Come to side door through garden.
The existence of a side door was news to Kelsey, so with an enhanced sense of curiosity, she made her way outside and around the back of the building, passing under the branches of the spreading oak tree in the centre of the communal lawn, her camera cases with their long straps slung across her body, bumping at her hips.
At the back of the building there was a dense shrubbery of fading purple buddleia choked with teasels and bindweed. She’d seen it before but hadn’t noticed the path worn through the weeds. Following it, she found it led to a rickety gate, half off its hinges and framed with a tumble of rambling roses, the blooms now turned to swollen red hips.
Lowering her head to squeeze through the gap in the greenery and getting her hair caught on a thorn, she passed into a small courtyard with lichen-speckled Victorian flagstones interspersed with colourful, cracked patterned tiles underfoot. There were wind chimes and birdfeeders hanging from the branches of densely packed small trees, and a chair and table by the door to a wood-framed glass lean-to which looked as old as the building itself. Its peeling mint-green paint contrasted wonderfully with the late sprigs of Cotswold lavender growing in great round clumps under an unkempt hedge bordering this little wild Eden.
Kelsey was just becoming aware of a sweet scent in the air; not a natural, floral, garden scent, but a strange, not-unpleasant, chemical tang.
Early autumn leaves made scratching sounds on the flags as they blew around her feet and, as she looked down at them, she realised they were joined by a black cat which had clearly come to suss her out. It was parading haughtily in front of her, its tail tensed bolt upright.
‘Hello, kitty.’ Kelsey crouched to pet it, but it fluffed its tail and gave her an outraged glare, a mixture of angry and afraid. It was just opening its jaws to hiss a warning to stay back when there was a loud bang from inside the house followed by the sound of shattering glass and a cry of ‘Bugger, bastard and blast!’ The cat scarpered up a tree, sending a startled blackbird squawking from under the hedge.
‘What on earth…?’ Kelsey made her way to the glass door, propped open with a pile of rain-damaged paperbacks, and as she went she became increasingly aware of the same hot, acrid smell in the air, now mixed with a slight odour of something singed.
‘Hell’s bells! Not again,’ came the voice from inside; an elderly woman’s voice, shaky and thin.
‘Hello!’ Kelsey called as she put her head inside the glass lean-to, which was full of faded books and red geraniums in pots, the scent of their leaves mixing with the burning smell and the white vaporous clouds now emanating from the gap between thick purple velvet drapes which separated the inner space from the green world outside.
‘Is everything all right? Do you need help?’ she called.
‘Bloody, bloody, bloody bastard and blast!’ This was muttered under the breath of the person behind the curtain and accompanied by the sounds of shards of glass being swept up.
Kelsey was about to cry out again and was reaching for her phone – in case she had to alert the authorities to a chemical spill or a gas leak on an epic scale – when the purple drapes twitched and a head poked out.
Kelsey took a step backwards at the sight of the woman, easily seventy years old, with long, thin white hair splaying messily around her face, and piercing, suspicious violet eyes peering through skew-whiff plastic goggles.
‘I thought I heard somebody snooping about. What do you want? I’ve told your lot already it’s perfectly safe and you should keep your sticky beaks out of an old lady’s private goings on.’
‘Umm, are you Blythe Goode?’ Kelsey managed, taken aback. The woman was surveying her from head to toe, the curtain still clasped shut beneath her neck so only her head showed.
‘You don’t look like you’re from Environmental Health.’
‘What? I’m not, no, I’m from theExaminer. I’ve come to take your picture to accompany the interview you did recently? Didn’t Mr Ferdinand ring a few minutes ago to let you know I was coming?’
‘He didn’t, no. Hardly surprising; man’s a buffoon. Makes a mockery of that paper. Clement Dickens would be spinning in his grave if he could see what’s become of that place. Fine man, he was, Clement.’
Kelsey could do nothing but shrug. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that, this is my first job for the paper.’
‘Hmm, well, make sure he pays you.’
‘You’re the second person to tell me that. Doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence.’
‘Mind out the way.’ Blythe had released her grip on the curtain and was attempting to bustle past Kelsey, holding before her a dustpan containing what looked like lumps of congealed burnt sugar, still smoking slightly. ‘Marlowe! Where is that cat? Very sensitive, he is, always disappearing.’
‘He ran off under that tree,’ Kelsey said, distractedly, trying to peer between the curtains. ‘Look, has there been an accident? Are you all right?’
Blythe shuffled by, one hand moving a walking frame in front of her, the other shakily grasping the dustpan. ‘Open the bin, then.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Kelsey dashed to the silver trash can tucked around the corner of the glass house, lifted the lid and watched as Blythe walked painfully slowly towards it and tipped the acrid contents in.
‘Just a small explosion. Nothing to worry about. Come inside, but mind your feet, there’s glass everywhere.’
She waited for Blythe to walk her way back through the curtains then followed her in. The smell was much stronger inside the cluttered kitchen. Kelsey looked around in amazement. ‘What’s all this?’ she asked.
Around the walls and from the pulley on the ceiling hung drying herbs and flowers, and there were two great pots with what smelled like fruit jam bubbling on an old stove. On the shelves lining the room stood many hundreds of books, all decidedly dusty-looking. What must have once upon a time been a fine oak kitchen table was piled high with glass beakers raised on frames, bell jars, strange metal coils and pipes, and in the centre, a tall copper rocket-shaped pot with some kind of pressure gauge, its needle fluctuating wildly from black to red – whatever that signified – on its cylindrical belly. Copper tubes led off from the device to what appeared to be an eccentric copper kettle. The whole kitchen gave the impression of a cross between Dr Jekyll’s laboratory and aDownton Abbeyscullery.
‘Don’t gape. It isn’t polite,’ Blythe said as she turned the knobs on the stove. The gas flames died away but there were still alarming gurgling and banging sounds coming from the great copper device on the table. ‘It’s a still. Have you never seen one before?’ she said, a hint of terseness in her voice which, now Blythe was recovering from the blast, Kelsey registered as surprisingly commanding and theatrical.
