Author's note: this chapter considers the genesis of the tabby cat we see on the Parkers' hearth rug in Murder Must Advertise.
Charles Parker came heavily up the stairs at the end of a long day and in through the door of his flat. He hung up the winter coat which had once been the most expensive item of clothing he had ever bought and had seemed so luxuriant and almost ostentatiously warm. It had had heavy use over the last few years and was getting threadbare now, but Charles hadn't thought of replacing it. There was plenty of money for new coats, thank God, but he had had too many worries in recent months to spare even half a thought for his own wardrobe.
He was surprised not to be greeted as normal by the thunder of his son's feet down the hallway, always unfeasibly loud for such a small person. For somebody who had recently turned two, Peterkin had an impressive ability to hear his father's key in the lock almost before it had turned. Charles looked in through the kitchen door as he passed down the hall, nodding to the placid and efficient Mrs Gunner as he did so. All was still silent as he entered the sitting room and took in the picture that awaited him. He barely noticed the tiny striped kitten with whom Peterkin was playing, completely enraptured, in front of the fireguard and who certainly had not formed part of the family entourage when he had left the flat that morning. All Charles's attention was taken by the sight of his wife, sitting up in the blue armchair. She looked thin and pale but for the first time in a long time it was with the usual paleness of her very fair complexion rather than the pallor of illness. He almost ran to the armchair and knelt by the side of it, taking her limp hand and putting it to his lips.
"I expected to find you in bed, Mary, dear. Are you well enough to -
"Oh yes, darling, I'm so much better today. I've been up for several hours now, and I'm not a bit tired. Ada's putting Mary to bed now but I've played with her and Peterkin all afternoon. It's been simply wonderful."
"Good Lord, Mary, but you mustn't overdo it," Charles said, alarmed. He held her hand against his cheek and looked at her carefully. Then he leaned forward and kissed her gently and almost timidly on the mouth.
With the unerring instinct of small children for interrupting adults precisely when they will least welcome it, Peterkin suddenly noticed that his Father was home, leapt up and ran towards him. Charles gathered the little boy into his arms and standing up raised him high into the air, eliciting a squeal of delight. "Hullo, my little rapscallion!" He kissed the shiny, ruddy little cheeks, and set the boy down on his sturdy legs. "Have you been looking after mummy?"
Perhaps feeling that the kindest thing to do with a silly question like that was to ignore it, Peterkin took his father's hand and led him to the hearth rug of which the kitten had started to chew a corner. "Look, Daddy! Look! Cat. Peterkin's cat."
"Hmmmmm," said Charles, noncommittally, and batted it away from the rug. "It's a cat, all right." Further than that he would not go. "Where did it come from, Mary?"
"Mrs Rowley from the basement flat at number 14 called by to drop off some biscuits she'd made, and she said that their cat had had kittens again and they were big enough to sell, and I just mentioned in passing how we'd always intended to get a cat - we had, darling, you know we had - but then had children so quickly we'd somehow never got round to it, and then she rushed off and came back with him in a basket and gave him to Peterkin as a present and there really wasn't a thing I could do about it."
"Peterkin's cat," that young man repeated with happy emphasis. He placed a chubby hand on the cat's back and stroked it with surprising gentleness. "Good cat."
"Look how sweet they are together, Charles," Mary said, appealingly.
"If you like it, darling, of course we shall keep it," Charles replied. "I just rather thought that you had sufficient small creatures to keep alive at the moment."
"Well, a kitten must be less work than a baby. One doesn't have to manufacture it oneself, to start off with."
"True." This train of thought caused Charles to look anxiously at Mary again. The birth of small Mary Lucasta nine months ago, so soon after the difficult birth of her older brother, had been more difficult still and although the baby had thrived into a fiercely healthy and spirited infant, the mother was still far from recovery, and Charles blamed himself bitterly. But Mary looked back at him now with something more like her usual spirits than he had seen for the best part of a year and his heart flooded with hope and relief.
At that moment the nursemaid came briskly into the room. Charles nodded to her gratefully. He would never have imagined that he would be so glad to come home to a house which seemed to him full of servants, and he had not initially been appreciative when in a characteristic gesture in which it was hard to disentangle what was kind from what was domineering, the Duchess of Denver had dispatched Ada Thomas, who had been nursemaid to her own children, down to London shortly after the arrival of the first little Parker. Mary too in that first glow of the intensity of motherhood had not wanted any outside interference. But the reality of caring for a small and lustily crying infant, followed by the heavy blow of Mary's long illness after the second child (whose arrival had been far from intended) had made Ada's help invaluable.
"Fast asleep, my lady," Ada reported cheerfully. "Good evening, Sir. Now, who's going to come and be a duckling in his bath like a good boy?"
"I think that it had better be you, Peterkin," Charles said gravely.
His son reflected on the proposition. "Cat come too," he said firmly.
"Certainly not. Cats hate water. But I'll bring him up to see you when I come to kiss you if you like."
The boy's negotiating style seemed to be to make another demand as soon as one had been refused and to acknowledge no concessions. "Cat sleep with Peterkin."
"I think not, old boy. We have limited information about the reliability of his toilet habits."
The infant's face displayed the tell-tale signs of giving way to the fury at not having demands met, such as can befall even the most reasonable two year old, and Ada stepped forward seamlessly, extending her hands as if they were long-clawed paws and saying urgently, "Charles Peter! Kiss mummy and come along quickly, the fox is coming to get the duckling and he's not safe until he's in water!"
Peterkin shrieked with gleeful terror at this game, whose efficacy was by no means diminished by its familiarity, and threw himself onto Mary's lap to deposit a wet kiss on her face. Charles saw his wife's slight wince on the impact but Peterkin felt only her loving stroke of his cheek, and he bounded down to run off towards the staircase.
At the door he paused, suddenly serious. "Daddy catch lots of baddies?" he asked, as was his wont on evenings when Charles was home early enough to be interrogated as to the success of his day's work.
"Heaps of em," Charles assured his son, and the child and the nursemaid slipped out of the door. Charles sat down on the Chesterfield and considered his wife in silence for some time.
"I suppose I shall have to spend ages chasing that kitten around to catch it before I go up to say goodnight to Peterkin now," he reflected ruefully.
"Oh no, darling, he's incredibly tame. Look." Mary rose only slightly shakily from her chair, stooped and held out her hand to the kitten. The kitten scampered up to her and allowed her to scoop it up with every appearance of enjoyment. She carried it over to the sofa and arranged herself in Charles's lap, and the kitten in hers. "What shall we call him, do you think? Peterkin made several suggestions but each of them was just the word "cat" at different volumes."
Charles put his arm gingerly around his wife's waist, and kissed her shoulder thoughtfully. "We haven't been terribly creative with naming small beings so far," he admitted. "Which is your fault, my dear."
Mary smiled. She had insisted on calling their first child after the two best men that she knew, in descending order of excellence, and Charles had quite properly felt that a woman who has just given birth ought to have her every whim acquiesced to. They had resolved the confusing circumstance of father and son sharing the same Christian name by addressing the smaller Charles by a modified version of his middle name, but it would not do in the long term. When the second baby had come along, Charles had asserted the right to name her after the best woman he knew, and because she was still small enough to be addressed and referred to as "the baby", the arrangement had worked pretty well so far. Still, they could hardly call a cat Charles as well. The situation would become absurd.
"What about Maddox," he suggested after a pause. "Or Bendick. Perhaps Ecclestone?"
"Charles, aren't those the names of your chief suspects in the Dixon murder case?" Mary asked suspiciously. "We can't name a cat after a murderer."
"Well, where do you expect a detective to find naming inspiration? And only one of them is likely to have done it, you know," Charles grinned. He was delighted to find that Mary had been listening when he had lain in bed with her at nights over recent weeks, Mary too ill to move or to speak much, telling her about his day's work because it was an old habit and he could see that, though she was in no position to ask the intelligent questions that she once had, she liked the rolling sound of his murmuring voice as she stared up at the ceiling. "No sign of it being a joint enterprise. Two of them are probably as innocent as babes."
"All the same," Mary smiled. "Let's think of something else for him. How did you get on today, anyway?" Charles relaxed joyfully into the old routine of talking to Mary - really talking to her - and hearing her response show her lively mind working in its usual practical way.
Their talk continued through the dinner that Mrs Gunner served before she went home for the evening, and though he noticed his wife ate very little, still it was a wonderful treat to see her across the table with the kitten scampering under the table. Mary saw him looking anxiously at her plate. "Don't forget that Mrs Gunner's been making me all that nourishing broth," she reassured him. "And now that little Mary doesn't need so much milk, I don't feel nearly so drained. Honestly, darling, I shall be quite all right. I'm just too tired to eat much. But you still haven't explained why you think all this points to Bendick, anyway. Surely either of the others could have dropped those papers, and there still isn't a ghost of a motive for him."
Charles was about to re-launch into further particulars of his day's discoveries, and to helpfully finish his wife's dinner, when he noticed her suddenly rest her head in her hand. He stood up firmly.
"I knew you were overdoing it," he said, and picked her up from her chair as though she had been a child. "Come on, lass. Up to bed with you."
Mary didn't protest and in fact Charles barely felt her weight in his arms. He sighed inwardly, remembering how different it had felt when he had so often carried Mary to bed in their newly-wed days, when she had been slender but healthy. Upstairs, he walked down the hall to their bedroom and ran into a tousled and pyjama clad Peterkin, fresh from an indulgently long bath and on his way to bed. His son looked at him approvingly. "Daddy put mummy to bed," he nodded. "Then cat."
"Then cat," Charles agreed. Ada smiled to herself as she followed small Charles Peter into the nursery, reflecting that this was not a scene she could have imagined occurring at many of the houses at which she had worked.
Charles laid Mary gently on their bed, and tenderly undressed her as well as he could, minimising the amount of movement she had to make to get out of her clothes and into her pyjamas. He traced her collarbone as he eased her into her pyjama top, and kissed her softly just above the swell of her breasts.
"Charles, I'm so sorry that it's been so long - that I can't - it must be a year, almost."
"Good God, Mary. I waited five years before I ever laid a finger on you, and I should think I can wait five more if that's what it takes for you to be better. I love you more now than ever before."
He kissed her tenderly on the forehead, and then folded and put away her clothes. He was about to lie down next to her when a sudden crash from downstairs attracted his attention.
"Good Lord, the cat. I dare say it's knocked something over. Perhaps we shouldn't have left the dishes on the dining table. I'd better go and catch it and bring it up to say goodnight to Peterkin."
Mary's eyes were closing before her husband had left the room.
In the morning it transpired that she had overdone it, rather, but from that day forth every day she was a little better and before little Mary had turned one, her mother was romping in the park with the baby in her arms and Peterkin on her shoulders, as though she had never been ill. Although only Mrs Gunner was superstitious enough to consciously attribute this wonderful turning point in the family's fortunes to the arrival of the cat (eventually named after the recently-exonerated Bendick on the day that Charles charged Maddox for the murder), it was a fact that Charles was always surprisingly indulgent towards the animal, for a man who claimed to have no love of cats.