by Mandy Morton
Hettie, Tilly, Clippy and the rest of the passengers all leant forward in their seats as if willing the bus to climb the hill; this time, the engine roared as the driver forced the bus into low gear, pushing his paw down hard on the accelerator as the bus slowly but surely climbed to the summit. There was rapturous applause and cheering from all the cats on board, and Clippy took a bow on behalf of the bus and the driver. She waved Hettie and Tilly off as they made their way to the gatehouse, hoping to find Micks Wither-Spoon at home.
As instructed, the gates to Wither-Fork Hall were open, and Hettie could see a great deal of activity taking place in the parkland beyond: three large marquees and a series of tents lay on the grass, waiting to be erected, and several cats stood round scratching their heads and directing each other. A number of vendors’ caravans were also setting up to offer light refreshments to the hoards who would descend at the weekend. By contrast, the gatehouse looked uninhabited: there was no sign of Micks on his battlements, and as Hettie and Tilly made their way round to the back door, they noticed that the curtains were drawn in what they took to be the kitchen. Hettie knocked on the door and waited but there was no reply, only a strange murmuring sound coming from within.
Tilly noticed a small chink in the kitchen curtains and climbed up on a couple of well-placed logs to see if she could see through the window. ‘There’s definitely something going on in there,’ she reported as the logs gave way and she banged her chin on the windowsill. ‘It’s all green and swirly, like under the sea.’
Tilly’s assessment of what was going on in the Wither-Spoons’ kitchen turned out to be more accurate than it sounded. After several more bangs on the door, it was finally opened by Micks, wearing chain mail over a dress and with a cardboard crown perched on his head. ‘Splendid!’ he said. ‘An audience – just what we need. Come in and perch yourselves on the edge of the blasted heath.’
Hettie was somewhat taken aback by their welcome, but twice as shocked by the vision that greeted them as they stepped inside the kitchen. What she assumed to be Mash Wither-Spoon was dancing round a bubbling, volcanic cauldron, which exuded something that looked like pea soup. Mash had enhanced the outfit from the day before with a headband of dangling, slimy seaweed, topping everything off with a battered witch’s hat for extra effect. The whole scene was bathed in a green light, created by makeshift lamps draped in green crêpe paper. As Tilly had quite rightly suggested, the overall effect looked like something from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, with Mash playing the part of everything that had ever swum in murky waters. She’d completed her look with sea-green-painted paws and claws, and was busy tossing a multitude of props into the cauldron, rhythmically chanting what sounded like the menu from the local Chinese takeaway. ‘Tripe of beef, tongue of duck, ear of pig, feet of chicken, mix of kelp, grill of eel.’
‘Brilliant, just brilliant,’ shouted Micks. ‘Now to me. Go on – say it for our visitors.’
Mash had been so taken with her role as all three hags that she’d hardly noticed her audience; when she did, she inadvertently slipped on a spillage of pea soup and rejuvenated her seaweed dreadlocks in the cauldron itself, saved only by Micks’ quick action in pulling her out. Undaunted, she rose to her big speech, and Micks bowed his head to receive the oracle’s news. ‘Arise, Thane of Corduroy, King of Prawns, Noodle of Wonton, Master of Clams. Macbeth shall be King of Michaelmas!’
Hettie and Tilly stared in disbelief as Mash anointed Micks with a measuring jug full of pea soup, and both stepped forward to take a bow. Tilly could never resist a theatrical experience and clapped her paws in appreciation of the spectacle before her. Hettie’s was a more muted response, but the smile she offered was genuine.
‘It’s not quite there yet,’ said Micks, ‘but it wasn’t too bad for a dry run, was it?’
The irony of the words didn’t escape Hettie as she took in the full impact of the pea soup on the kitchen floor. ‘I wonder if you could spare some time for a quick chat, Micks?’ she said. ‘I think you may be able to help us with our enquiries regarding the death up on the allotment yesterday.’
Micks threw his paws above his head and shrank back as if Hettie had run him through with a spear. ‘Why should you think it was me? Why would I want to do that? Where’s your evidence? That’s what you’ll need, evidence, and you won’t find any round here.’
Mash adopted a pleading pose and fell down before Hettie with her paws clasped together. ‘Oh, please don’t take him! He’s all I’ve got, and how will I manage without him? He’s the love of my life.’
Hettie was finding the whole situation in the Wither-Spoons’ kitchen more than a little wearing. She had never conducted an interview where the candidates were caked in pea soup before, and now they seemed to have left Macbeth behind in favour of the finer points of Victorian melodrama, with Micks assuming the role of dastardly villain and Mash as distressed damsel.
‘Perhaps if we call back later that might be more convenient to you both?’ suggested Tilly, sensing that Hettie’s patience was fast fraying at the edges.
Micks was about to respond when there was a loud and urgent hammering at the door. Startled, Mash slipped and fell backwards, banging her head on the cauldron as Micks slid his way to the door and hurled it open. Blackberry Tibbs stood in the doorway. ‘I need the detectives!’ she shouted. ‘Jeremiah says he saw them coming in here. It’s terrible!’
Deciding not to wait for any sort of response from Micks, Hettie and Tilly paddled through the pea soup and out into the sunshine, shutting the door behind them before Micks could follow. Blackberry was distraught, hopping from one paw to another, out of breath and gasping for air. Eventually, she managed some disconnected words: ‘Lilies … blood … just lying there!’ She jabbed her paw in the direction of the allotments.
Hettie and Tilly responded immediately. They crossed the road and took the central path to the allotments, where a hubbub of cats had gathered. The Chits were there, together with Bonny Grubb, the Mulch sisters, Tarragon Trench and Apple Chutney, but there was no time for conversation. Hettie stared down the path to where Jeremiah Corbit was standing at the gate to Gertrude Jingle’s allotment. Blackberry caught up with them, still out of breath but a little more coherent. ‘It’s Miss Jingle,’ she explained. ‘She’s been murdered. I found her when I went to collect the lilies. I’ve never seen so much blood!’ The distressed cat collapsed onto the path and sobbed.
Hettie turned to the onlookers. ‘Would one of you make Blackberry a nice cup of sweet tea? She’s had a terrible shock and needs looking after. Tilly will stay with you and take statements while I go and see what’s happened to Miss Jingle.’ Tilly nodded in agreement, relieved to escape the initial viewing of the body; when it came to the grislier aspects of the detection business, she much preferred to take a back seat.
Hettie made her way down the path to Gertrude Jingle’s gate, where Jeremiah Corbit was standing guard. ‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ he said, as Hettie pushed past him, shutting the gate behind her. She was pleased and relieved to see Corbit turn on his heel and go back up the path without another word. The last thing she needed was a guided tour of the murder site by a cat who had questioned Miss Jingle’s right to live there in the first place.
The beautiful white garden shone in the sunshine, with each bloom attracting as many bees as could fill its flower heads. The bees danced from one plant to another, collecting an abundance of late-summer pollen, and the joyful murmuring as they went about their work combined with an intoxicating scent to make what Hettie was about to see even more horrific. She followed the path up to the door of a small but attractive summer house, taking care to avoid treading on some delicate white lobelia that had strayed onto the old herringbone brickwork. The summer house boasted a veranda, with a single wooden chair and table to one side and a row of potted white geraniums to the other. The door in the centre was slightly ajar. Hettie stared at it for a moment, wishing that she could be anywhere else but in front of it.
She knew that the peace and tranquillity of the garden had become a distorted and surreal entrance to the darkest of all crimes; just how dark she was about to find out.
She pushed the door open, and the true horror was immediate. The floor was strewn with white lilies, leading to a bed at the far end of the hut where Gertrude Jingle was sitting, propped up by her pillows. She was surrounded by more white lilies, but this time they were stained with blood, and her white nightdress was peppered with rips and tears where a knife had slashed and stabbed at her. The book she’d been reading had slipped from her bloodied paws and lay on the floor, stained beyond recognition; her spectacles were shattered and broken next to it, as if someone had ground them into the floor in a final act of spite.
In Hettie’s experience, a body was supposed to take on the mantle of serenity in death – but not this time. In life, Miss Jingle had been a gentle cat of reduced circumstances, making the best of things and surrounding herself with flowers that could never hurt or disappoint her. Now, as Hettie took in the scene before her, it was as if the killer had wanted to mock her peaceful existence, as if they had actually enjoyed turning her home into a slaughterhouse, with the murdered cat as the ultimate centrepiece. She looked around, taking everything in. The walls were full of framed pictures: some were sepia photographs from the theatre, but most of the space was taken up with watercolours of flowers. An easel stood in one corner, with an abandoned paint-spattered smock draped across it and a collection of paints and coloured chalks on a small table next to it. Gertrude had clearly enjoyed painting flowers as well as growing them. In the opposite corner, there was a small log-burning stove and a high-backed rocking chair, well used and with an air of nobility about its intricately carved arms. A tartan rug lay abandoned on the seat of the chair, together with the remains of a slice of cake and half a mug of cocoa.
On first sight, Hettie had assumed that the cat had been murdered in her bed, but the half-eaten supper suggested something even more terrible. Had she let her killer in, then been subjected to some sort of horrendous ordeal before her life was taken from her? Had she been made to climb into her bed before the killer set to work? Had the book and the broken spectacles been added for effect? Whoever had done this would have left the scene covered in blood; even if the murder had taken place at night, the killer would surely have left some sort of trail? She returned to the garden, locking the summer-house door behind her to secure the scene from prying eyes – Miss Jingle deserved the dignity now that her killer had denied her. Blinded by the sunshine as she stepped out into the air, Hettie shaded her eyes with her paw and looked around her. On either side of the summer house was a collection of green water butts; behind it sat a small greenhouse, hidden from view. The water butts were as tall as Hettie, and she had to stand on tiptoes to look inside. Most of them contained clear, fresh rainwater, but the nearest had clearly been used to wash the blood off the killer’s paws: the side of the butt was smeared with Gertrude’s blood, where the killer had attempted to clean the evidence away.
The greenhouse offered further evidence: an abandoned bulb sack, still wet and covered in blood. Hettie looked round for further clues, finding a pile of empty sacks pushed under a potting bench. She pulled them out and, as she did so, a bloodstained handkerchief fell out of the sacks with a clank. The murder weapon, which had been hurriedly concealed in the sacking, was a long, pointed kitchen knife with a brown handle; except for the blood, the handkerchief was unmarked.
Hettie folded the handkerchief back over the knife and placed it in one of the clean sacks, then returned to the summer house to see if Gertrude Jingle’s cutlery bore any resemblance to the knife she’d found. In a drawer by the stove was a small collection of white-handled knives, forks and spoons, including two sharp kitchen knives; there was nothing that resembled the style of the murder weapon. Perhaps this was a stroke of luck: if Hettie could establish whose kitchen the murder weapon had come from, she might be closer to finding the killer. There was a long way to go, and she was yet to establish whether this murder had anything to do with the death of the stranger on Bonny Grubb’s onion patch. She had a murder weapon, a pocketbook full of sketches and a whole community of cats who appeared to know nothing – but that was all. Without wasting any more time, she locked the door on the latest carnage, picked up her sack of evidence and went off to find Tilly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The sunshine could do nothing for the depression that had descended on the Wither-Fork allotments. Tilly had done her best to engage the community in general enquiries, but an air of silence and suspicion had taken over, and all the cats returned to the safety of their own patches of ground, declaring that they knew nothing about Miss Jingle’s death.
‘I think they’re wondering who’s next,’ Tilly said, as Hettie caught up with her by Bonny Grubb’s gate. ‘I’ve spoken to Bonny, the Chits and Jeremiah Corbit so far, and had no luck with any of them. It seems that Miss Jingle kept herself to herself. Corbit said that if it hadn’t been for Blackberry calling in to collect some lilies, Miss Jingle could have been undiscovered for days. I was just on my way to see Tarragon Trench.’
Hettie brought Tilly up to date with the rather macabre details of the murder, and the two cats let themselves in through the gate to Tarragon Trench’s allotment. In the centre stood a tall wigwam tent surrounded by row after row of catnip plants at various stages of growth, and Hettie was impressed by the sheer quantity of what was viewed by some as an illegal substance. Used in small quantities, she had found it relaxing and therapeutic, and had had some of her best ideas after a pipe or two. For Tarragon Trench, it had become a way of life. He sat on a mat at the entrance to his tent, wearing a bright-yellow kaftan and plugged into a hubble-bubble pipe, which he puffed on as he stared up at the sky.
‘Mr Trench,’ she said, making her approach, ‘I wonder if we might have a word with you?’
Tarragon continued to gaze up at the sky, but responded by treating Hettie and Tilly to an in-depth analysis of the current state of the universe. ‘We all wonder about having words,’ he said, ‘but do we truly understand them, when they can change their shape and form by altering just one letter? They only exist when written down. They are nothing without the sky, the sea and the land to give them perspective. Words are but travellers along the way – said and forgotten, or misinterpreted to create wars where peace is just an obstruction. Words unsaid have power. They can be anything you want them to be.’
Hettie could see that there was no real point in even starting a conversation that was clearly going to waste time. With Trench continuing his catnip-fuelled musings, she and Tilly beat a hasty retreat back onto the path and opened the gate to Apple Chutney’s allotment. After their rather strange encounter, the two cats were relieved to discover that Apple Chutney was almost normal. They found her lifting shallots and carefully placing them in wooden crates lined with newspaper, and she acknowledged their arrival with a cheerful smile that lit up her chocolate-brown face. She was dressed for gardening in a brightly patched pair of blue dungarees with a pair of heavy-duty gardeners’ boots, adorned by red laces, and gave the impression of a cat who clearly inhabited her allotment in every sense of the word.
‘I’ve decided to keep busy,’ she said as they approached. ‘I’ve always felt safe up here, and I even survived the great storm with only three jars of date and walnut lost and a bit of felting off me roof – but now I don’t know what to think. Would you like to try a glass of beetroot pressé?’
Hettie’s relationship with beetroot had never been a good one, and since Tilly had stained one of her best cardigans with a stray slice, she too had taken against it. They both declined Apple’s offer of refreshment, keen to get on with the investigation. ‘We were wondering whether you could help us with our enquiries into what has now become a double-murder investigation?’ Hettie began. ‘Perhaps you’ve noticed something or someone out of place up here in the last few days?’
Apple Chutney thought for
a moment before replying, then slowly shook her head. ‘Trouble is, I’ve been in me chutney shed mostly, so the world has passed me by in the last week or two. I’ve been getting me stock ready for the show. Miss Wither-Fork lets me have a stall in the marquee – she gets twenty per cent and I keep the rest.’ Hettie looked around the allotment and noticed that there were two sheds, one painted bright red with curtains at the windows, and another that resembled a rounded grass hut with a large funnel-like chimney on its roof; a trail of brown smoke puffed up into the cloudless sky. Apple followed her gaze. ‘That’s me chutney shed. Come and have a look – I’m doing me final batches of sweet onion today.’
Hettie and Tilly followed the dungareed cat, taking care to avoid treading on any plants in their path, as almost every inch of soil on the carefully laid out allotment had been planted with vegetables or fruit bushes. The chutney shed was quite spacious inside and had the air of a small and very productive factory. The stove that supported the chimney had two large vats bubbling away on its hotplates. Beside the range were a number of neatly stacked crates of peeled onions, and the potting bench offered an assembly line of empty jars, lids and labels. ‘Sorry about the smell,’ said Apple, as their eyes began to stream from the pungent odour of onions, which filled their nostrils. ‘You get used to it when you do it all day long.’
Hettie had seen enough and escaped into the sunshine, swiftly followed by Tilly. Apple stayed behind to heave a couple more crates of onions into the vats, eventually emerging with two jars of freshly made onion chutney. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Should be lovely by Christmas. Just stick ’em in your cupboard. Go nicely with cold meats.’