Trick or Threat

  TRICK OR THREAT

  A Belchester Chroniclette

  Andrea Frazer

  The Rev. Goodfellow pays a visit to Lady Amanda Golightly at Belchester Towers, upset by the trick-or-treat antics of some local youths who are apparently using this innocent Hallowe’en pastime as a means of extracting money with menaces.

  Incensed at this bullying of vulnerable local residents, including one of her own circle, Lady Amanda, aided by her faithful friend Hugo Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump, girds her loins and prepares to bring the perpetrators to justice.

  NB: This story is set between Strangeways to

  Oldham and White Christmas with a Wobbly Knee

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  I

  ‘I would so appreciate some help, Lady Amanda. These elderly parishioners of mine feel terribly threatened, and don’t even dare leave their homes to do their little bits of shopping in case something happens to their homes.

  ‘One of them has had the whole front of her house pelted with rotten eggs, another has had the word “bitch” sprayed across her front wall, and yet another has come home to find all the winter pansies in her little front flower bed uprooted and stamped into the lawn. They live in fear of a return of these young bullies.’

  ‘I thought trick-or-treating was a fairly innocent pastime, Vicar. Doesn’t one just keep a bowl of sweeties by the door to offer out when any of these little tots come around in their costumes? That’s what Beauchamp usually does and sometimes he even dresses up to surprise them when they answer the door,’ said Lady Amanda Golightly of Belchester Towers in reference to her butler-cum-general factotum.

  ‘That’s all very well, but these aren’t ordinary trick-or-treaters. They are at least sixteen years old, and what they’re after is hard cash to buy cigarettes or alcohol. They’re effectively demanding money with menaces, and I simply don’t know what to do to protect my dear elderly parishioners,’ replied Rev. Christian Goodfellow.

  He was the vicar responsible for all three small Anglican churches in Belchester: namely, St Michael-in-the-Fields on The Butts, St Marks on Summerfield Road, and St Paul’s in Church Street, and sometimes he wished he had a C of E helicopter to get him to all his Sunday services on time, without the endless Sabbath race that he ran every week against the clock. The only other clerics in Belchester were attached to the cathedral, and had a comparatively easy life compared with his.

  ‘But can they not be described and identified, and the police informed?’ asked Lady Amanda in her firmest, ‘let’s not get this thing out of all proportion’ voice.

  ‘I’m afraid not, as they wear masks – as is, I believe, traditional for this activity – and completely disguise their identities. They even use hoarse, threatening voices to intimidate the poor old dears.’

  ‘Have you informed the police of this?’ For one ghastly moment, a vision of Inspector Moody rose in her mind, only to be completely dismissed by the vicar’s next comment.

  ‘I’m afraid the police are totally uninterested in our problem.’

  With a sneer of triumph, Lady A trumpeted, ‘Then we shall have to apply the principles of private detection to this problem.’

  ‘Are you able to do that, Lady Amanda? Have you ever done anything like this before?’

  ‘I have indeed, Rev. Goodfellow, and I have a staff of three to aid me on this mission. The only thing I shall need are some names and addresses, so that I can speak to some of those thus intimidated, to get a little data before I decide how to proceed.’

  ‘What a Christian woman you are, and I thank God for your presence in my congregation – or one of them, at least,’ the vicar finished, rather lamely.

  ‘Just let me get a writing pad and pen, and we can get going – oh, hello Hugo. Are you going to join us?’

  ‘For tea? Yes, please,’ replied the venerable man who had just hobbled in on two walking sticks, seating himself slowly and carefully in a feather-cushioned armchair. ‘Why are you here, Vicar, if you don’t think me impertinent?’

  ‘I’m visiting to see if Lady Amanda can help me with a little parish problem,’ he answered, without giving anything away.

  ‘It’s a new mystery, Hugo,’ Lady A almost crowed, ‘but without the murder this time.’

  ‘Oh, I say. How exciting. Tell me all.’ Hugo was all ears. They had been involved in one case before which did involve murder, but it had, for Hugo, happily begun with Lady Amanda rescuing him from the Birdlings Serenade Rest Home, where he had been, basically, just waiting to die.

  She had brought him to Belchester Towers to live and got him a proper doctor, who was slowly dealing with his ageing, problem joints and giving him more effective medication, so that he wasn’t bedridden any more – and he did so enjoy his new life, especially the detecting he had done with his old friend Manda.

  ‘Well,’ began Lady Amanda, ‘it would appear that a gang of not very young youths has been going round terrorising older people, pretending they’re trick-or-treating, then demanding money with menaces, or else they’ll do something really horrible to the resident’s house. The old people are afraid to go out in case the scoundrels come back and do something worse.

  ‘The gang members are about sixteen years old and the vicar reckons they want the money for booze and fags. The police – curse old Moody’s socks – don’t want to know, so it’s going to be down to the Belchester Towers Specials to solve this one.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You, me, Beauchamp, and Enid – when she finally gets here. She’s late. She should have been coming for tea, but, no doubt, her mother has invented some last-minute fictional crisis to delay her.’

  She was interrupted in her flow by a frantic pulling on the front door bell-pull, and after the quiet tones of Beauchamp’s voice greeting the newcomer, Enid came flying into the drawing room, her hair out of its usual pins and flying all over the place.

  ‘Whatever is it, Enid? What’s happened?’ asked Lady Amanda, as Enid sank down into a sofa and Beauchamp stood immaculately and unmoving just inside the door.

  ‘I’ve been trying to clean the paint off the windows,’ she explained breathlessly. ‘I’ve cycled here as quickly as I could, but we had some trouble last night, and I didn’t realise it until this morning. Since then, I’ve just been scrubbing and scrubbing, and I think I’ve just about removed the letters.’

  ‘What letters? Where? Start from the beginning, Enid?’

  Enid Tweedie took a deep breath, and began her story as calmly as she could. ‘About eight thirty last night, there was a knock at the door, and when I went to answer it, there were these lads in Hallowe’en masks, about six feet tall, some of them, chanting, ‘Trick or Treat’. I got the bowl of treats, as I had for the other, younger children that had been round, but they said it would cost me twenty quid to get rid of them.

  ‘Well, my old mother had tottered out, by that time, and she gave them what for, telling them to, if you’ll pardon my language, “bugger off” or she’d call the police and have them arrested. They seemed to go away at that point, but when I went out to greet the postman this morning, somebody had sprayed “S-H-one-T” and “B-U-M” on our front door in paint which, of course, by then was dry, and it’s taken me all day, so far, to get rid of the shapes of the letters.

  ‘Mother was apoplectic with rage when she saw what they must have come back to do, so I phoned the police station, but they just brushed it off as high spirits. Nobody would take me seriously.’

  ‘Poor Enid,’ said Lady A. ‘That was criminal damage they were ignoring. I’ll make sure someone comes round and repaints your front door after Hallowe’e
n. No point in doing it before, otherwise they might come back and do it again.’

  ‘Not if we investigate, Manda,’ interjected Hugo, his face shining with excitement.

  ‘Now, Vicar,’ she continued, turning to face Rev. Goodfellow, ‘if you’ll just give me some names and addresses, I can go and personally get accounts of what happened at some of the other houses. Enid, you sit there and think if there was anything unusual or memorable about any of those young thugs.’

  ‘Old Ma Baldwin,’ he said, then apologised for not knowing her given name. ‘She’s not a churchgoer, or at least, only if its harvest festival, and there’s something in it for her. She lives at 13 Scraggs Lane; on her own, so she was very frightened. She hasn’t even got a telephone, so she had to trudge all the way up to the vicarage, and she has terrible trouble with her feet, poor old woman.’

  Lady Amanda made a note, then looked at her parish priest, inviting him, with a nod, to continue. ‘Irish Vince and his wife – again, I don’t know their full names. I think they’re C of E, but they could be C of I, or even Roman, but they live at number two, Beggars Run. Then there’s Sheila Shilling of fifteen Rag-a-Bone Lane, Peter and Percy Smudge of fourteen Lumpen Lane, and finally Betty Bunn of twenty-one Twixt-the-Ways, who threatened to run after them and tan their hides for them, big as they are. She’s a large woman – I don’t know if you know her at all, but she frightens me to death,’ replied Rev. Goodfellow, thinking that so did his present hostess.

  ‘Thank you very much, Vicar. We shall do our best to stop this cruel practice, and bring the culprits to justice by consulting with the police once we have our evidence for the case,’ Lady Amanda assured him.

  ‘I knew the gentry wouldn’t let me down,’ sighed Rev. Goodfellow, with relief. ‘I’ll leave it in your more than capable hands, then.’

  As the vicar cycled off down the drive, whistling, and occasionally skidding on the gravel, Hugo turned to his old friend and asked, ‘So, where are we going to start?’

  ‘I suppose, with a detailed verbal statement by Enid, which Beauchamp can take down as he is thoroughly competent in shorthand, then he can type it up and print it from the computer. You and I, Hugo, are going to consult a street map of Belchester and decide on the best route to tackle these addresses, then I’ll decide whether we’ll take the Rolls or our tricycles.

  At the mention of the latter, Hugo’s previously beaming face fell, and he hoped against hope that she would choose to go by car. His tricycle may have a little motor to aid forward movement, but he was always driving into obstacles, and couldn’t seem to get the hang of the steering. Once it had even – he would swear – reared up and thrown him over the handlebars.

  Once they had their route planned, it taking them to three of the small city’s quarters, she read it out loud to Beauchamp, and asked his opinion as to their best recommended mode of transport. ‘We’ve got to go to Scraggs Lane then Twixt-the-Ways in the north-western quarter, then to Lumpen Lane and Rag-a-Bone Road in the south-western quarter, then to Beggars Run in the south- eastern quarter.

  ‘Might I suggest that it would be more efficient if I went out in the old Austin Seven, considering the state of the roads, with an invitation on the back of one of your calling cards, inviting them to tea here tomorrow afternoon?’

  ‘That’s a wonderful idea, Beauchamp, but you’ll never get them all in that little car,’ replied Lady Amanda, chiding his over-enthusiasm.

  ‘I wasn’t intending to, m’lady. I was going to bring them in for two different sittings: one at three fifteen, then take them back to collect the second sitting for four fifteen. You don’t have to eat too much, merely question them and make notes.’

  ‘Genius man,’ sighed his employer, and Hugo nodded joyfully at the thought that he wouldn’t have to go adventuring on his motorised tricycle, which he was convinced currently was possessed by the devil.

  At that juncture, the telephone rang, and Beauchamp called his employer to the instrument to speak to one of her old friends, then disappeared up to the higher reaches of the house in search of something.

  The call was from Angelica Featherstonehaugh-Armitage – pronounced Fanshaw-Armitage – aka Stinky. Her husband, Aloysius, had the unenviable nickname of Donkey.

  ‘Manda, the most ghastly thing has happened. A group of absolute ruffians has been to the house and demanded money or they’ll break all the windows. They were wearing masks, so we don’t know who the hell they were, but Donkey gave them fifty quid just to get rid of them.’

  ‘But, didn’t Donkey see them off? I believe he was once in the army,’ parried Lady Amanda.

  ‘Catering Corps, Amanda. He could have coped with custard pies at dawn, but not fisticuffs, and other physical forms of fighting. What shall we do? I mean, they didn’t break our windows, but there’s nothing to stop them coming back and demanding more money. It’s blackmail, and I don’t want to cause a scandal, but you know how tight actual cash can be.’ Stinky was in a real funk.

  ‘Don’t you worry about it at all. We’ll come over and take a statement …’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Hugo and I will come over – you know we can solve mysteries – take a statement, then put it with all the statements were going to take tomorrow from other victims of this scam, and then, hopefully, Bob, as they say, will be your uncle.’

  ‘What statements are you going to take tomorrow?’ asked Stinky, now confused.

  ‘Why, the statements from the other people they’ve tried this on with, the names and addresses of whom the dear old vicar has just informed us.’

  ‘So, we’re not the only ones?’

  ‘Not by a long chalk. May I suggest that you warn your local friends not to open their front doors after dark, or allow the servants to, either? It’ll take a while to round up these ruthless thugs and remove them from the scene. You’re the first one of any breeding who has been visited, but I’d like to bet that you won’t be the last.’

  ‘I don’t think I can forbid friends to stop their staff answering the door but I’ll tell them what to expect, and we’ll leave the mopping up to you.’

  ‘Good girl, Stinky. We’ll be over later.’

  As she put down the telephone, Beauchamp came bounding down the stairs with a very smug grin on his face. ‘Look what I’ve found upstairs. It’s my old miniature tape-recorder. We could use that for the interviews tomorrow, so we don’t have to interrupt the victims while they’re in full flow.’

  ‘What a marvel you are, Beauchamp. Now, could you get the tricycles out, please? Hugo and I are going to pay a call on good old Stinky and Donkey.’

  ‘What?’ asked Hugo, in horror, as he exited the drawing room door and heard what was expected of him. He may be more mobile than he had been, but he still found the tricycle difficult and recalcitrant, and he was, also, rather tubby.

  II

  ‘Hugo!’ shouted Lady Amanda. They had only been on their tricycles for a couple of minutes, and Hugo’s was already playing up. ‘What are you doing playing in the rhododendrons?’ she called. ‘I don’t know, ask the man to ride down a perfectly easy drive, and he goes straight into the shrubbery to play.’

  ‘I’m not playing, Manda. These bushes seem to have eaten me,’ he shouted back.

  ‘Well, why did you ride into them in the first place?’

  ‘I didn’t. It was the trike wanted to go into the blasted things.’

  ‘Balderdash! Stuff and nonsense! All you have to do is keep the handlebars pointing straight ahead,’ she added, dismounting and coming across to pull him free of the evergreen embrace of the shrubs that lined the drive.

  ‘There you are, silly,’ she chided him gently, pulling stray sprigs of plant out of his wheel spokes and brake cables. ‘Now, a gentle curve, and we’re out on to the road, and it’s not far to Stinky and Donkey’s place.’

  Lady A remounted her non-motor-assisted tricycle and began to pedal off. Hugo restarted his tiny engine, which had stalled during its visit to the r
hododendron bushes, and began to pedal as it spluttered into life. Lady Amanda looked over her shoulder as she heard him, then screeched, ‘No, Hugo, not into the little pond! I told you to do a gentle curve.’

  There was a splash, and Hugo remained seated on his vehicle, now stalled again, his pedals just below the waterline. ‘I couldn’t turn them,’ he explained, then bowed his head as his friend came over and turned them easily, even though the front wheel was in the water.

  ‘Well, at least the motor’s under the saddle, and hasn’t got wet. Get off that thing and let me pull it out. You are a clumsy, Hugo. No one else I know could have done that.’

  ‘May I go and change my shoes and socks?’

  ‘No, you can get them dried out at Stinky’s. Now get back on and start to engage your brain, old thing, or we’ll never get there before nightfall.’

  Hugo was all right for a while, as the road was, indeed, very straight, having been built originally by the Romans. It was only as they got to the gates of Stinky and Donkey’s that he began to have trouble. The route had been all downhill, and he had achieved quite a speed. At his fellow tricyclist’s loud instruction of, ‘Turn right’, he had turned the handlebars to the right, then had completely forgotten to correct his steering to straighten up. He went, instead of straight towards the house, whizzing off on a back-path that led to the door of the servants’ quarters, yelling his head off all the way.

  There was a terrific crash, and two screams, one high-pitched, the other rather lower, and Lady A turned her steed towards the sound of what was obviously an accident.

  When she came across the scene, it was a most incongruous sight. The tricycle was standing to one side, triumphant, somehow, in its lonely status. On the ground was the figure of Mrs Mint the cook, with Hugo astride her body, to all the world as if he were attempting to ravish her. Mrs Mint’s voice was raised, shouting, ‘Get him orf of me!’ while Hugo puffed like a grampus and yelled,