Mole Smith And The Diamond Studded Pistol

By Paddy Bostock

Tricked into believing he is to be accused of a murder he hasn’t committed, PI gofer Mole Smith is inveigled into the search for an ancient order and its famous diamond-studded pistol. What Mole doesn’t know, as he undertakes the quest with his partner Oksana, is what powers lurk behind the scenes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781613090442

Book preview

MOLE SMITH AND THE DIAMOND STUDDED PISTOL

The massage was really okay—it was. This time Oksana had only displaced two of my vertebrae, meaning that I used my good arm to steer the car while leaning the impossibly limp one on the center rest.

She really didn’t mean any harm performing these therapeutic massages; it was one of the ways she showed her affection for me. It’s just that her martial arts skills came inexorably into play as a matter of course, a fact I sometimes pointedly reminded her during our early-morning pillow talk. Her way of dealing with my unrest in this area was to smile in that winsome way of hers, run her fingers through her silky ash-blonde hair and, in the end, shrug a bit.

Right now I wish I could shrug as well. But every time I tried, my left shoulder locked up, shooting pain all the way down to my coccyx. It was an unpleasant sensation as the car swerved to the pitch and yaw of the road.

Table of Contents

MOLE SMITH AND THE DIAMOND STUDDED PISTOL Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Epilogue

Meet Paddy Bostock

Other Books by Paddy Bostock

MOLE SMITH AND THE DIAMOND STUDDED PISTOL

Paddy Bostock

A Wings ePress, Inc.

Suspense Novel

Edited by: Jeanne Smith

Copy Edited by: Joan C. Powell

Senior Editor: Jeanne R. Smith

Executive Editor: Marilyn Kapp

Cover Artist: Richard Stroud

All rights reserved

Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Wings ePress Books

Copyright © 2010 by Paddy Bostock

ISBN 978-1-61309-044-7?

Published by Wings ePress, Inc. at Smashwords

Wings ePress Inc.

3000 N. Rock Road

Newton, KS 67114

Dedication

For all the family—Amy, Tom, Natalie, Theo and Anya—but especially for Dani. No Dani, no book.

Part One

One

The massage was really okay—it was. This time Oksana had only displaced two of my vertebrae, meaning that I used my good arm to steer the car while leaning the impossibly limp one on the center rest.

She really didn’t mean any harm performing these therapeutic massages; it was one of the ways she showed her affection for me. It’s just that her martial arts skills came inexorably into play as a matter of course, a fact I sometimes pointedly reminded her during our early-morning pillow talk. Her way of dealing with my unrest in this area was to smile in that winsome way of hers, run her fingers through her silky ash-blonde hair and, in the end, shrug a bit.

Right now I wish I could shrug as well. But every time I tried, my left shoulder locked up, shooting pain all the way down to my coccyx. It was an unpleasant sensation as the car swerved to the pitch and yaw of the road.

But I smiled anyway. That’s the sort of bloke I am, you know—easy come, easy go.

At home I did the basic chores while Oksana handled all the hard stuff, like paying the bills. And at our PI agency, I did the gofer work while she caught the bad guys. It was no good complaining—Oksana was just very good at what she did. Even the Met recently invited her to look into some of their trickier cases, thanks to her reputation for morphing villains into thumb-suckers. It was the yowls and the ballet-like swivels with her Scorpion King-kicking feet that petrified them, which allowed me to stroll up and ask if they felt like surrendering.

I wondered sometimes what she saw in me—with her doctorate in Russian mafiyas of the 1990s while I had a mere master’s in nineteenth-century French symbolist poetry in a poststructuralist context. But any time I asked her about it, she just smiled, went through her hair-flicking routine, and said that she appreciated a man with sensitivity. I guess I was lucky to have snared her by teaching English lessons when she’d only recently arrived from the Ukraine. A few more successful cases and Oksana Vottabodych would be changing her name to mine—Smith, that is—which may or may not make her life easier.

Cheered by those thoughts, I whistled a tune to myself as I drove the VW around Marble Arch and then well along Park Lane, until I hit a snarl-up. My tune of choice was Marching Through Georgia. Dee, dee. Dee, dum. Dee dumpy dumpy dumpy dum. Dee, dee. Dee, dum. Dee dumpy dumpy dumpy dum. Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee, dumpy dumpy dum"…when we go marching through Georgia." The Beetle Cabriolet is a nifty car. Ours was the Alaska-metallic-green model with black leather seats and a 1.9-litre engine that took you to 100 mph in ten seconds, although I was currently traveling at only one twentieth of that speed. Congestion charging was a rip-snorter of an idea and, on good days, traffic actually flowed through central London. But it only took a single incident at some critical junction and then bingo, back to the bad old days, when cyclists were the masters of the road and Porsches, Mercedes and Rolls Royces—and VW Beetle Cabriolets—were about as useful as yachts on a sandbar.

On the upside, though, few bikes came equipped with flower vases, as the Beetle did. We have a geranium in ours; Oksana named it Gerry. At first I explained to her that you’re only meant to put a plastic flower in there, an orchid perhaps, but she truly loathes simulacra. That’s why we have genuine Gerry, whose watered-daily compost made our otherwise pristine VW stink like a sty. But what can you do? At least I got to drive an Alaska-metallic-green VW Beetle Cabriolet with an electric-powered convertible top that was pretty fabulous in these days of global warming. It’s like a sun bed on wheels, you might say.

In this late July weather, I always motored in a t-shirt and shorts. You don’t want to know what Oksana drove in. Well, perhaps you do. She wears a halter and a G-string—a pink one with lacy bits over the crotch—an outfit that has provoked wide-ranging commentary from drivers of lorries, buses and 4x4s, and has also led to a number of shocking near misses.

~ * ~

Traffic ground to a halt outside one of those swish Park Lane hotels I’d never been in—the Savoy perhaps? No, the Dorchester? Damn, I don’t remember. Anyway, there we were, grid-locked. Blokes were head-butting their horns, shrieking into mobiles and chewing on the upholstery. Cyclists zoomed past, flipping us the finger and laughing. I just smiled, leaned back in the specially crafted, vertebrae-enhancing leather seat and poked at the radio. There was no sense in losing my cool. The song that came blaring out of the Cabriolet’s quadraphonic speakers, on Capital Gold, was No Particular Place to Go by Chuck Berry, one of my father’s favorites.

I chuckled at the irony, which I indicated to the puce-faced person stacked up in the silver Mercedes 230-SLK next to me by raising my good arm through the electronically lowered roof, clicking my fingers and singing along with Chuck. The bloke looked back at me like I was nuts. To be more specific, he stared over at me, placed his forefinger against his temple and began screwing it back and forth while waggling his remaining fingers about at the same time, a difficult trick. Then he screamed something at me, unintelligible since he had the windows closed to make his a/c more effective. It looked like he’d said, sod off, wanker, but then I’m no lip reader.

I checked my watch. I was already late for my appointment at the university with a bloke called Jeeves—or possibly Jenson—about some bicycle thefts I was meant to be investigating, but he would just have to wait. What was I supposed to do, fly? Maybe the designers in Wolfsburg should have developed a jump-jet version of the VW Beetle but, to the best of my knowledge, they hadn’t. All this model could do was develop about a trillion horsepower on a straight road, so long as no traffic was coming in either direction. That’s how the brochure photos had portrayed it, anyway—pissing along a road, but definitely not flying. It had regular wheels, just like any other car. Sure they were nice wheels, with the blue-and-white VW insignia and oversized tires with special treads, but we’re not talking the Batmobile here.

Ah, well, I said, as I leaned back, laid a hand behind my head and sang along with Chuck. Riding along in my automobile, my baby beside me at the wheel...

While I was doing this and simultaneously musing on possible incident scenarios that could have explained the vehicular stagnation all around me—the discovery of a weapon of mass destruction in Hyde Park, perhaps—Puce Face in the Merc suddenly opted to fling open his door, scuttled around the snub-nose front of the Beetle, and vaulted himself into the passenger’s seat.

Hi, he said. I’m Lionel. Look, sorry about that ‘sod off, wanker’ bit, but it pisses you off sometimes, doesn’t it? All this? He gestured vaguely at the tons of overheating metal parked all around us. Cigarette? he asked. Well, I was fairly taken aback, to say the least. This was the first time in my life a person had jumped uninvited into my car. Mind you, the only other vehicle I’d owned was a ’78 Renault 5 you could only enter through the hatchback, so fat chance of anyone vaulting into that. Maybe this was the sort of thing that happened once a person graduated to Cabriolet status. Not wishing to appear naff, I masked my surprise, accepted the proffered fag and booted up the VW’s computerized cigar lighter.

Yeah, bummer, I said as we waited for the lighter to heat up. A Zippo would have been quicker, and a match faster still. But you know how proud we are of technology, feeling obliged to use it even when the non-tech way is best. So while the device’s fluorescent arrows ran up and down its optimal incendiary potential indices, I sized up both the fag and Lionel. The fag was a Disque Bleu, which was okay. I liked Goolies. As for Lionel, the jury was still out.

I’ve got a lighter in my pocket, he said, staring impatiently at the VW’s flashing gizmo.

Lionel was wearing one of those retro green corduroy suits with flared trousers, the sort Winnie said he used to wear with a pink shirt back in the nineteen-sixties—not that I believed him, of course.

Winnie—full name Winston Leonard Spencer Smith, my father—fantasized a lot about the clothes he used to wear back in the day, including purple velvet hipsters, Jimi Hendrix Y-fronts, kipper ties and winkle-picker Chelsea boots, just to name a few. Then there were all the fab-gear things he said that he and Trixie—real name Patricia, my mother—used to do. They saw The Beatles in the Cavern in 1962, went on the Woodstock pilgrimage, attended the free Stones’ concert in Hyde Park—the same Hyde Park alongside which Lionel and I were now grid-locked—smoked pot, and took a Greyhound bus across the States in 1967 to Haight Ashbury. Yeah, Winnie, so what’s with the Jaguar and the poncy residence in Richmond? Double standards, that’s what I say—and none of that National Health nonsense, either, but private orthodontics, hence the grossly conspicuous wealth.

I think it’s ready, Lionel said.

What?

Your lighter.

He was right. The VW’s twenty-first century fag lighter was set to go. "Fire up now and hope to die," I imagined it saying in a voice out of somewhere between Wolfsburg and Los Angeles—Boris Becker’s, perhaps. I dragged the optimally incandescent gadget from the console and placed it at the end of Lionel’s Goolie before lighting my own. Two of Gerry’s leaves drooped in protest as we inhaled and then exhaled luxuriantly into the exhaust-laden Park Lane air, but I ignored the plant.

Don’t worry about Gerry, I said.

Gerry? Lionel asked, turning around to look for passengers in the rear seats.

The geranium.

Geranium?

Yes.

Okay. I won’t worry about Gerry.

Good.

There were no signs of movement ahead, so Lionel and I simply smoked our cigarettes and chilled. Well, Lionel didn’t actually chill so much as drag hard on his fag while he fidgeted and writhed about. Lionel acted like he was coming apart at the seams. His lips kept twitching as though he wanted to speak, but nothing came out except a few gurgles. I decided to ignore him. I mean, first the bloke vaults into your Cabriolet, and then he simply sits looking like a beached haddock. What’s all that about, then? For all I knew, he could have been nuts. To pass the time, either until he came to his senses or I decided to leap from the VW and do a runner, I returned to my WMD musings.

Maybe it was one of those leftover German doodlebugs they kept finding while digging up London’s streets to repair the Victorian-era sewers. Now there was something you could truly call a WMD, at least according to my grandfather. He’d been a big wheel in Dad’s Army during World War Two, ostensibly a conchie but more likely a shirker, I reckoned. That sort of thing ran in our family. Rumor had it that he’d had a gammy leg, but was that a good enough reason to stay home instead of confronting the Bosch, one of whose latter-day cars I was currently driving? Well, I wasn’t so much driving it as sitting in it.

Oh, the disagreements we used to have down in Richmond! My big brother Incy would argue that only cowards refused to fight in wars, which made Winnie clip him ’round the ear and march about while talking up the Siege of Chicago, flowers down soldiers’ gun barrels, and John Lennon bravely returning his MBE. Then I’d have to restrain Incy from whacking Winnie in the eye while Gramps looked on and grinned, dragging on yet another lung-challenging roll-up. A few more years and Gramps would be getting his hundredth birthday card from Elizabeth Rex. I smiled at the memories.

Are you laughing at me? Lionel asked.

No.

Because I will not tolerate people who laugh at me.

I wasn’t laughing at you.

"But you were laughing."

Yes, at memories.

Not at me?

No.

Good. he said, making to stub out his Goolie in the Cabriolet’s ashtray until I placed a restraining hand on his forearm.

Not in Klinny. Just toss it.

Toss it?

Onto the street. The last thing I needed was another one of Oksana’s massages after she’d discovered a fag end in Klinny’s ashtray. She threatened to kill me if she ever found evidence of my having smoked in the VW, and considering her lethally prodding fingers and all… My partner is a non-smoker, I explained, and this is her car.

Klinny?

That’s what she calls it. Gerry Geranium. Klinny Car.

Clearly barking, Lionel snorted. Don’t think of marrying her, young man.

Okay, I said to the stranger in the passenger’s seat.

The VW is called Klinny because it reminded Oksana of Jurgen Klinsmann, a German footballer who used to play for Tottenham Hotspur and someone for whom Oksana had the hots ever since I showed her my video clips of our glory days. Klinny, as Oksana dubbed him, also drove a VW Cabriolet—one of the old ones with its motor in the boot—and wouldn’t swap it for a Mercedes at any price, which endeared him to Oksana. Well, it was that and his flowing blonde hair, his graceful diving in the penalty area and, frankly, his body. Anyway, that’s why the car was called Klinny.

She hates it when she finds ash in the ashtray, I told Lionel, who had gone all mute and glassy-eyed, staring off in the direction where I figured they might have found a doodlebug. On second thought, they couldn’t have, because otherwise there would be sirens blaring and hard-hats passed ’round by people in yellow-and-blue coats, none of which was happening. It was probably just another outburst of bus-rage, a regular occurrence in early twenty-first-century London.

Got another one of those? I asked, humoring him and hoping the traffic would finally start moving so he’d be obliged to vault out of my car and back into his.

"Another one of what?"

Fags.

"For fuck’s sake," he said, shaking the packet over his head and spraying Goolies all around Klinny’s insides.

I picked two off the dashboard and used Lionel’s proffered pink plastic disposable mini-Clipper to light up for both of us. He seemed grateful, even relaxing a bit. Good, I thought as I took a closer look at the bloke. He was somewhere between forty and sixty, I reckoned, although it’s hard for us young people to judge age. Of course, we don’t try all that hard in case it happens to us. Old is just old, like Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Paul McCartney and even Sir Mick Jagger. Old is simply death’s close-by neighbor and nobody wants to think about that, including Lionel, to judge by his neo-trendy clothes and his thinning black-going-on-silver hair, plus the unfashionable sideboards and the sad ponytail that swished dandruff all over his collar as he writhed. Otherwise he looked pretty trim, certainly trim enough to vault into other people’s cars, and even more certainly able to beat the shit out of me if his current level of nervousness suddenly switched to fury.

Be cool with this, Mole. Here’s an old guy having a hard day, so don’t aggravate him. There’s no point getting your head kicked in for no reason.

Mole is my first name, by the way. It’s hard to believe that someone would be called that, I imagine. It’s been an embarrassment all my life and the subject of repeated protests down Richmond way, but Winnie always just shrugged and said those were the sorts of trendy names back in the nineteen-seventies. Think River Phoenix and his sister Stream, or Ocean, or whatever.

It’s a perfectly good name—Molar—he insisted, while Trixie looked on and smiled through the Marlboro smoke that wreathed her expensively maintained features. Trixie still looked a great deal like Marianne Faithfull used to, and Winnie liked that. He’d call her Cuddles and stroked her bottom in public, which I’m not knocking, mind you. It was the name thing that bugged me. Incy was the only one who got narked about our parents’ public display of sexuality. He didn’t mind his name because he reckoned that Incy was a much cooler nickname than Mole. Still, he claimed that his childhood was repressed because Winnie took greater interest in Trixie’s bottom than in him. I used to remind him that Winnie’s interest in Trixie’s bottom was what caused him to be born, but then he’d just moodily stare off into space. We were different brothers with different hang-ups, the same as with most families.

Anyway, we hadn’t heard much from Incy ever since he hit pay dirt in the sex-tourist industry several years ago in Phuket, Thailand—just the occasional self-aggrandizing letter.

I don’t think I caught your name, Lionel said. So I told him.

"Mole?" he asked, going all squinty eyed.

It’s an abbreviation of Molar. My dad’s a dentist.

Lionel cottoned on quicker than most. Good job he didn’t call you ‘Eye,’ he giggled. Or ‘Wisdom,’ he chuntered, tugging at his ponytail, "or ‘Incisor,’" he guffawed, slapping himself on both thighs the way fruitcakes did when they thought something was funny. Slap, slap, slap on the thighs—chortle, chortle, head cocked back to bray at the moon that wasn’t there yet because it was only late afternoon.

That’s my brother’s name, I said, which choked off his chortling.

Sorry, Lionel said, who took to twitching again.

That’s all right. We’re coping.

Good, good. Glad to hear it. More than can be said for me.

Ah, I said.

And that’s all I said. There was a long silence while Lionel peered about and squirmed in his seat, hoping I would ask him for further details, I reckoned. But I didn’t. I make it a point of not asking people how they are these days, just in case they’re tempted to tell me. So instead I hummed another snatch of Marching Through Georgia.

You mind not humming? Lionel barked.

Okay, I said, tapping out the tune on Klinny’s dashboard instead.

Or tapping, either?

Sure.

There was further silence as Lionel began clenching and unclenching his fists. So, more in the interest of my own safety than for anything else, I broke my cardinal rule and asked the bloke what was the matter.

"Matter?" he snorted.

Well, you do seem a bit edgy. Hard day?

"Hard day? Lionel snorted again. What we’re talking about here, young man, is hard week—month—year. Years. Hard life is what we are talking about here, Miles."

Mole.

"Mole," Lionel said, sweeping a hand through his once-luxuriant locks and flicking his dandruff-laden ponytail about while I stared off at the hotel whose name I could not recall. Hilton? Maybe it was the Park Lane Hilton.

Sorry to offload on you, a perfect stranger, but…

It’s fine, I lied, hoping he wouldn’t start weeping. I hate male weepers.

"Hard barely describes my situation, Lionel spat. Fag?"

I nodded. My lighter or yours?

Mine, he said, keen to fire up quickly.

And then out it all spewed, a potentially wonderful second wife until she turned petty and filed for divorce on the un-fucking-provable grounds of him having molested a postgraduate student named Clementine. A perfect bitch of a first wife, but both of them would soon be toast. And the wonderful children they had both provided him with, however—well, sort of wonderful. One of the first-marriage sprogs, Morgan, was currently on probation for knifing (not his fault, you understand, Miles, he was goaded) the opposition’s left wing-back during a Sunday-league match, while the other, Jade, was in a detox clinic, at which Lionel shook his head sadly. The three small ones from the second marriage—actually two from his new wife’s first marriage and one from the fresh union—were doing pretty well, experiencing only relatively minor problems in their respective kindergarten and primary schools.

"Very minor problems, actually," Lionel said as I gazed at a sizeable crowd of London Pony Express passengers stumping up and down Park Lane in search of their driver, or anyone else they could lynch.

Their Lucy had only chewed affectionately on the ear of one of her little classmates—nibbled was probably a better verb—Lionel explained, not bitten it off altogether as the police had claimed. And how was it poor young Nigel’s fault when, confronted by an enraged black boy twice his size—Lionel believed passionately in cultural pluralism—that he should have defended himself with the only means at his disposal?

"An axe?" I asked incredulously after Lionel had defined the weapon, still keeping a sharp eye on the Pony Express people milling about.

"A small axe. Mind you, the other lad has recovered most of his faculties."

Most?

Well, he limps a bit and he’s still having difficulty thinking.

Right. And the other one?

"Other what?"

Child. You said there were three in your second marriage.

Nancy? She takes after her mother, was all that Lionel said before changing the subject altogether. Plus there’s all this bicycle stealing going on at the university, for God’s sake. I’ve hired some detective oink to check it out, but so far he’s come up with zilch—the useless tosser—and anyway I’m never going to make the appointment now. He gestured despairingly at the scenes of chaos all around us.

Bicycle stealing? I asked, finally jarred into interest and turning to focus both my eyes on him.

It’s been going on for bloody months. I thought I’d got it under control, but no chance of that, Lionel moaned. And now I won’t even be able to meet the berk who’s supposed to be helping, not that he sounded like much. The head of the agency was too bloody busy, she said. So what do I get? The gofer. I ask you, Miles.

Mole.

"It never rains but it fucking pours."

At the university of...? I asked just as two BMW police motorbikes wah-wah-wahed up to Klinny’s rear bumper, trying to carve a route through traffic. That’s when Lionel went ashen and muttered the name of the very institution I was meant to be visiting down in South London. Seconds later, he vaulted out of Klinny, sprinted back to his Merc and dove behind the wheel. Then he donned a pair of wrap-around shades and, keeping his head well below windscreen level, took to digging about in his glove box. That’s also when my repressed road rage concatenated at my release from the presence of a dangerous lunatic in my car. I yelled out, "Oink, tosser, berk, gofer, my arse. Come back here and say that and I’ll kill you!"

But then the gridlock magically vanished. That’s the way gridlock worked. One minute you’re in it and the next you’re not. Lionel floored the gas, burning rubber and leaving me expostulating at thin air. I was still muttering darkly when the coach driver behind me started to honk as if his life depended on it. In a sense it did, seeing how his passengers practically had a noose around his neck. So with my easy-come, easy-go attitude fully wrecked, I fired Klinny into life, looped cursing around Hyde Park, and headed back to Hampstead. By the time I got home an hour late, some of my self-possession had returned, but not the full quotient—not by any means.

Two

Nice day, darlink? grunted Oksana as I clumped back into the flat at a bit past six. She was doing yoga in our studio.

"Comme ci, comme ça. Yours?" I asked as I aimed my reply at the spot where I reckoned her face ought to be.

What? she replied, a grunt from within her coiled body.

Wonderful thing, yoga, but ill-suited to conversation—head up the bottom and all that—so I raised the decibels a jot.

YOURS? I asked again, perhaps a bit louder than I’d meant.

No need for shriekink, Oksana said before rolling over onto her stomach, grabbing both her ankles, thrusting her spine through her abdomen and then segueing via some bizarre serpentine movement into an effortless headstand.

"I wasn’t shrieking. I was just saying."

"Sayink, skriekink; shriekink, sayink," the inverted person riposted, but it was hardly an ideal moment for lexical debate—or for hanky-panky, just in case that was on her mind. Oksana performed yoga naked as part of our expensive sex-therapy program and, what’s more, she had the sort of body the gutter press would pay squillions to photograph upside-down, her tits hanging in the wrong direction. Lucky me. But I wasn’t in the mood—again—especially not after Lionel, so the best I could manage was a quick cantilever in her general direction and a kiss that landed on her topaz navel-stud.

Mmmmm, she moaned.

Hungry? I asked, turning smartly toward the kitchen.

Mmmmmmm, she moaned again, a bit more drawn out this time. You do not think...?

Not just now, darling. Long day, you know—probably better to relax a bit first. Thought I’d just get dinner ready.

Okay. Down from the headstand she came, into a dog-stretching-onto-its-forepaws position, the sort of shot that could quadruple the Daily Sport’s wankership overnight.

Right then. So… I prompted.

There is sauce in the freezer and chopped meat in the fridge. You cook the spaghetti Bolognese, no?

‘Spag bol’ was what I was thinking, I confirmed, to which she sighed a dispirited mmm and then returned to concentrating on her inner flame, an orange image of which she had tattooed just above her pubis, which was shaved in the form of an invitingly downward-pointing arrow. All this stuff—the tattoo, the navel jewelry and the arrow—were integral parts of the Mole Libido Re-Awakening Program designed by our sex therapist, Dr. Janet Stronsky. So far, nothing was working for me, no matter what Stronsky believed about lust-storage, and certainly not after a long and useless day spent with lunatics in traffic jams.

I left Oksana to her contortions and clumped through to the kitchen where I said hello to Mishkin, who was sitting on the peninsula looking rather angry. Then I donned my pinny and started cooking, which made him look even angrier.

Lady forgot din-dins? I asked, whereupon he sprung into a standing position, arched his back, stiffened out his tail and then jumped meaningfully onto the floor, where he paced about while ignoring me. You have to wonder about cats, especially why they don’t live life in straight lines, like dogs. Offer Bowser his dinner and the next thing you know he’s slavering at his bowl. Not so Mishkin, whose idea of din-dins was to rub against your legs while the Caesar tin was being opened, and then piss off into the garden just as you’re emptying the specially selected morsels onto his monogrammed plastic plate. Returning half an hour later, he’d sniff at the contents, wrinkle his nose as if it were arsenic, and then stalk off back into the garden. Mishkin ate his din-dins while Oksana and I were asleep. I knew that because I’d crept from the bedroom at midnight on three separate occasions to catch him at it.

Well, did she? I asked again, firing up the hobs while tearing at the pasta packet with my teeth, having long ago given up on the idea of opening cellophane-wrapped goods by pulling the red zip-cord. I’d