Baking Bad--A Cozy Mystery (With Dragons) Read online

  “A dragon can’t fight on an empty stomach,” Beaufort said, and next to him Mortimer covered his eyes again and whispered, “Fight?”

  10

  Mortimer

  There was a lot to be said for a nice egg sandwich, Mortimer thought. Scones were lovely, but they just didn’t fill you up like a nice egg sandwich. And with any luck, if he ate enough of them, he wouldn’t be able to fit through any more windows, either. He nibbled the crust contentedly, thinking that whatever spices Alice put in the filling were very tasty. Miriam tended to get heavy handed with the paprika, which could lead to sneezing, and dragon sneezes are rather risky to the furniture.

  They’d moved inside, to the kitchen table, just in case DI Adams decided to pop back unexpectedly. Mortimer felt distinctly more secure inside. While the sun was lovely on his scales, particularly the new ones on his tail where he’d been stress-shedding, Miriam’s low-ceilinged kitchen, with the heavy beams overhead and the AGA baking quiet heat in the corner, felt very safe. And he needed safe right now. He wasn’t sure he’d quite recovered from the close calls with either the giant dog or the police officer yesterday. He wasn’t sure he’d ever entirely recover from them.

  Unlike Beaufort, who was sat back on his hindquarters, his head level with the table, offering Miriam advice as she dug around in the vicar’s tablet.

  “What’s that? What does that do?”

  “It’s a music thingy.”

  “Oh. And that?”

  “For TV.”

  “I say, these are terribly clever things, aren’t they? Mortimer, do you think we should get one?”

  Mortimer scratched his ear. “We don’t have anywhere to charge it, Beaufort.”

  “Ah, of course. We really need to update things around the caverns, don’t we?”

  Mortimer had a sudden, alarmed vision of Beaufort contracting an unsuspecting interior decorator to redesign the ancient, scale-polished caves above the lake, but before he could say anything Miriam stretched and said, “I don’t think there’s much else on here. Not that I can figure out, anyway.”

  “Well done, Miriam,” Alice said, and set a fresh cup of tea in front of her. “I’d have lost patience long ago.”

  Miriam looked pleased with herself. “Well, it wasn’t exactly hidden in secret files or anything.” She gave the tablet a dubious glance. “I don’t think.”

  “And do we have anything beyond Violet and S.B.?”

  “Not if we don’t count BestBakerBoy.”

  “Ah. Him.” Alice tapped her fingers together, then said, “Can you check the vicar’s work emails to see if that man from the gastropub contacted him?”

  “Harold?” Miriam asked, picking up the tablet again.

  “That was him.”

  Mortimer put his forepaws on the table to watch Miriam scrolling through the emails, eventually stopping on one from a Chef Harold.

  “Here,” she said. “Any luck getting the W.I. to budge? I know it’s important to keep the locals happy, but think of the prestige of having a chef of my level at your fate! Let me know. And remember, dinner and drinks on me any time you fancy it. H.”

  “They seem very chummy,” Beaufort said.

  “Well, Harold was,” Miriam said. “The vicar’s just put, Sorry, no, in his reply. Not even a hello!”

  “He’s not BestBakerBoy, anyway, is he?” Alice asked. “Not unless someone else wrote this for him.”

  “It’s from a different email address, too,” Miriam said. “And he seemed to be trying to butter the vicar up, what with sending stuff to meetings and offering him meals. He wasn’t threatening him.”

  “Well, then,” Alice said, and held another half sandwich out to each of the dragons. Mortimer took his eagerly. They really were very tasty. “It was a stretch. And I would think it’ll be more likely to be someone from the vicar’s past than an unhappy baker. Did you find out if the vicar answered any of the emails from the other two?”

  “He doesn’t seem to have.”

  “Well, he always was quite the nonconfrontationalist.” Alice smiled at the dragons. “Can I get you anything else, Mortimer? More tea? Beaufort?”

  Mortimer nodded around a mouthful of egg mayonnaise, but Beaufort looked at Alice with amused gold eyes. “Not that I disagree with the tactic, but are you using sandwiches to soften us up?”

  Mortimer froze, his mouth still full, and Alice laughed.

  “Was I that obvious?”

  “I’m very old, Alice. Although I admit I’ve never been bribed with egg sandwiches before. Once upon a time it used to be gold. Or sheep.”

  “I’m rather in short supply of both of those.”

  Mortimer swallowed with difficulty. “Why are we being bribed?”

  “Not bribed, Mortimer, dear,” Alice said. “We all needed a bite to eat after that little encounter with the inspector.” Although, Mortimer noticed, she’d only eaten half a sandwich herself. He sighed heavily.

  “Please don’t tell me I need to break in anywhere. I don’t feel I have enough of a criminal nature to keep breaking in places.”

  “You absolutely don’t, lad,” Beaufort said. “That’s one of the things that makes you such a wonderful young dragon. There’s not a bad scale on you.”

  Mortimer tried to maintain a suitably annoyed and anxious look, but he could feel a happy orange flush creeping up his tail. He’d never been very good at keeping his colour changes under control.

  Alice put big mugs of tea in front of the dragons. “I don’t intend for anyone to have to break in anywhere again. But I would like you to come with me to the church and see if you can find anything else in the churchyard, any of those emotional traces. We can’t go back to the vicarage, and from what you say I rather think the village hall will be nothing but a mess of all the same smells.”

  “That sounds like an excellent idea,” Beaufort said. “We should go immediately, before too many other people track their scents about the place.”

  Mortimer ate the last piece of his sandwich in one despairing gulp.

  “Should we even be going to the church?” Miriam asked. “I mean, mightn’t that look suspicious?”

  Alice smiled at her. “The church is not part of the crime scene, Miriam. And it still needs fresh flowers, which is a perfectly reasonable explanation for us being there.”

  Miriam made an uncertain little noise, and Beaufort said, “Miriam may have a point, though. It might be best for just Mortimer and I to go and see what we can find.”

  “Nonsense,” Alice said. “We agreed to investigate this together. I don’t know how you propose we do that, if Miriam and I are left at home.”

  Mortimer sneaked a look at Miriam. She looked like she wouldn’t complain about being left at home.

  “Well, then.” Beaufort finished half his tea in one swallow. “That’s all there is to it. Shall we get going?”

  “Just as soon as we have some flowers together,” Alice said. “We best have our excuse for being there in evidence. Plus I need to make a couple of phone calls. I think it’s time to delegate a few investigative duties.”

  “Delegate to who?” Miriam asked.

  “Well, Gert has her sister-in-law’s niece’s sister in the local council offices,” Alice said. “Or sister’s sister-in-law. Or niece’s sister-in-law. I’m not sure. I can never keep these things straight. Anyhow, she might be able to find out if the vicar was married to anyone called Violet.”

  “That’s terribly clever,” Beaufort said.

  “One must use the resources one has,” Alice said. “I also want Gert to find out about this S.B., since she still has contacts back in Manchester. And I’d like to see if someone can look into bakers while we’re at the church, too.”

  “Do we even really need to go to the church, then?” Mortimer asked. It seemed uncomfortably close to returning to the scene of the crime.

  “We must cover all bases, lad,” Beaufort said. He looked like he was enjoying this far too much.

  “Bu
t someone might see us,” Miriam protested. “Can’t we at least wait until tonight?”

  “I rather doubt anyone would believe we were replacing the flowers in the middle of the night,” Alice said, and Miriam looked crestfallen.

  Mortimer took a deep breath. “Um,” he said, then faded to an anxious grey when everyone looked at him. “I hate to, you know, be, well, a bit—”

  “Spit it out, lad,” Beaufort said, and Mortimer felt the colour come back into his tail at the affection in the old dragon’s voice. “You do come up with some very good points.”

  “Oh. Oh, okay.” Mortimer was almost fully his own purple-blue again. “But what exactly are we hoping to find? Say we think we have the scent, how does that help us? We can’t follow it, unless they left on foot. If they got in a car, it’ll be gone. We’ll know someone was there and was angry, and if we stumble across them we’ll recognise them, but that’s all.”

  There was a pause, and Miriam was starting to look almost relaxed when Beaufort spoke. “I remember when certain dragons used to train up to track scents. Not just track them, but build a description from them. Male, female, adult or child, if they were a big human or a small one, if they were brave or cowardly, even their favourite meals. Not that the meal thing was so helpful, but the rest was very useful if there were knights sneaking around looking for a dragon to murder. Amazing what knights used to think would impress a princess. And every princess I met was really rather fond of dragons!”

  “You don’t say,” Alice said, and Miriam snorted.

  Beaufort looked puzzled, then said, “D’you know, I was never very interested in tracking, personally. It was by nature quite a solitary activity, because a brew of dragons charging around the countryside looking for a fight tended to overwhelm any emotional traces of lovesick knights. But Lord Walter—”

  “No,” Mortimer said, with more emphasis than may have been strictly necessary. He grabbed his tail as everyone looked at him, worrying at the loose scales. “No, Beaufort, he’s terribly antisocial. He’ll try to eat someone.”

  “Nonsense,” Beaufort said. “Walter would never do such a thing.”

  Mortimer opened his mouth to protest that he thought that Walter might, and was in fact rumoured to be one of the last dragons who actually had, but the High Lord was looking stubborn. And there was no point talking to Beaufort when he was looking stubborn. All he could hope for was that Walter was in one of his periodic mini-hibernations. They came on without warning and could last a month or so.

  “I’m sure we can come up with another plan,” Miriam was saying, looking alarmed.

  “Not at all. This is a fabulous idea!” Beaufort got up and headed for the door. “Come along, Mortimer, lad. Alice is quite right about using all the resources at our disposal. Let’s go and see if we can roust old Walter. He’ll be so excited. It’ll be just like the old times for him.”

  “Wait, Beaufort—” Mortimer ran after the High Lord, who was already settling into a steady trot as he headed for the back gate. “Not Walter!”

  “Amelia! Amelia Amelia Amelia!” Mortimer barely folded his wings before crashing into the entrance to his workshop. It was only a small cave, and not at all deep, with low stone benches running along the walls and forming a broad work surface in the centre of the floor. Crystal prisms caught the light from outside and focused it on the workspaces, splintering rainbows across the stone walls. There were dwarf-made tools hanging in marked places on the walls, tongs and pincers and little rounded hammers, all modified for dragon claws and resistant to dragon heat, and in the corners were deep barrels filled with shed scales and copper wire. The stone floor was perfectly clean, and baubles made of magic and dragon scales drifted gently across the low roof like a flock of sedate, multicoloured birds. It was a terribly peaceful spot, Mortimer’s place of ideas and quiet craft-dragon-ship, his refuge from the stresses that life as Beaufort’s unwilling escort into the modern world always seemed to bring.

  “Amelia!” Mortimer shouted again, rushing into the dimmer light of the workshop and colliding with a small dragon who yelped in shock. “Amelia?”

  “Nooo,” the small dragon said, and waved a tangle of wire and scales at him. “Look, you made me crush it! It was going to be so good!”

  “Gilbert?”

  “He’s helping out,” Amelia said, emerging from the end of the cavern with a half-made glider in one paw. “We’ve got too much to do between now and the fete for just the two of us.” Mortimer heard a little note of reproach in her voice, and she didn’t have to add, especially with you not being here half the time.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, a general apology that took in him not being here, knocking Gilbert over, and interrupting them. “Look, you have to help me. Beaufort’s convinced Lord Walter to try and track a human, and—”

  “What?” Amelia asked, as Gilbert breathed, “Holy cow.”

  “Yes! I know! And he won’t listen, and Walter’s all puffed up about being asked to help, and I’m scared he might eat someone!”

  “Well, he probably won’t,” Amelia said, a little dubiously.

  “Probably isn’t going to cut it, Amelia!” He swallowed as she glared at him. “Sorry.”

  “Things would be so much easier if everyone was just vegetarian,” Gilbert said, putting his tools back on the wall. “I mean, no one’s worried about me eating a carrot in a moment of wild abandon.”

  Mortimer covered his mouth with both paws. “They’ve already left! What do I do?”

  “Gilbert, keep working,” Amelia said, putting her tongs down on a bench.

  “Aw, man.”

  “We’re going to be flying. You want to fly?”

  Gilbert gave her an unimpressed look. It was no secret that the young dragon was acrophobic, but his sister was usually a little more diplomatic with him, if with no one else. Mortimer took a deep breath. Okay, if he had Amelia, at least that was two sensible dragons against two old … somethings.

  “Amelia, I owe you for this.”

  “I know,” she said, and led the way out of the cavern.

  It was mid-afternoon in the churchyard, the light bright and the dappled shadows of the trees nowhere near as thick as Mortimer would have liked them to be. Alice and Miriam were waiting for them by the stile, carrying baskets filled with flowers from their gardens, and Mortimer banked a little to the right, planning to land on the path. They’d risked flying all the way, because there was no way Walter would walk any of the distance at all. He disdained walking as the locomotive method of animals.

  “Mortimer!” Amelia yelled. She’d just started to bank in the opposite direction, maybe thinking they’d fly right into the churchyard.

  Mortimer gave a strangled yelp as their wing tips tangled and they crashed into each other with a solid thud and a clatter of scales, then plummeted into the brambles.

  “Mortimer! Are you alright?” Miriam asked, and Mortimer sat up to see her watching them with wide eyes, her basket crushed to her chest. At least she seemed to have some idea of how serious all this was.

  “Yes, yes. Are they here yet?” he asked, struggling to disentangle himself from both a grumbling Amelia and the brambles.

  “Are who here yet?” Alice asked. “And that was rather risky, flying all the way here.”

  “It’s an emergency,” Mortimer said.

  “Well, you’re certainly acting like it is,” Alice said. “Hello, Amelia.”

  “Hello, Ms Martin.” Amelia pattered out onto the path and eyed Alice’s basket expectantly.

  “Alice is fine, dear. Where’s Beaufort?”

  “They must already be here. We need to get to the church quick as we can,” Mortimer said. He had a bramble caught over his shoulder and was thrashing wildly to try and get it off. “Oh, what are they going to be doing?”

  “Do calm down, Mortimer,” Alice said, lifting the bramble clear. “Apparently the DI is watching the vicarage, but Rose and Jasmine are going to keep an eye on her, and they’ll distract
her if she seems like she might come near the church. Everything will be just fine.”

  Mortimer had serious doubts that was going to be case, but he scooted out from under the bramble without commenting further and set off over the stile.

  Beaufort and Walter had already arrived. They were sitting in the sun on the church steps like two ageing gargoyles, faces upturned and contented streams of green smoke drifting from their nostrils. No one seemed to be quite sure if Walter was actually older than Beaufort, or if he just wore his years badly. His scales were patchy and dry-looking, and he seemed small and bony inside them, as if he’d started to shed then forgotten to keep going. His eyes were milky green when he looked toward the little group coming across the grass, and his nostrils flared wide and quivering.

  “Lord Walter,” Mortimer said politely.

  “Mm,” the old dragon said, still looking at the women. A small thread of drool appeared on his lower lip. Miriam looked alarmed, and even Alice didn’t seem entirely comfortable.

  “Walter,” Beaufort shouted. “These are our friends, Alice and Miriam.”

  Miriam waved nervously.

  “Eh?”

  “I said—”

  “I know, I know.” Walter waved impatiently. “Don’t shout, Beaufort. You hurt my ears.”

  Alice handed the old dragon a slice of parkin. “Pleased to meet you, Lord Walter.”

  He took the parkin, sniffed it, then ate it in two hasty gulps. “I say. That’s not bad.”

  “I always think the cakes are perfectly wonderful, personally,” Beaufort said, and got up. “Come on, then. What can you tell us?”

  Walter sighed. “What do you want to know, exactly? Plenty of human stink around here to choose from.”

  Mortimer shook his head, and Beaufort opened his mouth to say something, but it was Alice who answered.

  “There is absolutely no need for that sort of talk. Do you hear me saying that your claws are filthy or that your scales look dreadful? No. Of course not. Because I have manners.”