The Diamond Cat

by Marian Babson

  “I can’t bury it now.” The rain was lashing down, a howling gale shook the windows, it was pitch dark again. Perhaps they had just been in the eye of the storm for the past few hours; it seemed to have returned with renewed vengeance. The kitchen had turned dark and claustrophobic.

  “Put the light on.” Her mother shivered suddenly. “This is going to be a dreary day.”

  As she snapped on the wall switch, the light flickered ominously before settling down to a steady glow, much dimmer than it should have been.

  Bluebell looked at the light bulb, then at the rain-streaked windows, and retreated into her carrier to curl up on her favourite blue velvet cushion. This was going to be a good day to sleep. The others seemed of a mind to agree with her and drifted towards their own soft-cushioned carriers.

  “We can’t need a new light bulb already,” Mrs. Bilby said. “They must have cut the power.”

  “They have a lot of lines down in this storm already,” Bettina said. “They’ll be trying to conserve what power they have. It’s better to have weaker power than none at all.”

  “You’d best start cooking that chicken now then. It’s going to take longer than usual and, if we lose the electricity entirely, we can eat it cold once it’s cooked. Boil plenty of potatoes, too, so that we can have potato salad with it.”

  Bettina agreed, regretting, not for the first time, that they didn’t have a gas stove. This problem didn’t seem to occur with gas pipes well underground.

  “For heaven’s sake, get rid of that thing and wash your hands first!”

  “I’m just going to.” Evading Adolf’s last-ditch attempt to retrieve his prey, Bettina slipped out of the kitchen and closed the door firmly behind her.

  It was dark and gloomy in the hall, the rain drummed relentlessly against the art deco stained-glass window on the landing, threatening to break it with the next gust of wind. It was also chill and dank.

  Automatically, Bettina glanced ceilingwards, checking for new leaks. A steady drip-drip-drip into the buckets reminded her that they needed emptying. So did the two bowls in the corners where a slow trickle of water seeped down from unidentified weaknesses somewhere above.

  The roof needed mending. Needed replacement, in fact. But where was the money to come from? Her salary, combined with her mother’s pension, just managed to cover the bills they had now. She didn’t want to think about the rumours that Jelwyn Accessories was in financial difficulties and perhaps heading for bankruptcy. She had worked there since leaving school, rising from office junior to personal assistant to David Norris, one of the partners. It was the only work she had ever known; it would not be easy to find a new job for someone over forty—even if the country wasn’t still struggling out of a recession.

  She closed the door of her room behind her firmly; she always did. It gained her those few extra seconds from the moment she heard the creak of the fourth stair from the top and the moment her mother threw open the door without knocking. Just time enough to toss one of the magazines her mother thought too expensive or one of the novels her mother considered too risqué (it didn’t take much—there weren’t many novels Mrs. Bilby approved of these days) into one of the drawers or under the bed.

  Inside, she leaned against the door and looked around indecisively. The tiny burden in her hand seemed to have gained weight and become cumbersome. It was sheer imagination to think that a whiff of faint corruption was already rising from it.

  But she did not want to set it down on top of the dressing table or—heaven forbid!—the bed.

  After a moment, she pulled a copy of Vogue from the top drawer of the dresser and put it on the windowsill, carefully settling the paper-towel swathed pigeon on top of it.

  She stood there for a minute, looking out on the storm. The wind swept wildly across the adjoining gardens of the terraced houses, bending trees and bushes, shaking fences and hedges; torrential rain was turning puddles into ponds. The sky lit briefly, then a rolling crash of thunder shook the window.

  Instinctively, Bettina stepped back and pulled the curtains shut. Not before she had seen another bough break away from Mrs. Cassidy’s apple tree, however, and go tumbling across Jack Rawson’s garden, ploughing a furrow through his neat rows of cabbages.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and turned on the lamp on the bedside table—quickly, while they still had electricity. At this rate, the power was going to fail again any moment now.

  “Bettina! Bettina!” her mother shouted from the foot of the stairs. “Are you all right? That lightning was close.”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she called back. “I’ll be right down.”

  “Don’t bring that thing with you!”

  “I wasn’t going to.” She didn’t really want to keep it in her room, either. She wanted to get rid of it, the sooner the better. If it weren’t for the storm, she would put it outside somewhere—but then she’d have to worry about the cats finding it again.

  Surely the bird must have been carrying some identification. She took the small cylinder from her pocket and uncapped it. Vaguely, she had expected to find a small scroll of paper inside, perhaps with a message; certainly with the name and address of the owner.

  The top of the tube seemed to be blocked with a minute piece of cotton wool. With the tips of her fingernails, she managed to get hold of a fleck of the wool and tugged gently. It had been firmly wedged in but, after a moment, it yielded suddenly. She dropped the wool on the bedside table and raised the tube to eye level, squinting into it in the dim light.

  The expected slip of paper was not there. At least, not immediately apparent. There seemed to be another obstacle clogging the cylinder. She prodded the blockage with the tip of her little finger, but nothing happened.

  “Bettina! Bettina!” her mother called again.

  With an impatient exclamation, she upended the cylinder inter over the palm of one hand and tapped the end of it with the other. At first there was resistance then, with the abruptness of closely packed olives tumbling out of their bottle, the contents of the cylinder spurted out.

  Only they weren’t olives.

  A shimmering cascade of small objects spilled into her hand, shooting off bring multicoloured sparks even in the dim light. She gasped, staring down at them incredulously.

  A tiny heap of gems rested in the palm of her suddenly trembling hand, vibrating and burning with an inner life of their own.

  Diamonds!

  She was holding a fortune in flawless blue-white diamonds in the palm of her hand.

  Chapter 3

  “BETTINA! BETTINA! Are you coming down? I’m trying to stuff the chicken and these animals are plaguing the life out of me! Get down here and control them!”

  “All right! All right! I’m coming!” Frantically, she tried to scoop the diamonds back into the little cylinder, but they wouldn’t all fit. They must have been packed in with geometric precision by—

  By whom?

  She tilted them out again and peered inside, still looking for some scrap of paper to establish the identity of the owner of the bird, of the diamonds. Something, anything … but there was nothing. The inside of the tube was whistle-clean and empty. It had contained nothing but the gems.

  “BETTINA!”

  Immediately upon her mother’s shout, Adolf’s voice rose in the indignant plaint of a cat who had been most unfairly trodden upon. Or possibly kicked.

  “Yes, yes! I’m coming!” She began dropping the diamonds back into the cylinder one at a time. They still weren’t all going to fit, tossed in in this haphazard way; there wasn’t even going to be room to replace the cottonwool stopper—and there would still be gems left over.

  There was a shriek from downstairs, followed by a crash of crockery and several hysterical yowls.

  “BETTINA! If you don’t get down here at once, I won’t be responsible for what I do to these bloody cats!”

  “All right!” Three diamonds wouldn’t fit in: an emerald cut, a round and a pear shape. Th
ey lay on the table beside the cylinder, quietly glittering. She rammed the top of the cylinder in place and looked around wildly for somewhere to hide it. Somewhere her mother would not look. Was there such a place?

  Despite her protests, Mrs. Bilby regularly entered her room in her absence; suddenly tidied drawers or a pristine carpet and scent of furniture polish silently proclaiming: “I was only trying to help, dear.” That the help involved poking and prying into every corner was simply unfortunate, but the place had to be kept clean. Long ago, Bettina had learned that it was safer to keep anything personal in her desk at the office, risking the occasional forays of curious cleaners, than to expose it to her mother’s ruthless inspection. But it had been a long time since she had had anything she wanted to keep that secret.

  “BETTINA!”

  “Yes!” She thrust cylinder and loose diamonds into her cardigan pocket, snatching a couple of paper handkerchiefs from the box on the bedside table to ram down on top of them for protection. Getting up, she stamped her feet noisily all the way across the room to signal that she was actually on her way this time. Damn! She needed time to think, but that was a luxury she seldom achieved when her mother was around.

  “You always did have a temper,” her mother greeted her as she stamped into the kitchen. “I thought it was getting better, but it isn’t. It’s all because of those cats, if you ask me. If you didn’t have them to worry about, you’d be more reasonable.”

  “The cats have nothing to do with it.” Bettina spoke between clenched teeth.

  “The cats have everything to do with it. If they hadn’t killed that pigeon, you wouldn’t be left with a dirty dead bird in your nice clean room and you wouldn’t be in such a state. You’re not going to leave it there all night, are you?”

  “I’ll take care of it, you don’t have to worry.” She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “And the cats didn’t kill it. It broke its neck hitting the back of the house.”

  “So you say,” her mother sniffed.

  She was never going to hear the last of this, she knew. And her mother didn’t know the half of it. If she ever found out about the diamonds …

  The one with the real temper was her mother. If she hadn’t lost it and swept the cats out in a fury, they would never have discovered the dead pigeon and the gales would eventually have blown it away to rest in someone else’s yard, where it would be someone else’s problem. Or, better still, into the woods nearby, where one more decomposing pigeon wouldn’t have been worth a second glance. And no one would ever have found the diamonds.

  “I put the chicken into the oven,” her mother said with a martyred air. “I didn’t wait to stuff it, the cats were getting too excited.”

  “We can manage without stuffing,” Bettina said absently. Culinary arrangements were the least of her preoccupations at the moment. Except for one other. It was suspiciously quiet in here.

  “Where are the cats?” She looked around.

  “They’re all right.” Her mother’s eyes shifted uneasily.

  “I didn’t ask how they—” She broke off and raised her voice, calling: “Bluebell … Enza … Pa—”

  Adolf’s overriding yowl broke into the roll call. He was furious, he was affronted—and he was outside.

  “Oh, no!” Bettina dashed for the back door and threw it open. Three cats in various stages of bedragglement scurried into the kitchen. “Oh, Mother! How could you?”

  “I told you to come down. They were driving me crazy. I warned you I wouldn’t be responsible—”

  “They’ll catch their deaths of cold!” Bettina captured Pasha, who looked the worst, perhaps because of his long coat now plastered to his skin. She snatched paper towels and began blotting him. Enza and Adolf began weaving around her ankles, leaving wet patches where they rubbed against her. Pasha, Enza and Adolf …

  “Bluebell!” she cried frantically. “Where’s Bluebell?” She leaped to her feet, tumbling Pasha to the floor. “She’s still outside.”

  “Bluebell’s all right,” her mother said as her hand closed around the doorknob.

  “Prrr-yaaah!” At the same moment, the triangular little face poked out from the carrying case, eyes blinking.

  “Bluebell’s a little lady,” Mrs. Bilby said. “She’s not a ruffian like those others. She’s been asleep in her own little hidey-hole until we decide to feed her. I don’t mind Bluebell; she knows her place.”

  Adolf sent Mrs. Bilby a filthy glare and hissed sharply.

  “Not like that nasty defiant mongrel.” Mrs. Bilby returned the sentiment.

  A faint urgent pain began throbbing its message at the base of Bettina’s skull. It was time to take another tranquillizer and hope that the hovering headache did not settle in for the rest of the day.

  “You shouldn’t have turned them out into the wet.” It was pointless arguing with her mother; Bettina picked up the despondent Pasha and finished drying him as much as possible.

  “You know very well you shouldn’t have all those cats around. If the proper authorities knew what you were doing, you’d be stopped. There are regulations about how many animals you should be boarding at any one time—and you’re way over the limit for the accommodation you can provide. You’re acting like a cattery—without any of the licenses or permissions you need for that.”

  A cattery. For a moment, Bettina was caught up in the impossible dream: a little house with plenty of land, room enough for a row of small heated chalets with their own exercise runs. A procession of legal boarders, paying their way. Perhaps even a cat or two of her very own …

  “If anyone decided to report you for what you’re doing,” Mrs. Bilby said darkly, “you’d be in dead trouble!”

  Bettina put Pasha down slowly and gave her mother a long level look, of the sort she rarely permitted herself. It was bad enough that she could never realize her dream, but if she were to be denied the occasional comfort of The Boarders …

  “If anyone reported me,” she said evenly, “I’d have a pretty good idea who it was—and I’d walk out of this house and you’d never see me again.”

  It was more than she had ever said to her mother before and the words shocked them both. But she meant them. The sudden knowledge lay between them like an impassable crevasse.

  “Bloody cats!” her mother said. “Come here, Enza, let me dry you off.” She reached for the more amenable Enza and pulled her into her lap, beginning to stroke the fur with her bare hands before belatedly reaching for a towel. She avoided Bettina’s eyes.

  “Here, Adolf!” Adolf carried no grudge against Bettina and settled contentedly on her lap.

  Bluebell yawned delicately, stretched and sat down in front of her carrier, tucking her long plumed tail neatly around her legs, ready to supervise the domestic activity going on. Pasha went over to her, murmuring complaints deep in his throat, looking for sympathy. Bluebell regarded him solemnly for a moment, then began to wash his face. He stretched out beside her and, after an aggrieved look at the rain lashing against the windowpane, allowed himself to be comforted. They both began to purr.

  The lights flickered and resumed their glow at a distinctly lower brightness.

  “There,” Mrs. Bilby said. “I hope that oven is hot enough. We’ll have to add at least an hour to the cooking time, from the look of this.”

  Enza and Adolf were as dry as they were going to get for a while, but showed no inclination to leave their respective sheltering laps. Bluebell and Pasha had gone to sleep, entwined in contentment.

  Mrs. Bilby sighed deeply and reached for her newspaper again, returning to the iniquities of the local police.

  “They’re all on suspension—with full pay, I’ll wager. That’s usually the way it goes. And I suppose they’ll be allowed to take early retirement with no loss of pension. You can’t trust anyone these days. Even stealing the things turned in to Lost and Found. Just think of it!”

  “Just think,” Bettina echoed. She had been thinking of little else since she found the diamonds.
There was no guarantee that the new police brought in to replace the suspended officers would be any more honest—if the temptation were strong enough. Working for Jelwyn Accessories, she knew just enough about gems—from their disastrous foray into genuine jewellery, as opposed to costume jewellery (one of the reasons they were in the current financial plight) and rather exotic motor accessories—to know that she was in possession of a substantial fortune.

  If she handed it in to the local police, it might be lost for ever. If she went to a police authority farther afield, the problem remained the same, with the added complication that she might not be believed when she tried to explain how she had come into possession of the gems.

  If only the pigeon wasn’t dead. If it had just been hurt, disorientated—maimed, even—there would have been the possibility of nursing it back to health and sending it on its way again, carrying its awkward cargo to its rightful owner.

  Who was the rightful owner? The person who had dispatched the diamonds or the person who waited to receive them? And what was any bird doing carrying such a valuable cargo? And not carrying any identification? Why would anyone send a bird out into a storm like this to begin with? What was going on?

  No honest—or legal—explanation sprang to mind.

  Smuggling seemed the obvious explanation. These days, one usually thought of drug smuggling, but the value of the diamonds was well above that of the same cylinder tightly packed with any drug. Had some dishonest entrepreneur in Amsterdam or Brussels launched his bird out over the Channel in an attempt to evade Customs and Excise? That possibility might also explain the bird being aloft in such a storm—the weather might have been quite all right on the Continent. Of course, the intensity of the storm had been unexpected in this country, too. It had ruined someone’s carefully laid plans.

  “Bettina!” Her mother’s voice penetrated her thoughts. “This is the third time I’ve spoken to you. I don’t know where your mind is!”