by Lyra Barnett
MURDER BITES
THE VAMPIRE MYSTERIES - BOOK 1
LYRA BARNETT
TWISTED TOMES PUBLISHING
Contents
1. Muffins & Murder
2. What a D.I.C.
3. Parents…
4. Police and Poison
5. Opportunity
6. House Mates
7. Piles of Paperwork
8. A Haddock in Hot Water
9. Lunchtime Wine
10. The Widow
11. Guests for Dinner
12. New Evidence
13. Unravelling
14. Doubts
15. Reality Bites
16. A Penny Drops
17. High Drama
18. Crowd Pleasing
19. Making Dates
20. A Great Offer
21. Making Choices…
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Copyright © 2016 by Lyra Barnett
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Twysted Tomes Publishing
www.LyraBarnett.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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1
MUFFINS & MURDER
“Y ou could be a diving instructor!” Betty said, biting into her muffin. “You said you went diving in Egypt that time.”
“Once!” I said laughing. “And anyway, we live about as far away from the coast as you can get in England, I don’t think I’d find the customers somehow.”
Betty tapped her lips with a finger.
“Hmm, good point.” She was clearly deep in thought, which for Betty was only deep enough to paddle in.
“Well, Sandra will retire soon and give up all her secrets to me, so we can run this place together.”
I nodded and took a sip of coffee. Betty and I had both worked in the Whole Latte Love Café for the last ten years. From the age of sixteen when we had joined fresh from school. The thought of working here for another ten didn’t exactly fill me with joy. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the place, but I wanted something I could really get my teeth into (which believe me, means something coming from me).
I’d always felt like there was something else that I needed from life, but had never really known what it was. Instead, I’d spent my days gliding through life aimlessly.
Betty though, she was in her element. Despite her annoyingly perfect hourglass figure (mine was less hourglass and more ruler), she loved cooking and baking, and was desperate to learn the secrets of our boss and longtime ‘second-mum’ figure, Sandra Carter.
“So, he’s arrived,” Betty said, swirling the spoon in her coffee cup distractedly.
“Who?” I asked, taking another bite of the still warm muffin which I held in front of me in a serviette. Delicate vanilla sponge with a chocolate orange, gooey middle which oozed out as you bit into it. Absolute heaven, and one of the main reasons that people flocked to the Whole Latte Love in Stumpwell.
Betty had a tendency to mix up conversations she’d had with different people, as though she assumed everyone was somehow privy to all the bits of information that she was. Often I’d arrive in the café for her to start talking to me halfway through a conversation she’d just left off with someone else, leaving me to catch up and work out what was going on. It was… interesting.
“The new DCI obviously. You know that they’ve been waiting for a replacement since old John left.”
I knew alright. It was pretty much all my mum and dad had been talking about since John Slater, the former Detective Chief Inspector assigned to the small station that passed for a police presence in the town of Stumpwell, had decided to retire. A new police chief was not good news for my family, they tended to ask questions…
“Yeah, I remember, so what’s he like?”
“Tall, good looking and a chest you could spread out on like a king sized mattress,” Betty answered, as she knocked the sugar bowl from the table with her elbow. I sighed and took another sip of coffee as I watched her stoop to recover the rogue cubes.
Betty Haddock was an enigma wrapped in a caramel coloured bombshell. She could have been a supermodel if it wasn’t for her complete lack of grace, poise and often, balance. It was like watching Naomi Campbell playing Stan Laurel with an inner ear problem.
“I meant, what’s he like as a policeman?” I said as she returned to the table.
“Oh who the hell cares about that when he looks like… Oh…” She looked around conspiratorially. “You mean because of your family’s… thing.” She gave a wink about as subtle as a brick through a window and leaned forward. “I hadn’t thought about that, is your dad worried?”
It had always made me slightly uncomfortable, but right from when we first met at primary school, Betty had had a bit of a crush on my dad. For starters, he was over a hundred years older than her, a bit of an age gap by anyone’s standards. Secondly, he was a vampire, like me. It wasn’t beyond the imagination to picture Betty stood in a billowing white nightdress as a dark figure swooped in through her open bedroom just as the moonlight caught her soft bare neck, but that wasn’t my dad. As desperate as he was to be what he saw as a ‘traditional vampire’, he was more woolen cardigan than black cloak.
I shook the thought from my mind and leaned forward over the table.
“They both are. They’re talking about selling up and moving away. “
“What?!” Betty’s dark almond eyes widened with shock. “They can’t! What would you do?!”
Though I resented the implication that I was so reliant on my parents that them leaving would ruin me, it was unfortunately true. To my great shame, at the age of twenty six I was still largely unemployed and living at home with my parents. In my defence, finding any sort of employment risked exposure, so the younger members of families like mine tended to wait a while before making a move out on their own. With our average age being over a century, time was on our side.
“I’d be fine, thank you very much.” I gave her a pointed look. “Look, this is how it is for us. We have to keep moving and starting over.” This was another sad truth. Living to an average age of one hundred and fifty was likely to raise eyebrows in any case, but that’s before you get to the fact that for some reason the un-dead (of which my family is exclusively made up of), never seem to physically age beyond about fifty five. After a while, you had to move on before people started looking at you funny and funny looks are only a hop, skip and jump from lighting torches and grabbing pitchforks.
“Even if they did leave, I wouldn’t have to go. I’d just need to find some more money from somewhere.”
“Well no, you’re not going anywhere. I won’t let you.” Betty reached across and squeezed my shoulder as she stood up. “Look, I’ve got to get on, but let’s talk later.” She sighed as she began to walk back to the counter.
“Bring me another muffin will you?” I called after her, making her half turn and bump into the back of a man in a wax jacket, knocking him forward in his chair and making him spray muffin across the table from his mouth. She really was a clutz. She apologised to the customer and then, as she passed behind him, fanned her face dramatically at me and mouthed the word ‘hot’ at me and pointed. I glanced down. She was right, the man was pretty gorgeous. A dark mess of hair sat above deep set brown eyes. I turned away from the man as he noticed me staring and looked out of the window.
Stumpwell was a modest town. Despite its dual high streets, and though it served the surrounding villages well enough with its small selection of shops, it wasn’t about to give the larger nearby town of Cowton a run for its money anytime soon.
It did though, have the Whole Latte Love cafe. Famous for at least twenty miles in all directions for its muffins, baked by resident genius, Sandra Carter. A big bustling woman who cared for everyone like a mother hen with an iron fist. The muffins were so good, it felt like they should be illegal.
Betty returned with mine, stumbling as she reached the table so that the muffin rolled off onto the table in front of me.
“Are you ok? It’s just that you seem more… well, more you than normal,” I said as I took the plate from her and placed the cake back on it. She took the tea towel that hung from the belt loop in her trousers and began to brush off the muffin crumbs which had scattered across the table.
“Oh its nothing really, just tired…” She looked up as the door opened and a small, wiry middle aged woman entered. “Oh crap.” She looked at me and raised one eyebrow and said, “Mrs Tranter,” in a voice that implied that all the evil in the world could have poured through the door on this sunny morning and it wouldn’t have struck more fear into her than Mrs Tranter. She bustled off towards the counter as I watched the small woman take her place at a table in the far corner. So, this was the infamous Edith Tranter? Betty complained about her on pretty much a daily basis, but I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of watching her in action. When Sandra asked me occasionally to help out at the café I was mostly with her in the kitchen. I enjoyed baking, and in particular watching Sandra work. It was like peeking over the shoulder of Van Gogh, but with more butter.
I watched Betty move over to take her order, almost knocking the man in the wax jacket over who had moved to the counter to order another coffee. Generally customers had to go to the counter to order, seemingly Mrs Tranter got special treatment.
I watched Betty note down Tranter’s order, apparently something she insisted upon despite ordering the same thing every day. I put Edith Tranter to the back of my mind as I focused my attention on the muffin in front of me. After all, I didn’t want it to get cold. I lifted it to my mouth and bit down, enjoying the warm chocolate orange goo which oozed from inside. Being a vampire meant I had one obvious craving (if you can’t guess, it’s red, sticky and rhymes with dud), but I had others. One was a nice cold glass of crisp New Zealand white wine, the other, anything sweet. Betty liked to joke that I had the same sweet tooth lots of other people had, the difference was, my teeth were bigger. This was technically true, although I reminded her that my ‘fangs’ as she liked to call them, only slide out of my gum to reveal their true length when I am in ‘full vamp’ mode. Which generally only happens if I see or smell blood, or if someone threatens me or someone I care about.
In fact, I realised that my ‘vampness’ as I like to call it had been on high alert for the last few minutes. The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling and my incisors had shifted just a fraction from their home in my gums. I looked around, but couldn’t see anything that would be causing it, maybe I was tired too.
My muffin was gone in a matter of moments. I sat back satisfied and watched Betty deliver a coffee and a blueberry breakfast muffin to Mrs Tranter, miraculously without spilling or dropping anything. At the same time, another woman joined her at her table. Short and plump, with her brown hair in a bob, the woman sat down gingerly opposite the fearsome Edith and spoke in a quiet voice to Betty, who scribbled away in her notebook.
Enough of this, I had to get home. Mum and dad had been in a state recently about the new incoming town DCI, and mum had told me to get out of the house this morning as dad had something he wanted to work on. Knowing dad, that was something to worry about.
I looked back through the window at East Street, which ran to the left of the green outside and thought about popping into the Reed’s sweet shop on the way home to grab a few things, when something caught my eye. A bright red sign which stuck out from the buildings, waving slightly in the wind. Its white text glinting in the morning sun. I recognised it with a flutter of excitement in my chest. An idea formed in my mind. I needed to do some investigating.
I stood up and fished my purse from my battered old Italian leather handbag as I walked over to the counter and waited until the man in the wax coat had paid for his takeaway coffee.
“I don’t know who that guy is, but I hope he’s going to be a regular.” Betty sighed, watching the man’s rear leave through the café door. “So do you want to meet when I finish?” she said taking my money.
“Yeah, text me when you’re done and I’ll come down. How was Mrs Tranter this morning?”
“Oh god, awful as always. I think that woman that’s sat with her works for her. Imagine that?!” Her eyes expanded to saucer size and I shook my head at her and laughed. I was about to tell her about the red sign I had seen, when a loud metallic clang rang out around the café, followed by a piercing scream.
I turned to see the plump figure we had just been talking about jump up, sending her chair flying backwards across the floor. She screamed again as her finger rose to point at Mrs Tranter who was slumped back in her seat, head back, with her lifeless eyes staring up into nothing.
2
WHAT A D.I.C.
“What on earth is going on out here?!” Sandra said, bursting through the swing doors which led into the café from the kitchen.
“Sandra, go and get the port you keep in the back,” I said standing. “Betty, call the police.”
I moved quickly to the woman who had stopped screaming and was crouched at the side of the now deceased Mrs Tranter and put my arm around her, guiding her to a spare chair nearby before I moved towards the body. I’d known that Mrs Tranter was dead from the second I had looked at her. My vampness had kicked in fully and I’d honed in on her heartbeat without thinking about it (it’s a vampire thing).
It hadn’t been there.
There seemed to be nothing around the body, no obvious wounds or marks. Just a neat, bony old woman sat in front of a barely drunk cup of coffee and a muffin with one bite taken out of it.
I realised the rest of the café had fallen into silence. All that could be heard was the heavy breathing of the woman who had been sat with Mrs Tranter, and Betty, who sounded like she was in a panic on the phone.
“But you’re not the American ones right? You are going to send someone to England?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I ignored it as the sobbing dumpy woman in front of me needed me right now.
I dragged a chair up and sat opposite her, looking around the room. Apart from the Barter twins, two little old ladies who were sat at their normal table in the corner of the room and hadn’t moved, there was only me, Betty, the dumpy woman, and the body of Mrs Tranter.
Sandra emerged through the doors to the kitchen with the bottle of port.
“Sandra,” I called over, “bring a load of glasses, I think we could all do with a drink.”
She nodded and bent to grab a tray of glasses from below the counter. I turned my attention back to the woman in front of me, who at least now appeared to be composed.
“Are you ok?” I asked her, realising that this could well be the stupidest question of the year. She nodded meekly.
“It was just a bit of a shock,” she mumbled, dabbing at her eyes and nose with the serviette I had handed her. I held her hand as Sandra returned with the port and started pouring. Betty soon followed and slumped in the chair next to me, grabbing a glass and necking it.
“I was so flustered, I phoned 911! They said it was ok as it gets sent through to 999, but I was worried I’d called the American police! It’s
all those bloody police shows I watch on TV,” she muttered.
I had to stifle a laugh, it really wouldn’t have been appropriate.
“What happened love?” Sandra said to the woman in the plain green dress who was now sipping cautiously at her port.
“I don’t know. She was telling me what she wanted me to do today, and then she just started sort of having a fit or something and then fell back… like that.” She nodded her head to where the body sat, alone on its table, as though waiting for service that would never come.
“A heart attack maybe?” Sandra said, looking between me and Betty.
“Maybe.”
I nodded, though something didn’t feel right about all of this. My vampness was screaming that something decidedly fishy had happened in Whole Latte Love this morning.
THE POLICE ARRIVED around ten minutes later. Not a bad response time and Betty was at least reassured that they had not had to come from America.
A young female officer, clearly a rookie, lived up to the term ‘green’ by turning that very colour upon seeing the body. She was followed in by a tall, rangy man in a cheap suit which still managed to look pretty good on him. His blonde hair was swept neatly to one side, his mouth pursed in thought as his piercing blue eyes scanned the room. He had a sort of presence about him which gave the impression he was in control.
“I am sorry that you have all had an unpleasant morning,” he said to the occupants of the café after entering and looking around the body for a few seconds. “I will just need to ask each of you a few questions and then you can be on your way.”
I noticed that his eyes lingered on Betty, but that was hardly surprising. I’ve turned a few heads in my time, but Betty could make them spin off at the neck. It was the only slightly sour point of being her best friend. Being a pale, acceptably brunette with a body that, although slim was mostly straight lines, was not easy with Betty as a friend.
He called Betty first and they vanished through the doors into the kitchen, where he had decided to take our statements. I sat and drank port with Sandra and the Barter twins. The two old ladies from the corner table had swarmed across the second they had seen the port bottle. The woman who had been sat with Mrs Tranter was also sat with us and had introduced herself as Joan Sithers. She had explained that she was the victim’s personal assistant in between swigs of port and we had nodded and sat in silence until I was called to go through next. I passed Betty on my way to the doors.