Raisins and almonds - Poisoned Pen Press (UK)

1 0 Kerry Greenwood
and closed its beak. Dot exclaimed, delighted, and Mrs. Katz
smiled.
‘Such a pretty thing. Now we have a look at the other rooms,
and then tea, yes?’
When they came to examine the front room, they found it
in the same schemozzl as the parlour. It took the two of them
to heave the mattress back onto the spring base and to remake
the bed. Everything in the room had been roughly and hastily
searched. All the drawers from a bureau had been torn out and
emptied and turned over, then tossed onto the heap of bedding.
But nothing had been taken, not even Mr. Katz’s best watch,
which had been hidden in between the mattress and the base.
The other room contained some furniture which was in the
process of being mended. It smelt strongly of wood glue. Even
here all the pieces of a large bedstead had been moved, and some
of the glued joints had been broken.
It took Dot and Mrs. Katz an hour to put everything to rights,
and by the end of it they were friends.
‘You see,’ explained Mrs. Katz over another cup of strawcoloured
tea flavoured with lemon, ‘I thought it old country
matter because they were speaking Yiddish. “Find it,” they say
many times. There were two of them, dark men, young, one
taller than other, and they were angry. But me they never told
for what they were looking, just a paper. What paper, maybe
your Miss Fisher knows. But they don’t found it here.’
‘Why not?’ asked Dot.
‘Why not?’ Mrs. Katz cried. ‘Because here it was never hidden.’
‘Have you ever seen them before, Mrs. Katz?’
‘That I can’t answer, it was sudden, I didn’t see them too
good, but no, I don’t think so.’
‘In the bookshop, Mrs. Katz, what did you see in the bookshop?’
‘I don’t see nothing, I went there, the lady is very nice, my
Max wants a book of maps, we talk for a while about an atlas, I
never hear the word before. Then I go home. That’s all.’
‘Did anyone else come in while you were there?’