The next day there was no concert to prepare for, so Madame Emerald arrived at the hotel very early and carried Sylvia and Agnes away in a gleaming bottle-green car. Maximilian curled up on Madame’s lap. Oscar perched neatly at her side, his chin lifted high in a most gentlemanly manner. They sped down avenues lined with trees of falling pink blossom and through a park filled with couples taking picnics and pulled up outside a cream townhouse in the east of the city. Its lower windows were almost obscured by a wisteria in high bloom that snaked up the building, blue flowers cascading down on to the balconies that sprouted from every floor. At one window, Maximilian noticed, the stems hung ragged as though they had been torn away from the wall.
“Madame Elise is my dearest, oldest friend,” Madame Emerald told them as she pressed a finger to the doorbell. She glanced down at Maximilian and Oscar and smiled. “And I feel sure that one of these two splendid fellows will lose their heart to the beautiful Summer Rose.”
A rather flustered footman met them at the door. After he had taken all their coats and dropped at least three of their hats he showed them into a dainty parlour in which a tiny woman was sprawled across a sofa, sobbing into a cushion. The footman blushed and coughed a little too loudly and the lady lifted her head.
“Chérie!” she cried and, leaping up from the sofa, she threw herself into Madame’s arms. “Thank goodness you have come! My poor darling Summer Rose!”
Madame Emerald led Madame Elise to a seat and whisked a lace handkerchief out of her sleeve. The footman threw her a look of extreme embarrassment and shuffled out of the room. Sylvia and Agnes perched on a cornflower-blue sofa crammed with far too many cushions for comfort and shot one another looks that said “this is a little awkward”.
“Is Summer Rose ill?” Madame Emerald asked, patting Madame Elise on the shoulder. The woman lifted her head and wailed one word, a word that made Maximilian’s tail buzz.
“Kidnapped!”
“Kidnapped?” cried Sylvia and Agnes together.
Madame Elise waved a hand at a pile of papers strewn across a low coffee table in the middle of the room. “There have been an appalling number of cases this month. All beautiful animals, though none of them as beautiful as my little Summer Rose. And I’d just had a new portrait made of her too!”
Maximilian stared at the papers. On each there was a photograph much like the one he had seen of Winter Star: a beautiful cat sitting on a cushion or perched on a chair. His tail prickled. Somehow he was sure that there was something that linked them, but he could not work out what. They all looked so similar. What was it he was missing?
He glanced around the room. Every surface was covered in photo frames. There were carved wooden ones and plain glass ones, gleaming silver ones and antique ones on which the lustre was dulling. Every frame had a photo of the same cat in it, a sleek Siamese with sparkling, intelligent eyes. She peered out of a hatbox as a kitten in one, and sat upright on a cushion in another. In each picture a diamond-encrusted collar round her throat stood out, a shimmering heart-shaped jewel hanging from it.
“Is this the new picture?” Madame Emerald asked, picking up an unframed photograph that had fallen to the floor. It was covered in tear stains and was a little crumpled around the edges. Madame Elise sniffed loudly and nodded her head.
“I had it taken only two days ago,” she sobbed. “She was so good, sitting for her portrait, and I was going to have it framed in rose gold at Lucée’s. I went to wake her this morning, and the window to her room was wide open and she had gone!”
Maximilian padded over to sit by Madame Emerald and inclined his head to get a closer look at the photograph she was holding. Summer Rose sat on a cushion, her head turned elegantly to the camera lens. He craned his head a little and his tail tingled at the sight of a new clue. Half-covered by Madame’s thumb was a signature on the corner of the photograph that looked very familiar.
“She didn’t make a single sound,” Madame Elise was saying. “And none of the windows were broken. That’s how I know it was one of the staff. She would have cried out if a stranger came into the house.
I’ve dismissed all the staff. All except Victoire, who let you in. He was away in the country till this morning, so I know it wasn’t him. He’s having to be cook, butler and housemaid, but he’s coping admirably, and he did so love my little Summer Rose.”
She dissolved into floods of tears again and Maximilian raised an eyebrow at Oscar. Now they knew why the footman was looking so frazzled. Maximilian slipped to the floor. “I think we should do a little detecting, don’t you?” he asked as he passed Oscar, and the two of them padded out of the room and into the hallway.
Madame Elise had said that Summer Rose had disappeared from her room, but where on earth could her room be? And how could the thief have got in? “How might you get into a house without breaking a window?” Maximilian wondered aloud.
Oscar thought for a second.
“The wisteria that was so ragged on the front of the house as we drove up…” he began, but Maximilian was ahead of him.
“The left-hand side of the house, at the front, first floor,” he hissed, and they sped up the stairs, took the left-hand bend at the landing and bounded into a small room at the end of the corridor.
Maximilian, before he had been fortunate enough to find his home at the Theatre Royal, had been brought up in what he thought was the height of luxury, but Summer Rose’s room took his breath away. The carpet was so soft and plush that he sank into it to the top of his paws. The walls were decorated with paper, hand-painted with rose trellises. In the middle of the room sat an enormous velvet pillow, surrounded by soft silk curtains pulled back with satin rosebuds. A small bedside table held potions and powders that Agnes and Sylvia would have been envious of, and in the centre was a large jewel box with room for just one precious cat collar. It was open and empty.
“Of course, she may simply have run away,” Oscar suggested.
“What cat would run away from this luxury?” Maximilian said, but even as he said it his conscience pricked him. He would not swap his life and all his friends in the Theatre Royal for a hundred luxurious cat beds, and the old velvet cushion that Mrs Garland had found for him to sleep on was the most comfortable one he had ever had.
Maximilian sniffed the air. In spite of all the roses there was an unpleasant smell pricking at his nose. He sniffed again. He was sure that the smell was coming from the window. Crossing the room (which was most difficult as his paws kept sinking into the carpet), he leapt up on to the sill. He had been right. The smell was stronger here. He sniffed again and his tail tingled at the same time that his head reeled. The busy Paris street swam a little below him.
Maximilian peered closely around the tiny balcony. To his left hung the wisteria branch with its roots ripped away from the wall. What on earth could have caused that? He wondered. He padded round the sill, but there was nothing except a candle in a silver jar, tipped over on its side, and a folded piece of glossy paper, torn at one corner. He pushed this around with one paw, but it did not seem to him to be much of a clue, so he batted it aside.
He nosed into a corner where the smell seemed stronger and something sour filled his nostrils, fighting against something tasty and sweet. Maximilian covered his nose with one paw and, reaching into the corner with the other, he dragged out a piece of meat.
Oscar sniffed the air. “What a curious smell!” he said. “What on earth is it?”
Maximilian swept the meat into the room. He leapt up on to the bedside table and whisked a handkerchief from a pile elegantly tied in a ribbon next to the jewel case.
“I’ve smelled this before,” Maximilian said. “It smells like the drops those villains used to kidnap Madame Emerald last year. I think it has been drugged.” He rolled the meat into a neat parcel. “We should show this to the humans. Together with the broken wisteria outside the window, I think it points to only one conclusion. Summer Rose was not taken by a member of Madame Elise’s staff. The reason she did not cry out was because she was drugged, and whoever took her climbed up that wisteria branch to get into her room.”