Catscape Page 4

  The next moment, Mrs. Speight shouted, “Fergus, you’ve got a visitor.” Her voice seemed to echo and hang in the hallway like the first of many accusations. Fergus looked at Murdo, and then at the window as he weighed up whether there was any means of escape.

  “Fergus …!” his mum called again more insistently. Knowing that there was nothing he could do but face the music, Fergus left his bedroom and trudged along the hall to the living room.

  “I’ll hang these up,” Mrs Speight said as she came out of the living room carrying the woman’s coat and umbrella. She raised a single questioning eyebrow as Fergus approached looking forlorn.

  “Fergus,” said his mum guiding him into the living room, “this is Mrs. Jenkins from down the road.” Fergus edged slowly round the living room door. The old lady was sitting up straight in the armchair by the fire in a voluminous knitted cardigan. She looked Fergus straight in the eye and said, “Oh yes, Fergus and I have already met.” Fergus began to go almost as pink as her cardigan.

  Mrs. Speight looked a little confused by this exchange but politeness got the better of her and she didn’t immediately enquire any further. Fergus knew, however, that it wouldn’t be long before she found out just how he did know “Mrs. Jenkins from down the road.”

  “Right, well, I’ll just put the kettle on,” said Fergus’s mum, giving Fergus a look that said, “I’ll know everything shortly and I can already guess most of it.”

  “Tea with milk and two sugars would be just the ticket,” said Mrs. Jenkins.

  “Right you are,” said Mrs. Speight with another piercing glance at Fergus as she left.

  Fergus was finding it hard to look at Mrs. Jenkins. The last time he had seen her a few hours before, she was wagging her finger at him accusingly and now here she was sitting in the middle of his own front room. When he did summon up the courage to look at her, the adjustments she was making to the cushions behind her, along with some repeated throat clearing, suggested to Fergus that she was composing herself before making the big speech which would expose him as the neighbourhood’s newest villain.

  “So, Fergus,” she said finally breaking the silence, “you must think that you are in a spot of bother.”

  “Aren’t I?” said Fergus quietly, thinking that a “spot of bother” was an understatement for his situation.

  “Frankly, when you gave me that ridiculous explanation last night about your watch, I told myself that not only did I have a troublemaker for a neighbour, but also one with a vivid imagination.” Mrs. Jenkins adjusted herself to get more comfortable, and cleared her throat again as if she was about to say something that she was finding difficult.

  “I now know,” she continued, “that you were in fact telling the truth and I want to apologize.”

  There was a silence before Fergus could manage to blurt out just one word. “What …?!”

  “You appear to be correct,” said Mrs. Jenkins, lowering her voice and looking at the door, as if not wanting anyone else to hear.

  “Is your friend here at the moment?” she continued. “I presume the two of you are working together on this. Perhaps he should hear this too.”

  A minute later Fergus and Murdo were side by side on the settee, still looking nervous but with the flickerings of relief on their faces.

  Mrs. Speight appeared carrying a tray with tea, juice and biscuits. She couldn’t contain her anxiety and curiosity any longer as she put it down on the coffee table.

  “Is everything all right?” she said to Mrs. Jenkins. “You’ve got me rather worried. Have the boys done something wrong?”

  “I assure you that everything is fine,” said Mrs. Jenkins in a voice so kindly that the boys couldn’t quite believe that it came from the same person who had interrupted their investigations the night before.

  “Your son was a good neighbour yesterday and I’m really just here to say thank you.”

  Mrs. Speight looked baffled but slightly proud as she looked at Fergus and ruffled his hair. The boys both noticed that Mrs. Jenkins quickly winked at them out of the corner of her eye as Mrs. Speight was looking down at Fergus.

  “Please don’t let me hold you back, my dear, I’m sure you have lots to keep you busy. The boys and I can entertain each other,” continued Mrs. Jenkins.

  Fergus nearly choked on a biscuit as he saw his mother being asked to leave her own living room in such a gentle way that she seemed quite happy about it. Fergus’s admiration for Mrs. Jenkins shot up even further. He had been practising for years and he could never have pulled off that trick. Here was a woman he needed to get to know.

  “Oh well, I’ll leave you to chat. Shout if you want a top-up,” Mrs. Speight said, pointing at the teapot, and with that she left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Mrs. Jenkins took a big slurp of her tea and a large chunk of biscuit, which she manoeuvred noisily around her mouth, clearly having a few problems with her teeth. The boys didn’t quite know what to expect.

  “I didn’t sleep much last night,” said Mrs. Jenkins breaking the silence again, putting her cup down and brushing her hands of biscuit crumbs. “All of that disturbance gave me a bit of a start I have to say. Anyway, this morning I went out with this.” She rummaged in the baggy pocket of her pink cardigan and produced an old watch on a chain.

  “This belonged to my husband, Stan, and it hasn’t lost a minute in sixty years — until this morning when I stood on that manhole cover! What is going on down there?” She leaned towards the boys with a whisper.

  “Well,” said Murdo speaking for the first time and realizing that the elderly lady was rapidly becoming an unexpected ally, “we might have had a better idea what’s going on if we hadn’t been interrupted last night!”

  They all laughed at this and any remaining tension in the room disappeared. For the next few minutes the boys showed Jessie their DataBoys and explained about their watches going into reverse. They went on to describe their side of the story from the previous night, including the fact that the abrupt end to the investigations which Jessie had caused, had resulted in the microphone wire being chopped in half.

  “Oh, I am sorry about that. I must insist that you let me replace it as soon as possible,” said Mrs. Jenkins. “I must say this is all very mysterious isn’t it? It definitely sounds like something we need to get to the bottom of. Why don’t you come down to my flat some time soon and we can get our heads together. I’ll pass it with your mother of course, Fergus,” she added.

  “How about this afternoon?” said Murdo, his enthusiasm for mystery solving having reappeared dramatically in the last few minutes.

  “Let me just see,” said Mrs. Jenkins, fishing a small diary out of her cardigan pocket. Fergus wondered what else the bulging knitted pockets contained. She licked a finger and paged through the battered black book.

  “No, I’m sorry, boys. I have my karate class at 2pm, and this evening I’ve got my Local History discussion group,” she said matter-of-factly. “But this time tomorrow would be fine, if that suits you?”

  The boys watched Mrs. Jenkins setting off down the front path. She looked pleased to see the rain had stopped and was jauntily swinging her umbrella as she headed away, limping slightly.

  “Don’t people usually learn karate when they’re younger?” asked Murdo.

  “And when they’re able to jump around a bit?” added Fergus, wondering what other surprises were scheduled in Mrs. Jenkins’ diary.

  Fergus was relieved that Mrs. Jenkins had had a big chat with his mum before she left but not one that involved any details of the night before. In fact Mrs. Speight had tried to insist that Mrs. Jenkins stay for lunch but she had left saying that she never ate much before karate.

  “She’s great fun,” said Fergus’s mum. “I hope I’m like that when I’m that age.”

  “I suppose we’ll find out in a couple of years,” said Fergus ducking as his mum aimed a tea towel at his head.

  Mrs. Jenkins’ visit had left the boys in high spirits
. As they made their way back to the Incident Room chatting about the value that some more help with the case might bring them, Murdo stopped in his tracks.

  “The tape!” he shouted.

  “What tape?” said Fergus.

  “The tape from the walkman. We lost the microphone but we still have the tape and we haven’t checked it yet!” said Murdo, breaking into a puffing run.

  Back at the caravan Murdo rummaged around and in no time had rewound the tape and set it to play in a small cassette recorder. The first noises that the boys could hear were their own muffled voices, recorded when they had switched the walkman on and lowered it through the gap and into the manhole. These quickly disappeared and Murdo turned up the volume to maximum to see if the tape could offer more than just a humming sound.

  “What’s that?” said Fergus.

  “What’s what?” asked Murdo.

  “That bleeping noise,” said Fergus.

  Both boys leaned into the cassette recorder to listen more carefully. Every so often there was a very distant single bleeping noise. Murdo got the stopwatch ready on his DataBoy and confirmed that thirty seconds passed between each bleep. Just before the tape cut off suddenly they heard more muffled noises but they were all from above ground with a hint of Jock’s crazed barking.

  “Well, I’m not sure what we really learned there,” said Murdo.

  “Other than the fact that something is bleeping under the pavement of Comely Bank Avenue,” said Fergus. “Why don’t we start thinking about the cats again. We seem to have hit a bit of a dead end with the watches for now.”

  With that, the boys started looking through Murdo’s notes on the interviews that he had completed with all of the cat owners, to see if there were any common links between the disappearances. It seemed that most owners reported that their cats had been behaving normally in the time leading up to their disappearance. They had gone on to describe themselves as being baff led as to what might have happened to their cat, and that they thought it was very out of character for their pets to disappear in this fashion. The boys had read five or six sets of interview notes when Fergus spotted an emerging theme. “Don’t all of these people say that the first time they noticed their cat was missing was early in the morning?”

  Murdo flicked back over the notes and nodded in agreement. Fergus continued with his line of reasoning, “So maybe it’s just the owners who allow their cats out at night whose pets go missing. What if something is happening at night to these cats?”

  The boys worked hard during the afternoon looking through every set of interview notes just to establish at what time each cat had gone missing. Sure enough, the pattern that Fergus had spotted proved to be true for every single cat.

  “This is a major breakthrough,” concluded Murdo pacing around as much as he could within the confines of the caravan. “A significant development,” he added.

  “But what does it mean?” said Fergus.

  Murdo stopped in his tracks. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Despite this, the boys finished the day feeling positive that they had begun to make some sense out of all the information that Murdo had gathered, even if they didn’t quite know where it might lead.

  The following day Murdo arrived on his scooter with Jock tagging along behind and the boys walked down Comely Bank Avenue to Mrs. Jenkins’ flat.

  “Come in, come in,” she said to the boys. Jessie bustled her way through the dimly lit hall of her ground floor flat. “Right, you boys go through to the living room there,” she said pointing to a room on the right. She headed off along the hall chatting cheerily to herself about “getting a tray organized,” her baggy cardigan almost knocking a vase of flowers off a rickety hall table as she went.

  Fergus led the way cautiously into the living room. As he pushed the door open, it felt like going back in time. Their first impressions were that the room was dingy and dull, but as their eyes adjusted to the gloom they could see that there was plenty of interest.

  The floral-patterned wallpaper was difficult to see because there were so many framed black and white photographs, and paintings of landscapes and farms. A big clock with a long pendulum and weights hanging on dark brassy chains was attached to the wall near the fireplace.

  “Look at that,” said Murdo pointing to a large framed photo on top of the mantlepiece. A white cat looked back at them.

  “Look at this,” Fergus said with wonder in his voice, pointing to one corner of the room where there was a very new, very shiny, and very, very large computer on a table. “This lady is full of surprises,” said Fergus shaking his head slowly. Murdo went over to the computer and peered at the books lying beside it. “You’re Never Too Old to Learn, Crash Course in Computers, Grannies Can Surf Too,” he read out.

  Before the boys could find any more surprises, Mrs. Jenkins appeared behind them. “Here we are,” she said, carrying a tray into the room and setting it down on a dusty coffee table.

  “Ah, you’ve found my latest purchase,” she said seeing the boys standing beside her computer. “It’s top of the range!”

  The boys looked stunned. “Don’t look so surprised,” said Mrs. Jenkins, “I might be ancient but I do live in the 21st century you know,” she said with a sly smile. “Now, how about this?” she said turning her attention to the tray. “Not only am I a computer geek but I also bake the best cakes in Edinburgh.”

  Jock had already worked this out and was sniffing impatiently at the edge of the coffee table. Neither he nor the boys needed a second invitation to tuck in to the plate of rock buns, pancakes and shortbread. They munched away happily, grinning to each other as Mrs. Jenkins chatted and asked them questions about the backwards watches. However, there really wasn’t much more that the boys could tell her, and so the conversation soon went quiet.

  Murdo asked innocently, “Is that your cat, Mrs. Jenkins?” nodding towards the photo on the mantlepiece.

  “Now, boys,” said Mrs. Jenkins seriously, “If we are to become friends, and I hope we shall, you will have to get one thing straight.” Murdo looked embarrassed, thinking that he was being too personal with his line of questioning. However, Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t bothered by Murdo’s question.

  “It’s Jessie. You must call me Jessie. I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide any more homebaking if you call me Mrs. Jenkins. That sort of name would be some strange old dear who lived on her own and who everyone avoided. Jessie on the other hand, is the name of someone who regularly produces pancakes for private investigators.” The boys smiled and Murdo looked especially pleased at this description.

  “Now that we’ve cleared up that little issue Murdo, yes, that it is my cat, Jasper, but I’m afraid that the poor old thing has gone missing. I haven’t seen him for a fortnight.”

  The boys glanced at each other and stopped chewing at the same time.

  “What is it?” said Jessie suddenly distracted from her teacup by the boys’ reaction.

  “Well,” said Fergus cautiously looking at Murdo for approval, “we’re actually trying to solve two mysteries. Murdo can explain better since he’s been on the case for longer than me.” Picking up the story, Murdo took the next few minutes to tell Jessie all that he knew about the forty-three missing cats, the Incident Room and the interviews that he had carried out with cat owners in the area.

  Jessie listened intently, occasionally asking questions and nodding, but when Murdo had finished she just sat shaking her head slowly. The boys sat in silence. “Don’t you believe him?” asked Fergus eventually.

  “Oh yes,” said Jessie looking up brightly, “I’m just shaking my head to make sure all of the information sinks in evenly. That is quite a story, boys. So my Jasper isn’t the only one. I suppose that’s reassuring in a way.”

  Jessie stood up and began walking round the room, her pink cardigan flapping as she shook the stiffness first out of one leg and then the other. “Well, you’ve got two big mysteries on your hands here, haven’t you? This calls for quite
an investigation, quite an investigation.”

  The boys smiled and nodded.

  “Jessie, what time of day did Jasper disappear?” said Fergus, suddenly remembering the significant discovery of the previous day.

  Jessie thought for a minute. “Let me see now. It was a Wednesday and we had our breakfast together. He often went out after that, but he was around again at teatime when I came in from karate. He went out again during the evening. I looked to see if he wanted to come in for the night, but he wasn’t around. That wasn’t unusual so I just locked up. When I opened the front door at breakfast time I would have expected to see him sitting on the doorstep, but there was no sign of him. I haven’t seen him since.” Jessie sighed and dabbed at her eyes, “You probably think that I’m just a daft old dear for getting upset but I did talk away to Jasper any time he was in the flat. He has been a very faithful friend ever since my husband, Stan, died. I particularly miss him at breakfast. We would sit down together and eat peanut butter and marmite on toast every day. The start of the day just isn’t the same any more.”

  Both Murdo and Fergus decided that it wasn’t the time to comment on the bizarre choice of food that Jasper ate.

  “I can’t imagine losing Jock,” said Murdo. “It must be awful.”

  Fergus told Jessie of the recurring pattern of nighttime disappearances. Their new friend seemed reassured once again that she was by no means the only one faced with this predicament.

  “I suppose you’ve got a database that helped you spot these patterns?” asked Jessie. The boys looked blankly at her. “Now don’t tell me you two aren’t computerized?” she quizzed them further, putting down her teacup in consternation.

  “Neither of us have computers right now,” said Murdo. “But I do have a very good filing system,” he added defensively. Fergus nodded supportively beside him, but suspected that this was a line of questioning that Jessie was not about to let go.