Roscoe & Bailey on the Trail of the Hamster Napper

Oh good, you’re back. That means we can crack on with part two of Molly Whiskers and the Blue Tentacle.

In the first episode we met Molly, Fogsworth’s private detective, who just so happens to be a rabbit. I promised you I’d introduce you to some new faces too, so let’s not waste any time and get into it.

Mark, hit the theme song.

There are a few things you should know about Molly Whiskers, private detective. She is exceptionally clever about most things, but has difficulty understanding the things others take for granted.

Molly can take one look at your left ear and tell you what you had for breakfast, but often can’t tell if you were upset because you’ve had a bad day, or you had a tummy ache because your morning cup of tea had lumps in it that weren’t sugar. She can detect and deduce all sorts of schemes, scams and shenanigans, but doesn’t always know when it’s the right time to say “please” and “thank you”.

But this isn’t a sad story about a lonely rabbit. Molly has friends who love and support her, and she has a job she excels at.

Molly is a good-looking rabbit, with a shiny golden-brown coat and a grey tail. Her large black eyes are alert, and her ears move and twitch when she’s thinking deeply.

Rabbits are unique among the people of Fogsworth. While the cats handle police matters, the dogs take care of military work and the crows — well, the less said about crows the better, as much of what they do is not suitable for this sort of podcast — rabbits are what we might call freelancers. They work for themselves, doing all sorts of different jobs: making clothes, building houses, even inventing new machines.

Molly’s dad was a builder.

“You should put that big brain of yours to work”, he would often say when Molly was a child, and, three years ago, she finally did. She now runs the Molly Whiskers Detective Agency from her small flat on Fisk Lane. Her proudest day was when the man from the sign makers finished painting the final letter “Y” on the glass window of her door.

Her most successful case was shortly into her career, when she tracked down a thief who’d stolen an expensive necklace, that had been in the victim’s family for centuries, and was the only thing of value they owned. Her reward for returning the necklace and bringing the thief to the police was a large blueberry pie.

“Hmmm”, Molly ponders from her desk, as she once again reads the letters stencilled so beautifully on the glass of her closed front door. “MOLLY WHISKERS DETECTIVE AGENCY”, she reads aloud, slowly.

She knows something isn't quite right about her door, and wonders whether that’s why so few people seem to knock on it, despite the fame and respect she’d earned by solving mysteries the police were too busy to look into. She could do with a paying customer for a change, as the assortment of baked goods she’d received as reward over the years were not going to help to pay the rent.

That was the sound of someone knocking on Molly’s door. Now and again, you might hear someone say “knock knock” out loud before coming into a room when the door’s already open. These people deserve your love and patience, because they’re a bit like a large slice of blueberry pie: nice enough, but not something you could manage every day.

There’s that knock again.

No, the people you really need to watch out for are those people who say “knock knock” and actually knock on the door frame at the same time. They’re like a whole cupboard full of blueberry pie. They’re also the kind of people who say things like “I’m mad, I am!” and wear ties with musical instruments printed on them. Again, not horrid; you just don’t need it all the time.

The knocking’s growing impatient now, probably because we’ve spent all this time talking about pie, and we haven’t let Molly answer the door.

“Come in” says Molly, “it isn’t locked”.

The door opens very slightly, and from the crack appears a little pink nose. The nose edges a little further into the room and is followed by two large black eyes. Two ears jostle their way in from the hallway and stand to attention atop a fluffy white head, then the whole collection totters shyly to the desk where Molly sits, looking distractedly at some papers.

“Are you…” begins the shy little rabbit, unsure how to finish the sentence.

“It’s over there on the kitchen table” says Molly, jerking her head slightly to the right but not looking up.

There then follows quite a bit of silence.

There are lots of different types of silence. Most of them don’t involve complete quiet; sometimes a room can feel silent but you can still hear the ticking of a clock, for example. Some silences feel like they have a weight to them, as if they’re heavy. Some feel like an invisible balloon, inflating until the balloon takes up all of the available space before it’s mercifully popped by someone speaking. That particular type of silence is often what happens when someone says to a large lady “congratulations! When’s the baby due?”, only to discover the woman isn’t pregnant. You must never, ever do this.

This particular silence has that kind of feel, although the imaginary balloon here is full of confusion, rather than embarrassment.

“Um”, says the shy rabbit. “I don’t…”

At this point, Molly looks up from her paperwork and sees her guest for the first time.

“Oh, I thought you were Mr Huggins from downstairs.”

“I’m Patchee”, says the guest.

“Oh, well, it’s been raining. Do you need a towel?”

“What?” asks Patchee in utter confusion. “No, Patchee is my name. I’ve just come from the tavern.”

“Right. In that case, hello Patchee. What can I do for you?”

“Well”, continues the younger rabbit, a little more shyly than before, “I was wondering what I could do for you.”

The little town of Fogsworth is kept safe at night by its police force: brave cats and clever cats and cunning cats. As one of them is leading a grumpy and guilty goat out of a noisy tavern, across town, two cats are looking glum, and glad to be out of the rain. One of them takes a hip flask from his inside jacket pocket, unscrews the cap and takes a sip of milk.

“I’m getting too old for this”, says Roscoe, a large tom cat. His hair is long and black, except for his muzzle, his paws and his large belly, which are bright white. Roscoe has been at the scene of many crimes in his years on the force, and it’s starting to make him sad. But he’s good at his job, and always wants to do his best to keep the people of Fogsworth safe.

Without looking, he passes the hip flask sideways to his partner.

“Come on, old-timer”, says Bailey, a smaller brown and white tabby, passing the flask back without opening it. Pretty much everything about Bailey is smaller than Roscoe:, including her tail, which is short and stiff, where Roscoe’s is long, fully and waves around a lot.

They’re at the scene of a crime, so Bailey is very careful as she steps through the hallway of the little house they’re standing in, making sure not to tread on anything that might be a clue.

A third cat stands in the living room, and waves Roscoe and Bailey over to him.

“We called you as soon as we knew what it was”, says the tired-looking officer.

“It’s happened again?” asks Bailey.

“Third time this month”, says the officer.

Roscoe lets Bailey and the officer continue discussing the case. He already knows the story. Another hamster has disappeared from his home, and the only thing left behind is a trail of little scraps of vegetable matter.

What the cats don’t know, and you probably do, is that hamsters like to eat all sorts of things. They even eat meat (except in Fogsworth, because that would be ghastly), but mostly they nibble on grain and hamster pellets (except, again, in Fogsworth, where they don’t know how to make hamster pellets). What the cats also don’t know is that hamsters like peas as a treat, and that peas are at their freshest when they’re in their pods.

Remember our discussion on connecting the dots? Well, if someone on the police force had figured out that the little scraps of vegetation were in fact pea pods, they’d have concluded — correctly — that the hamsters were being lured away from their homes by means of snacking.

It can sometimes be frustrating when you know something that the people in your story don’t yet know, so we should try and be patient while they figure it out.

“I see there’s another trail of those green things”, says Bailey as she rejoins Roscoe. “The trail goes cold after a few yards, though.”

“Have we given any to the lizards yet?” asks Roscoe, not looking up from the trail of pea pods.

“Yes, they said they should have the results back in a day or so.”

Actually the lizards who run the crime lab — which involves dusting for prints and putting things under microscopes or inside glass tubes — had already come to the same conclusion as we did, but the boss of the lab isn’t letting on. Sometimes people with very difficult jobs like to make their work seem mysterious or magical, when all it really takes is lots of reading and hard work. Some people feel that, if everyone knew how the work could be done, the people who do the work would no longer feel special, but the best people work very hard and make it look effortless.

“Well, tell the lizards they’d better get a move on”, huffs Roscoe. “This case won’t solve itself.”

The two cats head back out into the street. Roscoe hails a passing taxi, and they get in.

“Back to the station, is it?” asks the driver, a large, brown horse.

“Please”, says Bailey, a little distractedly.

Now, your idea of a taxi might be very different from those found in Fogsworth. Although there are some mechanical devices, nothing is motorised. There was a moment, a few years back, when someone invented a device for moving around quickly, using two wheels, one directly behind the other. You would sit on a seat in-between the two wheels and make a sort of running motion with your feet, which would push against pedals. Some people even added a little bell to the bars you held onto at the front of the contraption, but the idea never really caught on.

Those that can afford to hail a horse-drawn carriage, which is a large canvas box with wheels that the horse pulls along. It’s a marvellous way to travel, as it’s safe and comfortable, and you can see the town go by, out of the sides of the carriage.

Lately, passengers have taken to rating their horse rides, by drawing smiley faces on the canvas sides of the carriage. The horses with the bigger smiley faces pick up more work, but the older horses who have been carrying people around for years and don’t have lots of smiley faces on their carriages end up getting fewer passengers.

“Here you are, govs”, says the horse, cheerily, as he pulls up to the police station. “That’ll be two tarins. And don’t forget to leave feedback”. He adds the last with a quick toss of his massive head, towards the inkwell and quill sitting in a pocket on one of the carriage’s canvas sides.

Roscoe hauls himself out of the cab, leaving Bailey to fish out two bronze coins and draw a simple little circle with two dots and a curved line. As she drops the coins and quill into the carriage’s side pocket, the horse gives a little snort and wanders off to pick up another passenger, or to have a well-earned cup of tea.

As we follow Roscoe and Bailey inside, we see the reception desk of the police station, where a goat is moodily emptying his pockets onto the desk. The station is lit by a number of oil-filled lamps: round glass jars around the size of a large dog’s head, stuck to the walls. Whoever is on duty at the reception desk has the job of re-filling the lamps when the oil runs out. This is usually the time when other cats play pranks on the junior officer, but the pranks the cats play on each-other will have to be the subject of another episode. The police station’s reception is small, with a desk on one end, opposite a few old-looking chairs. Straight ahead, as Roscoe and Bailey walk into the building are a set of doors leading to the areas of the station that are off-limits to the public.

One of these doors is labeled “Laboratory. Totally Top Secret. Don’t Come in Here, Not Even for a Peek”, and from it comes a surprisingly-tall monitor lizard.

“Ah, glad I caught you”, says the lizard, as she catches sight of Roscoe and Bailey.

“Any further along in identifying those green things?” asks Bailey.

“Yes”, says the lizard, whose name is Po. She looks down at a clipboard, as if it were easier than looking her colleagues in the eye.

“They’re, um, pea pods”, she says. She seems embarrassed that it took her team so long to discover this, but she’s too kind to tell tales on her boss. “I’d have told you sooner, but…” This last part she addresses to Bailey, but doesn’t continue to say “but my boss is rotten and he likes to slow things down for no reason”. Instead, she says, “Anyway, it’s all here.”

She hands over the clipboard to Roscoe, while never taking her eyes off Bailey. After a moment’s pause she seems to react as if something awful has happened.

“I’m so sorry, I’ve got to go” she ays.

There’s another pause.

“To the bathroom.”

Pause.

“It’s not for a poo.”

Another pause, followed closely by Po running out of the reception and out of the building, as fast as she can.

Roscoe and Bailey exchange a confused look as they head, past the ladies’ toilets, into their office.

“Have you still not asked her out yet?” asks Bailey, as she holds the door open for Roscoe.

“I was wondering what I could do for you”, says Patchee. We’re back at Molly’s office. Patchee hasn’t repeated himself; this is just a way we can remind ourselves of what’s happened.

“I saw you at the tavern, and how you figured out the goat’s plan”, he continues. “I love mysteries but I never guess the endings, so I’d love to see some for myself”.

“OK”, says Molly, slowly, “but you haven’t actually told me what you can do for me, yet.”

“Oh, sorry”, says the younger rabbit. “Well, I uh, I can… I mean, I have… bwwwrrrrrm”.

There comes a time in most of our lives where we have to be interviewed for a job. It can feel very scary, to sit across from someone important and tell them why you think they should pay you instead of paying someone else to do a particular thing. Even the most highly-skilled and intelligent people find this incredibly difficult, and it can make them very anxious.

When we’re anxious, our bodies react as if something deadly is approaching. Somehow our bodies know that doing well in an interview, scoring highly on a test or talking in front of lots of people, is important to us, so they prepare us as if we’re going to run a big race, or away from a hungry lion. When this happens, our minds can go blank and sometimes, when we mean to say something clever like “I have a number of skills that I think you would find very useful”, we instead say something like “bwwwrrrrrm”.

Lots of important people who sit behind desks know that everyone finds it tricky, so they’re often pretty patient. Molly is a very good rabbit, but she’s not a patient one. She is still a little distracted, as every time she catches a glimpse of the sign on her door, she feels somehow uneasy.

“Right, well, I’m very busy, so thank you—”

At that point, two things happen at the same time: a knock comes at the door, and the large telephone on Molly’s desk begins to ring, its brass bell clamouring for attention.

The telephone is a relatively new invention in Fogsworth’s history. It was invented by a famous scientist who died many years ago. Nowadays, no-one knows exactly how it works, but every home has a heavy metal contraption with a large funnel-shaped thing for listening with, a smaller funnel for talking into, and a bell that rings whenever someone wants to interrupt your train of thought and demand that you speak to them right away.

Without saying a word, Patchee makes a series of gestures with his right paw that seem to say “you get the door and I’ll get the telephone”. This, Molly understands, and so gratefully gets up to answer the door to Mr Huggins from downstairs.

After a moment, she bustles into her bedroom to fetch something for him, and when she gets back to tell him she can’t find it, she sees her downstairs neighbour — who is also the owner of the building — is just about to leave.

“Your assistant managed to find it for me. He seems very nice”, he says. As Molly looks around in confusion, he continues: “He’s just left and he wished you a good day. Very nice chap indeed”. And with that, the fluffy, round beaver wearing a cloth cap, called Mr Huggins — that’s the beaver’s name, not the cap’s, obviously — gives a little wave and totters down the hall.

With confusion piling on top of confusion, Molly closes the door and heads back to her desk, where she sees a note has been left on her little notepad, written in small, neat handwriting.

“New client: Mr Toggle wants you to find his wife who went missing last week from Walnut Grove. Also, I think the sign on your door might be painted on backwards. Good luck, and thank you for seeing me. Kind regards, P.”

Quick as a flash, she darts to the window and sees a small, furry white body, padding slowly up the lane. Hoping it’s not too late, she dashes out of her office, very nearly flies down the stairs and pelts out of the building in the direction of the little rabbit, just in time for me to run out of different ways to say “moved quickly”.

Panting, she catches up to a wet and miserable looking Patchee and says “The pay’s rubbish but at least the hours are long. Oh, and the work is often difficult and frustrating. Oh, and… I suppose I could be a little nicer.”

She sees hope begin to dawn on Patchee’s features.

“Also it’s raining and you haven’t got an umbrella”, she continues.

“Neither have you”, Patchee replies.

“Yes, but I only work a few steps away. You could too, if you’ll take the job?” She looks expectantly at Patchee, whose big smile lights up his little face.

“When do I start?” he asks, reaching his paw out for a shake.

“Now! Come on”, she says, briskly, grasping his paw and whisking them both off to her office.

That’s it for part two. Next time, Patchee and Molly get to work on their first case together, as they pick up the trail of the missing hamsters. Let’s let them dry off first, though.