No Vivaldi

No Vivaldi

By Edward Clinton (excerpt)

She needed energy and she looked briefly at the loaf on the cutting board. The eyes of the man in charge followed hers. “On holidays, are we?” the little leader asked, looking at her bags all packed and ready for the return flight home. She did not respond. It didn’t seem to matter. He walked slowly around the room till he stopped over by the bread board. “Who murdered the loaf?” he asked blandly, poking at the hacked up loaf of bread. The room began to blur a bit as she brought her attention away from the fire and up to his face. She was going to have to answer questions sooner or later. But then, as she stared at his face, she set about assigning an animal to him, something she always did upon first meeting a person. Aardvark, she thought, and was pleased. She had never had an aardvark before. The other two could be Brendan Bear and Mr. Macaw. (Kids would like that.) Then she noticed how awfully silent the two upstairs were. What must they be thinking?

An ambulance decorated by a neon orange stripe slipped subtly into the courtyard, dousing its lights. No one emerged.

“Come on, luv, let’s have a bit of chat, then,” Aardvark prompted, appearing to be nice. “The pub up the great hill have anything to do with this?” he enquired, as it pubs held the answer to every crime.

Another darkened ambulance squeezed its way silently into the tiny Mews Courtyardm crunching the gravel. Again no one emerged. She remembered, from her American crime programs, that ambulance crews are not allowed into a crime scene until it has been made safe.

“What do you use these for?” Aardvark asked, pausing in his endless circle of the room long enough to hold up the pair of surgical scissors.

She knew she had better say something. “Clippings.”

“Any particular kind of clippings? The keenest price on a tin of pears perhaps?

No Vivaldi. Photo - Elena

Mean, sarcastic little aardvark, she thought. That was men for you – can’t figure something out and they get mean right off. “Ideas for stories. I write children’s stories,” she said.

“Childrens’ stories, it is then?” he said dismissively as people, especially men, often did. “You want to tell us what happened here tonight? He asked as he dropped the scissors into a zippered plastic bag he had produced from nowhere. It already contained the bread knife. “I have to tell you that what you say from now on will be taked down and used against you at your trial, if there is a trial, of course.” Now he had a small pad in hand and was scratching notes. He spoke as he wrote. She hated people who spoke as they wrote. “Are we sure we weren’t up the great hill in the pub drinking; and it made us crazy enough to do a thing like what has occurred here tonight?”

“I don’t know what happened. I had nothing to do with it. I only found him. That’s all.” Strangely, her eye kept coming back to that loaf. It did look murdered – he was right. She wasn’t used to cutting her own bread and had made quite the mess of it. “I had dinner at the pub. It’s the only place in town. When I returned home I heard the cat calling out in the wind, It was a terrible night…”

“Fierce night, yes, Ma’am,”

“I thought the cat might be hurt, so I went out into the wind with my flashlight. It was raining then as well. What with the wind and the rain, I couldn’t hear anyrthing, but I saw the black and white cat go up that horrible steep hill in the abandoned garden.”

(Ellery Queen, Mystery Magazine, September 1993)