“I don’t understand,” Minou said for the umpteenth time. “This has to go in the paper: Tatter Cat Crippled by the President of the Animal Lovers’ Association.”
“No,” said Tibble. “‘Cats aren’t news,’ that’s what my boss says.”
“Hitting a poor old mother cat with a bottle!” said Minou. “She might never recover.”
“I’m not entirely surprised,” Tibble said hesitantly, “at someone losing their temper when they suddenly see a stray cat standing on their salmon. And I can imagine them grabbing whatever’s at hand to knock it off the table.”
“Really?” said Minou, giving Tibble such a vicious look that he stepped back out of range of her nails.
“In any case, it’s not something for the paper,” he said. “And that’s all there is to it.”
Whenever Minou was angry, she got into her box to sulk. She was about to do that now, but Fluff came in through the kitchen window with a long-drawn-out miaow.
“What’s he saying?” Tibble asked.
“The fishmonger?” cried Minou.
“Rwo… wwieeu… row…” Fluff continued. He told her an ecstatic story in Cattish, then disappeared again, back on the roof.
“What about the fishmonger?” Tibble asked.
“He’s in hospital!”
“Really? I thought it sounded like Fluff had good news.”
“The fishmonger got hit by a car,” Minou said. “It ran right into his fish stall. All the local cats are going straight there because there’s fish spread all over the road.”
“I’m on my way,” Tibble said. “I can write an article about this.” And he grabbed his pad.
“I’m going too,” Minou said. “Over the roof, that’s faster.”
She tried to climb out of the window, but Tibble stopped her. “No, Miss Minou. I don’t want my secretary scrounging around an upset fish stall like an old alley cat!”
Minou gave him a haughty look.
“What’s more,” said Tibble, “there’s bound to be a lot of people there and you don’t like that.”
“Fine, I’ll stay here,” said Minou. “I’ll hear the news on the roof.”
There were a lot of people in Green Square. A real crowd. The police were there, there was glass on the street from the broken windows and the fish stall was completely wrecked; there were slats and boards all over the place, the bunting had been trodden underfoot and the last cat was running off with the last herring.
Mr Smith was looking around too.
“They just drove off with the fishmonger,” he said. “They’re taking him to hospital. He’s got a broken rib.”
“What happened?” Tibble asked.
“A car! But the weird thing is nobody knows which car. It was a hit and run. Outrageous!”
“Weren’t there any witnesses? Right in the middle of the day?”
“No,” said Mr Smith. “It was twelve noon exactly, everyone was having lunch. They all heard the smash but by the time they’d come out to have a look, the car had gone round the corner.”
“And the fishmonger?”
“He doesn’t know either. One moment he was gutting some herring, the next thing he’s upside down, stall and all. The police have questioned everyone here in the neighbourhood, but no one saw the car. It must have been a stranger, someone from out of town.”
Tibble looked around. There was a cat eating something on the corner of the square. The cats must have seen who it was, he thought. And I bet Minou has already been informed.
He was right.
“We’ve known who it was for ages,” she said when Tibble arrived back upstairs. “Everyone’s told everyone else up on the rooftops. It was Mr Ellmore’s car. He was in it too. It was him.”
Tibble could hardly believe it. “Come on,” he said. “Why would a man like that keep driving after an accident? He’d report it straight away.”
“The cats saw it,” Minou said. “You know how there’s always cats hanging around the fish stall. Cross-eyed Simon was there and so was the School Cat and Ecumenica too. They all saw it. Now you can put it in the paper.”
Tibble sat down and started chewing his fingernails.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” asked Minou. “This can go in the paper, can’t it?”
“No,” said Tibble. “I’ll write an article about the accident. But I can’t say Ellmore was the driver. There’s no proof.”
“No proof? But three cats—”
“Yes, cats! But what good’s that? There wasn’t a single witness.”
“There were three witnesses.”
“Cats aren’t witnesses.”
“No?”
“No. I can hardly write in the paper: according to information we have received from several cats, the vehicle that smashed into the fish stall was driven by prominent Killenthorn resident Mr Ellmore. I just can’t. Don’t you understand that?”
Minou didn’t understand. She left the room and got into her box without a word.
At night on the roof Cross-eyed Simon said, “There’s someone waiting for you at the Town Hall.”
“Who?”
“The Deodorant Cat. He’s got news.”
Minou went straight there. It was three in the morning and very quiet on the square. Two marble lions were crouched in front of the Town Hall, each with a marble shield between its knees.
Minou waited. A mixture of strange smells was wafting out from the left lion’s shadow. She could smell cat and perfume. And now the Deodorant Cat emerged.
“Nosey-nosey first,” he said.
Minou held out her nose.
“Sorry about the apple blossom,” the cat said. “It’s our latest fragrance. I’ve got something to tell you, but you mustn’t tell anyone you got it from me. You have to keep my name out of the papers. Promise?”
“I promise,” said Minou.
“Well… remember I told you about Billy? The boy who worked in our canteen and got fired?”
“Oh, yes,” said Minou. “What about him?”
“He’s back. He got his job back.”
“He must be pleased,” Minou said. “But is that all? It’s not really newspaper material.”
“Don’t interrupt,” said the Deodorant Cat. “I’m not finished. Listen. This afternoon I was sitting on the ledge. Outside on the wall there’s a ledge and when I sit on it, behind the creeper, I can hear and see everything that goes on in the owner’s office. Our owner is Mr Ellmore. Do you know who that is?”
“Of course I do!” Minou exclaimed. “He crippled your mother!”
“Exactly,” said the cat. “That’s why I hate him. Not that I see much of my mother these days. She smells a little too vulgar to my taste. I’m used to more refined fragrances. But that’s not the point. I was sitting there on the ledge and I saw Billy in Ellmore’s office and I thought, let’s have a little listen, you never know.”
“Go on,” said Minou.
“I heard Ellmore say, ‘That’s agreed then, Billy, you get your old job back. Just run along straight to the canteen.’ And Billy said, ‘With pleasure, sir, lovely, sir, thank you very much, sir.’”
“And that was the end of it?” asked Minou.
“I thought so at first,” said the cat. “I thought it was over and I dozed off a little… because the sun was shining and you know what that’s like… sitting on a ledge in the sun…”
“Yes, I know,” Minou said. “Go on.”
“Well, all at once I heard Ellmore whispering something at the door, ‘… and don’t forget… if anyone happens to ask you what you saw this afternoon on Green Square… you didn’t see a thing. Understood? Not a thing.’”
“‘No, sir,’ said Billy, ‘Not a thing.’ And he left the office. And that was that.”
“A-ha,” said Minou. “I get it. Billy must have seen the accident.”
“That’s what I thought too,” said the cat.
“Now we finally have a human who saw it,” Minou told Tibble. “A real witness. Not just a cat witness.”
“I’ll go see Billy right now,” said Tibble. “Maybe he’ll admit to seeing something if I ask him straight out.”
He left.
While Tibble was gone, Minou had a conversation on the roof with the cat from the hotel. The Metropole Cat.
“Tell me,” Minou said. “I hear that Ellmore sometimes eats at the hotel. Is that true?”
“Yes,” said the Metropole Cat. “He and his wife have dinner in our restaurant once a week. On Fridays. That’s tonight.”
“Could you sit close by?” Minou asked. “To listen in on what he says?”
“Not likely,” said the Metropole Cat. “He kicked me once under the table.”
“It’s just that we’d really like to know what he’s saying in private,” Minou explained, “but none of us dare go to his house to eavesdrop. Because of his dog… Mars… So if you could, try to get close to the table.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the Metropole Cat promised.
Tibble came home much later, worn out and disheartened.
“I went to see Billy,” he said. “But Billy says he didn’t see anything. He insists he wasn’t even in Green Square when it happened. I’m sure he’s lying. He’s too scared to say anything, of course. I went to see the fishmonger too, in hospital.”
“How is he?” Minou asked. “Did he still smell good?”
“He smelt like hospitals,” Tibble said.
“How sad.”
“I asked him, ‘Could it have been Mr Ellmore’s car?’ But the fishmonger just got angry and shouted, ‘What a stupid idea! Ellmore’s my best customer, he wouldn’t do something like that.’ And…” Tibble hesitated. “I went to the police too. I asked them, ‘Could it have possibly been Mr Ellmore’s car?’”
“And what did they say?” Minou asked.
“They burst out laughing. They thought I’d gone mad.”