Slay Bells Ring (A Christmas Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) Read online

  “I took photographs of the scene, just in case they might come in handy. I haven’t even had chance to look at them. They might give us a clue,” I explained as Wiggles stopped the car outside Claus Cottage.

  “Well, I’ll leave you ladies to your gruesome fun.”

  “Won’t you come in, Wiggles? I’m sure Gilbert will have something tasty prepared.”

  “I’d love nothing more, but I’m on the way to make an arrest.”

  “What? You shouldn’t have stopped to drive us if you were on important police business!” Mrs Claus scolded.

  Wiggles laughed. “I always have a few minutes to spare to be chivalrous.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “Who are you arresting?” I asked.

  Wiggles shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. What I can say is that it’s not at all related to Greasy’s death. Let’s say that someone was seen selling shaved ice with a distinctly yellow tint.”

  “Eww! You’re kidding!” I exclaimed.

  “It’s just a town kid pushing some boundaries,” Wiggles said with a grin.

  “And you’re going to arrest him?”

  “Her. And I won’t actually do an arrest. Just turning up in the old cop-mobile should make her think twice in future.”

  “Excellent thinking. These children nowadays, they really do get creative with their mischief!”

  “I probably did worse as a youngster,” Wiggles admitted.

  “Me too,” I mumbled. I’d had a few years of systematically ignoring all good advice while acting silly and trying to impress the wrong people.

  “I was quite the good girl,” Mrs Claus said. There was a sparkle in her eyes and I wasn’t sure I believed her.

  “Of course,” Wiggles said, but he turned in his seat a little and gave me a wink.

  “We’d better let you be on your way,” Mrs Claus said. She leaned in and planted a kiss on his cheek, and we forced ourselves out of the tiny vehicle. As soon as we’d closed the doors, we heard Wiggles turn the music up and begin to sing along.

  We stood on the doorstep and watched as his tiny car drove away.

  “You were a good girl?” I asked with a smile.

  Mrs Claus beamed at me. “Or perhaps I just never got caught!”

  10

  The next day, we were up and out early.

  Mrs Claus and Gilbert went ahead to Knock on Wood to lay dust sheets and give the walls a clean, while Nick and I went into town to choose paint.

  It was the first chance I’d had to spend any time alone with Nick since the Ball, and I found that I felt nervous.

  We drove across town mainly in silence, each of us humming along to the radio and lost in our own thoughts.

  I wondered if Nick had realised that he just wanted us to be friends. Maybe he was having doubts. Maybe he wanted me to leave Candy Cane Hollow and return to my old life in London.

  “You’re quiet,” he said as he found a space in the car park of Joseph’s Technicolour Paint Shop.

  “So are you,” I said. My words came out harder than I planned, and I winced.

  “I guess a lot’s happened,” he said with a smile. The dimple in his cheek taunted me. I wished I could reach out and stroke it, but I didn’t have the courage.

  “You’re right. Look, I know you’re busy. You don’t have to help with this,” I said. If Nick Claus was having doubts, I wanted to let him off the hook easily.

  “Never too busy to be chivalrous,” Nick murmured.

  I cocked my head to one side. “Wiggles said the same thing. Do they teach that in school here?”

  “Not quite. It’s an important part of our culture here, though.”

  I sighed. “There’s so much to learn.”

  “Are you sure this is what you want? Leaving your big fancy London life behind and moving here?” Nick asked. Here it was, the chance for me to disappear and make it easy for him to believe it was my decision all along.

  But that willingness to disappear, to not reply to a message or return a call, was probably a good part of why I had been single for so long. I saw the potential for a good thing and got scared.

  What would happen if I was honest instead?

  “I’m not sure how everything will work out, Nick, but I want to give it a try and find out,” I said.

  Nick swallowed and I felt the awkwardness in the car with us. My heart thumped in my chest. What was he going to say?

  “I feel guilty at times,” he finally said.

  “Guilty for what?” I asked, and a thought played out in my head. What if Nick was about to confess to killing Greasy? I shook my head. That was nonsense. I was getting carried away with the whole amateur sleuth thing.

  “You have a life in London. A family, friends too I’m sure. A home. I wonder if it’s fair to ask you to give all of that up,” he met my gaze and offered a sad smile.

  “Nick, I want to be here. I’m ready for a change. And I’m excited - and terrified - to see what happens between us, but I’m not making this decision just for that reason. I’ve never been welcomed anywhere the way I’ve been welcomed here. I don’t think it would be possible for me to leave now and return to my old life.”

  He smiled. “Really?”

  “I promise. I’m not the kind of woman who drops everything for a man, even a man as amazing as Santa,” I said with a laugh.

  “I know that. Trust me, I do. I’ve been the most eligible bachelor in Candy Cane Hollow, just because of my job title. It’s been hard to know whether interest has been in me or the red suit, you know?”

  “I understand that a little bit. There’s an awkward point on a first date where I have to reveal that I’m a doctor, and everything changes at that point. Some guys really like the status of that, and others are really scared by it. Either way, I stop just being Holly when I tell them.”

  “I’m not scared by it,” he murmured.

  “No?” I asked. I couldn’t meet his gaze. The inside of the car was suddenly really hot and the windows had steamed up.

  “I think it’s really cool. Next time you give me concussion in a snowball fight, you can at least tend to my injuries,” he said with a laugh.

  The ice broken, I pushed open the door and found myself walking out into yet another snowstorm. Nick came around to my side of the car, grabbed my hand, and we made a run for it together.

  The paint shop was tiny, one of a row of old fashioned stores, and it seemed that we were the only customers in the place.

  A wizened old elf sat on a stool behind the till, his attention focused on a paperback book that looked as old as him.

  “What kind of colour are you thinking?” Nick asked.

  “Something cheerful and bright. Maybe a yellow or a green.” I said.

  We walked the aisles, each of us picking up shade cards and studying the colours on them.

  “They even do glitter paint, no way!” Nick exclaimed.

  I looked over at him and laughed. “That could be fun.”

  In the end, we settled on a pale yellow shade and paid at the counter. Nick insisted on carrying the paint and we made a mad dash across the car park back to the dry safety of Nick’s car.

  “I’ve been thinking of asking you out. On a second date. Would that be okay?” Nick asked as he started the engine.

  I tried to play it cool but couldn’t stop the grin. “That would be more than okay!”

  “Phew. You’ve been so busy since the Ball, I was starting to think maybe you were avoiding me.”

  My stomach flipped as I realised how my busybody sleuthing might have appeared to him.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to give you space. You must be so busy.”

  “Never too busy…”

  “… to be chivalrous?” I finished.

  “That, yes. But also, never too busy for the people who matter. Being Santa is pretty intense, that’s true, but the best Santas are the ones who make their loved ones feel special, not just the children of the world.”

&
nbsp; I swallowed. “Loved ones?”

  He reached across and squeezed my hand, and we continued the journey in a comfortable silence. The car wipers worked quickly to try and clear the snow as it fell, and the radio was playing carols on a low volume.

  We reached Knock on Wood far too quickly for my liking, and burst into the surgery with our paint and brushes.

  “Excellent, you made it. The snow’s really coming down out there! We’ll make quick work of this, dear,” Mrs Claus gushed as Nick and I stomped the snow off of our boots on the welcome mat.

  Gilbert had changed into a skin-tight black onesie and was wearing protective eyewear.

  “Goodness gumdrops, are you painting or preparing for an extreme sport?” I teased.

  He gave a sarcastic laugh. “Mock me now, Holly Wood, but you’ll wish you’d planned ahead when your clothes are ruined by paint splatters.”

  “I’m just pleased he’s not naked,” Nick said with a wink.

  “You couldn’t handle that,” Gilbert said with a sashay of his tiny body.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. I know that!”

  “Less chat and more work. Some of us have got lunch to prepare after this,” Gilbert chastised us.

  We each picked up a paintbrush and began working on a different wall. It was clear that Gilbert was being competitive, speed-painting his way around a whole wall in the time it took me to try and do neat edging.

  “It’s not a race, dear,” Mrs Claus warned him.

  Gilbert snickered at us. Maybe he was getting a little high on the paint fumes.

  “Shall I finish your wall?” Gilbert asked Nick.

  “I’m doing okay, thanks. Why don’t you start in the other room?” Nick suggested.

  “No problemo,” Gilbert agreed. He stood on the tips of his toes and did a little victory dance, and we could all see what was going to happen before it did.

  I opened my mouth to warn him, but he tripped on an uneven section of the dust sheet and tumbled, falling backwards into the can of paint, where he sat, his slight frame a perfect fit into the large can.

  “Oh, I say!” Mrs Claus giggled.

  “Well don’t just stand and watch, get me out of here!” Gilbert exclaimed.

  We all climbed up from the floor. Mrs Claus and I grabbed a hand of his each while Nick held on to the paint can.

  “One, two, three,” we said in unison, and then we pulled the little elf out of the can. The jolt left us all splattered with yellow paint, but it was Gilbert who came off worst, a proud yellow circle painted over his bottom.

  “This goes no further than this room, do you understand?” Gilbert said, and we nodded our agreement even as we stifled our laughter.

  11

  With the painting finished, and Gilbert’s onesie on a high temperature wash, we each went off to a different bathroom and scrubbed ourselves clean.

  I had splatters of paint on my hands, my arms, in my hair and even one bit on my teeth.

  I enjoyed a long, hot shower and then inspected myself in the mirror until I was happy that I’d found every spot of paint and got rid of it.

  Dried and dressed, I made my way down to the kitchen, where Gilbert was back in his usual working attire. It was hard to believe that he’d ever dressed in the skintight lycra, or fallen into a pot of paint, and yet I knew we’d never let him live the incident down.

  “I suppose you’re on the hunt for food?” Gilbert asked.

  “Not unless you’re making something,” I said.

  “Of course I’m making something. What kind of establishment do you think this is? The kind where you come in and open the cupboards yourself, in the hope that a scrap of food remains? I’ve made soup. Soup and homemade ciabatta,” Gilbert said with a flourish.

  I thought I saw a discarded plastic wrapper on the side, and couldn’t believe that Gilbert had had time to prepare his own bread, but I decided to let it go. He was having a bad enough day without me catching him out with a culinary shortcut.

  Mrs Claus joined us in the kitchen and explained that Nick had been called away to deal with a toy emergency down at the HQ.

  She joined me at the table and we gratefully devoured the soup and bread. It turned out, we were so tired from the painting that we didn’t have any energy to tease Gilbert about the paint escapades.

  “What are you doing for the rest of the day, Holly?” Mrs Claus asked.

  “I need to look at the photos from the Ball,” I said.

  “Ooh! Can I look with you?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, and we stacked our empty bowls in the middle of the table, and thanked Gilbert for a tasty lunch.

  “Oh, Gilbert, dear. Careful you don’t fall into the soup pan,” Mrs Claus called as we left the room.

  Gilbert huffed and clattered around by way of response, and we stifled our laughter as we walked across into the den.

  The fire was roaring in there and I stood in front of it for a few moments to soak up some heat. My feet in particular had never known cold like in Candy Cane Hollow. I would have to invest in some really chunky socks and a pair of slippers too. Maybe even a spare pair for my new surgery!

  I’d transferred the photos from my phone to my laptop, and I set the device up on the coffee table and opened the folder where I’d stored them.

  “So, here we go. I took some photographs before the glitter ball fell. I’ll flick through them,” I said.

  There was a photo of Mrs Claus and Father Christmas, both of them beaming from ear to ear.

  “Goodness, doesn’t he look handsome? I swear he hasn’t aged a day!” Mrs Claus gushed as she eyed up her husband on the screen.

  Then there was a selfie of me and Nick, and he was gazing at me with so much devotion that I felt my cheeks flame. I could tell that Mrs Claus was desperate to make some comment about the picture, but she managed to hold her tongue.

  There were general shots of the venue, of the group gathered for the Ball, and on one photo I spotted what must be the staircase up to the beams.

  “I think that’s how you get up to the ceiling,” I tapped the screen.

  “It is, dear, yes. You think someone used those stairs?”

  “It seems like the only option really. Unless someone rigged the glitter ball before it was fixed up there.”

  “I’m no technophobe but I can’t see how that would be possible,” Mrs Claus said.

  I smiled at her mistaken use of the word technophobe. “I can’t, either.”

  I flicked to the next image. Another general scene, showing the Candy Cane Hollow residents laughing and chatting.

  “There’s someone by the staircase, dear. Look,” Mrs Claus said.

  I picked up the laptop and gazed at the image. She was right. Near the staircase was a man on his own, and the image had caught him clearly mid-stride. He was approaching the staircase.

  I felt my heartbeat race as I realised who the man in the image was.

  “It’s Drayton,” I murmured.

  “It certainly is,” Mrs Claus agreed.

  I carried on flicking through the images, but the next ones I’d taken didn’t show the staircase at all.

  Finally, I got to the images I had taken after the glitter ball had fallen.

  “These pictures are quite gruesome. Are you ready?” I warned.

  Mrs Claus looked at me with a steely gaze and nodded.

  As soon as I flicked to the next image, she gasped and began to cry, but insisted I keep going.

  The shots of Greasy under the glitter ball gave us no help. He was clearly dead, but there was nothing else to be discovered from looking at him.

  I flicked past and reached the image I had hoped for. It showed the top of the glitter ball, including the fixings that should have kept it hovering above the dance floor.

  I studied the image and clapped my hands together.

  “Look at this. This is the clip that fastens the glitter ball up there.”

  “I can see it, dear,” Mrs Claus said.

  “Someone
went up there and unclipped it. We’re right, there is foul play here!”

  “I’m not sure I follow, dear.”

  “Look how the clip has come down? It’s not damaged, and the chain links that connect the glitter ball to the clip are all intact. If the ball had collapsed under the weight, the links would have torn or the clip would have come down with part of the ceiling attached to it.”

  Mrs Claus gasped. “Someone’s just unfastened the clip and let it fall? Oh my. Goodness gumdrops.”

  “You can say that again,” I murmured.

  “What do we do now?”

  “I’m going to go and speak to Wiggles. Once he sees this evidence, he’s going to have to investigate,” I said.

  “Good idea!” Mrs Claus exclaimed, then her brow furrowed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just realised that I have a meeting with the Natter & Knit ladies.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. You go and do that and I’ll speak to Wiggles.”

  “I can go via Candy Cane Custody and drop you off?” Mrs Claus offered.

  I accepted the offer of a lift to protect my poor cold feet from more walking through the snow.

  We pulled up outside the police station and I bid farewell to Mrs Claus, took a deep breath and pushed open the door to the foyer.

  I was always pleasantly surprised by how festive the place was, with its huge real Christmas tree and the festive tunes playing out.

  Wiggles was right there in front of me, and who was with him but Peggy-Sue.

  “I demand an investigation!” She screeched.

  “Now, now, I can’t say that I imagine there was any dishonesty intended,” Wiggles said.

  “What would you call it, then?”

  “Run it by me again,” Wiggles asked as he scratched his head.

  “It says clear as day, right here on the packaging: contains at least 12 baubles!” Peggy-Sue raised an eyebrow as if her case had been proven with that one sentence.

  “And?”

  “And this package contained 12 baubles exactly.”

  “I just don’t see what the issue is,” Wiggles admitted.

  “At least 12 baubles suggests more than 12! It’s false advertising! These enormous companies have to be controlled or they’ll take liberty after liberty. I’ll bet if I go back and buy more, every single pack will include no more than 12 baubles. In which case, the description should be 12 baubles. The suggestion of more than 12 doesn’t need to be made!”