A New Chet Millerby Case: The Missing Weevil

The Case of Chet Millerby and The Missing Weevil

This is a story about a cat called Chet Millerby, who - like most cats, was also a detective. You see, when your cat disappears, and slips out through the cat flap, or prowls away off along your garden wall, you no doubt think he or she is off hunting for little voles or sparrows who are slow off the mark. Well, that is sometimes the case, but mostly you would be wrong. For mostly they are off solving a case which has proved too difficult for the Metropolitan Police. The Metropolitan Police are the best police force in the world, without a shadow of a doubt, but sometimes even they are stumped. And when they are stumped, they turn to the cats. And when they are most especially, expensively and utterly stumped, they turn to Chet Millerby.

Chet Millerby lived in a tumble-down sort of a house at the top of a hill in North London. His owner was a painter or a professor of some kind, perhaps a bit of both, and he doesn’t concern us much, only that he was beardy and absent minded and left half opened cans of cat food all down the stairs; which suited Chet just fine. The painter/professor mainly lived on the upper floors of the house, where the curtains remained ever drawn, and he sketched furiously under a solitary lamp, or pored over dusty books in a very deep chair with the springs hanging out. On the ground floor was the kitchen, a scene of total neglect: old milk cartons standing on wet newspaper all along the sills, a sink which was home to stacks of dirty plates with fish bones dangling out (again much to Chet’s liking), and great snowdrifts of unopened post - some of which dated back to 1953- covering the floor.

But between the dishwasher which had never worked, and the tottering grandfather clock whose hands had been at quarter to six for as long as anyone could remember, there was a small door. And that small door led down to the cellar. The painter/professor never went into the cellar, and if he ever thought about it (which he didn’t), he probably thought it was full of packing cases, a bicycle gathering dust and yet more unopened boxes of books he was never going to read. It wasn’t. For behind the kitchen door was in fact another door, with frosted glass, and the words “Chet Millerby, Cat Detective” engraved very neatly on it. And behind that door was some stairs, and at the bottom of the stairs there was a very large desk, and sitting behind the desk, wreathed in a cloud of smoke from his favourite kind of Turkish cigarette, was the world’s greatest sleuthing mind.

“I don’t do missing persons”, he said. “Missing persons never end well. Rubies and diamonds I can get back for you. Definitely dead persons I can find who twisted the knife. I even once discovered who was trying to poison the Prime Minister’s parrot, which wasn’t as satisfying as it sounds. But when a person goes missing, it’s usually because nobody’s found the body yet. And that’s not the kind of Easter Egg hunt I enjoy, I’m afraid.”

He leaned back, and stubbed his cigarette out in the large gold ashtray on his desk. It depicted a female cat in a bathing costume, taking a very coquettish pose, above the hand inscribed legend “To Chet - We’ll Always Have Padstow XXX Kitty ”.

The man perched uncomfortably on the stool opposite, dressed (eccentrically, Chet thought) in traditional Tyrolean yodelling garb, took off his feathered loden and wrung it between his hands.

“I don’t you think you quite understand, Mr Millerby. I’m not talking about just a person. I’m talking about a weevil.”

TO BE CONTINUED