‘Have you got a search warrant?’ my aunt demanded.
‘Certainly, madam,’ Fliques said, taking out a piece of paper which might have been a warrant – but could just as easily have been his laundry list – waving it briefly through the air, and returning it to his pocket.
‘You could have knocked, at least,’ Aunt Peggy complained. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to knock, would it?’
‘Didn’t want to disturb you unnecessarily,’ Fliques told her, and the seven or eight coppers he’d brought with him all nodded their heads, as if to agree that they really didn’t want to be any trouble.
The sergeant’s eyes swept the room then homed in on the whisky bottle and two glasses which were sitting on the table.
‘Has Bobby started drinking hard liquor?’ he asked. ‘Or are you expecting company?’
‘What’s all this about?’ my aunt snapped, ignoring the question.
Fliques took out his notebook, and opened it with some ceremony. ‘We have reason to believe—’
His affirmation of faith was cut off mid-way by a loud howl from one of the other policeman, who had gone quite white.
‘Pull yourself together, man,’ Fliques said harshly.
But it’s not always that easy to pull yourself together when something else is doing its best to pull you apart.
The constable lifted his right leg in an effort to dislodge the cat which had attached itself to his trousers, but with no success. If anything, the moggie only dug its claws in further.
‘Use your hands, you fool!’ Fliques bellowed.
The constable did as instructed. No doubt it was the pain which made him forget to put his foot back on the ground first.
Hands around the cat, he rocked for a second then toppled backwards. The room was not large, and there were a lot of policemen there. It would have been a miracle indeed if the cat-savaged constable had managed to avoid cannoning into at least one of his colleagues.
He didn’t avoid it. The top of his head caught the chin of the man behind him. The new victim’s eyes crossed, then he, his unintending assailant and the moggie, were all in a downward plunge. A third officer, stepping smartly to the side, barked his shin on the coffee table, hopped on one foot briefly, then gave way to the forces of gravity and joined the waving pile of arms and legs on the floor.
The cat, well-satisfied with his handiwork, detached himself from the first constable’s leg and padded smirkingly across the room.
‘Good Mickey,’ Aunt Peggy said, with what – for once – sounded like genuine affection.
‘Get up, and start searching,’ Fliques said angrily. ‘And you two,’ pointing to a couple of constables who had somehow managed to avoid injury, ‘can bring in our mystery guest.’
The “mystery guest” was a tall man in his mid-thirties. He was dressed in an expensive, though flashy, blue suit. Heavy gold bracelets hung from his wrists. His arrival seemed to instantly put Fliques in a better mood.
‘This is Harry Bowers,’ the sergeant announced, playing the master of ceremonies to perfection.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Bowers,’ Aunt Peggy said, although she’d seen him often enough before.
‘And Harry’s line is …?’ Fliques asked.
‘His line?’ my aunt repeated.
‘His occupation. What he does for a living.’
‘How would I know?’
‘Do you want to do the mime for us, Harry?’ Fliques asked jovially.
‘Get stuffed!’ Bowers growled.
But nothing would have dampened Fliques’ spirits at that moment.
‘Harry is a villain,’ he told us. ‘To be more precise, he’s a fence. We caught him at the end of the drive. What were you doing there, Harry?’
The big man shrugged. ‘I got lost.’
‘You got lost!’ Fliques echoed contemptuously. ‘I’ll lose you, Harry – in Strangeways Prison.’
One of the constables who’d been searching another part of the house returned to consult his leader.
‘There’s a room at the back that’s locked, Skipper,’ he said.
‘Is there?’ Fliques asked. ‘Is there indeed?’ He turned to my aunt. ‘Have you got the key, madam?’
‘Of course. Well, I would have, wouldn’t I?’
‘Then we’d both better go and take a look at it,’ Fliques said. ‘You, too, Bobby – I want you to see for yourself how little things like riding your bike without lights and inciting people to murder can be just the first step on the path to serious crime.’
****
If Fliques had expected to find the storeroom full of jewels, he was disappointed. In the old days, when the smallholding was a going concern, the shelves of the store must have been crammed with produce. Now, like Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, most of them were bare.
Fliques’ eyes fell on the cat in a cage on the floor. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s a cat,’ Aunt Peggy replied.
‘I can see it’s a cat, madam. Why is it locked up?’
‘It’s new. It’s just settling in,’
Not true. The cat – called Elvis, because he liked to play dead – had been with us for over a year, and was one of my favourites. The reason he was in isolation was not because he’d just arrived but because he was about to leave – with Harry Bowers.
‘I don’t approve of keeping animals in cages,’ Fliques said. ‘People, yes, but not animals.’ He glanced despondently at the row of empty shelves. ‘Search this place thoroughly,’ he told one of his constables, though without much hope in his voice.
As successes go, the search was about on a par with the maiden voyage of the Titanic.
‘I know there’s something here,’ Fliques ranted, as his men emptied the sugar jar and examined the contents of the rubbish bin. ‘I just know there is.’
In the end, he was forced to concede defeat with his usual grace.
‘You can go,’ he told Harry Bowers, ‘but don’t let me catch you on my patch again. And as for you, madam, I may not have found anything this time, but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up. I’ll get you in the end, you know.’
‘Get me?’ Aunt Peggy asked complacently. ‘You haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance.’
****
‘What did he mean about you inciting people to murder?’ my aunt asked, when Fliques had finally stormed off.
‘It’s just his sense of humour,’ I told her, praying that she didn’t notice the catch in my voice.
But Aunt Peggy’s mind had already moved on to other matters.
‘He’s making a nuisance of himself, that policeman, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘I want him off my back, so I think I’m going to have to phone your Aunt Catherine.’
‘Aunt Catherine. But she lives somewhere in darkest Wales – what can she do?’
‘Our Chief Constable writes to her post box,’ Aunt Peggy said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s one of her “special” correspondents. A lot of people write to her, but only a few are special.’
‘Special? In what way?’
‘And the ones who are special,’ my aunt continued, ignoring my question, ‘will do almost anything she asks them to.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I’ve said enough,’ my aunt replied. ‘If truth be told, I’ve probably said too much. So just take it from me – we’ll have no more trouble from that sergeant.’
****
There is a big difference between knowing something for certain and being able to prove it, so even without the intervention of the Chief Constable, Les Fliques’ investigation was going nowhere. He knew the who, you see – Aunt Peggy. He knew the why – greed. What he didn’t know was the how. And it was the how that I thought I’d finally worked out.
If I was right, then the evidence Fliques needed had been under his nose all the time he was searching the house. If I was right,
Aunt Peggy was not only a criminal, but also a cruel, evil woman. If I was right, she had to be punished.
‘Always make sure you’ve got your facts straight before you go making accusations,’ Mother used to say.
Very well, then – before I could condemn Aunt Peggy, it was first necessary to carry out a little investigation of my own.
12
I proceeded with caution, as Les Fliques might have said in his road safety lecturing days.
My first requirement was access to the storeroom. That was impossible when a cat was locked in there, because at such times Aunt Peggy kept the key on a ribbon around her fat little neck. But she didn’t carry the key when the isolation cell was empty – therefore she must be hiding it somewhere else. It took me less than half an hour to find that the place she’d chosen was the bottom of her knickers’ drawer.
Stage Two of my investigation was more complex.
‘I want a voice-activated tape recorder, please,’ I told the assistant in Norton Hi-Fi.
‘I don’t think we’ve got any in stock,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Not much call for them round here. I expect I could get you one – but it won’t be cheap.’
‘The price doesn’t matter,’ I told him, fingering the thick wad of pound notes which Mrs Cynthia Harrap had been only too glad to lend me.
The equipment arrived a week later. I smuggled the tape recorder into my room, and installed the microphone in the store while my aunt was snoring noisily on the sofa.
Now all I had to do was wait for the next cat delivery.
****
I did not have to wait long. The cat turned up the next Thursday evening. It was a scrawny, pale tom, with part of one ear missing, and was accompanied by a scrawny, pale man, who looked like he’d lost part of his brain in the same fight. As usual, once business had been satisfactorily completed Aunt Peggy took the cat to the storeroom, and locked it in.
School, the next day, was sheer hell. I couldn’t concentrate on my lessons. I couldn’t even think about bridge or Mrs Cynthia Harrap. There was room for only one thing in my mind, and that was the store room back at Cuddles Farm.
‘You should have stayed at home,’ I told myself a hundred times. ‘If you’d stayed at home, you’d have known for certain by now.’
My mind raced, but time crawled. The clock at the front of the classroom seemed to be ticking off the minutes at half its normal speed. The teacher wrote on the whiteboard in slow motion. When my fellow pupils spoke, they stretched out their words with the sole purpose of prolonging my agony.
And I itched.
God, how I itched.
The final bell rang at last. I ran to the bike shed and leaped on my machine like the Lone Ranger used to leap on Silver. My feet hit the pedals, and I began to pump furiously. In the driveway, small children scattered, and teachers behind the wheels of middle-sized, sensible family cars slammed on their brakes and made a note to speak to me first thing on Monday morning.
Out on the open road, I knew no fear. Buses missed me by inches, lorry drivers paled and hit their horns in frantic, desperate warning.
I was a Titan. I was a Fury. I demolished any speed record there was – or ever could be – for covering the route between school and Cuddles Farm.
The bumpy dirt track to the farm did nothing to slow me down, and I was almost flying when I hit Aunt Peggy’s back yard. I squeezed the brakes hard and the back wheel skidded, but I was already free and running towards the house by the time my bike clattered noisily to the ground. And then I saw the pale tom with the missing ear!
He was huddled tight against the wall under the kitchen window. What a change had come over him in the few hours he’d been at the farm. He’d seemed a plucky little thing the night before. Not unfriendly – just spirited. Now his eyes were wide with fear.
My own needs could wait. The frightened moggie came first.
I approached him slowly.
‘It’s all right, Van Gogh,’ I crooned. ‘Don’t you worry, little pussy, it’s all right.’
His fur stood on end, and he extended a threatening claw.
‘I know you must feel a bit rough now,’ I told him, ‘but it will pass. I promise it will pass.’
The cat looked wildly to the left and to the right, then made a hysterical dash for the barn.
I didn’t try to follow him. What would have been the point? Who could blame him if – after what I suspected he’d been through in the last few hours – he was in no mood to accept the assurances of a complete stranger.
I entered the house weighed down by the knowledge that it looked as if my theory about Aunt Peggy’s racket was absolutely correct.
‘How could I have been so stupid?’ I asked myself angrily. ‘If only I’d worked out what was going on earlier, I could have saved so much suffering.’
‘There’s the washing up from my lunch to be done,’ Aunt Peggy called from the living room. ‘And I want you to fix that dripping tap in the bathroom before you start making tea.’
‘Yes, Auntie,’ I said wearily.
But instead of starting my tasks immediately – as I usually did – I went straight up to my bedroom to listen to the tape recorder.
13
The tape had been running. With trembling hands, I rewound it.
‘I don’t want to be right,’ I told the tape recorder. ‘Please, please, don’t make me right!’
I pressed the play button. There was just a hiss at first, then Aunt Peggy spoke.
‘Have you done what I wanted yet, Mickey?’ she asked. ‘No, I can see you haven’t.’
‘Meow,’ the cat said plaintively.
‘Be a good little pussy and give your Auntie Peggy what she wants,’ my aunt wheedled.
‘Cough!’ went Van Gogh.
‘I don’t care which end they come out of, as long as they come,’ Aunt Peggy told him.
‘Retch!’ Van Gogh replied.
‘Normally, I wouldn’t rush you,’ my aunt said, all sweet reasonableness, ‘but this time I’m in a hurry. The creep’s coming back for his money this afternoon, and I have to see the diamonds before I pay him.’
‘Gag!’ the cat commented.
‘Listen, you little bastard,’ my aunt said, losing her patience, ‘we can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is to shit them out. The hard way – for you – is that I slit your throat, slice open your belly, and root around inside until I find the jewels. It’s a bit messy, but when you’ve done it as often as I have, you get used to it. So it’s your choice, Cat.’
If Aunt Peggy was so ready to use the knife, how much more willing would the people she did business with be to use it?
Would Harry Bowers wait for hours for the cats to perform their natural functions – or would he, once the animal had served its purpose as a carrier, do what my aunt was threatening to do to Van Gogh?
I thought of all the cats who had been spirited away from Cuddles Farm under the cover of darkness …
... Oscar … Rudolph … Kennedy … Snow White … Romeo …
There was so many of them, and long before I had finished going through the list, I felt tears streaming down my face.
14
I should have thought about the rice jar first, but it never occurred to me that Aunt Peggy would hide anything in a room which, since my arrival, she’d rarely visited. So it was not until three o’clock in the morning – having searched her bedroom while she was watching television, and the rest of the house after she’d gone to sleep – that I finally reached the kitchen. And then, of course, it was obvious.
‘We never use this rice, Auntie Peggy,’ I’d said to her on more than one occasion. ‘Shall I throw it out?’
‘No, keep it,’ my aunt had always replied. ‘It might come in useful one of these days.’
And it had had come in useful – as a hiding place for jewellery when it was between cats!
I spread a newspaper carefully over the w
ork surface and began pouring the rice onto it. The first ring, buried about a third of the way down the jar, took me by surprise, and before I could stop it, it fell free, bounced twice and landed on the floor with a terrifyingly loud clink.
My heart started pounding, and my breaths came fast and irregular. Frozen to the spot, I strained my ears for the sound of any movement from my aunt’s bedroom.
Down the stairs came the reassuring sound of Peggy’s fat-lady snores. I relaxed again – a little.
I spooned the rest of the rice slowly onto the newspaper, and not until the jar was completely empty did I stop to look at my haul. There were three rings and a small brooch which was edged with precious stones. I was holding a small fortune in my hands.
I spent some time examining the jewellery, and only when I was satisfied that I would remember every detail of it did I replace it – and the rice – back in the jar. That job successfully completed, I checked the floor and work surface for tell-tale grains of rice and, finding none, I screwed up the newspaper and placed it in the bin.
There was nothing more for me to do that night. I crept back up to my bedroom and grabbed a few hours’ sleep.
****
My appearance in the yard early the following morning, weighed down with tins of food and plastic feed bowls, created something of a sensation. The cats knew as well as I did that this was not their normal feeding time, but saw no point in looking gift horse-meat in the mouth, and, as I crossed the threshold of the barn, I was being followed by a long line of slavering felines.
The cats arranged themselves in a semi-circle around me, and looked on hungrily as I dumped tin after tin of meat into the plastic bowls.
‘Have you noticed anything different about what I’m doing today, Mr Spock?’ I asked as I worked.
The cat I’d questioned blinked an affirmative response.
‘What about you, Mae?’ I said to a slinky tortoiseshell.
Miss West’s responding purr indicated that she had.
‘I’m giving you all extra rations,’ I said, for the benefit of the slower cats. ‘It’s a sort of celebration.’
A Conspiracy of Aunts Page 8
