Free Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow by Patricia Harwin

England. I couldn’t even have imagined owning a cat, I thought, as I caught sight of Muzzle slinking warily across the yard toward me. I’d never liked cats, but here I was catering to an old black tom that wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of an occasional petting and purring session.
    I heard him slurping water from the bathroom faucet while I got into my nightgown and slippers. He had started doing that soon after he moved in with me, and after lifting him out of the sink a few times, I’d given up and now left it dripping for him. Since he spent most of his time wandering outside, picking up who knew what organisms, I didn’t feel like sharing a faucet with him, so I’d begun drinking and brushing my teeth in the kitchen. The bathroom sink had become Muzzle’s property pretty quickly, and I only wondered what he would claim next.
    I had formed the habit of listening to Book at Bedtime on the BBC every night. A very good reader was currently making her way through Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, and it was wonderfully comforting that night to curl up in the green baize wing chair in the parlor and listen, sipping a hot cup of Horlicks.
    When I got into bed I heard Muzzle settling himself in a corner of the bedroom, on a cushion I’d put down for him. He’d only go there after the light was out, and if it went on again he would be gone in a second.
    I was thinking about Peter as I settled into my pillows. Poor boy, spending this night in a jail bed! They couldn’t be very comfortable, and even if they were, the knowledge of what was happening to him would be enough to keep him awake. I tried hard to think of another way to clear him, since my first try had been such a spectacular failure, but my weary brain refused to cooperate, and soon I was asleep.

Chapter Four
    The cloudy day my discontents records,
    Early begins to register my dreams
    And drives me forth to seek the murderer.
    —Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
    Y ou can never trust English weather for long. We’d had a three-day spell of beautiful spring days, so I wasn’t surprised to wake the next morning to the patter of rain on my slate roof. I looked at the clock on the nightstand and swore when I saw 6:00. It would have been lovely to turn over and fall asleep for another hour, but I had been wakened, as I always was these days, by Muzzle’s plaintive meowing from the floor beside my bed. I knew if I didn’t give him breakfast and let him out, it would just go on and on. Really, I should put his cushion downstairs somewhere and shut my bedroom door, I thought as I emerged from the covers into the damp, chilly air. But I knew I wouldn’t do that. There was something comforting about having a living creature in the room with me at night.
    He shut up once he had me on my way to the kitchen, and followed at my heels, even brushing quickly across my legs for encouragement while I opened the cat food can. Once he was settled to his bowl I could start boiling the water for my steel-cut oatmeal and for instant coffee. I would still have to let him out before I carried my breakfast into the dining room, or I’d be eating it to another chorus of meowing. Even on rainy days he had to do a quick patrol of the area, but I’d have to remember to let him in again before I went to Oxford. As he stepped warily onto the doorstep, I brought in the pint of milk the roundsman left every morning, and the Oxford Times that lay beside it.
    The murder of Edgar Stone dominated the front page, with a mercifully blurry photograph of Peter being led, handcuffed, into the police station. I argued with the newpaper story while I ate breakfast, furious at its neutral tone. People reading it might actually think he was guilty! Which was absurd—although that phone call to 999 was a problem. If it weren’t for that, I would have no trouble coming up with other suspects, because everybody who knew him seemed at least to dislike Edgar Stone.
    I washed up my few dishes, took a