Page 3 of A Clean Sweep

'Last month was really interesting, shame you couldn't make it,' continued Celeste, as her sister looked at her watch and wondered if anyone else was going to show up.

'Not my usual cup of tea, but I’m now an Ernest Hemingsworth devotee.

' Oh help, thought Emily, wondering where this particular train of thought would crash spectacularly. 'Alice chose it, she’s always been a bit pretentious, but I found it quite fascinating. All about bullfighting in Spain. You know, the tradition behind it, the way those men saw themselves as warriors fighting a noble cause. You really should read it, Em. Here, I’ve written down the name for you.

' Celeste scrabbled in her bag, produced a tiny notepad with a flourish worthy of Paul Daniels at his peak.

‘ Murder in the Morning!’ she pronounced.

Emily simply prayed for the doorbell to ring. Which it did.

Half an hour in and book club was in full flow.

Emily’s living room was filled with the thrum of ceaseless chatter.

Glasses chinked and plates clattered as oozing wedges of Brie were spread on crackers, spring rolls dipped in sweet chilli sauce, horseback thingys taken apart to cries of ‘Ooh, it’s a date, thought it’d be an oyster!

Or is that the angel version?' Michael – damn him – had been proven right as this month’s weighty tome had barely warranted more than five minutes of their time.

'Watching paint dry would have been more fun,' said Esther Thompson, licking a particularly gooey St. Augur from her fingers.

'Too true,' chipped in Susan Wainwright. She had sped her way through the savouries like an Olympic athlete with an eye on the gold, which in her case was Emily’s fabled mini cheesecakes.

With a crumbly butter biscuit base and meltingly creamy in the middle, they were topped with a layer of sweet but tangy blackberry compote.

Emily felt slightly miffed that her book choice had failed to captivate her fellow members.

Still, at least she'd got beyond the first chapter.

'Oh, I really shouldn’t, but …’ Susan bore the expression of a woman who’d just spent the past hour in the throes of ec stasy with George Clooney/Brad Pitt/take your pick of desirable males as she grabbed another cheesecake.

Her third, Emily noted, relieved that she'd made a double batch. Susan then launched into a blow by blow account of what some random woman she knew was up to these days. Which involved latex, whips and something about the headmaster of the local secondary, who’d always seemed a perfectly nice man to Emily, if you discounted his fur-lined anorak and encyclopaedic knowledge of feathered creatures.

Nancy Edwards, a mousy little soul who had barely contributed a word to the proceedings, was currently fanning herself with a copy of Good Housekeeping purloined from Emily’s magazine rack.

Gosh, it was a little hot in here, thought Emily.

Even with her wispy Arnold-attracting top.

Taking a large gulp of water, she glanced at the fireplace and realised her fire was more than blazing.

It was now raging like a mini Hades and belching out eye-watering plumes of smoke.

Esther was in the midst of a spectacular coughing fit, Alice’s face was turning a vivid shade of scarlet and Susan had put down her dessert plate and looked vaguely distressed.

And not just because the cheesecakes were finished.

'Emily!' squeaked Celeste, having just returned from a nose-powdering session in the cloakroom.

'I think we have a problem!' No kidding Miss Marple, thought Emily, as smoke continued to billow around the room.

All the women were now convulsed in a cacophony of honking and spluttering like consumption sufferers in a modern-day sanitarium.

What to do? Call the fire brigade? Much as the thought of hunky hose-wielding men storming her semi gave her a little frisson of excitement, it seemed to her that the problem was more to do with a blockage in the chimney than an out-of-control inferno.

'What the hell’s going on in here?' Through the pall of smoke emerged the robust figure of Celeste’s husband, Michael.

Often on taxi duty – Celeste never knowingly under drank – he forged a path towards the fireplace, pausing only to grab a vase of fast-wilting tulips.

Tossing aside the blooms, he chucked the water on to the smouldering embers.

Which hissed, spat and emanated an astonishing amount of steam.

From hellfire to hammam , thought Emily.

All we need now are fluffy white bathrobes and a reflexology session.

A short time later, the book club ladies said their goodbyes.

'Most excitement I’ve had in a long time!' Nancy gave Emily an uncharacteristic hug, her usual lavender and old lace fragrance tinged with a hint of charcoal.

'Wait until I tell the women at yoga about tonight!' chirped Susan, although Emily suspected they already knew, had seen the high definition footage and were on to the next domestic drama-to-be.

Michael, a pink-faced and slightly droopy Celeste clinging to his arm, paused at the front door.

'Have you ever had your chimney swept, Emily?

' For some reason – maybe one too many glasses of Pinot consumed or just the sheer exhaustion of it all – Emily couldn’t help but giggle.

Not recently, she wanted to retort, but thought better of it.

Michael was solid, reliable and adored her older sister but he was not over-endowed in the sense of humour department.

Particularly the section marked ‘slightly smutty’.

'Well, I think you should call someone in. Have a look on Google. Could well be something dead up there. Goodnight then.’

Emily, having cleaned up the kitchen, sprayed liberal doses of air freshener around the living room and taken a shower to wash away the stench of smoke, sank down on her bed.

A chimney sweep. Did they even exist anymore?

Suddenly her head was filled with pictures of Dick Van Dyke dancing with penguins, alongside Julia Andrews being practically perfect in every way.

‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down …’ She shook her head forcefully.

The last thing she needed right now was a night’s sleep plagued by Mary flipping Poppins.

She’d investigate the existence of men with long brushes and soot-smeared faces tomorrow.