Cat Out of Hell Read online

  Roger pulled away, jumped off the table and strolled to the cat-flap – but waited to hear the end of the conversation before going outside.

  “So you mean it has happened before?”

  “About six months ago, apparently,” the policeman said. “In Lincolnshire. At the home of some sort of artist who fell downstairs.”

  An hour later, we had flicked through nearly all the contents of Jo’s phone – and let’s just say we had different ideas about what we’d found. He thought we’d found nothing! “Oh well, it was worth a try,” were his exact words. What he’d been looking for, I suppose, was a name, a number, a secret lover, a villainous fancy man. So a series of pictures of the garden, taken from the upstairs window, with a large, unknown black cat in them – sometimes with that loyal dog Jeremy face to face with him – were of no interest whatsoever.

  And then we looked properly at the last picture taken with the phone – a picture just of Jeremy on his own, the little J-Dog, Jo’s beloved little border terrier. At first glance, it had looked like a simple snap of Jeremy lying on his side on the gravel by the gate. But oh no, this was not a doggie having a lie-down in the sun on some nice winter’s day. This was taken on the day Jo disappeared; the day she called me in the theatre; the day something really bad happened at this house. Poor little J-Dog was lying right beside the big five-bar gate that leads to the lane, and his face – well, his whole head, really – was crushed. The poor little thing was obviously dead.

  The policeman and I went straight out to the gate and when we got there, I felt such a fool for having noticed nothing earlier. I’ve been here three weeks! And there were still traces of blood and dog-hair in the hinge of the gate – about a foot off the ground, exactly Jeremy’s height. Oh God, poor Jo. How she loved that J-Dog. I noticed Roger watching us from the garden wall as we examined the scene. It was easy enough to see what had happened. In the gravel – Oh God. In the gravel, we even found some little doggie teeth.

  “So the dog was sniffing here,” said the policeman. “And then someone lifted the latch. Is it a heavy gate?”

  I could hardly speak. I just nodded. The thing is, it’s a very heavy gate, yes. And the way it swings open – Jo always said it was lethal. That’s why we tended to leave it open. It had been open ever since I arrived.

  With some effort, I walked the gate shut, to demonstrate. Dumbly, I signalled to him to stand back. One flick of the latch, and it swung open so fast and so violently that we both gasped.

  “Jesus!” he said, catching it. “She should have fixed this.”

  “She was always meaning to,” I said.

  So the poor dog must have been standing there, with his little nose right in the hinge of the gate, when someone lifted the latch. But why had he been standing there?

  “Look at this,” said the policeman, bending down. “He was deliberately lured.” And there it was. A ham bone, now stripped of all flesh, was wedged between the gate post and the wall.

  At this point, I’m sorry, I was sick.

  “She wouldn’t have done this herself?” he said.

  “Oh God, no. God, no.” I fumbled for a tissue, and couldn’t find one. I felt like crying: I kept thinking of the force of that gate swinging open, and the poor dog’s head just cracking like a nut. It was as if I’d personally heard the noise; been there myself when it happened. The J-Dog had been dead before I got here! And all this time I’d been imagining he was safe, even enjoying himself, in a jolly space ship, hovering over the Solent. Up on the wall, Roger was still watching, not moving.

  The policeman made to leave. “I’ll find out if she took the dog’s body to a vet’s anywhere. This could explain why she left in such a hurry,” he said. “Although it doesn’t explain why she didn’t take the car.”

  He turned to me and gave me a searching look. “It’s a shame you didn’t notice it before,” he said. “And it’s even more of a shame that you didn’t do anything useful with that phone.” It was the first hint of unfriendliness in his tone.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Mr Caton-Pines, I have to say this. You haven’t done anything to find out what happened to your sister, have you?”

  I thought of all the hours I’d spent since I got here, listening to Roger, thinking about Roger, writing about Roger, when I could have been focusing properly on finding Jo. In a way, what he said was true.

  “I’m beginning to think you’re not telling my everything.”

  I didn’t have to answer because I was throwing up again. But not telling him everything – oh God, he was definitely right about that.

  Interpolation, with apologies

  I promised I would allow the Wiggy files to tell their own story without any unwelcome “editorialising,” but something has happened that has made me change my mind. Yesterday, having reached a natural break in this batch of transcriptions, I left the cottage for the first time and drove to Norwich. I imagined I would go shopping for food, possibly catch an improving matinee at the art cinema, and (if time allowed) spend a few moments at an internet café, checking on Wiggy’s appearance schedule at the theatre in Coventry. In fact, I spent four hours at the internet café, and was so upset I had to come back at once. I now shan’t bother with the file entitled “Roger Dream.” It doesn’t add much, except that in his dream Wiggy keeps being led to look at that peg in the hall – the peg that usually has the keys to next door but on which nothing was hanging when he arrived at the house. His subconscious mind has worked things out, even if he hasn’t. If the keys to next door are missing from the usual peg, his exasperated inner self is asking, what do you think that means?

  But that’s enough of WIGGY’s slow mental processes. The bare facts of what I discovered are these:

  1: Will Caton-Pines (Wiggy to his friends) did appear in See How They Run! The Coventry Bugle review is exactly as he gives it. The play ran at the Belgrade just two months ago.

  2: He is now at the centre of a gruesome investigation into the death of his sister. The noted watercolourist Joanna Caton-Pines, who had been missing for three weeks from her cottage near Littlehampton, was found in the first week of December in the cellar of an adjoining house, with the corpse of a dog whose head had apparently been crushed. Both she and the dog had been partly devoured by rats. She was alive when she entered the cellar but the dog was not. She died, says the preliminary report, of “dehydration, asphyxiation and (possibly) rat-induced dementia.”

  Her brother is the chief suspect, mainly because much of his behaviour is inexplicable. For example, he evidently showed signs of “inappropriate amusement” when the mobile phone belonging to his sister was found to have been disabled. He also withheld from the police the fact that he had heard scratching from beyond the party wall for several days after his sister “went missing.” Those scratchings were, of course, the sound of his sister clawing at the bottom of a heavy cellar trapdoor. After he eventually “found” his sister’s body, it is clear that he did not contact the police for at least three hours. In the interim, he evidently went on a bloody rampage, in which he bludgeoned a cat to death, beheaded it, and incinerated its body in the garden. He is now in custody.

  3: The academic whose obituary Roger had removed from the Daily Telegraph was a Professor Peplow. He was eighty-two, and he appeared to have killed himself, using hemlock. In the 1960s he had co-authored a major work on the place of animals in ancient death cults with a Dr G. L. Winterton. Neighbours reported his agitation about repeatedly spotting a large black cat in the area. He left a note saying (these exact words) ‘I have lost the will to live.’

  End of interpolation

  PART TWO

  HOME

  It was to a sad and comfortless house that I returned after cutting short my wintry sojourn by the sea. A film of dust had settled on everything during my absence; the windows looked smeary; Mary’s favourite fern beside the front door had bent and cracked from thirst; meanwhile various damp items of unimportant post, many of them tactles
sly addressed to my dead wife, littered the tiles for quite some distance along the musty hall, as if they had exploded through the letter-box. On what appeared to be a happier note, the dog seemed glad to be home. He scratched at the garden gate, and panted excitedly. This I found rather gratifying, until, as he was straining at the lead coming up the garden path, it dawned on me: was he expecting to see Mary? It was soon distressingly clear that such was indeed the case. Once inside, I’m afraid I grew quite impatient with him as he stupidly ran round and round, romping upstairs and down, barking and wagging his tail, pawing at closed doors.

  “Stop it!” I said. “Come here, Watson! Watson, stop it. Come here!”

  I could not catch him. He raced in circles, scattering rugs, madly knocking against the furniture. It was only when he had searched the entire house three or four times that he was prepared to admit defeat. He crawled under a chair and glared at me with an accusing expression that was all the more tragic because, in happier times, Mary and I had often imitated it, for each other’s amusement. “Oh, Bear,” she would say to me (we had pet names for each other, I’m afraid). “Bear, how could you?” And then she would pull the accusing doggie face, and we would both laugh. No wonder I couldn’t bring myself to look at him right now. I deeply envied him, though, in a way. All this time, had he simply forgotten that Mary had gone? What a blessing such oblivion would be. Imagine if I could have forgotten all about the last couple of months, myself – cheerfully bursting back into this house, calling for Mary, “We’re back! You were right not to come, it was freezing!” But imagine, also, the unbearable pain of remembering the truth; of having that happy oblivion freshly shattered. To re-experience the devastating news, overcome the disbelief once more, and crumple yet again under the blow, would be beyond endurance. It would be like dying twice.

  I filled the kettle, adjusted the thermostat for the central heating, and considered the unpacking. Mary, of course, had perfected a very efficient system for unpacking, which rendered it quite painless, at least as far as her husband was concerned. The house, with all our possessions restored to it, would be back to normal within just an hour or so. I very much approved of Mary’s system, because what it required of me, principally, was that I just keep out of the way. I would retire to my study with the accumulated letters and bills, and re-emerge at dinner time to discover that the emptied bags and suitcases were already stowed in the back bedroom, the washing machine was half-way through a cycle, all the toiletries were back in their normal places, even the books were ready (in piles) to go back on to the shelves. Could I face the unpacking by myself? Could I recreate Mary’s system, based on my tiny sideways knowledge of it? I looked at the heap of boxes and suitcases in the hall, and quailed at the sheer scale of the difficulty. In order to make life bearable at the cottage, I had taken with me (in the old Volvo) simply everything I could think of: cooking pots and radios and the laptop and towels, and a box of books, and a big blanket, and two phone chargers, a box of stationery, and all the dog bowls and all his balls and toys and his special towel. And on top of all the cargo returning to the house, I now had additional freight – acquired on voyage, as it were: the obligatory bag of left-over groceries such as porridge and butter, tea bags and eggs – plus, of course, those time-honoured souvenirs of the outraged self-caterer: some minimally-used washing-up liquid, a minimally-used bottle of olive oil, and a 99 per cent full extra-large container of very ordinary table salt.

  Did I have the patience to cope with the organisational demands of all this? Of course not. In that case (I heard Mary ask), would I prefer to unpack piecemeal over the next few weeks? No, Mary. I would not. I would hate that more than anything, as you very well know. Once clothes started spilling out of suitcases in the hall, I would have to move out and live in the car. But for heaven’s sake, why was I even thinking about this? As a fresh wave of sadness broke over me, I had to sit down and swallow the emotion, while Watson – who might have been a real comfort to me at this point, had he made the requisite effort – continued to observe, still accusingly, from under his chair.

  It was Mary who’d had the idea of naming him Watson. At first, she’d liked the idea of saying to an enthusiastic puppy, “Come, Watson, come! The game’s afoot!” But it turned out to be a rather clever inspiration, and the name stuck. We both enjoyed finding “Watson” quotations that fitted perfectly with the dog. My own favourite was: “You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.” Meanwhile, Mary preferred to quote the famous telegram summons: “Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.” She even used to call it out in parks and woods, when Watson was off the lead. Mary never cared much what people thought of her. While others were trying to attract their own dogs by shouting, “Monty! Monty, teatime!” Mary would be calling, “Come at once if convenient, Watson! If inconvenient, come all the same!”

  With the dog still watching me, I got up. In the hall, I found the box with his food and bowl. I opened it, extracted just the things I wanted, and (feeling guilty) closed it again. Guessing what was occurring, Watson came out from under the chair – but after wolfing down his dinner, he retreated once more. His grand gift for silence was not quite such an asset right now. I sat down again; I got up again. I took off my coat. Finally, with an effort, I put some tinned soup in a saucepan, and began to heat it up; while this was happening, I went to the gloomy study, switched on my computer and started to download (slowly) 216 e-mails. Back in the kitchen, I realised all the wooden spoons were still packed – so I managed without. Sitting down again, I sipped the soup and tried to start a list of things to do. Without thinking, I looked up at the wall, half-expecting to see a board with GET THIS, DO THAT and TAKE CARE OF as the headings. I looked for the peg where next-door’s keys ought to hang. But of course neither of these items was in my own house. Although I could picture them quite clearly in my mind’s eye, I had to accept that I had never, personally, seen them in my life.

  I had, as yet, made no decision about Wiggy and Roger, but my instinct was strong: forget it. Try to forget Dr Winterton’s file and all of its contents. What good could it do to dwell on this story? Was it even true? Why on earth was it sent to me? Was it perhaps sent in error? On the drive home, all the way, I had maintained a running internal dialogue. Was Dr Winterton in desperate danger? No, stop thinking about this. Dr Winterton means nothing to you. A smell of cloves, you said. That’s all you remembered about him. A bit tough that poor Peplow had to die – although I have to say it was very classy of him to have chosen hemlock. Why had Jo put her phone on to charge and then gone next door to hide in the cellar? Why hadn’t she taken it with her? You’re right, this is a detail that makes no sense, but just don’t think about it because there is no way you will ever know the answer. Why did she think a next-door cellar was a good place to hide, anyway? I can’t imagine – especially if it had a heavy trap-door that could make it your living tomb. Imagine the sight Wiggy found when he opened that cellar trap-door. No, don’t. Don’t ever try to imagine that. You realise he heard the scratching for several days? If he hadn’t been such an idiot, he might have saved her! Don’t say that. Please don’t think like that. Roger said that the pit was the worst of all deaths. You’re quoting a cat now. An impossible cat, at that. So just desist. All of this story, remember, is based on the completely unacceptable and ludicrous premise of an evil talking cat called Roger that travelled romantically in the footsteps of Lord Byron in the 1930s and now solves cryptic crosswords torn out daily from the Telegraph.

  At six o’clock the doorbell rang. It was one of the neighbours – Tony Something. He and his wife have lived in the house next door for six years or so, so I suppose I really should know their surname by now, but I’m afraid I left that kind of thing to Mary. I picked up Watson and opened the door with him under my arm. Mary and I both had a horror of Watson running outside when the front door was open, so we made it a rule to pick him up.

  “A
lec,” Tony said. “I noticed the lights were on.”

  I realise I haven’t mentioned my name before. I do apologise. I suppose it was because this wasn’t my story.

  “Everything all right?” Tony asked. He and his wife Eleanor have been very solicitous since Mary died. It was Eleanor who called the ambulance on the fateful day. She looked out of an upstairs window and saw that Mary had collapsed in the back garden. Her heart had just stopped, they said. It just stopped. As I stood there with Tony, I realised I had never thanked his wife for what she did, or even talked to her about it properly. Did she think me very ungrateful and ill-mannered? Or did she understand that, when someone dies, there is so much to do, and facing people is the hardest part?

  It was still very difficult talking to people. I certainly didn’t want to face Tony right now. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Just having some soup,” I said. “Come in?”

  “No, no. That’s OK,” he said, but he remained shuffling on the doorstep – which was annoying, as it meant I had to continue holding the dog, and letting all the newly-generated warmth in the hall go straight out of the house.

  “How was the coast?” he asked.

  “A trifle bleak,” I said. “Are you sure you won’t – ?”

  “I was just checking. You’re back a little earlier than you said.”

  “Yes. I’d had enough.”

  “Well. You must come round for supper.”

  “Thank you.” I looked at the dog in my arms. I was hinting that I should like to shut the door and put Watson down. Tony thought I was hinting at something else.

  “Bring Watson.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  He turned to go, and then made a decision to say something more. I tensed up. I was afraid he was about to say something nice about Mary. But he wasn’t.