Not a muscle moved in his obsidian features. ‘At this stage, it would appear that these people are not directly involved in the case.’
‘They are not suspected of any involvement?’
‘No, they are not of further interest at this stage. Enquiries are continuing,’ he repeated, and the video mercifully wound to its inglorious conclusion. I silently thanked Letty White, many times over. Kylie gave me an overexcited look.
‘That was you, wasn’t it?’
‘If they were carrying a dog, then yes, that was us. Oh my. All right. What did you get up to on the weekend, anyway?’
I noted that while I still appeared to have Kylie’s attention, Goss was lost in her phone. I had a quick look over her shoulder at the video she was watching. It appeared to be a rehearsal of Othello, starring none other than our guest actors. One face kept appearing, centre stage. I exchanged a look with Kylie, who shrugged and rolled her eyes.
‘We’ve been partying with the actors. You didn’t hear us come in on Sunday morning? It must have been around dawn.’
‘Dawn and I have this understanding, Kylie,’ I informed her. ‘We say hello every weekday morning. At weekends, we go our separate ways.’ I looked again at Goss. Oh dear. Now she had freeze-framed on none other than Stephen, our public schoolboy and Trinculo impersonator. Oh dear. This looked like an outbreak of romantic love in its most virulent manifestation.
‘Well, I’m glad somebody managed to stay out of trouble.’ I made shooing gestures with both arms. ‘Howsoever this be, we have work to do. Jason and I bake the bread, and you two sell it. To arms, ladies. Aux barricades, citoyens!’
Kylie all but wrenched the phone out of Gossamer’s hands, and they began hauling bread trays out into the shop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Well, here’s my comfort. (Drinks)
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT 2, SCENE 2
Around nine am the bread and muffin trays were clearing away nicely. We don’t work at full capacity in January. Full service is resumed only after school holidays end, but I was relieved to find – as I was every single morning – that my customers are faithful and buy my bread all year round. By this time of the morning everyone who is going to come in on their way to work has already done so, and it’s a good moment for everyone to take a short breather. This was, therefore, the ideal moment for Meroe to walk through my front door and look me over. She wore her customary straight black dress, some lightly chiming jewellery and the inevitable purple gypsy wrap and she looked – as ever – calm, composed and exalted.
‘I see you’re all right, Corinna,’ she observed, moving closer to me. Her face crinkled in delight.
‘I am, thank you. Your supernatural assistance came in handy. It was a close-run thing, but we got in and out and Alasdair has his dog back.’
‘So I heard.’ I did not ask if she’d seen it on TV or somebody’s phone. Perhaps there’s a special psychic channel out there somewhere and all she has to do is tune in to the twenty-four-hour feed and pull news off the ether. It would be rude to enquire, so I didn’t. She looked at the ring she had given me and smiled. ‘Your courage was equal to the test.’
‘It was. Though I’ve never experienced gunfire before. Or explosions. It was …’
‘Testing?’
‘Absolutely bloody terrifying. I think I would have been furiously angry afterwards – how dare these thugs start treating our town like the Fall of the Assyrian Empire? But we had the dog, and that was what we came for. And after that I was too relieved to be really cross.’
‘How is Alasdair?’
‘Blissfully happy. A man and his dog. It must have been love at first sight.’
‘Those two have a deep psychic link. When you trust your life to another sentient being, the bond is strong. I am so glad.’ She leant over, kissed me lightly on the cheek, and whispered, ‘Blessed be.’ And with that she melted away into the street again before I could offer her a muffin. But she so rarely seemed to want anything.
Our next visitor was Mrs Dawson, in search of bread. I looked her over with care. She was dressed in a light brown suit and appeared steadfast, but somewhat sad. While Gossamer attended to the financial aspects of the occasion, I asked her how she was.
‘Tolerably well, thank you, Corinna. But, alas: it seems my guest must return to his apartment. The police have quite finished with it, and he is anxious to return to his studies. I shall miss the company.’
‘You can have dinner with him every night if you want to,’ I suggested.
She smiled. ‘There is that. So much more satisfactory than breakfast. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. I shall ask him to dinner tonight. Thank you, Corinna.’
She turned on her heel and departed. I wondered about her and Dion Monk. Especially the latter. I was eager for a talk with him. Jon’s revelations about our good Professor had intrigued me.
Since we had the shop to ourselves for the present, and Kylie and Goss, whom I had permitted to consult their phones, were engrossed, I mentally reviewed our cases. Most were tied up with a little pink bow around them, but there remained some annoying loose threads.
Sitting in the Solved column were Narek’s break-ins, the abduction of Geordie and the attack on Philomela. With the latter, we didn’t know for sure it was the Petrosians, but it certainly looked like it. All part of a ridiculously ham-fisted gang war. Neither ensemble would be troubling the scorers for a while, I guessed.
As for Jordan King … As far as I could make out Dion Monk had committed some nameless heresy of interest only to holy warriors like him. I could see that Jesus being married with children might upset a strict Catholic, but that was old news; many writers had already posited as much. If Dion Monk had found a manuscript suggesting that Jesus had founded a society of pole-dancing tax lawyers I could understand his outrage, but I couldn’t see what was exercising the young man in the Gospel of St Joseph. Perhaps he might eventually confide in Sister Mary, and she would tell me.
My other loose end was the cyberattack on Cafe Delicious. At the time, I had assumed it was the same folks who had done everything else. The more I thought about it, though, the less likely this became. Someone else had probably done it. Just a common everyday cyberattack then? Presumably so.
My train of thought was interrupted by a sudden inrush of customers, and I returned to my core business: baking bread and bready products and selling them. I decided I would stick to that.
The rest of the day passed without events of note. Kylie went to the bank to deposit the day’s takings, and I returned to my apartment and had a lazy afternoon playing with my cat and making a light dinner of salade nicoise. Horatio demanded tribute from my bowl and took the tuna away to the bathroom floor to be alone with it, and I poured myself a glass of chardonnay. For years I had abominated the stuff and drunk only sauvignon blanc from New Zealand’s Marlborough Sounds. My unlamented husband James had drunk chardonnay, and would pontificate endlessly on the subject unless discouraged with a cake fork. I thought it tasted like chateau collapso shaken up with pine bark: the stuff you smear all over gardens if you wish to discourage unauthorised plant life. But I had recently discovered some wonderful offerings from South Australia which tasted like heaven in a glass, and I had decreed that James or no James, I was going to reintroduce it to my life.