‘I told you. It was the handsome professor.’ Alice Beeton shut the hardback library book with a satisfied snap. ‘Never trust a man with a dimple in his chin.’
The kettle trilled like an old-fashioned police whistle. Alice walked across the small kitchen to turn off the gas, releasing the cap so that it gasped, the boiling water inside fizzing.
Agatha barked once in reply, her bright brown eyes staring up at Alice who now took a china cup and two saucers from the cupboard, moving the remaining crockery a fraction to retain their pleasingly neat stacks. With a silver spoon, she measured out the precise amount of Earl Grey tea leaves from the caddy into the teapot, before filling it up from the kettle and placing a knitted cosy on top.
As a self-confessed addict of crime fiction, Alice loved the twisty plots, red herrings and scattered clues that invariably resulted in her outsmarting most fictional detectives – with the exception of Miss Marple, of course. She had a prized set of all eighty Agatha Christies (after whom she’d named her dog), but she’d run out of space for any more books.
Alice’s basement flat was never at its best early in the day, only brightening up when the sun was above the buildings opposite. Pulling up the Roman blind above the sink and peering up through the barred windows to street level, she noticed the weak grey shimmer of the December sky, but the ‘beast from the east’ that was predicted had yet to arrive. It really didn’t look like it was going to snow, but you could never be too sure. Nevertheless, it was definitely a day for a thermal vest.
On the table, trumpets of orange amaryllis that one of her grateful clients had sent filled the kitchen with a cheery dash of exotic colour, but despite everything being just right in her flat, it was hard to ignore the loud neighbours upstairs. She winced as that dratted son of theirs bounced a ball across her ceiling. She flicked on the radio, which was set permanently to Classic FM, and turned up the blast of Vivaldi as a riposte.
Agatha barked again and tipped her head to one side.
‘I’m doing it,’ Alice said. ‘Be patient.’
She poured the tea from the dainty spout into one of the saucers, topped it up with cold milk from the jug and placed it on the floor where Agatha lapped at it. But just as she was pouring her own cup, the ancient egg-shaped timer pinged. Alice jumped and put the teapot down. It got her every time.
She thought, as she often did, of how this small object brought her back to sitting on the bowed wooden counter in the kitchen of Hawthorn Hall, as Mrs Doulton taught her chapter and verse about running a kitchen and a household. Her memories had the same quality as those kodak prints of the time – faded and most definitely of a different era – but Mrs Doulton remained more like a feeling. The person who felt like home. Even now, five years after she’d passed on, Alice missed her old mentor and the person who’d been more like a mother than anyone else with an ache that she knew would never subside.
She slid on her oven gloves and peered through the clear glass door, but even without the timer she could tell from the delicious aroma that the biscuits were done to perfection. They were made to the precise recipe of her Victorian ancestor, the very famous Isabella Beeton – she of the Book of Household Management fame. Alice liked to live by the standards of her long-lost relative: neatness, orderliness, punctuality, and hard work. And of course, the satisfaction and comfort of home-baking.
Dressed in her usual uniform of a sensible knee-length skirt, the thermal vest, a crisp white shirt and one of her many neutral cashmere V-necks, and her most treasured accessory – her Victorian spinner necklace — Alice prepared to leave the flat. Given the weather, she added a jacquard silk scarf for a touch of colour and warmth, wondering, as she often did, why it was that people always bought her scarves as presents. Was she really that boring? If her sister-in-law Sassy gave her another this Christmas, she was determined to actually say something for once.
She took a tin from her large collection in the kitchen cupboard and lined it with crinkly greaseproof paper before placing the cooled biscuits carefully inside. Whistling along to the cheery Handel melody, she stowed the tin in her leather satchel, then turned off the radio and put her slippers in the shoe rack by the door. She laced up her leather brogues, shrugged on her trustworthy Burberry mac and checked herself in the gilt oval mirror by the front door, raking her fingers through the fringe of her neat brown bob. She was perfectly presentable. But hang on … Alice did a double take. Was that the faint outline of a … good heavens! A moustache?
Unlike so many of the women she met, she didn’t engage in the lengthy and, in her opinion, mostly futile pursuit of fighting time. On the other side of fifty, but still feeling very much in her forties, she’d decided to make peace with her face shape changing, her waistline thickening, her hair showing off" rather more than the odd strand of silver now. But whilst she wouldn’t consider herself old, or vain by any stretch of the imagination, this new development simply wouldn’t do.
If she could muster the courage, she’d ask Jinx how to get rid of it. Although, once she gave her best friend even an inkling of an ‘in’ when it came to Alice’s appearance, she suspected the floodgates would open. Jinx had more lotions and potions and ‘hacks’ for beautifying oneself than Alice dared to count.
She took a deep breath and opened the door, steeling herself for the inevitable sight of discarded takeaway wrappers at the bottom of her steps, but for once the terracotta plant-pot-lined route up to the gate was clear.
Mr Mantis, the building manager, was coming down the wide stoop of the red-brick mansion house above her flat, sprinkling anti-slip salt onto the steps from a container that looked like a giant tube of Pringles. He was a little man – wiry and suspicious and always stooped over in his tatty leather jacket. He stank of cigarettes and cheap aftershave, and Alice didn’t trust him one little bit.
‘Miss Beeton,’ he said, elongating the ‘e’ with his whiney voice. ‘I’ve had a complaint, see. About your dog. Specifically about its barking.’ He looked pointedly at Agatha and then flicked his head in the direction of the ground-floor window above them, the slatted blinds of which now flicked closed.
‘Agatha doesn’t bark. She communicates,’ Alice replied, tightening the belt of her mac. ‘And, anyway, his son bounces his ball across the floor. You can’t imagine the noise. Consider the complaint doubled and sent back.’
‘If you don’t like living here, you could sell. I know people—’
‘I’ve told you before, Mr Mantis,’ she said, curtly, ‘I’m not selling. Now, good day,’ she added as she turned away, but not before noticing Mr Mantis’s eyeroll. The bloody cheek of it.