by Kim M Watt
“Just a little stressed and tired,” Alice said. “As are we all. Apparently she believes you’re going to arrest her for growing belladonna.”
DI Adams sighed, and nodded. Miriam froze, her sobs stuck in her throat. Then she sniffled and wiped her nose. “I’ll come quietly,” she said, straightening her back. She might go crying, but she could have some pride. “Can someone water my garden?”
DI Adams gave her an amused look and shook her head. “Not you, Miriam.” She looked at Alice. “Alice Martin, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.”
Miriam gave a horrified little gasp, but Alice just nodded as if she’d expected nothing less and got up. “Very well,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
17
Mortimer
The night was still as Mortimer followed Beaufort through the graveyard, the vicarage cool and quiet, and there was no one to be seen on the paths or at the church, which loomed silvered and graceful in the faint light of the stars. Dragons see well in the night, their prismed eyes collecting and reflecting the smallest drift of light, but even to Mortimer it felt dark under the trees, and the vicarage seemed foreboding where it crouched before them.
It took them a little while to find a way in. The windows all seemed to be shut and latched, the doors firmly locked. Finally, on the third circuit of the building, Mortimer spotted a tiny gap on a small sash window with frosted glass, where it hadn’t been pulled all the way down to the sill. It didn’t prove easy to open, though. He tried standing on Beaufort’s broad back and hooking his claws into the gap, struggling to push it up, but it wouldn’t budge. Beaufort got impatient and insisted he should have a go, so Mortimer reluctantly crouched in the garden for the High Lord to use him as a step ladder.
The old dragon’s weight just about made Mortimer’s legs buckle, and by the time they were finished there were deep Mortimer-sized dragon footprints in the soft earth among the geraniums, and he had a new twinge in his front left shoulder to add to his collection from falling down the stairs. But, to be fair, the High Lord did manage to muscle the window open with a screech of swollen wood and sticky paint.
But it was too tight for Beaufort to fit through, with his broad shoulders and wide expanse of wings. He shoved his nose into the gap and looked around, then grunted and jumped off Mortimer’s back, tearing divots out of the lawn as he landed.
“In you go, lad. Then pop round the back and let me in the kitchen door.”
Mortimer, shaking dirt off his snout after having it shoved rather unceremoniously into the flower bed when Beaufort jumped clear of him, said, “Should we both go in? Shouldn’t one of us stay outside and keep watch?” He was thinking he’d quite like to be the lookout, given the choice. The air drifting from the window smelt stale and sad, and even with no cars waiting out front, and no one else in evidence, the place felt watched.
“There’s no one around, and no one likely to be. Two sets of eyes are better than one. We can cover more ground.”
Mortimer sighed. He was right, of course. That was the problem with Beaufort. He was quite often right. Mortimer crouched back on his hindquarters and jumped, hooking his front paws over the windowsill. He wriggled his shoulders through, folding his wings as tight as he could against his back, and feeling the rough skin of his spines scraping on the window above him as he peered into the shadowy room.
“How’s it looking, lad?” Beaufort called from behind him.
“It’s a toilet, Beaufort. A toilet.” Mortimer eyed the bowl below him unhappily.
“Oh, you’ll be fine. In you go!” Beaufort gave the young dragon’s tail a slap that was probably meant to be encouraging, but it startled Mortimer so much that he squawked and kicked the wall wildly with his back legs, straining against the window frame with his front paws. For one horrible moment he thought he was going to be stuck like that partly dressed yellow bear humans liked so much, half in and half out, then he forced the rounder part of his midriff through, the longest of his spines slid under the window with an audible snap, and he was plunging head-first toward the toilet bowl.
He yelped, threw his front paws out to catch himself, and planted them on the seat as if he were about to do a handstand. His body and tail slid through the window after him in a rush of uncontrollable momentum, and he flipped over with an alarmed squeak and landed on his back on the floor, just in time to be hit on the nose with his own tail. “Ow.”
“Everything alright in there?” Beaufort called from outside, and Mortimer wriggled around in the tiny space between the toilet and the door until he could sit up. He supposed that since nothing was broken, things were as near alright as they seemed to get at the moment, so he climbed onto the toilet seat and peered out the window at Beaufort.
“I hit my nose.”
“Oh dear.” Beaufort looked at him critically. “You haven’t lost any scales that I can see.”
Mortimer patted his snout, humph’d, and went to let the old dragon in.
The house had the feel of somewhere long unused, shut up and left years before, the air stale and the thin starlight that came through the windows draining everything of colour and life. Mortimer shivered, wishing they’d waited until the morning to go investigating. Maybe they were more likely to be seen, but this place felt awash with ghosts.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” he whispered to Beaufort as the old dragon sniffed around the kitchen.
“A way to find Violet Hammond. An address book, perhaps?”
“From what Miriam said, he didn’t want to find her.”
“That’s not to say he always felt that way.” Beaufort opened the pantry cupboard and snuffled inside.
“He’s hardly going to keep an address book in with the beans.”
“No, but he might keep some – ah, yes.” Beaufort held a box up and peered at it in the dark. “Apple pies? Mr Kipling’s apple pies. I don’t know who Mr Kipling is, but they look rather nice.”
“Beaufort! It’s a crime scene!”
“They’ll only go to waste.” Beaufort tucked the box under one front leg and headed for the hall. “We need to keep our energy up, lad. This may take some time.”
Mortimer sighed and pattered after the High Lord, wondering if it was really stealing when the owner of the pies was, unfortunately, deceased.
They were in the kitchen when the sun came up, chasing ghosts away and turning the dim, dusty corners of the house into bright, still-dusty corners. Mortimer’s belly had won out over any moral objections, and he and Beaufort were sitting on the floor, sharing a can of condensed milk and a loaf of sliced white bread.
“I just don’t understand it,” Beaufort said, licking condensed milk off one claw. “The man has an entire room full of mannequins, old hiking gear, and bags of tinsel. How are there no personal papers?”
“Everyone keeps those sort things in the Cloud nowadays,” Mortimer said, pouring a generous dollop of sticky sweetened milk onto a slice of bread.
“The cloud? What cloud? Clouds are just water particles. How can you keep an address book in a cloud?”
“Um.” Mortimer crammed the bread into his mouth to give himself time to think. He’d heard Miriam talk about it, but he didn’t really know what it was. Beaufort always thought he knew all these things. “It’s not that kind of cloud,” he managed around the bread, hoping the old dragon didn’t ask any more.
Beaufort huffed. “Used to be, humans just knew where their friends lived. Third hut past the lake, and so on. Then they built roads and made addresses, and suddenly it was number 3, Butcher’s Row. Then it was writing letters and sending them to different countries, and you had to know all these details, like states and counties and numbers and so forth. Now it’s not even written down, and no one knows where anyone is.” He punctured another tin of condensed milk with one heavy claw. “Everyone’s just names on the internet thingy.”
“True,” Mortimer said. “But people chat to each other from all over the world because of it. I m
ean, just think – we haven’t even heard from the Loch Ness cousins since I got my back teeth in. If we used internet we’d be able to see each other.”
Beaufort hmm’d, pouring the sweetened milk carefully onto a piece of bread. “I suppose. But it doesn’t help us an awful lot right now, does it? What we need is a good old-fashioned street address.”
Mortimer accepted the messy sandwich Beaufort offered him and took a thoughtful bite. They did indeed need a good old-fashioned street address. Miriam had looked, but the vicar hadn’t had Twitter or Facebook on his tablet, which, as far as Mortimer understood things, was unusual. Although it made sense, given what Stuart Browning had said about him being so scared of his past catching up with him. So the vicar himself was old-fashioned. His only online contact had been his email address, which just identified him as the vicar of Toot Hansell. Mortimer was willing to bet that there were no photos of him on the church website, and that even if some popped up elsewhere, he didn’t look much like he had when he was younger. However, Violet had known how to find him. She’d found – or been given – both his email and his actual address, just like Stuart. What if she’d been sending him not just emails but actual mail? What If …
Mortimer got up suddenly and hurried into the living room.
“Lad? Where’re you going?”
Mortimer heard the soft percussion of the High Lord’s claws on the carpet as the big dragon followed him into the musty stillness of the living room. It still smelt faintly of cake and death, but Mortimer ignored that. He was looking at the birthday cards arranged on the mantelpiece.
“They were friends,” he said aloud. “Maybe more than friends, before he was a vicar. So she’d send a birthday card.” He stood on his hind legs to carefully lift the cards off the shelf and check the insides. Most were from the Women’s Institute, or churchgoers, but one, with a slightly garish teddy bear on the front, said Here’s to the old times in it, and was signed ‘V’ in flowery, curving script. He held it out to Beaufort, who took it and sniffed deeply.
“It’s been too long,” he said. “All I can smell is this room.”
“The scent won’t help us anyway.” Mortimer patted a wicker basket that sat next to the hearth, full of magazines and junk mail circulars. “But this might. Humans need help starting fires. Miriam puts all her paper rubbish in her box by the fireplace.”
Beaufort looked from the basket to the younger dragon, and gave him that enormous, snaggle-toothed grin. “The envelope.”
“With a return address, if we’re lucky.” Mortimer sat down and began shuffling through the papers, the remnants of the condensed milk on his claws making the pages stick to them. But he didn’t pause to clean them off. His heart was pounding. They were going to catch the killer.
The envelope was almost at the bottom of the pile, and Mortimer was starting to doubt that the vicar had kept it. But there it was, a pale mauve colour with that same swirling script spelling out the vicar’s name in the centre, the return address for a V. Hammond on the top left corner. They stared at it together, then Beaufort patted Mortimer on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger.
“You did it, lad! You found her!”
Mortimer gave a lopsided, self-deprecating little shrug, partly because the shoulder Beaufort had just patted didn’t want to move. “That’s if she is the murderer. Seems a bit strange, to be sending him cards one week, murdering him the next.”
Beaufort peered at the postmark. “That’s last month. Plenty of time for a human to change their opinion of someone. And maybe she was even lulling him into a false sense of security so she could get close to him.”
“Maybe.” Mortimer put the cards back, then followed Beaufort into the kitchen. The floor was a mess of crumbs and condensed milk droplets, and one of them had sat in an apple pie, smearing it across the linoleum. A squirrel had appeared from somewhere and was sitting on its haunches eating a piece of apple in the centre of the debris. It chattered at them threateningly. “Oh dear.”
“Indeed,” Beaufort said. “It must have come in through the window.”
“I mean the mess! We need to clean it up.”
“We don’t have time, lad. We have a murderer to catch.”
“We can’t just leave it! Someone’s going to come in, and—” Mortimer broke off as the faint, unmistakable sound of a key in the kitchen door shattered the stillness. They spun around at the same moment, colliding with each other, then scrambled to squeeze under the table, Mortimer trying desperately to get his wildly cycling colours under control. He shut his eyes, as if that would help, then opened them again to see a set of large human legs in luminous yellow trainers standing on the floor just in front of him. He could have reached out a claw to touch them, and had to fight a sudden urge to do exactly that.
“What on earth …?” A woman’s voice said, sounding confused. “Who did this?”
The squirrel, which had retreated to shelter under the overhang of the cabinets, rushed out to snatch another piece of apple, chittered loudly, then darted back again. The woman shrieked.
“Oh, you filthy creature!” The legs vanished, then rushed back, and Mortimer caught sight of the head of a broom as it swung at the squirrel and missed. The animal was rushing wildly about the kitchen as if it wanted to escape but couldn’t work out how, and he silently willed it to run out into the hall, to lead the woman away before she got to wondering who had opened the cans that were sitting on top of the bread bag in the middle of the floor.
The squirrel gave a squall of alarm as the broom came whistling toward it again, then shot under the table and took shelter behind Beaufort’s wing. The High Lord jumped, bumping the table, and the woman gave another shriek.
“Who’s there? Who’s there?”
Beaufort and Mortimer exchanged alarmed glances, and the younger dragon wondered how sensitive the cleaning lady might be. She wasn’t a W.I. member and likely wasn’t expecting dragons, so who knew what she might decide she saw when she bent down to peer under the table. She was expecting to see something, but there was no telling what it would be. Maybe a whole platoon of rabid, can-opening squirrels. Maybe two giant, toothy squirrels. Maybe she’d just pass out. You could never predict what way people would go. He tried a reassuring smile on for size as the woman crouched down, her knees coming into view. Then her hands, clutching the broom that was extended straight toward them. Any moment now. Any moment.
“Janet?” Miriam’s voice came from the door, and Mortimer let out his breath in a gust of relief that charred the edge of the tablecloth. Janet screamed and straightened up, and the broom vanished as she spun around. Mortimer guessed she was probably brandishing it at Miriam. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Miriam! Miriam, oh my God, I think someone’s in here!”
“What? Why?”
“Look at the mess!” The end of the broom reappeared, waving at the filthy floor. “And there was a squirrel!”
“A squirrel?”
“Yes! It ran under the table!”
“Um, I don’t think the squirrel opened those cans.”
“I know! That’s why something else has to be in here!”
There was a pause, then Miriam said, “Let’s go check the rest of the house and make sure they’re not in there somewhere.”
“But the table—”
“That was the squirrel. You said so yourself.” Miriam’s feet appeared, clad in a pair of pink clogs, and led the way into the hall.
The dragons waited to make sure they were gone, then shot out the door, closely followed by the squirrel, still clutching its piece of apple.
The dragons were lying on the far side of Miriam’s very old, very green Volkswagen Beetle when she came back out of the vicarage. She frowned down at them both, then opened the driver’s door. “Get in.”
They scrambled in, Mortimer hurrying Beaufort along when he stopped to examine the gear stick. There was a momentary confusion of legs and tails and wings, then they were both
wedged in the back seat, peering at her eagerly.
“We’ve got Violet’s address!” Mortimer exclaimed, waving the envelope at her.
“Oh? Is that why you stopped to have a celebration in a dead man’s house?” she demanded, cranking the engine rather harder than was necessary.
The dragons exchanged glances. “We were going to clean up,” Mortimer offered.
“Oh? Well, that makes everything better.” Miriam released the handbrake and promptly stalled the car. “Dammit!”
“Miriam, we’ve been searching most of the night and all morning,” Beaufort said gently. “We didn’t forget about you. Alice told us we needed to focus on finding this Violet person.”
Miriam gave a large, dramatic snuffle, and started the car again. This time she pulled away smoothly, but only drove until the vicarage was out of sight before she pulled off the narrow lane into a space in front of a farm gate.
“Miriam?” Beaufort put a heavy paw on her shoulder, rather more gently than he had on Mortimer’s earlier.
“What’s the address?” she asked, pulling out her phone.
Mortimer read it off, but she was struggling to type it in, and kept missing letters and swearing. Finally she just dropped the phone and covered her face with both hands.
“What is it?” Mortimer asked quietly. “Where’s Alice?”
“She’s been arrested,” Miriam managed, and Mortimer couldn’t contain a horrified gasp. “There wasn’t even time for the crime scene people to get here. Detective Inspector Adams found the rest of the cupcakes in Alice’s compost bin and took her away. The inspector said – she said that the knife in her door didn’t have any prints on it, and anyone could have done it, including Alice. They arrested her, Mortimer. They’re taking her to jail. Even if we find Violet, how do we know she had anything to do with the murder? How do we prove it if she did? They’ve got all the evidence they need. I’m just a silly old woman with bad hair, and you two aren’t even meant to exist. What are we supposed to do?”