A theatre safe is rifled — and the main suspect is Boysie the Pantomime Cat and his friend Zoe.

Despite all the false clues the Find-Outers have planted to throw the police off the scent, they finally discover the perpetrator.

A hanky with the initial Z on it, some cigarette ends, matches and a page torn from a timetable with a particular train underlined, are designed to send Pippin on the next stage of a wild goose chase.

After depositing the false clues outside the back door of the Little Theatre, Fatty gets a shock when he catches sight of the pantomime cat looking out of the window at him, mournfully.

This is at seven o'clock and the Find-Outers have already seen the rest of the cast walk off after performing the show, though Enid does not describe them for us in any detail.

From the verandah, he sees a furry animal lying in front of the fire, eventually realizing it must be Dick Whittington's cat.

But he hears a noise in the first floor room and sees someone slumped at a desk with an overturned cup in a saucer beside him.

The Find-Outers meet at Pip and Bets playroom and they realize that the laying of false clues will have complicated the police's investigation.

Fatty tells Pippin that the Find-Outers were round the back of the Little Theatre from about 5.30 (actually, they set off on their bikes for the place at ten to 6, a minor mistake by Enid).

Starting with the pantomime cat lying, sleeping by the fire to the manager stretched out across his desk.

They all feel sorry for Buster, wonder about Boysie, and look forward to meeting Goon at Peterswood station when he follows up their false clue.

Although Goon is around and making things awkward, Fatty arranges a meeting with Pippin in the lemonade shop.

They read Pippin's notes about the suspects and their alibis, which start with Boysie who took the manager a cup of tea at eight o'clock.

After going through the outline of the alibis of the seven suspects, Fatty suggests that they use their autograph books as an excuse to meet them all, hopefully leading to discussions.

Pippin tells Fatty that all the cast have motives for stealing money from the manager but that all their alibis check out except Zoe's.

As for the last three chapters, this one concerns itself with the Monday morning, the checking up of alibis and the noon meeting in Pip's playroom to communicate what the various sub-sets of the Find-Outers have found out.

The physical descriptions are important, because it will later be revealed that someone else stripped the cat suit from sleeping Boysie and put it on themselves.

Enid intervenes at this point to say: 'Boysie was queer in the head and silly, he was ugly to look at - but he was kind and sincere and humble, he had sense of fun - and you simply couldn't help liking him.'

Boysie reminds the group that he saw three of the children - Fatty, Larry and Pips but not Daisy or Bets - on the night of the robbery.

Surely Enid's conscious mind was aware by this time that someone had taken the cat-suit off the drugged Boysie and put it on himself or herself.

Enid begins this chapter by pretending that she thinks that Boysie did indeed take up tea to the manager and that he must be covering for someone.

Meanwhile Fatty and Pip had gone to the place by the river where William Orr and Peter Watting were supposed to have had tea.

I should say here that Enid makes a mistake that was not picked up by herself when re-reading the typescript, nor by the copy editor at Methuen in 1949, and is still there in the latest paperback version I have, the 2003 edition whose cover kicks off this essay.

In other words, there was plenty to back up the alibi of the pair both of whom had been described as tall and thin anyway, meaning they couldn't have got into the cat suit.

The chapter ends with Fatty intending to phone Zoe that lunchtime to see if she knows where John James will be that afternoon.

Fatty phones round the others, telling Pip to talk to Kitty again and make a note of exactly when the breaks in the film were.

Up to now, the alibi of Alec Grant has not been checked as he went off to do his female impersonation show in Sheepridge that evening.

This is hardly convincing as a piece of plotting as the cat suit was stretched and torn in the process of being used by the guilty party.

If it had been a big person, Enid could have found a way round that, by re-examining the suit and finding stretch marks, for example.

The chapter ends with Pippin telling the Find-Outers that Goon has arrested Boysie and Zoe and taken them over to the Inspector.