The brown parcel tape bit into Kit’s thumb as she dragged the dispenser across the cardboard flaps, only for the bottom of the box to bow outwards and spill fourteen volumes of an old encyclopaedia onto the flagstones.
She swore, then immediately murmured, “Sorry,” to the empty hallway.
She checked her watch. Nine-fifteen. If she boxed the sitting room by two and the study by six, she could load the hired transit van on Sunday morning, drop the keys at the solicitor’s letterbox, and be back in Leeds before the Sunday night shift at St Jude’s. Two days. Forty-eight hours to pack eighty-one years of Hester Vane into double-walled cartons, sweep the ash from the grate, and get back to her sterile, predictable dispensary where every bottle had an expiry date and a barcode.
The brass letterbox rattled. Something thick and damp slapped onto the coconut matting, bringing a gust of wet November air and the sour tang of coal smoke from the chimney stacks along Kirkgate.
Kit stepped over a pile of dictionaries of phrase and fable and tugged the folded newsprint free of the bristles. The newsagent’s boy hadn’t been told. Or perhaps in Skelby they kept delivering until the funeral was paid for.
It was the Saturday Morning Ledger.
She walked into the kitchen, intending to drop it straight into the recycling crate beside the back door. Her thumb caught the fold. The paper fell open on the scrubbed pine table, right at the back page of the weekend supplement.
Cryptic Crossword No. 14,892. Set by Magpie.
A black border, two millimetres thick, ran round the fifteen-by-fifteen grid. Above it sat a single italicised line: Hester Vane, 1945–2026. Our Saturday setter for forty years.
Kit’s throat tightened. She picked up the paper to tip it into the green plastic box, hesitated, and laid it flat beside the kettle instead. She hadn’t looked at a Magpie grid since the autumn three years ago when she’d come off four consecutive twelve-hour night shifts in oncology, forgotten Hester’s eightieth birthday lunch, and snapped down the phone when Hester told her that tiredness was merely poor syntax of the body.
“You always were sloppy when you rushed, Katherine,” Hester had said.
“And you think the whole world fits into fifteen squares,” Kit had answered, and hung up. And then three years of rota swaps, winter pressures, and stock audits had gone by until a GP she didn’t know rang St Jude’s switchboard on Wednesday morning to say Hester had died in her armchair on Tuesday night.
A brisk, two-beat knock sounded at the front door. Before Kit could reach the latch, it lifted, and a man in a Loden coat stepped inside, shaking a tartan umbrella over the porch tiles.
“Miss Lomax! Forgive the intrusion. Nobody locks a door on Kirkgate before dark, and my hands were full.” Martin Rook tucked the umbrella into the stoneware stand with the ease of a man who had visited every month for a decade. He was fifty-eight, pink-cheeked from the rain, with silver hair combed neatly over a receding crown and a buff document wallet under one arm. “I brought the preliminary probate inventory and the utility transfer forms. Thought I’d save you the walk up the hill in this drizzle.”
“Thank you, Mr Rook. Sorry about the mess in the hall. One of the boxes gave way.”
“Please, call me Martin. And don’t apologise. Clearing a house is wretched work, especially a house with quite so much vocabulary in it.” He smiled warmly, stepping over the spilled dictionaries into the kitchen, and laid his folder on the pine table. His eyes fell on the open Morning Ledger. “Ah. They ran it. I hoped they might.”
“Did she keep a backlog with the paper?” Kit asked, reaching into her cardigan pocket for her biro.
“Not Hester. She hated stockpiling. Said a clue went stale if it sat in a drawer for a fortnight. She always sent Saturday’s grid in on the Tuesday evening before.” Rook tapped the folded newsprint with a manicured forefinger. “I always finish Magpie on the 8.12 to Leeds on a Monday morning. Takes me all the way past Gargrave, mind you, and sometimes right into the station concourse, but I get there. She had a wicked mind, your aunt.”
“Precise,” Kit said. “She didn’t think she was wicked. She thought everyone else was unobservant.”
“Quite right, quite right.” Rook opened the buff wallet and slid out three stapled sheets of heavy cream paper. “Now, as executor, and having held her power of attorney these last two years while her ankles were bad, I’ve tried to keep the paperwork tidy for you. Her accounts are straightforward. The cottage is the principal asset, of course, though Simon has already been on the telephone to me twice since Thursday morning asking when we can have an estate agent measure the parlour.”
Kit uncapped her pen. “Simon has bills.”
“Simon has horses,” Rook said mildly, though his mouth twitched with a country solicitor’s disapproval. “Which amounts to the same thing, only faster. If you’d just initial the bottom of page two and sign the declaration on page three, we can freeze the direct debits and…”
Kit had already read page one and turned to page two. She never signed a release form in the dispensary without reading the batch numbers and the dosage lines twice. Her eye caught on the third paragraph of the executor’s covering schedule, typed on Rook’s office letterhead.
To accomodate the immediate settlement of funeral and parish expenses…
One m.
A tiny, reflexive wince went through her. At nine years old, sitting at this very pine table with a saucer of midget gems and a sharpened HB pencil, she had once written ACCOMODATE into a ten-letter light. Hester hadn’t raised her voice. She had simply fetched the tape-bound dictionary from the study, dropped it open beside Kit’s elbow, and said, A house large enough to accommodate two c’s has room for two m’s, Katherine. A setter who cannot spell is a pharmacist who cannot weigh.
Kit signed her name below the paragraph without mentioning it. “There. Sorry to keep you standing in the cold. The heating’s off.”
“The boiler’s on a timer in the pantry, if you want me to…”
“No, really, I work faster when it’s chilly.”
Rook slid the signed pages back into his wallet. As he turned towards the hall, he glanced through the open doorway into Hester’s little study at the foot of the stairs. The rain tapped steadily against the glass of the cold conservatory beyond it.
“There’s the laptop on her desk,” Rook said, pausing with his hand on the doorframe. “It’ll have her royalty spreadsheets from the Ledger and her tax notes for the year. I’ll need to go through those for the tax return. Shall I take it off your hands now?”
Kit looked past him at the study desk: the grey metal anglepoise, the jar of yellow pencils sharpened with a penknife to long cedar cones, the A3 pad of blank grids, the small silver laptop with its lid closed.
“Leave it for tomorrow, if that’s all right,” Kit said. “I haven’t sorted the desk drawers yet, and her passwords will be written down in one of her notebooks. I’d rather hand it over with everything complete.”
“Of course, of course. Whenever suits you.” Rook buttoned his Loden coat to the chin. “I’ll pop round tomorrow afternoon, then. Do make yourself a hot drink, my dear. You look perished.”
* * *
By five o’clock it was pitch dark outside, and the rain had thickened into the steady, slanting Yorkshire downpour that filled the stone gutters along Kirkgate with a noise like running taps.
Kit had boxed forty-two linear feet of poetry, linguistics, and county history. Her lower back ached. Her hands smelled of old paper and damp bindings. She stood in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, and looked down at the wooden pill organiser sitting on the windowsill above the sink.
It was a standard seven-day dosette box, pale plastic with twenty-eight flip-top compartments: Morning, Noon, Evening, Bed. The police officer who had attended on Tuesday night after the neighbour raised the alarm had left it where it sat; Dr Amery, Hester’s GP for thirty years, had come round at ten on Wednesday morning, checked his records of her chronic atrial fibrillation and congestive heart failure, and signed the medical certificate of cause of death without asking the coroner for a post-mortem. Eighty-one years old, ankles swollen since August, dead in her chair with the lamp still on. Nobody questioned an old heart stopping in November.
Kit didn’t open the box. She poured boiling water over a teabag, picked up the Morning Ledger, and carried both into the study.
She switched on the anglepoise. The bulb threw a warm yellow circle across the green leather blotter. Everything was in its ritual station. To the left, the red dictionary, its spine mended with three strips of grey gaffer tape. In the centre, the A3 pad of fifteen-by-fifteen grids. Top sheet filled in Hester’s neat, upright block capitals in 2B pencil. To the right, the silver laptop and a porcelain dish holding three rubber erasers and six pencils.
Kit sat down in the captain’s chair, took a pencil from the dish, and looked at the top sheet of the pad.
Wait.
She leaned closer to the bottom right-hand corner of the hand-drawn grid.
It was blank.
Every grid Hester had ever completed, every Saturday puzzle since 1986, had been signed in the bottom right margin before she typed up the fair copy of the clues. Not with her initials, never with a date, but with three brisk strokes of a soft pencil: a long tail, a round belly, a cocked head. A tiny pencil magpie.
There was no magpie on the sheet.
Kit pulled the newspaper towards her, laid it beside the pad, and began to solve.
At first, the old rhythm came back like riding a bicycle down a hill. She read 1 Across: Initially, royal ornithologist’s old kestrel (4). The indicator initially pointed to the first letters of royal ornithologist’s old kestrel: R-O-O-K. A simple acrostic to open the top left corner, and a wry nod to the birds that nested in the churchyard elms at the bottom of the lane.
She wrote ROOK into the newspaper grid, glancing at the pencil pad. The letters matched Hester’s neat block capitals.
She moved along the top row to 3 Across: A place for work or worship (6). A clean double definition: OFFICE. Then 13 Down, dropping down the right-hand side: Stands for benches in the house (6). Another crisp double definition: STOOLS.
For twenty minutes the only sound in the study was the scratch of graphite and the rain drumming on the conservatory roof. Across clues slotted neatly into Down lights. The phrasing had Hester’s unmistakable, waspish economy. Each surface reading sounded like a fragment of dry village gossip while operating underneath with the precision of a watch movement.
Hester had four rules. She had written them in black ink on the inside cover of Kit’s first exercise book in 1999, and she had repeated them to every aspiring setter who ever sent her a stamped addressed envelope:
One: Every clue must have an exact definition at the very beginning or the very end.
Two: Never, under any circumstances, use an indirect anagram. A solver cannot rearrange letters that are not printed on the page.
Three: No unmarked Americanisms. We live in Yorkshire, not Ohio.
Four: Never misspell a word in the wordplay or the grid.
Then Kit reached the bottom right-hand corner of the puzzle, where four short lights intersected.
She stopped dead at 22 Down.
The clue in the paper read: Accomodate in a little house (5).
The letters on Hester’s pencil pad were L-O-D-G-E. A straightforward double definition, to accommodate someone and a gatehouse or small dwelling, except that right there in the column of the Morning Ledger, the first word was printed Accomodate. With one m.
Kit stared at the newsprint. A sub-editor in London might miss a typo in a rush, or leave an odd spelling assuming it was deliberate wordplay, but Hester would never have typed it. Something about the misspelling snagged at the back of Kit’s mind, and slid away again before she could catch it.
She looked down at the next clue, 24 Down, running down the bottom right border of the grid where Hester’s pad showed the letters E-M-B-E-R.
The clue read, in its entirety: Inside September (5).
Kit’s pencil point hovered over the paper. Inside was a hidden-word indicator, showing that the five letters of EMBER were tucked inside Sept-ember. And that was all. There was no definition at either end. Nothing in those two words meant a glowing coal, or a dying fire, or ash. It was half a clue, naked and unfinished, written by someone who knew how to hide a word inside another word but had forgotten that a cryptic clue still had to define its answer.
Her pulse quickened. She looked across at the bottom two horizontal lights, 26 Across and 27 Across.
26 Across read: Color of a ruby (3).
The answer on the pad was R-E-D. Not colour with a u, as Hester had spelled it every day of her eighty-one years, and not flagged with in New York or on Broadway. Just a bald, unmarked Americanism sitting in the middle of a Yorkshire setter’s grid.
And finally, right on the bottom line, 27 Across: Confused gentle animal’s flesh (4).
The letters in the grid were M-E-A-T.
Kit laid her pencil down on the leather blotter. Animal’s flesh was the definition. Confused was an anagram indicator. Which meant the solver was supposed to take the word gentle, mentally translate it into the unprinted synonym TAME, and then rearrange the letters of TAME to get MEAT.
An indirect anagram. The cardinal sin of British crossword setting.
A misspelling with a single m. A hidden word with no definition. An unmarked Americanism. An indirect anagram.
Hester Vane had not written those four clues. She would rather have eaten the Morning Ledger page by page with a salt cellar than send those four clues to London.
The iron knocker on the front door banged once, hard enough to rattle the glass in the conservatory door.
“Hello?” a voice barked from the porch. “Katherine? You still in here?”
Simon Vane didn’t wait for an answer either, though unlike Rook he didn’t wipe his boots. He tracked wet dead leaves across the hall flags and propped his shoulder against the study doorway. He was fifty-five, heavy in the jowls, wearing a wax jacket with a torn pocket and smelling of damp wool and tobacco.
“Thought I saw a light,” Simon said, nodding at the desk. “You’ve barely touched the study. I told Rook we need the house clear for the valuer by Tuesday. Market’s dead by December, and I’m not paying council tax on an empty stone box all winter.”
“Hello, Simon,” Kit said. “The sitting room’s boxed. I’ll have the rest done tomorrow.”
Simon squinted down at the newspaper and the yellow pad under the lamp. “What are you doing? Her wretched puzzle? Bit late for that, isn’t it?”
“Did you see her on Tuesday?” Kit asked, keeping her voice level.
“What? No. Why would I? Every time I came round she lectured me about my overdraft. Last time I spoke to her was Sunday morning, and she bit my head off because I asked if she’d thought about equity release.” He snorted, rubbing his nose with the back of his wrist. “Fifty years she’s lived in my father’s house, and she acts as if the mortar’s made of her own blood. And those bloody squares. I never understood a single clue in my life, and I told her so. Why can’t you just write ‘cat’ when you mean ‘cat’? I said. She looked at me as if I’d dropped my trousers in church.”
Kit held the newspaper up slightly. “Four of the clues in today’s puzzle are wrong.”
“Wrong? What d’you mean, wrong? The letters fit, don’t they?”
“The letters in the grid are hers. Four of the clues aren’t. They break every rule she had. One of them doesn’t even have a definition, and another relies on misspelling a word.”
Simon stared at her, then gave a short, harsh laugh. “She was eighty-one, Kit! With a failing heart and water on the lungs! Half the time these last two weeks she was breathless walking from the kettle to the chair. Her mind was slipping, or she was tired, or she just couldn’t be bothered.”
“Her mind wasn’t slipping.”
“How would you know?” Simon said nastily. “You haven’t set foot in Skelby since she turned seventy-eight. Leave the damned paper alone and get those shelves cleared.”
He turned on his heel and banged out through the front door.
Kit sat still for ten seconds. Then she stood up, pulled her raincoat from the banister, and stepped out into the wet dark of Kirkgate.
The cottage next door shared a party wall with Hester’s study. A warm amber light glowed behind its leaded front window. Kit tapped on the door.
Graham Pettifer opened it wearing slippers and a cardigan with leather elbow patches. At seventy, he was thin and stooped, with fierce white eyebrows and ink stains on his middle finger. For thirty-five years he had set the Wednesday puzzle for the Chronicle under the name Fenwick, and for thirty-five years he and Hester had conducted a territorial war over hedges, dustbins, and Ximenean grammar.
“Katherine,” he said, his voice dry as kindling. “Come out of the rain. You’re letting a draught into the hall.”
His sitting room was warm and smelled of toast. On the low table beside his armchair lay today’s Morning Ledger, folded back to the puzzle page. It was completely filled in, in fountain pen. Around the four clues in the bottom right corner, Graham had drawn four violent red circles with a felt-tip marker.
Kit looked at the red circles, then up at Graham’s face.
“You saw them,” she said.
“Saw them?” Graham’s eyebrows drew together. “I nearly had a stroke over my kippers. An indirect anagram in a Magpie puzzle? Accomodate with one M? Have they sacked all the sub-editors in London and replaced them with Labradors?”
“Hester didn’t write those four clues, Graham.”
Graham looked away towards the coal fire. His jaw worked. “We had a screaming row on Tuesday afternoon. Four o’clock, right over the garden wall. Mrs Garside across the street heard every word of it, no doubt.”
“What about?”
“A clue in my draft for next month. I’d used roughly after the anagram fodder instead of before a participial form. She stood in the rain in her slippers and told me my syntax was turning to porridge.” He swallowed hard, his thin throat bobbing. “And then at seven o’clock I drove my car out of the lane, parked outside her gate for five minutes wanting to go in and apologise, lost my temper all over again, and drove off to Skipton for fish and chips. Never spoke to her again. By the next morning she was gone.”
He pointed a shaking, ink-stained finger at the red circles on the newspaper. “She was furious with me, Katherine. Or she was already having the turn that killed her, sitting at that desk at nine o’clock at night with her heart giving out, trying to finish the last four clues before deadline so she wouldn’t miss a Saturday. Grief, temper, hypoxia: who knows what it does to the brain?”
“If you had sixty seconds to live, Graham, would you write Inside September with no definition?”
“I’d die with the square blank!” Graham snapped. Then his shoulders sagged. “Which is why I’ve been sitting here staring at it since nine this morning.”