The Eight-Legged Detective And Other Stories

By Marie Spillane

In these richly imagined stories anything is possible...

 An octopus on the trail of a pair of criminals; an island where gargoyles fly to spend their down time; an alien social researcher is left to cope with an unexpected problem of scale. An ancient stone carving decides to go walk-about, sending the ghostly guardians of her home i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wood Sorrel Books
• Release date: Jun 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781916717015

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The Eight-Legged Detective

THE EIGHT-LEGGED DETECTIVE

AND OTHER STORIES

MARIE SPILLANE

WOOD SORREL BOOKS

‘No Raisins’ (Published under pseudonym). Copyright © 2021 by M A Morris. First published in Spaceports & Spidersilk October 2021

All other stories Copyright © 2023 by Marie Spillane

This collection Copyright © 2023 by Marie Spillane

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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For Tree,

the best littlest sister

CONTENTS

The Eight-Legged Detective

A Problem Of Proportion

The Erratic Fanatic

A Song of Love and Tea

No Raisins

The Mystery of the Missing Sheila-na-Gig

How the Huntress Saved Christmas

Afterword

About the Author

Also by Marie Spillane

THE EIGHT-LEGGED DETECTIVE

It was a wild, windy day in November in Belmarian when I first laid eyes on Timory Murphy. His bright green velvet frock coat and thigh high scarlet leather boots would have attracted my attention, but it was the octopus that caught my eye first.

I’d just popped out of my lamp shop to get to the pharmacy when I knew Jenna would be on her lunch break. You don’t want the girl who pinched you in Year 3 in primary school knowing all about your mad meds, even if she is bound by the pharmacist’s code. Some scars you just can’t erase.

So my head was down, eyes on the pavement, slick with rain, and my nose full of the salty smell of the storm and ears full of the creaking shop signs and the bass boom of the waves against the sea wall round the corner. The wind was bowling me along the high street, my hair streaming out in front of me, when a clear plastic bag rolled into my vision. 

Towards me. Against the wind. I stopped dead. 

The bag stopped dead too. It was full of water. Something was bobbing in the water.

‘Catch her!’

I looked up, then pushed my hair out of my eyes and looked again. A short man in high-heeled scarlet boots and a green velvet frock coat was sprinting towards me, holding a black pork-pie hat on his head with one hand and gesticulating with the other. 

I pushed my hair aside and scanned the street for an absconding child, or dog, or perhaps a ferret. 

‘Catch who?’

‘The octopus!’

The plastic bag started rolling again. As it passed me I saw a small body, the size of my clenched fist, at the centre of a whirl of suckered arms somehow wheeling the bag up the street into the wind. 

I was seriously impressed.

I ran a couple of paces after it and stopped it with my foot. I swear I could feel the creature inside cursing me. Before I could pick it up, the bag had oozed itself around my foot, between my legs and was on its way again.

Wise to its tricks, next time I picked it up as soon as I’d stopped it with my foot. The bag was slick with water from the pavement and the creature inside wriggled around, staining my jacket sleeves and attaching a cigarette butt and a couple of slimy leaves, but for once this was only of passing interest to me. I found the knot that held the bag closed and gripped it. I held it up in front of my face.

Suspended in the water inside was a small, perfectly beautiful octopus. Her skin was pearly, opalescent, green and gold and sun-on-sea coloured. Her eight arms moved sinuously, holding her in place the way a kestrel holds its place in an invisible niche in the sky, with tiny fluttering adjustments. Her eyes were huge and black and compelling.

They were also very cross. Trust me when I say that you know when an octopus is glaring at you.  Especially when she lifts one of her tentacles towards you and turns the end of one into a rigid middle finger.

‘Thank you,’ shouted the man over the noise of the wind when he caught up. He held out his hand for the bag. ‘I am very grateful.’

‘I don’t know if I should be giving this back to you,’ I shouted back. ‘She seemed very determined to get away from you.’

‘She doesn’t want to escape from me. It’s just a difference of opinion on which investigative avenue to follow next.’

I held onto the bag. ‘Investigation?’

He clapped his hand over his mouth. ‘I’ve said too much.’

‘Investigating what?’

He turned his back to the wind. ‘Is the weather always this bad?’

‘It’s north Wales,’ I shouted in his ear. ‘What were you expecting?’

Someone yelled across the street. We both turned. Jenna the pharmacist, red hair like a helmet, not a strand out of place, was waving at us. 

‘Aha!’ said the investigator. ‘My lunch date. If I could have my partner back now, please?’ 

He held his hand out, smiling politely. I handed the octopus back to him.

‘Thank you very much for catching her.’ He looked at the octopus fondly. She folded two of her arms and turned her back on him. ‘She does get her notions at times. Here’s my card.’ 

A moment later he was scooting sideways across the street. In windy weather in Belmarian you have to aim upstream of where you want to hit the opposite pavement, like swimming across a fast-flowing river. Jenna waved and smiled at me, then they leant in towards each other and air kissed like old friends before vanishing into the Blue Boat Tea Rooms.

I went into the pharmacy and got my meds from Jenna’s assistant Medwen. My thoughts were whirling. What was Jenna doing with a private investigator? Was she a client? What sort of private investigator dressed like that? And who had an octopus for a partner?

Well, it was lunchtime. I’m the boss, I said to myself as I scuttled crabwise across the street. I can take as much lunch as I want, when I want.

I pushed open the door of the Blue Boat. The smell of chocolate and coffee and pastries and warm soup enveloped me. I fired off a quick text to Bobby, my assistant, then ordered from Mair at the counter. 

Mair owns the place. She’s tall with dark hair and looks as if she could carry two of me under each arm, but she’s not fat. Just very very tall and strong. I’ve no idea why she isn’t fat as well. If I owned this place I would be the width of a small car. 

‘This is very bad for you,’ said Mair, as she always does as she assembled my three chocolate brownies and hot chocolate with no silly whipped cream or marshmallows on top (heresy). 

‘Mmm.’ I frowned at Jerry the Bus reading one of the free papers over a weapons-grade cappuccino at one table, getting ready for his long afternoon drinking in the pub. At another, a couple of walking-booted tourists were tucking into hot soup as if their lives depended on it while their wet outerwear steamed on a chair beside them and a wet spaniel steamed under the table. ‘Did Jenna come in just now?’

‘She’s not here, love. Down here or upstairs?’

‘Upstairs, please.’

‘You go ahead and I’ll bring it up.’

The room was quite full. Three lads in navy Council overalls silently putting themselves outside three massive sandwiches. A family (three teenage boys - why weren’t they in school?) squabbling over the menu. A pair of middle-aged walking women, one with a red bobble hat, one with a yellow one, with three black labradors between them, unwisely eating ice cream, dogs included. 

I sat at one of the small tables, in the corner by one of the street-facing windows. The wooden shop sign was hanging parallel to the ground. I took a moment to sit myself inside the sound of the wind. I love the wind. Then I looked around at the occupants of the room again.

No Jenna. No small round man in high heels and florid clothing. No octopus. 

Mair brought my tray up, unloaded it and departed with a silent nod. The heady, rich scent of her peerless brownies almost made me swoon. I had noticed that she hadn’t answered my question earlier. She’s not here,’ she’d said.

Which is not the same as saying Jenna hadn’t come in. 

I looked around the walls as I ate and drank, examining them. Was there a hidden door? I’d never noticed one before and couldn’t see one now. Nor were there any doors on the landing that weren’t accounted for. Maybe a room on the top floor for functions? But Mair lived there with her husband and nephew and I’d never seen customers going into any of those rooms.

I slid the investigator’s card, slightly soggy now, out of the sleeve where I’d tucked it. It was purple with a green border. Exquisite miniature octopuses linked arms around the border. The name Timory Murphy was written in elaborate script in the form of an arch. Underneath the arch was written: 

Things found.

Questions answered.

Oddness explained.

There was phone number on the back. A landline. Nothing else. I brooded as I ate, ignoring the dogs who’d finished their ice-creams and were now staring at my brownies.

I asked Mair as I paid on the way out.

‘Are there private rooms that you let people eat in?’

‘Whatever you see is what there is.’

Well, that was no answer at all. Most people can’t shut up even when they’ve nothing to say and some just don’t say a thing if they don’t feel like it. I’m like that. So’s Mair. 

Back at the lamp shop I sent Bobby upstairs to my living room for his lunch. Feeling slightly sick from the brownies (I must remember to stop at two), I brooded at the card as the rain hammered against the windows. The way I saw it, five things needed answers. I made a list:

1. Why is Jenna lunching with a private investigator?

2. Where did they disappear to?

3. Why is Mair so mysterious about her rooms?

4. How can an octopus fold her arms?

5. Did Timory Murphy really mean his octopus was a partner in the business sense?

Of course! The answer was in my hands. 

I phoned the number on my card. As I’d suspected, it was diverted to a mobile number immediately. While it rang the two couples with dogs who’d been in the Blue Boat tried to come in out of the rain. Four dogs! In a lamp shop!

‘We’re closed,’ I snapped.

‘No, we’re not.’ Bobby appeared from behind the bead curtain that leads to the corridor between the shop and the rest of the house. The four faces under the hats and hoods turned to him gratefully. 

‘Yes, we are,’ I said, ‘and you’re on your break—’

‘Hello?’ said my phone. I had it on speaker.

‘We are open,’ Bobby told the wet walkers again, smiling. I ignored them.

‘Timory Murphy?’

‘Speaking.’ 

‘I met you about an hour ago. I caught your octopus.’

‘Ah! Yes. Is there any chance I could call you back a little bit later? I’m in the middle of—’

‘I want to hire you. I have some questions I need answered.’

He sounded startled. ‘Really? That’s wonderful. I will need to call you back as I’m—’

‘I want to know where you went in the Blue Boat.’

‘Pardon?’

‘It’s a question. You answer questions. It says so on your card,’ I said patiently. ‘I would like to hire you to answer it.’

‘That’s not quite the way it wo—’

‘And your octopus. She’s definitely an oddness and I want you to explain her.’

‘If I could—’

‘She gave me the finger! Well, the tentacle, but it was definitely a rude gesture.’

At this point I became aware that Bobby, the female couple and the straight couple and their dogs had fallen silent. They looked away quickly when I caught their eyes, except for Bobby who mimed urgent pill-swallowing.

I bit down on my scream. Anything either side of boring middle-of-the-road-ness and people assume I’m heading for a high. I turned my back on them all and switched my phone off speaker. 

‘… happy to speak later but—’

A blast roared in my ear. I jerked the phone away from me. ‘What the…’ 

One of the women in the shop screamed. 

‘What was that?’ gasped Bobby.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. My ear was still ringing. Then I realised no-one was looking at me. They were all crowding into the doorway and front window, looking out into the street. I joined them.

Down the street, people were pouring out of the tourist-tat shops and cafes into the rain, looking up at the smoke that was pouring out of the shattered upstairs windows of the Blue Boat.

#

‘Mr Murphy? Mr Murphy!’ I shouted into my phone. I pushed past the customers, who obligingly squeezed themselves into the little passageways between the tables laden with lamps. ‘Mr Murphy!’ I tripped over a dog lead and nearly went headfirst into a table of my favourite Turkish coloured-glass lamps. Bobby saved me and the table. I bounced off him and out the door into the rain, tugging on my coat as I ran up the street.

Most of the few passing vehicles had stopped to stare. I was soaked in seconds with the horizontal rain. People held jackets over themselves and pointed upwards. Someone in yellow was already telling people to move back, move back from the building.

‘Mr Murphy? Timory Murphy!’ I could barely hear myself yelling over the wind. All I could hear from my phone was a roar that didn’t sound quite like static.

The Blue Boat sits on the corner of Castle Street, which is the main street, and Main Street, which isn’t. I ran around the back of the small crowd and dodged the traffic to get to the opposite corner, where I could see the front door of the coffee shop.

The large downstairs windows were intact. It was hard to look up into the rain, but a cloud of dust still billowed out from the windows of the upstairs room I’d been sitting in not long ago. The wooden sash window frames were in pieces and shards of glass were still falling at random onto the pavement below. The yellow jacket was joined by the shop owners on either side who yelled at the small crowd to get back off the fallen glass. Jerry the Bus was being helped out the front door. 

The family with the three teenaged boys was standing close to me, in the butcher’s doorway corner, shocked faces peering through the gap between hoods and scarves. I went over to them.

‘Did you see a man in scarlet boots with an octopus in there?’

The boys ignored me. The mother looked at me sharply and moved slightly in front of her boys. The father just carried on staring at the Blue Boat with his mouth open.

‘We were just in there,’ he said.

No help.

I crossed to go in the front door. A huge shape in a blue parka stopped me.

‘It might not be safe, Lois.’ 

I looked up, and