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

start with some of the disguises.”
    I was led by Aunt Japonica to a large cupboard in a corner. She opened the doors with pride and I saw inside an array of extraordinary outfits. There was a uniform of the French Foreign Legion; there was the outfit of a Russian sailor. Then there was adoctor’s white coat and a ballet dancer’s tutu. There were many others.
    Next, Aunt Japonica opened a drawer to the side of the cupboard. Inside were all sorts of devices to stick on your face. There were scars—straight and curved—there were pimples and spots (these were for use if you wanted to look like a teenager). Then there were false ears and false noses—all very realistic—and several kinds of false chins.
    “I could make you look like anyone,” Aunt Japonica said proudly. “I could pass you off as the president of the United States himself, if I wanted to.”
    “That’s enough of that,” said Aunt Thessalonika rather impatiently. “There are other things in the office, you know.”
    I followed Aunt Thessalonika past a row of neatly stacked notebooks.
    “Our old cases,” she said proudly. “We keep notes on everything we do.”
    I stopped and looked at some of the titles. “The Case of the Double-cracked Mirror.” “The Case of the Vanishing Bus.” “The Caseof the Poisonous Lettuce.” (“A very disturbing case,” said Aunt Thessalonika, shaking her head rather grimly.)
    Next we came to a shelf that was full of magnifying glasses. I was wondering why the aunts needed so many of them, when Aunt Thessalonika took one of them off the shelf and showed it to me.
    “These are no ordinary magnifying glasses,” she said, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Look through that.”
    I held the glass over a section of the shelf and stared through it. All I saw were fingerprints.
    “You see,” said Aunt Thessalonika, “that’s our fingerprint glass. If you look at anything with that magnifying glass, you’ll see any fingerprints that happen to be around. It’s a very great help, I can assure you.”
    I picked up another magnifying glass and showed it to Aunt Thessalonika.
    “What does this one do?” I asked.
    Aunt Thessalonika took it from me and examined it for a moment.
    “Ah!” she said. “That one’s very useful indeed. There aren’t many of these around.”
    “But what does it do?” I pressed.
    “Translates French into English,” said Aunt Thessalonika. “Look.”
    She reached for a book off another shelf and opened it. I could see that the book was written in French.
    “Now look at this page through the magnifying glass,” said Aunt Thessalonika.
    I held the glass over the page and looked through it. At first the words seemed a little bit blurred, but when I moved the magnifying glass slightly they became clearer. What is more, they were in English!
    “This one does German,” said Aunt Thessalonika, pointing to another, very heavy and serious-looking magnifying glass. “And this one,” she went on, pointing to a very elegant magnifying glass with swirls of silver around the handle, “does Italian.”
    We moved around the room, examining all the bits and pieces that my aunts used in their unusual work. There were bags of coins, allneatly labeled; there were maps; there were pens that wrote in different colors. At one point I picked up a large white object and asked Aunt Thessalonika what it was. “That,” she said, “is very strange. It still puzzles us.”
    “Yes,” agreed Aunt Japonica. “We haven’t heard the last of that.”
    Aunt Thessalonika took the object from me and placed it under a light.
    “This is a plaster cast,” she said. “I take it that you know what a plaster cast is?”
    I nodded. I had made casts at school, pouring the plaster into shapes to make impressions.
    “Well,” continued Aunt Thessalonika, “you’ll see that this plaster cast is of a footprint.”
    I felt rather disappointed by this news. I was hoping that it would be something much more