Amanderella and the Casket Mystery Chapter 5.

Chapter Five.

 

Terkins Marmalade Facility.

 

Mrs Gaffletter, who had been silent long enough to chill the air, now spoke with the calm severity of a woman accustomed to closing accounts.

“Lady Gottsnobbler,” she said, “I must remind you that such matters are not for ladies of standing. Undertakers and hospitals may wrangle as they please, but it is no business of yours to chase after vanished grocers. Mysteries breed gossip, and gossip breeds scandal.”

The undertakers wilted. Amanderella’s expression did not change.

“Gentlemen,” she said, folding her hands, “I shall make enquiries. I will begin at the Marmalade Facility.”

Mr Belling sagged in relief.

Mr Sighing echoed him with a faint, strangled sigh.

Mrs Gaffletter gave a small, immovable sniff, the kind that suggested she did not approve, but could not prevent it.

And with that, the matter was settled.

The gates of the Terkins Imperial Preserve Facility were an exercise in wrought‑iron grandeur. A pair of gilded oranges perched at the top glinted under the grey London sky like twin cannonballs defending a fortress of sugar.

As Amanderella stepped from her hansom cab, the air did not merely meet her; it enveloped her. A thick, damp fog of boiling rind and sugary steam clung to her like a sticky accusation. To the uninitiated, it might have smelled like breakfast. To Amanderella, it smelled like a crime scene.

The ironwork promised splendour. The building behind it did not. A squat brick structure hunched beyond the gates, its windows begrimed, its roof unadorned. Whatever ambitions Mr Terkins possessed, they had not yet translated into architecture. The Imperial Preserve Facility was still more aspiration than empire.

By the delivery bay, the site of the “incident”, four figures waited with the stiff, resentful air of people told to stand still until someone important arrived. They did not look pleased to see her.

Tom Sugger shifted his weight, boots peeling reluctantly from the cobbles.

Dickie Pottle narrowed his eyes as though assessing whether she might be carrying a clipboard.

Harry Belcher stared at the ground, hoping invisibility might be an option.

Nellie Winkle folded her arms so tightly it looked as though she were keeping her ribs from escaping.

“Yard’s not open to visitors,” Nellie said, voice flat as a shovel blade. “Who are you?”

“Lady Amanderella Gottsnobbler, I was sent by Belling and Sighing,” Amanderella replied.

The name landed like a dropped wrench.

Tom straightened.

Dickie stopped squinting and started worrying.

Harry swallowed audibly.

Nellie’s jaw tightened.

“The undertakers?” she said.

“Yes.”

A long, sticky silence followed.

Nellie exhaled through her nose. “Well. If they’ve sent someone, then I suppose you’d best hear it from us before someone makes up a load of lies.”

Tom nodded reluctantly.

Dickie muttered something about “ought to have been fixed months ago.”

Harry looked as though he wished the marmalade avalanche had taken him instead.

They were not friendly.

They were not relaxed.

But they were talking, because undertakers were official, and accidents meant inquiries, and inquiries meant consequences.

“We were present,” Nellie said. “Whether we saw anything useful is another matter.”

“I’m not here to assign fault,” Amanderella said. “Only to understand what occurred.”

That earned her the smallest softening of Nellie’s shoulders. Barely perceptible, but present.

Tom cleared his throat. “Mr Terkins was inspecting the Twelve‑Ounce line. Said the jelly wasn’t clearing proper. He was standing under the top shelf when it went.”

“Went?” Amanderella repeated.

“Gave way,” Nellie said shortly. “Too much weight. Too little sense. We told him last month the brackets were bowing.”

Dickie nodded. “He didn’t listen. Said quality came before carpentry.”

Harry muttered, “Quality didn’t help him much in the end.”

Amanderella stepped closer to the shattered remains of the shelving, now stacked against the wall like broken ribs. “And when you pulled him out?”

Nellie’s expression tightened. “We pulled out what we could. The hospital took it from there.”

“Did he speak?”

Four heads shook.

“Did he look like himself?”

A longer pause. Tom swallowed.

“My Lady,” he said quietly, “after three hundred jars of Reserve have fallen on a man, he doesn’t look like anything you’d recognise.”

Amanderella let the silence settle.

“Show me where he was standing,” she said. “And don’t worry, I’m not here to peel blame off anyone.”

This time, they obeyed without hesitation.

They led her into the delivery bay, boots sticking faintly with every step. The floor had been swept, but not well; a thin glaze of orange shimmered underfoot like hurried varnish.

“This is where he stood,” Nellie said, pointing to a scuffed patch of stone beneath the towering frame of the remaining shelving. “Right there. Checking the clarity.”

Amanderella touched the stone with a gloved fingertip. Sticky. Still tacky, even after a day.

“Has this been washed?”

“Twice,” Tom said. “Stuff gets everywhere.”

“And the shelf that collapsed?”

Nellie gestured to the broken timbers stacked against the wall. “There. We pulled it down after. Too dangerous to leave hanging.”

Amanderella turned her gaze to the copper vats, which stood like tarnished sentinels.

“It is a fascinating operation, Miss Winkle,” she said, her tone shifting to civilised curiosity. “One so rarely sees the mechanics of a high‑class breakfast. Pray, tell me, how does one manage the transition from a common orange to a jar of the ‘Imperial Reserve’?”

Pride, the one solvent for suspicion, softened Nellie’s posture by a fraction.

And the workers began to talk. “It’s the reduction, my Lady,” Nellie explained, stepping toward the nearest vat. “We boil the skins until the bitterness is just a memory. Then comes Harry Belcher’s job. Harry, tell the lady about the sugar.”

Harry Belcher stepped forward, his boots giving a sharp, syrupy clack. “I’m the heat-master, Lady Gottsnobbler. I have to keep the vats at a simmer so precise that the sugar doesn't caramelise. If I let the temperature climb by so much as a degree, the whole batch tastes like a burnt chimney.”

“And Mr Pottle?” Amanderella asked, turning her smile toward Dickie.

Dickie Pottle straightened his waistcoat, which was currently stiff enough to serve as light armour. “I’m the Clarifier, my Lady. I skim the foam. A true Terkins Reserve must be as clear as a cathedral window. If there’s a cloud in the jar, it doesn't leave the floor.”

“Exacting work,” Amanderella murmured. “And I suppose that is when the… medicinal additives are introduced?”

She looked toward Tom Sugger, who was clutching his cap as if it were a lifebuoy.

“That’s where I come in, my Lady,” Tom said. “Once Harry has the heat and Dickie has the clarity, I bring the jars to the Flavouring Cabinet. Mr Terkins would unlock the bottles, the Highland Malt, the Jamaican Dark, or the Napoleon Brandy, and we would dose each vat according to his personal instruction.”

“According to his ‘palate’,” Amanderella added helpfully.

“Precisely, my Lady,” Tom agreed, his guard dropping entirely. “He’d take a spoonful of the jam, then a sip of the spirit, then another spoonful, until he said the ‘marriage’ was complete. Sometimes the marriage took a good hour and half a bottle of Brandy to find its feet.”

“And on the afternoon of the… avalanche?” Amanderella asked softly.

The three men fell silent. The rhythmic dripping of a cooling pipe seemed to count the seconds.

“The marriage,” Nellie Winkle said, her eyes returning to the splintered wood of the shelving, “had been particularly difficult that afternoon. He’d been ‘harmonising’ with a new crate of Seville Sunset Rum since half-past eleven.”

“I see,” said Amanderella. “So, when the shelves collapsed, Mr Terkins was not only buried in the fruit of his labours, but he was also, shall we say, significantly ‘harmonised’?”

The four workers all nodded.

“So, the batch he was inspecting… may have been stronger than usual.”

Four reluctant nods.

“And if the shelf was already unstable,” she murmured, “a heavier load would have made it worse.”

Nellie exhaled. “Exactly.”

Amanderella let the word settle. The workers shifted, uneasy, as though they sensed she was not finished. She glanced once more at the sticky floor, the broken timbers, the vats standing silent as witnesses.

There was one question they had not yet answered.

And she intended to ask it.