by James Barrie
‘The actor who played Norman Bates slashed the girl. You must know it. It was a big film. They remade it. He kills this girl in the shower.’
‘Psycho? No, never heard of it. And Norman Bates is this psycho in the film, right?’
‘Yes. Maybe that’s what’s putting people off calling you. They see your name and think twice.’
‘It explains a lot,’ Norman said. ‘But I’ve had all these leaflets and business cards printed up. They cost me twenty quid for two hundred at the service station.’
Norman took a business card from his back pocket and handed it to Jonathan.
Jonathan took the card. ‘It says N. Bates,’ Jonathan said, handing the card back to Norman. ‘You could always change your first name to another name that begins with N.’
‘Like what?’
‘What about Nigel?’
‘Nigel? I’m not sure about that. My family have always been Normans.’
‘Nigel Bates wouldn’t scare customers away like Norman does. You don’t get many mass murderers called Nigel.’
Theodore’s eyes widened. I think you might be forgetting Nigel ‘Cat Killer’ Hibbs.
Nigel Hibbs murdered up to 70 cats in the village of Newbold Verdon, Leicestershire, by placing sodium cyanide-laced sardines in his back garden in a killing spree that lasted two years. When arrested, the police found enough poison under his bed to kill 1,500 cats as well as an empty sardine tin, latex gloves, face masks and newspaper cuttings about the disappearances.
‘Nigel?’ Norman said. ‘I suppose it sounds all right. Nigel Bates.’
‘So, are you going to be Nigel from now on?’
‘Yes, I think I might give it a go. Just for business like.’
While Jonathan and Nigel were discussing the changing of names, Theodore slipped through the French windows that had been left open and trotted across the lawn to the back of the garden.
Geoffrey Offers to Help
He watched from the bottom of the hedge as Ellen dragged her mother out of the shed by her feet and laid her out on the unkempt lawn.
She then pulled the green wheelie bin next to the corpse and swung open its lid. She bent down and picked up her mother in a fireman’s lift. Then she dropped her into the wheelie bin, head first.
Rigor mortis had set in, and her mother’s feet stood proud of the top of the bin. Ellen pulled the lid down on the legs but the bin lid refused to close. She tried to push the legs further down into the bin but they still jutted out at odd angles, so that she couldn’t close the bin lid without a foot sticking out.
She pushed the bin on its side and went inside the shed. She emerged a minute later with a rusty old axe.
She pulled her mother out by her feet until her knees were exposed and then began to hack at her shins.
Theodore heard an excited bark and then watched as Lucy led Geoffrey to the hedge that formed the boundary between his house and the Blacks.
Geoffrey stood beside the hedge and heard Ellen chopping at her mother’s legs. ‘Doing a spot of gardening?’ he said. ‘A spring tidy, is it?’
Ellen paused from her efforts. She stood up and faced her neighbour, who was wearing his mirrored sunglasses and a shirt that had been buttoned up wrong so that one collar was higher than the other.
‘Just trying to get this old tree in the wheelie bin,’ she said. ‘Can’t seem to get it all in…’
‘I’ve got a chipper in the garage,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You could use that… Haven’t used it in years what with my eyesight going but I’m sure we could get it going. You’d have to give me a hand looking for it… If we put it through the chipper, you won’t have any problem fitting it all in your wheelie bin.’
‘A chipper?’ Ellen said. ‘I don’t think a chipper is really necessary… It’s just these big branches I need to fit in.’
‘Well, the offer’s there,’ Geoffrey said.
Lucy had her face pushed into the hedge. She whined excitedly; the dog could see the dead woman on the other side. She clawed at the ground in front of the hedge and barked.
‘Lucy!’ Geoffrey admonished. ‘Whatever’s got into you?’ He yanked on her lead.
Lucy barked again.
‘That’s quite enough,’ Geoffrey said, pulling on her harness. ‘She wants her walk,’ he said to Ellen. ‘I’d better get her to the park. We’re normally in West Bank by now.’
‘You get off,’ Ellen said. ‘I’ll soon sort this out; don’t you worry about us.’
‘Well, give my regards to your mother,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Haven’t seen her for a while.’
‘No,’ Ellen said. ‘She doesn’t get out that much these days.’
‘Oh, she should. A bit of fresh air would do her the world of good.’
‘I think it might be a bit late for that,’ Ellen said under her breath.
Geoffrey shrugged and pulled his dog away, Lucy still barking.
‘I really don’t know what’s got into her,’ he said, pulling Lucy across the lawn, back towards the bungalow.
Theodore watched from the bottom of the hedge as Ellen finished hacking through her mother’s legs, threw the dismembered body parts into the wheelie bin and closed the lid. She then went back into the shed and came out with a spade. She wedged the spade down the inside of the wheelie bin and closed the lid once more.
Well at least he was not the only one to know the truth, Theodore thought. Lucy had also seen the dead woman. He wasn’t the sole witness anymore. But why did it have to be a dog? A dog detective on the case! Whatever next?
Then he heard Marjorie shouting for her husband, louder as she drew closer to the shed. She was almost at the shed door before Wally opened it.
Theodore turned and looked back at his own house. Through the French windows he saw Jonathan sitting on the sofa, his booted foot propped up on the coffee table.
Wally, Jonathan and Geoffrey…
Deaf, dumb and blind…
He was definitely up against it.
He closed his eyes, deep in thought, and only opened them when he heard Emily call his name. She was standing in front of the French windows. Theodore chose to ignore her; he stayed where he was.
He looked across at the green wheelie bin that stood by Ellen’s shed. Emily soon gave up and went back inside. Theodore waited.
In the kitchen Ellen was staring out of the window. Her eyes were red rimmed from crying. She took a gulp from a wine glass. She spotted Theodore in the bottom of the back hedge and caught his eye. She smiled at him.
From behind, Theodore heard Emily almost shout, ‘I told you not to let him out. And what do you do? Let him out… Three days in a row.’
Theodore looked again from Ellen to the wheelie bin and waited.
Night-time came. Ellen went out the back door. She pulled the wheelie bin down the side of the house. Theodore waited for her to disappear before emerging from the bottom of the hedge and setting off after her. He followed behind her, along Constantine Crescent and out onto York Road. She didn’t look back.
There were few people in the street and the people they passed took little notice of the young woman with a wheelie bin and the large grey cat that trailed twenty yards behind.
Eventually Ellen turned left and entered through the gate that led into the grounds of St Stephen’s church.
Theodore paused at the gate, and as Ellen passed between two great elms, Theodore began to trot after her.
He passed to the east of the church, under the curtilage of a gigantic beech tree. Before him there was a cemetery, stretching down the hill. Gravestones stood high, low, or lay flat on the ground. There were plenty of places for a cat to hide.
Near the bottom of the hillside, Ellen had stopped. The headstones in this part of the cemetery were of hard black granite and not the softer sandstones and limestones of the ones further up the hill.
She pulled the wheelie bin to the side of a grave. She pulled out the spade and began to remove the turf from the grave and put it to one side.
Once the turf was removed, she began to shovel the sandy soil to the other side. Within half an hour she had dug a hole three feet deep.
Theodore approached cautiously, careful not to make any sound. He crouched behind a headstone. He watched as Ellen pulled her mother from the wheelie bin and laid her in the newly opened grave. She placed the bottoms of her legs at the foot of the hole.
She stood for a moment over the grave.
Theodore studied the headstone. It was inscribed in gold letters on the black background:
‘Colin Black
1954 – 2007
Beloved husband and father,
A light that burned bright, snuffed out too soon
R.I.P
Theodore watched as Ellen wiped tears from her eyes. Then she began to backfill the hole.
Verge Wars
On arriving home from work, Steve always parked his Audi on the grass verge in front of Linda’s house. He couldn’t park in front of his own house, as there was a lime tree growing there and all the other spaces along the side of the road had been taken.
What had once been a little rectangle of green in front of Linda’s house had been reduced to churned-up dried mud. Linda was determined to change that.
After Steve had set off to work that Friday morning, she scurried out of her house, a trowel in one hand and a large bag in the other. She then proceeded to plant daffodils in the verge in front of her house. Linda wasn’t one to complain to the council; she was a believer in direct action.
Theodore watched from the front window as his purple clad neighbour squatted down and planted the yellow flowers.
Later a coach of Chinese tourists drove by, very slowly, and Theodore felt a hundred small handheld devices point at him from behind the coach windows, a hundred small screens that now held his image.
He realised he was part of the picture, a part of the suburban scene: the cat in the window of the semi-detached house.
Curtains for Sandy
Sandy the Shih Zhu was twelve years old. She had been utterly devoted to her owner Tessa. When Tessa had taken to her bed after her husband Colin died, Sandy had stuck it out with her.
He had watched her drink bottle after bottle of Lambrini or Pinot Grigio from her basket in the corner of the room. He had kept her company while she watched depressing daytime television. He had witnessed her wee the bed on numerous occasions.
Now the bedroom door was closed and her owner was dead. It was two days since she had been fed. She scratted at the brown carpet in front of the bedroom door. She whined. She yapped. She weed in the corner. She yapped some more. She scratted at the carpet some more. She weed in the corner once more. Finally she heard footsteps approach. Sandy yapped with excitement. Finally she would be released.
The bedroom door swung open.
‘If you don’t shut up,’ Ellen said, entering the bedroom. ‘You’re going to get it.’
Sandy yapped some more.
‘I’ve warned you,’ she said and shut the bedroom door behind her.
‘Is that dog ever going to be quiet?’ Jonathan asked Theodore. They were sitting on the sofa, watching North by Northwest.
On the screen, Eva Marie Saint is hanging by her fingers to the rocky face of Mount Rushmore. ‘What happened to your first two marriages?’ she asks Cary Grant, who is playing advertising executive Robert O Thornhill, mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies and chased across the country.
‘My wives divorced me,’ he replies.
‘Why?’ asks Eva Marie Saint, who is playing the part of gorgeous blonde Eve Kendall.
‘They said I led too dull a life,’ Cary Grant says.
Yap, yap, went Sandy from the house behind.
Jonathan paused the film.
‘I really can’t concentrate on this,’ Jonathan said to Theodore. ‘What with that racket coming from behind…’
They both looked over at the window with drawn curtains.
Theodore heard Sandy’s yaps take a different, more desperate tone. He watched as Sandy’s head suddenly appeared in the window, the flowery curtains parting for a moment, before coming together again, as the dog dropped out of sight.
‘Did you see that?’ Jonathan said.
Theodore blinked yes and sat up.
A few seconds later, Sandy’s head appeared once more in the bottom of the window.
Both Jonathan and Theodore watched the window opposite, as the flowery curtains were repeatedly parted and the little dog’s head appeared again. The curtains remained slightly apart, and the dog managed to scrabble up onto the window sill, only to fall back down again.
‘It must be locked in the bedroom,’ Jonathan said.
Theodore agreed with another blink of his eyes.
Then the yapping turned to a whimper.
Then a yelping.
Then nothing.
‘Do you think something might have happened to the dog now?’ Jonathan asked.
Theodore jumped down from the sofa and approached the French windows. He miaowed affirmatively.
Jonathan took his crutches and got to his feet. Careful not to put any pressure on his booted broken foot, he crossed to the French windows and joined Theodore.
The curtains were closed.
‘I think something has happened to that dog,’ he said.
I think that was curtains for Sandy, agreed Theodore.
‘Ted Bundy started on animals and worked his way up to humans,’ Jonathan said. ‘Let’s hope she’s not working her way down the chain… Cats could be next.’
Theodore pondered his words. Working her way down the chain? I think you might have that tail about whiskers…
Jonathan opened the right hand window absent-mindedly and looked across at the house behind. It was now deathly quiet.
He didn’t notice Theodore slipping through the open window until it was too late.
‘Not again,’ he said to himself.
The Beginning of the End of the Roman Empire
“But we read that Severus had his palace in this City, and here at the houre of death gave up his last breath with these words, I entred upon a state everywhere troublesome, and I leave it peaceable even to the Britains. His bodie was carried forth here to the funerall fire by the soldiors, after the military fashion, and committed to the flames, honoured with Justs and Turneaments of his soldiours and his owne sonnes, in a place beneath this City Westward nere to Ackham where is to bee seene a great mount of earth raised up, which, as Raulph Niger hath recorded, was in his time of Severus called Sivers.”
William Camden
And so, in Ackham (now spelled Acomb), York; on a hillside to the west of the city, while his sons and soldiers played games, Septimus Severus’ body was turned to cinders; signifying the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.
Over 1,800 years later, near this very spot, a cinder caught in Ellen’s eye. She blinked furiously and wiped at it; then swore.
She was standing over a hole she had dug in the flower bed. She stuck the spade in the lawn and stared over at the corner of the hedge, over which grey smoke billowed. She walked over.
‘That smoke is coming right at me,’ she shouted across at Wally, who was standing over the garden fire, a stick in his hand, a red cap on his head.
Wally turned and grinned at Ellen. ‘I can’t change the direction of the wind. But you could always try standing somewhere else.’
‘You’re always burning stuff,’ Ellen said.
‘There’s a lot of garden waste this time of year.’
‘You could always use your wheelie bin like everyone else.’
‘I’d never fit it all in,’ Wally said. ‘They’re too small.’
Elle thought back to the difficulty of getting her mother into the bin. She agreed with Wally that they were a bit small. ‘You might have a point there,’ she said.
‘If you want to chuck anything on, go ahead.’
Ellen glanced back at the shed, in which Sandy waited
to be buried. ‘I think I can manage,’ she said.
‘Well, if you change your mind, just chuck it over over the hedge.’
‘I’d better get on,’ Ellen said.
She crossed the garden to the shed and retrieved the Shih Zhu. She carried it across the lawn by its paws as if it were a handbag coated in faux fur.
Theodore watched from the bottom of the hedge as Ellen deposited the dog into the hole in the garden and began to shovel soil over the top.
He turned, exited the hedge and raced back across the lawn. He saw Jonathan sitting on the sofa and Jonathan saw him. Theodore noticed a look of alarm on Jonathan’s face.
He carried on running, towards him, forgetting that there was glass in the French windows that separated them; glass that had been so thoroughly cleaned by Nigel, it was invisible to the eye.
When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on the patio. Jonathan was standing over him, balanced on his crutches. He wasn’t sure how long he had been knocked out. He invoked Bastet to bring about a curse upon window cleaners before getting to his paws.
Then he remembered the dead dog.
He began to make his way on wobbly legs back towards the lawn.
‘Are you OK?’ said Jonathan, following. ‘Are you sure you don’t need a lie down or something?’
But Theodore kept going, back across the lawn, weaving his way towards the hedge.
And Jonathan followed after him.
A Spot of Gardening
Jonathan saw Ellen over the hedge, digging in her garden. Theodore had disappeared into the bottom of the hedge. Jonathan approached, trying not to put any weight on his broken foot.
When Jonathan reached the hedge, Ellen was compacting the soil with the back of a spade.
She had her back to him and Jonathan surveyed her rear, clad in tight blue jogging pants, before asking, ‘Have you seen my cat?’
