Duchess was Chief Inspector of All Rooms, and she took this very seriously indeed. Every night, before she settled onto her red velvet armchair — the one with gold trim that was absolutely, officially, hers — she made her rounds. The hall. The kitchen. The sitting room. Everything in its place. Everything accounted for. Tonight, she padded into the sitting room and stopped dead. The velvet footstool had moved. Six inches to the left. Duchess knew this because the footstool's left leg always sat in the small dent it had pressed into the rug over many years. And now — it did not. Someone had been in her room. Someone had touched her things. Sniff, sniff, sniff.
Duchess lowered her nose to the floor and began. The carpet gave up its first clue near the doorway: a small tuft of pale grey fluff, finer than anything Duchess had ever grown herself. She sniffed it carefully. Not a cushion. Not a mitten. Something alive had passed through here, dragging something soft. She lifted her head. Her whiskers twitched once, precisely. She followed her nose to the stairs.
On the third step, another tuft. On the fifth step, a tiny scratch in the wood, fresh and pale. Whatever had come through here was small — small enough to fit between the banisters. Duchess pressed one white paw to the smudged glass of the hallway door and peered through. The corridor beyond was dark and still. She pushed it open with the air of someone who has every right to push open any door in any house.
The kitchen tiles were cold under her paws. And there, scattered in a wobbly trail from the back window to the far corner — seeds. Small, oval, brown seeds, the sort that fall from the dried flowers in the blue vase on the shelf. Duchess followed them one by one, sniff, sniff, sniff, until she reached the bookcase against the kitchen wall. She stopped. She listened. A very small rustling came from behind the bottom shelf.
Duchess sat down, curled her tail around her paws, and waited. After a long moment, a small brown nose appeared. Then two round dark eyes. Then an extremely embarrassed dormouse, who was sitting in a nest made of cotton wool, three buttons, a torn page from a seed catalogue, and — Duchess narrowed her eyes — the gold tassel from the velvet footstool. The dormouse clutched the tassel to its chest and did not move. Duchess considered the situation. The tassel was, she had always privately felt, slightly too fussy for an otherwise dignified footstool. The dormouse was very small and looked as though it had worked very hard. The nest was, she had to admit, impressively constructed. She blinked at the dormouse. Slowly. Once. The dormouse blinked back.
Duchess stood, turned, and walked back down the hall with great dignity. The case, she had decided, was closed. The dormouse could stay. She had not wanted that tassel anyway. And if anyone asked, she had solved the mystery in under twenty minutes, which was a new personal record. She stepped into the sitting room, leapt onto the red velvet armchair with the gold trim, turned once, and arranged herself just so. The lamp made a small warm circle on the ceiling. The house was quiet. Duchess tucked her white paws under her chest, let her eyes go half-closed, and gave one long, slow, final blink — sniff, sniff, sniff — case closed, Chief Inspector. Case closed.
