by Mandy Morton
She had left looking under the bed until last, mainly because of the body lying on it. The room had become almost tomb-like as she worked her way round it and she had, in her imagination, convinced herself that the bed held secrets that only she was destined to discover – if she could be brave enough to go there. She was not disappointed. Lifting the bedspread and folding it back across Alma Mogadon’s body, Hettie lay on the floor and reached under the bed for a shoebox covered in dust. Even to her untrained eye, it had not been opened for some time. Then came the box file, which interested her more as it had recently been dragged through the dust under the bed, its contents obviously viewed or added to within the last few weeks. Opening the file, her attention was instantly drawn to a letter, addressed by hand and kept in place by the spring inside the box. There had been no real attempt to hide it, and it was clearly the most recent addition to a number of similar letters written in the same paw. Not wishing to linger any longer than she had to with her very silent companion, Hettie put the boxes on the table by the lamp and opened the letter that had caught her attention. It was from Digger Patch, short and very much to the point:
I KNOW THE CASKETS WERE EMPTY AND THAT YOU TOOK THE BODIES. EITHER YOU PAY UP OR YOUR NASTY LITTLE SECRET IS OUT. KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU. D.P.
Putting the letter to one side, Hettie opened some of the others. It soon became clear that Digger Patch was very much aware of Alma Mogadon’s family problems and had used the information to extract payments as silence money. Some of the letters mentioned other Furcross residents, and hinted at a number of ‘difficulties’ that had beset them in their earlier lives; and there were personal obscenities aimed at Alma, who, in the past, had clearly fought off Patch’s advances – something which Hettie was convinced lay at the root of his vindictive behaviour. It didn’t really change the fact that Alma Mogadon had been involved in the removal of the bodies, and according to Marley Toke’s tea caddy, she had been paid handsomely for it. If Digger Patch hadn’t stumbled across the empty caskets, Alma would still be alive and her mother would be moving to the seaside. But who had Nurse Mogadon sold the bodies to, and why? It was impossible to be certain about anything, except that Digger Patch was a blackmailer and a petty thief.
Hettie gathered up the bundle of letters and slipped them into an empty folder, then lifted the lid on the dusty shoebox. Very quickly, she realised that it should be removed from prying eyes, as it contained photos of a childhood spent with an adoring mother cat. There were long letters, birthday cards and thank you notes, all in the same paw and all addressed to Lavender Stamp’s post office in the High Street, marked for collection only. For fear of losing her sister, Alma Mogadon had hidden her mother’s love away in a shoebox, and Hettie decided to remove the deception before it could bring further grief for Marcia Woolcoat. Picking up the box and balancing the blackmail notes on top, she left Alma Mogadon in peace, locking the door behind her before making her way back to the main building just as the lunch bell sounded.
CHAPTER SIX
Tilly had also had a busy morning, cleaning and tidying. It was her intention to have the room spick and span by lunchtime, so that she could do the library van justice before setting out down the High Street to Jessie’s charity shop. There was one difficult moment with Hettie’s best mac, which Tilly had attempted to sponge down, scrubbing away hard at the piccalilli stains deposited the day before by Marley Toke’s ladle; in spite of – or probably because of – her labours, the stain appeared to spread across the mac like an incoming tide. Throwing caution to the wind, Tilly decided to immerse the whole garment in a tin bath full of soap suds in the backyard. She climbed in herself to tread the mac and its stain into submission, and finally achieved a good result, which swung proudly around on the washing line as if showing off to anyone who was interested. Keeping the mac company was an assortment of woolly socks, including the ones Tilly had selected for herself earlier that morning and had quite forgotten to take off before climbing into the bath.
The Butters’ pie of the week promotion had been going very well, and Tilly made sure of Friday’s supper by exchanging their luncheon vouchers the second that Beryl Butter threw the bolts back on the shop door. She was torn between the steak and kidney – Hettie’s favourite – and a sausage and onion recipe, for which the Butters had received a gold medal at the Southwool Pie and Produce Show. Eventually she decided on one of each and two large cream horns for pudding, and was satisfied that whatever sort of day Hettie was having, she would have a feast to come home to.
Placing supper under a tea towel on the staff sideboard, Tilly went about the rest of her chores and wrestled her typewriter out from under Hettie’s desk, ready to have a go at the agency’s rate sheet later. She had been eyeing up her sausage roll for some time and, seeing that it was nearly twelve, she indulged herself with a cup of tea and a sit down while she tucked into her breakfast leftovers. Then she gathered up her books, skipped out into the High Street, and climbed the steps to Turner Page’s library van.
Turner Page had been chief librarian for more years than anyone could remember. Before the old library closed, he had become quite a celebrity, running a number of aggressive campaigns to keep the doors open. But eventually his appetite for chaining himself to the table leg dwindled; when he was the only cat left in the building, with no one to notice his protest, he joined his despondent readers and went home. The library doors closed for the last time, and the bulldozers moved in to make way for a car park and bowling alley.
Before she met Hettie, the old library was Tilly’s salvation, especially on cold winter days. The reading room boasted a number of comfortable armchairs, and the big old iron radiators brought warmth and drying facilities to hats, mittens and raincoats as their occupants parked themselves out of the winter chill for a few hours each day. Tilly had had her own library ritual: newspapers in the morning, read on a table that sprawled the length of the room, and then a visit to detective or romantic fiction for something to curl up with until the library bell clanged at six, telling all readers to make their way home. In Tilly’s case, home was an old garden shed with a broken window and no door, and there had been times – in the middle of a winter’s night – when the cruelness of the frost and snow had kept her awake, frozen to the old shelf she’d adopted as her bed. Only the thought of the library’s warmth had kept her alive.
The building had closed at the height of summer, and the true impact of its demise had not been felt until the autumn, when the nights drew in and the first frosts began to bite. That was the winter that Tilly met Hettie, and the two cats found a friendship based on looking out for each other; when Tilly was invited to share Hettie’s small room at the Butters’, it had given her life meaning and – most of all – hope. A number of her library acquaintances had perished in the cold that winter. There had been an outcry against those responsible, especially when the bowling alley failed to capture the imagination of the townsfolk and closed within a year, leaving a derelict building inhabited by homeless cats, with plenty of parking spaces and no cars to put in them. The strength of feeling had resulted in a lot of press coverage, and media giants like Hacky Redtop had vowed to put a library back where it belonged at the heart of the community. A great deal of money was raised by local shopkeepers, and some well-known authors – keen to hang onto their royalties – lent their names to the cause.
Turner Page took great pride in his mobile library. Although well into his seventies and much greyer than he used to be, his love of the written word and of those who read spurred him on to polish his bookshelves until they gleamed. The lettering for his categories was bold and delivered with the flourish of an artist, and he was no stranger to innovation: recently, he had made tentative steps into the world of video movies, introducing a small selection for those who could afford the equipment to play them on. Such was his devotion to work that his personal appearance lacked a little attention: most days, he appeared still wearing his pyja
mas, covered by a woolly tank top for decency’s sake.
Clutching her returns, Tilly made for detective fiction and scanned the shelf for the H’s until she found what she was looking for: the latest novel by Polly Hodge, an author she greatly admired. The new book, An Unsuitable Job for a Cat, boasted a rather lurid cover of a cat’s paw holding a dagger dripping with blood, and Tilly pounced on it with a cry of delight. The queue to have books stamped had died down a little, so she decided to unburden herself of the pile she was returning. Turner Page, who was usually either reading a book or stamping one and very rarely looked up, checked the dates on Tilly’s returns and placed them in a box under his desk. Needing to know something, she tried to catch his attention, but a tut from behind forced her back to the shelves and a rather unpleasant-looking male cat slammed his books down to be stamped. As he banged into Tilly on his way out, she noticed that he had selected a number of books on self-improvement; the irony had not gone unnoticed by Turner Page, who looked up, shrugged his bony shoulders and smiled with the twinkliest eyes that Tilly had ever seen. She seized her moment. ‘Mr Page, I wonder if you could explain to me what these vid-e-os do? They look like books but I can see they’re not, and when I open them there’s nothing inside. Your shelf is fuller every time I come to the library van, and I notice that this one has a picture of my favourite actress, Elizabeth Traybake, on the front.’
Turner Page did a rare thing, and came out from behind his counter to assist Tilly in her enquiries. ‘My dear Miss … er …?’
‘Tilly. You can call me Tilly.’
‘My dear Miss Tilly, the video is the very latest technology. It enables one to enjoy the delights of cinematography in one’s own home at a time of one’s own choosing. It is like a book with moving pictures and sound that you can put down or pick up whenever you wish, without the constraints of a television schedule. It is, quite simply, a cinema in one’s front room.’
Tilly stared in absolute wonderment at the plastic box that Turner Page had placed in her paws. She turned it round, trying to work out the magic, opening the catch and snapping it shut again as if frightened that something would escape. ‘Does it need batteries to make it work?’
‘No, my dear, and the box is empty because I have had to impose certain levels of security to guard against theft. Videos are very much the “must-haves” of modern living.’ Turner Page returned to his desk and reached behind his chair, pulling out another plastic box slightly smaller than the one glued to Tilly’s paws. ‘This, my dear, is the actual video. You are holding the box it fits into. Think of it like a dust jacket.’
Tilly was finding it hard to keep up, and tried desperately to remember if there had been any talk of a drink or drug dependency issue regarding Turner Page during her days at the old library. In a last effort to get to the bottom of this seemingly new phenomenon, she took the proffered item and noticed that it rattled and had two plastic spools; it appeared to be a larger version of some of Hettie’s old cassette tapes, the ones that Poppa’s van chewed up on long journeys. ‘If it doesn’t need batteries, how does it go and where do the pictures come from?’ Tilly began to feel hot tears of frustration well up in her eyes. It was the same whenever she encountered a new gadget. Her favourite, of course, was the television, and she’d been heartbroken on the day that reduced circumstances forced the cat from the rental shop to take the set away – but there had also been much excitement when Hettie turned up with an electric kettle that turned itself off. Tilly had spent days watching it in case it forgot, and it had cost a fortune in coins for their greedy meter. But this video thing – did she need one? Would it help to ease the pain of not having a TV?
Seeing her distress, Turner Page gently removed the video and its case from her paws. ‘I feel I have not given you a full and comprehensive introduction to the video,’ he said. ‘I have offered its joys without the practicalities. It runs on mains electricity. You will need to hire or purchase a video machine which is compatible with your television set, and you will need to tune an empty channel to converse with the video player – which will also be able to record a television programme of your choice if you are out, as long as you have some blank videos.’
Tilly was now more distressed than ever. The thought of leaving a machine in her room that randomly recorded anything it felt like from her television whilst she was out was more than she could bear; life was difficult enough as it was without machines watching TV when she couldn’t. Snatching up the latest Polly Hodge, which she’d abandoned earlier, she quickly selected a Nicolette Upstart and an Alexander McPaw Spit to add to her pile; with the books firmly stamped, she fled the library van, looking back over her shoulder in case the videos were chasing her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The lunchtime rush had been quite spectacular at Furcross. Marley Toke’s Jamaican curry was the hit of the week, and the residents – fresh from a morning of retail therapy – positively galloped towards her serving hatch, carrying away plates and trays piled high and returning for large helpings of mango suet pudding drowned in Jamaican custard. Poppa joined Hettie in the queue, having dealt with his unruly boiler, and the pair ate their lunch at a table away from the general scrum so that Hettie could bring him up to speed with her search of Nurse Mogadon’s room. Digger Patch had also isolated himself from his fellow inmates, Hettie noticed; he had not gone shopping with them, and now sat at a table for one, picking at what appeared to be a cauliflower cheese – the non-Jamaican option.
‘He looks like a cat in a bit of bother,’ said Poppa, parcelling up a samosa for later.
Hettie followed suit, remembering that Tilly had missed out on a staff lunch. ‘I think we have enough proof to tackle him about the blackmail letters. We could even mention stealing from the caskets, but I doubt he knows much about the bodies going missing so we’re back to where we started,’ she said despondently, stirring the mango suet into her custard. The night’s events had caught up with her, and Marley’s excellent lunch made her long for an armchair by a sunny window to catch up on some sleep, but the job was far from done: Digger Patch was responsible for Nurse Mogadon’s suicide, and needed to be prevented from spreading his poisonous allegations any further. With that in mind, she rallied slightly, spooned down the rest of her pudding, and loaded up the tray with empty plates for Poppa to return to Marley Toke’s hatch.
As Poppa progressed across the dining room, Digger Patch rose from his solitary table and headed towards the French windows and out into the garden. Signalling to her friend, Hettie followed the celebrity gardener at what she considered to be a safe distance, waiting for Poppa to emerge from the dining room and take up a nonchalant but observant position in the shrubbery. Patch strode across the lawn and through to the vegetable garden, where – overlooked by Nurse Mogadon’s window – he slumped down on a bench and stared at his gardener’s boots.
‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ Hettie asked. ‘It’s such a lovely afternoon, and everything looks so fresh in the sun after all that rain last night.’
‘Suit yerself. I’m not stoppin’ long. I got some potatoes to lift and the last of me salad crops before the frost gets ’em.’
Hettie sensed that Digger Patch was not looking for company or niceties about the weather, so she decided to cut to the quick, certain that Poppa was ready to spring to her defence if things got nasty. ‘Mr Patch,’ she began, ‘I’m sure you must know that my colleagues and I have been brought in by Miss Woolcoat to investigate the disappearance of three bodies earlier this week from the burial ground at Furcross.’
‘Yeah, well, you got that bit wrong straight away,’ said Patch, sneering at Hettie’s opening gambit. ‘Them bodies never reached their graves. They was taken before. The caskets were empty when I came to bury ’em, so before you start accusin’ me, I had nothin’ to do with it. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’
Digger Patch began to rise from the bench but Hettie caught his arm, forcing him down again and surprising herself with
her determination to have her say. ‘I am aware of that, Mr Patch, and I’m not accusing you of stealing bodies – but it has come to light that you are involved in other unpleasant schemes that concern me. It’s not just bodies that have been stolen from the coffins. I understand that you have been helping yourself to personal effects belonging to the deceased, and this must be so – you wouldn’t know that the bodies were missing if you hadn’t tampered with the coffins.’
Digger Patch rounded on Hettie, showing a face that had never been seen by his adoring TV fans. ‘If you knows what’s good for you, you’ll push off and leave me in peace. I can make things difficult for you. I got friends who can make sure you never work again, and they aren’t known for bein’ nice, if you know what I mean. You obviously have no idea who you are talkin’ to, and Miss Woolcoat won’t be too pleased when I tell her you been botherin’ me.’
Aware that Poppa was only a matter of yards away and in earshot of Patch’s threats, Hettie faced the gardener with what she hoped was her best steely stare, then waited a moment for full dramatic effect before turning the screw a little tighter. ‘Please feel free to complain to Miss Woolcoat, but don’t forget to tell her that you were the reason her sister killed herself and that your nasty letters – sent to Nurse Mogadon – also mentioned other Furcross residents whom Marcia Woolcoat had protected from the outside world. Oh, and that closer to home you had discovered the relationship between Nurse Mogadon and her elderly mother, which she had been keeping from her sister for fear of losing her job. In fact, shall we both go and find Miss Woolcoat now and get this all out in the open? I have your letters, and I would be happy to pass them to Miss Woolcoat for her thoughts on the subject.’ Hettie paused. ‘Or you could just tell me what happened on the day of the burial.’