Pudding
At noon on Wednesday I was standing on the roof of a Range Rover in the high street in the full light of day, and I was prosecuting.
I will explain how it came about, since you will want to know that it was not my fault.
The blood had driven us into town to buy more of her tablets, her face being at last the size of a face, and she left the taxi in the little car park beside the chemist's, up the ramp, beside Mo's car, with the quarter-light open two inches for my air. The car park lies under the window of the counter where Mo works. It is a good window. Mo sees from it the bin lorry, the bakery girl's boyfriend, and everyone who has parked wrongly since 1994.
"Oh, love," said Mo, through it. "Look at your face. That's better. Is he with you? Is he in the car?"
"Keep an eye on the car, Mo," said the blood, and bent to the window, and lowered her voice, which she does not do. "Agatha's book's in the glovebox. I'd not leave it at the cottage."
"I'll watch it like a hawk," said Mo. "I'll not take my eyes off it, love, I'll not blink."
And then, as she was going round to the shop door, there came a sound that I knew from the drove, a big, wealthy, expensive engine turning in at the ramp, and the Range Rover came in and stopped across the end of the car park with its nose in the air, and the window came down, and the gilet said, "Jess! Jess! I saw the Skoda from the Lamb. Tomorrow's Thursday! Don't run off! Two minutes!"
"Nope," said the blood, and went in.
I considered the matter. A man who follows a woman up a ramp to a chemist's has not come for a prescription. I had a great deal of justice about me, and nowhere to put it.
I left the taxi by the quarter-light, an operation requiring a cat the width of a bread bin to pass through a hole the size of a slice of bread, and I shall say only that it was not elegant. I went down the ramp in the flat of the sun, past a pigeon, and under the Range Rover.
He was in the chemist's a very long time. When he came out he had a small white paper bag, held as one holds a thing one is ashamed of, and he put it on the roof of the car and took out his telephone.
I went up the wheel, which was warm from the engine, and got on the roof by the aerial, beside the paper bag, and sat down, upright, black, with my tail round my feet, and I felt as a judge feels when he has taken his seat. I do not say it was a throne, but I have sat on worse.
"Oh, look at him," said Mo, from her window. "Look, he's up on the car, God love him. Isn't he a pet? Look at his little face."
Gavin Thew did not look round. He was on the telephone, with his back to me and one hand in his gilet, and a man who has his back to a cat is a man who deserves what is coming.
"Phil. Gavin. No, listen. Thursday. I've got her Thursday. Sixty-forty she signs, that's me being modest." A pause. "She's skint, Phil. She's got finance on that Skoda like a limpet. Honestly, it's a kindness. At the end of the day I'm doing her a favour."
I will give him this: he spoke the whole of it as a man who believes every word.
A noise came from the corner of the chemist's wall. It was the noise of a very small sneeze, held in with some force, and it came from four yards behind him, and I did not need to look. A woman who does faces badly does stalking worse. She had come out of the shop door, and she had heard her own name, and gone along the wall on tiptoe in her dead aunt's boots like a burglar at a nativity. Then it came again, bigger, and it went off like a gun.
"Bless you!" said Gavin Thew, turning round. "Jess! Perfect timing! Have you got two minutes?"
She did not say anything. She stood at the corner of the wall with her face red and her nose streaming, and one hand up as though to stop traffic.
I had my moment. A judge does not choose them. I stood up on the roof of the Range Rover with my back up and my tail like a candle, and I addressed the gilet, in the voice I had used to the Bishop of Ely in 1760, and I put the charges to him one by one.
"Sir, a man who buys plasters is a man expecting blood."
Gavin looked up at me. A man with a paper bag and a telephone is not a great man in a crisis.
"Jess, your cat's on my car. He's got his back up. Is that a good sign?"
"No man," I said, "puts forty hot tubs in a flood plain for the love of his fellow man."
"He was buying plasters," said the blood, flat, from the wall.
I went on. A duke can. A crowd had begun to come, six of them: the man in the bowls blazer with his hat in his hand, the woman from the bakery with a tray, two women with the same cough, and a boy with a plaster on his ear, who was looking at Gavin's paper bag with great interest. None of them had heard a word. They had heard a cat, on a car, shouting. Nobody in this parish has ever been surprised by that.
"He's grieving," said the man in the blazer.
"He's a good boy," said Mo, from the window, with her hand on her heart.
I put one more charge. It was my best. I had been saving it for forty years, since I first saw a man in a padded waistcoat at a funeral.
"I put it to you, sir, that no man has ever been warm only in the middle for an honest reason."
Gavin looked at the blood. He looked at the crowd. He looked at his paper bag.
"Right," he said. "Jess. Honestly. Hear me out. Three fifty. That's my last, that's my best, and here's the thing. I'll settle your finance. Direct. To the company, Thursday, bank transfer, you'll never see it, no middleman, and you walk away clean. Cottage, cat, whatever you want. Clean."
"How d'you know about the finance?" said the blood.
"I can add, Jess." He smiled. It was a very good smile, with a great deal of tooth, and I have seen better in a trap. "You're driving a ten-year-old Skoda with a meter on a night shift. It's finance or it's a miracle. And I'm not a man who believes in miracles. Think about it. I'll ring tonight."
He went. He got down into his car, with the roof still under me and a cat on it, and I will tell you that he did not drive off. He started the engine, and put it in gear, and then, with his window down, looked up through the glass at a black fat cat in the full light of noon, sitting on the roof of a car that cost more than the church roof, and said, quite gently, "Do you mind?"
"Madam," I said to the blood, "he is asking me to leave."
"Get off his car," said the blood.
I got off his car. I went down the bonnet. Nobody has ever called it dignity but it was what I had.
We went back up the ramp, the two of us, in silence, along the line of cars, with the blood's boots going on the tarmac like something being typed. It was five minutes past one.
I saw who was about. The Range Rover was behind us, on the corner, with its engine going and its paper bag still on the roof. Mo was at her window with her cardigan on, waving at me with all her fingers. At the foot of the war memorial, on the corner, Ned's white van stood with its orange light off, and Ned himself was on the memorial steps with a clipboard of flood levels, telling a gauge to two old men from the almshouses, who nodded as if at a sermon. The vicar's bicycle was leaning against the plinth, tall and black and patient, and the vicar was in the church hall across the road with the flood rota, and I could smell him from the ramp, pear drops and paper and a man afraid of a clipboard.
The glovebox was open.
It was hanging down on its hinge, like a mouth. The blood saw it from ten feet and stopped. She did not shout. She does not. She put out one hand, and took hold of the car's roof, and walked round to the passenger side, and the door was shut and unlocked, as a door of that age is unless one leans on it. She had not leaned. The lock of the glovebox was bent back as if somebody had been at it with a flat piece of iron. On the seat lay the tyre gauge. And in the glovebox there was a parking ticket, and a sandwich, and an empty space the size and shape of a paving slab.
"Where is the film?" I said.
"What film?"
"The camera on the windscreen, madam, that watches your fares. There is film."
"It only runs with the engine on." She pressed her knuckle on the little red lens. It was dark. "I've never had it on with the engine off. It uses the battery." She was talking very flat, in the voice she uses when something is not all right. "It's off. It's been off since I parked."
"Then it saw nothing."
"It saw nothing."
She went into the chemist's. I heard her ask Mo, through the window, if she had seen anybody near the car, and Mo's voice, high and wet, "Oh love, I never saw a soul, I was doing Mrs Pettit's water tablets, I only looked away for the one minute, I'd never, I said I'd watch it like a hawk!" And then she was out again, with her telephone, standing in the middle of the car park, on the line to the police in a voice like a clerk's, giving the number of the car and the nature of the book. She said the word ledger twice. She said, "It's about this big." She held her hands apart.
"They've given me a number," she said, when she put it down.
"What does it do?"
"It's a crime number. It's for the insurance."
"Does it find the book?"
"No," said the blood.
She stood there, in the car park, in the sun, with a crime number in her hand like a bus ticket. A pigeon came and looked at it.
"Say the names," she said.
I looked at her.
"Now. Here. You've got them by heart. You said so. Say them. All of them. I'll write them on my hand."
In three hundred years it had not once occurred to me that somebody would say, "Say them."
"Madam," I said. "I never kept count."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that she kept the page." I did not look at her. I looked at the ticket. "It was her business to keep it. I did not think it was mine."
She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, "Right," and shut the glovebox, which would not stay, and held it with her hand, and said she was going to ask Gavin tonight, at his cabin, and then the vicar, and then everyone else in the town who had ever said the word book, one at a time, in order.
"And Mo's cupboard," I said.
"Not Mo."
"Madam, she has told you in her own mouth that she is a woman who takes what is not hers and puts it in a cupboard."
"She watched the car."
"She watched it like a hawk," I said, "and a hawk, I believe, has been known to be looking at something else."
She got in. She put her forehead on the wheel for a count of six, and then she turned the key, and the engine came on, and the little red light on the windscreen came on with it, a small bright eye, looking at the two of us, and at the empty space where the book had been.