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transformed into expensive loft-style homes. The difference was that Bryant’s place was the only one not to have been converted, for it still looked like a factory. He was too old and twinge-prone to start renovations himself, and as Alma could no longer be tempted up a ladder with a claw hammer and a mouthful of tacks, they were forced to make the best of things, carrying out odd bodge-jobs as the need arose. If the situation became desperate (as it had last month, when part of the kitchen ceiling fell, mostly into Alma’s casserole), Bryant would then head for the Peculiar Crimes Unit to make sad kitten-in-a-boot eyes at his colleagues, who could be relied upon to rally around at the weekend armed with tools and planks and electrical tape to aid a poor helpless old man. It was shameless, but a perk of being officially classed as elderly, and he knew he was sufficiently loved to be able to get away with it.
    ‘It would be nice if you could put the book down long enough to eat,’ Alma suggested.
    Bryant’s great watery eyes swam up from his copy of
The 1919 Arctic Explorer’s Handbook Volume II: Iceberg Partition
. ‘This is fascinating stuff,’ he told her. ‘Maggie Armitage sent it to me.’
    Alma harrumphed and made a face. Bryant’s theatricality was catching. ‘That woman is godless,’ she complained.
    ‘Quite the reverse. As a practising white witch she’s more aware of true religion than most Christians, whose experience usually only extends to miming “O God Our Help in Ages Past” during weddings and christenings.’
    ‘Well, I hope you’re going into work today, and not just sitting around reading.’ Alma disapproved of such pointless activities. ‘I’m planning on a spot of hoovering.’ She shifted him to clear away the breakfast things.
    ‘Just in time, I’d imagine. There was a rumour the BBC was coming around to film an insect documentary inside your hall rug.’
    ‘Are you insinuating I don’t keep a clean house?’ asked Alma, mortified. ‘All these years I’ve been looking after you, with your spilled chemicals and your disgusting experiments. Who fed rotting pork to carnivorous plants on top of his wardrobe during the heat wave of 1974?’
    ‘That helped me catch the Kew Gardens Strangler, if you recall.’
    ‘You boiled my tropical fish in 1968, and filled my bedroom with mustard gas.’
    ‘In order to track the Deptford Demon, as well you know. I didn’t realise your aunt was sleeping in the house at the time.’
    She could have mentioned that the ancient detective also grew plague germs in her baking trays and ruined her best kitchen knives putting stab wounds in sides of beef to determine methods of death. He had also rewired the toaster to see if it could be made to electrocute anyone walking across a wet kitchen floor in bare feet, and had been able to answer in the affirmative after nearly setting fire to a Jehovah’s Witness. ‘You filled my sink with sulphuric acid last Christmas, and if I hadn’t been wearing rubber gloves to do the washing up, I’d have ended up in hospital. Took the finish right off my plug, but did I complain?’
    ‘You most certainly did, madam, and the fact that you bring it up at the drop of a hat reminds me how long you bear the grudge.’ He rose and collected his battered brown trilby from the table.
    ‘I wish you wouldn’t leave that thing over the teapot; it’s unsanitary.’
    ‘Most probably, but it keeps my head warm. When you’ve as little hair as I have, such small comforts are appreciated.’ He smoothed the pale nimbus of his fringe back in place. ‘I might remind you that I am still the breadwinner in this household, attending to police work for six decades with an unbroken record, despite your regular attempts to poison me. I could have taken holidays but was too conscientious.’
    ‘Too scared of missing out on a good murder, more like.’ Alma sniffed. ‘It’s not natural, all this morbidity, especially at your