I don't normally post things nigh on top of each other. But as this is really the bookend to the previous chapter, I thought you might like to have them close together.

February, 1930

It has been brought to notice that Tea is being made in the Scullery adjoining the Police Room. This practice must cease at once.So read the sign pinned to the Scullery in question on the Monday following the Gurevitch dinner party. It had been brought to Jem's attention by Geordie, equal parts baffled and exasperated. Now Teddy had been pulled over to scrutinise it. He read it, blinked and said, 'Sorry, Sir, but isn't the Scullery where you're supposed to make tea?'

'Evidently not,' said Geordie. He was patently put out at being cheated of his morning brew, and Jem, who had only snatched half a cup himself before heading out, was still too addle-brained to face solving this conundrum.

'Well, we can't make it in the Police Room,' said Teddy reasonably. Jem nodded obliquely. He didn't see, all things being equal, why one couldn't make tea wherever there happened to be a kettle and a means of heating it. Except the police surgery. That would just be bad practice. Drinking in front of his patients, like that, when they couldn't. Jem shook his head.

'It is beginning to dawn on me,' said Geordie, 'that they don't wantus to make tea at all.' He looked and sounded mutinous. If he was right, Jem didn't blame him. Before he could do more than nod again, Benwick, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked and abnormally energetic, came bounding towards them.

'It's about that robbery at the Natural History Museum,' he said, all but bouncing on the balls of his feet. It occurred to Jem for the first time that the boy must never take up with Kitty. They'd be a terrifying whirlwind together.

'You'll never guess,' Benwick was saying, 'what was nicked. Go on, guess!'

'It wasn't adder venom, by any chance?' asked Teddy. Benwick's face fell, but did not lose any of its colour.

'How'd you guess?' he asked.

'How did you guess?' said Geordie. 'That's awfully specific.'

'Yes,' said Jem, 'about that. What with spontaneous invitations to the home of your butcher's family, I never got the chance to tell you. We got the verdict back on Pelorous Choke.'

'And it was adder venom?' said Geordie, eyebrows ascending well into his hairline.

'A syringe of the stuff from the look of it,' said Jem.

Geordie grimaced. 'Dear lord,' he said. 'Whatever happened to giving the poor murdered sod a sharp clobbering on the back of the head?'

'Dunno, Sir,' said a demure Benwick. Teddy shrugged. Geordie went on unfazed. 'We've had strychnine, with a side helping of dogs down the well – '

'That turned out to be unrelated, Sir,' said Teddy ineffectually.

'We've had weaponised foxglove, and some devil's poison in roses that turned Faith Meredith the colour of undercooked bread she was that afraid of it. There have been tiger whiskers – Tiger whiskers! –crushed into soup with a fastidious attention to the seating plan. Cakes have been laced with arsenic, and – my personal favourite – a man was stuffed like a plush animal and stuck out to pasture as a bizarre warning.' Here Geordie sighed. 'But good, old-fashioned, straightforward murder has died. I should tell Kitty to write its obituary if I were you.'

'Tea,' said Jem, 'come one, you clearly need it, and apparently the Scullery is out. God knows why.' He got a hand on Geordie's back and began marching him in the direction of outside. 'And now,' said Geordie, 'you tell me Pelorous Choke has had the misfortune of being dosed with adder venom and that it didn't get into him by way of an adder.' He shook his head.

'In fairness,' said Jem, 'I haven't seen any adders around lately. I mean, I'm no Carl Meredith, so no expert, but I wasn't expecting to find one trawling the streets of Kingsport. I'm stunned the museum even had the stuff.'

'Temporary exhibition,' said Benwick at once, rallying with information. 'On loan from, well, actually, I sort of forget where. Point is, it wasn't here permanently, so it was a pretty opportunistic grab.'

'It's a bizarre one,' said Teddy. 'Snake venom?' He shuddered as if it was too actively distasteful even to mention.

'I'm more curious that it was on loan,' Jem said. Geordie nodded. 'Seems an odd thing to borrow.'

They were now outside, which was pleasantly sunny and heavy with birdsong, both circumstances that only reemphasized the lack of tea. Only Kitty – and apparently Benwick – had any right to be this cheery so early in the morning on no tea.

'Also on loan,' said Benwick as they made their way down the street, 'were the skins of six different kinds of snake – I did get the names but they sounded funny over the phone and I didn't like to get the spelling wrong, so I'd have to go back to the museum if you wanted them written up exactly right. I mean I can, but…anyway, there was also several skeletons of the same, and a whole cabinet of venoms including…'He began to rattle these off with gusto.

Teddy said in an undertone, 'I begin to sense our problem, Doc, is that we just don't get the appeal of snakes.'

'Quite,' said Jem.

Geordie said, 'Really, you two. It was a natural history museum. What do you expect it to have?' Jem looked at Teddy, who looked right back at him. Neither having anything original to offer, Geordie waved a hand at Benwick to stop his recitation. He was now knee-deep in the latinate names of something-or-other, having apparently felt he could write those out phonetically. It was that or Benwick knew Latin, which if he did, was news to Jem.

'Very good, Constable,' Geordie said. 'We'll stick a watch on the msuem, just in case our murderer heads back and tries to make off with anything else.'

'And hope no one else is dosed with adder venom,' said Jem. He stopped abruptly outside a café with good, plain tables and sufficiently free of rosettes as to look appealing. 'Tea?' he asked their assembled company.

'Please,' said the others in chorus. Jem got the door open and was waving the others through. Geordie said, 'Benwick, you're most awake of all of us. Go follow up with the museum, can you? And get in touch with whoever loaned them all that stuff in the first place. Find out what they can tell you, and warn them the stuff's evidence in an investigation.'

Benwick opened his mouth, thought better of arguing, and sprang directly into action. 'Right you are, Sir,' he said, and went barrelling back out the door, jostling Jem on the way. Benwick departed, they filed up to the counter to place orders with the young woman who appeared to head the culinary operations.

'Any pastry?' she asked.

'Oh, might as well,' said Geordie, genially. 'The Doc might find it useful for reconstructing the murder.'

Behind the counter the unsuspecting young woman blanched, but said only, 'There's jam, sugar and plain. Oh! And almond.' She articulated the L in almond so that at a guess Jem traced her ancestry to sort of adjacent Mara and her family. Geordie ordered one of each, and then refused to let anyone else pay.

'The Station House will get it back to me, anyway,' he said. 'Better do, if the Scullery is no longer available for tea-making.'

Jem decided it was better not to argue. Teddy, on a sergeant's wages still, never even bothered trying. They'd have sooner gone to Geordie's, but the gremlins were still poorly and Judith radiating an atmosphere that brooked no interruption from anyone she hadn't expressly invited to wipe their shoes on the mat. And since Jem knew all too well what it was to be in charge of multiple ailing gremlins, and since the others valued their lives, they respected said atmosphere and took a secluded table in the back of this anonymous café. They were near enough the kitchen that they could look through the open door and watch the pastry manufacture as the spirit moved them. Jem found it oddly mesmeric, especially given they were no further ahead on the case of Pelorous Choke, who was regrettably still dead of ill-gotten adder venom courtesy of a party or parties unknown. They needed Benwick back with insight about the theft, and sharpish.

So Jem and company sipped their tea in a state of mutual perplexity, and it began to work on them by degrees. If nothing else, it woke Jem and Geordie up. Jem went on watching the pastry construction, the rolling out of the dough, the folding, the adding of the jam, over and over and over. Just how many pastries did they think were liable to be eaten in one day? And how were they so expert at it? The tea began to work, or inspiration struck, or tea triggered inspiration. Jem sipped at it, weighing the different notes of the blend, and thought suddenly, Expert. Expertise. That seems important. And why? Because…More tea. Because his arms were practically unmarked, thought Jem. He set his cup down and said, 'Not for nothing, Geordie, but it strikes me whoever gave him that venom knew what he was doing.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Geordie. 'I might have reached for adder, too, if I'd been hell-bent on killing the poor man with a snake.'

'No,' said Jem, 'that's not what I mean. Though you're right. Christopher would have put that together from Biggles. No, I mean, ever tried sticking a syringe? It's trickier than you'd think – people can be made of sturdy stuff. And veins can be fiddly. They roll, depending on the person. Our chap though, whoever he is, did it did it neatly. No false starts or anything. I'll show you the arms, remind me.'

Teddy grimaced over a mouthful of pastry, sending crumbs skittering across the table.

'We'll take your word for it,' said Geordie hastily. He swallowed his tea, grimaced in turn and said, 'But don't tell me you think we have a murderous medic on the loose?'

A startled noise behind them alerted them to the appearance of the young woman from the counter, presumably come to ask if they required more hot water. Geordie said they would, and simultaneously Teddy alerted them to the return of Constable Benwick.

'Better bring another cup, too, then,' said Geordie. 'I don't suppose they'll let poor Benwick use the Scullery, either.'

Jem nodded and spared a smile for the trembling young woman. 'It's quite all right,' he said. 'The wild speculation should stop imminently, now the Constable just there has come back.' She nodded uneasily, and went to fetch the tea. Benwick was deep in the throes of unburdening himself of his coat, folding it elaborately over his chair. Immediately thereafter he had to unfold it again to extract his notebook from an inner pocket, whereupon he refolded the coat, sat down and commenced riffling through his notebook.

'Well,' Benwick said leaning back in his chair, 'it's very interesting, Sir. Looks like it's privately loaned to the Museum. The collection I mean. Not a visiting thing from, say Charlottetown or anything like that.'

'That makes sense,' said Teddy. 'I thought some of that stuff was quite exotic when I took the gremlins the other week.'

'Hang on,' said Geordie, 'You've actually seen this thing, Teddy?'

'Well yes,' said Teddy. 'It didn't seem relevant to the investigation, or of course I'd have said, Sir. Why? Do you think it might have a bearing?'

'I think you're better positioned than Benwick to notice if anything else is missing.'

Teddy shuddered and poured them all fresh tea. He said, 'Oh, I wouldn't say that, Sir. All I did was read out the big words. Your lad Ben is probably much cleverer about what should be there and all that. I wasn't paying all that much attention, you know.'

Geordie groaned. 'It would be one of mine. Jem, why can't your gremlins have a fascination with reptiles instead of cotton gauze and bodies? Obviously Ben's much too stuffed up to be remotely articulate on the subject, even if Judith would let him help. Which she won't. Probably wouldn't even if she wasn't trying to cure him of the Dread Lurgy.'

'It's only a very bad cold,' said Jem, more than mildly amused. 'And I'll be sure to take the subject up with the children over dinner.'

'Sometimes,' said Geordie, 'you sound startlingly like your predecessor.'

'Oh, go on, Sir, Mac had much less sense of humour than the Doc,' said Teddy. Benwick nodded agreement. 'Much pleasanter, too,' he said.

'Snakes, Benwick,' said Geordie. 'What can you tell us about the snakes and their owner?'

Benwick stared balefully at his tea. Teddy said, 'It's not you, it's that damn note on the Scullery door and the gremlins being poorly that have made him snappish. Speak up.'

Benwick picked up his teacup and said reluctantly, 'There was one interesting thing, Sir.'

'Well?'

'Well, see, it turns out the exhibit was contributed by Mr Choke.'

Groans all round the table. The nervous young woman – Jem thought they really had better get her name at this rate – came back to ask if there was anything else. Jem suggested more pastries. He thought Benwick looked in need of them. So did Geordie, if it came to that.

'What?' said Geordie, 'you mean our corpse was a snake aficionado?'

'No, Sir!' said Benwick hastily. 'No, I was getting to that, see. No, he hated them. But his brother, er…' a pause as Benwick consulted with his notebook. 'Er…Arou…Anorius…no! Arhcibald! Archibald Choke! Yes, right, Archibald Choke, well, he's some kind of explorer. Brought all this stuff back from the far side of the world, he did.'

Geordie opened his mouth, presumably to ponder the early permutations of Archibald's name, and closed it again abruptly. The young woman returned with the pastries.

'Everything all right?' she asked. Jem couldn't decide if she meant about possibly murderous medics or with the state of the table. He opted to go with the latter. 'Lovely, thanks,' he said.

'So he knows snakes,' said Jem, turning to Benwick. Benwick nodded enthusiastically.

He also turned out, did Archibald Choke, to have an infamous quarrel with his brother over something so convoluted sounding that no one but Kitty, who was doing the explaining, seemed to understand it. This came up when, of necessity they left the tea shop and relocated to Larkrise.

'It was a famous scandal,' she said. 'Made all kinds of headlines. I can dig them out, if you like.'

'Just the facts, please, Kitten,' said Teddy. He sounded exhausted. He was sprawled against the sofa, obviously exhausted after a day of going quite literally all round the houses, first on the home turf of the deceased Pelorous Choke, and subsequently that of his brother.

'Right,' said Kitty. 'Well, they ran a chemist's, I think. Or maybe a surgery?'

Judith would have known, but Judith, obviously, was up to her elbows in ailing gremlins.

'Surgery,' said Faith, surprising them. She had clearly just returned from her own surgery, because she still smelled of ether and lanolin, and looked as exhausted as Teddy. Also she was still removing her coat. Under different circumstances she would here have launched into an account of just how many overly nervous mothers the world possessed, how many preventable injuries she had dealt with, and just what she thought of the people who tried to go to work normally through bad bouts of appendicitis. Instead, she elbowed Teddy along the sofa, sat down next to him, and said, 'The Choke family was quite a name in medicine. There's a plaque with their name on it up at the Kingsport Hospital. Donated by the wife of Choke Senior on his demise, or something. Everyone around there is stupidly proud of them. The boys were supposed to follow after him, but one of them got some romantic dream about…oh I don't know…India, the East, could have been North Africa. Help me out, Kitty.'

'Doesn't matter,' said Geordie. 'The point is, he went into snakes?'

'Must have done,' said Kitty. 'He had adventures anyway. The other one, that will be Jem's dead body, he actually did become a doctor. Archibald never forgave him. I think he thought they were going to travel the world together, or something.'

Jem's stomach seized uncomfortably. He thought of Jerry stood next to him at the Glen St Mary Station all those years ago. 1914. What larks, he had thought, what glory and revolution we will achieve. And afterwards, oh, afterwards was going to be grand too. Jem was going to follow Dad into medicine, maybe take over the practice someday, and Jerry was going to do something brilliant and scintillating that would bring the world to its knees.

Now, here was Jem in Kingsport discussing the death of Pelorous Choke in preternatural detail while Jerry sheltered himself in all the quiet places of the world – though he had still found a way to bring the world to its knees. Something warm and damp pressed against Jem's arm. That was odd; Faith's hands would never be that damp. And they didn't traditionally smell of swamp, either. No, this was Tuesday, come to decrumb Jem's unsuspecting suit, and keep Jem nice and cosy in the process. Even now he was wedging his noble nose deep between Jem's ribs and his arm, snuffling enthusiastically. He had evidently come to lift Jem's spirits, and if he, Tuesday, got flaky pastry scraps out of the bargain that was wholly incidental. Clearly.

'Doc?' said Teddy.

'Sorry,' said Jem. 'Tell me again.' But he was finding it difficult to feel anything other than sorry for Archibald. He didn't really suppose he would have killed his brother.

'I was saying,' said Faith, and now she did squeeze his arm in spite of the lump that was Tuesday lying on top of it, 'that Archibald did actually do the medical training. Both boys did. That was why your Pelorous Choke was so furious with him. He saw it as a double waste of money; first the training that never got used, and then the stuff that got invested in the expeditions, obviously.'

'Right,' said Jem, and mentally revised his opinions. Obviously he was not Archibald Choke. Perhaps the man had done it after all.

'And, of course,' Kitty said, picking up where Faith had left off, 'Archibald was furious at Pelorous Choke for refusing to go on missions with him. As a doctor.'

'Hang on,' Geordie said, 'I'm remembering this now. Choke – Archibald – he married over there, didn't he?'

'That's right,' said Kitty.

Suddenly, horribly, Jem knew where the story was heading. He offered his hands to Tuesday for washing. His long pink tongue descended upon them joyously.

'And she died,' said Geordie with awful predictability.

'Don't tell me,' said Jem. He felt sick. 'Of adder venom?'

At least it wasn't just him, Jem saw. Teddy went green, then white, then green again for good measure. Even Kitty looked stricken. 'Orpheus and bloody Eurydice,' said Geordie, 'that was how the papers ran it.'

'But, look, I mean, Sir,' said Benwick, who had heretofore keep himself mostly to the shadows, 'if they both trained as doctors, couldn't he have saved her? This Archibald?'

A long silence ensued in which Jem and Faith looked at each other and argued mutely over who was going to explain this hellish thing. Faith fished in the pocket of her skirt and came up with a coin.

'Heads or tails?' she demanded, and the others just sat there like baffled lemmings.

'Tails,' said Jem, and then felt selfishly relieved when it came up Heads.

'Sorry,' said Jem. 'Want me – '

'No,' said Faith. She squared her shoulders and turned to Geordie in the wingback chair with such terrifying conviction that Jem saw her suddenly as she must have been during her side of the War. Needs Must.

'Archibald Choke couldn't save her,' she said, 'because he loved her. It's a terrible thing – a horrible one – to be doctor to your own people. You have to sort of detach from the thing that's happening, from the…I don't know…The themness of them, if that makes sense. You can't think about who you're treating or what you're doing because the minute you do, they're dead and you've failed yourself and them. It was like that with Miri – do you remember? I think it was why Dr Blythe wouldn't touch her, except as a grandfather.'

'It was why I made you do it, too,' said Jem. 'I had to be able to look Nan in the eye if anything…and I knew I couldn't do that, and I knew you could save her for all of us.'

Faith smiled, a tight little thing, but there was understanding in it. 'Of course,' she said. 'Anyway, if they really were miles from home, without even his brother for comfort, and she was obviously dying in front of him, well, even if you knew what to do, I'd dare anyone to be put together enough to do it competently, much less calmly.'

The silence that followed was total. Only Tuesday, vigorously snuffling at Jem for further crumbs, dared break it. Jem wrapped his hands tight around the warm, snuffling little body with its funny, leathery blue fur.

'Dear God,' said Geordie, finally, and there was nothing really, worth adding. Obviously Teddy disagreed. He said, his voice seeming preternaturally loud in the Larkrise sitting room, 'But why the Museum? I mean, say he does blame his brother not being there and saving the woman. His wife. Why all the faff with the museum? Why not just…well, I guess I'm back at what the inspector said earlier. Why not clobber him, or stab him, or something?'

'Oh, no,' said Jem. 'It had to be adder venom.'

'You see that in the science, Doc?' asked Teddy.

'No,' Jem said quietly. 'In the poetry of it. Don't you see?' And he saw that they did see, too. 'And the museum?' asked Geordie. 'Is that in the poetry, too?' But he wasn't teasing, he was speaking barely above a whisper, the only noise in the room Tuesday's enthused snuffling, his magnificent nose twitching under Jem's arm.

'I think so,' said Jem. 'Sort of a last hurrah. Get the recognition and notoriety the brother he'd loved wasn't going to give him. And no one would steal from their own collection – it's just ludicrous. The last place we'd think to look.'

Except Jem had lost a brother, two of them really, to a terrible, callous world, and could not now save either of them, and anyway, what Kitty Foster didn't know about local gossip wasn't worth knowing. So of course they had looked, in the end. In his arms, Tuesday called a halt to his Mission Pastry Crumb and hunkered down to sleep, his broad-chested stomach warm and snug against Jem's middle.

'Come on, you lot,' said Geordie from the depths of the lionshead chair. 'Work to do.'

Only, of course it didn't need all of them to arrest Archibald Choke, so Benwick was persuaded to stay to supper. He'd get stuck with the paperwork, but there was always tomorrow for that, Faith said, and Benwick didn't argue. Jem didn't blame him; it wasn't a hard choice between paperwork for the station house and a hot dinner. Teddy had meant to cook it, but the arrest of Archibald Choke for the suspected murder of his brother took precedence. So Faith roasted a chicken instead. Kitty offered to help, for which reason Jem and Benwick did not. But then Kitty just sat at the spindly legged table chatting, which made it very hard for Jem not to laugh. Faith actually did, and ribbed their resident reporter continuously through the preparations. Benwick, stuck for an occupation, joined Kitty at the table and the conversation promptly became twice as rapid and nigh impossible to follow. Their hands flew as they wrangled the finer points of god-knew-what and Faith redoubled the original ribbing. Jem listened with half an ear and shook his head.

'Tell you what,' said Jem to Tuesday, 'it strikes me that if we ever need to stop them talking we could do worse than tie their hands.' Tuesday saturated with pastry crumbs, opened his eyes in lazy acknowledgement of this observation, and then promptly fell back asleep.

At the appropriate interval Jem leaned out the window and called the gremlins in; they brought Iain with them, so Jem then had to ring Shirley and tell him he'd better not be expecting his son at table. He didn't really mind though; it felt good to talk to Shirley so easily, and about something so inconsequential, even a bit comic.

The chicken was drier than it would have been in Teddy's hands, and there were about twice as many onions. None of that had anything to do with Jem's inability to eat it. He kept thinking about Archibald falling out with his brother, and about Archibald abroad, maybe with his dying wife in his arms. Jem could picture how she had looked, the colour she must have turned, because after all, hadn't he cut open Pelorous Choke like a guddled fish?

The telephone rang. They jumped. Well, the adults jumped. The gremlins went on eating and laughing and chattering in three languages at once. Jem thought dazedly, Death. Death is what comes from telephones, because wasn't that how Rilla told it? The station master ringing to say news had come for Ingleside…Jem thought, but was not sure, he dropped his knife. Something clattered to the ground. Tuesday was in ecstasies.

'Larkrise, Dr Blythe speaking,' said Faith's crisp, clear telephone voice. 'Do you require the doctor or the police? Oh – Geordie. Yes, yes he's still here. What's happened? Sorry, yes, of course. I'll tell him directly. Where are you? Yes, of course. I'll send him now.'

At the table Benwick set down his knife and fork, and said forlornly, 'I take it that was a summons?'

Kitty all but launched herself out of her seat. 'I'll come too,' she said. Benwick twitched.

'He's escaped,' said Faith. 'Archibald Choke. They've gone to his house, and all the nearby ones, and any place his neighbours thought likely. You're to go up to the Station House and try and warn the stationmaster, and the Halifax Harbour, all that sort of thing. I gather you'll know who to reach.'

'Yes,' said Benwick, 'of course.' Already he was out of his seat, delayed only by a compulsion to clear his place. Faith waved impatiently at him. 'Murderer to catch,' she said. 'Go, catch him. Time and tide, etc, etc. I'll do the dishes.'

'I'll come too,' said Kitty again. 'Oh, it will make specular headlines! Choke chances escape; police caught out!'

'Geordie will have your head,' said Jem.

'But not my editor!' she was practically crackling with electricity.

'Anyway,' called Benwick over his retreating shoulder, 'We still might catch him. Better not go to press too soon! Think of the cost of rewrites!'

Then he was off, leaving Kitty bristling with indignation, Tuesday nose-deep in the remains of Benwick's dinner, and Jem and Faith blinking at one another across the room. The gremlins were still eating, but now they were also theorising about what would happen.

'Will he hang?'

'Benwick will catch him!'

'Uncle Geordie, too!'

'Bet Teddy saves the day!'

'Course Teddy will save it,' said Kitty, reclaiming her abandoned seat with a racket worthy of an elephant or twelve.

Faith was retreating from the telephone. She lingered at Jem's chair, leaning against the back of it, and said in conspiratorial whisper, 'Your Constable Benwick didn't just do the thing no one has ever succeeded at before, did he?'

'What,' said Jem, 'stop Kitty Foster getting her story?' He grinned and nodded in the direction of Kitty and the gremlins. 'Apparently so.'

'Geordie will have to promote him,' said Faith.

'Oh, I should think that's the least of it,' said Jem. Faith laughed. A fountain pen collided with Jem's forehead and Kitty said, 'I can hear you!'

Jem only shook his head, unapologetic. He tilted his head upwards to catch Faith's eye, and saw she was grinning fit to burst. He leaned his head against her arms and found they smelled now of onion, chicken stock and residual ether. He began to laugh with her. He could think of no better touchstone to fall back on; Faith's warm ruddy laughter, Kitty's gentle vexation, the gremlins talking around, over and on top of each other. It was the world as it should be, and it was worth all the rest.

Up next: more on that notice pinned to the scullery! Never let it be said I ignore a narrative dare from a fellow writer.