by Lynne Truss
“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 s
at 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.
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re talking about the one that got killed at the cottage?”
“Yes.”
“Neighbour’s cat.”
“But –”
“There was this black cat hanging around the house, you see. Went by the name of Inca – isn’t that a good name? I’ve never been good at naming animals. With a black cat, you see, you’d think of Blackie, perhaps –”
I interrupted. “But the black cat hanging about was the Captain,” I pointed out.
“Oh no, no, no!” Winterton laughed. “That wasn’t the Captain!”
“The cat Jo had photographed on her phone wasn’t the Captain?”
“No, no, no, no, no.”
I was baffled.
“Jo might have thought it was the Captain. She probably did think that. But it was just some neighbourhood black cat.”
“Really?”
“This is something Roger has remarked on before. He says there’s always a black cat in any neighbourhood; he says once you plant the idea of the Captain with people, they start noticing black cats everywhere. But it was just this pet cat Inca that got attacked by Wiggy – in the wrong place at the wrong time. Completely innocent. Wearing a collar, he was; which is a pretty big giveaway. Little identity tag with a phone number on it, you see. But when Wiggy found Jo in that cellar next door, he was all worked up, wasn’t he? Inca strolls in. Oops. Black cat, bang splat. Roger had made himself scarce, of course. He isn’t daft, our Roger!”
I wasn’t sure I wanted Roger described as “our Roger.” Winterton seemed to be taking it for granted that I was part of this story already.
Looking back, I should have asked him then and there about Jo. Did he know why had she hidden next door? How had she become trapped? Why hadn’t Roger told Wiggy where she was? But he still hadn’t answered my original question.
“How did Mary get involved?” I asked again, steadily.
“They banned me from the library ten years ago, you see,” he said.
“Oh good grief!” I said.
It was time to adjust to the reality of this situation. I had been expecting Winterton to talk with the authoritative tones and narrative control of a story by M.R. James. I required a strategy. And the main thing was: I needed to stop asking open-ended questions.
“Did you meet Roger on the Acropolis?” I said.
“Oh.” He was a bit surprised by the sudden change of direction, but he answered me simply (which was a relief). “Yes. Yes, I did.” He thought about it some more, and then added, “Yes. I was very young.”
“Is his story about his nine lives true?”
“Oh, I think so. Yes.”
“Do you mind my asking rather abrupt yes/no questions like this?”
“No, no,” he said, cheerfully. “It’s probably best, you see.”
“Are you in cahoots with Roger?”
“Cahoots. Oh, um. Yes. I suppose so, yes.”
“Does he do your bidding?”
“Oh no! What? No, quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. I’m his creature, oh yes.”
“Does the Captain exist?”
“Oh, I’m afraid so.”
“Does he really have – I don’t know, powers?”
“Oh my God, yes. Oh yes. Powers, yes. Sometimes he kills; sometimes people kill themselves. Oh yes, powers.”
“Is Roger telling the truth about their relationship in the files?”
“I don’t know. What does he say?”
I was rather shocked that Winterton didn’t know the full contents of the folder he had sent me, when I had studied it myself so closely.
“Mainly, that the Captain is jealous of Roger’s closeness to humans, so he always arranges in some supernatural way for them to ‘lose the will to live.’ ”
“What was the question again?”
“Is that the relationship between Roger and the Captain?”
“No. Nothing like it.”
“No?”
“Well, perhaps it used to be. But Roger hasn’t seen the Captain for years and years, you see.”
“Does he look up to the Captain?’
“What? No.”
“No?”
“Not any more.”
“So?”
“He hates him. Basically, he wants someone to help kill him, you see. He was working on Wiggy, telling him the first part of the story, building up to the big stuff when he and the Captain were reunited after the war, but then it all turned nasty when Wiggy found out about Jo. So he’ll have to start again now.” He thought for a moment. “To be honest, he has already started again. On you. That’s why he wanted me to send the file. It’s all coming to a head, you see.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“Can the Captain even be killed?”
“Ah. There’s the rub.”
He gave me a significant look. He took a sip of wine. “I’m enjoying this,” he said. “Mary used to ask me a lot of questions too. At this very table. She would keep saying, ‘Don’t ramble, Geoffrey. You’re rambling!’ ”
He laughed at this pleasant memory. I closed my eyes, and he must have noticed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I waved it away. I wasn’t going to share my agonies with Winterton.
“Look,” I said. “This is what I really want to know.”
“All right.” He assumed a look of seriousness.
“It’s a simple question.”
“OK.”
I took a breath.
“Winterton, were you responsible in any way for Mary’s death? Did the Captain come here?”
He sucked his teeth, and pulled a face. I waited. And then he answered, quietly, “Yes. I think he did.”
I put my head in my hands.
“I’m so sorry I got Mary involved,” he went on. “Roger thought she was the perfect ally because she thought his story was all nonsense. We were getting very close to something, you see. If you help us now –”
I had so many other questions, but for the time being, I could manage only one more.
“Have you ever heard of a publication entitled Nine Lives: The Gift of Satan?” I said.
The effect on Winterton was electric. He jumped up, and set Watson off, barking. “No! How do you know about that? Have you got it? Where is it? Is it here?”
That night it was windy and bitterly cold. Winterton left at aro
und 10:30; Watson and I escorted him to the main road, where we saw him into a taxi. The bare winter trees were bending and rolling in the wind; light from the street lamps was both feeble and stuttering. We shook hands before he got into the cab. He really was a ridiculous little man, but if he had managed to evade the wrath of the Captain all these years, then there could be no doubt he had hidden depths. We quickly ran over the highlights of the plan we had made.
“Saturday at six,” I said. “Back entrance, near the cycle parking area.”
“Right.”
“You have to be in position, because I’ll only have a few seconds.”
“Right.”
“This doesn’t mean I’m willing to be part of Roger’s story,” I said.
He laughed.
“It’s not Roger you have to worry about,” he said.
Back at the house, I went back to the kitchen and sat for a while at the table. The idea of Mary sitting right there and saying to Winterton, “Don’t ramble, Geoffrey” was both painful and comforting at the same time. I drank the last of the wine and patted Watson. Then I held up a treat above his head and said, with as much confidence as I could muster, “Do the trick?” – and what do you know? He just looked up at the treat and whined, so I gave it to him.
As I blankly stared around the kitchen, I started to wonder whether I was any better than Wiggy, really. Was I missing vital clues staring me in the face, as he had done? After all, I now knew something quite important about Mary’s death: when she had come home from the library on that Monday morning, she had known she was in danger. Working with the shambolic Geoffrey Winterton had attracted the attention of an evil cat – an evil cat capable of devastating a small room and its contents; an evil cat looking for a book written by a famous diabolist on the subject (presumably) of supernatural longevity in cats. Whether she believed in any of this paranormal stuff was immaterial. The point was: what had she done? Being Mary, she had acted. Putting two and two together from what Tawny had told me, I now believed that Mary had retrieved the Seeward pamphlet from the devastated carrel and hidden it elsewhere in the library. My wife was enough of a Sherlock Holmes fan to know that a library was the very best place in which to secrete a book. Behind the inquiries desk in the reading room, she had ascended the small, staff-only spiral staircase to the stacks above. From this I knew one thing for certain: she had not returned the book to the Seeward collection.
