The World's Finest Mystery Part 28

Maureen read, "Good to meet you yesterday after so many conversations on the telephone," the letter began. It was from a firm of solicitors in Park Place, Leeds... someone called K. Broadhurst.

Maureen felt the first stirrings of anxiety.

The letter went on to congratulate Stanley and the three fellow members of his (his! Stanley's?) consortium on their acquisition of the allotment plots on Honeydew Lane. "As I pointed out yesterday, the proceeds of the eventual transaction" (K. Broadhurst continued) "will be considerable" and (he/she was delighted to inform Stan) the purchaser was now prepared to consider "a high-end six-figure sum, but one which was not expected to exceed 800,000." When payment to the council had been made- and their own fees deducted, K. Broadhurst seemed keen to point out- the resulting sum should be in the region of 550,000.

Maureen's eyes grew wider and wider as she finished the letter (the signature looked like it might be Kenneth Broadhurst, although the two words were little more than elongated squiggles) and then read it again.

It was The Big One: He had done it. Stanley had brought it off.

When the doorbell rang, Maureen had stopped wondering whether clinching The Big One could ever really be considered a sensible reason to drink a tipple of Black Sheep mixed with EXTERMINATE!

As she made her way to the front door she was worrying that perhaps she should have disposed of the bottle in someone else's dustbin. Or whether any EXTERMINATE! traces had rubbed off on her light-blue Marigolds.

Or even- Maureen thought almost idly as she fast-forwarded all the events of that fateful day- what the police might make of a man who was able to open a can of poison one-handed.

When she opened the door, Maureen was not surprised at all to see that the nice detective wasn't smiling today.

Mat Coward.

Twelve of the Little b.u.g.g.e.rs.

MAT COWARD'S stories and novels have become one of Great Britain's most delightful exports. Coward writes with a tart tongue and pitiless eye, and yet there is a pleasing tomfoolery in much of his work, a tone of forgiveness for our foibles missing in so much crime fiction today. Our first selection by him, "Twelve of the Little b.u.g.g.e.rs," was first published in the January 2000 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Twelve of the Little b.u.g.g.e.rs.

Mat Coward.

Middle of September, one of my editors rang- would I like to do a jokey piece on cats?

"Cats?" I said.

"Right," said Jenni. "Like, we were talking it over in the office, and we thought, you know- robins, turkeys, reindeer, et cetera et cetera, puddings..."

I couldn't immediately see the connection. "Puddings?" I said.

"Right," said Jenni. "I mean, only three more planning months to Christmas, right?"

"Oh," I said. "The Christmas number. Gotcha."

"Right," said Jenni. "So we thought- no: Let's do cats. Not very Christmas-y, but, you know, different. Cute. Nice big puddy-tat on the cover. Lots of interior pics, lots of colour. Kittens peeking playfully out of Christmas stockings. Lovely tabby mummy-cats posing proudly on Yuletide logs. Sweet old toms dozing amid the prezzies, 'neath the glittering tree. And then, seasonal cat stories. Tragic tales of cats given as gifts, but with, like, happy endings. A hundred and one things you can buy your kitty for Christmas. Recipes-"

"Instead of turkey?"

She laughed one of those editorial laughs; the very short sort, because even if editors had a sense of humour they certainly wouldn't have time to indulge it with only three planning months left before Christmas.

I've only met Jenni once in the flesh- what there is of it. She really doesn't have anything much but teeth; that and a slight lisp, which is, in fact, so slight that I tend to doubt its authenticity. First time she commissioned me, she took me to lunch at a reasonably fas.h.i.+onable West End Italian place. I drank imported beer; she ordered mineral water. She asked the waiter for a yogurt- a main-course yogurt, right? -and seemed pretty surprised when he told her they didn't have any. So she just ate bread sticks instead.

I ordered the whole menu.

I could tell now, by listening to her on the phone, that she had that habit of twisting her professionally frazzled hair around her fingers while she spoke; not from coquetry, though, but from repressed, generalized irritation.

"Special celebration recipes. What to feed Tiddles while the family's enjoying the mince pies."

"Yes, I get it," I said, in case she thought I was still confused.

"And, of course, humour."

"Of course," I said. That's what I do: I write humour for humourless magazines. Been doing it all my life. I could have done something else, I suppose. Could have become a mercenary, for instance, but I didn't fancy the training.

"So we thought, you know, Jim Potter. Jim's our man for a spot of cat humour."

"I'm flattered." I wasn't.

"Well," said Jenni, "you're the best, Jim." I wasn't. "We were thinking, you know, urban cats. An A through Z feature, maybe. Or a 'Twenty Crazy Things You Never Knew About.' Or whatever you like."

"Fine," I said. "How many words you want?"

"Well, we were thinking, you know, you could go to twelve, maybe. Or eight, with a big photo."

"I'll do eight," I said. Jenni's magazine pays a flat rate, not according to word count. "When do you need the copy?"

"Ummm... how about yesterday?" she asked playfully.

"Tricky," I replied, coyly.

"Okay. Week tomorrow?"

"No prob."

"By the way, Jim, I ought to check- you have got a cat yourself? Only if you haven't, you know, sorry, I should have said..."

"Oh yeah," I said.

"Oh, really? That's great! I thought you must have. We've got this survey in the Christmas issue, says that men in their thirties living alone are almost always cat persons."

"Oh yeah," I said. "Matter of fact, I've got twelve of the little b.u.g.g.e.rs."

"Twelve!" she squealed. "That's great! You must really love cats!"

The girl's a genius.

I wrote the piece the next day- "Urban Cats: An Unreliable History" -then waited a week until the deadline was up, and faxed it through. Jenni rang to say she loved it. Then she rang again ten minutes later and said my "stuff" was so fabulous, she was putting it on the cover. More money, obviously. Quite a lot more, you know, money. Actually.

"And then we were talking about it, and we thought- you know, let's get some pics."

"Great," I said.

"You know," she said, "of your cats. All twelve of them. Wouldn't that be great?"

"Oh yeah," I said.

"Great! So, listen, no time to waste, I'll send a photographer round this afternoon, okay? About five, five-thirty?"

"Oh yeah," I said. "Great."

Then we rang off, and I thought: Jesus-in-a-manger- where am I supposed to get twelve cats from, by five o'clock this afternoon?

The woman at the cat rescue centre wasn't all that helpful. "You want to provide a new home for twelve cats?"

"No, h.e.l.l, that's the last thing I want to do, I don't even like cats. I just want to borrow them for a couple of hours. Really, they'll be back here before anyone notices they've gone."

"You want to borrow twelve cats?"

"Listen, don't get hung up on the number. Half a dozen'd probably do. I could say they'd eaten the others."

"You want to borrow six cats?"

"Yeah. One thing; do you deliver? I'm a bit tied up this afternoon, that would really be a great help."

"I don't know if this is some kind of joke, or what, but I think you don't understand what we do here. This isn't Feline Express. We don't keep a fleet of moonlighting students on mopeds, biking Cats-With-Everything direct to your door, thirty minutes max or your money back. We don't- what I'm trying to say is- we don't lend cats. Okay? This isn't the National Whiskers Library."

I thought that over for a moment. "Look, if it's a matter of money, I'd be more than happy to put a couple of quid in the collecting tin. Or in your own private collecting tin, if that'd be better."

And then, while she was telling me that she hoped we might meet one day, because she knew a vet who could be relied upon to keep his scissors open and his mouth shut, I suddenly remembered the allotments.

I don't do gardening myself (as you'll know if you've ever read my column, "How Not To Do Gardening," in Gardener's Week Magazine), but the quickest route from my house to the pub is via a footpath that runs alongside a little river, right past the allotments- and even I know what an allotment site is: a patch of wasteland divided up into strips, which the local council rents out to residents, mostly old people and food faddists, so that they can grow their own fruit and veg there. Though why anyone should want to bother, when they're lucky enough to live in a country with perfectly good burger bars conveniently situated on every street corner, is far beyond my powers of explanation.

The point is, however, this: What did I often see on those allotments, on my way to and from the boozerama? Cats. I saw cats. Loads of them. Stray cats, presumably. Well, either that, or gardening cats.

Never having had a cat, I didn't know what kind of gear you needed to catch them. So I just grabbed everything I could think of: a big sack, a length of wood, a tin of date-expired treacle, a box of candles, and a whistle.

Took me two hours. Partly, that was because I kept losing count. It's not easy- and if you ever have anything to do with cats yourself, you might want to remember this- it's not easy to count cats in a big sack. Eventually, I had a brainwave: What did it matter if I got too many cats? I mean, if there were thirteen of them, I could just tell the photographer that one of the little b.u.g.g.e.rs had had a baby, right?

Don't ask me to describe the cats. They were various colours. I don't know what you call cat colours. Some were sort of splodgy, some sort of spotty, some sort of stripy. And some were sort of splodgy and spotty and stripy all at once. They were various sizes.

They were cats, anyway, so I took them home.

I just about reached the gate when all of a sudden there was a man standing in front of me holding his arms out like a recently demoted traffic cop. I didn't like the look of him: a long, cruel face, a superior scowl. Fair enough, though- he obviously didn't like the look of me, either.

"What have you got in that sack?"

"In the sack?"

"What's moving about in your sack?"

"Oh, yeah. Tortoises," I explained.

"Tortoises?" Like he didn't believe me.

"Certainly," I said. "Just picked 'em up in those woods back there."

Trying to edge round me, trying to get a good squeeze at my cat-sack, he said: "There are no tortoises in those woods, for heaven's sake."

"Of course there aren't," I said, "I got them all in this sack."

"What for?" he sneered.

"For? Why, for my three kids, naturally. They love tortoises, but the way they get through them, I can't afford to keep buying them. Kids, huh? So I thought: Hey, do it yourself!"

He sneered on in silence.

"So I'm taking them home for... for little Gerald," I said. "And..." The man waited. "And for little Geraldine."

"That's only two children," he said, unpleasantly.

"Well, not really," I said, "because you see, the third one's also called Geraldine, due to, like, y'know, a mix-up at the hospital."

He started to say something that apparently began with "You-" but then he stopped, and I realised he was staring over my shoulder. Turning round, I saw in the distance, back by the entrance to the woods, a scruffy young guy in a combat jacket, striding towards us.

"You just stay away from those cats. Got it?" And with that the interrogation was broken off, as the long-faced vigilante disappeared through a gap in the bushes.

Weird behaviour. But then, once people let cats into their lives, they do strange things. That's a medical fact.

Home safe, with about thirty minutes to spare, I unleashed the cats. Then I poured a gigantic vodka, lit a small cigar, and relaxed.

Carl, the pointlessly enthusiastic, ponytailed lensman- bright orange s.h.i.+rt, collar size XXL- was pretty impressed with my cats. "Great cats!" he said. "They're so- I dunno, they're so wild, aren't they?"

"Oh yeah," I said. "They really are."

"They just never keep still for a moment, do they? Rus.h.i.+ng around like crazy things!"