A Gaggle of Ghastly Grandmamas: Wonky Inn Book 9 Read online

  “Thank you. And Florence?” She had turned to go. “Can you make sure Monsieur Emietter knows it’s for Silvan and that he’s still famished.”

  Florence paused, studied my face and burst out laughing. “Oh, Miss Alf! You are naughty!”

  Thoroughly podged, fresh-faced Silvan turned up on time to his interview with the detectives. On the pretence of being helpful, I went in search of him to escort him to the corner of the dining room at ten thirty, although I’m absolutely certain he knew his way around the inn sufficiently well to have located the bar himself.

  Ho-hum.

  He shook George’s hand as he entered and the two exchanged some small talk before George indicated where he should sit and introduced him to Borewick, Elise and Ezra.

  I sidled quietly behind the bar, concentrating on melting into the background, but of course, George noticed me there and headed straight for me. “You really shouldn’t be listening in, Alf,” he scolded.

  “I’m not,” I protested. “But I have to get the bar sorted out for lunch. That means checking my stock of wine and spirits.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” I asserted, putting my hands on my hips and drawing myself up to full height. “I’m letting you interview people here out of the goodness of my heart. You’d have to take them to the station otherwise, and you know that would be onerous, to-ing and fro-ing all day long.” He couldn’t deny that. “So, why don’t you let me do my job and I’ll let you do yours.” I pretended to busy myself with a stock list.

  “Sheesh,” George sighed, but he left me to it, and I hid myself behind a couple of crates of wine I’d piled onto the counter just for this very purpose and listened in to the conversation.

  “You’re Horace Silvanus?” Elise was asking, and Silvan nodded.

  “I am.”

  “And Phyllis Bliss is your grandmother? Is that correct?”

  “She is. My mother’s mother.”

  Elise consulted her notes. “Were you aware that there had been a murder here at Whittle Inn?”

  Silvan hesitated. “Ye-es … A number of them.”

  “She means in the last few days,” George butted in.

  “Oh, yes. My grandmother filled me in on that over breakfast. I wasn’t sure which murder you were referring to.”

  George turned to Elise. “We’ve had a couple of incidents here in the past—”

  “Is that right?” Elise wrote that down. “I didn’t know that.”

  “One of the producers from The Great Witchy Cake Off,” Silvan told her, endeavouring to be helpful.

  “Among others …” George muttered, keeping his eyes on his own notepad.

  Elise took up the mantle once more. “Yesterday, when we interviewed Mrs Bliss, she told us that she and the victim in this case had a disagreement over you.”

  Silvan returned Elise’s piercing stare with a look of total nonchalance.

  “The victim’s name was Delia Cuthbert. Does that mean anything to you?” Elise leaned forward.

  “Delia Cuthbert …” Silvan swung away from her, the front legs of his chair leaving the floor tipping his face to the ceiling as though he were thinking. “Delia … Delia …” He tipped the chair down again. “Nope. That name means nothing to me.”

  “I have a photo of the victim, here, Sir. If you’d care to take a look for me,” Borewick handed over a snapshot, maybe six inches by eight. I couldn’t see it, but I imagined that it would be of Delia after death.

  I shuddered.

  Silvan studied it. He rubbed the corner of his eye, as though to ease a sudden tic.

  “Do you recognise that woman, Mr Silvanus?” Elise asked.

  Silvan returned the photo. “I don’t believe so, but you know I’ve met an awful lot of people over the years.”

  “What exactly is it you do?” Elise asked. “I ran you through our databases and I couldn’t find even the slightest trace.”

  Silvan didn’t answer immediately. From somewhere in the inn came the sound of a vacuum. The fire in the bar’s grate spat and crackled. The floorboards creaked overhead.

  “Mr Silvanus?” Elise prompted.

  “I pretty much live my life off-grid,” Silvan said eventually, his tone cavalier. “That’s the way I like it. I’m hired to do a bit of work here and a bit of work there. You know how it is.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Elise retorted. “I couldn’t find any tax records for you—”

  “I’m not sure I make enough money to pay tax.”

  “Or even a birth certificate—”

  “You’d have to take that up with my parents,” Silvan responded quickly, “if you could find them.”

  Elise changed tack. “Mrs Bliss told us that Delia had insulted you and the work you do.”

  Silvan shrugged. “There’s no accounting for some people. Haters gonna hate, isn’t that what they say?”

  I frowned and peered through the gap in the crates. Anyone with only a passing awareness of Silvan might have mistaken his laid-back posture and devil-may-care attitude as relaxed apathy, but there was just something in his irreverent responses that suggested studied indifference to me. He wanted them to think he knew nothing and didn’t care. He wanted them to think of Delia as something of a crackpot.

  A woman who was strange and not dangerous.

  Instinctively, I knew that he had lied to the police, and from the way that Elise was looking at him, I think she knew that too. Why would he do that?

  It didn’t sit comfortably with me, hearing him lie in that way.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to be in the room with him anymore. Or any of them. What is detective work, but a series of questions designed to elicit a series of responses? Unless you ask the right questions, you can’t necessarily get to the truth. Nobody seemed any nearer to knowing who Delia was or why she had been killed.

  Did I think Silvan had killed Delia? Of course not. And neither had Finbarr or Phyllis or Charity. Somewhere along the line, we were all missing something vital.

  Hearing Silvan give such pat answers to the police seemed a ridiculous waste of time. I abandoned all pretence of hiding and marched for the door. Pulling it closed after me, none too quietly I confess, I paraded down the hallway to The Snug. The door had been locked to keep out idle gossipers, snoops and other ne’er-do-wells. I had the key, of course, but not on me. That would have been far too straightforward.

  I tapped the door with my wand. “Reserare!”

  The lock clicked and I turned the handle, pushing it away from me and stepping inside. I flicked the light switch. The day was dark and dreary, typical of early February, and I needed some illumination.

  To a casual observer, there would have been nothing to see. The Snug looked like it had before I’d agreed to use it as a storeroom for Delia’s pets, but I could smell the animals. I could see the faint trace of the spider’s web in the corner of the grate.

  And more than that, in my mind’s eye, I could see Delia suspended in mid-air, almost as though she herself had been held in gossamer silk threads spun by an enormous spider.

  “Alfhild?”

  Gwyn’s voice startled me. “Grandmama!”

  “You’re unusually jumpy, my dear.”

  I puffed out my cheeks and flapped at her half-heartedly. I hadn’t spoken to her properly for what seemed like days. She’d been busily entertaining—or appeasing, depending which way you looked at it—our guests.

  I collapsed onto the bench, reaching for a cushion and plumping it up. “What went on in here?” I asked her, resting the cushion on my lap where I could beat the living daylights out of it if I wanted to.

  “I’m sure I don’t know, Alfhild.”

  “Everyone has been interviewed,” I said, “except you.”

  “There’s nothing I can tell anyone.”

  “You must know something about the Cuthberts.” I scratched my head.

  “Why would I know anything about them?” Gwyn harrumphed. “I’ve never met them before.”


  “What do you mean, you’ve never met them before?”

  Gwyn started to turn translucent, a sure sign she was about to apparate away. “I’m sorry about your friend, but you needn’t get chippy with me.”

  “Wait! Grandmama?”

  She’d almost disappeared. Only a soft glow remained where she’d been standing. If you hadn’t known the signs to look for, you wouldn’t have seen her there at all. “What?”

  “Wasn’t she a member of Kappa Sigma Granma?”

  “Good heavens, no. We have certain standards, you know.” The air popped delicately, and she vanished completely.

  “Well, that casts a different light on things, doesn’t it?” I said to myself and went in search of Charity.

  We sat together in my office, the ghost cat on my feet, Charity petting an enormous white rat, the hamster running miles on his wheel. Mr Hoo and the white owl that we’d freed from its cage chirruped together conversationally on a perch next to the fire, the white owl keeping a hungry eye on the prize in Charity’s casual grasp.

  I couldn’t help feeling nervous.

  “Are we able to tell when a booking is made?” I asked as Charity cycled through a number of screens on my computer, clicking the X button and trying to create some semblance of order.

  “Why don’t you ever close some of these down?” she complained. “I mean, look, what’s this game?”

  “Castles and Crones,” I said. “It’s brilliant!”

  “Well you don’t need it open now, do you?” She clicked on the cross and shut it down.

  “Noooooo!” I reached for the mouse, but Charity slapped my hand away. “I hadn’t saved what I was doing.”

  “Chill, boss. It will have automatically saved your progress, I’m sure,” Charity said, and handed me the rat. “Now focus.”

  She opened our database and in a few quick clicks, we were at the search screen. “What are we looking for? Cuthbert?”

  “I presume so.”

  Her fingers danced over the keys. “Well, that was easy. Here it is.” She jabbed at their name. “We wouldn’t have checked them in unless they had a reservation.”

  “But if they’re nothing to do with Kappa Sigma Granma, then how come we even gave them a reservation?” I puzzled.

  Charity studied the screen. “There’s your answer. The date of the booking is the third of January.”

  I leaned closer and the rat sniffed my face. “The third of January. That was before we decided to run this event.”

  “Right.”

  “So this is a pre-existing booking and nothing whatsoever to do with Kappa Sigma Granma.”

  Charity nodded. “That would seem to be the logical inference.”

  “Thank you, Mr Spock.”

  I sat back and thought through my encounters with the Cuthberts. “I made the assumption that one or the other, or possibly both, were with the sorority, because Mrs Cuthbert, well, and Delia come to that, elected to sit with Phyllis Bliss on her table. It made sense that they were known to each other.” The rat jumped into my lap.

  “Maybe that’s what they wanted you to think?” Charity suggested, taking the rat from me before I dropped him.

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  Charity smirked. “You know I love you, Alf, but you can be so naïve sometimes.”

  I folded my arms. “Go on. Amaze me with your genius.”

  “Have you never gate-crashed a party? Or scammed your way into a gig or a club?”

  “Of course.” Only about a million times. “When I was younger.”

  “What did you do if you were discovered?”

  I thought back to those days in my late teens, early twenties, and probably middle twenties if I dared to recall more recently. “I pretended I was with someone that had been invited, of course.”

  “Exactly.” Charity stood and popped the rat back in his cage, much to the white owl’s disappointment. “Had we realised at the time of check-in that Mrs Cuthbert and Delia were not part of the party, we would have welcomed them—”

  “Of course we would have.”

  “—but we’d also have arranged separate spaces for them away from everyone else. A separate dining area. Separate activities if they’d wanted them. We would at least have had a conversation with them about their requirements and expectations.”

  I nodded. “That’s true.”

  “But they were happy to remain under the radar, so to speak.”

  I frowned. “Are you suggesting that they wanted to blend in?”

  Charity shrugged. “It’s one possibility.”

  I leaned over, resting my elbows on the desk and sinking my head into my hands. “But I don’t understand why. I mean, if someone from Kappa Sigma Granma killed her, that’s a weird coincidence. Delia was annoying, yes, but not so much that you’d purposefully kill her. Would you?” I glanced at Charity, hopeful that she could cast some light on the situation.

  “I wouldn’t,” was the best she could come up with.

  “So that leaves her mother.”

  “Who has disappeared without trace, oddly enough.”

  “She’s a person of interest. Elise told me that.”

  “So somebody needs to find her.”

  I pretended to be amazed. “I do admire how you cut to the chase that way.”

  Charity thumped my arm. “Oh get away, you. Go and tell George what we just found out. I’m not sure it makes a difference, but he definitely needs to know.”

  George and I sat together in the kitchen, coffee in hand, biscuits ready for dunking. Almost like old times.

  Almost.

  “Your boyfriend is holding out on me,” George said.

  “I know.” I didn’t feel like beating around the bush. I hated game playing.

  “What else do you know?” George asked.

  I shook my head and signed. “Honestly, I don’t know anything. Only what I’ve shared with you.”

  George picked up the last chocolate Hob Nob and I narrowed my eyes at him. “Would you tell me if you did know anything?” he dangled the biscuit in the air between us.

  “Probably not,” I admitted. He stuffed the whole biscuit in his mouth at once.

  “That’s callous!”

  “You said you didn’t want to share,” he said, his mouth still full.

  I plucked a Jammy Dodger from the plate before he could take that one. “I’m doing my best here. Trying to keep this event going for Gwyn, while pacifying my frigid boiler—”

  George stopped chewing. “What?”

  “Never mind. My point is, I’ve a lot on. And yet again, as you so rightly pointed out to DI Liddell earlier, I’m up to my neck in another murder. This isn’t going to do my reputation any good.”

  George snuck out a hand and pinched the Custard Cream. “Maybe that’s the point.”

  He’d lost me. “What is?”

  “Back when I first met you, we found out that people were deliberately trying to damage your reputation. Do you remember?”

  How could I forget? “Yes.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s happening now.” George performed a swift dunk with his biscuit and popped the whole thing straight into his mouth.

  “But these are all Gwyn’s friends,” I reminded him.

  “Are they?” George tapped the side of his nose and took a large gulp of his coffee.

  “With the exception of Mrs Cuthbert and Delia, yes.” I thought out loud, “You’re discounting the Mrs Cuthbert-murdering-her-daughter theory, then?”

  “Not at all, but strictly between me and you, I’m beginning to doubt that woman even existed.” He waved his coffee at me, and I automatically reached for the pot to refill it, like the well-trained waitress I was. “Elise may not have been able to do any background checks on Silvan, but I know for a fact she’s come up a blank on Mrs Cuthbert, and Delia too.”

  “So they’re not who they said they were?”

  “That’s quite likely.” George offered me the plate of bis
cuits. All that was left was a plain Rich Tea and a plain Digestive. I opted for the Digestive on the grounds that it was bigger and would contain more sugar.

  George turned his nose up at the poor little Rich Tea.

  “Do you have any butter?”

  “Butter?”

  “I like to spread butter on my Rich Tea biscuits.”

  I stared at him, quite frankly appalled at the idea. “You can’t dunk a biscuit if it has butter on it!”

  “Hmm.” When the butter didn’t instantly materialise, he ate his poor little Rich Tea in all its naked glory anyway. “What I’m thinking now,” he said, brushing a crumb from the corner of his mouth, “is that one of your guests killed Delia Cuthbert or whoever she is, to make your inn look bad. That’s a strong motive to my mind. I have no idea why you make so many enemies.”

  “But I’d never met any of these women before,” I said, struggling to come up with a plausible explanation as to why any of them would seek to damage my reputation.

  Unless this wasn’t about me, and as George had suggested, it was about the inn.

  That begged the question of whether there was a witch staying at the inn who wanted the inn to fail. I shivered to think that anybody could be that malevolent. Bad enough that they had targeted Delia for no other reason than she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Could it be a historical grudge of some kind?

  George drained his second coffee and reluctantly stood. “I’d better get back to it. You know we still haven’t managed to nail Gwyn for an interview yet.”

  “Ezra mentioned that earlier,” I said. “I’ll try and persuade her to speak to him.”

  “I also meant to ask you about the parakeet.”

  I’d forgotten about her.

  “Did you find him?”

  “Her, apparently. No, we didn’t,” I said. “Archibald looked everywhere.”

  “Because you said the parakeet went missing the night before you discovered Delia.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Only, we think she must have found it shortly before she died, because the forensics have come back. They show numerous green parakeet feathers on her jumper and a couple in her hair.”