by James Barrie
Theodore blinked no; he was staying where he was.
Jonathan began to make his way towards him, using his crutches trying not to put any weight on his broken foot. He reached the corner of the garden when his neighbour’s head appeared above the hedge.
‘That cat of yours has taken up residence on my shed roof,’ Wally said.
Jonathan looked up and saw Theodore looking down.
‘That’s Theo,’ Jonathan said. ‘He came with the girlfriend. He shouldn’t be out of the house.’
‘That’s what I told her,’ Wally said. ‘But I don’t mind if he wants to sit up there. You see, we are allies of sorts.’
‘Allies? Oh, you mean the Scot?’
‘Aye, Stuart.’
Wally told Jonathan that Stuart was married to Leslie, who worked in a bank in the centre of York. They had two children, Dougie and Daisy, and Stuart was a stay-at-home dad. When the children were at school Stuart spent the time in his shed. When they weren’t at school he spent most of the time in his shed.
‘No idea what he gets up to in there,’ Wally said. ‘But he spends a lot of time in that shed of his. All you can hear is tap-tap-tapping and then a lot of cursing.’
‘I wonder what he’s up to in there.’
‘Beats me… Have you met your other neighbours?’
Jonathan shook his head.
‘Well, on your other side you have Steve and Sam. They have a little Chihuahua. Fattest little dog I ever saw.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out,’ Jonathan said.
‘Then there’s Geoffrey in the bungalow over there. He was a pilot but lost his sight. Spent too long staring into the sun…’
Wally laughed and Jonathan wondered if he was joking.
‘What about my neighbours behind?’ Jonathan said.
‘The Blacks?’ Wally said. ‘It’s just Ellen and her mum Tessa now… Colin died some years ago. Very sudden it was. He was here one day… Then one day he was gone. Whoosh! Just like that.’
Jonathan wondered a moment at the ‘Whoosh’.
‘Tessa hasn’t been well of late,’ Wally went on. ‘She has good days and bad days. Mainly bad days… She used to take her dog Sandy to West Bank Park every day. I saw her one day. It was after her husband had gone. She had a bottle in one hand and she was pulling hair from her head with the other. One hair at a time. Carried on doing that till she had no hair left. That’s why she wears a wig. Pulled all her hair out.
‘She never got over him. Fell apart she did… Never leaves the house these days. I don’t think she even gets out of bed some days.’
‘What about her daughter?’
‘I suppose Ellen does the best she can. She’ll be on that carer’s allowance. She’s never had a job. Stays at home and looks after her mum. That’s not much of a life for a young girl. In your twenties you should be out and about. Gallivanting…’
Wally took a drink of tea.
‘There’s another daughter,’ Wally said, remembering. ‘Penny. Aye, Penny… Colin was a keen stamp collector…’
Jonathan looked puzzled.
‘Penny Black! Like the stamp,’ Wally said grinning.
‘I see,’ Jonathan said.
‘Penny visits now and then but she moved away. Lives somewhere down south I believe. Went off to university and didn’t come back. Hardly ever visits.’
‘That’s a pity,’ Jonathan said.
‘Bad it is,’ Wally said, ‘Ellen being left to look after her mum like that.’
‘You didn’t hear Tessa shouting the other day, did you? You know when Stuart was trying to jet wash our cat…’
‘Can’t say I did,’ Wally said. ‘There was all the commotion out here, and my hearing’s not what it was.’
‘I was just a little worried about her. I heard her shouting. Then when I looked up again the curtains were closed and the window shut.’
Walter looked across. ‘She’ll just be having a lie in… Watching TV in bed. Like I said, some days she doesn’t even get up.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Jonathan said uncertainly, glancing up at the window with the sunflower curtains.
When Emily got home from work, Jonathan told her about the curtains not having been opened in Tessa’s bedroom all day and the dog yapping from inside the house.
He had a can of beer in one hand and took a swig. ‘I think something might have happened to her. I really do.’
‘Are you serious?’ Emily said, hands on hips. ‘She’s probably got a migraine and closed the curtains. And the dog was barking so her daughter shut it in another room so it wouldn’t disturb her.
‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Oh please,’ Emily said. ‘I’ve had a long day at work. This isn’t what I need when I get home.’
She crossed to the table and picked up a packet of painkillers. ‘I’m sure you shouldn’t be drinking when you’re on these. You’re imagining things.’
‘I was just telling you what happened today,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m just a bit concerned about her.’
‘Where is Theo?’ Emily asked.
‘He got out again,’ Jonathan said. ‘A window cleaner came and I opened the doors… He was on Wally’s shed roof earlier.’
Emily crossed to the glass doors. She opened them wide and called his name. A moment later Theodore appeared from the back hedge and trotted across the lawn. Emily scooped him up and hugged him to her.
‘The window cleaner mentioned something happening with the house behind, and then Wally said that the father had died suddenly. Maybe the daughter, Ellen she’s called, killed him too. She might be working her way through the whole family…’
‘Give it a rest,’ Emily said. She put Theodore down and closed the French windows. ‘I’m going to have a shower, and when I come back I don’t want to hear any more about it.’
She marched out of the lounge and into the hallway.
‘Just be careful of the shower rail,’ Jonathan called after her. ‘It’s loose and needs fixing.’
But Emily was already in the downstairs shower room, the door pushed closed behind her but left ajar. A few moments later Theodore heard water. He approached the door and then noticed a white rectangle of card lying on the floor by the front door.
It was a business card from Norman, the window cleaner. He must have posted it through the front door after he left.
On the card was written:
N. BATES
PROFFESIONAL WINDOW CLEANING SERVICES
NO SMEAR GARANTIE
Theodore stared a moment at the slip of paper. Then his attention was drawn by a buzzing overhead. It was a bee.
Theodore swiped at it as it flew past him. He turned round and chased after the bee. As the bee rose in the air, Theodore launched himself, a paw held out at the intruding insect. He just missed it. He turned again and saw the bee fly into the shower room. Theodore followed, pushing open the door so that he could fit through.
‘Is there somebody there?’ Emily said, over the spray of the water from the shower.
The shower room was tiled in shiny white and had a white shower curtain dividing it into two. From behind the curtain, Theodore made out Emily’s outline, her silhouette cast onto the plastic curtain by the window behind her.
The bee buzzed within the confined space of the shower room, unable to navigate a way out. Theodore crouched in the doorway waiting his chance.
‘Is that you Jonathan?’ Emily said from behind the shower curtain.
When the bee buzzed past the shower curtain the third time, Theodore chose his moment. His paws outstretched, he launched himself into the air. He saw the bee pass just in front of his paws as he dived forwards. Then his claws snagged on the shower curtain, ripping the thin plastic sheet.
Emily screamed, as the shower curtain and metal rail came down on top of her.
Not again, thought Theodore, as the shower head spun round, sending out a spray of water at him. Another soaking.
Emily stood naked and scr
eamed again, but this time it was Theodore’s name that came from her lips.
The Writing on the Doors
‘No Perambulation. In Front Street, Acomb, still much of the village character. The most notable house is Acomb House, mostly mid-Georgian, with a two-storeyed mid-projection. The top storey is later.”
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England Yorkshire: York & The East Riding
Most people think of Acomb as a big suburb of York, inhabited by plumbers and decorators, and retired plumbers and decorators, and they wouldn’t be far wrong.
But it was once a village on the outskirts of the city, and part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Its name came from the Old English for oak tree. It was only in 1937 that Acomb was swallowed up by the City of York and transformed into a suburb of the city.
The twentieth century saw the population of Acomb rise dramatically with housing built on the farmland and by the twenty first century Acomb had a population of twenty thousand people.
Jonathan was sitting on the sofa, reading the Pevsner guide he had picked up in Fossgate Books some years before. He glanced at the brief entry for Acomb. ‘No perambulation,’ he read aloud. ‘He didn’t even bother getting out of his car… Probably just said to his wife from the back seat, “Keep driving!”’
Theodore flicked back his good ear. Writing about architecture was the equivalent of miaowing about cat biscuits in his opinion. And besides, Pevsner might have had the right idea by not getting out of his car, he thought, thinking of some of his new neighbours. He looked out of the French windows at the houses behind and then jumped down to the floor.
Theodore paced in front of the glass doors. A woman had been killed and all Jonathan could do was to read architectural criticism.
Theodore knew that Ellen had killed her mother; Jonathan only suspected as much; Emily didn’t believe a word of it. It was going to be down to him to expose Ellen.
He thought of the crime dramas he had watched on television with Emily in the pre-Jonathan days. The ‘whodunnits’. Theodore knew who had done it: Ellen.
Then he thought of the Columbos he had seen, where the viewer knew who had done it but watched to see how Columbo would prove how they had done it. The ‘howdunnits’.
But this was not a howdunnit. Theodore licked his paws in contemplation. This was not a whodunit or a howdunnit, but a how-do-I-prove-to-the-humans-that-she-did-it?
He paced in front of the sofa, where Jonathan sat reading his book. He wagged his tail from side to side. He went into the kitchen. His litter box was still in the corner. The wrong type of litter, he remembered.
He headed towards the litter box. He urinated in the corner and then patted the clay pellets with his front paws until they turned to sludge. It really was the wrong type of litter. He emerged a minute later, his paws coated with urine-soaked clay.
Back in the lounge Jonathan was still reading his architectural guide to York. Theodore approached the French windows again. If Jonathan had any doubts that a murder had been committed he was going to have to spell it out to him.
He began on the right hand door and worked his way to the left. As everyone knows, cats both read and write from right to left. When he had finished he stood back to inspect his paw-writing.
‘She killed her mother,’ it was supposed to say.
Instead it looked like a lot of muddy smears across the glass. Theodore blinked. This writing business was trickier than he had presumed. He glanced at Jonathan on the sofa. His head was tilted back and his eyes were closed. He hadn’t even noticed Theodore’s attempts at writing.
Theodore settled down on the other sofa. He was going to have to think long and hard about the situation, he realised. It was definitely a three-nap problem; he would need at least fifty minutes to consider the problem.
He crossed his forelegs in front of him, placed his head in the V between his legs and closed his eyes, readying himself to enter into deep analytical thought, worthy of a detective of his status.
Before his fifty minutes had elapsed, there was a tapping at the front door and then he heard a key in the lock and the front door opened.
‘Jonathan?’ Trish called out, before entering the lounge. ‘Are you in here?’
‘I haven’t run off,’ Jonathan said from the sofa, not bothering to turn round.
‘I’ve brought you some lunch,’ Trish said. ‘Soup and a sandwich.’
‘Sounds good,’ Jonathan said from the sofa.
‘Did the window cleaner come the other day?’ Trish asked, staring over Jonathan’s head at the French windows.
‘Yes,’ Jonathan said, ‘he did both inside and out.’
‘Did he now?’ Trish said.
She crossed to the glass doors and waved a finger across the muddy smears. She held her forefinger in front of her face. ‘They’re still dirty. On the inside.’
‘He did the insides,’ Jonathan said. ‘I was here when he did them.’
‘Well, he didn’t do a very good job,’ Trish said. ‘These window cleaners… They’re a law unto themselves.’
Jonathan pointed past Trish at the house behind. ‘I think something might have happened to the woman behind. I haven’t seen her since the other morning. Her curtains haven’t been opened. And the dog has been yapping all the time. I think it’s been locked in a room.’
‘Why Jonathan,’ Trish said, ‘are you developing an imagination?’
Trish had evidently not forgotten Christmas Day. They had all been watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in which a party of dwarves and their hobbit ally continue their quest to reclaim their kingdom, journeying through the forest of their ancestral enemy, the elves, and finally face the dragon Smaug that had driven the dwarves from their home, when Jonathan woke from a post-prandial nap and said: ‘Well, this is all a bit far-fetched.’
‘You’ll be reading Terry Pratchett next,’ Trish added.
‘I think the daughter Ellen snapped and smothered her with a pillow,’ Jonathan said. ‘I heard her mother say, “It’s going to the dogs”. I think she meant her daughter’s inheritance. She was going to leave everything to the RSPCA…’
‘You’re reading too much into it… This is Suburbia. People don’t commit murder in the suburbs. You want to move to a village if you want that sort of thing. We have homicides, patricides, matricides, suicides… Even the odd felinicide,’ she said, casting a sideways glance at Theodore.
Theodore folded back his ears and looked at a patch of floor. He was glad he didn’t live in a village.
‘Well, I’d better put the soup on.’ Trish said. ‘I don’t have all day.’
Jonathan was relieved that the soup was tomato and the sandwich cheese. He ate off a tray on his lap and watched the news on television while Trish cleaned the kitchen.
After he had finished his lunch and Trish had washed up the dishes, she announced that she was going back to Acaster Mildew, a village just outside of York, its existence known only by those that actually live there, and the postman, of course.
‘I don’t like to leave Pat too long,’ Trish said, referring to her husband and Emily’s father.
When they had met, they both went by Pat. But as everyone knows, you cannot have two Pats in a house, so rather than her husband becoming Trick she had offered to be Trish, and that was the name she now went by, though deep down she was and would always be a Pat.
‘You know he’s always having those little accidents,’ Trish went on. ‘We wouldn’t want him bleeding to death in his workshop while I’m out, would we now?’
‘No, certainly not,’ Jonathan said nodding.
And with that, Trish turned and left.
Norman, the window cleaner, returned later that afternoon. Theodore watched from the front window as a white van with N Bates Window Cleaner pulled up outside the house and Norman jumped out. He went straight round the side of the house and let himself in through the gate.
Jonathan managed to get to his feet and opened the French windows
to let the window cleaner in.
‘Didn’t you clean the windows only the other day?’
Norman explained that he had been called by Trish. ‘She said there were some smears. She wasn’t very happy about it. I thought I’d better see for myself. I told her when I left yesterday, they were sparkling clean, but she insisted that they were covered in smears. On the inside.’
‘I hadn’t noticed any smears,’ Jonathan said.
‘The lady said there were smears. Gave me a right earful.’
Norman bent down and began to examine the glass. ‘Looks like muddy paw prints.’
He pushed his forefinger through the muddy streaks and then raised it in front of his nose. ‘It’s like clay.’
‘It’s probably…’ Jonathan said and then stopped himself as Norman dabbed his forefinger on his tongue. ‘It’s like clay.’
Theodore looked on from the doorway as Norman took a cloth and wiped the glass clean.
‘There’s nothing to pay this time,’ Norman said once he was done and satisfied that there were no more smears.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Norman said. ‘No smear guarantee and all that… Besides I had finished for the day. I don’t have that many customers at the moment…’
‘Maybe it’s down to the name,’ Jonathan said. ‘You know Norman Bates…’
‘What’s up with my name? Norman was my dad’s name, and his dad’s before that. It’s a good name.’
‘Norman Bates was the one who slashed the girl in the shower. You know in Pyscho?’
Norman shook his head. ‘Don’t know about him.’
‘He dressed up as his dead mother. You must know it. It’s the film I had on yesterday.’
‘Don’t know anything about slashing a girl in the shower,’ he said, still shaking his head. ‘Or dressing up as a dead mother…’
‘It was in the film,’ Jonathan explained. ‘It was a Hitchcock film. Psycho… You must have heard of it. ‘He’s the serial killer in Psycho. Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates.’
‘I’ve never heard of this Perkins,’ Norman said. ‘It was him who slashed this girl?’
