Cat Out of Hell (9 page)

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.

“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.

“I don’t know, but I
shouldn’t think so
,” said Tawny, choosing her words carefully. “But look. Julian doesn’t know about what’s happened in there. Only a very few people have seen inside. We’re waiting to get a better idea of the state of the books when we sort through everything on Sunday. Alec –” She turned the big eyes to mine, and seemed concerned. “Alec, I think we should get you a glass of water, and then you should go home.”

I allowed Tawny to lead me to the staff room, where I drank some water and left her there, promising that I was absolutely fine – the sight of the carrel had been a shock, that’s all, I said. Also, I’d found the atmosphere in the library very stifling. Next time I came, I would remember to leave my coat in the readers’ cloakroom in the basement! It was easy to forget to do this, I said, when you used to have an office of your own with coat
pegs in it. She seemed satisfied, and she said goodbye. I gave her the impression that I would be heading home immediately. In this matter, I misled her, I’m afraid, quite deliberately.

By the time I did indeed leave the building, an hour later, my mind was spinning. I realised afterwards that in all my years at the library, I had never used it myself to search for information. Now that the occasion had arisen, however, I had every advantage. Comprehensively, I knew the ropes. Just to begin with, I knew that Julian’s office was never locked, that it was accessible from staircase B, and that even if (as aforementioned) Julian was the laziest librarian in the world, my dear wife Mary was the most conscientious. If she had borrowed books from the Seeward Collection, she would have left a record. Within a couple of minutes of larcenous (but surprisingly un-stressful) trespassing, I had obtained a list of the books she had borrowed. The loans had been carefully hand-written by Mary in Julian’s ancient log-book – presumably in his absence. I quickly made notes of them all. The books mostly concerned funerary archaeology – which chimed with Winterton’s already-established academic interest in animals as ancient afterlife companions. A couple of the titles were in German – which I happened to know was a language Mary didn’t have.

What captured my interest, however, was the last item Mary had borrowed. It was a rare item: a leaflet written by John Seeward himself, privately printed in a small edition in 1960. My heart sank as I saw the title. Oh, Mary. It was called
Nine Lives: The Gift of Satan
. Next to the title, Mary had carefully added a note on the book’s size, pagination, and so on. It was typically thorough of her to do this. Such a small pamphlet, after all, would be easy to mislay. What her notes indicated was that
Nine Lives
was of octavo size; it was a mere 16 pages long; and it contained woodcut illustrations. Checking with the online catalogue for more details, I discovered that
Nine Lives
wasn’t
listed. This was frustrating. In my impatience, I tried entering key words such “
EVIL CAT
,” “
CAT EVIL
,” and “
EVIL TALKING CAT
,” but it still did not come up. Fortunately, however, I knew that with a donated collection such as the Seeward, the card catalogue of the original classifier would have been preserved. It didn’t take long to discover that the Seeward card catalogue was, in fact, one of several dusty cases stacked behind Julian’s desk. It had not been very respectfully preserved, it seemed to me: in the back of one of the card drawers there were stuffed some random bits and pieces – I saw a bit of old leather with a buckle on it, as well as some little plaster statuettes. Carefully, I riffled through the cards to find the right one. I then removed it from the drawer, and took it to the photocopier on the fourth floor, where fortunately I saw no one I knew. I then quickly returned to Julian’s office and replaced it in the drawer, but not before its unusual classification had caught my eye.

It was one I had heard about but never seen before. The great Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts employed it in the nineteenth century. The other items, you see, had been catalogued according to the antiquated “Beacham” system, with lengthy call marks, such as:

SEEWARD

W55a

Gruns 934

By contrast, stamped in red ink on the corner of the
Nine Lives: The Gift of Satan
card was the just one word, in capitals: “INFERNO.” Its meaning, simply, was that it should be burned.

Winterton was not at all how I had remembered him. Yes, he was old, dusty and dishevelled, but my memory had conjured
someone tall, gaunt and wraith-like, whereas Winterton was short and florid with an enormous head. He came to the house wearing a duffle coat, a gardening hat, and some muddy wellingtons: I was hugely disappointed. For some reason, I had been picturing an impressive monk-like figure, possibly with long iron-grey hair, high-domed forehead and dark, beetly eyebrows: basically, I had been bracing myself for a cross between Christopher Lee in
Lord of the Rings
and the dementors in
Harry Potter
. But if Winterton looked like anyone at all in children’s literature, it was actually Paddington Bear.

He arrived at dusk on the day I had been to the library. Watson barked at his approach. I took a deep breath, picked up the dog and opened the door in anticipation, and found Winterton outside, on the path, distractedly rummaging through an old Marks & Spencer’s carrier bag. He looked up, stopped rummaging, and smiled broadly. I was confused. Could this be Winterton? Or was it someone who had knocked randomly on my door, having lost his memory on the way home from his allotment?

He seemed to think he was Winterton.

“Hello,” he said, warmly. “Alec, at last we meet properly!” he said, holding out his hand for me to shake. “And Watson, my little friendy-wendy! How are
you
? How are
you
? How are you?” Watson, tucked under my left arm, started furiously wagging his tail.

I shook his hand. “Winterton?” I said, incredulously.

“Yes indeedy,” he said. He went back to rummaging in the bag and found what he was looking for: a dog biscuit for Watson.

“Ah, here it is. Can he have it?”

I was taken aback.

“Oh. Yes. I suppose so. Come inside.”

Once inside, I put Watson down and Winterton held the
biscuit above his head. Watson sat and looked up at it, his tail wagging. He looked extremely happy.

“Do the trick,” Winterton said. And to my astonishment, Watson fell over backwards and lay still, as if he’d been shot.

“Good boy,” said Winterton. Watson rolled back onto his feet, took the biscuit, and happily trotted into the living room to eat it.

I couldn’t help laughing.

“Good heavens,” I said. “I can’t believe he just did that.”

“Oh, that’s a grand little dog. Mary let me teach him a couple of things. I can show you later if you like. He got that one in half an hour. Now, are there any windows open anywhere? Any doors? Can we block up the fireplace? We’ve got a lot of things to catch up on.”

Contrary to all expectations, it was a jolly evening I spent with Winterton and the dog in the kitchen. We had a pleasant supper of soup and cheese; we drank red wine. There was just one problem: I had expected Winterton to explain everything to me (I had made a list of questions), and he didn’t. He possessed all the knowledge; he had all the answers; but getting a straight reply from him on any matter at all turned out to be frustratingly difficult. Unlike Roger the cat, with his beautifully lucid (and rigidly linear) narratives, Winterton started everything in the middle. If he had been a book, I would have hurled him across the room. The trouble was not with his intentions, which seemed genuine. The trouble was with his brain. He had all the right thoughts, but not in the right order. This explained a lot, of course. Formerly, I had assumed that his lack of scholarly publication credits (other than the work with the recently-deceased Peplow) was due to the nature of his subject area. What I now realised was that publication for Geoffrey Winterton, PhD (on his own) would have been a laughably far-fetched ambition. Coherent, organised argument
was completely beyond him. No wonder he had turned to Mary for help.

“How did Mary get involved in your work?” I said, when we first sat down to our supper.

“She had a marvellous mind,” he said. He fed a sliver of cheese to Watson, who thereafter sat beside the table throughout our conversation, looking hopeful.

“I know,” I said. “I know she did. But how did she get involved? When? What did she know?”

“She felt very bad about deceiving you.”

“I’m sure she did.” This was something I was still coming to terms with. I was so shocked that she had been working with Winterton behind my back – good heavens, he’d apparently known Watson long enough to call him his friendy-wendy! But I wanted an answer to my original question. “So when and how did it all start?”

“Mary said she’d found something for me in the Seeward, Alec. I need it. The Captain is closing in, you see. He got Peplow!”

I huffed.

“Can we come back to that?” I said. “Please, for now, can you just please tell me how it all started with Mary?”

He looked at the ceiling. I think he was genuinely trying to focus on the question he’d been asked. Instead, he dropped a bit of a bombshell.

“Roger helped me put the folder together for you. We felt we owed you that.”

This was such a large piece of new information that I had to pursue it.

“I thought Roger was
dead
,” I said. “Didn’t Wiggy cut his head off?”

Winterton looked surprised. “No.”

“But –”

“No, Roger’s in fine form.”

“But Wiggy attacked a cat and did unspeakable things –”

“Oh, that! Sorry.” He laughed. “Neighbour’s cat. Neighbour’s cat.”

He waved the back of his hand at me, as if to say it was nothing.