have anything to remove the layers of paint from the side of the boiler here?” I asked, tapping the side panel where the maker’s plate was located.
Ned examined the area. “Not an easy job, that. There must be half a dozen layers of paint on there.”
“If not more. I wonder how long this baby’s been in place.”
Pointing at the pipes, Ned nodded. “Lead pipework. A long time.”
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“Let me see what there is in the shed.”
A little later he returned with Finbarr in tow, clutching a handful of rags and a bottle of something cloudy. “Ned said you wanted to remove some paint.”
“Not just some paint.” I pointed at the area I wanted to uncover. “Look. See where the paintwork is chipped here? There are loads of layers there.”
Finbarr scratched at the area with a stubby thumbnail. “Who, in their right mind, paints a boiler pink?”
“Some of my forebears certainly had dubious taste in home decorating,” I said.
“I seem to recall that was your great-grandmother, Miss Alf,” Ned offered.
I turned to him in amazement. “Gwyn painted the boiler pink? Why would she do that?”
Ned shrugged. “There’d been a war on.”
“Oh.” I considered this. It sounded feasible. Kind of.
“Alright,” said Finbarr. “Let me see what we have here …”
He uncapped his bottle and tipped the liquid onto the cloth, wetting a patch. The room instantly filled with an eye-wateringly strong scent of chemicals. I blinked, wishing I had a mask. Finbarr seemed oblivious, however. He carefully dabbed at where the paint had chipped away. Ned and I leaned forward to watch.
“You’re in my light there,” Finbarr complained, so we stepped back. Or rather I stepped back and Ned fluttered to the other side of Finbarr where the light fell at a different angle. It didn’t make any difference. Ned didn’t have a shadow.
Finbarr rubbed harder. Nothing seemed to be happening. He upended his bottle once more, soaking the rag in his hand. I rolled my head on my shoulders. This could take an age and, after the day I’d had, I was shattered.
“It’s good, but it’s not right.” Finbarr stepped back and admired his handiwork. “You know what would help here?”
“More elbow grease?” Ned suggested.
“A flame thrower?” I asked.
“No. Easier than any of that.” Finbarr pulled out his wand. He tapped the side of the boiler gently. “Arcana relevant!”
I watched entranced as the paint liquified, first to a tacky consistency like fresh paint, then to more of a sludge where all the colours came together in a globular pinky-beige mess, then a jelly-like blancmange substance, which finally thinned out until it was no thicker than coloured water.
Finbarr swiped at the boiler with his rag, wiping away the remnants of the paint, and exposing the original silver iron of the contraction itself. The maker’s name stood proud.
Virtuoso.
“Bingo!” I said. “That’s who I need to track down.”
“It’s a Spellbinder model.” I doodled on the pad of A4 I had in front of me with my green felt tip, the phone clamped to my left ear. All of my normal-coloured biro pens had gone walkies. I blamed Charity for that. She often used my desk when she needed to email guests about reservations or update our database and mailing list, then she’d sashay off with all my precious pens. All she’d left me with today were a blunt pencil, an ancient fountain pen that had probably belonged to my father when he was a kid—and which had long ago run out of ink anyway—and this felt tip.
“That’s right,” I repeated. “The company was called Virtuoso.”
Ting.
The elevator zoomed past me. I tried to cover my right ear with my right hand and only succeeded in stabbing myself with the green felt tip, tattooing myself just below the eye.
I listened to the woman on the other end of the phone while colouring in the petals of a flower. “You’ve never heard of it? Oh … Yes … No, I appreciate that it was installed a very long time ago …”
I cricked my neck. This was my eleventh phone call in succession. If I didn’t get a biscuit and a cup of tea soon I’d pass out from low sugar levels. “Absolutely,” I said. “Thanks so much for your time. Bye now. Bye.”
I replaced the receiver and swung back in the chair, glaring at the elevator as it whined on its way back to the floor above me. Fortunately, the sheer number of witches alighting on the wrong floor had abated, but even so, the interruptions were frequent and distracting.
I had another two central heating engineers on my list, but to be honest I didn’t hold out much hope. Nobody had heard of a make of boiler going by the name of Spellbinder, or the Virtuoso company that had created it in the first place.
Zephaniah turned up, hovering in the doorway. “Here’s another one, Miss Alf. Where would you like it?”
He wafted a cage closer to me so that I could examine it. This one must hav
e been a hamster or a mouse or something. All I could see was a huge fluffy bed and a wheel. I felt rather like a hamster on a wheel myself, so I would have appreciated burrowing into a big squidgy bed and hiding away from the eyes of the world.
“Hoooo,” Mr Hoo, perched on the back of my chair, announced behind me.
“Her name’s Portia, is it?” I asked him. For some reason, he felt it important to fill me in on every single animal that was brought into the office, and yes, you’ve guessed it, there were an awful lot of them. Elise had requested they be moved and of course, I needed to accommodate them somehow. I didn’t have any available space except the large cold rooms behind the kitchen, which simply wouldn’t do, or my office.
And so here they were.
Ned, Archibald and Zephaniah had been carefully carrying them—or escorting, if you prefer—up the back stairs as the police catalogued and released each one from The Snug. By now we had identified the last of the familiars belonging to the other witches staying at the inn and they had all been reunited with their owners. That still left an unbelievable forty cages, baskets, crates and vivariums, all containing Delia’s pets.
What on earth had convinced her that bringing all of them here would be a good idea?
Already my office was beginning to smell like the ape house at London Zoo.
“Hoo. Hoo-ooo.”
“No, you can’t have her for lunch.” I scratched out the phone number of the firm I’d just dialled.
“T-wit.”
“Same to you, with brass knobs on.”
Archibald appeared at the door with an empty birdcage. I recognised it as belonging to the parakeet. “This is the last of the cages, Madam,” he said.
I stared at it, wondering if the loss of the parakeet had set in play a series of events that had ended up with the murder of Delia, or whether that had been a sad coincidence. She’d said the parakeet had been her favourite. I could understand how upset she must have been. I’d be distraught if I lost Mr Hoo.
I stood up and walked across to take it from the air in front of Archibald. “You didn’t have any luck tracking Cuthbert Cuthbert down?” I’d asked him this dozens of times.
“No, Madam. Unfortunately not,” he confirmed. “I am still keeping an eye out for him.”
“Hoooooooo,” Mr Hoo interjected. “Hooooo-ooooo.”
Archibald regarded Mr Hoo with interest. “What’s he saying, Madam?”
“He’s claiming that Cuthbert Cuthbert was a girl parakeet, not a boy parakeet.”
“Hoooo,” Mr Hoo said.
I shrugged. “I guess Delia didn’t know that. It must be hard to tell boys from girls in the bird world.”
“Hooo-ooo-ooo!” Mr Hoo sounded most indignant.
Archibald smiled. “I’ll carry on looking, Madam, of course I will, however we are very busy, what with all the requests from your guests.”
“They’re our guests,” I reminded him, not unkindly. I liked everyone who worked at Whittle Inn to have some sense of ownership. They didn’t—couldn’t, usually—benefit from their work economically, but Whittle Inn provided a safe haven for us all.
“Of course they are, Madam,” Archibald agreed readily enough. I think he’d struggled to find his feet a little in such a small environment compared to what he was used to. But it beat Castle Iadului hands down. Let’s face it, anything did.
“What sort of things are they requesting?” I peered into the empty cage dangling in my right hand.
“Oh you know, bingo daubers, eye drops, indigestion remedies, incontinence pads, Paracetamol, weather almanacs, chalk, candles, hair of bat, wing of fruit fly, a vial of the blood of a virgin—”
I held my spare hand up. “I get it.”
“Oh, there’s more.”
“I’m sure there is.” I placed the forlorn parakeet cage on top of my desk. “Are you managing to find everything you need?”
“I struggled with the blood of a virgin, Madam.”
“You do surprise me.” I hid a smile. “I’ll give Millicent a call and see if she can spare any.”
“I’d be grateful, Madam.”
“I’ll do it now,” I reached for the phone again.
I needed some air, so when Millicent offered to meet me at the end of the lane, I agreed. Throwing on my long coat and winding a multi-coloured scarf around my neck, I raced outside. It felt good to get away from all the old folks hanging out in the bar. The novelty of the police presence had worn off and most of them had grown bored now, so they had begun to play their games in earnest. Besides the bagatelle, there was Monopoly, Cluedo, Trivial Pursuit and a chess tournament to choose from, along with cribbage, bridge and even—and this pleased me way more than it should have done—a Buckaroo tournament. Every time I passed that table I’d hear the clattering of small plastic pieces and a witch hollering in deep dismay.
Weak sunlight filtered through the skeletal branches of the oak trees as I skipped down the lane. I could smell burning wood, the scent of several dozen wood-burning stoves and perhaps the odd bonfire. The grass still sparkled with a frost that had yet to melt off. The air was so cold today, I doubted that it would.
Millicent waited for me at the bottom, a large basket over her arm. At the sight of me dashing towards her she smiled, and her two dogs rushed to greet me. Jasper, an enormous hairy lurcher, and Sunny, a small and fluffy Yorkshire Terrier, danced around, sniffing my pockets for titbits as I reached down to fuss them.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get up to see you the other night,” she said without much ado. “I was attending to a lady in Abbotts Cromleigh who has some weird flu.”
“Ugh. Well, don’t worry. It’s all a bit late now.”
“So the rumours in the village are true?” Millicent pounced. It didn’t surprise me in the least that the news had travelled so quickly. Whittlecombe was a tight-knit community and the amount of police activity over the past few days would not have gone unnoticed.
“Do we have another mysterious death, you mean?” I stood up, pulling a face. “Yes, we do.” I sighed. “Why me, Mills? Am I cursed?”
She gave that serious consideration. “It’s a possibility.”
“Oh, don’t say that.”
She grinned and reached up to straighten her rather baggy woollen hat which had fallen over her eyes.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.
It was a familiar greeting where Millicent was concerned. She was a witch without even the slightest fashion sense at all. Today she had on an oversized woollen coat, quite obviously hand knitted. I think it was supposed to be a kind of orange colour, but at some point the person who had knitted it, and possibly that had been Millicent herself, had run out of orange wool and substituted beige in parts and baby yellow in others. It was ghastly. By contrast, the hat had been knitted in rainbow-coloured wool and had obviously been made especially for someone with a head the size of Humpty Dumpty. A dozen or so crocheted flowers in shades of puce and puke had been attached, adding to its weight, resulting in it constantly slipping down over Millicent’s eyes.
“It’s a sweet little combo, isn’t it?” Millicent replied and handed over the basket.
I took it from her and pulled aside the clean chequered tea towel covering the contents. She had carefully arranged everything I’d asked for. Numerous different coloured candles, small jars of creature parts—each neatly branded with its own label, and several jars of homemade jam.
“Any virgin’s blood?” I asked.
“Underneath the lemon curd.” Millicent reached in and pulled out the tiniest vial I’d ever seen. The label that had been tied to the neck of the bottle dwarfed it.
“Good gracious! Is that it?”
Millicent snorted. “This stuff is like gold dust. Be careful it doesn’t get spilled.” She glanced up at me. “Who wants it anyway? And what are they going to do with it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, I think it’s a good idea you check that out. This is potent stuff.”
“Okay, I will,” I sighed. “I promise.”
“You sound a little stressed,” Millicent commiserated.
“You don’t say?” I rubbed my eyes. “Besides this mysterious death we’ve had, I’m up to my neck in familiars and witches. There are more witches staying with me than I’ve seen in one place since my mother’s funeral, and then some.”
“And this murder? How did it happen?”
I glanced around, as though the murderer might have been listening to us. I suppose that wouldn’t have been an impossibility. He or she was still out there somewhere. “It’s mighty peculiar. I found her being held up in a beam of energy. As though she were being levitated by somebody or something.”
“Ooh. That’s an odd one.” Millicent mulled it over. “And she was already dead?”
“Definitely,” I said. “She was cold.”
“A witch-on-witch killing?” Millicent shuddered. “That’s not something to be blasé about.”
I leaned closer to her. “We have a couple of detectives down here from the Ministry of Witches. Someone up there is taking this very seriously.”
Millicent looked impressed. “Treading on George’s toes, are they?”
I laughed. I shouldn’t have done but I did. Poor George. “He’s not best pleased.”
A sudden breeze alerted me to a ghost apparating alongside us. Zephaniah.
“Beg your pardon, Miss, but we have a problem.”
So what’s new, I wanted to ask.
“What’s happened now?” Millicent asked.
“It’s Finbarr,” Zephaniah said. “I think the police are going to arrest him.”
“What’s going on?” I confronted Elise in the reception area, where she and Ezra were huddled over their phones.
She held a hand up. “Hey, it’s nothing to do with me. DC Gilchrist seems to have a bee in his bonnet.”
That didn’t sound like George. “It’s DS,” I reminded her and stomped off through the bar, ignoring the gatherings of witches around the various tables. All of my guests were getting on with their lives as though all this was normal. I had begun to feel uncomfortable about it. How could anyone play games at a time like this?
A Gaggle of Ghastly Grandmamas: Wonky Inn Book 9 Page 10