Bloody Awful. Georgia Evans
seen someone or something. She got out of the car and listened. Gran had made her practice and now Alice used all her Pixie hearing to cast around her. A small animal, a mouse or stoat, moved through the ditch, another several scurried in the hedge opposite and somewhere in the cluster of trees by the allotments, a larger creature, a badger perhaps, snuffled in the earth.
Other than an owl overhead, there was no sign or sound of life.
Didn’t mean there wasn’t something out there. A few weeks ago she’d learned the hard way not being alive didn’t stop some creatures.
She waited for several minutes, every Pixie sense alert, but nothing stirred other than the four-footed creatures looking for dinner.
And Gran was expecting her back for hers.
Alice got back into the car and headed for The Gallop, the house she’d grown up in and shared with her grandmother and her brothers when they were home. Not that Simon, now a POW in Germany, was likely to get home any time soon, and she worried daily about Alan, as they didn’t even know where his ship was most of the time.
As she pulled into the drive, Alice noticed a chink of light in the kitchen curtains. Gran must have missed that. Better take care of that right away.
The aroma of fresh baked bread greeted Alice the minute she opened the door. Closing it carefully, she parted the blackout curtain and stepped into the warmth of the kitchen.
“Gran, that’s smells wonderful!”
“Thought you might fancy some, my love,” Helen Burrows replied, looking up from her knitting. Air Force blue this time. Probably made a nice change from khaki. “I made extra. Thought you could take one to Gloria in the morning. How’s she doing?”
“Irritated at being cooped up, feeling guilty that Mrs. Jenkins has organized the villagers to bring her meals, and a little uncertain about whether or not she wants to go out with Andrew Barron tomorrow night.”
Gran smiled. “She’ll go. You mark my words. Here, take your coat off. There’s a mushroom pie in the oven.” She rolled up her knitting as she stood. “I’ll get it out while you wash your hands.”
They split the pie. Amazing really what Gran could make out of very little. She’d no doubt found the mushrooms in one of the fields and although Alice was getting tired of carrots, they did liven up the look of food on the plate.
The fresh bread, the honey Gran produced from the pantry, and a nice cup of tea rounded off the meal nicely.
“Delicious, Gran,” Alice said, licking the last trail of honey off her finger. “Nothing like fresh baked bread. It really is a treat.”
“You didn’t hear the news then?”
“What news? About the mother of Mrs. Grayson’s evacuees disappearing?”
“Hadn’t heard that.”
“She went up to London to help out her mother, who’d lost her house in the Blitz. She spent the night in an emergency shelter with her mother, then they went out to buy her mother new clothes and nobody has seen them since. Mrs. Grayson is getting more than worried. Those boys are pretty sick.”
“No one’s checking?”
“Of course. Mrs. Willows is in contact with the WVS in Shoreditch but so far, not a sign. After several nights of heavy bombing everyone’s inclined to think the worst.”
“Those poor little boys.”
“They don’t know anything yet. Mrs. Grayson thought it best to wait until they get well. Sometimes people do turn up in hospital.” They also disappeared off the face of the earth. At least Jim and Wilf had a good billet and Mrs. Grayson was willing to keep them.
Gran refilled Alice’s cup. “After that, we need my good news. There’s a new baker moving into Stone’s.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“From Doris.” Their charlady carried news all the time. “Seems Roger Hudson got a call asking him to make sure the shop was cleaned up and the flat over it in order and he asked her to take care of it. She said he was also told to get ready for a bulk shipment of flour.”
Good news. “That will put Whorleigh’s nose out of joint. He won’t have much market for his day-old bread any more. Wonder who he is. Or she.” Wasn’t impossible these days. It was downright interesting the jobs women managed quite comfortably when there weren’t men blocking the way.
“Time will tell, my love. Maybe it’s a CO sent here for war work.”
Would Gran never stop poking over her one-time prejudice? “If it is, someone else can have him. I’ve got mine.” Her love, her Peter. Her own.
“Anything else?”
Better see what Gran made of it. Alice mentioned the fast-moving shape that supposedly disappeared or…
“Humm,” Gran sipped her tea. “No sign of anything?”
“No, I listened as you’ve been teaching me.” Developing her Pixie powers after years of pretending they didn’t exist had been interesting and tiring. “The only creatures alive were animals.”
“If you saw something, my love. There was something. I’m going to talk to Howell Pendragon in the morning, and you’d better have Peter sharpening stakes.”
“Surely Gran, we won’t have another vampire!” One had been more than enough to last a lifetime.
“We know there were two. Maybe more. The wrong sort seem to travel in packs.”
Lovely! “And is there a right sort of vampire, Gran?”
She ignored that. “I’m going to talk to Howell and we’ll see.” After last time, Alice wasn’t the least sure she wanted to “see” anything. Not that she’d had much choice then. “Oh, by the way, dear, there was a phone call for you. A Doctor Pettigrew from Dorking. He wanted to talk to you about Miss Waite’s cause of death.”
Chapter Five
“All correct, I trust?”
Bloch shrugged. It was bound to be but how in Hades Weiss had all this prepared in a couple of days was beyond him. He opened the identity card. So, he was now William Arthur Benjamin Block, 28 years old and declared physically unfit for military service because of flat feet and asthma, but apparently possessed the stamina to work long hours in a bakery.
“Finding Eiche’s killer is our priority,” Weiss said, “but we need results for our benefactors in Adlerroost. Flattening that munitions factory would be an appropriate gesture.”
“I’ll need supplies: plastic explosives, detonators.” And better luck than Eiche.
“You’ll have what you need.” Bloch hoped so. He fully intended to succeed, come what may.
“And I go, when?”
“Tomorrow. Wednesday. Time to ready things and open for business on Friday.”
Bloch shrugged. “Pity we can’t change it to Block’s Bakery, but I don’t plan on staying long.”
“You’ll stay until you succeed and start by finding Eiche’s killer.”
If there was one. But that he’d keep to himself. “He shall die. Slowly.”
“No!” Weiss frowned. “I have orders. When we find the killer, we capture him. Incapacitate if need be. They want him in Adlerroost.”
Of course. They’d played power games with vampires and fairies, why not a powerful human? All the more reason to see this one dead. He did not want to see the Nazis breeding a race of vampire killers. “I will be there Wednesday.”
Doris Brewer put her hand on her hip and looked the new baker in the eye. “Like that, is it?”