Once Upon a Crime

by P. J. Brackston

  “Good afternoon to you, Kapitan. I’m pleased to see you so committed to your work. Three days and still sifting the ruins of Hund’s livelihood for clues. Such dedication. It must be a great comfort to the unfortunate man to know he is in such capable hands.” The continuing itching in Gretel’s nether regions forced her to stride about in an attempt to quell the irritation and stop herself tearing at her beautifully cut skirts. Strudel pulled himself up to his full height, which still left him six inches shorter than Gretel.

  “You’ve no business being here,” he told her. “This is a crime scene.”

  “Oh, I was just passing.”

  Something on the ground caught Gretel’s attention. At first she thought she must be mistaken, but no, her eyes were not playing tricks. She crunched over the sooty debris for a better look, which, regrettably, meant moving closer to Strudel. She stopped, willing herself not to scratch. Part of her (a very large part, naturally) wanted to break into a run in the direction of the apothecary, ripping off her undergarments as she went. But the opportunity to humiliate the odious Kinsgman, even if he was the one man in the town who wore his true character plainly on his face for all to see, was too good to pass up.

  “So, you haven’t found anything, then?” she asked. “No clues?”

  “That is kingsman’s business, and information not in the public domain.”

  “That’ll be a no, then.”

  “I am not at liberty to divulge . . .”

  “Yes, yes, I know. Just wondered. You know, taking an interest in the well-being of my fellow townsfolk, etc., etc. Haven’t turned up anything helpful, then? Nothing to point to a motive?”

  “We have not yet concluded that the blaze was arson.”

  “No clues as to the identity of a possible pyromaniac? Like that human hand you are currently standing on, perhaps?”

  “What!” Strudel followed the line of Gretel’s pointing finger to find that it was true; he was indeed standing on the charred remains of a human hand, which was, in point of fact, still attached to an arm, a shoulder, and, as a cautious probing with his baton revealed, an entire human corpse.

  Inside Strudel a battle clearly raged between fury and excitement. Excitement won. Barely pausing to grind his teeth at Gretel, he rushed about, bellowing orders at his underlings to fetch a spade and an undertaker. All the ensuing commotion and activity gave Gretel the chance to further examine the body. It was impossible to tell if it had been a man or a woman, so thoroughly cooked were the remains, but two things presented themselves as salient facts. The first was that the cadaver was missing the third finger of its right hand. Not in a burned-off sort of way, Gretel noted, but in a hacked-off sort of way. This struck her as odd. Had the deceased lost his digit years ago, perhaps, or had it been removed recently? Or had it—and the possibility prodded her investigative skills into high alert—been removed after his death? Could it be that he was dead before the fire even started? Questions crowded into Gretel’s mind, but were allocated second place in importance by the other salient fact that had come to her notice. The outstretched, digitally challenged hand was clutching something.

  Judicious nudging with her foot caused that something to drop from the clutches of the corpse and reveal itself to be a small, blackened but still recognizable, brass bell. Gretel let out a gasp. She glanced up to see Strudel on his way back. As nimbly as her rotundity would allow, she stooped down, snatched up the bell, and stuffed it into her bra, for once lamenting the lack of pockets in designer gowns.

  “What are you doing?” Strudel demanded, leaning in to guard the body like a hyena protecting its carrion find.

  “Nothing! Nothing at all,” said Gretel, moving swiftly away. “You clearly have important business to attend to. I shall leave you to it,” she called over her shoulder. She arrived back at her own house in a state of high dudgeon, clutching a tub of maddeningly costly ointment from Herr Pfinkle, the apothecary. As she climbed the steps to her porch, she wondered at how quickly her fortunes could change. One minute there was what promised to be a lengthy case to solve with a client willing to pay over the odds, the next it seemed the wretched cats had just been caught up in the fire. And that was that, game over, no more to be done except break the news to Frau Hapsburg that her precious pets were toast. On top of which, Gretel was covered in flea bites, had parted with ridiculous amounts of money for treatment, and Strudel was the one with an interestingly suspicious death to solve. Dusk was falling over Gesternstadt, and the day seemed to have been pulled all out of shape. As if by way of confirmation, Gretel opened the front door to the smell of breakfast.

  “Full English!” cried Hans from the kitchen. “Want some?”

  Gretel did, and yet she did not. She did because she hadn’t eaten all day and was fiercely hungry. She did not because the calorie fest Hans would present to her would do nothing to diminish her ever-widening girth. She did because the aroma of frying bacon was making her salivate and taking her mind off her headache and her itches. She did not because the part of her that kept her from walking off the top of a cliff, or stepping in front of a speeding carriage, was reminding her of the toxic levels of filth in which the repast had been prepared. Temperance spoke to greed. Greed shouted it down.

  “Extra black pudding for me, Hans, and don’t stint on the sausages,” she yelled. An hour later she was slumped on her daybed. She had changed back into her favorite house robe, fumigated her clothes, anointed her bites with balm, devoured Hans’s splendid breakfast, and was picking contentedly at her teeth with a fork.

  “What I don’t understand,” said Hans, his words distorted by the stout stump of a cigar he was smoking, “is why a person who was setting fire to some-person-else’s carriage workshop for some as yet unknown reason would be bothering himself with some-other-person-else’s hitherto unconnected cats.”

  Gretel frowned. “Darling brother, you have a way of cutting through the fatty tissue of a problem and—”

  “Getting right to the bone?”

  “I was going to say causing the patient to hemorrhage wildly, flooding the previously simple wound with so much blood no one has a hope in hell of fixing it.”

  “And that’s clear thinking, is it?”

  “Compared to the solid opacity of yours, it is.”

  “Can’t answer me question, though, can you, eh?”

  Gretel was too tired and too well fed to argue. Besides, it did no harm to let Hans believe he was capable of a clever thought from time to time. She understood, when she could be bothered to think about it, that his drinking problem was inextricably linked to his chronically low self-esteem. It had been thus for so many years. After all, who would want to be famous for getting his little sister lost and then having to be rescued by her? The minor celebrity status the pair had enjoyed since the case had become public knowledge had, for a time, brought freedom from poverty, but memories of those dark hours in the witch’s cage still haunted Hans. As a teenager, enjoying a school every bit as posh and ridiculous as the one to which Gretel had been sent (also at the behest of the king), Hans had turned to food for solace, and the result had been a build of such proportions as to make his sister feel slender in his presence. And then, at twenty-one, he had discovered beer and schnapps, and the pattern of his adult life had been set. Get up; pancakes and coffee laced with brandy in the Kaffee Haus; home for a nap; cook a little lunch to have with beer; to the inn for cards and beer; a walk to the grocery store for provisions; home for more food to soak up more beer; back to the inn for schnapps. This routine could be interrupted, for instance, by Gretel demanding he cook her something, or her giving him an errand to run, so long as she used the word “run” figuratively. But such disturbances to the established rhythm of his days were only ever temporary hiccups. The natural order was born of many years of practice so that it had become both instinctive and entrenched.

  Gretel would never have admitted it to anyone, but she liked having Hans around. Aside from his skills in the kitchen
(a room into which Gretel herself never ventured), his unchallenging companionship was a comfort, even if he did insist on dressing like every other Bavarian gentleman she had ever met—though, mercifully, he drew the line at lederhosen. More important, his knack for tangential reasoning had, bizarrely, on several occasions, illuminated dark corners of cases Gretel had been struggling to solve. It irked her to even consider the idea that she needed him, however. She had simply persuaded herself that having saved his miserable neck all that time ago, it would make no sense to abandon him now.

  “All I know,” said Gretel, having finished excavating around her molars, “is that I don’t want Frau Hapsburg getting wind of what I’ve found. One brass bell doesn’t prove anything.”

  “And you don’t want to have to give her back her money.”

  “There are three potentially abducted cats to consider here, and only one bell.”

  “And you don’t want to have to give her back her money.”

  “And in any case, the cat may have wriggled out of its collar and made off before the fire started.”

  “And you don’t—”

  “Stop it!”

  Hans puffed smoke donuts pointedly.

  “Things are never as obvious as they seem, in my experience,” Gretel went on. “Least I can do for the old trout is ask a few questions. See what I can see.”

  “Strudel won’t like that.”

  “Strudel will be far too busy trying to find out who was barbequed in Hund’s yard.”

  Hans shrugged. “You’d better go and talk to Agnes, then.”

  Gretel groaned.

  Hans shook his head. “It’s no good being like that; you know how useful she can be. She knows stuff. She sees stuff. Get her to read your cards.” He laughed throatily, pausing only just in time to prevent himself swallowing his cigar stub. “You’d like that!” He chortled. “Go on, treat yourself!”

  “Oh, ha very ha ha, Hans. You are so much less funny than you think you are. Your therapy sessions may have cured you of your fear of witches; mine, sadly, did not. As you very well know.”

  “Now, now, Agnes is not a witch, she’s a crone.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “There is a difference.”

  “Not a big enough one to make me want to spend time with the creature.”

  Hans raised his eyebrows. Gretel knew he was right. If there was tittle being tattled, the Old Crone (to give her her official title) would know about it. And she was unnervingly good at reading the damn cards.

  “Very well.” Gretel plumped up her cushions and wriggled into a more comfortable position. “Agnes it is. Right now, however, I intend fitting in a pre-bedtime nap, if you’ve finished filling the room with those toxic tobacco fumes.” She settled into the goosefeather embrace of her bedding. “I’ll get myself up to Crooked Cottage first thing in the morning. Very first thing, in fact.”

  TWO

  Three days later Gretel set off to consult the Old Crone. She wore one of her favorite outfits, a skirt and jacket combination in the finest yellow and dark gold wool check, with exquisite tailoring that made even Gretel’s figure look at least structured. She had agonized over her choice of footwear. It was a crooked mile to the Old Crone’s cottage, and the road was stony and uneven. Gretel’s hand had hovered above a pair of tan leather buttoned boots, which would have managed the terrain excellently. But it was spring, and her newest court shoes, in honey brown with elegant three-inch heels, were just crying out to be shown off in the April sunshine. Besides, the walk would wear them in nicely. Gretel completed the look with a miniature top hat in toning bronze, fixed jauntily to the side of her head, her hair having first been tamed by industrial quantities of pins and lacquer.

  By the time she reached Crooked Cottage, she was all but crippled by blisters.

  “Hah!” the Old Crone cackled at the sight of her. “Hah hah! What a foolish creature ye be, young Gretel. Here, come inside my humble dwelling and rest your poor sore feet.” The ancient woman added another cackle for good measure as she creaked inside the house, bent almost double, her steps apparently every bit as painful as Gretel’s.

  Gretel followed into the tiny room, falling into the first available chair.

  “Okay, Agnes, you can drop the act,” she said, gasping as she pulled off her shoes. “You know it brings me out in a rash.”

  Agnes straightened up, rubbing the small of her back.

  “Thank goodness,” she said in a surprisingly musical voice without a trace of crone in it. “Much more of that stooping and carrying on and I really will have a wonky spine.” She paused to remove a set of false black teeth from her mouth, revealing a perfect set of her own. “Tea or something stronger?”

  “Stronger, definitely. Though none of your home brew.”

  “Still don’t trust me, then?”

  Gretel let her gaze rest on the cauldron simmering on the range. It bubbled menacingly, and the fumes that emanated from it were of a worryingly meaty yet nothing-you-would-want-to-eat nature.

  The crone wordlessly placed a heavy lid on the pot.

  “With or without the cackle, Agnes, your chosen profession presses buttons I’d far rather leave unpressed.”

  Agnes fetched two bottles of local beer, uncorked them, handed one to Gretel, and sat at the small kitchen table. “So,” she asked, “what brings you all the way out here in those silly shoes?”

  “Silly! I’ll have you know these shoes—”

  “Were ridiculously expensive and have rubbed holes in your feet.”

  “They are Timmy Chews!”

  “As I said, silly shoes. Let’s hope you haven’t spent all your money on them, or there won’t be much point in your coming here, will there?” Agnes swigged off a couple glugs of beer and waited.

  Gretel shook her head.

  “Not so fast,” she said. “I’m not parting with any money until I’m sure you’re going to be of use to me. I’m not some dewy-eyed girl who wants to hear a lot of guff about tall, dark, handsome strangers.”

  “Are you not?”

  “I’ve taken on a new case. I want information to help me get started on the thing. No more, no less.”

  “‘Hmm, and would this new case have anything to do with the fire at Herr Hund’s carriage workshop?”

  “Nice try, Agnes, but no. At least, not directly. That is, I don’t think so. Or it may. Possibly. But not probably.”

  “Good to see your powers of deduction are as sharp as ever, Gretel.”

  “It has to do with cats.”

  “Cats?”

  “Yes, cats. You know, horrid furry things with claws, teeth, and fleas. Surprised you haven’t got one yourself,” she added, glancing around the little room.

  “I know what they are,” said Agnes. “I’m just surprised you’re having anything to do with them.”

  “My client is in despair and needs my help.”

  “Your client must be paying you very well.”

  “You’re the one who sees things and knows things.” Gretel drained her bottle of beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “No need for me to tell you the details of a private financial arrangement.”

  “That much, eh?”

  “Look, three of the woman’s wretched cats have done a bunk. Have you heard anything?”

  “Will you be paying in gold or notes?”

  Gretel sighed and pulled two folded notes from her cleavage. Agnes stood up. “I’ll fetch the cards,” she said.

  Agnes, Gretel had long ago realized, made a pretty fair Old Crone when she put her mind to it, but it was indeed an act. What was beyond question, however, was her talent with the tarot. She was well known for her accuracy and had proved a useful resource on several of Gretel’s more tricky cases.

  The women seated themselves closer to the table, curtains drawn, a pool of low light from a single lantern replacing the brightness of the spring sunshine. Gretel took the pack as she was directed and shuffled carefully, a
llowing her mind’s eye to see as many cats as she could stand. Agnes took the cards from her and began to lay them out. She did so in silence for a moment, seeming to find nothing of interest, and then, all at once, paused and gave a little smile.

  “Well, well, well,” she said. “That is unexpected.”

  “What? What can you see?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger.”

  “Oh, Agnes, really!”

  “I’m serious! That’s what it says.”

  “There had better be something else . . .”

  “All right, give me a chance. You can’t rush the cards.” She turned one more, and then another. The pictures meant nothing to Gretel, so that she was forced to sit quietly and wait for Agnes to reveal their significance.

  “This may be something, it’s hard to make out.”

  “What?”

  “Looks like it’s suggesting . . . gloves. Hands, maybe? No, fingers, that’s it. Fingers. Any of your missing cats got fingers?”

  Gretel successfully masked her excitement. “Don’t be daft,” she said.

  Agnes shrugged. “Stranger things have happened in these parts.” She turned another card and grimaced. “Urgh! That’s very nasty.”

  “For pity’s sake, what is it?”

  “A troll. Yeuch, haven’t had any dealings with a troll for years. Horrible things.”

  “What about it? Has it got the cats?”

  “No. I don’t think so. But there must be some connection.” She closed her eyes, leaning back in her chair. “I can see a bridge. An old stone one. There’s a revolting smell.”

  “Where? Where is this place?”

  “Not anywhere I’d be in a hurry to visit. Wait a minute, there’s a signpost . . . I can’t quite make it out. It’s all blurry.”

  “Would another note make it any clearer?” Agnes opened one eye.

  “Gretel, you are such a cynic.” She closed the eye again, screwing up her face in concentration. “Something beginning with F. No, P. That’s it . . . Per . . . No good, I can’t read the rest.” She opened her eyes and refocused on the cards. “There’s something here about water.”