by Kim M Watt
“It’s the Christmas tree?”
“Jasmine, please take Primrose out before she bites the detective inspector,” Alice said, and DI Adams looked down at the dog in alarm. Primrose had her teeth bared, and was regarding the inspector’s arm rather hungrily. Jasmine rushed to DI Adams, and the inspector shoved the dog at her. Mortimer watched as the DI carefully wiped her hands on her legs, taking a moment to investigate the back of her trousers. As far as he could see, they seemed to be intact. Beaufort had his paws over his nose, and his shoulders were hitching as he tried to hold another sneeze in.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” DI Collins asked.
“Yes, fine.” DI Adams picked up her discarded cup. “Ah, what time does the post office shut? We should really head over there. Don’t want to miss it.”
“I guess.”
She sidled out of the room, as if still not entirely sure she wasn’t missing half her trousers. Alice looked at DI Collins and said, “Why don’t you get the car started? If she’s coming down with a cold it’s going to be no good her getting into a chilly car.”
“Well—” he looked at his half-finished tea.
Gert hauled herself off the sofa and took DI Collins’ plate, which still had a piece of Christmas cake on it. He clutched his cookie and watched it go mournfully.
“Off you go,” she said. “We’ll send her out with a Tupperware.”
“Um,” DI Collins said, then Carlotta did something that Mortimer didn’t quite see, but which sent the inspector lunging out of his seat. “Yes,” he said, while Carlotta grinned broadly and Gert scowled at her. “Yes, we’ll be off, then. Thanks for the hospitality, ladies. Let me know if anything comes up, Auntie Miriam?”
“Of course,” she said, and padded out into the hall with him in tow, hiccoughing regularly.
There was a long, thin moment, while they waited to hear the door close, then Teresa, who’d been peering out the window, said, “He’s gone!”
Beaufort let his breath out in an agonised whoosh that set an abandoned paper napkin alight, and Mortimer scampered to grab it before Miriam’s poor abused carpet suffered any more damage. The High Lord rubbed his snout wildly with both paws, then sat back on his haunches and grinned.
“Well,” he said. “Nicely handled, ladies.”
Mortimer didn’t want to know what a badly handled encounter with the police would look like. Plus Beaufort seemed to have forgotten that there was a possibly singed detective inspector still in the house somewhere.
He picked up DI Adams’ abandoned mince pie with a heavy sigh and sat back down on the hearth to eat it. Well, no point it going to waste.
9
Alice
All in one piece,” Alice announced. She’d found DI Adams in the kitchen, trying to examine the back of her trousers without taking them off. “Although the hem does look a little charred.”
“Fantastic,” DI Adams muttered. “I just bought these.”
Alice looked at the coffee stains splattering the lower legs and said, “It looks like they’ve had a bad day.”
“You could say that.” The inspector sighed, rather deeply for such small matters as stained trousers, in Alice’s opinion. “Look, do you have anything to tell me? Do I need to come back?”
“No, Detective Inspector. At the moment we have nothing.” Except maybe the silver Audi, but she still wasn’t entirely sure that had actually been the car she’d glimpsed through Miriam’s window earlier. It had been vanishing around the corner when she spotted it. Plus, it was a small village. Anyone could have bought a new car, and she just happened to keep spotting it.
DI Adams put her hands in her trouser pockets and gave Alice a look that was designed to extract confessions. “Look,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I have said that if the dragons find out anything from their side – i.e. the not-human side – that’s fine. But I don’t want them or you poking around in anything else. I don’t want to find myself looking for missing W.I. members as well as missing postmen.”
“Understood,” Alice said, returning the look calmly. The thing with lying, she had always believed, is that you must be absolutely sure it’s for a good cause, and entirely necessary. And you must know all your tells. Alice knew hers, and not one of them showed.
“I’m serious,” DI Adams said.
“I do understand, Detective Inspector.”
“I will not hesitate to charge you with either withholding evidence or obstruction of justice, particularly if it’s the only way to keep you safely out of this case.”
Alice just raised her eyebrows slightly. She had plucked them only that morning, and DI Adams frowned and patted her own as if to make sure they hadn’t become suddenly unruly.
“Both,” the DI said. “I’ll charge you with both if I have to.”
“I’m sure you won’t have to,” Alice said. “Now, can I offer you and Colin some cake to take with you?”
“I don’t want cake, I want to know I’m not going to get a call about you going missing.”
“Oh, no danger of that,” Alice said. “But I rather think Colin would like cake. I think Carlotta gave him a bit of a fright.”
“Alice—”
“How about a coffee to go? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? I’m sure there’ll be some takeaway cups from the market lurking around somewhere.”
DI Adams ran her hands over her tightly bound hair and shook her head. “I’m going to the loo. Then I’m leaving before anything else happens to my trousers.” She stalked out of the kitchen, brushing past Miriam, who gave an alarmed hic and ducked away as if she thought the DI might grab her and shake her like a kitten.
“Miriam, dear, do you have any of those paper cups with the lids left over?” Alice asked.
From the hall rose a sudden volley of angry yaps, followed by a growl and some very broad and distinctly non-posh cursing.
“Someone get this bloody dog off my trousers!” DI Adams bellowed, and Alice winced.
Primrose was eventually removed from the by-now very irate inspector’s trousers, leaving behind several holes and a small tear. DI Adams stomped out the door with two Tupperwares of cake under her arm, joining a bemused-looking DI Collins in his car. Alice didn’t think that the trip back to Skipton was going to be particularly pleasant. Neither of them looked very happy.
“Is your hand alright, Miriam?” Jasmine asked in a small voice. The W.I. had regrouped in the living room, cradling fresh cups of tea and, in a few cases, more mulled wine. The atmosphere was no longer festive, and the excited chatter had given way to an anxious quiet. Primrose had, by general agreement, been banished to the kitchen. Infuriated yaps drifted into the hall.
“It’s fine,” Miriam said, waving her bandaged finger in the air to prove it. She had finally stopped her nervous hiccoughing. “Just a little nip. It was the shock more than anything.”
“I really do feel terrible.”
“Oh, don’t. She was just overexcited.”
Alice raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment, and looked at Beaufort to see what the High Lord thought of that. The High Lord, however, was occupied with licking out a bowl of eye-wateringly sweet and strong eggnog that Pearl had brought with her.
“Marvellous,” he declared, setting the bowl down. “Just the ticket. So, ladies, what’s next?”
“Next?” Miriam asked blankly.
“Next,” Alice said. “The show must go on, yes?”
“The show?” Rosemary frowned at her cake. “I thought we were just doing a dinner. Last year’s show wasn’t terribly successful.”
Alice grimaced. “Not terribly successful is the understatement of the year, if not the decade. I don’t know what I was thinking, agreeing to a tap-pantomime of Les Misérables.”
“It sounded good in principle,” Miriam said, then gave an awkward little grin when everyone stared at her. “Well, maybe not, now I think about it.”
“Anyway, we’re not talking about that sort of show,” Alice said. �
��We’re talking about finding the missing postmen and tracking down these monsters who are counterfeiting Mortimer’s baubles.”
“Oh, we should have told the police about the baubles!” Jasmine exclaimed. “I’ll tell Ben.”
“You will not,” Alice said, then sighed when Jasmine looked down at her cup with colour rising in her cheeks. “I mean, it’s best not to.”
“But why not?” the younger woman ventured, not looking up.
“Because if there are dragons or other Folk involved, then we can’t be tattling to the police or drawing attention to it. It’s too risky.”
“Plus there’s the Watch to consider,” Beaufort said. “If they get wind of it, there’ll be all sorts of trouble. And if the police know, the Watch will know. They’ve got spies everywhere.”
Jasmine looked up finally. She was still a little pink, but her voice was firm. “But Detective Inspector Adams knows. And she hasn’t told anyone else.”
“DI Adams isn’t necessarily an illustration of the police as a whole,” Alice said. “Nor is Ben,” she added quickly, when Jasmine opened her mouth to protest. “Others may be rather quicker to talk about things, and the next thing you know there’ll be reporters and all sorts sticking their noses in.” And not long after that will come the government authorities, she thought. And that will be the end of everything.
“Anyway,” Beaufort said. “The inspector told us to stick to Folk stuff while she sticks to human stuff, and baubles are Folk stuff. She can’t argue with that.”
“Besides, she’ll be all tied up with paperwork,” Gert added. “The police are always all about the whole paperwork thing.”
Carlotta circled the room with the mulled wine. “We’ll keep this in the family,” she said. “Just like in the old country.”
Rosemary snorted. “You’re from Manchester.”
Carlotta glared at her, and ignored her empty glass. “My heart is Italian.”
“Did you get it at the corner shop?”
“Just because you don’t care about your heritage—”
“Ladies,” Alice said, and they subsided. “Listen, Jasmine and I have ordered a bauble and a boat, respectively. Mail still seems to be getting to us, it’s just getting out that’s the issue. Hopefully we’ll get them in the next day or so, then maybe we’ll know a little more.”
“It’s just not right,” Mortimer said. He’d shed two scales on the hearth and seemed to have got his appetite back. Having finished his mince pies, he was steadily eating his way through a plate of overcooked brownies that Alice assumed were Jasmine’s. Even given the fact that they were dark chocolate, they looked somewhat scorched. “Stealing designs like that. We should report them to the Watch. Or get Detective Inspector Adams to lock them up. Or throw them in the duck pond and let the geese attack them.” He took another brownie.
“That’s the spirit, lad,” Beaufort said cheerfully.
“What about the other orders?” Miriam asked. “I’ve got eighteen orders to fill tomorrow, and I need to replace the ones that were stolen today. Where do I send them from? Do I send them?”
“Of course we send them,” Alice said. “We can’t let our customers down. Mortimer, do you have enough boats and baubles to replace the ones we’ve lost?”
“Yes,” he said, around a mouthful of brownie. “I’ll just need to check we have the right ones.”
“Alright. I’ll arrange a DHL pickup for tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll send out all the orders at once. It’s the safest option. The way things are going, who knows if Royal Mail will even be able to get someone to come collect post tomorrow.”
“I know I wouldn’t do it,” Gert said. “Damn risky business, being a postman around here.”
“It’s not right,” Mortimer said again, to no one in particular. “All that work, and people just take them without even a by-your-leave. Stolen goods and black-market scales, and it shouldn’t be allowed. It shouldn’t!” He frowned at the empty plate. “And now I’ve gone and eaten all the brownies. I’m so sorry!”
Rose patted his shoulder. “It’s quite alright, Mortimer. You need to keep your strength up.”
“I suppose,” he said, and huddled down with his chin on his paws.
Carlotta found a plate with a few pieces of shortbread left on it and placed it in front of Mortimer, then said, “So what do the rest of us do?”
“What you’re good at,” Alice said. “Talk to people. Find out anything you can about anyone who’s been maybe a little too interested in the baubles, or might suddenly have a lot of presents to dispose of. Anything out of the ordinary.” She paused, considering, then added, “This may be nothing, but has anyone noticed a new silver Audi about the place?”
The women exchanged glances. Beaufort was watching her with interest, and Mortimer was nibbling a shortbread disconsolately.
“Can’t say I have,” Gert said. “You notice the plates? My nephew’s sister-in-law’s cousin’s partner works at the DVLA. I could run it past him.”
Alice could never understand how Gert kept all these in-laws and cousins straight. She shook her head. “YC18, but I didn’t get the rest.”
“New, then, with the 18,” Gert said.
“And local,” Jasmine said, plucking at the carpet. “Y is Yorkshire, C is Leeds.”
“Is that so,” Alice said, smiling. “Well done, Jasmine. As I say, it may just be a visitor, or someone’s got a new car. But I’ve seen it a few times, I think.”
There was a quiet moment while everyone considered this, then Pearl said, “Right, then. When do we meet up again?”
“Let’s say 10 a.m., day after tomorrow. Any volunteers to host?”
“Come to mine,” Priya said. “But you can leave that dog behind, Jasmine. I don’t want it frightening my cats.”
“She wouldn’t—”
“Nowhere with cats,” Beaufort said. “Anyone who doesn’t have cats?”
“Alice, you don’t,” Miriam said.
“I seem to have acquired one,” she replied.
“Why would you do that now?” Miriam demanded.
“I didn’t really seem to have much choice in the matter.”
“No one ever has a choice when it comes to cats,” Mortimer said. He’d eaten three biscuits and was trying not to look at the others.
“What’s wrong with cats?” Priya demanded. “My cats are perfectly lovely.”
“I’m sure they are,” Alice said, “but it seems they’re not to be trusted.”
“They’re really not,” Beaufort said, and launched into an explanation of the Watch while the ladies of the Women’s Institute listened with rapt attention, ooh-ing in all the right places. Alice half-listened, but it was nothing more than Beaufort had said before, about the cats being the police force of the Folk, so to speak. Or the border guards might be more accurate. Mostly she watched Gert. She didn’t suspect her, exactly, but the big woman hadn’t volunteered anything about the side market she had going with Amelia. Alice didn’t want to come out and ask her in front of everyone else, but she decided she’d have a little talk with Gert, sooner rather than later. Mortimer said that Amelia was supplying Gert with baubles and jewellery, which was harmless enough, but maybe someone in Gert’s complicated and occasionally shady family had got wind of it and decided to get themselves involved.
Although that didn’t explain the exploding baubles. That suggested someone was making their own. For which you needed some sort of magical, and likely dragonish, partner.
The meeting broke up not long after, the women making their way home through the darkening streets with their depleted plates of goodies, sharing cars or walking, and all of them checking warily for spying cats and lurking silver Audis. Priya had been very upset, and even when Beaufort had assured her that not all cats belonged to the Watch it hadn’t helped. She appeared to be most bothered by the idea that her cats tended to follow her into the loo.
“But what are they doing? How does that help their intelligence efforts
?” She paused, then added, “And I clean their litter box. How are they so smart but still need the litter box?”
Alice thought of having to go outside for the loo in winter, and thought that cats were likely just as smart as they feared. “It’s probably best if you don’t let on you know,” she said. “We don’t want them wondering how you found out.”
“I’ll never look at them the same way,” Priya said, pulling her coat on. “And I’m never letting them in the loo with me again.”
Pearl, waiting for her on the path, smiled and said, “It doesn’t surprise me. They always look like they’re up to something, cats.”
Alice agreed and waved them off, then went back to the living room. As was befitting of a Women’s Institute gathering, the cups were already gathered and washed, the plates put away, the crumbs swept up. Only the two dragons and a very anxious-looking Miriam remained. Mortimer looked faintly queasy, and had gone a strange yellowish green colour. Alice clapped her hands together briskly.
“Well? Shall we go?”
“Go?” Miriam repeated blankly. “Go where?”
“To have a look at the place the van was found,” Alice said, frowning at her. “Jasmine found it, remember?”
“But it’s a crime scene.”
“The police will be long gone by now.”
“I still think Mortimer and I should just fly over,” Beaufort said. “There’s no sense you ladies going out in the cold and damp.”
“We won’t melt,” Miriam said, looking like she’d rather not disagree, but unable to help herself. “We ladies are just fine.”
Beaufort frowned. “I have a feeling I said something wrong.”
“I don’t feel very well,” Mortimer whispered. “Could I stay here, out of the cold and damp?”
“Nonsense,” Alice said. “You’ll feel much better with a bit of fresh air. And Beaufort, I know you mean well, but we can decide what’s best for us ourselves.”
“I don’t think the car is such a good idea,” Mortimer said. “I really feel quite poorly.”