The good thing, the detective (a very nice man with a very nice smile, Maureen thought with a slight colouring to her cheeks) assured her, was that Stan wouldn't have suffered… he was sure. He may well have been a nice man with a nice smile, Maureen thought, but he didn't know very much at all about drinking EXTERMINATE!
Would she be all right in the house overnight? (It was now after six o'clock and growing dark outside.) Maureen said that she would and, a little before seven, she was alone. Alone the way she would always be.
That night, she slept soundly.
* * *
The next morning, Maureen dressed as sombrely as she felt was appropriate and as frivolously as she felt she dare (considering her "unhappy" situation).
After a quick breakfast of Alpen and toast, Maureen left the house early and got the bus to Bradford, where she spent the day wandering around the shops and practicing how she would respond to all the expressions of condolence she would have to endure.
Where the time went, she didn't know.
For lunch, she had egg and chips, bread and butter, two pots of tea, and a jam doughnut from a cafe in the market— it was greasy, a little on the tasteless side, and the doughnut was rock-hard, but to Maureen Walker (newly-made widow of the parish) it was a banquet fit for a queen… and all for less than two pounds.
More shop-wandering (and practising) in the afternoon and then a visit to the cinema— alone: She felt
so daring!
—to see a film called
Dark City
that she thought might be a thriller, but she couldn't understand it: All it seemed to be was a load of buildings growing up out of the ground and then shrinking down into it again, and the ending showed them all out in outer space. Things had come a long way since the likes of Cary Grant and Alan Ladd and, in Maureen's opinion, the trip hadn't been worth the effort.
On the bus going home, Maureen realised that tomorrow she would have to make all the necessary arrangements. Staring out of the windows onto the black countryside, she tried to make a list in her head of how many people she would need to cater for… wondering whether to have a go at making the sandwiches herself or buying them in.
Letting herself into the house, she felt tired and, suddenly, just a little lost. It would pass: It was just the excitement of the past couple of days. She made sure the doors were well locked— going back to them twice to double-check— and made a cup of camomile tea to go to bed with. No sooner had she drained the last dregs, watching her foot stray under the covers into the cool of Stan's side of the bed, than she settled down and drifted off into a deep sleep in which she dreamt of buildings growing up all around her and hemming her in.
The next day, her second morning of freedom, Maureen slept in.
It was after nine o'clock when she was disturbed by a noise downstairs.
She opened her eyes wide and listened.
What had that been? Had it been the stealthy sound of a slippered foot on the stairs… the sound of her husband, returned from the morgue in Halifax General (a journey that had taken Stan a full day and a night to make), slurring along the lonely lanes to Luddersedge to arrive with the—
The postman! That was what it had been.
Maureen got out of bed, slipped into her slippers, and pulled on her dressing gown.
On the way downstairs, she could see the single letter on the doormat. Another brown job.
Maureen lifted it up.
Somewhere nearby, a car engine sounded… growing louder.
The letter wasn't even addressed to them but to
Luddersedge Development, Ltd
.… in a swirling, italicised script, at their address for some reason. That disappointed Maureen. Here she was on the first day of the rest of her life and the whole thing had been kicked off with a mistake.
She shuffled the letter inside the envelope until another line appeared above Luddersedge Development Ltd. The line read:
Stanley Walker Esq., Chairman
.
Maureen frowned.
She stretched and turned the envelope over, slitting it open with her finger and removing the single sheet.
As she scanned the letter, she noted that the car engine had stopped. It had stopped somewhere nearby.
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 Buggers
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 Buggers," was first published in the January 2000 issue of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
.
Twelve of the Little Buggers
Mat Coward
M
iddle 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 fashionable 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 buggers."
"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, hell, 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.