The First of Nine Page 3

  Wendy wondered what she was writing into her pad.

  She sipped at her tea. It was too weak. Wendy liked the tea bag left in. ‘I was going to tell you about that cobble today,’ she told the police officer. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘You could say that. They detected Mr Morris’s blood on it.’

  ‘You think whoever did it used that cobble?’

  ‘The police are questioning the resident of No. 19 Avondale Terrace… The fact that the cobblestone was found in his garden doesn’t mean that he did it. It’s more than likely that whoever did it, threw it over the wall as they left the scene.’

  ‘I heard he’s a strange fish,’ Wendy said. ‘Lives by himself and never opens his curtains. He wears one of those army coats. Though I doubt he’s ever served a day in his life.’

  ‘He’s being questioned at present, Mrs Morris.’

  ‘Call me Wendy. Less of this Mrs Morris.’

  The police officer took a sip of her tea. ‘So you didn’t hear anything the night before last?’

  ‘No. I sleep like a log. I’ve already told them that.’

  ‘And what about Mr Morris? When did he go to bed?’

  ‘He goes to bed early… Went to bed early, I mean. Always up with the birds, he was. But I like to stay up and watch the telly.’

  ‘We’ve had more than one person say they heard raised voices in the night. A man and a woman, perhaps? You didn’t hear anything?’

  ‘The first I knew something was up was when that girl screamed... A man and a woman, you say?’

  ‘We’ve had differing reports. Different people heard different things. It’s quite usual.’

  They sipped at their mugs of tea.

  ‘They meant the world to him those birds,’ Wendy said. ‘He used to show them. Ethel won best in show at Pickering last year. He got his photo in his magazine. Ever so proud he was.’

  She got up and went into the front room. The curtains had not been opened since the night Peter had been murdered, and wouldn’t be opened again until he was in the ground.

  A minute later she returned with a yellowed magazine. She opened it to an array of faded photographs.

  ‘That’s Peter,’ she said, pointing her finger at a photograph.

  Peter Morris cradled Ethel to his chest with one hand, a rosette held in the other. He smiled at the camera. He had pointed features with protruding eyebrows. He was bald on top and the hair at the sides of his head was silver. He stooped slightly like tall men sometimes do.

  ‘He was a handsome man,’ the police officer said.

  Wendy swept a tear from her cheek with her forefinger. She wiped her hand on the front of her apron.

  ‘I am sorry,’ the police officer said.

  ‘Sorry isn’t going to bring him back.’

  The police woman shook her head.

  ‘I keep expecting him to come through that door,’ Wendy said.

  She stood up and went over to the kitchen sink, the half-drunk mug of weak tea in her hand. She poured the tea down the side of the bowl and looked out of the window. Through the trellis, she glimpsed a silver grey outline. ‘It’s that silly girl’s cat,’ she said. ‘Returned to the scene of the crime. They do that, don’t they?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The criminal. They return to the scene of the crime, don’t they?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  The police officer stood up.

  ‘The pigeon that went missing,’ Wendy said. ‘I reckon it was that cat that had it…’

  The police officer approached the window but Theodore had already jumped down. ‘Our priority is to find out who killed your husband.’

  ‘Peter was paranoid about cats,’ Wendy said. ‘Paranoid that one would get at his birds. That’s why he put the barbed wire on top of the fence and installed the lighting. He had it set so that even if a cat jumped on the wall, it’d come on…

  ‘If owt got into the yard, he’d be out there in a flash.’

  ‘So if someone had got in, the light would have come on and Peter would have gone down to investigate?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  The police officer scribbled again in her pad.

  Wendy was sure that she had already said all of this just yesterday but to a different police officer.

  As Theodore made his way home in the late afternoon, something nagged at his mind. ‘It’s more than likely that whoever did it, threw the cobblestone over the wall as they left the scene,’ the police officer had said. Theodore pondered the police officer’s assertion and could not fault it. Whoever had killed Peter Morris had thrown the bloody cobble over the back wall of No. 19.

  Would Craig have left the cobblestone in his own back yard?

  It was possible but now seemed unlikely.

  But if Craig wasn’t the killer, who had murdered Mr Morris? What had happened to Ethel the missing pigeon? Was there in fact a link between the missing bird and the dead pensioner?

  And, more importantly – had Emily filled his food bowls?

  The Missing Birman Cat

  Emily was not yet home. Theodore stared for some minutes at his empty food bowls. Then he went into the front room and lay in the bay window, on the folded woollen blanket that covered the wooden chest. The chest contained board games that were never played but Theodore didn’t know that. He closed his eyes and soon fell asleep.

  Like most cats he slept two thirds of the day, although he usually kept one ear open to the outside world. If humans would only sleep more, Theodore reflected, crime could be drastically reduced. Half the waking hours would surely mean half the crime.

  Most days Emily left the television on to keep Theodore company. He tended to doze through many of the daytime offerings, but somehow absorbed an amazing amount of information. Theodore considered himself an expert on bargain hunting, overseas property acquisition and human relationship counselling. However, he preferred the crime dramas that were shown in the afternoons. His favourite was Columbo. He loved the cigar-toting, dishevelled homicide detective.

  When he heard Emily parking her car up the street, he got to his paws and stretched.

  Theodore knew all the cars on the street by their distinctive defects: the staccato from holes in exhausts, the groaning of engines that demanded tuning, the squeal of worn out brake pads. But he always recognized Emily’s Volkswagen Beetle as she approached by the music playing from inside. She always had one of two albums playing in the cassette player.

  One cassette was Michael Jackson’s BAD; the other Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits. She had bought the Michael Jackson at least ten years ago. The Leonard Cohen had been lent by an ex-boyfriend; she couldn’t remember which. Depending on her mood, as she drove to and from work, she usually had one of the albums playing. Her aerial had been snapped off a couple of years earlier, and unable to buy cassettes any longer, the car was limited to the two albums or silence.

  That evening, Theodore recognized the throaty voice of Cohen and knew she had not had the best of days. He was at the front door as she unlocked it.

  She picked him and pushed her face into his chest, holding him there a full minute while he purred.

  ‘I missed you, Theo,’ she said, emerging from his fur.

  ◆◆◆

  Emily Blenkin had been in two minds that morning whether to go to work or not. She had a good excuse not to go after all. It’s not every day your neighbour is battered to death. But then she’d decided it might take her mind off it.

  She was acting manager of a furniture store at Monks Cross, a retail park on the other side of York, a tedious forty-five minute commute halfway around the ring road.

  The store sold over-priced furniture and soft furnishings to the local well-to-do with money to fritter away on these luxury items. The customers were demanding and most of their demands unreasonable.

  That morning she’d had to deal with an irate woman who had wanted to return a throw she had been using as a table cloth – after she
had spilled red wine on it. Then, in the afternoon, there had been the rude young woman who had had a bookcase delivered which did not fit into her chosen recess. This was followed by a whiny woman who wanted to return a set of cushions that attracted dog hair. The cushions were indeed covered with fine golden hair and coated with what Emily hoped was dog drool and not anything worse.

  She had wanted to tell them that she didn’t care, that one of her neighbours had been murdered, and their petty concerns were just that. Petty.

  But she hadn’t. Instead she’d bitten the inside of her bottom lip until it was swollen and appeased the customers in accordance with the manual that they had to follow. Then she had sat in the stop-start traffic of the ring road at rush hour to get home.

  She slumped down on the sofa and threw her coat across onto the other sofa. The LED on her telephone was blinking and she knew her mother had called; she always called when she knew Emily was at work. Emily reached over and played the telephone message.

  ‘It’s so awful,’ Emily’s mother said. ‘To think you’ve been living next door to a murderer. Let’s hope they have got him. If they haven’t, that means there is some homicidal maniac still on the loose... I don’t know how you can sleep at night…’

  Her mother went on for several minutes, before finally declaring: ‘Your father wants to say hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ her father said, and the message ended with an abrupt beep.

  Emily paced the rooms of her house, Theodore at her heels. She walked past the empty food bowls several times but didn’t notice their lack of contents.

  She went into the yard and made sure that the gate was bolted. When she went back inside, she locked the door behind her. She opened a cupboard and removed the largest pan. She placed it on the kitchen side by the back door.

  She returned to the lounge and picked up a leaflet that had been dropped through her front door a few days before. It was the menu from a local Chinese takeaway. The front of the leaflet had a cartoon picture of two little Chinese girls with pigtails and wide horizontal smiles.

  She scanned the list of numbered meals, then took her mobile phone and dialled the takeaway. She ordered salt and pepper chicken wings, char sui pork, crispy noodles, egg foo yung and prawn crackers. When Emily was worried or upset, she ate. She was told it would be twenty minutes. She looked at her watch but didn’t take in the time.

  She went to the kitchen and retrieved a half bottle of white wine and a glass. Returning to the living room, she flicked on the television. She took her laptop from the table and put it on her lap.

  Theodore jumped up beside her, rubbing his face against her thigh, nudging the laptop at the same time.

  She still hadn’t fed him. He purred loudly to remind her, and Emily stroked him behind the ears in return. He pushed his head against the side of the whirring laptop.

  ‘Hey!’ Emily said, pushing him away. ‘Can’t I just check my mail?’

  Theodore maintained his offensive against the laptop until he was interrupted by a knock at the front door.

  Emily put the laptop aside. She looked at her watch. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes since she’d called the takeaway, could it? She opened the door.

  ‘Hello there,’ a young man said in an overly-friendly voice. ‘I’m from The Press. Would it be all right if I ask you a few questions about what happened the other morning? I understand you discovered the body... First on the scene, as they say…’

  Emily looked at the man’s blue checked shirt and grinning pink face through the gap in the door. From behind her Theodore miaowed.

  ‘I really don’t want to talk to anybody right now,’ she said. ‘I’ve just got in from work.’

  ‘It will only take a minute… if you let me come in.’

  The man stepped forward. Theodore miaowed once more.

  ‘My cat,’ Emily said, ‘I don’t like him getting out the front.’

  She shut the door on the reporter, feeling a little mean as she did so. She understood that he was only doing his job.

  Turning round, she said, ‘Were you being protective of me, Theo?’

  I think you might have forgotten to feed me, Theodore thought back.

  She bent down and stroked him, saying, ‘You’re right, Theo. You just don’t know who to trust these days.’

  She then followed Theodore’s raised tail into the kitchen.

  ◆◆◆

  Later that evening, as she was eating chicken wings from a silver foil carton that had taken almost an hour to arrive, she looked at the local newspaper website. The top story was the Clementhorpe murder. ‘Suspect Detained,’ the headline said.

  There was a photograph of a man with ginger hair and side burns, getting into the back of a police van. Her next-door neighbour. Her mother had been right.

  She saw him some mornings as she left for work, although he had never spoken to her. He seemed harmless enough, she thought. But you never can tell.

  As she scrolled down the story, she soon discovered that he was called Craig Foster, worked at York Science Park, and had lived alone since his mother had passed away ten years ago. The brief description shouted ‘Loner!’

  ‘To think he lives just beyond that wall,’ Emily said to Theodore. ‘Thank goodness the police have got him so quickly.’

  Let’s hope that’s the case, Theodore thought.

  The story went on to mention that one of Peter Morris’s pigeons was missing, suggesting that the pigeon could be worth as much as £15,000. It ended by stating that the bird had not been recovered. The story was sequenced to suggest that Peter Morris had been killed over the valuable pigeon. People had been murdered for much less, Emily thought.

  Theodore stared at the ten inch screen as she scrolled down the story. There was a photograph of Peter Morris taken with one of his birds.

  He had always said ‘How do,’ to Emily with a smile when she’d seen him in the back alley. Her eyes welled up. What had he ever done to hurt anybody? She cried for some minutes, felt a little better, and then finished her chicken wings.

  She went to wash her hands and when she returned she discovered that Theodore had settled where she’d been sitting. She stroked his forehead and he purred in return. She sat down on the adjacent seat.

  She signed onto her dating website and glanced at the messages that men she didn’t know had sent her. There were twenty three. Not a bad day, she thought.

  Five of these were from people living at least fifty miles away, including a couple from remote corners of Britain: towns or cities that Emily didn’t even recognize the names of. She deleted these ones straight away. She then deleted those from people who did not even have a profile picture: married or ugly, she thought. Then went the beardies and baldies.

  She scrolled through the remaining messages, deleting those she understood to be generic messages that could be sent out to twenty or a hundred prospective candidates at a time. She was left with five messages. She flicked through the accompanying profiles, deleting those she just didn’t like the look of, or those profiles that included any reference to sports. Her ex had dominated the television with his Sky Sports.

  She was left with one profile.

  He listed as his likes red wine, pepperoni pizzas, Scrabble, several television programmes, then a list of music bands – many of which she hadn’t heard of. She hoped he was joking about the Scrabble. She read on. He was a geologist. He had just a couple of photographs.

  He was tall and slim with blue eyes, medium length dark blond hair, parted on the left. In the photograph he was laughing. He had a nice smile, she thought. She twisted the laptop round so that Theodore could see.

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  Theodore didn’t bother to respond.

  He didn’t understand why Emily wasted so much time on dating websites, looking for a boyfriend. Cats couple at night, fulfil their desires and can be home for a good night’s rest – free of commitment the next day. This human ideal of monogamous coha
bitation was plain old miaowing up the wrong tree in his opinion. He glanced at the photograph of the potential suitor before meeting Emily’s questioning gaze.

  ‘Well?’ she prompted, stroking him between the ears.

  Theodore peered down at the chicken bones in the discarded tinfoil tray that had been left on the floor, wondering whether they were worth further investigation.

  Emily clicked on the other photograph. In this one he was holding a cat. A black cat with white paws. A cat person, she thought and smiled.

  He had signed off his message Jonathan.

  She responded, asking him for clarification on what he did: ‘What does a geologist actually do (apart from look at rocks!)…?’

  She put the laptop on the coffee table and patted Theodore, who had decided that the remains of the chicken wings, stripped of their flesh, didn’t warrant the effort. He decided to take possession of Emily’s now vacant lap. But it didn’t last long. He was soon deposited back on the seat of the sofa when Emily went to the kitchen to dish out her egg foo yung.

  When she returned she already had a reply from Jonathan.

  ‘I mainly dig holes with a JCB and supervise drilling. It’s not as bad as it sounds! I live up near the racecourse. Do you live in South Bank?’

  As Emily tapped out a response, glass shattered outside.

  Emily didn’t hear it for the whir of the old laptop, but Theodore’s ears pricked up.

  He got to his paws, jumped down from the sofa and went to investigate.

  ◆◆◆

  The Turkish couple at No.27 were fighting. Ahmet was a taxi driver. He worked for the local ‘Crow Line’ taxi firm. His wife Zeynep was pregnant with the couple’s first child.

  ‘You didn’t come in till after two in the morning,’ Zeynep said, her arms folded over her bump.

  ‘What are you accusing me of?’

  ‘I want to know where you were.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it. They arrested someone. It was in the newspapers, dear.’