Bob Burke - The Curds and Whey Mystery

‘Well, anyway, thank you for your time. You’ve been most helpful.’ As I stood to leave, the phone rang.

‘Excuse me a moment, won’t you,’ said Mrs Sole and lifted the receiver. It was like watching a weightlifter doing the clean and jerk. She was having so much difficulty I was almost tempted to hold it for her when she finally managed to get it to her ear. ‘Yes, this is she,’ she whispered into the mouthpiece. There was a brief silence, then Mrs Sole exploded.

‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY’LL BE LATE?’ Suddenly she wasn’t such a retiring old lady any more. ‘IF THOSE FLOWERS AREN’T DELIVERED IN THE NEXT HOUR, YOU WON’T HAVE A JOB. UNDERSTAND?’ There was a brief pause. ‘AND YOUR BOSS TOO.’ Her voice rose a few more decibels. ‘AND I’LL HAVE YOU RUN OUT OF TOWN; YOU’LL NEVER DO BUSINESS IN GRIMMTOWN AGAIN. UNDERSTAND?’ Another pause then she changed back into ‘nice old lady’ again, as if by magic. It was terrifying to watch. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes? Why, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much.’

She heaved the phone back in its cradle and turned to me, smiling sweetly once more.

‘You just can’t get good staff any more,’ she said.

I just nodded. I was shell-shocked and wanted to be out of the hotel before she lost her cool again – perhaps with me – and it wasn’t something I thought I’d particularly enjoy. Backing away towards the door I waved faintly at her and thanked her again.

‘Not at all,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve quite enjoyed our little chat. We must do it again sometime.’

Not in a million years, I thought, as I raced across the lobby and back into the taxi. Instructing the driver to get us out of there as fast as he could, I slumped down in the back seat and considered what I’d seen. Clearly, Mrs Sole wasn’t quite the demure lady she appeared. That having been said, she was probably right about not caring about Miss Muffet’s business. She may have been as nuts as a squirrel’s winter store, but I didn’t see her as the primary suspect in this particular case. It really didn’t make any business sense for her to see the Curds and Whey B&B as a threat.

I needed to do some further investigating and the spiders seemed like the next best thing to follow up on. Who could have supplied them? It’s not as if they were something you’d order every day. I could even envisage the conversation in the pet shop:

‘Do you sell spiders?’

‘Yes, sir. We do most species. Would you like one or a pair?’

‘Well, I’d like ten thousand actually.’

‘Well, I can manage about twenty – maybe thirty at a pinch.’

Eventually every pet shop in Grimmtown would have been emptied of spiders and they still wouldn’t have had enough – whoever ‘they’ might actually be.

It was the best (and only) lead I had right now.

Back in the office, I gathered my team (okay an ex-genie named Basili – who couldn’t do magic any more – and a little boy called Jack Horner) together and explained the current case. Jack seemed very interested in the spiders. He seemed to think that a house full of them was cool for some reason.

‘If I was looking for spiders, how would I go about it?’ I asked him.

‘Pet shop.’

‘Well, that much I’d worked out for myself. Now supposing I wanted a couple of thousand of the critters; tarantulas, black widows, all the big guys.’

Now I had his attention.

He mulled it over for a second. ‘Well, not too many of the local shops would be able to supply that many.’

I noted the use of the phrase ‘not too many’.

‘Best guy to talk to would be the Frogg Prince. He specialises in reptiles, spiders, that sort of thing. If anyone could do it, he’d be your man – I mean frog. I got my gerbil off him; he’s called Fred.’

I assumed he was talking about his pet and not the owner of the store.

‘And where is this Frogg Prince likely to be found exactly?’

Twenty minutes later I was talking to an enormous frog dressed in a grey pinstripe suit. Had I not been a pig myself it might have been a bizarre experience, but in Grimmtown you tended to meet all shapes and sizes – and creatures.

Theodore Frogg was the owner of Frogg Prince Pets and apart from a tendency to ribbit occasionally when talking, he was relatively normal – or at least as normal as a frog in a suit can be.

‘Ah, yes, Mr Pigg, we did ribbit get an order that exhausted our entire supply of arachnids and we still ribbit had to provide more.’

‘Arachnids?’ He’d lost me.

‘Spiders dear boy, ribbit, spiders. Yes, it presented us with quite a challenge I can ribbit tell you. But we managed it.’ He glowed with pride, but then again it might just have been the natural state of his skin – it was quite shiny.

I was getting that tingly feeling that I usually got when a case finally started to come together.

‘Who ordered the spiders?’ I asked.

‘Well, strange to relate, ribbit, it was a most unpleasant person indeed; very small, very green, extremely smelly and with a large wart on the end of his nose. Spoke in a kind of squeaky voice. He was somewhat bedraggled and quite offensive – but he did pay in advance so I ribbit didn’t ask too many questions. In any event, I didn’t want to refuse as he had two rather large creatures with him and I ribbit found them quite intimidating. I got the distinct impression they weren’t about to take “no” for an answer.’

This was getting stranger by the minute, but the reference to speaking in a squeaky voice hadn’t been lost on me. I’d have laid money that this was the same creature that had offered to buy the B&B from Miss Muffet.

‘Creatures? What kind of creatures?’

‘Large grey creatures dressed in ribbit, well, very little actually. They did ribbit rather frighten me, I must say.’

Large grey creatures; probably Trolls. Someone was certainly making sure the Frogg Prince wasn’t going to renege on this particular deal.

‘And they just instructed you to deliver them to the Curds and Whey B&B?’

‘Good heavens, no. I just had to organise the acquisition of the spiders. They said they’d ribbit collect.’

‘And you didn’t think that this was at all suspicious?’

‘Not at all, no. I just assumed they were scientists and needed them for research.’

That certainly wasn’t likely. One small, green, smelly person and two trolls were about as far from science as you could get. ‘And I assume they paid cash up front?’

Frogg nodded guiltily, knowing he’d been rumbled.

‘So once you had the spiders, how did you contact them?’

Mr Frogg rummaged around in his wallet. ‘They left me a number. Here it is.’

He handed me a piece of paper with some scrawled digits on it. It looked like a mobile phone so probably wouldn’t lead to anything, but I had to follow it up anyway. ‘And how did they collect the merchandise?’

‘They came in a big ribbit truck and loaded everything into it.’

I thanked Mr Frogg and walked back onto the street. As I did, a large transport truck, with an equally large bulldozer on its trailer, passed by. A yellow bulldozer, I noticed idly.

Yellow!

Construction yellow!

My mind began to make the connections and I finally began to do some serious detecting.

Construction workers – or more to the point, construction trolls – like the ones that tended to frequent Stiltskin’s Diner of an evening, and very like the ones I’d seen working near the B&B.

Small, green, smelly person! Could only be an orc. And who employed all the orcs in Grimmtown? Ah, now that wasn’t so good. That was someone I particularly didn’t want to upset if I wanted to keep all my body parts intact.