Baking Bad--A Cozy Mystery (With Dragons) Page 6

  “But why did you break into the vicar’s house?”

  “Because he was murdered,” Beaufort said, as if that should make perfect sense. Mortimer muttered something that Miriam couldn’t quite hear, but it sounded a lot like silly old dragons, and she saw the High Lord’s ears twitch slightly.

  “Tea,” she said. “Tea, and banana cake, and then I’m sure this shall all make sense.”

  “But it already makes sense,” Beaufort protested.

  She ignored him and got the cake from the pantry.

  Mortimer had peeled himself off the floor and shuffled further inside, and was now sitting up in the sunshine washing through the small panes of the deep-silled windows. He was working on his second cup of tea and third slice of cake, and was looking slightly less grey.

  With the immediate concern of a fainting dragon set aside, Miriam took a relieved sip of her own tea, and said, “But why on earth did you go to the vicarage? I was worried enough that you weren’t going to get out of the hall without being seen!”

  “It was the only sensible thing to do,” Beaufort said. He was crouched in the doorway with his paws tucked under him, like some enormous green cat, and Miriam wondered just what he based his estimation of sensible on. “We figured we couldn’t do anything at the hall, so we’d go have a little look at the vicarage while everyone was otherwise occupied.”

  “Only they came back,” Mortimer said around a mouthful of cake. “The police.”

  “Yes, most unfortunate, that. We were having a little look around downstairs, just to see if there were any scents or anything we could pick up—”

  “The whole place smells sad,” Mortimer said. “Terribly sad.”

  “Lad, someone just died there. It’s not going to smell of roses and kittens.”

  Mortimer looked at his empty plate wistfully. “Yes, but it was awful.”

  “Scents?” Miriam said. “Like tracker dogs?”

  “We’re not dogs,” Mortimer said indignantly, and licked the crumbs off his plate.

  “Emotional traces,” Beaufort explained. “We can’t smell physical traces like dogs can—”

  “Dogs are horrible,” Mortimer announced, looking hopefully at the cake on the table.

  “Dogs are very nice creatures,” Beaufort corrected him. “And very good at tracking physical scents. Every creature’s very good at something. That’s what makes them all so wonderful.”

  Mortimer muttered something dubious, but didn’t contradict him.

  “And did you find anything?” Miriam asked. “We were all questioned, you know. Like we were suspects!”

  “You are suspects,” Beaufort said. “We overheard that it was probably poison, and that there was cake involved.”

  “Poison? They really think he was poisoned? Deliberately?”

  “It sounded like it,” Beaufort said.

  “But surely they can’t think any of us would do it! Not really!”

  “Well, if it was cake, and it happened right after a W.I. meeting …” Beaufort trailed off as Miriam gave a horrified gasp and pressed her hands to her mouth. The kitchen was still, only the ticking of the clock above the mantel and the terribly distant happiness of bird song outside to be heard. Miriam couldn’t seem to breathe, the thick-beamed ceiling that was usually so cosy pressing down heavy and claustrophobic above her, the thick old walls less protection and more prison.

  All those questions in the hall that she’d so willingly given answers to, thinking she was just helping, that it was all just what the police did after a murder. To think that all that time the detective inspector was suspecting her, was imagining her a murderer! Suddenly everything the inspector had asked, every repeated query, every one of her own straightforward answers, seemed desperately suspicious. What if she’d said something wrong? What if she’d incriminated herself? Or, worse, one of the others?

  She jumped up, sending her chair slamming into the wall behind her. “I need some air.” She scrambled past Beaufort and out into the garden, almost running down the overgrown path to the rickety garden table nestled in its surrounds of trellis and vines. She leaned against it, cold in spite of the sun, while black spots swam in her vision and the sky reverberated with every breath, far too dark and low. They thought it was one of the W.I.! A murderer in their midst! How could this happen? How could any of this happen?

  She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out there when Mortimer shuffled outside with a cushion in one fore paw, and her cup of tea (slopping slightly, as although dragons can walk on their hind legs, it’s awkward) in the other. He placed the cushion on a chair and the tea on the table, then went back inside. A moment later he returned, this time with a large bag of cheese puffs from Miriam’s secret stash.

  “How did you know about those?” she asked him.

  “They smell really strong, even when they’re not open,” he replied, and handed the packet to her.

  She sighed, and opened the bag, watching Beaufort pad across the backyard toward them, a trail of thoughtful blue smoke drifting behind him.

  “So, what did you find out at the vicarage?”

  “Not much,” Beaufort admitted, sitting next to the table and folding his front paws over his belly. “There are so many emotional traces there, so many people over the years coming and going. It makes things complicated.”

  “Could you tell anything at all from it?” Miriam asked, licking cheesy orange dust off her fingertips and offering the bag to Mortimer, who wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

  “We were looking for someone angry. Passionately angry. Someone who wished the vicar harm. But emotions don’t fade the same way scents do, so it’s hard to tell if we’re smelling a person who was there and angry yesterday, or just a generally angry person who was there last year.”

  Miriam took another handful of cheese puffs. If this wasn’t a non-organic, artificially-flavoured cheese puff day, she didn’t know what was. “So we don’t know anything else, then.”

  “There was something,” Beaufort said. “It wasn’t entirely clear, but there was something. The only thing I can say definitely, though, is that the person who did this wasn’t inside. Not recently, anyway. If they’d been there, the whole house would have reeked.”

  “Outside?” Miriam asked, thinking of the angry, expensive-smelling woman who had chased the vicar from the village hall the day before.

  “We didn’t have much time to look around,” Mortimer said. “We were kind of running from the police.”

  “Don’t be over-dramatic, Mortimer. They didn’t even see us.”

  “They would have, if we hadn’t run.”

  “You really do need to relax, Mortimer. You wouldn’t have survived a day back in the Middle Ages with that attitude.”

  Mortimer plucked at his tail and mumbled, “They sound horrendous anyway.”

  Beaufort ignored him. “But we do need to go back.”

  “Go back?” Miriam exclaimed, at the same time Mortimer said, “Why?”

  He gave them both an amused look. “Because there was something in the room with the internet thingy. You said as much, Mortimer.”

  “I know, but I didn’t have time to look properly. Not really. There was just a whiff. It might be nothing, just an angry email or something. One of those chain thingies, even.”

  Beaufort looked puzzled, then said, “Well, at the moment we have precisely nothing to go on, so any sort of something is an improvement. The worst that could happen is we go for a look, and still have nothing.”

  “The worst that could happen is we get arrested,” Miriam pointed out.

  “Or tasered. I don’t like the look of that.” Mortimer was twisting his tail anxiously, the scales scraping under his paws.

  “Do put your tail down, Mortimer. No one’s getting tasered.” Beaufort frowned. “What is that, anyway?”

  “Um,” Mortimer said. “It’s this thing the police have. It electrocutes you.”

  “Electrocutes you?” Beaufort asked, one paw on
his chest.

  “What’s this about getting tasered?” a new voice asked, saving Mortimer from trying to explain further, and they turned to see Alice coming down the path. Miriam stashed the cheese puffs hurriedly behind her seat and wiped the crumbs from her mouth. Finally, a voice of reason. Alice would talk sense into Beaufort, if anyone could.

  “I think we definitely need to get into the vicarage,” Alice said, and Miriam and Mortimer looked at her in horror.

  “Really?” Mortimer wailed.

  “But it’s a crime scene,” Miriam said, and pulled the cheese puffs out again. If she got arrested she’d have years without cheese puffs, so there was no point hiding them now. Mortimer held his paw out, and she passed him the packet.

  “It’s our best lead,” Alice said. “We don’t know who this woman was that you saw, Miriam, so we have no way of tracking her down. But if we can get onto the vicar’s computer, we might find some emails from her. Or someone else, if it wasn’t her.”

  “But I told the inspector about her. Surely she’ll look into it?”

  “Miriam’s right,” Mortimer said. “We shouldn’t get involved. The police know what they’re doing.”

  “Not all the time,” Alice said. “At the moment, we’re their main suspects. They’ll be concentrating on us, not looking at other options.”

  “But how can they look at us?” Miriam demanded. “Why would we kill the vicar?”

  “It’s the cake,” Beaufort said. “Where else would the cake have come from?”

  “But no one—” Miriam began, and Alice patted her hand.

  “Of course not,” the older woman said. “But poison is traditionally a women’s weapon. Method, opportunity. Now all she’s looking for is motive.”

  “But none of us has a motive!”

  “Don’t we?” Alice smiled, but there was a tightness to it that made Miriam’s stomach twist. “The vicar was scared of me. He banned Gert from having poker nights in the village hall because it was gambling. Carlotta thought he wasn’t as devout as the last vicar, even though she likes the trappings more than the substance. Rose argued with him over his ‘no dogs in church’ policy. Jasmine could have done it purely by accident. Knowing her, she might have picked up the rat poison thinking it was sugar. Even you, Miriam. You argued with him over decorations more than once.”

  “Never seriously! He just didn’t accept that religious holidays have pagan roots that should be celebrated!”

  “I know that. You know that. But you see? The detective inspector has a whole pool of suspects to choose from. Any one of us could have done it. And sometimes, all anyone’s looking for is an answer. It doesn’t have to be the right answer.”

  There was silence then. The sun still shone, the light long and low and hopeful as only spring days can be, and it should have been filled with warmth and easy conversation and the delight of the oncoming summer. Instead Miriam just felt sick, and wished she hadn’t eaten so many cheese puffs. Her gloriously overgrown garden seemed messy and threatening, and the day felt full of unfriendly eyes, all waiting to see how she might incriminate herself.

  “So what do we do?” she asked eventually.

  “We investigate,” Beaufort said, and Mortimer sighed.

  Which was how Miriam found herself, an hour later, standing on the edge of the shadowy graveyard and twisting her skirt through her fingers.

  “I don’t like it,” she said, for what seemed to be the hundredth time.

  “Do calm down, Miriam,” Alice said. “It’s very simple. I will go and talk to the policeman on duty. If it’s the same one as when I left, I think it’s that nice Sergeant Graham. I’ll take him a sandwich, have a chat, and meanwhile Mortimer will go in the window, let you in, and you can see what you can find on the computer.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” Mortimer said. He was still on the other side of the churchyard wall, peering over the top at the others.

  “It is simple. Now come along.”

  Alice had the sort of voice that made disagreement difficult, to say the least, so Mortimer climbed over the wall with a reluctant sigh, and they set off among the cool shadows of the trees that sheltered the flower-scattered graves. Miriam concentrated on pretending she was just out for an evening stroll and not doing anything that could remotely be construed as breaking (or even bending) any laws. She tripped over the edge of a half-buried marker, fell onto another, and knocked a vase of plastic flowers into the long grass.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, and righted them before hurrying on.

  Before they reached the vicarage itself, Alice made Miriam wait in the whispering shelter of a heavy-limbed oak tree, and she circled the garden’s low stone wall with Beaufort following her. The big dragon was light-footed and silent, barely disturbing the grass, and he slipped into the garden itself to hover at the corner of the house as Alice went on ahead. It wasn’t long before voices drifted back to them, a man’s low laughter and the quieter murmur of a woman’s voice. Beaufort turned and came trotting back, pausing here and there to gesticulate at Mortimer.

  “I think he wants you to go in,” Miriam said.

  “I can see that. But I don’t want to,” Mortimer replied. He seemed to be struggling to stay grass green, and kept fading to a sad grey colour.

  “Neither do I,” Miriam admitted. “But do you want to say no to them?”

  Mortimer groaned. Beaufort had stopped under the open window and was sitting on his hindquarters, waving both paws at them wildly. “Dammit,” the young dragon said, then scampered across the grass and went scratching rapidly up the wall, his scales flashing from grey to pink in alarm.

  “Oh dear,” Miriam whispered, clutching her skirt in both hands. “Oh, do be careful, Mortimer!”

  He paused at the window, unlatched it, then scrambled over the ledge, and for a moment Miriam thought it was going to be just fine. Well, as fine as breaking into an active crime scene could be. Then, just as the dragon vanished from sight, his tail hooked the window and it slammed behind him with a crash that echoed across the graveyard and bounced off the walls of the church.

  Miriam squeaked and darted behind the tree. Beaufort froze where he was, taking on the colours of the bushes that circled the house, and a moment later the sergeant came jogging around the corner, a half-eaten sandwich still clutched in one hand. Alice was close behind him, and she stopped between him and Beaufort and pointed at the window, which had bounced open again and was still swinging lazily above them.

  “Look. It must have been the wind.”

  “There isn’t any,” the sergeant said.

  “What else could it have been?”

  “I don’t know.” He gave her a slightly suspicious look. “Anyone else here with you?”

  “Just me,” she said.

  He tried the door, found it locked, and turned back to Alice. “I’ll have to check it out. You better go, Ms Martin. Thanks for the sandwich.”

  “My pleasure. I hope you have a nice evening, Graham.” She put her hands in the pockets of her light jacket and strolled across the grass to the back gate of the vicarage garden, letting herself out and taking the path than ran between the grave markers to the church. She didn’t even glance around to see Miriam hiding behind her tree. Miriam stayed where she was and tried not to feel offended when Graham looked at his sandwich somewhat apprehensively. He sniffed it, shrugged, then took another bite and headed back to the front of the house.

  Beaufort ran to her as soon as they heard the front door open, and they crouched behind the tree together, peering around the trunk to watch the windows anxiously.

  “Where is he?” Miriam hissed.

  “He’ll be fine,” Beaufort said. “He’s a clever lad.” But he sounded worried. Lights were coming on in the downstairs rooms as the officer inspected the interior, and there was still no sign of Mortimer. Miriam kept expecting a scaly head to appear at the window, but there was nothing. Lights on upstairs now, probably on the landing. The officer was moving fa
st without rushing, and Miriam wondered if she should run to the front door, knock on it or something, give Mortimer a chance to escape. But she was frozen where she crouched, her heart pounding so hard against her ribs that she thought she might pass out. She didn’t know how criminals did it. This was awful!

  The lights came on in the room with the open window, and she ducked behind the tree as Graham leaned out and peered into the lengthening shadows. She heard the window shut, the latch lock into place, and when she peeked back around the tree the room was dark again.

  “He’s still in there!” she whispered to Beaufort.

  “I know.” The High Lord’s eyebrow ridges were drawn down anxiously.

  6

  Mortimer

  There had been a moment there, when Mortimer had knocked the window with his tail, when he’d frozen so completely that he’d thought he wasn’t going to be able to move at all, that the sergeant was going to come into the room and find a living statue of a dragon crouched in the middle of the old green carpet, cycling sadly from frightened pink to grass green to stone grey to a strange, mottled purple-blue that wasn’t even his normal colour, but a very stressed semblance of it.

  Then he’d heard Alice’s crisp voice from below the window, blaming the wind, and he’d bolted out of the room and straight into the one next door, which turned out to be a bathroom. He scrambled into the bath, turned around twice, realised that it not only offered him no protection at all, but that the tap was dripping on his tail, and fled, leaving a sparkle of water drops behind him. The next room was full of stacks of old parish newspapers and church magazines, dusty taped-up boxes and a sickly-looking fake Christmas tree, plus a mannequin by the window that scared Mortimer so much he almost tripped over his own paws turning around again.

  He heard the front door open as he dived across the hall and pushed himself under the vicar’s bed. The space was only just high enough for him to squeeze into, and his wings were jammed uncomfortably against the base. But he was in, and unless that officer, Graham, came right into the room and peered under the bed, he should be alright. He held his breath as he heard feet on the stairs.