Happy Birthday Inspector

Rowena cut the cards as Sister Margaret stubbed out her cigar. 'You should stop that you know ... terrible for your skin.' The circle of women round the card table fell silent for a moment, before they burst out laughing.

'As if we have to worry about that,' she blew a final plume of blue smoke into the air. On Wednesday nights, Rowena dealt poker cards rather than tarot - it had become a good excuse for the women to get together in the back room of McGilligans, and the only place where Vi and Swotsy could openly show their love for one another.

Violet affectionately kissed the top of her head. 'I've got a surprise for you love,' she whispered, and she slipped her thumb and forefinger between her lips, letting out a low whistle. 'Happy Birthday,' she said as a well built guy strutted onto the dancefloor.

The women shrieked with laughter, and Sister Margaret clapped her hands in delight. 'A strippogram!'

'No - better than that,' Vi smiled as he began his routine.

'Your feet's too big ...' Swotsy laughed, her eyes dancing with love as she turned to Violet.

'Not for me,' her lips parted as she closed her eyes and kissed Swotsy.

'Get a room,' a low voice growled as a tiny woman approached the table.

Rowena looked up. 'Mum, where've you been? We started without you.'

'You have no idea ...' she shook her head and poured a shot of Schnapps from the bottle on the table. Lindisfarne had its mead, but Sister Margaret ran a nice sideline in Little Hamptonpoint Valley Schnapps - the nuns had become quite adept at distilling over the years, and the schnapps was a good front for what really went on in the distillery behind their convent near the school. They had been excommunicated years ago once the Church became suspicious, but no one in Suffolk seemed to care or even to have noticed that the links with Rome had been severed. Schnapps went out the front door, and the key ingredient for Creme de Nain out the back while successive generations of East Anglian children passed through the shady corridors of the school. She waved a surprisingly wrinkle free finger at her daughter. 'All day, the same card, every time I dealt. Death.' Everyone shifted uncomfortably. 'I told you, the moment that boy arrived back in town it would be trouble.'

'We'll sort it out,' Sister Margaret said firmly. 'We always do.'

'We were getting so close,' the old dwarf shook her head. 'What with Wilma and now Alice gone, I'm the last one left from the circus days. I miss them,' she wiped a tear from her eye.

'He wanted to know why I had his mother's ring ...' Swotsy said quietly. 'If CJ hadn't been looking out for me ... I think we threw him off the scent.'

'We have to get him out of here,' Violet's eyes glinted. 'Donohoe, Bill and Jack have made a fortune out of Wilma and Alice's discovery. Dad's always said they promised to go back to Ireland millionaires, but I'm damned if I'm going to let him corrupt my James.'

'And let's not forget it would have been too dangerous without your mother Bitsy's help,' Sister Margaret patted her niece's hand. 'If she hadn't suggested adding catnip to counteract some of the obvious problems of using dwarf cat instead of dwarf human in the recipe ...'

Rowena laughed. 'All these years, there was the men thinking Alice was the Sweeny Todd of Southwold, bumping off dwarves when they came to 'visit' ...'

'When we've been helping them escape over the channel to safety in Holland.'

'To the Dwarf Liberation Front!' Rowena's mother raised her glass. 'And happy birthday Swotsy, bravest of all our agents. That's why Alice loved you like the daughter she never had.'

'What are we going to do now?' Swotsy said quietly. 'It was only a matter of time before this French buyer - Monsieur ... No one knows his name do they?' she turned to Violet for confirmation. 'Bill and Jack have been whacking up the price of Creme de Nain for years. No wonder he's come looking to cut out the middle man ...'

'Greedy bastards,' Rowena's mother hissed. 'They'll get what's coming to them. Especially after they bumped off Sister Mary ...'

'She was the spitting image of Alice wasn't she?' Rowena said sadly. 'They got him to ...'

'The dwarf catcher?' Violet paled.

Rowena nodded mutely. 'He killed her as a warning to us. Just like he killed the love of my life, the fire of my loins, my Clive before he could tell Joe how brave dear Alice had been ...' she disolved into tears.

'All the women in this town are beautiful ... and long may it stay that way,' Sister Margaret looked at each woman in turn. 'The men will get what's coming to them, but Joe Sullivan is an innocent in this. This 'Monsieur' is using him to get to the secret, and we must remember Alice's dying words, the reason she left him Gideon Stone's estate ...'

This All Makes Perfect Sense

. . . murder and mayhem?”
“Inspector Smith-Jones, I am painfully aware that this is a most inopportune time to say this, but has anyone ever told you what lovely eyes you have?”
Inspector Smith-Jones turned away, tears suddenly welling up in the corners of her left and right eyes. She removed the tiny rainbow-colored paper umbrella from her glass and took a sip of her gin and tonic.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .” Joe said, reaching out to her. Smith-Jones waved him away.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, and then began to laugh. “Mostly I get comments on the size of my feet.”
“How rude. I hardly noticed them. Your feet, that is. Well perhaps when you tripped down the stairs, but that could happen to anyone. I don’t know why I said that just now about your eyes. I guess it’s all the stress, all the weirdness that’s going down. Lovely music, though.”
“It’s okay, I understand. People say strange things in situations like this. And yes, it is quite lovely. The music, that is. I've always been rather fond of James. Especially the old stuff.”
“Right. What we need to do here is focus. In fact I learned a special technique for focusing back when I was doing Special Ops for the British Army.”
“You were in the army?” she asked, somewhat surprised.“Yes, but it’s not something I like to talk about. Some really bad stuff went down back in ‘96. We were on the Menlung Glacier, hunting Yeti. I assume that you’re familiar with mountaineer Eric Shipton and his 1951 Everest Reconnaissance expedition?”
“I’ve heard the lads talking about it in the pubs now and then.”
“Well, we were doing a follow-up. What I’m now going to tell you might help you understand a little bit of what is going down here. You see Jack, Violet’s father, was my commanding officer. The second week out we came to a small village called Panda Town. That’s not what it was really called, but we named it that. You know how it is in the army. Anyhow, Jack met a lovely little native lass. She swept him off his feet. I think he was going through a mid-life crisis at the time. Anyhow, there was a third member on our team who was also a local boy.”Inspector Smith-Jones drew in a large quantity of air; “You don’t mean . . .”
“Exactly. So you see, in a way, this all makes perfect sense.” Joe raised his St Pauli Girl and drank deeply.

The Will

Inspector Smith-Jones looked down at her feet. She sighed. Size 43 boots. Ever since she was a little girl her feet had been a problem. What had the specialists called it? Supermegapodiatry, that was the loathsome terminiology. The other kids had called her SuperMeg. These monstrous feet had been following her around her entire life, hounding her. No matter where she went, there they were. Another sigh. Well, everybody had their cross to bear.
“I’m sure you’re familiar with those popular films, ‘Lord of the Rings,” she finally said.
“Lord of the Rings? Of course - those fantasy movies with all those weird creatures and what-not.”
“That’s right. You might remember that there were dwarves featured in that film. Well, the director, Peter Jackson, is a real stickler for details. So he hired several real dwarves as consultants, to, you know, add authenticity to the film. Clive was the assistant to the head of the dwarf division.”
“I didn’t know that. I’ve been out of touch for years. I’ve been abroad.”
“Then you also couldn’t know that Gideon Stone, Head Dwarf, befriended Clive; he became his mentor. The two were inseparable, two peas in a pod. It went so far that Gideon re-wrote his will, making Clive the sole inheritor of his rolling estate in Northumberland. As you might imagine, that didn’t sit too well with everybody. What I’m now going to tell you is, at this point, confidential information. I didn’t say it, and you didn’t hear it, is that clear?”
“I’m not so sure I want to hear it. I’ve got a lot on my mind just now,” Joe said. He felt himself sliding further down the hill, closer to an opening abyss.
“Oh, you want to hear this, my friend. Because at the very last moment, the name on Stone’s will was changed. Clive was removed and your mother’s name written in. Yes, your mother had become Gideon Stone’s secret lover.”
“What? No, this can’t be!”
“Yes, and what’s more, two days after the will was changed, Gideon Stone was found murdered, shot fifteen times in the heart with a .44 Magnum.”
“Do you think Clive . . .”
“No, Clive had a solid alibi. And anyway, he loved Stone as his own father. Who shot Gideon Stone? I thought that should be pretty obvious by now. But perhaps even more interesting for you is Clive’s alibi. He couldn’t have killed Stone. Joe, I just lied to you about that horrid painting. I thought I had to. That painting is Clive’s alibi. It’s part of the will. You see, on the night Stone was murdered, Clive was . . .