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people.
     

 
    Sprawled on her back on the unmade bed,’ Brigitte exposes her pale blue-gray belly to the musty air, which seems to her neither stale nor fresh but so familiar that it is taken for granted. She is named after Bardot but is no sex kitten. For one thing, even for a cat, she is flat chested. Also, she was spayed at an early age, and thus feels nothing for males and cannot attract them. Even so, her name, Brigitte, is pronounced in the French manner or in as close to the French manner as Bostonians can manage. Furthermore, at the age of two years, she is not a kitten except to the extent that her diminutive size and long, fluffy coat doom her to be eternally, if nauseatingly, known as Baby Brigitte. At seven pounds, she is only a little more than half as big as her absent companion, Edith.
    Brigitte cannot be said to miss Edith but does find it dull without her, principally because provoking Edith is Brigitte’s favorite means to banish boredom. In every tiff between the two, Brigitte is the instigator and the loser. To those who don’t know Brigitte, it might seem stupid of her to tackle so hefty an adversary. Brigitte, however, understands Edith’s gentle, pacific nature. Provoked beyond endurance, Edith strikes back, but she can be relied on to yank out great quantities of Brigitte’s long, soft hair without inflicting flesh wounds. What’s more, Edith never holds a grudge.
    So, lolling on the sheets, Brigitte doesn’t actually long for Edith’s presence but suffers from the tedium that Edith’s presence would relieve. Rousing herself, she leaps off the bed, flies to the kitchen, and attacks the dry cat food in the bowl that she and Edith amicably share. When she finishes, the bowl is almost empty. Brigitte is unconcerned. She has never experienced hunger.
     

 
    Irked at the unliterary—and infuriatingly un-British—behavior of the police and her neighbors, Felicity longed to retreat to her kitchen to await the inevitable arrival of an important detective of some sort, preferably a chief superintendent, if the rank existed in the United States, as she suspected it did not. To fortify herself against shock, a condition commonly observed at crime scenes in British mysteries, she intended to pour herself a second shot of Laphroaig and broil a fillet of farm-raised Scottish salmon. Accustomed! as she was to controlling the behavior of law enforcement! personnel, she was chagrined to have the lowly policeman] forbid her to enter her house.
    “It’s a crime scene,” he explained.
    “The vestibule is a crime scene, and I have no desire to go there. Ever again! I have already been in my kitchen, and I just want to go back.”
    “We’ll need to check for signs of forced entry. Were your doors locked?”
    “Of course. The doors to the house were locked. The outer door to the vestibule wasn’t. And I have already been in the house! If the murderer were lurking there waiting to kill me, I’d be dead now.”
    “Do you have an alarm system?”
    “Yes, but it was turned off. I never use it. I tried, but I kept forgetting the code or setting it off by accident. Please! I’m cold, and I haven’t had any dinner.”
    As the officer was sympathizing, yet more official vehicles arrived, and for the next ten minutes, Felicity was temporarily distracted from her thirst and hunger by the sight of what looked increasingly like a movie set. Powerful lights flooded the area, and to Felicity’s satisfaction, uniformed men taped off her yard with official crime-scene tape. Just as in a mystery novel, the police were securing the scene. Hurrah! Better yet, after Felicity had surrendered her house keys, a pair of officers armed with real, actual handguns entered her back door to search for the presence of what Felicity knew enough to call “the perp” or to look for signs that the perp had been inside. Meanwhile, other uniformed men walked around the house, presumably to check for signs of forced entry. At the