by Mandy Morton
Tilly chuckled as she followed Jessie through to the shop, barely able to see over the three cardigans she was carrying. Jessie found a suitable bag while Tilly made herself at home once again in Hettie’s mac, hastily abandoned in the excitement of the new knits. ‘What time would you like me tomorrow? I’d rather be here early so you can show me the ropes. I’ve never worked for cardigans before, so I’ll need to do a good job for you.’
‘Come about twelve – we’ll have an hour to go through everything. I’ll make us a sandwich, so don’t bother with lunch – and I’m dying to find out how Hettie got on at Furcross. That’s worth three cardigans of anyone’s money.’ The two cats laughed. Bidding farewell to her new recruit, Jessie returned to her knitting and braced herself for the Methodists, while Tilly skipped all the way home with her three new best cardigans.
CHAPTER NINE
Tea at Furcross was an unusually quiet affair for a Friday. Only a handful of residents had bothered to leave their rooms to partake of Marley Toke’s lemon drizzle triple-layer cake; most were busy squeezing themselves into their chosen finery as a trial run for Saturday’s night out, and an extra slice of cake could be the difference between a cocktail dress fitting or not. The situation didn’t seem to deter Marcia Woolcoat: as Hettie and Poppa stepped through the French windows, she was positioning the largest slice of cake on her plate – perhaps to compensate for the others’ lack of interest, but probably because she was just plain greedy. Marcia nodded to Hettie, collected a cup of tea from Marley Toke’s serving hatch, and disappeared back down the corridor to her parlour.
‘Not exactly in mourning for her sister, is she?’ noted Poppa, attacking the drizzle cake with enthusiasm. ‘Do you think she should be on our list of suspects?’
Hettie stirred her tea thoughtfully. ‘Well, she’s a bit strange, but I can’t see her bringing all this trouble on herself and I think her heart’s in the right place. She didn’t have to set this place up with her windfall. She could have lived an easy life wherever she chose, and let’s face it – all this business isn’t going to do her much good. A lot of her guests have left already, she now has no nurse to keep them going or help them on their way out, and by the end of today the gardener will have cleared off. I’m not surprised she needs a big piece of cake.’
Poppa agreed as Marley emerged from her hatch and made her way over to their table. ‘Miss Hettie – what shall I do wid dat shoebox from Moggy’s room? I know I said I’d keep it safe for you, but Miss Marcie, she just been askin’ me if you found anythin’ in her room when you done the searchin’, and she asked if there was any letters or anythin’ like dat. I tink she knows me’s coverin’ up for Moggy, and I worryin’ meself sick about dat money in me tin. If she finds out I bin keepin’ tings from her, she’ll turn me out and den where will I be? Oh my days! Miss Hettie, I been so happy here with me cookin’ and me nice room and a place to grow me magic plants.’
Marley was working herself up into a highly emotional state, and with every good reason; Hettie knew she would have to choose her words very carefully in her final interview of the day if she was to protect her friend. She looked across at Poppa for inspiration, and he didn’t disappoint: wiping the icing sugar from his whiskers, he stood up and attempted to put his arm round the sizeable shoulders of Marley Toke; his words of reassurance saved the day, at least for the moment. ‘No worries there, Marley. You can come and stay on my boat with me if Marcia Whatsit chucks you out. I’ll clear some of my junk out of the old spare cabin, and as long as you keep the cakes coming, you can stay until you get fixed up with something better.’
Hettie marvelled at Poppa’s kind offer. She knew how much he loved his independence. On the day his old uncle Ned had died – in his chair by the fire in the snug at the Tot and Towpath – Poppa had become the proud owner of The Ned-Do-Well, a forty-foot narrow boat which had given him a home of his own and a place from which to run his plumbing business. He lived happily there, enjoying his own company and pleasing himself, and his offer of a bolt-hole for Marley was generous in the extreme.
‘Poppa boy! You a very fine cat, savin’ me bacon,’ Marley said, cheering up instantly. ‘I’ll keep Moggy’s tings safe in me room for now, but de old mother cat needs to know dat Moggy is gone or she’ll just keep writin’ to the post office.’
Hettie could only imagine how Lavender Stamp would react to a mountain of uncollected mail, but agreed that something would have to be done. It was really Marcia Woolcoat’s problem; Hettie’s problem was deciding which bits of the sorry tale to report back to her. It was nearly five o’clock, and she couldn’t put it off any longer. She left Poppa to finish his third slice of cake, collected a careful selection of Digger Patch’s blackmail notes from the safety of Marley’s kitchen, and – with a deep breath – made her way down the hallway to Miss Woolcoat’s parlour. The door was closed. Hettie raised her paw to knock, then changed her mind and hurried back to Marley’s kitchen; it was not her job to cover up the sins of others, and it suddenly occurred to her that there was another way of dealing with the situation she found herself in. She snatched up Alma Mogadon’s shoebox of letters and retraced her footsteps, this time making her presence felt with a resounding thump on Marcia Woolcoat’s door.
Marcia Woolcoat tested the hinges by throwing the door open with such force that she all but fell into the corridor. ‘Ah, Miss Bagshot – I trust you have some news for me? I always like to enter a weekend with the trials of the week dealt with and on the way to being forgotten. Do sit down.’
Hettie was more than a little taken aback by the matron’s words – she seemed to have forgotten that there was an unburied corpse on the premises – but she was getting used to her strange behaviour and decided to plough on regardless. ‘Miss Woolcoat, I have completed my search of your sis … er … Nurse Mogadon’s room, and have found a number of things that help to explain her decision to end her life. She was, as I suspected, being blackmailed by one of your residents, and I am now able to confirm that this was Mr Patch, your gardener.’ Hettie paused, waiting for a reaction; when none came, she continued. ‘Mr Patch had been sending some very unpleasant letters to Nurse Mogadon for some time, and these letters – which I have here – also contain a number of unkind rumours about your other guests. I think it best if you read them yourself.’ She pushed Digger Patch’s notes onto the table next to the empty lemon drizzle plate, but still Marcia Woolcoat showed no interest. ‘It would appear that Mr Patch has been stealing from your clients’ caskets before they were buried. Nurse Mogadon had discovered this and was going to inform you, but – as is now very clear – she had become involved in a deceit far worse than stealing trinkets, and had sold the bodies of your last three Dignicat clients to an outsider. Digger Patch knew this and threatened to expose her to get his own back. Sadly, she could see no other way out, and chose to kill herself rather than admit to you what she had done.’
Hettie had no idea if her words had hit home. Marcia Woolcoat stared straight ahead, seemingly composed and unmoved, and her attitude was beginning to unnerve Hettie a little – but the shoebox was becoming heavier by the minute, and it was time to hand it over and run. ‘I found this under Nurse Mogadon’s bed,’ she said. ‘I have only glanced at the contents, but I’ve seen enough to know that these are family letters which are of no interest to anyone but you. They may provide some reasons for your sister’s behaviour.’ Feeling very brave at having used the word ‘sister’, and relieved that there had been no visible explosion from the cat sitting opposite her, Hettie gently rested the shoebox on Marcia Woolcoat’s knee and stood up to leave. ‘I will, of course, continue my investigations into who bought the bodies – if you would like me to. Perhaps you could phone my office on Monday after you’ve had a chance to look through the letters, and let me know how you would like me to proceed. I will obviously put all my other cases on hold until I hear from you.’
At last there was a response, but it was not what Hettie had expected. Marcia Wo
olcoat rose from her sofa, knocking the shoebox and its contents onto the floor. She shuffled through the letters as she moved across the room to her desk, where she located her cheque book and proceeded to write out a money order, signing it with a flourish before handing it to Hettie. ‘Miss Bagshot,’ she said after a pause, ‘I am indebted to you and I hope this will cover your costs, and more especially your silence, in the matters you have just brought to my attention. I have no wish to continue this investigation any further, or to tie up more of your time. Please accept this cheque as final payment for your services. Now, you must excuse me – it’s nearly time for the six o’clock news.’
With that, Marcia Woolcoat strode out of her room and disappeared down the corridor, leaving Hettie to see herself out.
Too shell-shocked even to look at the cheque, Hettie made her way to the front door, collected her great coat from its hook and strode out into the car park, where Poppa was waiting patiently in his twin-wheel base transit van. She climbed into the cab beside him, still holding the cheque and still not daring to look at how much it was for, but hoping that Marcia Woolcoat had remembered the bonus that had been promised for a satisfactory outcome. Admittedly, Hettie was unable to pinpoint anyone in the Furcross case who could truly be described as satisfied by the service she had provided; in fact, since she had arrived on Wednesday, everything had got a whole lot worse. As she and Poppa drove away, narrowly missing Digger Patch who sat on his suitcase at the bus stop, she wondered if she was entirely cut out for the work she had chosen. Her doubts vanished when she finally glanced down at Marcia Woolcoat’s cheque, and saw in disbelief that it had been made out for fifty pounds.
The rush hour traffic in the high street was heavier than usual. Oralia Claw’s van had obstructed the departure of Turner Page’s mobile library, which now seemed to be wedged across the road, forcing Lavender Stamp – who had been directing the traffic – up against the Butters’ shop window. Poppa took decisive action and jumped the queue of traffic by taking to the pavement on the post office side of the street. Seeing his success, the rest of the cars followed suit and it soon became clear that Oralia Claw, Turner Page and Lavender Stamp would be going nowhere for the time being. Hettie was grateful for Poppa’s swift response to the hold-up: she was long past her best on a day that had started at three o’clock in the morning with a hysterical Jamaican cook, and had expanded into a room search with a corpse for company, an unpleasant interrogation with a burnt-out celebrity gardener, and a surreal encounter with Marcia Woolcoat brandishing a cheque for fifty pounds. The cheque now shared a pocket with a squashed samosa, Hettie having hurriedly stowed it away in case Marcia Woolcoat ran after them and asked for it back. She was dead on her paws and, as she waved Poppa on his way, her only thought was of a blazing fire and her comfortable old armchair. She had had no time to consider that – for the first time in her life – she was financially secure. In spite of her haphazard approach, it seemed that she was a successful detective after all.
CHAPTER TEN
Tilly knew that whatever had befallen Hettie at Furcross, she would have had one of her ‘difficult’ days, so she made all the homecoming preparations before setting to work on the agency’s rate sheet. A battle of wits between Tilly and the typewriter had been raging for some time when Hettie finally fell through the door. The problem – as far as Tilly could see – was that the typewriter had been blessed with a mind of its own, and that particular mind was a tetchy and spiteful one. She had done her best to make friends with it, coaxing it into life by gently tapping its keys and not being too harsh with the carriage return lever, but all she got for her consideration was badly spelt words, numbers where there should have been letters, and holes in the paper where the arms had pressed too hard. To make matters worse, it had decided to unravel its ribbon, covering everything in red and black ink, including Tilly. If the typewriter had been given a voice, it might have suggested that Tilly’s paws were simply too wide for the job and that it could not be expected to choose from three letters every time she hit a key; it might also have gone on to point out that the typist was in charge of the spelling, and that a typewriter’s job was merely to supply the letters and the mechanical action to get them onto the page. Mercifully, the machine had not been given a voice, and Tilly remained oblivious to her shortcomings, assuming that she and this particular wordsmith simply did not get on. It was only in the last few minutes that the machine had seen fit to spew out something vaguely recognisable as a price list. As she appraised her ink-stained offering, even Tilly had to admit that it needed a bit more work, but she had made a start and that – in her book – was the main thing.
With much tugging and pushing, the typewriter was returned to its place under the desk, which was halfway through its transformation into supper table when Hettie stumbled over the threshold under the weight of her day. Tilly skipped to the door and helped her off with her coat, seeing instantly that the visit to Furcross had offered a number of challenges; by the tired look on Hettie’s face, a good supper was needed as soon as possible. She put a match to the fire, which responded instantly, and Hettie – not wishing to crumple her warm business slacks – exchanged them for her dressing gown, pulling the samosa and the cheque out of the pocket before abandoning her day clothes in the second drawer of the filing cabinet. The cheque was tossed like an old shopping list onto the staff sideboard and the samosa – a little worse for wear but still recognisable – was placed on Tilly’s fireside blanket for later. Tilly busied herself setting out their supper, keeping half an eye on her friend’s silent, methodical dismantling of her day; she was desperate to hear the latest news on the case, but she knew that Hettie would speak when she was ready.
She had to wait longer than she hoped: Hettie climbed into her armchair and, with a grateful sigh and a yawn that threatened to consume the hearth, fell into a deep sleep as the fire filled their little room with the shadows of dancing flames. Hunger woke her eventually and, with one eye open, she noticed that Tilly had changed into her pyjamas and was resting on her blanket by the fire with her nose stuck firmly in the latest Polly Hodge mystery. A slight turn of the head told her that the gingham tablecloth on her desk was laden with an untouched supper and, for the first time that day, all seemed to be well.
‘What’s in the pies?’ asked Hettie, stretching her tabby paws out in front of her.
Tilly jumped, startled at the break in the silence, and tore herself away from a rather nasty knife murder that Polly Hodge had seen fit to include in chapter two. ‘I went for the award-winning sausage and onion, but then I thought – what if we don’t like it? So I got your favourite steak and kidney as well. And there’s cream horns for pudding.’ Hettie purred with satisfaction, and gave her paws and face a cursory lick as Tilly added some coal to the fire and put the kettle on. She struggled from her chair and cut the two pies in half; examining the sausage and onion filling, and deciding that it looked very good indeed, she put half of each pie on the two plates that Tilly had laid out for them. As they ate, she went through the events of the day, encouraged by Tilly’s occasional gasps and mild expletives to wring every ounce of drama out of what would always be known as the ‘Furcross Case’. When the pies had been dispatched, they returned to their fireside to suck the life out of Beryl Butter’s cream horns and Hettie loaded her catnip pipe, settling back in her chair to wait for Tilly’s questions and for the wisdom which she would no doubt bring to the mystery. Marcia Woolcoat’s three pounds had been excitedly stowed away in the rainy day tin on the mantelpiece, empty and neglected in recent months, but Hettie had not yet mentioned the cheque. In the true tradition of the command performance, she was saving the best until last.
‘What do you think Marcia Woolcoat will do when she’s read the shoebox letters?’ asked Tilly, scraping cream off the spine of her book. ‘It might send her mad. Then she might go on a killing spree, or set fire to Furcross with all the cats still in it.’
Tilly’s enthusiasm built to a c
rescendo, inspired by Polly Hodge to include as many classic scenarios as she could remember, and Hettie marvelled at her friend’s imagination, knowing that Marcia Woolcoat was probably capable of all of them. ‘I think Miss Woolcoat’s world is crumbling around her ears,’ she said, when Tilly had run out of dramatic endings. ‘Her problems started long before she set up Furcross, and I think her chickens are all coming home to roost at once. When I left, she seemed more dead than her sister, and she certainly wasn’t interested in taking the case any further – which is a shame, because we could have got another week’s work out of her.’ Hettie said the last few words with a twinkle in her eye, then a broad grin, and Tilly put the change of demeanour down to the catnip until Hettie sprang from her chair and snatched the folded piece of paper from the staff sideboard ‘She did give me this, though. What do you make of it?’
She allowed the cheque to float down onto Tilly’s blanket and watched as her friend unfolded the paper and read the glorious words over and over again, vocalising the sum in a mystic chant. ‘Fifty pounds. Fifty pounds. How can it be for fifty pounds? Look! It says “Pay Miss Bagshot the sum of fifty pounds”, and she’s signed it. Look! It says Marcia Woolcoat. How can there be so much money on one piece of paper?’ Tilly stood up and danced around her blanket, grinding flaky pastry and samosa crumbs into the carpet, and for the first time Hettie felt the joy of their windfall. She joined Tilly in her dance and they spun round the room together, without a care in the world.