SERPENT
I’ve never been in a club like this before. Clubs like this aren’t meant for people like me. Nevertheless, it was ridiculously easy to get in.
Private function? Not if you know the world of hotels, bars, back streets and staff entrances like I do. A smelly alleyway. A steel door, a narrow corridor, past champagne crates, then a velvet curtain.
Peeling back the layers of an onion to enter the rotting heart.
As expected, the heart is dark, and I slip into the shadows. Points of light flit across the floor, but they don’t get me. I look out for a hiding place, but it’s hardly necessary. Nobody here sees me. Nobody wants to see me. I might just as well be invisible.
All eyes are on the little stage at the other end of the room.
They’re dancing on it.
Eve.
And the serpent.
Long legs, topless, a sparkly little thing round her hips, the reptile draped over her shoulders.
It should look obscene, but on her it seems strangely innocent. Childlike even. A scene from paradise.
Obviously, I don’t buy the whole innocent act. She ought to know better. I’m not quite sure of all the things a bride has to do before her wedding, but definitely not this. Not this shameless making-a-show-of-yourself. She feels so safe. She’s mistaken. Oh, she’ll soon realise just how mistaken she is!
A champagne cork pops and Eve cheers. She hops off the stage and jumps into the lap of the man who opened the champagne. He passes her a glass and she laughs, throwing her head back, curls like a waterfall.
Everyone laughs.
If you think about it, they’re laughing at me.
Eve shakes her hair, and it’s like snow. She’s so blond. Pale as a piece of wood that’s been left in the sun. Suddenly I wish she weren’t so blond. Does she think she’s beautiful? Do other people think she’s beautiful? I can’t gauge it anymore. At home she wears flowing silk dresses in misty hues, and she moves gracefully, but now there is something akin to shattered glass in her voice.
Suddenly I’m struggling to suppress a laugh too.
Now I’ve got her, trapped forever more as if she were in a glittering snow globe. There is no escape for her, no matter how loud she laughs, no matter how much champagne she drinks. I raise my phone and quickly take two, three photos, almost surprised at how easy everything is all of a sudden.
How clear.
How cold.
As I’m taking photos, the pale snake frees itself from Eve’s shoulders, lunges forward, with a swinging motion and flicks its rosy tongue at me.
A grin steals across my face.
I have to admit I’m looking forward to the honeymoon.
ONE
BELLS
Agnes Sharp opened the village quack’s door and poked her nose outside. A cold wind blew in her face, tugged at her scarf and instantly seeped into her limbs. Ugh, yuck!
For a moment she toyed with the idea of calling a taxi. Then she cast another glance back to the waiting room, where a crowd of people seemed to be damn happy to finally see the back of her. At least as happy as she was to be able to give her back to those petty-minded fuddy-duddies. There had been some unpleasant scenes and even a bit of a tussle over a dog-eared magazine, and when the receptionist noticed Agnes looking, her brow furrowed with concern.
Back to the waiting room? No way!
Onwards!
Agnes fished her walking stick out of the umbrella stand and stepped pluckily onto the pavement. At least the air out there was fresh, not as stale as in the surgery, and a bit of exercise had never hurt anyone.
Except her hip maybe.
Leaning heavily on her walking stick, off she strode.
Clack-clack-clack.
Like a strange three-legged animal.
It only occurred to Agnes two houses down the road how dark it was already.
Not even five o’clock and dark already. Pitch-black, in fact.
It was enough to give her the heebie-jeebies . . .
Her village had only ventured into the modern day ten or twenty years ago and installed a couple of streetlamps, islands of light in the night. There weren’t many of them. Agnes spotted the bus stop at the other end of the road, in a pool of light. Full of promise.
That’s where she was heading.
But first she had to struggle past the church, which, shrouded by the graveyard, lay in thick, soupy darkness.
Agnes clutched her walking stick. Her biggest fear was not noticing some kind of obstacle in the darkness, having a fall, not being able to get back on her feet and then being found and rescued by the waiting room clowns, let alone by the snooty receptionist who had taken the magazine from her before.
The scandal. The shame. The snide remarks.
It didn’t bear thinking about!
So, she proceeded even more slowly and used her stick to feel in front of her for trip hazards in the dark. Nothing. To top it all, the church bells suddenly started up, all at once, as if they were poking fun at her. Agnes winced. Up until very recently, she wouldn’t really have noticed the ringing, a muffled background noise like so many others, but now, with the hearing aid, each chime of the bell went through her like a little shock. Pretty stressful things, these hearing aids!
Agnes limped stubbornly on.
But once she had almost made it to the beam of light at the bus stop, something made her stop. It took a while for her to realise what it was exactly.
The bells.
Or to be precise: the bell.
All the other church bells had fallen silent, but one was still chiming, getting quicker and quicker, and quicker again. In her long life, Agnes had spent a lot of time near these bells, but she’d never heard them ringing like that. So erratic, panicked almost. Something wasn’t right.
She looked back at the church, which still lay in deep darkness, then over at the bus stop, where a bus could appear at any moment.
Curiosity finally got the better of her.
While the bell began a hectic finale, Agnes turned around with a sigh and groped her way back towards the church using her tried-and-tested three-legged technique.
By the time she had reached the graveyard and was following the dully shimmering strip of gravel path, the bell had long since stilled.
She got to the church door, felt for the knob with her free hand, turned and pushed. The door opened with a bloodcurdling creak, a scream almost.
Inside it felt even colder than outside, if that was possible. She looked around. A light was flickering on the altar, but she wasn’t interested in that. Another light caught her attention, a narrow strip peeking out from beneath the door to the belfry.
In there, then.
Before Agnes set
off again, she took a moment to listen.
Outside, the wind was howling at the top of its lungs. It had been a long time since she had last really heard the wind.
But in here: nothing.
Or almost nothing.
Thanks to the hearing aid, she could hear something like a gentle dragging, like something soft against stone or wood. Agnes wasn’t sure. She didn’t quite trust the new hearing aid as far as she could throw it, and she obviously didn’t trust her own ears in the slightest.
There was only one way to clear it up: Agnes dragged herself towards the chink of light. She tried the door, discovered it was open, and she was suddenly bathed in yellow light. Awaiting her was a medium-sized room with an unimaginatively carpeted floor and a row of narrow benches and stools along the walls. One of the stools had tipped over. A sign on the wall pointed out the importance of washing your hands, exactly like one she’d seen before at the doctor’s.
The unusual thing was the ropes.
The space at the foot of the bell tower was dominated by six thick ropes, which disappeared into the ceiling and presumably led up to the bells, tonnes and tonnes of singing bronze, centuries old.
Five of the thick ropes were each neatly knotted in loose loops at the end and were swinging gently back and forth.
The verger was hanging from the sixth.
He wasn’t completely dead yet. His fingertips were still twitching. But the strange angle of his head and neck told Agnes that he was beyond help.
Broken neck.
Nothing could be done.
The body was hanging in an unusual, half-kneeling position, his head in a loop at the end of the rope. Not just hanged then, the rope wasn’t hanging high enough for that. The verger would only have had to stretch out his legs to free himself from the rope. Curious.
Agnes stepped closer and carefully prodded the body with her stick. The verger swung gently back and forth, an expression of infinite surprise in his fixed eyes.
“You probably imagined your Friday evening a bit differently, didn’t you?” she murmured. “Me too!”
Agnes had always had a somewhat relaxed relationship with the dead—after all, they didn’t make any stupid comments, they were discreet and polite, albeit not always hygienic. Panting, she sat down on one of the stools—to think, but also because her hip really was fed up now.
She knew that bell ringing wasn’t an altogether risk-free endeavour. Once the huge bronze bells up there were in motion, nothing and nobody could stop them. She had heard of cases where a distracted bell-ringer got his foot caught in one of the loops and was then yanked several feet up in the air by the corresponding bell, only to land back on the ground again with broken bones and back injuries.
If a neck were to
get caught in the loop instead of a foot . . .
Agnes looked at the dead verger, whose fingertips had now stopped twitching, and noticed that one of his legs was also sticking out at an unhealthy angle.
Aha! That’s what must have happened! But how did you manage to get your head caught in a loop, especially after the ringing, when all of the other ropes were already neatly rolled up? An accident was out of the question, unless the verger was crawling through the room on all fours, drunk as a lord.
She sniffed but couldn’t smell any alcohol.
Suicide?
She hadn’t known the verger personally, but from afar he had made a rather reserved impression. Not the sort to dramatically break his neck with several tonnes of bronze. Aside from that, the man looked far too surprised for that to be the case.
Still murder then.
Murder in Duck End.
Again!
Agnes sighed and clambered to her feet. The murderer must have set the bell in motion and then quickly put the loop around his neck. The verger had been dragged upwards, and the bell had broken his neck instantly. That explained the surprised look on his face.
Then the bell had jingled itself out, getting quicker and quicker, while the murderer—that’s a point, where had he got to?
Agnes wasn’t the fastest on her feet. It was quite possible that the killer had slipped outside before she arrived. Maybe he was outside crouching behind one of the pitch-black headstones, waiting for her to leave. Or he was hiding in the church.
Or . . .
Agnes suddenly felt overwhelmed by the situation. For years, she had fought against getting a hearing aid, and now that she had one in her ear, everything seemed loud to her.
Even the silence.
And then there was the body . . . It was too much aggravation for one day. She was an old woman with a bit of plastic in her ear. Who was interested in what she thought, anyway? What was she doing there? And what was she hoping to achieve?
She realised she had no desire to do her civic duty and call the police. They would take her to the station and scream in her ear—and the rest of the day was sure to be a write-off. Apart from that, the local police were good for nothing. Complete waste of time. She decided to make her way back to the bus stop. Life was hard enough; there was no sense in letting the dead verger spoil her evening. Maybe she could call the police from home, anonymously of course, then they could deal with the dead body and the corresponding criminal. It was nothing to do with her and she was too old for this squit. She was looking forward to a cosy evening by the fire—maybe a nice cup
of tea and some music on the radio.
Or just an early night, with a bulging hot water bottle and a good book, but definitely not a murder mystery.
Agnes Sharp hobbled back to the inviting glow of the bus stop, by some kind of miracle caught her bus, and was soon on her way home.
To Sunset Hall.
But eager anticipation turned to unease as the bus ambled its way through the village, and Agnes stared out of the window, only able to see her own reflection, complete with cold-reddened nose. A few years ago, she had turned her home into a house share for senior citizens, and living together had lots of advantages—if you were in a bad mood, there was usually someone there you could take it out on, but there were also disadvantages. Not much got past the residents of Sunset Hall. Today they would be waiting for her full of curiosity—with some sort of warmed-up dinner and a whole host of awkward questions. They were dying to test out Agnes’s new hearing aid.
Charlie, Bernadette, Winston, Brexit, Marshall and, of course, Edwina. Individually they were each good eggs, but when something as exciting as a doctor’s appointment took place, they transformed into a mob and wanted to know exactly how it went.
It had gone badly, and Agnes had no desire to let her house-mates in on the embarrassing details. The bad thing about a hearing aid was that you heard things that you could really do without. The words “hippies” and “antisocial,” for example. And if a hefty magazine happened to be at hand . . . At least she would be able to distract her housemates with the story of the dead verger. With a bit of luck, it would keep them busy for long enough to facilitate her escape up to bed.
With a bit of luck—because just lately a murder in Duck End was no great shakes anymore.
The bus stopped at the village square, where they’d recently fished the pharmacist out of the pond. It passed where the chairman of the pigeon fanciers’ club had been found dead in a bush—not a mark on him, but there was definitely something fishy about it—and hurtled purposefully along the road towards Sunset Hall.
As a heater blew warm air up her skirt, Agnes’s face flushed hot and red, and her mood got darker and darker.
What was going on in Duck End, her home village?
Things like this didn’t used to happen there.
Any conflict in the village had traditionally always been solved in a civil fashion. People had spread nasty rumours, shaved cats, hammered copper nails into neighbouring apple trees or, at a pinch, written poisonous anonymous letters in to the village rag, but as a rule, murder was frowned upon.
Until now, that is.
Now it looked as if the residents of Duck End were suddenly making up for all of the murders that they had suppressed over the last twenty years.
And of course, the trend had started back in the autumn with Agnes’s friends
Lillith and Mildred. Thanks to Agnes, those cases had been solved, but that didn’t seem to stop the villagers from merrily murdering away.
Agnes did not approve.
Was she expected to somehow clear up all the mess in the village? They’d be waiting a long time. After all, she’d been retired for so long, she could hardly remember exactly what she used to do in the police. There had been lots of files, and every now and then someone had brought scones into the office, that much she was certain of. The rest was a bit hazy.
She stared gloomily at her reflection, which was getting more and more red in the face, until the bus finally spat her out in front of Sunset Hall.
Agnes hobbled up the garden path, her house in front of her managing to look cosy even in the inhospitable winter months. Rose hips flashed on bare branches, ivy snuggled up to the walls like a green blanket, warm light illuminated the windows and the welcoming, and recently painted, coral-red front door. Like a picture-postcard. Then Agnes spotted her housemates through one of the illuminated windows. As expected, they had assembled in the lounge, even Brexit the wolfhound was there, and they were lying in wait, ready to pump Agnes for information about her doctor’s appointment.
She took a deep breath, opened the door, hung her stick on the hall stand and wriggled out of her coat.
Then she entered the lounge, ready to do battle, the story of the dead verger on the tip of her tongue.
“You’ll never believe what happened to me tod—”
She fell silent because it dawned on her that nobody was interested in what had happened to her in the village, today, yesterday, the day after tomorrow or any other time for that matter. Brexit briefly but politely wagged his tail, but the others’ attention was focused on a letter resting on the coffee table, harmless, white and rectangular.
“What’s that?” Agnes asked, suddenly offended by the general disinterest. After all, she had got a hearing aid at the behest of her housemates—and now nobody gave two hoots about it!
“A letter,” Charlie murmured. She was their new arrival and far too glamorous for Agnes’s tastes, but she did make outstanding pancakes.
“I can see that!” Agnes hissed. It was a mystery to her how a letter could be more interesting than her story about the verger.
“It’s for Edwina!” Bernadette added gravely. Bernadette was blind and fat and cynical. Behind her dark glasses, she could be gloomy like no other.
Oh!
Agnes had to sit down. A letter for Edwina really was something to write home about!
Edwina was what
some people would refer to as “not all there.” Such people didn’t understand how unbelievably “there” Edwina could be when you lived with her. Yoga, dancing, games, antics with Hettie the tortoise. Apart from that, she baked the hardest biscuits for miles around. Superb missiles. Practically indestructible, like Edwina herself.
Only, she was by no means a likely correspondent. In all their years of living together, Agnes couldn’t remember ever having seen a letter addressed to Edwina—not even junk mail. But today was the day.
She looked more closely. The letter seemed official, with a little plastic window you could see the address through. Agnes put on her reading glasses and gingerly fished the missive off the table. Edwina’s name was clearly written on it. And: Sunset Hall.
She sighed.
“We thought we’d wait for you to open it,” Marshall explained. He used to be in the military, and as a general rule waited for Agnes in crisis situations, whether she liked it or not.
By the look of it, they had already formed factions. The first, anti-letter faction consisted of Bernadette, Winston, Marshall and Charlie. The other faction was Edwina, who had adopted the warrior yoga pose. Not a good sign.
Winston manoeuvred himself next to Agnes in his wheelchair. “We even wondered if we should just burn it,” he whispered to her. Winston was responsible for peace and logic in the house. A controversial suggestion like that wasn’t like him at all.
“It’s my letter! No way!” screeched Edwina, who still had good ears. Good ears, good eyes, good bones, a good figure. It was only soft and woolly inside her head. Edwina snatched the letter out of Agnes’s hand and made to open it.
“Maybe it’s a bomb!” Charlie warned.
That gave them all food for thought. Edwina used to work in the Secret Service, and taking into account all of the facts, a letter bomb seemed a great deal more likely than a straightforward letter.
“It is not!” Edwina objected, but stopped in her tracks regardless.
In a daring manoeuvre that almost cost Agnes her balance, she managed to bring the letter back under her control.
She thought for a moment.
“Let’s open it,” she decided finally. “We can still burn it afterwards.”
It took a while for Agnes to poke open the envelope with the help of a knitting needle—she didn’t really believe in the thing about the letter bomb, but better to be safe than sorry. The letter consisted of a single sheet of paper. Agnes unfolded it and adjusted her reading glasses.
“Dear Edwina Singh,” she read.
“That’s me!” Edwina beamed.
The rest of the household was hanging on Agnes’s every word, a rare occurrence.
“I am delighted to inform you that you are the winner of our grand prize draw!” Agnes read.
“Hurrah!” Edwina
cheered.
LATER ON, it took them quite a while to ascertain how it had come about that Edwina was able to even take part in a prize draw, let alone win the thing. Normally they made a concerted effort to make sure Edwina had as little contact with the outside world as possible. It was better that way.
Above all, for the outside world’s sake.
Strictly speaking, Marshall was to blame. The mistake happened about a month ago, when, worn down by hours of pestering, he had let Edwina on the internet so she could look at tortoise videos.
Then he had gone to the loo and subsequently got a bit side-tracked.
In the fifteen minutes of internet time that she got out of it, Edwina had managed not only to watch videos of mating tortoises, order a heat lamp for reptiles and register Marshall for a dating agency, but she had obviously also taken part in a prize draw—and won!
Now they were getting their just deserts!
“AND WHAT has she won?” Charlie asked gingerly.
“A . . .” Agnes read on, speechless.
Then she read it a second time.
And a third time just to be sure.
It was all far worse than she had feared!
TWO
PANCAKES
Agnes was sitting in bed, wide awake and absolutely livid. She had got out the big guns: the hot water bottle was bulging, hot tea was steaming in her mug, music was tinkling from the radio, and a good book was lying open on her lap.
Not a murder mystery, obviously. Something with a bit of class.
Despite everything, the cosy atmosphere she had imagined in beautiful technicolour detail didn’t quite come to fruition. The heating had stopped working again and the hot water bottle was no match for the arctic room temperature. Her tea was cooling rapidly. “Jingle Bells” was booming mercilessly from the radio, bringing back unpleasant memories of the verger.
And on top of that, there was the matter of the holiday too.
As ill luck would have it, Edwina really had gone and won a holiday on the internet. A romantic getaway, no less! For two. To the coast. To a high-end luxury eco-conscious hotel. Romantic! Edwina! And instead of trying to talk her out of it, as would be right and proper, her housemates were busy sucking up to Edwina to win the second guest’s place.
The whole thing was completely out of the question, of course. None of them was in any position to keep Edwina in check on their own. No way. And in a romantic hotel, even little mishaps could have dire consequences. Apart from that, Agnes found the “eco” in the hotel’s name unsettling. Carrots could be eco-friendly, couldn’t they? And were then mostly a bit wrinkly. But a hotel? It didn’t make sense . . .
She realised she wasn’t remotely interested in her book, whether it had a bit of class or not, and threw it out of bed in annoyance. Her tea was cold, the hot water bottle was gurgling mockingly, the radio switched to an untimely rendition of “The Little Drummer Boy.”
Parumpumpum-pum.
Agnes flicked the switch on the radio, then the reading light.
Then she lay in the dark and fretted herself to sleep.
WHEN SHE entered the kitchen the next morning, wrapped in three cardigans and still stiff with cold, the rest of the household was already sitting down to breakfast. Highly unusual, normally Agnes was the first to the table. Winston was swaddled in a garish wool blanket and with his bald head, he looked alarmingly like a giant baby; Marshall was wearing a scarf and military hat to keep out the cold; Bernadette had just brought her duvet to the table; Edwina was wearing a down jacket, and a tea cosy as a head covering; and a fabulous fur hat sat atop Charlie’s head.
Brexit’s breath was steaming.
Agnes sniffed. It smelled good. Of coffee and . . .
Charlie had made her famous pancakes, and Edwina had already stacked four of them on her plate. Eyes bigger than her stomach, again, but nobody said a word. Of course they didn’t.
“Good morning,” Agnes murmured.
Marshall leaped up and pulled up a chair for her. Then he poured her some lukewarm coffee. At least that was still working.
Other than that, her housemates were good for nothing this morning. Becapped and bundled up, they sat there watching as Edwina stuffed one pancake after another into her mouth.
At least nobody had uttered the stupid “holiday” word.
But once Edwina was finished—she left one partially eaten pancake, just as Agnes had feared—Winston plucked up the courage.
“So, Edwina,” he said gently. “Have you had any thoughts?”
Agnes resolutely swallowed down a bit of pancake and attempted a distraction tactic.
“We need a plumber!” she said loudly. “I’ve had a look at the boiler. It’s not just on the blink. It’s completely broken! Again!”
This news would normally have prompted widespread consternation, but today they all did their best to ignore Agnes. It was outrageous!
“Thoughts about
what?” Edwina asked after a while, poking around with her fork at the spurned pancake.
“Well,” Charlie murmured. “Who you’d like to take . . .”
“On the holiday,” Bernadette added, as if there could be any doubt.
Marshall looked as if he wanted to throw his hat in the ring too, but he noticed the look on Agnes’s face and loyally kept his mouth shut.
Edwina nodded. “I have. Of course I have.”
She rolled the partially eaten pancake up and held it up to her eye like a telescope. Then she looked from one of them to the other.
Charlie, Marshall, Brexit, Bernadette, Winston, Agnes.
Agnes, Winston, Bernadette, Brexit, Marshall, Charlie.
Charlie . . .
Was Agnes seeing things, or did her housemates really sit up straighter when Edwina turned her pancake telescope on them?
“So?” Bernadette asked finally. “Who are you taking?”
“Lillith!” Edwina beamed.
Bernadette groaned, Charlie rolled her eyes, Marshall put his hand to his forehead, and Winston slumped down a bit beneath his garish blanket. Agnes felt a hysterical laugh rising in her throat but managed to pull herself together.
Edwina, seeming to sense the general resistance, plopped her pancake back on her plate. “Lillith is my best friend,” she explained. “And she doesn’t get out much.”
“No way!” Agnes belligerently sipped her coffee. “You can’t go to a hotel like that on your own. Someone has to take care of you!”
“And someone has to take care of the hotel,” Bernadette muttered.
“Lillith can look after me!” Edwina wasn’t giving in without a fight.
Agnes finally exploded. “Lillith is dead and in a tin!” she hissed.
Unfortunately, their friend Lillith had fallen prey to a bullet a few months ago and had resided in a coffee tin in the flower window ever since. Did Edwina really prefer the company of a tin of human ashes to theirs? That really did speak volumes!
Edwina did finally look a bit guilty. “Obviously, I would prefer to take Hettie, but Charlie said we shouldn’t break the cold chain,” she explained sensibly.
Hettie was Sunset Hall’s pet tortoise; she spent the cold months hibernating reptile-style in the fridge.
“What about Brexit?” Agnes asked sarcastically.
The wolfhound heard his name and optimistically turned his attention to the last pancake.
Edwina shook her head earnestly. It was obvious that she had already considered it. “Brexit’s too big. He can’t come!” With that, she apologetically pushed her pancake towards the dog, and Brexit chowed down.
Agnes noticed she was holding her breath. Now Edwina had run out of
non-human companions, and things were heating up again. To her great consternation, Agnes realised that even she was beginning to find the thought of a holiday quite attractive. Sure, whoever the chosen one was would have Edwina on their hands—not exactly fun—but a well-heated hotel room alone seemed like a luxury at the moment, and there would probably be lots of good food and maybe even an entertainment programme.
Apart from that, she wouldn’t have to grapple with the dead verger. She had this vague feeling that sooner or later the thing would be pinned on her, incompetent as the local police generally were.
But if she were to just pack her case . . .
She wrestled with an excitement of sorts and stood up.
“I’m going to call the plumber!” she announced and stalked out of the kitchen. Suck up to Edwina?
As if!
WHEN AGNES returned with crushing news, the mood had shifted. Before, they had all been trying to curry favour with Edwina, now all eyes turned optimistically to Agnes.
Odd.
“The plumber has vanished,” she declared gloomily. Presumably also murdered, as was the current trend in Duck End. Or fled. Maybe he was the killer? Or he’d just run away with his mistress? Agnes didn’t really care. What was for certain was that he would not be repairing their boiler, and the plumber from the next small town along had, by his own admission, ...
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