The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn (6 page)

“All we know is what it says on the jar,” Dittany replied.

“Then you at least know that Mother Matilda’s Mincemeat is a subtle blend of chopped beef, suet, apples, sugar, cider, raisins, currants, citron, dried orange peel, and a good many other things I needn’t go into just now. Including a couple I wouldn’t tell you about anyway. But what makes our mincemeat unique isn’t so much the ingredients as the subtle blending. We don’t just scoop up a jugful of this and a handful of that and bung ’em into the cauldrons the way some people seem to think. Every milligram of nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, and several more things I’m sworn to secrecy about is weighed, measured, and sniffed to ensure absolute consistency of taste and quality. Oh, we’re sticklers, I can tell you that.”

“We believe you,” Dittany replied politely.

Mother Matilda didn’t seem to hear her. “Yes, it was stickling that got us where we are today, and stickling which I greatly fear has precipitated this awful business.”

“How’s that?” said Osbert.

This time Mother Matilda heard. “Well, you see, Deputy, there’s only one person alive in this world today who knows the whole secret recipe and that’s yours truly right here. The paper it’s written on in Granny’s handwriting was handed to me by my mother on her deathbed. I took my oath then and there never to divulge the recipe to anybody until the time came for me to hand over my cap and apron, figuratively speaking, to Matilda the Fourth. Actually my daughter’s Matilda the Fifth because it’s really Great-Granny’s recipe, but it was Granny who first developed the commercial possibilities, so we think of her instead of her mother as Matilda the First. You could argue it either way, though I don’t suppose you’d particularly care to in the present circumstances.”

Osbert didn’t suppose so, either. “So what that means is that you have to go all over the factory every day telling everybody how much of which ingredient to use, right?”

Mother Matilda managed a wan smile. “Lord bless you, sonny, how’d a high-powered executive like me have time for all that? Mother Matilda’s Mincemeat is a multimillion dollar operation these days. If I told you what we spend in a year’s time on orange peel alone, you’d think I was having a pipe dream. What we do is, we compartmentalize. That was poor Charles’s word for it. We have a VP Cinnamon, as we call them for short, a VP Mace, a VP Cloves, and so on down through the list. They’re all tried and true veterans, all sworn to secrecy. I’d have trusted any of them with my life. Though of course not with my recipe.”

The mincemeat magnate appeared for a moment close to tears, but she rallied bravely and went on with her explanation. “I don’t know how much you people here in Lobelia Falls know about the vicious internecine war raging in the mincemeat business today. We’d heard reports of spies infiltrating elsewhere, but never dreamed it could affect us until all of a sudden, things began to happen.”

“What sort of things?” said Dittany.

“First it was VP Cider. The cider we use is sweet cider, fresh-squeezed in our own cider press, so naturally you wouldn’t expect there to be anything wrong with it, right?”

“But there was?”

“I’ll tell the world there was! You see, one of VP Cider’s functions is to taste each batch of cider and make sure it conforms to our rigid standards. We can’t always get the same variety and quality of apples, needless to say, so this tasting is another extremely important function. Well! VP Cider—Fred Perkins, his name is, Fred and I were in Sunday school together—was down in the cider store by himself, tasting a batch as usual, and he didn’t send through the okay signal for the cider fetchers to come and get it. So the foreman decided after a while that he’d better go see what the story was because they needed the cider, you see. What the foreman found was Fred sprawled out on the storeroom floor in his shirtsleeves, drunk as a boiled owl, singing ‘The Maple Leaf Forever.’ ”

“No!” cried Dittany.

“Yup,” said Mother Matilda, “the jug he’d been testing turned out to be pure applejack. And there was Fred—a strict teetotaler, a thirty-third, degree Mason, a Sunday school superintendent, and a high-ranking company official—the butt of opprobrium and coarse ribaldry. We naturally assumed the incident was meant as an extremely ill-conceived practical joke, but it certainly wasn’t funny. Furthermore, we had to hold up production till Fred’s mouth quit tasting like the bottom of a bird cage and he could get on with the job he’s paid to do.”

“And there were other incidents?” Osbert prompted.

“Too many. The most outrageous of all was VP Lemon Peel’s getting debagged by masked marauders in his own office while his secretary was out collecting her afternoon tea. They just rushed in, pulled a typewriter cover over his head, hauled down his britches, lashed him to his swivel chair with his own suspenders, and dashed out again. Miss Flaubert dropped the tea and fainted when she came in and found him sitting there in a pair of lemon-colored boxer shorts. Another tasteless and pointless prank was the consensus, but then Charles began putting two and two together. And he saw!”

“WHAT WAS IT HE
saw, Mother Matilda?” asked Dittany.

“Well, first I should explain that in our zeal for perfection, we at Mother Matilda’s never trust to memory. Each of the VPs has his own segment of the mincemeat recipe on a separate card, which he’s required to keep on his person at all times during working hours. I use ‘his’ in the impersonal sense, of course; several of our VPs are women. Right now I wish they all were, since the men seem so much more vulnerable to attack. But anyway, these cards are never taken off the premises except when the VPs carry them to the bank at night and pick them up again in the morning. Each card is kept in a separate safe deposit box, to which only the particular VP and I have keys.”

“How far is the bank from the factory?” said Osbert.

“It’s directly across the street. What our VPs generally do is drive up to the bank and park outside long enough to run in and get their cards, then swing across and drive into the parking lot, where our security guard lets them in through the side door, takes the car, and parks it. Then of course, the VPs are inside the factory and theoretically safe from molestation.”

Osbert started to say something, but Mother Matilda held up an imperious hand. High-powered executives couldn’t help it, Dittany supposed.

“Let me finish, Deputy. As I said, these disgusting incidents went on until it suddenly occurred to Charles that, while the formula cards were always found exactly where the VP had put them, they were always in a part of the clothing that had been vulnerable to search. Fred Perkins kept his card in his inside coat pocket, for instance, and when they found him he had his coat off. He was too befuddled, poor fellow, to remember whether or not he’d taken it off himself, but there it was.”

“And VP Lemon Peel carried his card in his trousers?”

“Precisely. And while the entire recipe is quite lengthy, the information required for each individual ingredient doesn’t amount to more than a few lines. You could copy it off in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, slip the card back where you found it, and nobody would be the wiser. That’s what Charles decided they must be doing. We’d been infiltrated! The recipe was being stolen under our very noses, one ingredient at a time.”

“When did your husband come to that conclusion, Mother Matilda?” asked Osbert.

“Only last night. It hit Charles like a ton of brick. That was why he was a little late getting to work this morning. He’d stopped to see about having the formula recorded in that special ink you have to look at through an X-ray machine, or whatever it is that only shows up when you do whatever it is you do. I leave all that to the boffins.”

Mother Matilda dismissed the world of science with an impatient wave of her hand. “Anyway, whoever’s been doing these dastardly deeds must somehow have got wind of the fact that the jig was up. Or else the nutmeg formula simply happened to be next on their schedule, and this gangster act was another of their bright ideas. I have to tell you the police chief over in Lammergen doesn’t believe me. He thinks it was a bona fide attempt at a bank holdup; but that hardly explains why the so-called bank robbers pursued Charles from there to here, shooting at him all the way, judging from the number of bullet holes Sergeant MacVicar says were found in his car.”

“Why do you suppose your husband came to Lobelia Falls?”

“I think Charles was trying to decoy them away from the factory. He used to be a stock-car racer in his younger days, and may have thought he could easily shake them off on the Lobelia Falls road. Also, Charles had an extremely high opinion of Sergeant MacVicar’s acumen and a very low one of Fridwell Slapp’s. That’s our police chief, I’m sad to say. It’s my opinion that Charles was heading right here to the police station. By the time he got here, he’d been hit by one of the bullets and was, as you know, bleeding profusely.”

Mother Matilda broke down for a moment, took a deep breath, dried her eyes, and fought gamely on. “Coming from Lammergen, he’d naturally have been on the wrong side of the road, and he must, have known the other car was in hot pursuit. Whether Charles failed to make the U-turn for the station because somebody else happened to be in the way at the crucial moment or whether he thought it would be better to park and run across to the station, I couldn’t say.”

“Judging from the way he ran into Miss Jane’s and ran straight out again,” Dittany suggested, “do you think it’s possible your husband simply got confused? Anybody might have, what with getting shot at all the way along and losing so much blood.”

“So they might be,” Mother Matilda agreed. “Charles was always inclined to be a trifle absentminded, anyway. Whatever happened, it’s clear he meant to protect that nutmeg formula to the last. Though I suppose they must have got it off him when they …”

Mother Matilda’s voice failed her. Dittany and Osbert sat silent, realizing how futile mere words of compassion would be in the face of so overwhelming a loss. It was Mrs. MacVicar who brought true consolation. In she bustled, carrying a tray on which sat three teacups and one steaming bowl filled with something that looked like fish chowder and exuded a seductive aroma of finnan haddie.

“Cullen skink!” cried Mother Matilda.

“Aye,” said Sergeant MacVicar, who had followed his wife with the teapot. “And good as your granny’s, I’ll be bound.”

“We’ll see.”

Mother Matilda was in command of herself again. She took the serviette Mrs. MacVicar had brought and spread it neatly over her navy-blue lap. She picked up the spoon, paused a moment to decide precisely where to dip, and essayed her first taste. To a high-powered food expert, this could be no trivial slurp. She sniffed, she sipped. She rolled the rich, creamy broth around on her tongue. Gradually the pain that had wracked her unbeautiful but by no means uncomely features subsided. She raised to her impromptu hostess eyes filled with tears of wonder and gratitude.

“Exactly the way Granny used to make it. To think that I should live to taste Granny’s cullen skink again! Oh, Mrs. MacVicar, you’ve given me back my lost youth.”

Mrs. MacVicar flushed and became very busy with the teapot. Canadian to the bone, she’d never quite got over the suspicion that praise to the face might really be open disgrace. “Here, Dittany, you’d better have extra milk in your tea. Did you get any lunch?”

“My husband took me out,” Dittany replied demurely. “We wound up eating at the inn with Mum and Arethusa and the Bleinkinsop twins.”

“The—you did say twins, Dittany?”

“That’s right. Glanville and Ranville, their names are. They recognized Arethusa from her photographs, and it appears to have been the start of something relatively beautiful.”

“But how?” It was not like Mrs. MacVicar to be incoherent. She simply knew that Dittany would know that she knew what twins were under discussion. Dittany, of course, did.

“Easily enough. They sat on a couple of stools placed, as I needn’t say, back to back, with a table in front of each twin. Arethusa sat across from one and Mum across from the other. Osbert and I sat side by side at a third table so they could look at us over their shoulders when they weren’t goggling at Arethusa and Mum.”

Refreshed by the cullen skink, Mother Matilda was taking a keen interest in this unusual seating arrangement. “My stars and garters,” she observed, “you do paint a curious picture. For one fleeting moment there, I thought you must be describing a pair of Siamese twins joined at the spine.”

“We didn’t get into physiological details,” Dittany replied, “but on the visual evidence, that’s what they appear to be. I have to say I was rather surprised at first to see all those arms and legs on one person. But then when one realizes he’s actually two persons … unless they have a jointly owned torso, which is quite possible since they only wear one coat which has four sleeves and buttons both fore and aft—or aft and fore, as the case may be—I must say it gave me a fascinating new insight on the possibilities of being twins. Glanville and Ranville seem to have such a lovely time together.”

“Land’s sakes!” exclaimed Mother Matilda. “Are you by chance expecting twins yourself?”

“So Dr. Peagrim tells me, and he’s never been wrong yet,” said Dittany. “At least he claims he never has, and I expect he’d be the one to know if anybody does. He says one’s a boy and one’s a girl, so I do in fact rather hope my babies emerge one at a time with a decent interval between. You know how people talk.”

“Well, if you’re not a caution!”

Mother Matilda set her spoon in the empty bowl with a sigh that was partly of repletion and partly of regret that there wasn’t any more cullen skink to be had. “My gracious, that was good! Not to be nosy, Mrs. MacVicar, but your granny didn’t by any chance happen to be a McCorquindale?”

“Why, yes,” the sergeant’s wife replied. “That is to say, she married a McCorquindale. That was my maiden name, as a matter of fact.”

“Your folks were from around these parts, were they?”

“Oh yes. McCorquindales were among the early settlers of Scottsbeck, as you doubtless know. In fact they’re one of the reasons it came to be called Scottsbeck. There were a lot that came over from Scotland in the early days: Frazers, MacDonalds, MacLeods of whom the McCorquindales are a sept, as I again don’t suppose I have to tell you. They’ve spread out a lot, but some of the descendants are still around. I was born and grew up in Scottsbeck, but moved to Lobelia Falls as a bride and must say I’ve never wanted to leave here. So you think you and I may be related to one another?”