“She lives over there,” Peppi said, pointing a paw towards a cream townhouse with tall, narrow windows and window boxes overflowing with flowers. A long balcony of intricately wrought ironwork ran the length of the top floor.
“If someone could get on to the roof they could drop down to the balcony and get in that way,” mused Maximilian, feeling his tail tingle the way it always did when he was solving a puzzle.
Peppi ignored him and pointed to another house a few streets away. “That was the scene of the first kidnapping,” he said. “That one with the wide bay windows. The entire household was away having dinner on the river and when they returned, their new kitten, Mathilde, had been taken from her basket.”
“How awful,” said Oscar.
“Was Mathilde grey as well?” asked Maximilian, spotting a possible link, but Peppi shook his head. “A really lovely tabby with such striking black and cinnamon markings. There was a picture of her in the Gazette, in her basket, surrounded by roses. Her owner is an artist.”
Maximilian thought that roses and art was rather getting away from the point, but Peppi clasped his front paws together and sighed, utterly forgetting all thoughts of how high they were and how treacherous his footing was.
“Speaking of photographs, you must come and visit me the day after tomorrow,” he said. “I’m going to have my photograph taken by Zelie.” From the excitement with which he said this it was clear that Maximilian and Oscar were meant to know who Zelie was.
“She’s the most exciting young photographer in the city!” Peppi exclaimed. “Very chic and most exclusive. She only photographs the most elegant clients, and there is a tremendously long waiting list for a sitting with her. Oh, do say you’ll come.”
Maximilian was not sure that he wanted to sit watching Peppi preen and pose all afternoon. He was beginning to think that the grey cat was a little fussy. On the other paw, it would be most impolite to turn down an invitation and, after everything that had happened that day, Maximilian was anxious to show that he knew how to behave in polite society.
“It’s easy to find our little house,” Peppi said. “Just head for the Eiffel Tower, and when you come to a park with a carousel in the middle, we are the pink house that overlooks the lake of swans. It’s quite a tiny apartment: I hope you won’t find it too crowded a place to spend the afternoon.”
Maximilian was about to say that it would be a pleasure to visit when a clocktower bell broke through the bustle of the streets below, chiming half past the hour. Peppi suddenly looked panic-stricken and turned to look over the rooftops at the concert hall.
“Madame will be frantic if we’re late back!” he said. “It was quarter to when the curtain came down. We’ve been ever so long.”
And, not thinking of how frightened he had been earlier, he dashed across to the edge and took a great leap to the rooftop opposite.
The next day there was no concert to prepare for, so Madame Emerald arrived at the hotel very early and carried Sylvia and Agnes away in a gleaming bottle-green car. Maximilian curled up on Madame’s lap. Oscar perched neatly at her side, his chin lifted high in a most gentlemanly manner. They sped down avenues lined with trees of falling pink blossom and through a park filled with couples taking picnics and pulled up outside a cream townhouse in the east of the city. Its lower windows were almost obscured by a wisteria in high bloom that snaked up the building, blue flowers cascading down on to the balconies that sprouted from every floor. At one window, Maximilian noticed, the stems hung ragged as though they had been torn away from the wall.
“Madame Elise is my dearest, oldest friend,” Madame Emerald told them as she pressed a finger to the doorbell. She glanced down at Maximilian and Oscar and smiled. “And I feel sure that one of these two splendid fellows will lose their heart to the beautiful Summer Rose.”
A rather flustered footman met them at the door. After he had taken all their coats and dropped at least three of their hats he showed them into a dainty parlour in which a tiny woman was sprawled across a sofa, sobbing into a cushion. The footman blushed and coughed a little too loudly and the lady lifted her head.
“Chérie!” she cried and, leaping up from the sofa, she threw herself into Madame’s arms. “Thank goodness you have come! My poor darling Summer Rose!”
Madame Emerald led Madame Elise to a seat and whisked a lace handkerchief out of her sleeve. The footman threw her a look of extreme embarrassment and shuffled out of the room. Sylvia and Agnes perched on a cornflower-blue sofa crammed with far too many cushions for comfort and shot one another looks that said “this is a little awkward”.
“Is Summer Rose ill?” Madame Emerald asked, patting Madame Elise on the shoulder. The woman lifted her head and wailed one word, a word that made Maximilian’s tail buzz.
“Kidnapped!”
“Kidnapped?” cried Sylvia and Agnes together.
Madame Elise waved a hand at a pile of papers strewn across a low coffee table in the middle of the room. “There have been an appalling number of cases this month. All beautiful animals, though none of them as beautiful as my little Summer Rose. And I’d just had a new portrait made of her too!”
Maximilian stared at the papers. On each there was a photograph much like the one he had seen of Winter Star: a beautiful cat sitting on a cushion or perched on a chair. His tail prickled. Somehow he was sure that there was something that linked them, but he could not work out what. They all looked so similar. What was it he was missing?
He glanced around the room. Every surface was covered in photo frames. There were carved wooden ones and plain glass ones, gleaming silver ones and antique ones on which the lustre was dulling. Every frame had a photo of the same cat in it, a sleek Siamese with sparkling, intelligent eyes. She peered out of a hatbox as a kitten in one, and sat upright on a cushion in another. In each picture a diamond-encrusted collar round her throat stood out, a shimmering heart-shaped jewel hanging from it.
“Is this the new picture?” Madame Emerald asked, picking up an unframed photograph that had fallen to the floor. It was covered in tear stains and was a little crumpled around the edges. Madame Elise sniffed loudly and nodded her head.
“I had it taken only two days ago,” she sobbed. “She was so good, sitting for her portrait, and I was going to have it framed in rose gold at Lucée’s. I went to wake her this morning, and the window to her room was wide open and she had gone!”
Maximilian padded over to sit by Madame Emerald and inclined his head to get a closer look at the photograph she was holding. Summer Rose sat on a cushion, her head turned elegantly to the camera lens. He craned his head a little and his tail tingled at the sight of a new clue. Half-covered by Madame’s thumb was a signature on the corner of the photograph that looked very familiar.
“She didn’t make a single sound,” Madame Elise was saying. “And none of the windows were broken. That’s how I know it was one of the staff. She would have cried out if a stranger came into the house.
I’ve dismissed all the staff. All except Victoire, who let you in. He was away in the country till this morning, so I know it wasn’t him. He’s having to be cook, butler and housemaid, but he’s coping admirably, and he did so love my little Summer Rose.”
She dissolved into floods of tears again and Maximilian raised an eyebrow at Oscar. Now they knew why the footman was looking so frazzled. Maximilian slipped to the floor. “I think we should do a little detecting, don’t you?” he asked as he passed Oscar, and the two of them padded out of the room and into the hallway.
Madame Elise had said that Summer Rose had disappeared from her room, but where on earth could her room be? And how could the thief have got in? “How might you get into a house without breaking a window?” Maximilian wondered aloud.
Oscar thought for a second.
“The wisteria that was so ragged on the front of the house as we drove up…” he began, but Maximilian was ahead of him.
“The left-hand side of the house, at the front, firs
t floor,” he hissed, and they sped up the stairs, took the left-hand bend at the landing and bounded into a small room at the end of the corridor.
Maximilian, before he had been fortunate enough to find his home at the Theatre Royal, had been brought up in what he thought was the height of luxury, but Summer Rose’s room took his breath away. The carpet was so soft and plush that he sank into it to the top of his paws. The walls were decorated with paper, hand-painted with rose trellises. In the middle of the room sat an enormous velvet pillow, surrounded by soft silk curtains pulled back with satin rosebuds. A small bedside table held potions and powders that Agnes and Sylvia would have been envious of, and in the centre was a large jewel box with room for just one precious cat collar. It was open and empty.
“Of course, she may simply have run away,” Oscar suggested.
“What cat would run away from this luxury?” Maximilian said, but even as he said it his conscience pricked him. He would not swap his life and all his friends in the Theatre Royal for a hundred luxurious cat beds, and the old velvet cushion that Mrs Garland had found for him to sleep on was the most comfortable one he had ever had.
Maximilian sniffed the air. In spite of all the roses there was an unpleasant smell pricking at his nose. He sniffed again. He was sure that the smell was coming from the window. Crossing the room (which was most difficult as his paws kept sinking into the carpet), he leapt up on to the sill. He had been right. The smell was stronger here. He sniffed again and his tail tingled at the same time that his head reeled. The busy Paris street swam a little below him.
Maximilian peered closely around the tiny balcony. To his left hung the wisteria branch with its roots ripped away from the wall. What on earth could have caused that? He wondered. He padded round the sill, but there was nothing except a candle in a silver jar, tipped over on its side, and a folded piece of glossy paper, torn at one corner. He pushed this around with one paw, but it did not seem to him to be much of a clue, so he batted it aside.
He nosed into a corner where the smell seemed stronger and something sour filled his nostrils, fighting against something tasty and sweet. Maximilian covered his nose with one paw and, reaching into the corner with the other, he dragged out a piece of meat.
Oscar sniffed the air. “What a curious smell!” he said. “What on earth is it?”
Maximilian swept the meat into the room. He leapt up on to the bedside table and whisked a handkerchief from a pile elegantly tied in a ribbon next to the jewel case.
“I’ve smelled this before,” Maximilian said. “It smells like the drops those villains used to kidnap Madame Emerald last year. I think it has been drugged.” He rolled the meat into a neat parcel. “We should show this to the humans. Together with the broken wisteria outside the window, I think it points to only one conclusion. Summer Rose was not taken by a member of Madame Elise’s staff. The reason she did not cry out was because she was drugged, and whoever took her climbed up that wisteria branch to get into her room.”
The humans, as usual, proved particularly slow on the uptake. Maximilian dropped the morsel of drugged meat in front of Sylvia and pawed at her ankle, but she only shooed him away with her foot and went back to patting Madame Elise on the arm. Agnes, who was rather ineffectually stroking the photo of Summer Rose and murmuring “poor puss-cat” over and over again, was also uninterested in the smelly portion. It was only when Oscar pressed a paw against the meat so that the sourness leaked out into the room that the humans finally sniffed the air.
“What on earth is that smell?” Madame Elise cried.
Sylvia wrinkled her nose in disgust and glanced down at Max. He nudged the parcel of steak towards her and miaowed his “I think this is worthy of investigation” miaow. Sylvia whisked her feet away and squealed.
“Urgh, Max, what have you got there?”
Madame Emerald was far more sensible. Max knew he could rely on her. She had been very brave when he had first met her in London, shimmying down drainpipes and standing up to dastardly villains.
She leaned forward and peered at the morsel on the floor.
“My dear, if I am not mistaken, this is a piece of beefsteak.” She sniffed the air and a shadow fell across her lovely features. “And I think it has been drugged.”
After that it took them very little time to piece things together. Maximilian pulled at the hem of Sylvia’s dress and they followed him upstairs, where he and Oscar drew their attention to the broken wisteria.
“And to think I thought it was one of my maids. When we have found my Summer Rose I will make it up to them. They will have a week’s holiday and tea at Alfonse’s and meringues from—”
Madame Emerald gently cut her short to suggest that she phone the gendarmes with the new information that Maximilian had found.
“You’re a marvel, Max,” Madame said as they drove away from the house. “You and your friend stopped Madame Elise from making a very unfair mistake.”
“It’s most peculiar that the latch on the window wasn’t broken by whoever stole Summer Rose,” Sylvia mused. “I wish Max could solve that mystery.”
“Someone probably forgot to close it properly,” Agnes offered, and they agreed that this seemed sensible.
But Maximilian was not so sure. The kidnapper had known that Summer Rose would be in that room at the front of the house. They had known which window to climb in at, and that must mean that they had been in the house at least once before the kidnapping. Could they have been there just before the crime and left the window unlocked on purpose?
Maximilian and Oscar discussed the possibilities on the way back to the concert hall. It was a fine spring day and Paris was beautiful, but Maximilian was so engrossed in this new mystery that he hardly took in any of it. While Agnes gasped in delight over the pink blossom in bloom on the tree-lined avenues, Maximilian was pondering who could have had access to Madame Elise’s house. While Madame pointed out the beautiful church of Sainte-Chapelle and described the stained-glass windows which were the finest in Paris, Maximilian was thinking about the wisteria’s strong trunk and sprawling stems. And when Sylvia begged them to stop the car so that she could browse through boxes of silk-covered notebooks and photograph albums at a tiny stationer nestled in one of the backstreets, Maximilian and Oscar huddled together on the back seat and put their heads together.
“Madame Elise’s wisteria is strong,” Maximilian said, “but even so, could it bear the weight of a full-grown man?”
Oscar frowned. “There were quite a few stems that had pulled away from the wall,” he said. “The trunk is strong, but to reach the balcony a thief would need to clamber across one of the smaller branches.”
“So, it would be someone small,” Maximilian mused. He sighed. There did not seem to be much to go on. Something in his whiskers tingled, the familiar sign that he was close to connecting one clue to another. He was sure that the photographs of the cats held a clue to the mystery, but still he could not work out what it was that they all had in common.
Maximilian and Oscar had not forgotten their promise to Peppi, and the next day they wandered through the city streets to find the grey cat’s apartment. Paris is very different to London, Maximilian thought. Everyone’s legs seemed to walk at half the speed, taking long strides instead of the neat hurried steps of London’s crowds. There were cafés on every corner, at which ladies in simple but beautifully cut dresses sat drinking from tiny coffee cups and nibbling at pastries dripping with chocolate. They passed by milliners’ shops, the windows full of extravagant hats overflowing with pleated silk and velvet flowers, or simply topped with a single peacock feather and jet beading. They lingered outside patisseries, where pyramids of cakes in every colour of the rainbow made Maximilian’s mouth water, and shops where jewel-like sweets tumbled out of twists of paper. And everywhere they went, the filigree shape of Eiffel’s tower followed them. Sometimes it peeped above the rooftops, only the top platform visible through the chimneys and trees. Sometimes it surprised them, ap
pearing between the streets that led down to the river Seine.
“The tower really is splendid,” said Oscar as they walked towards it through a beautifully kept park.
Maximilian agreed. It was beautiful, from its four great columns, sprawled like lion paws digging into the ground, up to the tower itself, swooping skywards, its iron girders criss-crossing over one another as it wove its way to the clouds. Maximilian could see dozens of visitors scurrying around inside like tiny mice. Thinking about mice made him think about food and how long it had been since breakfast, and whether there might be anything tasty at Peppi’s house.
They found the pink house on the other side of the park. Far from being the “tiny apartment” Peppi had described, it was a beautiful townhouse six stories high. The front overflowed with flowers cascading down from window boxes groaning under their weight. A small cream van had drawn up at the door and, from the back, an elderly delivery man was unloading yet more flowers. Vase upon vase of pink roses came spilling out of the van and were passed to a frazzled-looking young boy who bounded up the steps to the front door to hand them to a stern maid.
“Put them over there, behind the cushions,” called a voice from inside the house. Maximilian followed the sound and leapt up to an open window to peer in, followed by Oscar.
They looked into a small sitting room. Peppi sat on a pink velvet cushion that set off his beautiful grey fur to perfection. He was being carefully groomed by a girl in a striped apron while Madame Belfourte conducted an orchestra of flustered maids bearing swathes of ivy and vases bursting with roses. Beside her was a young woman dressed all in black. Her hair was slicked back against her head, one perfect round curl pinned above her right eye. She wore a monocle and stood with her arms crossed, the forefinger of one hand impatiently tapping against her arm.
The Catnap Caper Page 3
