Who let the dogs in? That’s the question the Bradshaw family was asking of each other. Someone did but nobody was willing to own up. The fact that the dogs had been let in was clearly established. Their muddy footprints were all over the freshly bought, freshly laid carpet. (The Bradshaws been advised a deep shade of umber by the carpet salesman, with this exact problem in mind, but they had settled on a light biscuit tone to match the walls.)
Willie Bradshaw, aged eight, shook his golden locks and said he never let Toby and Mildred in. Emma, a year older, shook her even longer golden tresses and swore with wide-eyed sincerity that she’d never have done such a thing.
“Because daddy asked us not to,” she confirmed.
Kate and Samuel looked at each other, as parents are wont to, when no solution presents itself immediately. For a minute it even looked like they might be on the verge of asking the other, “Did you, by any chance?”
But the moment passed, and they shook their heads, as people do when caught up in a mystery.
The easiest thing in such a situation is to fall heavily on the culprits. Toby and Mildred were taken out of the house and given a stern talking-to.
Mildred, a Labrador, looked like she understood where the master was coming from and put on a suitably shamefaced routine, folding down her ears and looking at the ground, and refusing to look the master in the eye when he called for her attention.
Toby, a Jack Russell, on the other hand, kept his haughty head up all through the lecture and even deigned not to be interested in anything that was being said. Once or twice his ears pricked up at the sound of a rustling in the dried eucalyptus leaves, thinking it might be a bird he could chase after and thereby give himself some morning sport.
Lecturing the dogs
“We’ll just have to get the carpet shampooed, I’m afraid,” said Kate with resignation, after Samuel had finished lecturing the dogs.
A tenth wedding anniversary was approaching. A party was in the planning stages. The new carpet was part of that larger plan.
“Did you make sure that the pin which holds the latch in place was actually doing its job?” Samuel asked his wife, more rhetorically than one expecting a reply.
The door itself was unique, in that it consisted of two halves. This was a kind of safety device when the children were growing. The lower door could always be kept bolted while the upper half could be opened and provide the place with some ventilation.
“Well that’s odd, now that you ask,” replied Kate, “because only a fortnight or so ago I found myself asking ‘Who let the dogs out?’ Because both the kids were at play school, you were at work and I had nipped up the road to buy some herbs. When I returned I found both Toby and Mildred outside playing, but the lower door was locked! And I remember locking them both in. Except I didn’t think much of it.”
The two of them looked at each other once more with a growing sense of mystery.
A week passed. The carpet got re-shampooed. Two days before the party, the dogs were in their kennels at the back of the house, the children were in bed, Samuel was looking at some work emails on his laptop in the bedroom and Kate was putting away the dishes when she heard a ‘click’.
Poking her head around the kitchen wall she saw Jemimah, their tortoiseshell cat, on her hind legs. It looked like she was posing for a picture for ‘tall cats’, but what she was really doing was working the latch on the door. Tiptoeing upstairs, Kate beckoned Samuel with a crooked finger and a gesture for silence. As they tiptoed back down she whispered, “Who let the dogs in? Come, let me show you.”
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
