''Mrs Beeton herself would be proud. A perfect recipe and devoured in one sitting between elevenses and afternoon tea'' ― Ian Moore, author of Death and Croissants
'A glorious new addition to the cosy crime genre with recipes which leave you wanting more' – Melanie Cantor, author of The F*ck It List
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Please enjoy the following excerpt of Miss Beeton's Murder Agency, copyright 2024, Josie Lloyd
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1.
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‘I told you. It was the handsome professor.’ Alice Beeton shut the hardback library book with a satisfied snap. ‘Never trust a manwith a dimple in his chin.’
The kettle trilled like an old-fashioned police whistle. Alice walked across the small kitchen to turn off the gas, releasing the cap so that it gasped, the boiling water inside fizzing.
Agatha barked once in reply, her bright brown eyes staring up at Alice who now took a china cup and two saucers from the cupboard, moving the remaining crockery a fraction to retain their pleasingly neat stacks. With a silver spoon, she measured out the precise amount of Earl Grey tea leaves from the caddy into the teapot, before filling it up from the kettle and placing a knitted cosy on top.
As a self-confessed addict of crime fiction, Alice loved the twisty plots, red herrings and scattered clues that invariably resulted in her outsmarting most fictional detectives – with the exception of Miss Marple, of course. She had a prized set of all eighty Agatha Christies (after whom she’d named her dog), but she’d run out of space for any more books.
Alice’s basement flat was never at its best early in the day, brightening up when the sun was above the buildings opposite. Pulling up the Roman blind above the sink and peering up through the barred windows to street level, she noticed the weak grey shimmer of the December sky, but the ‘beast from the East’ that was predicted had yet to arrive. It really didn’t look like it was going to snow, but you could never be too sure. Nevertheless, it was definitely a day for a thermal vest.
On the table, trumpets of orange amaryllis that one of her grateful clients had sent filled the kitchen with a cheery dash of exotic colour, but despite everything being just right in her flat,
it was hard to ignore the loud neighbours upstairs. She winced as that dratted son of theirs bounced a ball across her ceiling. She flicked on the radio, which was set permanently to Classic FM, and turned up the blast of Vivaldi as a repost. Agatha barked again and tipped her head to one side.
‘I’m doing it,’ Alice said. ‘Be patient.’
She poured the tea from the dainty spout into one of the saucers, topped it up with cold milk from the jug and placed it on the floor where Agatha lapped at it. But just as she was pouring
her own cup, the ancient egg-shaped timer pinged. Alice jumped and put the teapot down. It got her every time.
She thought, as she often did, of how this small object brought her back to sitting on the bowed wooden counter in the kitchen of Hawthorn Hall, as Mrs Doulton taught her chapter and verse
about running a kitchen and a household. Her memories had the same quality as those kodak prints of the time – faded and most definitely of a different era – but Mrs Doulton remained more
like a feeling. The person who felt like home. Even now, five years after she’d passed on, Alice missed her old mentor and the person who’d been more like a mother than anyone else with an
ache that she knew would never subside.
She slid on her oven gloves and peered through the clear glass door, but even without the timer she could tell from the delicious aroma that the biscuits were done to perfection. They were made
to the precise recipe of her Victorian ancestor, the very famous Isabella Beeton – she of the Book of Household Management fame.
Alice liked to live by the standards of her long-lost relative: neatness, orderliness, punctuality, and hard work. And of course, the satisfaction and comfort of home-baking.
Lemon Biscuits
INGREDIENTS – 1 1/4 lb of flour, 3/4 lb of loaf sugar, 6 oz of fresh butter, 4 eggs, 1 oz of
lemon -peel, 2 dessertspoonfuls of lemon-juice.
METHOD – Rub the flour into the butter; stir in the pounded sugar and very finely minced lemon-peel, and when these ingredients are thoroughly mixed, add the eggs, which should be previously well whisked, and the lemon juice. Beat the mixture well for a minute or two, then drop it from a spoon on to a buttered tin, about 2 inches apart, as the cakes will spread when they get warm. Place the tin in the oven and bake the cakes of a pale brown from 15 to 20 minutes.
Time – 15 to 20 minutes.
Average cost, 1s. 6d.
Season able at any time.
Dressed in her usual uniform of a sensible knee-length skirt, the thermal vest, a crisp white shirt and one of her many neutral cashmere V-necks, and her most treasured accessory – her Victorian spinner necklace – Alice prepared to leave the flat.
Given the weather, she added a jacquard silk scarf for a touch of colour and warmth, wondering, as she often did, why it was that people always bought her scarves as presents. Was she really that boring? If her sister-in-law Sassy gave her another this Christmas, she was determined to actually say something for once.
She took a tin from her large collection in the kitchen cupboard and lined it with crinkly greaseproof paper before placing the cooled biscuits carefully inside. Whistling along to the cheery
Handel melody, she stowed the tin in her leather satchel, then turned off the radio and put her slippers in the shoe rack by the door. She laced up her leather brogues, shrugged on her trustworthy Burberry mac and checked herself in the gilt oval mirror by the front door, raking her fingers through the fringe
of her neat brown bob. She was perfectly presentable. But hang on . . . Alice did a double take. Was that the faint outline of a . . . good heavens! A moustache?
Unlike so many of the women she met, she didn’t engage in the lengthy and, in her opinion, mostly futile pursuit of fighting time. On the other side of fifty, but still feeling very much in her
forties, she’d decided to make peace with her face shape changing, her waistline thickening, her hair showing off rather more than the odd strand of silver now. But whilst she wouldn’t consider
herself old, or vain by any stretch of the imagination, this new development simply wouldn’t do.
If she could muster the courage, she’d ask Jinx how to get of it. Although, once she gave her best friend even an inkling of an ‘in’ when it came to Alice’s appearance, she suspected the
floodgates would open. Jinx had more lotions and potions and ‘hacks’ for beautifying oneself than Alice dared to count.
She took a deep breath and opened the door, steeling herself for the inevitable sight of discarded takeaway wrappers at the bottom of her steps, but for once the terracotta plant-pot-lined
route up to the gate was clear.
Mr Mantis, the building manager, was coming down the wide stoop of the red-brick mansion house above her flat, sprinkling anti-slip salt onto the steps from a container that looked like
a giant tube of Pringles. He was a little man – wiry and suspicious and always stooped over in his tatty leather jacket. He stank of cigarettes and cheap aftershave, and Alice didn’t trust him one little bit.
‘Miss Beeton,’ he said, elongating the ‘e’ with his whiney voice. ‘I’ve had a complaint, see. About your dog. Specifically about its barking.’ He looked pointedly at Agatha and then flicked
his head in the direction of the ground-floor window above them, the slatted blinds of which now flicked closed.
‘Agatha doesn’t bark. She communicates,’ Alice replied, tightening the belt of her mac. ‘And, anyway, his son bounces his ball across the floor. You can’t imagine the noise. Consider the
complaint doubled and sent back.’
‘If you don’t like living here, you could sell. I know people—’
‘I’ve told you before, Mr Mantis,’ she said, curtly, ‘I’m not selling. Now, good day,’ she added as she turned away, but not before noticing Mr Mantis’s eyeroll. The bloody cheek of it.
2.
Alice walked her usual route to Kensington Gardens, releasing Agatha from her lead, so that she could sniff her favourite spots along the avenue of sycamore trees. She found comfort in the
familiar morning commute: the runners, the young mothers with their pushchairs, the scooter kids and a gentleman Sikh who she often saw walking with his stick. In the distance, the ducks took off, skimming the surface of the pond and up towards the sprawling branches of the bare elms and the white sky above.
There was an icy chill in the air, and Alice shivered, retrieving her woolly beret from her pocket and pulling it low over her ears. She didn’t usually allow rude people to bother her, but her encounter with Mr Mantis smarted. She’d dearly wanted to buy the ground floor flat herself when it had come onto the market eighteen months ago, but the property had rocketed in value, and it was completely out of her budget. She’d re-mortgaged too many times and taken out too many loans over the years to help
Jasper, and her line of credit was running out.
But it irked her that the spacious flat, with its stately period features, had been sold to such thoughtless neighbours who’d ripped the guts of it out, the endless building work causing end of dust and noise. It puzzled Alice that they’d managed to get such a modern refurbishment in a listed building past the planning department. She didn’t trust for a second that they had the right permissions. And now, having removed all of the insulation, they had the gall to complain about Agatha. Agatha was a dream compared to most dogs. Well, compared to any dog, as far as Alice was concerned. It was most discombobulating to be complained about for just living one’s own life in one’s own home. It was most un-neighbourly. People just didn’t have any manners these days and, as Mrs Doulton had always insisted, manners were everything.
Sometimes, it felt as if the world was just changing far too fast. Take her neighbourhood, for instance. Alice had bought the bohemian basement flat before Notting Hill and its environs had become full of rich bankers. At the time, the half-derelict mansion block flat had been a bargain and she’d paid for it outright in cash from the sale of her mother’s jewellery. She’d kept only the Victorian spinner necklace from the box of shiny baubles she’d inherited and tried to stop minding so very much that Jasper, her younger brother, had got the whole family estate. She couldn’t fathom why her free-spirited parents had kept such an antiquated clause in their will, passing Hawthorn Hall down the male line.
But then, they probably hadn’t expected to die in a helicopter crash, after one of their legendary parties, causing Jasper to inherit when he’d been a clueless eighteen-year-old. Thank God for Mrs Doulton, who’d stayed on to run the whole place.
The pull of Hawthorn Hall was always there, but it would never be Alice’s. And anyway, what would she do with it if were? She wouldn’t want to rattle around in Sussex all by herself. Hawthorn was more suited to Jasper and his boys, although Sassy (or @yummymummyinthehall as she apparently called herself on Instagram) had no clue how to run the place.
Besides, Alice loved London. Though, at this time of year with the Christmas decorations up, it was hard to combat the feeling that her life hadn’t quite panned out as she’d hoped. As she crossed
through the ornate, rusty-red Queens Park gate and waited at the lights, a threesome of London buses squished together at the stop opposite, the sides of each decorated with a variation of the same advert for the latest movie romcom, depicting a perfect family opening presents next to a roaring fire.
She’d always assumed that she’d have her own luxury house like the one in the advert by now. In her mind’s eye, she could perfectly envisage a hallway, a massive tree, the bannisters up the stairs decorated with ivy and lights, her brood of talented children jumping around in excitement; the comfortable, stylish drawing room filled with eclectic, arty friends; and in the centre of them
all, pouring champagne, her husband, who she imagined was tall and mysterious – like a friendlier Captain von Trapp.
But this fantasy had somehow failed to materialise in any shape or form. She rarely pondered the fact that she was childless and single, but Christmas did rather serve to rub it in. Not for the first time, she wondered how it had all happened so fast – that her fertile years had passed in a flash whilst she’d been working.
She’d assumed that if love were to find her, then it just would, despite Jinx telling her repeatedly that it wasn’t how it worked these days. She’d steadfastly refused to put up her profile online, finding the whole idea of dating a stranger utterly distasteful embarrassing. But having failed over the last twenty years to meet even one single, eligible man, Alice had reluctantly concluded
that Jinx might have been right all along.
The buses were on the move now and they drove off in unison on their route towards Clapham. The pedestrian crossing flashed, breaking her out of her reverie. She walked determinedly forward, pulling Agatha who wanted to say hello to a Labrador going the other way.
Her life was perfectly satisfactory, Alice reminded herself. Besides, in her experience, children were totally overrated and not nearly as rewarding as a dog. And she had her business.
Yes, right foot forward, she thought. There was work to be done.
Ten minutes later, Alice arrived at a cream Regency building. Its glossy black door had once been the portal to a gentlemen’s club, but the building was now full of offices. Like everyone else who
crammed their businesses into the tiny spaces inside, Alice had chosen it solely for its prestigious postcode, just a stone’s throw from Berkeley Square.
Inside was far more utilitarian than the Doric columns outside might have suggested. Walking two at a time up the grey stairs with their reinforced steel treads, Agatha panting and hopping
up beside her, Alice passed several offices until she got to the door with the frosted glass, which read, ‘The Good Household Management Agency’.
It had been Mrs Doulton who’d suggested the name for the agency since a book with ‘good’, ‘household’ and ‘management’ in the title had done very well for her distant relative. Alice knew
that her old mentor would have been very proud that she’d in business for over twenty-five years.
Though probably, like Alice, she’d also be a little disappointed that in that time she’d failed to move into better, more brightly lit and spacious offices. They’d come close, of course, when the agency was doing well in the boom of the two-thousands, but the rent had sky-rocketed. And in recent years, the Covid pandemic certainly hadn’t helped. It was a non-stop job supplying the carefully vetted domestic staff for her clients’ extravagant townhouses and sprawling country piles. Running the kind of high-end, event-filled life of the uber rich required good staff and Alice prided herself on supplying
only the very best. Her old-fashioned Rolodex was stuffed with everyone from chefs, nannies, chauffeurs, estate managers, PTs and PAs, to mixologists, maids, gardeners and housekeepers,
many of whom had been on her books for years. She understood that for her clients, exceptionally high standards needed to be maintained and her staff knew that discretion was the key. No matter what the problem behind closed doors, staff from Alice’s agency were always on-hand to fix it.
‘Morning,’ she said, entering. ‘How are we?’
The cramped office contained two desks in the reception area, one for Helly and one for Jinx, and a green sofa. Alice’s office was through a glass divide, but she rarely ever closed the door.
Helly put down her knitting, the ball of purple wool falling off the front of her desk and spinning towards Alice’s feet.
‘Oh, Alice, quick,’ Helly said, and Alice grabbed the wool before Agatha got hold of it. Agatha considered Helly’s knitting to be a particularly fun game and had once managed to unravel
a whole jumper.
Helly was in her early twenties and had the kind of cropped haircut that Alice had always wanted at her age but had never quite mustered the nerve to get. She had multiple piercings
in her ears and a nose stud, although Alice had drawn the line at Helly’s septum ring in the office. With her dead-pan voice and all the piercings, Jinx had worried Helly wouldn’t take to the
work, but Alice had spotted a well-brought-up, organised young person with an old soul. And, despite Jinx’s initial misgivings, she had turned out to do her job surprisingly well.
Jinx was warming herself against the fan heater, and now turned around in a way that a starlet from an old movie might, her arms outstretched.
‘There you are. My baby, my baby,’ she said in a silly voice, scooping up Agatha and nuzzling her.
‘Good morning to you too,’ Alice said, pointedly, making Jinx laugh – the same deep, raucous laugh she’d had since they were children at school together. The kind of laugh that had got
them into trouble with their teachers.
After their A levels, when Jinx had been off on multiple gap years, they’d lost touch, and in her early twenties, when Alice had been dealing with the fall-out of her parents’ sudden demise, she’d watched from afar as Jinx, armed with that very laugh and a swagger to match, had become an ‘It’ girl in London in the mid Nineties.
Always pictured in the gossip columns on the arm of some minor prince or playboy, Jinx’s first celebrity wedding to an oil magnate’s son had lasted all of six months. When Jinx has called out of the blue from the South of France, in floods of tears, explaining that she was penniless and humiliated, Alice hadn’t hesitated in helping her out. Husband number two seemed a better prospect, but he’d turned out to be a rotter too. Husband number three had hardly been any better. And when
husband number four had died unexpectedly in a hot tub – which Jinx hadn’t been in at the time – Jinx had cleaned up her act and declared that she was off men forever.
It was then Alice had invited her to come aboard to help run the agency. From day one she’d been a natural, and in recent years had really come into her own, branching out into a very successful concierge service for their clients.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’ Alice asked, squinting at Jinx’s stripey taffeta dress with puffed sleeves. She looked alarmingly like a deckchair.
‘Don’t you love being old enough for things to come back into fashion?’
‘It’s very Princess Diana,’ Alice ventured, knowing the compliment would land with her friend, who loved the royals and had never really stopped being a Sloane Ranger – for whom the iconic
Princess had, of course, been the main torchbearer. ‘But maybe one for spring? Didn’t you hear we’re expecting snow?’
‘Hasn’t the royal family been cancelled? I don’t know why you two still harp on about them,’ Helly said, not looking up from her knitting.
Alice, who along with Jinx had mourned profoundly the passing of the late Queen, was saved from entering a debate about loyalty and service when the buzzer sounded.
Helly leant into the comms screen.
‘It’s that girl for the interview,’ she said. ‘She’s early.’
‘Good,’ Alice said. ‘Bring her in.’
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(end of excerpt)
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Published 24th October 2024
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