Rear Garden: The Cat Who Knew Too Much ( A York Cat Crime Mystery Book 2)

by James Barrie

  Emily said, ‘It’s a trap… A trap of our own making. We have to get out while we can.’

  You cannot run from yourself, thought Theodore.

  ‘I just can’t live like this,’ Emily said. ‘I can’t go on like this… pretending everything’s fine. Pretending this is me. I’m not happy. I need to do something about it.’

  She put Theodore back down on the bed. She crossed to the bedside cabinet and took out the rolls of bank notes wrapped in clear plastic from the drawer. She pushed the money into the suitcase and then closed the lid.

  ‘That should last a few months,’ she said.

  She was pacing in front of the bedroom window and gesturing at the houses and gardens of suburbia.

  ‘I should never have come here. This isn’t the life that I want.’

  She put the suitcase into the bottom of the wardrobe and closed the door. ‘Tomorrow our new life begins,’ she said.

  Dance How You Like!

  Emily woke early on Easter Monday. She sat up in bed and remembered that today she was going to escape this suburban nightmare and begin the rest of her life. She looked across the bedroom at the wardrobe, where her case waited. She glanced at the drawer of her bedside table, where she had stashed the shop’s takings. She stared up at the bedroom ceiling. She would just have to choose her moment to slip out and take Theodore with her; she didn’t want Jonathan making a scene.

  Theodore was sleeping on the bed beside her. She stroked him for some minutes.

  When she got up she parted the curtains. The front window faced east, towards York. She could make out the Minster in the distance. In the middle ground, there were some blocks of flats and an ugly concrete water tower on stilts. On the side of the water tower somebody had painted in large red letters: ‘VOYER!’

  ‘She still can’t spell,’ Emily said to herself.

  Theodore jumped up onto the windowsill. His attention was drawn by a commotion in the street below.

  Steve was standing in front of his car, parked on Linda’s front verge.

  ‘Did you do this?’ he demanded of Linda.

  Linda was dressed in her purple jogging gear. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said with a misplaced grin.

  ‘My car,’ Steve said. ‘Someone has painted flowers and trees on it… It’s a bloody woodland scene!’

  ‘I can see,’ Linda said. ‘How pretty!’

  ‘This will cost a fortune to sort.’

  ‘You could always leave it as it is. It’s a big improvement.’

  ‘It’s going to need respraying.’

  ‘Well, I need to get going. Can’t stand here chatting…’

  ‘You did it, didn’t you?’ Steve said.

  ‘It’s Dance How You Like this morning,’ Linda said.

  ‘You’re going to pay for this…’

  ‘You should try it! Unlock some of that aggression.’

  ‘I would be calm if you hadn’t done this to my car.’

  ‘Don’t want to be late,’ Linda said and began walking away, a skip in her step, leaving Steve to contemplate his paintwork.

  Emily pulled the curtains closed. ‘See what I mean,’ she said. ‘Suburbia! Get me out of here!’

  The Origins of Marmalade

  Theodore went into the back bedroom. It was still full of unpacked boxes. He jumped up onto the windowsill.

  Wally and Stuart were arguing over the hedge. Theodore soon picked up the thread of their argument. It was over the origins of marmalade.

  ‘It’s as English as tea,’ Wally shouted at his neighbour.

  ‘It’s Scottish, I tell you,’ Stuart said. ‘Queen Mary brought it back to Scotland. She had sea sickness and they gave her marmalade to settle her stomach. And she took a taste to it and had it brought over to Scotland in the middle of the sixteenth century.’

  ‘I’ve never heard so much rubbish,’ Wally said. ‘It was Henry the Eighth who brought it over. Before Mary had a dodgy tummy, we were already enjoying marmalade on our toast. You Scots are always one step behind.’

  ‘Och, och, bollocks,’ Stuart said. ‘You might have had a bit of some shredless jelly, but it was Janet Keiller of Dundee who added the peel to it. Her husband bought the oranges at the harbourside and she shredded the peel and boiled down the oranges to make the marmalade that we know today. They were doing that in the seventeen hundreds. What you English were scoffing back then was flavoured jelly. Not proper marmalade.’

  ‘Absolute nonsense,’ Wally said. ‘Shakespeare was eating marmalade on his toast before your Janet Keiller’s great grandmother was even born. Not just oranges but quinces and all sorts of fruit.’

  Stuart rolled up his shirt sleeves and squared up to the hedge. ‘It’s Scottish,’ he said. ‘You never thought of putting the shred in it. That’s what we Scots did. We put in the shred. Without the shred, it’s not marmalade!’

  ‘Well, it is marmalade,’ Wally said. ‘Just shredless.’

  ‘Like this country,’ Stuart said. ‘Shredless.’

  ‘Some people like their marmalade without the shred,’ said Wally.

  ‘Just you wait,’ Stuart said, ‘Us Scots will have our independence. Then Trevor Trout won’t put up with your nonsense no more. We won’t put up with your shredless marmalade!’

  Trevor Trout was the then leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party. He carried on the tradition of leaders of the Scottish Nationalist Party being named after fish.

  ‘Your Trevor Trout will not outlaw our shredless marmalade…’

  ‘You prick!’ shouted Stuart, escalating the argument a notch.

  ‘Talking of pricks,’ Wally said, ‘you want to be careful where you go putting yours.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Ellen Black,’ Wally said. ‘I know what you’ve been up to… Carrying on with a girl half your age… You should bloody know better.’

  ‘What was that?’

  Both men turned. Leslie was standing several yards behind Stuart, her dressing gown pulled tightly around her.

  ‘Who’s been putting their prick where?’

  ‘I’d better get on,’ Walter said. He adjusted his cap; then made for the safety of his shed.

  Stuart stared at his wife. He had some explaining to do.

  However, the ensuing argument escalated and less than an hour later, Stuart was in his car, Hamish in his cat carrier in the passenger seat, on their way back to Scotland.

  Well at least Hamish is out of the way, thought Theodore, looking down on the scene from the bedroom window.

  The Evidence

  A magpie swooped down and picked up a scrap of silver from the lawn. Theodore realised that it was a fragment of tinfoil, a remnant of yesterday’s barbecue. He watched as the bird disappeared into the white blossom of the apple tree in the corner of Geoffrey’s garden.

  Theodore thought of the basket in the kitchen of Ellen’s house. The wedding ring that was no longer there. He remembered the flash of black and white feathers coming out of the kitchen.

  He looked again at the apple tree and miaowed.

  He trotted downstairs and miaowed at the French windows until Jonathan opened them.

  He trotted across the lawn, through the hedge, and cut across Ellen’s lawn. He entered Geoffrey’s garden and made for the apple tree.

  He ascended the four feet of near vertical trunk and gained the V of two branches. He looked up and sighted the magpies’ nest up one of the branches. He climbed the branch. As he reached the nest, the branch bowed under his weight. He peered inside.

  There were several scraps of tinfoil, and there in the middle was the gold ring set with diamonds. He took hold of the ring with his teeth and was about to turn around when the pair of magpies attacked.

  They flew at him, pecking at his face, his body. They were everywhere. He looked down at the lawn, ten feet below. Then he dropped from the branch.

  He landed but swallowed the ring on impact. He got to his feet. The magpies swooped down and
pecked at his body, their sharp beaks finding their way through his long fur and piercing his flesh.

  He scrambled back through the bottom of the hedge still pursued by the birds, the ring lodged in his throat.

  Jonathan had suffered vertigo for as long as he could remember. It was an affliction he had learned to live with, but the condition had affected his life to the detriment.

  His final year of university, he had been sent into the field to log a previously unmapped mountainside in Wales. While he had spluttered some protests, his tutor had assured him he would be fine. ‘It’s all in the mind,’ he’d been told.

  He had restricted his mapping to the lower reaches of the mountain, and on his return his tutor had given him a very low grade, resulting in him scraping a 2:2 in his degree, which meant that he was out of the running for a lot of jobs with the larger consultancies. When he was offered a job by a small consultancy on the outskirts of Leeds, he jumped at the opportunity.

  He tried to explain to people that vertigo was not a fear of heights, as a lot of people seemed to believe, but an actual physical reaction to being up high.

  He had placed Vertigo at the bottom of the pile of Hitchcock DVDs he was working his way through. He had now reached the bottom of the pile. He bent down and was about to put the DVD into the machine when Theodore appeared in front of the French windows, miaowing to be let back in.

  Jonathan crossed to the windows and opened them. The cat stayed where it was. ‘Please yourself,’ he said.

  Theodore miaowed up at him, a strange, raspy miaow, as though he had something stuck in his throat. He placed his head near the ground and began to heave.

  Soon he had thrown up what looked like a short length of twisted grey rope.

  Jonathan looked at the knot of cat fur and winced. ‘Nice,’ he said.

  Then he noticed something glisten from within the salivary fur. He reached over and picked up the fur ball and peeling it apart, removed a gold ring, set with diamonds.

  ‘A wedding ring…’ he murmured. ‘Where did you get this?’

  Theodore looked back over the garden, towards the house behind.

  ‘It’s hers, isn’t it?’ Jonathan said. ‘It’s Tessa Black’s wedding ring, isn’t it?’

  Theodore stared up at him and blinked yes.

  ‘This is the proof we need,’ Jonathan said. ‘I think it’s time we confronted Ellen.’

  He made his way across the garden to the back hedge, Theodore following behind.

  The Vertigo DVD was left on the floor in front of the television.

  There was a green wheelie bin pulled in front of the back door. He could see Ellen inside the kitchen.

  ‘Hey!’ Jonathan shouted over at her. ‘Can I have a word?’

  Ellen pushed the wheelie bin aside and walked across to the boundary hedge. ‘Yes, what is it?’

  Jonathan held the wedding ring up. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ellen said, ‘it’s my mum’s wedding ring. Where did you get it?’

  ‘It’s proof,’ Jonathan said. ‘Proof that you killed her.’

  ‘Give it to me,’ Ellen snapped.

  ‘No. This ring is the proof! You killed your mum. Then you killed her dog. And now you’ve killed your sister.’

  ‘Penny?’

  ‘Yes. She came yesterday. I saw her… She knew something was up. Then you killed her too. Didn’t you?’

  Ellen folded her arms across her chest; she was wearing another of her father’s old shirts. She stared at Jonathan a moment; then said flatly: ‘My mum’s in bed and Penny’s upstairs having a shower.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  He looked at the hedge. He could hardly jump over it on his crutches. ‘Well, that’s not really possible.’

  ‘You’ll have to walk round,’ Ellen said.

  ‘It might take me a while.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  Jonathan noticed Theodore entering the bottom of the hedge. The cat miaowed. ‘I’ll walk round then,’ he said. ‘But if they aren’t there, I’m going to call the police.’

  ‘They are both here,’ Ellen said. ‘I think you’ve got a screw loose… You think I’ve been murdering my family? You’re the bloody psycho!’ She laughed in his face.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Jonathan said, turning red in the face. ‘Five minutes and we’ll see who’s the psycho!’

  Ellen had already turned and was walking back to the house. The door was slammed shut behind her.

  Jonathan turned and began to walk back across his own overgrown garden. Theodore made his way towards Ellen’s back door.

  As The Crow Flies

  Jonathan grabbed his mobile phone from the side. From upstairs he heard water running. ‘I’m going out,’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to prove that I’m not imaging things…’

  ‘Whatever,’ Emily shouted down.

  As soon as Jonathan had shut the front door behind him, Emily turned off the bath taps and called a taxi.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ she said into her mobile. Then: ‘Twenty minutes? That’s fine… I’ll be waiting.’

  She heard the front door open and close. She peaked through the bedroom curtains and saw Jonathan begin to make his way round to Ellen’s house. It will take him at least fifteen minutes to get there and another fifteen minutes to make his way back. She had at least half an hour to get away. She just had to find Theodore and get him in the cat box.

  Although Jonathan had only seen Penny at a distance over the hedge yesterday, he recognised her straightaway. She was wearing the same designer sunglasses even though it was overcast. He also noticed that her dyed red hair was still wet. So she had been having a shower, Jonathan reasoned. Ellen wasn’t lying about that.

  ‘Where’s Ellen?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘She just went out,’ Penny said.

  ‘Where?’ Jonathan said, ‘I need to speak to her.’

  ‘She was acting strange,’ Penny said. ‘We argued and she left.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I think she’s gone to the church,’ Penny said. ‘It’s where dad is buried. It’s where she goes when she’s upset. I was about to go after her… But, as you can see, I wasn’t dressed. I’d just got out of the shower. I’m going to look for her.’

  Penny shut the front door and began to walk away down the street.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Jonathan said.

  But Penny was already striding down the street.

  Jonathan set off after her on his crutches but he soon lagged behind. He watched as she turned right at the top of the street.

  He rested on his crutches for a few seconds. He took his mobile phone from his dressing gown pocket. He called Emily’s mobile but she didn’t answer. He sent a text. ‘Come to church. I was right about Ellen. I’m onto her.’

  Theodore rested below a parked car. He knew that it couldn’t be Penny that Jonathan was following: she was dead. He had seen Ellen whack her over the head with the iron. It was Ellen they were following. Ellen wearing Penny’s sunglasses, dress and hair.

  When Jonathan set off again on his crutches, Theodore followed him, darting from car to car until he turned right onto York Road.

  He waited until Jonathan was twenty yards further up Constantine Crescent before he turned the corner.

  He had to pause as a taxi entered the other end of the crescent. On the side of the taxi was written Crow-Line Taxis. Theodore watched as the taxi came to a stop in front of his house. The driver beeped his horn.

  A few seconds later Emily appeared, dragging behind her a suitcase on wheels. Theodore padded behind a tree. He watched as the driver got out and put the case in the boot. Emily was looking up and down the street. She called Theodore’s name. She disappeared back inside the house. She came out again. She called his name again.

  When he peered around the tree, he saw that Emily was standing on the footpath, holding a cat carrier. He looked ac
ross the road, in the direction that Jonathan had taken. He was nowhere to be seen.

  But Theodore knew where he was going and he knew that the quickest way to get there was as the crow flies. He spied the church steeple in the distance.

  He peered back down the street. Emily was standing by the side of the taxi, her head bent down, talking to the driver.

  Theodore chose the moment to dart across the road and then, rather than following Jonathan along York Road, he nipped under a gate, along the side of a bungalow and dashed across a lawn.

  A dog barked and set off after him but Theodore was already at the hedge; then through it and into another garden.

  ‘I can’t leave without my cat,’ Emily explained to the taxi driver. ‘Give me a few minutes and I’ll go and look for him.’

  Emily headed back inside the house. Once back inside the front door, she noticed the sign that hung from the vestibule door.

  A

  HOUSE

  IS NOT A

  HOME

  WITHOUT A

  CAT

  She called Theodore’s name. She knew he wasn’t going to come, even if he heard her. It was as if he knew.

  She took her mobile from her pocket and read the text from Jonathan. ‘Come to church. I was right about Ellen. I’m onto her.’

  Outside the taxi driver beeped his horn.

  Vertigo

  “St Stephen, York Road, Acomb. 1834 by G. T. Andrews; the chancel 1851, perhaps by J. A. Hansom. w tower with broach-spire. Lancet windows. No aisles, but transepts.”

  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England Yorkshire: York & The East Riding

  Theodore climbed to the top of the church wall and surveyed the churchyard.

  Then he jumped down and picked his way between the headstones. Between the trees he saw a flash of red. Ellen was making her way towards the entrance of the church. Theodore crouched down in front of a sign. It was a laminated sheet of A4 paper. It read: