Game of Scones--a Cozy Mystery (with Dragons)

by Kim M Watt

  5

  Miriam

  Miriam was standing at Alice’s gate, trying to disentangle her fingers from the handles of her shopping bags without poking herself in the face with the rhubarb or squashing the cherries when a car pulled up next to her. She peered around, and promptly dropped the bag with the strawberries in it on her foot. “Oh no!”

  “Are you alright there, Auntie Miriam?” Colin asked, climbing out of the car and rescuing the bag.

  “You surprised me,” she said, trying not to sound accusing. “Are my strawberries alright?”

  He peered into the bag. “I think so.”

  An urgent tapping on the car window made them both look around, and Miriam spotted a very grey Mortimer squashed against the glass as if trying to stay well away from something in the middle of the car. Beaufort was already climbing out the other door while DI Adams held it open, looking like a particularly impatient chauffeur. “Out,” she said, leaning down to peer in, then checked the lane for observers. Miriam could hear a mower running somewhere, but she couldn’t see anyone out in their front garden or dog-walking down the lane.

  “Hello,” Miriam said, putting as much cheerfulness in her voice as she could manage. It wasn’t a lot. There were going to be Interviews, she could feel it.

  DI Adams nodded at her, then slapped her leg and said, “Come on! Out!”

  Mortimer scrabbled at his door desperately, not moving toward DI Adams, and Colin stepped forward to open it. Mortimer spilled out of the car in a tumble of wings and tail and legs, whimpering as he bumped his nose on the kerb, found his feet, and took cover behind Miriam.

  “Hello, dear,” she said, looking down at him. He was trying to take on the cheerful green of the grass, but it wasn’t getting past his knees. Did dragons have knees? She supposed they must. “Are you alright?”

  “We had to ride with the dandy,” he said. “He kept breathing on me. And staring at me.”

  Miriam thought of pointing out that at least he could see the detective inspector’s invisible dog, but didn’t think it’d be much comfort, so she just said, “Oh dear.”

  “Hello Miriam,” Beaufort said, trotting happily around the car. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  DI Adams muttered something about lovely days being overrated, and Alice called from the house, “Are you going to come in, or just stand at my gate all day? I’ve popped the kettle on.”

  “Right you are,” Colin said, relieving Miriam of her other shopping bag, and DI Adams made a despairing noise that Miriam thought was a most unusual response to the offer of tea.

  Alice shooed everyone straight out the back door again, with instructions to get the cushions for the chairs out of the little summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. Miriam stayed in the kitchen to help with the plates and mugs, and also to avoid having to make small talk with DI Adams. She had a feeling the detective inspector might be even worse at it than she was, and she wasn’t sure she was quite prepared for that.

  “Were you expecting them?” she whispered to Alice as the older woman took a golden cake studded with the pink stems of rhubarb from a tin and set it on a plate, then handed it to her.

  Alice smiled. “Of course. We were most likely some of the last people to see him alive, after all.”

  Miriam squeaked and almost dropped the cake, then followed Alice out into the neatly trimmed garden, catching the scents of fresh-cut grass and lavender.

  DI Adams was arguing with a smoky tabby cat who was standing on the table with his tail bushed out to impressive proportions.

  “He’s not doing anything,” the detective inspector insisted. “He’s just sitting there!”

  “Being all devilish and dandy,” the cat said. “And stinking.”

  “Does he still smell? I seem to have got used to it.”

  “He’s a dog. All dogs smell. And he’s a dandy devil dog, so he stinks like the devil.”

  “How do you know what the devil smells like?” Collins asked. “Have you met him?”

  The cat bared his teeth. “Humans. Always so literal.”

  “Lovely to see everyone getting on as well as always,” Alice said, setting the teapots on the table.

  “She needs to stop dragging that dandy around,” the cat said.

  “I’m not dragging him anywhere. He’s just sort of there.” DI Adams shrugged. “Besides, maybe I like having an invisible dog.”

  “I wouldn’t mind an invisible dog,” Collins said. “Seems like the sort of thing that’d come in handy.” He picked up a piece of cake with a sigh and took a huge bite, scattering crumbs on his shirt. Alice handed him a plate and a napkin, and he looked guilty.

  “I don’t know,” DI Adams said. “He hasn’t really done anything yet.”

  “He’s a dandy,” the cat said. “How many times do I have to tell you?” He shook his head and stuck his nose in the milk jug. Alice grabbed him and lifted him away. “Hey!”

  “You’ll get hair in it,” she said.

  “What’s a little hair between friends?” The cat sat down on a chair to groom himself, radiating a put-upon air. “It’s all, ‘Hey, Thompson, help us find the goblins’, or ‘Oi, Thompson, find us a lost inspector’. But gods forbid I tell you to stop hanging out with nasty dogs. Oh no. Just a bloody effective marketing campaign, that one. Man’s best friend. Huh.” He apparently had a lot more to say on the subject, but found a particularly matted patch of fur and started to lick it frantically, muttering unintelligibly the whole time.

  “Well,” Beaufort said. “At least we know his thoughts on the matter.” He gave Miriam a toothy grin as she handed him a soup mug of tea. “Now, how can we help you, inspectors?”

  “We actually came to see Alice and Miriam,” DI Adams said, and Miriam tried to take a calm sip of tea but slurped it instead, her cheeks growing hot at the sound.

  “Ooh, an Investigation, is it?” Beaufort took a piece of cake while Mortimer retreated under a large clump of geraniums. “Maybe we can help. Is it about the crash?”

  “I was asking Alice and Miriam,” DI Adams began, just as Colin said, “How do you know about the crash?”

  They exchanged equally obstinate looks, and Alice set her mug down. “Shall I start?” she suggested.

  “Yes,” DI Adams said. Colin shrugged and brushed crumbs off his belly.

  “There’s nothing much to add to what we told the officers last night. But it was very out of character for him to be speeding.”

  “And he wasn’t upset at the meeting yesterday?”

  Alice considered it. “Not really, no. He did get a phone message that seemed to bother him, but it didn’t send him rushing off or anything.”

  DI Adams made a note on a pad she’d put on the table, and looked at Miriam. “Did you see him get the message, Miriam?”

  “Me? What? No!” She swallowed hard, and Colin patted her shoulder.

  “You’re not in any trouble, Auntie Miriam. Just tell us anything you remember.”

  “I don’t remember anything. He was worried about Jasmine’s potato salad, and I think he didn’t agree with me very much about the companion planting.”

  “Companion planting?” DI Adams started, then shook her head. “Never mind. Had he been drinking?”

  “He had a very small amount of Gert’s cordial,” Alice said. “He certainly wasn’t drunk.”

  “He was very against it,” Miriam said. “Not drinking, I mean, he owned a pub. But being drunk. Bryan used to joke that the last time Thomas had been tipsy was on his mum’s sherry trifle when he was nine.”

  “I see.” DI Adams tapped her pen on the notepad. “And he was well-liked enough?”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “He was a nice man. And very good on the council, too. Did what he said he was going to, and never fussed around talking like a politician.”

  “How does one of those talk?” Beaufort asked. Next to him, Mortimer was beginning to get his colour back as he ate his way steadily through the rhubarb cake.

  “With l
ots of words but very little meaning,” Alice said.

  “Oh. I wonder if that’s where I went wrong with our election.”

  “You have elections?” Colin asked.

  “We tried them. It didn’t go quite as planned.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Mortimer muttered, apparently addressing the cake.

  Colin looked as if he’d quite like to pursue this line of inquiry, but DI Adams said, “Well. I guess that’s it, then.”

  “There’s not much more we can tell you,” Alice agreed. “So, have you transferred to Skipton, DI Adams?”

  “No! No,” the younger woman continued, as if aware that she might have been a little too overenthusiastic. “Just on loan.”

  “She’ll come round,” Collins said cheerfully, setting his mug on the table. They were Alice’s outside mugs, squat and green and solid. Miriam, to her shame, was the only person who’d ever managed to break one.

  “There’s no coming around to do,” DI Adams snapped.

  “I’m just saying, Toot Hansell keeps having cases. I can’t request you every time or the DCI will start thinking I can’t do my job at all.”

  DI Adams made a non-committal sound that suggested that wasn’t her problem, and that the DCI might not be entirely wrong, which Miriam felt was a little unfair.

  “More tea?” she offered, and DI Adams made an alarmed pushing away gesture.

  “No, no. We better go. We need to head up to the pub and interview the husband.”

  “Now?” Miriam said. Nervous as she was, she felt vaguely safer with the inspectors here, which was a new experience. Rather than worrying that they might arrest her for some undefined crime, she rather felt that their presence might stop Alice and Beaufort wanting to Get Involved, which she was sure was actually going to lead to her arrest one day.

  “Can we help at all?” Beaufort asked the inspectors.

  “Absolutely not. You can just carry on as usual,” DI Adams said, and Thompson snorted so loudly it turned into a hacking cough.

  DI Collins patted the cat on the back and said, “I told you to stop smoking.”

  The cat made a noise that suggested he was being strangled and hurked a hairball onto the cushion.

  “Ew,” Miriam said.

  “Ew, yourself.” The cat sat up and licked his lips. “Have you not figured out that their usual is sticking their noses into things?” he asked DI Adams.

  She scowled at him. “I’m hoping common sense will prevail.”

  “Yeah, good luck on that one.”

  The inspectors exchanged glances, and DI Adams looking from Alice to Beaufort as she said, “You understand this is not an invitation to investigate. This is a police interview.”

  Alice raised her eyebrows and took a sip of tea. “Are you suggesting we can’t be trusted?”

  “No, just that the W.I. and … friends have a tendency to get involved.”

  “Not deliberately. You really can’t blame us when we’re targeted by murderers or kidnappers, or shut up in a country house with a killer.”

  “That would be victim blaming,” Colin said agreeably, taking another piece of cake. DI Adams glared at him.

  “I mean,” she said, “you can’t start poking around in this. You either,” she added, frowning at Beaufort, who had crumbs on his nose.

  “Especially not that last one,” Colin said, then frowned. “I don’t think. Which would be worse, Adams? Dragons crashing the investigation, or the W.I.?”

  “I think both options are equally bad,” she snapped. “We don’t want anyone involved, scaled or otherwise. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Mortimer and Miriam said together.

  “I understand exactly what you mean,” Alice said, and Beaufort grinned.

  DI Adams looked as if she wanted to start shouting, and she put her pen down very carefully. “Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is there any point in telling you again to stay out of this?”

  “Oh, there’s always a point,” Alice said. “We all know where we stand, then.”

  “Well, that’s such a relief,” Mortimer mumbled, and everyone looked at him. He was a rather blotchy mix of anxious grey and his own purple-blue, and now his nose went bright pink. “I’m sorry! I keep coming out with these things. I think I’m spending too much time with Gilbert.”

  “The vegetarian dragon?” Colin asked.

  Mortimer covered his nose with both paws, trying to hide his flush. “Yes. He gets like this when Amelia tells him his baubles are no good.”

  “I can see how that would upset him,” the big inspector said gravely, and got up. “Adams is right, though. You do need to stay out of this. None of you are involved in any way, so you really have no excuse.”

  Miriam squinted up at her nephew, looming over them with his big hands clasped in front of him, his round face serious. He seemed to block out the sun, and she hoped desperately Alice was listening. But when she looked at her friend, Alice just smiled and said, “I’ll wrap you up some cake to take with you.”

  Miriam held onto her own smile until the inspectors had followed Alice into the house, then she slumped back into her chair and clutched the loose cloth of her dress in both hands. “Noooo,” she said to the dragons. “Not again!”

  Mortimer nodded miserably, but Beaufort just gave her a toothy grin.

  “Cheer up, Miriam,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll have nothing to do with us at all.”

  Miriam thought, rather darkly, that the odds of that were pretty low when certain people went around making sure things had to do with them.

  Miriam wondered, if she’d been a different person – or Alice had been – if she’d have dared get up and say, “I would like to not be involved in this, please.” Or maybe even just rise wordlessly from her chair and walk out of the garden, leaving her half-finished tea behind her. Sweep out of the garden, in a suitably dramatic manner, if she was going to really daydream about this.

  But she wasn’t. This was just like the many W.I. events she kept finding herself involved in, such as creating fliers for church fundraisers when she was a very firm non-believer in any sort of organised religion. Or being the person who made up the numbers when not enough people wanted to go to the macramé museum, or the bug exhibit that had come to York. Only this was even worse. Although the bugs had been rather nasty. She shuddered, and Alice said, “Are you alright, Miriam?”

  “Oh yes. A cat walked over my grave.”

  “Hey! Don’t blame us. We spend far less time strolling about graveyards than people seem to think.”

  “Sorry.” Miriam tried to sit up straight.

  “You should be. All these negative stereotypes attached to cats …”

  “Do shut up, Thompson. You’re only causing trouble,” Alice said.

  “It’s true.”

  “That’s entirely beside the point.” She wiped a few crumbs off the table. “That was most instructive, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Instructive?” Miriam said.

  “Yes. They obviously have no leads.”

  “They don’t?” She reached for another piece of cake, then decided against it. She was going to have to break into her emergency stress-eating cheesy puffs this afternoon, it was obvious, so she’d best save some room.

  “We shall have to find them some, then,” Beaufort said.

  Mortimer said something under his breath and scowled rather ferociously at a rosebush.

  “You mustn’t become too involved,” Alice said. “This is local politics. There will be times when the situation won’t be suitable for dragons.”

  Miriam rather thought that there were many times when the situation wasn’t very suitable for her, either. Such as now. The whole conversation was feeling most unsuitable.

  “Really?” Beaufort said, as if such an idea had never occurred to him.

  “Alice, what on earth are you talking about?” Miriam asked. “We can’t just start investigating when we’ve been told not to!”


  “Of course not,” Alice said, lifting her face to the sun.

  “So, what do you mean to do?”

  “Well, I believe Toot Hansell is currently missing a council representative.”

  “Oho,” the cat said, and gave his curious, huffing laugh. “Alice for prime minister.”

  “Don’t be so silly, Thompson.”

  “Hey, I can arrange it. I know cats in high places.”

  “Alice, is this wise?” Miriam twisted her fingers in her skirt. “If someone really did … if Thomas’ death wasn’t an accident …”

  “Then things are very serious indeed. And rather someone who understands that than someone who doesn’t.”

  “But you’ve never had the slightest interest in politics,” Miriam said. “And don’t you have to run for elections and things?”

  “This shall be a most fascinating look at modern democracy, don’t you think lad?” Beaufort said, nudging Mortimer.

  “Fascinating,” Mortimer said, and groaned.

  “I do believe that, with the right signatures, I can step in as an emergency replacement, so to speak,” Alice said. “It’s not as if I want to hold on to the position.” She tapped her fingers on the table. “Doesn’t Gert’s second cousin twice removed, or sister-in-law’s cousin’s niece, or something to that effect, work in the council offices?”

  “Probably,” Miriam said weakly. Gert had such a convoluted and extensive family that the odds were good someone worked pretty much everywhere. “But what will you do? We’ve been told to stay out of it!”

  “Out of investigating, dear. Not out of ensuring Toot Hansell is individually represented in the council, which has been in the town charter ever since we accepted we couldn’t be our own county.”

  “In 1901,” Beaufort supplied helpfully. “Only sixty-three years after you stopped fighting to be declared an independent nation.”