DULCET TONE

When Dolcie's head hit the pillow, her torso slid on to the bedroom floor and ended up alongside the old tallboy, the one she'd inherited from her uncle. Her violent killer had despatched her and her partner with such ferocity that it would take the very best that Mr Dulcet's cleaning company could come up with to remove all the traces of the dreadful event and make the bedroom once again habitable. Mr Dulcet had become an expert in such things. What he didn't know about the removal of those tricky blood stains from the skirting boards was no bodies business. Well no live bodies business.

Founded in 1942 by Reggie Dulcet senior and fairly quickly given a rather useful business leg up by the Luftwaffe, Mr Dulcet's cleaning company cleaned up in the East End. It's next big break came in December 1951 with the Gillingham bus disaster. The sixties saw a lot of tidying up after the Cray twins and the seventies bought the IRA to London and more work for the third generation of Dulcets. The eighties provided, as history and Companies House would show, rather thin pickings for the specialist business but thanks to frugal management, fastidious Jewish accountants and an unorthodox approach to supplementing the income, Mr Dulcet's cleaning company survived right through to the present day. Given, as they were, the key to the door, temptation to bolster turnover by plundering the goods and chattels of the unfortunate was too much to bare. The light fingered habit first experienced by Reggie Dulcet senior became an ingrained and inevitable sideline shamelessly passed down through the generations. What the several Mr Dulcets lacked in take home pay they more than made up for in take away booty.

Mr Dulcet always liked to quote for the main jobs himself. So he was first on the crime scene when the police, photographers and forensics had done their digging. Dressed in the regulation white body suit with its built in hood and wrap around foot wear, Mr Dulcet entered the house looking rather like those that had just left it, but nothing like any one who had crossed the threshold since Dolcie and her late husband had acquired the place in the nineteen eighties. He left the same premises looking a few sizes bigger and the white protective suit had filled out to protect far more than its wearer.

Dolcie kept a tidy house. She was what some would term a house-proud person. She liked a place for everything and everything in its place. Her dusted collection of musical instruments stood as good testimony to her willingness to be openly judged as a woman of taste. When she said comfortable or vegetable she always prolonged the sound so that every vowel was pronounced as it was written. "Very com-fort-able," she'd declare as though she was speaking in time to a metronome. Her precision and attention to detail were just two facets that made her an accomplished music teacher. Music however was not the only food of love as far as Dolcie was concerned. Since her husband's passing and after a respectable interlude, she discovered that she needed the involvement of a good man or indeed two. Thus it was that unwittingly she stumbled into the path of her murderer. Jealousy, it seems, was a dangerous and unwelcome bed fellow and one that sadly lost Dolcie her organised head.

"I'm sure that mother kept it there," said Megan when it was her turn to enter and inspect the cleaned property. Mr Dulcet couldn't throw any light on the missing possession and didn't say a word as he showed the daughter his handiwork. Megan couldn't see anything different in her late mother's tidy home which of course was why Mr Dulcet's cleaning company had the reputation it did. From a slaughter house to an ordered house, that was Mr Dulcet's unwritten slogan.

But there was no doubt about it. Dolcie's violin wasn't there. More to the point it wasn't anywhere in the house and so was reported as missing, presumably stolen by the perpetrator of her murder. When in the process of their investigations the police eventually charged a local man with the double killing it became clear that he only had one thing on his deranged mind. He wanted Dolcie and her partner dead because, as the arresting officer put it, the detained suspect was involved in a complicated and intimate relationship that involved both of the victims of the crime. The local hack would have put it more colourfully had his editor let him loose on the front page. "Music teacher plays love triangle."

The case of the missing violin or more correctly the missing violin and its case was puzzling. Megan knew that her mother had thought quite highly of the old stringed instrument. She had called it her "you-hou-dee" after Yehudi Menuhin and no one was quite sure where it had come from other than from the same uncle next to whose tallboy Dolcie's torso had finally come to rest.

In stuffing the instrument down the front of his white all-in-ones Mr Dulcet emerged from the home looking even more like the Michelin Man than when he had entered the building. He grabbed the case on his way out almost like a busy mum at a check out snatching a bar of chocolate just because it was there. There was something else too that made him go for the neat black leather case. He thought he recognised it, was almost positive that he'd seen it somewhere before. The faded rose emblem embossed onto the surface seem very familiar. So he scooped up the prize almost with a feeling that if it didn't, it certainly should belong to him. Once safely in the van he extracted the case from out of his uniform and threw it in the back along with the tools of his trade and the paraphernalia of the professional forensic cleaner.

"Should be worth fifty quid," he thought when he finally opened the case in the safety of his own home and pulled out the handsome fiddle. He added it to the small pile of assorted loot he had acquired nearly every day that week. Little and often was what his father had told him. "A good man puts a little into kitty each day." That's what he had learnt from his grandfather. Not one to upset the family code of practice Mr Dulcet did as he was told. An old violin with cat gut strings would, Mr Dulcet smiled to himself, be most apt in satisfying kitty that particular day. And then he glanced at the photographs he had displayed in their assorted frames. His family looked out at him from the past. His father and mother with him on his father's knee. His proud grandfather surrounded by a rag tag gaggle of smiling children. He was wearing his flat cap and standing next to the horse and cart and in his hand a violin case. Mr Dulcet picked up the old photo frame and peered into its image.There it was.The same instrument case he had brought home. The rose emblem just visible in the black and white image. What an extraordinary coincidence he thought. By pure chance he'd stumbled upon something that his grandfather had owned or perhaps borrowed back in the forties. He took another look at the case and decided that he'd hang on to this particular prize. If it was once in the family then it should become an heirloom. He'd keep it.

Nearly every Saturday he took his week's collection along to his usual and willing contact and exchanged the stolen goods for cash. That particular week the contact was asked to pick up the goods because Mr Dulcet was otherwise engaged. Had he been at home when the contact called, Mr Dulcet would probably have hung on to his violin. But he wasn't and because it looked like part of the week's haul stacked up with the other bits and pieces, it was included at £45 as a part of the £649 tax free payment left in the envelope in folding with no questions asked. Actually Mr Dulcet wasn't that bothered. It would have been nice to keep something his grandfather had once had but never mind. Mr Dulcet went to bed and slept.

It was the same local news paper (it also made the nationals) that had reported on Dolcie's murder and the arrest of her killer that broke the news about the Stradivarius. There was little doubt about it and the insurance company confirmed as much, namely that Dolcie had indeed been the owner of a rare instrument. Much was made in the tabloids about the sale at the Tarisio Auctions of the Lady Blunt, a 1721 exquisite example of the master's craftsmanship which made $15.9 million to an anonymous bidder in 2011. The Nippon Foundation had sold the instrument to raise funds to help the Japanese tsunami appeal.

"Fuck-me-gently!" said Mr Dulcet which was quite a thing for a man who rarely swore. He was beside himself. Forty-five quid for something worth millions. How could he have been so dumb? He hurried off to find his contact and to retrieve his instrument. He felt sick. He felt angry. He felt confused.

The damp open air market in the East End was no place to create a scene. Mr Dulcet was determined that he wouldn't accost his contact in an aggressive way but so pumped up was he with anxious emotion that he leapt at the poor fellow and dragged him to the ground by his faded lapels.

"Where is it? Where is it?" was all Mr Dulcet kept saying to the terrified contact across whose chest the trembling Mr Dulcet sat like someone trying to cling on to a mechanical bucking bull. Obviously the prone contact didn't have the faintest idea of what his assailant was talking about. But Mr Dulcet was persistent. "Where is it? Where's the violin?" The garbled answer hit him like a tsunami.

"Who the fuck bought it?"

From the description he eventually got, Mr Dulcet realised that the purchaser of the priceless instrument was Megan, Dolcie's daughter. It all made perfect sense. She had obviously been trawling the markets and such like for her mother's stolen violin and had struck lucky. Mr Dulcet decided to go and see her. He took with him the photograph of his grandfather holding the violin case.

"Yes Mr Dulcet", said Megan. "I was very lucky. Found it as I thought I might at that big market, you know, in the East End. Got it back for sixty pounds."

Mr Dulcet's mouth was as dry as it had ever been. He perhaps shouldn't have offered Megan a hundred pounds for the violin. Mr Dulcet had shown Megan the faded photo and she had studied the picture with a broad grim. She pointed to one of the children in the picture, a little girl with pig tails and long white socks up to her bare knees and below her tatty drab dress. Apparently her name was Dolcie.

"How much?" said Mr Dulcet as if he didn't know.

"You know it's a Stradivarius and probably worth at least five million pounds . If not more." Megan let the words trip casually, cruelly. "You Dulcets," she went on. "You might be good at cleaning up but you're not very bright when it comes to priceless violins. Fancy loosing the thing twice. I don't know." And she laughed as she shut the door on the crest fallen man.

Mr Dulcet sat down heavily on the door step and felt his feelings welling up from inside. With his head in his hands he started to nod from side to side and very quietly at first a wail could be discerned and increasingly pumped by his leaden lungs, the sound grew into something primeval, the sound of despair, an alarm, a lament, a cry for help, a summons, a warning, a siren.

Nothing like a dulcet tone thought Megan as she put the kettle on.