Free The Harriet Bean 3-Book Omnibus by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

He seemed very ancient and very bent, and he had a walking stick in each hand.
    “I’m so sorry,” he said in a very old, cracked voice. “No, there’s nobody in today. They’ve all gone away. All of them.”
    My mouth dropped open.
    “B-b-but,” I stuttered, “they knew I was coming. I spoke to them …”
    The old man peered at me and shook his head. Then, with a sudden cackle of laughter, he jumped up in the air and clicked his heels together. For a moment or so I was too surprised to think, but then I realized what was happening.
    “Aunt Thessalonika!” I exclaimed. “I had no idea it was you.”
    “Of course you didn’t, my dear,” said Aunt Thessalonika, taking my arm in hers and leading me down the corridor. “Sometimes I even fool myself. Do you know, the other day I was heavily disguised and I saw myself in the mirror. And I said to myself, ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here?’ Of course, the person in the mirror said exactly the same thing, and so I replied, ‘But I’m Thessalonika and I
live
here!’ And it’s onlywhen I heard the person in the mirror saying that she was Thessalonika that I realized what was happening.”
    As she spoke, Aunt Thessalonika removed layer after layer of disguise. Off came the gray beard. Off came the lines and the wrinkles, wiped quite clean, and there, underneath it all, was my aunt.
    Aunt Japonica now appeared. At least
she
looked the same as she had the last time I saw her.
    “Thank you for coming, Harriet,” she said immediately. “And I see that you have been writing in your diary.”
    Once again, my mouth fell wide open with astonishment. She was right—I
had
been writing in my diary when she telephoned to invite me over. But how did she know?
    Aunt Japonica gave a little laugh. “If you look at your right hand,” she said, “you will see that there is an ink stain on the forefinger. Now that shows you have been writing. And what are you likely to have been writing? It’s school vacation, is it not, so you will not bedoing school work. You could be writing letters, but then when I called, you answered the telephone immediately. People who are writing letters never like to leave what they’re saying until they’ve finished the sentence. Why is that? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? People feel it’s rude to cut off halfway through a sentence when you’re writing to somebody. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it is. Diaries are different. It’s not rude to stop talking to yourself halfway through, is it?”
    “No,” I said, still astonished at how my detective aunts managed to work things out. That’s what made them good detectives, I imagined.
    We sat down for tea, and while Aunt Thessalonika cut the cake, Aunt Japonica explained why they wanted to see me.
    “We could tell that you were interested in detective work,” she explained.
    “We could tell that from the moment we met you,” chipped in Aunt Thessalonika.
    “Yes,” said Aunt Japonica, and then, from the side of her mouth, “please concentrate onwhat you’re doing, Thessalonika. Cutting cake is not an easy task.”
    Aunt Japonica turned back to me and fixed me with her gaze. “You see,” she went on. “A case has cropped up that we thought you might help us solve. After all, you are not as old as Aunt Thessalonika and I are. And you are somewhat smaller too. You can go where we can’t go. You can, I imagine, run faster than we can, and your eyes might be a little better when it comes to detecting very fast movements.”
    “In other words,” interrupted Aunt Thessalonika, “you might be able to catch these wicked cheats!”

Disguised!
    Wicked cheats?
    I sat back and listened as Aunt Japonica talked. Every so often, Aunt Thessalonika interrupted her to correct some detail or add a scrap of information. But for the most part, it was Aunt Japonica’s story.
    “We first heard about it only two weeks ago,” she said. “We received a visit from a very famous