Read The Kettle and Quill Mysteries free: the opening chapter

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 on in slow, shining ribbons. The smell filled the room. "Poppy is coming on the ten-fifty from Ashby?"

"If she remembers to get off at the right stop."

"She is fifteen, not foolish."

"She was on her phone the whole of Christmas. I am not sure she knows where her feet are."

"Then she is fifteen," said Win comfortably, and set the loaves on the rack to cool.

---

By half past ten the shop had found its Saturday rhythm. A couple in matching anoraks bought a walking guide to the Cotswold Way and asked whether there was a toilet (there was, upstairs, and the chain needed a firm hand). A man Dot half recognised from the bowls club spent twenty minutes in Military History without buying anything, which was his right. Two women from Ashby Market settled in the tearoom with a pot of Assam and a slice each of drizzle, and Win stood over them until they had taken the first bite and made the proper noises.

Dot sat behind the till with the volunteer ledger open, writing up the week's prices in her small, square archivist's hand. She had worked for thirty-eight years at the Kingsbury County Record Office, the last fifteen as senior archivist, and she had never quite lost the habit of writing everything down as if a stranger might need to read it in a hundred years. Harold had teased her about it. He used to say that if she ever left him a note saying she had gone to the shops, it would have a date, a time, a reference number and a cross-reference to the shopping list.

Four years since he had died. Four years since a mild September afternoon, a row of King Edwards, and a heart that had simply stopped while he was bending over the fork. Forty-one years married. She could say the numbers now without her voice doing anything odd. The grief was still there, but it had worn smooth, like a step that a great many feet have used, and she had learned to walk on it.

The shop had helped. Win had helped more. It had been Win, two years ago, who had sat at the pine table at Lavender Cottage with a bottle of sherry and said, "Dot-Dot, you have six thousand books in that house and nobody to read them to, and I have a pension and a bad habit of feeding people. The parish wants a tenant for the Vestry House. Are we going to be two old women talking about it, or two old women doing it?"

They had done it. And on Tuesday evenings, after closing, they and a handful of friends sat in the back room with a pot of tea and whatever cake was left over and talked things through. They called it the Kettle Club. It had begun as a joke and was now a fixture, as much a part of the week as Sunday.

The bell over the door gave its tired jangle at five to eleven, and a voice said, "Gran. Your village has literally one bus."

Poppy Ashcombe stood on the mat with a rucksack the size of a small sheep, a long dark plait over one shoulder, and her father's freckles. She was wearing a grey hoodie that came nearly to her knees and, Dot noted, chipped purple nail varnish. Her phone was in her hand. Of course it was.

"It has two," said Dot, coming round the counter. "One in the morning and one in the afternoon. Hello, darling."

Poppy allowed herself to be hugged, and then, briefly, hugged back hard, which Dot had learned to treasure because it was not offered often. She smelled of bus and of something sweet and synthetic, strawberry perhaps.

"Dad says hi," said Poppy. "And he says to tell you he's emailed you a thing."

"What sort of thing?"

Poppy rolled her eyes with the expertise of long practice. "A retirement flat thing. With a balcony. He made me promise to mention the balcony."

"Consider it mentioned," said Dot.

"POPPY!" Win came through from the tearoom like a weather front, arms wide, flour and all. "Look at you. Taller than your grandmother."

"Everyone's taller than Gran."

"Mm-hm. Cheek already. Come here." Win enveloped her. Poppy disappeared entirely for a moment and emerged pink and laughing. "Now. There is drizzle, there is parkin, there are rock cakes I made for the old men who like to break their teeth. What will you have?"

"Can I photograph them first?"

"Photograph them? They are cakes, not film stars."

"For the Instagram," said Poppy patiently. "The shop's. I set it up last summer, remember? You've got eleven hundred followers. Some of them are probably even real people."

Win looked at Dot. Dot looked at Win.

"She means the pictures on the internet," said Dot. "With the little hearts."

"I know what Instagram is, Dorothy. Grace has it. She puts up pictures of her lunch." Win waved a hand at the cake stands. "Go on, then, child. Make them famous."

Poppy was already through the arch. Dot followed and watched her granddaughter crouch at the counter, tilting her phone, moving a glass dome an inch to the left, frowning at the light from the window as seriously as any of Dot's old colleagues had ever frowned at a damaged charter. She took perhaps forty pictures of one slice of lemon drizzle. Then she took a picture of Win's floury hands holding the skewer, and Win, protesting, struck a pose with it like a conductor.

"That's the one," said Poppy, satisfied. "Hashtag Easter Saturday. Hashtag village life."

"Hashtag eat your cake," said Win.

---

Bernard Tulley came in at a quarter past eleven, as he did most Saturdays, folding himself under the low lintel with the care of a tall man who has struck his head on a great many old doorways. He was seventy, a little stooped, with a neatly trimmed white beard and half-moon glasses, and he wore the brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches that Dot privately believed he had been born in. A jeweller's loupe hung on a cord round his neck. He brought with him a faint smell of clock oil and liquorice.

"Dot," he said.

"Bernard."

That was, more or less, the whole of their greeting, and had been for years. Bernard did not waste words. He had been Harold's chess partner every Thursday evening for twenty years, and Harold had once said that Bernard could make a single "Hmm" do the work of a paragraph.

"Scone?" said Win from the counter. "Cheese or fruit?"

"Fruit," said Bernard. "Please." He took his silver pocket watch from his waistcoat, opened it, looked, and closed it again. It was a gesture so habitual that Dot no longer noticed it unless she was nervous, and she was nervous now, because under the counter, in a carrier bag from the Ashby Market garden centre, was Harold's carriage clock.

She had been meaning to do this for a month. For four years, if she was honest.

She waited until Bernard had his scone and his tea, at the corner table by the window where the light was good, and then she brought the bag over and set it down on the chair opposite him. Her hands felt clumsy.

"I wondered," she said, "whether you might look at something."

Bernard put down his knife. He looked at the bag and then at her, over the half-moon glasses, and said nothing, which was a kindness.

She drew the clock out. It was a small brass carriage clock, a little over five inches high, with bevelled glass sides and a white enamel face and a leather case that had gone soft with handling. It had been a wedding present from Harold's aunt Muriel in 1980. It had sat on the mantelpiece at Lavender Cottage for forty-one years, and Harold had wound it every Sunday night after the news, with the little key he kept in the dish on the windowsill, and it had stopped. She did not know exactly when. Some time in the week after the funeral, she had noticed it had stopped, and she had not been able to bear to do anything about it.

"It was Harold's," she said. "Well. It was ours. He wound it. It stopped, after. I don't know what's wrong with it. I don't know if anything can be done."

Bernard did not touch it at first. He looked at it the way, Dot thought, a good doctor looks at a patient before he picks up the stethoscope. Then he turned it gently in his long careful fingers, lifted the loupe to his eye, peered through the side glass at the movement, and turned it again.

"French," he said. "Eighteen-nineties, perhaps. Good maker." He looked a little longer. "Something's broken in the striking train. Not the going. A part's gone."

"Can it be mended?"

Bernard set the clock down on the table between them, very carefully, as if it were asleep.

"Some take time," he said.

It was not an answer, and yet it was. Dot felt her throat go tight, and she was cross with herself, because it was a clock and she was sixty-seven and there was a customer in Gardening.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me yet." He wrapped the clock back in its bag with great gentleness and set it at his feet. Then, as if nothing at all had happened, he picked up his knife and buttered the other half of his scone. "Win's made these too big again."

"I heard that," said Win.

---

Ambrose Tait arrived at twelve with a cardboard box in his arms and a bow tie the colour of a ripe plum.

He was not a Saturday volunteer. Thursdays were his day: for eighteen months he had come in every Thursday to price the antiquarian stock, sitting upstairs in the little office with his reference books and his pencil, and he had been, Dot often said, worth his weight in first editions. But a house clearance in Ashby Market had turned up a box of old county histories and he had been "simply unable to wait".

"Dorothy, my dear." He kissed the air beside her cheek. He was a round, pink man of sixty-six with a soft fluting laugh, a tweed waistcoat strained gently over his middle, and the beautiful manners of another age. "And Winifred, queen of the kitchen. And this must be the famous granddaughter."

"Poppy," said Poppy, who had come through with her phone. "Hi."

"Charmed. Absolutely charmed." Ambrose produced a small round tin from his waistcoat pocket and opened it. "Peppermint? I'm never without them. Terrible habit. Better than the cigars, my doctor says."

Poppy took one. Dot took one too, because she always did; it would have been rude not to, and Ambrose would have been hurt. He took one himself and tucked the tin away, and as he did so the light from the window caught the ring on the little finger of his right hand: a heavy gold signet ring with a small engraved acorn on its flat face. Dot had admired it once and he had told her, with his fluting laugh, that it had been his grandfather's and that the Taits had been "mighty oaks from little acorns, my dear, and then little acorns again."

He set the box on the counter and lifted out the top book, a stout calf-bound volume with a faded gilt spine. "Rudder's Gloucestershire. Seventeen seventy-nine. Not the best copy in the world, the front board's held on by prayer, but look at the plates."

Dot looked. They were lovely: a bird's-eye view of a great house with tiny formal gardens and tinier horses in its park. She felt the old pleasure of it, the pleasure of a thing made carefully and kept.

"We'll talk about it on Thursday," she said. "You'll price it properly."

"I shall price it lovingly." He set the book down. "And on Monday, you know, I'm helping on the judging table at the fair. Cynthia's roped me in. Somebody has to keep the plates straight while dear Lionel pronounces sentence on the sponges." He gave his fluting laugh. "One would almost pity the bakers."

"Lionel's judging again?" said Win from the arch. "After last year?"

"Cynthia says no one else will do it."

"Cynthia," said Win, "is correct, for once. Nobody else will do it because nobody else is that rude."

"Now, now, Winifred."

"He told Mrs Garside her scones were like 'geological samples'. She cried in the car park. I delivered her son."

"I know, I know," said Ambrose, and he made a small apologetic face, as though Lionel's rudeness were somehow his to apologise for. "He was always like that, you know. Even in the old days, when we had the shop together. He'd tell a duchess her Chippendale was a reproduction to her face, and be right, and lose the sale." He shook his head fondly. "Never mind. It's only cake."

"It is never only cake," said Win darkly, and went back to her oven.

---

The man himself arrived at a quarter to one.

Dot heard the cane before she saw him: a sharp tap on the step, another on the mat. Lionel Crabbe came into the shop the way a cold draught comes in. He was seventy-six, thin and very upright, with a clipped silver moustache and a cream panama hat he did not remove. He carried a malacca cane in one hand and, in the other, by its strap, a battered tartan thermos flask.

Everybody in Wrenfield knew about the flask. Lionel drank only his own lapsang souchong, a smoky Chinese tea that smelled, Win said, like a bonfire in a wet sock, and he would not drink village tea under any circumstances. He carried the flask to the church fete, to Parish Council meetings, to funerals. He had once, famously, carried it to a wedding at Wrenfield Hall and poured himself a cup during the speeches.

"Mrs Ashcombe," he said. He never called her Dot. Sometimes he called her Dorothy, and when he did it was usually a prelude to something.

"Mr Crabbe. Can I help you?"

"I very much doubt it. But I shall look." He tapped his way to the Local History shelves, which were by the window, and stood before them with his head tilted, scanning the spines. Over his shoulder he said, "I passed through your tearoom. I see the scones are still the size of a child's head."

"I heard that too," said Win.

"I intended you to, Mrs Okafor." He did not turn round. "Your scones are an act of aggression."

"Would you like one, Mr Crabbe?"

"I would not."

"A cup of tea, then. On the house. I have Darjeeling."

"You have a tea that has been sitting in a supermarket warehouse since the Coronation," said Lionel. He lifted the tartan flask an inch, like a man raising a glass to toast his own good sense. "I have my own, thank you."

Poppy, at the arch, caught Dot's eye, and her expression said, as clearly as words, Is he for real? Dot gave her a tiny shake of the head.

Lionel took down a slim cloth-bound book from the top shelf. Dot knew it: A Short History of the Parish Church of St Agnes, Wrenfield, by a former curate, printed in Ashby Market in 1938, foxed, with a fold-out plan of the church. She had priced it at six pounds. He opened it, turned to the back, ran a long finger down a page, and grunted.

"Inventory of the plate," he said to no one in particular. "Nineteen thirty-eight. Two patens, a flagon, a pewter alms dish. Ha." He closed the book with a snap and brought it to the till. "I'll take it."

"Six pounds, please."

"Robbery." He counted out the coins exactly, from a small leather purse. "I'm writing a pamphlet, you know. On the church plate of this district. Somebody should, before the dioceses sell it all to Americans."

"I didn't know," said Dot. "How interesting."

"It is interesting. Far more interesting than anyone here realises." He put the book under his arm. As he did so, he looked up and saw Ambrose, who had been very quiet beside the counter, unpacking the box of county histories with unusual concentration.

"Ambrose," said Lionel.

"Lionel. Good afternoon." Ambrose's voice was perfectly pleasant. "I was just telling Dorothy you're judging on Monday."

"So I am." Lionel considered his old partner for a moment, his head on one side, the way he had considered the shelves. Then he smiled. It was not a friendly smile. "We must have a little chat about provenance, old friend."

There was a short pause. Win, in the arch, had stopped wiping her hands.

"Of course," said Ambrose. "Any time. You know where I am."

"I do," said Lionel. "I always have."

He turned and went to the door, his cane tapping, the tartan flask swinging from its strap. On the step he stopped and looked back at Dot, and for a moment, in the bright cold light from the street, his thin face looked almost mischievous, like a boy who has found out something about a teacher.

"This village has more secrets than your shelves, Dorothy," he said. "I intend to air one or two."

The bell jangled. The door swung shut. Through the window Dot watched him cross the High Street without looking either way, his panama bright in the sun, and vanish into Back Lane.

"Well," said Win. "Happy Easter to you too."

"What did he mean?" said Poppy. "Secrets. That's so dramatic. Is he, like, okay?"

"He's Lionel," said Win. "He is never okay. He enjoys it."

Ambrose laughed. It was his usual soft fluting laugh, but it went on a little too long and a little too high, like a note held by a singer who has run out of breath and will not admit it.

"Oh, he's always been like that," he said. "Mysteries. Hints. He used to tell customers he knew where the bodies were buried in every great house in the county. Pure theatre. He adores an audience." He reached into his waistcoat for the tin of peppermints, opened it, took one out, and began to unwrap the little twist of paper around it.

Dot watched his hands. She could not have said why she watched them. Perhaps it was only the archivist in her, the old habit of looking at the small thing while everyone else looked at the large one. They were neat, plump hands, and the gold acorn ring shone on the little finger, and they were not quite steady. The paper rustled. It took him three tries to get it off.

The sample ends here.