The Kettle and Quill Mysteries: Four Cozy Village Whodunits in One Collection

Book One, Chapter 1: The Kettle Boils

The first customer of Easter Saturday was a wasp, and Dot Ashcombe was not inclined to serve it.

It had come in with the cold bright air when she propped the shop door open at half past nine, and now it was bumping drowsily against the front window, among the sun-faded spines of a row of Observer's Books. Dot took a postcard from the rack by the till, a view of Wrenfield church in the snow, and a clean jam jar from under the counter, and she caught the wasp at the second attempt.

"Out you go," she told it on the step. "We open to readers, not to you."

The High Street was still half asleep. A milk float hummed past the green. The honey-coloured stone of the cottages opposite had that early-morning paleness it wore before the sun got properly into it, and the lychgate of St Agnes, right beside her, was hung with a wreath of primroses some kind soul had made for Easter. Dot shook the wasp free over the churchyard wall, watched it wander off towards the yew trees, and went back inside to the smell she loved best in the world: old paper, beeswax, coal dust from the hearth, and, coming warm and lemony from the middle room, Win's baking.

The Kettle and Quill occupied the whole of the old Vestry House, which had been built in 1702 for the parish and had been, at one time or another, a vestry, a schoolroom, a soup kitchen, a store for the bier and the hand-bells, and, for twenty dull years, an office for the diocesan surveyor. The parish still owned it. Dot and Win leased it, and paid their rent on the first of each month to the churchwarden in an envelope, because Dot did not believe in paying anything important by a button.

The front room was the bookshop. Shelves went up to the beams, and two wooden library ladders leaned against them on brass hooks, and the floor dipped towards the window as if the whole room were trying to read the street. The middle room was the tearoom, with six tables that did not match, a long counter of Win's, cake stands under glass domes, and a blackboard on which Win wrote the day's offerings in chalk capitals that admitted no argument. The back room was the reading nook: two shabby armchairs, a rag rug, a wide old hearth, and set into the back wall of it, under a curve of blackened stone, a bricked-up bread oven nobody had used for perhaps a hundred years.

Inkpot lay on the hearthstone in front of the oven, exactly where he always lay. He was a large ginger tom with one eye, and he had come with the building, as the solicitor had put it, "like the damp". He opened his good eye when Dot came through, decided she was not carrying fish, and shut it again.

"It is the warmest spot in the building," Dot told him. "I know. You needn't explain."

"Who are you talking to?" called Win from the tearoom.

"The cat."

"Mm-hm. And does he answer?"

"More sensibly than some."

Win's laugh came rolling through the doorway, a laugh you could hear from the lychgate on a still day. Dot went to stand in the arch between the rooms. Winifred Okafor was taking two lemon drizzle loaves from the oven behind the counter, tall and broad-shouldered in a striped apron, her close-cropped grey hair gleaming, her gold-rimmed glasses steamed at the edges. She had flour to the elbows.

"Do not touch," said Win, without turning. "I can feel you thinking about it."

"I was thinking about the syrup."

"You were thinking about the corner piece. I know you, Dorothy Ashcombe. Twenty years I have known you." Win pricked the hot loaves all over with a skewer and spooned the lemon syrup ...