by Simon Brett
‘You knew Stuart McCullough?’
I reckoned a half-truth might be safer than a whole lie. ‘Heard of him. Small-time crook, wasn’t he?’
The detective nodded. ‘He’d been shot near a beach-hut full of stolen property.’
‘Oh.’
‘Where were you last night, Mr Cotter?’
Time for whole lies now. I didn’t know how much they knew. My car might have been spotted in Lancing. I might have been spotted in Lancing. But I wasn’t going to give in without a fight. ‘As I say, had a few drinks. A few too many drinks.’
‘Where?’
‘Round Brighton.’
‘With friends?’
‘Mostly on my own.’
‘Sounds a bit sad, drinking on your own . . .’
I didn’t risk another shrug, but I hope my expression did it for me.
‘Would you be able to put us in touch with people who might have seen you last night?’
‘Maybe. I’d have to think about it. All a bit hazy, I’m afraid.’
‘Mm.’ He let a silence establish itself. I was aware of the bigger detective looking round the room. ‘We have to take tip-offs seriously, Mr Cotter,’ the smaller one went on.
‘Of course.’
The bigger detective picked up the trainers I’d been wearing the night before, turned them over, and spoke for the first time. ‘Sand on the soles of these. And a bit of tar.’
‘Yes,’ I said innocently. ‘I go for a walk on the beach most days.’
The smaller one nodded, assimilating and assessing this information. ‘You said you knew Stuart McCullough . . .?’
Had I been that stupid? ‘Knew of him,’ I qualified.
‘Assuming – and as yet we have no reason to assume otherwise – that you had nothing to do with Mr McCullough’s death, can you think of anyone who might have had a reason to murder him?’
If my brain had been in better nick, I might have been more cautious. As it was, I said, ‘I have heard that he’d recently fallen foul of someone called Harry Day.’
The name had an instant effect on both of them. ‘I’d be careful what you say about Harry Day, Mr Cotter.’
‘Oh?’
‘There are laws about slander and defamation in this country, you know.’
‘All I said was—’
‘Trying to stain the reputation of Mr Day could be a very bad move, Mr Cotter.’
The detectives exchanged glances; some private cue passed between them. When the smaller one next spoke, his words had an air of conclusion about them. ‘There are a lot more lines of enquiry we have to follow up, of course. We’ll probably need to ask you further questions, Mr Cotter, at a later date.’ He handed me a card. ‘I’d be grateful if you could ring me on this number if you’re likely to be leaving Brighton over the next few days.’
‘OK.’
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Cotter.’
And they went. Leaving me totally bemused. Why on earth had the whole tone of the interview suddenly changed? It had to be my mention of Harry Day. Up until then they had been looming, aggressive, trying to nail me. But the moment Harry Day’s name came up they had folded, given in, surrendered.
My head still hurt like hell, but my brain was repairing itself quickly. I rang through to a contact I had in the West Sussex Constabulary, and he made the situation a bit clearer.
A big operation had been mounted over the last year to nail Harry Day. West Sussex had been working with the Yard on it, following a sequence of robberies in London and tracking the goods through a series of stashes till they were taken to the house in Ditchling. A raid was planned, the raid that was finally going to catch the big operator red-handed, finally pin something on ‘Flag’ Day.
The raid had happened. A day after Stuart McCullough had cleaned the house out. Nothing was found that wasn’t strictly kosher.
The boys in blue were left with egg all over their faces and dripping down on to their uniforms. And Harry Day was mustering his cohorts of expensive lawyers to make the police extremely sorry for the slanderous mistake they had made. In future they were going to be unbelievably cautious and sure of all their facts before they made any further allegations against Mr Harry Day.
I tried phoning Stephanie, but there was no reply. I found out where her house was and went along there. No one answered. The second time I tried, there was a ‘For Sale’ notice fixed to the gatepost. My battered cherub had vanished as if she’d never existed.
Three days after their visit I had a phone call from the police. The smaller detective apologized for troubling me on the previous occasion, but reiterated that they did have to check everything. Anyway, he could now put my mind at rest, I had been eliminated from their enquiries. He wanted to leave it at that, but I demanded to know if they did have any leads on the murder. He told me that it was thought Stuart McCullough had been killed in a dispute over the division of profits from various robberies he had perpetrated in London. The murderer was probably one of his accomplices. ‘A gangland killing’, he called it, dismissively, as if the phrase precluded further enquiries.
Clearly Harry Day was still bunging the right amounts to the right people.
I pieced it together as I drove up over the moonless Downs. I wasn’t the only one who had been set up. Stuart McCullough, too. He had been very convenient. As soon as ‘Flag’ Day’s information service got wind of the planned police raid, McCullough had been told of an ideal target for his next robbery. That way the London robberies would be attributed to McCullough and Harry Day would remain as Mr Clean. But, of course, for the scheme to work, Stuart McCullough couldn’t be around to answer questions when the goods were finally discovered. He needed to be dead. Killed by some irrelevant small-time crook, someone with a police record. Which was where I came in.
These conclusions raised other questions. Who had tipped McCullough off about the stuff in Day’s house? Why hadn’t Day taken reprisals straight away? Whose idea had it been to bring me in? Was McCullough’s death convenient for other reasons than just keeping him quiet about the robberies?
The answers to all these questions were glaringly obvious, but I tried to evade them, tried to find other explanations. Until I had proof.
I soon had proof. It winded me and made me nauseous like a blow to the stomach. I had crept over the perimeter fence of Day’s estate, a dark balaclava masking my bleached hair. I had edged myself through the trees, and dashed across the shadows of the lawn to the house, drawn mothlike to its leaded mock-Gothic windows. Perched on an upturned wheelbarrow, craning like a Bisto kid towards a slit between curtains, I saw them.
Harry Day was as big as Stuart McCullough, white hair, black eyebrows over mean eyes. She sat on his lap. A burgundy leather dress this time, tight, hugging. Champagne glasses in their hands, and on their faces the confidence of their immunity from prosecution. Her vulnerability and innocence had been erased completely. There was nothing cherubic about that hard, hard face. Except its beauty.
I felt the wheelbarrow shift and slid down, clattering on to the patio. I heard a door open, a rough male shout, dogs barking.
I ran.
I had a couple of stiff drinks and fell asleep round one. I woke again before two, feeling, as amputees are supposed to, pain in a part of me that had been cut off. I got out of bed. I hadn’t closed the curtains, so didn’t have to open them to look out over the blackness of the sea.
The vodka bottle and I sat there, sharing each other’s solitude, until dawn first speckled, then linked up the shifting waves in the embroidery of another day’s light.
WAYS TO KILL A CAT
‘There are more ways to kill a cat than choking it with cream.’
Old Proverb
1. Putting the Cat Among the Pigeons
Seraphina Fellowes felt very pleased with herself. This was not an unusual state of affairs. Seraphina Fellowes usually felt very pleased with herself. This hadn’t always been the case, but her literary success over the pre
vious decade had raised her self-esteem to a level that was now almost unassailable.
Only twelve years before, she had been no more than a dissatisfied mousy haired housewife, married to a Catholic writer, George Fellowes, whose fondness for ‘trying ideas out’ rather than writing for commercial markets, coupled with an increasingly close relationship with the bottle, was threatening both his career and their marriage.
Seraphina clearly remembered the evening that had changed everything. Changed everything for her, that is. It hadn’t affected George’s fortunes so much, even though the original life-changing idea had been his. This detail was one of many that Seraphina tended to gloss over in media interviews about her success. George may have given her a little help in the early days, but he had long since ceased to have any relevance, either in her career or her personal life.
When the idea first came up, Seraphina hadn’t even been Seraphina. She had then just been Sally, but ‘Sally Fellowes’ was no name for a successful author, so that was the first of many details that were changed as she created her new persona.
Like an increasing number of evenings at that stage of the Fellowes’ marriage, the pivotal evening had begun with a row. Sally, as she then was, had crossed from the house to the garden shed in which her husband worked, and found George sprawled across his desk, fast asleep. Cuddled up against his head had been Mr Whiffles, their tabby cat. Well, the cat was technically ‘theirs’, but really he was George’s. George was responsible for all the relevant feeding and nurturing. Sally didn’t like cats very much.
It was only half-past six in the evening, but already in George’s waste-paper basket lay the cause of his stupor, an empty half-bottle of vodka. That had been sufficient incentive for Sally to shake him rudely awake and pull one of the common triggers of their rows, an attack on his drinking. George’s subsequent picking up and stroking of the disturbed Mr Whiffles had moved Sally on to another of her regular criticisms: ‘You care more about that cat than you do about me.’
George had come back, predictably enough, with: ‘Well, this cat shows me a lot more affection than you do,’ which had moved the altercation inevitably on to the subject of their sex-life – George’s desire for more sex and more enthusiastic sex, his conviction that having children would solve many of their problems, and Sally’s recurrent assertion that he was disgusting and never thought about anything else.
Once that particular storm had blown itself out, Sally had moved the attack on to George’s professional life. Why did he persist in writing ‘arty-farty literary novels’ that nobody wanted to publish? Why didn’t he go in for something like crime fiction, a genre that large numbers of the public might actually want to read?
‘Oh yes?’ George had responded sarcastically. ‘What, should I write mimsy-pimsy little whodunnits in which all the blood is neatly swept under the carpet and the investigation is in the hands of some heart-warmingly eccentric and totally unrealistic sleuth? Or,’ he had continued, warming to his theme and stroking Mr Whiffles ever more vigorously, ‘why don’t I make a cat the detective? Why don’t I write a whole series of mysteries which are solved by lovable Mr Whiffles?’
The instant he made the suggestion, Sally Fellowes’ anger evaporated. She knew that something cataclysmic had happened. From that moment she saw her way forward.
At the time, though the cat mystery was already a burgeoning sub-genre in American crime fiction, it had not taken much of a hold in England. Cat picture books, cat calendars, cat quotation selections and cat greetings cards all sold well – particularly at Christmas – but there didn’t exist a successful home-grown series of cat mysteries.
Sally Fellowes – or rather Seraphina Fellowes, for the name came to her simultaneously with the idea – determined to change all that.
George had helped her a lot initially – though that was another little detail she tended not to mention when talking to the media. She rationalized this on marketing grounds. The product she was selling was ‘a Mr Whiffles mystery, written by Seraphina Fellowes’. To mention the existence of a collaborating author would only have confused potential purchasers.
And George didn’t seem to mind. He still regarded the Mr Whiffles books as a kind of game, a diversion he took about as seriously as trying to complete the crossword. Seraphina would summon him by intercom buzzer from his shed when she got stuck, and he, with a couple of airy, nonchalant sentences, would redirect her into the next phase of the mystery. George was still, in theory, working on his ‘literary’ novels, and regarded devising whodunnit plots as a kind of mental chewing gum.
Seraphina proved to be a quick learner and an assiduous researcher. She negotiated her way around library catalogues; she established good relations with her local police for help on procedure; she even bought a gun, which ever thereafter she kept in her desk drawer, so that she could make her descriptions of firearms authentic.
As the Mr Whiffles mysteries began to roll off the production line, the summonings of George from his shed grew less and less frequent. While Seraphina was struggling with the first book, the intercom buzzer sounded every ten minutes, and her husband spent most of his life traversing the garden between shed and house. With the second, however, the calls were down to about one a day, and for the third – except to unravel a couple of vital plot points – Seraphina’s husband was hardly disturbed at all.
The reason for this was that George had made the first book such an ingenious template, writing the rest was merely a matter of doing a bit of research and applying the same formula to some new setting. Seraphina, needless to say, would never have admitted this, and had indeed by the third book convinced herself that the entire creative process was hers alone.
As George became marginalized from his wife’s professional life, so she moved him further away from her personal life. As soon as the international royalties for the Mr Whiffles books started to roll in, Seraphina organized the demolition of George’s working shed in the garden, and its replacement with a brand-new self-contained bungalow. There her husband was at liberty to lead his own life. Whether that life involved further experimentation with the novel form or a quicker descent into alcoholic befuddlement, Seraphina Fellowes neither knew nor cared.
She didn’t divorce George, though. His Catholicism put him against the idea, but also Seraphina needed him around to see that Mr Whiffles got fed during her increasingly frequent absences on promotional tours or at foreign mystery conventions. Then again, there was always the distant possibility that she might get stuck again on one of the books and need George to sort out the plot for her.
Besides, having a shadowy husband figure in the background had other uses. When asked about him in interviews, she always implied that he was ill and that she unobtrusively devoted her life to his care. This did her image no harm at all. He was also very useful when over-sexed crime writers or critics came on to her at mystery conventions. Her assertion, accompanied by a martyred expression of divided loyalties, that ‘it wouldn’t be fair to George’ was a much better excuse than the truth that she didn’t in fact like sex.
As the royalties mounted, Seraphina had both herself and her house made over. Her mousy hair became a jet-black helmet assiduously maintained by costly hairdressing; her face was an unchanging mask of expertly applied make-up; and she patronized ever more expensive couturiers for her clothes. The house was extended and interior designed; the garden elegantly landscaped to include a fishpond with elaborate fountain and cascade features.
And Seraphina always had the latest computer technology on which to write her money-spinning books. After taking delivery of each new state-of-the-art machine, her first ritual action was to programme the ‘M’ key to print on the screen ‘Mr Whiffles’.
So, twelve years on from the momentous evening that changed her life, Seraphina Fellowes had good cause to feel very pleased with herself. The previous day she had achieved a lifetime ambition. She had rung through an order for the latest model Ferrari. There was a year-an
d-a-half’s waiting list for delivery, but it had given Seraphina enormous satisfaction to write a cheque for the full purchase price without batting an eyelid.
She looked complacently around the large study she had had built on to the house. It was decorated in pastel pinks and greens, flowery wallpapers and hanging swathes of curtain. The walls were covered with framed Mr Whiffles memorabilia: book jackets, publicity photographs of the author cuddling her hero’s namesake, newspaper best-sellers listings, mystery organizations’ citations and awards. On her mantelpiece, amongst lesser plaques and figurines, stood her proudest possession – the highest accolade so far accorded to the Mr Whiffles industry: an Edgar statuette from the Mystery Writers of America. Yes, Seraphina Fellowes did feel very pleased with herself.
But even as she had this thought, a sliver of unease was driven into her mind. She heard once again the ominous sound that increasingly threatened her wellbeing and complacency. It was the clatter of a letterbox and the solid thud of her elastic-band-wrapped mail landing on the doormat. She went through into the hall with some trepidation to see what new threat the postman had brought that day.
Seraphina divided the letters into two piles on her desk. The left-hand pile comprised those addressed to ‘Seraphina Fellowes, Author of the Mr Whiffles Books’; the right-hand one was made up of letters addressed to ‘Mr Whiffles’ himself. A lot of those, she knew, would be whimsically written by their owners as if they came from other cats. In fact, that morning over half of Mr Whiffles’ letters had paw-prints on the back of the envelopes.
But that wasn’t what worried Seraphina Fellowes. What really disturbed her – no, more than disturbed – what really twisted the icy dagger of jealousy in her heart was the fact that the right-hand pile was much higher than the left-hand one. This was the worst incident yet, and it confirmed an appalling trend that had been building for the last couple of years.
Mr Whiffles was getting more fan mail than she was!
The object of her jealousy, with the instinct for timing which had so far preserved intact all nine of his lives, chose that moment to enter Seraphina Fellowes’ study. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, welcome in her house – he spent most of his time over in George’s bungalow – but Seraphina had had cat-flaps inserted in all her doors to demonstrate her house’s cat-friendliness when journalists came to interview her, and Mr Whiffles did put in the occasional appearance. To get to the study he’d had to negotiate four cat-flaps: from the garden into a passage, from the passage into the kitchen, kitchen to hall and hall to study.
