More Cats in the Belfry by Doreen Tovey Read Free Book Online Page A

on his lead tugging to get through the gate, and Tani like small mouse on a string behind me, scratching furiously to try to cover it up.
    Â Â I tugged the cord, but she wouldn't come. I couldn't go back to her, with Saska pulling hard in the other direction. At that moment Fred Ferry swung briskly down the hill behind me and rounded the corner (Fred was always appearing like that, knapsack on his shoulder and heading for the hills, which was why he had the reputation of being our local poacher) and said, his eyes like saucers, 'Cor did she do that?' He knew very well she couldn't have done, but it didn't stop him reporting it as a fact up at the pub, so that people kept coming past for days asking was it true that I had a cat that widdled like a water-cart?
    Â Â They used to stop and watch to see if she'd perform, and she didn't like it. She would run indoors and hide behind the sofa, protesting that the White Slavers she was always expecting had caught up with her at last.
    Â Â Life had its complications where my Aunt Louisa was concerned, too. Now nearly eighty, in her young days she'd helped my grandmother bring me up, and I looked on her as my responsibility. She still lived in the old family house in Bristol and, with a strong strain of independence, kindly neighbours and myself keeping an eye on her, she managed very well indeed.
    Â Â 'Managed' was the operative word. She was lively as a cricket, looked about sixty, and ran local affairs, as my grandmother had done before her, as if she were the Queen Mother. Her particular friend was a much younger woman who lived a few doors away and whose name was pronounced like mine but spelt Dorine.
    Â Â Every day, while Dorine was at work, Louisa would go down to let her two cats, Norton and Petal, into the garden for exercise, get them in again in due course, and generally see that all was well. Dorine, in turn, came up for a chat with Louisa every evening and acquainted her with what was going on in the rest of the road and her own activities, which were not inconsiderable. To help cover the expenses of her big old house, in addition to her full-time job she regularly took, as boarders, two or three students who were on special courses at the nearby polytechnic. They had their lunch at the college and went home at weekends, and thus fitted in well with Dorine's own schedule. She gave them comfortable accommodation, had only to provide them with breakfast and an evening meal five days a week and she and Louisa monitored their welfare between them. Louisa, for instance coped on the odd occasion when she went down and found one of the students still in bed, suffering from a cold or a stomach ache and needing cosseting. Dorine dealt with the reprobate who said he didn't like cats and was caught one day aiming a kick at Norton. He was reported to the college and transferred forthwith to other accommodation. Even so, when I found one of Louisa's pantry shelves loaded one day with bottles of tomato ketchup and Louisa said she was hiding them from Dorine's students, my mind did boggle slightly. Dorine had, it seemed, come up the previous evening breathing fire and slaughter, clutching a bagful of bottles and declaring that this lot (her current quota of students) were really the end. They wanted tomato sauce on everything – even the gourmet meal with wine which she gave them once a week when her boyfriend came to supper – and she wasn't going to have it, so would Louisa keep them for her so she could say with truth that she didn't have any in the house?
    Â Â She added vengefully that she'd put an air-freshener in their bedroom and they'd been searching for that, but they hadn't found it and never would. She'd put it there because one of them smoked heavily and the bedroom smelled ghastly. Why had they wanted to find it? Louisa asked. Because they didn't like the smell of it, said Dorine. Where had she hidden it? In the smoker's mattress – there