I was fast, but she was faster. A ginger blur arrowed its way to the top beam of the pergola. There, out of reach, she dug in her claws, literally and figuratively.
Impasse.
I flounced back indoors and unearthed her working collar from the suitcase.
‘Collar, G.’ I dangled it hopefully in front of the carrier, then cooed with false heartiness, ‘Du-ty.’
Her tail twitched as if in painful remembrance of The Snatching of the Hairs. She’d been caught that way before. Her back arched, her claws dug in more firmly.
This could take hours.
Behind me Jesús said, ‘I sing the madrelena and I hold the box. Then she come, señora. No problema.’
And there wasn’t.
I secured the carrier door. ‘Muchas, muchas grac—’
I stared at Jesús. His lips weren’t moving, but the Eeeee…aa…eee… Aaaah…aa…eeee… Notes of the madrelena were still spiralling up from his pots of geraniums like audible wisps of smoke.
‘I make a cinta, a cassetta,’ he confessed with a gummy grin. ‘When you go home, the cat every night she will hear the madrelena and she be happy.’
I planted a kiss on each leathery cheek. ‘Jesús, you are a genius.’
Number one priority, the purchase prontissimo of a set of heavy-duty earplugs.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy the first book in the DJ Smith and Gorgonzola series.
Read on to find out more…
THE MULGRAY TWINS
No Suspicious Circumstances
It can be tough working undercover for HM Revenue & Customs, but DJ Smith has more than a little help from her trained sniffer cat, Gorgonzola, a moth-eaten Persian with gourmet tastes and a mind of her own.
In this first case DJ Smith and Gorgonzola are on the trail of a drug smuggling ring operating in and around Edinburgh. Beneath the innocent surface of the White Heather hotel eddies a sinister undercurrent. One death follows another. Who among the cast of formidable and flamboyant guests specialises in making murder look like accident? As sea mists gather, a deadly game of cat and mouse is played as the killer awaits a chance to strike…
About the Author
From the moment that, as premature twins, they were born in an Edinburgh nursing home, HELEN AND MORNA MULGRAY have lived together in Edinburgh. Identical twins, they have pursued an identical career path teaching English in Midlothian for thirty years. After retiring from teaching, they now live and write together. When they are not writing DJ Smith mysteries at home in Edinburgh, their favoured pastimes are gardening, walking and travel.
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
12 Fitzroy Mews
London W1T 6DW
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2008.
This ebook edition first published in 2013.
Copyright © 2008 by HELEN AND MORNA MULGRAY
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
Extracts in Chapter Nineteen from ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ by Robert W Service, used by kind permission of Mr William Krasilovsky, attoney, agent for the estate of Robert W Service.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1385–1
Under Suspicion Page 28