A hand touched his head, his human stroking his fur. ‘Settle down, Rex,’ Albert chided. Albert hadn’t spotted the sausage dog behind the counter, nor could he decipher its smell over all the other scents in the café. Not that he used his nose to gather information. Like all humans, he relied on sight and sound and was unaware that ignoring his most informative sense annoyed his dog. His attention wasn’t on Rex and whatever he might be growling at, it was on the young lady working behind the counter.
She was average height with light brown hair that looked like it couldn’t decide whether to be blond or brunette. Her face was a little pinched and her nose a little long. Basically, she was a little plain-looking but that wasn’t the dominant thing he noticed. Above all else, she looked sad. Or possibly worried, Albert thought. He knew nothing of her or her situation, so it could be that the tension he could perceive was nothing more than a workplace disagreement. Maybe she turned up late for work and was on her final warning. For what was probably the fifth time, he told himself to stop looking at her and mind his own business.
Their accommodation was a short walk away along Hitching Road where Albert’s daughter Selina had booked him into Ye Old Leather Bottle, a public house with a restaurant that boasted a Michelin star. It was now late on a Tuesday afternoon on his second day in Biggleswade, a delightful small town in Bedfordshire. He arrived feeling wary for what unwelcome surprise the town might hold for him – the last three stops on his culinary tour of the British Isles had each presented murder and mayhem. He wanted a nice quiet couple of days in Bedfordshire to recover, but almost thirty hours after arriving, he was wondering if perhaps he might be feeling a little bored.
Rex couldn’t decide whether to turn his back on the annoying dachshund, a demonstration of how unbothered he was by the tiny dog, or to just lunge forward and scare the laugh out of him. His lead was looped around the foot of his human’s chair, a needless precaution in Rex’s opinion because if he wanted to go, the chair leg would either snap, or just flip the chair over, and if he didn’t want to go, a simple request from his human would keep him in place. He’d demonstrated this to be true recently, throwing his human to the carpet in a bid to get to a piece of bacon. His human appeared to be upset by the event for many hours afterward, but Rex got the bacon and that was what counted.
The dachshund looked set to say something else, but before he could, a human hand looped under his belly and the four tiny feet Rex could see under the bottom of the swing door, vanished from sight as he was lifted into the air. Appearing again in a female human’s arms, the dog acted as if being carried around was a privilege bestowed upon him and not an embarrassing indication of just how small he was. No human would try to carry Rex: he weighed the same as a large man.
Albert looked up from checking his phone when someone approached his table. It was the lady from behind the counter, the one who looked sad. Was it his imagination? Or was it a brave smile she wore?
‘Are you all done here?’ she asked, glancing to his plate which quite clearly had nothing but crumbs remaining on it.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Albert replied. The dachshund was balanced along her left forearm with its butt end tucked under her armpit. It leaned forward to smell Albert. ‘Cute dachshund,’ he said, striking up a conversation. ‘What’s his name?’
The woman smiled as she glanced down at her dog and back up. The smile reached her eyes for the first time since Albert had started observing her. ‘This is Hans. He’s my little bratwurst!’ she exclaimed in an over-excited manner while jiggling the dog to make his ears flap.
Albert didn’t react or turn his head when the bell tinkled to signal that the café door had just opened. It was behind him, and he was still watching the woman’s face. It was because he was watching her face and not turning to look at whoever might be coming in that he saw the blood drain from the woman’s cheeks. Her smile fell away, and she staggered slightly, putting a hand out to grip the back of the chair opposite Albert for support.
Thinking she might fall – she really looked that close to passing out – Albert got to his feet. ‘Are you alright, my dear?’ he enquired, glancing across the shop where he spied two uniformed officers accompanying a man in a suit and coat. He knew a plain-clothes policeman when he saw one; they all looked the same somehow.
‘I’m … I.’ The woman couldn’t form a coherent sentence but managed to pull the spare chair out so she could collapse into it. The police went to the counter where they were met by a stern-looking woman. ‘It’s my Joel,’ the woman now sitting at Albert’s table sobbed quietly. ‘He went missing three days ago, and …’ she sobbed, tears filling her eyes, ‘and they found his body yesterday morning. It was in Wales. What on Earth was he doing in Wales? I filed the missing person report just before they found his body, but they said he’d been murdered.’ She gasped suddenly. ‘They must be here to tell me they caught the killer!’
At the counter, the stern-faced woman nodded her head and narrowed her eyes before jutting out an arm. ‘That’s her sitting there,’ she told the plain-clothes police officer. Albert was looking her way but didn’t understand her expression:
