Was there a gingery one? "Oh yeah," I said.
"Great! So, like, what do you call her?"
"Stinking rat," I said.
"Stinking
what?
"
"Er— no, no. Not stinking. Slinking. Slinking Cat."
"Oh, that's
sweet
."
"Slinky for short."
"Oh, that is so sweet!"
"Oh yeah," I said. "Well, she's a sweet cat. Glad you like her."
"Love her,"
said Jenni. "In fact, what we were thinking was, you know, why don't we send Carl over again, get him to do some more pics? Just of Slinky, you know, make a bit of a feature of her."
"Great," I said. "Some more pics. Great idea."
"Well, you know, we're talking about maybe even a calendar. You know, like a spin-off. She's really a special little puss. My publisher's own personal idea, actually. First one he's had for ages! Whoops, no, he's, you know, smashing, actually. Anyway, if it works out, we could actually pay you some, you know, truly decent money for once. I mean, the publisher's just given me this cheque with, like, a signature at the bottom and nothing else! So, what do you think, Jim?"
"Oh yeah," I said. "Totally fabulous."
* * *
A flashlight. A writer on the edge of madness. The allotments by night.
"Slinky… Slinky… C'mere, Slinky…"
What the hell was I calling her
Slinky
for, for God's sake?
* * *
Yup, that was Slinky all right. Sitting on my bed, eating chili con carne from a plastic washing-up bowl. I could tell by comparing her with the big photo Jenni had faxed me. Good old Slinky, my sweet little, special little golden goose.
There was a knock on the door.
* * *
The man now standing in my hall was angry. He was also fiftyish, well-dressed, greyly bald, and the same boney bloke who'd doubted my tortoises on the allotments the other day. But mostly he was angry.
"It's
my
cat, Mr. Potter. You have stolen my cat, and I demand its return. Without any further argument. Understand?"
"Must be some mistake, Dr. Lane. My little Slinky and me, we—"
"Look! I saw you take the damn cat. From the allotments. I was down there looking for her— because she was missing, right? And I saw you take her, and I followed you home. Now hand her over, please."
"Ah," I said. "I think I can solve this misunderstanding." I dragged a crumpled twenty-pound note from my back pocket. "I'll keep Slinky, my beloved pet of long-standing, and you take this and get another cat."
"Twenty pounds?" he yelled.
"Hey, if you're proud, I can respect that. We'll go halves. A tenner each."
Sounded fair to me, but what I hadn't counted on was that the phrase
get another cat
turned out to mean "Why don't you stick this in your ear and twist it?" in Dr. Lane-language. Must have done, I reckoned, because Lane was really horrified.
"Get another cat?" he gasped.
I don't know if you've ever been to one of those weddings where everybody keeps throwing up on the bride's mother? But if you have, then picture in your mind the expression the bride's mother was wearing by the end of a long day, and you'll know just how much disgust one face can be made to contain.
"You obviously know nothing of cats, Mr. Potter, or you would realise that when one loses one's cat one doesn't just go out and buy another one."
"Sure," I said. "I can understand that. I'll tell you what, how about a
dozen
cats? Hey, think about it: If dry-cleaners took compensation that seriously, they'd all go out of business, right?"
He looked at me as if I'd just escaped the noose on an insanity plea, and marched out of the house, down the street, without another word.
"Seriously, Dr. Lane," I called after him. "I'm not kidding! I know where I can lay my hands on more cats than a faith-healer in a violin factory!"
* * *
So, okay: When I got home from the pub two days later to find one of my ground-floor windows broken open, and the house doing a neat imitation of a Slinky-Free Zone, it wasn't exactly a three-pipe puzzle.
But, honestly. All that fuss over a cat? After all, Lane didn't know how much Slinky was worth.
I had about three hours before Carl arrived to take the portfolio which, with any luck, would keep me in sunshine holidays for the next three winters.
* * *
"Should've called you Lucky," I told Slinky, as I stuffed her back into the sack which, by now, was becoming like her second home. "I never thought nasty old Dr. Lane would be idiotic enough to let you out to play on the allotments so soon."
Which was when Dr. Lane, approaching unobserved from the rear, slammed his fist into my spine, shouting: "You moron! You've no idea what you're interfering with here!"
What I had no idea of was why a grown doctor should be willing to assault a virtual stranger just to keep possession of a gingery cat with a kinky tail. What I did have an idea of, however, was that Lane had a big stick in his hand, and was just about mad enough to use it on me as I lay sprawled at his feet. His grey face was red now.
On an impulse, I swung the sack, Slinky and all, right into his belly. The cat screamed; he didn't. He just tripped, fell, and landed with a splash in the shallow river. A splash and a thud, the latter caused by the sudden connection of his head with a rock.
I stared at him for about a minute. He didn't move.
* * *
I was still a little shaky when Carl arrived, but the vodka was helping.
"Where're all the other cats?" he asked, as I should have guessed he would.
"Who knows where staff go on their afternoons off?" I replied, haughtily. "To the pictures, I expect."
Carl laughed (which used up about ten minutes of the day, right off), took his photos, and eventually left. Slinky had chili for dinner. I had vodka.
* * *
When a noise in the hall woke me the next morning, I thought for a moment it was one of Slinky's old mates discovering how to enter a house through the letter box. But it was the local paper, with a stop-press item announcing the suspicious death of Dr. Reginald Lane, 54, research scientist, at his home in River Walk.
At his home?
Police were said to be unable to explain why, when found dead sitting in a sun-lounger on his veranda, Dr. Lane (who had been shot twice in the lower body at short range) was wearing wet clothing and had a crude, apparently self-applied, freshly blood-stained bandage on his head.
The mystery— for me— only lasted until the lunchtime TV news, which reported that an animal-rights activist had confessed to the "justified execution of a mass-murderer." Lane had been right; I'd had no idea what I was interfering with.
Far from being an aggrieved pet lover, the doctor was actually what that Sunday's tabloids called a vivisectionist. Slinky— and all the other cats on the allotments— had been part of an experiment, a deeply illegal experiment, it transpired, designed to develop a rapidly contagious but easily contained feline disease.
Quite who was sponsoring Lane's alfresco laboratory has never been established, but speculation centered on the government, on the property developers, on all the usual suspects. At any rate, some people, it seems, do not value urban feral-cat populations in quite the way that I have come to value them.
And I certainly do value Slinky. I do. The calendar—
Slinky's Big Year
(text by J. Potter) —will be, Jenni's marketing colleagues assure me, the biggest-selling gift item nationwide next Christmas. There is talk of an animated television series. Two book publishers are bidding for the rights to Slinky's autobiography, which I am to ghostwrite (well, yeah,
obviously
). I'll have to make up some amusing adventures for her. The truth, I think, would not do at all.
Which brings me to why I'm writing this strictly private memoir.
* * *
The remaining allotment cats were rounded up by the council's vet and taken away for tests "as a precaution." There was really no cause for concern, the authorities insisted, but just to be on the safe side…
(I bet they ended up on some health farm, all chili con carne and Ping-Pong and free booze, and all at the public's expense. While your average humourist has to virtually kill himself just to meet the mortgage. Ask me, the welfare state saps enterprise. Look at Slinky: She got herself a career, she didn't sit around waiting for handouts.)
I don't know if you've ever lived in close proximity to a cat which may or may not be carrying an unidentified bug, which may or may not be transferable to humans, and which may or may not kill you at some time in the future. But if you have, then you'll know that it's something that tends to worry you a little.
But really, most of the time I'm too busy worrying about what it's going to be like entering the super-tax bracket.
Still, "just to be on the safe side…"
If I should predecease my Aunty Cissie, I would like her to inherit my copyrights and royalties. And please, whoever reads this, tell her I'm terribly sorry I never visited her.
I'm not, in fact, but what I always say is: Being nice doesn't cost anything, does it?
At least, it doesn't when it doesn't cost anything.
Peter Robinson
Missing in Action
PETER ROBINSON
is one of the finest writers to come out of the cold northern lands of Canada in recent years, with numerous appearances in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, in other anthologies, and writing some of the best mystery novels of the past decade. Like many others in our collection, his name and fame are growing with each new story or book. "Missing in Action," first published in
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
in November of 2000, has it all, his wry voice, a spot-on sense of history, and a keep-you-reading-until-the-last-page whodunit plot.
Missing in Action
Peter Robinson
P
eople go missing all the time in war, of course, but not usually nine-year-old boys. Besides, the war had hardly begun. It was only the twentieth of September, 1939, when Mary Critchley came hammering on my door at about three o'clock, interrupting my afternoon nap.
It was a Wednesday, and normally I would have been teaching the fifth-formers Shakespeare at Silverhill Grammar School (a thankless task if ever there was one), but the Ministry had just got around to constructing air-raid shelters there, so the school was closed for the week. We didn't even know if it was going to reopen, because the idea was to evacuate all the children to safer areas in the countryside. Now, I would be among the first to admit that a teacher's highest aspiration is a school without pupils, but in the meantime the government, in its eternal wisdom, put us redundant teachers to such complex, intellectual tasks as preparing ration cards for the Ministry of Food. (After all,
they
knew what was coming.)
All this was just a small part of the chaos that seemed to reign at that time. Not the chaos of war, the kind I remembered from the trenches at Ypres in 1917, but the chaos of government bureaucracies trying to organize the country for war.
Anyway, I was fortunate enough to become Special Constable, which is a rather grandiose title for a sort of part-time dogsbody, and that was why Mary Critchley came running to me. That and what little reputation I had for solving people's problems.
"Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!" she cried. "It's our Johnny. He's gone missing. You must help."
My name is actually
Bascombe
, Frank Bascombe, but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the mispronunciation. Still, with half the city's children running wild in the streets and the other half standing on crowded station platforms clutching their Mickey Mouse gas masks in little cardboard boxes, ready to be herded into trains bound for such nearby country havens as Graythorpe, Kilsden, and Acksham, I thought perhaps she was overreacting a tad, and I can't say I welcomed her arrival after only about twenty of my allotted forty winks.
"He's probably out playing with his mates," I told her.
"Not my Johnny," she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. "Not since… you know…"
I knew. Mr. Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the fleet carrier
Courageous
, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland just three days ago. Over 500 men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially "missing in action."
I also knew young Johnny Critchley, and thought him to be a serious boy, a bit too imaginative and innocent for his own good. (Well, many are at that age, aren't they, before the world grabs them by the balls and shakes some reality into them.) Johnny trusted everyone, even strangers.