Mugs, Murder, and Mayfair

by L. A. Nisula

  Mugs, Murder, and Mayfair

  copyright (c) 2018 L. A. Nisula

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to actual places or persons is purely coincidental.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  Cassie Pengear was expecting a quiet week helping her friends Kate and Ada inventory their Mayfair tinkering/haberdashery shop, with nothing more exciting to worry about than a shaving mug thrown through the window, hiding the evidence of a student prank, they assume. But then a body is found a few streets away, and the inspector in charge of the murder case begins to suspect Kate. Now Cassie must help her friend by finding the connections between mugs, murder, and Mayfair.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  Other books in the series

  Killing at the Carnival

  Death at Dinner

  Stabbing Set with Sapphires

  A Spartan Murder

  The Body in the Boxroom

  A Drowning in Bath

  The Death Downstairs

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 1

  THE NIGHT THE WHOLE THING STARTED, I was spending a week in Kate and Ada’s flat above their shop to help them with their inventory. Their shop was a combination haberdashery and tinkering shop in Mayfair, which allowed the young ladies who could afford to shop in the area to buy their embroidery threads and tinkering supplies in the same place, all wrapped in pink paper and bows to make it more palatable to—and often to hide it from—the rich, old-fashioned papas who were usually settling the accounts. Every year, Kate and Ada closed the shop for a week when most of their regular customers were out of town at their country estates for the holidays—their usual clientele were the sort to have country estates—and did a full inventory of the shop to tell them what was selling, what wasn’t, what was being stolen, and ultimately, what they would need to order for the coming year. It had become a bit of a tradition with us that I would go over and help them count up their gears and buttons and other interesting bits and pieces. I hadn’t been sure if I was even going to be needed this year, as they had hired a girl to help in the shop who was proving quite capable of dealing with both the tinkering and the sewing departments, but Kate and Ada had scheduled the inventory to coincide with Julia’s sister’s wedding in Brighton so they could give her the full week off, and I was once again installed in their second bedroom.

  Kate and Ada’s second bedroom looked out over the front of the shop. Kate had once told me it was to keep irritating guests away. Apparently, not many people could sleep through the noise of the street below, even though Mayfair was not exactly filled with pubs and theaters. But even if it had been, it wasn’t a trick that would have worked on me. I’d grown up in a city, so the normal sounds didn’t bother me at all once I’d fallen asleep. But there were some things even I couldn’t sleep through, and the clatter of shattering glass in the shop just below me was definitely one of those things. I was half-awakened by the sound and groggily trying to figure out where the crash of glass had come from when Kate’s system of alarms started going off, waking me fully. No one would be able to sleep through those. I went to the window and looked out, but I couldn’t see anyone on the street below who could have set them off. I grabbed my shawl from the end of the bed, glanced at the clock and noted it was just past midnight, and went into the hallway to see if Kate and Ada needed help.

  I met them on the landing, Kate with a heavy-looking spanner and a lantern and Ada with a brass-topped walking stick. Noticing I was unarmed, Ada handed me a fireplace poker that was inexplicably kept in the umbrella stand near their bedroom, and we started downstairs and through to the door to the back room of the shop.

  The noise from the alarms was worse downstairs. I maneuvered my poker until I could hold it while pressing my hands over my ears, which muffled the clanging and ringing enough for me to concentrate on looking around. The shop was dark, but there was enough light from the gas lamps outside for us to see that several panes of one of the large windows facing the street had been shattered, from the outside by the amount of glass glinting on the floor. Kate had already run into the shop and was shining her lantern into every corner and behind every desk and shelf as she made her way along the back wall, where there stood what I thought was a cabinet until she unlocked it and revealed that it was merely a box to hide the wall behind it and the large number of gears and wires mounted there. She pulled a few gears out of place and the noise stopped. I dropped my hands from my ears. Ada calmly pulled some wadded cotton from her ears. Apparently, she’d been through this sort of alarm before.

  “I think it’s empty,” Kate said as she looked behind the counter.

  “The noise probably scared them off,” Ada said as she went to light the lamps.

  “Then everything worked as intended. I suppose I should re-set them.” Kate wandered back to fiddle with the wall of gears behind the cabinet door.

  I went to the area near the window and looked at the mess that was there. Broken glass, of course, and the scattered remains of a few of the displays, although since they were all made of metal I doubted anything had been damaged too badly. There was one thing which seemed out of place, or the pieces of one thing. The remains of something that seemed to be ceramic or clay. I took one of the lanterns from a nearby display and brought it over to Ada so she could light it for me, then went back for a better look. It appeared to be the remains of a large mug. I could identify the base and what seemed to be the two pieces of the handle. There were more bits scattered about. “Is this something you had in the window?”

  Ada came over to have a look. “No, if we’re showing tea things, we use proper teacups, nothing like that. And we have a display of automated knitting accessories at the moment.”

  I could see the remains of the gears and yarn among the glass. “Then this must be what broke the window.”

  Ada stared at it. “Seems an odd thing to use, but it wasn’t in the window before, I’m quite certain.” She turned her attention back to the mess. “At least it was that window. The other one would have been much worse.” The broken shop window was a mullioned sort with several small panes of glass, only four of which had been broken. The other one was a modern window, made of one large piece of glass which would have completely shattered had it been hit.

  “I wonder if that was on purpose.” I stared at the window, but there weren’t any clues as to motive. “Well, we should start by going for the constable. Do you know his beat?”

  Before either of them could answer, Constable Polwarth looked in through the remains of the window. Ada hurried to unlock the door and let him in.

  Kate looked up from her switches. “See, the alarms worked exactly as they should. I’ll bet you heard them and came running.”

  “Heard of them,” Constable Polwarth said diplomatically.

  “You mean you got noise complaints,” Ada said.

  Constable Polwarth chose not to answer that.

  “Here’s what broke the window,” I said pointing to the mug.

  Constable Polwarth came to have a look. “Seems to be a shaving mug.”

  “Why would someone throw a shaving mug through our wi
ndow?” Ada asked as she stood beside him looking at the remains of it.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better. Are you ladies having problems with anyone at the moment?”

  “No,” Kate said at once.

  Ada shook her head.

  “No irate fathers, no brokers wanting to buy the place?”

  “Everyone seems to be out of town at the moment,” Ada said, “and we’ve been closed for inventory the past couple of days.”

  He looked up at me. “That explains you, then.”

  I nodded.

  “And there’s no note? No threat? Nothing they may have wanted you to see?”

  “If there is, I don’t recognize it as such,” Ada answered.

  “There seems to be something printed on the mug,” I offered.

  Constable Polwarth leaned over to look. Ada brought her lantern over so he could see it clearly.

  “It looks like a shop logo. Perhaps someone pinched it on a lark and wanted to get rid of it. Then it’s possible it was some brats in the area, or drunk students trying to outdo each other, which can be worse. They may not even have meant to break the window, just get rid of the evidence. I’ll write a report all the same. Would you like me to find someone to board up the window?”

  “I don’t like to wake anyone this late,” Kate said.

  “If they’ve managed to sleep through this, I don’t think we could,” Ada said but softly enough that Kate didn’t hear her.

  “And I don’t think we’ll be getting much sleep after this,” Kate went on without pausing. “We could just stretch a tarp over it and ask Mr. Bergman to come over in the morning.”

  Constable Polwarth nodded. “Do you have the materials for that, or should I fetch something?”

  “We have plenty in the shop. But as you are tall...”

  Constable Polwarth smiled. “I’ll help you get the top bit settled.”

  While Kate followed Constable Polwarth out with her toolkit from behind the counter and Ada went to locate a suitable tarp in the storeroom, I found a pair of Kate’s leather tinkering gloves and started on the glass. I had the impression Constable Polwarth didn’t think we would find out who our vandal was, but in case he did and needed the evidence, I gathered together as many pieces of the mug as I could see in an empty gearbox before I swept up the larger pieces of glass. When Ada had found the tarp, she found a second pair of gloves and came to assist. She didn’t comment on my collection of mug bits, merely dropped any she found in the box with the rest.

  By the time Kate had come in and sent Constable Polwarth on with a flask of hot tea—it seemed Ada had put the kettle on while getting the tarp—we had finished clearing up the glass, although Kate insisted on going over the area with one of her inventions that was meant to collect any small bits of things like glass to be certain. Then we went to the back of the shop to have our own tea and wait for it to be a respectable hour to go in search of Mr. Bergman.

  While Kate and Ada debated the best way to have the window repaired, I looked at the bits of the mug I had collected. Constable Polwarth had been correct: there seemed to be some sort of shop logo split across the pieces of the mug. I took one of Kate’s long screwdrivers and began to slide the pieces around the box absently, sorting out the ones that had the logo on them, then trying to fit them together to make the original image. I had managed to get part of a name pieced together when I realized Kate and Ada were waiting for me to answer something. Since they had certainly figured out by then that I wasn’t paying attention, I looked up until they repeated the question.

  “Anything interesting there, Cassie?” Kate asked with a bit of a grin.

  “I have part of a shop name, or maybe a person’s name. I can’t quite tell. And you?”

  “Ada has vetoed every suggestion except plain glass, so I suppose that’s what we’ll do. What’s the name?”

  As there wasn’t enough to read aloud with any sort of sense, I slid the box over so she could see what I had so far.

  “That doesn’t look like the name of anyplace around here, but then that isn’t very much to go on.” Kate pushed a few of the pieces around trying to reveal more of the image, then slid the box over to Ada.

  “And we’re not acquainted with many places that would use a shaving mug,” Ada said as she looked at the pieces, “but I’m quite certain Constable Polwarth wouldn’t have identified it as such if he weren’t certain. And if he recognized the logo or the name, he would have mentioned it.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Kate said. “It has to be from around here. Who in their right mind steals something as silly as this and then carries it around town before disposing of it?”

  “Perhaps it was a drunk student,” Ada suggested, “and he sobered up somewhere around here and realized he shouldn’t be caught with it, or brought it here to show his friends, then disposed of it.”

  “I suppose.” Kate pushed the box back across the table to me. “And there are plenty of candidates in the neighborhood. What do you think, Cassie?”

  “I don’t know, but then you probably wouldn’t be able to get restitution out of them whoever they are, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.” I was trying to avoid thinking too hard about it, as I suspected it was going to be the sort of annoying case that never had a proper solution, even if it was tempting, particularly as it seemed like a nice, safe case, not one that would lead to us being followed by murderers or forced to go to ground in Bath.

  Kate must have noticed I didn’t want to speculate as she changed the subject. “When do you think we could go to Mr. Bergman’s shop?”

  “I’d say it was too early now,” Ada said with a perfectly straight face as the clock struck three.

  In the end, we didn’t need to decide on the appropriate time to fetch Mr. Bergman. The sun was barely up when the man himself was knocking on the shop door. He nodded towards the window. “I take it that’s what Constable Polwarth’s note was about.”

  Ada held the door so he could come in. “That’s it. I hope he didn’t wake you.”

  “Not a bit. Slipped it under my door in the night. Let’s see what you’ll be needing.”

  Mr. Bergman came into the shop and began examining the front window from the inside. It was hard to tell what his assessment was, as all he said was “Hmm” several times, broken up by a few “Ah!”s. There wasn’t much to see, but we all stayed near the counter and watched until he nodded and climbed off of the display area of the window. “Let’s see what it looks like outside.”

  Kate followed him out. Ada went to fetch the ledger book for the inventory, so I followed her into the backroom, and we tried to get a bit more work done, although it wasn’t easy with the noises coming from the front of the shop, particularly when we heard glass breaking again. At least that proved to be nothing more than Mr. Bergman knocking the remaining glass out of the broken panes and onto the tarp that had been taken down and spread out for the purpose.

  Despite the noise, which only got worse when Kate and Mr. Bergman decided to bolt a piece of metal over the empty bits of the window, Ada and I managed to make good progress on a particularly fiddly box of buttons, which meant that we got some counted. I convinced myself that I did not need any more pearl buttons, and we came to the conclusion that it was simplest all round for me to buy all of the copper gear-shaped ones, as there were only a dozen to begin with. Ada was adding my purchase to my account and I was trying to avoid looking at how much it had grown since I’d started helping them when Kate and Mr. Bergman finished their assessment of the window.

  “Could be worse,” Mr. Bergman said. “Could have been the big one. I’ll get the glass ordered and be back in a couple of days to install it. The copper should hold until then. Unless you want any of the modifications we talked about.”

  “No,” Ada said before Kate could answer.

  “I suppose we’d have to coordinate them with my alarms, so that might be something best left for a time when there isn’t a rush on the
window.”

  “Suit yourselves.” Mr. Bergman wrote up their work order and left.

  We spent the rest of the morning inventorying the small bins of gears along the back wall, interrupted every few minutes by the window alarms going off, which meant Kate had to run outside to sort them out. It took until almost teatime for her to figure out the problem. “The copper was to prevent me from having to re-wire everything around the broken panes, then re-do all that work once the new glass is installed,” Kate explained as she carried out a plate of biscuits for tea. “The idea being it would act like the wires. It turns out, the Stantons’ cat has figured out how to convince mice to run up the wall and over the metal at just the right angle that the vibration sets off the alarm.”

  Ada brought the kettle over. “So we’ll be hearing this every time the Stantons’ cat is bored until the glass arrives?”

  “Of course not. Cassie would be gone by dinnertime if I left it like this. I think I’ve sorted it out, if you have some felt or something like that that you don’t need.”

  “I’ll manage to find something,” Ada said quickly.

  I took my time selecting my biscuits so Kate wouldn’t see me smile at that.

  “Then I can tack that up over the outside of the copper and that should do the trick. Unless the cat figures out how to throw something metal at the window, but that should take him a couple of days, at least, and we should have the glass by then.”

  Ada finished her tea quickly and was back with a bolt of brown felt before Kate or I had finished our first cup. Apparently, the felt did the trick as we passed a quiet afternoon. Without the alarm bothering us, we made good progress on the inventory, getting all of the Shetland wool counted and logged and most of the knitting needles sorted. I had re-assembled more of the cup—using one of Ada’s long knitting needles was more efficient than Kate’s screwdriver—but none of us recognized the logo, and as there hadn’t been any other instances of vandalism reported, it seemed a bit pointless to go looking for the shop, even if I was curious. By Thursday morning, it seemed we would be able to finish the inventory without any more broken windows or other disturbances. We were just getting our morning tea sorted out when there was a knock at the front door. Ada put the plate of muffins down on the table. “I could have sworn everyone was out of town.”