Cat Among the Pumpkins by Mandy Morton

session with Crimola – to check up on some facts.’
    Hettie was a little confused. ‘But you said that Crimola lives in your head, so why did Miss Spitforce need to book a session with her? Why didn’t she just talk to you there and then?’
    ‘Ah, bless you! The conditions have to be right for Crimola to speak. She has to take me over for a bit, and that’s a full on session. She channels herself through me and I only tend to do that sort of work on Fridays.’
    ‘But you said you’d helped Mr Bunch find his tin opener this morning and it’s Tuesday, so how does that work?’ asked Hettie, her irritation made worse by the first pangs of hunger; the shared packet of crisps was just a distant memory.
    ‘Well, I didn’t find the tin opener actually. She’d thrown it away before she passed over as she didn’t want him living on that nasty tinned stuff. But I went straight to her and it was a simple job – no need to involve Crimola in that one.’
    Hettie was keen to move things along: it was getting late and Mavis was still taking up most of her kitchen floor.
    ‘Would you help me to make Miss Spitforce a little more comfortable? I think she’d be better in the parlour.’
    Irene Peggledrip smiled. ‘Of course I will, butshe’s not here any more. My guess is she left around midnight and she’s being processed as we speak. I’ll know more in a day or two. Why don’t you come and see me on Friday? Crimola may have some answers for you.’
    For some unknown reason, Hettie agreed to the somewhat bizarre assignation with Crimola and the two cats bore Mavis Spitforce’s body into her parlour, leaving her in peaceful repose on the chaise longue. Having waved off her new friend, Cossack hat and all, Hettie picked up Teezle’s bag of abandoned letters, took one last look at the murder scene and locked the door, knowing that she would have to return in the morning to do some real detective work.
    She made her way down the passageway and back onto Whisker Terrace, and then stopped dead; there was something she needed to check and it wouldn’t wait for the morning. Letting herself back in, she went straight to the parlour and to the corpse. She looked down on Miss Spitforce’s face and noticed a slight bulge in her cheeks. Taking great care not to break the jaw, Hettie gently prised the mouth open wide enough to see that there was more than teeth inside. She looked round for something to help and settled on a pair of tweezers that had been left on the desk, tweezers which Miss Spitforce had used to add to her butterfly collection, a hobby she was very keen on.
    Returning to her grim task, she removed severalsmall bits of paper from the victim’s mouth; on closer inspection, it was clear that the fragments related to the Milky Myers story and – by the quality of the paper – had come from Marmite Sprat’s Strange But True version of events. She put the fragments in a convenient jar on the mantelpiece, secured the house once again and strode off home, hoping for a good dinner, a blazing fire and a pipe or two of catnip.
    Those hopes were shattered when she arrived home to a less than blissful scene. Her arrival went unnoticed, mainly due to the volume of the TV, and only after she’d banged the door shut did Tilly react, shrugging her shoulders in a desperately apologetic way as if the chaos was none of her making. She got up from her blanket and bounded over the considerable bulk of Teezle Makepeace, who was lying stretched out in front of the fire, singing along with Bruiser, who was still in Hettie’s chair. They were glued to a rerun of Top of the Cats, and – to make things worse – a number of empty plates were dotted round as if a good time had been had by all.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tilly said, seeing the look on Hettie’s face. ‘There was nothing I could do. Teezle said she needed to eat because her blood sugar was dropping with the shock, whatever that means, and Bruiser had already collected