The Old Dog and the Doorstep Read online

Home Economics for Girls

  or

  Tabitha Tickham and the Cake Crisis

  JP Wright

  Copyright 2016 JP Wright

  Contents

  Chapter 1 … A very curious detective

  Chapter 2 … Guests arrive

  Chapter 3 … To the village

  Chapter 4 … The right way to eat scones

  Chapter 5 … Kitty’s morning

  Chapter 6 … Confronting the natives

  Chapter 7 … The Actress Belle

  Chapter 8 … A murderer roaming the grounds

  Chapter 9 … The mystery deepens

  Chapter 10 … The night

  Chapter 11 … A double agent

  Chapter 12 … The unbalanced Butler

  Chapter 13 … The dog with the bad name

  Chapter 14 … Watery moods

  Chapter 15 … Family drama

  Chapter 16 … Blackmail

  Chapter 17 … Whodunnit

  Chapter 18 ... Stone soup

  Afterwords

  Connect with Kitty

  About the author

  Other works by the author

  Chapter 1

  A murder mystery ought to begin with the discovery of the body of the first victim, I suppose, swiftly followed by the arrival of the detective, who must be unorthodox; independent of the police force, or at the very least a maverick within the force. Ideally there will be a sidekick, indispensable for expositionary purposes. There should be a country house, filled for one reason or another with strangers, guests or extended family. Families especially are useful for hidden motives, resentments, feuds and secrets.

  There will of course be staff: at the minimum a Cook (motherly, given to country wisdom and muttered bloody asides, perhaps married to the truculent game-keeper with the dark past), a Maid (flighty, tearful, possibly with child, to be discovered at an opportune moment clutching a torn photograph or lover's letter), and a Butler (to do the dastardly deed, or to serve as misdirection). According to grandpa, butlers come in two flavours, the dry, lean and silver-haired absolute soul of discretion who turns out to have been watering the port; and the buttery, bloated and whiskery kind, apt to beat the maids and embezzle money to lose on the dogs. Both smell of red herring.

  Given sufficient funds, we would add a scape-grace gardener, groom or manservant, and a housekeeper with a grey chignon and a decades-concealed passion for the master of the house. She would have an apothecary cousin or have access to the medicine cabinet, as well as to the family secrets. For this weekend, we will have to scrape by with the bare essentials, and even that will be a fuller staff than has been kept at the house for two generations; finances have never run to live-in Maid, Butler, or Cook in my lifetime, and livery when required was do-it-yourself.

  A few chapters in, a glamorous stranger ought to arrive. An actress or an heiress, a belated guest or mysterious half-cousin around whom the plot can be made to twist; and there will be rumours abroad about person or persons unknown staying in the village, sitting in dark corners of the snug of the King's Head or meeting with suspicious characters in the spit-and-sawdusty Golden Hind, being caught lurking near the stables the night before the race, or showing an unwarranted interest, a poisoner's interest, in the town pump or millennium horse-trough. If gypsies or circus performers are mentioned, you can be sure they are a distraction, something to throw the local bobby off the scent: he is a village policeman, so of course he will suspect the Hindoo juggler, or the smooth Musselman ambassador.

  Well, a detective of sorts, and certainly unconventional, I can offer you. The country house we have too: Garton Grange, tucked into a green little pocket of England's East-Anglian waistcoat, is a fine example of the type, according to the braced and bow-tied estate agent who came last week to poke around. What the type is, I am not sure. It is in parts brick, in parts stone. Yellow and red, and pretty in the autumn light in particular. Not very practical though – the stone has always been crumbling and the bricks have recently become downwardly mobile, dropping their faces at decreasing intervals to crack on the driveway or terrace, and on one occasion to smash through the glass of the orangery. The house is left pock-marked, ravaged by obsolescence rather than adolescence. Some treatment is clearly called for, some age-defying formula capable of dealing with wet rot, dry rot, subsidence, cracking, leaks, warping and death-watch beetle.

  Anyway, the shabby-chic or decaying gentry look is perfect for this weekend's entertainment. It is authentic without the vulgarity of crenellations, suits of armour and white ladies walking knee-deep in the floors. The location is ideal too: the village is two miles away, the nearest railway station and taxi-rank, eight. It was formerly set in more extensive grounds, but straitened times mean that the meadow through which the gravelled drive sweeps has been sold to a local farmer. The gardens are still large enough for chance encounters and secret rendez-vous though: there are the remains of a maze behind the house, beyond the terrace and rose garden; there is a walled kitchen garden that ends in a compost heap, a tangle of blackberries and a shady copse. Opposite the front of the house, across the widest expanse of the driveway, is a pond, scarce in fish but plentifully stocked with lily pads that hide half the surface. I remember playing by the pond, sailing leaf-boats across it while Grandpa tried to fish: even then, I do not believe there was anything to be caught, and probably he was just trying to catch a few minutes’ peace and forty winks away from pestering little girls. The pond is screened from the house by a bank of holly, though from the dining room, if one is seated back-to-the-door, a glimpse might be caught of it between the trunks. The stables that link to the north-east wing of the house hold guests now – or will, or will have to, if the estate agent is to be kept at bay – not horses (a sore point), so there is no champion hurdler to be guarded, and no groom (more's the pity) to upset the maids of the household.

  Farther from the house, between the last curve of the drive and the road, and opposite the lodge, there is a round barrow. It was excavated by grand-aunt Hettie, a redoubtable-looking, tweedy woman in sepia photographs, only ever seen posed with stick or shovel or trowel in hand. The few unimpressive remains she unearthed are still on display in a dusty case in the village hall. Not too much imagination is required to turn the hump of grass into a ghostly place: especially on a windy, moonlit night it would be easy to imagine the angry dead rising to seek out their stolen treasures. But this is a crime story, not a ghost story.

  You can see that the Grange has a fine range of locations for murder au plein aire, as well of course as the usual indoor facilities – kitchen, study, drawing and dining rooms, bedrooms, attic, cellar, candlesticks, lead pipes. Maybe not lead pipes: the plumbing was replaced when I was little, so now it is not life-threatening, though it is still ineffectual. Odd then that our victim was found in broad morninglight in the usually peaceful parsley patch of the kitchen garden. I was first on the scene. Well, technically, I was second – Marcus was already there when I arrived.

  Let me explain. I had got up for breakfast. This was Saturday morning, so no school, but I had been woken early by my geek sister crashing down the stairs. Naturally I stayed in bed resting for another hour or so, and by the time I got up the kitchen was something of a scene of devastation. Mother had been baking – a fine flour-dust was still hanging in the air, swirling in the breeze that was coming in through the open window, but rapidly settling to cover any foot or finger-prints. Empty egg boxes littered the table and a mixing bowl teetered on the edge of the sink, licked clean, doubtless by la petite vache. The sight of an empty milk carton on the side set a fear in me that a glance in the fridge confirmed. The thing was stacked with sliced ham, terrines, pickles, salmon mous
se, crab cakes, quiche, scotch eggs, sliced beef. It was definitely not stacked with milk. It contained no milk. Not a pint, not a gill, not a drop of milk was to be found there. V went to the fridge, and the fridge was bare. Not even a dribble for my tea; certainly not a splash for my cereal.

  Without lunch, I can get by. Given a bowl of dip and a bag of crisps, I can do without dinner. Weekdays, breakfast has to be enjoyed – if enjoyed is the word – as a moving feast, in the car, because school is too far away and starts too early. Even then I will not go anywhere without tea. Because of this weekday difficulty, weekend breakfast is special to me. No matter if I get up just before lunch, breakfast comes first. And it has two essential parts: cereal and tea. Both require milk, and milk, may I remind you, there was none. Not here: the nearest place was the shop in the village. I glanced out of the window, which was slowly swinging closed. The sun was almost half-way up the kitchen garden already, there were a few small, high clouds, no chance of rain. It would be a pleasant morning for a walk.

  “I'll get it myself then,” I told the empty room. “I'll get it myself then!” I repeated, with my head in the stair-well, “I'll get it myself then!” with my head in the hallway.

  Doors to the stairs and hallway duly slammed, I hurled myself in a fine fury through the back door into the kitchen garden – and there I saw it. The victim, below the window, obviously having fallen or been pushed, lying amongst the parsley, in the cool shade. The distance over which the remains were spread was dramatic; the damage was clearly irreparable.

  My first reaction was one of horror. Marcus was there, hunched over the remains, snuffling and slobbering.

  My second reaction was of hilarity. There was something gloriously chaotic about the scattering of the pieces, light and dark against the green of the parsley, an occasional cherry-red spot nestled here and there. The thought of the teetering, the toppling, the separation in mid-air and the crashing fall and explosion on impact, the whole slapstick nature of it, was irresistible. I leaned on the door-frame and laughed.

  In case I seem heartless, or a little sick, let me hasten to explain: Marcus is a dog; the victim, only a cake.

  And yet not only a cake. The cake. Mother's piéce de R. The centre-piece of tea, and a masterpiece of mystery, containing as it did – it had – a dozen fossilised clues. The cake that she must have been up before six baking, filling and icing. The cake that contained a good deal of the milk that was missing from the fridge. The cake that, therefore, represented and supported and contained Mother's effort, hopes and investment, and my breakfast. A very symbolic cake, that was now scattered in the herbage, its coffee and chocolate layers intermingled, all equally begrimed and smeared with Marcus's drool.

  Being a sort of mastiff crossed with a hearth-rug, Marcus is a dog more inclined than most to drool, especially when presented with a feast. I had just regained my balance sufficiently to drag him – reluctant but unprotesting – away from the dangerous cake, the damning cake, when Kitty skipped through the gate from the rose garden. I fear she saw me laughing.

  Here, then, is the odd detective for our odd mystery. A very amateur one, a very idiosyncratic one. A twelve-year old. Dear friends, I present my very own icky lickle sister, the freak, the geek, the little toad. A known sneak and snake-in-the-grass. The one who got the last of the milk. Tabitha Elodie Tickham. 'Kitty' at my three-year old insistence; my innocent faith in the power of words and hope was lost when she failed to sprout fur and a tail. She did sprout horns, I am sure, at around four or five, but Mother had them removed.

  The detective should have a quirk, to be sure, must be different in some way. In old times it was sufficient to be Belgian, to be a woman, to wear moustaches or to smoke a pipe. More recently, a guilty past has been considered de rig, or a drug habit, or at the very least a weakness for booze. All these things are happy pieces of the puzzle of the detective's character; all the more felicitous if the solving of the case swings on that very same character flaw that seemed such a weakness (“I was able, Detective Inspector Jobsworth, to ascertain the workplace of the assassin by the distinctive odour of gin that hung over his victims: the hint of cucumber and anise beneath the juniper was entirely characteristic of Yeoman's number three blend. A piece of detective work impossible for a dry officer of the law, yet simple for one such as I who has lived a lifetime half-pickled. Pass the sauce.”). But I am afraid Kitty is all quirk, all flaw. For example, her taste in clothes is unquestionably poor: she argues that it is art, and beyond taste. Like modern (what was then modern) music, she takes an a-tonal approach. In practical terms, this means dressing in the dark by taking at random one item from the top, middle and bottom shelves. Or, in desperate times, from three different heaps on the floor of her bedroom. This results in surprising, confusing, and shocking but rarely practical and attractive combinations, the trouble being that there are so many more wrong ways to do something than there are right ways. There is more chance of a million monkeys assembling a jumbo jet in a junkyard than of Kitty appearing in an acceptable state of dress. The key problem is that, despite my efforts at positive criticism (“In some lights, that purple might go with that green,” or “Jeezus, rat-bag, you look like shit.”), she deliberately avoids learning from her mistakes.

  It bothers me all the more when, complaining that there is not enough variety in her wardrobe, she wanders into my room at some ungodly hour (ie. any time before midday) to grab, eyes closed, at my shelves.

  So much for style. Her taste in music is equally eclectic (which is a half-polite way of saying someone less smart than you has no discrimination). On that particular weekend, she was listening to 'Gloomy Emo', a new band with no new ideas. The sort of music that sounds as though one's ears were full of black treacle. If she would hide in her room and quietly cut herself it would be fine, but she puts it on her i-pod and dances around the house, bounces practically, giving her own interpretation, half a tone flat. The week before it had been punk, next week it might be trad jazz or ABBA. Trying to predict her is like trying to catch a grasshopper. My sister, the human grasshopper. She jumps from fascination to fascination: from art to riding (when we could), from decalcomania to sculpture (shapeless lumps of clay adorn the bookshelves – Mother has always been keen to foster artistic expression. They look, literally, like shit.), from ping-pong to button collecting. Her greatest flaw, and probably her greatest asset, is her uncontained enthusiasm. She exhausts me.

  That weekend it was detectives, clues, suspects and alibis. She had been in the rose garden, laying clues – notes beneath flower pots and so on – and here she came, hopping up the path, eyes everywhere, antennae, so to speak, waving. She jumped immediately to two conclusions: the first that Marcus was the perpetrator of the crime; second that – Marcus being in her eyes beyond blame – it must have been me.

  “Jeezus, V, Mum was up before God baking that.”

  “It wasn't me. I didn't do it. I just found it here, and Marcus.”

  The brain of the detective Tabitha Tickham, wound like a spring, clicked into gear and began to whir. All that firecracker energy, usually blazing aimlessly in all directions, was focused like a laser on the crime. One potential witness, mute, doubtless struck dumb with shock at the crime; one suspect, claiming to have arrived after the fact. Further interrogation of the suspect could wait – before that, there must be clues to find. The first priority, though: to establish what we know.

  “The window opens outward ... clearly the victim fell or was pushed from inside the kitchen. Hmm. The perp must have had access to the kitchen, cause to be there. Was this a premeditated professional hit? Was the journey here made with delicious aforethought, in knowledge of the victim's tenderness and precarious situation, to intentionally send it tumbling to cut the grass and bite the farm. Or the kitchen garden. Or was there something else that drew him – or her” with an ominous glance at me. I stood as dumb as Marcus. “to this place, and was the murder an accident, or the result of a sudden access of rage? What
might draw an otherwise innocent person to the kitchen, enrage him – or her – to such a pitch that he – or she …”

  “Cut it out, Kitty.”

  “I must keep an open mind. Now you've got me off my train ... Ah! To enrage or infuriate or drive an apparently normal person to these lengths, there are only two possibilities: a pathological jealousy or an extremity of need, for money, or for a drug ... for tea for example.”

  Bounding recklessly heals-first into the parsley, Tabitha Tickham scooped up a morsel of cake. Chocolate. Brushing from it a small beetle, she broke off a moist crumb and popped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and rolled the cake around, making little sucking and tutting noises like a pseud drinking wine. Eventually she nodded, and spat the sticky remnant on the ground. “It was good cake,” she sighed, “It was very good cake.” So it should have been. A dozen eggs had gone into it, some very dark chocolate, muscovado sugar and a hint of molasses, the good French butter I had hoped would go on a crumpet, my splash of milk, some ground almond for moistness and density, and only enough flour to bind it all together.

  “This case puts me in mind,” said Kitty, her eyes flicking across the ground, “of another mystery related to sweet comestibles.” I groaned, as the story was one too often told in our family. “The case of Xeno's pie,” went on the loathsome tick, “That pie, whenever unsupervised, would be reduced in size by half, getting smaller and smaller, but never quite disappearing. I concluded then that a mathematical or classical mind, crazed with greed, was behind the crime. Or someone who liked pie, someone of good appetite. Someone well built. Solid. Well-planted. Of good stout stock. Hefty. Husky. Sturdy.” She lifted her gaze from the ground to look, for some reason, at me.

  “Quit it, witch.”

  “I am only pointing out the obvious,” she laughed. Of course she is stick-thin, despite her locust-like appetite. She is also jealous because I developed early, but she has no boobs at all yet. As Mother says, 'If you want the boobs, you must accept the bum.'

  I said nothing, but held onto Marcus's collar as the cat strolled through the garden. It stopped among the cabbages to rehearse its repulsive cleaning routine. Marcus, normally very tolerant of all other creatures, seemed to take offence at the casual saunter of the cat and raised a rumble from the depths of his chest. Myself, I just tried to imitate the feline's insouciance. Satisfied that it was clean, it sauntered on, pausing again once or twice to stare into the middle distance, then threaded itself through the fence and disappeared with a couple of bounds into the copse, doubtless to stalk and slaughter there some poor small creature.

  Whilst Kitty prattled on, I tried staring into the middle distance myself; away from the copse though.

  “Hmm,” commented the detective, looking hard after the cat. She whipped a pen from a back pocket of her faded red jeans (which she had counter-pointed today with a canary yellow blouse, and accented with a violet fleece knotted about her waist) and made a note on the palm of her hand. Holding the pen in her mouth, she then squatted in the herb bed, tugged an outsize magnifying glass from the same pocket, and began examining the ground minutely, muttering to herself all the while. She picked up one or two of the cherries that had topped the cake, and more lately had provided the scarlet highlights that had so caught my eye, and as she crouched along she collected up a handful of little ceramic tubes, peering into each and fishing out a scrap of paper. She nodded at each one and, juggling the magnifying glass and pen, scribbled further notes, before disposing of the cherries. “Muffing,” she said, “Mmo mew cloombs.”

  Suddenly she stood up straight, holding the pen to her cherry-smeared lips as a smile of inspiration spread. She took three paces, to where the cat had performed its toilette, and squatted again to examine its footprints. As she paced over to Marcus, I stepped to one side, to stand shuffling my feet as she thoroughly inspected each of the old dog's paws. She returned to the remains of the cake and surveyed the footprints there, added more notes, which by now reached half-way up her arm, looked once more at Marcus, and sighed.

  Pointedly, she waved me aside and stared down at the ground beneath the window with pursed lips. She said nothing, so neither did I. I knew what she was thinking without having to watch her lips work as she scrawled along her arm.

  “Inside,” she finally said, and marched up the steps into the kitchen, with me trailing behind. Marcus took a longing backwards look at the forbidden cake and followed us in, but he kept on going, into the hallway, through to the salon, and thence the orangery and a peaceful lying-down place.

  Looking about her with needle eyes, Kitty took in the drifts of flour and post-baking chaos of the kitchen. She jerked open the fridge door and nodded at the feast within. “Some-one has finished the milk,” she said snidely and then, shaking her head regretfully, “All these treasures secured, and yet the greatest of them all was left in full view.” She left the fridge for me to close and slid across the floor to the window. She peered out, assessing the fall, or the force to which the cake had been subjected, and then threw up her hands in theatrical despair.

  “There is nothing for us here,” she declared. “I shall interview these suspects further, but I expect that we will have to wait for the villain to reveal himself – or herself – through some further act of infamy. I fear we are not at the end of this. I shall need a note-book.” And turning on her heel, she marched out of the garden door, in pursuit of the cat.

  “Freak,” I muttered after her.

  “Witch,” came the cheerful reply from outside.

  It seemed it was up to me to give Mother the bad news. I set off up the back stairs, following the crashing sounds, to find her making up beds in the attic rooms.

  Chapter 2