Cat Out of Hell Read online

  “Someone was looking for you,” he said.

  “Really?”

  Instinctively, I held Watson more tightly, but otherwise I tried to show no reaction.

  “We told him you were away, but he said he’d come back.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you.” I tried not to smile, but I felt – what was it? To be honest, I felt excited. A mysterious visitor? A moment before, I’d been advising myself not to think about the Roger file ever again, and now I was secretly thrilled at the idea of this man who had been looking for me. What if it was Winterton?

  “Was he … quite old?” I said.

  Tony laughed. “Incredibly old!”

  I laughed as well. “A bit dusty?”

  “Incredibly dusty!”

  “Dishevelled?”

  “Incredibly dishevelled, yes!”

  He seemed relieved that I knew who he was talking about.

  “He said he was a friend of Mary’s?” he said, with that modern upward inflection that suggests a question.

  “That’s it,” I said. I sounded quite hearty, which indeed I was. Perversely enough, the idea of a visit from Winterton was quite cheering me up.

  “Apparently she worked with him on some project at the library.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Some project at the library.”

  He went back down the path and I shut the door. Then I put down the dog and laughed. Watson looked up at me with a quizzical air and wagged his tail, but I could hardly explain to him why I was so happy that the game was afoot; I didn’t remotely understand it myself. Surely I didn’t want to know more about the evil Roger? In the end, just to say something, I resorted to Mary’s standard address to Watson, whenever he came back dirty from digging in the garden.

  “Ah,” I said. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

  Three days were to pass before Dr Winterton called on me. Perhaps he wanted to give me time to finish my unpacking – which turned out to be such a lengthy and demoralising process that I loved Mary all the more for the way she had stoically undertaken it so many times on my behalf. In the interim, while I waited for his visit, I tried to adopt a normal domestic routine, but being at home brought me closer than ever to my sense of loss. In the evenings I tried to watch television, but quickly gave up: everything touched me too deeply. Nature programmes, detective dramas, and worst of all, the news – everything mercilessly underlined the same theme: it was all death, death, death, and all entirely unsupportable. Polar bear cubs starved in the snow, prostitutes were stabbed in urban underpasses, old age pensioners opened the door to teenage psychopaths armed with screwdrivers. The only recourse was to watch quizzes; but, sadly, those were impossible, too. Mary and I had watched University Challenge together, and she had invented a game whereby we would shout answers to the science questions in unison, and keep a running score of our (random) successes. Over the years we grew rather good at identifying types of mathematical question, and would take it in turns to shout “Minus one!” – which more often than not (odd, but true) was the correct answer to the seemingly meaningless questions involving x and y. We laughed a hollow laugh at the astronomy questions; we were seriously competitive on history and literature; she was shocked by my terrible ignorance of art; we were both hilariously bad at identifying great composers from even their most famous compositions. “Giotto!” I would say, regularly, to the art questions. “Haydn!” she’d say to anything musical. Not long before she died, there was a week when Minus One and Giotto and Haydn were the correct answers to starter questions. We laughed and laughed. It was the triumph of hope over ignorance.

  Speaking of literature, since Mary had died, there were two lines from Hamlet that I found I couldn’t stop thinking of. One was “How all occasions do inform against me,” and the other was: “And a man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one.’ ” I know it’s fashionable to think that Shakespeare was not personally bereft when he wrote Hamlet (or that he didn’t need to be), but I am positive, from that second line, that he was. Since Mary died, I have looked at people bothering about ridiculous things and I simply cannot bear it. How can they be ignorant of the fact that – in a second – we are gone? Any sort of cruelty or stupidity dismays me. And as for being conscious of the fragility of existence, one morning, as we walked to the newsagent’s shop, a cyclist on the pavement shot past Watson, narrowly avoiding him, and instead of yelling in outrage, I just went to pieces. I had to sit on a bench at the bus stop and hold the dog in my arms until I stopped shaking. Here is the truth of life’s fragility: one moment you are a witty female senior part-time librarian of 53, clearing weeds from the side of the garden path, and the next you are nothing but clay. One moment your heart is beating in your breast; the next it is a mass of bloody muscle, inert and dead. One moment you can say the words “I am.” And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

  In the end, while I waited for Winterton, I decided to visit my old colleagues at the library. I felt I had already left it too long. I also thought the familiarity of the building might be comforting. But I should have known better. Revisiting a place of work nearly always makes you feel like a ghost. Well, when you feel like a ghost already, it is the greatest folly; and at every hurdle, I wanted to turn back. At the turnstiles, I found that there was a new security person; on the membership desk, a new assistant. Awkwardly, I explained to both of them who I was. I then had to wait while a humiliating phone call was made, and then apply for temporary membership! “I ran the periodicals department for thirty years,” I said. “I officially left only at Christmas.” But it was like speaking into a void. Once I had breached the walls, the stately marble catalogue hall felt more like home, thank goodness, but it was also stuffy (far too warm after the cold outside), and smelled overpoweringly of furniture polish and body odour (as I suppose it always has). As I looked round, I started to feel faint. I wished I had worn a lighter coat. Avril, the deputy librarian, greeted me warmly, but was then called away to deal with a student having a battle with a photocopier. I asked after my old periodicals assistant, James, who is now in charge of research services; unfortunately, he was in a meeting. So I was just wondering why I had put myself through this unnecessary psychological ordeal, when Mary’s dreamy colleague Tawny happened to come along. To be honest, I had forgotten about Tawny. She was someone I had quite happily let slip from my mind.

  “Tawny,” I said, and smiled hypocritically. “How are you?”

  I had always felt sorry for her on account of her owlish name – presumably the proud handiwork of irresponsible hippie parents. As Bertie Wooster famously remarked, there is, from time to time, some raw work pulled at the font.

  “Alec! Awww. I was going to call you.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  Tawny had a sing-song sort of voice and wide eyes, and looked at you with a funny pursed-lip expression, like a kitten in a classic Disney animation. She had hair down to her waist, no make-up, and wore ballet pumps even when it was snowing. She was about forty-five years old. It used to drive Mary absolutely insane to work with her.

  “Awww, I’m glad you’re back. Awww, how’s Watson?”

  “Thank you, he’s very well.”

  She pointed a finger at me.

  “I,” she said again, “was going to call you.”

  “Well. That’s nice.”

  “Have you got time to come and see?”

  “See what?”

  “What I was going to call you about,” she said.

  I had promised myself not to risk going into the great reading room on this first, experimental return to the library. But now here we were, suddenly, in Mary’s old domain – through the heavy swing doors, and into that perfect, hermetically sealed world of panelling and high windows and book dust and polish (and BO), and soft, continuous keyboard clatter. Over the years, the usage of the room had inevitably changed – from being a silent reading room, it had become a silent wr
iting room. But its seriousness had survived the transition. Where many other campus libraries had become more like internet cafes, our great reading room was a place of intense, solitary learning. Mary had been ideally suited to her position here, presiding over so much heightened mental processing. Others might have been intimidated by it, but not her. Down each side of the room were the individual, lockable carrels that she could, at her discretion, allocate to research students and academics. It had surprised me to find out, when she first assumed her position, that not all students aspired to a carrel. I would have thought that having a tiny private panelled room of one’s own within the library, with a book shelf, lamp and desk, would have been any studious person’s fantasy environment. But the rental fee was perhaps off-putting; whatever the cause, they often stood empty. Mary had told me that, once in a while, she would take a key to an unused carrel and lock herself inside for a couple of hours – “Just to get a break from Tawny,” was what she used to say.

  It was to one of the carrels that Tawny now led me. She held the key.

  “Now this is really strange,” she said, in a whisper. “We think it must have happened the weekend before Mary – Oh.”

  She stopped. She couldn’t say it, so I had to say it for her. It is the common lot of the grieving, I’ve discovered, to spend half your time saving other people’s feelings.

  “The weekend before Mary died?” I said, helpfully.

  “Yes.”

  I braced myself. I looked around. I didn’t know yet what she was talking about. She had said the words, “It must have happened.” But what could happen here? Nothing had “happened” in this reading room, aside from some gargantuan efforts at mental application, for about a hundred years. We had stopped outside carrel number 17, which I now faintly remembered was the little private space that Mary had joked about retreating to. Tawny turned the key, but I almost stopped her. Was I up to this? What if there was something in here – something personal to Mary – that would break my heart afresh?

  “The thing is,” Tawny said, very quietly, “the caretaker said he had seen a cat prowling about in the library, and he’d tried to catch him. But of course he never expected this.”

  “A cat?”

  “Shhh,” she said. I had forgotten to whisper. Some of the “readers” looked round. We looked back at them, and I weakly gestured an apology.

  As if to compensate for my outburst, she lowered her voice still further, and turned her big wide eyes to mine. “We don’t know how he got in,” she said. Her voice was so low that it was little more than aspirated mouthing. “But he’s on the CCTV. He’s huge. Anyway, there’s a bit of a smell, so you’d better –”

  “Tawny, could you hang on a minute –” I said, but it was too late. She had opened the door.

  “Oh my God,” I said. I stumbled back.

  “Alec! Quick, oh, sit down. I’m so sorry. Wait here, I’ll get someone.”

  “No, no. Stay,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  I held on to the door jamb and tried to make sense of the scene inside the carrel, holding my hand over my face. The best way I can describe it is this: imagine you had placed a small, orderly panelled room in a jungle clearing and come back a week later when all the larger wild beasts had taken turns frenziedly tearing it to pieces, slaughtering inside it, and treating it as a lavatory. That’s what this little carrel looked like inside – it had been both savaged and defiled. The walls were slashed and splintered, papers were torn and scattered, books looked as if they had exploded, blood was spattered in flying arcs. The smell, of course, was cat urine; and you could almost hear the echo of the feline shrieks and yowls that must have accompanied such a violent attack. How big was this cat? It was hard to believe that any animal smaller than a bear could have caused such horrific damage. There were claw-marks on the walls a good six inches across. And to think that all this violence had been done – in a way – to Mary!

  “It’s this bit that freaks me most,” Tawny said. She pointed to the drawer in the desk, which must have been locked when the cat got in. The area around the drawer was cut and slashed so badly that splinters and chips had flown off. Grimacing, Tawny pointed to where, embedded in the shattered wood, there was a large claw, its end coated in dried blood. It had evidently been dug so deeply into the desk that the cat had not been able to withdraw it.

  “I know I’m being stupid,” she whispered, “But it’s as if it wanted to get into the drawer.”

  “What’s in there?” I said.

  “Nothing. It’s empty,” she said, and drew it out to show me.

  Tawny decided I had seen enough. She shut the door again, and we moved to the corner of the reading room, where we could speak a little more loudly. One thing above all I needed to know.

  “Did Mary know about this?” I said. “Oh God. Tawny, did she see this?”

  “We think she did,” said Tawny.

  “Oh my God. Oh, Mary.”

  “Actually, I’m sure she did. It was on the Monday morning, you see. Do you remember, I called you and said she had gone home, not feeling well?”

  Of course I remembered. Mary had died later that day.

  “This must have happened over a weekend, you see; and I remember she took the key on the Monday morning and came down here, and I was getting on with something and not really paying attention, but I’m sure she came straight back to the inquiries desk and said she didn’t feel well. She had something with her – a small, slim book, I think, in one of those old university slipcases. She went up the spiral staircase behind the desk – I remember that, because she usually preferred to take the long way round to avoid it. She was gone for a while. And then she came back down and went home. And – oh, Alec. I never saw her again!”

  A tear rolled down her face. I suppose she must have cared for Mary, working with her all that time. It had never occurred to me. I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

  “She took away the key with her, which she shouldn’t have done. But that’s why we didn’t find out what had happened in there until a few days ago, when Avril came up with a duplicate. The smell – well. We’d noticed the smell, of course, but we didn’t realise it was coming from here. Some of the readers – well, you know what they’re like.”

  I nodded. I did indeed.

  “Anyway, they’re going to clear it out on Sunday when there are no students around. Did you see what it did to the books?”

  I was still reeling. “I can’t take it in,” I said. There was no doubt that this carrel had been Mary’s. In the debris, I had recognised her handwriting on some of the ravaged papers. But why hadn’t she told me what she was doing in there? Why had she lied to me? Had Dr Winterton really been working on “a project” with Mary? Why had she never told me? I was furious. What had she got herself into? And what, by extension, had she got me into, too? This destructive act had been done, without question, by a large and powerful cat! Oh God. Until this moment, it had been of no real concern to me whether the Captain existed or not. I could believe in him, or disbelieve in him: it was all the same. It had nothing to do with me. But now disbelief was not an option. For heaven’s sake, I had seen one of his actual claws, violently embedded in a piece of venerable oak library furniture!

  “Can you open it again, Tawny?” I said. “I have to know what she was working on in there.”

  Tawny pulled a face. “I don’t think you ought to touch anything, Alec.”

  “I have to see,” I said.

  “Ooh, I’m sorry,” she said. “But technically I’m not supposed to show it to anyone. I just felt you should know.”

  “Can I see the CCTV?”

  “No, of course not!”

  This was very frustrating.

  “All right, where are the books from, at least?” I said. “Do you know?”

  “Oh yes.” Thank goodness, Tawny could see no harm in telling me this. “They’re from the Seeward Collection.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

&nb
sp; “Of course,” I said. “Of course they’re from the Seeward. Well. I see.”

  The Seeward was a world-famous collection, donated to the library on the collector’s death in the 1960s, and classified as “arcana.” Since that time, it had been housed in a twenty-foot-square steel-mesh cage, deep in the library stacks. John Seeward is no longer a household name, but he had been a celebrated journalist-cum-“ghost hunter” in inter-war Britain – the sort of chap who made friends with (instead of running a mile from) self-styled diabolists such as Aleister Crowley. His collection had been used, in his lifetime, by the occult writer Dennis Wheatley. Seeward had collected books on ancient mysteries; also ghosts, witches, satanic rites and so on. In the library’s on-line catalogue, books from the Seeward were indicated with the sensational (and not uncontroversial) symbol of a hand-drawn pentagram, complete with drip-marks – to suggest it had been drawn in blood on a wall. Many of us had, over the years, objected to the continued presence of the Seeward Collection in a respectable academic library, and argued quite forcibly for its removal or sale.

  “Are you all right?” Tawny said.

  I smiled. Unsurprisingly, I was a little distracted.

  She tried to comfort me.

  “In the end, it’s only books and papers that were damaged, Alec. No one was hurt, I’m sure. I think the cat must have just got locked in and gone berserk. An aunt of mine got back to her house in France once and found that a bird – just a single bird on its own – had virtually trashed the place. It came down the chimney, they think. And before it died, it had pooed everywhere, broken a lot of my aunt’s favourite things, and the worst thing was, it had eaten all the spines off the books.”

  I had to think quickly.

  “Is Julian in today?”

  Julian Prideaux was the keeper of the special collections, and was very rarely seen. Mary and I despised him. He seemed to think that leaving an old threadbare cardigan (with a sprinkle of dandruff on it) over the back of his chair – sometimes for weeks on end – was a brilliant bluff, and that, seeing it there, we would all exclaim, “Look! A cardigan! This means he can’t have gone far! See, this dandruff is quite fresh!” How he kept his position had always been a mystery to me. He never once turned up to a departmental meeting; Mary and I had jointly decided he was the laziest librarian on the planet. I enjoyed asking Tawny whether he was in today. Tawny would know as well as I did that if it was a month with any letters in it whatsoever, the answer was probably no.