Cat Out of Hell (6 page)

“Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed

As of a person separate to God
,

Designed for great exploits, if I must die

Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out
,

Made of my enemies the scorn and gaze;

To grind in brazen fetters under task

With this heaven-gifted strength?

“Gosh,” says Wiggy, impressed.

“Well, I admit, not
everything
in that passage fitted my exact predicament.”

“But the gist – ?”

“Exactly!” Roger is pleased, for once, with Wiggy’s grasp of essentials. “Yes, what I’ve found so often in life is that recollecting poetry at key moments is all about the gist. Why, I asked myself. Basically, why was I made so special if I was going to end up in a cat basket?”

Wiggy makes a sympathetic noise.

“So there I was. Not eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, but defeated by the tiny buckle that kept the door of a simple wicker basket closed! I had no way of telling the Captain what had happened. I just had to hope he would return to the Acropolis and that somehow he would work out where I’d gone.

“Poor Captain.”

“Yes.”

“And poor you, of course.”

“Thank you, Wiggy. I’m afraid I do think ‘Poor me,’ even though, on the voyage, I suppose I was treated well enough. The boy’s parents were academics who had the best literary conversations I’d ever heard, although they were far too soft on Robert Browning for my taste. The boy was not neglectful of me – he just made me very anxious. I could hardly forget that he had
read about cats like me
. But here’s the point. When we arrived back in England, we came straight to London, and I escaped – and came straight to Bloomsbury.”

“How did you manage it? The escape?”

“Oldest trick in the book, I’m afraid. Laundry basket.”

“And why Bloomsbury?”

“I suppose I only had one idea. Where would the Captain think to look for me? I’d worked it out on the voyage – he’d last seen me at the Parthenon, so the obvious place was the London home of the Parthenon marbles!”

“Oh, that’s clever.”

“Thank you.”

“Are they anything like the Elgin Marbles?”

“The Parthenon Marbles and the Elgin Marbles are the same thing, Wiggy.”

Wiggy says nothing.

“So that was my thinking, for right or wrong, and the British Museum was my actual home both during the war and for a long time after. Even when all the objects were evacuated, I stayed put. I still visit as often as I can. I am proud to say that I know the lay-out of the Enlightenment Gallery better than I know the back of my own paw.

“The boy became an academic himself, in time. I followed
his progress. He specialised in pre-Christian attitudes to animals – in particular, their relationship to the afterlife – as companions, and so on. He co-wrote a masterly work on the subject with a quite famous historian, and he also once wrote an affectionate piece in the
Times Higher Education Supplement
about the cat he had found at the Acropolis which later (or so he’d been told) lived wild in the British Museum, even throughout the Blitz. This cat had inspired him, he said. Well, as if I gave a damn about that! All I knew was that he grew up, he got older; in the fullness of time, he grew old. I, by contrast, have remained exactly the same, aside from becoming (if I may say so) much, much cleverer than he could ever be. But what he did, when he abducted me from Greece, was ultimately to draw to him the wrath of the Captain. He lives still, but it’s a miracle, and I have reason to believe that he doesn’t have long.”

MORE STUFF

(by Wiggy)

Sergeant Duggan brought the phone back with pretty extraordinary news. It had been urinated on, by a cat,
while it was charging
! Whoa. The effect was basically to electrocute the insides of the phone. Duggan said he’d never heard of anything like it. I said, truthfully, I bloody well hadn’t either.

“Imagine!” he said. “Why would a cat
want
to wee on a phone?”

I was just asking myself the same question when Roger happened to saunter into the kitchen, as if by coincidence, and the policeman (knowing not who he was dealing with) reached down and picked him up. It was, I have to say, a brilliant moment.

“Who’s been a naughty cat, then? Who’s been a naughty ickle cat?”

Roger looked at me over the policeman’s shoulder. I waggled my eyebrows at him. He glowered. It was hilarious.

“Can’t have animals at home. Daughter’s allergic,” Duggan said, bending to put Roger down. I fleetingly wondered whether any of the great poets ever wrote anything that covered the ignominy of that particular situation. I’d be very surprised if they had.

“Er, did they retrieve anything from the Sim thing?” I asked, trying to show a polite interest. I think the policeman realised quite a while back that I had no idea what a ‘Sim thing’ was.

“Ah, now,” he said. And he gave Roger a last pat on the head as he straightened up. “Now, because it’s an iPhone, there’s nothing stored on the Sim card apart from account data.”

Roger curled up on a nearby chair, as if unconcerned.

“All the interesting and useful stuff – things like messages, photos, voice memos, map references – they would have been stored on the phone itself, which, as we know, was destroyed, burned out –”

“By the peeing?”

“Yes, the inside of the phone was sort-of electrocuted when it was unfortunate enough to come into contact with electricity and cat urine at the same time.”

I looked at Roger. He was doing a bit of grooming, but with his ears pricked up for every word. What a cool customer. However, he wasn’t prepared for what the bloke revealed next.

“But fortunately, all is not lost!” he announced. And God, it was funny to see Roger’s reaction. He fell off the chair.

“What? Oh
fuck
!” he said, aloud.

I suppose it slipped out. I gasped. Duggan looked at me, and said, “What did you say?”

So I had to impersonate Roger, with his Vincent Price voice and everything. I laughed. “Sorry, officer. I just said, ‘What? Oh
fuck
!’ It’s a funny family catch-phrase, that’s all.”

I could see he was confused, but he let it pass.

“You were saying all is not lost,” I prompted.

He frowned at me. “Yes, well. Most people ‘sync’ their phones with their computers. In many cases nowadays, it happens automatically when the phone is in range of the computer in the house. And if your sister did that, we can ‘sync’ this replacement phone.” He held one up. “And then we can find out at least what was on her other phone the last time she plugged it in. Do you see?”

“Blimey,” I said. “So whoever peed on the phone – they didn’t think of that?” I couldn’t help rubbing it in a bit. I was enjoying seeing how this news was affecting Roger. His tail was thrashing about like nobody’s business.

The policeman was surprised. “I don’t suppose he did it on purpose, did you, ickle puss, ickle puss, ickle puss?” He reached for Roger again, but Roger backed off.

“Can we do it now?” I asked. “The syncing thing?”

“Of course,” he said. “Shall I – ?”

I said absolutely, and he was just going upstairs when his own phone beeped with a text message. He stopped to read it. And I’ll remember the moment for ever, I think. Up to that point, I was still enjoying Roger’s discomfort. It was great being
in on it
, if you know what I mean. He had hopped up on the table, and I was stroking his head like a normal cat-owner, saying to Roger in a normal talking-to-animals kind of way, “The nice policeman’s going to ‘sync’ Jo’s phone upstairs, Roger. This might clear up the mystery of where she’s gone.” And he was pretending he didn’t understand a word anyone was saying.

“Any news?” I said, when the policeman had finished reading his text.

“Not relevant to this, no. Sorry,” he said. “Silly, really. We thought we’d just check whether this cat-peeing-on-a-charging-phone thing had ever been recorded before as part of, you know, ‘suspicious circumstances.’ ”

I felt Roger’s body go tense under my hands.

“And?”

“It turns out, it has. Oh well. There’s nothing original in this world, I suppose.”

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?