More Cats in the Belfry (18 page)

  The earth and small stones could be spread over the lane, I told him. It would help build up the surface. But the larger stones had better be put in the long grass on the verges, behind the part I kept cut. I didn't want them damaging my neighbours' car axles.

  So they delved and dug and loaded the debris into a wheelbarrow, which Norm trundled out into the lane, putting the large stones where I directed and spreading the rest over the lane surface under my supervision. When I decided he could be left to get on by himself I came indoors to do something else. An hour or so later I made them a cup of tea, and while they were drinking it I wandered out into the lane to look and nearly had a fit.

  Piles of rubble dotted the surface like molehills, obviously tipped straight out of the wheelbarrow and left. Each one had its quota of rocks and large stones sticking out of it like bumps on a landmine. All it needed was Poppy Richards to come down from her cottage in her car, or Miss Wellington to prospect past in the other direction, for the fat to be really in the fire.

  Why hadn't he spread the stuff out as I'd asked him? I demanded of the hapless Norm. He'd dumped so many stones on the verges there weren't no more room – they kept rollin' down, he said. And Bill was shovellin' so fast he din't have time to level out the loads before he had to run back with the wheelbarrow. 'Keeps I goin' till I nearly meets meself comin' back,' he assured me. 'An' Bill said the cars 'ould level it out.'

  So there was nothing for it but to get out there with a rake, scramble the rubble about as best I could, and heave the big stones on to the verges further up the lane. Thank goodness I got it done before Miss Wellington came past on surveillance bent and said how nice it was of me to be improving Poppy's surface for her.

  We did our best, I panted weakly. After which Bill and Norm departed, informing me that they'd be back on Monday to do the cementing – Bill had Monday off and Norm, it seemed, was temporarily jobless – and I went indoors and lay on the floor to try to unwind my back with Tani and Saphra sitting pointedly beside me asking me what on earth I was doing lying about like that. Didn't I know it was time for their Tea?

T
he only real snag on Monday was that Bill arrived at 8 a.m. with the cement mixer he'd hired from the DIY and Norm, who must have been brighter than he looked, didn't turn up till nine, whizzing down independently on his motor-bike. This meant my having to help Bill unload the mixer from the home-made camper in which he'd brought it – the camper having been converted by Bill from a secondhand ambulance. The cement mixer got caught on a bed-fitting inside the van; we had a job to unhook it and it was a hazardous job lowering it to the ground; but by the time Norm arrived saying sorry he was late but he had to do an errand for his mum, it was in situ in the yard with Bill busy churning up the first brew of cement in it and I was able to retire and feel my back for signs of breakage while the two of them got on with laying the path round the rear of the cottage, watched by Tani and Saphra from the cat-house window.

  They were there so they couldn't get on the cement – or into the mixer, which would have been a distinct probability with Saphra. They stayed there until the path was finished and Bill and Norm went home, having got the cement mixer on board the camper without my assistance. Bill gave strict instructions that the path should be left for two days to set hard before anybody walked on it, so I blocked it at either end with chicken wire and made sure the cats didn't go anywhere near it on their way down from the cat-house, and we settled down for the evening.

  I settled, that is, glad that the job was over without too much upheaval. The cats, aware that something interesting had been going on behind the cottage and if they got up into the horizontal window that looked out on to the hillside they could peer downwards and see what it was, spent the evening glued to the glass, making chittering comments at intervals as a mouse or some other denizen of the night trekked, I hoped light-footedly, along the new path. Around eleven I lured them up to the bedroom with a few cat-biscuits while I came down to finally lock up. I checked everything and went up again leaving the sitting-room door propped open: that way they could come down to look out of the windows some more if they liked, but I'd made sure they couldn't get out to the kitchen, and that the outer doors were bolted without a cat's being on the wrong side of them, which was still one of Saphra's chief ambitions.

  As soon as I re-opened the bedroom door the cats erupted through it like greyhounds out of a starting trap, pelting down to resume their vigil at the window. I got into bed and started to read while I waited for them to come back again. They didn't usually stay down there very long. I had a book called
The Cat Who Ate Danish
Modern
by Lilian Jackson Braun, the writer of a series of American whodunnits whose hero is a seal-point Siamese called Koko, who helps his journalist owner solve some extremely baffling murders. In this one the Danish Modern that Koko ate was not, as I'd expected, some kind of pastry he'd taken a fancy to, but a style of furniture whose upholstery he persisted in chewing, not only ruining it in the traditional Siamese manner but thereby providing valuable clues which eventually solved the mystery. He was also in the process of acquiring a female Siamese companion who was to become his accomplice in further adventures.

  As if two masked Machiavellis of my own were not enough, I was absorbed in the machinations of this other pair. I read and read. Tani came up and sat upright on the bed waiting for Saphra to join her: she will never settle for the night without him. I read on. Saphra still didn't appear. There must be something riveting outside the downstairs windows, I thought detachedly...

  I must have fallen asleep. Suddenly I woke up, still clutching the book. Somebody was hammering on the front door. I looked at the alarm clock. Ten past three in the morning. The bedside lamp was still on. Tani and Saphra were curled up asleep beside me.

  Mind working like clockwork... maybe it was would-be intruders, seeing the light and pretending a breakdown to gain an entry: never open the front door to anybody after dark was my motto... I slipped out of bed and through the bedroom door, closing it so that the cats couldn't follow me, crept into the spare room without putting on the light, opened the window and called out 'Yes? Who's there?'

  A torch shone upwards on to a peaked cap and checked hatband and a voice replied quietly 'Police.'

  They were after somebody! They wanted my assistance! Just as I'd been reading in
The Cat Who Ate Danish
Modern
. How could I help them? I enquired, in unruffled control of the situation. They'd known the right one to come to. I hadn't been on the Parish Council for fourteen years for nothing.

  'Are you all right?' asked the policeman, still very quietly.

  Puzzled, I said 'Yes.'

  'Only all your lights are on and all your curtains are pulled back,' he went on. 'Your neighbours noticed it when they drove down the hill a while ago and they were worried and rang us. Are you sure everything's all right inside?'

  I leaned out and looked down. The policeman was right. Light was streaming out across the lawn from all three sitting-room windows. Behind me it was shining out through the bedroom window too – naturally, as I'd fallen asleep with the bedside lamp on. To the right, the hall light illuminated the yard and fishpool. Seen from the road down the hill, it must have looked as if a space ship had landed. I had a good idea how it had happened, too, but I kept my counsel for the moment, just in case. 'If you wait a moment, I'll come down and look around,' I told them.

  I opened the bedroom door, grabbed my dressing gown, shut the door once more on the cats and crept downstairs. The policeman and his companions, who'd been out in the lane reporting back to base from the squad car­ presumably in case they needed reinforcements – were now positioned outside the middle sitting-room window. I opened it, the picture of calmness and confidence, and said 'All's well so far. I'll just look round the back of the cottage.'

  'You're sure you wouldn't like us to do it?' asked the first policeman.

  'No, I'll be all right,' I said. Leaving them no doubt thinking what a courageous female I was, I inspected the kitchen and lobby beyond it, peered up the newly cemented path with a torch... I was certain there'd be nothing there and there wasn't... and back I went to the policeman. 'Everything's all right,' I assured them. 'I fell asleep reading. I've had a heavy day and must have overlooked the other lights. And' – my voice dropped at this: I didn't know how they were going to take it – 'I've got Siamese cats who like to look out of the windows at night and I always pull the curtains back so they can.'

  Their faces were a study. I could see it even in the semi-darkness. I bet they'd never heard anything like that before. 'Glad everything's all right, then. Goodnight,' they chorused weakly and retreated to the squad car, no doubt to phone the station again and wonder whether the sergeant would believe it.

  The lights were on at the Reasons' cottage down the lane, too. I phoned them, though it was still not four in the morning. They were probably up and wondering, I thought. And sure enough they were. They'd been to a birthday party, said Janet. Peter had come up with the dog when they got in, and had thrown gravel at my bedroom window, but I hadn't answered so they'd phoned the police in case... I thanked them for doing it, went back to bed, and told the cats it was all their fault and Bill's. Theirs for insisting on looking out of the windows at night and Bill's for making me help unload the cement mixer. My back would never be the same again, I informed the world in general and the bedroom ceiling in particular, and what the police, and now the neighbours, would think...

  I stayed awake the rest of the night worrying about it and next day, believe it or not, I did it again. Went to a local seaside town to do some shopping, took a picnic lunch to eat in the car on the front, sat listening to the news on the radio afterwards – and the next thing I knew, there was a policeman tapping at the car window asking if I was all right. He and his mate had noticed me with my head on the steering wheel as they drove past, he said, and they wondered if I felt ill.

  Only tired, I told them. I hadn't had much sleep the previous night. I didn't tell them about the cats, but I had no doubt that there were two police stations in Somerset that day where I went down in the records as an Incident. With either O for Odd or P for Peculiar against my name. Not, as it should have been if there were any justice in this world, SC for Siamese Cats. A week or so later, too, I looked out of the cottage window and saw yet another police car pulled up outside. I wondered what I'd done this time – went out to see, and it was a young policeman who said he was new on the beat and wanted to get acquainted with the valley. I've often wondered since if he was really checking whether I was still showing signs of strange behaviour.

  My neighbours would probably have assured him that I
was
peculiar. Always had been. Even Poppy Richards, I was sure, thought I was slightly odd. I was going up the hill in the car one morning when I met her driving down the other way. There wasn't room for us to pass each other, so she drew to one side in a gateway and flashed her headlights for me to go on – which I did, only to spot a blackbird in the road ahead of me, pottering about picking up bits.

  It made no move to fly away. Other than Miss Wellington's doves, birds don't around here. They know that no-one in the valley would hurt them. There are pheasants in the forest who congregate on the woodshed roof like sparrows, and flutter down around my head like homing pigeons when I go out to give them corn. I couldn't wait, though, as I normally would have done, for the blackbird to move at its leisure. Poppy Richards was waiting to come down. So I hooted – something Charles had always told me to do, faced with a non-moving bird. They didn't like sudden noise, he said, and would straightaway take off like rockets. The blackbird did, twittering angrily at my colossal cheek. Blasted Woman Driver, it was probably saying. Poppy Richards wouldn't have noticed the blackbird, though, not as far away as she was. Only that I hooted loudly, zoomed up the hill and passed her, hand half-raised in acknowledgment but looking straight ahead. I couldn't look at her – I was going round the corner, where there is rock sticking out of the bank, but that presumably didn't occur to her. That evening she appeared on my doorstep, extremely frosty-faced, asking what she'd done wrong. 'Nothing,' I said, explaining that I'd been hooting at a bird, but I felt sure she didn't believe me.

  A curt nod and a 'Goodnight then', and she was gone, slamming the gate as she went. It was a pity, because there was something I wanted to ask her. Something which had me extremely curious.