The Case of the Missing Cats Read online

  GARETH JONES

  To Lisa for discovering this story

  and encouraging me to write it

  – G. J.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter One

  Dirk Dilly reclined with his feet resting on his desk, watching the smoke curl up from his mouth and fill the room. It spiralled up and then, as it caught in a breeze coming from the window, swooped back down. Business was slow. If the truth be told, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been sat there. Two hours? Three? He could turn his head to look at the clock but it all seemed like so much effort. Anyway, he had never quite got to grips with telling the time. It was such a peculiar method of measuring things. Sixty seconds in a minute. Sixty minutes in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. He understood the principle, all right. It just seemed like a funny way to chop up time.

  Dirk listened to the traffic passing and closed his eyes. He felt so relaxed that when the phone rang, harshly breaking the trance he was in, he fell backwards, his long, scaly tail lashing out, knocking the clock clean off the wall. It smashed on the floor.

  ‘Rats,’ he growled with such force that a small thin line of fire darted from his mouth. The flames caught a pile of yellowing newspapers that Dirk hadn’t got round to filing yet, setting them alight.

  ‘Big rats,’ he said, springing to his feet. He threw the contents of his glass of neat orange squash at the spreading fire. It was woefully inadequate. The fire reached the curtains. Dirk looked around in panic. In the corner of the room was an old fire extinguisher. He whipped out his tail to grab it, but rather than grabbing it properly his tail caught the pull chord, immediately setting it off. White foam shot across the room and the fire extinguisher spun around, covering everything in sight. Everything, that was, except the fire, which was now blackening the ceiling.

  ‘Big fat rats!’

  There was only one thing for it. The painful option. He flapped his wings a couple of times, and lifted himself into the air. Then with a pre-emptive wince he threw himself against the curtains and ceiling. The whole building shook and Dirk landed heavily on his desk. He lifted his head and looked up. The fire was out. There was a moment’s pause before the pain registered.

  ‘Owwww!’ he groaned.

  His scaly, red back was fireproof, but he had landed with some force on his soft, green underbelly, which was now making an alarming ringing noise.

  ‘I must have hurt myself pretty bad,’ he muttered worriedly. ‘What does a ringing belly mean?’

  Tentatively he lifted himself up on his four legs to examine the damage. The ringing grew louder. He took a deep breath and looked down. To his great relief he found he had been lying on the telephone. He climbed off the desk and sat down behind it, catching his breath before answering.

  ‘The Dragon Detective Agency. Dirk Dilly speaking.’

  ‘Hello, are you a detective?’

  It was a human child, a girl, by the pitch of the voice.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eleven. Why?’

  ‘That’s too young. Goodbye.’

  Dirk put the phone down.

  Kids, he thought. Time wasters.

  And that was that.

  Or rather that would have been that had the phone not started ringing again. In actual fact, that was going to be anything but that. By picking up the phone a second time he made sure that that was about as far from that as was humanly – or even dragonly – possible.

  ‘Hello?’ said the girl’s voice again.

  ‘What do you want, kid?’ he said gruffly.

  ‘My cat’s gone missing.’

  ‘I don’t do animals.’

  On the other end of the phone there came a strange gurgling, hiccuping, wailing, noise. She was crying.

  ‘Listen,’ said Dirk, a little softness creeping into his voice in spite of himself.

  But the noise kept coming.

  ‘Listen,’ he said more sternly.

  The girl still sobbed.

  ‘All right, I’ll find your cat.’

  The crying stopped suddenly and the voice said with surprising brightness, ‘Great. My address is forty-three Elliot Drive. The cat’s name is Willow.’

  ‘And have your parents looked for the cat?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not even sure they know we have a cat,’ she replied.

  ‘Why do you think it’s been stolen?’

  ‘Because Willow always comes in when I call her, but she didn’t tonight.’

  ‘Tonight? When did you last see her?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘So she’s been missing for how long?’

  ‘I normally call her for tea at about four o’clock.’

  Dirk glanced at the space on his wall where the clock should have been, then looked down to where it lay on the floor. He flipped it over with his tail. It had stopped with the big hand pointing at the six, and the smaller halfway between the four and the five. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was half past four.

  ‘You’re telling me that your cat has been missing for thirty minutes and you’ve called me?’

  ‘I told you. She always comes when I call her.’

  ‘Hey, kiddo, I’m going to put the phone down. Don’t ever phone me again. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about thinking it. If you even think about thinking about thinking about . . . Where was I?’

  But the girl didn’t answer. Instead the awful noise started again, growing louder and louder like an airraid siren. Dirk wasn’t exactly soft-hearted and he had no love of humans, let alone their small annoying offspring, but the noise was so horrible that he knew that even if he put the receiver down the memory of it would linger on. And so, against every molecule of common sense in his large, scaly body, he put the phone back to his long pointy ear and said, ‘All right. I’ll check it out.’

  ‘Great,’ said the girl cheerfully. ‘My name is Holly, by the way. Holly Bigsby.’

  After getting the cat’s description, Dirk put the phone down and prepared to leave. It wasn’t his usual sort of work. Normally he trailed cheating husbands, found teenagers who had run away from home or took photos of people off work with bad backs that were taking trampolining holidays.

  He slipped his notebook behind his wing and peeked though the slatted blinds that hung in front of the window. Satisfied that no one was looking, he pulled up the blinds and pushed open the window. What could be simpler than a missing cat? It was probably stuck up a tree or had found a woman next door with fuller-fat milk or maybe it had been run over. No, this would be an easy case. He spread his wings, flapped them a couple of times and leapt out.

  Chapter Two

  You may be wondering what a dragon was doing working in London as a private detective. The answer is that if you’re going to be a private detective, London is a large city with lots of people with lots of problems, so there’s plenty of work to be had.

  The other advantage of London for your average jobbing dragon is that hardly anyone eve
r looks up, which means that even if you are a four-metre-long, red-backed, green-bellied, urban-based Mountain Dragon, as long as you stick to roofs no one’s ever going to see you.

  Of course, there had been some close calls. But even if someone did look up in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and catch a glimpse of a medium-sized dragon leaping overhead, by the time they had blinked or rubbed their eyes or tapped their husband on the arm to say, ‘Look, a medium-sized dragon just flew past,’ by that time Dirk was safely out of sight.

  And the husband would say something like, ‘A dragon? In London? Don’t be ridiculous.’

  And his wife might reply, ‘That’s what I saw.’

  And he would say, ‘Maybe it floated over from China Town. They have big long dragons for Chinese New Year.’

  And she would say, ‘When is Chinese New Year?’

  And so on until one of them would say something along the lines of, ‘We haven’t had Chinese takeaway for ages. Let’s have one tonight. Mmmm . . . sweet-and-sour pork.’ And the memory of seeing a dragon would vanish as quickly as the dragon had himself.

  While having to remain unseen is a disadvantage for a teacher or a bank clerk or an insurance salesman, it is a positive advantage for a private detective. Dirk only ever spoke to clients over the phone. In fact, the only face-to-face interaction he ever had with humans was with his elderly landlady, Mrs Klingerflim, who lived below his office. Although she claimed to be able to see perfectly well through her thick glasses, she was clearly as blind as a bat. Dirk had discovered this when she walked into his office and caught him asleep, head slumped over his desk.

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ she had said as she opened the door.

  Dirk had awoken with a start. ‘Er, Mrs Klingerflim. I . . . I can explain,’ he had said, ducking behind the desk.

  ‘No need, Mr Dilly. After all, your rent is only two days late. I just wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten,’ said the sweet old lady.

  ‘My rent? Oh my rent . . .’ he had replied. Then, testing the water, he had stood up again and said, ‘I meant to apologise for my appearance.’

  She looked him up and down and said, ‘I think you look fine, Mr Dilly. Very smart. My Ivor never looked smart in his life. On our wedding day, the vicar threw him out of the church. He thought he was a tramp who had come in for the wine!’

  Blind as a bat. And as mad as a badger. Since then Mrs K often popped in, always with some story about her dead husband, Ivor, and her children, who were grown up now and never visited. The old girl liked the company and Dirk was always careful not to let his scaly skin accidentally brush against her.

  * * *

  Dirk took his usual route south, leaping from roof to roof, ever grateful that dragons cast shadows upwards. Still, he had to be careful, particularly in South London, where the buildings were lower to the ground. The consequences of being seen were unthinkable. But he was quick and humans were slow. He had been doing this job long enough to know that he could avoid being seen as long as he stayed alert.

  He arrived at Elliot Drive. It was the kind of quiet suburban area that human families liked to live in. Half of its inhabitants would be crammed into overflowing trains on their way home from boring office jobs, wondering what was for dinner. The other half would be at home cooking dinner, thinking about how nice it would be to have a job to get them out of the house.

  He ran across a row of terraced houses, jumping the chimneys like they were hurdles, then somersaulted across the quiet road and landed on number forty-three. He curled himself around a chimney, pulled out his pad, flicked it open and checked his notes.

  Female Cat - black - white paws - white face, black smudge

  Answers to name ‘Willow’

  * * *

  He watched a tabby stroll across a garden proudly. Another, this one ginger, darted from a cat flap, chasing an imaginary mouse. Dirk raised his head, seeing a black cat stretching on the warmth of a car bonnet, but its paws were black, too, and its face wasn’t white.

  And then he saw just about the last thing he had ever expected to see. At first he noticed the smoke coming from a chimney three streets away, just above where the black cat was rolling on the car. But looking more closely he saw that the smoke wasn’t coming from the house. Curled around the chimney, was a red-backed, green-bellied Mountain Dragon lying quietly on the roof. It was like looking in a mirror. He couldn’t believe it. Was it lost? Did it know the punishment for being seen by a human? What was it doing here?

  Suddenly, the other dragon swooped down from the rooftop and then back up again. It jumped to another building and then another and so on, travelling much in the same way as Dirk did.

  The black cat, that seconds ago had been lying so contentedly and happily in the sun, was gone. That’s what the dragon was doing there. It was stealing cats.

  The next question, of course, was why?

  Chapter Three

  Dirk took chase. The other Mountain Dragon obviously wasn’t expecting to be followed, so Dirk was able to stay close behind, but every now and then it would pause on a rooftop, waiting for someone to pass, and he would have to stop dead in his tracks to avoid being seen.

  Until that moment he knew of only one other dragon living in the area, but he dwelt far below the surface and would never be seen jumping around on rooftops in broad daylight.

  On the whole, dragons were solitary creatures living in isolation high up in the mountains, deep within the oceans or far beneath the surface of the earth. There were no dragon towns or cities. Living in London, Dirk marvelled at so many humans wanting to cram themselves into such a small space. It was no wonder they were so unpleasant to each other most of the time.

  But despite the greed, deceit and corruption that Dirk uncovered daily, he loved the city with its historic buildings, bright lights, constant noise and variety of smells – some great, like popcorn or fast food, some bad, like car-exhaust fumes or fish markets on hot days. He had been there so long that it was now as much a part of him as his own wings.

  Dirk had followed the mystery dragon all the way to the River Thames and was now heading eastward, where the roofs were higher and wider, the trees fewer and the buildings greyer.

  And then it vanished. One minute it was on top of an old warehouse in the middle of a particularly grim-looking industrial estate. The next, it had disappeared from sight.

  Cautiously he approached the spot where the other dragon had stood. He landed lightly on the rooftop and scanned it for clues. On the flat roof was a dirty skylight that looked down into the warehouse below. He wiped the dirt away with one paw, being careful not to scratch the glass with his razor-sharp talons, and peered in.

  In the warehouse below were five large wooden crates. Four of them had the words DO NOT OPEN printed in red on the top. The fifth crate, in the middle of the room read, HANDLE WITH CARE.

  A bell rang and a door opened at the side of the building. A short, fat man entered, and walked to the middle crate.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said, straining to lift it. ‘It’s like tryin’ to lift a flippin’ lead-lined elephant. Lend us an ’and, will you?’

  ‘A hand?’ replied a second man, entering the building.

  He was taller than the first, with the merest wisp of hair carefully combed across his otherwise bald head. ‘May I remind you that you are supposed to be the muscles of this operation?’

  ‘Can’t you just take one corner?’

  ‘No, I cannot. As I have explained to you some thirty-eight times now, I am unable to participate in any physical activity on account of a rare condition that I concocted in Africa. That is why I am the brains.’

  ‘I think I wanna be the brains for a change. Maybe we could job share,’ panted the fat man.

  ‘Sadly, my friend, that would require you being in possession of the aforementioned grey matter to which you have previously referred,’ said the tall man.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You’re too thick. Now come on!’

/>   ‘Honestly, I’m gonna give meself an ’ernia if I keep on like this. Why can’t we get a forklift truck?’

  ‘What would I use a forklift truck for?’

  ‘Movin’ the boxes.’

  ‘I see, so I could drive in, lift up the boxes using my forklift truck, move them hither and thither and I wouldn’t even have to disturb you from your beauty sleep.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Then what would I need you for?’

  ‘Oh . . . I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘Which is why I do the thinking.’

  ‘I could make the tea.’

  A bell rang, making Dirk jump. He looked around but couldn’t see any sign of danger. The bell rang for ten seconds and then stopped. He put his ear back to the roof.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ said the taller man. ‘Leave that.’ The short, fat man put the crate down and said, ‘Why do we have to leave every time that bell goes off?’

  ‘While I’m the brains, leave the whys to me. OK?’

  ‘Look, I ain’t grumbling. I’m glad to have a break. It’s just that every time that blinking bell . . .’

  The rest of his words were cut off by the bell, which rang again. By the time it had finished the two men had left the building.

  Dirk looked up and saw, just in time, another dragon approaching. This one was light grey and in place of ears had two gills. It was a Sea Dragon. But this was no time to get out his I Spy Book of Dragons. It was coming this way, bounding across the roofs towards him.

  Quick as a flash he leapt in the air and somersaulted backwards over the edge of the building. Grabbing wildly, he caught hold of a gutter by the tip of his claws. With a loud CLANK the Sea Dragon landed on the roof. Dirk held his breath. Had he been seen? He could hear the other dragon pacing on the roof centimetres away from him. Was he trying to work out where he had gone?

  The plastic gutter creaked unhappily. Clearly it wasn’t designed to support the weight of a dragon, even one in as good shape as Dirk. He looked down. Directly below him was a mass of barbed wire on top of the high fence that separated the yard beside the warehouse from the main road. The two men were walking across the yard towards an old caravan.