Sally Hawkins, who was having no success at all in shooing Mungo away from the tables, complained bitterly to Melrose. “Who’s that dog that’s been all over the room begging food off my customers?”
Melrose put down his book and looked puzzled. “What dog?”
“That dog!” The finger she pointed had a cutting edge. “That mutt that’s begging his dinner.” It was a table where a lone man sat. Melrose stood up, hoping the “mutt” attribution hadn’t reached Mungo’s ears. Mungo had now drifted from the beans-on-toast couple to a man by himself with a paper and a ploughman’s. The man was handing Mungo down a bit of cheese.
Melrose adjusted his glasses, as if the fractional realignment of glasses with eyes would reacquaint him with the dog. “I have no idea.”
She stood with hands on hips. “Well, he came in with you!”
Melrose leaned back from her. “With me? I believe you’re mistaken. I brought Dora’s cat back.” His injured tone suggested that this act of mercy and heroism was being unkindly repaid. “Dora is certainly happy.”
“Well, the dog was with Morris, is what I’m saying.”
Melrose laughed. “With Morris? I don’t think so. Morris-” Here he ran his hand over Morris, who was in her favorite spot by a window, where light was fast deepening into dusk. “Morris strikes me as a cat who would hardly strike up a friendship with a gypsy dog.” He picked up his book. It was called A Dog’s Life. Not the best choice for a man who had no interest in dogs.
“You’re telling me the dog’s a stray?”
Melrose shut his eyes as if his patience were wearing thin. “I’m not telling you anything, other than I don’t feel I should be held responsible for knowing the dog’s provenance. He appears to be well-mannered-that is, he’s not fighting your customers for food-so I’d assume he belongs to someone in Chesham here.”
“He’s been round all the tables.”
“Just as long as he’s not eating with a runcible spoon.”
“A what?”
Melrose was saved from reciting “The Owl and the Pussycat” by the return of Dora, who veritably bounced into the chair beside Morris (never mind Melrose).
Mungo chose this moment to turn up, too, at their table. Great.
He hauled himself up beside Morris, lay down, and tried to fold in his paws.
Sally Hawkins nodded toward the two. “There’s something awful matey about those two. The dog acts like it knows Morris. Like they’re mates.”
Just as she said that, Schrödinger (if it was Schrödinger) raced by with the other black cat (unless that was Schrödinger instead) on her heels. They pulled up under the table of the elderly lady with the racing form. The two cats nearly brought her down as all of their ten legs got caught up together.
“Bloody beasts,” the elderly lady muttered, and went for them with the racing form. “You know, Mrs. Hawkins, you’ve got three cats in here. You might think more about that problem than about the one dog.”
Melrose checked his watch. Why in hell didn’t Jury call? What was he supposed to do now?
53
On his way to Islington, Jury got out his mobile, found Plant’s number, and punched it in.
“Where are you?… You’re still in Chesham? Why haven’t you started back with Schröd… What do you mean you can’t tell the difference?… Well, look at their eyes, what color are they?… Yellowish… what does that mean?… Oh, for God’s sake… we can’t keep Harry at the station for bloody ever…”
On Melrose’s end, he asked, “How was I to know there’d be three black cats to deal with? They all look alike… Dora? Well, of course I asked Dora. She knows Morris; Morris is all she’s sure of. She could tell Morris on a moonless night in an alley of black cats. But she can’t tell Schrödinger, she’s never seen him before, and the other one Sally Hawkins dragged in-”
“Listen,” said Jury, “just stuff one or the other into that carrier, shove it in the car, and get back to Belgravia. You’ve a fifty percent chance of being right, which is what you usually have, and Harry himself might not even know the difference. At least it’ll do for a bit.”
“All right all right all right. What do you mean, ‘what I usually have’?”
Melrose found himself talking to a dead phone. He shook it, as if Jury might fall out.
He tossed his mobile on the table and turned to Dora, who’d been listening to the call with great interest. Adults saying dumb things. “What’d he say? What’re you going to do?”
“What are we going to do, you mean. You are going to help me get those cats into the carrier and the car.”
They both checked to see that Morris was still here and not over there. Yes.
Schrödinger (whichever one she was) and Morris Two were behind the bar. They were at opposite ends of a piece of something-rope, meat, fishbone, who knew?-pulling it in opposite directions.
“You go for one cat; I go for the other. That’s the only way I can think to do it.”
Dora said, “I don’t want to get scratched.”
Melrose ignored that and pulled out the carrier from under the table in the window. “I’m going to put it right on this side of the bar so they don’t see it.” They moved to the bar, and he opened the top of the box. “We’ll go about this slowly.”
Dora looked dubious.
Stealthily, they approached.
Melrose grabbed one cat, which rewarded him by slicing the air at his ear with its claws.
“I’ve got her, I’ve got her!” yelled Dora, wrestling the other one to the ground.
“Okay, we’ll take both.” He pulled over the carrier and together he and Dora shoved in the cat she was holding; Melrose then shoved in the other one with great effort and a good deal of yowling. He shut it, then grabbed it up and headed, once again, for his car and London.
54
The phone rang as Jury was tying his tie. He picked it up and eyed the tie, wondering if it was sending the right message. It had bunnies on it; they were minute ones, but you could tell they were bunnies if you looked closely. Where in hell had he got it?
“Jury.”
It was DI Jenkins, calling from the Snow Hill station. “I really have nothing I can hold him on.”
“Then just cut him loose. He didn’t do it.”
During the brief silence on the other end of the line, Jury wondered where he had got this tie. And was that a speck of egg or just another bunny?
“You know he didn’t?” said Jenkins.
“No, but I’m pretty certain.” He was more than “pretty” certain.
“Well. The reason nobody saw him in Chesham was because he went to pains that nobody would see him. He didn’t want to be associated, he said, with the bloody swine of a cat-”
“‘Swine of a cat’: I like it. Go on.” The phone’s flex was long enough to get him to the bottle of Macallan on the little table beneath the window, which was what mattered, he had pointed out to Carole-anne. He poured out a measure.
“He’s still saying it was a joke. On you. And you knew it.”
Jury knew all right, but it annoyed him that Jenkins seemed on the verge of believing Harry Johnson, pathological liar. No, wait, this story actually wasn’t a lie. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.” Jury observed that his glass was too tall for a whiskey glass, and he told himself to get some proper ones.
“It’s to do with a dog,” Jenkins labored on. “The one at the house that took a fancy to you.”
“Mungo.”
“He says he told you a very convoluted story about his friend disappearing with that dog and, well, frankly, the man sounded a little mad.”
“He is. He’s a nutter. He told me the story and later denied ever telling it. It was a series of stories, actually. Don’t let him con you, Dennis. He’s a great con artist.”